Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#82:
Using Excess Renewable Energy to Power Smarter, Smaller Data Centers — John Belizaire CEO of Soluna Computing
Chris Wedding:
John Belizaire, Co-founder and CEO of Soluna Computing, welcome to the show.
John Belizaire:
Thanks for having me, Chris, it's a pleasure to be here.
Chris Wedding:
Excellent. Well, we'd like to start off with some version of the elevator pitch, John. We get folks hooked on why they should keep listening, then we'll back up and talk about all sorts of mistakes we make. But yeah, what's the short and skinny of Soluna Computing?
John Belizaire:
Well, we are on a mission to make renewable energy a global superpower. We want it to be the dominant source of power on the planet because, hey, we like our planet and we want to continue to have it be livable. We are doing that or accomplishing that by solving a very big problem in the renewable energy industry that most people don't know. And that is that as more renewable energy is added to grids all around the world, more and more of that energy becomes wasted because grids were not designed for intermittent energy. They were designed to synchronize the energy production with the energy consumption.
And so, as a result, as you add more wind farms and solar farms and hydro plants to the grid, there's this mismatch between production and consumption because the production part is really managed by Mother Nature and she does what she wants and so you've got wasted energy as a problem. That wasted energy makes it harder for the grid to integrate those resources.
So, what Soluna does is, we go to existing plants and plants that are about to be built that may experience wasted energy. We build these flexible data centers right at the location where the plant is, usually next to it. We build it to a certain size such that the facility can absorb that wasted energy and convert it essentially to a global resource.
Inside of our data centers, we're not running your Netflix movie, so we won't stream your movie from that facility, but we'll run the machine learning model that determines what movie to show you next. In our facility, we'll run the AI or the search algorithm that's trying to find the molecule to help deal with COVID-19. We will secure the largest Bitcoin or crypto networks in the world through the machines in our facilities.
That sort of thing is the way to think about the type of computing that happens in our facility. It's all batchable, resilient to the loss of energy or the loss of the computing access. So, by building these flexible facilities, we integrate with renewables, solve the wasted energy problem and do what I like to say is help deliver clean, green low-cost energy at a local level and deliver more green sustainable computing on a global level.
Chris Wedding:
I have so many questions, John.
04:26
John Belizaire:
Indeed.
Chris Wedding:
Maybe just for the listeners, I think part of what you said early on, this problem is not well understood, you're defining curtailment, right?
John Belizaire:
Exactly, that's the technical term, yeah, for loss of energy.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, the grid can say, “Hey, look, I know the sun's shining, you got solar power electrons to pump into our grid, but we don't need them. We can't take them.”
John Belizaire:
We don't need them. Exactly.
Chris Wedding:
I know in some countries curtailment is worse than others. I think I've heard it being as bad as 30% in places like China. I'm sure that's changing. All right, so that's the problem, curtailment, a mismatch of production and consumption. I think many listeners have heard of the duck curve in California. If you don't know the duck curve, google it, lots of grass about a very big problem in California.
One response, of course, to this mistiming is battery storage. I wonder if you can talk about using excess solar and wind for green computing versus, or maybe versus is the wrong word to put there, but I'll just say it to be controversial. Versus, lithium-ion batteries or whatnot, what are your thoughts there?
John Belizaire:
My thoughts are that batteries will be one of many solutions that can be used to solve the grid's challenges as it evolves to become a more modern system for how we want to power our lives. When I talk to people, I mean, there aren't so much cocktail parties happening these days with COVID, but when I do get to one or two, usually like a birthday party for one of my kids or something, I'm talking to another parent, “What do you do?” Quintessential question and I explain it, and they're like, “Huh, can't you just store that energy?” And I say, “Yes, actually, you can store the energy.”
Batteries are a solution, but they're not yet scalable enough. Cost footprint is not yet there. It's come down a lot, but it's not at the level that you can build giant grid-scale batteries at a level that makes sense for what you're trying to do and batteries are also businesses.
So, the way they work is they don't just technically store the electrons and then put them back out. They actually also buy the power at a price that's low and try to sell the power at a price that's high. Well, when it's trying to sell the power at the price that's high, you're back to that mismatch problem where it's trying to inject the power where the grid may not need it. So, it may be trying to inject it when the price is very, very low or negative and actually the battery doesn't end up being very profitable. So, unless you can discharge continuously, it can't store the energy for very long these days because you don't have long duration batteries that can be built at scale. There are some challenges with the scale, but it will be a solution for the grid.
07:21
The other is, why don't you just move the power? Wind is blowing in Oklahoma, grid can't use it, send it to Atlanta, where they might be partying right now and they need some electrons. It takes a long time to build those transmission lines, years in fact.
And so, it's very difficult for them to address this issue in a near-term basis when a power plant is having lots of financial issues or unable to get the return to its investors.
Computing though, computing is available now. It's very scalable, infinitely scalable to be exact. Our demand for computing and our production of data and the need to process that data is an exponential technology at this point. It's an exponential problem and by using that counterintuitive way, essentially lateral thinking, take that problem, which is you've got computing, lots of need for power, bring it back to the power and integrate it back into the grid, not as a customer, but as a grid resource. That means you got to build a different type of data center, which we've done, and you've got all sorts of interesting problems you have to solve. That's how I would respond to, “Hey, what about batteries, John?”
Chris Wedding:
Well, I thought you might have a response. Got to have your birthday party conversation ready. We all have that.
John Belizaire:
Yeah, it's like birthday parties, graduation right now, that's the best we can do in this situation.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I hear you. All right, so just to follow on some of that. Yeah, you're right. Lithium ion-based batteries, their maximum discharge duration for maybe six hours, so that's cool. It meets a lot of needs, but not all the needs for sure. Long duration energy storage, which many of our listeners know about. Amazing levels of funding. Hooray, but not mainstream for a few years still.
John Belizaire:
Correct. Not bankable either, they're project financed.
Chris Wedding:
They’re what we call a FOAK, first-of-a-kind financing, a fun word that it sounds like another word starts with F. Similar frustrations you might say this sometimes.
John Belizaire:
I actually never heard that term before. I got to remember that.
Chris Wedding:
Oh, it's a great one. Yeah. First-of-a-kind.
John Belizaire:
Cool.
Chris Wedding:
I would direct listeners if they're curious about battery, well, economics or chemistries for certain use cases, the financial institution, Lazard produces these amazing levelized cost of storage reports each October or November, 40 or 50 pages. They're really great. So, I think for listeners who want to dig deeper into where storage is, and luckily the projected IRRs in those analysis are coming up.
You also raised a good point about transmission. “Oh, well, just move it across the country.” That sounds great, but our transmission lines are insufficient for sure and to build them, you got to get permission for folks who don't want that in their backyard. Right?
10:14
John Belizaire:
They do not. Yeah, especially if it's not coming to them, it's just passing over, it doesn't make sense. Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. I'll also mention, if there are listeners who are keen on addressing the transmission problem, one of the members in our Climate Mastermind at Entrepreneurs for Impact is TS Conductor. So, they've got 25 million bucks of funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, NextEra, National Grid to create next generation transmission lines. It's like 100-year-old technology finally being innovated.
John Belizaire:
Wow.
Chris Wedding:
Anyway, solutions are coming, but you all are a different solution, lateral thinking. I like that. I also want to point out to listeners, as you talked about what your green data centers can be used for, you were telling little stories. You're making it really tangible. I think it's easy to talk about data centers or many other topics and listeners are like, “Man, I understood the words that person said, but they didn't mean anything to me.” So, I think just for listeners, you did a good job of making it very clear. I mean, the one where you drop, you're like, “Who knows? Maybe our data centers are like figuring out the next atom or a solution to COVID,” boom. Right?
John Belizaire:
Yeah, exactly.
Chris Wedding:
Resonant, like real time, in my face, I like it.
John Belizaire:
Thank you.
Chris Wedding:
Let's go to one of those use cases, which is related to Bitcoin mining, or other cryptocurrency related solutions. I think you have nightmares about this or dreams, but you certainly have had this conversation a thousand times, which is, but wait a second, John, how can we be using power to mine Bitcoin, in parenthesis, what the hell is it, when it's the equivalent of X number of nations power consumption? So, it's a nuanced story. I think the audience kind of gets it, but just say more about that, if you will.
John Belizaire:
Yeah. So, if I double click on that parenthesis, what is it and why does it use so much power, you would get essentially two narratives depending on who double clicks it. I think that's part of the problem.
In the Bitcoin space, there are really two narratives. One is that this is a very interesting technology. Looks like it's taken some time for it to take hold. The blockchain element of it seems to have some very interesting potential in terms of reshaping the financial services industry and so forth, but it has this terrible side effect. It uses as much energy as Sweden. How can that be? That makes no sense.
12:53
Usually, the person or persons who are presenting that narrative really haven't done the work to understand the technology and what it's all about. And so, that's why the folks who have are more of the second narrative, which also happens to just be truthful. And that is that Bitcoin has incredible potential to reshape lots of industry, Bitcoin and the underlying technology. So, there’s the capital B Bitcoin, which is the protocol itself, and the small b bitcoin, which is the digital currency or asset that it manages. Both together have infinite possibilities in terms of transforming the world.
Today, this technology is approximately 13 years old. It has taken the internet about 20 years to reach the ubiquity that we all enjoy and take for granted today. The internet is actually quite boring and you don't talk about it very much, but Bitcoin is still very sexy and everybody wants to talk about it and have fights about it because we really don't understand its true ultimate potential yet.
Over 100 million people in places that are not the West rely on the technology today to store their wealth, to protect them from different sovereigns. The underlying technology has already created lots of derivative things that are reshaping everything from art to finance, to the way we look at commodities, et cetera. It also has the potential to catalyze the growth of renewable energy. I'd like to take the listeners through why that's true.
To understand that, you first have to understand, what is the energy for? What does it do exactly and why does it need so much of it? The reason is because Bitcoin fundamentally is a digital form of money that's distributed in nature. There's no central party that manages or controls it. It's completely code driven, so it's a technology solution. And being a technologist and a computer scientist by nature, I can tell you all out there listening that to create what Bitcoin has become and sister technologies like this, it had to solve lots of very complicated computer science problems that some of my professors told me was intractable, you can't solve it.
So, it's very possible that an alien invented Bitcoin because apparently humans don't have the ability to solve these problems. But someone did and it created this very, very powerful platform for managing transactions where trust is actually irrelevant.
Participants on the platform or the protocol, their job is to combine those transactions into, think of a sheet of paper for a second, there's transactions happening among all participants. They appear on the sheet of paper, the sheet of paper gets filled, the paper has to now be protected in a way such that it can never be tampered with. Then it gets added to a folder and that folder builds up a series of sheets of paper. Then that folder gets thicker and thicker and thicker over time. The sheets of paper are the blocks. The folder is the blockchain and the stamping and management of that whole process is the mining business of the protocol.
What they do is they're trying to solve for this very complex mathematical equation to seal those transactions in a way that cannot be tampered with. In order for you to tamper with it, you would have to perform the same computing calculations again for every block since the beginning of the blockchain, if you ever want to break the system. To do that, you have to expend so much computing power that you would have to use a tremendous amount of energy. It just doesn't make sense for you to do it. It's actually worth it to just join the club and just protect the network. So, it's designed to fundamentally create the behavior such that the commodity is protected by the fact that it requires energy to do so. And so, energy is what backs the asset. The energy consumption is a feature, not a bug. It's done on purpose to make it really hard to break the protocol.
17:21
Now, the other narrators, for example, when they say that it uses Sweden level energy, what they don't realize is that that energy peaks at some point. It doesn't just infinitely grow until it consumes all the energy in the universe. It peaks because the protocol itself is also dynamic based on the amount of computing that's on the network. It sets the amount of energy that's required to protect it. As more powerful computing comes on the network, it increases the amount of energy you need, which protects the network more.
And so, that's like the quick and dirty, if you will. I didn't want to use up the whole podcast going through my magic machine understanding of how the blockchain works, but that's the response. The energy in Bitcoin is there for a reason. It's not an accidental bug or an unfortunate side effect. It's actually by design for that purpose.
Now, here's the cool thing, Chris, because that's true, we can put these energy intensive computing applications right there at that wind farm, absorb that wasted energy, convert the security process to Bitcoin to a clean, sustainable process that can allow that transformation I've been talking about of financial services and beyond to happen and catalyze renewables becoming a superpower.
Chris Wedding:
So, it's a good visual on the folders and the sheets of paper in the folder and what the mining means to stamp it all and lock it in so many words. Can you give us an example of an installation, a project that the economics or the policy or the sun or the wind makes sense for a project to be built yet still curtailment is a real issue and therefore Soluna Computing solution belongs there?
John Belizaire:
Yep.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Maybe just a small case study.
John Belizaire:
Typically, what happens with renewable energy projects, we learned this ourselves, we came up with a solution by solving it for ourselves. We started out as a renewable energy developer building wind in Morocco. What happens is, you do a lot of study of the area. You put wind masts and you collect information, for example, or you do solar analysis and you determine that this is a good location to build a wind and solar project. You complete your analysis, you get investors, you fund it, you start building it, you construct it, it's running, it's spinning, the sun is shining on it and it's producing electrons.
Well, guess what? If you draw a map for all the really great places to put wind and solar in the world, I call it the Burger King and McDonald's problem, two companies that are focused on real estate optimization so they optimize and optimize to build their stores close to the direct population that they need to serve. They optimize so much that you end up with a Burger King and a McDonald's literally blocks away from each other.
Chris Wedding:
Right. Yeah.
20:24
John Belizaire:
The same thing happens in the renewable energy space where there's billions of dollars being put to work to build this type of infrastructure because there are incentives to do so and there's a push to decarbonize the grid. So, more and more projects show up in West Texas. They show up in parts of Australia. They show up in parts of Ireland. They show up in parts of upstate New York. They show up in parts of California such that that project that you modelled may not have had much curtailment, but suddenly there's lots and lots of projects trying to get their electrons onto the grid from the same location. There's lots of congestion and the grid operator has no choice, but to curtail those projects.
When you're doing that design, you don't really have a way to hedge for that. Like what do you do if you're going to get curtailed? There's no way to model that right now, but now, the more we've talked to infrastructure players and they've learned the simulation that we can do, now they think, “Huh, wait a minute, we should go back to all the projects we decided not to do because we're not going to go there. That's like way too many projects already there. Let's go find someplace else or do some other deal.” And actually, simulate back in and see if we actually would have done the project if we had a Soluna Computing facility attached to it.
It turns out a lot of the answers to that question is yes. Some of the infrastructure folks actually have more sophisticated processes where they project out and they have consultancies that go in and they can see that the pricing of power in a particular region will become compressed.
So, our solution actually offers a more future-proofing solution to their projects to some extent, because we have this physical hedging. We can sign a PPA with them that's built around this wasted energy and other types of structures, then they can build the project and always have this asset that can protect them when things get bad on the grid.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. So, I think part of what I heard there is curtailment. The other part I heard was, I think, that you all could pay them more per kilowatt hour than the grid can as more and more cheap, say solar wind is dumped on the grid in the most loving way--
John Belizaire:
Exactly.
Chris Wedding:
…at the same time, is that true?
John Belizaire:
That's right. The price starts out at a certain level and as you add more and more energy, the value of energy in that particular location goes down because there's abundance of it. Sometimes it can go negative where the power plant actually has to pay to send its power in and some do because there are other advantages to the project structure like tax equity and reduction in tax credits that they need to get.
So, we can come in and take a negative price to zero even, or to some single digits positive number by providing a price that offsets that that's very lucrative for them from a revenue perspective. If they could always be sure that they would have that, in fact, if they could go back and build a project with that baked in from day one, then they would actually never have to show a revenue curve to their LPs or the project owners that was going in the wrong direction.
23:59
So, that's the new and interesting opportunity around this technology. What if computing became part of the overall infrastructure equation and it was always there? For us, that's the nirvana because now you can go build renewables where you could never build them before in parts of Africa where people are suffering from basically energy and light poverty, essentially.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, energy poverty, for sure. Energy access issues.
John Belizaire:
Exactly. It's just we enjoy, over here in the West, consistent. When we turn the toaster on, the coffee machine, it's great until it's not like what Texas folks experienced a couple years ago. But lots of other places, they see that every day and sustainable energy could be a solution to that, but you don't have a way to bring in capital, where you can monetize it with the computing until it reaches a point where it can inject the power to the grid.
When the grid gets there, support the economy advancing and then feed itself and just start to grow from there. That's what we would like to see happen and we would like to see the industrialized economies become more green powered. This is a solution for doing that. It's one of many, but it's a novel solution.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Well, I think in this example of, hey, we could allow for more money per renewable energy electron, I think listeners are perking up all of a sudden, are perking up [inaudible – 00:25:25] there perhaps.
John Belizaire:
Yeah, that's right.
Chris Wedding:
I think in your developing country example there, what I think I hear is, if you can build a large wind or solar farm and have computing as part of the revenue, it starts to make it possible to provide some of that power to those who don't have any power. Whereas without computing, harder to get it financed, right?
John Belizaire:
Yeah, so for a project to work, to pencil out, it's got to be able to sell all of its energy, especially in a developing country where you no longer have the luxury of getting a rated PPAs with the government, to some extent, you've got to build a self-sustaining business. But what if you came in with your own revenue source embedded in the project and then you sold a portion of that energy to the grid?
Let's say you have a site that can generate 100 megawatts, the economy or that particular grid system may not need 100 megawatts right now. They're just not big enough because these are small economies, but they need power to get bigger. That's the chicken and egg. So, if you can build a site that has this revenue capability attached to it, now you have 50 megawatts source, you can put 50 megawatts on the grid, that's great because now the grid has 50 megawatts of sustained energy at a really reasonable price because they've got this offtake and then it feeds on itself. That energy allows the economy to grow and then it needs more and more energy, more projects can build, and then energy poverty starts to sunset in that particular location.
27:00
There's lots of countries on the continent that have incredible, I'm talking about some of the best renewable energy resources in the world, but there's no way to monetize them because they can't get the capital to come in. It's risky in some other ways, but from a financial perspective and technical perspective, this is a way for them to mitigate that risk.
Chris Wedding:
Cool. I mean, I think for listeners that are keen to get involved in the energy access challenge, a billion or so folks lacking access to any power, probably a couple of billion lacking access to reliable power, there's an interview I did with Kristina at Power for All in an earlier episode, I'll just encourage listeners to check that out. They're tip of the spear for dozens of organizations working overseas on this problem.
Okay, so John, let's go to one more question on the business and then we'll switch to the personal side. So, on the business, a frequent question is, how have you funded growth? What's you-all’s strategy or path now versus looking forwards?
John Belizaire:
Sure, so we're a public company and we fund growth in two ways. We raise money at the public company level, so we have a parent company, Soluna Holdings, that trades on the NASDAQ. We raise capital through the sale of our stock with two classes, a preferred stock and common stock, and that capital is used to build facilities within different projects. Each project is its own company and that allows us to bring money in a second way, which is at the project level.
So, within those projects, we allow infrastructure, equity, private equity, and debt, both in the form of infrastructure or machine debt to come into those SPVs to finance the construction of the project. Then those investors enjoy a return on their capital and then the excess return we share with them essentially, and that flows all the way up through the whole enterprise. That's how we scale the business and finance it. We've raised over $100 million doing this so far and we hope to raise a lot more.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, hear, hear. I think for listeners, where there is some infrastructure or third-party financing possibility, the freedom, the flexibility to have funding potential at the corporate level and funding potential at the project level, it opens up lots of doors for what's possible. Risk sharing, clarity in terms of revenue and off takers and all the rest.
John Belizaire:
That's right.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, cool. Let's switch over to John. So, as we joked before pressing record, you're a real slacker. That is, of course, a joke. Along the path here, John, what are maybe a couple of keys to your success to finding slash creating roles of leadership and impact? What are a couple that come to mind?
John Belizaire:
Keys to my success. Well, I think the first one seems to be that I pick a really, really hard problem to solve. If I look back at the 20 plus years I've been an entrepreneur and a CEO, I'm usually building companies where there's a problem that has yet to be unsolved, but it's a very gnarly problem. It's not just like, okay, you build a new type of chair because people have back pain and you want to them to have less back pain. Mine tend to be, you've got to go in and not only solve a problem for a particular industry, but you've got to bring a solution that normally doesn't seem at place in that industry.
30:54
By way of example, I brought digitization and workflow solutions to the insurance industry, which you would think they would already have that stuff, but they don't have it. It just didn't seem at place for them until recently where insurance and transaction has become a very B to C focused activity and you need to be able to have those technologies.
Soluna is another one of those examples where renewable energy only is limited to certain classes of technology. Infrastructure has a very clear color to it in bringing a new innovative approach to a very large problem, which is very hard to do because it's a consistent or continuous education or missionary selling process and I tend to be attracted to those. It's a skill set that I've built over time.
The other is building teams. I have been fortunate in my first few companies to work with the same team continuously. We know how each other think, and we're able to attack the problem and carve out the work appropriately. Soluna is the first time I didn’t work with that same team. I've been able to build a new team that is equally capable and incredibly passionate about what we're doing and getting that team to hum, make sure everybody's passionate and lead the team.
I believe that leadership has three elements. You've got to set direction. We want to make renewable energy a superpower. You've got to be able to coach people and really help them to understand what it is that leadership is about and help them to work through some of the growth and personal things that they need to deal with as, not just individual contributors, but managers and leaders in the company.
Then the last and probably most important thing is removing obstacles. My job is to go in, my team is stuck, what can I do? What's the obstacle for you? How can I remove that obstacle so that you can go be successful? Those are some of the things that come to mind that have been keys to my success.
Chris Wedding:
I like those, John. I wrote down two things as you're talking. One is, the last mile is the least crowded. Right?
John Belizaire:
It is.
Chris Wedding:
You've heard it before, for listeners that can't see your face beaming with a smile because you know it, you feel it in your bones, I think.
John Belizaire:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
So, I think it's a good reminder to listeners that there of course are risks and challenges to picking hard problems, but it may mean you have less competition. It also may mean you excite and get the attention of investors who haven't seen 10 other pitch decks just like this in the last week.
33:38
John Belizaire:
Right. Exactly.
Chris Wedding:
The second I wrote down was on the coaching piece you mentioned around teams. I was just recommending this book to the CEO peer groups that I run, it's called The Coaching Habit, which is a mainstay yes, in coaching, but really it's for managers. Managers need to coach their teams to reach their full potential. And, so much of it is built around asking questions, right?
John Belizaire:
Right.
Chris Wedding:
I think so often the expectation is, well, wait a second, the CEO or the managers, they should have the answers and preach the answers. It's like, well, kind of, but you learn a lot by asking questions, maybe gasp things you didn't know. Anyway.
John Belizaire:
Yeah, exactly.
Chris Wedding:
The Coaching Habit, a good resource for folks listening. How about daily tricks or routines or even the weekly that keep you healthy, sane, focused, productive, et cetera?
John Belizaire:
Well, I'll share one that I've been doing mostly consistently, everything is a process, that's been very helpful for me. It's journaling essentially. Every morning, I write down three things or three buckets. There's a rose and rose is something you're grateful for, something that's a positive that's happening that you're happy about, you're excited about.
There's a thorn and that is something that's really challenging that you're dealing with right now. Something you didn't like that happened recently and you need to work through it so you can diffuse that energy. Then there's a bud. A bud is something you're looking forward to, something you're excited about, something that really inspires you today.
I try to do the rose, thorn, bud just about every morning before I start the day. It's a good way for me to collect my thoughts in silence, again, process some of those things that seem to be nagging me.
The CEO role is actually a very lonely role for those of you who are out there who understand what I'm saying and sometimes having peer groups, and I'm glad that you're running one that's so powerful for helping with that because then you get to realize that I'm not the only one that wants to cry right now.
Chris Wedding:
Validation, baby. Yeah.
John Belizaire:
One of the things I’ve learnt is a lot of your battles are with yourself, those voices in your head and the more you can get them out of your head and just on paper, it helps you to process them. Not judge them so much and just kind of let them free. You talked about meditation, I've been doing that as well. So, I do meditation every night and it's helped me to be more patient and see each step of the journey as just part of the journey. It could be good or bad, it's just part of the journey.
36:30
In the short run, you see little dots and stops along the journey and some of them are up and down, but in the long run, it's just like one smooth line. That's fundamentally that perspective you want to get to. These habits help me to do that.
Chris Wedding:
The journaling you mentioned, the phrase brain dump comes to mind. Where it’s I don't want them just in my brain bouncing around. I want them a little external. Just get them on a piece of paper. I don't do it enough, but I bought these very nice journals recently, big leather, these beautiful cases. I was like, well, I guess if I have a stack, I'm going to use them now. But yeah, I think just getting a little distance between what's in your head and what's on paper can allow for a more proactive response versus a reactive response, which ties in nicely with the meditation practice as well.
John Belizaire:
Yeah, I also find that the analog process, anything that's not on a computer or a phone, your brain and psyche just respond to it differently. It's much more creative, more open. You're just in a different mood when you're dealing with a clean sheet of paper, beautifully leather bound than typing on a keyboard. It's interesting.
Chris Wedding:
It's true. Well, and the state you're in. If you journal on a Google Doc, which I've tried before, then you're in work mode, right?
John Belizaire:
Yeah, exactly.
Chris Wedding:
You might have tabs open, et cetera, but your body is telling you, “When I'm in this position, I'm in this chair, I'm supposed to be staring at a screen and working,” quote unquote, but if it's analog, as you say, it's a good point. It's like, no, wait a second. I’ve got this weird device in my hand, a pen. I'm touching this dead tree, this paper here. Maybe I'm in a different chair, that state chain I think helps a little bit as well.
John Belizaire:
Yeah, it does. It does very much.
Chris Wedding:
All right, maybe one last one here, John. Tell us a couple of books or podcasts. What do you fill your brain or heart with to be the best leader in this space?
John Belizaire:
I do read a lot. I read books about failure. I read biographies about interesting leaders. The older, the better because they help me to put things in perspective. I do read about mental models. I have found that the process of being a leader really is about a series of decisions that you have to make all the time. And the more you can create a set of tools and systems for you to slow down your thinking and decision-making to make it less gut to some extent. Sometimes gut plays a role, that's a variable, but making it more systemized so you can pattern match on problems, I think it's really good. So, I spend a lot of time reading and understanding different models. I have found that to be very helpful for me.
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I read fiction because storytelling is such a super important part of being a leader and introducing new innovation to the world, you have to be a really good storyteller. So, reading good stories and good storytelling is super important. I try to also listen to podcasts. I listen to podcasts that are talking to some of these entrepreneurial leaders live. I listen to podcasts that talk about the psychology of humans. Human psychology is such an important thing. We have so many biases and understanding those biases is really, really important.
Then every year I collect those readings and then I write a little book list and book review, happy to send those out to you to drop in the show notes. I usually start with like my favorite book of the year, so last year was Greenlights, the memoir written. Oh my God, why can't I remember his name?
Chris Wedding:
Matthew McConaughey.
John Belizaire:
Yeah, Matthew McConaughey. That I found was fantastic. I just reached age 50 and I was thinking about my life up to now and he had the benefit of journaling for over 35 years, incredible amount of discipline to do that. By looking back at his life, what he realized was that every step of the way he was getting green or red lights, sometimes red lights were not bad. They were just sending you in a different direction on the road of life. Reading that was a very spiritual experience for me. And so, that's one of many that I read last year.
Another one was on intelligence that really talks about how the brain works and the cortex and how the brain actually processes information and converts it into form and variant forms so you can see things. It's funny, ever since I read that book, I see the world completely differently. It's very mind opening and bending.
It was written by the creator of Handspring and the Palm. He started those companies to have enough money so he can go do what he really wanted to do, which was to study the brain. He believes that AI is not going to kill us because it is not really based on how the brain actually works. And so, he talks about how it actually works in that book. Now he's got a second series that came out.
I'm reading one now, The Exponential Age, which is talking about what exponential technology looks like and how poor we are at understanding large numbers and how quickly technology can just creep up on you. To my point earlier about how quickly Bitcoin can just become a ubiquitous technology and just creeped up on you, it's crazy. So, there's many, many, many of those that I can share, but if you just go to my personal blog, I try to keep a list of them so folks can enjoy them on their own.
Chris Wedding:
That's fantastic. Okay. Again, some notes here and then we'll wrap here. You mentioned reading biographies. I know a lot of our CEO peer group members mentioned the benefit of reading biographies and partly it's just what you said, it's putting things into perspective.
John Belizaire:
It is, yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Where sometimes you feel like, “Man, this is the biggest problem that anybody could have faced.” You don't say it out loud, but you feel it in your gut. When you read biographies, you're like, “Whoa, now that was a big problem. Oh my gosh.” So, that's helpful. Mental models, these shortcuts for how we pattern recognize and make decisions.
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In my newsletter today, I was talking about Occam's razor and I said, “Hey, you want to sound smart at the next dinner party? Just mission the words, Occam's razor.” But it is, it's a beautiful thing. It's like the thing with the fewest assumptions or the simplest is often the right answer. I'm like, well, no, wait a second. We need some like PhD analysis, spreadsheet building. No. This is my wife talking, “Honey, this is where we're staying at Bryce Canyon. The answer is done.” I said, “But what about--” “Honey.” Occam’s razor in action.
John Belizaire:
Often the simplest explanation is the best. Exactly.
Chris Wedding:
I just finished Greenlights myself. I did the audio version with Matthew McConaughey reading it, which was extra entertaining. For me, it was like, man, I got to get riskier, live more fully. Anyway, it was pretty inspiring.
John Belizaire:
That's right.
Chris Wedding:
All right, John, we can talk for a long time here. We're going to call it a show for now. Any final words, who you want to hear from or advice or whatnot, then we'll sign off?
John Belizaire:
Yeah, absolutely. If folks want to learn more about Soluna, please go to our website, solunacomputing.com. We're also on all the social platforms. Folks that I would love to hear from are folks who are in the data center business right now and just heard this and are fascinated by what we're doing and maybe can help us shape the phase two part of our business as we look at doing more than just crypto in our facilities and supporting some of these newer applications. We'd love to hear from you.
If you own a power plant or invest in power plants, we'd love to hear from you because we're solving a big problem for that industry. And I think the last piece is, young people who are in university, who are trying to figure out where to go next, this is just an incredible time to be helping and doing something that is incredibly positive for the world and that is helping us to transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy. This is the right time to jump in. There's just so much going on, so many incredible teams at work. We're one of them. There are many out there. Just like jump in because this is one of those rides that it's a once in a lifetime experience.
Chris Wedding:
You want to be on it. Yeah. You want to be on this ride. Hey, John, great stuff. Enjoyed talking. We're rooting for you-all’s success. The world needs it. Talk to you soon.
John Belizaire:
Thank you so much. Thanks Chris.
Chris Wedding:
Thank you so much for listening. Seriously, the world needs you, and I know your time is super valuable. If you want more content like this, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter at entrepreneursforimpact.com. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I read every single one, I promise. These reviews are the number one way to draw more attention to the world-changing climate CEOs and investors that I am lucky enough to be interviewing on the show. And each month I pick one listener review for a one-on-one brainstorming call with me. Who knows what can come of those?
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