Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Hey, Ron Kaufman here from the home library.

I’d like to encourage you to listen to a podcast interview between Tim Ferris, author of the book ‘Four Hour Workweek’ and many others that came after, and the gentleman he interviewed twice in one year named Balaji Srinivasan.

Balaji has got four engineering degrees from Stanford University and in listening to this long interview, well, it got me thinking about something that I’d never thought about that way before. In particular, it was this. Electrical current and digital currency, like Crypto, share a word in current-currency. 

But what’s the connection or at what point even the convergence between the two? What Balaji pointed out was, if you have a location, let’s say, with an alternative energy source, which made me think about my wife’s hometown. Esperance, Australia, where they have a wind farm just outside the town. 

But in the middle of the night, they could be generating electrical current but there’s no demand because everybody’s asleep. So, what if that electrical current was used to do the mining that’s necessary to generate and then be able to store digital currency? Well then later on, in the middle of the day when there is peak demand, that digital currency could be converted back to electrical current by using it to purchase electricity from some other provider on the grid. 

Interesting. I’d never thought about that before. Now I have other clients, for example, in Materials Science, and they’ve told me for years about how important it is that we continue to progress in battery and transmission technology. There’s great research going on in that area or we’ve got a client in the chemicals field who talks about how clean and efficient hydrogen can be, but storing and transporting hydrogen is hard, so they convert it to ammonia and then they ship ammonia and then crack it back into hydrogen. Okay. There’s research going on there, too. But nobody, up until this particular podcast, had stimulated my thinking about this particular area.

Now, when I use the word “thinking”, I don’t just mean the casual sharing of opinions like, “You know what I think?”, or “Hey, what do you think?” I mean, genuinely exploring to hear voices you’ve never considered before. Intentionally immersing yourself in conversations where you don’t know where it’s going to go. 

This interview between Tim and Balaji is 4 hours and 18 minutes long, and I promise you it will go places you had not considered. So take a moment, or a long moment, and listen in. You can find it at Tim.Blog /B2.

Enjoy the conversation and enjoy the new thinking.