563. “Something Non-Human Has Been Here A Long Time” | Dr. Garry Nolan

**Garry Nolan** (0:00)
I'm a professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford.

**Jordan B. Peterson** (0:03)
It's pretty obvious that you have a multitude of abilities and a stellar track record. You started to become interested in unidentified aerial phenomena.

**Garry Nolan** (0:14)
Somebody representing the CIA and an aerospace company showing up at my office at Stanford, showed me their credentials and said, we need your help looking at patients who had harm done to them. And then a small subset of them said that they'd been in proximity to things that you would call a UFO. I thought it was a joke at the beginning.

**Jordan B. Peterson** (0:35)
Let us know if you would what the hell you think is going on.

**Garry Nolan** (0:39)
That there's something non-human here and it's been here for a long time.

**Jordan B. Peterson** (0:42)
I imagine it's put a bit of a bump into your life. I mean, maybe one that's mostly interesting, but still to call it strange is to barely scrape the surface.

**Garry Nolan** (0:51)
If something is here, it's likely been here longer than humans have even been civilized.

**Jordan B. Peterson** (1:11)
Dr. Garry Nolan is an immunologist, academic inventor, and biotech entrepreneur, serial biotech entrepreneur. He's a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, and somewhat surprisingly, a ufologist. We talked about his career, his research interests, the rise of AI, and his interest in unidentified aerial phenomena.
So, Dr. Nolan, Garry, before we get to the heart of the matter with regards to your interest in unidentified aerial phenomena, more commonly known as UFOs, let's talk a little bit about you so that we can situate you in the minds of our readers. So, you have a remarkable research background and a technology background. Clue us in a bit and tell us who you are.

**Garry Nolan** (2:06)
So, I'm a professor in the Department of Pathology. I hold the Ratchford and Carlotta A. Harris Endowed Professorship.
The major focus of my lab's research, frankly, over the last 30 years since I've been at Stanford, has been on the immune system and creating technologies that allow us to collect more and more data about the immune cells and or cancer cells that we're interested in. And so, that's led me from the development of retroviral techniques for gene delivery and gene therapy. So, all the retroviruses and lentiviruses that are used in the world today for gene therapy were developed based on a technique that I came up with called the 293 T cell technique. And frankly, that's old technology to me, but it still generates a nice royalty stream. So, and then, from there, it's about measuring more and more what we call parameters per cell, which are events that relate, we think, to the biology of the cells. And so, we've created and spun out, I don't know, probably at least half a dozen companies on that side of things alone. Lately, we've been moving into artificial intelligence. We've started and spun out two companies there. And now, I'm actually moving into atomic imaging, because I sort of feel like that's the next level down of information that I need to get at to understand gene function. So, I've raised the money to create a whole new kind of instrument that can measure things at the atomic level.

**Jordan B. Peterson** (3:46)
Tell me about that a little bit. That's electron microscope territory. You have a new technology, that you're... I know that's an old technology now.

**Garry Nolan** (3:56)
It's a fusion of two technologies, something called atomic probe tomography and field ion microscopy. And it's a way to bring the two together, because previously they couldn't sort of exist in the same machine. So, by bringing them together, we can go another order of magnitude lower. We can get down to what's called subangstrom. Like the bond length between two atoms is in the subangstrom realm. But this technology that we've developed not only can see down at that level, but can also determine what kind of bond structure we have locally. And that has a range of applications all the way from biology through to metals, alloys, nanotechnology, etc. And actually, the instrument is already half built down at a lab here in Cupertino that we've set up. So, we're excited about that.

**Jordan B. Peterson** (4:49)
So, how many companies have you started or been involved in starting?

**Garry Nolan** (4:55)
About a dozen. And we've had about eight successful exits so far.

**Jordan B. Peterson** (5:02)
Hmm. Well, that's pretty good track record, all things considered.

**Garry Nolan** (5:06)
All things considered. One complete failure, but that's okay. One failure out of that many isn't so bad.