Andrew Potter — Opera’s Broken Pay Model

Tell me a little bit about the work that you're doing now that you are not singing.

Absolutely.

I'm happy to.

I am very excited about what our team is putting together.

So going back to the fact that my son took his gap year with me, one of the things that I really, really have worked to create in our home is a place for brave honesty and open conversation.

And my son is kind of anti-AI.

I have been using AI as a tool for years at my marketing firm for various and sundry things like copy editing, uh, but also things like coding, source checking, math, you know, these, these sorts of things.

Uh, it is, it is quite good.

And so he and I had this beautiful open conversation about how I use AI, his frustrations with AI, and he finally landed on a, a question that I think was incredibly important, which was, "Dad, I know how much you love people, and I know how much you love communities." And he was like, "So I understand the use of AI as a tool." He said, "How do you justify what data centers are doing to the communities that host them with the amount of data that I know that you use at your marketing firm?" And it was an amazing question, and we just sat and talked about it.

And this is where I actually think that humanity has lost the importance of sharing different opinions, having different opinions and viewpoints on things, right? Because what it led to was a dad sitting with his son and going, "Yeah, you know what? That really does suck.

These stats are right.

These stats are right.

That maybe that's a little, you know, misleading, but, uh, overarchingly, yeah, there needs to be a solution." And so started down this giant rabbit trail and started initially looking overseas in Europe to find all of these facilities that are utilizing the waste heat for various applications, from municipal heating to aquaculture farms, to wellness springs, to greenhouses.

They've figured it out.

And so my son, of course, you know, was like, "Well, why isn't it happening here?" And I was like, "I don't know.

Why isn't it happening here?" Uh, and so because of my marketing background, because I had quite an extensive network outside of opera, I was able to kind of connect and bring some pieces together.

And so our company is called Intelligent Harvest, and we harvestJust the heat as opposed to the waste heat being used for pollution, right? Servers create heat.

Anybody who has ever held a laptop on their lap and done their video editing, they understand their lap, uh, gets warm, right? And so we take that heat, and we set up a heat exchanger that works, uh, essentially like a hot water heater in your house, and it warms the water for, uh, a community farm.

And so we are in the process of stepping into what, as we very much have all seen, is a bit of a contentious space and saying, "Hey, there's a better way to do this." We can have data, and we can do it responsibly for the communities that host these data centers.

Because anybody who's watching this, right, uh, anybody who's watching this exact podcast that's recording it right now, we're using data centers.

This is not...

It's not going away.

If you checked Instagram today, or you were one of the folks that was like, "Let me make myself look like I'm in the '80s," we're all using it.

And so what our team is doing is stepping into the space, going, "Listen, if data centers aren't going away, and clearly they are not, it has to be done in a more responsible way for communities and for the planet." And so that's what Intelligent Harvest is all about.

We harvest the waste heat, and we grow community farms with it.