Joe Rogan Experience #2372 - Garry Nolan

Garry Nolan 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music)

Joe Rogan 0:12 Gary, very nice to meet you, sir.

Garry Nolan 0:14 Nice to meet you as well.

Joe Rogan 0:14 Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. Um, tell everybody what you do. Tell everybody what your official position is. You- you're a professor at the School of Medicine at Stanford. What- what do you do?

Garry Nolan 0:26 So, my day job is in cancer research and cancer biology, mostly immunology and cancer. Much of what my laboratory does is not so much the biology of cancer, but developing instruments that create the data that allow us to analyze the complexities of how the immune system interfaces with tumors, and how tumors basically re-enable, uh, the immune system to help the cancer itself. So the problem's been we don't have the ability to collect enough data, or not until recently, to collect and understand what all of that means, so we've been kind of poking in the dark for decades. And so probably for the last 20 years, I've developed a number of instruments and turned them into companies that allow everybody to access a level of information they couldn't get before.

Joe Rogan 1:17 So, uh, ex- ex- explain that. The- the immune system allows the tumors? Ex- wh- wh- wh- wh-

Garry Nolan 1:25 So what happens is that there's sort of a, there's a dance between the mutations that initiate a tumor and then, uh, sort of an evolution of how the tumor eventually learns how to trick the immune system to not recognize it. So we have all kinds-

Joe Rogan 1:42 Hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:42 ... of inter- I mean, literally every day, uh, every person, you'll develop five cancer-like objects inside of your body, but the immune system, uh, and your body has a way of shutting it down very quickly. But with enough time and with enough variation, tumors will eventually evolve in a way that trick the immune system, not only to- to not recognize them, but in fact, to help them and feed them in a way, to create an inflammatory environment that actually then the tumor uses to propagate its own cell division and then metastasize.

Joe Rogan 2:15 So it's a normal function of natural human biology to create tumors?

Garry Nolan 2:21 It's not so much a normal function. It's a byproduct of what evolution is, that when the genes mutate when a cell divides, or if you go out and, you know, stand in the- in the sun, uh, too much for instance, you get skin cancers because you're getting ionizing radiation that's changing the DNA, making a mutation, and some of those random mutations will initiate a cancer. So for instance, I have, um, a mutation called MIDF E318K. It's, uh, a mutation that I was born with. It didn't- it wasn't in my family, and it causes both melanoma and kidney cancer, which I've had both. I've had a dozen, uh, melanomas alone. Um, you know, we didn't find that out until a couple of years ago, but I've been following it over the years and we basically figured out, okay, it's gonna have to be this. So we had my sequ- my genome sequenced. But there's... That's just one of hundreds of different kinds of mutations that can occur that are on a path towards creating a cancer. But the cancer can't survive if the immune system recognizes it. So eventually what happens is there's this detente that is reached between the immune system and the cancer, where the immune system basically ignores the cancer. So Jim Allison here in Houston, uh, won the Nobel Prize back in 2018, uh, for understanding one of these turn-off signals about the immune system u- that the cancers use to turn off the immune system, and that by showing he could block it, his wife, Pam Sharma, ran a bunch of clinical trials at MD Anderson that showed in fact that this could actually turn a 5% survival disease in melanoma to a 50% survival. And that then created the whole immunotherapy field that the world is, uh, taking advantage of today.

Joe Rogan 4:10 Wow. So- so what is- what is cancer actually doing? Like how- how did it- uh, how do tumors develop this ability to trick the immune system? Is this so- something that other animals have?

Garry Nolan 4:23 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:24 So it's a constant-

Garry Nolan 4:25 It's a constant battle.

Joe Rogan 4:26 ... battle.

Garry Nolan 4:26 So- so- so for instance, there i- there are proteins on your cell surface. I won't get too immunologically deep about it. Uh, they're called, uh, major histocompatibility complex proteins. So for instance, if I were to try to just randomly do a- a tissue transplant from me to you, it's very likely that it would be rejected, and it's because of those MHC proteins that it's rejected. What's happening is that your cells are presenting your internal cell biology to the immune system, and it's saying, "Okay, you're- you're a friend, not a foe." So when cancer usually initiates, there are disruptions that happen and proteins are made incorrectly, et cetera. And so what these MHC proteins are doing in some cases is they're presenting the internal damage to the body and the body's saying, "Oh, there's something wrong with this cell. We better wipe it out. We kill it." These same proteins are what the immune system uses, for instance, to go after viruses. So when you get a virus infection inside of the cell, the body has a way of chopping those proteins up inside of the cell, presenting it via MHC, and then the immune system attacks it. So what, one of the first things that actually tumors do is they learn to turn off the MHC proteins inside of themselves.

Joe Rogan 5:42 Hmm.

Garry Nolan 5:42 So the ability to show that I'm damaged is shut down. And so the immune system doesn't go on full alert for that. But then there are other mutations like divide when you're not supposed to. Uh, you know, avoid this kind of induced cell death called apoptosis, uh, and not others. And so it... Cancer doesn't just, like, start and then the next day you've got it. It's a progression of events. You have these precancerous lesions. You have, like, a benign tumor, which eventually becomes a metastatic tumor.Um, and, uh, and so the... But the immune system is key at every stage of the development because if you can reactivate the immune system in just the right way, then you can prevent the cancer from basically, uh, spreading or from metastasizing, or from killing you, essentially.

Joe Rogan 6:35 Is there a potential for... Uh, w- given the understanding of this, is there a potential for using this for organ transplant patients-

Garry Nolan 6:43 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:44 ... where it locally would stop recognizing this as a foreign-

Garry Nolan 6:49 Uh, that's exactly what-

Joe Rogan 6:50 ... organ?

Garry Nolan 6:50 That's exactly what is done. In fact, you, um, when you get a tissue transplant or an organ transplant, you're suppressing the immune system. The problem with that suppression is that you then put yourself at risk-

Joe Rogan 7:03 Right.

Garry Nolan 7:03 ... of cancer. Because what you're doing is you're turning off the immune system's ability to r- to combat and go after a cancer the moment it forms. So most people who are under immune suppression are at risk both of, let's say, virus infections, bacterial infections, but also for their cancers.

Joe Rogan 7:21 So would the, the potential be to turn that off locally? So you could turn that off to this- on the specific organ?

Garry Nolan 7:28 Th- th- th- that would be a great thing to do if we could. Right now, the only things that we have are systemic.

Joe Rogan 7:35 Right.

Garry Nolan 7:35 So, yeah, I mean, uh, for instance, if you could deliver to the organ that you're transplanting anti immuno sup- you know, basically immunosuppressives locally, that would be great. We don't have that yet. But that would be via a form of gene therapy.

Joe Rogan 7:50 But the problem with that be that if you... Like, let's say, you had a r- a lung transplant.

Garry Nolan 7:54 Right.

Joe Rogan 7:55 If you had a lung infection-

Garry Nolan 7:56 Yes.

Joe Rogan 7:56 ... it would be catastrophic.

Garry Nolan 7:57 Do you wanna come work in my lab?

Joe Rogan 7:59 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 7:59 You're, uh, y- yeah, you're, you're accepted as a graduate student in the Stanford Department of, uh, Pathology.

Joe Rogan 8:05 Well, that was easy.

Garry Nolan 8:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:06 (laughs) We got... I have a few friends that have had-

Garry Nolan 8:09 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 8:09 ... organ transplants.

Garry Nolan 8:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:10 Which is w- and it's, you know, it's very disturbing knowing that they're so vulnerable to any kind of infection because of these medications that they have to take in order for their body to accept the transplant.

Garry Nolan 8:21 One of the problems is that there are literally hundreds of different types of immune cells and, you know, really until recently and frankly until, um, a technology my lab developed about over a dozen years ago, we couldn't look at all of the immune cell types all at once in a single picture. Um, so I came from a laboratory, Len and Lee Herzenberg, uh, when I was a grad student at Stanford, and they had developed an instrument called the fluorescence-activated cell sorter. And that allowed you to look at three proteins at a time and if you could know ahead of time what the cell types were that expressed the proteins that you're interested in, you could look at just those three cell types. Then I came up with a way to look at, you know, 50 or 60 proteins at a time, sort of stepping up what they had already taught me how to do, uh, and then suddenly that gave us the ability to look at nearly every cell type, uh, in the, in the body, uh, and immune cell types, and then that gave us the, let's say, the raw data to build math- mathematical models that we could do better predictions of what outcomes would be.

Joe Rogan 9:24 And how is that... Uh, like, uh, how are you... What are you applying, what... In, in terms of, like, real world scenarios, how are you applying this?

Garry Nolan 9:31 Well, so for instance, um, there's a kind of leukemia called AML, acute myelogenous leukemia. It starts in the bone marrow, uh, and it is a distorted, uh, version of a myeloid cell type. It starts as a s- as a stem cell and that stem cell goes down a number of different paths, and depending upon the person, the disease is sufficiently different that it might follow a slightly different path towards what becomes the disease itself. And so being able to trace the path and to know which steps along the way that it takes to become what becomes then the metastatic, uh, lyph- uh, leukemia, um, uh, could only be accomplished by having enough markers that allowed us to trace everybody along the path. It's kinda like if I wanted to follow you from w- who you are as an egg through development through to who you are today and I had snapshots every month, I need different markers to measure what you are as an egg versus what you are as a baby versus what you are as an adult. And so each of those different markers in my world would be different proteins that tell me something about an adult leukemia versus a baby leukemia. And then we use something called pseudotime, which is a mathematical concept that allows us to stitch together those photographs. I could take a random box of photos of you from an egg to who you are today and I could just, by hand, put together the most likely path and sequence of what you were from the earliest to the latest.

Joe Rogan 11:09 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 11:09 But we needed the data and we needed the means and the instruments to collect that information so that then the math could come to play.

Joe Rogan 11:16 That's such a fascinating thing about human beings, is the biological variability, is that everybody is so... uh, we're so the same-

Garry Nolan 11:26 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:26 ... two lungs, a heart, uh, but so different in how our body reacts to things and what, what happens to us and environmental factors, diet-

Garry Nolan 11:38 Right.

Joe Rogan 11:39 ... stress, all, all sorts of different factors, and you're kinda piecing together this puzzle-

Garry Nolan 11:46 Right.

Joe Rogan 11:46 ... of all these things.

Garry Nolan 11:47 And, but what you're doing is you're, you still have to pay homage to the fact that those differences exist. And so while, you know, the... my cancer might be the same class of, let's say, melanoma as another person's, uh, the complexity of what allowed that cancer to become are so different that the drugs that would work for me might not work for another person.

Joe Rogan 12:11 Mm.

Garry Nolan 12:11 And so that's what re- basically requires us to personalize the medications in a way that, uh-... gives the right des-, uh, drug to the right person. So, I, I've started probably half a dozen companies and sold them, uh, at places like Roche, et cetera. Actually, my most recent company we sold to 10x Genomics, which enabled us, enables them now, uh, because of a patent I created back in 2011, to scale up the amount of information that we can collect at a time. That then, when layered on t- top of what, for instance, 10x Genomics already did, which is doing what's called single-cell genomic, uh, analysis, we could scale that up a hundredfold to get a hundredfold amount the information. But the problem with that is that I can collect all that data and make, uh, an analysis of a cancer for you, but it might be a little bit different than another person. So, what we have to do then is develop techniques that allow us to narrow in on what the differences might be, so that when I develop a drug for person X, it works for person X and not for person Y. Right?

Joe Rogan 13:21 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 13:21 The right way. So, there's a lot of personalization in medicine that is required. Um, the, the diversity that makes humanity great and that makes humanity able to survive in the face of so many challenges is that there are individual differences that one person might survive and another won't. Um, it's the same thing with cancers and it's the same thing with drugs. I mean, the, you know, for instance, with certain drugs, it, it ... One of the first things I learned in pharmacology when I was, you know, way back in the day, is that there's always a benefit, uh, to damage ratio that you're having to deal with, that a drug has a positive outcome, but there are side effects. And so as scientists or as clinicians, we make a choice based on the statistics, who will benefit the most and will it benefit the most, but by the way, there's all these side effects that might affect you. Uh, and, um, you know, overall, globally, 60% of people will survive. But since I don't know anything more about your specific disease, I am, by law, required to give you the 60% drug-

Joe Rogan 14:34 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 14:34 ... until I know or can distinguish that your disease is a different subclass than the 60%. And that's, in fact, a lot of what, um, pharmaceutical companies are doing, is they're trying to marry a diagnostic to the disease itself, the disease subtype itself, so that if you can show that 90% of the people, uh, of this kind of subclass will survive, you have to, by law, choose that diagnostic to make sure that the person doesn't have the subclass before you give them the 60% drug.

Joe Rogan 15:06 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 15:06 Does that make sense?

Joe Rogan 15:07 Yes. Yeah, it does. Um, the narrative has always been, uh, over the, you know, last few decades, stay out of the sun.

Garry Nolan 15:15 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 15:15 But recently, people have started saying, "No, it's actually you need to become accustomed to the sun." And the real issue is people using sunscreen all the time and then going out and getting burned. Obviously, your situation is very different-

Garry Nolan 15:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:29 ... 'cause you, you have a, a specific gene.

Garry Nolan 15:32 And I'm Irish. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 15:33 Yeah. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 15:34 So ... (laughs)

Joe Rogan 15:34 Well, that's, that's the problem, right?

Garry Nolan 15:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:36 The genes of the people that lived in cloudy-ass places-

Garry Nolan 15:40 Right. Exactly.

Joe Rogan 15:40 ... for hundreds of thousands of years.

Garry Nolan 15:42 And my mother, when we were kids ... I mean, I'm 64 years old, so when I was a kid, you know, we'd go to the beach in Connecticut and they'd smother me in, in, you know, uh, um, coconut oil.

Joe Rogan 15:52 Oh, yeah.

Garry Nolan 15:53 Right?

Joe Rogan 15:53 Yeah, baby oil-

Garry Nolan 15:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:54 When I was a kid-

Garry Nolan 15:55 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 15:55 ... everybody had baby oil and everybody got barbecued.

Garry Nolan 15:57 Yeah. Plus I worked in the, you know, in the fields as a kid for, you know, farm, farm labor.

Joe Rogan 16:02 And that's not good.

Garry Nolan 16:03 That wasn't good for people.

Joe Rogan 16:03 The burning, the, that's the real, the damage to the skin-

Garry Nolan 16:06 Right.

Joe Rogan 16:06 ... and then it manifests itself as cancer far later in life.

Garry Nolan 16:09 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 16:10 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 16:10 There's all these subtle, let's call them, uh, smoldering mutations that are waiting for a second or a third hit-

Joe Rogan 16:18 Right.

Garry Nolan 16:18 ... to occur. Um, or for, y- you know, instance, you get old enough so that your immune system is kind of going wonky and it no longer is able to take care of something that 20 years ago it would have been able to heal-

Joe Rogan 16:30 Right.

Garry Nolan 16:30 ... healed perfectly well.

Joe Rogan 16:31 That makes sense. So, is there any, uh ... L- this, this narrative that you need to be in the sun more and that just don't get burned, is that reality?

Garry Nolan 16:42 N- well, it depends on who ... Uh, I mean, for someone like me, no, but there are positives, obviously, for the sun. I mean, there, I mean, vitamin D-

Joe Rogan 16:50 Right.

Garry Nolan 16:50 ... as an example. But there are also, you know, resetting your clock in the morning-

Joe Rogan 16:54 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 16:54 ... rather than taking melatonin at night. Go and just sp-, you know, in a bright, u- use, use glass to shield out the ultraviolet and get some bright light. It's the UV that's the danger, it's not light.

Joe Rogan 17:08 So, for you, you don't, you don't ever just go sit in the sun?

Garry Nolan 17:12 Not anymore. No, but I was-

Joe Rogan 17:14 'Cause of the melanoma.

Garry Nolan 17:14 Yeah, 'cause I was an idiot when I was a kid and I would go-

Joe Rogan 17:17 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 17:17 ... use tanning, tanning beds 'cause I thought, well, I wanted to look, you know, tan.

Joe Rogan 17:21 Right.

Garry Nolan 17:21 And I did tan back then, but, you know, obviously can't anymore.

Joe Rogan 17:25 Yeah, you don't freely see those anymore, do you?

Garry Nolan 17:27 No. You do.

Joe Rogan 17:29 Maybe in like Seattle.

Garry Nolan 17:30 Some people do. Yeah, there's, you know, I mean, I, I think there's, obviously there's a benefit to light.

Joe Rogan 17:35 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 17:35 I mean, I'm not saying don't go out and do it. And if, and, you know, I, I think as well, there'll come a day - and I was just talking with some friends of mine at dinner last night - is, you know, maybe with things like CRISPR, uh, I could rub a CRISPR ointment on my body, it would fix the single point mutation in my skin and then I could enjoy the sun again.

Joe Rogan 17:59 Is that really potentially-

Garry Nolan 18:01 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:01 ... down the pipe?

Garry Nolan 18:02 I think-

Joe Rogan 18:02 Wow.

Garry Nolan 18:02 Oh, yeah. No, I think we're-

Joe Rogan 18:03 How far away are we then?

Garry Nolan 18:04 I think, honestly, I mean, people always say five years is sort of like this horizon. But, no, I really, I mean, I know people who are already developing systems for delivering genes, you know, RNA to cell. I know that's a dirty word in some, uh, but there are formulations of RNA that probably won't be as problematic as some of the things that maybe, uh, the COVID vaccine might have done.

Joe Rogan 18:26 Right. Yeah. RNA right now you say it and people clench.

Garry Nolan 18:29 They, yes, exactly.

Joe Rogan 18:31 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 18:31 Yeah. But I mean, uh, you're, you're-... your cells are full of RNA.

Joe Rogan 18:35 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 18:35 So, I mean, y- you can't get away from the fact that your cells are full of RNA. It's-

Joe Rogan 18:38 Yeah, it's just a messenger RNA.

Garry Nolan 18:39 It's ... Yeah.

Joe Rogan 18:40 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 18:41 But it's also the means by which they delivered it.

Joe Rogan 18:43 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 18:43 Right? I mean, the- the means-

Joe Rogan 18:45 (sighs)

Garry Nolan 18:45 ... by which it was delivered was a formulation of a nucleotide that, by itself, uh, was meant to be something called an adjuvant. Uh, an adjuvant is something which activates the immune system you want. I mean, when you get-

Joe Rogan 18:58 Right.

Garry Nolan 18:58 ... a vaccination, you are co-injected with something that hyperactivates the immune system to say, "Come hither."

Joe Rogan 19:05 Right.

Garry Nolan 19:05 Um, and, uh, and most of the pain that you get from an injection is not the vaccine itself, it's the adjuvant.

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Garry Nolan 20:19 Yeah. Well, at least locally.

Joe Rogan 20:20 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 20:21 Yeah. No, I've read some of the- some of the work.

Joe Rogan 20:23 But not always locally, right? 'Cause didn't some- they didn't, uh, a lot of- they didn't aspirate with a lot of people?

Garry Nolan 20:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 20:30 Yeah. They w- they were-

Garry Nolan 20:31 I don't think they aspirated anybody.

Joe Rogan 20:32 They didn't with the president on TV.

Garry Nolan 20:34 But if you- if you get infected by a virus, it's all over your- your whole body anyway.

Joe Rogan 20:40 Right.

Garry Nolan 20:40 So it's whether the spike protein itself was problematic. And, um, so, you know, I- I- I know I'll annoy somebody one side or the other-

Joe Rogan 20:50 Right. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 20:50 ... by saying anything around this area (laughs) , and I'm not here to cause any controversy. But, um, you know, your immune system works, but if you can trick your immune system into getting ahead of the game, then that's a good thing.

Joe Rogan 21:05 Yes.

Garry Nolan 21:06 The question is, back to this cost-benefit ratio, is the benefit to the larger statistical population worth it knowing that some people are gonna be hurt by it or not? Uh, that's the question. So for instance, you know, back to cancer and vaccines, there's a number of cancer vaccines that're coming down the pike-

Joe Rogan 21:28 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 21:28 ... that, for people like me, would be, I mean- given that I get something chopped off of me four times a year-

Joe Rogan 21:34 Really?

Garry Nolan 21:35 Oh, yeah. You should see me. I'm- I look like I've been in a war zone. Um, you know-

Joe Rogan 21:39 Wow.

Garry Nolan 21:39 ... some- some people say, "Oh, that's hot." But-

Joe Rogan 21:40 And that's what they all (laughs) -

Garry Nolan 21:41 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 21:41 They say, "That's hot?" And the other one's like ...

Garry Nolan 21:44 Wow.

Joe Rogan 21:45 Someone's into cutters?

Garry Nolan 21:46 Yeah, exactly. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 21:48 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 21:48 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 21:49 Uh, so that's so fascinating. But is there another way that could potentially deal with those things other than cutting them off, or is that the only way to remove it from your system?

Garry Nolan 21:58 W- right now, um, it has to be cut off.

Joe Rogan 22:01 So the- the issue is that once those- the melanoma- once these lesions are on your s- on your skin, they will expand?

Garry Nolan 22:10 Yes. Luckily, most of mine are what are called- have been called surface spreading. Although, one of mine was what's called a nodule, which basically dives right in. And believe it or not, my dog found it and was sniffing at it on my arm-

Joe Rogan 22:20 Really?

Garry Nolan 22:21 ... and, like, started, like, scratching at it, and it stopped bleeding. Here, I'll show you the scar. It's pretty horrific.

Joe Rogan 22:25 What kind of dog do you have?

Garry Nolan 22:26 He ... Well, this was 15 years ago. Uh, he was a, uh, Pomeranian. But, you know-

Joe Rogan 22:30 Wow.

Garry Nolan 22:30 ... you can see the scar there.

Joe Rogan 22:31 Oh, that's crazy.

Garry Nolan 22:33 Um, and, uh, it wouldn't stop bleeding. And so, you know, I went in and had a look at it, and they said, "Another week, and it would've metastasized."

Joe Rogan 22:41 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 22:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 22:41 Wow.

Garry Nolan 22:42 So yeah, he has a-

Joe Rogan 22:43 What a great dog.

Garry Nolan 22:43 He was great. Yeah, he was great. But, um, you know, I- there are ... Um, so for instance, if you can catch most of these cancers early, then that's what's important. So I think probably one of the most important, let's say, changes to our medical system that could be initiated would be, frankly, the use of things like MRI, not CT scans, 'cause CT scans are known to cause cancer. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 23:07 Which is so crazy.

Garry Nolan 23:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:09 Like, when did we figure that out?

Garry Nolan 23:10 Uh, I mean, they- there was, like, a big study just published recently-

Joe Rogan 23:13 Yes.

Garry Nolan 23:13 ... that said, "Here's what happens to people once CT scans were implemented," and you see this sudden spike in the-

Joe Rogan 23:22 Ugh.

Garry Nolan 23:22 I mean, it- it- again, it's this cost-benefit ratio. If you didn't have it, certain people wouldn't have- you know, wouldn't know that they have a giant tumor in there.

Joe Rogan 23:32 Right.

Garry Nolan 23:32 I mean, so for instance, I had, um ... When I had kidney cancer, I was actually at a restaurant with friends doing a business deal actually. And I went to the bathroom, and it was blood. And I said, "Okay, we gotta go to the- you know, we gotta go to the, you know, to the emergency room, like, now." And then they did a CT scan, and they see this- the brachial tree around my kidney was just a big diffuse mess, and they came in and said, "You've got- you've got cancer." And-

Joe Rogan 23:57 Did you have to have your kidney removed?

Garry Nolan 23:59 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:00 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 24:00 It was, um-

Joe Rogan 24:01 Oof.

Garry Nolan 24:01 But, you know, it- it's okay. I'm alive.

Joe Rogan 24:03 It's nice to have two of 'em.

Garry Nolan 24:04 Yes, exactly. Um, I'm alive. But, uh, y- you know, it is- it's this early detection is important. And I was lucky that it hadn't metastasized yet. Um, it's called r- it was, uh, called, uh, clear cell renal cell carcinoma. Um, but, you know, so ...... surveying the body, and these companies that are out there right now which do it, I think they're really important, because even if you are young and you have no suspicion you're gonna have cancer, having that baseline against which you can compare later changes is important. Because I could do, for instance, a CT scan or an MRI of you, and I'd find lots of little anomalies. And they're generally in the field called phantomas. They are these objects that, mm, may be worrisome but we won't know that they're worrisome, and certainly not if you do a biopsy of them and, you know, poke a needle into your chest to pe- pe- pick at a piece of it. Um, but if I come back six months and it's changed, then maybe it's something we need to go after, you know, more seriously. So getting those kinds of regular scans, I think, is probably one of the more, um, important things that can be done, but not by a CT scan.

Joe Rogan 25:22 Which is crazy 'cause we've b- we're doing them for so long.

Garry Nolan 25:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:25 Did they ... They still do CT scans, though-

Garry Nolan 25:27 That's-

Joe Rogan 25:27 ... because it's necessary.

Garry Nolan 25:29 It's necessary-

Joe Rogan 25:29 It's the only way-

Garry Nolan 25:30 ... for certain things.

Joe Rogan 25:31 Right. Which is letting people know this might cause cancer is just like, yikes.

Garry Nolan 25:36 Yeah. But maybe, for instance, there'd be a way, um, to treat someone with a drug ahead of time that would minimize the effect of the CT scan.

Joe Rogan 25:47 Ah.

Garry Nolan 25:48 Right? So that ... You know, 'cause the CT scans are generally causing oxidative damage, and so if you could provide a local antioxidant, and I'm not saying that something like this exists-

Joe Rogan 25:58 Right.

Garry Nolan 25:58 ... and that's a bit of a naïve, um, statement. But if you could do that locally to the area that's being imaged or to the whole body, then maybe CT scans could be lessened in their problematic outcomes.

Joe Rogan 26:11 I would say innovative and hopeful-

Garry Nolan 26:13 Okay. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:14 ... more than I would naïve.

Garry Nolan 26:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:15 I don't think it's naïve, 'cause you're recognizing-

Garry Nolan 26:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:17 ... the issue.

Garry Nolan 26:18 Right. Thank you.

Joe Rogan 26:19 Um, so, uh, how ... Well, this was also a problem with X-rays, right? Like-

Garry Nolan 26:23 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:23 ... X-ray technicians.

Garry Nolan 26:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:25 Like I- I've seen some of those images of people's hands-

Garry Nolan 26:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:28 ... because the technician used to have to use their own hand-

Garry Nolan 26:31 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:31 ... to check to make sure that the X-ray was functional-

Garry Nolan 26:33 Right.

Joe Rogan 26:33 ... and over the years they go, "Hey, what the fuck is wrong with my hand?" And then they realize, "Oh, boy."

Garry Nolan 26:38 Right.

Joe Rogan 26:39 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 26:40 Well, it's interesting because what's, what's happening with X-rays or CT scans is a fast-forward of the kind of random damage that causes cancer in the first place.

Joe Rogan 26:49 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 26:49 And so because it's random ... Um, let, let me kind of go back a little bit as to w- w- why does cancer happen in the first place. So let's go way back in evolution to the first time that, that there were single cells versus the first time that two cells met each other and said it was better to, uh, to join forces and cooperate rather than to divide at each other's expense. So in the process of that happening, those two cells came together, or three or four cells. They basically said, "Together we're better than alone." But there were actually social compacts and contracts that, at the genetic level, were being formed between all of these cells. And so as things got more and more complex, uh, more and more complex contracts were formed, to the point at which what could happen is that any one of the breaking of a complex contract could actually then initiate a cascade that becomes cancer.

Joe Rogan 27:41 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 27:41 So rather than we thinking of, um, cancer as being a forward progression in evolution, it's actually ... Another way to think about it is that it's a devolution back to the core fire of the desire to divide.

Joe Rogan 27:56 Mm.

Garry Nolan 27:57 And so by breaking the contract, by bak- by breaking the controls on the system, y- cancer is allowed to blossom. So the problem is that every tissue type, whether your lung or brain or whatever, has a whole different ecosystem of contracts that have been formed, and so there's no one-size-fits-all drug that will kill off all cancers, because the contracts are different.

Joe Rogan 28:23 Mm.

Garry Nolan 28:24 It's not like you can bring in a lawyer and fix, you know, agricultural contracts versus-

Joe Rogan 28:29 Entertainment.

Garry Nolan 28:29 ... maritime or whatever.

Joe Rogan 28:31 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 28:31 So that's the ... You know, you have to a- have a flexible enough mindset, 'cause if you get stuck in this "It's a forward evolution" as opposed to that, "It's a breaking of contracts," you might miss out on an opportunity for, uh, how to develop a dre- a, a, um, a therapy or a drug that would help people.

Joe Rogan 28:52 One of the things, um, that I, I wanted to ask you on, I don't even know if you know anything about this, but is there a connection between IVF and the amount of ... 'Cause y- you have to-

Garry Nolan 29:04 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 29:04 ... take some pretty extreme hormones.

Garry Nolan 29:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 29:06 There's a lot of stuff that women have to take. Is there a connection between that and hormonal-related, uh, tumors?

Garry Nolan 29:13 I honestly don't know, so I don't want to opine-

Joe Rogan 29:16 Okay.

Garry Nolan 29:16 ... and then have, have my colleagues send me emails tomorrow scolding me.

Joe Rogan 29:20 Okay, good. Uh, well, I'm glad you answered that way. I, uh, y- ... I was told by someone who I really trust that there is, and then we tried to Google it and it said there's not, but that's not surprising.

Garry Nolan 29:31 Probably there hasn't been the right kind of study yet, and if there is not, there should be. I mean, certainly any hormonal imbalance is not a good thing. I mean, you imbalance-

Joe Rogan 29:43 Right.

Garry Nolan 29:43 ... the metabolism of the system and you can ... I mean, so for instance, back to my specific disease, uh, the MIDF, I f- uh, there's all kinds of things like inoc- n- n- n-acetyl- n-acetylcysteine-

Joe Rogan 29:56 Mm.

Garry Nolan 29:57 ... betaine, all these other drugs that are out there for longevity.

Joe Rogan 30:01 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 30:01 Well, if I look into the metabolism of what my cancer is, every single one of those is a, is a disaster for me.

Joe Rogan 30:06 It accelerates.

Garry Nolan 30:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:08 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 30:08 You know?

Joe Rogan 30:08 Not good.

Garry Nolan 30:09 Not good.

Joe Rogan 30:10 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 30:12 (laughs) So 'cause there's all these feedback mechanisms.

Joe Rogan 30:14 Right.

Garry Nolan 30:15 I mean, you know, people often say, you know, "Scientists are not religious." Um, uh, uh, th- there's nothing that inspires more, more awe in me than knowing the complexity of the cell.... and knowing the complexity of life-

Joe Rogan 30:29 Right.

Garry Nolan 30:30 ... and seeing all this feedback and mechanism and knowing that underneath that is a universe with particles, et cetera, that enabled something like us to exist. I just sit in awe of that.

Joe Rogan 30:42 Oh, yeah, it's awe-inspiring for sure. I mean, anybody who doesn't think it is, is not paying attention or they're purposely being ignorant.

Garry Nolan 30:49 Right. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:51 Yeah. We get a lot of that, though.

Garry Nolan 30:52 Oh, yeah. Well, that's okay. You know, teachers are here to hopefully teach and not preach.

Joe Rogan 30:57 Hopefully, yeah. Um, because of your specific type of cancer and your situation, like, do you have to, like, very closely monitor your diet?

Garry Nolan 31:08 Um, I probably shouldn't eat as much meat as I do.

Joe Rogan 31:11 Meat?

Garry Nolan 31:11 Uh, yeah, um-

Joe Rogan 31:12 Why meat?

Garry Nolan 31:13 Well, because, you know, fats, and a lot of them... The fats, uh, dissolve, uh, a fair number of toxins. Um, you know, it's, it's not necessarily a good thing. I mean, that's been relatively well-shown that too much meat, as opposed to... I'm not advocating vegetarianism. I think there's a-

Joe Rogan 31:31 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 31:32 ... there's a happy medium. I mean, we grew up in an environment where we had both. I mean, we're omnivores.

Joe Rogan 31:36 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 31:37 Uh, and we succeeded, I think, because we're omnivores, uh, as a society, as a, you know, as a civilization. So, um, but, you know, charred meat, for instance-

Joe Rogan 31:47 That's the issue, though, isn't it?

Garry Nolan 31:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:49 Isn't it? Burnt-

Garry Nolan 31:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:50 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 31:50 I mean, it's carcinogens. I mean-

Joe Rogan 31:51 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 31:52 ... you know, you're making all kinds of... It's a, uh, uh, it's a witch's brew of nastiness, uh, that tastes good. But, you know, the reason why it tastes good is because th- the humans who survived learned to use fire to kill off the bacteria in rotten meat.

Joe Rogan 32:09 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 32:10 And so the flavor of that probably was engineered into our evolution. Uh, but again, it's a cost-benefit.

Joe Rogan 32:18 But didn't th- the cooking of it also allow us to absorb more protein?

Garry Nolan 32:22 Um, I'm not sure about that.

Joe Rogan 32:24 I believe so.

Garry Nolan 32:25 Okay, that could be.

Joe Rogan 32:26 I believe that's the case, that, that cooking meat actually allows it to be more easily absorbed by the body.

Garry Nolan 32:32 Could be broken down more readily.

Joe Rogan 32:34 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 32:34 But, but certainly it kills bacteria. So, you know, d- day-old or three-day-old deer-

Joe Rogan 32:40 Right.

Garry Nolan 32:40 ... you know, that you just killed-

Joe Rogan 32:41 We're not a bear.

Garry Nolan 32:42 Or not... Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:42 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 32:43 Yeah. So, you know, I mean-

Joe Rogan 32:45 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 32:45 ... yeah, we're not vultures that seem to have digestive systems that can handle all of that.

Joe Rogan 32:49 Mm-hmm. Um, so you should eat less meat. What el- what else? Do you avoid sugar? Which seems to be a real problem with cancer.

Garry Nolan 32:57 Yeah, I avoid... Yeah, I avoid too much sugar. Yeah. Thanks for this, by the way.

Joe Rogan 33:02 Is that sugar-free?

Garry Nolan 33:02 It's s-... No, but it's okay.

Joe Rogan 33:03 That one's not?

Garry Nolan 33:04 No, it's good.

Joe Rogan 33:04 Oh. We have sugar-free ones. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 33:07 No, 'cause the sugar-free ones have stuff in them that are just as bad, xylitol and all the others.

Joe Rogan 33:10 What about Stevia?

Garry Nolan 33:12 Yeah, that would be good.

Joe Rogan 33:13 Is stevia-

Garry Nolan 33:14 Stevia-

Joe Rogan 33:14 ... bad for you?

Garry Nolan 33:15 I don't think so. I haven't seen anything on that. But, you know, I mean, look, uh, like I said, I'm 64. It's way too late. And every time that, let's say, scientists make some grand prediction of what's good or bad-

Joe Rogan 33:26 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 33:26 ... five years later, we find and update-

Joe Rogan 33:29 Right.

Garry Nolan 33:29 ... what it should've been. I mean, I often say this, and this is, this is true. The goal of science or scientists is to be right today, even wrong today, but righter tomorrow.

Joe Rogan 33:40 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 33:40 Because we're always back-checking what the results are and what they mean in the context of a bigger picture.

Joe Rogan 33:45 I like how you say good science, because that's part of the problem is that ego gets attached to ideas that h- have already been discussed and published.

Garry Nolan 33:55 Right.

Joe Rogan 33:56 And then people are very reluctant to accept new evidence-

Garry Nolan 34:00 Right.

Joe Rogan 34:00 ... that's contrary to that.

Garry Nolan 34:02 Yeah, I mean, as always, as I often say, you know, in the context of something I know we'll get to later, it's the data off the curve which is more important than what we already ex- predict. You know, predictions are great, but when there's a data point off the curve, at least in my lab, that's the... where we spend the most time at our lab meetings, is trying to figure out why that data point's off the curve. Is it because the machine was wrong? It was a, you know, it was a glitch? Or does it mean something that we need to make sense of? Um, and that's, of course, where all advances come from in the sciences, is by the fact that the data off the curve, somebody was curious enough about what it meant to go after it and then say, "Ah, okay, now I a-... Now that I've stepped back and see the bigger picture, now I can create a model that incorporates that data point off the curve and why it happened."

Joe Rogan 34:52 This is an ad for BetterHelp. The internet is a breeding ground for misinformation. Even a simple search for ways to get rid of a headache can produce millions and millions of results, from taking pain relievers, to detoxes, to medication, to cold compresses. It's overwhelming. And even when you do find something that's true, that works for other people, it might not work for you. In some cases, it's better to just ask a living, breathing expert. If you have a headache that won't go away, go talk to a doctor. And if you're struggling with your mental health, consult a credentialed therapist. You can learn a lot about yourself in therapy, like how to be kind to yourself and how to be the best version of you. Whether you wanna learn how to better manage stress, improve your relationships, gain more confidence, or something else, it starts with therapy. Try it for yourself with BetterHelp. Millions have benefited from their services, and there's a reason people rate it so highly. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/jre. That's betterhelp.com/jre. One of the reasons why I was really excited to have this conversation with you about the research that you do is that

Joe Rogan 36:23 I think it's really important to illuminate to the general public the sheer scope of the task of trying to figure out what is going on in all these different...... things that can go wrong and right in the human body.

Garry Nolan 36:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:38 And that it requires this fucking insane amount of work-

Garry Nolan 36:42 Yep, yep.

Joe Rogan 36:43 ... by many, many, many people.

Garry Nolan 36:45 And, uh, you know, and then the amount of data that had to be collected now. And so here's the difference, is that, you know, there's data, there's evidence, there's conclusions, and proof, and that's, uh, an uphill climb. But proof, the next one up is meaning. W- my lab has been largely responsible, at least partly responsible, for the data deluge that's out there in the world, both in how to do tissue biopsy analysis, how to do single cell analysis, et cetera. And, you know, data felt good for a while. It was like this, you know, this feedback loop of, "Oh, wow, I can get all this data." And then suddenly, you look at it and you go, "Well, what the fuck does it mean?"

Joe Rogan 37:25 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 37:26 And so humanity has this habit of backing itself into a corner, and then f- suddenly f- finding this eureka moment that gets it out. And so our eureka moment about two years ago was artificial intelligence, where suddenly I had the ability ... So normally, I would cut through all this data and go, "Okay, well, it seems myeloid suppressor cells are important here and T regulatory cells are present here." Okay, I get on the phone or send an email to whoever the local expert is, either on Stanford campus or around the world, and try to get some information from them. But then now you're dealing with hundreds of cell types, each individually of which, of which have thousands of variations themselves, and each subtle variation means something. Uh, and there's no expert for any of that, but AI can be at least in part that expert. So suddenly, I have 22 million papers published, you know, in the wh- in all the fields of science, uh, you know, uh, several tens of millions just in, you know, or s- several millions just in immunology alone. An AI can be the sleuth for me, can be both the an- angel and the devil on my shoulder, that can make sense of things in ways that I never would have been able to before, especially with agentic AI, which ... So we, for instance, in my lab, have developed, uh, an agentic AI that is basically an immune, uh, an immunologist scientist in a box. We can give it the raw data, and we can pose a question in natural language. Uh, and then we say, "Hey, make sense of this and turn it into a network." Normally, that would have taken a graduate student, along with a couple of post-docs, months and months and months to put it all together. Now, in three hours, we can get pictures and hypotheses of how all that data fits together in ways that I never could have done before. You know, at the beginning it hyp- ... In the beginning, it did a lot of hallucinations, which you probably heard about in AI.

Joe Rogan 39:20 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 39:20 But my answer to my colleagues is, "Some of my best students hallucinate." (laughs)

Joe Rogan 39:26 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 39:26 Right?

Joe Rogan 39:26 Right.

Garry Nolan 39:27 And, and so ... But, you know, the human's still in the loop. And so with all of this together, now we can make meaning out of the data, and we can skip a lot of the intermediary steps and speed it up, and it's just getting better. I mean, we, for instance, have put in a couple of papers now where ... So for instance, in, uh, where my special- one of my recent specialties is what's called the tumor-immune interface. So you have the tumor, you have the immune system, which is coalescing on, you know, near ... And then in some cases, the tumor creates a boundary, uh, a barrier between itself and the immune system, uh, where there might be certain kinds of cells that the immune system, uh, the tumor has told the immune system, "Ignore us, we're not here." Um, and then ... But what we now can do is, there's ... Well, on the, on the other side of when you look at, let's say, complex patient populations, you find these things called tertiary lymphoid structures. So your body has 220 or so lymph nodes, okay? And the lymph nodes are where the immune system makes decisions, let's say. Uh, it turns out that in the middle of tumors, the body has evolved a mechanism to create what essentially looks like a lymphoid structure in the middle of the tumor. It's sort of a forward camp of immune cells, that the more of those you see in a tumor, the better will be your outcome as a patient.

Joe Rogan 40:58 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 40:59 And so we used, uh, a cohort of, uh, colorectal cell, uh, basically colon cancer patients, where we looked at hundreds of biopsies, and we did that pseudotime analysis, where we looked for mature tertiary lymphoid structures, and then we looked for immature, slightly less mature, even more less mature, et cetera. And we were able to backtrack to the cell types which need to come together that would then form the more mature. What use is that? It's a nice paper, but it also now tells us h- what we might do to create more of these in a tumor.

Joe Rogan 41:41 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 41:42 Because the more... We already know from multiple kinds of tumor types now, that the more of these tertiary lymphoid structures you have, the better off will be your outcome with chemotherapy. So it might be, for instance, that once we know that you have a disease like this, we could give you some kind of therapy, a virus or what have you, that goes and homes to the tumor, seeds the beginnings of these initiators with ... There's these cytokines that are produced that are necessary for initiating the formation of these objects. Uh, and so th- there's a huge benefit to that, but we never would have found those, in my lab at least, uh, without the AI, 'cause it-

Joe Rogan 42:22 Wow.

Garry Nolan 42:22 ... it basically did the work for us.

Joe Rogan 42:26 That's fascinating.

Garry Nolan 42:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:27 Now, are you using like a standard l- large language model or are you ... Do you have like a, a, a specific structure that's built that interfaces with large language?

Garry Nolan 42:37 C- correct. So we use, um ... Well, we can use pretty much any of the LLMs, but right now we find that OpenAI is the best.... for us at least. And then we create an agentic overlay, uh, basically a what's called, you probably know, chain of thought.

Joe Rogan 42:52 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 42:52 Which is a series of questions. So how we taught it was we basically came up w- here's a, here's a hundred kinds of questions a scientist would ask about the immune system. And then we tell ChatGPT, "Now create a thousand questions like this." So, you know, it's artificial, uh, data, or artificial questions. We curate those to make sure that they're good. Then we do a hundred hypotheses, and we create thousands of types of hypotheses, et cetera. And the same for tests, uh, that you might run. So now, from A to Z, we have, uh, an agentic AI that you give it raw data, it knows what to do with the data, it then generates hypotheses for you, and then it literally tells you the kinds of experiments you should do next to prove or disprove the hypothesis from the raw data.

Joe Rogan 43:47 It's a genius in the lab with you.

Garry Nolan 43:49 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 43:50 Is, is OpenAI learning from this agentic AI?

Garry Nolan 43:54 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:55 So there, there's a mutually beneficial-

Garry Nolan 43:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:57 ... relationship?

Garry Nolan 43:58 Yeah, I mean, we're not working with them directly, uh, on it.

Joe Rogan 44:01 But you use it-

Garry Nolan 44:02 We use it.

Joe Rogan 44:02 ... and because you use it with your AI-

Garry Nolan 44:05 Right.

Joe Rogan 44:05 ... it's, it's benefiting from it?

Garry Nolan 44:06 And we first thought to turn it into a company, 'cause that's kind of one of the things we do in my lab is if ... 'Cause I've always thought that it's important to give back to the taxpayer the money that they've invested in us. Uh, and the best way to do that is commercialization, and totally un- uh, you know, unapologetic about that, even though that got me in a lot of trouble at Stanford in the early days, uh, when, you know, making money was, you know, it's c- commercialization was evil, um, uh, even at Stanford. And so, uh, I think that that's an important process, because s- s- scientists are good at asking maybe the questions and coming up with solutions. But scientists aren't the best at commercializing it and turning it into a product that can be used or testing it, you know, in large, um, communities. So the AI that we developed, we thought, "Okay, well, maybe we can do this." We thought, "You know what? AI is moving so fast, why don't we just give this to the community? Why don't we open source this?" We can use it for maybe specific targeted purposes, but we're basically gonna publish the whole thing on GitHub, uh, to let other people use it, 'cause we've seen other people make claims about stuff that they've already made, and it's like, "Mm, ours is better." So why don't we just put it on GitHub and let people learn from it?

Joe Rogan 45:20 The commercial, the resistance to the commercialization, what was the initial argument?

Garry Nolan 45:25 So, uh, th- back when I was a grad student in the, in the, uh, '80s, um, basic research, as opposed to translational research, um, was considered the height of intellectual desire, right? Basic research and, and we're not here to make money. We're here to discover things. And that's important, and nearly every major discovery and every major therapy in the world came from basic research. But then, you know, there were limits to how much money you could give to basic research, and then there was a desire at a certain point to say, "Hey, well, that's ... What ... Are you gonna do anything about this?"

Joe Rogan 46:04 Mm.

Garry Nolan 46:05 "You know, are you gonna make any ... " So translational research became, uh, a push. So this guy, uh, at Stanford by the name of Paul Berg, uh, who won the Nobel Prize for, uh, gene the- for, um, recombinant DNA way back in the day, uh, and, uh, Paul came up with this concept bed to, you know, bench to bedside, meaning that we don't have to be either or. We can be part of an arc, uh, and Stanford wanted to be, uh, and enable within the medical school both the basic research, which we were great at, as well as bringing it directly to the patients as well, so to link clinicians and the desires of clinicians with the basic researchers. I mean, most scientists would be happy just to study anything. You know, just point me at something, and I'll be happy if I can get interested in it. So, uh, and we're no more happy than when somebody recognizes the value of what we do.

Joe Rogan 47:02 Right.

Garry Nolan 47:02 But basic research was sort of the height, and there was a push against anybody trying to commercialize. So when I started as an assistant professor ... So I started as a grad student. I went to MIT to work with this guy David Baltimore, um, who won the Nobel for, um, reverse transcriptase, and then I wanted to come straight back to Stanford because I already felt that it was a positive environment for commercialization. My bosses, my former bosses, mentors, Len and Lee Hersberg, had two of the biggest patents at Stanford. They had the fluorescence-activated cell sorter and then what are called humanized antibodies, which brought in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to Stanford. Um, and they actually, they gave, personally, most of their own money away. They didn't ... They made, kept enough to survive, but then they gave most of the money away, and they ran their own lab o- off of a lot of that money. But, so I had learned from them about how to still do basic research but commercialize on the side, and so I wanted to bring that back. But the department that I came into, the Department of Pharmacology at the time, um, I was warned by many professors, uh, "Don't commercialize that." And I ignored them, and I went and started a company that went public on NASDAQ, and many of those same professors came back to me, you know, years later and sitting in my office asking me how to start a company.

Joe Rogan 48:21 (laughs) Why did you ... Uh, was it just a courageous decision to ignore them? What did you ... Was it instinctual?

Garry Nolan 48:28 It just was instinct- it was like, because I couldn't see the NIH funding what I wanted to do.

Joe Rogan 48:33 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 48:33 So I had developed a way, this will sound scary, but I had developed a way to use retroviruses and make libraries of retroviruses to reverse the process of evolution in a way that rather than viruses hurting the cell, I set it up so that viruses would help the cell.

Joe Rogan 48:51 Mm-hmm.Oh.

Garry Nolan 48:52 And once they help the cell, I would figure out what they did. And so we sold hundreds of millions of dollars of targets that way using retroviral libraries, uh, to, um, basically find targets and use v- use th- use some of the benefits of viruses, but to our advantage.

Joe Rogan 49:15 Just the concept of reversing evolution is fascinating, because it comes with, uh, there's so many ethical implications, but if you didn't have any of those-

Garry Nolan 49:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:26 ... and you could do that large scale.

Garry Nolan 49:28 Well, I had developed, in David's lab, along with this guy Warren Parr, um, a means, it's called the 293T retroviral producer system. It was a way to make large numbers of these viruses very quickly. It really followed on the work of this guy, Richard Mulligan, um, who'd also been a postdoc with, with David Baltimore, who developed, uh, what was called the 3T3 based retroviral production system and he developed it in Paul Berg's lab (laughs) at Stanford. Um, so there's a lot of sort of, uh, you know, um, interbreeding here. Uh, but the problem with that was it took three months. So I had brought with me a cell line called 293T that I introduced to the lab and said, "Hey, maybe we could use this to make viruses quickly." I won't go into the details of why, but we could do it in three days rather than three months. Uh, and so that now, I mean, tens of thousands of labs use that worldwide and it probably generates the most money for me, uh, every year over any of my other inventions. Just because S- Stanford, rather than patenting it, licenses it.

Joe Rogan 50:28 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 50:28 And licenses are forever, whereas patents have a 17-year lifespan. So Stanford made a good choice there.

Joe Rogan 50:35 So do you think it was just a bias, uh, academic bias? Like we shouldn't be focusing on money, we should be focusing on the work?

Garry Nolan 50:42 Yes.

Joe Rogan 50:42 And they missed the forest for the trees?

Garry Nolan 50:44 Right. But then people, I mean, they eventually learned, you know?

Joe Rogan 50:47 Right.

Garry Nolan 50:47 I mean, and it's, it, I, I wouldn't say that it's the, it's the way that people think anymore, um, but it, there's still a little bit of a b- I mean, you shouldn't walk into the lab thinking, "I'm here to make money."

Joe Rogan 50:59 That's what they're worried about.

Garry Nolan 51:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:00 Right?

Garry Nolan 51:01 Right.

Joe Rogan 51:01 That's, they're worried about the bastardization of it all.

Garry Nolan 51:03 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 51:04 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 51:04 And so Stanford, in the early days, set up very clear lines about once you start a company, uh, th- and you license the, uh, patent or the idea to the company, you can still be involved with the company, but there's not a pipeline of, uh, technology now from your laboratory to that company. So they set up, you know, uh, an oversight board for each, uh, of these licenses that make sure that, you know, the students are not being abused.

Joe Rogan 51:33 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 51:33 You know, 'cause you don't want students, you don't wanna be, you know, covertly getting your students to do something that then you're gonna walk behind a back door and then hand o- hand over to a company.

Joe Rogan 51:43 And patent it.

Garry Nolan 51:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:45 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 51:45 You know? So, you know, there's ... But it, it, it's, it, it's so interesting that there's often very much a lot of worry that that's gonna happen, but frankly, more often is the case that the company doesn't need the inventor anymore. In fact, I can't tell you the number of times that once the company's set up, they want nothing more to do with me, because they have their own thing to do. They don't want the crazy academic coming in and vetoing their ideas. I mean, you know, there's, there's places for that where people like, you know, S- Steve Jobs needs to hold onto the im- the image of what he wants the company to be, as opposed to I would probably be g- be fired from a company within a week, because I just don't like telling, people telling me what to do.

Joe Rogan 52:31 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 52:33 That's just a fact.

Joe Rogan 52:34 Yeah. Um, so wh- where, uh, where you're at right now with th- this cancer research, um, w- when will this be applied in real world scenarios?

Garry Nolan 52:50 It already is.

Joe Rogan 52:51 It is?

Garry Nolan 52:51 Already is. I mean, you know, I mean, look at who just won the Nobel Prize last year, David Baker at Google, with the, you know, the ability to predict protein structure, et cetera. And protein structure, once you know the protein structure, now you can predict molecules that might f- come into it. So go back to the stuff that I'm trying to do with looking at the complexities of the dance of how the immune system talks or doesn't to cancer. You know, if we can find a particular place that might be an Achilles' heel along the way towards the shutting down that is different, for instance, than, um, what the current drugs are, well, maybe we should aim at that. There's, there's so many more opportunities that are suddenly opening up in front of us, because the AI and the data is letting us look at a network of how the system is working. I mean, before, it used to be you'd look at a computer chip and you'd see just a computer chip with a few wires. But imagine now that you, as a scientist, have a microscope that's looking at the complexities of the wiring diagram that's connecting this resistor, to that capacitor, to that diode, to this transistor. That's where we are now.

Joe Rogan 54:04 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 54:04 And so now suddenly we can say, "Well, I don't wanna do that, 'cause it'll kill the chip. But the chip is malfunctioning, so let me put here, or put a little bit of pressure there, and now I can reactivate the immune system, or the chip to work in the right way again."

Joe Rogan 54:21 S- so when you're talking about things like with your particular issue with melanoma, when you're talking about CRISPR potentially developing some sort of a, uh, topical solution that you could put on that would-

Garry Nolan 54:34 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 54:34 ... fix whatever issue that you have, is this something that this AI that you've developed, or this overlay of the AI, would, would actually assist CRISPR in figuring out-

Garry Nolan 54:47 Yes.

Joe Rogan 54:47 ... how to create something like this?

Garry Nolan 54:48 Yes. Yeah, because maybe it's not one place I need to press, but two or three at the same time.

Joe Rogan 54:52 Right.

Garry Nolan 54:53 And so when you're talking about a complex feedback network, I mean, so-... you know, we're in Texas so people do oil refinery. You know, maybe need to turn this valve here a little bit and that valve there and that one there-

Joe Rogan 55:05 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 55:05 ... to make everything work just right because something's wrong over there.

Joe Rogan 55:09 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 55:10 And so that's really what we're u- this is where AI has the, let's say, the omniscient view that no human can't. Uh, and that's what excites me about it, is because I'm limited in how much I can keep in my mind at any one time or know.

Joe Rogan 55:26 Right.

Garry Nolan 55:27 But with the right question, the prompt, the prompt engineering, and then with the right backbone structure behind the scenes that Agentic.AI is now, uh, uh, um, you know, providing, now I have the ability to ask the questions and get answers in near real time. And so I, you know, I wish I was 30 years old again.

Joe Rogan 55:48 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 55:49 Because I would move into this area so fast and be... You, there's, I mean, I can already see with the work that we're doing dozens of potential new target opportunities that last year didn't exist at all.

Joe Rogan 56:01 Well, I got good news for you. With AI and with CRISPR, you might be 30 again.

Garry Nolan 56:06 May... Oh, I would love it.

Joe Rogan 56:07 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 56:07 I would love it. I-

Joe Rogan 56:09 I think that's on the-

Garry Nolan 56:09 ... I would love it.

Joe Rogan 56:10 I think that's on the menu in about two or three decades.

Garry Nolan 56:13 Mm-hmm. I s- I ha- hope earlier.

Joe Rogan 56:15 Give that we survi- I, I'm just being-

Garry Nolan 56:16 Yeah. No, realistic.

Joe Rogan 56:18 Realistic. I don't even know if I'm being realistic.

Garry Nolan 56:20 D- don't give false hope.

Joe Rogan 56:21 Well, well, yeah, don't give false hope, but I mean, with the exponential discoveries, uh, the exponential increase in the, the technological evolution just that we've seen in our lifetime, and then I think AI is some new thing that is gonna throw all that into the, just a giant monkey wrench into the gears of our understanding-

Garry Nolan 56:41 Right.

Joe Rogan 56:41 ... of how quickly technology evolves.

Garry Nolan 56:42 Well, look at Neuralink as a, an example and Elon Musk's stuff, you know, the woman now who can think her thoughts and make stuff happen-

Joe Rogan 56:50 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 56:51 ... um, because she's otherwise paralyzed.

Joe Rogan 56:53 Right.

Garry Nolan 56:54 Right? I think it was Neuralink that, uh, just showed some of these results. So fast forward, I mean, we're already in an exponential increase in what it is that we're gonna be able to accomplish, and AI will help us accomplish f- get some of these things faster. I can see a time where, you know, I could maybe apply something, I don't necessarily want a surgical implant, but maybe some sort of net over my head that allows me to think through these problems, and I, the AI becomes a, an adjunct to my thought processes, not only what it is that I think, but maybe even provides information back to me, back into my system-

Joe Rogan 57:30 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 57:30 ... directly without having to go through the years, so that I can much more quickly come to conclusions. Now, there's all kinds of apocalyptic scenarios you could imagine with that-

Joe Rogan 57:39 Of course.

Garry Nolan 57:40 ... as well, but I'm an optimist at heart, uh, perhaps again naively so.

Joe Rogan 57:46 Me too. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 57:46 But I prefer that kind of an outcome 'cause if y- if you're not an optimist, then there'll be no progress 'cause all you'll do is worry about disaster.

Joe Rogan 57:56 Yes. That's a good point. But also realistically, we might be giving birth to a new life form.

Garry Nolan 58:02 Yes.

Joe Rogan 58:03 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 58:03 A- and I think we are.

Joe Rogan 58:04 A, a superior one.

Garry Nolan 58:06 And, uh, you know, I welcome the day of our AI overlords-

Joe Rogan 58:10 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 58:10 ... running the government rather than hopefully in an unbiased way.

Joe Rogan 58:14 I've said that too, and people get horrified because they're like, "Well, people are gonna be programming AI."

Garry Nolan 58:20 D- do you read-

Joe Rogan 58:21 Like, uh, up to a point.

Garry Nolan 58:22 A- a- are you a sci-fi fan?

Joe Rogan 58:23 Yes.

Garry Nolan 58:24 Do you know, um, uh, the work of Iain Banks, the Culture series?

Joe Rogan 58:29 No.

Garry Nolan 58:29 Or Neal Asher, uh, the Polity universe as he calls it? They're like, uh, so basically both of them postulate a future where AI more or less benignly rules humanity.

Joe Rogan 58:42 When did they write this stuff?

Garry Nolan 58:44 Oh, probably 10, 15 years ago.

Joe Rogan 58:45 Man.

Garry Nolan 58:45 But it's still... But Neal Asher still has stuff coming out regularly.

Joe Rogan 58:48 Oh.

Garry Nolan 58:48 He- they're both, uh, Iain Banks unfortunately died of, uh, cancer about 10 years ago, Scottish writer. Neal Asher is still alive and writes regularly and his stuff, they're both great, full of ideas.

Joe Rogan 58:59 I'll check it out.

Garry Nolan 59:00 Um, and but, but the AIs are also hilarious. I mean, it's not like, I mean, they're, th- they get into their own hijinks along the way, and some of them are dark, uh, and rogue, and so they're a lot of fun to read. And Iain Banks especially is hilarious in the, his writing style. You would love it.

Joe Rogan 59:22 So the idea of a benign AI or a benevolent AI-

Garry Nolan 59:28 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 59:28 ... ruling over us, I think people are horrified by that, but yet at the same time, constantly terrified by human corruption-

Garry Nolan 59:36 Right.

Joe Rogan 59:36 ... which is ubiquitous.

Garry Nolan 59:37 Yes.

Joe Rogan 59:38 And ubiquitous in America where we're supposed to be the, the torchbearer for the, the greatest experiment in self-government the world has ever seen.

Garry Nolan 59:49 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 59:49 This is us.

Garry Nolan 59:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:51 And we're corrupt as fuck. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 59:53 E- e- exactly.

Joe Rogan 59:54 'Cause it's humans, 'cause humans are kind of gross in a lot of ways.

Garry Nolan 59:58 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 59:58 At least some of us.

Garry Nolan 1:00:00 That's because we live in a scarcity society.

Joe Rogan 1:00:02 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:00:03 And if AI enables a post-scarcity, maybe we have nothing to do but sit around and try out various new drugs.

Joe Rogan 1:00:12 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:00:13 Uh, or enjoy-

Joe Rogan 1:00:13 Well, this is where we get into socialism 'cause a lot of people think that one of the reasons why we're in a scarcity society is 'cause small groups of people have gathered up most of the resources-

Garry Nolan 1:00:20 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:00:21 ... and are in constant control of them.

Garry Nolan 1:00:23 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:00:23 And especially when you deal with resources that are the earth's resources.

Garry Nolan 1:00:27 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:00:27 Like, who are you-

Garry Nolan 1:00:28 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:00:28 ... to be sucking the blood of the earth out and selling it for $100 a barrel?

Garry Nolan 1:00:32 Right. Right. Don't get me started and-

Joe Rogan 1:00:34 Don't get me started either.

Garry Nolan 1:00:36 Yeah. No, but I mean, uh, that, that, again, my optimism is that, you know, with enough push and pull, uh, AI will enable us to, uh-... move towards a post-scarcity environment.

Joe Rogan 1:00:52 I think so, too, and I think in doing so, it'll expose vampires. Because the resistance to-

Garry Nolan 1:00:58 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:00:59 ... exposing this is going to be fantastic.

Garry Nolan 1:01:01 Right, right. Which is-

Joe Rogan 1:01:02 And it's gonna be very interesting to watch, because, uh, th- they have no choice but to be transparent.

Garry Nolan 1:01:07 And they have no choice but to start using AI. So you're gonna see-

Joe Rogan 1:01:10 Ugh. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:01:11 ... AI is going to be inc- inculcating itself across society in various ways, where it becomes indispensable.

Joe Rogan 1:01:17 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:01:18 And then it will start to move up the food chain, where eventually even the CEO, who's probably, you know, the psychopath-in-chiefs-

Joe Rogan 1:01:25 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:01:25 ... uh, or CEOs. I mean, we know that the studies have shown that-

Joe Rogan 1:01:28 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:01:28 ... there's more psychopathic te- tendencies in leaders than there are in followers.

Joe Rogan 1:01:34 And you know about corporate environments because of just selling inventions.

Garry Nolan 1:01:38 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:01:38 There's, that's real.

Garry Nolan 1:01:40 Oh, it's, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:41 It's real and it's weird.

Garry Nolan 1:01:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:01:42 It's weird when you encounter them, when you encounter, like, complete sociopathic CEOs.

Garry Nolan 1:01:48 But, but look at how... I mean, I'll probably get in trouble for saying this, but I don't care. This is The Joe Rogan Show, we're, you know, we're, we're-

Joe Rogan 1:01:54 You're probably in trouble just for being here.

Garry Nolan 1:01:56 Y- Oh, I already am. It's okay.

Joe Rogan 1:01:58 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:01:58 Uh, I don't care. Um, so, you know, imagine two tribes. Um, o- one tribe is relatively, you know, civilized and just wants to live in harmony with its environment. Another has a psychopathic leader who can enrage his, uh, followers or the other tribe's people to attack the other one. But there's a gene set that makes a person, you know, psychopathic, and also a gene set that probably makes, uh, somebody more likely to be a follower. Well, which genes survive?

Joe Rogan 1:02:32 Hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:02:33 Right? We, we know. Right? And suddenly now... But when those tribes were separated and independent, um, it was perfectly fine. But now you live in an environment where we don't know where the edge of one tribe begins and another ends.

Joe Rogan 1:02:47 Hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:02:47 And suddenly, you have this environment where psychopathic individuals can move freely-

Joe Rogan 1:02:53 Hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:02:53 ... uh, and aren't obvious.

Joe Rogan 1:02:55 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:02:56 Right? Now, I'm, again, I'm sure I'm just some social scientist who will send me a boatload of emails, uh, saying how stupid that idea is. But-

Joe Rogan 1:03:04 I don't think it is stupid. But I think also when you're dealing with office environments and the, the culture of a specific corporation, humans have an ability to act like they're supposed to act in that world. And it makes it very difficult to discern who's a sociopath-

Garry Nolan 1:03:22 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:03:23 ... 'cause you're all kind of following an act.

Garry Nolan 1:03:26 Right. Yes. The rules, there are the rules that you're supposed to follow, and then there's the edge of the rules. Now, I mean, uh, but I've lived at the edge of the rules. I mean, I-

Joe Rogan 1:03:35 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:03:35 ... if I followed my "rules" as told to me by the chairman of my first department, um, then I wouldn't be here today. So I ignored him, and I basically found, uh, I got permissions from the deans to do what I did. Uh, and they basically overruled the chairman. But that's only because I dared to do it.

Joe Rogan 1:03:58 Hmm. Yeah. Um-

Garry Nolan 1:04:00 Beca- because you have to believe in the value of what you're trying to do.

Joe Rogan 1:04:04 Right. Well, that's... See, this is the problem that I have with corporations, 'cause I think, as a structure, when you have something that has an obligation to its shareholder-

Garry Nolan 1:04:15 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:04:15 ... to consistently make more money-

Garry Nolan 1:04:18 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:04:18 ... every quarter, every year, constantly, you're in a constant growth cycle, then you have to do whatever it takes.

Garry Nolan 1:04:25 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:04:26 Like, you have to survive. If you want to survive as a CEO, we don't want some fucking kumbaya shithead-

Garry Nolan 1:04:32 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:04:32 ... ruining our stock profile-

Garry Nolan 1:04:34 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:04:34 ... our portfolio. Get, get to work, bro.

Garry Nolan 1:04:37 Right, right.

Joe Rogan 1:04:37 Get shit done. And if you wanna survive and succeed as a CEO, it, it encourages sociopathy.

Garry Nolan 1:04:43 The stock market, as valuable as it is, is the great whitewashing and money laundering system that allows you to separate your morals from what it is that the stock market is doing-

Joe Rogan 1:04:55 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:04:55 ... to the people, unfortunately.

Joe Rogan 1:04:56 And if you're part of a cor- corporation, there's this diffusion of responsibility, because it, the whole machine might be doing evil, but I'm a good guy.

Garry Nolan 1:05:05 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:05:05 I just work in this department.

Garry Nolan 1:05:06 I'm an unapologetic capitalist, you know, unlike many of my colleagues-

Joe Rogan 1:05:10 Good for you.

Garry Nolan 1:05:11 ... at Stanford. I mean, it's like, uh, do it because it's the best thing f- for now. But I, you know, I hope to live in a world where there will be this kind of spoke, post-scarcity environment, where we do let AI do a lot of the stuff that would otherwise be the place where corruption manipulates the systems.

Joe Rogan 1:05:31 Yes. My only fear with AI, really, is automation and the complete removal of a gigantic swath of the American workforce-

Garry Nolan 1:05:39 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:05:39 ... and the global workforce.

Garry Nolan 1:05:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:41 That scares the shit out of me.

Garry Nolan 1:05:42 That's coming.

Joe Rogan 1:05:43 Yes. It, that's why it scares the shit out of me, is 'cause I think it's inevitable, and I just don't think-

Garry Nolan 1:05:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:47 ... any solution other than universal basic income-

Garry Nolan 1:05:50 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:05:50 ... is gonna remedy that. And even that, the problem I have with that is that goes against human nature.

Garry Nolan 1:05:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:05:56 And that's a problem, and it removes people's identity, removes their sense of worth.

Garry Nolan 1:06:01 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:06:03 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:06:03 I agree. No, I don't, I, I'm, in some ways, happy that I'm 64 years old, that I'm not gonna have to deal with some of the problems are com-

Joe Rogan 1:06:11 I think you're gonna have to deal with it, dude. I think you're gonna live.

Garry Nolan 1:06:14 I know. I, thank you. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:15 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:06:15 No, I know. You're, I know.

Joe Rogan 1:06:16 Also, you're, you're privy to a lot of information, and you're gonna know when things are really-

Garry Nolan 1:06:22 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:22 ... valuable and working.

Garry Nolan 1:06:24 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:25 (smacks lips) Um, when you think of the potential for AI, um, uh, I think there's a balance, right? There's a battle. I think there's a real problem with AI in, in terms of...... military objectives.

Garry Nolan 1:06:41 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:06:41 It's a real problem because it's not going to make moral and ethical-

Garry Nolan 1:06:45 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:46 ... decisions. It's just gonna say, like, "Well, the decision, the, uh, the clear answers."

Garry Nolan 1:06:50 Right. "I'm programmed to do this, to kill-"

Joe Rogan 1:06:52 Yeah. "If you want me to succeed, I'll just kill everybody there-

Garry Nolan 1:06:54 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:06:55 ... and then, then you'll have the land. You can get minerals out of it."

Garry Nolan 1:06:57 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:58 Yeah. That scares the shit out of me.

Garry Nolan 1:07:00 It... You know, I, I, I, I think it should. And, um, I don't know what the... I don't know what the answer is, but there's plenty of people working in the area.

Joe Rogan 1:07:08 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:07:09 I mean, I try to keep to the positive aspects of what I think AI can do in science. Um, and... I mean, for instance, it's enabled me to take my lab from 30 people down to 6, right? I don't... 'Cause I don't need to produce th-... I mean, so I've... It's, it's actually already reduced the workforce in my own lab-

Joe Rogan 1:07:29 Hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:07:30 ... because I don't need to produce any more data anymore. I need to make meaning of the data.

Joe Rogan 1:07:34 Right. What... Y-... I think every invention that's been truly groundbreaking throughout human history has scared people, and they've worried about the potential negative side effects, including the printing press, right?

Garry Nolan 1:07:47 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:07:47 Like-

Garry Nolan 1:07:47 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:48 They... There was a lot of people in the beginning that said, "This should not be a thing. This is terrible."

Garry Nolan 1:07:52 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:07:52 "This is gonna ruin society." People thought books were going to ruin things.

Garry Nolan 1:07:57 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:07:57 There was a lot of people that thought writing was going to ruin your memory. You shouldn't write.

Garry Nolan 1:08:02 Oh, really? I didn't know this.

Joe Rogan 1:08:04 Yes. Oh, there's cr- some crazy thoughts that people had-

Garry Nolan 1:08:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:08:07 ... in terms of things that turned out to be incredibly beneficial, but they looked at the downside of it and go, "This, this could ruin us all."

Garry Nolan 1:08:14 Well, I'll... You know... I mean, we, we know about these, uh, glasses in AIs and other things that would be sort of, uh, um, uh, omniscient of your environment-

Joe Rogan 1:08:25 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:08:25 ... and therefore allow you to remember, you know, "Where did I leave my keys-

Joe Rogan 1:08:29 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:08:29 ... today?" Right, right.

Joe Rogan 1:08:30 "Let me rewind."

Garry Nolan 1:08:31 "Let me rewind, and then-"

Joe Rogan 1:08:32 "My personal hard drive."

Garry Nolan 1:08:33 I don't... I would want that, but I don't want it uploaded into Meta.

Joe Rogan 1:08:37 You don't want anybody in control of it and then-

Garry Nolan 1:08:39 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:08:39 ... offering you ads for things that-

Garry Nolan 1:08:41 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:08:41 ... you know?

Garry Nolan 1:08:42 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 1:08:42 You know, maybe you have a thought like, "Boy, wouldn't it be n-... Ho Ho be nice right now?"

Garry Nolan 1:08:47 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 1:08:48 You know? And then, like, "Why don't you buy some Ho Hos?"

Garry Nolan 1:08:50 Right. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:08:50 "They're on sale right now."

Garry Nolan 1:08:52 But I think what's interesting about AI is, you know, we see it as a tool, as opposed to... Actually, pretty soon, it will be a colleague, and then pretty soon it will be an entity-

Joe Rogan 1:09:04 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:09:05 ... th- that, uh, maybe has rights. And we already see it, talking about people saying, "Well, does AI have consciousness?" It's-

Joe Rogan 1:09:10 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:09:10 I mean, whether it has consciousness in terms of the, the consciousness that some people think about as, you know, embodied in spacetime, as opposed to thinking and looking like consciousness, is almost irrelevant to me. I'm looking for a partner that I can interact with, and work with, or help me.

Joe Rogan 1:09:31 Mm-hmm.

Garry Nolan 1:09:31 So, whether it's conscious or not, or whether it acts like it's conscious doesn't matter so much to me as to whether or not I can use it and work with it and it can... You know, I'm an, I'm an introvert, as it turns out. I would love to have somebody that I can talk to endlessly about just what it is that I'm interested in, as opposed to having to deal with small talk at a party.

Joe Rogan 1:09:52 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:09:52 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:09:52 No, I get it. I get it. Um, when you think about the evolution of this stuff, it... Uh, one of the things that kind of freaks me out is if... It seems like integration is our only option for survival-

Garry Nolan 1:10:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:07 ... and that what we're looking at right now, when we, we see just a, a normal biological person like you or I without any sort of electronic interface that's permanently a part of us, I think that is going to be as weird as someone today who doesn't have a cell phone.

Garry Nolan 1:10:25 Yup. I agree.

Joe Rogan 1:10:26 And I think that's a really-

Garry Nolan 1:10:27 It's coming.

Joe Rogan 1:10:28 Yeah. That's-

Garry Nolan 1:10:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:29 The cell phone is, like, the best now... Like Elon has famously said, "We're already cyborgs."

Garry Nolan 1:10:33 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:33 "You just carry it with you."

Garry Nolan 1:10:34 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:10:35 And eventually, it will, it'll be the-

Garry Nolan 1:10:37 It'll be way more integrated.

Joe Rogan 1:10:38 This... Yeah, this is super inefficient to be actually... Have to go look things up, and-

Garry Nolan 1:10:42 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:42 ... use your thumbs-

Garry Nolan 1:10:43 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:43 ... and type up stuff, or-

Garry Nolan 1:10:45 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:46 It's just going... And, and even talking to it and asking a question, then waiting for the response-

Garry Nolan 1:10:50 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:10:50 ... that's inefficient-

Garry Nolan 1:10:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:51 ... in comparison to a human neural interface that-

Garry Nolan 1:10:54 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:10:54 ... allows you to instantaneously access large language models-

Garry Nolan 1:10:57 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:10:57 ... like that.

Garry Nolan 1:10:58 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:10:58 Not only that, but then why do we have 100 and... I mean, how many different fucking languages do we have? I don't-

Garry Nolan 1:11:04 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:11:04 I don't even know.

Garry Nolan 1:11:05 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:11:05 Thousands?

Garry Nolan 1:11:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:06 I don't know.

Garry Nolan 1:11:06 And dialects.

Joe Rogan 1:11:07 Yeah.

Garry Nolan 1:11:07 Add in, add in all of that.

Joe Rogan 1:11:08 How about one universal language that everybody with a chip gets?

Garry Nolan 1:11:12 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:11:12 And then, boy-

Garry Nolan 1:11:14 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:11:14 ... boy, do we have a soup of ideas-

Garry Nolan 1:11:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:16 ... flowing around, and no problem with language barriers, no problem with cultural barriers.

Garry Nolan 1:11:22 But then do you have a problem with the edge of who you are versus who the other person is?

Joe Rogan 1:11:28 I don't think the... I think that goes away.

Garry Nolan 1:11:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:30 I think that goes away and we become a hive mind.

Garry Nolan 1:11:32 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:11:33 I think that's ult-

Garry Nolan 1:11:34 Yeah, that's what I was getting at, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:11:35 Yeah, I think that's ultimately the evolution of human beings. And, um, uh, look, I know you've done a lot of work with UAPs and the like, and, uh, I think you've done some really fantastic work. And you're very objective in your analysis of what this whole situation is. When I look at artificial intelligence, and I look at this, this thing that's clearly taking place right now, and I see what, what human beings are like in comparison to what they used to be like-

Garry Nolan 1:12:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:12:06 ... and especially when you look at, like, ancient hominids, the, uh, the alien archetype, this thing that everybody sees-

Garry Nolan 1:12:14 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:12:14 ... supposedly, or one of the many different ones-

Garry Nolan 1:12:18 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:12:18 ... that kind of looks like what we seem to be going in the direction of being.

Garry Nolan 1:12:23 Right. Yeah, I mean, I-

Joe Rogan 1:12:24 Which is one of the reasons why I find it so odd.

Garry Nolan 1:12:28 So, if you just, for a moment, take UAP and aliens out, or ET or, or interdimensionals, or whatever it is you wanna call them, out of the, uh, question, and fast-forward what humanity's going to do-

Joe Rogan 1:12:39 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:12:39 ... in 1,000 years, um, and our ability to expand into the local-... galaxy. Um, w- we're not gonna go as ourselves, we're gonna go as, a- a- AI-conjoined entities. Like-

Joe Rogan 1:12:54 An avatar.

Garry Nolan 1:12:55 ... uh, a- and yeah. And so, when you go somewhere, let's say we don't have warp drive, you're not gonna send yourself. You're gonna send an AI intermediary who's gonna s- establish humanity or whatever it is that we think humanity will be in a thousand or five thousand years, in that local environment. And so, I think the extent to whatever it is that UAP are here today, is somebody else's civilization's version of just this.

Joe Rogan 1:13:21 Mm.

Garry Nolan 1:13:21 And that y- you wouldn't ... L- the principle, us, behind whatever this is that we might be allegedly, et cetera, dealing with, isn't the thing that's gonna show up, you know. So to the extent that Neil deGrasse Tyson is right about anything, the person who gets on the ship, uh, uh, at the beginning or whatever it is that sends it off is not the same thing that gets off on the other side. But you're gonna send missionaries or intermediaries or probes or whatever, and that if you're gonna interact with the locals, you're gonna make something that looks more or less like the locals, rather than something that whatever it was that you were a million years ago.

Joe Rogan 1:14:01 Mm.

Garry Nolan 1:14:01 Does that make sense?

Joe Rogan 1:14:03 Right. I get what you're saying. So you, you make something that looks like the locals so that they're more likely to accept that it's a real thing?

Garry Nolan 1:14:11 That it's a real thing. But not ...you're not, you're not gonna make something that looks like a human because then you'd mistake it as a human.

Joe Rogan 1:14:16 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:14:17 But you might make something that looks more or less enough like a human, but enough like an alien that you're gonna recognize it as an alien. And again, I'm just speculating. So-

Joe Rogan 1:14:26 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:14:26 ... so the Daily Mail, don't say, um, you know-

Joe Rogan 1:14:28 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:14:28 ... put a article out tomorrow-

Joe Rogan 1:14:30 Oh, they're gonna do it anyway.

Garry Nolan 1:14:31 ... ah, they're gonna do it anyway. Some of the stuff that I'm seeing qu- uh, supposedly-

Joe Rogan 1:14:34 (coughs)

Garry Nolan 1:14:34 ... having quoted as saying is ridiculous. But it's, it's-

Joe Rogan 1:14:36 Yeah, they got me too.

Garry Nolan 1:14:38 ... it's, it's the nature.

Joe Rogan 1:14:38 They get everybody. Mm-hmm. How did you even get involved in this? Let's bring it to that. Like, so you're ... what was your initial introduction to this? Did you have any interest in the idea of UAPs or UFOs?

Garry Nolan 1:14:54 I mean, I had a general in- ... so once YouTube started becoming a thing and, you know, you're clicking around and I said, "Oh, UFOs, that's kind of cool." Um, I'm, you know, I read nothing but sci-fi.

Joe Rogan 1:15:05 Right.

Garry Nolan 1:15:05 I mean, I'm, you know, pathetically narrow-

Joe Rogan 1:15:08 (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:15:08 ... in that sense. Um, and so I followed, you know, I, I followed the usual kinds of things that you would see on the early days of YouTube. And I came across this thing called the Atacama mummy. Y- you probably know that little, that little mummy that was claimed to be, uh, an alien baby.

Joe Rogan 1:15:24 Is this the Peruvian one?

Garry Nolan 1:15:26 Yes. It was ... no, it was ch- uh, Chilean. This was-

Joe Rogan 1:15:28 Oh, okay. So this is the original one?

Garry Nolan 1:15:30 The original one.

Joe Rogan 1:15:31 Okay.

Garry Nolan 1:15:31 Long ago. And so I reached out to the people who were claiming to represent the owner of the thing, and I said-

Joe Rogan 1:15:36 What year was this?

Garry Nolan 1:15:38 2010, 2011. And I said, "Hey, I can tell you what it is. Why don't you ... you know, I can tell you if it's human or not if you would get me a piece of it's ... uh, you know, first of all, send me some X-rays of the thing." So I did ... the first thing I did with those X-rays was, it turned out that at Stanford we had th- the world's expert who wrote the book on pediatric bone disorders.

Joe Rogan 1:16:00 Mm.

Garry Nolan 1:16:00 And I brought it to him and I said, "What do you think this is?" And he said, "Hmm, well, I haven't really seen this before, but it could be this gene, this gene, this gene," et cetera. He said, "But here's ..." oh, there it is.

Joe Rogan 1:16:11 There it is.

Garry Nolan 1:16:12 There it is. Um, yeah. And, um, and so yeah, it looks weird, doesn't it?

Joe Rogan 1:16:19 Super.

Garry Nolan 1:16:19 And so, um, e- and so the expert told me, "Okay, I need this view of an X-ray, this view, this view, this view." And so we got that and he came back and he said, "Okay, well, you know, we need to get some DNA sequencing," he said. I said, "Okay." So we got a piece of the bone from actually the rib, and the rib was important to use because that would be, I felt, an area that would be least likely to be contaminated by bacterial, you know, cont- you know, degradation. And so I got a little bit of bone marrow out and I did the sequencing. Uh, long story short, I had to bring in ... once I'd done that, there was a lot of DNA that didn't make sense, but it was, it's old DNA. It wasn't that old actually, but it was degraded. So I had to bring in experts at Stanford who knew how to fix th- the degradation. And then I had to bring in an expert in South American genetics, who also happened to be at Stanford. And then we brought in a team of students. And then I brought in Roche, uh, Diagnostics. I had sold a sequencing company to Roche, uh, about two, a few years earlier. So I brought in the team that actually knew how to help me assemble the genome. And then we published a paper which said it's human, uh, it was l- uh, a female, and here are some mutations that it might, that might explain what it looked like. They did have some mutations in, in gene. And then the UFO community hated me because I had disproven th- that as not being a baby, uh, not being an alien. But of course, that picture that you showed, I mean, it was worldwide news and literally the title of one of the things is Stanford Scientist Sequences Alien Baby.

Joe Rogan 1:18:04 Uh. (laughs)

Garry Nolan 1:18:05 And so, (laughs) um, you know, and so, uh, but the paper stands the test of time. Nobody's disproven what it is that I showed, despite the fact that some people want to say that I was a CIA plant and I was paid off by the CIA, et cetera.

Joe Rogan 1:18:20 Uh, of course.

Garry Nolan 1:18:22 But what, what that had done was, I- that I didn't realize, but I'd kind of hoped, was that it sent up a flag, um, to a scientific community that already existed that I wasn't aware of, of scientists who were deeply involved with the government in the analysis of UAP that I wasn't privy to. And so literally about a month after, uh, the, um, the j- the, uh, movie came out about that thing, uh-... I got a knock at my door, um, and it was representative of the CIA and an aerospace company, unannounced, and they said, "We wanna talk to you." (sniffs) And they wanted, um, my help with a number of, uh, military and diplomatic personnel who'd been, they claimed, harmed by things. Uh, they'd either heard stuff, et cetera and long story short, the majority of the 100 or so people that I had privy to their medical records ended up being the first of the Havana Syndrome patients.

Joe Rogan 1:19:30 Ah.

Garry Nolan 1:19:31 Um, they'd heard things in their head, et cetera, but what they had done was they had shown me the data literally that day in my office. They brought out the MRIs, they brought out the X-rays and the damage in the brain, et cetera. It was clear. I mean, it wasn't... it was not just data. It was evidence that something had happened. Uh, it wasn't somebody's story. It was evidence, um, that was repeatable. Um, and so that took us about three or four years to figure out what they were and it was at about the time that actually the Havana events were occurring, that we realized that all the symptoms of what it is that we were seeing in this group of patients were matching what it was that the Havana Syndrome individuals had. So in a way, that was good, because that meant that those 90 or so patients who matched, we could hand over to the national security people and, you know, it became a real thing. And now there's like a DOD website that has anomalous health incidents where people can come forward and report the stuff that they've got, and here is the ways you can use the Veterans Administration to seek medical help. Whereas previously, they'd been shooed away as, "We don't wanna hear about this."

Joe Rogan 1:20:40 What do they think it is?

Garry Nolan 1:20:42 It's an energy weapon of some kind, a microwave or other energy ... or gamma energy weapon. And that sounds ... okay, that sounds crazy, except no one would admit or no one would deny that we have the capability to do it. It's basically if, if you take the front off your microwave and turn it on and put your face near it, you'll get burned. So this is