If you’ve ever stared at a test kit like it personally insulted your family… welcome home.
Talking Pools Podcast is the pool industry’s “pull up a chair” show—part shop talk, part field manual, part therapy session—built for people who actually live on pool decks: commercial operators, service techs, builders, facility managers, and anyone responsible for water that can’t afford to go sideways. The network was created to level up the pool industry with real-world conversations on water chemistry, filtration, troubleshooting, construction, safety, and the business side of keeping pools open and budgets intact.
Here’s the hook: it’s not theory-first. It’s experience-first—a roster of seasoned pros (with 250+ years of combined “been there, fixed that” wisdom) turning complicated problems into practical moves you can use the same day. And it’s not one voice, one vibe, one corner of the industry: it’s a network of shows designed to reflect how diverse this work really is—different regions, different specialties, different personalities.
Also worth saying out loud: women aren’t “special guests” here—they’re on the mic as hosts, from the beginning, with an intentionally balanced roster. That matters, because the best ideas in this industry don’t come from one lane—they come from the whole road.
If you want a podcast that can make you laugh and make you better at what you do—without pretending the job is easier than it is—Talking Pools is the one you queue up before the first stop, and keep on when the day starts getting weird.
WARNING: This episode is intentionally abrasive. It contains strong language, blunt opinions, and an alarming lack of patience for sales pitches disguised as education. If professional disagreement offends you, consider this your continuing education credit in hurt feelings.
Not all pool industry education is created equal—and “free” education is rarely free.
In this episode, Rudy examines the difference between manufacturer-funded seminars, paid independent instruction, field experience, and research-based education. A company trainer may know the product inside and out, but does that knowledge survive on a real equipment pad? A veteran may have decades of stories, but do those personal experiences have evidence behind them? And when every road in a seminar conveniently leads to the sponsor’s product, did you attend a class—or a sales pitch with continuing education credits stapled to it?
Rudy also addresses the criticism he received after publicly supporting Pool Brain’s hiring of Erik Knight. Respecting someone does not mean agreeing with every position they hold. Professional disagreement is healthy when people show their work, provide sources, remain open to challenges, and understand the limits of their own knowledge.
Before investing your money—or four hours of your life and half a turkey sandwich—research the instructor as carefully as you research the class.
In This Episode
Why supporting an educator does not require treating everything they teach as gospel
Erik Knight’s role in bringing LSI into the everyday pool industry conversation
The difference between disagreement and intellectual dishonesty
Why today’s pool professionals may be overwhelmed by too much education
Manufacturer education versus paid independent instruction
Why “free” seminars still have a cost and an agenda
The difference between product knowledge and field experience
Why personal experience is valuable—but not automatically universal truth
How research and field experience should challenge and strengthen one another
The warning signs of a sales presentation disguised as education
Questions to ask before registering for any class
Why expertise in one subject does not qualify someone to teach everything
The value of an instructor willing to say, “I don’t know”
The strongest educators understand both the literature and the realities of the field. They identify whether they are presenting scientific evidence, professional judgment, product-specific training, or personal observation—and they never pretend those categories are interchangeable.
A famous name only proves the marketing worked. A company title tells you who employs the speaker. A registration fee tells you what the class costs. None of those things tells you whether the instructor deserves your time.
Research does. Transparency does. Relevant experience does. Evidence does.
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A Catholic priest, a rabbi, and a pool professional walk into a bar. The bartender asks, which one of you believes most strongly in continuing education? The priest holds up the Bible. The rabbi holds up the Torah. The pool professional holds up a test kit and points to a class he had registered for at the trade show. The bartender pauses for a minute and says, Why pay for a class when that YouTube guy gives advice for free? The pool professional says, Because the closest that guy's ever come to servicing a pool was off in a motel six hot tub. The priest sprays his drink across the rabbi. The rabbi wipes his face and asks, Is that where phosphates come from?
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The sponsors of the 2026 Talking Pools Podcast Pool Industry Mentor recognition are Blu-ray XL, United Chemical, Lamont Company, Revved Up Apparel, and Aqua Comfort Water Group.
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I've been getting Service Industry News since I first stepped into this business, and every time it landed, I did the same thing. Flip straight to the horror file. The weird installs, the absurd finds, the stuff only pool pros ever see. Then I'd go back and read the articles. Service Industry News is a twice-monthly trade publication for pool and spa service text, 24 issues a year, emailed free to over 10,000 texts and available on their app. Every issue covers nationwide industry news and real technical content you actually will use.
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Get your free subscription at serviceindustry news.net. Again, that's serviceindustry news.net. Do it now.
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Welcome to Friday. This is the Talking Pools Podcast. I'm Rudy Stankwitz. And today I want to talk about education. I got absolutely grilled. I mean fucking grilled when I posted a video on Instagram supporting Pool Brain's hiring of Eric Knight. I don't owe anybody an explanation, but in this particular case, I want to give one. Let me tell you what I have personally observed and what I've learned about Eric along the way. Eric was largely responsible for the development and promotion of Arenda's LSI app. Whether you agree with his interpretation of LSI or not, Eric played a massive role in making LSI part of the everyday pool industry conversation. Fight me on that if you want. I may see LSI as one piece of a much larger water chemistry puzzle. Eric may assign that piece more real estate than I do. So fucking what? We can disagree on how large the piece is without pretending the other person is an idiot or an enemy. Eric is also one of the few people I know who entered this industry without decades of field experience and then genuinely busted his ass to educate himself. Yes, his education initially came through a manufacturer. Every instructor has a lens. Every organization has a reason for teaching. Smart professionals learn to recognize both. Then Eric left the manufacturer's side and joined Watershape University, where the mission is broader education. That was a leap. And honestly, how fucking cool is that? Here's something else I can say about Eric after speaking with him. Whether we agree or disagree, he will explain why he believes what he believes. More importantly, he will tell you where the information came from. He brings sources. He brings research. He brings the path he followed to reach his conclusion. In an industry where some people cling to a 40-year-old belief with a death grip, even after science, technology, and testing methods have moved forward, that is fucking refreshing. I still don't have to agree with him 100%. In several areas, I don't. I respect anyone willing to explain their position, show their work, and allow the evidence to be challenged. That's how education's supposed to work. And despite being an old Gen X guy who, for the record, still looks like he's in his 30s, I remain open-minded. My approach to debate is actually very similar. I don't make any claims that I can't support with research, data, published science, or documented field results. Eric doesn't pull his positions out of his ass either. We may examine the same evidence and occasionally reach different conclusions. That is not intellectual dishonesty. That is a legitimate professional disagreement. In this week's episode with Natalie this past Wednesday, Eric made another valid point. Maybe there is simply too much education available. That sounds ridiculous until you consider the person entering the pool industry today. They're immediately buried under LSI, CYAA, phosphates, borates, enzymes, secondary sanitation, ORP, UV, ozone, AOP, variable speed, hydraulics, automation, electrical theory, codes, standards, certifications, and 12 different experts telling them that their particular subject is the most important fucking thing in the pool. For a newcomer, it can be completely overwhelming. And that ties directly into today's topic: manufacturer education versus paid education. This connection, I promise, was actually coincidental. I'd already recorded this episode you're about to hear before deciding to add this piece, this segment. But after the reaction to the Instagram post, I felt this needed to be said. There are a lot, a lot of people in this industry I call friends. There are a lot of people I admire, appreciate, a lot of people I respect. And I believe many of them consider me a friend as well. There are also people who cannot stand me. They think my methods are bullshit, my opinions are wrong, and I'm an abrasive pain in the ass. Good for them. I don't want an industry where everybody agrees with me. If nobody challenges your ideas, those ideas never get tested. And if your ideas cannot survive being tested, they probably weren't worth a shit in the first place. So to those of you I consider friends, and to those of you who consider me one, God bless the pool pros. God bless you. To those of you that hate me, criticize everything I do, watch every video, read every post, and immediately run to the comments, thank you. You're keeping me in the algorithm. Before you invest money in a class, research the speaker. Actually, before you invest your time in a free class, research the speaker. Because free doesn't mean there's nothing at stake. Your time has value. You spend four hours learning incomplete, outdated, or commercially filtered information. You did not save $400. You traded four hours of your life for a branded hallucination and half a turkey sandwich. Find out who's teaching. Not just their job title, not just the company printed beneath their photograph, not how many followers they have and how many conferences booked them, or how confidently they gripped the microphone. What have they actually done? Did this person learn through years of field work? Have they installed equipment, treated the water, diagnosed failures, managed routes, trained technicians, dealt with customers, and watched theoretically perfect solutions shit themselves when introduced to an actual equipment pad? Or did they learn the material last month from the same corporate presentation they're now delivering to you? That does not automatically make them wrong. A company trainer can be intelligent, prepared, technically accurate, and exceptionally good at explaining a product. But product knowledge is not necessarily field experience. Learning the approved company explanation is not the same as spending 10 years discovering how that explanation survives heat, rain, bad plumbing, poor maintenance, installation errors, creative homeowners and technicians who tighten everything as though they were preparing it for re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Ask whether the instructor has personally used what they teach. Ask how often. Ask them under what conditions. Ask whether they have encountered failure. Anyone can describe how something is supposed to work. Experience begins when it doesn't. That's where the difference becomes obvious. A field experienced instructor can often tell you what the manual says, what technicians actually do, why the two become separated, and what happens next. They can explain the variables that do not appear in the clean laboratory photograph. They can tell you which symptoms look alike, which measurement usually gets overlooked, which repair seems logical but waits three hours, and which tiny detail turns a routine service call into a flaming dumpster full of warranty paperwork. That knowledge has value. But field experience has its own limitation. Personal experience is not automatically universal truth. I've seen this happen is useful evidence that something can happen. It does not establish how often it happens. It does not prove the suspected cause. And it does not mean the same solution applies to every pool. The best field instructors understand that distinction. They do not present every story as a controlled experiment. They say, This is what I observed. This is what I measured. This is what the available research suggests. This is the conclusion I reached. And this is what remains uncertain. That is intellectual honesty. Be suspicious of anyone whose personal experience has never failed, never produced an exception, and never required revision. That person has not achieved perfect expertise. They stop checking their work. Then there's the instructor who has little or no field experience, but has seriously studied the subject. Don't dismiss that person automatically. Someone can learn through books, technical literature, controlled research, codes, standards, engineering, documents, and scientific papers and become an excellent educator. They may lack the field stories. They may never have pulled a pump apart in a customer's backyard while a labrador attempts to perform a cavity search. But they may understand the underlying science better than the person who has replaced that pump 400 times. Formal study and field experience answer different questions. Research helps establish what's generally supported under defined conditions. Field experience reveals how those conditions become complicated in the real world. The strongest educators connect the two. They understand the literature and respect the field. They do not use books to dismiss experience, and they do not use experience to dismiss research. They make each one answer to the other. An educator who has learned through serious independent study, has no product to sell, openly cites sources, and honestly explains the boundaries of their knowledge, may provide far more reliable instruction than a charismatic 20-year veteran who has never researched a single claim. The veteran has stories. The researcher has evidence. The educator you want knows which one they are presenting at any given moment. Now, compare that with somebody who has never worked in the field, never conducted independent research, never seriously examined competing explanations and learned the topic entirely through their employer's approved materials. Again, that person may teach the company's product accurately, but what they possess is a company perspective. They know how their employer defines the problem, they know how their employer explains the mechanism, and completely coincidentally, they know why their employer's product is standing at the end of the presentation wearing a cape. If every path through the seminar leads to the same product, you are not being taught the entire landscape. You are receiving a guided tour of one company's property. The landscaping may be beautiful, the information may be useful, but do not confuse the property line with the edge of the known world. That is the recurring weakness in some manufacturer-funded seminars. The class begins with a broad industry problem. The instructor establishes the pain. The presentation explains why older competing approaches are inconvenient, incomplete, dangerous, outdated, or apparently invented by people who hated swimming pools. Then, within 15 minutes remaining, the sponsor's product appears as the logical solution. What a fucking coincidence. It's like attending a seminar called Understanding Hunger, presented by Taco Bell. You may learn several accurate things about hunger, but I would not expect the final recommendation to be grilled salmon and a sensible salad. The product does not merely appear because the instructor is corrupt. The product appears because selling, supporting, or increasing confidence in that product is one reason the company funded the seminar.
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That is the agenda. It may be disclosed, it may be obvious, it may not bother you at all.
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If you use that product, the seminar may be exactly what you need. But evaluate it as vendor-funded product education, not as an independent comparison of every available solution. The test is simple. Does the seminar seriously discuss conditions where the company's product is unnecessary? Does it identify situations where another method might work better? Does it fairly represent competing products? Does it distinguish evidence supporting the underlying principle from evidence supporting that particular brand? Can the instructor answer a question that falls outside the approved corporate presentation? And if you remove the sponsor's product from the final slide, does the educational argument still stand? If the entire presentation collapses without the product, I'm sorry. You attended a sales pitch with continuing education credits stapled to it.
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If you remove the sponsor's product from the final slide, does the educational argument still stand? If the entire presentation collapses without the product, I'm sorry, you attended a sales pitch. Then we have the paid independent instructor. The financial arrangement is different. The instructor charges you up front. There is no mystery about the transaction. They are selling education. That is their product. Ideally, this allows them to compare manufacturers' methods and competing explanations without having to steer every conclusion toward one company's inventory. A good independent instructor can say, This product works well under these conditions. This competing product may work better under those conditions. You don't need either product in this situation. And sometimes the correct answer is to stop pouring shit into the pool and diagnose the actual problem. That independence has tremendous value. It allows the class to follow the evidence wherever it leads instead of dragging the evidence toward the sponsor's loading dock. But do not call the paid instructor completely unbiased. Nobody is completely unbiased. The independent instructor still has incentives. They want strong evaluations. They want invitations to speak again. They want you to recommend the class. Attend an advanced program, hire them as a consultant, buy a book, or join a membership. That the difference is that this agenda should be visible. They charged you to learn. They offer additional education at the end that does not invalidate the class that you just completed, provided the first class delivered what was promised and was not intentionally hollowed out to create the next cell. There's a difference between offering next level and withholding the answer. Responsible instructor might say, Today we covered the foundation. If you want deeper training, here's the advanced course. A manipulative instructor spends six hours telling you that the actual answer will be revealed after you purchase level two in the platinum workbook, join the inner circle, and travel to a secret bunker beneath Orlando. That is not professional education. That is Scientology with test strips. So research the instructor before enrolling. Look for relevant field experience. Look for evidence of independent study. Look for publications, technical articles, documented casework, presentations, citations, and a history of correcting mistakes. Read the course description carefully. Determine whether it is product training, general education, certification, preparation, or an extended sales presentation. Search for previous attendee feedback, but do not count stars alone. Look for specific outcomes. Did the attendees learn something they could apply? Were difficult questions answered? Were limitations discussed? Were claims supported? Did the instructor distinguish personal experience from established evidence? Was the class still valuable to people who did not purchase anything afterward? And look at the instructor's specialty. Do not assume somebody is qualified to teach every subject because they are well known in one corner of the industry. Expertise is not an all-access wristband. A person can be brilliant at construction and weak in chemistry, brilliant at chemistry and inexperienced in business, brilliant at equipment and completely unqualified to interpret toxicology. The more complicated the subject, the more relevant that distinction becomes. Research the speaker with the same seriousness you use to research the class. You're not merely buying information. You're allowing someone to organize the way you understand a subject. That instruction does more than waste an afternoon. It can install a false framework that influences hundreds of later decisions. That's harder to repair than ignorance because the person does not know they are missing information. They believe they have already been educated, and there is nothing more dangerous than incorrect information wearing a certificate. Choose instructors who have done the work. Choose instructors who have studied the work. Choose instructors who clearly tell you which kind of knowledge they are sharing. Field experience, research, product-specific training, professional judgment, or personal observation. The very best may offer all of them, but they will never pretend those categories are interchangeable. Famous name tells you the marketing worked. A company title tells you who employs the speaker. A long resume tells you that they've been busy. A registration fee tells you what the class costs. None of that tells you whether the instructor deserves your time. Research does. Transparency does. Relevant experience does. Evidence does. And an instructor willing to say, I don't know, maybe more trustworthy than one carrying a confident answer for every imaginable question. Because real experts understand the boundaries of their knowledge. That's all I have for you this week.
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I'm Rudy Stankowitz. This is the Talking Pools podcast. Until next time. Be good. Be safe.
