Latest / MC Fireside Chats, an Outdoor Hospitality Podcast / MC Fireside Chats - August 26th, 2026

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MC Fireside Chats - August 26th, 2026 · MC Fireside Chats, an Outdoor Hospitality Podcast

• 0:46
  Brian Searl: Welcome, everybody, to another episode of MC Fireside Chats.
• 0:48
  Brian Searl: My name is Brian Searl with Insider Perks and Modern Campground.
• 0:50
  Brian Searl: Excited to be here with you.
• 0:51
  Brian Searl: That was close, guys.
• 0:52
  Brian Searl: I was two seconds, I forgot my hat.
• 0:53
  Brian Searl: I had to go find it during the intro.
• 0:55
  Brian Searl: I was like, almost didn't make it, sat down half a second before.
• 0:59
  Brian Searl: But I'm here.
• 0:59
  Brian Searl: I made it, so not that anybody's excited.
• 1:01
  Brian Searl: They're all here to see you guys.
• 1:02
  Brian Searl: But excited to be here for another week four episode of MC Fireside Chats.
• 1:06
  Brian Searl: We're gonna talk about AI technology.
• 1:07
  Brian Searl: We've got a couple special guests, some new people here.
• 1:10
  Brian Searl: Let's go around the room and briefly introduce ourselves 'cause some of us haven't been together for a while, and then we got some new people too.
• 1:15
  Brian Searl: Matt, you wanna start us off?
• 1:18
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah.
• 1:18
  Matt Whitermore: Hey, everybody.
• 1:18
  Matt Whitermore: Matt Whittemore here, director of market expansion at Climb Capital and Unhitched Management.
• 1:24
  Matt Whitermore: National platform, growing quickly, adding parks through both third-party management and through our investment platform.
• 1:30
  Matt Whitermore: Always enjoy these chats, Brian, so appreciate you having me on and excited to dig in here.
• 1:36
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 1:36
  Brian Searl: Thanks for being here, Matt, as always.
• 1:38
  Brian Searl: Ravi, our new recurring guest for week four.
• 1:40
  Ravi Parikh: Hey, everybody.
• 1:41
  Ravi Parikh: I'm Ravi.
• 1:42
  Ravi Parikh: I'm the CEO of RoverPass, which is a property management software company
• 1:50
  Brian Searl: That's it?
• 1:51
  Brian Searl: You're just gonna undersell yourself like that, man?
• 1:54
  Ravi Parikh: I use AI about 10 hours a day personally, and our whole team uses it, so I'm excited about, I can s- speak to the gospel of AI for hours and hours on end.
• 2:06
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah, we're we're a very AI-pilled organization over here at RoverPass.
• 2:12
  Brian Searl: Awesome.
• 2:12
  Brian Searl: Glad to have you here, Ravi.
• 2:14
  Brian Searl: Mychele?
• 2:16
  Mychele Bisson: I'm Mychele Bisson.
• 2:17
  Mychele Bisson: I am the founder of Wayhaven Resorts.
• 2:19
  Mychele Bisson: We own campgrounds and marinas from Alaska down to Florida.
• 2:22
  Mychele Bisson: And I'm always trying to be here, but I'm usually in my campgrounds during the summer, so I'm glad to be back today to be able to have these conversations with you guys.
• 2:33
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 2:33
  Brian Searl: Thanks for being here.
• 2:33
  Brian Searl: Appreciate it.
• 2:34
  Brian Searl: And our two special guests.
• 2:35
  Brian Searl: Caleb, you wanna go first?
• 2:37
  Caleb Cook: Sure, yeah.
• 2:38
  Caleb Cook: I'm Caleb Cook.
• 2:39
  Caleb Cook: Good to be with you guys.
• 2:40
  Caleb Cook: And I'm from CampLife.
• 2:42
  Caleb Cook: I was formerly the marketing and creative team lead, but actually just made a leap into the product design side, so I'm kinda joining you from both perspectives today.
• 2:49
  Caleb Cook: And yeah, CampLife is like RoverPass, a, a reservation and park management system.
• 2:55
  Caleb Cook: And now a marketing system too.
• 2:57
  Caleb Cook: We recently released some email marketing tools too that we're pretty excited about.
• 3:01
  Caleb Cook: So yeah, that's that's the 40,000 foot view.
• 3:03
  Brian Searl: You know what we should do, Matt?
• 3:06
  Brian Searl: Matt, you and I should have a project where we bring back MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch with AI, and then the CampLife and RoverPass guys can fight it out.
• 3:16
  Matt Whitermore: All right.
• 3:16
  Matt Whitermore: I'm in.
• 3:17
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah, let's do it.
• 3:18
  Matt Whitermore: All right.
• 3:18
  Ravi Parikh: We'll, I'll build a, I'll build a little robot where me and Caleb can go head-to-head.
• 3:25
  Brian Searl: All right.
• 3:25
  Brian Searl: Last but not least, Mr.
• 3:26
  Brian Searl: Nick Purslow, who, Nick, are you still three hours north of me and still haven't come see me?
• 3:30
  Brian Searl: It's raining up there.
• 3:30
  Nick Purslow: Ah, no, totally.
• 3:31
  Nick Purslow: You haven't come see me.
• 3:33
  Nick Purslow: Yeah, Edmonton, you've upgraded the the intro music since the last time I was been on here.
• 3:37
  Nick Purslow: It's great.
• 3:39
  Brian Searl: Yeah
• 3:39
  Nick Purslow: but yeah, and- You- Sorry, go yeah.
• 3:43
  Nick Purslow: I'm Nick Bisson.
• 3:44
  Nick Purslow: I'm a co-founder at Posh Outdoors.
• 3:46
  Nick Purslow: We partner with landowners through revenue share partnerships, so they want to add unique year-round kind of modular lodging structures on their property.
• 3:54
  Nick Purslow: We'll install them, provide marketing services to ensure that they're filled and take a percentage of the revenue.
• 3:59
  Nick Purslow: So we've got one project up near where Brian and I Brian and I are in the Canadian Rockies and we've got a partnership in Texas as well, and we're hoping to scale heading into the next year.
• 4:10
  Brian Searl: Awesome.
• 4:10
  Brian Searl: Excited to hear what you've been up to.
• 4:11
  Brian Searl: Yeah, I've only been to Edmonton once in my life, man, so don't like-
• 4:14
  Nick Purslow: Yeah
• 4:15
  Brian Searl: take offense.
• 4:16
  Brian Searl: I went up there with-
• 4:16
  Nick Purslow: At the same time
• 4:17
  Brian Searl: I went up there to catch a train last year.
• 4:19
  Brian Searl: We took one of the sleeper trains across to...
• 4:21
  Brian Searl: it wasn't a sleeper for us, but we took it across to Winnipeg and then went up north to Churchill, so-
• 4:26
  Nick Purslow: Nice
• 4:27
  Brian Searl: And I went to a really good brewery and pizza place that I gotta remember to tell you about.
• 4:30
  Brian Searl: I'll f- I'll...
• 4:31
  Brian Searl: I don't remember the name of it off the top of my
• 4:32
  Nick Purslow: head, but- Isn't isn't Churchill where they have the polar bears?
• 4:35
  Brian Searl: Yes.
• 4:36
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 4:36
  Nick Purslow: Oh, nice.
• 4:36
  Nick Purslow: Yeah, that's
• 4:37
  Brian Searl: lovely.
• 4:37
  Brian Searl: Over the years, like 10,000 beluga whales- Nice so you can...
• 4:40
  Brian Searl: It's crazy.
• 4:41
  Nick Purslow: Yeah.
• 4:41
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 4:42
  Brian Searl: Really good place to visit.
• 4:43
  Brian Searl: Okay, so to our recurring guests who are typically here with us, Mychele, Matt Ravi, you're a recurring guest now, so you can weigh in if you want.
• 4:50
  Brian Searl: Is there anything that's come across your desk in the last month or so that's related to AI technology, stuff like that, that we should be talking about or you guys wanna talk about?
• 5:00
  Matt Whitermore: I would
• 5:01
  Brian Searl: say my-
• 5:01
  Mychele Bisson: Got so much
• 5:03
  Brian Searl: Oh, we all went at once.
• 5:04
  Brian Searl: Okay, go ahead.
• 5:10
  Ravi Parikh: I'll
• 5:10
  go.
• 5:10
  Mychele Bisson: I was gonna say, go ahead, Ravi.
• 5:12
  Mychele Bisson: You said that you could talk about this for hours,
• 5:13
  Ravi Parikh: there's so much.
• 5:14
  Ravi Parikh: Every week there's something new.
• 5:16
  Ravi Parikh: I'm a subscriber of x.com, formerly Twitter, and the Twitterverse is popping off about the new Grok bot which is a competitor to Hermes and OpenCloud.
• 5:31
  Ravi Parikh: That's the latest.
• 5:32
  Ravi Parikh: And then Claude released a better version of Claude Remote, so you can basically code while you're walking your dog or, wherever, like hanging out with your friends, just pop open your phone and start shipping code while you're doing
• 5:45
  Ravi Parikh: that.
• 5:46
  Ravi Parikh: So I would say those are like the latest small things that I've seen come up.
• 5:51
  Ravi Parikh: P- and I don't know, GrokBot might be big, but I haven't messed with it yet personally.
• 5:56
  Brian Searl: Maybe set the stage for our audience and I don't know, Matt, if you've played with any of this or Mychele, but set the stage for our audience for who th- who don't know about OpenClaw or Hermes or-
• 6:05
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:06
  Brian Searl: So- Because GrokBot is, I think the consumer geared version of like your easy way into that world.
• 6:12
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 6:12
  Ravi Parikh: So the first version of this was OpenClaw that came out, I don't know, it's probably been like seven, eight months now.
• 6:19
  Ravi Parikh: A guy named Peter Steinberg released it for free on x.com and then OpenAI ended up hiring him as their I don't know exactly his position, but it's essentially like he's building what everybody's gonna use as their personal assistant.
• 6:39
  Ravi Parikh: So Iron Man's...
• 6:41
  Ravi Parikh: What's the name of Iron Man's assistant?
• 6:44
  Ravi Parikh: The voice- I don't know.
• 6:45
  Brian Searl: I don't know what you're talking about.
• 6:45
  Brian Searl: I can't remember.
• 6:45
  Brian Searl: 'Cause it was played by Gwyneth Paltrow, right?
• 6:48
  Ravi Parikh: I don't remember the name.
• 6:48
  Ravi Parikh: Not Cortana.
• 6:49
  Ravi Parikh: That's, Man, I can't remember what it's called.
• 6:51
  Ravi Parikh: But anyways, the idea was that everyone's gonna have a personal assistant, OpenAI got excited about it and then hired this guy Peter Steinberg.
• 6:59
  Ravi Parikh: He released this product called OpenClaw, and OpenClaw basically connects into like everything that you've got.
• 7:05
  Ravi Parikh: Google Calendar, your email Google Drive.
• 7:08
  Ravi Parikh: It can make phone calls for you.
• 7:10
  Ravi Parikh: It can do all these different things.
• 7:12
  Ravi Parikh: So like you just tell AI "Hey, schedule me this meeting," or, "Call this restaurant and make this reservation," or whatever.
• 7:19
  Ravi Parikh: Whatever you want it to do it can do.
• 7:22
  Ravi Parikh: Then the next one was Hermes that came out, which was like...
• 7:26
  Ravi Parikh: I don't know if it's Hermes or Hermes like the designer bag brand, but Hermes maybe.
• 7:32
  Ravi Parikh: They were the next iteration on OpenClaw.
• 7:35
  Ravi Parikh: And then the Twitter sphere was going crazy about that.
• 7:40
  Ravi Parikh: And then the next iteration i- of that is GrokBot, which is Elon's competitor to Hermes and OpenClaw.
• 7:49
  Ravi Parikh: It seems like OpenClaw has died off.
• 7:52
  Ravi Parikh: Like I don't really know what happened to it.
• 7:54
  Ravi Parikh: And so like in seven months time, we've released three different versions of your personal assistant.
• 8:00
  Ravi Parikh: At some point one of them's gonna take off.
• 8:03
  Ravi Parikh: I don't know which one yet.
• 8:04
  Ravi Parikh: I kinda gave up after OpenClaw and haven't messed with Hermes and Grok Bot, but I need to.
• 8:09
  Ravi Parikh: I need to spend some time kinda trying to set them up.
• 8:12
  Brian Searl: Yeah, for clarity of our audience, like I think an easier way to understand this is and you tell me if I'm wrong, Ravi, with how I'm perspecting or perceiving this or explaining this or whatever, right?
• 8:21
  Brian Searl: Is that, your regular Claws, your Chat GPTs, your Geminis are...
• 8:26
  Brian Searl: While they can connect and search your inbox for Gmail and do things like that, they're mostly like conversation in, conversation out.
• 8:33
  Brian Searl: Search, give me ideas, write me social media posts, write me code, do those things.
• 8:38
  Brian Searl: Whereas these tools that we're talking about, OpenClaw that came out in January, Hermes, the Hermes that followed, whatever we're pronouncing it as, Grok Bot now is the idea of more taking control of your computer and operating it as
• 8:50
  Brian Searl: a human would.
• 8:51
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah, like the big ways that you use these tools you can connect it into your iMessage, you can connect it into WhatsApp, you can connect it into Slack or Microsoft Teams, you can connect it into your email.
• 9:03
  Ravi Parikh: So every which way that you could possibly talk to it in all of the different channels.
• 9:08
  Ravi Parikh: If you're on your phone you might not have the Slack or Microsoft Teams app, so you wanna send it a voice note, right from iMessage.
• 9:18
  Ravi Parikh: That's the first part is capturing all that data, and then from there it's connected to all of the data sources that you have.
• 9:27
  Ravi Parikh: So it could be like work data sources, it could be personal data sources, anything, and it can access those data sources and then do certain actions based off them, based off the tools that you give it.
• 9:40
  Ravi Parikh: If you wanted to connect it to something like Twilio, which is used for like placing phone calls or sending text messages, it can place a phone call or it can send a text message for you.
• 9:52
  Ravi Parikh: If you're like having a chat with somebody via text message...
• 9:56
  Ravi Parikh: This always happens to me, like I'm like, I get an introduction to someone via text message and I'm like, "Man, like I can't connect my Google Cal to my text message to schedule this."
• 10:07
  Ravi Parikh: So you just add your OpenClaw or your Hermes or in this case I guess GrokBot to that text thread, and it can be like, "Hey, here's all the availability," and then you...
• 10:18
  Ravi Parikh: it can handle scheduling for you.
• 10:20
  Ravi Parikh: So it's like really like your personal assistant for everything, right?
• 10:24
  Ravi Parikh: Every morning I had it send me a Slack message that's "Hey, you forgot to answer all these emails.
• 10:31
  Ravi Parikh: You need to look at these conversation threads inside of your Slack account because your team is like talking about all these different things and they need your weigh in."
• 10:40
  Ravi Parikh: And then it sends me like a, a series of metrics on RoverPass every morning or every week or whatever fixed schedule that I told it to.
• 10:49
  Ravi Parikh: So it can consolidate all of that into one and then present that information to you in which if you wanna text with it, if you want an email, if you want a Slack message it can give you all
• 11:01
  Ravi Parikh: of that information.
• 11:03
  Brian Searl: And I think the intention behind GrokBot, and we'll have to see if it goes there is to make it less head explody for all the people who are watching this, like what's happening.
• 11:11
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 11:12
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 11:13
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 11:14
  Ravi Parikh: OpenClaw was made clearly by a developer that was building it for himself and it like feels like you're on the command line when you're trying to use it, which is not super accessible for like everybody.
• 11:27
  Ravi Parikh: Whereas GrokBot is "Hey, I'm gonna build this like nice consumer slick interface," the Elon way of doing things and make it easy for people, right?
• 11:37
  Ravi Parikh: Like it's the Apple-ified version of of OpenClaw.
• 11:42
  Ravi Parikh: And it's more stable from what I hear.
• 11:43
  Ravi Parikh: Like I always had problems with OpenClaw where like it would just kept breaking and that's why I stopped using it, 'cause I got tired of trying to fix it and I was like, "It'd just be quicker for me
• 11:54
  Ravi Parikh: to do this myself than trying to fix you constantly."
• 11:57
  Ravi Parikh: So hopefully, hope- hopefully that one is more stable
• 12:01
  Brian Searl: Matt, have you played with any of this new stuff?
• 12:05
  Matt Whitermore: I haven't yet, but I'm on the edge because, I was gonna jump in and say personally, I'd say the last month or so, and I don't know if this is like AI psychosis or not, but I've been disappointed
• 12:18
  Matt Whitermore: with Opus 5 and Fable 5 on Anthropic models.
• 12:22
  Matt Whitermore: I feel like there's been this cycle of whenever they're about to release a new model The performance just deteriorates, the model gets dumber and just it gets it, being trying to keep yourself on the cutting edge of AI
• 12:37
  Matt Whitermore: is one of the most frustrating things.
• 12:39
  Matt Whitermore: It's amazing and it's incredible and it's mind-blowing and exciting, but it's also insanely frustrating for a lot of reasons.
• 12:47
  Matt Whitermore: There's, like Ravi was saying, there's a new feature every week, every day, right?
• 12:52
  Matt Whitermore: I've tried to quiet my mind with that and focus on agent skills and automations and just try and stick to the things that will translate from provider to provider, agent harness to agent harness, model to model.
• 13:10
  Matt Whitermore: Because I've been anticipating this.
• 13:13
  Matt Whitermore: It just feels different for me for the last month.
• 13:15
  Matt Whitermore: I don't know if anybody agrees with anthropic models.
• 13:18
  Ravi Parikh: I-I think anthropic's freaking out about Kimi 3 coming out.
• 13:22
  Ravi Parikh: So Kimi 3-
• 13:23
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah
• 13:23
  Ravi Parikh: for those that don't know, is the Chinese equivalent of Opus 4.8, which w- which I guess Fable 5, which is Anthropic's latest, most advanced model.
• 13:35
  Ravi Parikh: A Chinese company released something that is like one-twentieth the cost that's just as powerful, and so they're like, it's this like interesting tit-for-tat war because the Chinese people the, the Chinese are distilling their models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
• 13:55
  Ravi Parikh: So they're basically, what distillation is, it's basically like at, they like at scale send a bunch of questions to Claude or OpenAI and read the outputs, and then they train their models based off of the output.
• 14:11
  Ravi Parikh: So it's like kind of this like warfare that's happening between the two countries, and like China is like usually three to six months behind the latest model.
• 14:20
  Ravi Parikh: So then if the US is supposed to compete against China, and all the US businesses are supposed to use a model that's 20 times more expensive than a model that is just only three months behind the latest model,
• 14:32
  Ravi Parikh: wouldn't all the US companies just switch to the Chinese model?
• 14:36
  Ravi Parikh: Which is we did do some of that because it is-
• 14:39
  Brian Searl: No, I do, I use Chinese models in everything.
• 14:42
  Brian Searl: It's open source
• 14:43
  Ravi Parikh: It's one-twentieth of the cost, right?
• 14:44
  Ravi Parikh: So it's like- Yeah not everything you do needs to be the most cutting edge.
• 14:49
  Ravi Parikh: Cutting edge.
• 14:50
  Ravi Parikh: Right?
• 14:50
  Ravi Parikh: Like- Yes so it's just this like, it's interesting how these like war dynamics are playing out.
• 14:55
  Ravi Parikh: But for us consumers I love it because it keeps bringing the cost of AI down, right?
• 15:00
  Ravi Parikh: It's like a real fierce competitor- in the race and it makes compute cheaper for all of us over time.
• 15:09
  Ravi Parikh: So I think it's a good thing.
• 15:12
  Brian Searl: Yeah, we saved almost $15,000 a month in our AI bills by moving to this stuff.
• 15:15
  Brian Searl: And they're all open source, and you can s- you can use providers that don't log your data, that don't save your stuff, that have the privacy in, in, everybody's logging it anyway.
• 15:24
  Brian Searl: Claude's logging what you do.
• 15:25
  Brian Searl: OpenAI's logging what you do.
• 15:27
  Brian Searl: Whether it's the Chinese or the Americans, someone's keeping all your data, putting it somewhere, and doing something with it.
• 15:30
  Brian Searl: It probably isn't something like this.
• 15:32
  Ravi Parikh: And the n- the latest thing is that just two days ago, Apple released their MacBook Studios because I think everyone's been wondering, like, where is Apple in this whole thing?
• 15:45
  Ravi Parikh: Like, why do they not ha- like, why is Siri so dumb?
• 15:49
  Ravi Parikh: Really.
• 15:49
  Ravi Parikh: You c- it barely can set an alarm for me.
• 15:52
  Ravi Parikh: And I think Apple's response to all of this is that they want people to run models locally on their computers.
• 16:00
  Ravi Parikh: So they actually released these super powerful studio desktops where you can lease them for 200 bucks a month, and then there's another company that you can rent your compute power to, so then they'll pay you 250 bucks a
• 16:16
  Ravi Parikh: month.
• 16:17
  Ravi Parikh: So you can actually make $50 a month running a local model on your computer.
• 16:22
  Ravi Parikh: And it's this really interesting, supply chain.
• 16:26
  Ravi Parikh: I don't know how to, I don't even know how to explain it.
• 16:27
  Ravi Parikh: But you went from having to pay Anthropic to now the Chinese are competing against Anthropic to Apple just coming in and being like, "Hey, everybody gets free compute.
• 16:39
  Ravi Parikh: Just run like Quinn," or which is like another one of the models, "On your computer for free.
• 16:45
  Ravi Parikh: Like, all you gotta do is pay for your power."
• 16:47
  Ravi Parikh: So then it's man, is everyone just gonna have free compute constantly because they're just running their models-
• 16:53
  Brian Searl: Yes
• 16:53
  Ravi Parikh: on their local computer.
• 16:54
  Brian Searl: Eventually, and that's what's gonna break the AI bubble and bring it all crashing down.
• 16:58
  Brian Searl: Not because AI is- Yeah in itself a bubble, but because the companies can never actually make the trillions of dollars that they're borrowing.
• 17:05
  Brian Searl: But that's a whole other topic.
• 17:06
  Brian Searl: Mychele, what's new in your world?
• 17:08
  Ravi Parikh: Sorry, I digress.
• 17:09
  Mychele Bisson: Oh, God, I can tell you what, it's not that stuff 'cause, that went way over my head.
• 17:17
  Mychele Bisson: So no, I think the AI stuff is great.
• 17:19
  Mychele Bisson: I was playing around with it at the beginning of the season.
• 17:22
  Mychele Bisson: And then we got into the season, and I'm just one of those weird people who kinda wanna be in my parks.
• 17:25
  Mychele Bisson: So I was actually in the parks for a lot of the season.
• 17:28
  Mychele Bisson: Plus, like I was mentioning earlier, getting my daughter ready to go off to college and becoming empty nesters.
• 17:34
  Mychele Bisson: And I kinda passed it off to my operations director, and he's been kinda playing around with it, and I don't really know where he's gone, but I'm pretty sure he's probably launching spaceships out of one of the marinas
• 17:43
  Mychele Bisson: at this point.
• 17:44
  Mychele Bisson: It just moves so quick, I can't even keep up.
• 17:47
  Mychele Bisson: And just taking a couple months off to focus on what I was doing, I feel so left behind
• 17:53
  Brian Searl: I think that's one of the important things that, that we, that I wanna balance on this show as we go forward is, right?
• 17:58
  Brian Searl: Like technology is moving faster than it ever has before.
• 18:01
  Brian Searl: Nobody on this show is gonna be able to keep up with it, even me who has no life.
• 18:06
  Brian Searl: Or maybe Ravi has beaten me, I don't know.
• 18:08
  Brian Searl: Ravi likelier.
• 18:09
  Brian Searl: But so we're not gonna be able to keep up with it, but I think it's very important to look at where we are as an industry and how this is gonna benefit us.
• 18:17
  Brian Searl: Because I think there's a, a push and pull here between what you just said, Mychele, and where I am with AI in trying to develop products, and Ravi is, and where Matt's playing with it, and he's also trying
• 18:27
  Brian Searl: to improve the guest experience at Unhitched and everywhere else, right?
• 18:30
  Brian Searl: Is that I think outdoor hospitality is perfectly positioned for this.
• 18:33
  Brian Searl: I think regardless of how much da- and I say this to clients all the time on calls, I, there's gonna be a ton of AI slop out of there, out of h- out here.
• 18:41
  Brian Searl: There's gonna be, like, you're gonna, we're gonna quickly go toward a Ready Player One where people are putting on headsets and living in virtual worlds.
• 18:48
  Brian Searl: But the one thing that AI will never be able to duplicate is sitting by a river, near the mountains, under the trees, listening to the bir- maybe listening to the birds, we'll do that, but not the same thing.
• 18:57
  Brian Searl: And so I think we're perfectly positioned to take advantage of that.
• 18:59
  Brian Searl: So the way we, as for you guys as outdoor hospitality operators, 'cause I'm not an operator, needs to think about this, and the people watching this show too, is how do I use this technology to weave it under
• 19:10
  Brian Searl: the surface so it's not visible to the guest, but makes their stay and experience better?
• 19:15
  Brian Searl: Is that fair?
• 19:17
  Mychele Bisson: No, I completely agree with that.
• 19:18
  Mychele Bisson: I know that for us we've used it as in building a chat model so that our managers can get information quickly so that it's really easily trainable so that they can build out training SOP models when we bring
• 19:30
  Mychele Bisson: new people in.
• 19:31
  Mychele Bisson: I know that we're working with a reservation system right now to help build out a new program where they actually, everything is a little less, a little easier on the reservation front.
• 19:41
  Mychele Bisson: Everything is kinda being AI-driven on that end reporting so that we're not searching for reports anymore.
• 19:47
  Mychele Bisson: Now we can just type in what we want.
• 19:49
  Mychele Bisson: Just things that we know will make things easier on our side as operators, making sure that we're being able to streamline certain things on the back end so that we can really focus on the guest experience so when
• 20:01
  Mychele Bisson: they come in, we know them by name.
• 20:04
  Mychele Bisson: We can da- whatever purpose they have in there, whether it's buying something or, booking the reservation, phone calls, things like that.
• 20:12
  Mychele Bisson: We're trying to streamline all the back end so that our people can be completely present.
• 20:16
  Mychele Bisson: And so that's the nice thing that I think AI is starting to do for all of us is that a lot of people are afraid of it because it's not something that they are used to, and they feel
• 20:26
  Mychele Bisson: like it takes away from the guest experience, and I think it's completely the opposite.
• 20:29
  Mychele Bisson: I think it's streamlining everything on the back so that we can be fully present
• 20:35
  Brian Searl: Nick, do you guys have AI in Edmonton or has it not made it that far?
• 20:38
  Nick Purslow: Not made it that far in the border yet, no.
• 20:40
  Nick Purslow: We-- my, my job is basically we're supplying these structures and providing the marketing services.
• 20:46
  Nick Purslow: We're not in the weeds, on the ground, in the operations, in the back end kind of thing.
• 20:50
  Nick Purslow: So my most of my use cases for it have been on the marketing side.
• 20:54
  Nick Purslow: So for example, at our second location out in the Texas Hill Country, we're putting together, Instagram carousels where it's 10, 10 slides each with a very small kind of piece of text to make it as readable as possible
• 21:05
  Nick Purslow: to make the, the reader want to read on.
• 21:08
  Nick Purslow: And I just find it a really useful tool to basically as a creative sparring partner, and it's just simple Chat GPT.
• 21:14
  Nick Purslow: I'm not as clever as you, Brian, when it comes to setting up all the automations and workflows.
• 21:18
  Nick Purslow: But just as a creative sparring partner to help ideate.
• 21:21
  Nick Purslow: For example, if I'm looking for some marketing copy and I've got one sentence in mind, I might ask it to, I might feed it that and then ask it to spit out 10 potential variations of that.
• 21:32
  Nick Purslow: And I hate kind of AI written copy, but it can be a great kind of creative tool to just spit out lots of variations and then relying on, human taste to refine that a little bit.
• 21:42
  Nick Purslow: So it just opens up kind of the possibilities for me when I'm crafting copy and I enjoy that, and I'd never want to outsource that to AI.
• 21:49
  Nick Purslow: But it's very good for, helping take it to the next level.
• 21:52
  Brian Searl: That's a good thing to, to-- for the people who are listening to this and wanna ground themselves and are hearing what Ravi's saying and hearing what I've said before and hearing what Mychele said and what Matt said and
• 22:00
  Brian Searl: every- Caleb I'm sure we'll get to you in one second.
• 22:03
  Brian Searl: You'll say some really profound things too.
• 22:05
  Brian Searl: But just I think it's important for the audience to realize that, that this is not something where you have to jump in and understand immediately tomorrow what Ravi's saying.
• 22:13
  Brian Searl: Otherwise, you will get completely overwhelmed.
• 22:15
  Brian Searl: Your goal should be to start small, just like and I'm not saying you're s- you're small, Nick, right?
• 22:19
  Brian Searl: With your- Yeah AI.
• 22:20
  Brian Searl: But start with one thing and say, "What do I need help with in my business that would make me more efficient, that would allow me to go out and serve my guests better?"
• 22:27
  Brian Searl: If that's analyzing your accounting, if that's improving your SOPs, if that's doing your Instagram reels, if that's whatever, fill in the blank.
• 22:34
  Brian Searl: I think that's the place you begin and you start.
• 22:37
  Brian Searl: And then just like we, I told people two, three years ago who asked me how do I start with AI, you go to AI and you ask, "How do I start with AI?
• 22:44
  Brian Searl: This is my struggle.
• 22:44
  Brian Searl: This is where all my hours are going," whatever.
• 22:47
  Brian Searl: And just the more you do with it, the more you touch and play with it.
• 22:49
  Brian Searl: That's been Matt's growth journey too, right?
• 22:51
  Brian Searl: I think, Matt Like the, it- Totally yeah, the more you play with it, the more you'll understand oh, I can do this.
• 22:59
  Brian Searl: Oh, I can do that.
• 23:00
  Brian Searl: Oh, I can do...
• 23:00
  Brian Searl: And the goal is not all time consuming, it's to save you time.
• 23:04
  Brian Searl: So you can go down the rabbit hole like me and Ravi apparently have, or you can kinda go down the rabbit hole and peek and see what's down there and then come back up and realize that there's sometimes
• 23:13
  Brian Searl: it's nice to see what we've got.
• 23:14
  Ravi Parikh: We trained our entire team.
• 23:16
  Ravi Parikh: They may not be quite at the level of depth that I'm at right now, but i- it's all about just thinking about, like if you come across a problem, how does AI solve that problem for you?
• 23:28
  Ravi Parikh: And like, when should you go to AI versus not go to AI?
• 23:31
  Ravi Parikh: And the best analogy that I give to people is if you just start asking Claude how to build an airplane, it's gonna start telling you how to build an airplane and where to procure the parts to do it
• 23:44
  Ravi Parikh: for and start teaching you about fluid dynamics, right?
• 23:47
  Ravi Parikh: So it's like the, the people who are the most curious about what AI can do for them are just gonna ask AI an insane amount of questions, and then it's going to give you answers back and teach you
• 24:01
  Ravi Parikh: exactly what you need to know.
• 24:03
  Ravi Parikh: It's like having the world's greatest tutor in your pocket.
• 24:06
  Ravi Parikh: You just ask it anything that you don't know about and pretty soon you're gonna know everything about that thing.
• 24:13
  Ravi Parikh: And that's the best way to learn with AI.
• 24:15
  Ravi Parikh: It does take time to figure that out, but you'll start to spot patterns and see "Oh, okay, can I like automate my bookkeeping with this?
• 24:24
  Ravi Parikh: How do we do that?
• 24:26
  Ravi Parikh: Oh, you need an API into QuickBooks for that.
• 24:29
  Ravi Parikh: Okay, how do I set that up?
• 24:30
  Ravi Parikh: Oh, okay, go to this link, click on this.
• 24:33
  Ravi Parikh: I don't know how this works."
• 24:34
  Ravi Parikh: Then you can just take a screenshot of that page and upload it into AI and be like, "Click on that link."
• 24:40
  Ravi Parikh: And it can like spoon feed it to you pretty easily and then you'll, your level will start to advance, right?
• 24:47
  Ravi Parikh: And you'll start to understand how all these things work and flow and, just go from there
• 24:53
  Brian Searl: Do you recommend people build their own airplanes?
• 24:56
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 24:56
  Ravi Parikh: Just definitely just build a, the W- the, the Wright brothers started one way, right?
• 25:01
  Ravi Parikh: Now you guys have Cl- no, I'm just kidding.
• 25:03
  Ravi Parikh: Don't do that.
• 25:03
  Ravi Parikh: Definitely don't do that.
• 25:04
  Brian Searl: I don't...
• 25:05
  Brian Searl: it interests me 'cause I've always just wanted to have my own private jet, but I realize I'll probably never have enough money, but also I then wouldn't wanna fly in the jet that I built 'cause I don't wanna
• 25:12
  Brian Searl: die.
• 25:13
  Brian Searl: So it's a quick no for me.
• 25:15
  Mychele Bisson: It's probably not a good idea to have a jet anyway, because if you have one, then you have to have two because the other one's usually in maintenance all day long.
• 25:22
  Mychele Bisson: Yeah.
• 25:22
  Mychele Bisson: Plus you have to have two staffs for both of them, and they have to be able to revo- trust me, I've talked to people who do this, and they keep telling me it's the worst thing ever.
• 25:30
  Mychele Bisson: That's what they tell me.
• 25:31
  Mychele Bisson: I think it's to make me feel better.
• 25:33
  Mychele Bisson: But I'm going with it.
• 25:36
  Brian Searl: Makes sense.
• 25:37
  Brian Searl: We'll go with it too, 'cause I don't think I'm ever gonna have a private jet either.
• 25:40
  Brian Searl: Caleb, how do you use AI at Camplife?
• 25:43
  Caleb Cook: Yeah.
• 25:44
  Caleb Cook: It's something that we're really pursuing from a perspective of asking, where can we eliminate some of those day-to-day, rough spots where people are just, yeah, throwing time down a barrel.
• 25:56
  Caleb Cook: And so we do have some tools that we're working on in the back end that are really gonna streamline some of the staffing side of things too.
• 26:04
  Caleb Cook: That's gonna be pretty big here coming up soon.
• 26:06
  Caleb Cook: Where we're at with AI, obviously we're using it in the back end with some of the development processes as well to speed up our, go to market and our velocity as well.
• 26:15
  Caleb Cook: And yeah, I'm in that same boat of just, asking AI a bit and learning from AI and then just diving in too.
• 26:22
  Caleb Cook: It's interesting 'cause I'm, this is gonna be a little bit more personal rather than a, a company statement per se, but I'm a person that I, in some ways I hate to love AI because there are a lot
• 26:33
  Caleb Cook: of questions that I have about it still from a societal perspective.
• 26:37
  Caleb Cook: But looking at what it has enabled, especially for, for some of these smaller park operators and what we can provide for them it's pretty exciting.
• 26:46
  Caleb Cook: And yeah, definitely having made the leap to the product side, I see that a lot more clearly with what we're able to start building out here.
• 26:52
  Caleb Cook: It's exciting stuff.
• 26:54
  Caleb Cook: But yeah.
• 26:55
  Nick Purslow: I think we share similar guilt, Caleb.
• 26:57
  Nick Purslow: I'm the exact same.
• 26:58
  Nick Purslow: I'm like, I don't like all of this, but it's really good."
• 27:01
  Nick Purslow: Yeah.
• 27:01
  Caleb Cook: True.
• 27:02
  Caleb Cook: True.
• 27:03
  Nick Purslow: Yeah.
• 27:03
  Caleb Cook: And I think I, I really resonate with Brian, what you were saying, and Mychele as, as well, that, we're using this as the underlying support to providing good hospitality.
• 27:13
  Caleb Cook: And this is actually something that came up in a conversation that we had some pa- with some parks yesterday, was- At the root of hospitality is making people feel at home, and you wouldn't feel at home with somebody
• 27:28
  Caleb Cook: that you don't trust.
• 27:29
  Caleb Cook: And so as we're using this AI, toolbox we have trust to maintain with our customers, with our campers.
• 27:36
  Caleb Cook: And so making sure that, yeah, we're not just using AI sight unseen, that yeah, we utilize it, but we do run it through our own human filters to say, "Hey, does this sound like my park?"
• 27:49
  Caleb Cook: "Does this preserve trust with my customers?"
• 27:52
  Caleb Cook: I think that's gonna be the big question that comes up is yeah, we know how to use this now.
• 27:57
  Caleb Cook: Now how do we preserve trust and preserve hospitality here?
• 28:01
  Brian Searl: That's with everything, right?
• 28:01
  Brian Searl: That's the same thing with your automated phone systems that you wanna do- True with a branch and a tree and everything.
• 28:06
  Brian Searl: Does this preserve trust or does this irritate my customer?
• 28:08
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 28:09
  Brian Searl: I think there's gonna be a lot of people who do it wrong, and there's gonna be some people who do it right.
• 28:12
  Caleb Cook: Yeah.
• 28:12
  Caleb Cook: Yeah.
• 28:12
  Brian Searl: So hopefully we can encourage the hospitality of this, the outdoor hospitality industry to mostly do it right.
• 28:18
  Caleb Cook: Absolutely.
• 28:19
  Caleb Cook: Yeah.
• 28:20
  Caleb Cook: Yeah, 'cause
• 28:20
  Mychele Bisson: At the end of the day, it's a relationship.
• 28:21
  Mychele Bisson: I also think that it's part of the presentation also, though, right?
• 28:23
  Mychele Bisson: Like if you have something, and I'm just, this is just from my own personal experience of what we've experienced in coming into new parks, but it's all in how you present whatever it is.
• 28:32
  Mychele Bisson: When we presented an AI answering system for emergency, everybody freaked out at first, and we were like this is to ensure that, one, if it's really an emergency, that we get the, to the right person.
• 28:41
  Mychele Bisson: But two, if you just need the code, it's gonna answer a question without waking up the manager who will then be able to better serve you the next day."
• 28:48
  Mychele Bisson: And then it was, "Oh, that makes sense."
• 28:50
  Mychele Bisson: I think it's just all in presentation.
• 28:52
  Mychele Bisson: I think it's all in how people perceive things.
• 28:54
  Mychele Bisson: When you get something brand new, everybody freaks out.
• 28:58
  Mychele Bisson: Nobody wants change.
• 28:59
  Mychele Bisson: Nobody wants different.
• 29:00
  Mychele Bisson: Everybody goes to the worst case scenario of, "Oh my God, robots are taking over the world, and now human-to-human contact is out."
• 29:07
  Mychele Bisson: And it's like, no, we're actually doing this so that you can have better human-to-human contact.
• 29:11
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 29:11
  Mychele Bisson: And that is the story of, how you work with people.
• 29:16
  Mychele Bisson: It's just how you present it to them, because if you're not telling them the right story, look at the Grimm Bror- Brother stories.
• 29:25
  Mychele Bisson: The originals suck.
• 29:26
  Mychele Bisson: They are horrible.
• 29:28
  Mychele Bisson: Disney remakes them, and everybody falls in love with them.
• 29:31
  Mychele Bisson: So it's, that's what I think AI is about, is it's just you've got to be able to present it in a way that they can relate to it and not think that they're taking over the world and we're
• 29:42
  Mychele Bisson: all gonna be out of jobs and, subject to being slaves to a machine all of the sudden.
• 29:48
  Brian Searl: Yeah, I think it goes back to the example like I, I've cited on this show before.
• 29:52
  Brian Searl: First time we released our AI phone agent, like years ago now, somebody commented on a LinkedIn post and said, "I will never wanna talk to an AI ever on the phone, ever."
• 30:01
  Brian Searl: And my response to them was, "As soon as you call your cable company and you aren't have, you don't have to be transferred for two hours to eight different people to solve your problem, and you're off the phone
• 30:09
  Brian Searl: in 30 seconds, you'll never wanna talk to a human being again."
• 30:12
  Ravi Parikh: And actually SpaceX 80% of their customer service is done through voice AI.
• 30:19
  Ravi Parikh: They're able to resolve 80% of tickets through voice AI, and that's a huge company.
• 30:23
  Ravi Parikh: I don't know how good it is, but we implemented phone AI for our support team, and we just...
• 30:29
  Ravi Parikh: If you wanna dial zero, it just transfers you to a human, right?
• 30:34
  Ravi Parikh: So if you just give the customer a way to, opt out until most people are generally comfortable with these types of AI tools.
• 30:42
  Ravi Parikh: Eventually, I do think that, you know- industry will get to the point where for example, voice is on par or as good as anything else out there.
• 30:55
  Ravi Parikh: Like I went to Taco Bell like a month ago and ordered a Chalupa, and I was talking to voice AI, and I was like, "Holy crap, that was the most efficient Chalupa ordering experience I've ever had."
• 31:06
  Ravi Parikh: And it didn't mess up my order.
• 31:08
  Ravi Parikh: And I was like, "That was awesome," because they always mess my order up.
• 31:13
  Ravi Parikh: And like there will be little aha moments that people start to have around it as the technology advances, and it's getting better like insanely fast.
• 31:24
  Ravi Parikh: At this point, the AI is making itself better because it's like writing itself.
• 31:29
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah I think over time it's gonna improve all of these interactions, and humans will start to understand like what the right cases of it are and what the wrong ca- use cases of it are for.
• 31:43
  Brian Searl: Yeah, it's all perception, like Mychele said.
• 31:45
  Brian Searl: But before we get to that, like you didn't order lettuce at Taco Bell, right?
• 31:48
  Brian Searl: There was a problem with that.
• 31:48
  Ravi Parikh: No.
• 31:49
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah, I didn't order lettuce.
• 31:50
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 31:51
  Brian Searl: Okay.
• 31:51
  Brian Searl: All right.
• 31:52
  Brian Searl: So so the, yeah, it's all perception with the guests though.
• 31:54
  Brian Searl: Like right now people have a perception of chatbots as the stupid, horrible things that you would yell and curse at and just say human on the bottom of a website since 2013 or '14.
• 32:04
  Brian Searl: They were never good.
• 32:05
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 32:06
  Brian Searl: And that's what most people think a chatbot is.
• 32:08
  Brian Searl: The same way as most people think an automated robot answering system is the press one, press two.
• 32:13
  Brian Searl: It can barely understand you, it can't transcribe your words correctly, and you just want a human.
• 32:17
  Brian Searl: Eventually that's gonna flip, and it's gonna happen, I think, sooner than most technology does.
• 32:21
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 32:22
  Brian Searl: And when that does, then that's gonna be better.
• 32:24
  Brian Searl: And again, to Mychele's point then allow us to go back to focusing more on the guest experience.
• 32:30
  Ravi Parikh: We- And the- we as humans can't do everything, right?
• 32:33
  Ravi Parikh: There's just only so many of us, but the AI is on 24/7, 365, and doesn't sleep.
• 32:38
  Ravi Parikh: So for, for simple things, hopefully it can get pretty, pretty effective at helping people out
• 32:48
  Brian Searl: How do you think it changes social in the future?
• 32:50
  Brian Searl: Like I know what you're using it for right now, but as we see more of this, let's call it AI slop for what it is, right?
• 32:56
  Brian Searl: As the attention gets pushed and pulled, as people become more used to things not being real or not being able to tell they're real, how does that impact how a property does social media in the future?
• 33:06
  Nick Purslow: I honestly don't know.
• 33:07
  Nick Purslow: I've been noticing more and more Instagram reels with AI models.
• 33:13
  Nick Purslow: And my first thought when I see it as a consumer is like, "That looks crap."
• 33:18
  Nick Purslow: But the numbers are doing pretty well.
• 33:21
  Nick Purslow: I don't know, people don't seem to care or, but the engagement's pretty good.
• 33:25
  Nick Purslow: So it wouldn't surprise me if, for example, properties just, and obviously the technology's gonna get better, so it wouldn't surprise me if, for example, you don't need models anymore for a photo shoot or a content shoot.
• 33:36
  Nick Purslow: At the minute I just wouldn't do it just 'cause I think it looks so much better with real people.
• 33:40
  Nick Purslow: But given we're so early and people i've seen people using it and they're engaging pretty well.
• 33:45
  Nick Purslow: That's one immediate thing where I think, and then-
• 33:47
  Brian Searl: My worry, my worry is the depth and authenticity of it, right?
• 33:51
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 33:51
  Brian Searl: So this is my worry.
• 33:52
  Brian Searl: Like right now it's not fun for me, but apparently it's fun for some people to scroll through the AI slop and leave and react and do all the things, right?
• 33:59
  Brian Searl: But when we get to the point where people are starting to use this with their campground, and I saw KOA do this, like AKOA, not corporate KOA, but I saw AKOA do this the other day where they posted
• 34:09
  Brian Searl: a picture of their train and it was clearly AI 'cause there's neon lights on the cur- on the thing at night and they made it look like this really cool experience and I don't think they were intentionally trying
• 34:19
  Brian Searl: to mislead anybody, but there were a lot of people that were like, "Hey, I live in the local area.
• 34:23
  Brian Searl: Can I bring my son or daughter to come to that?"
• 34:25
  Brian Searl: And they're expecting something I think- Yeah rightfully or wrongfully that what isn't actually what they're going to get.
• 34:30
  Brian Searl: Even if it's a small difference- Yeah like neon lights.
• 34:33
  Brian Searl: So that's what worries me.
• 34:35
  Ravi Parikh: I think there's a, I listened to a podcast called The All In Pod and a couple months ago there was a topic where they were talking about Congress is Potentially thinking about passing a law that identifies on social
• 34:51
  Ravi Parikh: or graphically generated content that you have to say that this is AI, right?
• 34:57
  Ravi Parikh: Or like there's like a watermark or something so people know that this is AI generated versus if it's real or versus AI.
• 35:05
  Ravi Parikh: And I think that's a good thing to know whether what you're looking at is AI generated or not.
• 35:11
  Ravi Parikh: Because it's starting to get kinda hard to figure that out.
• 35:15
  Ravi Parikh: Like Nick said, when you're scrolling through L- Instagram reels, it's "Is this real or is this not real?"
• 35:21
  Ravi Parikh: And that makes fake news kinda scary.
• 35:23
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 35:23
  Nick Purslow: I think it is tricky as well.
• 35:25
  Nick Purslow: Say if you're, t- using AI to create models like, human models, that's not...
• 35:30
  Nick Purslow: You're not giving a false impression of...
• 35:31
  Nick Purslow: It's not like you're, generating a, a brand new unit that does it all like that.
• 35:35
  Nick Purslow: It's just literally just filling that unit with people.
• 35:37
  Nick Purslow: But yeah, I'd, I don't know.
• 35:39
  Nick Purslow: I'd be interested to see how it goes.
• 35:40
  Nick Purslow: I'm su- I'm sure we're gonna see it getting a lot better and a lot harder to tell.
• 35:44
  Ravi Parikh: A- Anthropic actually started putting watermarks inside, like hidden watermarks in anything that's AI generated text.
• 35:53
  Ravi Parikh: So if you use Claude to, write any copy on your website, there's some hidden metadata in there that says, "This was generated by AI," which I do think Google's gonna start picking that up and maybe giving SEO penalty
• 36:07
  Ravi Parikh: for AI written content, but TB- TBD, like we don't know yet.
• 36:13
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 36:13
  Brian Searl: I come down a little bit in the middle on both of this stuff, right?
• 36:15
  Brian Searl: Because I don't think anybody should be misleading their guests, but I also think there's a benefit to specifically what you were talking about, Nick, like the model thing.
• 36:22
  Brian Searl: A small campground can't afford to pay models to come into their thing and do a photo shoot.
• 36:27
  Brian Searl: And so if you can take a real photo, and we've done this like years ago with we did it as an example for one of the CRR properties.
• 36:34
  Brian Searl: We never used it online, we just, you played around with Gemini and showed it, where like you had a, a beautiful picture that maybe a professional photographer had taken years past of their fire at night around the pool,
• 36:44
  Brian Searl: and there's just nobody there.
• 36:45
  Brian Searl: And so you just insert a couple people there.
• 36:48
  Brian Searl: I don't know if that's misleading.
• 36:49
  Brian Searl: I think it's a fine line, because like the, the models that you would normally shoot aren't gonna act that way for the guest anyway.
• 36:57
  Brian Searl: So is it a benefit or is it a harm?
• 36:59
  Brian Searl: I don't know.
• 37:00
  Brian Searl: I think I'm in the middle.
• 37:01
  Nick Purslow: Yeah.
• 37:01
  Nick Purslow: I think it's-
• 37:01
  Caleb Cook: So a couple of different stor-
• 37:02
  Nick Purslow: Go ahead.
• 37:02
  Caleb Cook: Oh, sorry.
• 37:03
  Caleb Cook: Go for it, Nick.
• 37:05
  Nick Purslow: No, you go.
• 37:05
  Nick Purslow: You go.
• 37:06
  Caleb Cook: A, a couple of different stories on this note.
• 37:09
  Caleb Cook: There was actually a a retail company that used AI generated product photography with models and everything.
• 37:16
  Caleb Cook: And they found that their social media interaction rate and their purchases tanked after using it.
• 37:24
  Caleb Cook: Now on the flip side of this coin there was a-
• 37:27
  Brian Searl: Hold on.
• 37:27
  Brian Searl: Hold on one second.
• 37:28
  Brian Searl: 'Cause did their customers know it was AI?
• 37:31
  Caleb Cook: They were they did not, it was not called out to them, but-
• 37:35
  Brian Searl: Okay
• 37:35
  Caleb Cook: the customers were starting to call it out as, "Oh, I see something that makes me believe this is AI generated."
• 37:40
  Brian Searl: But that, but that's the reason though.
• 37:42
  Brian Searl: It's not if you do quality good AI, right?
• 37:45
  Brian Searl: I don't know.
• 37:46
  Caleb Cook: Yeah.
• 37:46
  Caleb Cook: And presumably, like I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say it was good AI.
• 37:49
  Caleb Cook: But I think we have a- A market now that is on alert for AI.
• 37:56
  Caleb Cook: And on the flip side of the story is there's a professional photographer that posted some ph- some food photography that they did for a client, and somebody on their socials was like, "That's definitely AI."
• 38:08
  Caleb Cook: And so she was, like, posting all these process photos of saying, "No, this is how I made this."
• 38:13
  Caleb Cook: And so we're in this weird space of everybody's, everybody's guard is up for AI content for good and for worse, so I tend to, yeah, fall in that, that midground with you too, Brian from the perspective of saying
• 38:27
  Caleb Cook: let's do what," you, in a sense Photoshop did to photography, years ago.
• 38:31
  Caleb Cook: "Let's use reality and help people to see themselves in that scene more."
• 38:38
  Caleb Cook: And some people will like that and...
• 38:40
  Caleb Cook: Finish.
• 38:40
  Caleb Cook: Sorry, go ahead.
• 38:40
  Caleb Cook: Please finish the question always is too, is yeah what's your market?
• 38:44
  Caleb Cook: And what's interesting with the retail brand is it was primarily Gen Z and late millennials that were the target market for that.
• 38:52
  Caleb Cook: And these ones are like, they're like hardcore calling it out.
• 38:54
  Caleb Cook: And so that's a question for us too, is who are we trying to reach with our AI content?
• 39:00
  Caleb Cook: And that may answer some big questions too.
• 39:02
  Nick Purslow: There, there's a, a certainly a real anti-AI movement, I think particularly kind of Gen Z in particular.
• 39:09
  Nick Purslow: For example, like one of the things that I would just never, ever use it for is music.
• 39:12
  Nick Purslow: I just would never listen to AI-generated music.
• 39:15
  Nick Purslow: I think that's a pretty hard line for me, and there are so many other people that are saying if you go on, if you're looking for a YouTube kind of DJ set or whatever you'll pretty quickly find s-
• 39:25
  Nick Purslow: in the titles, a lot of them have, no AI or no AI slap, whatever.
• 39:29
  Nick Purslow: And there's a clear market for people who are actively against AI.
• 39:33
  Nick Purslow: And so I'm wondering, even almost as like a counter-positioning marketing tactic, particularly if you are seeking kind of younger demographics is, almost be like, we will ne- yeah, we will never use AI.
• 39:45
  Nick Purslow: I think that can, that will really resonate with a select group of people, but I'd be interested to see whether that grows, over time with, tech bros getting more and more influence and power, whether that, whether that, that
• 39:56
  Nick Purslow: movement will grow or whether it'd be a flash in the pan.
• 39:58
  Nick Purslow: But I would...
• 40:00
  Nick Purslow: Yeah I don't think it's necessarily gonna be automatically accepted by all generations that this is just the way it is, even if that's the way it's been painted a, a little bit.
• 40:08
  Nick Purslow: So I'm curious to see how that plays out.
• 40:10
  Brian Searl: Yeah, I think you're always gonna have to find a balance, right?
• 40:13
  Brian Searl: 'Cause like I, this is not a new argument.
• 40:15
  Brian Searl: There's always going to be people who will, for AI, and then we'll go historically, right?
• 40:20
  Brian Searl: There will always be people who are anti-AI.
• 40:22
  Brian Searl: There will always be people who are for AI.
• 40:23
  Brian Searl: I think most people end up landing somewhere in the middle.
• 40:26
  Brian Searl: But this is an age-old argument.
• 40:27
  Brian Searl: I remember working...
• 40:29
  Brian Searl: We used to work on trade in like 2012 with a tiny hotel in Daytona Beach called Dream Inn.
• 40:34
  Brian Searl: And back then was my first exposure, like we were doing, like we were actually going around taking pictures of campgrounds and hotels at that point with, I had a DSLR and whatever else.
• 40:42
  Brian Searl: And he was the first person who brought to my attention "I have 50% of my guests who don't like seeing anybody in the pool photos because they can't envision themselves there with somebody else in the pool scene."
• 40:53
  Brian Searl: But that, but it, but then there's the 50% of the other people who are like, "I want people in the photos to see how happy they are and how they interact and everything else."
• 40:59
  Brian Searl: So there's always going to be a push and pull with everything, I think.
• 41:02
  Brian Searl: I don't know that ever gets solved.
• 41:04
  Brian Searl: It maybe gets solved for your specific park, your demographic, who are your users, what do they want?
• 41:10
  Brian Searl: How do you make them happy?
• 41:10
  Caleb Cook: It all comes back to that knowing your camper well
• 41:17
  Brian Searl: Matt, how do you do this?
• 41:17
  Brian Searl: 'Cause you've probably got a bunch of different types of campers at all your, in all your portfolio, right?
• 41:22
  Brian Searl: Mychele, you, if you wanna take that after this.
• 41:25
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah.
• 41:25
  Matt Whitermore: It's a really interesting question.
• 41:27
  Matt Whitermore: I am on the side of good content is good content, whether it's written content or whether it's an AI-generated image.
• 41:36
  Matt Whitermore: We're, I think we're at the point where the quality of the image models and the video models out there if someone's gonna take the care to, to generate AI im- AI-generated videos and photos, w- we can all be
• 41:53
  Matt Whitermore: fooled, right?
• 41:54
  Matt Whitermore: I- if they're really taking the time to do it well, none of us would have any idea.
• 42:00
  Matt Whitermore: What gets me is the lazy use of AI, right?
• 42:05
  Matt Whitermore: It's so funny, I, there's this I'm in Syracuse, New York, and there's this local Instagram account called Stop the Slop 315, which is, is our area code here, and they just they're, like, kinda mean, right?
• 42:16
  Matt Whitermore: They they single out local restaurants that have the classic AI posters, right?
• 42:22
  Matt Whitermore: And they're horrible.
• 42:23
  Matt Whitermore: But that's a mom-and-pop restaurant that doesn't have high margins, probably doesn't have a lot of revenue.
• 42:27
  Matt Whitermore: They don't have a marketing agency.
• 42:29
  Matt Whitermore: They don't have a graphic designer.
• 42:30
  Matt Whitermore: And they just go on their free version of Chat GPT, and they give a one-sentence prompt that says, that's probably copying another AI poster, and says, "Make me a version of this.
• 42:41
  Matt Whitermore: Here's my menu, and here's my website."
• 42:43
  Matt Whitermore: And, it's, there's levels to this and there's t- everybody's in a different position, and that's probably somebody who's, I'm gonna, stereotype a little bit here, but a little bit older, a little bit less tech inclined.
• 42:55
  Brian Searl: But even that, but even that person there's a benefit to that, isn't there?
• 42:58
  Brian Searl: Because I can imagine...
• 42:59
  Brian Searl: I remember traveling, I used to travel 300 days a year when we were building this company, and we used to go to so many restaurants who had no menus, who had no online booking, who had no...
• 43:09
  Brian Searl: And so even if it's AI looking to us, doesn't, isn't that helpful to their guests?
• 43:15
  Matt Whitermore: In that case, the alternative is they probably weren't gonna post anything, right?
• 43:20
  Matt Whitermore: 'Cause they weren't gonna have the time to do it.
• 43:22
  Matt Whitermore: When I look at Unhitched in our portfolio, this, it's funny, this has been an internal debate, right?
• 43:28
  Matt Whitermore: The, the internal stance was never any AI generated images, and we've never done it.
• 43:33
  Matt Whitermore: I am on the other side of that argument though, 'cause the way I look at it is the w- like the way I would approach that is let's go have a professional photographer go photograph and video and do
• 43:44
  Matt Whitermore: the 360 video, and then you give that to your a- your image model, and then you have an unlimited real loop of this is what my property actually looks like.
• 43:56
  Matt Whitermore: This is what our guests actually look like, and you iterate it.
• 44:00
  Matt Whitermore: And the benefit there is that I don't have to go send a professional photographer every season and every year and every time the leaves change or whatever, right?
• 44:10
  Matt Whitermore: You're not totally cheating, you're not skipping all the hard steps, but you're making it a lot more scalable.
• 44:16
  Matt Whitermore: And right, I would approach it from the standpoint...
• 44:20
  Matt Whitermore: And it's not to fool people, right?
• 44:22
  Matt Whitermore: It's it's that good content is good content and authentic content is authentic content.
• 44:28
  Matt Whitermore: Whether or not that first draft was written by AI, I could care less.
• 44:33
  Ravi Parikh: I think if you identify that it's AI, people will be a little more disarmed by that.
• 44:40
  Ravi Parikh: It's like it's when you try to- Totally fool them that people get frustrated about it.
• 44:44
  Ravi Parikh: But if you're like, "Hey, this is AI generated," and we acknowledge it, then it's like, okay we know that this is AI, so we kinda get it.
• 44:52
  Matt Whitermore: I mean, we all see the, we all see the content on LinkedIn and, right?
• 44:57
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah.
• 44:57
  Matt Whitermore: People screenshot it and make fun of it, and I laugh at that.
• 45:00
  Matt Whitermore: And it- it's right, it's not about the use of AI, it's about the lazy use of AI.
• 45:04
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah.
• 45:05
  Matt Whitermore: The short prompts- Yeah, because- the not giving it the context.
• 45:08
  Matt Whitermore: And I think we're in a world where a few year- may- even today, maybe a few r- year- a few, years from now, 95% of the content you read online is gonna be, there's gonna be AI involved at
• 45:20
  Matt Whitermore: some point, right?
• 45:22
  Matt Whitermore: Most of the stuff that I write starts off as an AI draft, and I, the way I look at this is it gives me unlimited capacity to generate that first draft, and then I can spend all my time
• 45:34
  Matt Whitermore: on refining it and making it authentic and putting the real human stuff into it.
• 45:41
  Matt Whitermore: The alternative was I was gonna wake up at 5:00 AM and stare at a blank screen and a blinking cursor, and it was gonna take me an hour to just type those fir- first, two sentences.
• 45:51
  Matt Whitermore: Now, have unlimited drafts and un- unlimited material I can read through, and I can pull that, and then I can say, "Okay, this is halfway there.
• 45:59
  Matt Whitermore: This is directionally I like this, but..."
• 46:01
  Matt Whitermore: And then you're an editor, right?
• 46:03
  Matt Whitermore: You're an orchestrator and an editor, not a drafter.
• 46:05
  Matt Whitermore: Same thing with, right- editing photos.
• 46:10
  Matt Whitermore: I laugh, right?
• 46:11
  Matt Whitermore: Do you do you get offended when, you're looking at somebody's Instagram photos and then it's edited, right?
• 46:16
  Matt Whitermore: Is that not authentic, right?
• 46:17
  Matt Whitermore: Oh, it's not just the raw photo?
• 46:19
  Matt Whitermore: Like where do we draw the line with this stuff?
• 46:21
  Matt Whitermore: I think it's really super interesting conversation.
• 46:22
  Brian Searl: Yeah, I think we're all gonna figure out that line, I think we're all gonna figure out that line together as society moves forward.
• 46:28
  Brian Searl: I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer, because I'm in Ravi's camp partially, where our AI phone agents that we have, we tell everybody, "You should have your AI phone agent answer the phone and say that
• 46:38
  Brian Searl: they're an AI."
• 46:39
  Brian Searl: We should disclose that.
• 46:40
  Brian Searl: And then I'm with you on some of the s- the slop on LinkedIn should be disclosed as AI or regulated or however we wanna do it, whether that's by LinkedIn or the government or whatever else.
• 46:49
  Brian Searl: Probably by LinkedIn would be my preference, smaller government and all.
• 46:52
  Brian Searl: But but then there's some things where I'm like, "Do I need to disclose this?"
• 46:55
  Brian Searl: If I'm not intentionally misleading and/or I'm stepping back, maybe this is a one-two punch and I'm stepping back and saying, "Could this potentially be misleading?"
• 47:04
  Brian Searl: Maybe I even run that through an AI and ask "Hey, I edited this AI photo.
• 47:07
  Brian Searl: Is this misleading to my guest?"
• 47:09
  Brian Searl: If I'm just adding those people, like I was talking about, near a pool in a, at their ranch, and again, they never use this photo publicly, right?
• 47:17
  Brian Searl: But if I'm doing that and the pool furniture's the same, the colors are the same, the fire didn't change, the, the nighttime didn't change, the moon is still aligned, the trees are the same, everything is exactly how that
• 47:26
  Brian Searl: customer's gonna see it except for that lady is not gonna be there when they get there, which wouldn't be there in a model shoot anyway.
• 47:32
  Brian Searl: Should I be disclosing that's AI?
• 47:35
  Brian Searl: I don't know.
• 47:36
  Brian Searl: I don't think so, but that's me.
• 47:40
  Mychele Bisson: I think if everything is not misleading and everything is exactly the same, I don't think that's misleading at all.
• 47:45
  Mychele Bisson: We do a lot of organic content, so everything we do is shot in the park with our people with activities going on.
• 47:52
  Mychele Bisson: So all of our social media, pictures, videos, all of that stuff is organic.
• 47:56
  Mychele Bisson: And we just felt like it was better that way because we wanted people to actually get the real experience and to feel what our guests were feel- Like, we did a shoot with some of our guests a couple
• 48:06
  Mychele Bisson: weekends ago in one of our parks where they, the kids took the GoPro and went down the water slide with it, and they did an amazing job, and we're gonna reuse that forever because it's just a- amazing shots.
• 48:18
  Mychele Bisson: So I think, if I could...
• 48:21
  Mychele Bisson: I guess I would reuse that in AI.
• 48:23
  Mychele Bisson: If I could redo it in there, I would use it if it was the same exact information and the same exact everything except the people, 'cause those people, like you said, aren't gonna be there anyway.
• 48:34
  Mychele Bisson: But we do a lot of organic stuff, and it does really well.
• 48:36
  Mychele Bisson: Our social media my social media alone is, does really well just because I feel like it is organic and I feel like I'm taking everybody on a journey with me.
• 48:47
  Brian Searl: And I'm not making an argument where we should default to AI.
• 48:50
  Brian Searl: We should default to human, but if you don't have a budget or you wouldn't otherwise post in the case of a restaurant, or you have a great photo and there was no people in it and you need people
• 48:59
  Brian Searl: in it for...
• 48:59
  Brian Searl: Then that's where I'm saying there's a little bit-
• 49:01
  Mychele Bisson: Yeah
• 49:01
  Brian Searl: of flexibility.
• 49:02
  Caleb Cook: 100%.
• 49:03
  Mychele Bisson: No, I think- I mean- I think I agree with you in the side of if nothing is changing and it's not misleading and it's exactly the way that it would look if they were there, I...
• 49:11
  Mychele Bisson: Totally for it.
• 49:12
  Mychele Bisson: Like I said, I would take that same footage that we have of the kids and redo it for years with different people in it or different things as long as everything looked exactly the same, just change out maybe
• 49:22
  Mychele Bisson: the people.
• 49:23
  Mychele Bisson: I just- I'm on the side of I just don't want anybody to look at it and be like, "That is not there."
• 49:29
  Mychele Bisson: Because they call it out.
• 49:30
  Mychele Bisson: Yes.
• 49:30
  Mychele Bisson: We had a weird shot of one of our one of our marinas.
• 49:34
  Mychele Bisson: We had a shot that people don't usually see 'cause it was from the water, and it was just the way that it looked at it.
• 49:39
  Mychele Bisson: It even fooled me, 'cause I was like, "That's not our marina."
• 49:43
  Mychele Bisson: And so I'm looking at it trying to figure out if they maybe took one of our other marinas and put it into the picture and they messed it up, and I'm looking at it and I'm looking at it
• 49:52
  Mychele Bisson: and I was like, "That's not it."
• 49:54
  Mychele Bisson: And so then somebody else was like, "No, that's that..."
• 49:56
  Mychele Bisson: And then somebody else posted, a guest posted a picture underneath the same thing and they were like, "This is the marina.
• 50:01
  Mychele Bisson: This is where the angle came from."
• 50:03
  Mychele Bisson: And I was like, "Okay, they saved me," 'cause I didn't even realize it was my own marina.
• 50:06
  Mychele Bisson: So I think, like that I...
• 50:10
  Mychele Bisson: Like, when people get...
• 50:12
  Mychele Bisson: 'Cause they do, they nitpick, and they're...
• 50:14
  Mychele Bisson: 'cause they want the same experience.
• 50:16
  Mychele Bisson: They wanna know "This is what I'm gonna see," and they will pick it apart if they realize it's not the same picture.
• 50:21
  Mychele Bisson: 'Cause there were like 20 people on this thread going, "This is not that marina.
• 50:24
  Mychele Bisson: I don't know where this came from."
• 50:26
  Mychele Bisson: And even I was fooled by it because of the angle that it came from, but then somebody was like, "I'm literally sitting in the spot that they shot the picture and here it is."
• 50:32
  Mychele Bisson: And so that, that saved that post, but it's just if you change anything, I think everybody is on high alert because everybody wants to be the detective and be like, "That's not real," right?
• 50:44
  Mychele Bisson: And so- Yep I think that's where the problem lies is just when it doesn't look the way that it should or if you add something or make it look different, I can go out and AI myself into looking
• 50:56
  Mychele Bisson: like Christie Brinkley.
• 50:57
  Mychele Bisson: Everybody's gonna be like, "That's not her," 'cause they're gonna see me in real life and realize that's definitely not me.
• 51:02
  Mychele Bisson: I wish, but no.
• 51:03
  Mychele Bisson: It's just, it's those things that people nitpick because they're gonna say, "That's not what it is."
• 51:09
  Nick Purslow: I think you've always gotta make allowance for-
• 51:10
  Mychele Bisson: I may have just aged myself because I don't know if everybody knows who Christie Brinkley is.
• 51:13
  Mychele Bisson: I just realized that.
• 51:15
  Brian Searl: I know Christie Brinkley.
• 51:17
  Nick Purslow: I, you gotta make an allowance for there's always gonna be crazy people in the comments regardless as well.
• 51:22
  Nick Purslow: Like we did a pre-sale campaign where we just used like artist impression renderings.
• 51:26
  Nick Purslow: It wasn't AI, it was just, traditional kind of animation.
• 51:29
  Nick Purslow: And people were like beating us up for that.
• 51:32
  Nick Purslow: And it's like right now the property's an, an empty lot.
• 51:35
  Nick Purslow: And this is what we're gonna build and it's quite clearly, animation.
• 51:38
  Nick Purslow: And so some people you just, I think you gotta accept that, that there's gonna be no convincing them and that there'll always be crazy people out there,
• 51:44
  Mychele Bisson: oh, there's always crazy people-
• 51:45
  Brian Searl: All right.
• 51:45
  Brian Searl: Let's-
• 51:45
  Mychele Bisson: out there trusting all the time.
• 51:49
  Nick Purslow: I'm just gonna give you a hundred percent-
• 51:50
  Brian Searl: Let's spend the last few minutes of the, let's spend the last few minutes of the show asking each other questions.
• 51:53
  Brian Searl: Matt, do you have any questions for anybody here?
• 51:55
  Brian Searl: Just a que- question for one person that you wanna know?
• 52:00
  Matt Whitermore: Oh, that's a good one.
• 52:01
  Matt Whitermore: Nick, we haven't caught up in a while.
• 52:03
  Matt Whitermore: What's new in the land of Posh Outdoors?
• 52:05
  Matt Whitermore: What's what's been going on?
• 52:07
  Nick Purslow: Lots going on.
• 52:08
  Nick Purslow: We're always in cat raise mode, but we're really ramping up now.
• 52:11
  Nick Purslow: We wanna get to 2, 3, 4 locations by mid next year.
• 52:16
  Nick Purslow: And I've just been deep in the weeds of social media marketing and really figuring out that code and how to speak to people through social media.
• 52:23
  Nick Purslow: So lots going on on, on my end.
• 52:25
  Nick Purslow: Curious to know what's going on, on, on your end too.
• 52:29
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah, no, appreciate that
• 52:30
  Nick Purslow: what's going on in yours?
• 52:32
  Matt Whitermore: Just growing fast.
• 52:33
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah we're ho- hopefully some exciting announcements soon with some, some big adds to the portfolio.
• 52:38
  Matt Whitermore: Management side, investment side.
• 52:40
  Matt Whitermore: Been keeping busy.
• 52:41
  Matt Whitermore: Try- trying to scale, with a corporate crew of about 20 in headquarters has been tough.
• 52:48
  Matt Whitermore: Doing a lot of AI stuff to- get more efficient behind the scenes.
• 52:51
  Matt Whitermore: So that's been my my day-to-day focus.
• 52:54
  Nick Purslow: Nice.
• 52:56
  Brian Searl: Nick, do you have a question for anybody?
• 52:58
  Nick Purslow: That was my question.
• 52:59
  Brian Searl: Oh, you're gonna take it
• 53:00
  Nick Purslow: That's what I was gonna ask
• 53:00
  Brian Searl: take it easy on them?
• 53:01
  Brian Searl: Okay, all right.
• 53:02
  Nick Purslow: I, r- it'd be good to know how, what Ravi's best use case is for AI given, your position.
• 53:08
  Ravi Parikh: Oh, best use case.
• 53:09
  Ravi Parikh: I don't know what the best use case is, but I pretty much wrapped our AI around, like every problem I face, I try to think of it AI first now.
• 53:26
  Ravi Parikh: Something cool we've built at RoverPass is this concept called SETT Com.
• 53:32
  Ravi Parikh: We call it SETT Com because I think central command sounds cool.
• 53:36
  Ravi Parikh: But it's basically connected into every part of our business HR, finance, support, product, engineering, everything.
• 53:46
  Ravi Parikh: And so like our whole team now essentially can just ask questions and it can look at our code base and answer questions.
• 53:56
  Ravi Parikh: It can generate FAQ articles on the fly based off how features work.
• 54:01
  Ravi Parikh: So I don't know that I have the best use case but there are just so many unlimited use cases that we're constantly finding every single day.
• 54:12
  Ravi Parikh: But like one thing that we've started doing is identifying loops within our workflows.
• 54:19
  Ravi Parikh: So it's where, let's say like we implemented voice AI in our support.
• 54:24
  Ravi Parikh: When a campground owner calls us, if for some reason we can't pick up the phone or it's after hours, it defaults to voice AI.
• 54:32
  Ravi Parikh: And the problem was is that we didn't have training data to train the voice AI on like what to do and what not to do because we didn't use to record our calls.
• 54:42
  Ravi Parikh: So it's how do you train AI on an infinite number of possibilities?
• 54:47
  Ravi Parikh: If you're like, somebody asks you what the Cowboys score is on a call, it's like like what do you do in that case?
• 54:54
  Ravi Parikh: So we've got like AI agents that grade the call after the call based off how it's supposed to run and then it fixes our prompt based off of what that other AI agent thinks the voice AI agent screwed
• 55:12
  Ravi Parikh: up and then if it doesn't have an FAQ article to answer the client's question, it automatically creates the FAQ article and queues it up for our support team to approve that FAQ article.
• 55:24
  Ravi Parikh: So looping is the next frontier of AI, I think.
• 55:29
  Ravi Parikh: It's like identifying these like recursive loops in your workflow and then having AI improve those so you can start to compound from there.
• 55:38
  Ravi Parikh: So just I don't know if that answers your question directly, Nick, but there's just so many use cases that we're finding, so I don't know if there's any one best
• 55:47
  Brian Searl: The best is the best for you, and th- and that's what you gotta start your journey like we talked about, right?
• 55:52
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 55:52
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 55:52
  Brian Searl: Start your journey with something small.
• 55:54
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 55:54
  Brian Searl: And you'll figure your best will be something today, and then it'll be different tomorrow, it'll be different next week, it'll be different next month, it'll be different, right?
• 56:01
  Brian Searl: So-
• 56:01
  Ravi Parikh: And the crazy thing is you couldn't even do half of this stuff until December of last year when Anthropic released Opus 4.5.
• 56:10
  Ravi Parikh: AI wasn't as anywhere near as good as it was until like late last year.
• 56:15
  Ravi Parikh: So it's crazy how fast this is all moving.
• 56:19
  Brian Searl: Caleb, do you have any questions for anybody?
• 56:20
  Brian Searl: And if anybody needs to drop off, I know we're a little bit over, so-
• 56:23
  Nick Purslow: I've gotta dash to another call.
• 56:24
  Nick Purslow: Thank you, Brian.
• 56:25
  Nick Purslow: Okay.
• 56:25
  Nick Purslow: Nice to meet you all.
• 56:26
  Nick Purslow: Thanks for your time.
• 56:26
  Nick Purslow: Thank you.
• 56:26
  Nick Purslow: Yeah.
• 56:26
  Caleb Cook: All right.
• 56:28
  Caleb Cook: Yeah.
• 56:29
  Caleb Cook: I'd be curious to Mychele here, just how, I know it's been a little bit of a unique season across the industry, and so I'm curious how marketing has gone to recurring guests or past guests and how they've responded
• 56:42
  Caleb Cook: to that.
• 56:44
  Mychele Bisson: Actually, we had a great season.
• 56:46
  Mychele Bisson: We started off really slow because of the, I think it was mainly the weather and the gas prices.
• 56:50
  Mychele Bisson: But we pivoted to marketing closer to home and actually booked out our parks most of the season.
• 56:54
  Mychele Bisson: I think for July 4th we were like at 106% across the board.
• 56:58
  Mychele Bisson: Nice.
• 56:58
  Mychele Bisson: Yeah.
• 56:59
  Mychele Bisson: So we did really well.
• 57:00
  Mychele Bisson: August is always probably our slowest month because everybody goes back to school, and so I was just talking to my team right before this about, "Okay let's give all the locals a bigger discount just to get them all
• 57:10
  Mychele Bisson: in."
• 57:10
  Mychele Bisson: And we're doing like f- first responders.
• 57:11
  Mychele Bisson: Like this is when we do all of that stuff so that we can just get people and heads in beds because we know August and September everybody goes back to school.
• 57:18
  Mychele Bisson: So I think it's always just understanding who is where and who's coming to the park at what times to understand how to switch your marketing up.
• 57:26
  Mychele Bisson: But I think because we are a smaller group we're able to pivot really quickly.
• 57:33
  Caleb Cook: That's awesome
• 57:34
  Brian Searl: All right
• 57:35
  Mychele Bisson: Yeah
• 57:36
  Brian Searl: Mychele, you have any questions?
• 57:37
  Mychele Bisson: I think, I think we're probably done for the day
• 57:39
  Brian Searl: You lost everybody
• 57:39
  Mychele Bisson: Yeah
• 57:39
  Brian Searl: You, you lost everybody but like the other day was the day-
• 57:41
  Mychele Bisson: Actually, my question was for Caleb anyway because I wanted to know, so with CampLife, how are you guys integrating AI into your systems?
• 57:48
  Caleb Cook: Yeah.
• 57:49
  Caleb Cook: So there, there are a couple of things we're working on the backg- in the background.
• 57:53
  Caleb Cook: I don't actually know how much I can divulge on a couple of the-
• 57:57
  Brian Searl: Nobody watches the show, Caleb, so just say whatever you want.
• 58:00
  Caleb Cook: Okay.
• 58:02
  Caleb Cook: But yeah, what I'll say is there are-
• 58:04
  Mychele Bisson: They're everybody excited
• 58:04
  Caleb Cook: there are some big things...
• 58:05
  Caleb Cook: Yeah, true.
• 58:07
  Caleb Cook: So there are gonna be some big things coming.
• 58:09
  Caleb Cook: We have some things on both how we help parks strategize both on the rating side, and then how we help parks manage those front desk operations.
• 58:19
  Caleb Cook: So one of the things that we hear from a ton of parks is that they just have a hard time hiring for people, and a hard time just staffing through the year.
• 58:29
  Caleb Cook: And granted, this, these, a lot of the cross-section are kinda these smaller parks, and so we're looking at really ways that we can help streamline things for people that are strapped for operating income or operating resources on the,
• 58:43
  Caleb Cook: the staffing side.
• 58:44
  Caleb Cook: So I think I'll leave it there for the time being, but we are following up on the email marketing releases with some, some 2.0 tools that that really do leverage sometimes AI, sometimes not AI, but AI structure, if
• 58:56
  Caleb Cook: you will to prompting out, "Hey, I wanna send emails to all my guests that stayed within the park, between X days on this site so that we can really re- effectively retarget those customers."
• 59:10
  Caleb Cook: And we honestly find that a lot of our our customers don't really leverage that returning customer base even when there's a very high percentage of g- of campers that are likely to restay or revisit a park.
• 59:24
  Caleb Cook: So that's where we're putting a lot of our focus right now is just, yeah, how do we streamline the staffing side?
• 59:32
  Caleb Cook: How do we streamline the remarketing side?
• 59:36
  Mychele Bisson: Yeah.
• 59:36
  Mychele Bisson: I actually think that's a huge thing 'cause I know like for us, when we acquire a park, the reoccurring guests are like our biggest, they're our biggest advertisers.
• 59:45
  Mychele Bisson: Oh, yeah.
• 59:45
  Mychele Bisson: So we go after them hard.
• 59:48
  Mychele Bisson: So yeah, and it pays off,
• 59:51
  Caleb Cook: good.
• 59:52
  Caleb Cook: Glad to hear that.
• 59:52
  Caleb Cook: Glad to hear you guys had a good season too.
• 59:54
  Caleb Cook: That's awesome.
• 59:56
  Mychele Bisson: Yeah, we actually had a really good season.
• 59:57
  Mychele Bisson: It was a great one.
• 59:58
  Mychele Bisson: We were actually last season we were I think it was 8 to 12% above where we were the year before, and then this season we were actually, I think it was 16 to 25% above where we were last
• 1:00:09
  Mychele Bisson: year.
• 1:00:11
  Brian Searl: Nice.
• 1:00:11
  Caleb Cook: Very good.
• 1:00:12
  Ravi Parikh: That's good growth.
• 1:00:13
  Mychele Bisson: Yeah, so depending on the park.
• 1:00:16
  Brian Searl: All right.
• 1:00:16
  Brian Searl: I wanna be cognizant of everybody's time here.
• 1:00:18
  Brian Searl: So Ravi, final thoughts and any, where can they find out more about RoverPass?
• 1:00:22
  Ravi Parikh: Software.roverpass.com or just reach out to me, ravi@roverpass.com.
• 1:00:28
  Ravi Parikh: I guess final thoughts, AI is here, and I think just learning to use it.
• 1:00:36
  Ravi Parikh: Education, I think, is the most important part of this.
• 1:00:39
  Ravi Parikh: This is like a brand-new technology that's moving at a speed we've never seen before in any kind of technology, so just spending more time teaching yourself how to use it, I think, is something everybody should just slow down
• 1:00:54
  Ravi Parikh: for a second and do because it will really up...
• 1:00:59
  Ravi Parikh: if you spend two weeks just deep diving into AI, and if you're an investor like Mychele you will make back those two weeks of investment in two to four weeks, right?
• 1:01:10
  Ravi Parikh: Objectively speaking, that's an incredible return if you can make your money back in two to four weeks.
• 1:01:17
  Ravi Parikh: That's literally all it takes.
• 1:01:18
  Ravi Parikh: If you wanna start small, just start, tinkering.
• 1:01:21
  Ravi Parikh: That's the best way
• 1:01:25
  Brian Searl: Final thoughts, Caleb, and where can they learn more about CampLife?
• 1:01:28
  Caleb Cook: Yeah.
• 1:01:28
  Caleb Cook: Software.camplife.com and forward slash email dash marketing if you're interested in learning about that new feature release specifically.
• 1:01:37
  Caleb Cook: And yeah, final thoughts is at the end of the day we're in hospitality and building relationships that's the, the filter that I would encourage everybody to run things through, and it'll be different for everybody.
• 1:01:48
  Caleb Cook: But we have relationships to maintain and people to make feel at home.
• 1:01:54
  Caleb Cook: And so that's, yeah, that's the goal with all of this too.
• 1:01:57
  Caleb Cook: And that's what I hope for our industry too.
• 1:02:00
  Brian Searl: Awesome.
• 1:02:01
  Brian Searl: Thanks for being here, Caleb.
• 1:02:01
  Brian Searl: Last but not least, Mychele, where can they...
• 1:02:03
  Brian Searl: or final thoughts and where can they learn more about Wayhaven?
• 1:02:06
  Mychele Bisson: Oof.
• 1:02:07
  Mychele Bisson: Final thoughts.
• 1:02:08
  Mychele Bisson: I agree with both of you guys.
• 1:02:09
  Mychele Bisson: I think that we are completely a hospitality-driven business, and we should never lose sight of that, but we should always find ways to be able to streamline things on the back end so that we can be fully focused
• 1:02:19
  Mychele Bisson: on the hospitality side and ensuring that our guests do feel like they're coming home every time they visit us.
• 1:02:24
  Mychele Bisson: And where can you find me?
• 1:02:25
  Mychele Bisson: You can find me at wayhavenresorts.com is where you can find my portfolio.
• 1:02:29
  Mychele Bisson: You can also find me on social medias at Mychele Bisson anywhere from YouTube to Instagram to LinkedIn and michelebisson.com.
• 1:02:39
  Brian Searl: All right.
• 1:02:39
  Brian Searl: Thank you guys for being here, for joining us for another episode of MC Fireside Chat.
• 1:02:41
  Brian Searl: Scott Bahr and I are off today.
• 1:02:43
  Brian Searl: Again, we're just I'm taking the whole month of August off, 'cause we're busy.
• 1:02:46
  Brian Searl: We'll be back with another episode of Outwired next week, so until then take care.
• 1:02:49
  Brian Searl: Have a great week.
• 1:02:50
  Brian Searl: Thanks, everybody.
• 1:02:51
  Mychele Bisson: Bye, guys.
• 1:02:52
  Caleb Cook: Thank you.