At 16, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor—a turning point that made me rethink everything I knew about health. What started as a focus on fitness evolved into a mission to understand the biology of aging and how we can actively improve our healthspan.
In this video, I share how that experience led me to explore the science behind longevity, speak with leading researchers, and challenge the health advice we often hear online. If you’re curious about real, science-backed strategies for aging better—not just living longer. You’ll want to watch this!
Transcript
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Hi, I’m Chris Mirabile, founder and CEO of the human longevity company Novos and also the creator of SlowMyAge. And today I’m here to talk to you about my story. Why is longevity so important to me and what do I hope to do with this channel? I want to educate people and inform them about the science of longevity. There’s a lot of information out there on the internet now and social media that’s giving the wrong impression of longevity. I come from the scientific community. I work with the top
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scientists in the field of biogerontology. So I go straight to the primary sources, the people running the scientific studies and I’m here to communicate the insights from those studies so that we can find lifestyle tweaks that we can make to be able to improve our health span, our lifespan and slow down the aging process. So, my personal story begins when I was 12 years old. I started to read Men’s Health magazine from an early age. The truth is, I just wanted to be attractive like the guys on the cover so that I
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could be attractive to some of the girls in high school. And so, I started exercising and doing pull-ups every day and watching my diet and eating healthy. When I was 16 years old, it came as that much more of a surprise to me, my family, my friends, that I would have a seizure, which was caused by a brain tumor. So, I was on a school trip in New York City and I suddenly got dizzy and nauseous and next thing I knew, I woke up on the floor with blood all over my shirt because I had severed my tongue
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from the seizure. And they rushed me to the emergency room and I had to wait for my parents to come. And in I would say the single most emotional moment of my life, I was laying in the emergency room with my mother and my father by my side and the doctor came in with the results of the CAT scan and said, “We found a large mass above your left ear. We believe you have a brain tumor.” And it was larger than a golf ball. So they had to do emergency surgery right away. And going through that experience was
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transformative for me. It completely changed my perspective on life, on what I wanted to get out of life, and most importantly, at least to this day, on what is health. So, prior to that, my perspective on health was one that was really just superficial. I wanted to be in good shape, look good, play sports well, but it wasn’t really focused on the fundamentals of biology and health, which is the avoidance of disease and living as long of a healthy life as possible. So after going through that experience,
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it planted these seeds in my mind. Whenever I would get health advice or guidance or hear from an influencer or read something in a magazine, I always ask the question, I understand why this advice is given for a specific short-term benefit, but what’s the long-term impact of this specific lifestyle hack or tip or guidance? And unfortunately, in most cases, there was no clear answer if this was going to be good for you in the long term or not. Because believe it or not, a lot of things that can bring you to short-term
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health outcomes or goals might actually be bad for you in the long term. So, I was always thinking this way. And as I progressed through my 20s, I started to experiment a lot with supplements, with different diets, the paleo diet, keto, and so on, different sleep hacks and improving my sleep hygiene. So from there, I decided to go directly to the primary sources, and I discovered this website called PubMed, which is where the government tracks all of the scientific studies. And you can find through a search engine scientific
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research about practically any topic. And while I was doing my own research on PubMed about a wide range of health related topics, I came across a scientific paper in a prestigious scientific journal called Cell. And that study was called the hallmarks of aging, which is now considered a seinal paper in the field of longevity research. And that paper uncovered what’s known as the nine mechanisms of aging or another way to think of this is the nine biological root causes of the aging process. And
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this moment was like an epiphany for me because prior to this I always thought of aging as this immutable force something that could not be controlled in any way. I always thought, well, let me avoid some sort of disease like another brain tumor or heart disease or Alzheimer’s or anything that might end my life prematurely and as long as I don’t get a disease, then I’ll live my life as long as is written into my genetic code. But it actually doesn’t work that way. And coming across this paper about the hallmarks of aging, I
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came to realize that scientists were actually deconstructing the aging process into its individual processes. And from there we had a hope of being able to target aging at the most fundamental level and to be able to slow it down. From there I came across scientists and researchers in the field. For example, Aubrey Deg Grrey was one of the pioneers of this field and he gave the analogy of a car which he likens to the human body and essentially that as we age our bodies start to get run down just like a car and your tires start to
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lose air and the muffler might fall off and the engine needs more oil. It’s not well lubricated. And so as we age, as long as we’re consistently getting checkups and we are uh servicing the car, uh we will be able to extend healthy lifespan. The only problem is we haven’t invented all of the technologies to be able to service all aspects of the car yet. And that’s where Dr. Aubrey Deg Gray’s work and many other scientists for that matter really comes in. And so although at least at this point we can’t
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make a a car the new model once again, right? So if you have a 1970s Corvette, it’s still going to be from the 1970s. You can have a pristine condition Corvette or you can have one that’s very rundown and can’t even turn on. And so that analogy really resonated with me. From there, I really wanted to dig in deep into the field of longevity research. and I started to go to biotech events and network with the top scientists in the field. I went to for example Harvard Medical School, MIT, NYU and so on. And this is going back now
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about seven years to 2018. And I met with worldrenowned scientists like Dr. David Sinclair and Dr. George Church. And I learned a lot from them. And I also proposed an idea to them which was rather than focusing on these very long-term moonshot ideas of extending lifespan and health span with these brand new technologies. For example, crisper genetic modification or epigenetic reprogramming. What if we actually used natural substances that have been researched and found to have positive effects on these
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mechanisms or causes of aging and created the most powerful natural formula that combined these ingredients together to target all of these hallmarks or mechanisms of aging simultaneously. And I was pleasantly surprised to find that these scientists unanimously agreed that this would probably be the best way that we can naturally make an impact on the aging process at this point in time. And so that’s what it took for me to decide that I had something that I personally wanted. I was already sleeping well and eating a healthy diet
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and exercising a lot and managing my stress and spending time in my community and with loved ones and so on. The question was what more can I do beyond that? How could I impact these mechanisms of aging beyond that? And it turned into this journey to then create the most powerful scientifically validated formula to be able to address these hallmarks or causes of aging. So as I was starting Novos, I was met with very unfortunate news. My mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and it really stopped me in my tracks and it
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made my work that much more important to me because the aging process is the number one risk factor for diseases of aging. That includes cancer and pancreatic cancer. It includes heart disease, Alzheimer’s, all of these things that bring so much suffering to life and ways that we lose the loved ones in our lives. and I was experiencing it firsthand while I was working on Novos. And so unfortunately I lost my mother after nine months um while she was battling cancer. But that led me to dedicating Novos to her and I
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established Novos as a public benefit corporation in her honor. But we do more than just focus on commercial interest. We tried to create a lot of free resources for the public interest. free technology, free mobile app, lots of information for people to be able to slow down their aging and by extension to be able to reduce the chances of these diseases of aging completely for free without having to spend a scent. My vision at Novos is to add a billion years of healthy life to humanity. And we’re not going to do that simply by
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selling our formulations and products. We need to do that by empowering people with the knowledge that they need to be able to slow down the aging process regardless of budget or lack of budget. And that’s part of the reason for this channel. And our mission at Novos and my mission also at slow my age is to make longevity accessible and achievable for the masses. So this means that we need to get beyond these very pricey expensive biohacking tools that people and influencers are telling you you need
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and get to the truth which is you don’t need these tools. There are fundamentals that are going to make enormous impacts on your rate of aging and your likelihood of disease and you don’t need to spend a scent on most of them. So part of what I’ll be doing with slow my age is to give a voice to longevity scientists. They deserve to be heard over influencers in the space. The reason is that these scientists are the true experts in the field. And unfortunately, there are so many influencers out there right now that are
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giving inaccurate, incorrect information or they’re confounding general health advice and claiming it to be longevity advice or things that are purely speculative and have no real scientific validation behind it and claiming that these are ways for longevity. So, I’m here to set the record straight. I’m not a scientist myself, but I work very closely with the top longevity scientists in the world. And my intention is to bring them on the show or those who are camera shy to get the insights from them directly and then to
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share that information with you on this channel. I’m also looking to clarify complex scientific topics and make them very digestible to a wide audience. So, although we’re not always going to oversimplify things, we will make many of these topics simple enough for you to be able to have some take-home messages for things that you can do that will impact your health span, your lifespan, and your rate of aging. I’ll also in some cases give you a peak into the future of longevity. We’ll cover the biotechnologies that are being worked on
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in the scientific labs, at the startups, and at the academic universities across the world. and we’ll talk about what might be possible in two years, five years, 10 years, 25 years, 50 years, or a hundred years from now. For all of you sci-fi addicts or people who are looking to live as long of a healthy life as possible. Some people even want to live forever. Not sure if I’m in that camp, but I will give you insights into the ways that scientists are looking to tackle these fundamental causes of aging
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and to actually not just slow down the process, but actually rejuvenate our cells, our organs, and our entire bodies so that we can potentially be a younger version of ourselves again. So, with all of that said, welcome to my channel. Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe if you’re interested in learning more about the science of longevity and the truth behind longevity.