You can learn a lot about the future of energy from someone rebuilding an 1897 house with their own hands. Arash joins us from Rotterdam to talk about the fears, mistakes, and hard-won confidence that come with DIY electrical wiring, plumbing, and structural work and why that same “follow the logic” approach matters when we try to fix much bigger systems.

From there, we trace Arash’s path from jazz guitar to Silicon Valley during the dot-com rush, then into the energy industry after burnout pushed him to find more purposeful work. He shares the idea he calls “energy Buddhism,” a metaphor for a world where energy is flow, everything is connected, and nobody should be able to “own” what the sun provides for free. We also dig into incentives: why volume-based utility models stay stuck in the past, what a value-based model could look like, and why the phrase “flat fee energy” can change how you think about pricing, fairness, and sustainability.

We zoom out to nature for design lessons. Ecosystems don’t rely on a single silver-bullet solution; they build resilience through diversity, self-balancing feedback loops, and local adaptation. That leads straight into the Internet of Energy: distributed energy systems where solar, batteries, heat pumps, and thermal storage can coordinate at the edge, share locally, and use the grid as backup instead of default. Arash also explains how hackathons and open standards can turn this from a concept into real infrastructure, including rapid prototyping at music festivals as “pop-up cities.”

If you care about renewable energy, grid resilience, microgrids, climate solutions, and the future of the energy transition, this conversation will stretch your thinking and give you concrete mental models to keep. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves systems, and leave a review with your biggest question about local energy resilience.

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For over 20 years, behavioral scientist Dr. Ja-Naé Duane dedicated herself to one mission: Make life better for one billion people. This award-winning innovator and expert on global systems focuses on helping corporations, governments, and universities understand and develop systems of the future using emerging technology such as VR/AR, AI, and blockchain. Ja-Nae guides companies forward, helping them get out of their own way to create exponential innovation and future forecasting. She has had the pleasure of working with companies such as PWC, Saudi Aramco, Yum Brands, Samsonite, Natixis, AIG, and Deloitte. A top-rated speaker within the Singularity University community and the author of the bestseller, “The Startup Equation,” Ja-Nae at helping both startups and multinational firms identify new business models and pathways for global scale. Her next book SuperShifts is due out in April 2025.

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