Latest / MC Fireside Chats, an Outdoor Hospitality Podcast / MC Fireside Chats - September 23rd, 2026

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MC Fireside Chats - September 23rd, 2026 · MC Fireside Chats, an Outdoor Hospitality Podcast

• 0:46
  Brian Searl: So everybody, it's another episode of MC Fireside Chats literally today, but I'm gonna turn around 'cause it's not really warm here if I'm facing away from it, so I just wanna to have the proof in the background that
• 0:54
  Brian Searl: I'm actually doing it.
• 0:55
  Brian Searl: But Fireside Chats, welcome here to everybody.
• 0:57
  Brian Searl: Excited to be back for another episode.
• 0:58
  Brian Searl: We're gonna talk about some AI tech.
• 0:59
  Brian Searl: We got some special guests here, some of our recurring guests Ravi Matt Whitemore back with us and then a few special guests.
• 1:05
  Brian Searl: We got Alex, Tessa, and Mitch from Northgate Resorts.
• 1:09
  Brian Searl: Alex, sorry, you're from CRR.
• 1:10
  Brian Searl: I didn't mean to lump you into that whole kind of group there.
• 1:12
  Brian Searl: I guess I should have paused and put some kind of comma there or something.
• 1:15
  Brian Searl: But welcome everybody.
• 1:16
  Brian Searl: Let's go briefly around our the room and just introduce ourselves.
• 1:19
  Brian Searl: Ravi, you wanna start?
• 1:21
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 1:21
  Ravi Parikh: I'm Ravi.
• 1:22
  Ravi Parikh: I'm the founder of RoverPass.
• 1:25
  Ravi Parikh: We're a management software company that about 1,000 campgrounds across the US use to run all of their reservations through.
• 1:34
  Brian Searl: Awesome.
• 1:34
  Brian Searl: Thanks for being here, sir.
• 1:35
  Brian Searl: Alex?
• 1:40
  Alex Burkett: Hey everyone my name is Alex.
• 1:41
  Alex Burkett: I'm GM at COTA RV Park right on site at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas which is managed by CRR Hospitality.
• 1:50
  Brian Searl: And you're gonna later describe how you woke up this morning for us, right?
• 1:54
  Alex Burkett: Sure.
• 1:54
  Alex Burkett: I can replay that.
• 1:55
  Alex Burkett: Yeah.
• 1:56
  Brian Searl: Sure man, like it fits into the branding.
• 1:58
  Brian Searl: You can promote the park, like wow, man.
• 2:01
  Alex Burkett: For sure, yeah.
• 2:02
  Alex Burkett: We've been blessed.
• 2:03
  Alex Burkett: We have a company called RideSmart that does a lot of it's like a motorcycle school which I've been shocked by the amount of like amateur racing that actually occurs on the track when there's not like a major event
• 2:13
  Alex Burkett: like F1 or Moto.
• 2:14
  Alex Burkett: So literally about 7:00 AM this morning, woke up to, motorcycles racing 100 miles an hour, you know, right outside your RV.
• 2:20
  Alex Burkett: Pretty, pretty incredible experience.
• 2:22
  Alex Burkett: Definitely very experiential and, if you're looking for adventure, this is the park for you.
• 2:27
  Brian Searl: Yeah, it's not probably the park for me.
• 2:29
  Brian Searl: Like I remember the only time I remember waking up to something was at like a KOA somewhere in Kentucky, like in 2012 when we were filming videos of them, and it was like a goat screeching at 4:00 o'clock
• 2:38
  Brian Searl: in the morning.
• 2:39
  Brian Searl: Like I'm not...
• 2:40
  Brian Searl: Yeah, I need to sleep in till I wake up.
• 2:42
  Brian Searl: I don't like alarms, but more power to you, Alex, like you're a better person than me.
• 2:46
  Brian Searl: Matt first and then we'll do the Northgate duo.
• 2:50
  Matt Whitermore: Yes, hello.
• 2:51
  Matt Whitermore: Gonna throw you for a little bit of a loop here maybe, Brian, we haven't talked, but new role, new company this, this month.
• 2:57
  Matt Whitermore: So after a really fun, rewarding, meaningful year, a little over a year with Climb Capital and Unhitched decided to make a move over to a, a company, a startup in the AI and tech space and commercial real estate
• 3:10
  Matt Whitermore: space and outdoor hospitality space called Travo.
• 3:13
  Matt Whitermore: So I'm manager- managing director with Travo.
• 3:16
  Matt Whitermore: Happy to talk more about that, but first, first and foremost, a huge thank you to Bob Preston, Dave Wilner all of the Climb Capital and Unhitched teams for a really fun, rewarding year and still big fans and a
• 3:30
  Matt Whitermore: lot of exciting stuff going on with those, those two teams.
• 3:34
  Matt Whitermore: But new opportunity for myself here, so good timing, an announcement here.
• 3:39
  Brian Searl: I don't mean to I didn't I would have preferred to tell you this privately, Matt, but Bob was sending us checks to have you on the show every week.
• 3:47
  Brian Searl: Just kidding.
• 3:49
  Brian Searl: Welcome.
• 3:50
  Brian Searl: W- I'm glad to hear it, man.
• 3:50
  Brian Searl: Congratulations are in order, I assume obviously good role to good role, but like glad you're growing and moving and doing what you wanna do.
• 3:56
  Brian Searl: Exciting to see where you go from there.
• 3:57
  Matt Whitermore: Thank you
• 3:58
  Brian Searl: Mitch or Tessa, who wants to go first?
• 3:59
  Brian Searl: You guys wanna fight over it or?
• 4:02
  Mitchell Spence: Ladies first.
• 4:03
  Tessa McCrackin: All right.
• 4:04
  Tessa McCrackin: Yeah.
• 4:04
  Tessa McCrackin: So I'm Tessa McCracken, I'm the CMO here at Northgate Resort, so I'm overseeing all of our marketing for all of our locations, and Mitch reports directly to me.
• 4:13
  Tessa McCrackin: That's a joke.
• 4:14
  Tessa McCrackin: So Mitch can introduce himself.
• 4:16
  Mitchell Spence: I wish.
• 4:19
  Brian Searl: Go ahead, Mitch, please.
• 4:20
  Mitchell Spence: I, M- Mitch Spence.
• 4:21
  Mitchell Spence: I realized I didn't put my last name on there, but I'm the chief commercial officer at Northgate Resorts, so oversee a lot of the just commercial strategy revenue management, that kind of thing
• 4:30
  Brian Searl: Awesome.
• 4:30
  Brian Searl: Welcome everybody.
• 4:31
  Brian Searl: So we typically start the show to tossing it to our recurring guests.
• 4:34
  Brian Searl: Guess we only have two today, Ravi and Matt.
• 4:36
  Brian Searl: Is there anything that's come across your guys' desk in the last month since we've been together?
• 4:40
  Brian Searl: Primarily staying around the AI tech area, but if you have something else that's important, throw it out there that you think we should be talking about
• 4:49
  Matt Whitermore: I'll jump in.
• 4:50
  Matt Whitermore: I since we spoke a- about a month ago, I've just opened my world.
• 4:54
  Matt Whitermore: I was a a loyalist to Claude and Claude models and Claude Code and have since broadened my horizons to Codex and OpenAI models and Cursor and Groq models and GroqBot, and have just really kinda gone to town on
• 5:12
  Matt Whitermore: testing and experimenting with different models and really trying to become model and, app agnostic, which is, has been really eye-opening
• 5:25
  Brian Searl: Yeah, we use that.
• 5:25
  Brian Searl: I think I've said it on the show before and for the people who you know, who are watching the show and don't speak geek like Matt just did a bunch of different AI models that do a bunch of
• 5:34
  Brian Searl: different things that you know from different providers.
• 5:36
  Brian Searl: But basically for, for most of the people who are watching this show, you're gonna find a lot of these are similar, but Matt loves to experiment.
• 5:42
  Brian Searl: He loves to do a lot with Claude Code, like I do, and build things, and and Ravi too and maybe the Northgate people too, and maybe Alex too will get there.
• 5:50
  Brian Searl: But just different things, different tools for different use cases, and it's kinda good to grow and expand and see what different providers offer.
• 5:56
  Brian Searl: Opus 5.5 is out now, which is good,
• 5:57
  Ravi Parikh: yeah.
• 5:57
  Ravi Parikh: That was the-
• 5:58
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah
• 5:58
  Ravi Parikh: that was the drop this morning.
• 6:00
  Ravi Parikh: Or was that yesterday?
• 6:01
  Brian Searl: It was yesterday.
• 6:02
  Ravi Parikh: Oh, okay.
• 6:03
  Matt Whitermore: Yesterday.
• 6:03
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah.
• 6:04
  Ravi Parikh: I feel like the biggest news in AI in the last 30 days has been Facebook dropping Muse, which is-
• 6:10
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah
• 6:10
  Ravi Parikh: basically like a, a personal assistant.
• 6:13
  Ravi Parikh: I guess Grok Bot too happened this last m-
• 6:16
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah
• 6:17
  Ravi Parikh: I don't know, that's probably been, like, 60 days now.
• 6:21
  Ravi Parikh: But the AI personal assistant wars are firing on all cylinders now.
• 6:28
  Ravi Parikh: It seems like all the big guys have, have a claim in that battle.
• 6:33
  Brian Searl: Before we get into the geeky stuff, why don't we go to let's start with Alex, right?
• 6:37
  Brian Searl: Alex so first tell us about your role at COTA and what you're kinda doing, anything you wanna take in.
• 6:41
  Brian Searl: But then my second question is how are you utilizing some of this AI in tech for the work that you're doing for either in your personal life, you wanna do that, or work for COTA?
• 6:50
  Alex Burkett: Yeah.
• 6:50
  Alex Burkett: So I think, one, I have a, a unique perspective as kind of the, I think, only one on the call that operates a single campground location from, primarily the, the day-to-day operations as the GM.
• 7:01
  Alex Burkett: So I actually credit, like, Ravi, to you in, in the last episode that I listened, with this and you talking about how, interconnected a lot of the tools that you use were with AI.
• 7:10
  Alex Burkett: And, I kinda took that from that, prior episode and challenged myself to say, "How can I use Copilot more to look at emails?
• 7:16
  Alex Burkett: How am I better utilizing data to impact our guest experiences, our major events happening on campus?"
• 7:22
  Alex Burkett: I'm fairly new to the property and with CRR as well and Brian, you're a big part of our AI strategy here and a lot of what we believe, trying to be AI forward and AI first at CRR.
• 7:32
  Alex Burkett: And for me to step into a new park and a new role, there's a lotta data that you have to kinda cover, out of the gates.
• 7:37
  Alex Burkett: So I think that's kinda the most tangible impact that I've seen in the last 60 days, is really- Utilizing it to my advantage to download the things that I need to understand quicker here, to then be able to
• 7:48
  Alex Burkett: go into how am I making the experiences better how are we gonna be preparing for F1 coming up, right?
• 7:53
  Alex Burkett: All, all the things that I really should be doing and spending my time on.
• 7:57
  Alex Burkett: So really just how I've connected things from the start and started downloading things has been, pivotal for me.
• 8:03
  Brian Searl: Okay.
• 8:04
  Brian Searl: Tessa, how are you using it at Northgate?
• 8:07
  Tessa McCrackin: Yeah.
• 8:07
  Tessa McCrackin: In the marketing department we've been using it a lot to create dashboards and automate reporting.
• 8:12
  Tessa McCrackin: I think over the past couple years we used it to automate a lot of the kind of menial tasks, and now we're moving a bit beyond that.
• 8:18
  Tessa McCrackin: So something that we've been doing for the past two years, it just keeps getting better and better, is helping us assess and respond to guest reviews, complaints, feedback like that, and assess the trends, but then also get back
• 8:29
  Tessa McCrackin: to them.
• 8:30
  Tessa McCrackin: That's one thing.
• 8:31
  Tessa McCrackin: But then we created a lot of dashboards this year with just different purposes, so we have dashboards for everything that we're trying to track, and it makes this a lot easier for us to surface the answers to ourselves
• 8:42
  Tessa McCrackin: and to stakeholders too.
• 8:42
  Tessa McCrackin: Before someone might ask us "What's going on with this here?"
• 8:45
  Tessa McCrackin: And we might spend all day trying to track down the answer to it.
• 8:47
  Tessa McCrackin: But, now it takes five minutes to find that answer for someone.
• 8:50
  Tessa McCrackin: So that's been a huge help for me so I can spend more time thinking about the creative and fun things and less time just hunting down the answer to, some question that someone has in the office here.
• 8:58
  Tessa McCrackin: But Mi- Mitch and I work really closely, and he does a lot with AI as well.
• 9:02
  Brian Searl: Do you have a secret to getting people to actually view the dashboards that you create?
• 9:07
  Brian Searl: 'Cause I haven't figured that out yet.
• 9:08
  Tessa McCrackin: Yeah, we...
• 9:09
  Tessa McCrackin: If you automate the report and send it to their inbox, there's a, 15% chance they'll look at it.
• 9:13
  Tessa McCrackin: So if you're not doing that, try that.
• 9:17
  Brian Searl: Yeah, that's what I think I'm missing.
• 9:18
  Brian Searl: I'm like, I created all these fancy dashboards, and then they just want emailed reports.
• 9:21
  Brian Searl: I'm like, "What did I make the dashboard for?
• 9:23
  Brian Searl: It took me forever."
• 9:24
  Tessa McCrackin: Yeah.
• 9:24
  Tessa McCrackin: And we'll get a question like, "Is there a dashboard for this?"
• 9:27
  Tessa McCrackin: And, you just have to smile and say, "Send it again," but it's helpful.
• 9:31
  Brian Searl: Mitch, how about you?
• 9:36
  Mitchell Spence: I don't know.
• 9:37
  Mitchell Spence: What don't I use it for, I guess
• 9:41
  Brian Searl: You can start with that.
• 9:42
  Brian Searl: Like then we can problem solve together.
• 9:43
  Brian Searl: We can help you work and use it for that if you don't use it already
• 9:50
  Mitchell Spence: Yeah I, I use it for almost everything day to day, things through it just to see how it works and what, where it can be useful and not.
• 9:56
  Mitchell Spence: It's really helpful at scale for us to run reporting and to look at things across large swaths of data and reach, options that we haven't.
• 10:06
  Mitchell Spence: But I don't know, I use it for all kinds of stuff just to see if it's helpful for it and try to train try to train my model to be able to automate and reach conclusions faster and automate
• 10:16
  Mitchell Spence: things faster.
• 10:17
  Mitchell Spence: And we run a, a lot of programs through it really at this point
• 10:23
  Brian Searl: Yeah, this is where I'm at.
• 10:24
  Brian Searl: I, and I started thinking about this I guess a few months ago.
• 10:26
  Brian Searl: We had a, it wasn't an AI show but we had a podcast where Sandy Ellingson was on.
• 10:30
  Brian Searl: She's a recurring guest in week one, and she was, she asked me like, "What's the latest in AI?"
• 10:35
  Brian Searl: "What's the latest thing you've been working on with AI?"
• 10:37
  Brian Searl: And I'm like, I stopped and I couldn't think 'cause I like, I've been coding with AI and building databases and all kinds of features and things with Camp Vantage and, but like I hadn't really, I didn't have an
• 10:46
  Brian Searl: answer for her 'cause she was asking specifically about AI.
• 10:48
  Brian Searl: And I realized then that the kind of there's places that we've taken this, and Tessa you mentioned reviews so I'll give that as an example, 'cause we still manage review responses for I think, I don't know, 150 parks
• 10:59
  Brian Searl: or something like that even though we're trying to wind that down.
• 11:02
  Brian Searl: But we're looking at okay yes, we can analyze the text of the review, like kind of use those models to say like what is the emotional tone of voice that this guest is speaking in.
• 11:12
  Brian Searl: Are they angry, are they upset, are they not?
• 11:14
  Brian Searl: And then obviously sometimes a human being can read that but a model can pick up nuances better.
• 11:19
  Brian Searl: And then responding based on that and taking into a context.
• 11:22
  Brian Searl: I wanna make a personal response but also understanding, empathizing, which is sometimes hard for owners or managers who it's their baby and, how dare you talk about me that way, that kind of thing.
• 11:33
  Brian Searl: But then taking it to the next level is what interests me, not just with reviews obviously, but everything else.
• 11:38
  Brian Searl: So an example would be like how do I connect the data we have in a Campspot or a Newbook or a Staylist or whatever your PMS is, RoverPass, et cetera, right?
• 11:47
  Brian Searl: How do we connect that data to the guest so that when we're responding to the review we can link it to the person and we can make the response like 100 times more personal.
• 11:55
  Brian Searl: I don't know that we've solved that yet with every PMS out there, but it's an interesting place to take it, so I think that's, not to tout our products or anything, we don't have that publicly.
• 12:04
  Brian Searl: But just to say as we move forward I think that's where the kind of next step comes from is, yes, we can take it and respond to reviews or we can write blog posts or social media, or we
• 12:13
  Brian Searl: can analyze spreadsheets, but how do we not just automate it, but how do we automate it in a better way than was being done before?
• 12:20
  Brian Searl: I don't know.
• 12:21
  Mitchell Spence: And trust the outputs.
• 12:24
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 12:25
  Ravi Parikh: And I think like the next evolution of AI is gonna be on workflows.
• 12:29
  Ravi Parikh: That's already here.
• 12:29
  Ravi Parikh: Every- a lot of people are doing it, but I think most people are using it for like reporting and data analysis.
• 12:36
  Ravi Parikh: But like when you start evolving from just reporting and data analysis to actually letting the AI control workflows, and they're called evals, right?
• 12:49
  Ravi Parikh: You send data through, and then you look at the output, and you do that a whole bunch of times to see if it's a consistent output every single time.
• 12:58
  Ravi Parikh: When you can start to think about your business from the perspective of just like workflows, which most businesses really that's...
• 13:05
  Ravi Parikh: If you break it down, everything is a-
• 13:07
  Brian Searl: Process
• 13:07
  Ravi Parikh: workflow or a process at its core.
• 13:10
  Ravi Parikh: That's when you take a company that is, That's when you can call...
• 13:14
  Ravi Parikh: and you inject AI into those workflows, that's what an agentic native organization looks like, right?
• 13:21
  Ravi Parikh: Every part of the business has AI injected into it, whether it's marketing, sales, support, product, engineering like anything, any department, any, any part of it, and there's a brain that all of this kind of feeds into.
• 13:36
  Ravi Parikh: And then I think our, in our industry, that brain in most cases is gonna be the PMS system because it's got like probably a PMS system and your CRM platform, right?
• 13:47
  Ravi Parikh: Those two together really probably have most of the data that you need to be able to then build workflows on top.
• 13:57
  Ravi Parikh: So I think that's gonna happen over time, but you don't wanna lose the personal element of the business 'cause we're in the hospitality industry too
• 14:04
  Brian Searl: Yeah, we've talked about that on the show before.
• 14:06
  Brian Searl: Like I think the ultimate answer with technology is you wanna, especially in our industry, in outdoor hospitality, it's never gonna replace the human being.
• 14:12
  Brian Searl: It's never gonna replace a CMO Tessa with good strategy or what Mitch does at Northgate, but it's gonna enhance their workflow, allow them to, to, to do things that they'd probably rather do with their day instead of finding
• 14:22
  Brian Searl: the, spending six hours trying to find the data point like Tessa said or whatever that was, right?
• 14:26
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 14:26
  Brian Searl: And I think that's where you take it.
• 14:27
  Brian Searl: W- with the guest experience especially, like there are so many ways that like we're exploring at our company, I'm sure other people are too, how do we personalize the journey for the guest?
• 14:38
  Brian Searl: How do we like, give them things that are unique to their stay that make them have a great first impression of the property before they even arrive, and then once they're there, the technology's out of the way.
• 14:47
  Brian Searl: Like it's there, but it's not there.
• 14:48
  Brian Searl: You can't see it.
• 14:49
  Brian Searl: It's underneath the floorboard, so to speak, and I think that's the best way to use AI in outdoor hospitality.
• 14:55
  Brian Searl: At least that's my current working theory.
• 14:58
  Mitchell Spence: Yeah, I totally agree with that
• 15:01
  Brian Searl: How do you guys, how do you guys handle this at Northgate?
• 15:03
  Brian Searl: Mitch, you said you do operations or is that just your title?
• 15:06
  Mitchell Spence: Yeah, operations support really.
• 15:08
  Mitchell Spence: But exactly that, your points.
• 15:11
  Mitchell Spence: One, once a guest is on property, they don't, AI should really have very little to do with it.
• 15:16
  Mitchell Spence: But we s- we spend most of our time building the systems behind it, in order to, in order to really maximize the experience, for guests that are for guests that are, looking and booking and for guests that are
• 15:31
  Mitchell Spence: coming to the resort.
• 15:33
  Mitchell Spence: But AI's not f- on the forefront of their experience.
• 15:37
  Mitchell Spence: It's working in the background We, we use it extensively for many things,
• 15:41
  Brian Searl: alex, you got some background noise back there, it's mute me, so just...
• 15:44
  Brian Searl: I don't know if it's-
• 15:45
  Ravi Parikh: We
• 15:45
  Brian Searl: can hear
• 15:45
  Ravi Parikh: a race car back there or something.
• 15:51
  Mitchell Spence: Are you playing Gran Turismo?
• 15:54
  Brian Searl: Maybe.
• 15:54
  Brian Searl: Yeah, like every time I talk he plays Gran Turismo, and then when people say something important he turns it off.
• 15:58
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 16:00
  Brian Searl: But that's a real, that's a real question I think if we can get to the point to with people w- there's so many people watching this show who are like, "I've only played with Chat GPT a couple times,"
• 16:07
  Brian Searl: or, "I've done it and I've just used it to write social media posts or respond to reviews," or the basic things, right?
• 16:12
  Brian Searl: Maybe even come up with an email marketing plan.
• 16:14
  Brian Searl: And maybe Tessa we start with you here, right?
• 16:16
  Brian Searl: But like obviously it's not going to replace marketing, but it's gonna replace the low-hanging fruits of marketing.
• 16:22
  Brian Searl: But how can operators like take advantage of this to do the things they couldn't do before?
• 16:26
  Brian Searl: Like one of the things that we'll cite on calls with some of our clients is like you used to have to, if you wanted to create ideal customer profiles or buy a, buyer personas or audience style guides or
• 16:36
  Brian Searl: all those kinds of things, you were paying an agency thousands of dollars a month to do this because they needed four or five people that were making 120,000 plus a year to be able to do all this.
• 16:47
  Brian Searl: And now with AI you've just, it's democratized it all in a way and there's this opportunity to really, instead of just saying, "I want to attract people into my RV park," understand who those people are, where they're coming
• 16:58
  Brian Searl: from, why they're coming to you.
• 17:00
  Brian Searl: I don't wanna keep talking forever, but a good example is like we were talking to a park about traveling nurses the other day and understanding like the psychology behind traveling nurses and how they need a quiet area in
• 17:09
  Brian Searl: the park because sometimes they'll work overnight shifts and they sleep till 2:00 and they don't wanna be near the construction worker that's working on the pipeline at 4:00 in the morning and then they also don't...
• 17:19
  Brian Searl: aren't comfortable with monthly rates.
• 17:21
  Brian Searl: And I don't know any of this stuff, right?
• 17:22
  Brian Searl: This is all AI spitting this out.
• 17:23
  Brian Searl: But they aren't comfortable with monthly rates 'cause their contract can be canceled with a week notice and then they owe you three weeks.
• 17:28
  Brian Searl: And so all these are hesitations or things that can help set you apart that, you could have done before, but not easily, right?
• 17:34
  Tessa McCrackin: Yeah, I mean it's a great thought partner if nothing else to you if you're just starting out with brainstorming.
• 17:39
  Tessa McCrackin: Beyond copy, like ideas for the psychology behind things like you said, or, even what can you help me do, AI?
• 17:45
  Tessa McCrackin: Tell me.
• 17:46
  Tessa McCrackin: So that's if you're using, just your GPT or Claude or whatever, what have you.
• 17:50
  Tessa McCrackin: But a lot of the tools that you might be paying for, I think it's interesting, are al- also integrating their own AI into it.
• 17:56
  Tessa McCrackin: So you can just use some, use the function of AI that's being built into the platforms that you're already paying for.
• 18:01
  Tessa McCrackin: So going back to reviews, if you're already paying, to have something help you manage your reviews, there's probably built-in AI now that they've put into it that you could be utilizing that you might not realize is a feature
• 18:11
  Tessa McCrackin: that's been added.
• 18:12
  Brian Searl: Yep
• 18:12
  Tessa McCrackin: I can think of many tools like where that's the case and you just might need to try some of these things that have- been built in we don't need to segment our data using Claude because Salesforce has that
• 18:23
  Tessa McCrackin: built in, doing it its own in the background.
• 18:25
  Tessa McCrackin: And same with, your meta ads, optimizing them.
• 18:28
  Tessa McCrackin: That's all AI too, but it's within the platform, so you don't need to be, like, doing this all yourself.
• 18:32
  Tessa McCrackin: The, the tools are at your fingertips of what you're already using perhaps.
• 18:36
  Tessa McCrackin: How do you- I do think results will vary though.
• 18:37
  Tessa McCrackin: The design things, proceed with caution if you're using it to design your flyers, but it's certainly better than alternative of maybe having a kid make something in Word for you,
• 18:47
  Brian Searl: yeah.
• 18:47
  Brian Searl: How do you stitch it all together, though?
• 18:49
  Brian Searl: That's the kind of thing, like...
• 18:51
  Brian Searl: and I don't know, maybe if that's too advanced of a question for our audience, I think some will be appreciated and some won't.
• 18:57
  Brian Searl: But the question I...
• 18:58
  Brian Searl: like you talked about there's an AI in Meta, there's an AI in Salesforce, there's an AI in HubSpot, there's an AI everywhere.
• 19:03
  Brian Searl: Everybody's got their own chatbot doing their own thing.
• 19:06
  Brian Searl: But how do you link those systems together?
• 19:08
  Brian Searl: Campspot just has their new revenue management thing they released yesterday.
• 19:11
  Brian Searl: How do you link that together without it...
• 19:13
  Brian Searl: it, it doesn't need to in some fashion or some way, but also it would be helpful if it linked to Meta and everybody understood what the rate individual people were paying, and you could feed all your conversion data
• 19:23
  Brian Searl: back into that.
• 19:24
  Brian Searl: But don't get too complicated, but I think you understand what I'm saying.
• 19:28
  Tessa McCrackin: Yeah.
• 19:28
  Tessa McCrackin: And results will vary and we've been trying to build a marketing dashboard for literally years and we've paid people to h- try to help us build it, we've tried to build it ourselves.
• 19:36
  Tessa McCrackin: Finally it's just gotten to a point where we were able to build it.
• 19:38
  Tessa McCrackin: But before, things would never match up and still with marketing specifically attribution's not going to work all the time depending on where you're pulling the data.
• 19:46
  Tessa McCrackin: Is it coming from Google?
• 19:47
  Tessa McCrackin: Is it coming from Meta directly?
• 19:48
  Tessa McCrackin: Is it coming from Reddit directly with these, these first source platforms?
• 19:52
  Tessa McCrackin: But we've tried to connect everything through, Claude, and Mitch and I have worked together on this because, Mitch and I were having conversations like, "Wait, you actually don't have access to my Meta results, and I don't have access
• 20:03
  Tessa McCrackin: to your report."
• 20:04
  Tessa McCrackin: We've been trying to connect things so we're getting a more holistic view and have visibility to things that w- before we were just asking each other for.
• 20:12
  Tessa McCrackin: I don't know if you have anything to add to this, Mitch, like some insights that you've had from having access to my data that you m- might have not been able to see easily before?
• 20:22
  Mitchell Spence: It's, a, a simple example is that they gave me the credentials to get into all of their the meta, all the digital ad spend stats that are behind it.
• 20:33
  Mitchell Spence: And with a click of a couple of buttons, I now have, direct access through API into those systems that I can integrate into pacing data, conversion data, like and that's, unheard of two years ago.
• 20:45
  Mitchell Spence: Now-
• 20:46
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah, I have a lot of those problems
• 20:47
  Mitchell Spence: how the trends of tracking is a lot different
• 20:53
  Ravi Parikh: I have a lot of thoughts on this topic if you guys care to hear.
• 20:57
  Ravi Parikh: I think every company is gonna have a brain that is connected to all of their information systems via APIs.
• 21:06
  Ravi Parikh: And What that basically means in layman's terms is you have a brain, and then you have all your different software systems, and you give your brain access to all of those software systems via API.
• 21:20
  Ravi Parikh: And then there's gonna be two types of software companies moving forward, ones that integrate AI into their products, so you use the AI in their product, or there's gonna be companies where there is no user interface.
• 21:35
  Ravi Parikh: The AI is used through something like Claude, right?
• 21:39
  Ravi Parikh: It's just like an enhancement that you connect into Claude.
• 21:42
  Ravi Parikh: Good examples of that are there's a company that we use called Data for SEO, and it's a API that you plug into Claude, and you put your website in, and it gives you the most incredible report on what's
• 21:59
  Ravi Parikh: messed up with your website and what you need to fix.
• 22:03
  Ravi Parikh: And so that's a company that is API first.
• 22:06
  Ravi Parikh: There's no user interface.
• 22:07
  Ravi Parikh: You can't see anything.
• 22:09
  Ravi Parikh: It's all returned back to you in Claude.
• 22:12
  Ravi Parikh: Whereas Salesforce, for example, is a company-- Well, they kinda have both ways right now.
• 22:19
  Ravi Parikh: So Salesforce is a user interface.
• 22:22
  Ravi Parikh: They have got like a co-pilot in it that helps you use Salesforce better.
• 22:26
  Ravi Parikh: But for people like me, I don't want to use a user interface.
• 22:30
  Ravi Parikh: I don't even wanna log in and click on any buttons.
• 22:33
  Ravi Parikh: I just wanna talk, and it gives me what I want, right?
• 22:38
  Ravi Parikh: And so Salesforce has a headless version, which just means literally they chop the head off the software and they're like, "Hey, you're just an API, and now you just talk to your data through something like Claude."
• 22:51
  Ravi Parikh: There's really gonna be two ways that this kinda goes down over time.
• 22:57
  Ravi Parikh: There might be a third way that presents itself, I don't know.
• 23:00
  Ravi Parikh: It's all evolving so fast.
• 23:02
  Ravi Parikh: But I think that's something important to understand as, as AI is evolving, is that Claude is your brain or Claude or Codex or whatever is your brain because it's the processing power, and you need to give it access
• 23:17
  Ravi Parikh: to the data to be able to do stuff.
• 23:20
  Ravi Parikh: And then if you give your brain a database where it can take the stuff that it learned and dump it into a database, now it has access to that forever.
• 23:30
  Ravi Parikh: So you're creating insights from your data, and you just store those somewhere.
• 23:34
  Ravi Parikh: And just kinda backing up, Brian, to your question of how do people start using AI, if you don't have a paid subscription to Chat GPT or to Claude, you're- I tell this to people I know all the time,
• 23:47
  Ravi Parikh: you're not really using AI.
• 23:49
  Ravi Parikh: That's like you're just using like Google basically.
• 23:52
  Ravi Parikh: It's like you are only accessing like 1% or 2% of like what AI is capable of doing.
• 23:59
  Ravi Parikh: And then the next tier would be a paid subscription.
• 24:03
  Ravi Parikh: At that point, you're probably using like 6% or 7% of what AI is doing.
• 24:08
  Ravi Parikh: And until you move into a command line, which is like Claude's desktop app, Claude Code, at that point you've got access to 100% of AI.
• 24:19
  Ravi Parikh: And then it's about the structure that you stack on top of it, right?
• 24:24
  Ravi Parikh: Like, how do you architect the AI solution for a company, right?
• 24:29
  Ravi Parikh: Do you have a brain?
• 24:30
  Ravi Parikh: Do you have everything connected to that brain?
• 24:32
  Ravi Parikh: Do you have a way to dump the data out of the brain from the data that comes in from your CRM instance?
• 24:38
  Ravi Parikh: So that's at that point you're like on the advanced tier of AI.
• 24:43
  Ravi Parikh: But the amazing thing is if you just describe that to Claude in literally plain English and wait for it to give you a response, it'll tell you exactly how to do that.
• 24:54
  Ravi Parikh: And like you can just like It'll give you like step-by-step instructions like, "Click this button, go to this URL.
• 25:01
  Ravi Parikh: If you don't know where to go once you're at that URL, copy and pa- take a screenshot, upload it to Claude."
• 25:06
  Ravi Parikh: It'll be like, "Okay, click on that thing."
• 25:08
  Ravi Parikh: So that's the amazing part of AI.
• 25:11
  Ravi Parikh: It's like knowledge is basically free at this point.
• 25:15
  Ravi Parikh: It's 20 bucks a month, and if you use a lot then it's 100 and then it's 200.
• 25:19
  Ravi Parikh: But yeah.
• 25:21
  Ravi Parikh: But it's much cheaper than it ever has been.
• 25:24
  Ravi Parikh: So I could go on a rant about that for a while.
• 25:27
  Brian Searl: I think some of the, the issue if you step back and look at like who's watching the show primarily, like campground owners, managers, vendors, other people in the outdoor hospitality space, right?
• 25:36
  Brian Searl: But let's Like Alex, I'm curious with your take here because you manage COTA and I imagine that there's probably other things that you do in your day besides sit down and be like, "I wanna learn Chat GPT."
• 25:47
  Brian Searl: So I think that part of the issue here as we talk about this and Ravi gets into the weeds and we talk about the things that Tessa is able to do and Mitch is able to do at a
• 25:56
  Brian Searl: corporate level are different from a, we're telling a campground owner they should learn AI and they're looking back at us like with what time?"
• 26:05
  Brian Searl: Don't forget to unmute yourselves
• 26:09
  Ravi Parikh: We can't hear you, Alex
• 26:13
  Brian Searl: Let's see if I can do it.
• 26:14
  Brian Searl: I tried to do it.
• 26:14
  Brian Searl: Try it now.
• 26:15
  Alex Burkett: Any better?
• 26:16
  Brian Searl: There we go.
• 26:17
  Alex Burkett: Okay.
• 26:17
  Alex Burkett: Perfect.
• 26:18
  Alex Burkett: Yeah, I've definitely fallen into this, this trap myself, and I'd say, to, to Tess's point earlier, I, as we've built dashboards, and Brian, again, I'm gonna plug you because we use it every day at CRR.
• 26:28
  Alex Burkett: If there's, you have some great marketing dashboards that you've built for us internally that's been helpful to figure out how we can pivot and grow.
• 26:34
  Alex Burkett: COTA especially we have a, a lot of our demand is based off of these major events that are, 10 to 12 days of our year does a disproportionate amount of our revenue.
• 26:44
  Alex Burkett: So figuring out how we can leverage the demand created from the events which helps us drive rate, helps us drive length of stay, and then using the review piece of carrying that forward and how do we get somebody
• 26:55
  Alex Burkett: to come back when it's not F1, when it's not Moto, right?
• 26:59
  Alex Burkett: There's still 350 days left in the calendar that we've got to fill.
• 27:03
  Alex Burkett: Being able to utilize the data, and I think we have meetings all the time.
• 27:07
  Alex Burkett: Myself as a GM with, the, the corporate team that we're with, bringing your marketing person into that.
• 27:13
  Alex Burkett: If you have a revenue management person or if you're doing that function, like, scheduling the time to actually sit down and review it and have the data that you're using in the tools already there, like that's where I
• 27:24
  Alex Burkett: actually see it as it's a valuable use of my time and I actually can...
• 27:28
  Alex Burkett: if I take the time to do that hour meeting with our team, I go away with it with practical things that I can get our team here to do or that I can leave and actually say, "This is
• 27:36
  Alex Burkett: gonna move the business forward, and this is gonna give us the financial result that we want."
• 27:40
  Alex Burkett: So just leveraging it that way I think has been helpful in my seat trying to run the operation and, be stretched with my time as it is.
• 27:49
  Brian Searl: I think if I step back and I'm definitely way up here on a geek level above every- that doesn't mean I'm better, it just means I'm...
• 27:55
  Brian Searl: have no life.
• 27:56
  Brian Searl: But if I step back and try to put myself in the shoes of somebody who's trying to learn this, whether it's a campground owner or whether it's a team member who's an employee of mine or anybody else that
• 28:04
  Brian Searl: I'm talking to, I think the, the barrier really is curiosity for most people.
• 28:08
  Brian Searl: It's either you have that gene of I wanna be curious and I wanna keep asking questions and I wanna critical think and I wanna figure this stuff out and I'm willing to go down the rabbit hole like Ravi
• 28:16
  Brian Searl: said, where it's gonna explain everything and I'm willing to follow it and willing to have patience and understanding that it's gonna break and I'm gonna scream at my computer.
• 28:22
  Brian Searl: Maybe that scream at my computer's just my problem, but but But I think that's generally the, you need that curiosity gene or you need an incentive to go there and have it solve a problem for you.
• 28:35
  Brian Searl: And I think
• 28:35
  Alex Burkett: that- and for me, the, the financial part has been the incentive.
• 28:38
  Alex Burkett: I've seen our real growth of, like, where I can justify if I spend an hour this week doing that, I generated X amount that went right to my P&L, which is tied to my bonus as the GM, right?
• 28:50
  Alex Burkett: It's something that as you said, CRR's culture is all about that.
• 28:53
  Alex Burkett: We're all about trying to find that next stone to unturn and what are we doing every day for continuous improvement to drive that additional revenue.
• 29:01
  Alex Burkett: So 100% agree with you that if people in the GM seat start to see that connection, I think there's gonna be more adoption across the industry with that.
• 29:10
  Brian Searl: But then you also look at and everything you said is correct, I'm not saying...
• 29:13
  Brian Searl: I'm saying there's a flip side, though, of the people who don't have a support system like a CRR or a Northgate or something like that, right?
• 29:19
  Brian Searl: Or an Unhitched or whoever, that are the, the mom-and-pop operators who have to get on the tractor every day and mow or fix the sewer line or whatever, right?
• 29:26
  Brian Searl: That are, is the, you have to do that too as a GM, but you don't also have that support system behind you, like you do, but many people don't.
• 29:34
  Brian Searl: And so then the question becomes is how do I devote time to learning Chat GPT when my lawn is unmowed or when there's a busted sewer pipe or when there's six RVs lined up at the check-in counter and
• 29:43
  Brian Searl: somebody needs to escort them to the place?
• 29:45
  Brian Searl: And I think that's where you have to you have to have a mindset of and again, I'm not a camp runner, I'm not saying that you should just make the time and find it because it's not as easy
• 29:53
  Brian Searl: as that is, sounds coming out of my mouth.
• 29:56
  Brian Searl: But it's a I'm either curious or I recognize that maybe there's a way I can, I don't know, teach myself about the latest robot lawn mowers and understand how they work and map them to my property and then
• 30:06
  Brian Searl: not get on the mower as often as I did before.
• 30:08
  Brian Searl: Just making something up.
• 30:09
  Brian Searl: Maybe you like being on the mower, right?
• 30:11
  Brian Searl: But that's where I think we are as an industry is there's just not enough time to go around and until there's an impetus to force that for the people who aren't curious, there's an impetus to say I have
• 30:22
  Brian Searl: maybe the economy is perhaps not going in the right direction 'cause diesel prices are at all-time highs.
• 30:26
  Brian Searl: That could happen sometime.
• 30:28
  Brian Searl: You never know.
• 30:29
  Brian Searl: Then maybe you wanna figure out how to, how do I diversify my audience and reach out to more people and figure out what I can get or what kind of promo I can run to help them save on
• 30:37
  Brian Searl: diesel or whatever it may be, right?
• 30:39
  Brian Searl: That impetus is gonna force the adoption too What do you see, Mitch, from an operations support standpoint as you talk to, I'm assuming you liaison with a, a bunch of your different properties.
• 30:50
  Brian Searl: It's, I'm extrapolating on your role.
• 30:52
  Brian Searl: Tell me if I'm wrong
• 30:54
  Mitchell Spence: I personally don't as much.
• 30:56
  Mitchell Spence: Okay.
• 30:56
  Mitchell Spence: I'm s- on the sideline but watching a lot of those conversations happening.
• 31:00
  Mitchell Spence: I honestly don't know how our operators are using it on a day-to-day basis.
• 31:06
  Mitchell Spence: I do know that I- I'm cautious to push people that I directly work with to adopt it and get into it too quickly, and I think you hit it on the head from the curiosity piece.
• 31:18
  Mitchell Spence: If you aren't willing to...
• 31:20
  Mitchell Spence: I will say I do use it significantly.
• 31:22
  Mitchell Spence: I'm probably up there, too, on my curiosity and just how often I'm engaging.
• 31:27
  Mitchell Spence: I get a lot of wrong answers.
• 31:30
  Mitchell Spence: I get...
• 31:30
  Mitchell Spence: I don't know if you f- if you have the same, but I get...
• 31:33
  Mitchell Spence: I have to correct it and really I found f- from what I've learned is if you don't build the guardrails in what you're trying to accomplish it remains chaos at times.
• 31:44
  Mitchell Spence: And I get a lot of wrong answers on things.
• 31:46
  Mitchell Spence: Or the model will just openly forget things.
• 31:49
  Mitchell Spence: And so I recognize that with people I work directly with, that I don't push them to, to get into it.
• 31:56
  Mitchell Spence: I let them adopt it at their pace and their speed to learn along the way so that th- there aren't unintended consequences,
• 32:04
  Brian Searl: yeah, like I've run into that constantly, like, where it will-
• 32:07
  Mitchell Spence: Context
• 32:07
  Brian Searl: it has a 10-minute memory.
• 32:08
  Brian Searl: For those people who don't know what a, a context window is in AI, 10-second primer.
• 32:14
  Brian Searl: It's the amount of things that it can remember before it, you have to start telling it to go search or read past summaries or whatever else.
• 32:21
  Brian Searl: It's al- it's almost if you were a human being and you could only remember the last three days of what you had for breakfast and dinner and whatever else, and the fourth day and beyond, nothing was there.
• 32:32
  Brian Searl: Maybe I guess Alzheimer's might be a good example, right?
• 32:35
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 32:35
  Brian Searl: If you can only remember short-term, long-term.
• 32:38
  Brian Searl: Not at all.
• 32:38
  Brian Searl: And then you...
• 32:38
  Brian Searl: But then the difference is that it could go back and it can find stuff for you if you direct it, but you gotta be very intentional about how you direct it, or it's gotta be in a file, or
• 32:45
  Brian Searl: it's gotta be somewhere else.
• 32:46
  Mitchell Spence: How you structure
• 32:47
  Brian Searl: it.
• 32:47
  Brian Searl: Otherwise, it's not relying on its full memory.
• 32:48
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 32:50
  Mitchell Spence: And I don't know I Ra- Ravi made a good point that if you're curious, just ask it and it'll point you in the right direction as to how to start to create these things.
• 32:59
  Mitchell Spence: But what I've found as I get further and further in is...
• 33:03
  Mitchell Spence: 'Cause, I do that and it's trying to remember things, and it's if you can't remember this now, what about five years from now when I have five years worth of information I wanna build upon?
• 33:12
  Mitchell Spence: And so what's a better way to build this so that you can?
• 33:15
  Mitchell Spence: And it really doesn't know what's the best way.
• 33:18
  Mitchell Spence: And there are, th- there is there is research and there are common approaches, but it's a totally wide open situation.
• 33:27
  Brian Searl: Because best is subjective, right?
• 33:29
  Brian Searl: That's the problem with best.
• 33:30
  Brian Searl: Build it the best way, it's subjective.
• 33:33
  Brian Searl: Here's an interesting thing for you to try if you're interested.
• 33:35
  Brian Searl: Say, think about it, think about this problem from first principles and see what it does for you.
• 33:40
  Brian Searl: It's really interesting.
• 33:41
  Ravi Parikh: There's-
• 33:41
  Mitchell Spence: Okay.
• 33:42
  Ravi Parikh: So Mitch, to kinda tack onto what you're talking about, there's...
• 33:47
  Ravi Parikh: I think AI was designed, like Anthropic and Claude, they came out with the idea, they laser-focused in on coding, and because I think in their heads everything boils down to code.
• 34:01
  Ravi Parikh: And the, the thing is for most AI users, they're, if you're not in the software business already like I am, you don't know what the core tools there are for solving problems like what you're talking about, like managing
• 34:16
  Ravi Parikh: context windows.
• 34:17
  Ravi Parikh: But if you're in the software business and you kinda know what some of those tools are, you're more able to stitch them together.
• 34:24
  Ravi Parikh: And I actually did a guest lecture about this at a school called Maker Square in Austin teaching non-technical people how to use AI.
• 34:33
  Ravi Parikh: There's just like basic tools that you actually need.
• 34:36
  Ravi Parikh: You need to understand how GitHub works.
• 34:38
  Ravi Parikh: You need to understand what Vercel is.
• 34:41
  Ravi Parikh: You need to understand what a database is, like Superbase.
• 34:45
  Ravi Parikh: Like all these companies in Silicon Valley have made using AI at the same level as a software engineering company would so much easier, but non-technical people don't know what these tools are yet and how they all work together.
• 35:03
  Ravi Parikh: And once you kinda get that framework, it starts to click.
• 35:07
  Ravi Parikh: Like I've seen people just start going, for lack of better words, Moto GP on, on their AI on their AI journey.
• 35:16
  Ravi Parikh: I think it just kinda comes down to like- Somebody needs to train the camping industry on like the fundamentals of AI and just kinda give it to 'em and so people can get, more understanding of some of these
• 35:33
  Ravi Parikh: tools that are more widespread in the tech industry.
• 35:36
  Brian Searl: Matt, what are you doing at your new company?
• 35:38
  Brian Searl: Why'd you tell us that?
• 35:41
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah, an interesting question.
• 35:42
  Brian Searl: Maybe it has to do with what Ravi's saying, that's why I'm throwing that out there and saying that.
• 35:44
  Brian Searl: I'm not cutting you off, Ravi.
• 35:47
  Matt Whitermore: No it, and there a lot of really great stuff Ravi, Ravi touched on that I wanted to jump in on too.
• 35:52
  Matt Whitermore: To answer your question directly first, though, so we are, we're still a little bit in stealth mode.
• 35:58
  Matt Whitermore: So I'm gonna have to, give you some, some non-answers.
• 36:01
  Matt Whitermore: But you know-
• 36:03
  Brian Searl: Maybe you want to push through, Matt.
• 36:04
  Brian Searl: Just say what you want, man
• 36:05
  Matt Whitermore: We, in, in short I'll be embedding with investors in outdoor hospitality and in some other commercial real estate niches.
• 36:13
  Matt Whitermore: And this was such an incredible opportunity for me because, 10 years ago I started in real estate investments and not having a technical background I built what I call the, the deal machine, right?
• 36:26
  Matt Whitermore: A whole integrated tech stack to surface, uncover, get in touch with and close real estate investment opportunities.
• 36:36
  Matt Whitermore: And this was essentially an opportunity to get in and make that AI native and kinda do that whole thing over again with the focus in outdoor hospitality.
• 36:46
  Matt Whitermore: At least for the near term, and get to use a lot of my relationships and add value for a lot of people in the space.
• 36:52
  Matt Whitermore: But essentially just creating a, an AI native acquisitions motion Really just sifting through data, right?
• 37:02
  Matt Whitermore: Going through an incredible amount of data in a smart way to surface opportunities, uncover opportunities, maybe look at an opportunity with a slightly different lens.
• 37:12
  Matt Whitermore: It's like having a team of super powered financial analysts and market analysts at your disposal to just cover so much more ground, cover different markets, right?
• 37:23
  Matt Whitermore: One of the biggest challenges that any commercial real estate broker or investor faces is something called deal merge, right?
• 37:31
  Matt Whitermore: We talk about context windows.
• 37:33
  Matt Whitermore: We all have a, a context window in our brain, right?
• 37:36
  Matt Whitermore: And I think I've-
• 37:37
  Brian Searl: Good story every day, man.
• 37:39
  Matt Whitermore: And it's funny I laugh about this all the time 'cause I'll be saying to Claude and I'm like we talked about this before.
• 37:45
  Matt Whitermore: Come on."
• 37:46
  Matt Whitermore: And, like- Yeah then I think back and I'm like, "I said the same thing to my wife," and she's we never talked about this.
• 37:51
  Matt Whitermore: You don't know what you're talking about."
• 37:52
  Matt Whitermore: And I'm like, "Wow, I guess humans hallucinate and have context windows as well."
• 37:57
  Matt Whitermore: Alex is laughing 'cause he knows my wife and probably couldn't picture her saying that.
• 38:02
  Matt Whitermore: So yeah.
• 38:03
  Matt Whitermore: It's...
• 38:04
  Matt Whitermore: The last year or so has been AI is a force multiplier, so the last year has been using it to go wide and look at a bunch of different areas in different operating businesses, and now I'm narrowing my
• 38:17
  Matt Whitermore: focus and going deep and using it as a f- a force multiplier to go deeper, get really smart in one area, make it repeatable, scalable right?
• 38:26
  Matt Whitermore: Do all the things that I've spent the last almost decade and a half doing and just do it with a whole new lens and a whole new set of tools, which is super exciting.
• 38:36
  Brian Searl: I wanna step back for a second, and I wanna maybe toss this to Tessa or Mitch if you guys wanna answer it, because I think there's probably a lot of owners listening to this who are like, "Wait, I
• 38:44
  Brian Searl: can analyze my financials.
• 38:45
  Brian Searl: I love doing that every day.
• 38:46
  Brian Searl: I wanna do more of that."
• 38:48
  Brian Searl: Or, "Great, I wanna sit there and talk about social media posts or do more about that."
• 38:52
  Brian Searl: But I think there's probably some use cases here that if you look...
• 38:56
  Brian Searl: If you step back and look at it from a campground owner's perspective- and I don't mean to stereotype the industry, but there's probably a good chunk of people who probably got into it because they wanted to be outside
• 39:05
  Brian Searl: and not cooped up in an office behind a computer, right?
• 39:07
  Brian Searl: To work with their hands, to be outside, to get their hands dirty, that kind of thing.
• 39:11
  Brian Searl: And I think there's probably some use cases that would resonate with them a little bit more, talking specifically about how do I operate my campground better?
• 39:20
  Brian Searl: How do I use the information that AI might be able to provide to be able to spend more time outdoors to do what I like?
• 39:28
  Brian Searl: How can I use that information to serve my guests better, to have them have a better experience?
• 39:33
  Brian Searl: And I think that's where a lot of this maybe sometimes gets lost, is we need to ground it in the perspective of the owners who are working it this day to day.
• 39:40
  Brian Searl: And so I don't know if you guys have anything to add.
• 39:42
  Brian Searl: And you operate so many resorts, I'm assuming there's something, like something you can share with us that's wise
• 39:50
  Tessa McCrackin: Yeah, I think that every, if you're just a standalone park, you're probably operating your own website or you're paying someone to run it for you and that's just an important part and the way that people are finding their
• 40:04
  Tessa McCrackin: campgrounds now is changing as people use more AI to plan their travel.
• 40:07
  Tessa McCrackin: So making sure that you're optimizing not just for regular keywords, but for people planning their trips in AI seems like an easy place to start and making sure you're, this is still a little bit of an unknown, but
• 40:17
  Tessa McCrackin: are you structuring your website to be set up optimally for people who are planning their travel that way?
• 40:22
  Tessa McCrackin: That seems like a very even if it's not your interest, it seems like a bare minimum thing that you should be doing or asking the person that is running your website for you to help you with.
• 40:30
  Tessa McCrackin: So that's one thing that seems pretty like you just can't probably avoid it at this point.
• 40:36
  Tessa McCrackin: And then something else that just dawned on us that we've been using a lot is if you're doing any kind of promotional thing, like it's not to the point where it creates good videos, I would say, of your
• 40:44
  Tessa McCrackin: property or if you give it a bunch of clips and say, "Mash this together and make a commercial," that doesn't really work.
• 40:48
  Tessa McCrackin: But specifically for doing the voiceover piece of it, it does a great job, in AOI vo- voiceover, if you're stitching together some clips then you can help it write a script for you and then put the voiceover on,
• 40:57
  Tessa McCrackin: you're not gonna be we used to work with a lot of like Fiverr contractors or record it ourselves, but that's been a really that'd be a really practical solve to getting something that could be really expensive if you
• 41:05
  Tessa McCrackin: were, working with someone freelance or an agency that you might be able to do it yourself now, which is kinda fun.
• 41:11
  Brian Searl: Yeah, I think I s- I said this on a show before I think at some point, or it might have been Outwired with Scott Bahr, I can't remember, that we do normally on Wednesdays after the show.
• 41:19
  Brian Searl: But I was talking about how I was doing this for CRR actually, Alex.
• 41:23
  Brian Searl: They never used it, we were just doing it as a test like a couple years ago we were playing around with it with Verde Ranch RV Resort and we took a still image of their photo of their pool
• 41:32
  Brian Searl: at night, like it was a professionally taken image and we took it into Gemini and we said just add people to it and they were just sitting on the lounge chair like at, sitting around the campfire or whatever
• 41:40
  Brian Searl: else, just like you would have professional actors there and I think that's a good use of AI.
• 41:44
  Brian Searl: And then you can take that and you can also have Gemini turn it into like a short reel video you can post.
• 41:49
  Brian Searl: I think if it's the real pool, if it's the real trees behind it, if it's the real scenery, if that's exactly what the guest is gonna see minus the people which they wouldn't have seen had you hired real
• 42:01
  Brian Searl: models anyway sitting by the pool, then I think you're right.
• 42:04
  Brian Searl: Like I, I don't know if that's what you were talking about, Tessa, but I think that's a great example of ways that you can shortcut the creative, I don't know strain on the time you have to spend to
• 42:14
  Brian Searl: do those things.
• 42:15
  Brian Searl: Or the money you have to outlay.
• 42:16
  Matt Whitermore: Did anyone see the viral staged apartment sublet in New York City?
• 42:21
  Matt Whitermore: It went super viral on Twitter.
• 42:22
  Matt Whitermore: It was about like a, it was like an AI freshened up apartment sublet advertising photo.
• 42:28
  Matt Whitermore: People losing their minds over it.
• 42:30
  Matt Whitermore: It's pretty funny.
• 42:32
  Ravi Parikh: I think we talked about that last, last time about fake fake images versus real images and-
• 42:39
  Matt Whitermore: Yeah
• 42:39
  Ravi Parikh: disclosing that or not disclosing that or-
• 42:43
  Brian Searl: Yeah, maybe it was in show.
• 42:44
  Brian Searl: Context window, man.
• 42:45
  Brian Searl: We talked about it.
• 42:46
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 42:46
  Brian Searl: It's gone.
• 42:46
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 42:46
  Ravi Parikh: That was last month.
• 42:50
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 42:52
  Brian Searl: Mitch, you have anything to add?
• 42:56
  Mitchell Spence: Yeah, there's there's a lot of things that are low-hanging fruit that are a lot easier.
• 43:00
  Mitchell Spence: A, a good example, marketing's a challenge for single property owners knowing really how to spend money.
• 43:08
  Mitchell Spence: And AI can really help uncover some of that.
• 43:10
  Mitchell Spence: It's not gonna be able to run programs, but for digital ad spends just to ask the right questions of keywords and different things like that you're just gonna uncover some insight that you might not have otherwise have seen.
• 43:23
  Mitchell Spence: And especially as it pertains to specific markets or something as simple as just going in and asking it to aggregate the last couple years of reviews, and what are trends in my reviews that have surfaced, and has there
• 43:39
  Mitchell Spence: any, been any improvements or has there been any declines?
• 43:42
  Mitchell Spence: What's a word cloud to just see what's, what's my where's my biggest opportunities, things like that.
• 43:48
  Mitchell Spence: Just downloading reports that otherwise would've been challenging to, to draw insight from.
• 43:53
  Mitchell Spence: And AI is pretty good on the surface of just finding patterns pacing reports or POS reports, just raw data for specific time periods that you just ask a simple question of what's interesting here, or is there any insights?
• 44:10
  Mitchell Spence: And you'll be surprised what you get, and especially if it's your business and you own it you're gonna have follow-up questions because it'll intrigue you and you'll want to try to uncover more because it's information looking at it
• 44:22
  Mitchell Spence: in ways you haven't before a lot of times.
• 44:25
  Mitchell Spence: So those are some like, low hanging opportunities that you'd be surprised what, you know, what you'll find
• 44:31
  Brian Searl: Yeah, I think the biggest low-hanging opportunity that we often tell people is like every time I, and I've said this before I think on the show, but like every time I get on a sales call with somebody and
• 44:39
  Brian Searl: talk about marketing or AI chatbots or the dashboards we're building with Camp Vantage or something like that, at the end of the call, I always say "After this call, make sure before you decide to buy from me, go
• 44:47
  Brian Searl: to ChatGPT and say, 'Is Brian full of shit?'"
• 44:51
  Brian Searl: And that's the biggest unlock I think you have a- as an owner is you have all this knowledge now that it knows everything about marketing and advert- not everything, right?
• 44:59
  Brian Searl: But a lot of things about marketing and advertising and construction and operations and building playgrounds and burying sewer pipes and adding cable or Wi-Fi or what systems are good or what systems aren't that like you don't need to
• 45:11
  Brian Searl: know everything.
• 45:11
  Brian Searl: It's not always going to be right.
• 45:13
  Brian Searl: But it we used to tell people prior to AI that if you just need to know 5% enough to be dangerous, to be able to understand that you're not being taken advantage of or you're not going down a
• 45:21
  Brian Searl: wrong path when you should be on the other path.
• 45:24
  Brian Searl: And I think that AI now can be like a 20, 30% check without you even having to learn that 5%.
• 45:31
  Brian Searl: So next time you're-
• 45:31
  Mitchell Spence: Or if you run like a basic ROI analysis on adding an amenity to your campgrounds and pulling in the right metrics just to be able to maybe go to a bank and say, "Hey, I, I need some help
• 45:43
  Mitchell Spence: with this type of thing."
• 45:45
  Mitchell Spence: Or competitor analysis, that's another thing that's hard in our industry.
• 45:49
  Mitchell Spence: You have to, the, it, it's difficult to aggregate and to find...
• 45:53
  Mitchell Spence: we even find when we're in certain markets, a lot of times seasonal rates aren't published.
• 45:58
  Mitchell Spence: But if, if you ask the right question, it'll drop into the reviews for instance, and it'll see that somebody said, "I can't believe they raised the rate to $2,500."
• 46:07
  Mitchell Spence: It's like, "Oh, $2,500 this year.
• 46:09
  Mitchell Spence: Great.
• 46:09
  Mitchell Spence: Okay.
• 46:10
  Mitchell Spence: That saves a phone call."
• 46:13
  Brian Searl: We're gonna solve your comp intelligence problem.
• 46:15
  Brian Searl: You just give me a couple weeks, Mitch.
• 46:17
  Brian Searl: We're gonna have something cool coming out for you.
• 46:19
  Mitchell Spence: Sweet
• 46:20
  Brian Searl: but anyway.
• 46:21
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 46:21
  Brian Searl: Look, I think that's the idea, right?
• 46:22
  Brian Searl: Is the ROI and then it, that leads into the, the curiosity of the matter, right?
• 46:26
  Brian Searl: The curiosity or the solving of the problem.
• 46:28
  Brian Searl: Because you can say, "How much is it gonna cost me to add a playground?"
• 46:31
  Brian Searl: Then I know that the ROI on the playground is much harder to calculate when you're not charging directly for the playground.
• 46:37
  Brian Searl: And then it's the looking at we're going down a rabbit hole.
• 46:39
  Brian Searl: I don't wanna, I don't wanna be Ravi.
• 46:41
  Brian Searl: I don't wanna be Kiki for you guys too much.
• 46:43
  Brian Searl: He's got that, that side...
• 46:44
  Brian Searl: I'm just messing with you, right?
• 46:45
  Brian Searl: But but then understanding your guest as an export from Campspot and how many of those people, I assume Campspot keeps track of this, but how many of those people are adults traveling with children?
• 46:54
  Brian Searl: And how many of those people with children were families that stayed with you in the last two years who you didn't have a playground before, now you do.
• 47:01
  Brian Searl: Can you increase the occupancy by 5 or 10% in that vertical?
• 47:05
  Brian Searl: And what does that look like?
• 47:06
  Brian Searl: And then, then doing the math on-
• 47:07
  Mitchell Spence: Or target them directly that you added it, yeah.
• 47:10
  Mitchell Spence: Send an email that, compile the email list to send to them to tell them about our new our new amenity.
• 47:16
  Brian Searl: But only to the people who care because they had kids, right?
• 47:18
  Mitchell Spence: Yeah.
• 47:18
  Brian Searl: Not to the older couple who's tra- yeah.
• 47:20
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 47:20
  Brian Searl: I think we, I think in 10 years we look back on this and we're like, "The fuck were we thinking sending emails to every single person about every single thing we had to announce?"
• 47:28
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 47:29
  Brian Searl: I don't know if I can say the F word on my own show, but I don't know.
• 47:32
  Brian Searl: There's no FCC, And I'm in Canada anyway.
• 47:34
  Brian Searl: They can get me.
• 47:35
  Brian Searl: Alex, do you have anything to add?
• 47:36
  Brian Searl: You've been quiet, man.
• 47:38
  Alex Burkett: Yeah.
• 47:38
  Alex Burkett: I'd say just to drive the point home, and I'm gonna double down on my comment from earlier, the more that we can connect the real revenue increases and ties back, I think that's where a lot of, you know,
• 47:49
  Alex Burkett: like Brian, as you mentioned the time factor.
• 47:51
  Alex Burkett: Owners, managers, right?
• 47:53
  Alex Burkett: I've seen the impact and it's the reason that I choose to continue to invest time is because it's, real financial performance.
• 47:59
  Alex Burkett: As we noted, Campspot came out with their revenue management 2.0, just a couple days ago.
• 48:04
  Alex Burkett: We're already starting to implement that and the ability for me to adjust rates, particularly when, at COTA especially, we're such an event driven, calendar and business that marginal rate loss has a dramatic impact on my P&L at the
• 48:19
  Alex Burkett: end of the year if we don't get that right.
• 48:21
  Alex Burkett: Knowing that we're likely gonna sell out for the major race events, how much more rate could we get for that?
• 48:26
  Alex Burkett: Do we need to drop rate in any areas and solve an occupancy problem, right?
• 48:30
  Alex Burkett: Yeah, I think that the revenue piece is ultimately what will continue to push people to, to give it the try and sharing more case study examples of, "I did this, I got this result."
• 48:41
  Alex Burkett: That is what kind of takes the monotony out of sitting in front of the screen all day and where the owner can go of course I'm gonna invest more time in growing my business every..."
• 48:50
  Alex Burkett: Yes, we love the outdoors, but I assume most of us are in it to, make a decent amount of money.
• 48:54
  Alex Burkett: Yeah, I think that's to me is the real unlock that we need to keep driving home.
• 48:58
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 48:59
  Brian Searl: And then again, everything from first principles.
• 49:00
  Brian Searl: How do I use AI to create something that hasn't existed before?
• 49:03
  Brian Searl: Here's a free one for you, Alex.
• 49:05
  Brian Searl: You can take this to Mike and tell him it was your idea.
• 49:08
  Brian Searl: Nobody needs to know, 'cause nobody watches the show.
• 49:10
  Brian Searl: Tell him you need to buy six Tesla Model Ys that can auto-drive themselves in camp mode around the racetrack, and people can sleep in those all night.
• 49:19
  Brian Searl: That would be like $500 a night experience right there, man.
• 49:21
  Alex Burkett: I- if I can get it to work, that would be, that'd be amazing.
• 49:26
  Brian Searl: Why wouldn't it work?
• 49:26
  Brian Searl: They have camp mode.
• 49:27
  Brian Searl: I don't know, like I- they keep the air conditioning on.
• 49:29
  Brian Searl: They gotta be able to drive all night.
• 49:31
  Alex Burkett: Fair.
• 49:31
  Alex Burkett: The the track dynamic is always interesting of what can and can't be done, but-
• 49:35
  Brian Searl: It's-
• 49:36
  Alex Burkett: i'll push for it.
• 49:37
  Brian Searl: I think it'd be cool.
• 49:38
  Brian Searl: I would pay to do that if I knew it wouldn't crash.
• 49:42
  Alex Burkett: Yeah, exactly.
• 49:43
  Brian Searl: Yeah.
• 49:43
  Alex Burkett: Hey, Austin's crawling with all those those CyberCabs I'm seeing all, all over.
• 49:47
  Alex Burkett: So yeah, the, the Teslas are all over the place.
• 49:50
  Brian Searl: Ravi would test it for you.
• 49:51
  Brian Searl: He's rich and lives in Austin.
• 49:53
  Brian Searl: He's got money to spend on that.
• 49:54
  Brian Searl: You're charging $1,000 a night, Ravi will pay it.
• 49:56
  Ravi Parikh: I, honestly I've used the, I've used the Tesla CyberCab and it's pretty cool.
• 49:59
  Ravi Parikh: It's a good experience.
• 50:00
  Brian Searl: Have you?
• 50:01
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 50:01
  Brian Searl: The robo- the s- actual CyberCab or just the Robotaxi with the steering wheel?
• 50:06
  Ravi Parikh: The gold one.
• 50:06
  Ravi Parikh: No, their gold ones.
• 50:07
  Ravi Parikh: No, no steering wheels.
• 50:09
  Ravi Parikh: Yeah.
• 50:09
  Ravi Parikh: They're autonomous now in Austin.
• 50:11
  Ravi Parikh: You can call one, it'll come to my house, pick me up.
• 50:15
  Brian Searl: Yeah, that's a, that's an interesting revenue opportunity for another time.
• 50:18
  Brian Searl: But yeah, owning your own cyber cabs and leasing them out.
• 50:21
  Brian Searl: But anything else that we have to add?
• 50:24
  Brian Searl: Like to spend the last few minutes here, like asking each other questions.
• 50:26
  Brian Searl: Tessa, you have any questions for anybody that you wanna ask and play host for a second?
• 50:31
  Tessa McCrackin: Oh gosh.
• 50:32
  Tessa McCrackin: Play host for a second.
• 50:34
  Brian Searl: You can't do worse than me.
• 50:35
  Brian Searl: Don't be nervous.
• 50:36
  Tessa McCrackin: I'm trying to think what's a good question to ask.
• 50:40
  Tessa McCrackin: Trying to think.
• 50:42
  Tessa McCrackin: Some- I was gonna say,
• 50:43
  Alex Burkett: I've got one for Ravi if, Tessa, you need a minute to think through.
• 50:45
  Tessa McCrackin: Yeah, you pop in.
• 50:46
  Tessa McCrackin: Pop in.
• 50:47
  Alex Burkett: So Ravi, as I mentioned with Campspot kind of launching with the revenue management 2.0 side, is RoverPass coming out with anything similar on that front with revenue management tools for parks?
• 50:59
  Ravi Parikh: No comment today.
• 51:03
  Alex Burkett: Maybe later.
• 51:04
  Ravi Parikh: Maybe someday, but I will...
• 51:07
  Ravi Parikh: You'll know when everybody else knows.
• 51:11
  Ravi Parikh: I have one thing that I think people should do.
• 51:14
  Ravi Parikh: I think you should start thinking about AI like your Netflix subscription and just pay the $20 a month because it'll change the game for you.
• 51:23
  Ravi Parikh: If you're not paying the 20, it's just not the same.
• 51:27
  Ravi Parikh: You're not even getting close to the same amount of power.
• 51:30
  Ravi Parikh: And start incorporating it into your daily life even before you start to incorporate it into your business life.
• 51:37
  Ravi Parikh: And, do some meal prep planning and figure out like a workflow in your personal household that you wanna automate and then work backwards on that, and then start applying those concepts to your business.
• 51:49
  Ravi Parikh: That's how I got my wife to...
• 51:52
  Ravi Parikh: She's not quite as AI pilled as me, but she built a WhatsApp app to meal prep for our son, and she's a dentist.
• 51:59
  Ravi Parikh: Start there if that's where...
• 52:01
  Ravi Parikh: If you can't think of practical applications for business, there's tons of them for your personal life.
• 52:08
  Brian Searl: And if you're short on money, cancel Netflix because there's better shows on Apple TV and Amazon anyway.
• 52:14
  Brian Searl: I haven't opened Netflix in a couple months, but yeah.
• 52:16
  Brian Searl: Tessa, did you think of a question yet?
• 52:19
  Tessa McCrackin: I'm still working on it.
• 52:20
  Tessa McCrackin: This was-- I-- Now I'm thinking about meal prep.
• 52:22
  Ravi Parikh: Brian put a lot of pressure on you.
• 52:24
  Brian Searl: Sorry, I did.
• 52:25
  Brian Searl: It was last night.
• 52:26
  Brian Searl: Mitch, you got something?
• 52:26
  Brian Searl: It's your first podcast.
• 52:29
  Mitchell Spence: My question's for Matt, and the question is, you said you're, you were a, a big Claude guy, and then you've been exploring exploring other options.
• 52:39
  Mitchell Spence: What are some of your takeaways?
• 52:42
  Matt Whitermore: That I now probably spend six hundred dollars a month on, on AI subscriptions because with just the way things change so quickly, right?
• 52:53
  Matt Whitermore: I don't know if you've experienced this where I, it was Claude Code or nothing else for a year.
• 52:59
  Matt Whitermore: And, but there were times where I would just feel like either Claude got dumber or slower or whatever, and it would go on for like weeks at a time.
• 53:10
  Matt Whitermore: It was maybe right before a new model was dropping or whatever.
• 53:13
  Matt Whitermore: I don't pretend to know why, but there was just stretches of time where I would get so frustrated and just know that the performance degraded.
• 53:21
  Matt Whitermore: It just wasn't working the way it was the day before, the week before.
• 53:25
  Matt Whitermore: And so in those moments I knew I needed to jump in, and I saw it as like such a huge undertaking.
• 53:31
  Matt Whitermore: Oh, I gotta go learn Codex now, or I gotta go learn Cursor or Groq.
• 53:36
  Matt Whitermore: Now, with the desktop apps, the interfaces are all exactly the same.
• 53:40
  Matt Whitermore: The-- It's the same app.
• 53:42
  Matt Whitermore: There's minor different features, but right, if you just set up your workspace in a way that it's just, it's on your machine, they're all just coding assistants.
• 53:50
  Matt Whitermore: You could point them at the same stack of files.
• 53:53
  Matt Whitermore: They all understand it the same way, and it-- Like we've said a few times on this show that if you're hitting a blocker, just ask it.
• 54:00
  Matt Whitermore: I just went in and said, "Hey, I'm in Codex now.
• 54:03
  Matt Whitermore: I've used Claude Code.
• 54:05
  Matt Whitermore: What are some things we need to translate?"
• 54:06
  Matt Whitermore: So just set up some basic files, some pointers, some symlinks to skills, and like it just took five minutes for it to be like, "All right.
• 54:14
  Matt Whitermore: I fully understand everything you were doing in Claude Code.
• 54:17
  Matt Whitermore: I'm in Codex now."
• 54:18
  Matt Whitermore: And then same thing with, in Cursor with the Groq models and...
• 54:23
  Matt Whitermore: What was really interesting was Grok Bot.
• 54:25
  Matt Whitermore: I haven't messed with Muse yet.
• 54:27
  Matt Whitermore: I'm assuming it's pretty similar.
• 54:29
  Matt Whitermore: But I spent like 1,500 bucks in Grok Bot in a day.
• 54:33
  Matt Whitermore: It just went crazy and you re- you're like, "Oh, just spin up an army of agents and go to town," and like then you're broke.
• 54:39
  Matt Whitermore: So like I feel like it's a consumer thing, right?
• 54:43
  Matt Whitermore: If you're fluent in, with a coding assistant or any- anything Agentech, I feel like kind...
• 54:50
  Matt Whitermore: It's cool, it's awesome, but like you can just build your own Grok Bot essentially.
• 54:54
  Matt Whitermore: You already have your own Grok Bot inside a Claude Code or a Codex or a Cursor for the most part.
• 55:00
  Matt Whitermore: So ho- hope that helps.
• 55:04
  Ravi Parikh: I gotta run, y'all.
• 55:05
  Ravi Parikh: It was it's always a pleasure.
• 55:07
  Ravi Parikh: Thanks, Brian, for having me on.
• 55:09
  Brian Searl: Yeah, I was gonna say we gotta wrap up and be cognizant of everybody's time.
• 55:11
  Brian Searl: Ravi, can, where can they find more about RoverPass?
• 55:14
  Ravi Parikh: Software.roverpass.com.
• 55:17
  Brian Searl: Thank you, sir.
• 55:17
  Brian Searl: Appreciate you being here.
• 55:18
  Brian Searl: Alex, final thoughts- Yeah and where can they find out more about COTA?
• 55:22
  Alex Burkett: Yeah.
• 55:23
  Alex Burkett: A- as always, really enjoyed this week episode specifically.
• 55:27
  Alex Burkett: I learned a lot from Ravi.
• 55:28
  Alex Burkett: Matt, as, talk to Matt all the time on and off camera and just wealth of knowledge and info.
• 55:33
  Alex Burkett: You can find more about COTA at cotarvpark.com.
• 55:36
  Alex Burkett: And obviously our parent company crrhospitality.com if you're looking for third-party management.
• 55:42
  Brian Searl: And sorry, go ahead and plug your match show if you want.
• 55:48
  Brian Searl: Outdoor Hospitality Weekly?
• 55:49
  Alex Burkett: Yes.
• 55:49
  Alex Burkett: We- it's been a, a minute since we've done a a new episode, but Outdoor Hospitality Weekly is another podcast that Matt and I do.
• 55:55
  Alex Burkett: I would say- Yeah more one-on-one interviews or discussions, not necessarily the same, round table style that Brian, you have here.
• 56:01
  Alex Burkett: But that is ohweekly.substack.com.
• 56:05
  Alex Burkett: Free Substack to join with podcast videos, et cetera.
• 56:09
  Brian Searl: Awesome.
• 56:09
  Brian Searl: Thanks for being here, Alex.
• 56:10
  Brian Searl: Matt, final thoughts?
• 56:13
  Matt Whitermore: Just, if you don't have the time to do it, hire a consultant.
• 56:16
  Matt Whitermore: I think like either you gotta jump in and learn it and take the time and clear some stuff off your desk, and if you really can't do that, get somebody that you're gonna, attach to at the hip that
• 56:26
  Matt Whitermore: does understand it and can understand your business and really embed with you and, help you along the way.
• 56:32
  Matt Whitermore: Because, you- you we're at the point now where you're starting to fall behind if you're not, if you're not staying on top of it.
• 56:39
  Matt Whitermore: And yeah we'll...
• 56:39
  Matt Whitermore: Alex and I will get back on that.
• 56:41
  Matt Whitermore: We'll get a, we'll get another show out soon.
• 56:43
  Matt Whitermore: And you can learn more about Travo at travoai.com and you can email me at matt@travoai.com.
• 56:51
  Brian Searl: Awesome.
• 56:51
  Brian Searl: Thanks for being here, Matt.
• 56:52
  Brian Searl: Tessa, final thoughts?
• 56:54
  Tessa McCrackin: I guess all this AI stuff just seems serious and daunting, and if you're like a laggard out there and a campground owner perhaps, it maybe it seems, yeah, just too daunting.
• 57:01
  Tessa McCrackin: But it's really fun, sometimes we'll just, be playing with AI and we'll almost like, whoo, like squeal with delight at times about "Oh, we didn't know it could do that.
• 57:08
  Tessa McCrackin: Look at what it did."
• 57:09
  Tessa McCrackin: So I think it, just a reminder yeah, that it can be fun.
• 57:12
  Tessa McCrackin: It doesn't need to be so serious.
• 57:14
  Tessa McCrackin: You can find us at northgateresorts.com.
• 57:16
  Tessa McCrackin: Mitch too.
• 57:18
  Brian Searl: Thanks for being here, Tessa.
• 57:19
  Brian Searl: And Mitch, last but not least, how was your first podcast, Mitch?
• 57:22
  Mitchell Spence: Yeah.
• 57:23
  Mitchell Spence: Great.
• 57:23
  Mitchell Spence: I don't know.
• 57:24
  Mitchell Spence: How did I do?
• 57:24
  Mitchell Spence: I...
• 57:25
  Mitchell Spence: Thanks for having me, tessa just emails me things and I just say yes and don't read it, and then, two weeks later I- I realize I signed up for a podcast.
• 57:32
  Tessa McCrackin: But- when I was, when...
• 57:33
  Tessa McCrackin: Yeah, when Mitch was, you asked Mitch how he was using AI, I was really holding in that he, that's how he responds to all of the emails that I sent him, so
• 57:40
  Mitchell Spence: Yeah.
• 57:40
  Mitchell Spence: But it was actually Claude that signed me up for this- Yeah.
• 57:42
  Mitchell Spence: when it responded to Tessa's email.
• 57:45
  Mitchell Spence: So yeah.
• 57:46
  Mitchell Spence: That...
• 57:46
  Mitchell Spence: so that's the important, cautionary tale here in all of this, is that Claude is really fun and has a lot of great, Or AI in general.
• 57:53
  Mitchell Spence: And so there's a lot of really really great outcomes, but there's also unintended consequences and it's not a, it doesn't solve all problems and it's certainly not a, a fantastic decision maker.
• 58:03
  Mitchell Spence: Aside from me being here, I, that was a, it made the right call there,
• 58:05
  Brian Searl: thanks for being with us, Mitch.
• 58:06
  Brian Searl: I appreciate everything.
• 58:07
  Brian Searl: You did great, and like I told you before, this is the worst podcast you'll ever be on.
• 58:10
  Brian Searl: It's only up from here.
• 58:11
  Brian Searl: Maybe they'll have you on Outdoor Hospitality Weekly.
• 58:13
  Brian Searl: That's a better podcast.
• 58:15
  Brian Searl: They're professionals.
• 58:16
  Brian Searl: They...
• 58:16
  Brian Searl: Look, Alex even has a mic.
• 58:17
  Brian Searl: I don't even have a mic.
• 58:18
  Brian Searl: I'm just holding my phone here.
• 58:20
  Brian Searl: So- standard of quality.
• 58:22
  Brian Searl: Thank you guys for being here for another episode of MC Fireside Chats.
• 58:25
  Brian Searl: We normally have Outwired after this, but we're gonna take a week off, myself and Scott.
• 58:28
  Brian Searl: So we'll see you next week on another episode of MC Fireside Chats.
• 58:30
  Brian Searl: Appreciate everybody being here.
• 58:32
  Brian Searl: Take care, guys.
• 58:33
  Brian Searl: See ya.