The man who got Tetris out of the Soviet Union and onto the Game Boy is now building simulated Mars habitats on a Hawaiian volcano and pushing states toward 100 percent renewable energy. This episode follows the nonlinear career of Henk Rogers, born in Amsterdam in 1953, educated at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and transplanted to Japan after marrying his wife Akemi in 1977. There he produced The Black Onyx, Japan’s first major turn-based role-playing game, founded Bullet-Proof Software, and spotted a Russian puzzle game by Alexey Pajitnov that was perfect for handheld hardware.

Rogers flew to Moscow at the height of the Cold War to negotiate with the state software monopoly Elorg, speaking the language of long-term systemic value rather than aggressive legal maneuvering. The deal led to The Tetris Company, where he remains managing director, and a 2023 film starring Taron Egerton. The hosts then trace how he redirected that capital: founding the Blue Planet Foundation in 2007, leading the 2015 campaign for the first 100 percent renewable energy law in the United States, co-launching the Blue Startups accelerator, founding Blue Planet Energy to build grid-scale batteries, chairing PISCES, founding the International Moon Base Alliance, and developing the HI-SEAS analog habitat on Mauna Loa.

• Why constant relocation from Amsterdam to New York to Hawaii to Japan made Rogers a professional outsider who sees systems others miss
• How one negotiation with Soviet bureaucrats changed the trajectory of handheld gaming
• Why Hawaii’s isolated island grid makes it a high-stakes testing ground for clean energy policy and storage
• Lithium ferrous phosphate versus nickel manganese cobalt chemistry, cobalt mining, and the risk of thermal runaway
• How a 1,200-square-foot Mars simulation on a volcano connects directly to solving Earth’s energy problems