WBD563 Audio Transcription

Bitcoin, Unleashing an Ocean of Energy with Nathaniel Harmon

Release date: Thursday 6th October

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Nathaniel Harmon. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Nathaniel Harmon is an oceanographer, Bitcoiner and cofounder of OceanBit. In this interview, we discuss how an old technology deriving energy from ocean temperature differences can provide unlimited renewable baseload energy, and Bitcoin’s vital and symbiotic role.

“Where I think the real valuable conversation is, is not debating the science because again, I am a scientist, and I can back that shit up with fucking receipts. And that’s not going to be a fun debate for anybody. What’s the fun debate is ‘What do we actually do about it?’”

— Nathaniel Harmon

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: I broke the law for him, because I bought him a beer and then took it over.

Nathaniel Harmon: Hey, if nobody asks!

Peter McCormack: Was the law broken?

Nathaniel Harmon: The bar broke the law.

Peter McCormack: They should close that fucking place down, it's irresponsible.

Nathaniel Harmon: And that's why we're not going to name them, not because I don't remember.

Peter McCormack: You don't remember!  It was a good bar, good group of people as well.

Nathaniel Harmon: Chinatown is fun, Chinatown's a fun place to hang out when we did, before baby!

Peter McCormack: Before baby, when we had a little meetup, a little unplanned meetup there in Hawaii.  It was funny, because Danny had been saying for ages that he wants to get you on, Nate.  He's been like, "You've got to meet this guy, he's fucking amazing, I've spoken to him on the phone".  But Danny says that about everyone!

Danny Knowles: But we first spoke at the conference, right?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, I ran into you guys just randomly in the hallway.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, and I mean such an interesting topic though.

Peter McCormack: Danny says, every phone call he's had, they're either amazing or terrible!

Danny Knowles: Don't say that, because now everyone I've spoken to who's not been on the show is going to be like, "Clearly, I was terrible!"

Peter McCormack: Well, they're going to be thinking that anyway, they didn't get an invite.  But he says everyone's amazing, and he does, and then sometimes they turn up and I'm like, "Yeah, they're all right, but…"  But then I bump into you in Hawaii, but I didn't make the connection that you were the guy he was going on about, because we were going to try and get you into the US.  And then when it clicked and I was like, "Oh, yeah, this guy's fucking amazing.  When can we make this show happen?  Let's get him on, let's light the paper and just let him go".

Nathaniel Harmon: I'm really glad you took my advice to go to the Big Island.  The Big Island is --

Peter McCormack: I wish I'd gone at night.

Nathaniel Harmon: Oh, yeah, go Mauna Kea at night on a New Moon.  So, it's the only place in the US, and one of the very few places in the world, where you can see the Southern Cross and the North Star in the same field of view, shooting stars, it is…  I mean, that's why they put the telescopes up there.  I mean, our place in the Universe is named after Hawaiian mythology, because it was discovered in Hawaii.  They have all those telescopes.  You're so far from civilisation, so far from land, it's way up in the sky. 

Again, it's the tallest mountain on Planet Earth, and it's an unobstructed view, nine months out of the year no clouds, rarely ever rains.  The only inputs, all the things that live up there, are cosmogenic, so they survive on basically stardust.  The silverswords are just some of the most amazing plant life on the planet.

Peter McCormack: Aren't the locals fed up though with the amount of telescopes and things?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, it's a contentious topic for sure.  They want to build a new 30-metre telescope, and it's a very touchy subject.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  It was interesting to go to Hawaii, because Hawaii's one of those places that you hear about as a kid.  And in your mind, Hawaii is paradise, it's the perfect place.  So, to go there and see it and learn about it, even learning about why it's a group of islands; do you know about this, why there's a group of islands?

Danny Knowles: No.

Peter McCormack: Well, I'll try, because you explained this to me and I'll see if I can get it right.  But the reason it happens, there's a break in the tectonic plates where the lava can come up.  But the Earth is always moving, so those plates are always moving.  So it's a bit like, have you ever seen it where they make Krispy Kreme doughnuts?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's like the reverse of that, it pushes up, and then everything moves on and pushes up.  And that's why they follow a curve, right?  How did I do?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, that's really good, it's exactly like a doughnut machine.  It's a straight line, and then there's a dogleg to the right, called The Emperor seamount chain.  It's the Hawaiian Islands and then the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and then once they're below the ocean surface, it's the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain.  It travels straight for a couple of thousand miles, and then there's just a sharp, almost 90° dogleg, up to Kuril-Kamchatka, and that was a result of the Indian Subcontinent smashing into the Asian plate, and just reorganising the direction of the world's tectonics.  It's crazy.  The Hawaiian Islands are great.

Peter McCormack: So, our plan was to stay on the whole trip on O'ahu, and Nate here said, "No, dude, you've got to go to the Big Island, and you get the Island Hopper plane.  What you don't know about me is I hate flying.  Danny, what's it like flying with me?

Danny Knowles: It's embarrassing!

Peter McCormack: I'm so bad!  Where did we fly from?

Danny Knowles: We went from New York to Nashville, I think it was.

Peter McCormack: I don't think Danny was ready for this.

Danny Knowles: We took off, and the plane takes a very gentle left turn.  Pete's looking round, panicking.  It's ridiculous!

Peter McCormack: "Why are we turning; why are we turning?"

Danny Knowles: He's like, "Why can't they just take off and go in a straight line?"

Peter McCormack: Well, that's it.  Why can't planes just go, "I'm going here", then I understand they have to go around weather systems, but --

Nathaniel Harmon: Runways are designed, so where the runways are laid, are designed based on predominant wind patterns.  So, you generally don't want to take off or land with a crosswind, right.  You ever seen the planes that come in like this?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Well, Knock Airport in Ireland, so when I went to go and visit my dad, that is a crosswind.  And coming in to land at that airport is horrendous, it's horrible.  It's kind of like turning into the wind.  I've got a few things about flying.  Well firstly, it doesn't help a young man to become confident about flying when your dad is an aircraft engineer and won't get on a plane, which by the way I always tell people as we're taking off!  That doesn't help.  But secondly, there's this whole weird -- you know Stacey Herbert, Max's wife?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, me and her have this whole thing.  So, whenever I'm basically on a plane and it's shaking like a fucker and I'm panicking, I end up messaging her.  Then, she goes and checks the weather systems and she reports back and she's like, "No, it's fine, there's a storm coming in, your pilot's going round it".  She knows everything.  She's like, "That region, you're definitely going to have turbulence, there's always turbulence there".  So, she helps me through it, but no, I'm not a good flyer!

My landing here in Austin was awful as well.  We circled once coming in, and I was like, "Why are we circling; what's going on here?"

Danny Knowles: Oh, really?  Mine was really bad yesterday as well.  I wonder if there was some weird weather or something?

Peter McCormack: Fuck knows, man, I hate it, I hate it.  I think I'll get to the point where like my dad, I'll just never fly again.

Nathaniel Harmon: So, how was your island jumper?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so that was the point I was getting to.  They take off quick.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: They take off really quick, and they basically go steep, it's a steep climb, and then it comes straight back down.  It's basically like a very quick rollercoaster.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, you go up, get your juice box, you come back down.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I didn't like it; I did not like it!

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, next time, you should fly Mokulele.  You'll shit bricks!

Peter McCormack: But I've done it, I always force myself to do stupid stuff.  Like, when I flew from Bangkok to Ko Samui, we had the option of going on a normal plane, or one with a propellor, and I took the propellor one, because it was going sooner and I wanted to experience it.  I also got on a plane from Finland to Latvia once, where you boarded it through the back of the plane; that was weird.  And my seat was near the front.  I was like, "If there's a problem here, I'm fucked, because I'm at the front".

Nathaniel Harmon: Michael says he only sits at the back of the plane, because statistically something about not dying the most at the back of the plane!  But all of our plane flights are over the middle of the Pacific, so no matter what, if it's going down, we're all going down.

Peter McCormack: And there's no Wi-Fi on that journey. 

Nathaniel Harmon: Except for Hawaii Pacific Teleport.  So, some of the flights do have Wi-Fi, and it's through the Hawaii Pacific Teleport, which of course is located in Hawaii and provides satellite internet service.  And I know this, because we need satellite internet service in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!

Peter McCormack: You do, we're going to get onto that.  But look, I had a good time in Hawaii.  It's a long way for us to go and we have to fly over the Caribbean to go there, and it doesn't offer much more than the Caribbean in terms of a holiday, if you just want to sit by a beach and relax.  So, it's a long way.  I'm glad we've seen it, but if I had a choice, I'd probably just go to the Caribbean, because it's one hour away.

Nathaniel Harmon: It's an active vacation.  I mean, last time I went to the Big Island, I drove 800 miles on that island.  Whenever I go there, it's like, "Let's find a base of operations", and then we're driving 200 miles a day to go do these hikes, go to the green-sand beach.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we saw that.

Nathaniel Harmon: That's cool.  Did you take a jeep out there?

Peter McCormack: What did we have rented?  Yeah, we had a jeep.

Nathaniel Harmon: You drove that, I mean that trail's getting eroded, and there's a push to make everybody walk the 4 miles in and 4 miles out.  But it's crazy; it's green!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, also we went to the Rainbow Waterfall, which is very cool, and there's a whole weird thing.  Basically the Rainbow Waterfall's very cool because -- Danny, do a Google search, search for @petermccormack, then "rainbow", see if you can find the tweets I put out.

So, there's this weird thing.  When my mum passed away five years ago, in Ireland they bury you within two days, it's just the way they do it.  So, mum dies, she's taken up to the house, you have a wake at the house, and then you basically -- you found it?  So, this is really interesting.  We walk out of my dad's house, we carry my mum into the hearse, we get into the hearse, we turn round the corner, and see that rainbow?  That's on the church.

So obviously, anyone rationally listening is going to go, "Yeah, it's pure coincidence", but hey, what a coincide that the morning, it's there on the church.  So, the next thing that happens, scroll down, Danny, this keeps fucking happening at weird times.  So, pause this for a second before you play it.  So, she wanted to have her ashes scattered in the ocean, right.  So, because my dad won't fly, it's like, "Where's the further we can go in a car?"  So, we decide the South of Spain, but he won't fly, so all the family gets on a plane apart from me and my dad and I'm like, "Okay, I'll fucking drive".  It was a 25-hour drive.

Anyway, we get to the South of France, it's a gloriously hot day, we see this golden rainbow.  Play it now, Danny.  And this doesn't even do it justice, but can you see it?  I'd never even seen a golden rainbow before, didn't even know it was a thing.  And that, for about 20 minutes, is just going back and forth across the road as me and dad are driving.  Keep going, Danny, keep scrolling down.  And then, on my mum's birthday, my sister went over to Ireland to play golf with my dad and there's a rainbow.  Yeah, look, "Went to see mum's grave today.  Of course, there's a rainbow".

It's so weird how it keeps happening, but it's become this thing that's just become important to my family, in that my friend, Louise, who's a hippy, slightly crazy, she'll be like, "No, that's your mum, that's your mum in the Universe talking to you", and my rational friends will go, "Yeah, that's a great coincidence".  But what's been really cool about it, as a family in our WhatsApp group, if anyone sees a rainbow, they put it in there and we go, "Oh, look, it's mum", and it's just a nice way of keeping mum's memory alive and keep thinking about her.

So, going to Hawaii, when we saw there was a Rainbow Waterfall, it was like, "We've got to go and see mum".  Of course, we get there and there's no rainbow, of course there's no rainbow!  So, we're sitting there watching for ages, and just as we were about to leave, bang, one comes out and it was just beautiful.  So, that meant a lot to me.

Nathaniel Harmon: I mean, that's a beautiful story.  I mean, that's what life is, is keeping the memories of our loved-ones alive.  That's beautiful.

Peter McCormack: What I will say about Hawaii, I wasn't a fan of Waikiki.

Nathaniel Harmon: Oh, God no, it's awful!

Peter McCormack: I thought I was in LA, basically.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, it's terrible, don't go.

Peter McCormack: But North Shore was incredible, the kids surfed and loved it.  But it reminded me of India in one way in that, I'm not a spiritual person, but in India and Hawaii are the two places I've really sensed spirituality, like something's going on.

Nathaniel Harmon: There's something magical there and you can feel it in the mountains, in the ocean.  I mean, it's truly one of the most magical places on Earth, and it's definitely an active vacation.

Peter McCormack: It is, yeah, it is.  What was that story?  You were telling my daughter a story about some mythical -- I'm going to get this all wrong.

Nathaniel Harmon: Oh, what was the story?

Peter McCormack: The guy from the sea, or something?

Nathaniel Harmon: Oh, yeah, yeah.  So, the Hōkūle'a.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Nathaniel Harmon: I was telling her the story about the Hōkūle'a.  The Hawaiians had discovered open-ocean travel, open-ocean navigation, 1,000 years before the rest of humanity.  The Vikings and all of us Northern Europeans were still scrounging around in the dirt for grubs and whatever we could find, while these guys were actively navigating the Pacific Ocean; not just the North Sea, but the largest ocean on Planet Earth.  And that technology got lost over time.

Peter McCormack: But didn't they populate all the islands near Australia, like Tonga and Fiji?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.  The Polynesian Empire, the Polynesian Triangle is New Zealand to Hawaii to Easter Island.  And there's evidence that they had arrived in North America 1,000 years before the Vikings did, or before Columbus did.  And so they arrived in Hawaii, and Hawaii was sort of towards the end of their expansion, and of course the Pacific's very large and communication's difficult, so things naturally fell off, and they had all the resources they ever needed.  So, the technology to do that open-ocean navigation got lost generation after generation.  I mean, 1,000 years is a long time and if you're not navigating the open ocean anymore -- they didn't have written language.

So, there was Thor Heyerdahl, he's Norwegian or something, yeah, I think Norwegian, he said, "The Polynesians weren't that great, they just accidentally on rafts accidentally landed", and that's obviously bullshit.  You don't populate the entirety of every major island in the Pacific Ocean by accident.  And so, this group --

Peter McCormack: Michael knows somebody.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.  So, Uncle Nainoa, they sought out to demonstrate, to prove the Thor Heyerdahl was rooted in racism, like these guys weren't genius sailors, they were dumb, lucky people.  That's kind of a racist view.  So they sought to actually recreate this technology that was lost over for 1,000 years, and they did that, they went out and they found somebody who still had that knowledge, way off the grid.  So, they recreated the type of ship, and probably the greatest watermen, they recruited all the greatest watermen.  Probably the single greatest was this guy, Eddie Aikau.

Peter McCormack: Is he the surfer?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I remember.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, the big-wave surfer.  He rescued 500 people from the most dangerous break in the world up at Waimea, and the largest surf competition in the world is named in his honour.  So, on their maiden voyage out there, on this Hōkūle'a, they were going to definitively prove that the Hawaiians were active navigators, so no technology, doing it the old-school way, they set out.  They were throwing this big party for them, because it was this big deal, and the weather was shit, and so they were like, "No, no, we're having this party, we've got all the people here", and all the sailors were like, "Let's not go, it doesn't look good.  Let's just wait a day, let's wait two days", and they were like, "No, no, the politicians are here, the photo ops".  They forced them out.

A few hours into the voyage, bang, there goes their main mast.  And so, they're floating and nobody knows where they are.  And so Eddie, he just goes for it, man, grabs his board, jumps in the ocean to paddle back.  He never made it, but that next morning, they came and rescued them.  So, Eddie is --

Peter McCormack: A legend of Hawaii.

Nathaniel Harmon: Absolutely legend.  There's a great movie, called the Waterman.  What's his name, Jason Momoa, produced it.  Me and Michael were working on the plane, but I saw the people ahead, I was like, "Fuck, I've got to watch this on the way home".

Peter McCormack: We've got to watch that.

Nathaniel Harmon: It's good.

Peter McCormack: Do you want to find it?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Is there a trailer?

Danny Knowles: Probably, but we got copyright infringed last time we did a trailer.

Peter McCormack: Did we?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: What was that with?

Danny Knowles: It was It Follows, whatever it was, that movie you told us to watch the trailer of.

Peter McCormack: So, we got copyright infringed for promoting a movie?

Danny Knowles: Correct.

Nathaniel Harmon: Sorry, it's actually about Duke, a different surfer, but still watch it!

Peter McCormack: Okay.  That's weird, because I can understand if we were stealing content, but we're helping them.  Loads of people messaged me after that and said they'd watched It Follows.

Danny Knowles: Oh, really?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: But I think they say they own the copyright to that video we published, I think, but I could be wrong.

Nathaniel Harmon: There's a 30 for 30 on Eddie.  It's a really good 30 for 30 episode, you know, the ESPN series about sports stuff.  There's a whole 30 for 30 on him.  I forget what the name is, but it's the only 30 for 30 I ever watched.

Peter McCormack: Well, so I liked Hawaii, I want to go back, I want to go and see the other islands at some point.  It's more likely something I'll tag onto an LA trip, rather than -- I also want to go to that island where the indigenous people live.

Nathaniel Harmon: Oh, yeah, you've got to be invited.

Peter McCormack: They'll kill you, won't they?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, there's a lot of good diving that you can do.  If you're a scuba diver, you can do off the island.  So, I was out there scuba diving, and it's a drift dive.  You jump in, you sink down, you just kind of float along with the current.  Well, one of the divers didn't come up on our dive, and we were supposed to go do another dive.  So, I'm a scuba instructor, it's what brought me out to Hawaii in the first place, 10, 12 years ago.  So, one of the guys didn't come up, so all of the instructors on the boat, and me as an insured, active instructor, we were like, "We need to go do not rescue, but recovery".  It turns out the guy had floated around one of the outer islands and then washed up on shore, and they were pissed; it was a big deal.  He had set foot on the island.  It didn't make the paper.

Peter McCormack: Is it because they have this active dislike for Americans, westerners, or is it just because they have no exposure to the outside world, and anyone who comes in is a threat?

Nathaniel Harmon: No, they have active exposure, but it was the Robinson family, they saw what was happening to the indigenous culture and they wanted to carve out a place where it could stay alive.

Peter McCormack: That's cool.

Nathaniel Harmon: The Hawaiian language at one point was almost extinct, and now it's back.  I mean, this huge effort to bring this -- and now, you can do your entire K through graduate school entirely taught in the Hawaiian language.  It's a beautiful language, and I'm glad it didn't die off.  But they kept the culture.  It was like the Ireland of Europe, right?

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, they're actively trying to encourage the teaching of Irish in Northern Island at the moment.  I mean, it's been an ongoing, contentious point.  Start with Wales.  I went out to Wales during the COVID lockdowns.  It was the only place we could travel to, we couldn't fly, so we booked a caravan in Wales and went out there.  There's certain parts you go to, just everyone speaks Welsh, which surprised me, even though it shouldn't.  Did you realise that?

Danny Knowles: Well, I used to go to North Wales quite a lot, it's not far.  And I think it's a big thing in North Wales, I don't think it's as much in the South, but I might be wrong.

Peter McCormack: But it's all in North Wales and they just actively speak the language.  You go into the pub and you just can't understand anyone, and I just wasn't expecting it.

Nathaniel Harmon: It was all Welsh!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's not even a proper country!

Nathaniel Harmon: I'm a Scott!

Peter McCormack: Are you really?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, I'm Irish.

Nathaniel Harmon: We're from Skye, family on Skye, MacNicol active clan structure.  My uncle's the North American Chief of Clan MacNicol.

Peter McCormack: You've got the look now!

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, you can see the Scottish.  The red in the beard.  We've got Castle Balvenie is our family -- it's ruinous, nobody lives there.  But you can get a ticket, go take a tour, it's all ruins.  You park at the Glenfiddich distillery.

Peter McCormack: Did you go there, Jeremy, on your trip?

Jeremy: No, Talisker's way more interesting in Skye.

Nathaniel Harmon: Oh, yeah, so the castle is in Speyside, but yes, on Skye we have Scorrybreac is the name of the ancestral home.  But Skye was one of the first for the clearances, so we got kicked off of Skye right after the failed Jacobite Rebellion.

Peter McCormack: Well, so in Ireland, my exposure of going a lot because my dad lives there, it's spoken less.  But when I went to Galway, we took a plane out to the Isle of Aran, another horrible little plane, horrible; and there, they do speak Irish, but there's not many people there.  But they are actively trying to encourage the language to be spoken.  But obviously in Northern Ireland, where you have the Unionists and the Republicans and they don't agree, and it's a contentious point, because the Irish want Irish to be taught in the schools and the Unionists don't want it.  So, that is a problem that they're trying to solve.  I mean, I think it should be taught and it should be optional.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.  I mean, you have to take second languages, what better language than your own?

Peter McCormack: Well, some people say it's not our own.  Our own is the King's English, but it is what it is.  Okay, so you've been there, what, 10 to 12 years now?

Nathaniel Harmon: Something like that.

Peter McCormack: So, what kind of experience have you had living there with understanding climate change; has it affected Hawaii, in a provable way to explain it to some doubters?

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, before I came to Hawaii, I was a scuba instructor in the Florida Keys, where I experienced my first coral bleaching event, and that broke my fucking heart.  Then, when I moved to Hawaii, I saw a lot of the same sort of stuff.  I mean, direct as a scuba instructor, I take these people out to the reefs, and then they just kick all over the coral, knock it over, kick sand all over it, which kills the coral.  Coral is an animal; it's not a rock, it's an animal, and that animal lives symbiotically with a phytoplankton, zooxanthellae, that lives inside of it, and the waste products of this plant that lives inside of it, it feeds on. 

So, the main source of its food is the plant, and the plant's main source of food is the sun, so when you kick sand all over it, it kills the coral.  So, the coral reefs right off of Waikiki have been heavily degraded year over year, and taking people there day after day, looking back at the pictures, you just see how year after year, it gets worse and worse.

Peter McCormack: But that sounds like a tourism problem, not a climate change problem.

Nathaniel Harmon: So, my wife does study -- she got a paper published about with the sea level rise, where that's going to affect things.  She studies specifically wetlands, and over the years, of course, the wetlands have been vastly decreased in size.  The largest wetland in Hawaii is still right behind our house and it keeps us protected from floods.  But if those go, of course flooding.  Waikiki and that whole area used to be a giant swamp.  Waikiki means "springing water", and so by putting people there, now it floods a lot, and Waikiki will be underwater.

I mean already, when I lived in Waikiki, and Michael still lives in Waikiki, on a king tide, you'll see the tide come up on the other side of Waikiki, out of the sewers, and I think it's about 20 years -- they're not building new hotels there specifically, because the payback period for one of these hotels in Waikiki is around 20 years.  So, if Waikiki is not going to be a suitable location for hotels in 20 years, there's no reason to put up anymore.  So, the last round of hotels are being built there.

Peter McCormack: Hawaii's definitely experiencing rises in sea levels, because this is something that came up in my discussion with Alex Epstein?  If I misquote him from that interview, I apologise, and please do go back and check the interview and what was actually said.  You can try and help me here, Danny, but there was a couple of things.  One of the things he referred to was that we must learn to adapt.  Not too many people live on the coast.  Yes, that's fine if you're in the US --

Nathaniel Harmon: Only 40% of all people live on the coast, not too many!

Peter McCormack: But also, he explained that in some places, sea levels are dropping, so we got into that.

Nathaniel Harmon: If he said sea levels are dropping, that's bullshit.  The only places sea levels are dropping are places like Alaska --

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that one came up, didn't it?

Danny Knowles: I'm pretty sure that's right.

Nathaniel Harmon: The reason is glacial rebound.  So, glaciers weigh a lot, enough to where they can increase -- if they're sitting on a piece of land, it's a lot of extra weight, so a lot of glaciers cause that land to sink down lower, because of course the mantle is liquid rock and so things float.  We float on top, we're the scum at the top of this big, molten mantle.  And so, a big glacier causes that land to sink down.  As those glaciers melt, that land springs back up, and so it's called "glacial rebound".  And in fact actually, even in Hawaii, not all the land is -- some of the land is rising.

So, you just mentioned the doughnut-maker earlier.  When these islands are formed, they're big and hot and so hot rock is more voluminous, so it has a larger volume, and it sinks down and that pushes up.  So, Maui is actually coming out a little bit, whereas the Big Island is pushing down, which has this rebound effect on Maui.  So, by saying some places are actually rising, it's a lack of education on how the plate tectonics work.  It seems like just a basic -- I mean, I don't want to call out Alex on it, but it seems like a basic understanding of plate tectonics.

Peter McCormack: Well, look, the thing about Alex is he has been welcomed in by many people within the Bitcoin community, and I think he has shifted some of my thinking as well with regards to, he talks about the rapid -- he's essentially against the rapid reduction in fossil fuels, and I understand why.  You can see now in Europe the issues we're having with our energy crisis; he makes a very valid point with regards to that.

Nathaniel Harmon: I wouldn't call out Europe as the paragon of renewable energy, when it's the geopolitical struggle over oil right now; it's an oil problem, or natural gas.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what I mean is, he's pointed out the impact of not having energy.  And I think if you're going to transition, you transition right to the right technologies, and I don't know your view on nuclear, but most people agree that the decommissioning of nuclear plants was wrong.

Nathaniel Harmon: Pretty dumb.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, pretty dumb, and that's where we should be focusing technology.

Nathaniel Harmon: But with nuclear, I'm a fan of nuclear.  There's not enough fissile material.  Right now, with our current nuclear production, we only have about 80 years' worth of fissile material available.  Now, there are ways to extend that, from pulling it out of sea water, but that is a much more expensive technology.  And again, using our current production of nuclear energy, that only extends that life for 35 years.  So, every new nuclear plant we build, that 80 years of current technology gets smaller and smaller. 

Peter McCormack: Can you look that up?  That's interesting, I did not know that.

Nathaniel Harmon: And you have the same problem with solar panels too.  On the other side, solar panels have this big problem, solar panels and batteries, where are you going to get the lithium; where are you going to get the cobalt; where are you going to get the manganese, the copper, the nickel?  These things exist in finite quantities on land.

Peter McCormack: It's going to be a problem for Tesla!

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, especially the cobalt.  People who just say, "Batteries and solar"; the cobalt is all sourced from the Congo and these artisanal mines --

Peter McCormack: The kindergartens?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: So, this says roughly 230 years' supply.

Peter McCormack: At the current consumption rate.

Nathaniel Harmon: Scientific American is not the best source, but yeah.

Peter McCormack: But the point is, all these sources of energy are finite.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, they're finite.

Peter McCormack: Whether it's oil or natural gas.  I mean, it's not going to affect our lifetime.  This obviously is a hot topic in the Bitcoin world at the moment, not only in energy and climate change separately, and at the same time being discussed together, but energy and energy sources.  But also, there is a growing group of I would say people from the left joining Bitcoin, who are more actively discussing issues with climate change.  I don't know your political position, I don't care, but what I do know is you're a bitcoiner and you're exposed to the Bitcoin community. 

What's your current take on the debate, and the debates they're having?  The reason I ask is I've brought up a couple of things here and you've instantly had solid answers.  So, you see it all; what's your interpretation; what's been got wrong, what's been got right?

Nathaniel Harmon: My background is I have a master's in marine geology and geochemistry, so I don't call myself a -- I'm an oceanographer, or limnologist, or isotope geochemist, depending on what the topic is.  I mean, all my different specialisations have different names, different hats that you put on for different situations. 

The fossil fuel maxis, which is always so weird, it's the petrodollar!  How can you be a fossil fuel maxi?  The thing that props up the US dollar; it's just such a hypocritical thing to hold up as the be-all and end-all of energy, the thing that props up the US dollar.  You can't be a Bitcoin maximalist, no fiat, no CBDCs, when the thing that props them up, you're simping for. 

Peter McCormack: Well, I mean, look --

Nathaniel Harmon: I know, that's not a good argument.

Peter McCormack: No, but I get your point.  But I really think it comes from a point of political polarisation.  We don't have in the UK polarisation with regards to climate change around politics.  Whether you're on the left or the right, you understand there is an issue with climate change, and that's something that will hopefully get dealt with.  Policies or technologies that can be used, yes, there are plenty of areas for debate, but would you say everyone's on the same page?

Danny Knowles: Pretty much, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Is it the same in Australia?

Danny Knowles: Yes.  I think actually less than the UK.  It's probably somewhere between the two.

Nathaniel Harmon: Rupert Murdoch has a large outlet in Australia!

Peter McCormack: He's got a large outlet in the UK.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, everywhere.

Peter McCormack: I would say we have a growing problem of climate change activists, or policymakers, making poor decisions, or doing things which are turning people against supporting what they're doing.  But you've got exposure to it all.  What are we getting right, what are we getting wrong; where's your position on all of this?

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, I'm a climate scientist, and the position of the scientific community is unanimous, that it is happening.  That's the thing about scientists, we go out and we look for evidence.  Scientists don't tell anybody what they need to do, we go out and we gather the data and say, "This is what's happening.  Now you make that decision yourselves".  And so, yeah, politicians are going to politic; activists, if you don't have a scientific background, which most of the people on the anti-climate change side just don't understand how basic science is done. 

I mean, I've been to Mauna Loa, where the Keeling Curve was discovered, where the CO­2 emissions, you know that graph with the CO2 emissions?  We've been taking the same measurements there for 50 years.  I've been to Station ALOHA, which is this region in the middle of the ocean, 100 kilometres north-east of O'ahu, and we've been going there month after month on research cruises for the last 30 years, taking the same exact measurements and watching the change.  There's no room for fiat to come in there and put their, whatever their --

Peter McCormack: Their dirty fiat fingers.

Nathaniel Harmon: Their dirty fiat fingers!  Fiat fuels; do you mean, petroleum?!  Sorry, I've been reading too much of this book that I don't want to talk too much about.

Peter McCormack: Well, now I want to know, what book?

Danny Knowles: Is it not clear to you after that?

Peter McCormack: Is it Fossil Future?

Nathaniel Harmon: No, it's Saife's book.

Peter McCormack: Which one?

Nathaniel Harmon: He has a chapter in The Fiat Standard called Fiat Fuels.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I haven't read The Fiat Standard.  I read The Bitcoin Standard, had some good bits.

Nathaniel Harmon: Had some good bits, yeah.

Peter McCormack: And some absolute bullshit.

Nathaniel Harmon: I look at it as like a parable.  It tells a good story, and the moral is -- there it is, the Mauna Loa Observatory.

Peter McCormack: Okay, we'll come back to Saife's book.

Nathaniel Harmon: The Keeling Curve, this is --

Peter McCormack: What is this?  Explain to the people listening who can't see the chart.

Nathaniel Harmon: It's the carbon dioxide concentration from the second highest mountain on Planet Earth, so so far removed that there is no human impact on that.  It's so high up that there's no crosswinds coming from LA that are deluding it.  This is the heartbeat of the atmosphere, and the Station ALOHA Observatory is the heartbeat of the ocean.

Peter McCormack: So, from 1960 to 2015, some 55 years, it's gone up about 30% in a pretty straight-ish line; it seems to be just slightly accelerating.

Nathaniel Harmon: You can see the jagged line.  That's the difference between the summer and the winter.  There's a lot more land in the Northern Hemisphere.  You look at a map, all the land is in the Northern Hemisphere.  So, when we burn a lot of fossil fuels in the wintertime for warmth; higher.  And then when it shifts to summer, it goes back down, because the Southern Hemisphere uses a lot less.

Peter McCormack: And I assume there's other people doing these readings all around the world?

Nathaniel Harmon: All around the world.  And it's not just these -- this is just CO2­, I mean this is kindergarten shit.  You take people up there and then kindergarteners do this on field trips, right?  People make a pilgrimage up there, high school students, middle school students, they can all make this measurement.  The real measurements are actually the delta13C, the isotopes.  That's just straight carbon dioxide, but it's the isotopic record that really has that fingerprint of humanity, because not all carbon is the same; there's different flavours.

Carbon-12 is the one we know the best, weights 12.  All carbon has six protons.  The amount of neutrons is kind of arbitrary.  Not all isotopes are stable, but of the stable isotopes, carbon-12 and carbon-13 are the most important.  13 obviously has six protons, but seven neutrons, so it weighs a little more.  And it turns out that life, things that are living, that makes a big difference.  The energy required to form bonds with carbon is proportional to the weight.  Imagine walking around with an empty backpack, your carbon-12, and then sticking a bunch of bricks in your backpack, that's carbon-13.  Which one are you going to prefer?  If it's between you and Danny, who gets to wear which backpack and have to walk around for the rest of your life?

Peter McCormack: To be honest, Danny's been carrying me for a long time!

Nathaniel Harmon: So, he's carrying you and the backpack?!

Peter McCormack: So, I probably owe Danny one!

Danny Knowles: Carbon-25!

Nathaniel Harmon: So, fossil fuels come from living matter.  I remember, I was listening to one of the interviews with Saife and Alex, and they were talking shit about wetlands and swamps, and it's like filthy swamps.  It's like, "Where do you think fucking coal comes from, you dingleberry?  Where does coal come from?  It comes from swamps!  300 million years ago, but fucking swamps!"  So, those plants that lived in the swamps disproportionately uptake that lighter carbon over the heavier, that carbon-13.  So, they took up that extra carbon and then when they got buried, they took it with them.  So, that changed the isotopic content of the CO2 in the atmosphere, and we can measure that.

So, now what we're seeing, that isotopic content, that deltaC13 ratio, shifts down, because we're putting that lighter carbon back into the atmosphere, and that's the fingerprint.  It is unambiguous, it is humans putting that in.  It's not rocks, because rocks don't give a shit.  Rock don't care; rock do what rock do!  Geology, there's not much art in geology.  This is a rock, it's going to do the thing that a rock does.  Life is weird.

Peter McCormack: All right, so we're definitely increasing the carbon in the atmosphere.  That is unambiguous and you can't debate that.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yes.

Peter McCormack: But does having more carbon in the atmosphere definitely change the temperature?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Tell me how.  I'm being the doubter here.  I believe you!

Nathaniel Harmon: So, carbon dioxide: one carbon, two oxygens.  It's a linear molecule, because there's a double -- how deep do we want to go into the science?

Peter McCormack: Have you got to go anywhere?  We should have got a bottle of whiskey.

Nathaniel Harmon: There you go.

Peter McCormack: That's what we should have done.  You can go, we'll carry on!

Nathaniel Harmon: Scotch.

Peter McCormack: No, fuck that shit!  You can't drink scotch.

Nathaniel Harmon: If they have Talisker?

Peter McCormack: All right, let's get some whiskey on, let's go.

Nathaniel Harmon: But no, so carbon dioxide's a linear molecule --

Peter McCormack: But do you know why I care?  It's because I don't retain knowledge well; I'm more creative.  My entire career's been creative, storytelling or getting people to tell stories.  This is why I can never remember what a fucking xPub is; it's because I can read it, I just don't retain the knowledge.  I'm always reading about climate change and trying to understand it, and reading the scientific papers, but I don't retain it.  But I'll have someone like Alex on my show, and I just don't have the ability to debate him correctly.  But I do want to give him the time.  So therefore, hearing from you and having you explain it, I mean I should just get you to sit down with him and have a conversation.

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, I'm supposed to debate someone.  They're being little weasels.

Peter McCormack: Who's that; is it Saifedean?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: We'll get to Saife, oh God, we'll talk about Saife in a bit.

Nathaniel Harmon: So, carbon dioxide is a linear molecule, because there's that double bond between both the carbon and the two oxygens, so there are different modes of freedom and it can wiggle.  And it likes to wiggle at a very specific frequency.  Think like a guitar string.  You tighten the guitar string and it makes the same D or the G or the A, and it's based on the wiggle.  So, different bonds have different wiggles, and they like to wiggle at that one frequency.  So, when something strikes it with that same frequency that it likes, it responds.  And in general, the one that really matters is the twisting and the bending.  There's symmetrical and asymmetrical, but those aren't necessarily super-important.

But the major one happens to wiggle in the IR frequency, Infrared Radiation frequency.  So, what a lot of people don't understand is that the heat that we feel here at Earth, on the surface, is not directly from the Sun.  The Sun strikes the Earth, and black-body radiation says that the Earth will then re-radiate that energy that it's given.  So, the Sun is very hot, so the frequency of the energy comes off of it as a lot shorter wavelength, and when it strikes the Earth, the Earth is much cooler than the Sun, so it has a longer wavelength in the IR spectrum.  It turns out that that wiggle in the CO2­ and of course in methane and all the other greenhouse gases, they all absorb energy really well in that range that the Earth puts out.

So, as the Earth radiates the energy from the Sun back up, well the carbon dioxide absorbs that energy, which is going straight up.  If that carbon dioxide wasn't there, that energy would just fly straight up, because the Sun hits the Earth and the Earth radiates away from the circle.

Peter McCormack: So, we're just retaining the heat?

Nathaniel Harmon: That's a good thing too, because if that carbon dioxide wasn't there, it would be like -19°C all day long.

Peter McCormack: So, we need Sun, we need a balance?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, and it's about how much.  And what it does, it just keeps filling up.  Where that carbon dioxide is, it slows that energy transfer down, because the Earth has to radiate the same amount of energy it takes up; it has to re-radiate that to space, otherwise of course we'll boil.  So, what more carbon dioxide does is it slows that transfer of energy down, and we can of course record this from space by just taking a spectrometer saying, "Hey, this is what the Sun's putting out, this is what the Earth's putting out". 

Turns out we're about 5% -- in order to get that static, where we're putting out as much as we're taking in, we're about 5% lower than that, and so that's where the energy -- and it keeps going up and up and up.  That means there's more heat here, we're just retaining more heat.

Peter McCormack: Which means polar icecaps melt?

Nathaniel Harmon: That's only one component of a sea level rise.  So, the density of water is dependent on its temperature and salinity.

Peter McCormack: When it's warm, it expands.

Nathaniel Harmon: When it's warm, it expands.  So, the polar icecaps, if they all melt, it's like 30 feet of sea level rise.  If at that same temperature where they all melt, the expansion --

Peter McCormack: The water's expanding, yeah.

Nathaniel Harmon: -- it's 300 feet.  And what's cool about living in Hawaii, we see this all the time.  There's a number of hikes that you can do where you can just look up 300 feet and go, "That's a bunch of fucking coral in the air", because the sea level was hundreds -- and that would be devastating to all life.  Like we were talking about before, with the Mississippi; if the Mississippi River was allowed to shift, that would just completely fuck over our inland transportation network, using the rivers, the navigable rivers of the US.  Well, a 300-foot higher sea level would devastate our --

Peter McCormack: 300 feet, or 30 feet?

Nathaniel Harmon: With thermal expansion of the ocean, we're talking 300 feet.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, how much of all Earth is left after that point?

Nathaniel Harmon: A lot.  I mean, it would push in.  I mean, Florida's gone.  Florida; who needs it?!  I lived in Florida for a while, I like it, I lived in the Keys.  I'm not going to talk too much shit about Florida.

Peter McCormack: But we will lose a number of nations.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, low-lying Pacific nations, which are a big deal.

Peter McCormack: Okay, that's one, but there's numerous issues with climate changes that come.  So, when you see this discussed within the Bitcoin community, I'm no good as somebody to debate this, I don't have the expertise.  But I feel like we are sometimes shooting ourselves in the foot trying to expand Bitcoin into other communities, when we get this so fundamentally wrong.  And you're saying we're getting it fundamentally wrong.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, what should be done then, because okay, you flew over here, you got on a plane, you're in a car, etc, and I'm the same, I'm a complete hypocrite.  What should and can be done?  What are the conversations within the circles you're within, because it's very clear there are issues with solar and wind?  Yes, they can support and add to the mix, but there are clear issues.  There has been an issue with the green lobby essentially destroying the nuclear industry; but also, you said that's finite.

Nathaniel Harmon: Don't get me started.  I'm not a fan of the Sierra Club, not a fan of Greenpeace.  I mean, these guys are all on the take.

Peter McCormack: So, what can be done, what should be done?

Nathaniel Harmon: That's the question we need to ask ourselves as the human race, "What should we do?  Because, if doing nothing leads to billions of deaths, and doing something leads to a billion deaths, what is the right answer there?

Peter McCormack: A claim of a billion deaths is something somebody would jump on you for and say, "Hold on a second.  What evidence do you have that this will lead to a billion deaths?  We've had lots of claims before in the past that haven't come true, and that's an issue".  So, are you just saying that as a pass-away comment, or do you actually believe that will happen; what causes it?

Nathaniel Harmon: You have to define the timeline, so what is the timeline for those deaths? 

Peter McCormack: But what causes those deaths?

Nathaniel Harmon: Breakdown in supply lines, food production, water, just straight-up flooding.  What happens when a billion people at the coasts need to migrate?  Where do they go; how does that affect your nation?  I mean, I know in the US, there's huge anti-immigration.  Well, what happens when there's a billion people knocking on the doors?  I mean, at least China built all the ghost cities that they could put people in. 

You look at the distribution of land on Planet Earth, it's all in the Northern Hemisphere.  So, if the vast stretches of the equator become uninhabitable, where do those -- 40% of all people live in the tropics.  40% of all humanity live in the tropics.  And if we change, we start fucking with the water cycle, and we start fucking with where they live and their land gets flooded, where do they go?  The only answer is, they go North.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so the question is, what can we do; what should we do; and have you thought about this deeply; have you discussed this?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.  I mean, that's why I started OceanBit with my partner, Michael.  I started small.  I started looking at it from, okay, Hawaii, we have this law that says we have to reach 100% renewable energy by 2045.  So, I started looking at, "How do we actually do that?" because Hawaii's a very unique place.  Unlike many other places, we don't have the land.  So, I looked at what it would look like to replace just a single, you know, the Kahe powerplant over on the West side.  There's Electric Beach, there's some reefs there, there's a big powerplant there.  It has about a 600 MW capacity.

Peter McCormack: And how's it generating?

Nathaniel Harmon: Fossil fuels, petroleum.

Danny Knowles: I've been snorkelling there, and you can go out to the vent, and super-hot water comes out, and all the fish hang around it.

Nathaniel Harmon: And you can swim into the vent, and it will shoot you right back out; it's a lot of fun!  Michael was there the other day snorkelling.  It's a great snorkelling, scuba spot around there too.  It's fun.

Peter McCormack: It reminds me of that place I went to on O'ahu, is it the Spitting Cave?  It's incredible; let me show you the videos afterwards.  Because you hear about the Spitting Caves, you go up there, "What the hell's this all about?" and somehow, the way the coastline has eroded, there's this cave --

Danny Knowles: It's like a blowhole, kind of thing?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and so the water shoots out and it just flies out.  It's incredible.  I mean, I don't see anything like that in Bedford, so to me it was amazing!  We don't have much in Bedford.

Nathaniel Harmon: But I did this analysis for the State of Hawaii, how we can actually achieve that.  And just replacing that one, what it would look like to replace just that single 600 MW petroleum powerplant.  So, I looked at of course solar.  Well, the problem with solar is that we don't have the land for solar.  Unlike other places that can just willy-nilly bulldoze a big stretch of land to do that, our land is sacred.  You can't just do that.  We don't have the vast stretches of land for that giant solar -- it turns out you would need a solar plant that's four times the size of the international airport, which is a big airport; you need four of those somewhere, and then about $1 billion worth of batteries.  I think all-told, it's about $5 billion or $6 billion to do that, so that's a no.  There's no land for the solar anyway.

Then you look at wind, right.  Well, we have a hard enough time putting up new windmills anyway.  Again, it's the land thing and our migratory birds.  And so, you have to start looking offshore, and it turns out you would need an offshore windfarm the size of O'ahu, just to replace the one powerplant.  Nuclear, as great as nuclear is, we don't have siting for it, where are you going to go if there's a Fukushima?  Where are you going to go?  Are you going to crowd on the other side of the island?  Then the nuclear fallouts just going to come and kill you there!

Peter McCormack: Do you have weather events that seem like flash floods from the sea, tsunami-type events?

Nathaniel Harmon: Sure, tsunamis are a thing, flash floods everywhere.

Peter McCormack: Because that was the problem with Fukushima, it was too close to the coast, right?

Nathaniel Harmon: They have to be, they have a lot of water needs.  It takes a lot of water to cool those things down, so you have to be next to a giant body of water.  So, you have to be siting on the coast, it has to be a certain distance away from a population centre.  We're on an island!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay.

Nathaniel Harmon: We don't have any rivers for hydro, and pumped hydro is something that they're doing on the island of Kauai and the question is, "Which mountain top do we remove on O'ahu?  Good luck getting that through public review and public comment".  And the geothermal that we have is on the Big Island, and people are not happy about that anyway; already they're not happy about the only one that's over there.

Then you have, not only is Hawaii is its own grid, each island is its own separate grid, so they're not connected.  Maui and O'ahu and the Big Island are all separate grids, so you'd have to build this long-ass cable between the Big Island and Hawaii and O'ahu, and the people, the indigenous community, would not be very happy about syphoning the resources of the Big Island to support Waikiki.  There's a lot of animosity, especially against O'ahu.

So, the one thing that stood out in all of these renewable portfolio standard reports is there was always this footnote that this technology, ocean thermal energy conversion, could theoretically provide much, much greater than 100% of all of O'ahu's needs and it requires no land footprint at all, and it's been around for 100 years.

Peter McCormack: What is it?

Nathaniel Harmon: The Balvenie!  Oh, wow, yes!

Peter McCormack: What have you got there as well?

Jeremy: Texas beer for Dan.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to have a beer.  It's going to sound -- I don't like Scotch whiskey.

Nathaniel Harmon: You don't like Scotch?

Peter McCormack: No, I don't.  I don't have a bourbon.

Nathaniel Harmon: But these are made with bourbon casks so you don't get the harshness of the tannins of the wood.

Peter McCormack: All right, I'll have a little bit, then I may have a beer.  I wasn't going to drink today.  This is Danny's fault.

Danny Knowles: You're the one that sent Jeremy out!

Peter McCormack: It's still Danny's fault, even though it was my idea and I sent Jeremy and I'm going to have the…

Nathaniel Harmon: But yeah, this OTEC thing stood out.  And of course, as a marine geologist and geochemist -- I love that bottle.

Peter McCormack: That is pretty.  What is this OTEC technology; explain to me how it works?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, it's a heat engine.  You use the difference in temperature between the warm surface water in the tropics and deep cold water, about 800 metres to 1,000 metres below the surface of the ocean, and you can run a heat engine off of that.  You have a working fluid, in our case ammonia, an ammonia and water mix, it's a binary fluid.

Peter McCormack: Cheers!  To the celts.

Nathaniel Harmon: Aloha!

Peter McCormack: Aloha!

Nathaniel Harmon: Oh, that's the good shit!

Peter McCormack: It's not bad actually.

Nathaniel Harmon: My uncle's official title is The Baron of Balvenie.

Peter McCormack: Do you ones I don't like, I don't like the peaty, you know the peaty-tasting ones.

Nathaniel Harmon: Those are the best.

Peter McCormack: Oh, I think they're gross.

Nathaniel Harmon: I like my whiskey to taste like a candy store that was lit on fire; that's the flavour that I go for!

Peter McCormack: I think it tastes like a foot!

Nathaniel Harmon: An ash tray!

Peter McCormack: Have you ever had one?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I fucking hated it!

Peter McCormack: Somebody bought me a really expensive one once, and then they wanted to drink it with me.  I didn't want to say I didn't like it, so I just had to keep drinking it.  It's gross.

Danny Knowles: I got a bit distracted there; can we start again with some of that?

Nathaniel Harmon: Sure!

Peter McCormack: We're so unprofessional.  Again, it's your fault, you're the producer.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, can you just start again with what this technology is and what it does?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, ocean thermal energy conversion is just another method -- it's like geothermal, which uses the thermal energy of the Earth.  This is ocean thermal; it uses the thermal energy of the ocean.  So, at the tropics, the Sun is dead on, hitting, striking it all day, every day.  It warms up the water at the surface, and the natural flow of deep water is such that, at about 800 metres to 1,000 metres below the surface, it's freezing cold; 4°C.  So, anytime you have a difference in temperature, you can extract energy from that.  You have a warm source of heat and a sink for that heat.

Peter McCormack: But how, how does it?

Nathaniel Harmon: It's a Rankine cycle.  You use a working fluid, in our case we use a binary fluid of a combination of water and ammonia.  So, ammonia boils with the warm surface water, and then as it boils, it turns into a gas, a vapour, and flows through a turbine.  Then you use that freezing cold water to condense it back to a liquid, which should run it in a big old loop. 

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Nathaniel Harmon: It's the original engine.  The engine technology's been around since the beginning, and this OTEC is 141 years old.

Peter McCormack: So, why is it not being used?

Nathaniel Harmon: The first plant was built in the 1930s in Cuba, and the 1930s was not a great time for renewable energy.  The discovery of oil in the Middle East kind of put the kibosh on a lot of renewable energy products, so it was shelved for a while.  Then, Hawaii came back.  We have this list of all the different plants.  There have been about 14 different plants built over the last 100 years, the first one in Cuba, and then there have been three or four built in Hawaii.  But they have all been on the small research end.  This tech, it's the most basic fucking -- it's plumbing; it's not rocket science, it's not like nuclear energy.  Basically, it's just a series of tubes, it's literally just a series of tubes!

Peter McCormack: But you've got to go out into the ocean and do it?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, it can be done on land.  There are two options: land based; but once you start getting into the large scale, it really makes the most sense to do this on the ocean on a platform, an offshore platform.

Peter McCormack: So, it's a floating plant?

Nathaniel Harmon: It's a floating plant ship.  So, if I say plant, I'm referring to a plant ship, rather than what you think of on land as a plant.

Peter McCormack: And why can that generate so much energy?

Nathaniel Harmon: The ocean is very big and that's a lot of surface area.  It's a solar-powered --

Peter McCormack: So, the size of the plant will reflect how much energy you want to extract?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Nathaniel Harmon: It's proportional to how much water you take up.  So, think of a 100 MW plant which could power 100,000, 150,000 homes.  It's going to be about the size -- since everybody after the Suez Canal disaster, we're all familiar with ship sizes now; it's about that size.  100 MW is about the size of that ship that crashed in the Suez Canal.

Peter McCormack: So, how do you get that energy from there to land?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, for the last 100 years, there have been two ways that have been thought of to do this.  There is the direct cable connection, high-voltage cable.  Something like this in Hawaii would be about 10 km off the coast, so you'd have a 10 km long cable.  The other option is a grazing option.  With a connected plant, you have to have a mooring to keep it in place, you can't have it floating around, because it doesn't really need to touch the bottom of the ocean.  Basically it's just a big straw, it's a 30 foot diameter straw, it's a big fucking straw, but it's a straw nonetheless!  So, you have the connected version with a mooring.

Then the grazing option is just a free-floating platform that you use to -- Lockheed coined the term, "energy carrier plant", where they would produce ammonia on board, or hydrogen, that could be transported anywhere.  So, you do this in the middle of the ocean, you're cutting CapEx, you don't need the mooring.  Deep water moorings take forever to get, that cable is expensive and you have all this extra overhead of being on land and being close to land.  So, the grazing option's cheaper.

Peter McCormack: I still don't understand it.  So, you generate the energy.  Are you storing it and then sending it back --

Nathaniel Harmon: So, in the grazing option, the energy carrier, you use that energy to generate hydrogen fuel, and then you convert that to ammonia by the Haber-Bosch process, and then a ship comes by, takes that ammonia to wherever it's needed, and then you can use that as fuel somewhere else.

Peter McCormack: And what fuel do you use -- can you use that to generate energy?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: How do you use ammonia to generate energy?

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, you turn it back to hydrogen.

Peter McCormack: And then, how do you turn the hydrogen to energy?

Nathaniel Harmon: Fuel cell, like hydrogen cars; that's one of the big pushes.

Peter McCormack: But how advanced are the hydrogen fuel cells to generate?

Nathaniel Harmon: Not very.  So, this was theoretical, this was purely theoretical at the time.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to ask something, but I think I know the answer.  Is the answer to this, "In Bitcoin", because it goes back to Saylor's point?  So, if you go out there, if you take a bunch of ASICs, you can mine Bitcoin, you can send that Bitcoin --

Nathaniel Harmon: Transport it back to land.

Peter McCormack: You don't have to transport it.

Nathaniel Harmon: It's already there, right.  You just stick the address in the block.

Peter McCormack: And then, how do you convert that Bitcoin then into energy?

Nathaniel Harmon: You don't.  You convert it into financial capital.

Peter McCormack: Right, but that doesn't solve the energy -- this is great for Bitcoin mining, but it doesn't solve the need for renewable energy.

Nathaniel Harmon: So, the problem with OTEC, it's not a technological problem, it's very simple.  Again, it's not rocket science, it's plumbing.  And at scale, 100 MW, 400 MW plant sizes, those are connected to land, because the cable and the mooring make up a very small portion of the budget.  The problem is that all of the research that's been done, and all the plants that have been built, are on a small scale.  So, scaling this technology from 100 KW, which is the size of this last plant built on the Big Island of Hawaii, to 400 MW, you can't go straight; you need to build somewhere in the middle.  You need to build a pilot plant that's of sufficient scale to prove that it works at large scale.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I get it.

Nathaniel Harmon: So, the problem with this 10 MW plant has been, well if you hook it up to land, that cable, that mooring, make up an outsized portion of the budget.  So, what happens is, once you start adding that cable in and the mooring and the ten years' worth of cost, you end up with an LCOE, cost of energy, being around 50 cents per kWh.  We pay in Hawaii 44 cents per kWh, so even at our current cost of energy, that's still too high, especially for something that you would need to pay for for 30 years.

Now, with the grazing option, you cut all this CapEx, you can stand it up faster; but before Bitcoin, there was never a way to make money in the middle of the ocean.  These 10 MW sites isn't necessarily for the energy, it's more for the technology.

Peter McCormack: I get it, ding ding.  You take a bunch of miners out there, a bunch of ASICs, and that is going to reduce the cost for you to build your proof of concept.  And once you've built your proof of concept, you can --

Nathaniel Harmon: The 10 MW plant size only needs to generate a single kWh of energy; that's it.

Peter McCormack: How many of these plants would you need to power all of Hawaii, all the islands?

Nathaniel Harmon: It would end up being about six.

Peter McCormack: Six would power all the islands?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, well O'ahu is about six, another one per island.  So, on O'ahu, we take about 2,000 MW of energy, and then the other islands have about 200 MW each.

Peter McCormack: So, where are you at with this?  Have you started construction?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, our plan right now is to take over the -- our partners are Makai Ocean Engineering, who constructed that 100 KW plant on the Big Island.  So, what's nice about Bitcoin and OTEC is that it's not just the energy part.  That's been the MO of Bitcoin miners for the last -- you take the miners, you put them in a container, you collocate that container next to an energy source.

Well, our plan isn't just to collocate these things next to, it's to actually integrate those Bitcoin miners into the energy generation process in a full-cycle integration, or something I call, The Harmon Cycle!  Because that delta T of the OTEC cycle is so low, that you get in the water, it happens to have a lot of overlap with the heat output of these Bitcoin miners. 

So, what you can do in this full-cycle integration, you can generate the energy with the OTEC cycle, put that energy into the Bitcoin miners, re-use that heat to stick back into the OTEC cycle to improve its efficiency and then you can cool -- it has to be done with an immersion fluid, and then you can sub-cool the immersion fluid with an infinite supply of freezing-cold water.  So, you get the cooling for free and the energy, including Bitcoin, makes it more efficient.  You can't do it any other way.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's fucking genius!

Nathaniel Harmon: And that's why Makai partnered with us.  Richard?!

Peter McCormack: Where are you at though; what can you tell us about where you're at, from your own concept?  How far away are you from actually mining Bitcoin in the ocean?

Nathaniel Harmon: Nobody's ever built Bitcoin into an energy cycle, so we have to prove that out, first things first.  So, the plant on the Big Island was built actually to test the heat exchangers for F-35s, the new military aircraft; they're pretty awesome.  It was built to test the heat exchangers that went into them; Makai built those heat exchangers.  So, it's this testing facility, so we want to test this out to actually constrain those numbers to a reasonable point. 

That's the stage we're at.  We're refurbishing it, it's been mothballed since the F-35 was finalised, so it needs some new parts, it hasn't been run in a while; it needs a new turbine, so we're getting some new parts.  We're going to refurbish that, starting around next year, what is it, around summer?  Around summer, we'll have the refurbishment all done, and we're actually going to demonstrate the heat re-use, the Harmon Cycle, the efficiency.  Then from there, we will construct a component prototype.

We're obviously going to go with the grazing concept, we're not going to hook this thing up to land, we're going to consume all -- an Ouroboros sort of setup, where it consumes all the energy that it produces.  So, what's nice is we're going to, in this grazing concept, we can take this thing anywhere in the world.  So, we're going to go seek the highest delta T on Planet Earth, and of course that's close to the equator.

Danny Knowles: The delta T being the difference between the surface and the deep-water temperature?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Keep up, Danny!

Nathaniel Harmon: We're towards the northern bounds of the OTEC zone in the tropics in Hawaii.  We're 21° North, and that's kind of the upper limit.  Our sea surface temperature year-round is about 26°C, and there are places that we can go, close to the equator, that are 32°C.  So, that 6°C, the way that you generate energy is, the amount of energy you produce scales with the square of the delta T.  So, each degree of extra temperature you have has an outsized impact.  So, taking a plant from here in Hawaii and moving it to the equator, you could theoretically generate 70% more energy with the same equipment.  So of course, we have to do that to make the economics work at all, at a 10 MW scale.

So, we're first going to construct -- what's nice about the equator is there are no hurricanes at the equator.  It's called the doldrums for a reason.  Hurricanes don't cross.

Peter McCormack: Why is that?

Nathaniel Harmon: The Coriolis effect.

Peter McCormack: You say that like I should understand.

Danny Knowles: Keep up!

Peter McCormack: Come on, Danny, explain the Coriolis effect!

Danny Knowles: I don't know the Coriolis effect, but I assume it's because there's not a big enough temperature differential to create it, right?

Peter McCormack: Is he right?

Nathaniel Harmon: We're talking to Danny!  So, you know how toilets spin one way -- this isn't true, the toilets spin one way in the northern hemisphere and the other way in the southern?

Danny Knowles: Is that not true?

Nathaniel Harmon: No, it's not true, because it's not enough space.  It has to be over a long distance.

Peter McCormack: I always thought that was true.

Nathaniel Harmon: No, that's bowl design.  So, if it's true, it's bowl design; bowl design is the more important factor in the spin.

Peter McCormack: Wasn't it Home Alone, or something?

Danny Knowles: Probably.

Nathaniel Harmon: Something like that.

Peter McCormack: Some bullshit.

Nathaniel Harmon: But hurricanes do.  And so, this isn't the exact way, but you can think of it like this.  If hurricanes spin one direction in the northern hemisphere and they have to spin another direction in the southern hemisphere, just based on the way that earth spins; well, if they try to cross, they have to stop and then turn the other way, which of course they can't.

Peter McCormack: They die at that point.  Yeah, I thought it was that!

Nathaniel Harmon: So, what we can do is instead of that 1930s plant built in Cuba, a few months into operation --

Peter McCormack: It got hit.

Nathaniel Harmon: So now, of course, everybody hurricane-proofs their plants so that that doesn't -- scientists tend to learn from their mistakes.  Engineers especially learn from their mistakes; they don't make the same mistake twice.

Peter McCormack: So, let's fast-forward, you've built the proof of concept, it works, there is the desire then to build these, not for Bitcoin mining, actually to provide the energy source for Hawaii.  But Hawaii can be hit with extreme weather.  These ships can move, maybe?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, when the hurricane comes, you just drop the deep-water pipe.  That's the only part that can really break, so you just drop that for a few days until it subsides, and then you re-hook back up and you're on your way.

Peter McCormack: But so, in those scenarios, you would need backup generation of energy?

Nathaniel Harmon: During a hurricane, I mean I don't know how many hurricanes you've been through, but my power always goes out in a hurricane anyway!

Peter McCormack: I mean, I've not been in any, I live in the UK.

Danny Knowles: I was reading the other day though that there are some homes in Florida they reckon will be without power for weeks.

Nathaniel Harmon: The same with Puerto Rico.  I have solar panels on my house and those don't work obviously in the middle of a hurricane either.

Peter McCormack: We don't get extremes.  We get a little bit of wind sometimes, and sometimes some roof tiles fall off, but it's like a meme that goes round when it's quite windy in the UK.  Someone will take a picture of a bin that's fallen over and they'll say, "We will recover" or, "We will rebuild".

Danny Knowles: Or a garden chair tipped over!

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, we can save a lot of money by not having to hurricane-proof our 10 MW demonstration.  We can containerise the entire process in ISO containers, shipping containers, fasten it to a barge, cut the platform cost, cut the engineering time, cut the stand-up time, the integration time, by just basically doing Legos.

Danny Knowles: Apart from those freak weather events, could this act like a baseload on the grid?

Nathaniel Harmon: It is baseload.  The heat capacity of water is so high, it doesn't get cold at night in the water.

Danny Knowles: So obviously, the big problem with solar and wind is that it's intermittent; but along with solar and wind, I guess you can't get that everywhere though, you have to be coastal?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, you have to be coastal, unless of course you have super-grids, unless the grids of all these countries are connected to each other.  Then, it could provide inland.  It could provide energy as far inland as the grid goes.

Peter McCormack: Right, but you lose energy the further you try and send it.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, unless you then have to use higher and higher voltage DC.

Peter McCormack: What's really interesting is this is obviously a fascinating project.  Adam Wright's project, Vespene, with regard to landfill sites, burning off the methane, there are so many interesting projects.

Nathaniel Harmon: My favourite thing about his project is he's created -- I mean, Adam is a genius.  He created an incentive for adults to pick up trash on a global scale!  You can't get children, teenagers or adults -- I mean, there'll be a bin right there and somebody will drop a cigarette butt on the ground.  Imagine creating an incentive to pick up trash on a global scale?  That always just blows my fucking mind.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's so many of these interesting projects.  My question is, or the thing that's on my mind is, we need Bitcoin to succeed, because you don't want all these projects being built and then Bitcoin kind of stagnates, or gets over-regulated.

Nathaniel Harmon: But these projects, isn't it a self-reinforcing loop?

Peter McCormack: I know that, but you've got to win the race.

Nathaniel Harmon: I mean, if Bitcoin bootstraps OTEC -- because this is the largest untapped energy source on the planet.  I mean, if you look at how much solar energy the world receives, it looks at the Earth on a flat disc, and if you look at the distribution of area on a flat disc with a radius the size of the Earth, well 50% of the world's area is located in the tropics, on a flat-disc Earth, not in the round world.  But when you're looking at solar energy, it's only striking a flat plane; the Sun sees us as a big flat plane.  And if you're looking at the Earth as a flat plane, 50% of that area is in the tropics, and 80% of the tropics is covered in the ocean.

That means that 40% of all the solar energy that falls on Planet Earth falls in the middle of the ocean, where there is no industry, there is no human civilisation.  It's the largest untapped energy source.  And I think the best estimate done so far is by this guy, Gérard Nihous, who is an advisor to our company, has been studying OTEC for 50 years; he estimates that there's about 8 terawatts' worth of this available in the ocean before you start cooling the surface of the ocean.  Now, we were talking about thermal expansion of the ocean, so that may become something that we need to discuss.  I'm not a fan of geoengineering, but as a last resort that's a different conversation.

Peter McCormack: Is that sprinkling shit up in the atmosphere?

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, geoengineering, that is one way to do it, yeah.  Another option is iron seeding.  You take a ship, go dump iron, little bits of iron, off the back of your boat.  OTEC, if you start going above 8 terawatts and you start cooling…  What we've been doing with carbon dioxide is geoengineering.  We were just too stupid -- well, no, we've known it would heat the planet up for 150 years.  Shell wrote about it.

Peter McCormack: ExxonMobil.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.  We have their email saying, "We should not talk about this, but this is what's happening", so simping for fossil fuels and then disregarding your own BFF's writing is just silly.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, I mean look, you just have to follow the money; it's the incentives.  Of course, the fossil fuel industry, when their scientists discovered that burning fossil fuels increased carbon in the atmosphere and was going to warm up the planet, they had an incentive to change the narrative.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, like Kodak when they discovered the digital camera and it was like, "This is going to fuck over our entire business model".

Danny Knowles: And then did nothing about it.

Nathaniel Harmon: And then did nothing about it.

Danny Knowles: So, if one of these plants broke and it leaked ammonia, does that matter?

Nathaniel Harmon: It's a closed cycle, so there's no way it leaks ammonia.  And it's not enough to do anything.

Danny Knowles: So, why can't it leak ammonia?

Nathaniel Harmon: It's a closed cycle.  It's not like they're in big vats; it's in giant metal encasings.  It's not something that leaks.  It's not like a tanker of oil that spills in a crack of a hull.  That's not how it…

Danny Knowles: Okay.

Peter McCormack: So, you're going to prove the case with Bitcoin, but back to the case I was going to make, that we need Bitcoin to be successful, and increasingly successful, because there isn't enough usage of Bitcoin now to justify enough ASICs to deliver on all these projects.  So, that's what we need, Bitcoin to keep growing, so there's an incentive to build out these units, because Bitcoin's valuable enough to justify this.  So, we just need Bitcoin to keep growing.

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, the Bitcoin becomes sort of ancillary the larger this project gets.  At the 10 MW, Bitcoin is crucial, but at 100 MW and 400 MW, when it's connected to land, it's just for curtailment uses, when it turns out the tropics where OTEC is useful is also home to great sunlight and wind energy as well.  In the middle of the day when the Sun is shining, you have to curtail something.  Well, because of the cold water, the free cooling, OTEC at scale is the most efficient way to produce Bitcoin; it makes sense to curtail the OTEC and then just mine Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I sense both of your excitement.  You should come and say hello to the cameras at some point.

Michael: Whenever you want me to.

Peter McCormack: Come and say hello now, just come and say hello.

Michael: I'll just come and say hi.

Nathaniel Harmon: This is Michael, he's my co-founder.

Peter McCormack: Come round that side.  Just introduce yourself on the mic, Mike.

Michael: How are you doing, everyone.  My name's Michael, also known as Michael Hawaii on Twitter.

Peter McCormack: Closer to the mic.

Michael: Thank you for having us, Peter.

Peter McCormack: You should have brought me a shirt.

Michael: You know, it's very funny, because my MO is I'll send all these very high-up people shirts, the venture capitalists and so forth --

Peter McCormack: So you're saying I'm not high up, I'm low down?

Michael: No, what I'm saying is I fucked up!

Peter McCormack: We talked about it last night, didn't we?  We said, "I need a Hawaiian shirt".

Michael: So, Danny, if you can get us addresses after, we would be more than happy, and sizes as well.  I'm going to get you one too.

Nathaniel Harmon: This is my 50th anniversary NOAA shirt, you know, the oceanographic…

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  It's very cool, everyone you're doing is very cool, but it's good for everyone to see you, because we keep shouting at you and you keep shouting back, so you should say hello.

Michael: Perfect, I'll be there in the back.

Peter McCormack: You'll be in there drinking the whiskey!

Nathaniel Harmon: Michael's the business genius to the crazy, mad scientist, engineer genius!

Peter McCormack: He's your Danny.

Nathaniel Harmon: He carries me!

Peter McCormack: So, okay, right.  So, what's going on with your debate, because it's a debate I want to hear.

Nathaniel Harmon: Before we get to that, let's talk about more of the baseload; we were on something there with the baseload.

Peter McCormack: Oh, yeah, of course, yeah.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, OTEC is baseload, you're right.  So, we've been able to identify 1,000 carbon-based plants around the world that have a higher cost of energy than our LCOE at scale, but that only makes up about 300 GW of the 8 TW.  So, what do we do with the rest of it, is the question, especially when it's in the middle of the ocean?  Well actually, I've brought something for show-and-tell!

Peter McCormack: Oh, man, awesome!  What is this, man; what have you got here for us?

Nathaniel Harmon: This is what's called a manganese nodule.

Peter McCormack: It looks like a shit.

Nathaniel Harmon: That's a space poop; that's a space peanut.  Joke!

Peter McCormack: If you told me this is actually a shit and this was just a trick…  Anyone listening, I'm holding a rock.  It does look like a shit, but also I can imagine, this is volcanic rock?

Nathaniel Harmon: No, that is a ball of pure metal.

Peter McCormack: What metal?

Nathaniel Harmon: Well the nickname for the manganese nodules are "the battery rock".

Peter McCormack: Okay, explain this to me.

Nathaniel Harmon: So, this contains manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper, a bunch of trace rare Earth metals, depending on the formation region, lithium and there are more; and it's just a ball of metal.

Peter McCormack: Where does it come from?

Nathaniel Harmon: Sitting on the floor of the ocean, 20,000 feet below the surface, and there are trillions of these over 10 million square kilometres across the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

Peter McCormack: This is what Elon Musk needs.

Nathaniel Harmon: Actually, Howard Hughes was the originally billionaire who was -- there was this whole story of Howard Hughes, and they were working with the government.  There was a Russian nuclear submarine that had crashed, and so the US Government worked with Howard Hughes on this farce to go and mine these in the middle of the ocean.  But the real reason was to go and recover that nuclear sub.  But the cover was to go mine these, because these have been known for 70 years.  The largest and most economically important region for these is about 1,000 km southeast of Hawaii.  I asked the question earlier, to the solar people, where do you get those minerals?

Peter McCormack: I mean, what is the value of that rock?

Nathaniel Harmon: This rock, I don't know.  I got this from a friend, but I think I've seen them sold online, because Hawaii UH Mānoa, who are my alma mater, and who we're working with on some of the things, we study these.  But I think on the open market, this is probably about $300 or so.

Peter McCormack: That piece there?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Because somebody wants to own it; or the value of the metals in it is about $300?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, about that.

Peter McCormack: Okay, interesting. 

Nathaniel Harmon: Now, there's more of those metals that I mentioned in these rocks that are available terrestrially by, I forget the exact multiple, but it's a large multiple.  And I think the estimated value of the Clarion-Clipperton Facture Zone, the CCZ, which is that zone about 1,000 km southeast of Hawaii, the total value of all the mineral, of all these manganese nodules, is about $60 trillion.

Peter McCormack: What?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, $60 trillion.

Peter McCormack: Danny, let's get a sub with a claw and a basket!

Danny Knowles: That's all you need!

Nathaniel Harmon: The Wikipedia page for manganese nodules.

Peter McCormack: Let's put it up.

Nathaniel Harmon: Polymetallic nodules; either one will pull it up.

Peter McCormack: How did they get there?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, the region that they form -- there you go.  The whole seabed just looks --

Peter McCormack: Cameron's got one, has he?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, the reason that they're formed is in the middle of the ocean --

Peter McCormack: Hold on, "Very little is known about deep seas ecosystems or the potential impacts of deep-sea mining.  Polymetallic nodule fields are hotspots of abundance and diversity for a highly vulnerable --"

Nathaniel Harmon: "-- abyssal fauna".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, what's abyssal fauna; you'll know that?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, the abyssal zone is a region between a certain depth.  There's the mesopelagic, the abyssalpelagic, the hadopelagic from the Mariana Trench.  The abyssalpelagic is the lowest --

Peter McCormack: You know a lot of stuff about the ocean.

Nathaniel Harmon: I am an oceanographer!

Peter McCormack: Okay, "Nodule mining could affect tens of thousands of square kilometres of these deep sea ecosystems --"

Nathaniel Harmon: Millions.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay.  So, how do you get it without fucking that up?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, this kind of touches on the --

Peter McCormack: Can you leave that up?  I just want to read a bit more in a second.

Nathaniel Harmon: And, pull up the picture of the fields.  I mean, it's absolutely beautiful.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, can you get the images up, Danny?  People should check this out.  Go and google these manganese nodules.  Can you go to Google Images?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I'm doing that now, I've got it here.

Nathaniel Harmon: And so, the regions that these things are formed --

Peter McCormack: Holy shit, look at that one!

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what that reminds me of, that one there?  Go on that one, Danny, click on that image.  It kind of reminds me of Aliens, you know, when they've got the pods!

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.  Balls of fucking metal sitting 20,000 feet below the surface.  It is coocoo, bananas, nuts!

Peter McCormack: And, how did they get there, sorry?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, the region that these are formed in, it's in the middle of the ocean, and the sea floor of any region is determined by the shit that falls down.  Well, in the middle of the ocean, there's no terrigenous material from land, there's no coral, there's nothing really living above it, so there's nothing falling down.  So what happens is, you'll get a nucleation point, like a shark's tooth or a fish bone will fall from the surface, and around it the dissolved metals in the ocean just kind of glom on.  Now, some of these form, there's hydrogenesis, and then there's diagenesis, formed right below the surface; some are formed from dissolved metals in the ocean, some are formed from dissolved metals -- the potato fields of the deep sea!

Peter McCormack: What is that, gold in the middle there?

Nathaniel Harmon: No, it's copper.

Peter McCormack: All right.  Danny, go on that "mine manganese nodule" to the left of that.

Danny Knowles: This one?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: Do these happen deep in the ocean because they need the pressure?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, pressure is a big portion of everything.  But it's just that there's nothing falling down.  I mean, it takes tens of millions of years for something like this to form, because there's not a lot of dissolved metals in the ocean.  And it's enough to power all the solar -- there are enough of these minerals to build all the solar panels, all the batteries the world needs.  Instead of tearing down the rain forests with slave child labour --

Peter McCormack: I was going to say, this is going to put a lot of African 12-year-olds out of work!

Nathaniel Harmon: So, it's really a binary question.  You read the part about the mining and it's, "If we need these minerals, where do we get them?"  Now, this region again, there's not a lot of shit down there.  There's high diversity of fauna, but there's a very low biomass versus the Congo Rain Forest, which is the last carbon-negative rain forest on Planet Earth, there is both a high diversity and high biomass.

Peter McCormack: Danny, can you go on that "manganese nodules for sale"?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, what is the cost of these things going to be?  Whoa!

Peter McCormack: Holy shit, look at that one!  $5,700.  That's too much.  Can you go on eBay, let's have a look.

Danny Knowles: I've got to do this on my screen because I can't see that one.

Peter McCormack: Right.  I'm going to be honest, some of them look cooler than yours.

Nathaniel Harmon: They do, yeah.

Peter McCormack: That one there does look like one of those aliens.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, like the alien, the egg.

Peter McCormack: The pod, the egg, yeah.  Wow, this is amazing.

Nathaniel Harmon: Fuck tungsten tubes; buy manganese nodules!

Peter McCormack: Nic Carter, we've got something here for you!

Danny Knowles: Would it damage the ocean floor to mine those, and does it matter at that depth?

Nathaniel Harmon: And that's the question.  You've touched on the binary question of, "Where do we get the metals?"  We need these metals, there's no question about that; where do we get them?  Do we get them from the bottom of the ocean, which is a terminal, you know, the abyssalpelagic, the abyssal benthic zone, is a terminal ecosystem.  Shit falls down there, but the question is whether it comes back up.  And the answer is, no one can tell us, because there are no clear signs that it does.

Now, we know that the rain forest is a highly connected ecosystem, there's no question there.  Now, whether the things that live on these manganese nodules -- and of course, the ISA, the International Seabed Authority, under the Charter from the UN, has already issued permits.  They've issued permits for the extraction of these to I think about a million square kilometres have been permitted for extraction, then another million, they've sold off the parcels of land.  Then another million square kilometres have been reserved for developing countries who can't compete with your Chinas, Germany, US, France, Japan; they all have stakes.  So, half of the mining area for these has been reserved for developing countries so that the entire world can share in this mineral wealth, this collective.

Peter McCormack: But how, because this is international waters, right?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Who owns that land?

Nathaniel Harmon: The International Seabed Authority has jurisdiction over it.

Peter McCormack: Who gives them jurisdiction over it?

Nathaniel Harmon: The UN, so member nations, which of course they all are.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, I'm so distracted by this, "Superb, rare ancient Madagascar --" can you go on this Madagascan one?  Also, it makes me laugh, it's in the "used" category.  What the fuck have they used it for?  "Superb, rare ancient Madagascar septarian nodule, looks like a Dinosaur Egg fossil gemstone", $2,500.  I want it; I don't know what I'd do with it, but I want it.

Nathaniel Harmon: Display.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Nathaniel Harmon: You keep it on the table for all future guests.  So, you have to find $60 trillion worth of minerals that are not being used!

Peter McCormack: Do you know what we could do, we could just put it there and say, "Listen, I'm not going to tell you what this is, but I dare you to touch it"!  People will instantly freak out and they won't know why!

Nathaniel Harmon: We're going to meme manganese nodules into the public consciousness.

Peter McCormack: Dude, these are cool.  How do I get one?  Do you want to sell me that one?  That one's yours.  I want one.

Danny Knowles: So, we kind of missed a link.

Peter McCormack: What has that got to do with anything?!

Danny Knowles: Well, you came from like, "We are going to have tons of excess energy", but obviously presumably that's to mine these, but how?

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, it turns out that every manganese nodule region happens to be in the OTEC zone.  Right now, the reason we're not mining these is because obviously it doesn't reach cost parity with terrigenous sources.  So, it turns out that in the middle of the ocean, a large-scale mining operation needs a lot of energy, and that equates to about 40% of the cost of pulling these out.  That requires shipping in just an absolute shit ton of fossil fuels, which have variable cost.  As we're seeing now, the cost is even higher.

Well, let's say there was some magical source of energy in the middle of the ocean at 3 cents per kWh; or of course in the middle of the ocean where there are no other energies, what we sell that energy for is a different question.  We produce it for 3 cents; what we sell it for is another question.  We'll mine it, we'll mine Bitcoin at the 3 cents, we'll sell it to ourselves for 3 cents.  When we sell it to someone else, 5 cents, 6 cents, whatever multiple; there are no other energy sources in the middle of the ocean.

Peter McCormack: So, on the timeline of everything you're doing, where does this sit, because you're going to do the proof of concept; when do you start mining?

Nathaniel Harmon: I'm not going to mine these.

Peter McCormack: Oh, you're going to give someone else the energy; you're going to sell it to them so they can do it?

Nathaniel Harmon: So like I say, the ISA has already permitted mining, and it looks like the most likely case is the first country, Nauru, has petitioned the ISA to commence activity in 2023.  They're not ready obviously, but it's to spur the ISA to issue guidelines to do so, and there's mostly likely going to be a moratorium for about ten years, is what the world is sort of moving towards.  It turns out ten years is about our timeline to get a 100 MW to 400 MW OTEC stand-up.  So, there's this convergent evolution of these two technologies.

Then there's of course all these other use cases that people aren't considering, in the middle of the ocean: green hydrogen production.  There's obviously no way you're going to be able to produce green hydrogen at cost parity with steam methane reforming, using fucking solar.

Peter McCormack: Obviously.

Nathaniel Harmon: Obviously, using solar panels and wind.  But 3 cents per kWh and instead of having to go to, say, the Sahara, or all the ships in the world for hydrogen have to go to a handful of locations.  Well, if you only have to travel to the equator, saving you a big chunk of change and with unlimited energy, you can solve unlimited problems.  If you have unlimited energy, you can beat back sea level rise.  If you have unlimited energy, you can beat back shifts in the water cycle.

Peter McCormack: Well, they talk about civilisation types and how they harness energy.  What are we, are we still a type I civilisation?

Nathaniel Harmon: We are 0.7.

Peter McCormack: We're 0.7?  Can you get that up?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, Sagan's contribution to this was an actual formula.  And so, the way that a type I civilisation is defined is, a civilisation that uses all the energy that's available to it from its home star on its home planet.  Well, that number is defined by what I was talking about earlier, an energy from the Sun on a flat Earth, on a flat disc.

Peter McCormack: We're at 0.73 on this scale.  You see, you do know everything.  Type II, "Can harness the total energy of its planet's parent start". 

Nathaniel Harmon: 40% of type 1 is only available through OTEC.  There is no type I without OTEC.  What that means is most likely, if we don't do OTEC, then the Kardashev Scale is often linked to the Fermi paradox.

Peter McCormack: I love the Fermi paradox.

Nathaniel Harmon: The most likely explanation for the Fermi paradox is that the Great Filter is ahead of us.

Peter McCormack: It's our stupidity.

Nathaniel Harmon: It's our stupidity, our resource use, and our inability to get all of the energy that is available to us from the Sun.  Again, 40% of that is only available through OTEC, and we can use that energy to go and get these fucking rocks from the bottom of the fucking ocean and make all the fucking batteries and solar panels.

Peter McCormack: Do you know why I love this Kardashian Scale --

Nathaniel Harmon: Kardashian Scale!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the reason I like the Kardashian Scale is because it's like this prediction about energy usage across the Universe, where we've got no evidence that anyone has reached type II or type III.  But the reason I love it is, I'm a bit of a space nerd, so I follow some of the space websites, I read New Scientist and shit like that; but they have these radio signals that occasionally they're like, "We've had these --" what is it, fast radio bursts, they call them, and they're like, "It's intermittent, it doesn't make any sense", unless they've got a Dyson sphere around their sun.

Nathaniel Harmon: The other of course is neutron stars do some weird shit.

Peter McCormack: But they've invented the Dyson sphere with the expectation that advanced civilisations in other galaxies have already done it.

Nathaniel Harmon: We have a very clear pathway to do that.  We can create a single robot that we send to Mercury which starts to reproduce itself at some point, it starts mining away; we have to cannibalise the entire Planet of Mercury.  You send 1, then it becomes 2, then 4 and 8 and 16 and on and on, and then --

Peter McCormack: How does it reproduce itself?

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, it mines the ore on Mercury, again cannibalising Mercury to build more of itself, which then you build the factories to build the giant solar panels, which then, not Dyson sphere, but a Dyson swarm, because if you have Dyson sphere --

Peter McCormack: Hold on!

Nathaniel Harmon: Sorry!

Peter McCormack: How many interviews have you done?

Nathaniel Harmon: I don't know, maybe half a dozen, a dozen?

Peter McCormack: Okay.  I will admit I'm going to be on the dumber end of the scale, but still; you can't just throw these things out there and not explain them!  What's a Dyson swarm; unless Danny already knows, he's been acting like a smartarse?

Danny Knowles: Oh, no, you get this one.

Nathaniel Harmon: A Dyson sphere, actually they made a fun movie, Moonfall, recently.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I saw that.  Well, I haven't seen the film.  I keep seeing it when they get on the plane.

Danny Knowles: It's terrible.

Nathaniel Harmon: It's like The Core.  It's a really stupid fucking movie, but if you want to just turn your brain off and have a good time, it's a good time.

Peter McCormack: Isn't it a comedy?

Danny Knowles: No.

Nathaniel Harmon: It's like The Core.

Peter McCormack: Oh, I'm confusing it with something else.

Danny Knowles: It's where literally the Moon falls.

Nathaniel Harmon: And it's because the Moon, spoiler alert, the Moon is a megastructure, it's a Dyson sphere, which is a fully enclosed battery.  You capture a star, you fully enclose it and you use all the energy available.  That's type II.  Now, a Dyson swarm is, instead of fully enclosing it, you just have -- because of course, we still need the Sun.  If you fully enclose it, there's no Sun, and that would be bad.

Peter McCormack: What do you think with the Fermi paradox?  Do you think, the Great Filter, no one's ever got past the Great Filter; or they have and they don't give a shit about us; or they have and they haven't found us?  The Universe is quite a big place.

Nathaniel Harmon: You know, at 13.9 billion years old, if a civilisation had 1,000 years' head start on us from a technological perspective, they would be at type II.  A million years' a billion years' head start, they're type III and beyond, because there are beyond type III; the scale has been amended over the years.

Peter McCormack: Is there are type IV?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, there's type V as well.

Peter McCormack: Oh, no, I think it actually goes up to type X.  I'm sure I researched this with somebody, and there's some weird --

Danny Knowles: Well, we did a whole show on the Fermi paradox with Vijay, didn't we?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so look up type V, Danny, first; we'll jump one.

Nathaniel Harmon: The main three are the type I, II and III, that's really all that matters.

Peter McCormack: No, but I'm sure it goes up to type X, I'm sure.

Nathaniel Harmon: Using all the energy of the multiverse!

Peter McCormack: All right, "Type IV: capable of using energy at the scale of the Universe (create galaxies, manipulate spacetime)", okay.  "Type V: capable of using energy at the scale of the multiverse (travel to parallel universes and simulate universes)", okay, so we could be in the simulation.

Nathaniel Harmon: Oh, there's a very high likelihood we are a simulation, yeah.

Peter McCormack: "Type VI: civilisation that exists beyond time and space, or in higher dimensions (creates and destroys multiverses)".  I think it goes higher.  You don't need pictures.

Danny Knowles: I'll keep going.

Peter McCormack: See if you can find a type X, because I'm sure they went that high.

Nathaniel Harmon: I mean, you've got to be pretty high to talk about type X!

Peter McCormack: I was probably drunk.  Here we go, "Type X: civilisation has explored every universe, multiverse, megaverse, omniverse --", what the fuck is a megaverse and omniverse?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, that would be The Avengers!

Peter McCormack: What's a megaverse?

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, you should ask Tony Stark.

Peter McCormack: "-- and all dimensions of the hyperverse --", what the fuck's a hyperverse?!

Nathaniel Harmon: Hyperverse!

Peter McCormack: "-- we are gods to countless civilisations and have a far greater understanding of realms beyond reality in the outerverse".  Come on, man, they're taking the piss now, "The exponential nature of the scale stops here as time is meaningless beyond reality.  An eon is like a second to those who dwell there and beyond, and space has no bound".  That's almost poetic.  Hold on, it's going further.  Scroll -- how far down?  "A member of the Afterlife after eons of initiation and tests from its lower hierarchy".

Danny Knowles: I mean, it's just bullshit, isn't it?

Peter McCormack: But 10.8, "Made a book"!

Danny Knowles: Yeah, it reads like an ICOI paper.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, all these things, so 10.7, "Contact with other-dimensional godlike beings in the afterlife, and awareness of strange beings"; 10.6, "Discovery that the afterlife is contained in the 2nd realm".  But you get to 10.8 and it's like, "Made a book"!  I wrote a book!

Danny Knowles: So, God's at 10.8!

Nathaniel Harmon: I saw the multiverse of madness!

Peter McCormack: "Navigation to Kardashian type".

Nathaniel Harmon: The Kardashians!

Peter McCormack: Hold on, Danny, look it goes further.  You've got type XXV, type XXVII, type XXIX, type XXX, Eye, Brain.  Hold on, sorry, anyone listening who's like, "What the fuck are you on about?" you've got to watch the video.  What's type XXX; can you click on that?  "A type XXX civilisation exists beyond the highest planes outside reality and non-reality.  They are the gatekeepers of the beyond.  They are the Beyonders".

Nathaniel Harmon: The Beyonders, yeah, this is Marvel.  We're getting to -- let's go into Marvel!

Peter McCormack: "Type XXX citizens live in the tenth level or tier of the pyramid.  The actuality of the Beyonders and their home is unknown and unknowable, and therefore is a concept".  What the fuck?!  Right, go to "Eye".

Danny Knowles: Oh, dear.

Nathaniel Harmon: Oh, and then "Brain".

Peter McCormack: "The Eye is a type XXX citizen.  This is the all-knowing, all-seeing Eye --"  This is getting into --

Danny Knowles: Lord of the Rings.

Peter McCormack: No, it's like Handmaid's Tale.  Isn't there the Eye in that?  "-- all-seeing Eye, capable of overseeing all that happens in the pyramid".  That's basically God, "The Eye confirms and enforces that all systems of morality and science --", okay, someone's just made this shit up.

Nathaniel Harmon: They're definitely taking the piss.

Peter McCormack: Can we go to Brain?  "The Brain controls the Eye and all that happens in the pyramid".  Honestly, anyone listening to this is like, "What the hell are you on about?"  Just search for, not the Kardashian Scale; search for the Kardashev Scale.  What is Kardashev?  Is that a dude who just came up with this?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, he's a dude, he's a Soviet physicist.

Peter McCormack: So, he wrote all this?

Nathaniel Harmon: No, he talked about type I, II and III.  And then, Carl Sagan expanded it with a formula.

Peter McCormack: And then some dudes did some mushrooms.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, someone on acid did this one.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, some crazy motherfuckers.

Peter McCormack: Oh, that's where it is.  Omniverse takes you up to type VII, hyperverse takes you up to type IX, outerverse takes you up to type XIII, adverse takes you up to type XIX, beyond-minus takes you up to type XXV and beyond-plus takes you up to Brain.

Nathaniel Harmon: I mean, the Kardashev Scale is just I, II and III.

Peter McCormack: I know what's going to happen now.  So, I do this thing sometimes where I get into bed and I know I should go to sleep and I get on my phone and I go down Wikipedia rabbit holes.  I know tonight, that's what I'm going to do.  I'm going to go to bed about 10.00pm, thinking I need to get up early, and then I'm going to be about two hours in this rabbit hole.  Okay, man, listen; by the way, this is amazing! 

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, 40% of all the energy available to a type I civilisation is only accessible via OTEC.  What we use that energy for, whether it's connecting super-grids with a string of daisy-chained OTEC platforms across the equator connecting all the different continents, whether we stick an OTEC powerplant on the bottom floor of a cruise ship and create a floating society.  One of the problems with seasteading was always they didn't have an energy source; they'd have to come back to land.

Peter McCormack: The Freedom Ship, remember the Freedom Ship?

Nathaniel Harmon: No.

Peter McCormack: We've had that on the show before, haven't we?

Nathaniel Harmon: I think that came up in the Peter Young show we did.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, bring up the Freedom Ship.  So, this was a thing I followed years ago, it must have been like 15 years ago, this concept of a ship that would just -- it was like a floating country, just floating round the world.

Nathaniel Harmon: Oh, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I was following it for ages and I was super-fascinated by it.

Nathaniel Harmon: They didn't have an energy source, so they'd have to dock eventually.  With OTEC, you could be out there indefinitely.

Peter McCormack: Look at the size of that thing.

Nathaniel Harmon: Of course, with an energy source, you can grow food; with an energy source, you can desalinate water; with an energy source, you can have life.

Peter McCormack: Desalination, the problem is energy, isn't it; it takes a huge amount of energy?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, 3 kWh per metre cubed.

Peter McCormack: The interesting stuff about things like this, they show you the graphics for how it's going to look and it all looks pretty and amazing, it's all going to be brilliant; but the truth is, it's still going to be Snowpiercer.

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Interestingly enough, that's what I thought about when I was reading, well, listening to the Project Hail Mary book.  What was the Moon one?

Danny Knowles: Artemis.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Artemis.  Do you know Project Hail Mary?

Nathaniel Harmon: No.

Danny Knowles: Same guy who wrote The Martian; Andy Weir, he's called.

Peter McCormack: You've seen The Martian, right?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, of course.

Peter McCormack: So, he did this other book, called Project Hail Mary.  I won't go into too much detail, but based on what I know about you, I think you would love, love this book.  And it's just about this guy who's got to save Planet Earth.  He also did this book, called Artemis, which is about the Moon and the colony that's been established on the Moon.  But basically, they do a very good job of building this picture of this colony on the Moon, but there is a social structure, and how you live if you are one of the peasant workers there, and the different access you have to resources and stuff.  So, they do a really good job of that.  I always think these people skip it.

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, do we have a Moon colony, even an outpost, by the end of this century?  I think, maybe; not definitively.  I mean, I can tell you definitively, there will not be permanent civilisation on the Moon by the end of the century; that's flat-out ridiculous.

Peter McCormack: Why?

Nathaniel Harmon: Because you can't go outside.  We couldn't build a fully self-contained society on Planet Earth, we can't do that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but could you have like the International Space Station?

Nathaniel Harmon: People didn't live there for their entire lives.  They needed food, they needed water to be brought in.

Peter McCormack: But don't you see a potential building, a permanent structure, and having a rotating --

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, but that's not a permanent civilisation.  A colony versus a military or scientific outpost are two very different questions.

Peter McCormack: But do you not see we'll get an outpost, the start of establishing a colony?

Nathaniel Harmon: Possibly.  A scientific outpost, there's a maybe that that will happen by the end of the century.  It's not a definite, because there's a lot of shit that happens.

Peter McCormack: There's a really good Apple TV series, I made you watch it, called --

Danny Knowles: For All Mankind.

Peter McCormack: -- For All Mankind, yeah.  So, it's about the space race and, plot spoiler, if you've never seen it and you want to see it, ignore the next minute.  But basically, they just tweak history and the Russians make it to the Moon first, that's all they do.  But from there, they end up building outposts, the Americans and the Russians, and what happens.  It's really fascinating; it's well worth watching.

Nathaniel Harmon: Living in space is a real problem.  I mean, the radiation thing is not a problem that anyone has proposed to solve outside of a 3-metre water encasement, which how are you going to get that water?  If we can't build it on the ocean, if we can't build a permanent civilisation on the ocean first, that has to happen first.  We can't build a permanent civilisation in Antarctica, people don't live there for their entire lives.  They go there, they do research, they come back.  If we can't do this on the ocean first, with an inexhaustible energy source…

One of the cool things about OTEC is it takes in water from deep, and that water is super-nutrient dense.  And so, in a moored concept, you can't release it at the surface, and the photic layer, the area that light reaches down to, because you'll get eutrophication, you'll get red tides, shit like that.  In the grazing concept, you can actually release it in the photic layer and stimulate primary productivity. 

So, one of the interesting biproducts of grazing OTEC is carbon capture and storage.  And if you can mine Bitcoin, you can do this profitably, which would be the first profitable implementation of carbon capture and storage on Planet Earth.  And what's cool is you will have this entire ecosystem, you'll have all these mega-fish come around; basically you'll have a floating fishery out there.  So, you'll have all the food you need, you have all the energy you would need to create your own fresh water supply.  With energy you can do the vertical farming and shit.

So, we have all the pieces, and if we can't do it on the ocean first, fuck, you're never going to do it in space, are you kidding me, if we can't do it first here.

Peter McCormack: So, do you think Elon Musk's whole, "Get us to Mars" thing is basically bullshit?  The reason I think it might be -- I think obviously he's a fucking incredible person, achieved infinitely more --

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.  What he's done with industrialisation, with factory production, with all these things, and then there's the marketing portion.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, the first time I came to Austin, funny we were in Austin, was for a South by Southwest.  God, when was that?  It would have been about ten years ago.  I used to work in marketing and I came for the marketing, and I ended up looking at all the different things that were on, and I decided to fucking sack them all off.  I ended up going to -- one of them I went to was NASA, and they ran a panel talking about going to Mars, all the challenges of getting to Mars.  They said the biggest problem we haven't solved is the radiation problem, because anyone there is going to get absolutely hit.

Nathaniel Harmon: Super-cancer.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's just going to hit, hit, hit.  They said we've got a lot of problems to solve to get there; that's our biggest problem.

Nathaniel Harmon: Then there's the water of course, you're not going to have enough water to get there.  The food you would need to bring onboard would take up the entirety of your cargo space plus some; there's not enough cargo room for all the food you need, there's not enough cargo room for all the water you need, there's no space for you.  It's going to be, if anything, a small crew and they're most likely not going to come back, and you'd have to be trapped there.  No.

Peter McCormack: But the ambition of doing this creates a good story to tell for a company that actually has innovated in space cargo and space exploration, and has made them a successful, profitable business.

Nathaniel Harmon: The Falcon 9 is a beautiful rocket; I love the Falcon 9.  I'm ambivalent on the Starship, super-heavy.  I mean, that's a big fucking rocket.  But he's got big tubes that I'd love to get my hands on!  He's got the production capacity for giant tubes, and I need about a kilometre worth of them.

Peter McCormack: Based on everything he's invested in though, I could imagine he would be super-interested in what you're doing.

Nathaniel Harmon: And, Elon, I would love to chat with you.

Peter McCormack: Well, me and Elon are friends, he's a regular listener, so if you want to give him a message…!  Okay, I mean it's probably a conversation to have with Michael later, but I'm assuming you're not struggling to get investment to this project?  You probably can't even talk about that.

Nathaniel Harmon: If you're interested, renewable energy, decentralising Bitcoin, pushing the bounds of human society, we would love to chat.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay.  Can we now talk about you debating --

Nathaniel Harmon: Saife?

Peter McCormack: Well, anyone, not just Saife.  I don't particularly want to just say -- I mean, I would love to have -- I enjoyed my conversation with Alex Epstein, but whilst I should be interviewing him, I wanted to push back on things.  But I'm not armed with the information you have, the background; I haven't done what you've done. 

Nathaniel Harmon: Ten years' worth of study, you learn a few things along the way.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I would struggle, and I think it's useful for someone like him to be pushed back, because as much as I can't push back on him because I don't have the experience, I think also people who are repeating what he says don't have the ability to decipher what's right and what's wrong.  So, I think it's not an attack on Alex.  Like I say, Alex has shifted my thinking.  But I'd like my thinking to be as accurate as possible, therefore I would like you to sit with him and see if you change his opinion or he changes yours, so I'd love to make that one happen if we can.  We should try and make that happen in LA, if possible.

Nathaniel Harmon: I mean, the science of climate change is irrefutable.

Peter McCormack: I don't think he would debate you on that point.  It's --

Nathaniel Harmon: What do we do about it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, what do we do about it?

Nathaniel Harmon: My solution is OTEC, my solution is, "Let's go get 8 TW of extra energy that's just fucking sitting there", and his solution is, "Let's keep business as normal", even though we know, or have the best models humanity can produce.  All models are wrong, some models are enlightening, some models teach you something.  And the best models that all of humanity, the collective knowledge of humanity, have been able to produce say business as normal leads to a disastrous outcome for the human race, all people.

Now, the question is, "What do we do about that?"  Do we bury our heads in the fucking sand and do nothing; or do we fight?  Like human beings do, we fucking fight and we have to fight, and OTEC is that fight.

Danny Knowles: You're so angry, you broke the camera!

Peter McCormack: Do you know what, your anger just broke some shit!  That was some Jedi fucking move you pulled there!  Okay, so when are you debating Saife, because Danny messaged me the other day.  Danny's a huge fan of Saifedean, and he said, "Nate is going to be debating Saife on climate change".  What happened there, what's the background; where are we at; when's it happening?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, I responded to some Twitter callout, and my initial email was I pointed out that --

Peter McCormack: What do you mean, "Initial email"?

Nathaniel Harmon: We got into debating the time, the format.  Saife wants to do this debate on his platform where he has the ultimate control, where he is the moderator and participant with the edit button at the end.  That's his proposal, and you can't moderate and debate yourself.  And right now, he's currently refusing to do it in any other way, where he moderates himself and me.  He refuses to do it in person, he refuses to fly anywhere to do this.

Then, I simply pointed out that the language he chose was not really good for himself, because "climate crisis" is the term he -- he's a stickler, I tried to say, "Well, let's use 'anthropogenic climate change', it's a well-defined term, it's something we can debate.  Climate crisis is not really a well-defined term", so I wrote a 2,000-word email, where I went and I pulled the receipts.  I went to the primary source, the piece of literature that actually coined the term "climate crisis", and it's under-case, it's lower-case letters, and he used "A climate crisis", rather than "The climate crisis".  I showed him how stupid the sentence he wrote -- it's clear he just didn't think very hard.

Peter McCormack: What was the framework of the debate that he wanted?  I haven't seen the tweets.  Have you got it up, Danny?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Nathaniel Harmon: He wanted to talk about the bullshit he's always talking about, about eating bugs and the climate hysteria, and I'm a climate scientist, I don't participate in the Climate Act.  I eat meat, even though I know that the aggro businesses --

Peter McCormack: All right, "I would like to host someone on my podcast to debate me by arguing for the proposition: "Human CO2 emissions are causing a climate crisis".

Nathaniel Harmon: "A climate crisis".

Peter McCormack: Are causing, or will cause.  I mean, look, the language is important here, but you can separate from your -- oh, "Let's do it, bud".  "Wait, so you're agreeing to arguing in the affirmative that: "Human CO2 emissions are causing a climate crisis?"  And so you, Mr Harmon said, "I am a geochemist who has been to Mauna Loa and station ALOHA --", okay great, okay, "Fantastic.  Thank you for stepping up".  So, Saifedean accepted, you can pick apart the words, or whatever, but he wants to have a discussion.

Nathaniel Harmon: The problem with the words, and he was being a stickler that it has to be the exact sentence.  So, what I showed in this email is if you do the sentence -- and I laid out the argument that I was going to do, in person, and it was just a semantic argument, because if we're debating this exact sentence, there is nowhere for him to talk -- I think there is a very valuable debate to have, a very valuable conversation to have about, "What do we do?"  Now, that won't happen with this sentence, because as written, if he wants to do the exact sentence as written, well that becomes a semantic argument and I win that 100% of the time, because I pull the primary source.  That sentence, it's clear he just didn't do enough research on that sentence.

Peter McCormack: But Saifedean has a general scepticism towards anybody who believes that there is, or will be, a climate crisis.

Nathaniel Harmon: What is the definition of a climate crisis?

Peter McCormack: I mean, that's the problem.

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, no, it's actually defined.

Peter McCormack: Well, we know this, but I think you can use it, I think you can twist it.

Nathaniel Harmon: You can, but it would be irrelevant.  So, this is why we need an independent moderator, because if we use "climate crisis", this is a term that has a meaning, and we can't discuss some nebulous concept where there is nothing to argue.  One person's arguing against one thing, the other person's arguing against something else --

Peter McCormack: Crossed purposes.

Nathaniel Harmon: -- that's a ridiculous proposition.  And if we argue that, we have to argue, it's in quotes, that exact sentence.  And if that's the proposition, that's the proposition I have to defend, that's a 100% win every time, there is no wiggle room, because that word "climate crisis" is well defined, we know exactly where it comes from.

Peter McCormack: How is it defined?

Nathaniel Harmon: So, it comes from this paper, actually; the title of the paper is "[something, something] Climate Energy", climate crisis is not in the title.  In that paper, there are two sections.  There's a section that defines 18 vital signs of the Earth that are in crisis.  A crisis is a pivot point from one state to another state, and that's how the word crisis is used, only four times in the course of this paper, where that term "climate crisis" is first coined.  And in that paper, it defines the crisis as the pivot point for 18 vital signs of the Earth's system, and they are in flux, and those 18 different vital signs are all listed. 

The only citation on any sentence that includes the word "crisis" is from the IPCC reports.  So now, it's a scientific question, is what it comes down to.  And I don't want to have that conversation, because now it's a semantic argument that I win, and it's no fun for everyone and it precludes him talking about the things that he wants to talk about.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because the thing I want to happen is, what is the trajectory we are on; where is that leading us; should we do something about it; and if we should, what are the things?

Nathaniel Harmon: And so, the question I have, we're trying to work out through email, we have to find some point of agreement.  Things are happening.  We either have to debate the IPCC report, which is the collection of human knowledge on this subject, the vast collection; that is the starting point.  And if we can't agree on that, the debate is about that, we can't have the discussion of what we do.  And I want to have a discussion about what we do, but we have to both be on the same understanding.

The IPCC report is not a fiat-funded, Illuminati conspiracy theory, it is the collection of hundreds of thousands of individuals, like myself, making the trek up the fucking mountain, making the trek to Station ALOHA, to make these measurements that are done in the exact same way using standards agreed to.  The PDB standard is the standard for carbon, for carbon isotopes, for oxygen isotopes.  There is no debate over what that fucking standard is; and if we can't agree that we are all on the same page, we have to debate that.

Peter McCormack: So, he's bottled it?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, he's bottled it to that sentence.

Peter McCormack: No, sorry, "bottle" is a British term.  Get up Urban Dictionary.  Do you know Urban Dictionary?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so it's very good for explaining it in British terms.  But "bottle it" doesn't mean to bottle it down to a single point; it basically means you've shit your pants!

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, I QEDd it.

Peter McCormack: In football, if you're through on goal, you've got a penalty to win the game and you miss you say --

Nathaniel Harmon: "Go Bedford!"

Peter McCormack: "Go Bedford!".  You say, "They bottled it", it means you shit yourself.

Danny Knowles: It's this one here.

Peter McCormack: Fuck, Danny, come on, man!  I can't put that up!  My dad now listens to the show.

Danny Knowles: Well, as long as he doesn't watch it, he won't see it.

Peter McCormack: Bottled it, "When someone decides to opt out of a rather nerve-racking task, instead of just growing some gonads and doing it".

Nathaniel Harmon: That's basically it.

Peter McCormack: So, me and Saife are really good friends, so I can -- no!  Me and Saife fell out, and the starting point of us falling out was climate change.  I've obviously made my views clear on this and I've accepted I'm a hypocrite, but I put out a tweet; see if you can find it, Danny, @petermccormack, where I just call everyone an idiot. 

Danny Knowles: There's going to be a lot!

Peter McCormack: Yeah!

Nathaniel Harmon: I mean, I have sympathy for, "It's happening, but moving the ship at this point would cause irreparable damage and we shouldn't do anything and let the people who get fucked by climate change get fucked by climate change.  They'll move".  I mean, that is an absolute -- I don't know if you'd call it a genocide, but dooming people.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so look.  I put out, "You are an idiot if: you deny climate change is real; you claim that current change is a natural weather cycle; you claim models are inaccurate; you claim climate change is too expensive to fix; you claim this is not a crisis".  So, I put this out in 2020, got a lot of likes, got a lot of pushback.  But look, maybe I shouldn't have said, "You're an idiot", maybe I should have picked my language better and said, "You've got it wrong", but climate change is real, we know that's true.

Nathaniel Harmon: The only one that I have any pushback on is your claim, "Models are inaccurate".  All models are wrong, some are useful.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  But we've done the research into the models, haven't we?  And the models are so accurate that they've --

Nathaniel Harmon: They're wrong, but they're useful.

Peter McCormack: When you say they're wrong, are they wrong because it's impossible for a model to be 100% accurate?

Nathaniel Harmon: Yeah, it's analogue versus digital.  You can never recreate the analogue world in a digital world.

Peter McCormack: Of course, but trajectory-wise, people claim the problem is with the models.  Find that article on the models.

Nathaniel Harmon: So, we're trying to price out a powerplant for 30 years.  I have to model the price of Bitcoin 30 years into the future.  I built a really cool model that has only two independent variables.  One of those variables is that, "More energy into the Bitcoin system over time; as time goes on, there will be more and more energy participating in the proof of work".  The other independent variable is that, "The all-in price that the Bitcoin Network pays per kWh that goes into it will continue to decrease over time".  Those are the only two independent variables. 

What I come up with, is that wrong?  Yeah, of course it's wrong.  Is it going to be accurate over the time period that I'm looking at?  If I'm looking at 30 years, I don't really care about what the price of Bitcoin is in a year to year; I care about what it is over a 30-year -- I think it's pretty accurate over a 30-year time period, and that's what the models are.  They're not to say, "In this year, it's going to be this temperature and this is going to happen", it's saying, "Hey, climate is defined by weather patterns over a 30-year span.  If you talk about anything that's not a 30-year pattern, you're not talking about climate", sorry.

Peter McCormack: No, that's fine.  But my point on the models is, the pushback I've received is, "Oh, but the models are always wrong".  Now, we did the research, and wasn't it something like -- have you found the article?

Danny Knowles: No, to be honest, I don't know what article.

Nathaniel Harmon: They're well within the bounds.

Danny Knowles: I think you're kind of arguing the same point here.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what I'm saying is, try and search for, "Climate models are so accurate, they've received a Nobel Prize", because I'm pretty sure that's the one.

Nathaniel Harmon: My advisor won the Nobel Prize for the IPCC 2009 Report, Chris Sabine.

Peter McCormack: There you go.

Nathaniel Harmon: You can pull up the acceptance speech.  He was my chairperson on my graduate committee.

Peter McCormack: Have you found it? 

Danny Knowles: I don't know, it could be this.

Peter McCormack: "How climate models got so accurate, they earned a Nobel Prize", yeah, "Cimate predictions were treated with heavy scepticism just 30 years ago, but they've become our main window into how global warming works".  "Two weeks ago, Katharine Hayhoe", I've interviewed her, "of Texas University was a guest on the popular CBS show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!", anyway, we can put that in the show notes.  The point being is what I found is that those on the sceptical, denial kind of side, will find one wrong model and say it's all wrong; or they'll say, "Climate is always changing"; or they'll find something maybe like Alex Epstein has said about --

Nathaniel Harmon: I can explain.  Do you want to go into why the climate changes over a long period; what timescale; why climate changing is on different timescales is different?

Peter McCormack: No, but the point I'm trying to get to, people will latch onto certain things.  And by the way, it happens the other way round.

Nathaniel Harmon: Of course.

Peter McCormack: The activists latch on.  They'll find something like cow farts and they'll say, "We all have to stop eating meat".

Nathaniel Harmon: Note on that, sorry, it's not cow farts, it's burps.  Only the first gut of the ruminant produces methane.  So, cow farts is inaccurate, it's cow burps!

Peter McCormack: I know.  So anyway, I put out that tweet.  I didn't think it was a bad tweet, but that was the start; because me and Saifedean, we used to share an interest in Liverpool Football Club and Bitcoin.  We got on.  I put out that tweet, he yelled at me, blocked me.  I might have called him a psychopath and compared him to the Nazis; he tried to cancel me, wrote to my sponsors.

Nathaniel Harmon: Cancelled?

Peter McCormack: No, he did.  We went through this cycle, he wrote to all my sponsors and said, "Fucking stop sponsoring him".  This whole shit happened.  But do you know what, we shouldn't be enemies in these scenarios.  I've put my hand out to Saife on more than one occasion and said, "Look, we don't have to be friends, but we're in the same sphere.  If we agree, we can work on the same team and expand the knowledge of Bitcoin and grow Bitcoin.  And if we disagree, we can arrange the discussion so we can try and find truth".

But what I found, my issue I found with Saife is, when he's challenged, it comes down to insults or blocking people.  There's multiple problems with that.  The first problem I see with that is that it creates this kind of information bias, it creates this closed cycle; it becomes influential for other people.  But also, when I'm trying to get my friends into Bitcoin and people say, "You have to read The Bitcoin Standard", and then they follow him on Twitter and see all this crazy bullshit, it puts them off.  I know for a fact it puts them off, and this isn't useful.

Nathaniel Harmon: Sorry, I'm going to get that.

Peter McCormack: We need Eric Yakes' book.  Eric Yakes wrote this great fly-swatting book, called Bitcoin: The 7th Property.  Actually, it's an amazing book.  But the point is on Saife, me and him have fallen out for whatever reason, and I will constantly say, "Saife, if you want to bury the hatchet and discuss these things, let's try and find truth together, let's just try and find truth.  If you block yourself out from other arguments, are you really finding truth?"

So, I would host a discussion with you and Saife, I would agree the rules, we can agree the discussion topics upfront.  I can just do time management, but I want it to happen.  I don't care if it's me or someone else, but it needs to happen.  We need to get to this point where -- because the trajectory of where we're heading isn't great.

Nathaniel Harmon: And this is why the language is so important, because something as simple as a choice of the word "a", "a climate crisis" is the indefinite article, rather than "the", the definite article.  And if we have to debate a proposition, that's the proposition.  And so by choice of "a", I only have to prove that a single climate on Planet Earth is changing, and that that is only due to human cause, and that's not a fun debate, because good thing the paper that defines climate crisis lists 18, and he has to know which one I'm going to talk about as "a", any single climate crisis.  So, we're in talks about what the exact language is.

Peter McCormack: Well, look, I hope it happens, it needs to happen.

Nathaniel Harmon: Me too.

Peter McCormack: It needs to happen.

Nathaniel Harmon: It's on him at this point.

Peter McCormack: Well, people are influential and voices are influential, and we know people out there who aren't smart enough, because I've done this, will see something somebody they follow says, somebody they respect, and then they'll start repeating it.  I've had it, I've literally watched people say things, and then I read Alex Epstein's book, and they've just repeated what he said.  They haven't done the research, they've just said it, so we know this happens.  If someone in authority is writing something which is false, other people are going to disseminate that and that false information is going to spread.  And we should all care about the truth over being right.

Nathaniel Harmon: Now, that's where I think the real valuable conversation is, not debating the science, because again I am a scientist and I can back that shit up with fucking receipts, and that's not going to be a fun debate for anybody.  What's the fun debate is, "What do we actually do about it?"

Peter McCormack: We should put out a tweet, say we've made this show, Dan is willing -- Dan?  Nate is willing -- there is a Dan Harmon -- Dan Holman.

Nathaniel Harmon: Dan Harmon is Rick and Morty, baby!  And Community, six seasons in a movie, it's fucking happening!

Peter McCormack: Neil Berkeley, who directs my films, made a film about Dan Harmon.  But I was also thinking of Dan Holman, who is the ex-Torquay striker, who our Bedford rivals, Northampton ON Chenecks, have signed.  He's playing upfront for them.

Danny Knowles: Why don't we just ask Alex if he wants to do it?

Peter McCormack: Alex might do it.

Danny Knowles: I think Alex will do it.

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, he's debating Margot.

Danny Knowles: Is that actually happening?

Peter McCormack: No, that's not confirmed yet.

Nathaniel Harmon: They're in talks.  Again, I'm a good friend of Margot, and they're in talks.  Again, it comes down to the language.  Alex wants to talk about crazies, and Margot wants to have a realistic discussion about what we actually do about it, at Bitcoin 2022.

Peter McCormack: No, Pacific Bitcoin.

Nathaniel Harmon: At Pacific Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I've offered again to chair that one.  I think I'm rejected sometimes, because people think I'm not impartial enough, which is a fair point, because in the Bitcoin world, I'm not, I'm seen as a leftie moron.

Nathaniel Harmon: But as a moderator --

Peter McCormack: I'm experienced.

Nathaniel Harmon: There's one thing about if the debates in 2016 were held by the Clinton Foundation or at Mar-a-Lago; that's one.  Having it hosted by CNN or Fox; they can be independent.  As a moderator, your job is to be a fucking independent, to be neutral.  You don't have to have your bias; your bias doesn't come into that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it does sometimes.  I tried to host a debate between Peter Schiff and Greg Foss, and it ended up being me and Greg Foss against Schiff.  But that's experience, you learn from these things.  But we should put out a tweet saying that Nate Harmon is willing to debate anyone with regards to climate change; we'll get the wording afterwards.  I'll tweet it out, let's just get the wording right.

Nathaniel Harmon: Well, climate change, as long as it's capital -- again, he used under-case climate, under-case crisis.  Climate Change, capital-C, capital-C, is a well-defined term that I will debate anyone on any time.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but like I say, that might not be the debate you want to have.  Once this is done, we'll sit down, we'll write the tweet, we'll get it out there and I will happily host it.  I'll fly anywhere, fly anyone in, I'll cover the cost, we'll make it happen, because I think it should happen.

Nathaniel Harmon: It should.

Peter McCormack: Like I say, the reason I had Alex Epstein on, someone I was really sceptical about, is because I want to talk to the people I'm sceptical about, as well as the people I agree with, which is why I have libertarians on, people from the left, the right, everyone.  I will talk to anyone.

Nathaniel Harmon: Me and my partner, Michael, have very different opinions on politics.  Both of my business partners have diametrically opposed -- but I can get along with fucking anybody.

Peter McCormack: Right, we will try and arrange that.  Couple of things.  Firstly, to anyone listening to this -- because I'll tell you what's going to happen is, it's going to go up on YouTube.  When it goes up on YouTube, there's going to be -- by the way, I don't read the comments anymore, but the comments, I know what's going to happen.  There's going to be a lot of people who are going to insult you, insult me, disagree with us, parrot something, just say we're leftie statists.

Nathaniel Harmon: Well then they're just agreeing with abundant energy for everyone, which is what they claim to want.  OTEC is that.

Peter McCormack: But what would you say to anyone who is super-sceptical of you and everything you've said, who thinks Alex Epstein is right, what would you say to those people?

Nathaniel Harmon: I want abundant energy for everyone.  Society does not work without abundant energy.  We have two different viable paths to do so.  Mine is a little harder, but I think the benefits of OTEC outweigh the drawbacks of fossil fuels.  I think this is a better world.  A world with OTEC is a better world for everyone and that's it.  I mean, I want abundant energy.  There are a billion people living in the OTEC region that have OTEC available to them today, a billion human beings.  And my only goal is to make sure that they can experience the same industrialisation that we in the developed world have gone through.

Fossil fuels has had 100 fucking years to bring these people energy and they have failed.  Fossil fuels have failed at every occasion to bring the developing world into the industrialised world.  OTEC can do that.

Peter McCormack: All right, man, well listen -- by the way, we're going to do this again.  If people want to find out more, where do they find out more?

Nathaniel Harmon: You can follow me @NateHawaii, or Michael @michaelhawaii, really easy, oceanbitenergy.com.

Peter McCormack: All right, man, well listen, this was a fantastic conversation.  I feel like this is the springboard for some other things.  I massively appreciate you.  I'm really glad we met in Hawaii.  I consider you a friend and anything I can do, let me know.

Nathaniel Harmon: We're not friends for the debate, me and Peter don't know each other!

Peter McCormack: No, but all the best with this, keep going.  I'm going to get myself some of this seabed --

Nathaniel Harmon: Manganese nodules!

Peter McCormack: All right, man.  Good luck, keep crushing, keep crushing, Michael.

Nathaniel Harmon: Aloha.

Peter McCormack: Aloha.