george grombacher 0:00
Come on worldwide for this is George G and the time is right. welcome today’s guest strong and powerful Chris Murali Chris, are you ready to do this?
Unknown Speaker 0:18
Yes, I am. Alright, let’s
george grombacher 0:20
go. Chris is the co founder of nervos. They’re an organization working to slow aging. He is a longevity hacker. Chris, I’m excited to have you on tell us a little about your personal lives more about your work and why you do what you do.
Unknown Speaker 0:35
Sure. So I’ve been interested in health since an early age when I was 12 years old that I picked up an issue of Men’s Health magazine at the bookstore. And that was the beginning of my health journey, I wanted to exercise and get into good shape. And that was the motivation for it. So I installed a pull up bar in my basement with my father. And every day after school, I would come home and do pull ups and push ups and do some running and so on. And I was doing really well with him until I was stopped in my tracks. When I was 16 years old. I was I suddenly had a seizure while on a school trip in New York City. And it turned out it was from a brain tumor. And so I suddenly had a shift in perspective, if you will, thinking about existential questions and about life and what I wanted out of it, unfortunately, obviously, I was my life was spared, and I made it out, okay. But that was really a transformative experience. And it planted a seed that I would say is is really blossoming now in the form of what I’m working on with with no bows. So over the years, I always had that deep interest in health and nutrition and exercise. And at this point, though, I began looking at it from more of a biological perspective, as opposed to, I would say more of a superficial perspective. The superficial being I wanted to get in good shape do well in sports and the biological was I want to avoid illness. And I want to feel as good as I can for as long as I can live as long of a healthy life as possible. I worked in I was I became an entrepreneur, essentially, I first I spent a year in private equity finance in New York City, Park Avenue high paying job and it wasn’t for me. I felt like I was selling myself out. And so I stepped away. And I started on a company called hotlist, which was a social network. We scaled to over 200 million people social plans, we showed you what’s happening in the real world. And after that, I worked in other technology, technology, verticals or industries. But I always had this passion for longevity. And about five years ago, I had an opportunity to take a moment to stop working for the first time since I was about 14 years old, I stopped working for an extended period of time, I took about six months to think about what I wanted to do next. And the answer was something in longevity. But I didn’t know exactly what I could do. Because most of the people in this space are PhDs. And they are creating biotech companies with really aggressive goals, right, like inventing a new molecule to slow aging or DNA modification to alter our genes so that we age more slowly and so on really aggressive things. And the question I had was, what can I do today to actually slow down aging? And there was no clear answer. But in a serendipitous way, I was volunteering at NYU Medical Center, that’s the hospital where my brain tumor was treated. And I wanted to get back. So this is now in my, my early 30s. And I saw a poster on the wall for what was called the mitochondrial Summit. And that wouldn’t stop most people. But for me, because of my interest, I was excited. And I saw the names of a number of scientists whose work I was familiar with in relation to longevity and slowing down aging. And so I went to the events and I asked them questions about natural ingredients that could potentially slow aging and I wanted to basically get their opinion on whether there was something legitimate behind it or if it was overhyped. And I was surprised to see, to be honest, at the time, I was surprised to see how legitimate they said it was. And now it was enough for me to say okay, here is here is a business, one where I can create formulations that can slow down the aging process so that I can take it myself, give it to my loved ones and by extension, enable enable everyone to be able to add this to their their daily routine. And so eventually Novus was born they brought on some world renowned scientists from Harvard, MIT, the Salk Institute these are people who are world acclaimed experts in biology, genetics and longevity. And they along with my co founder, Dr. Christopher Berg, who I know you’ve you’ve met and interviewed as well have come together to help us launch Novo send our initial formulations.
george grombacher 5:14
Nice. What a story what an awful thing that would have been to be 16 years old and to be diagnosed with a brain tumor.
Unknown Speaker 5:22
Yeah, you know, it’s, it’s awful for when you think of it that way. But for me, I look at it, I choose to look at it as a gift. It really changed my perspective. And I went from, from playing on the football team. And you’re beginning to experiment with going out with partying with friends and having a beer or two, to writing poetry and taking time for myself and really being introspective. And I think that really shaped me and who I am today. So ultimately, I look at it as it as a gift that was bestowed upon me at an early age.
george grombacher 6:02
I wrote down as you’re telling me that story that quote from Jack Kornfield, that says, The trouble is you think you have time. And we all think that we have this really vast amount of time. And we theoretically 100 years can be a really long time. Or it could be really short time, depending on how you look at it. But it oftentimes does take some kind of a traumatic event or seen something bad happened to a loved one or somebody that we know, to get us to spring into action. And so for you to be given that gift at age 16 that shaped the course your life is pretty amazing.
Unknown Speaker 6:34
Yeah, without question. It made me into who I am today, and not only with what I’m working on with Novus, but just in general, being becoming an entrepreneur, for example, I wanted to have more control over my life in the direction of my life, rather than just, you know, marching in lockstep with with others, so to speak. So it’s not for everyone, of course. But for me, that was that was one of the events that really gave me that perspective of make the most out of your life and try to design it the way that you want to live the life. And that was that was my approach to being able to do it.
george grombacher 7:15
Nice. So you’ve been working diligently, hard, diligently, whatever term, I’m probably both at this and working to be as healthy as possible. How, how is it working?
Unknown Speaker 7:31
I think it’s working well. So fortunately, knock on wood, there’s been no recurrence of the brain tumor, I do get a an MRI once at this point, once every few years. adds it in terms of other markers for health. I’ve recently gotten a series of tests done related to my biological age. So these are new tests, they’ve only been developed within the last seven or so years. And every year or every few months, new versions are being spun up in terms of new algorithms and testing, but they’re essentially tests to be able to measure your biological age. So this is a new concept for many people. But we have our chronological age, which is obviously the number of times the Earth revolves around the Sun, right? This is, this is the, your literal age when you celebrate your birthday. And then there’s your biological age. This is based on how old your cells in your overall biology your as an organism, how old are you? And that can vary for people, right? So for example, if you smoke a pack a day for an extended period of time, you are probably about seven years or more older biologically than chronologically. Whereas if you live a very healthy life, you might be a little bit younger, biologically than chronologically. You have a biological age and a chronological age, and the chronological age is what most people think of as their age. It’s their birthdays, right? How many years have they been alive for, but your biological age is how old your actual biology is. So you as an organism, how old are you? And if you’ve smoked a pack a day, for example, you would be biologically older. Some studies fine, on average, that could be seven years older, but it could be even more than that, potentially. And if you’ve lived a very healthy lifestyle, you can be biologically younger. If you think about people that you look at maybe 5060 years old, and you say, Oh, they look great for their age, or they look 10 years younger. That’s the idea. We’re talking about it. That’s not the best marker or indicator. It’s not a scientifically based marker looking at them, but it gives you an idea of somebody who’s younger or aging more slowly than their actual time on Earth. And so I had a number of these tests done at a laboratory that specializes in this, they run multiple different clocks. So by clocks, I mean, different researchers come up with their own algorithms and approaches for measuring the biological age. And so we ran all of those different clocks on my my epigenetic data. So your epigenome is essentially which of your genes are turned on and which genes are turned off. And as you age, certain genes turn on that shouldn’t be on, and certain genes turn off, that shouldn’t be off. And these patterns can be detected by age across populations. So that’s how these epigenetic age clocks work. And so for one of the most famous clocks, one created by Dr. Steve Horvath who was the inventor of these epigenetic clocks, when I was 37 years old, my age came back as 26 and a half. So that was minus 10.6 years, biologically from chronologically. Now the laboratory who ran these tests said, this is an outlier results, we were so surprised by your result that we had to do error checking and run your genetic data again. And we looked, we had researchers look specifically into your case, and they confirmed it’s all accurate. But it was it was that much of an outlier for them. They ran multiple other clocks. And so for example, one of them is called the Dunedin poem, poem tests are the dunes and pace test. And this is one that’s created by researchers at Duke University and Columbia University, they have been following people for a extended period of time, it’s the only clock that has looked at the same population of people and seeing how their epigenome changes over time. So this is one of the most respected tests out there in terms of its accuracy and methodology. And this test, instead of measuring your your biological age, measures your pace of aging, so the rate at which you’re aging, and this clock came back as 75%. So that implies every chronological year, I am biologically aging point seven, five years. And so
Unknown Speaker 12:15
that was really exciting information for me to hear, especially having had like a trauma of biological trauma with a brain tumor, when I was younger, things like that events like that could potentially accelerate aging. It seems like at least with what I’m doing now, to this point in my life, I’ve been able to slow down the pace.
george grombacher 12:34
So what’s, what’s your secret?
Unknown Speaker 12:40
Good question. So there’s a number of things that I do, in terms of the effect size of each of these things we don’t know Right? Like that it would require a population study with a lot of people, each doing different things, different interventions, and then seeing how that changes for people. And everyone is different genetically. So what works for me might be slightly different for you, and so on. But I can tell you what I am doing. So one of those things is every quarter, I do an extended water only fast. Now this is the most extreme of the things I do. The other things I mentioned, will be significantly easier than this. So for your listeners don’t don’t get intimidated by this. But once every quarter I’ll go as long as three days without eating food. And it’s instead I’ll have a it’s called a water fat. So I’ll have water and electrolytes like sodium and potassium and calcium and magnesium. It’s it’s not as hard as it sounds, especially if you start with like a 24 hour fast. So maybe you have dinner at 7pm and you don’t eat again until 7pm The next day, as long as you keep yourself busy and active, then that’s that’s achievable. But if you’re doing once you do that for the first day to then extended to 36 hours and 48 eventually your body starts to adapt and it becomes easier. So I do that I intermittent fast. So every day I only eat within an a window of eight hours. So between typically either 11am to seven or 12 to eight I tend to be low carb and low saturated fat during the during the day like during work hours. But then in the evening, I add carbs back in, it tends to help me sleep, which makes sense because the carbs can help to produce serotonin and melatonin to help you sleep. And on the weekends I’ll have more carbs as well but they’re always healthy carbs, like with with fiber and not a high glycemic index with the exception of every so often maybe having having dessert or something. I do minimize animal protein intake. I do eat animal protein. I’m not a vegetarian or vegan, but there is a fair amount of research related to the effects that animal protein can have. For example, in stimulating mTOR is a growth pathway, which is good if you’re, you know, to build muscle, but it can also accelerate aging if you’re constantly stimulating mTOR. So post workout, I want to stimulate some mTOR for my muscles to grow or maintain themselves, and then I might have some animal based protein. But generally speaking, I have reduced that compared to what I was doing years ago. So I’ve added some more plant based proteins I’ve also had, if I am having animal protein, I tend towards fat fatty fish like sardines or salmon, and so on. Supplements. So there’s two categories of supplements, I think of them as your, your nutrient requirements. So these are the things that will make sure that you you function properly, and you you stay as healthy as possible. Things like you could imagine for multivitamin, or that the USDA says are essential nutrients, and then longevity specific nutrients. So for the general health nutrients, I don’t personally take a multivitamin, I actually purchase each of the different components like Vitamin A, Vitamin E, the B vitamins, and so on separately, because we, me and my co founder, we have not found a multivitamin that had the proper forms and dosages of everything we want. So for that reason, I kind of customize it.
Unknown Speaker 16:32
But that’s something that that I I’m pretty religious about is making sure that I’m getting the right nutrients because it’s nearly impossible to get it from your diet. As healthy of a diet as you might have. It’s it’s incredibly difficult to for example, get an adequate amount of potassium, or Selenium or if you eliminate milk from your diet, which I have because of different aging compounds in it. For example, galactose, which researchers literally use to age mice is that molecule galactose, which you find in in milk, so I’ve eliminated it. So I need a little bit of calcium, which I get from sardines, but and other foods, but I need to sell supplements with it, as well. So So those are the general health supplements, and then the longevity health supplements. That’s where my company comes in novos. So we have novice core and novice Busara are two products at this time novice core is our foundational supplements, it has 12 ingredients in it supported by more than 180 studies in in multiple organisms, including humans, we put it through a really tight filter in terms of which ingredients we consider. And you can actually learn more about that on Novus labs.com/evidence. So it talks about the approach we take and any evidence for why we chose these ingredients. And it includes things like calcium alpha q, the glue rate, or fight certain rhodiola, rosacea and so on. So these ingredients have been every single ingredient has been found to extend healthy lifespan in in one form or another. And a number of them have also been found to have short term health benefits as well like improved skin health, improved energy, improved calmness, and so on. And the way we formulated it was to look at what’s known as the 10 mechanisms of aging. So this is what scientists have discovered is the reasons why we age things like mitochondrial health or stem cell rejuvenation, but also less commonly known things like cellular senescence, or proteostasis, and so on. And so we are the first product ever, either over the counter or pharma, first company ever to create a product that addresses all 10 of these causes of aging, with natural over the counter ingredients. So I would say that that’s probably one of the more significant factors in my lower biological age is because these ingredients were specifically chosen for their impact on aging. And some of them have an impact a favorable impact on the epigenome, which is what is being measured with these tests. So if I had to put my money on it, I would put it most likely on novice core first and foremost, and it was boost as a as a contender.
george grombacher 19:33
I love it. Nice. With the water fast, can you drink coffee or is that just It’s just water?
Unknown Speaker 19:42
You could drink coffee? Yeah, yeah, that’s I think it’s probably the most common question. Yeah, what you’re really looking to do is to prevent yourself from stimulating insulin secretion and raising your blood glucose levels. So you really want to avoid that any carbohydrates, any proteins, and then ultimately, you also want to try to avoid the fats as well because you know, fat is calories are calories your body needs to process them, your liver needs to work, you basically want to like turn off all of these systems so that they go into a different mode, rather than like working and, and torch stimulation and so on. You everything is kind of relaxing. And then you activate other bio pathways, things like autophagy, and apoptosis. So autophagy is when your immune system starts to identify old cells, and it breaks them down, it removes them, and it makes sense why you would do it in particular, when you’re fasting because you need calories, you need energy. So while you’re fasting autophagy is turned on, and that can remove unhealthy cells from your body, something that doesn’t happen nearly as much when you’re constantly being fed. So, back to your question. Yes, copy coffee is fine. But don’t add sugar. Don’t add milk. Just have it black.
george grombacher 21:04
Beautiful. Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for sharing your story. Where can people learn more about you and and how can they get the products?
Unknown Speaker 21:11
Personally, you can follow me on Instagram at slow, you’re slow my age. And I also have a website that I’ll be launching soon, which goes more into detail about my biological data, as well as the approach my biohacking routine if you will.
george grombacher 21:30
Excellent. Excellent. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show, Chris your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas. Give us the website one more time.
Unknown Speaker 21:42
novos labs.com,
george grombacher 21:44
Novus labs.com and ovoslabs.com find Chris on Instagram, and we will keep an eye out for the new website as well coming up soon. Thanks again, Chris. Thank you, and until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai