The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 121. Dr. Matt Cook: Reversing Age with Peptides, Stem Cells & Gene Therapy

Starting point is 00:00:00 Who's the queen of healing in the body? It's the stem cell. The immune system is the system that heals musculoskeletal problems. It turns out that there's a peptide that is an immune peptide that tends to be very helpful. I'm such a huge fan of the peptides and their use because of the limited risk profile. Some of these other really advanced, scientifically valid, evidence-based, have a real propensity to truly extend life. The most impactful peptides are this category of peptides that are immune peptides that tend to stimulate or regulate the immune system. Wow. You think even more so than growth hormone peptides and healing peptides, these are the most impactful. We're designing peptides as a strategy that will address every organ system. What does a journey like that look like from whatever state that I'm in now

Starting point is 00:00:52 to where I'm really optimized and setting myself up to live a life of longevity, anti-aging? You've got to pick the low-hanging fruit and you got to start with... Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Brekka, human biologist, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, longevity, biohacking, and everything in between. And we are very, very blessed to have a good friend of mine. He's somewhat of a mentor to me, probably a mentor to a lot of physicians in the functional medicine space, an anesthesiologist that became a functional medicine icon. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Cook. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here and even more delighted to hang out with you.

Starting point is 00:01:50 Yeah, yeah. We had a great morning. We did our functional medicine morning. You know, we did the biohacking morning. We did breath work this morning. You showed me some really cool new techniques too. Yeah. For actually creating.

Starting point is 00:02:05 Before we did red light, we did red light, uh, steam and sauna, cold plunge, uh, breath work. And, um, and after the breath work, you showed me a really cool, uh, technique for creating a vacuum, um, in your thoracic and abdominal cavities to actually help drain, um, the lymph, which I want to talk about, um, uh, at some point during the podcast, because I love to give, you know, people these tips that they can use that are cost absolutely nothing, but could have a profound, you know, impact on the trajectory of their life. But for my guests that don't know you, I mean, you're a medical doctor, but you, you started your career as an anesthesiologist. Can you talk a little bit about your journey from

Starting point is 00:02:46 anesthesiologist to functional medicine practitioner? Because I don't think anybody ever starts out in functional medicine. Right. Yeah, that's so true. That's so true. Yeah. I thought I was going to be an expedition doctor and go on big journeys and I needed to be in a field where I could take six months off and go to Everest. And so I went into anesthesia and started doing that with the idea that I could be in a real technical with a lot of physiology. So I was really interested in physiology in medical school. And so I was doing that. And I got really lucky that the year that I got out of my residency was the year that ultrasound basically came onto the market

Starting point is 00:03:33 where we had portable ultrasounds that we could use. You're really dating yourself with that. You're around for the invention of 1842. But that's why I'm an anti-aging doctor. They didn't have television back then. It was like horse and buggy. And so then when I was in my residency, we basically would use a nerve stimulator. And we would use landmarks to know where a nerve was. And then we would go and then we would touch the nerve, which would sometimes hurt a little bit. But then the person would be twitching. And we would turn the stimulator down to know that we weren't in the

Starting point is 00:04:06 middle of the nerve and then put numbing medicine around those nerves. And so basically I was doing nerve blocks, running surgery centers and doing basically surgery for sports medicine. Okay. And, uh, but you know, I started to realize surgery was not the panacea for healing athletes that we thought it was. And so then I began to get skeptical. And so almost right away, I started becoming a functional medicine doctor. And so I studied Qigong and Chinese medicine and Ayurveda and got board certified in functional and integrative medicine. And so I was on this kind of 12 year journey of a little bit of a schizophrenic life of living like the super straight, uh, Western medicine injection, uh, job, and then kind of an alternative. And so I would work in the mornings, uh, uh, in the surgery

Starting point is 00:04:58 center in the afternoons. And then, um, in the afternoons, you were more Western medicine, Qigong, Ayurveda. Exactly. These are some of the oldest medicines in the world. I think Ayurvedic medicine is the oldest form of medicine in the world. And super, super advanced, super advanced stuff. And so then and then what happened about halfway through, I came home and one day Barb goes, oh, guess what? I found out what you're going to do for the rest of your life.

Starting point is 00:05:24 And then I go, what's that? She goes, oh, they're doing injections with ultrasound and putting something around nerves that's not local anesthetic. And I go, really? And I go, where is it? She goes, oh, it's happening tomorrow. I bought you a plane ticket. I got you a hotel and I signed you up for the course. Sounds to me like somebody needed some downtime. Exactly. That sounds like something my wife would do to me and like try to sell it as like a pause. I bought you a three day vacation by yourself. So, and when I got, I showed up, I had already been doing ultrasound guided injection basically all day for the lot because what my my old job was, I would put the brachial plexus, which is all the nerves that go to your arm asleep. And then we would do shoulder arthroscopy, butosomes, and all of the regenerative things that we now inject around nerves.

Starting point is 00:06:35 Right. And then as soon as we started doing that, then all of a sudden the awareness sort of came out of regenerative medicine. So we started injecting ligaments, tendons, fascia, nerves, and joints. Wow. And what were you injecting them with at that time? So at the very beginning, we were doing the injections with PRP. And what PRP is, is if you do a blood draw and you take and you isolate platelets in the blood, and then those platelets, you can concentrate them and inject and they've got a lot of growth factors. Eventually then we started to move up

Starting point is 00:07:12 the ladder of regenerative medicine to better and better products. And so now we have a wide variety of different products that we inject with. And we can inject those not just into joints and nerves, but also we can put them IV. And so we combine that with glutathione and vitamin C and all of that stuff. So there's a systemic approach and then a local approach. Hey guys, I'm really excited to announce this. Perfect Aminos has gotten a serious upgrade. They've added nucleotides, the building blocks of our nucleic acids, DNA and RNA. And this is important. We know essential amino acids are the building blocks of protein and collagen. Having all the essential amino acids in the correct ratio is necessary for complete protein synthesis without the caloric impact.

Starting point is 00:08:03 But if we want perfect protein synthesis, we need to look at the process of protein synthesis without the caloric impact. But if we want perfect protein synthesis, we need to look at the process of protein synthesis itself. Because if the process is faulty, we won't get the correctly made protein, collagen, fibrin, or the red blood cells in our bloodstream or our muscles. We can even stop creation of specific proteins, which can affect us in so many different ways. Our DNA and our RNA are what direct protein synthesis, building new proteins. If our DNA or RNA get damaged from toxins, harmful bacteria, or just plain aging, we get faulty protein synthesis. So cells, enzymes, and hormones are less functional and we get premature aging. By adding nucleosides and nucleotides, the building

Starting point is 00:08:46 blocks of the nucleic acids DNA and RNA, our cells get exactly what they need to help repair faulty DNA and RNA and improve the process of protein synthesis itself. This is next level science and you need to try these. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. You know, we've had some really fascinating conversations over the last few days, and I appreciate you being willing to come and actually stay in the unit with me and spend so much time. We're off to Honduras here soon for some really interesting gene therapy injections. But, you know, one of the things that I really found fascinating about our discussion is that, you know, I was talking to you about how do you walk a patient through from where they are

Starting point is 00:09:33 to being good, to being better, to being their absolute best? Because I think that a lot of people think the presence of health is just the simple absence of disease. And I think the functional medicine doctor would take issue with that and say, it's not just that you're not in a diseased state, you know, it's that you're in your most optimal state. So for someone listening to this podcast that is really interested in going as far as they can possibly go within the limits of evidence-based medicine, what would a journey like that look like? And what would, you know, would there be testing in the beginning? And then would you progress to some of the biologics,

Starting point is 00:10:17 peptides? What does a journey like that look like from whatever state that I'm in now to where I'm really optimized and setting myself up to live a life of, let's call it longevity, not aging? Okay. That's a great question. And I feel like I'm doing that here because we're doing all of these fundamental things. And so, you know, you've got to pick the low hanging fruit and you got to start with the easy, low cost things to do, which is super healthy lifestyle, perfect diet, and then all of the lifestyle biohacking things that we're all doing today. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that's the foundation. And, and I think that it's probably a year curriculum to learn how to design your life so you create the space for all of that stuff and as i was i was saying to barb we basically feel like we got we we live

Starting point is 00:11:14 the perfect lifestyle and then i go carrie's better at biohacking than we are yay um but you actually said that to me at the coffee maker this morning. I was like, I'm feeling pretty good on the top functional medicine experts. I like your biohacking, Pat. I think you got me. Yeah, you beat me. And it's amazing here. But so then the next thing is, where are we starting? What's our baseline? You need a before and after. If you're going to say, what's the best place we can go? You got to, you got to have data. And so then, um, I'm, I'm part of a team that we're developing an AI platform, and then we're going to do all labs, wearables, and then track all modalities that are done. So we're tracking peptides,

Starting point is 00:12:02 stem cells, exosomes, and then every other intervention gene therapy that people are doing to really know how people are doing. We need to have heart rate variability. And, you know, my issue is I basically started to have the amount of data that I used to get. I could kind of, I had it all in my head. And then now basically I get a pile this big. It's from five or six different countries. And I don't have access to your wearables. I don't have access to all this data. And so nobody's able to pull this into one central place. So one, we've got to organize that and then track that longitudinally over time. And then basically you use basically language modeling to understand labs and data and conversation. And ultimately that's going to be an assist to a consult.

Starting point is 00:12:57 And then ultimately that's just going to be sitting here doing a consult better than I can do it. Than a physician because they can weigh so many different independent variables. Exactly. And so then the other part of it is if you look at the big pharma companies, when they're trying to determine effectiveness of their drugs, they use a quantitative model. And so we're using a large quantitative model to turn that lens of looking at all of this data in terms of effectiveness of stem cells, exosomes, peptides, regenerative medicine, gene therapy. Wow. And so then now you're tracking all of that. And then we're going to learn a lot. We're going to learn exponentially more than we've ever known

Starting point is 00:13:37 in the next five to 10 years. I would agree with that. And what's exciting is as all of this data comes in because of artificial intelligence and the capacity to take large pools of data and create an actionable result you can for the first time sieve through it and really create something that's actually actionable you know one of the um genetics laboratories that that we work with takes 700 trillion independent variables and creates an actionable result when people how do you take 700 trillion independent variables and creates an actionable result. And when people go, how do you take 700 trillion independent variables? Well, I mean, if you look at your genome and you look at the possible variants in all of those sequences and the sub-alleles and the gene snips, these single nucleotide polymorphs, and you try to make sense of it on a spreadsheet or in an Excel model, you just couldn't do it. But AI can take all of that

Starting point is 00:14:26 information and create these actionable results. And I like how you described to me this morning, it has to start with the diet and the lifestyle changes. You don't fix the lifestyle, then you're just pushing down from the top. I mean, you're just fixing the consequences of lifestyle. But once you fix those and you've got, let's say, somebody's blood work in good condition, their triglycerides are where they need to be, cholesterol as well, their hormones seem to be balanced, they're not nutrient deficient any longer, the big cardiac risk markers, homocysteine, C-reactive protein are all kind of normalized. But now the exciting thing is you don't have to stop there. 100%.

Starting point is 00:15:08 So I wonder if we might just start with peptides as a treatment option and what they are, what they do, and why we should be using them and where you see it going. Okay, Amazing. So I was saying our body has about five different ways that it communicates with itself. And so hormones, cytokines, vitamins, and minerals, and proteins. And these are proteins are made up of amino acids. And so then if you have an amino acid that's more than a protein, that's more than 50 amino acids long, that's called a protein. If it's less than 50 amino acids, it's called a peptide. Okay. So peptide is a baby protein. And so then an example of a protein would be like insulin. It binds onto an insulin receptor, opens a channel, and so then that causes sugar to go inside of a cell. So proteins or peptides basically bind onto receptors and then cause something to happen.

Starting point is 00:16:13 Okay. Now, if we take a drug, a drug is usually trying to hack biology, but biology typically tries to overcome that hack. So a lot of times then as a result over time you end up having to take more of that drug and there's a lot of side effects in the case of a peptide or a protein we're just giving the actual thing that's working in the body kind of like when you take a hormone yeah and so there's there seems to be about an order of magnitude less side effects and complications. And then for us, our pillars, which I think are probably fairly similar to yours, we have 12 pillars, cell biology, musculoskeletal system, and genetics, and then nine pillars that are organ systems. All the nine major organ systems.

Starting point is 00:17:04 I would agree with that. And so then basically there's multiple peptides for each of are organ systems. All the nine major organ systems. I would agree with that. And so then basically there's multiple peptides for each of those organ systems and for each of the pillars. And so then when we're working with people and then we're working on optimizing their life, and then I would say there's two things. One is if there's a problem, then you might be working on the gastrointestinal system and you might be giving supplements. You could also give a peptide that would help the gastrointestinal system. You might have a neurological problem. And so there are supplements that'll help with the central nervous system, but there's also peptides. Okay. And so then now we're designing peptides as a strategy that will address every organ system. Wow. And so then to, to answer your question, I got, I got somebody, we, we spent a year and all of a sudden their lifestyle is perfect. Then we spent another year and they solved basically their brain fog and all

Starting point is 00:18:06 of their kind of main problems. And so here they are, we've got all of their data, they've got wearables and they're getting their labs and they're in a good place. Where are we going to go from here? So then the most impactful peptides are this category of peptides that are immune peptides that tend to stimulate or regulate the immune system. Wow. You think even more so than growth hormone peptides and healing peptides. These are the most impactful in terms of their system-wide. In terms of a system-wide, and I'm going to say that at at the end of 2024 coming out of covet and so then what happens is is the immune peptides when we travel and we're on planes overnight and and uh our immune

Starting point is 00:18:54 system is a little down then we take immune peptides and they stimulate the immune system if we get a cold we start taking immune peptides right away. And so then that cold lasts for a day and a half instead of 10 days. And so then you have an ability to be basically released into the wild and running around and exposed to risk. And so then we've got peptides basically for everything. And so then you can regulate. And peptides, for the most part, last about a day. So they're a short-term thing. And so I don't necessarily do peptides every day. I feel like the Dos Equis commercial.

Starting point is 00:19:37 Yeah, yeah. I don't take peptides every day, but when I do, it's BBC 157, it's a link. Exactly. And so then it's a real nice regulatory tool that you can use. And we travel with them. And then interestingly, they're very helpful tools as part of a functional regenerative medicine strategy towards optimizing the body. So we even do injections with them. That's great. So let's climb the ladder of peptides. So the peptides are amino acid sequences, which means that the body recognizes them, which I am, by the way, for the record, a huge fan of peptides. We've used them in our clinic system on well over 100,000 patients and

Starting point is 00:20:22 virtually no side effects. The downside is occasionally they don't work, not that they create harm. And I think that risk profile is excellent because a lot of times when we use chemicals and synthetics and pharmaceuticals, the downside is that you do permanent irrevocable damage, right? And then you can't just say, hey, my bad, I altered the neuroplasticity of your brain. And what we decided, you know, to take this for didn't work. But now you have permanent alteration in physiologic function. I've seen that quite a number of times, you know, with, you know, amphetamines and things like that, that we're using to try to get people around conditions like ADD or ADHD. And now somebody's been on a long, prolonged dose of Adderall that's,

Starting point is 00:21:05 that where it's progressively gotten, you know, more and more and more. And now you've, you know, you went in to fix a condition of, um, attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and now you created a central nervous system dependency on an understanding. Okay. So I'll take that one. And that sometimes works, right? Just a hundred percent. So I'll take that one. And that sometimes works, right? Just 100%. So I'll take that one. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:26 So then in a situation like that, then what for the ADD people, then there's an idea, one of my lines is a rising tide lifts all boats. And so- I say the same thing. Tide raises all the boats. I say it almost every day.

Starting point is 00:21:45 Don't I guys? Okay. Amazing. And so then the one functional medicine idea is if you could just improve mitochondrial function. Oh my gosh. Then everything, then you're going to improve cognitive function. And so then we like to use SS31 stabilizes mitochondrial membranes.

Starting point is 00:22:02 SS31. Like to take NAD, which will also donate electrons in the mitochondrial chain, so it helps give you energy. And so then just that combo, and then we'll take C-Max, which increases BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and will help for cognition. And then a lot of people with ADD actually have a little bit of immune overactivation, which basically leads to blood flowing with more viscosity. And I think that's one of the reasons for brain fog. And so we'll give often a little bit of TA1 or BPC-157. That as a stack is way better for mental clarity than a stimulant. And so then the ADD conversation is a conversation that would be like, I could probably just quit everything else and just have a scaled approach to ADD

Starting point is 00:23:01 and we'd be stimulants every day. Yeah, you would not need a stimulant. Yeah. Hey guys, I'm beyond excited to introduce something that's going to transform your nutrition game. A new protein bar formulated by me, created in partnership with Body Health. Now this is the kind of protein bar I would want in my own backpack. In fact, as I head out on the Great World Race, it's going to be in both my son's and my backpack. It is packed with Perfect Amino, the same essential amino acids I use every day for up to 99% protein absorption.

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Starting point is 00:24:13 down below in the description. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Again, for the listeners that are not exceedingly familiar with peptides um you know there's some great healing peptides um you know wound healing peptides um tissue repair peptides peptides that actually help with not just bumps and bruises but also micro tears and our ligaments and joints and tendons and cartilage and what have you um um and this is the bpc 157 which you're also a huge fan of you gave it to me today um so uh the bpc 157 and i'm also a very big fan of that um and the tb 500 that's right so um uh that's that's been this tag team combo that people have used for uh for pain and for inflammation. And that remember I said, there's something for every organ. Basically, BPC is actually a gastrointestinal peptide, but when we eat, it's secreted. And so the idea is we're mostly hooligans and we're going to do

Starting point is 00:25:22 whatever we're going to do. So our body makes some anti-inflammatory things to protect us from ourselves. Now, then the other thing to remember is what all of the who's the queen of healing in the body is the stem cell. The immune system is the system that heals musculoskeletal problems. And so then it turns out that there's a peptide that is an immune peptide, which is called TB500, which is a fragment of the thymus and beta-4 peptide. But that immune peptide tends to be very helpful for connective tissue healing. Wow. And so we'll combine BPC and TB500. And together, that combo is very helpful. And you can do it in your belly or your hip for a systemic effect.

Starting point is 00:26:16 But you can also, if you have pain somewhere, do a site injection. Yeah, that's amazing. And, you know, again, I'm a big fan because the risk profile is really, um, very attractive. And then if we move up the ladder on peptides and we start talking about things like, um, cognition, um, you know, we're talking about tissue repair, but if we talk about cognition, meaning, um, improving our cognitive function or short-term recall or focus or waking energy or concentration things like that that are a little more difficult to measure but people notice and the people around them notice that you know they're not as sharp or they're just not as attentive or they're not able to focus as much they're not able to recall things as accurately as they used to and what what do we have in the category of cognitive peptides? Okay, so then probably C-Max, which I mentioned,

Starting point is 00:27:13 is gonna be your best cognitive peptide that's commercially available. And so then that one increases BDNF, which is the brain-derived neurotropic factor. And why is that important? It's like an antioxidant is the brain-derived neurotropic factor. And why is that important? It's like an antioxidant to the brain. Wow. And so then we have probably, on average, more neurological inflammation than we can handle.

Starting point is 00:27:36 And that as we get older, our ability to handle neurological inflammation goes down. And then inflammation tends to go up. And a lot of times that comes from gastrointestinal inflammation. That's why they call it the gut brain axis. So then one thing is going to be to do something for the brain. The other thing is going to be to do something for the gut to heal that. So we don't have inflammation that's getting causing leaky gut that's going to leaky brain. And so then you could go make it easy since you already talked about it. BPC-157, which is the gastrointestinal peptide, also promotes something called angiogenesis,

Starting point is 00:28:16 which is blood vessel growth. Wow. And it also improves the flow of blood. So like if I do an IV and then I do BPC 157 IV, what happens is, is you can see that the blood becomes a little bit thinner. Wow. You can see the viscosity change. The viscosity changes for sure. Wow. And so a lot of times people will just do BPC plus C-Max, which is a great cognition enhancer. Adding an AD, like we were talking about in the setting of somebody with ADD can be helpful. I would say that there's an idea that immune stress and immune

Starting point is 00:28:58 activation leads us to have basically more antibodies floating around in our blood that could be binding onto things, which is decreasing viscosity and decreasing blood flow. And so then things that can regulate the immune response. And so one of those at a peptide level would be something like thymus and alpha-1. Another thing to go up the ladder, another thing that regulates immune function is exosomes. And so then you could potentially take exosomes with any of those other products, and you could do them either subcutaneously or IV. You could even inject it into your joint, and then some of that's going to be absorbed and will have a systemic effect. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:29:46 And so a lot of times we'll do an injection for somebody and all we'll do is do a shoulder joint injection. And they'll go, oh, how come my brain fog just totally went away? Wow. When you inject them with that. Yeah. Which I want to get to next. You know, my mother had some struggles for a while because she was bedridden from a bilateral knee surgery that she had and i put her on cerebrolysis um

Starting point is 00:30:12 and i'm telling you in just a few weeks it was night and day my father actually called and was like can you tone her down a little bit like he's like she wants to redecorate the whole house she's got all new artwork coming in like she is on fire i mean she went from being mid-70s year old woman cognitively to like an early 40s 100 it was night and day the difference and that was the cerebral lysine peptide um and uh i got it originally injectable now she takes an oral version of it. But again, I'm such a huge fan of the peptides and their use because of the limited risk profile. And now we get into the really exciting things. Stem cells, exosomes, and some of these other really advanced, cutting edge, but scientifically valid,

Starting point is 00:31:07 evidence-based therapies that are going on in mass outside of the United States, and in some cases are allowed here, some cases are not allowed here, but have a real propensity to truly extend life and maybe even reverse the cause or reverse the pathology and diseases that we at one time thought were not reversible. Maybe we thought we could halt them, but not actually reverse them. And I'd love first to talk about stem cells and then how a stem cell secretes an exosome, the difference between the two. And for therapeutic reasons, what are some of your recommendations? Let's just assume for the sake of argument, and I don't mean to off-put my audience, that somebody has an unlimited budget, just for the sake of this part of the discussion.

Starting point is 00:32:04 What are some of the things that they could do and expect from some of these biologics like stem cells? Okay, great. So there was this great idea that they figured out that a stem cell actually has the potential to turn into any other type of cell. Pluripotent. So it's kind of pluripotent. And so then this was this idea. And so then for the first half of my experience in regenerative medicine, which was sort of like right at the beginning, this was this idea. And so we were focused on that and I was and still am fairly involved in adipose stem cells. And so then we were having this idea that that could go turn into a cartilage cell or it could go turn into a tendon cell.

Starting point is 00:32:48 So then it's a total solution. And the name was mesenchymal stem cell. Basically, what happened is the person, Arnold Kaplan, who passed away, but is like one of the godfathers of regenerative medicine, figured out that these stem cells don't really turn into another cell. But what they do is they basically secrete little liposomal balls that have signaling molecules inside that tell other cells what to do. It's kind of like currency. And so then they changed the name to medicinal signaling cells. And so then they changed the name to medicinal signaling cells. And so stem cells are essentially a little mobile pharmacy.

Starting point is 00:33:31 And then they show up and then they secrete exosomes. And the exosomes is kind of like currency that goes around, currency and information that just goes to the other cells in the area. And then it initiates healing. So it tells them how to behave. It tells them. And basically what happens is if we have inflammation, let's say you get a trauma, we were talking about this today, it causes inflammation, which causes increased blood flow and pain. That's just a signal for a stem cell that may be there or that migrates from the blood stream. And then the stem cell turns the inflammation off as the first step in healing. There's a whole bunch of steps that happen after

Starting point is 00:34:10 that, right. That are coordinated by the stem cell. And so the stem cell secretes exosomes that, and I basically, I always tell people economic indicators are good. Kind of like right now, you can get a loan. the economy is going to be getting better, and we can do a remodeling project and fix this muscle that was torn. Wow. And so the stem cell arrives on the scene because it's called the site of inflammation. And when it arrives, it begins to deploy these little soldiers called exosomes, which are about 1 800th the size of a stem cell. They're nanovesticles, nanoparticles. We've talked about these before on the show.

Starting point is 00:34:50 You know, they cross the phospholipid bilayer of the cell without permission, which is a good thing because very often when you have damage to a cell, you know, things are not allowed through the membrane wall. And, you know, imagine having a heart attack on your floor, but the paramedic's being locked outside the door. You know, their proximity doesn't matter. So very often the proximity for a cell to get help doesn't matter because the help is locked outside the door it's outside of their that cell wall and i agree with you i think you know the really promising thing about exosomes is their molecular size and the fact that they don't have dna right so they can't actually transmit a signal

Starting point is 00:35:25 from somebody else's body, right? And they carry something called high molecular weight, hyaluronic acid, and growth factors. So what are the benefits of using these kinds of biologics like exosomes systemically, intravenously? So then I would say the most important thing is they tend to regulate immune function. And so we live in a sea of inflammation and we had that one bruise, but then that turned into 10 and that turned into inflammation in our liver and fatty liver and inflammation in our brain and our gut. And so we have more inflammation than we can handle. And then the cells are just waiting for a signal that everything is okay, that they can start to heal. Right. And so then exosomes are very anti-inflammatory.

Starting point is 00:36:16 And so like if you take, when I take a big trip and I'm, I got back from Dubai and you get, you take exosomes, It's almost like you feeling like you just took a shower and all the stress on the inside of your body just went away. Couldn't agree with you more. I love taking the exosomes. I, I, I feel like I'm looking through a 4k screen, you know, like, like the, um, it's hard to describe, like your vision is brighter. It's clearer. And you have that just very clear, cognizant, awake, focused feeling of, and it's not being stimulated. You don't feel like you did two shots of espresso.

Starting point is 00:36:53 You feel just clear and awake and alert and cognizant. And I notice how energetic I am after doing exosomes. And then my sleep just is incredible. So, and then above the exosome, which, you know, also really, really exciting. And I think this is a frontier where we're safely learning to go so that we can actually manage, begin to manage longevity. And that's the gene therapies. Um, and one in particular I want to talk about, because I have some biohacking buddies that did some of these gene therapies, specifically the folistatin, myostatin inhibiting gene therapy. And one of them put on, what, 14 pounds of muscle in 45 days. And I remember seeing him at a,

Starting point is 00:37:46 I saw him at the conference in Europe,, um, in, uh, Europe and I ran into him. I go, all right, brother, what are you doing? I mean, did you get on growth hormone? Cause I know he's sort of, you know, not for that. And he said, no, I went to Honduras. I did this, uh, full of stat and gene therapy. And, um, and then I just went deep down the road of this genetic therapy and i wonder if now you know i would consider these to be sort of top of the food chain longevity

Starting point is 00:38:11 anti-aging treatments could you talk a little bit about those yeah 100 that can we can i say that person's name yeah it's ben greenfield yeah i think ben's talked yeah i think you talked about it before we were in the podcast i'll make sure he's said it in the pod. We talked about it on my podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, so, so I can tell, shout out buddy. You're looking good. I love you, Ben. We love you, Ben. So then I, I was in London at that health summit. Yeah. And I saw you there too. I was, I was literally standing and like on my phone and then I,

Starting point is 00:38:43 I hung up and then I was looking at him just like he was as the camera and i just was like fuck that guy's jacked yeah and then i was like and then i'm looking and i was doing good before that but yeah and then he's he's looking at me and we're both looking at each other and then i and then i didn't i didn't even recognize him was so big. I did it also. And I've put on about eight pounds. And so then let me tell you about the science of this one. And remember, the body has a number of different ways of communicating with itself. One is hormones. One is protein-based things.

Starting point is 00:39:23 If it's a baby protein, it's a peptide. If it's a baby protein, it's a peptide. If it's a long protein, it's a protein. One thing you could do is inject it. If you inject it today, it's going to have a nice effect today, but it's going to be gone tomorrow. Right, peptide. And it's easy to inject peptides. It's a lot harder to inject a protein. Folistatin's 344 amino acids long. So then what happened is there's

Starting point is 00:39:47 two ways to do this, but there's a company called Minicircle. And what they did is they took the gene for Follistatin. So it's a gene that codes for 344 amino acids and they put it in a circular plasmid and then you can inject that into your shoulder. It gets absorbed by the cells, and then it pulls that plasmid into the nucleus. It doesn't actually get incorporated into your chromosomes. But while it's in there for about a year and a half, your body prints that plasmid. And so then when it prints that plasmid, it actually makes folistatin. So instead of doing an injection every day, then for a year, year and a half,

Starting point is 00:40:35 you have this protein at a higher concentration in your body and it's floating around and then that protein is actually um is inhibiting the protein that inhibits muscle growth right the myostatin um protein and there's a second one uh active in it yeah um that's actually inhibiting muscle growth because obviously when we damage muscle and it grows back larger, that muscle hypertrophy, that's a well-known concept. But at some point, the hypertrophy is limited by this myostatin. And what the fullostatin does is it blocks that from working. So your hypertrophy is not as limited.

Starting point is 00:41:21 And what do you feel about the safety of some of these therapies? Because when we say gene therapies, I mean, just like you said, it migrates into the nucleus of the cell and in the nucleus of the cell is our DNA. And our DNA is, is sending messages into the cell transcription, right? Messenger RNA, but it actually reads our DNA and reads that full of stat and DNA and will take the command from both. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 00:41:49 That's really, I want to make sure I understood that. That's incredible. And we, you know, I would say this one's really early. And so then this one, it's funny, some friends of mine asked me to fly down to Honduras just to do some vetting of the technology. So I wasn't really planning on doing it. Although I'd had a whole bunch of my patients have an incredible experience with it. And I, uh, I told you in the, I'd had this long experience doing adipose stem cells where we do a liposuction and harvest some stem cells.

Starting point is 00:42:36 So I show up and the doctor who is doing the study in Honduras is a doctor named Dr. Terry, who me and him had the same mentor in adipose stem cells, Bob Alexander. And so I showed up and I was like, oh my God, I've known this guy for 12 years and is an amazing doctor. And, um, and so then he walked me through their trial and he'd, he'd personally treated 250 people and had followed up with them all. Wow. And he hadn't had any negative side effects. There is a trend for LDL to go up by about 10 points. And so that's about the only negative, but it lengthens telomeres. It decreases biological age. So this is a very big anti-inflammatory effect. And this is called what? Full of statin. Full of statin. The Full of statin gene theory does all of this too. Yeah. So it has a host of benefits that are above and beyond just

Starting point is 00:43:31 muscle, but particularly anti-inflammatory. And then I would say that we've had a lot of people emotionally feel better. Wow. I'm in. I'm going to let you guys know how this goes. Honduras, here we come. I want to save some time for my rule bracket community because we've got a lot of questions coming your way for our rule brackets. But I think this approach to slowly climbing the ladder from getting your blood work to your genes done, supplementation to fixing your hormones to then incorporating things like peptides to then climbing into the world of biologic stem cells exosomes and gene therapies um is the frontier that people are really really really curious about so how can they find out more about you oh uh you've written a book.

Starting point is 00:44:25 Cause you need to, I need to write a book. I need to write a book, but it'd be a bestseller, uh, where you can find, find you can, you're going to find me at a bunch of international stem cell clinics. And,

Starting point is 00:44:37 uh, stay tuned. Cause you and I've got some, we're using, we're using these new stem cells, which I think are going to absolutely transform regenerative medicine. I think so, too. And they're the most effective stem cells that I've ever found.

Starting point is 00:44:55 And we've been doing it for a long time for orthopedic and for pain issues. And so, but you can find us at bioreset.com. Bioreset.com. Bioreset.com. Okay. Yeah. And, uh, and I'm, I'm, uh, I, I promise that I'm going to actually start doing social media. Yeah. I mean, it took me a long time too.

Starting point is 00:45:16 You know, I'm, I barely even have TikTok. I mean, TikTok on my phone. So I look, I wind down all of my podcasts by asking all my guests the same question. Um, and there's no right or wrong answer to this question. But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? I would say there's two things. One thing is living in the moment. And then the other thing is the arc of what your life and what it means and what you're going to do. And, and so for me, the, and, and these great European philosophers and physicians came up with all of these stages of life where you go through basically identity and family and relationships and all this stuff.

Starting point is 00:45:59 But then the final stage is generativity when you give back. Wow. And so then, and I always said it, that basically everything else doesn't matter. And I, I basically feel that way. And what really matters is if you can have a meaningful impact that gives back to, to, to everyone, to humanity. And so then for me being an ultimate human is human is actually having an ultimate impact. Yeah. And at the same time as that, being present and awake and being your best version of yourself. That's incredible, man. That's one of the better that I've heard in a long time.

Starting point is 00:46:38 Well, guys, you know how to check out Dr. Matt Cook. I'll put all of the information that he just went through in the show notes below. And as always, that's just science.

The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 121. Dr. Matt Cook: Reversing Age with Peptides, Stem Cells & Gene Therapy

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