#178 - Bespoke or A.I.

[00:00:00] What's up you beautiful bitches? If you are an irrigation professional, old or new, who designs, installs, or maintains high-end residential, commercial, or municipal properties, and you want to use technology to improve your business, to get a leg up on your competition, even if you're an old school irrigator from the days of hydraulic systems, this show is for you.

[00:00:31] Why did I just say that? You're like, Andy, you're normally this really nice guy. What's up you beautiful bitches? Why did I just say that? Well, stay tuned and I will tell you why because it has to do with the topic of today's episode. So that's why I started with something unexpected today because I wanted to emphasize the power of authenticity. I was listening to something this morning talking about A.I.

[00:01:01] generated content that I wanted to share with you today. So I thought I would open with something unique and grab your attention. Before I start today's episode, I would like to give a few personal shout outs to some awesome folks I spent time with this week. I tried to write down all of the names yesterday when I was on my flight coming back from Calgary. So my apologies in advance if I may have missed someone, but I would like to start off

[00:01:33] thanking Miles and the team at NIAID. Appreciate your friendship. Appreciate your vision, your openness, your curiosity for what's possible, what may be possible in the future and your ability to take a couple risks with me. So thank you to Miles, Jeff, Tom, Jose, Daniel from NIAID Irrigation.

[00:02:00] Also great to meet with Chris from Irrigation Management in Minneapolis. Actually, long story short, Miles put me in touch with with Chris, friend of his in Minneapolis. And Chris and I had lunch on my layover coming through Minneapolis. Great to see you, Jim Ruzica, on my way out to Calgary. Always, always enjoy our conversations and keep up the good design work up there in Minnesota. Great to stop into Regency Irrigation.

[00:02:30] Shout out with Don Finley. Some awesome guys at Site One. Thanks for being open, Turner, to what's possible with Sprinkless Supply Store going into 2025. Thank you, David, for connecting me with a couple folks at the city of Calgary. And also your interest and curiosity about opportunities in the future and how we can make some great shit happen. And Ken Vals, man, love chatting with you.

[00:02:58] Keep up the good work and appreciate you as a friend. And also stopped into ProSource. Supplier in Calgary. Met with Mike. Consolidated Supply. What's going on, Travis? Met with Corey Garish. Hope you enjoy that new soil moisture sensor, Corey. Let me know if you need some help setting that up. Also met with Bryce from Hydratech Irrigation in Edmonton.

[00:03:24] So this may not be completely correct, but I believe there are only, what I was told, is only two certified irrigation contractors in the entire city of Edmonton. And Bryce from Hydratech Irrigation is one of them. So kudos, Bryce. Hope you enjoy your soil moisture sensor as well. Thank you, Terry from Toro, for buying barbecue dinner. That was awesome. And I enjoyed hearing some of your stories. Shane, love you, man. Shane from Mount Royal University. Keep it real up there, Shane.

[00:03:54] Neil from the City of Calgary. Love the fact that the City of Calgary is into IoT. And I learned that the City of Calgary has their own citywide LoRaWAN network. And this wasn't even new. So it turns out the City of Calgary was one of the first cities to do a complete citywide installation of a LoRaWAN network. And Neil, look forward to putting some sensors in your hands and see what we can do with them.

[00:04:22] Great hanging out with a couple good bros from Hunter, Jordan, and Ryan. I'll see you at the pool, boys. Inside joke, but you know what it means. And let's see. Let's see. Where are my notes here? Okay. Had learned a little bit about some cool LED lights. Permanent LED lighting you can put on gutters and soffits from Matt at Pixel Lights. Great chatting with you. Trevor from NoMoreHazard.

[00:04:51] You guys can look up NoMoreHazard. They're not currently, I don't believe they currently have any clients in the U.S., but check out NoMoreHazard.com. Pretty interesting software to help you with your project safety reports. And again, I'm just curious about this kind of stuff. So by no means are any of these companies like NoMoreHazard sponsored on the episode.

[00:05:17] It's just me sharing some of the good conversations and some of the things I learned this week. I enjoyed chatting with you, Will, from Amiad. And thank you for being a willing participant in a video. So I took a video of Will's, what I might call a smart filter. Really cool automatic flushing filter from Amiad. I'm going to make a YouTube video, put that out, so stay tuned for that.

[00:05:46] And also had two more willing participants for a video while I was at the site. One, one stop from Richard and Zach from Romex Permeable Hardscapes. Thanks, guys, for sharing that. I think it's pretty amazing. And it makes me think why we don't have more permeable hardscapes just out there. It makes a ton of sense in areas where it rains a lot.

[00:06:11] And last but not least, on my notes, awesome to see you, Teague and Aline from LAS Design. Really enjoyed our conversation at lunch and just see so much opportunity to incorporate IoT into the irrigation consulting business. So some personal shout-outs today, an attention-grabbing opener.

[00:06:37] And this is because I'm thinking about what the next generation of AI might do for podcasting. If AI is changing the way that we do things and speeding things up and replacing certain job activities, it's quite possible, and actually I know that it's already happening, AI could replace me here. It could replace me, your host of The Sprinkler Nerd Show. AI is just, I mean, it's woven into everything that we do,

[00:07:07] from recommendation engines to voiced assistance. I think it's a, I can't say it's a fact. It's almost a fact that podcasts could be personalized for every listener. I mean, the podcast I listen to might be different than the podcast that you listen to, Miles, because the AI is going to make, could make one for all of us. It could pull news from our favorite channels. It could analyze our preferences.

[00:07:36] It can speak in whatever voice that we want. On paper, it seems really mind-blowing. But, but, you know what you can't replace? You know what you can't replicate? And this may sound awkward. You can't replace or replicate me. I mean, you can with AI. You could, you could, you could pretend to be me.

[00:08:01] But if you really want a, a real person and you want those sort of moments of honesty, moments of spontaneity, like say, the choice I made this morning to greet you with, what's up, you beautiful bitches, that is, that's like pure humanity. That's, that's like creation.

[00:08:26] It's like sort of, it's kind of like the sort of the thing that an algorithm might shy away from because it's not optimal, right? Most podcasts aren't going to start with what's up, bitches. Most podcasts aren't going to have an intro, maybe thanking the people they met, they met that day.

[00:08:47] So those are just kind of some things that can make this podcast more personal, more real, more human. And, you know, as I think about why somebody might want that, you know, why is it that you, that you want something unique, that you want something that is spoken by a real person, that may have some mistakes, it might not be that eloquent.

[00:09:17] If AI can produce an episode in a show just for you, why not choose that? So I, I started to try to find a comparison. How can I, how can I create a comparison in another part of our lives? Will we make a choice that's against the unique podcast? Okay. So I thought, all right, how about Walmart? Could AI be like Walmart?

[00:09:47] So if we think of Walmart and we think of Walmart in the terms of food, so it doesn't have to be Walmart specifically, but it could be a large grocery store, for instance. Mass producing affordable food for everyone, right? Walmart can mass produce affordable food for everyone with the goal to drive down prices. I mean, that, that could be great, right? It's convenient.

[00:10:13] It's cheap, but it's not the same experience as purchasing organic food. And on the, on the food note, it's like, okay, you've got a Chick-fil-A. Fantastic. But it's not the same thing as a home cooked meal shared around the table. And preferably with local ingredients, right?

[00:10:38] It's never been as much as mass production, low price foods are, are the sort of the standard. The boutique, locally grown part of the food industry is also really, really popular right now. Likely because they're polar opposites. You have Walmart or you have grown locally. Make the choice.

[00:11:02] And I think that AI and podcasts might not be that far apart. I think the same principle could apply. You know, sure, it might be free and infinitely scalable for an AI created podcast, but it might miss the essential soul and like the grit that comes from a real person like me sharing real experiences, talking to real people.

[00:11:31] And I feel like people often gravitate towards authenticity, especially when they may crave a deeper connection or a personal story they can latch onto. So the Sprinkliners show, I want, I want the show to be about authenticity.

[00:11:52] And as much as I love interviewing other people as a way to share information, I also enjoy, and as difficult as it is, doing solo episodes like this because I feel like that is true creation. What I choose to talk about, how do I say this?

[00:12:16] I care if you care, but I also don't care if you care. Meaning I'm trying to create something of value that might not necessarily be artistic, but might be a different way of looking at something or a different way of interpreting something that maybe could just make your mind, uh, just, just, you know, put a, put a little like a spark in your mind or make your mind shift and maybe, and maybe look at something

[00:12:46] a little bit different. So the solo episodes like this are actually really freaking hard because, because of long pauses like that where I have to think makes me nervous, but it's actually natural and it's human. And it's, uh, in a, in a weird way, personally, for me, something that I feel like has created

[00:13:14] some, uh, growth in, in just growth in me personally, um, to not be afraid of the silence or afraid that, uh, you know, it's Saturday morning and I'm in my hotel room and I have a stuffy nose and I might sound different today than another day, but you know what? It is what it is. And so, um, you know, whether it's deep dives into technology with guests on the show,

[00:13:43] or just sort of like, uh, musings on the future of AI, I want these episodes to be like as close to being crafted with my own two hand, my own two eyes, my own two ears, my own, my one brain as possible. And I think that's the real, that's the real secret sauce. And AI might be able to formulate flawless sentences and AI might be able to formulate

[00:14:12] sentences that's that have intentional mistakes to sound human, but I don't think it will be able to deliver the sort of off the cuff, sometimes slightly weird and spontaneous sparks of that real human connection. So as I think of what can I do for this podcast, I need to do shit differently. I need to take a song that's on my mind that might create thought and put it at the beginning for an intro. So I don't have any sponsors on the show.

[00:14:40] I don't think, I mean, I might have to worry about copyright for stuff, but I'm just having fun. This is like a sandbox, right? That's my, that's my theory for this year playing the sandbox. So I'm going to embrace it and play in the sandbox. It's like, there's this intersection between technology and craft. You know, do I think that in five years you can hire a robot to dig all your ditches and, uh, put your manifolds together and install your sprinklers? Yes.

[00:15:10] Yes, I do. Uh, and I actually saw one of these robots at the consumer electronics show. So do I think our, our labor problems will be solved by hiring robots? Yes, I do. But at the same time, there's something about this craft, the craft side of what we do. Uh, it's not anti AI. It's just trying to understand where something like AI fits, what it can be really, really good for and what it can be used for as the most powerful tool.

[00:15:40] Okay. So going back to food, just like, uh, uh, what's the word for a super incredible chef? Uh, Michelin, okay. Just like a Michelin star chef might use crazy, fancy kitchen gadgets. Like to get the perfect temperatures. I would might use AI tools to streamline some of this workflow, right? So instead of having AI read this and just create it out of the blue, I might create a couple buckets of content that I might need some assistance with.

[00:16:10] And I might use AI as a tool to help me produce this show. Just like a Michelin star chef might use really fancy kitchen gadgets to get the perfect temperature and make the perfect food, but they're still the creator of, uh, of that food of that dinner. So I think like at the core of what I want to do with this show is just kind of show my, uh,

[00:16:36] my passion for how we can use technology and these tools in our industry of irrigation, landscape, uh, construction, and service. So AI can enhance our work, but I don't think it can replace the spirit behind it. So, uh, yeah. So as I was just thinking about AI and, you know, could AI replace me?

[00:17:05] The question would be, yes, it could. But do I want it to? And why would I want it to? What is the value? Um, certainly somebody will make a, for our industry, somebody will make a AI podcast and it's likely because they can produce more. It would be the content will be produced quicker. And easier that the audience for it might be really, really large, right?

[00:17:32] If everyone in the green industry finds out about a podcast and it's AI driven and they get this content delivered to them every single day, the, the, uh, the audience might be really, really big. And that's like, you know, the Walmart grocery store versus the farmer's market and the grown locally. So, um, I think at the end of the day, I just, you know, I hope you'll join me in celebrating

[00:17:59] authentic creation, whether that's in, in our industries or your own creative projects or simply the way you want to choose to live your life. There's a reason we still value handcrafted items, you know, concerts, life theater performance and yes, the random podcast episodes on the sprinkler nerd show where Andy says, what's up bitches? Promise, promise not to use that again.

[00:18:29] I'll come up with something else to be more creative. So yeah, guys, that's the deal with the attention grabbing opener today and this episode and thinking about how, how AI will replace some things, but not everything. So thank you for letting me entertain you. Thank you for listening to this episode all the way to the end. Let me know what you think about, uh, shout outs to some, to a personal people.

[00:18:58] I don't know if that is, uh, you know, I didn't ask for permission to name any of you guys. I just did it. So I will beg for forgiveness if, uh, if that was not okay with you, but, uh, just trying to bring a little bit of that transparency, authenticity to the podcast and, uh, try to build as, uh, build as best a relationship that I can with you guys. So thank you for listening. Share this episode with a friend, your grandma.

[00:19:26] Yeah, that would be interesting. She'd be like, what's a podcast. Oh my God. Are you living in a pod already? I knew that was coming. That's it. So long. Appreciate you guys. See you on the next episode.