Radio Manu, Papa Tzango

I don't remember where I first

heard of today's guest. It may have been through the great Duncan Trussell. But in any case, about a year and a half ago, probably, somebody put me in touch with Dr. Bruce Damer.

And we exchanged a few emails and I looked him up or whoever introduced me to him told me a little bit about him. And he sounded really fascinating.

To be honest with yours, probably a little intimidated because he's the kind of ultra-high IQ person who can be difficult sometimes to engage in conversation because it's almost like they're speaking another language or their knowledge is so specialized that it's very difficult to sort of pull out the...

The applicability of it or to make it personal in a way that listeners who aren't astrophysicists or interested, particularly interested in the chemical origins of life or whatever the subject matter we're discussing that those listeners are going to be brought along into the conversation.

So part of it's probably just personal that I was like, he's too smart. I'll sound stupid or I'll feel stupid. But part of it is also that sometimes those sorts of people aren't especially great podcast guests just because they're...

They live in a world that's so remote and unusual that it can be hard for people to relate to them.

Bruce Damer is not that kind of person. Bruce is incredibly relatable, humble, sweet, kind, mysterious, mystical, just lovely, lovely man. And I'm so happy that I got around finally to meeting him. We tried to hook it up.

We actually, he came to a talk I gave at Burning Man and that's the first time I met him personally and at that point I knew that whatever reservations I may have had in the past were ridiculous and I couldn't wait to sit in a room with him and chat for a while.

But still it took us some time to get it together because he travels a lot. He was in various parts of the world doing field research and what you'll hear about in this conversation into the origins of life.

I'm talking the origins. I'm talking where non-organic, inorganic chemicals first made the step into what the sort of processes that in retrospect we now recognize as life.

Processing energy, self replication, certain cycles that from where we sit now we recognize to be the origins of life.

This is a fascinating conversation and if you're thinking, oh, it's technical and scientific and not really into that, give it a chance because there's so much more going on.

Bruce is very open and very intimate about his own life story and how some of the profound challenges that he's faced as a human being have both informed him and motivated his investigations.

In the sort of intellectual tradition, Bruce to me lines up with people like Copernicus and Kepler who were mystics, who were alchemists and lived in a world of mystery and sort of a scientific shamanism where shaman's move between worlds.

They move into the higher or lower world seeking information that can help them, that they can bring back to this world, the middle world where you and I are right now and they can apply that information to help heal people.

That's what shaman's do typically and it feels very much like what Bruce does.

Bruce enters an altered state, he's one way of thinking of it, it may be an alternate universe is another way it may just be that he connects with a dimension that most of us are unaware of or frequency or resonance.

I won't try to explain it because it's probably inexplicable and I haven't experienced it and Bruce does a very good job of explaining it himself.

Suffice to say that this is not a technical conversation, this is a very personal and beautiful conversation and I'm honored that Bruce is as open and trusting as he is and as fucking brilliant.

Bruce Damer coming up this episode.

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