Jay Curtis: The Joy of Tinkering

About this episode

Jay Curtis, a retired farmer and lifelong tinkerer from Ontario and one of Vance Crowe's closest friends, returns to the podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about curiosity as a way of life. Jay describes overcoming a decades-long fear of flying, using AI as a free diagnostic mechanic for antique tractors and chainsaws, and inventing the "Curtis Downforce" indicator — a low-cost sensor he built from scratch over a bored winter to solve a real planting-depth problem on old row-crop planters, which he is now selling through a small website. The conversation covers Canadian wildfire smoke drifting south, skepticism about a taxpayer-subsidized EV battery plant built on former farmland near his property, the accelerating adoption of agricultural drones for fungicide spraying, and Jay's conviction that AI will make managing fleets of robots easier than managing fleets of people. Bitcoin comes up as a scarcity hedge Jay compares to farmland itself, and the episode closes on the Legacy Interviews product, with Jay's wife's testimonial about how their own legacy interview changed their family's relationship to the past.

“I compare with it. It isn't always right, but most times it is extremely helpful. I had a diesel tractor at my father-in-law's estate and it just wouldn't run... I just kept prompting AI certain ways, ask it in the same things in a different way, more complex wording. And it just kept spitting out the same thing... And when I did it's like, holy shit, that thing was bang on.”

“I suspect we outbid everyone else in the world to get Power Co... I'm suspicious that the Canadian taxpayer is probably paid for everything to date and they're slowly building a building and they say it's gonna happen and be producing by the end of next year... I hope the taxpayer isn't left holding a bag.”

“So I just come up with this idea and it's not a new idea... I have lots of time now in the winter and I was bored, so it took me about a month... I come up with a very inexpensive way to look at that in live time going across the field.”

Key moments

• Jay describes his fear of flying, quitting for 20 years after getting his pilot's license, then returning to it and immediately loving it once total understanding "clicked."
• Jay explains using free AI as an at-home diesel mechanic, rewording the same question until it correctly diagnosed a stuck idle cutoff plunger (craft).
• Jay voices skepticism about a taxpayer-subsidized Volkswagen/PowerCo battery plant absorbing 1,500 acres of Ontario farmland with production still unbuilt (institutions).
• Vance and Jay discuss agricultural drones replacing ground rigs for fungicide application, and Jay predicts labor scarcity will accelerate the shift to automated, "less human" farm operations.
• Vance describes an AI tool (Fable) completing days of bookkeeping in two hours and argues managing a fleet of robots will be easier for AI than managing a fleet of people.