327: Can Solar Really Power the Future? Breaking Myths and Building the Next Energy Revolution with Scott Wharton, Tandem PV CEO
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Let me give you just a couple of facts for the listeners to wrap their heads around it. So solar has actually become 90% cheaper in the last 10 years, 90%. So of course, there was a lot of discussion about solar not being economically viable, not working. But today, it's the cheapest source of energy in the world, in the United States. But that's happened in a relatively short period of time. In parallel, batteries are now 70% cheaper.

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're listening. Welcome to AI and the Future of Work. I'm your host, Dan Turchin, CEO of PeopleRain, the AI platform for IT and HR employee service. Our community is growing. We recently surpassed the million listener mark. I get asked all the time how you can meet each other. Well, sign up for our newsletter. We launched it six months ago or so.

We share clips that don't quite make it into the weekly episodes and some additional fun facts. Join us there. There'll be a link in the show notes. If you like what we do, of course, please tell a friend and give us a like and a rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. It helps more listeners find us.

and enjoy these conversations. If you leave a comment, I just may share it in an upcoming episode like this one from Davida in Sun Valley, Idaho, who is a retired investment banker.

Davida's favorite episode is the excellent discussion with Eric Olson, also one of my favorites, consensus CEO, about how AI can be used to provide fact-based impartial answers to scientific questions where there's conflicting and sometimes dangerous information online. That was from the early days of LLMs, a great one from the archives. We learned from AI thought leaders weekly on this show. Of course, the added bonus, you get one AI fun fact each week.

Today's fun fact, Spencer Kimball writes at CNBC.com that data centers powering artificial intelligence could use more electricity than entire cities.

In it, he says the advent of AI makes finding enough power to drive them and produce enough sustainable land to house them increasingly difficult. The facilities could increasingly demand a gigawatt or more of power, or about twice the residential electricity consumption of the Pittsburgh area from 2024. Renewable energy alone may not be sufficient to meet power needs. Natural gas will have to play a role.

which could slow progress toward meeting carbon dioxide emissions targets. We'll put a pin in that one. Very relevant to today's conversation. My commentary, demand for power will only increase unless we find ways to dramatically reduce the runtime cost of AI inferences. China's deep seek, as we now all know, shows promising gains.

That new AI training architectures just may lead to these kinds of breakthroughs given the conflicting consumer appetite for power hungry technology, the economic interests of legacy non-renewable power producers, and the desire of some to mitigate the impact of global climate change. We need more thoughtful dialogue now about where we can innovate,

what we're willing to spend, and perhaps most importantly, what compromises we're willing to make. A great segue to today's conversation. Scott Wharton is an entrepreneur, a world traveler, and CEO who had a major impact on how businesses use consumer tech for productivity and collaboration during his eight-year tenure as a general manager at Logitech.

He has since become the CEO of Tandem PV, where he's shaking up the solar industry with solar cells that are about a third more efficient than what's on the market today. Previously, Scott was the CEO of VidTel, which was acquired by Fidelity Investments in 2013.

I know Scott as the much-loved leader of an amazing organization at Logitech, and also as a friend, more importantly. Although that team misses him at Logitech, I'm glad he's changing the world of energy production. Scott's a big thinker, a risk taker, and a great leader, the kind that we celebrate every week on this podcast. Scott received his MBA from Yale, go Bulldogs, and his undergrad from Binghamton, go Bearcats.

And without further ado, Scott, it's my pleasure to welcome you to AI and the Future of Work. Let's get started by having you share a bit more about that illustrious background and how you got into the space.

I would say I'm a serial entrepreneur and I've done, I would say it's my fifth startup scale up in a row. So how it relates to solar is that early in business school when most of my colleagues were really trying to get rich in investment banking consulting. When I wrote my essays to get into school, I talked about renewable energy back in the 90s.

And I did my summer internship at the Solar Energy Industry Association, which is a very weird and different path. And I fell in love with solar at the time, but it was just too early in the life cycle of the industry. So I was kind of depressed thinking about what else can I do if I can't do solar? And I'm like, well, there's this Internet thing.

Maybe I'll try that out. And I ended up doing two early stage startups in the voice of IP space. Both of them went public. The second company got sold to Cisco for $2 billion. And then I did the first cloud video conferencing service called VidTel, as you mentioned, three years before Zoom. So I think I had the right idea, but a little early. And then after three startups in a row, my wife said, would you mind not going to another startup anymore? Spend some time with me and the kids. So that's when I ended up going to Logitech.

to an internal startup and Bracken Darrell, who was the CEO, I'm really grateful that he took a chance on me to be able to

go into a larger company. And I was able to take it from small scale, $62 million to over a billion dollars a year. And we became the market leader in video conferencing hardware with Zoom, Microsoft, Google. So there were a lot of people, again, who said, you can't succeed at a big company because you've never done it. You've only done a startup. To people saying, you can't beat the incumbents. I was fortunate to work with Prakash, who you had on the show a few weeks ago. We literally started on the same day and rose through the ranks together. And then about two years ago,

I was at a conference that I just came back from in Europe, in Germany and I met one of the investors of this company Tandem PV. And I found out that they had this breakthrough solar technology which we can talk about with an amazing team of founders which both had their PhDs from Stanford and 50 years experience in solar and they were doing amazing work but nobody really knew about them because they were in the labs.

building science. I basically came in 18 months ago to help the company transition from being a pure R&D shop to commercialization. And so far, we're on our way. And I'd love to talk about how we can take this new technology to revolutionize solar and fix climate change. We met for coffee a few weeks back, and I came armed with all of the reasons why I don't think solar is viable as a source for powering AI workloads and a lot of things that I talked about in the intro.

And, gosh, you were prepared. And I came away just really shocked by my solar illiteracy, but also how dated my knowledge was about how far that technology, renewable technology, can go. Give our audience the pitch. Why is solar more viable than I've realized?

I think part of what's happened is that the world has changed so much, even in the last two, three years for solar, that people's minds haven't really had time to catch up on it. One of the observations, I just was fortunate enough to come back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, my fourth year in a row. And even there, I think there's just a lot of lack of knowledge from people who are leading in the climate space. So let me give you just a couple of facts for the listeners to wrap their heads around it. So solar has actually become 90% cheaper in the last 10 years.

So of course there was a lot of discussion about solar not being economically viable, not working. But today it's the cheapest source of energy in the world.

in the United States, but that's happened in a relatively short period of time. In parallel, batteries are now 70% cheaper. I think we inherently know that from our phones and our cars and other things, and we'll get back to that. But the two of them are actually working in concert where you have solar to capture the sun when it's shining and batteries to power the world and data centers and other things when it's not shining. And those two things I want to talk about, but I think they're poised to completely take over the energy space where I'll say something radical.

In 10 years from now, it might be the only energy source that we need. Well, let's hold that thought. So a couple other facts on solar, besides it being the cheapest. Last year in the United States, 80% of our new energy in 2024 came from solar and batteries. And then it was another 13% in wind. And then of all the other things that we talk about that were going to be big, nuclear, gas, coal, geothermal, it was about 7%.

So we're already very rapidly moving towards solar and we're not doing it because of necessarily public policy. We're just doing it cuz it's cheaper and better. Now I looked that up in China cuz they are this the US, it was the IRA. China is not as regulated. What are they doing there? It's the same ratio, 80% with solar and batteries and very little on these other things. So you can't just say it's a regulatory or arbitrage thing. And in China last year,

They rolled out 300 gigawatts of solar. Now, to put that in perspective, that is more than the last 68 years in the United States rolled out in solar. It also means that China was projecting that they'll be hitting their emissions peak in 2030, but they actually hit it in 2024.

So it's really good news that they're ahead of schedule for lowering their carbon emissions since China is about a third of the emissions worldwide. And I think what we're doing and even without what we're doing, solar inevitably and batteries are gonna get better and cheaper and other sources like gas and coal, they're not getting any cheaper. In fact, they've been about the same price they've been for the last 100 years.

So if you look at the exponential increase in solar wind, it's already the best source. It's already the cheapest source. And probably in 10, 15 years from now, it will be the only source because it's going to be so cheap, nothing will be able to compete with it. I referenced Tandem PV getting yields that are about a third higher than what's in the market. You're talking to a nerdy audience.

Give us a chemistry lesson. So perovskite solar versus alternatives. And what's the thesis behind why the perovskite chemistry could lead to the kind of yields that are going to be required to make it economically feasible?

Yeah, so one of the things that's exciting about Tandem PV is that we're not using the traditional silicon technology. It's a completely new material science called perovskites. Perovskites are something that Dr. Perovsky found a couple hundred years ago in the Ural Mountains. And it's a very common form of crystal structure. As an example, if you drilled 400 miles or 600 kilometers into the Earth's crust, 93% of it is perovskites.

Which is kind of astounding, right? Now, we're not mining for it or anything. It's basically we're taking this a bunch of chemicals and we're mixing in the lab and we're adding in our own secret sauce. And we basically create an ink that we put down on a piece of glass. Now, that ink uses off the shelf materials. It's 200 times thinner than traditional silicon panels. It uses only about 10 percent of the energy.

to make it, no rare earth metals or minerals. So it's kind of a miracle semiconductor. And part of what we do is we take this perovskite layer,

And then we take some off-the-shelf silicon cells and we combine them into a solar panel sandwich. That's why the company is called Tandem, because they're creating a tandem solar panel. And the combination of two allows us to have both much higher efficiencies at a lower cost. So for example, we're already at 28% efficiency today. So basically, for every 28 beams of light, sorry, 100 beams of light that hit, we can capture 28 of them. The traditional silicon panels today are only about 21%.

So we're already a third more efficient at capturing solar energy, and we're going to break 30% this year. Now, perovskites have so much potential they can get into the mid-face, where silicon has a physical limit of about 26%.

So we're already better than than silicon will ever be. And because of these physics advantages and economics advantages, one of the leading market research analysts, Rethink Energy said that by 2040, 90% of all solar panels or more will be perovskites. So clearly the people in the industry say we're looking for work in the future because of all the things I just said. And part of what's held back perovskites is that you need a combination of high efficiency,

durability to last decades and be able to make it big enough to be manufactured. And we've kind of cracked the code on that to be able to do all three things at once, which is why we now have funding to build the first commercial factory in the United States and get the flywheel going where we'll build. We have an RD factory. We're building a small factory. And then the next one will be Elon gigascale and where we can start making a pretty big impact on climate. So good news is that perovskite is abundant.

in the core of the earth. It is non-renewable. So I hear a lot of concern about drill, baby, drill. We want to drill for perovskite. Talk me through

the economics, the extraction process, what do we know about drilling for perovskite? So there's no drilling or extraction. I made the analogy of that it's in the earth as a common element, but basically we're just making this in our lab in California, in Silicon Valley. So there is no drilling and there are no limitations really on the types of materials. There are concerns about lithium or other things on batteries. We're not using any rare metals or minerals in our formulation. So it's very abundant, it's cheap,

In fact, for our product, the most expensive part of our product is the glass, which we'll work on reducing that too. So it's abundant and cheap and uses less energy. We can make it in the United States. So today, more than 95% of solar technology comes from China. So it allows us to both take it back from China to the US. The other thing I think is interesting about this is that if you think about probably a lot of model listers know about the idea of total cost of ownership. And today, the panel actually for utility scale deployments, which is what we're doing, solar farms,

Only 20% of the cost is the panel.

So 80% of the cost is the land, the labor, the installation. So if you think about it from an AI data center point of view, most of the data centers are not just in the middle of the desert in Arizona. They're near population centers like Virginia and Washington and California. So part of our value is not only in a cheaper panel, but also saving where most of the costs are for solar deployment, labor, land, and installation. And if you think about where that's going, the panel is going to get cheaper. And as we all know, labor and land always go the opposite way.

So we're really affecting more and more of what makes solar cost money by lowering those costs by having to be a third or 40% more dense. So think about it, instead of needing 15 panels that you install, you may need only 10. So that could save you on all those things in labor land, the balance of systems, of electronics, which will drive down the cost of the overall deployment for solar even more. Which is why when I talk to a lot of people in data centers,

They're particularly attracted to this not only being a green source of power, but making it cheaper overall for the total cost, not just for the panel itself. So you're solving the solar cell problem.

I get it. But aren't you constrained by the storage, the battery problem? So I think it's kind of what we talked about earlier is that if you think about solar, storage is like the peanut butter to their chocolate. And the cheaper that solar gets, the more attractive storage gets and vice versa. So both of them, I think as listeners know, they're both getting cheaper. And part of what I think is happening and will happen is that a couple of things. One is solar gets cheaper.

you want to store more of it. So you get more batteries. Batteries get cheaper, it makes solar more attractive. And the other thing that's happening in the solar and the storage situation batteries is that we're used to having these lithium batteries that maybe go four to eight hours, but they're both getting longer in duration. So instead of four hours, you go eight hours or longer. Some of them are having more longer durations, so you can use a different type of chemistry in the batteries instead of having it be very small

for a car or an iPhone. You can make them a little bigger. And there are new solutions coming out now that allow you to store it for weeks or months. So there's a lot of new breakthroughs in the technology that not only allow you to have it be cheaper and even more attractive from an economics point of view, but more attractive from a storage point of view. And all this is happening in the coming years, which is why I think if you look at this idea that solar won't work, the reality is

We still have nuclear and gas and coal as our baseline. So that's not going away necessarily unless we start shutting some of that down, but we don't have to. And as solar and batteries get cheaper, you'll run the solar during the day and then you'll just have massive storage that will allow you to do it either within the day or the month or the season. That's one thing. And then the other thing, as AI becomes more prevalent,

people assume that our behavior is fixed. So today we have this idea of, all right, I'm going to charge my car at night, as an example. But what if solar is much cheaper during the day? You can incent behavior and AI, say, charge your car during the day or run your dishwasher at the day during night. So I think there are a bunch of things that we do through software and pricing and incentives that can allow to even that out to take advantage of the fact that we have more electricity during the day. So I think

All these things are happening at the same time and they're not only compounding, but they're reinforcing each other. Even there was an article in The Economist recently, they said that solar will overtake all power sources combined in the near future. And I think it's for all the reasons that I said, technology improvements, but fundamentally it's just better economics. You're talking offline and I thought I stumped the panel when I said all the biggest data centers are built in cool places.

Because the data centers, the machines run hot and get natural cooling. And presumably those are places where there's less solar energy. But I'm wrong. As usual, I'm wrong. Just talk me through why that contradiction is valid. Well, I think there's also a lot of myths around this. So here's one myth. The sun doesn't work when it's cloudy.

It's not true. It works less. But just to give you a perspective, of course the sun works because if it didn't work, then all of our plants would die. So as a stat, if you compare California to London, London gets about 60% of the sunlight that California does.

Now, California gets more, of course, and it's better. But even in cloudy places like Germany and London and Vermont and Washington, there's plenty of sun. It's just not as much. So one of the things you can do is you can over-provision solar panels. And people go, why would I over-provision panels? And I go, look at your phone. Take your phone out of your pocket. There's a processor in there.

You've over provisioned the processor. It's not working right now. It's wasting processor. Aren't you afraid of it? And they're like, no, of course not. That's ridiculous. The same thing will happen with solar. It'll get so cheap that you will over provision it. So sometimes, yeah, it won't be working 100% efficiently. Who cares?

It's all about economics and the same trend that processes follow where a lot of it is wasted and not used or your cars are wasted and not used. You'll have a lower utilization, but still better economics. So you said something that was brain-breaking a little while ago, which is that soon we'll be able to power or supply the majority of Earth's power needs with solar. And it goes against everything that I thought I knew. When you say soon, I mean, are we talking, is it

10 years, is it 20, 30, is it the end of the century? I think 15 years is a rough guess. And part of what I think people don't realize is that if you think about every other source of energy they're looking for, oil, coal, there's a limit on them. Whereas solar,

You not only can just add modular manufacturing, so it's very, very easy to add them. It's easy to install them. So solar takes generally about a month or two to install. Nuclear, we can talk about nuclear that takes a decade to install. Gas, coal or oil, all these things you need to extract out of the ground and there are limits on them. There's really no practical limit on solar. You can just keep building as much as you need. So as the price goes down,

Usage is going to go up. Now, I think the listeners know that electricity has gone from being flat for the last 20, 30 years to starting to grow. And I believe we're only scratching the surface. It's going to grow exponentially. Well, we're going to need a lot more power. I think you kind of led off with that. Solar and batteries are very able to meet that because it's a standard, scalable technology.

processing thing that you manufacture, that every unit looks the same. And it's much easier to, ironically, it's much more easier to scale that up to any other energy source, which are more bespoken one-off. So one of the things that presumably would help the solar industry is a favorable or a friendly regulatory environment.

And I know you've thought about maybe how you get a little bit of help from friends in D.C. If Scott ruled the world, what kind of regulatory frameworks would help Tandem PV grow faster? Well, I think that there are probably a couple of things, but I'll give an example that maybe the listeners would not expect.

So today in the US, there's a tale of two cities in solar deployment. There's California and Texas. Okay, probably people think with the lead off that I'm gonna say California is better because they're more green and solar friendly and Texas is not. It's the reverse. Texas is now actually the largest supplier of solar in the US, bigger than California.

Which is completely ironic because all the rhetoric says Texas hates clean energy and California loves it. But Texas has actually deregulated their grid and infrastructure to make it easier to connect. They've lowered some of the regulations, so they're actually more solar friendly than green California. So I think we probably need a little bit more of taking, ironically, we need a little bit more of Texas has done in the solar industry to deregulate the grid to make it a lot easier just to take solar and connect it. Because right now there's a big backlog

of all these projects that connect. It's one of the reasons it could actually go much faster if the country looked a little bit more like Texas in this particular area. Fascinating. And that's the subject of a whole other conversation, Scott. So-

On this podcast, we talk a lot about the impact of AI on automation and ultimately jobs and kind of what it means for humanity. I think there might be a corollary in the solar industry where we have a lot of motivation as a species for the planet to shift more of energy consumption to renewable forms, cleaner forms, and yet...

Of course, there's a strong headwind because there's a very established, entrenched industry that exists. Jobs, et cetera, livelihoods exist because of coal and natural gas and other forms of non-renewable power sources. What's your pitch to that whole part of the world that's depending on perpetuating the infrastructure that you're selling against?

This is another one of these myths we started out by talking. There are more jobs now in the United States for solar than there are for gas and coal. Coal mining employment is dying out. There are many, many jobs for solar in the industry and it's far growing. So I think if you look at most of the politicians looking at, if they're just looking at jobs and job creation, not only obviously are solar jobs better and higher paying and cleaner compared to being in a coal mine, there are more of them.

And you can have them in more places. It's not just in Wyoming or West Virginia. There are solar jobs all throughout the United States. That's number one. Number two is, I get asked a lot about what will happen with the incoming administration. Isn't that going to be bad for solar? Actually, ironically, in some ways it might not be, and particularly for us in solar manufacturing, in that 85% of the

The tax credit money today goes to Republican congressional districts. So it's very popular from a bipartisan point of view. And I think when you hear JD Vance and other people talk about manufacturing, they may not be talking about clean tech, but they would like to have high tech jobs come back to the US and manufacturing. And that's kind of part of our story is that we are not only doing things good for the environment, but we're doing things for American national security. And I just went back to saying that solar is the majority of our power.

But as Donald Trump said, I think yesterday, pointed out on a Fox News interview I saw, almost all of that technology comes from China today. Obviously, he's saying that in a way that is bad. I think most of us from a bipartisan perspective

area believe we don't want to get 90% of our future energy source from China any more than Europe had good results from getting their natural gas from Vladimir Putin. So I think there are a lot of natural reasons why we would want to have more solar in the US. Now, we could try to recreate the war that we lost in silicon, which has been largely seeded China. And part of our argument is, why don't we leapfrog? And that right now, the US has a technological lead in perovskites, and we believe that we're the leader in this space. So

I think there's an opportunity maybe to embrace us and the perovskite industry to leapfrog to the next generation of solar technology and rust back control as American Silicon Valley are good at doing. So there's no need to lobby Congress. You won. No, there's always need to lobby Congress, but we can always use more help. So Scott, when we're back here, let's say it's not 2025, it's 2035. And we're looking back on the decade and saying, you know, we made a ton of progress. Tandem is exactly where we dreamed it would be in 2025.

How would you characterize what happened in the last decade? I would say,

There's gonna be two different things. One of them is not that great, one of them is really good. So I'll start with the not that great first. We've put enough carbon in the environment today that even if it starts declining, we're still putting more carbon in the environment every year. And we've already exceeded the 1.5 degrees centigrade threshold. And I think the LA fires are just, it's a preview of what's coming and it's gonna get worse. And it's kind of terrifying in a way, but it will get worse.

in the next 20 years or so because it's hard to reverse what we've done. That's a negative story. And that's part of my motivation for leaving a wonderful team and a great job at Logitech to dive back into a pre-revenue company because I felt

compelled to do something that would be innovative. So instead of yelling at people or complaining that the world's going to hell in a handbasket, I felt like I had some skill set and the freedom to be able to do something, the privilege really, to be able to do something that would help make solar cheaper, that people would do it for all the right reasons rather than proselytizing them. But I think on the good side, I kind of alluded to solar is already the cheapest. China is

The world's biggest polluter is already rapidly transitioning to a solar and electric economy. More than 50% of new cars now sold in China are electric. The majority of electric motorcycles now sold in the developing countries gonna have cars or electric.

and they're gonna be powered with solar. I believe that most of the world, whether it's Pakistan or Bangladesh, they're installing massive amount of solar, not because they're environmentalists, because it's cheaper. So I think there's a good news story that we are already rapidly transitioning to this clean and electric world. And I think we will get there faster than most people realize because the flywheel is already in effect and politics

May slow it down a little bit, but I think it's unstoppable because economics and greed are ultimately the drivers of this. It's not about being good. It's about being cost effective and doing the right thing. So I feel optimistic about that in the next 20 years, but we gotta go faster. I think everybody listening to this does not wanna see more

cities burning on fire or being flooded. So that's part of my motivation as well. While I think there's good news and the right trajectory, it's not enough. We have to go faster. You can't do it by yelling at people and telling them they're bad. They have to give them something that really makes them want to roll in and embrace it. And that's kind of what I'm doing and what Tandem PV is doing. And I think we have a long way to go, but we're in the right

I think we're in the right trajectory so far. I've got to get you off the hot seat, but you're not going anywhere without answering one last important question for me. So as you know, I walked the halls recently at Logitech with our mutual friend Prakash, and it was incredible. I thought I came to you getting the Nobel Prize or something. Everyone was saying such nice things without you there, such nice things about you and your leadership. And then

You leave that environment where you're loved, big team, global team, and you wake up one morning and you're the CEO of a chemistry company and you're tasked with building these massive manufacturing facilities. I got to believe that's not something they taught you at Yale or certainly not at Logitech. What has been the hardest thing about your time since you joined Tandem?

Well, look, I had a team that I loved and a company that I loved. And I loved and I still love video conferencing. So it wasn't like I left something that was bad. There was a lot to... I was going to say like, but love is really a more appropriate term. I mean, it felt like a family. So leaving that was hard. At the same time, I felt like I...

At some point, I think this is my fifth startup scale in a row. My average tenure is about seven years. And I think you go through an arc where the beginning is fun and exciting. And after a while, you're going to get comfortable. And I think there's nothing wrong with being comfortable. But I felt like I wanted to get myself out of my comfort zone and do something that would stretch me and be difficult. Doing a solar startup is definitely not the easiest thing that I could have done.

But I think part of what I found rewarding is that as hard as it is going back to the beginning from having a team of 500 to almost doing everything myself at the beginning, not easy. But the ability to take all the lessons that I've learned in life from other people and experiences and start essentially with a blank sheet of paper and have to put it into action, I love that. I think it's so much fun, whether it's on the hiring processes or

using ai and other tools to be able to reinvent how you how you run an organization to how you treat people like all the things that people say they want to do and then you have this basically blank sheet of paper to put in action like god it's so much fun so and i feel like that how lucky am i to be able to do something where there's great potential good for the world but also just this this very challenging and rewarding experience of taking your life experiences and uh

taking all the mistakes that you've made, and I've made many enough to fill a book, and redo it again and see if you can do it better. And it's just, it's been really fun. Congrats on an amazing journey. I know you're just getting started, but it's a lot harder than you make it sound.

It's certainly a lot harder. I think everybody out there who does startups knows that the glamour you read, it's not as glamorous. Fundraising is hard and doing things without resources are harder, without a brand, etc. But like I said, it's my fifth go in a row. Every time I've done this, people say it's impossible. You'll never beat the incumbent. With Logitech, it was Cisco. In this case, it's China. I think we're on a path to do it. It doesn't mean we'll be successful, but I think...

doing something that is meaningful and hard and then succeeding at it. I mean, I think for those who are listening, there's just nothing more fun and rewarding. Of course, not so much fun when you fail at it, but if you can pull it off, it's magic. And you know that because you're a startup junkie like me. As Walt Disney said, it's kind of fun to do the impossible. 100%. We wouldn't do it if the rest of the world didn't think we were a little nuts.

It's the only reason why you would do it, because then you're like, why would you leave your family and job to take on something like this unless you had a little bit of a screw loose? Scott, thanks for hanging out. And mostly thanks for the education. I always enjoy these conversations. Where can the audience learn more about you and the great work that Tandem is doing? I think they can go to our website, tandemp.com, and we've got some materials in there to check out.

Brilliant. Hey, we're all rooting for you to succeed, right? Great. Thanks for the conversation. Great to see you. You bet. Likewise. Well, gosh, that's all the time we have for this week on AI and the future of work. As always, I'm your host, Dan Turchin from PeopleRain. And of course, we're back next week with another fascinating guest.