Podcast appearances and mentions of jay harman

The genius of nature's design, recipes and principles is serving as the inspiration for redesigning human civilization. This Biomimicry revolution is spawning a next industrial revolution. Biomimicry masters Janine Benyus and Jay Harman illuminate the forefront of nature-inspired design, including human organization and the power of networks.

In the burgeoning field of biomimicry, bioneers are designing a technological civilization that harmonizes with nature's operating instructions. Inventor Jay Harman models the forms and dynamics of water with astounding results. Chemist Paul Anastas is re-inventing a “Green Chemistry” that transforms how we make things. Imitating nature is paying off for the economy, people and the planet.

Some of the best minds on the planet are busy cataloguing possible solutions to the crisis of climate chaos. Scientists, entrepreneurs and educators on technology's cutting edge offer a broad array of bio-based solutions that are already working to transition us to a truly sustainable civilization. Biomimics Janine Benyus, Stephan Dewar, David Orr and Jay Harman offer a smorgasbord of startling solutions based on nature's genius.

Jay Harman, author of The SHARK'S PAINTBRUSH is CEO of Pax Scientific a world leading design company that bases its inventions on Biomimicry, observing nature to inspire innovation.

The genius of nature’s design, recipes and principles is serving as the inspiration for redesigning human civilization. This Biomimicry revolution is spawning a next industrial revolution. Biomimicry masters Janine Benyus and Jay Harman illuminate the forefront of nature-inspired design, including human organization and the power of networks. For more information about this show visit: https://bioneers.org/sharkskin-hippo-sweat-and-the-wood-wide-web-from-flat-earth-to-whole-earth-thinking-janine/

Jay Harman owns a rare car, a 1978 Bitter CD Diplomat.  It is one of  only 395 produced and one of three known in North America.  The car was awarded the "Founders Award" at the 2018 Greenwich Concours and will be shown at the 2019 Turtle Invitational.  Listen as Jay tells us how his love for the Bitter started 36 years before a chance trip to Los Angeles brought he and his Bitter CD Diplomat together.

Jay Harman is a naturalist, author and award-winning entrepreneur and biomimetic inventor.  Born and raised in Australia, Jay started his career as a naturalist with the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife in Australia and went on to found several multi-million dollar research and manufacturing companies. Today, Jay talks to us about his book The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation. How did Jay discover that nature has the solution to all of our problems? Well, it first started when he was in school. He had no interest in the teaching materials and would often daydream about going down to the beach to surf, fish, and scuba dive. You could always find him near the water when he wasn’t in school. However, the one subject Jay did pay attention to was physics. The strange thing was, physics worked in a slightly different way in nature than it did in the classroom. Jay first realized this when he saw seaweed, often fragile, keep its shape during the worst of storms. It would always form in a certain pattern and this pattern would help it keep it intact and survive the rough weather. In school, Jay was taught that the path of least resistance was in a straight line. Well, in nature, nothing moves in a straight line! It became very apparent to Jay, but not to Jay’s physics teacher, that the path of least resistance in nature was a spiral. So, Jay began applying these spiral shapes in a practical way and slowly ended up discovering that nature, really, had all the answers. However, how does all of this apply to the business world? Well, you’ll have to listen in for more great insights from Jay and how he slowly discovered that answer. Interview Links: Thesharkspaintbrush.com More Resources: Bill on YouTube: Short videos to keep you growing. Scaling Up Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops.   Did you enjoy today's episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. It helps other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. __ Scaling Up is the best-selling book, by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher with Humanisteq Coaching and I’m one of the Gazelles business coaches. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).

JAY HARMAN is credited with being among the first pioneering scientists to use biomimicry—the science of employing nature to advance sustainable technology. Jay’s work is quickly becoming a cornerstone of modern and future engineering.  His book, The Shark's Paintbrush, is an exciting look into the brilliance of nature and how biomimicry is leading our new industrial revolution. […]

Inventor, entrepreneur, futurist, Jay Harman thinks big, outside the box but inside of nature. He is one of the world’s leaders in biomimicry research and development as well as founder of several companies that create industrial solutions that are clean and green and based on mimicking nature’s design solutions. Harman has just published his first book The Shark’s Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature Is Inspiring Innovation. Harman’s Portland lecture focuses on what he sees as the immense potential for biomimicry to change business as usual and create a shift from a resource depleting and pollution spewing economy to a clean and green economy. Entrepreneurs and scientists are turning to nature to find inspiration for future products, and how to build them in a way that is not only more energy and cost-efficient but friendlier to the environment. Harman has been at the forefront of this movement as a nature-inspired designer of boats, fans, pumps, propellers and mixers, and founder of several companies to bring these products to market. His book, The Shark’s Paintbrush is equal parts memoir, explanation of biomimicry breakthroughs, and business advice. Photo by Joseph Greer ‘16. MFA CD Lecture: Jay Harman A native of Australia and now a U.S. citizen working out of San Rafael, California, Harman is a gifted storyteller and successful businessman. Best selling author Paul Hawken says of Harman and The Shark’s Paintbrush, “Imagine Indiana Jones, Huckleberry Finn, and Erasmus Darwin rolled into one person, and you will have some sense of what it is like to roam and see the world through Jay Harman’s biomimetic eyes.” Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers have built things by a process now known as “heat, beat, and treat.” They’d start with a raw material, use enormous amounts of energy to heat it, twist it into shape with heavy machinery, and then maintain its design, strength, and durability with toxic chemicals. Harman encourages government and industry to consider biomimicry, to respect nature’s talent as the ultimate designer of more effective, efficient, powerful, profitable, and cleaner technologies not to mention profound biotherapeutic discoveries made by applying nature’s secrets to biotech and the business of public health. A force of change in industries as diverse as construction, biomedical devices and pharmaceuticals, transportation, and information technology, biomimicry is inspiring a new industrial revolution that will dramatically alter the landscape of the business world. Read UNTITLED’s interview with Jay Harman here. Download

Today’s guest, Jay Harman is the CEO of PAX Scientific and author of The Shark’s Paintbrush. In The Shark's Paintbrush, Harman introduces us to pioneering engineers in a wide array of businesses who are uncovering and copying nature’s hidden marvels. He shows business leaders and aspiring entrepreneurs how we can reconcile creating more powerful, lucrative technologies with maximizing sustainability. Jay Harman injects a whole new vocabulary and way of thinking into the business sphere that speaks to both small start-ups and corporate giants.   Key Takeaways: [1:14] Biomimicry looks to nature to determine how nature has solved a problem humans are facing. [2:48] Jay Harman designed a boat based on the “using the least to get the most” techniques used by nature. [7:23] Examples of breakthrough innovations that are fundamental game-changers. [16:59] PAX Scientific projects may allow for energy savings of up to 50%, meaning we may be able to reverse the negative effects of climatic change. [20:40] The opportunities to optimize the energy requirements of automotives are endless. [22:57] Reverse engineering a frozen whirlpool allows for an inventory of variables to study.     [26:16] How to best reach Jay Harman.   Mentioned in This Episode: Praxent PAX Scientific PAX Water The Shark’s Paintbrush

The President-CEO of PAX Scientific reveals how scientists and designers are taking cues from nature to find breakthrough solutions. Take sunscreen modeled on hippo sweat. How might we borrow the recipe? It’s time for a fresh look at technology and design, with nature as our mentor. This speech was given at the 2013 Bioneers Annual Conference. Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges. To experience talks like this, please join us at the Bioneers National Conference each October, and regional Bioneers Resilient Community Network gatherings held nationwide throughout the year. For more information on Bioneers, please visit http://www.bioneers.org and stay in touch via Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/Bioneers.org) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/bioneers).

Naturalist, inventor and entrepreneur Jay Harman shows how nature's favorite form, the spiral, is ubiquitous in nature: from the shape of galaxies to the flow of blood in our veins, how air moves through our lungs, and plants and flowers unfold. Movement wants to follow the path of least resistance. He shows how the spiral correlates with the fabled Golden Mean and the Fibonacci sequence, the mathematical representation of aesthetic beauty. This speech took place at the 2004 National Bioneers Conference and is part of the Ecological Design Collection, Vol. 1. Since 1990, Bioneers has acted as a fertile hub of social and scientific innovators with practical and visionary solutions for the world's most pressing environmental and social challenges.

The genius of nature’s design, recipes and principles is serving as the inspiration for redesigning human civilization. This Biomimicry revolution is spawning a next industrial revolution. Biomimicry masters Janine Benyus and Jay Harman illuminate the forefront of nature-inspired design, including human organization and the power of networks.

Originally Aired: November 2013 After 3.8 billion years of R&D on this planet, failures are fossils. What surrounds us in the natural world has succeeded and survived. So why not learn as much as we can from what works? JAY HARMON translates nature's lessons into technologies that solve problems and perform tasks more elegantly, efficiently, and economically. JAY HARMAN has founded and grown multi-million-dollar research and manufacturing companies that develop, patent, and license innovative products, ranging from prize-winning watercraft to interlocking building bricks, afterburners for aircraft engines, and non-invasive technology for measuring blood glucose and other electrolytes. His latest ventures - PAX Scientific, PAX Water Technologies, PAX Mixer, and PAX Streamline - design more efficient industrial equipment including turbines, fans, and pumps. He's the author of THE SHARK'S PAINTBRUSH: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation.

JAY HARMAN is credited with being among the first pioneering scientists to make biomimicry—the science of employing nature in advancing sustainable technology a cornerstone of modern and future engineering.  His book, The Shark's Paintbrush, is an exciting look into the brilliance of nature and how biomimicry is leading our new industrial revolution.  

Host Lisa Kiefer interviews Jay Harman. Harman is the CEO, and Founder of PAX Scientific, a engineering, research, and design firm. One of the first scientists to make biomimicry a cornerstone of modern engineering. His book is The Shark's Paintbrush.TRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:Method to the madness is next. Your listening to method to the madness. Biweekly public affairs show on KJ l x Berkeley, celebrating a area. Innovators. I'm Lisa Kiefer and today I'm interviewing Jay Harmon, president CEO and chief inventor at PAC scientific. He's also the author of the sharps paintbrush. I look at biomimicry. Welcome to the program, Jay. Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Yeah, [00:00:30] I'm very interested in biomedics and biomimicry. You know, you've written a book called the sharks paintbrush. It's in three parts. You first you talk about the potential of biomimetics, right? In business technology and in solving our climate change problems and other forces that are causing stress on the planet. Okay. And the second part, you give these amazing examples of creatures from fungus to sharks and what they can provide. And then your third part, which is very fascinating to me, is the business side of all this. [00:01:00] How do you bring these great ideas to the marketplace? So I want to talk about all of that and also about you. So first of all, you're Australian. Tell me about your life and how you got into all of it. Speaker 2:Well, you know, I think I have the best life possible for who I am. I grew up beside the beach in Australia, remote side, the left hand side, Perth. They chose the most remote city in the whole British empire and the nearest city to it is 1700 miles away. So I ran a small population, kind of a country town vibe [00:01:30] and an absolutely pristine co-sign, warm water and clear water. So I grew up in the water pretty much from the time I was 10. I just became fascinated by everything to do with nature. And a school was of no interest to me at all. You went to a Jesuit school? I went to a Jesuit school to not focus all that's right. They were fairly keen that I focused and uh, had persuasive methods, but I was able to resist my [inaudible]. I was interested in history, particularly pre history [00:02:00] and how humans have learned to develop skills. Speaker 2:And of course humans come from nature. We are nature, we're part of nature. We forget that a lot of the time as we evolved our societies out of nature, we copied how nature does things. And I was very interested in that as a, as a boy and at the same time noticing how nature actually does things, how to fish swim cause they're much better at swimming than I am. And I was fascinated by that, especially when I started trying to catch fish under water. Used to spear fish. [00:02:30] I used to. Yeah, I loved it. Yeah, it was just my favorite thing is okay then that was a very new sport then. This is in the early sixties and uh, skin diving. It really only just been invented and almost no good. He did it and I had a brain stick with a piece of shop on wire on it and I ran around trying to catch fish, but I noticed how just how wonderful fish were moving through the water with no fuss. Speaker 2:And I used to daydream about that when I was in school and when I went to bed at night trying to imagine how I could catch some who [00:03:00] I could be faster. And you know what was actually happening. Then one day I noticed that they just struck me that seaweeds, although they're quite fragile and managed to survive beautifully and even wild storms and huge waves, and I found that quite fascinating in over a period of time, I noticed that all these weeds are changing their shape to a particular pathway, even though it looks chaotic and it turns out that's the path of least resistance, so at least drag so the seaweeds can hang on just even in wild storms, and so then I did. I worked out over a long time and [00:03:30] over a lifetime. That's the archetype of shape of movement in nature. The nature uses it almost exclusively. Speaker 2:It's a spiral. You talk about the swirling shapes, which happened to be virtually identical to the whirlpool in your bathtub. When you pull the plug, that's a virtually frictionless device. It's nature's mechanism for moving fluids and energy. It uses it everywhere because it's almost frictionless. Unlike humans who really have huge problems with friction, that's where we use all [00:04:00] our energy. You were trained to overcome friction and resistance and drag. So we use huge amounts of energy and create huge amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. Trying to overcome friction. Is that your Eureka moment? It was, I wasn't able to define it as that when I was a kid, but I was just fascinated by it and I was building in pretty rough looking canoes at that time out of corrugated iron and so forth and, and instead of beating them into shape with a hammer to try and replicate these shapes I was seeing and seaweed and then the way fish move and these colors seem to work better. Speaker 2:[00:04:30] So I was totally hooked and then that just became my obsession, really. My fascination and I saw it everywhere. And then interaction with aboriginal people, they make their own boats. And of course exactly. A lot of people have very little, when I was a kid that SNL [inaudible], he joined the Department of Fisheries and wildlife and I arranged all over Western Australia and the outback. My territory was a third of the size of the United States. And so I came across all sorts of populations of indigenous [00:05:00] people and their culture and as well as different wildlife ecosystems from the tropics to, to the Mediterranean, of course going to Jesuit school, which had a focus on spirituality and religion. I noticed that the same shapes that I saw, it really spiraling shapes. We were in the iconography of the Catholic Church. No priest was able to tell me what that was about. But there are everywhere, you know, these curls and spirals are in the artwork of missiles and bibles and statues and [00:05:30] pictures. Speaker 2:And I'm in the solar system and the solar system of course. Exactly. And uh, and since then of course I've noticed that, um, the spirals or through old religions of the world and the face, the most common eye archetypal symbol for creation, the mystery of life, fertility or the intelligence through all of the world's cultures, all the traumatic cultures, every major religion on earth, this is the symbol. It happens to be the only path. Well, almost only paths that nature uses to move anything. [00:06:00] It's order within chaos. You know, we think of the universe as chaotic. But we have this order. We have this spiral that turns up everywhere in all sorts of living things. The shame of our heart muscle, the kills of our hair, the kills of our eyelashes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The cochlear of our ears, we see it in the Fido taxus of organisms. Speaker 2:Every wave we see, every ripple we see on the ocean cause the geometry of whirlpools in it, and yet a human nature is to make a straight line between points. [00:06:30] Exactly. Well, of course at school, what do we learn that because the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Then if you want to use the least energy going from say one end of a football field to the other end of a football field, you've got to walk straight. Because if you go around the edge of the football field, you're going to be doing a lot more steps. It's going to take a lot more energy. Well, that's all making perfect sense and our entire industrial world is built on that premise and yet nature, not since the dawn of time has shown one single example of ever moving anything. [00:07:00] In a straight line. Speaker 2:It always follows these spiraling pathways always. And in every case, nature uses less energy and less materials than humans do. And they don't create any output that is damaging. Well, that's right. Well across nature is always creating the two closest conditions conducive to life, right? And the zero waste in nature, waste from nature's vocabulary. You could eliminate the term waste and call it resource, which amazed me. I saw a film that you were [00:07:30] featured highly in elemental and you talk about the optimism of nature, right? Nature is not just a survivor is amazing. No matter what happens, it comes back, you know, we can spray DDT or set off a nuclear weapon and uh, everything's devastated, incinerated, you name it, come back a little bit later and it's all burgeoning with life again. And we put down concrete and, and grass will come up through the concrete. Speaker 2:We've built a city of New York and we left it 200 years from now. You, you would see the whole thing over grown with [00:08:00] life and wild animals and organisms everywhere. So nature is completely optimistic. It puts out millions of spores from each fungus. It puts out half a million eggs in one lobster. You know, you can wipe out all of the crabs, so on the east coast of America and just leave a couple and come back in a few years and their population will have recovered. That's amazing. We might disappear. In fact, it's inevitable when you think about it. 99.99% of [00:08:30] all species that have ever existed on earth and now extinct. We were just one in that succession. We've got our little moment in history so we will disappear at some point, but life will go on. Nature will go on without blinking an eye. Well, in the epilogue of your book, there's a beautiful scene where you're sailing in this very remote area, right? Speaker 2:That's right. In the Indian Ocean, what you discovered? Well, I was failing about 400 miles Java, the right out in the Indian Ocean and the water was 12,000 feet deep and [00:09:00] not on any shipping lane. This scenario, nobody goes to and they're not even tourist yachts. And in the distance I noticed what looked like an island and a, it shouldn't have been an island there. And I looked at on my charts, no island, 12,000 feet of water, no shipping lane sailed up to this. And as I got closer, I saw birds were flying around and I saw trees just very small, young coconut palms sailed right up to it. And it was an island made completely of garbage. And there [00:09:30] was fishing nets and broken dinghies and sea containers that were barely floating and logs that had been washed down from rivers [inaudible] there's the late eighties they discovered that this was unheard of then. Speaker 2:Right? So this thing had weeds and vegetation on it and these young palm trees and there were crabs running around and there were birds and schools of fish under it, you know, and this whole thing was a product of human negligence, if you like. And then it struck me that from nature's point of view, this was an opportunity [00:10:00] and it had created this amazing living argonaut that was floating across the ocean. That's pretty optimist. Oh, it's fantastic. So that really gave me heart and you know, we see a lot of bad news in the press, but especially now more and more when we wonder if our planet's going to be worth living on in another few decades. And you look at all the stresses they've happened at different times in history, but never at the same total. Exactly. Or at the size staggering in the last million years. Nothing like that though. Speaker 2:We're really on a precipice here. But I also [00:10:30] am totally optimistic because we've reached a point in time where we have the technology and the ideas and the ability to look at nature as mentor to solve all these problems. We have that ability. She's clean, green, and sustainable. And if you think of the 10 million species on earth today, these species, every one of them has solved the problems that we face. They have done it sometimes under incredible stress. Incredible staff. Extraordinary. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you've just got to look at these deep [00:11:00] sea events in the middle of the ocean, you know, miles deep in the ocean and you've got the sulfuric mass coming out of these little volcanic shoots. There's no oxygen. It's a completely hostile environment. How could there possibly be life there? And yet that water is teaming with life unbelievable. Speaker 2:Without oxygen and that very high temperatures. Okay, so let's go back. You know, when in your boy hood and you, how did you get out into the world with these ideas? Well, uh, all my spare time [00:11:30] as a kid was either in the water or making stuff. Then when I left school, you know, I'd rebuild old cars and get them working and, you know, just anything, right? Join the fisheries and wildlife department and became a captain, um, on patrol and research vessels and spent 12 years right in, sometimes you'd call it the teeth of Meta, you know, survived a hundred mile an a hurricane at sea on a, on a 50 foot patrol boat and lots of adventures and seeing the sea snake [00:12:00] advance fee snakes and so many encounters with snakes. You know, it's got a nine of the worst or the most poisonous this makes in the world of the top 10 being in the outback, I saw plenty and plenty of varieties and lots of advantages, but I also noticed that the environment was, even though there were a lot of folks out there trying to protect the environment in love with nature, feeling the pain of nature being destroyed and making heroic efforts to protect it [00:12:30] with a strike of a political pen, a wildlife reserve could be turned into a mine site. Speaker 2:Even with lawsuits and everything else. It was a losing battle. When I first left the fisheries department is a mud life. I went in search of myself. I said, well, who am I in all of this? And you know, the sort of ACA type or question most of us end up with at some point. So they went to university and studied comparative religion and psychology and Economics and economics. And I did that for awhile and then I went off around the world and, uh, study with [00:13:00] different mystics, met interesting people in different Christian faiths and then went to two Asian gurus and just really, really engaged myself full time in that inquiry for several years. And to the point that I completely ran out of money and I ended up back in Australia and I had to make some money quickly. And it was a recession at the time and there was really not much opportunity for a, um, a past fisheries and wildlife officer. Speaker 2:Right? So I started a company cause I [00:13:30] didn't know enough not to, and I started a company called DRG Australia thinking that I'll bring these ideas from nature into the industrial world. A couple of days after I founded the company and tripped up the name, bumped into an engineer who had an idea for an electronics product. So I thought, well, let's do that. We'll make a few bucks and then we can do the nature-based stuff. That electronics product turned out to be pretty successful. And, uh, we had the, um, one of the first two so-called high technology companies in [00:14:00] Australia, right place, right time. This was 1982. We formed the company two years to the day we put it on the stock market. It was enormously successful. It was just meteoric rise and everybody that was involved got very rich very quickly. Within a few weeks, I think six weeks, there was a hostile takeover of the company and I was out, which was a bit of a shock and a really interesting learning curve. Speaker 2:Okay. The world of business works quite differently from my thoughts about ethics and spirituality, [00:14:30] so that you left with enough money to do oh yeah. I, I, I, I left with a nice side of money and I'd built a sale Beta over the previous two years. So I took off sailing around Asia and there was a wonderful time. I ha I just had the best time that, and so I decided to try and tell the world how to adapt these technologies of nature, of these strategies of nature into the marketplace. But did they listen to you? You weren't an engineer by trade, [00:15:00] right? No, nobody listened. In fact, I was considered extremely fringe and eccentric. I designed a boat called the wild thing, which are much more efficient than a any boat in the world today, the best performing small craft in the world. And it won awards and you know, all sorts of articles and a great boat, extremely safe. Speaker 2:Third of the weight of anything else, like it, a lot less energy. But it was so different that the voting industry, which is extremely conservative, the boating industry rejected it [00:15:30] hands down, and yet the public really loved it. When I put it in boat shows at won first prize at boat shows and uh, you know, people that had never had boats before bought them. But it was such a struggle at the end. I sold the business, I moved on to other things. I thought, well, there's gotta be an easier thing to do. And I said, well, what about propellers? What if we made a better propeller? Nature's really good at propulsion. So I made a propeller based on a frozen whirlpool. Imagine you pull that plug from the bath and you've got that whirlpool. If [00:16:00] you could freeze it and rotate it, you're going to create the same flow patterns that nature does. Speaker 2:So I did that. I created this propeller and it worked really well. And then I thought, well I forgot to propeller. I've got a pump and a fan and a turbine. So it started adapting this approach to all those things and took them out to the marketplace, right to the uh, to the CEOs of 21 fortune 500 companies, got 17 interviews, did presentations, great reception. [00:16:30] People were very interested at the CEO level and they said, well, work with our engineers say we will pass down to the engineers. And the engineers really didn't know where to start because this was completely inside out thinking. And it was at a time where America is starting to lose its jobs to Asia. And so these engineers are all doing 60 hour days just trying to compete to keep their jobs and they didn't have the background in what I was doing. Speaker 2:So there was really no way to interface [00:17:00] effectively. So out of all those companies, not a single one actually took up the technology though we did get a few offers to buy all of the patents that we figured, well under these circumstances it's probably just going to get squashed or or left on the shelf because we were seen as competitive. So we walked away from that and then you know, we were running very short on funds so and a few friends and family. We're excited by what we are doing. So they helped us a little bit. Out of this came a [00:17:30] product that would get you on the map by cleaning water and cities you mixer, which was also based on this spiraling shape. Yeah, well once we had a propeller and a turbine and a fan and all that sort of thing, we had this frozen whirlpool and that's a very beautiful looking thing. Speaker 2:And the original one is six inches high, four in diameter. It's actually in the permanent collection of Moma in New York now. It's gorgeous, right? It's like something you might've picked from the garden and it works so well. And we [00:18:00] wondered, okay, well how are we going to earn some income from this? How are we going to pay for our staff, et Cetera. And we had a water engineer on staff. He helped us and he, he came to us one day and he said, well you know, the municipal water storage system has real problems with water quality because these great big tanks, you know, there might be 10 million gallon tank, you know, it's a football field, 30 feet deep, have the sun beating on them. So the water at the top heats up and the disinfectants that municipalities put into this water, the byproducts often [00:18:30] are nitrates, which are fertilizers. Speaker 2:So if you've got a warm water and nitrates, you get biological events, not good. So then municipalities have to tip in a whole lot more disinfectant and it's all stagnant. And the stagnant water cause this goes up and down cause the pipe that fills the tank is the same pipe that they draw the water out of the tank from. And it's right at the bottom. So there's no mixing going on. So, so he said, well, if we put in our little mixer and this tiny little thing we could, and what we do is turn it completely [00:19:00] into a ring vortex, which is almost frictionless. It's an amazing device. Nita uses them everywhere. The atmosphere, all the thermals that birds fly on the oceans are full of these. This room is full of them. So this is how nature mixes the tornado or a hurricane or actually the center spouts of a ring vortex. Speaker 2:So if you take this frozen whirlpool and rotate it in a tank or a pond or a lake, you're actually creating exactly the same thing. So there's tiny things, six inches high. We put it on the [00:19:30] little mentor and we ran it with 300 watts. And you imagine you put that in the middle of a football field, 30 feet deep. It's not gonna make any difference at all. Right? And they can have any effect. And yet it completely did the job. We went off to, um, to municipalities and they said, Oh yeah, sure. You know, show me. Yeah, you're smoking the wrong stuff. So eventually, um, the folks at redwood city kindly let us have tank to demonstrate. So we put it in the tank. It worked incredibly [00:20:00] well, which they verified. And we then set up a company around it, pax water. It was a tough sell to begin with, but now, um, we're in nearly 1300 of these installations in America, Australia and the Middle East. Speaker 2:So it's air raiding the water, it's decreasing the amount of chemicals in the water greatly decreasing the chemicals by about 85%. It certainly decreases the energy of any attempts that people might have had before to try and rectify the situation. [00:20:30] And it is 100% effective in 100% of applications. So that's, it's pretty cool. Yeah, and the company has the reputation for that now, so it's no longer difficult to sell. But anyway, their company's done well and now it's got another six. We're five products out there. So we're addressing all sorts of things to do with water. But you also have this other incredibly interesting product. You looked at some of the environmental stresses around the world, the air quality in Beijing, the air quality in places like Denver where the air is just sitting stagnantly this was working on. [00:21:00] It's very similar principle. If you think about it, the atmosphere is full of these. Speaker 2:When we see the birds circling Pelicans and the Congo was in, sorry, fourth cruising around and higher altitudes, they're cruising on these huge ring vortex, these big upwellings. What we've been able to demonstrate is that we can accelerate those upwellings in most of the cities in the world, even in the cleanest cities in the world, we're putting out a lot of gunk, the cleanest cities, typically a windy cities. It just means the gunks being [00:21:30] spread over our neighbors and we don't see it, but places like Beijing and Mexico City and Tehran and La and Denver have mountains near them, the form of basin, and what happens is certain times of the year, there's no air change in that base, and so it fills up with gunk and you end up with different densities of air as you go up in the atmosphere and the cold inversion layers. Speaker 2:We've all seen what Beijing looks like. It's shocking. What if you [00:22:00] could penetrate that inversion layer and break it? I create wind Craig, an updraft that actually goes through that and that's what every other city has and that's what New York has. That's what San Francisco, they have upwellings and then cross whims that distribute all that pollution. To me, this is not the ultimate fix. No, because that goes elsewhere. Yeah, I was still pollution, so we have to deal with the pollution, but in the short term you have this huge population of Beijing that has chronic [00:22:30] health problems. In fact, I think the consensus right now is that pollution is going to cause more deaths in Beijing than any other cause. Turn the short term we can, we believe and I think we've proven it well enough, break that inversion layer in Beijing and let the wind disperse their rubbish over other parts of the country and the ocean just like every other city in the world. Speaker 2:I have to emphasize again, that's not the long term solution. By us time [00:23:00] relieves these people. We're very confident that we can do something of use up yet in China. No it's got kind of in the, to the political morass at the moment. We've also been approached by people from Tehran. Well of course we can't trade with Iran. Um, that may change with these new new events that are happening. Cause Taran has got a huge problem. And the other thing is that we don't see this as, um, a way to pay our bills. This is more, you know, a humanitarian [00:23:30] thing, but we've put it out there and people know about it. So I thought it was pretty exciting. It is. I think so. And where it gets even more exciting. I think there's in many parts of the world, like the Middle East, around the Arabian Gulf or the Persian Gulf, depending on which side you live on, you get incredibly high temperatures and incredibly high humidity and no rain. Speaker 2:Can you affect that humidity and get it to passivity? Well, the way nature does it is with these upwellings and there are whole lots of ways to get that [00:24:00] rain to fall out because the Chinese right now do cloud seeding. A lot of countries do, but the Chinese have a whole squadron of their air force that does nothing but cloud seeding to cause rain and they use silver iodide. Now it works, but it's very expensive and they don't get a huge result from it, but they get enough to justify it. There are better ways to do it. Nature doesn't put silver or date up there. Nature causes precipitation. We think the same technology can absolutely make a difference in high humidity climate. Are there any other products [00:24:30] on the horizon that are, you're very excited? Oh yes. There's two in particular. One is that the fans, just the air moving fans, you use 22% of the world's electrical energy, computer server farms run by Google and apple and all these folks are using it, about two and a half percent of all of the nation's electrical energy and about 40% of that goes into cooling fans just to get rid of the heat from these silicon chips that are operating at very high temperatures. Speaker 2:We've taken the best fans in the world today [00:25:00] and applied the biomimicry approach in the state of California, funded this research and we took the two best fans in the world and one of them, we reduced the energy by 37% and the other one 47% now that's very significant. That's billions of dollars of energy a year just in the u s that can be saved. Refrigeration and air conditioning is about 30% of the world's electrical energy. Nature does refrigeration very well. Every hurricane, every tornado, every whirlpool [00:25:30] is actually a refrigerator. It's a heat engine, but if you could catch a hurricane, put it in a bottle and accelerate it to let's say twice the speed of three times the speed of sound you've got right there and incredibly powerful refrigeration system. And then that's what we've done. You've done that? Yes, in server farms and it's using somewhere around two thirds less energy than the best systems in the world today, but it's able to take these systems that are currently operating [00:26:00] around 80 degrees centigrade and take them and have them operate at 40 degrees centigrade and electronics always work much more efficiently as they get colder. Speaker 2:So this is, this is game changing. This is a very big deal. We need game changer. Is it going to be enough soon enough? We came to the conclusion a lot of years ago that it totally comes down in this modern world of ours to the bottom line. Companies are not altruistic. The shareholders want their pound of flesh and a board of directors [00:26:30] have one mandate to get the shareholder's money without hurting their companies, right? So what we have to do is prove that it affects the bottom line and that's what we've really focused on and we can show that over and over and over. So there's not a lot of appetite in big corporations to be highly inventive or take a lot of risk and smaller companies are not well capitalized and then have market share. Now refrigeration technology is phenomenal. We can show it to anybody. Speaker 2:We've got the prototypes, we've got the patent, we've got [00:27:00] eight patents on this. This is incredible game changing technology. There is no money. So how do you overcome that challenge? There has to be a new instrument. If you go to Europe, you can get all sorts of government grants. If you've got an idea, you can go and get 50,000 a hundred thousand dollars to build your prototypes and do some work with universities, et cetera. But there's no money to take it from there on. America's got plenty of companies here, you know, I mean there's a half a dozen I could list that could easily take this on and handle its development and marketing and we'd love to [00:27:30] support those companies to become world leaders in this new technology. But to get from where we are to those people wanting to take it on, there's the gap because it's great to have it in the laboratory that there's a development costs to get it to a manufactured item. Speaker 2:And the companies that are out there now are not making their money from doing that kind of transition and making their money from buying cheaply from China packaging it well and marketing has to be done tax concessions for companies to [00:28:00] pick up these kinds of technologies so government can drive, government can totally drive innovation, but in a politically contentious world, nobody wants to take a chance. We've had several grants, some of them, it costs us more to get the grant. Then the grant is worth, well we don't have time for [inaudible] so we have to get out of the political stuff. Is it going to take some kind of catastrophe or we're in catastrophe. President Obama has said he's devoting the rest of his presidency to climate change. All sorts of people standing [00:28:30] up now and saying, we have to do this. The pope fantastic. What a great thing that he would even take that on. Speaker 2:Right? While there are vested interests muddying the field and the heads in the sand, it's difficult for government to be really sensible and proactive with this. So then I think you have to turn to the people [inaudible] people [inaudible] investments, some something that's right. This refrigeration technology, one or $2 million would be sufficient to get through [00:29:00] that transition. I love that scene in the movie with you and Francesca and this hedge fund guys in there and he goes, you know, everything looks great, but you know, they have a real problem with a family [inaudible] we can't sell it. You know, if you, if you really look, you'll find the thing that really calls to you. It's gotta be in something that enthuses you, something that captures your imagination. So that's all I did. I just love being out in nature. [00:29:30] And if you devote yourself to that, even if you don't make a huge amount of money, and by the way, you, chances are you're going to have a richer life anyway by doing that because you're probably going to excel at it. Speaker 2:But even if you don't make a lot of money, you're going to have a wonderful life. So what, where do you want people to go to learn more about you, your company? If anybody's really interested in bio mimicry, ask nature.org is incredible resource and it's got really probably thousands of instances now of how nature is doing things that [00:30:00] we can learn from and adapt and a biomimicry 3.8 it's part of the same group as Janine Benyus as a group and then tack scientific. Francesca and I founded this and in 1997 so that they can reach you on that website. And that's right. That's great. Well, I really appreciate you being on the show. I could have talked all day the Speaker 1:stuff. I think it's incredible. So thanks again. Thank you. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Skepticule 101: British Humanist Association AGM, Richy Thompson, Jay Harman, Bob Churchill, Sneeze responses, Flow Hive, Love? TTPMO. Read more »

Some of the best minds on the planet are busy cataloguing possible solutions to the crisis of climate chaos. Scientists, entrepreneurs and educators on technology's cutting edge offer a broad array of bio-based solutions that are already working to transition us to a truly sustainable civilization. Biomimics Janine Benyus, Stephan Dewar, David Orr and Jay Hannan offer a smorgasbord of startling solutions based on nature's genius.

When designer Jay Harman comes home from a sailing expedition, he's got a head full of inventions which he spins into new products-- beautiful, efficient designs that mimic nature. He grew up in Australia and spent hours in the ocean watching the way fish move. He envied that ease and decided to copy those natural movements in his inventions. Produced by Mary Stucky.

A double feature this time around: William Wemyss shares his family's Scottish heritage with a line of single cask and blended malts named to describe what the whiskies inside taste like. We'll also start a two-part series looking at the growth of microdistillers in the U.S., featuring Jess Graber of Stranahan's Colorado Whiskey, Jay Harman of The Notch, and Brian Ellison of Death's Door Spirits.  In the news, Bruichladdich unleashes the Octomore peat monster and the X4 quadruple-distilled spirit on the world.