121. Dr. Matt Cook: Reversing Age with Peptides, Stem Cells & Gene Therapy

Speaker 1 Who's the queen of healing in the body? Is the stem cell? The immune system is the system that heals musculoskeletal level problems.

Speaker 1 It turns out that there's a peptide that is an immune peptide that tends to be very helpful.

Speaker 2 I'm such a huge fan of the peptides and their use because of the limited risk profile.

Speaker 2 Some of these other really advanced, scientifically valid, evidence-based have a real propensity to truly extend life.

Speaker 1 The most impactful peptides are this category of peptides that are immune peptides that tend to stimulate or regulate the immune system. Wow.

Speaker 2 You think even more so than growth hormone peptides and healing peptides, these are the most impactful.

Speaker 1 We're designing peptides as a strategy that will address every organ system.

Speaker 2 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 longevity anti-aging?

Speaker 1 You've got to pick the low-hanging fruit and you've got to start with.

Speaker 1 Ultimate human.

Speaker 2 Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, Gary Brecca, human biologist, where we go down the road of everything, anti-aging, longevity, biohacking.

Speaker 2 and everything in between.

Speaker 2 And we are very, very blessed to have a good friend of mine.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Cook.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 I'm delighted to be here and even more delighted to hang out with you.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. No, we had a great morning.
We like did our...

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 For actually creating, before we did red light, we did red light, steam insana, cold plunge, breath work.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 after the breathwork, you showed me a really cool technique for creating a vacuum in your thoracic and abdominal cavities to actually help drain the lymph, which I want to talk about.

Speaker 2 at some point during the podcast because I love to give people these tips that they can use that cost absolutely nothing, but could have a profound impact on the trajectory of their life.

Speaker 2 But for my guests that don't know you, I mean, you're a medical doctor,

Speaker 2 but you started your career as an anesthesiologist.

Speaker 2 Can you talk a little bit about your journey from anesthesiologist to functional medicine practitioner? Because I don't think anybody ever starts out in functional medicine.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah, that's so true.
That's so true. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 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.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And so we 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 and medical school.

Speaker 1 And so I was

Speaker 1 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, where we had portable ultrasounds that we could use.

Speaker 1 You were really daring yourself with that. You were around the invention of that.

Speaker 1 But that's why I'm an anti-Asian. I didn't even have television back there.

Speaker 2 I was like, horse and buggy.

Speaker 1 And so then

Speaker 1 when I was in my residency, we basically would use a nerve stimulator and we would use landmarks to know where a nerve was.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And we would turn the stimulator down to know that we weren't in the middle of the nerve and then put numbing medicine around those nerves.

Speaker 1 And so basically, I was doing nerve blocks, running surgery centers, and doing basically surgery for sports medicine. Okay.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so almost right away, I started becoming a functional medicine doctor. Wow.

Speaker 1 And so I studied Qigong and Chinese medicine and Ayurveda and got board certified in functional and integrative medicine.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 Western medicine injection

Speaker 1 job. And then kind of an alternative.
And so I would work in the mornings

Speaker 1 in the surgery center in the afternoons. And then

Speaker 2 in the afternoons, you were more Western medicine, Qigong, Ayurveda. Exactly.
I mean, these are some of the oldest medicines in the world.

Speaker 2 I think Ayurvedic medicine is the oldest form of medicine in the world.

Speaker 1 And super, super advanced, super advanced stuff. And so then,

Speaker 1 and then what happened about halfway through,

Speaker 1 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. And then I go, what's that? She goes, oh,

Speaker 1 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 it's happening tomorrow.

Speaker 1 I bought you a plane ticket. I got you a hotel and I signed you up for the course.

Speaker 2 Sounds to me like somebody needed some downtime.

Speaker 1 Exactly. That sounds like something my wife would do to me.
Guess what?

Speaker 2 And I try to sell it as like a positive. I bought you a three-day vacation by yourself.

Speaker 1 So, and when I got, I showed up, I had already been doing ultrasound-guided injection basically all day for the last, because what my old job was, I would put the brachial plexus, which is all the nerves that go to your arm of sleep.

Speaker 1 And then we would do shoulder arthroscopy, but we wouldn't have to put the person to sleep.

Speaker 1 Ah, and so then, you know, then when we found out that there were other things, next thing you know, we're putting

Speaker 1 dextrose followed by PRP, followed by peptides, stem cells, exosomes, and all of the regenerative things that we now inject around nerves. Right.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so. And what were you injecting them with at that time?

Speaker 1 So at the very beginning, we were doing the injections with PRP.

Speaker 1 And what PRP is, is if you do a blood draw and you take and you isolate platelets in the blood.

Speaker 1 And then those platelets, you can concentrate them and inject, and they've got a lot of growth factors. Right.

Speaker 1 Eventually, then

Speaker 1 we started to move up the ladder of regenerative medicine to better and better products. And so now we have a

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

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Speaker 2 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.

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Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 We're off to Honduras here soon for

Speaker 2 some really interesting gene therapy

Speaker 2 injections. But, you know, one of the things that I really

Speaker 2 found fascinating about our discussion is that, you know,

Speaker 2 I was talking to you about how do you walk a patient through from where they are

Speaker 2 to being good, to being better, to being their absolute best. Because I think that a lot of people think the

Speaker 2 presence of health is just the simple absence of disease.

Speaker 2 And I think the functional medicine doctor would take issue with that and say it's not just that you're not in a disease state, you know, it's that you're in your most optimal state.

Speaker 2 So for someone listening to this podcast

Speaker 2 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? What would,

Speaker 2 you know, would there be testing in the beginning? And then would you progress to some of the biologics, peptides?

Speaker 2 What does a journey like that look like from whatever state that I'm in now to where I'm really optimized and

Speaker 2 setting myself up to live a life of, let's call it longevity, diaging?

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 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 a super healthy lifestyle, perfect diet, and then all of the lifestyle biohacking things that we're.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly. So that's the foundation.
And

Speaker 1 I think that it's probably a year

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 we basically feel like we got, we, we live the perfect lifestyle. And then I go,

Speaker 1 Carrie's better at biohacking and lifestyle than we are. Yay.

Speaker 2 But you actually said that to me at the coffee maker this morning. I was, I was like, I'm feeling pretty good when the top functional medicine experts.
Like, I like your biohacking pat.

Speaker 2 I think you got me. Yeah,

Speaker 1 you beat me.

Speaker 1 But 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?

Speaker 1 You got to, you got to have data.

Speaker 1 And so then

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So we're tracking peptides, stem cells, exosomes, and then every other intervention, gene therapy that people are doing.

Speaker 1 To really know how people are doing, we need to have heart rate variability.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It's from five or six different countries.

Speaker 1 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. Right.

Speaker 1 So one, we've got to organize that and then track that longitudinally over time.

Speaker 1 And then basically

Speaker 1 you use basically language modeling to understand labs and data and

Speaker 1 conversation. And ultimately, that's going to

Speaker 1 be an assist to a consult. And then ultimately, that's just going to be sitting here doing a consult better than I can.
Then a physician, because

Speaker 2 they can weigh so many different independent variables.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And so then the other part of it is

Speaker 1 if you look at the big pharma companies, when they're trying to determine the effectiveness of their drugs, they use a quantitative model.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so then now you're tracking all of that. And then what then we're going to learn a lot.
We're going to learn exponentially more than we've ever known in the next five to 10 years.

Speaker 2 I would agree with that.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 You know, one of the genetics laboratories that we work with takes 700 trillion independent variables and creates an actionable result.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 and the gene SNPs, these single nucleotide polymorphs,

Speaker 2 and you try to make sense of it on a spreadsheet or in an Excel model,

Speaker 2 you just couldn't. couldn't do it.
But AI can take all of that information and create these actionable results.

Speaker 2 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, right? I mean,

Speaker 2 you're just fixing the consequences of the lifestyle. But once you fix those

Speaker 2 and you've got, let's say, somebody's blood work in good condition, you know, their triglycerides are where they need to be. Cholesterol is well.
Their hormones seem to be balanced.

Speaker 2 They're not nutrient-efficient any longer. Their big cardiac

Speaker 2 risk markers, homocysteine, C-rective protein are all kind of normalized. But now the exciting thing is you don't have to stop there.

Speaker 1 100%.

Speaker 2 So I wonder if we might just start with peptides as a treatment

Speaker 2 option and what they are, what they do, and

Speaker 2 why we should be using them and where you see it going.

Speaker 1 Okay, amazing.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I was saying our body has about five different ways that it communicates with itself. And so hormones, cytokines,

Speaker 1 vitamins, and minerals,

Speaker 1 and proteins. And these are proteins that are made up of amino acids.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So peptide is a baby protein.

Speaker 1 And so then an example of a protein would be like insulin.

Speaker 1 It binds onto an insulin receptor opens a channel and so then that causes sugar to go inside of a cell okay so proteins or peptides basically bind onto receptors and then cause something to happen okay now

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so, there's there seems to be about an order of magnitude less side effects and complications.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 we, I was,

Speaker 1 for us, our pillars, which I think are probably fairly similar to yours, we have 12 pillars:

Speaker 1 cell biology, musculoskeletal system, and genetics, and then nine pillars that are organ systems.

Speaker 2 All the nine major organ systems.

Speaker 1 I would agree with that. And so then basically there's a pep, there's multiple peptides for each of those organ systems and for each aspect of each of the pillars.
Okay.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 You might have a neurological problem and so there are supplements that'll help with the central nervous system, but there's also peptides.

Speaker 1 And so then now we're designing peptides as a strategy that will address every organ system. Wow.
And so then to answer your question,

Speaker 1 I got somebody,

Speaker 1 we spent a year and all of a sudden their lifestyle is perfect.

Speaker 1 Then we spent another year and they solved basically their brain fog and all of their kind of main problems. And so here they are.
We've got all of their data.

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 So then the the

Speaker 1 The most impactful peptides are this category of peptides that are immune peptides that tend to stimulate or regulate regulate the immune system. Wow.

Speaker 2 You think even more so than growth hormone peptides and healing peptides, these are the most impactful in terms of their system-wide.

Speaker 1 In terms of a system-wide, and I'm going to say that in at the end of 2024,

Speaker 1 coming out of COVID. And so then what happens is, is the immune peptides.
When we travel and we're on planes overnight and

Speaker 1 our immune 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.

Speaker 1 And so then that cold lasts for a day and a half instead of 10 days.

Speaker 1 And so then

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so then you can regulate. And peptides for the most part last about a day.

Speaker 1 so they're a short-term thing and so i don't necessarily do peptides every day uh i feel like the dosekies commercial yeah yeah i don't take peptides every day but when i do it's bbc 157 selink

Speaker 1 exactly and so then um and so then that's a it's a real nice regulatory tool that you can use and we travel with them and then and then interestingly they're very helpful tools as part of a functional regenerative medicine strategy towards optimizing the body.

Speaker 1 So we even do injections with them.

Speaker 2 That's great. So

Speaker 1 let's climb the ladder of peptides.

Speaker 2 So the peptides are amino acid sequences, which means that the body recognizes them, which

Speaker 2 I am, by the way, for the record, a huge fan of peptides.

Speaker 2 We've used them in our clinic system on

Speaker 2 well over 100,000 patients and virtually no side effects. The downside is occasionally they don't work, not that they create harm.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 And then you can't just say, hey, my bad, I altered the neuroplasticity of your brain. And what we decided

Speaker 2 to take this for didn't work. But now you have permanent alteration in physiologic function.

Speaker 1 I've seen that quite a number of times.

Speaker 2 with amphetamines and things like that that we're using to try to get people around conditions like ADD or ADHD.

Speaker 2 And now somebody's been on a long, prolonged dose of Adderall that's that where it's progressively gotten more and more and more. And now you've, you know, you went in to fix a condition of

Speaker 2 attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and now you created a central nervous system dependency on an on a stamina.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I'll take that one. And that sometimes works, right? Just 100%.
So I'll take that one. Yeah.
So then

Speaker 1 in a situation like that, then what for the ADD people, then

Speaker 1 there's an idea. One of my lines is a rising tide lifts all boats.
And so I say the same thing.

Speaker 2 Tide raises all the boats.

Speaker 2 I say it almost every day. Don't I, guys?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so then

Speaker 1 we like to use SS31, stabilizes mitochondrial membranes. SS31.
Like to take NAD,

Speaker 1 which will also donate electrons in the mitochondrial chain. So it helps give you energy.
And so then

Speaker 1 just that combo. And then we'll take

Speaker 1 Cmax, which increases BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotropic factor,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 will help for cognition.

Speaker 1 And then a lot of people with ADD

Speaker 1 actually

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so we'll give often a little bit of TA1 or BPC 157.

Speaker 1 That as a stack

Speaker 1 is way better for mental clarity than a stimulant.

Speaker 1 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 and we beat stimulants every day.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you would not need a stimulant. Yeah.
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Speaker 2 And this is the BPC 157, which I'm also a huge fan of.

Speaker 1 She gave it to me today.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 2 the BPC 157. And I'm also a very big fan of that.
And the TB500.

Speaker 1 That's right. So

Speaker 1 that's been this tag team combo that people have used for

Speaker 1 both for pain and for inflammation. And

Speaker 1 remember, I said there's something for every organ? Basically, BPC is actually a gastrointestinal peptide, but when we eat, it's secreted.

Speaker 1 And so the idea is we're mostly hooligans and we're going to do whatever we're going to do. So our body makes some anti-inflammatory things to protect us from ourselves.
Right.

Speaker 1 Now, then the other thing to remember is what all of the

Speaker 1 who's the queen of healing in the body is the stem cell. So the immune system is the system that heals musculoskeletal problems.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 that immune peptide tends to be very helpful for connective tissue healing. Wow.
And so we'll combine BPC and TB500.

Speaker 1 And together

Speaker 1 that combo is very helpful. And you can do it in your belly or your hip for a systemic effect, but you can also, if you have pain somewhere,

Speaker 1 do a side injection exactly. Yeah, that's amazing.
And,

Speaker 2 you know, again, I'm a big fan because the risk profile is really very attractive. And then if we move up the ladder on peptides and we start talking about things like cognition,

Speaker 2 you know, we're talking about tissue repair, but if we talk about cognition, meaning 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.

Speaker 2 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 the

Speaker 1 probably cmax which i mentioned is going to be your best cognitive peptide that's commercially available and so then that one increases bdnf okay and uh

Speaker 1 which is the brain-derived neurotropic factor and which is like important it's like an antioxidant to the brain wow and so then we we

Speaker 1 we have probably on average more neurological inflammation than we can handle. And that as we get older, our ability to handle neurological inflammation goes down.

Speaker 1 And then we tend, and 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.

Speaker 1 So then one thing is going to be to do something for the brain.

Speaker 1 The other thing is going to be to do something for the gut to heal that so so we don't have inflammation that's getting causing leaky gut that's going to leaky brain. Right.

Speaker 1 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, which is blood vessel growth.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And it also improves the flow of blood. So like if I do an IV and then I do BPC 157 IV,

Speaker 1 what happens is, is you can see that the blood becomes a little bit thinner. Wow.
And it'll see the viscosity change. The viscosity changes for sure.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And so a lot of times people will just do BPC plus CMAX, which is a great cognition enhancer. Adding an AD, like we were talking about in the setting of

Speaker 1 somebody with ADD, can be helpful.

Speaker 1 I would say that there's an idea that immune stress and immune 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.

Speaker 1 Right. And so then

Speaker 1 things that can regulate the immune response. And so one of those at a peptide level would be something like thymus and alpha one.

Speaker 1 Another thing that it took to go up the ladder, another thing that regulates immune function is exosomes. And so then

Speaker 1 you could potentially take exosomes with

Speaker 1 any of those other products and you could do them either subcutaneously or IV.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so you'll, a lot of times we'll do an injection for somebody and

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 When you get inject them with exosomes, which I want to get to next.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 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 cerebral lysin.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 Like, can you like,

Speaker 1 he's like, she wants to redecorate the whole house.

Speaker 2 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. Whatever

Speaker 2 it was night and day, the difference. And that was the cerebral lysine peptide.
Um, and um, I got it originally injectable. Now she takes an oral version of it.

Speaker 2 But I'm, I'm, again, I'm such a huge fan of the, of the peptides and their use because of the limited risk profile.

Speaker 2 And now we get into the like the really exciting things: um, you know, stem cells, um, exosomes, and some of these other really advanced cutting-edge, but scientifically valid, evidence-based therapies that are going on in mass outside of the United States.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 I'd love first to talk about stem cells

Speaker 2 and then how a stem cell secretes an exosome, the difference between the two, and for therapeutic reasons,

Speaker 2 what are some of your recommendations?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 what what are some of the things that they could do and expect from some of these biologics like stem cells okay great

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 there was this great idea that

Speaker 1 they figured out that a stem cell

Speaker 1 actually has the potential to turn into any other type of cell pluripotent yeah so it's kind of pluripotent and so then this was this idea and so then for the first half of uh my experience in regenerative medicine which was sort of like right at the beginning, this was this idea.

Speaker 1 And so we were focused on that. And I was and still am fairly involved in adipose stem cells.

Speaker 1 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. So then it's a total solution.

Speaker 1 And the name was Mazenkimal stem cell.

Speaker 1 Basically, what happened is, 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.

Speaker 1 It's kind of like currency. And so then

Speaker 1 they change the name to medicinal signaling cells. And so stem cells are essentially a little mobile pharmacy.
Okay. And then they show up and then they secrete exosomes.

Speaker 1 And the exosomes is kind of like currency that goes around, currency and information that is just goes to the other cells in the area.

Speaker 1 And then it initiates healing.

Speaker 2 And basically. It tells them how to behave.

Speaker 1 It tells them. And basically what happens is, is if we have inflammation, let's say you get a trauma, we were talking about this today.

Speaker 1 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 bloodstream.

Speaker 1 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 that that are coordinated by the stem cell.

Speaker 1 And so the stem cell secretes exosomes that, and I basically 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.

Speaker 1 And we can do a remodeling project and fix this muscle that was torn.

Speaker 2 Wow. And so so the stem cell arrives on the scene because it's called the site of inflammation.

Speaker 2 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 nano-vesicles, nanoparticles.

Speaker 2 We've talked about these before on the show. 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,

Speaker 2 you know, things are not allowed through the membrane wall. And, you know, imagine having a heart heart attack on your floor, but the paramedics being locked outside the door.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 It's outside of that cell wall.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 So they can't actually transmit a signal from somebody else's body, right?

Speaker 2 And they carry something called high molecular weight, high aleuronic acid, and growth factors. So what are the benefits of using these kinds of biologics like exosomes systemically, intravenously?

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 we had that one bruise, but then that turned into 10 and that turned into inflammation in our our liver and fatty liver and inflammation in our brain and our gut.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And so then exosomes are very anti-inflammatory. And so, like, if you take, when I take a big trip and I'm, I got back from Dubai.

Speaker 1 And you get, you take exosomes, it's almost like you're feeling like you just took a shower and all the stress on the inside of your body just went away.

Speaker 2 I couldn't agree with you more. I love taking the exosomes.
I, I, I feel like I'm looking through a 4K screen. Yeah.
You know, like

Speaker 2 the, it's hard to describe. Like your vision is brighter.
It's clearer. And you have that just very clear, cognizant, awake, focused feeling.

Speaker 2 And it's not being stimulated. You don't feel like you did two shots of Espresso.
You feel just clear and awake and alert and cognizant.

Speaker 2 And I notice how energetic I am after doing exosomes.

Speaker 2 And then my sleep just is incredible.

Speaker 2 So, and then above the exosome, which, you know, also really, really exciting.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And one in particular I want to talk about, because I have some biohacking buddies that did some of these gene therapies,

Speaker 2 specifically the folostatin, myostatin inhibiting gene therapy. And one of them put on

Speaker 2 14 pounds of muscle in 45 days. And I remember seeing him at a, I saw him at the conference in

Speaker 2 Europe. And I ran into him.

Speaker 1 I go, all right, brother, what are you doing? I mean, did you get on growth hormone?

Speaker 2 Because I know he's sort of, you know, not for that. And he said, no, I, you know, I went to Honduras.
I did this

Speaker 2 of statin gene therapy. And,

Speaker 2 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, uh, anti-aging treatments.

Speaker 2 Could you talk a little bit about those?

Speaker 1 Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 1 That we, can we, can I say that person's name? Yeah, it's Ben Greenfield. Yeah.
So I think Ben's talked about it. Yeah, I think he talked about it.

Speaker 2 Before we go to the podcast, I'll make sure he's said it in the podcast.

Speaker 1 We talked about it on my podcast. Yeah, yeah.
Okay. So, so, yeah, Greenfield, shout out, buddy.
You're looking for forward to it. I love you, Ben.

Speaker 1 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, I hung up.

Speaker 1 And then I was looking at him just like he was at the camera. And I just was like, fuck, that guy's jacked.
Yeah. And then I was like, and then I'm looking.

Speaker 2 And then I was doing good before that.

Speaker 1 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. It was so big.
I did it also.

Speaker 1 And I've put on about eight pounds.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so then let me let me tell you about the science of this one.

Speaker 1 And remember, we were, uh,

Speaker 1 the body has a number of different ways it's communicating with itself. One is hormones, one is protein-based things.
If it's a baby protein, it's a peptide. If it's a long protein, it's a protein.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And it's easy to inject peptides. It's a lot harder to inject a protein.
Folostatin is 344 amino acids long.

Speaker 1 So then what happened is, there's two ways to do this, but there's a company called Mini Circle. And what they did is they took the gene for folostatin.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 It gets absorbed by the cells, and then it pulls that plasmid into the nucleus. It doesn't actually get incorporated into your chromosomes.

Speaker 1 But while it's in there for about a year and a half,

Speaker 1 your body prints that plasmid.

Speaker 1 And so then when it prints that plasmid, it actually makes folostatin. So instead of doing an injection every day,

Speaker 1 then for a year, year and a half, you have this

Speaker 1 protein at a higher concentration in your body and it's floating around.

Speaker 2 And then that protein is actually

Speaker 2 inhibiting the protein that inhibits muscle growth, right? The myostatin protein. And there's a second one.

Speaker 1 Active and active. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 2 limited. 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.

Speaker 2 And in the nucleus of the cell is our DNA.

Speaker 2 And our DNA is sending messages into the cell transcription, right? Messenger RNA. But it actually reads our DNA and reads that

Speaker 2 fullest attin DNA and takes, we'll take the command from both.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay.
That's really, I want to make sure I understood that. And we, you know, I would say this, this one's really early.
And so then this, this one, I, uh, it's, it's funny. Um,

Speaker 1 Some friends of mine asked me to fly down to Honduras just to do some vetting of the technology.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I told you,

Speaker 1 I'd had this long experience doing adipose stem cells where we do a liposuction and harvest some stem cells. So I show up and the doctor who

Speaker 1 is doing the study in Honduras is a doctor named Dr. Terry who was who me and him had the same mentor in Adipos themselves.
Wow. Bob Alexander.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And so then we, so I showed up and I was like, oh my God, I've known this guy for 12 years and is an amazing doctor.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so then he walked me through their trial and he'd personally treated 250 people and had followed up with them all.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 And he hadn't had any negative side effects.

Speaker 1 There is a trend for LDL to go up by about 10 points. Wow.
And so that's about the only negative, but it lengthens telomeres. It decreases biological age.
So it's a very big anti-inflammatory gene.

Speaker 1 And this is called what? Fullostatin. Oh, fullostatin.

Speaker 2 So fullostatin gene theory does all of this too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So it has a host of benefits that are above and beyond just muscle. So it's a, but particularly anti-inflammatory.
And then I, I would say that we've had a lot of people emotionally feel better. Wow.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 2 I'm going to let you guys know how this goes.

Speaker 1 Honduras, here we come.

Speaker 2 You know, I, I, um,

Speaker 2 I want to, I want to save some time for my, my rule record community because we've got a lot of questions coming your way for the, for our rule recas. But

Speaker 2 I think this this approach to slowly climbing the ladder from getting your blood work to your genes done to 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 huh oh uh you written a book

Speaker 1 no i need to i need to write a book

Speaker 1 i need to write a book but be a bestseller

Speaker 1 Where you can find, find, you can, you're going to find me at a bunch of international stem cell clinics.

Speaker 1 And stay tuned. You and I've got some.

Speaker 1 We're using these mu stem cells, which I think are going to absolutely transform regenerative medicine.

Speaker 2 I think so too.

Speaker 1 And they're the

Speaker 1 most effective stem cells that I've ever found. And we've been doing it for a long time for orthopedic and for pain issues.

Speaker 1 And And so,

Speaker 1 but you can find us at bioreset.com. Bioreset.com.

Speaker 2 Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I promise that I'm going to actually start doing social media.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, it took me a long time too.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 2 I barely even have TikTok on, I mean, TikTok on my phone. So I look, I wind down all of my podcasts by asking all my guests the same question.

Speaker 2 And there's no right or wrong answer to this question.

Speaker 2 But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

Speaker 1 I would say there's two things. One thing is living in the moment.

Speaker 1 And then the other thing is the arc of what your life and what it means and what you're going to do.

Speaker 1 And so for me,

Speaker 1 and these great European philosophers and physicians came up with all of these stages of life where you go through.

Speaker 1 basically identity and family and relationships and all this stuff. But then the final stage is generativity when you give back.
Wow.

Speaker 1 And so then, and I always said it basically everything else doesn't matter. And I basically feel that way.

Speaker 1 And what really matters is if you can have a meaningful impact that gives back

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 1 everyone. To humanity.
And so then for me, being an ultimate human is actually having an ultimate impact. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And at the same time as that, being present and awake and being being your best version of yourself, that's incredible, man.

Speaker 2 That's one of the better that I've heard in a long time. Well, guys, you know how to check out Dr.
Matt Cook. I will put all of the information that he just went through in the show notes below.

Speaker 2 And as always, that's just science.