Is Ben Greenfield Going To Get Vaccinated, Which Vaccine Is The Safest, The Future Of Cutting-Edge Regenerative Medicine Therapies & More With Dr. Matthew Cook

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, this is something amazing that's going to happen. Science is going to improve, and then it's not going to be rich people. It's going to be everybody that's going to get access. That immune response, if there was already something else going on, can be more intense.

And you have all these other treatments, you know, with thymosin alpha 1 and monoclonal antibodies and ivermectin. Again, like, I still. Maybe I'm not getting it, but why would we need to get vaccinated?

Help, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show.

Matt, how's it feel to be back on the show?

Dude, it feels amazing.

You don't even know. You know how excited I am a because we get to record today's podcast, Walking in the beautiful Bay Area sunshine. And I don't know what are we on Los. Los Gatos Trail.

We're in the Las Ghettos Creek Trail.

Does that mean the cat?

Cats.

Aha. Nailed it.

Mountain lion.

That's right. Everybody had no clue I speak French. But now they know the Los Gatos Trail, and we.

Matt. Matt.

If you're not familiar with Matt and Matt, you're going to have to just blush here for a moment while I talk about who you are. Matt's been on the podcast five times before. He's a regenerative medicine physician who I hooked up with, like four years ago when somebody had introduced us. We wound up at a dinner together. And as a matter of fact, what we talked about most of the time during dinner was ketamine, which is like a super hot topic now, and everybody's into ketamine. But I was so intrigued, and we had so many other things we want to talk about. I wound up just like, randomly going to your office. I happen to have my mics with me because I was in town anyways to record some podcasts. I brought my mics. We report recorded a podcast. You gave me a ketamine infusion, which was interesting because I'd never experienced that particular drug, I guess, before. And then since then, we have done. And I'll link to all this stuff in the show notes. If you guys go to BenGreenfieldFitness.comCook that's Matt's last name. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness dot comCook then I'll put all the show notes there for today's episode, as well as links to all the other episodes I've done with Matt. Because we've done episodes on ketamine. We've done episodes on regenerative medicine, plasmapheresis, young blood exchange. Like, we. We've talked about a lot of stuff. I think we should end this podcast right now because we have nothing left to talk about.

Easy. That makes the day easy.

Yeah. And so I. I happen to be in San Jose, and you'll know why here shortly. I'll explain it to you guys. But Matt and I have had a good time. Matt played tennis for the first time in 20 years yesterday.

Yeah, I've won. Almost won two games, but I did win one.

Yes. And so we've been playing tennis. We've been cooking up buffalo, bison, yak. We made some Rocky Mountain oysters last night, which are, for those of you unfamiliar with the term testicles. Dredged those in egg. We dredged our testicles. No one has dredged their testicles before. You must experience a good testicle dredging. So we did that with, like, some coconut flour and some egg and some olive oil. We had lobster tacos. So we basically spend most of our time geeking out, enjoying the sunshine and cooking amazing food, so.

Which was super awesome. Thank you.

Yeah. And. And so Matt's clinic here is called BioReset Medical. It's in near San Jose, I guess. What town are you technically in? Campbell.

Campbell.

Yeah. So Campbell, down here in the Bay Area, people fly in from all over the world to see Matt and get treatments done by him. And that's actually one of the reasons I'm here. So, Matt, do you want me to lay out the history for you of why I'm here? Okay, so this will be really interesting for everybody listening in. So like, six years ago, five or six years ago, I was teaching at a yoga retreat. And no, I was not the guy in the stretchy pants taking people through Down Dog. I was there at this retreat. It was actually one of the early, early roomga retreats which still exists to this day. There's actually one coming up in Austin, Texas, pretty soon. And so at this room retreat, you do, like, kettlebells and ice baths and yoga and meditation. And I was there to do, like, nutritional consulting with people, do Q&As. Kind of like be the guy on staff who people could just like, have around during the entire event to ask questions to. And two nights in, I got stung by a scorpion in the middle of the night. Literally, like, felt the. Felt the sting, saw the scorpion scuttle into the corner of the room. I wound up killing it. Later, with a glass mason jar, I caught it and. And beheaded it. So I got my revenge. There's a tiny little scorpion, which are kind of some of the more dangerous variety, from what I understand. And this, this retreat had me all the way up on top of like a. Like a cottage at the top of a hill. Super far away, like a half mile, not super far, but far enough to where if you're stung and you need medical assistance, it was a little difficult. I had no radio, had no cell phone reception, nobody to talk to. So I laid there writhing in pain for like two hours, feeling and watching my knee swell up basically almost to the size of like a volleyball. And I had no first aid anything with me. So I eventually, just at about 5am, crawled down to the main resort area, and there was like a medicine woman there, and she had a fig poultice, she had some essential oils, I believe she had. Frankincense was one thing that she used as a topical. Kind of nursed my knee for a little while, but the next five days I was. I was just hobbling. I was useless. I was pissed because I couldn't surf and take part in some of the more vigorous activities at the resort. And ever since then, that knee has been super buggy. It's as though some of the muscles got deactivated and quit protecting and supporting the cartilage in the knee the way that they were supposed to. And the knee just got progressively like, low, low level pain all the time. Like a three on a scale, one to 10, you know, playing tennis, cutting, you know, playing noon basketball, whatever. There's like, there was always, and especially during, like Spartan racing and triathlon, just like that low level, bearable, but back of the mind kind of pain. And then what happened was I saw you, Matt, and we talked about some of the cool protocols that you do, like placental matrix and like ozone and a lot of these regenerative medicine therapies that we've done previous podcasts on. And you would. You would do injections on it occasionally, and the pain would subside for a while, but then kind of come back. I was like a temporary fix. And so then what happened was I decided to get stem cells injected into the knee about three months ago. So I went to a regenerative medicine doc. Not you, but a different person who was near to my hometown because I didn't have time to get down to San Jose, and the knee was really starting to bug me. So I got these stem cells injected in my knee. And the doc also did Kind of like everything in the kitchen sink, right? He used placental matrix, he used ozone, and he used exosomes. All kind of like darlings of the regenerative medicine industry. And literally by that night, the knee was swollen back, like, as big as it had been swollen with that scorpion sting. Massive swelling, inflammation, redness. And it. It was so concerning that I'm like, okay, I need to get an MRI on my knee. I actually called you and you. You helped me schedule an mri. So I went and got an mri and I had to, like, I went to one hospital. They took three hours of me laying inside that MRI tube. And for anybody who's never got an MRI before, you're literally just inside a tube with this loud hammering. You know, there's no phone, there's no tv. You're just like laying there. And they kept trying over and over again to get pictures, and they couldn't. Eventually they came in and they apologized. They gave me a ten dollar gift card to Red Robin, which is fantastic because everybody knows how much I love cheesy curly fries or I don't even know what you get at Red Robin, but anyways, so I got my gift card and they rescheduled me for a second mri. I went to another hospital, different MRI machine, because they thought maybe it was their machine. Same thing. It was something about the swelling or the oddness of that knee. They couldn't get good pictures. They finally got images of the knee, and those images indicated, of course, no surprises here, massive swelling, effusion. What's called a baker's cyst in the back of the knee. Explain to people what a baker's cyst is real quick, Matt.

So if the knee joint starts to get really infl. Inflamed, then there's a potential space between the hamstring muscle and the calf muscle, and fluid can leak back. And so basically fluid leaks into the back of the knee. And if you kind of imagine what a baker used to do, they would lean into where they. A big bowl and then throw their hands in to do the dough. And they would hyperextend their knees. And so they were famous for having fluid leak out the back. Oh, my gosh.

I thought it was named after the Dr. Baker. Dr. Baker, Tommy John surgery or something.

Yeah.

No. Okay, so it was actually baker's. And so you get this. This pocket of swelling. Yeah, like in the back of the knee. It's like a palpable swelling. And. And even after those. In the past three months, I've had that cyst in the knee drained three separate times and literally pulled 60 to 90 cc's of fluid out of my knee, like nasty yellow fluid. And this MRI showed not only was that occurring, but it showed degeneration of the cartilage on the back of my patella and degeneration on the surface of my femur. Probably because I'd just been using my knee so funny for like five years that it had really taken a beating in a way it wasn't really intended to take, or in a pattern it wasn't intended to take so long. So anyways, I talked to Matt and he said, all right, I got some, I got some cutting edge shit we can throw at this. Let's go ahead and tackle this thing once and for all. So now I'm going to shut up now that I've given you guys the history. And by the way, today's podcast, Matt and I decided we don't only want to talk to you about the latest kind of like regenerative joint therapies because there's some really cool, minimally invasive stuff you can do now. But Matt's got some super interesting and, and surprising takes on Covid and vaccination and we're gonna talk about those too. So, so sit tight, cause that's coming up also. But anyways, so I, I flew down here and my first question for you, Matt, is why the heck do you think my knee, after all those cool cutting edge things got injected into it, got worse and not better. What's, what's, what's the mechanism? Because this will be intra brain invasion who's considering stem cells?

So then this is an interesting one that I've discovered, which is that when you throw several techniques that all have a regenerative and healing potential, the synergy of them sometimes can be a little too much and you can get swelling. And the other doctor I have kind of infinite respect for and is amazing. So. But sometimes people can have a very exaggerated response. And the interesting thing is you've had a moderate amount of inflammation in that joint for quite a while. And so then you kind of got a little bit unlucky by creating this super crazy immune response. And interestingly, because you've had real long term inflammation in the joint and it's kind of like, it's interesting to hear the story because, you know, I injected you with placental matrix, which was a pretty simple five minute procedure that I've done a couple of times.

Literally derived from a placenta. Yeah, yeah.

And so then that's a, that's a Very safe and easy and very anti inflammatory procedure. But I think when I did that before, it only lasted a month or two.

Yeah, yeah. Everything works, but works temporarily.

And that's because that joint was, was so profoundly inflamed. But then the other problem is, is that you have edema in your bone marrow. And if your bone marrow hurts, your knee is going to hurt. And sticking something into the knee joint is not going to heal that bone marrow because the bone marrow is on the other side of the bone. Does that make sense?

It makes total sense. But why would the knee have acted like it got hit by a semi truck when you'd think stem cells and exosomes and ozone and placental matrix all at once would just be like a miracle infusion cocktail into the knee?

You would think that, but often if the joint's already inflamed, it's kind of part of the way that all of these things do their healing is by creating a little bit of inflammation. And that inflammation creates a healing response. And so if you combine four things that all have a little potential for inflammation, and then you add them all up together, one plus one plus one plus one might be 10. And in the setting of a joint that's already inflamed. And interestingly, you know, the whole scorpion thing is interesting. You know, this, this has been long term inflamed. So you were set up for an exaggerated immune response. And then now what we have to do is calm that down. And so then interestingly, what we did is normally we don't inject a lot of steroids, but I had them inject some steroids.

That's right. So three weeks ago I went in for a corticosteroid injection into the knee, which was probably the first time in years that for a few days I had almost no pain and the swelling, which came back a few days later, not quite as bad, but the swelling subsided after that steroid injection. And that's because of the anti inflammatory activity of the steroids.

Right, right. And so then this is, I'm going to telegraph later in our conversation, but so then steroids turn inflammation down, and so then they can turn inflammation down in a setting of COVID or in a setting of an exaggerated immune response in a joint.

Okay, so pretty much any inflammatory condition, steroids can help out with that. But are there downsides to just using that as a long term strategy, like every time something starts to hurt, just get injected with steroids?

Yeah.

Let's say you're like an athlete, you know, playing through your season.

Steroids are hard on connective tissue. And so then, like, for example, even in my literature and the anesthesia literature, steroids can be helpful for back pain. But a lot of times, a couple of years later, people are worse. So they're a band aid and a band aid that we love to use in certain situations, but not all the time.

Okay, all right. So now I come here, and you're like, we have this brand new protocol, which is really interesting because three days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article about all sorts of new cutting edge, minimally invasive protocols that are allowing people to get remarkable joint healing without an invasive surgery. Now, that article, which I'll link to in the show notes, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com cook it included, talk about a couple of drugs that are currently, I think, under trials that show great promise. I forget the. The names of these. Do you recall those two drugs?

So, so then what? These are basically early drugs that are going to help promote cartilage cells and help adhesion of cartilage cells so that they can stick together and, and create a more functional joint, essentially.

Okay, all right, got it. But then the article went on to describe almost like this concept that you can and you might be able to. To describe the protocol. But I'll give kind of the preview of the way I understand it. It's called, like an intraosseous procedure where they drill little holes in the surface of the cartilage and then put something in those holes that patches it up, almost like fertilizing a lawn to induce new cartilage growth. That's kind of like the basic idea I got from the Wall Street Journal article is that.

Right, right. And so, so then there's. There's two components to this. One is what's called micro fracture, and then one is an intraosseous procedure. Micro fracture is something that orthopedic surgeons do. And I used to do anesthesia for this all the time. And so then with that, they stick scopes in a knee, and then they look and they see a defect in the cartilage. And then they take an instrument and then they poke holes. And when they poke holes, they poke holes from the joint into the bone marrow. And the bone marrow is in the middle of the bone, basically. And then when they do that, you see bone marrow leak into the joint. And their goal is to start to heal and let that bone marrow start to come.

And the bone marrow is not like bone marrow they're getting from somewhere else. It's just leaking from right there in the joint as a response to the micro fracturing.

Right. And the goal of that is to start to heal that defect in the cartilage. If that doesn't work, then they try to do something called an oats procedure where they'll put a little graft to fix that cartilage defect. What we're going to do is we're actually going to stick a needle into the back of your hip into eure iliac crest. We're going to pull some bone marrow out, and then we're going to spin a needle into your bone marrow and then inject that bone marrow to try to heal. Because right now you've got inflamed bone marrow edema situation going on in your femur. And what's happening with that is that's causing a lot of pain and dysfunction. And then that's that inflammation and lack of the bone marrow serves as like a nutrition source for the cartilage. So we're hoping that by doing this, and this is probably the first in a series of several steps to try to create a healthy bone marrow and then start to rebuild cartilage there.

Now, for someone listening in who hears about all these needles and everything, I call this minimally invasive. Now talk to me about, like, how big, like, are you making incisions? Are you using, like ultrasound, you know, like digital imaging to guide the needles into where you want them to drill the little holes and inject the bone marrow? Or how is this working from an invasiveness standpoint?

So there's two ways to go. One is more invasive and one's more minimally invasive. And so we're going to start with the more minimally invasive just to see how you do. The minimally invasive thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to spin a needle into the bone marrow in the hip. And that's just a relatively small needle. And so then that's going to be very comfortable for you. I'm going to pull some bone marrow out.

It sounds comfortable spinning a needle into my hip.

Well, you're going to be under the influence of Versed, ketamine and nitrous oxide.

What's Versed?

Versed is a benzodiazepine. It's kind of similar to Valium, and it's a very incredible anti anxiety medication that I used every day for 12 years in the operating, 15 years in the operating room.

All right, so. So if we play like, if we play, you know, like Trivial Pursuit after this protocol, I'm going to be a little bit useless, probably. Okay, But. But it sounds to me like, in terms of, compared to, let's say, a scoping or like a, you know, like a resurfacing, this is. This is incredibly less invasive.

Right. And so then what I'm going to do is we're going to look and we're going to find a spot, spot where we can spin a needle into the bone marrow of the knee, and we're going to spin right by where your bone marrow edema is and by that defect, and then we're going to inject bone marrow from the hip to heal the bone marrow in the knee.

Now, let's say somebody's listening and they got elbow issues, knee issues, joint issues, etc. And they're like, that, that sounds dope. I would rather try that before surgery. Is this a common protocol? Like, are there doctors now that. That do this? Or how new is this type of thing?

There's a lot of people that are starting to do this, and I think doing a great job with it. And so there's people all over the country that are doing this. The question for them is going to be, do I. Do you have inflammation in your bone marrow, or do you just have a problem with your joint? Or do you have a problem with some of the nerves and arteries going to the joint or the fascia? So then basically what you're going to want to do is have somebody look and try to figure all of that out.

Would that be an mri or would that be an ultrasound? Or how when you say have somebody look, what do you think is the gold standard way to look for something like that?

So the only good way to look for bone marrow edema is with an mri, and then the best way to look at everything else is with ultrasound.

Okay. And that's a lot of what you do in your office. We've talked in the past about speaking of the nerves, another really cool protocol you do. And I've literally seen people sit up from your procedure table who have had, like, tennis elbow for years or golfer's elbow or chronic issues that they thought were related to joint degradation. And with that nerve hydrodissection, which we have a whole podcast on, we don't get into it now because we've literally talked like an hour and a half about that before. Sit up and feel like I saw one guy sit up and start crying on your table because we're just, like, gone.

Now. Question for you. Compared to your left knee or your right knee, do you feel like you don't activate your VMO as much on the affected side.

Well, that's the thing. Ben Patrick, very popular guy right now in the fitness industry, has a program called Knees over toes. Right. To strengthen the, the vmo, the tibialis and some of the toe muscles. Fantastic program that gets really great results in people who have a lot of muscle deactivation due to poor biomechanics or muscle D training. You know, I have a master's degree in biomechanics. I've worked with a ton of people specifically to strengthen areas around their particular joints. I have paid extreme like for the past five years, particularly my VMO training. My utilization even in the past few months of Ben Patrick's knee over toes program. My use of electrical muscle stimulation to keep stabilizing musculature like the VMO activated has been honestly probably about the level of what I'd be doing if I were working with a physical therapist. In addition to that, tons of deep tissue work it band work like really keeping the fascia nice and supple, using lots of traditional anti inflammatories, tumorosaccharides and all that stuff helps, but it's one of those things where at the end of the day, and I'm sure other people have experienced this, you know, there's something deeper going on that that stuff seems like it's helping and that the problem would be a lot worse without, but that still isn't providing like lasting relief. Does that make sense?

Yeah. So then we, there's a. I'm going to examine you and look at the femoral and saphenous nerves and obturator nerves. And there's a chance I may do a little bit of hydrodissection with this procedure. And so then step two would be potentially to do a bigger procedure where you stick a needle into the hip, pull out a little bone dowel and then spin a needle into the knee and then stick that bone dowel in and that bone dowel becomes a graft that good bone marrow can grow on. But I think that's a little bit bigger of a procedure.

Is that somewhat like the expanded stem cell procedures that the they do? Is that something totally different? Because I know in Mexico you've done like expanded stem cells before.

Right. So then these are just treatments that are taking bone marrow from the hip into the bone marrow and the knee to fix it. The other thing you can do, and I've done with quite a bit of good result, is to take prp, which is just platelet rich plasma that you got from the blood and you can spin a needle into bone marrow and PRP can be quite effective for bone marrow edema by comparison. What happens with stem cells, Most stem cells that people in all stem cells that you can get in the United States are just basically some stem cells that were harvested when somebody had a baby from around the umbilical cord. For the most part those have some potential. The downside that would be like non.

Autologous umbilical, amniotic, placental jelly, etc.

Yeah. The other thing that you can do is you can actually take culture expanded stem cells. These are stem cells that are grown in a lab and so they're very healthy. They have a little bit more regenerative potential and then you can put them in the joint. The only thing is, just like what happened with your stem cells in your knee, they can cause quite an inflammatory response. And so that's on my roadmap for you because this is going to be a pretty substantial problem. And so I think I'm going to treat it again. But I want to make sure that the knee really calms down before I do that. And it's not an exaggerated inflammatory response.

And it's illegal to really like expand stem cells in the US So a lot of those protocols need to be done internationally, Right?

Exactly. That's why we take people to Mexico.

You as part of your practice have like a set up in Mexico and you take people down there who want to get like the full on expanded stem cell treatment, right?

Yeah, we do that all the time.

Okay, interesting. What I'm going to do, and Matt, you and I talked about this a little bit is we'll kind of do like a part 2 later on for you guys where we talk about what's going on with this whole realm of regenerative medicine for joints. But I wanted to give you guys a preview of the type of things that a regenerative medicine doc will do that's kind of unique. And in my case I'll be able to give you guys updates and of course related to these type of joint protocols. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com cook you can leave your comments and your questions and your feedback there and pipe in with your own thoughts or things that you're wondering about this type of protocol.

And then remember we're at the very beginning of a super amazing journey about joints and bone marrow edema and this stuff. Type of stuff. There's protocols where people are putting human growth hormone into joints. There's actually some Protocols where you can put testosterone into joints. There's protocols where you can put peptides of different kinds into joints. Just I encourage people to be careful and not go crazy in combining in general. Almost all of these things do better when they're done individually. But the future I think is super exciting in terms of eventually preventing joint replacement. That's the goal.

Okay, got it. So this is going to be super cool. And I just had to kind of get a little news flash out to you guys about regenerative medicine. And it's really interesting because kind of to pivot here big time. You know, when I was talking with Matt a couple nights ago over whatever we're eating, bison, ribeye or he's got all sorts of stuff in his freezer. We've been smoking up on the Traeger. He started talking about COVID and vaccinations as people inevitably talk about these days when they're huddled over dinner. And Matt's interesting because he has an interesting take on it. I wanted him to share with you because a lot of times, I guess what you see in the functional medicine space, in many cases in naturopathy and what we might call alternative medicine or you know, non standard medicine, sometimes you'll see a real, real black and white approach. And in many cases in the alternative health community or kind of like the naturopathic community or the functional medicine community, people are like, basically vaccinations are horrific and they're unproven and come with a lot of potential side effects. You'll see some people focused on just targeting a specific high risk portion of the population, such as the elderly and the immunocompromised, which I've always thought seems to be a reasonable approach. And then people will propose a lot of alternative remedies. You'll hear people talk about ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. And you know, that's honestly kind of what I did when I personally had Covid and it worked out for me and I never did actually get vaccinated yet. I'm not anti vaxx, it's just I haven't been comfortable yet with some of the safety data that I've seen. And so I just, I haven't got it. Not because I'm against the idea of vaccinated. I'm vaccinated, my kids are vaccinated. They use a. We did an extended schedule vaccination with my children. We chose not all the vaccines, but some of them, particularly those that we felt comfortable getting for international travel. I Don't know if I'd do things differently if I go back over again. But regardless, you know, I'm not anti vax. I'm one of those guys who's super open minded and loves to just look at the research and see what's working, what's not. So, kind of perked up my ears when you said that you had, you had some interesting takes on Covid and vaccination. So where do you want to start, Matt?

Okay, let's start with the vaccination. And so then, you know, it's super interesting because for me, you know, my, all the people that I love for the most part in my practice told me we're going to get vaccinated. And a lot of them were on the fence and I talked to them and I talked a bunch of them into it.

And then as you talked a bunch of the people, your patients, your employees, et cetera, into getting the vaccination.

So I've talked 100% of my employees into getting vaccinated. And it turns out if you're vaccinated as a healthcare provider, your patients are less likely to get Covid if they come see you. And interestingly, you know, I live with Barb, who's immunocompromised, she had a kidney pancreas transplant.

And you're CEO at BioReset Medical. CEO definitely falls under the category of an immunocompromised person.

And of all people who have a super hard time with COVID they're almost at the top of the list. And she's taking medication that blunts her immune system. But it turns out if you're vaccinated as a healthcare provider and there's data on this, you're less likely to come home if you got exposed to Covid at work and infect somebody in your family.

Okay. Are you, were you concerned? I'm curious what vaccination you got and what kind of concerns you had or do have about what a lot of people are talking about, which is the lack of what seems to be long term safety data on the current vaccination options for Covid.

Okay, so this is like a 1 in 100 year pandemic. It's. And so we're on a very accelerated schedule with the vaccines. I chose the MRNA platform and I chose the Pfizer.

Moderna and Pfizer are both the MRNA vaccines.

And so then basically, you know, I've got quite a bit of experience with the immune system and immune problems and stuff like this and what the MRNA vaccines are is it's some MRNA that encodes for the spike protein. And so when you get the vaccine, that vaccine has MRNA and it's wrapped in a little casing to kind of protect it because it's pretty unstable, which.

Is why I need to be kept cold.

That's why you got to keep it super cold. So then that gets absorbed into some cells and they take and they put little bit of spike protein on that only lasts for about two weeks, but when that happens, it stimulates your immune system and it stimulates actually your whole immune system. So it stimulates the B cells that make antibodies, but it also stimulates the T cells. And then what happens as a result of that is you create an immune response. The immune response is not as intense as with the other vaccines. And so you got to get two of them. So you get one creates a little bit of an immune response. You wait somewhere between a couple weeks and a month and you get a second one.

Now, a lot of people are concerned about the idea of mRNA, the idea of that somehow affecting your genetics or causing longer term exposure of the spike protein, or many of the side effects that we seem to be seeing with some people who have gotten vaccinated. Are those fears unfounded or is there risk in terms of genetically altering the human body when you use something like mRNA?

Okay, that is a fantastic question. MRNA does not get encoded into your, your DNA. So MRNA is just an instruction to print a protein. So that MRNA vaccine is going to live for a few weeks inside you. It's going to instruct cells to make a protein. It's going to cause your immune system to go, wait a minute, let's make some antibodies and let's focus on this and let's memorize this. Then you're gonna make a bunch of antibodies and we test to see if you make antibodies in our clinic. But then what happens is you create some long living cells that now know how to recognize that those are the.

B cells and the T cells. Yeah.

The long living ones are like plasma cells.

Okay.

And then the long living ones are gonna live for the next 10 years. And so then they're just hanging out in your bone marrow. They're happy and they're just waiting. But if another horrific Covid came around in two years, your immune system is kind of primed and it's going to be able to react to it better.

If that's the case, why are people who get like the delta variant who are already vaccinated having issues like, do we have to get a new vaccine every single time a new variant pops up and, and eventually be getting 10 different vaccines.

So then what happens is, you know about like antibiotics people give, use drugs, they use drugs like antibiotics to treat a bacterial infection and we've had antibiotics for 90 years and the bacteria slowly, over a long course of time start to have an ability to outmaneuver the drugs. Viruses on the other hand can rapidly change. And so then, but still if you've been vaccinated, we still have some protection against Delta. And so most of the people that we see that are getting delta if they were immunized, they have a much less intense Covid, less likely to go to the hospital and they may have a little bit of a breakthrough infection, but it's nothing like what would have happened to them if they hadn't been vaccinated.

And are there any concerns about adjuvants in the vaccines? And I realize that's a difficult question because I believe there's adjuvants in like every vaccine that we're getting these days. That's, that's a, you know, that's a platform a lot of the anti vaccine community stands upon is you know, aluminum and albumins, like all these, all these other things. Like is there any concern about, you know, because you and I, I know you're aware of this because you don't like the concept of sous vide cooking which we were talking about last night and the idea that plastics from those bags might degrade. You know, it's one of the reasons I use the Stasher brand. Higher grade. It's not a plastic but it's kind of similar to a withstands heat. But I know, I know you're aware of and concerned about things like microplastics in the human body or toxins or metals, you know, you got molecule air filters in your house, et cetera. So with you being as aware of all that, is it for you kind of an issue where the benefits outweigh the drawbacks of any adjuvants in the vaccine?

Okay, so we're on MRNA and then we'll go to the other ones next. There's no adjuvants in the MRNA vaccines.

Okay.

And so then for me on the good side there's going to be a downside. But on the good side, the MRNA vaccines I think come into the body. The MRNA is very unstable so it's going to get broken down and be gone. But it does create an immune response and it creates some cells that are going to be ready to protect you. And I think long term, there's no adjuvant, there's no anything in there that's going to be triggering any long term thing. I think what you're getting at, and I'll kind of, maybe we talk about this a little bit, what happens is when you create a big immune response, just like what happened in your knee, that immune response, if there was already something else going on, can be more intense. So if you already had a scorpion bite, when you have a big immune response in your knee and it could have been in scorpion bite or something else, you're more likely to have a bigger reaction to a vaccine. And so then, yeah, so the, the classic ones is we see if somebody's gonna have a crazy reaction to the COVID vaccine. Almost always those people, we test them and they either have mold, Lyme, one of another handful of viruses like Epstein Barr, herpes, cmb.

Oh yeah, not a lot of people are talking. So these stealth co infections that people have, which are quite common, mold, Lyme, heavy metals, mycotoxins, etc. If you get vaccinated, you're far more likely to experience these deleterious side effects.

Yeah. Because what happens is those populations of people, and that's a lot of the anti vax community have, you know, I've taken care of tons of those patients because often they had a vaccine that triggered a crazy reaction that was because their immune system was in 10 out of 10 stress. And so when your immune system's in 10 out of 10 stress or even 7 out of 10 stress, and then you get something that taps on the shoulder of your immune system and says, let's go, we got to make antibodies and turn the immune system on. Sometimes that can be a little too intense. If you don't have a way to turn it off, then you can be stuck in kind of an inflammation cycle, kind of like you were in, in your knee. But the same thing can happen in your entire body.

Okay, so do you think it's prudent for someone who was going to get like, let's say an MRNA vaccine to do a screening beforehand for some of these stealth co infections? As annoying as that might be, and as big of an extra step as that might be, wouldn't you say that'd be like a prudent approach? Like in terms of best practices?

You know, it's intriguing, but the testing for all of that stuff is pretty expensive. And if you don't have a clinical indication for that, I probably wouldn't do that. And in general, what happens is the other side of the equation, which is a little bit of a problem, is that, you know, Covid was somewhat, I would say somewhat, and don't take this the wrong way, somewhat infectious, okay? But the delta variant is, like, massively more infectious. You know, they say it's more contagious than smallpox. And so what's going to happen is as this virus continues to grow and replicate in primarily the unvaccinated population, what's going to happen is there's going to be a potential for it to get dramatically worse. And we don't know when that's going to happen. And so I think from an immune perspective, if you can, I think the best course probably is to think about getting vaccinated. But then I think what's going to happen is, and then know that there's going to be an evolution of this stuff. But the platform's pretty good. And we may end up needing boosters for the next couple years, even once a year, but that may not be that bad of a thing. And then we may end up with a very robust immunity against coronaviruses from kind of a vaccination program.

Now, similar to the already existing argument pre Covid about, for example, you know, amping up a child's immune system with, you know, vitamin D and, you know, feeding them like a Western, a priceless diet and exposing them to good floral, you know, variety to support, you know, this, you know, the, the biome, the, the, the gut biome and the skin biome, etc, people say, well, that's, that's just as good as getting a vaccine. You know, my kids never gotten smallpox or polio or anything. Like, I've fully protected them. And, and you'll hear a lot of people now similarly saying, well, why can't we do, like. So, you know, it was like Joe Rogan was a recent figure. You know, he did ivermectin and he did, like, sauna, and he got some kind of, like, I think he may have done some kind of like, peptide bioregulators like thymus and alpha and, you know, a lot of things that people are using as a treatment for Covid, but many people are also using those as like, an alternative to vaccine, saying, well, I don't need a vaccine because, like, ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine or some of these things negate the need for it because if I get sick, they'll just crush the virus and therefore don't get vaccinated. Like, what's your take on that? Because I know people are going to say in the comments section, why the hell would you do like a vaccination? Especially people who are more libertarian or conservative or who wouldn't like the idea of a forced vaccination. They'll come in and say, well, why wouldn't we just use more natural means to knock this out and perhaps just vaccinate the immunocompromised and the elderly?

Okay, so I don't know, Joe, but I would be a fan. And I think he's totally hilarious. And I think what I read in the paper is that he also got the monoclonal antibody.

What do you mean? The monoclonal antibody.

So then what. What happens is if you get a vaccine, the idea of the vaccine is that you triggers your B cells to make antibodies. Those antibodies basically bind onto the virus and inactivate it and help your body locate and eliminate the virus and the monoclonal antibody. And so then what a monoclonal antibody is, is they actually take cells, they're hamster cells, and then they induce those cells to secrete an antibody that is active against Covid. And actually, to be honest, that's a super effective treatment for Covid.

Then why get vaccinated?

Well, the issue is you're all the people that you talk about that don't have smallpox. That's because back in the day, we were better at just getting everybody vaccinated quickly and eliminating something so that it didn't really exist anymore. So we, for the most part, eliminated smallpox. We, for the most part have eliminated these infections. But what's happening now is that virus is going to continue to cycle. And I'm getting, you know, it's interesting, I was. Would get calls from, you know, basically friends of friends. And then with the MRNA platform that came out, I didn't get any calls. So I was kind of relaxed, like, hey, this.

You weren't getting calls about the MRNA vaccine?

No, about COVID Okay. Now I get five calls a day from, you know, VIPs and just people. What's happening is people are getting Covid right, left and center. And if you get it, there is. I always tell people there's problems with the vaccines, there's problems with COVID The problem with COVID is 100 to a thousand times worse than the vaccine. I've seen a handful of kind of small problems from the vaccine.

The problem is worse in the immunocompromised, in elderly or. The problem is worse than, like, everybody.

Oh, and everybody. I mean, I've got like NFL football players. I mean, I'VE got all kinds of high end, incredibly young, healthy ish people that, that ended up having crazy long term problems from COVID And so then you may be able to get the monoclonal antibody, you may not. You may be in a position where you can't get it and then even then you're fighting an uphill battle again, something, you know, I don't treat Covid anymore, to be honest. If there was no regulations, like I just afraid somebody would come shut me down. But if I could, I would literally go open up a hospital tomorrow and treat Covid full time just because it's so interesting to me and I think we have a lot of good things to help it. But from a regulatory perspective, it's so crazy we're not doing that. But what I can tell you is Covid is super for real. And there are.

Yeah, I mean there's no denying that. What I just don't understand though is if you say you could open a hospital and you have all these other treatments, you know, we're talking thymus and alpha 1 and monoclonal antibodies and ivermectin. Like again, like I still. Maybe I'm not getting it. But why would we need to get vaccinated?

Because this, this. If as this continues to mutate and become more lethal, it may become more lethal very fast and then there's going to be a large percentage of people that end up. Right now we get a lot of long term Covid people. I got another one yesterday. Can't sleep at all. We just get people who are otherwise healthy where all of a sudden the immune system gets quite inflamed and just like me trying to go in and turn off the inflammation in the knee, we're gonna do our best and we tend to have pretty good results with that. But when inflammation starts to go haywire in the entire immune system and the entire body and Covid can fundamentally go anywhere, what can happen is you're behind the eight ball and sometimes you don't catch up. It's the biggest problem of our lives. And so I would strongly encourage people to consider the vaccinations because I think there's been a lot of crazy press against them. But I think A, you're probably going to do better and this thing may mutate to get a lot worse. And if you've been slowly building your immunity, I think you're going to be prepared. B, from a public health perspective, I think we protect. I become kind of an advocate for the immunocompromised a Because I have a lot of them.

Yeah.

And you live with someone who's b.

Who's immunocompromised.

I love one of them. Kind of crazy now.

So it sounds to me like what you're saying basically is we've got all these. Let me use this as an analogy. We've got all these amazing things that we can do for TBI and concussion that maybe we weren't aware of 50 years ago. Hyperbaric oxygen and ketones and fish oil and infrared light. All these things that can assist with an issue like that, both long term and short term. And that still does not negate the encouragement to put on a bicycle or a motorcycle helmet or your seat belt to potentially decrease the risk of that occurring in the first place. Despite us having some pretty cool tools to ensure that there's less damage that occurs if a head injury does happen. Is that kind of what you're saying?

Exactly. And then, you know, this has been the hardest time to interpret science also of my life, just because of the politicized nature of it. But my general sense from reading the articles has been that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are not as effective as we initially thought. You read the initial studies and then what happens in peer reviewed literature is then other people start reading it who are super smart and start poking holes in it. And there's some pretty big holes for both of those. And so, yeah, peptides I think can be incredibly helpful, particularly LL37, thymosin alpha 1. I think those are your best two.

LL37 and thymosin alpha 1 as peptides.

Yeah.

Are those, are those legal to get in the U.S.

It'S rapidly evolving and changing landscape with those and so it's kind of hard to say what's going to happen with those.

Okay.

A lot of people are just trying to order them themselves. There's other.

Is that a bad idea to order from a website?

Well, you know, it's just the difficult situation that people are in because they don't have access to things and they feel things are being taken away from them. And I kind of understand where they're coming from and there's some great producers out there. So BPC157 tends to have a lot of anti inflammatory effects and some very good beneficial effects for blood vessels. So that can be helpful. There's another peptide has been pretty helpful that a lot of people have used called Thymus and Beta 4. And interestingly, as people are out there thinking about it in terms of Preventing exposure. You can take LL37 and do some topical administration of that and sublingual, and it's a pretty good antimicrobial peptide. Some people are also.

I've heard it's amazing for SIBO as well. And you were even telling me about somebody who had like, they'll use like a xylitol nasal spray and put the LL37 in there and use that when they're like in crowded places as like an intranasal spray.

Yeah. And because it has anti microbial and some antiviral effects, then when that's in a nasal, basically film in your nose, it could be helpful. It turns out LL37 is actually good for breaking down biofilms. There's a bunch of articles on the Internet about it. And so, you know, I'm one of the bigger fans on the whole peptide conversation, and I'm, you know, cautiously waiting to see what's gonna happen with the regulatory landscape.

But yeah, honestly, anybody asks me about peptides, I typically tell them to call your office because you usually know what you can and cannot get and what's legal and what's not. I'm like, usually at this point I just tell people, go talk to Matt and get them for bio reset or from this guy named John Francois in Canada. He's good too.

Yeah, he is. He is fundamentally, I think, the. The one of the greatest luminator luminaries in the world. And, you know, he's taught me a lot. I call him all the time and he's incredibly, incredibly helpful.

Yeah. And I'll link, by the way, if you listen, those of you listening, I'll link to my podcast with John Francois. His company is Can Labs, right? Yeah, Can Labs. Peptides. Okay, so back to the. Back to the vaccination piece. So do you think that if someone were to get vaccinated, that doing something like the MRNI is the best way to go? Because you said that there were some other vaccination options you'd look into.

Well, yeah. And so then one is that. Now this. You're gonna love this one. One is that I'm gonna be a fan of that category.

Now then number the MRNA category.

But then the question is, okay, let's say most people are going to get it and they're going to do fine. And you know, I've had hundreds and hundreds of patients that I often had counseling, and I would counsel them all, and almost all of our patients got the mRNA. Now let's say somebody got that exaggerated kind of runaway inflammatory response from A vaccine. What are you going to do? One of the things I've been working pretty hard on is we submitted a IND an investigational new drug application for Chimaera Exosomes. As a chimera is a company that makes exosomes. And so then as a protocol to treat long haul Covid. And so we're waiting on that. But it turns out that exosomes that are derived from stem cells are secrete. Basically what stem cells do is they secrete exosomes. I always say bees make honey, stem cells make exosomes.

They're like the signaling molecules via the so called paracrine effect. That's how stem cells work so well, right?

Yeah. And so then what happens with stem cells is they're floating around the body and then when they find inflammation, they start to secrete stuff to turn that inflammation off. And one of the things that they secrete is microrna. So microrna is different from mRNA, and microrna kind of cancels remind people what.

The other M in MRNA stands for.

Messenger.

Messenger. So there's messenger RNA and microrna.

Yeah. And so messenger RNA encodes for proteins and it encodes for proteins to be made. Microrna modulates how messenger RNA works. And so basically, you know, you remember yin and yang, the body at all times. If it turns inflammation up, it's got a way to turn it back down. And so then there's been cases of doctors that I've talked to all over the country who had people who had an exaggerated immune response and then they gave them exosomes and then they turned that immune response down. And so part of as a way.

To treat an exaggerated immune response to a vaccination.

Yes. Here's the thing, this is kind of crazy. By turning down the immune response to that vaccination, it could be that what's going to happen is you're going to make that vaccination less effective. Okay, but let's say you've got somebody that had it and they've got a blood clot and they've got inflammation out of control. That's the type of person you're going to want to do that on. You're not going to want to do it on everybody. And it's going to have to be a very thoughtful strategy and algorithm of how to do this. But right now what people are kind of forced into is they're being told like, you know, every company over 100 is going to have to get vaccinated. And you definitely can't practice medicine if you're not Vaccinated for the most part, as far as I can tell, for how it's going. And so then what's going to happen is people are getting kind of pushed into getting vaccinated, but they don't have any way to turn that that's down.

Okay, that's my concern. Right. So, and pardon my verbiage here, there's all like the rich effers, right, who are going to go to their crazy good doc or who have you in their back pocket, they're going to say, yeah, I'll get vaccinated. Because we can totally just like hack our way out of any scenario where there was accelerated response or anything. Great. But for each one of those people, if we decide that we're just going to enforce vaccinations for everybody, there's like hundreds of thousands of people who are going to get injured due to that exaggerated immune response, who don't know what to do and who could potentially die. I mean, it seems like we need to really scale these solutions for controlling that accelerated response prior to requiring vaccinations. Wouldn't that be prudent?

Well, so I think you got to get the vaccination thing going because you might have 100,000 people with a vaccine reaction. We might have 20 million people die. I mean, if. Yeah, if it, if it gets a lot worse.

So you're saying the number of people who are going to die of COVID if we don't get some type of herd immunity setup will outnumber the number of people who are going to have an exaggerated immune response and vaccination issues therefore continue to roll out vaccinations but simultaneously continue to work on these solutions for the problematic response to the vaccinations.

Exactly. And you know what I'm talking about is hypothetical. We don't know how this is going to go. We didn't know if you were going to get a delta variant that comes out that's hundreds of times more contagious. If you get something that comes out next spring that's hundreds of times more contagious and hundreds of times more deadly, you've got a catastrophic problem. And, you know, if you're somebody like me, you're not that worried about getting a little bit of an mRNA, because I know how to deal with MRNA problems. Maybe this is something amazing that's going to happen for our planet. Science is going to improve, and then it's not going to be rich people, it's going to be everybody that's going to get access.

Well, yeah, you would Hope that this might accelerate that. But it's unfortunate the way that it's having to happen and the politics and the mistakes made along the way and kind of the lack of proper testing protocols, like a really good antigen test rolled out early on in the process, have dictated that we've kind of painted ourselves into this corner, so to speak. And now we're almost having to choose the lesser of two evils, which is difficult. But don't you think it's odd from like an evolutionary virology standpoint that the virus would be getting more lethal or more. More transmissible is understandable from an evolutionary virology standpoint. But more lethal is odd because as a parasitic type of compound, wouldn't you think that the evolution of the virus would result in it becoming less lethal so that the host stays alive?

Well, you know, that's just been a crazy journey to watch how this is unfolding. You know, we're on a roller coaster. You know, I'm not sure why it's happening. I don't understand the. That at a deepness level, but I think there are scenarios where it can get more lethal.

I suspect that probably one of the reasons that might be is due to the gain of function research and the fact that the virus may not have evolved in an entirely natural manner. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I didn't want to say it, but you said it. That was a good one.

Are you not supposed to say that on a podcast? Well, no, I don't even know. This is actually the most I've talked about COVID on a podcast for a while, so hopefully I'm not going to get banned on YouTube, I suppose.

Yeah, it's. Well, here's the thing. The trajectory of this conversation is like super vaccine positive from my perspective. And I think, you know, I thought about it, I thought, well, should we just talk about, like, you know, the type of stuff that we do or should we actually try to delve into, like, the problem of our day?

Oh, we have to delve into the problem of our day. Because the way I see things going, you're either going to need to make the decision to be an isolated and potentially scapegoated person or get the vaccine. And let's set aside all issues because I've always said, like, if I'm comfortable getting the vaccine, I want a T shirt that comes along with it that says, I did it because I wanted to, not because you told me to, just because I don't like the whole concept of forced vaccinations. It just rubs me the wrong way because I'm pro choice when it comes to one's body. You know, as long as the, the pro choicedness is, is involving the ethics of your body only. And so I, yeah, I think it's really tricky. But, but the other thing I want to ask you that I didn't quite get an answer to yet was, you know, you talk about the MRNA vaccine. What about Johnson Johnson? What about some of these others? Like, do you think that did you get the MRA because you think it's just like the best option out there right now?

Well, yeah, and so then I looked into it and this is sort of what I found. Now the AstraZeneca and the JJ vaccine are adenoviruses. And so then what they did is they took and actually put DNA into those viruses and then those. But that's like the traditional virus platform, right?

That's is not like what polio was like an adenovirus.

I think so. Okay, but, and so, and so then those, we've had experience with those. You and I have both gotten a bunch of that genre of vaccine and those vaccines are, are, you know, holding up to do quite a bit of good. And that's, that's the technology that's been in the world for, you know, the last 50 or 60 years. And so I think that there's, you know, a lot of good things to be said about it. But the thing that I like about the MRNA vaccines is that thing is going to be in there and then gone. So it's going to do something, it's going to have an effect that you can either live with or turn down. Then time goes on and then you can get another one. And so that is, I really like kind of the concept of that. There are some people who are suggesting that we may want to have different types of vaccines. We want to. May want to rotate between them.

I heard that before that there might be a better response if you, for example, get the Moderna and then like for your second booster shot or something, do it. Do a different vaccine. Is that what you're talking about?

I've heard about that, but now just where I'm coming from is I would just pick with one and go with that until there's good data on that. I wouldn't make that decision on your own because there's smart people looking at the data and the science on this. But I have seen of all of the crazy reactions that I've seen, they've all been on the JJ side or the AstraZeneca side.

Okay.

And so I think that those vaccines potentially have more problems and I have a good logic for where I'm coming from. At least I'd like to think so. So that's where. Why I'm encouraging people.

Okay. Yeah. And real quick, like, I personally would never endorse the J and J, because I am, I know, I just, I was pro choice when it comes to living soul inside of a mother. I believe that life begins at conception. And because the research for the Johnson and Johnson relied upon, you know, aborted fetal tissue back in 1985, like, I just can't ethically endorse that one. So that, that's off the table for me anyways. But that kind of relates to another question I wanted to ask you is I've had Covid. I'm not immunocompromised. I, you know, I've produced antibodies. My immune system is good to go. Like, do you think that, you know, societal restrictions, being able to travel or go to concerts or whatever, all that aside, which I think is just. Personally, I think it's silly. Do you think from a health standpoint that I or others in society would still benefit from me getting vaccinated if I've already had it?

Yeah, because the, the, when you have it, you, you generate an immune response. But it, it looks like I just read an article that the immune response that you get as a result of the vaccine is better than the immune response that you get from having Covid. But if you have.

See, that's not what I, I heard that I, I've heard the opposite. I mean, I could be wrong.

I read an article today. We'll find out because I didn't close it down on my browser. Okay, but then, and we'll link to.

That in the show notes, by the way.

Yes, and then there's, there's the, this article said the immune response that you get from having Covid, plus having had the vaccine is even, is like the best.

Yes. Yeah, I have heard that. But what I haven't heard is that if you've had Covid. Well, so what I've heard is that if you get Covid and then you get the vaccine, the vaccine, like, that's the very, very best immune response scenario you can be in. However, if you've had Covid, you still have an immune response that dictates that it wouldn't necessarily be crucial for you to get the vaccine.

Oh, so I'm going to disagree. And the trip on this one is. And this is just like my clinical practice with Delta coming out here. I've been getting phone calls almost every day of VIPs that have already had Covid that thought they were good and didn't get vaccinated because they were like, oh, I'm fine. And I get. Somebody calls me, I got Covid again. And so I think the protection that people get from having had Covid is not gonna long term be as good as the vaccines. It's gonna take a little bit of time for the data to play out on this. So I'm encouraging people to do it. And then I think the other thing is, is if you've been vaccinated, you're less likely to be an asymptomatic carrier and we're more likely. So that that's just going to slowly lead to this progression to herd immunity. And then once that happens, then everybody's going to be able to get back out there and start going to, okay, Dead and company and Willie Nelson concerts.

Exactly. I know that's your favorite. So if I've had Covid, there's a possibility that I could, for example, contract the Delta variant, be walking around not having been vaccinated. I could be fine, but I could potentially get somebody else, let's say, like, you know, like Barb, you know, back at home, super sick.

Or your kids.

Or my kids. Okay, this is an interesting discussion. You know, we didn't really talk about much of this before at all. So, you know, folks who are listening are kind of hearing me in real time, kind of soak up and interpret what Matt is saying. But as we are nearing the end of the time that we have for today's show, can I share what my thought pattern is after having this discussion with you, Matt?

I would love it.

Okay, so look, as I said at the beginning, I'm not anti vax. I'm probably after this discussion, although I still want to see some of the comments come in and hear other people's take. I always listen to a lot of people before I make as important a decision about something I'm going to inject into my body. So I would encourage everybody, you know, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Cook and kind of pipe in with your thoughts. But where I'm at is a, if I were to get the vaccine, I'd probably do something like this MRNA vaccine that you've alluded to. And honestly, it wouldn't only be because of the efficacy with that you've described about it, but it would also be because I Ethically am against any vaccine that was developed by research on aborted fetal tissue. And so I would encourage my audience, just from an ethical standpoint, to consider that somebody in the audience, if you're listening in, you decide, okay, well, this discussion has left me comfortable enough to go out and get Moderna or Pfizer. I would say if there is any remote possibility that you are able to set yourself up in a scenario where A, you can identify or at least ensure you don't have signs and symptoms or even tested evidence of a stealth co infection or some type of inflammatory condition that could cause a deleterious response to that vaccine, you should do that first if there's any chance that you can. And B, I think that you should also, if you have access to a doctor who can equip you with things like LL37 or thymosin alpha or some of the other solutions that will be laid out in the show notes that Matt talked about that you should also perhaps make sure that you're set up with those at home before you get the vaccine, just so that you're not added to the count of people who have that problematic reaction. That's kind of where my mind's at right now.

LL37 is antimicrobial to. To Covid. I don't think it's that helpful for the COVID vaccine.

Okay. So the anti inflammatories like BPC157, thymosin.

Alpha would be probably very good because they regulate and modulate, just like exosomes. Regulate and modulate.

Let's say you were fortunate enough to have in your fridge or your pantry back home, like your first aid kit for if shit goes south after you get the vaccine, review for people what you kind of have in your back pocket.

Okay, so then we're gonna. We have an entire sheet and so I'm gonna give you that for the show notes. Oh, that's amazing that we give people. But, you know, there's a whole bunch of things. We give people vitamin C, we give people a lot of glutathione. We give people before or after they get the vaccine. Before the vaccine. And then people are taking those afterwards. People are taking binders. It turns out a lot of the binders will bind onto inflammatory things that can bind onto mold. Exactly. And I've had. I have had a lot of people come in and tell me, hey, I took that afterwards. And it really helped me. It calmed down my symptoms after the vaccine because you're creating a calmer state in your body. While your body is ramping up this immune response against the virus.

Okay, well that's going to be super helpful. And don't worry everybody listening in, I will ensure that I follow through. What I'm going to get from Matt is not only some of these studies he mentioned that he looked into about the, or the discussions at least about the potential non efficacy of something like Ivermectin. I'll get some, some data from him on the idea that being vaccinated plus having had Covid is going to make you a safer person to be around. And I'll also get that you said it was like a PDF or something like that.

Yeah, we have that.

You give people. That's excellent. So I'll put all of that@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Cook.

Hey folks, I'm going to jump in right now. You may have noted that on this podcast I mentioned false vaccination cards. And I'm totally not one of the guys who endorses living a lie or walking around lying to people. And I didn't want to just throw out that off cuff comment and leave you guys hanging with that, this idea that oh, what if you have a false vaccination card and you could just use that to slip into a grocery store to buy toilet paper if it, it turns out you got to, you know, have a vaccination proof to go buy toilet paper or you want to.

Go to your favorite concert.

So why not just have a blank vaccination card that you have filled out to be able to go to a concert. But you know, Matt, Matt had a thought on that too and he told me after we recorded and I just wanted to throw this in there for you guys just to close the loop on that piece. So Matt, thoughts on false vaccination cards?

Yeah, I strongly recommend against that. And the reason is you've got all kinds of people with shades of being immunocompromised to fully immunocompromised. And some people are going to go to events where they expect everybody's vaccinated and the data says vaccinated people are going to be less likely to spread. You could create a super spreader event. And I think that is just unfair to people. And so I think that if you don't want to get vaccinated, probably just don't go to concerts. And, and I think following your integrity and following doing the right thing is important. And you know, we just heard a news story about a doctor that may go to jail for 20 years for giving patients False vaccination cards. So I think this is something that we should be super careful about.

Yeah. So basically, like, it puts your doctor.

Or your pharmacist or whoever would be doing a false vaccination card for you in an awkward position. And, I mean, the more that Matt and I have been talking about this, the more I think, well, you know, it's obviously convenient if, let's say you're not allowed to go to the grocery store unless you're vaccinated or have proof of vaccination. You want to get toilet paper, you get a false vaccine card. You go in, you get your toilet paper, great. But at the same time, you know, based on what we're seeing about the potential for, you know, somebody's grandma or somebody who's immunosuppressed or someone who you run into at said concert or said grocery store, I mean, the whole idea here is that, you know, you'd probably feel pretty bad if that person wound up getting Covid or getting super sick or having their life altered in a pretty dramatic fashion from you kind of, you know, tooling around with those kind of fake cards. So I would say that it's. It's probably prudent to not delve into that cat category. Plus, it also ensures that you're not putting a medical professional into a scenario where you might be that person that, you know, has them getting their license revoked because of you, and therefore they're not able to help people out in the way that God has called them to do. So again, it's.

It's.

It's probably better safe than sorry in a case like that. That's basically what you're saying, Matt.

Yep.

Good one. Okay. All right. We just had to throw that in.

There for you guys.

Thanks.

And now I gotta appeal to you.

Yeah. I was gonna say, like, I would love to hear, like, any thought.

Final thoughts you have My. My final. I appeal to you that this is a worldwide epidemic that's not going to go away, and it's going to escalate for the next couple years. And so I think at you actually getting vaccinated. I wasn't going to go here, but now at the end of this talk, my takeaway is my goal is you're going to do amazing when you get the vaccine. I'm going to support you and get you through it. And then I think you are such an influential person that influences people's judgment and their decisions and how they do things. And I think that you have a great potential to begin to show people hey, there's been a little bit of an irrational fear about some of these vaccines, and these are actually relatively safe. They have some problems. We've got ways to deal with them, and we have to band together as a human race and do something amazing to heal ourselves.

Well, you know, like I've already said, and I'm not gonna kick this horse to death. I really am very open minded about this entire situation. Politics aside. You know, I've had people say to me, well, even if it was healthy, I'm not going to get it, because they told me I had to. And I just don't like that idea of appearing as though I'm jumping through a hoop or being forced to be vaccinated. I don't care about that. If I get vaccinated, it's going to be because I want to get vaccinated. And it's for the good of society and for my own health and other people's health. It has nothing to do with whether or not I can get into a concert, because I'm going to be totally frank with you. I can get a fake vaccination card and get into a concert. Right? Like, that's, that's, that's not an issue. The, the thing is, as you've just alluded to, this is about the health of the planet and the health of the world. And this discussion has certainly got me thinking. What I'm, what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of pay attention to some of the comments and some of the things that people pipe in and talk about or bring, you know, any data about into the discussion that I may have been unaware of or that didn't come up during our discussion. And I'm going to sit with that. And I can probably tell people that from the time that this podcast gets released, I will probably, within 30 days after this podcast gets released, make a decision. And whatever decision I make, I will make sure that on my platform, I let people know about it. Does that sound fair?

This is my favorite conversation I've ever had about this whole topic because it's so been so controversial. But the reality is we love each other. And, you know, I respect where you're coming from.

Even though I kicked your ass in tennis yesterday.

Yeah, I know. But basically what happened is I sat there and I realized every single game I played better. And I basically started feeling sorry for you by the end because I realized how much I'm gonna beat you in the future.

Okay. Yeah, you just totally, you totally de platformed your credibility for the entire past hour and a half. Well, Matt, first of all, you know I respect you. You know, I appreciate you. You know that you're a guy I look up to, probably, probably the top physician who I go to for advice when something goes south with me or my family or I need help with any medical condition for myself or my family or even my extended family. You've helped my dad out. You've helped my mom out. You've helped my brother out. You've helped close friends and clients out. Most of the my clients have gone to you at one point or another for some form of treatment. Obviously, you're the guy I've turned to as a final solution for my knee. And so, you know, this is definitely one of those discussions that I'm taking quite seriously.

So.

So, anyways, I feel like we. We're kind of starting to kick the horse to death now. But what I would tell people is that, again, the show notes are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Cook I would encourage you to go there, leave your own thoughts, whether you're a professional, a scientist, a physician, a layperson. I. I just want to hear from you. I want to hear your thoughts over there, and I'm going to be looking at all that. That's going to be a great place for you to go through and see what other people are saying. And you have my word that I will get a decision out to you that. That I've personally made very soon after. I sit with this, and as I do, I walk on things, I sleep on things, I pray on things. And this has certainly been a super, super informative discussion. So, Matt, I want to thank you.

Oh, thank you. That's totally awesome. You're the greatest of all time.

You ready to go punish some bison ribeyes?

Yeah, I was born ready for that.

All right. All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dr. Matt Cook. I'll link to all the previous podcasts that we've done, everything we discussed in today's show, including what I'm most excited about that sheet for. For decreasing the problems that might occur and being vaccinated. And I'll put all that in the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Cook. Have an amazing, amazing week, everybody. Over and out.

Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.

Sam.