This episode of MC Fireside Chats, hosted by Brian Searl (Founder & CEO of Insider Perks and Modern Campground), dove into a profound discussion on the accelerating pace of Artificial Intelligence (AI), its impact on the Outdoor Hospitality and Recreation Industry, and the importance of enhancing the guest experience in a rapidly changing world. The show featured recurring guests Kurtis Wilkins, Matt Whitermore, and Cara Csizmadia, and welcomed special guest Lizzy Bustamante.

Brian Searl kicked off the show, noting his return to the studio after extensive travel, including conferences like OHI and KOA, and acknowledged the demanding convention season. He quickly steered the conversation toward AI, referencing the new Gemini 3.0 model from Google, which he noted had significantly outperformed competitors like ChatGPT in nearly all benchmarks, describing its performance leap as "night and day". Searl highlighted mind-blowing use cases, such as the model's ability to solve a physics problem written on a napkin in the same handwriting.

Kurtis Wilkins, from RJourney (running about 50-60 locations, 43 branded RJourney, and Advanced Outdoor Management), shared his concerns about feeding business data into powerful models like Gemini, worrying that what is pushed into these models "is no longer yours, that's theirs". He stressed the necessity of disclosing this to stakeholders and ensuring they understand the data protection implications. Wilkins, who had attended OHI, emphasized that AI's primary role will be replacing repetitive tasks, offering an opportunity for companies to redirect time and focus on increasing the guest experience.

Matt Whitermore, Director of Market Expansion at Unhitched Management and Climb Capital (owning and operating 30 parks), agreed with the need for better guest experience, noting that AI is slowing job growth by replacing the need for entry-level roles like analysts, as one person with AI can do the job of many. He shared an eye-opening anecdote about a high-end transient park operator in the saturated Texas Hill Country who is "crushing it" by leveraging AI in marketing and revenue management on the back end, which frees him up to be a human on the front end. This operator has all five-star reviews and impressive revenue numbers.

Cara Csizmadia, President of the Canadian Camping and RV Association, related to the end-of-year burnout but joined the AI discussion by highlighting the generational shift in tool use, noting that her teenage children use ChatGPT over Google. She argued that completely blocking children from using AI tools in school creates a "weird dynamic" because future jobs will require the skill of effectively prompting AI. Csizmadia views the technological shift as an opportunity to maintain focus on the "human-ness" of the hospitality industry, using AI's efficiency to enhance human interactions.

Special guest Lizzy Bustamante, CEO of TillerXR (a virtual tour, GPS-powered platform), discussed how her company is leveraging AI to enhance their product. She envisions using conversational AI to automatically build a virtual tour from images and use image analysis to determine and pull in contextual data—like site information, object detection, and auto-tagging—speeding up the process which currently requires manual input from campground owners. Wilkins immediately saw the value, noting that having this virtual tour data accessible as an API endpoint into AI engines would be "incredibly useful to the consumer" for refining their RV pad rental search. Searl added that AI will soon be able to "watch" the virtual tour and property video for the consumer, finding the perfect match by analyzing every piece of data available.

The conversation then took a broader turn to discuss the US government's Genesis Mission, a new executive order signed by President Trump, which Searl compared to the Manhattan Project. The order focuses on using massive federal scientific datasets to train powerful AI models, unifying supercomputers and lab data to shrink research timelines from years to days. Searl stressed that this push proves AI is not a fad but a serious, government-backed initiative, essentially turning the country into one big AI factory in an effort to race with China.

The panel universally agreed on the magnitude of the government's full-scale push into AI. The final discussion focused on the societal impact, particularly on the future of work and human identity. Searl cited an MIT study finding AI can already replace 11.7% of the US workforce, or about 19 million jobs, if it never improved beyond its current state. Wilkins expressed hope for humanity, believing people will use the freed-up time for "internal fulfillment," focusing more on community and human connection. Searl concluded the episode with an optimistic but realistic view: while there will be a difficult transition period as jobs are replaced, the long-term future, where intelligence and energy are abundant, will unlock greater human purpose.

[00:00:20] Brian Searl: You guys should have a good time if you're going. Is anybody here going to COE? Matt, you're going? That’s right. I saw Robert's post.

[00:00:26] Brian Searl: Said you guys were going. It's a great conference. I just don't have the bandwidth. It's been too crazy for me. But yeah like exciting conference season, all kinds of stuff. I think we'll start like, let's briefly go around and introduce everybody on the panel.

[00:00:49] Brian Searl: So please, Kurtis, you want to start?

[00:01:05] Brian Searl: Were you at OHI or anything, Kurtis?

[00:01:13] Brian Searl: I didn't catch up with you. It was nonstop.

[00:01:22] Brian Searl: We had the magician at our booth. He was doing all kinds of illusion tricks and stuff. It was crazy. He was drawing people in. It was pretty cool.

[00:01:28] Brian Searl: But you guys had a good show?

[00:01:37] Brian Searl: Yeah, that's one of the best uses of it. Matt?

[00:01:52] Brian Searl: Wait, we were up at the bar till 2 o'clock in the morning, man. That's where all the wheeling and dealing gets done.

[00:02:16] Brian Searl: Awesome. Thanks for being here, Matt. Cara?

[00:02:34] Brian Searl: No, KOA people party less hard than OHI people do, but we were up till 12, 1 o'clock.

[00:02:57] Brian Searl: Yeah, for sure. Lizzy?

[00:03:25] Brian Searl: Oh, so did I. I did that at KOA. We were up till 11 o'clock and then I boarded my plane at four. Yeah. Wow. I was, Casey Cochran from Campspot and I wear these Whoop bands or whatever, lots of people do, that track your fitness. And I have I got like a badge that said I was a zombie sleeper after OHI. I was pretty proud of that.

[00:03:42] Brian Searl: Yeah. I got 25 hours of sleep in 120 hours or something like that. It was pretty crazy.

[00:03:49] Brian Searl: Yeah. It is what it is. It's what's required. Anyway, so before I go to into my thing that I want to talk about AI and Lizzy, I want to get to later, you were having a really interesting conversation before the show with Kurtis about how some of your stuff integrates with AI, which I think will be perfect for the show to talk about in a little bit. Is there anything else that you guys have seen that's come across your desk, either attending conferences or in the last month or so since we've been together that you feel is important for us to talk about?

[00:04:20] Kurtis Wilkins: Nothing that I think is like crazy universal Brian. Everything that I'm seeing now is more we've been seeing it for a year, and right? It's just implementation. I'll shout out the Staylist guys, right? I love software. They, I love their implementation of AI and how they're using it. That is a great use case, right? In terms of informing GM and working towards like perfect information for the decision makers.

[00:04:45] Kurtis Wilkins: No. No. Like they're totally different platform, right? I see the value in what was created there. Our, we have a very similar tool for our internal fleet as well.

Like you already should be doing this, right? But yeah, you're right. Like iterative is important, but I think the big leap for me in the last week was, and I want to hear from you two, Matt and Cara and Lizzy, if you have anything to add, was before we talk about this huge thing I'm going to talk about, is Gemini 3.0 came out from Google, which by all accounts, and probably not many people follow all the benchmarks like I do being a geek with no life but usually when you see a new model come out, like ChatGPT-5 or 5.1 or Claude 4.5 or whatever else, it will one-up somebody in one of the benchmarks.

So like it measures how good you are in science or in math or in running a business or in solving problems or whatever. And so they usually just one-upping each other in one or two. Google did, destroyed everyone in every single benchmark, I think except for the SWE-bench coding and they came in like 1% less than Claude and 0.1% away from ChatGPT-5.1.

They figured out a new way to train these models. The thing is night and day, if you go play with this. And their new Nano Banana Pro image generator that's a step up from the one they had before, that's powered by Gemini 3, this thing and they didn't just beat them by 2%. Like they doubled sometimes the performance on some of these benchmarks. So whatever they did, they just completely killed ChatGPT. I don't even use that thing anymore every day. Gemini is now my go-to.

[00:06:43] Brian Searl: you should see there's really cool interesting videos on YouTube that we don't have time to play now, but use cases of where like you can take a physics problem and write it on a napkin and it will actually solve the physics problem on the same napkin in the same handwriting. So it uses the model and the logic behind it to solve the physics problem in math and then uses Nano Banana to create an image of it. It's crazy.

[00:07:06] Brian Searl: so Matt, anything else? Yeah. Go ahead. No, I was gonna say anything.

[00:07:40] Brian Searl: Yeah.

[00:08:13] Brian Searl: Yeah, it's interesting. There's a couple different ways to look at that, right? Like number one is you're not wrong. The ideal perfect scenario is that you have an IT department that trains your own private LLM based on something that's open source that you control, that you use offline, that you don't feed to any of these models. But realistically, 95% of businesses out there are not going to have the time or the ability or the staff or the knowledge or the whatever to do any of that stuff.

So you do have to be careful with what you feed it. I think primarily I would be more concerned with like financial data and things like that and guest data more than anything else. But like any tactic that like, and don't take this as an insult, Kurtis, but like any tactic that RJourney would deploy, any tactic that Unhitched would deploy, like somebody can, like AI could figure out that same tactic if it was prompted correctly, right?

[00:09:08] Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah, and Brian, I don't take that as, I 100% know it's gonna outthink me five ways from Sunday. Right? Because...

[00:09:15] Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah. And by 2027, right? Like it is supposed to be the top .001% of every person in every category. And so this thing that we're talking about is inevitable. It's just, making sure that when we, you have to get alignment from a lot of your stakeholders and making sure that they understand, hey, we are turning this information over to the Google, to OpenAI, Meta, we're turning it over. And I always make sure I just, disclose that to my stakeholders at all different levels. They all laugh because we go, they probably already have it.

Those old appearance releases that everybody would just sign without a second's thought. Now if you read those releases and it says you can create a derivative, that usually means that they could just edit your podcast appearance and put you in a different way on YouTube or something like that to promo you. Now it means they can clone your voice and clone your video.

[00:10:25] Brian Searl: You better be careful signing that stuff.

[00:10:29] Brian Searl: So I've had some debates with people on some of the podcast platforms. They're like, you can't appear on our show. Okay, fine. That's, I understand that's not what you're going to use it for, but you need to think about that I'm not going to be the only one who's going to ask you this question.

[00:10:57] Lizzy Bustamante: Yeah.

This is out on CNBC. I think it's up there today. I was reading it this morning. So I ran that through Gemini 3 and I said, if AI never improves at all beyond the current state of where it is today, how many jobs could that replace today? And it said 19 million in America. As 11.7% of the workforce. And that's not, it's not just the possibility of it replacing. This is AI can actually do their jobs and do it cheaper. Is what this 11.7% says.

[00:11:49] Brian Searl: Yeah. 24/7. Yeah. So this is not stuff we want to happen, but this is stuff that is happening and we have to have a conversation about it.

[00:11:57] Kurtis Wilkins: and I tell my team all the time like I don't see, AI is going to replace repetitive tasks. It's, some critical thinking tasks but it's going to replace a lot of repetitive tasks. And what we should do is take that as an opportunity to increase the experience for the guest because if you do not, like right? We already know 11% of tasks, let's just call it tasks, not jobs. Let's call it tasks.

[00:12:23] Kurtis Wilkins: Is going to be automated. That's 11% of time we can now push in a different direction.

[00:12:30] Kurtis Wilkins: And let's use it. And that's where, I don't know that's such a hard concept for, an organization to embrace, right? That's a hard concept because you're like, what do we do? No one knows the answer yet because we want to hear what does our guest want 11% more of?

And Scott was like, we put a bunch of shade sails over one of our properties in Texas and those sites sold out. And another lady was like, we put a bunch of paw pens on our site and those sites sold out. And I raised my hand and I'm like, you guys are answering your own question. You just need to focus on the guest experience. And if you make yourself different than the other people, and let's be honest, 70 to 80% of this industry has been building parking lots for 60 years. It's not hard to overcome that. Then you can really shine and show up the guest experience and still attract bookings.

They can pre-path their way through, they can think through those concepts. And that's where I think our whole industry that, those are the problems we should be trying to solve. Making that easier because that's what, if you talk to your, your Gen Alphas and your Gen Zs, right? And you talk to them about what's scary to them and why they don't camp? Go talk to those young kids. Like driving to a place? That's scary. They're 16, 18 years old, right? But then you start getting to 24, 25 and you talk to those groups, it's the same thought. That's a scary experience. I'm gonna go 200 miles for the first time. I'm brand new married, right?

[00:14:53] Kurtis Wilkins: That's a, and I don't know Cara, you probably talk to way more guests than I do being the President of Canada RV Association but that's what I hear a lot of. And that's where I'm like, I want to push our team into that. We want to be the best at that.

And yeah, freeing up, you know if I don't have to run my own monthly fiscal reports or reconciliations and AI is going to do that for me now I have, there's you know 10 hours a month or whatever it takes to get that done right there that I can be you know freed up to do those things more efficiently.

I think we have to see this whole kind of shift as an opportunity for us to maintain focus on how human our industry is. Like how important the human experience is to the guest experience and see this as an opportunity to enhance the human experience with all of these kind of new efficient tools. If we...

[00:16:22] Cara Csizmadia: No, it's all good. I was just gonna say if we continue to see it as something we're afraid of and nervous about it's, we're gonna continue, like Brian said, to do the 60 years worth of stuff we've been doing so far, which, for a small section of guests is probably okay, but those expectations are really shifting.

And to your point Cara, like I think that France and some of Europe too is about 10 years ahead of the United States in camping, in guest experience specifically. And I think the reason for that is, is because we've had the Baby Boomers. And the Baby Boomers over the last 60 years while we've been building parking lots have not demanded anything more than parking lots.

I want a miniature golf course, I want a pool, I want a place to sit outside and take my grandkids play on the playground. There's been no impetus for pushing the industry forward until now with the Millennials and Hipcamp and Harvest Hosts and then the generations that follow them. I don't have any data to back that up, but that's what.

[00:17:56] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, I think a lot of the tools that are available have driven that. Like I don't think it's the Millennials and younger that are driving, I think the tools they have at their fingertips is what's pushing them to set those expectations higher. Like they're I used this example before, my, my teenage kids, my kids are 18 and 16 and, or almost, and they don't use Google. They use ChatGPT.

Like they're not interested in bothering with a list of results and all those things. Same with, they can't talk on the phone. If I call my kids, it's, I've failed them as a parent. They can't, they have zero phone etiquette, they have no idea how to function on the telephone, but they'll text you all day long. Like those fundamental shifts are driven by tools that have been made available to them and that's driving the experience expectation demands in my opinion completely.

[00:19:29] Matt Whitermore: Cold caller's dream right there.

What if I could figure out a way to get my information of what does Brian need and have a way for him to talk to Kurtis on demand? Hey, I don't know what to do on this situation, right? And an answer comes back, right? That's hey, this is about, this is how I would proceed. It gives them a plan A, plan B, plan C. And like that kind of tooling for like on-site teams because we hire, we all have front desk folks that vary in qualifications, right?

[00:20:28] Kurtis Wilkins: And they might not know the answer to every question, but if they had the ability to ask Kurtis right then and there at the tip of their fingers or ask anyone on the team, I shouldn't say Kurtis but like anyone on the team. Hey, I got a guest in front of me and I wasn't trained on this particular thing and getting an answer. And that's how I think the next generation is and whether it's voice, but being able to get perfect information. That's what I preach is perfect information to my frontline folks so that they provide that best customer experience.

[00:21:09] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah.

[00:21:17] Kurtis Wilkins: I still think you're gonna have humans. I...

[00:21:37] Kurtis Wilkins: And that's...

[00:21:38] Kurtis Wilkins: And that's what I'm talking about is like that particular piece, right? I agree with you. Self check-in, that's, you don't have self check-in, you need to, everybody needs to be looking themselves critically in the eye and going why don't I have self check-in? But the, what I'm talking about is like being able to support that frontline person, right? Because we, they run into weird stuff. Like stuff you've never heard of. There's a I, a great example. Toy alligator in the toilet. I've never ran into that in my life before. But some little kid dropped the alligator in the toilet. My maintenance team had to go snake it and get it back.

[00:22:18] Brian Searl: so the answer is the AI then understands that's a problem that it can't solve because it's physically not there until the robots actually get here in 10 years, maybe sooner than that. And then it knows to dispatch your maintenance team, contact them on the phone or through Alexa and sends them right to the cabin, right?

[00:22:32] Brian Searl: And the guests just talk into their speaker or their headset in their cabin and be like, hey, there's an alligator, toy alligator, I don't f- to do. Really have to go to the bathroom, come fast.

[00:22:53] Brian Searl: Solved that without the GM.

[00:23:24] Brian Searl: One day I just want to run a a sarcasm first campground. Where I can say yes, we place those in random toilets. You win a free night if you found one. Just get it out of there. Bring it to me. Then you get a free night.

[00:23:38] Brian Searl: I just want to be sarcastic with people and see like I think there's an audience for that. Like the soup Nazi in Seinfeld. I think there's people who would come.

[00:23:50] Brian Searl: I don't know. That's a good question. Probably pretty good. Like I think eventually the voice is going to be able to actually, it can. There are models that can actually hear the emotion in your voice already. So I think it will be interesting.

[00:24:07] Brian Searl: That's what I'm saying. Like it just takes a little bit of creativity for the, your, the guest experience that you're building is the sarcasm campground is I saw a picture of a lodge in I think Georgia somewhere that's shaped like a camera and the bed is in the lens of the camera like that sells for $375 a night and is occupied 70% of the year. It just takes a little bit of creativity.

And it doesn't mean a million dollar water park. It could be organic soap in the bathroom or warm cookies at check-in or but it has to be what is your niche, what are the people looking for. And if you have just been focusing on as many of our clients are who call us for marketing, what type of guest are you looking for? RVers. What do you mean? What? All of them? Like it's you're not for everybody, right? So if you figure that out then you can really niche down and focus on the guest experience and make yourself special. Or if you don't have a niche, create one for yourself.

[00:24:56] Matt Whitermore: I had a really eye-opening conversation with an operator down in the Texas Hill Country and it just, it's got my wheels spinning and it's nothing earth-shattering but he's very tech-forward, he's using AI. He's in a market where the narrative is that it's a saturated, overbuilt market with supply issues.

[00:25:54] Matt Whitermore: He's operating a transient park, very high-end, resort and he's crushing it. And he's got the whole deck, seemingly stacked against him and that was just it, I think all that stuff in the narrative out there about transient business being tough and demand being, tough is all true but it showed a path to overcoming it. And he's utilizing a lot of AI in marketing and in revenue management strategies. And again, nothing really earth-shattering.

[00:26:36] Matt Whitermore: And I just met him for the first time so I'm not intimately familiar with his operation. But what I gathered is that he is using AI to essentially multiply himself on the back office and on the back end, which frees him up to be a human on the front end. I'm sure he's leveraging technology and AI to assist in that front too, he's got all five-star reviews. Not a single four-star review.

He's, his revenue numbers on transient sites are insane. And he works for those five-star reviews. And it's, he's really just one person. He's, a team of one in a lot of ways, but it's, his output is impressive. And I think a lot of that is attributed to AI in marketing, AI in revenue management, delivering the right product to the right customer at the right time for the right price always, every single day.

Which is, might sound simple, but it's exhausting and tiring and complex and it's just impressive. And then when I think about our company Unhitched, we're growing we're a lean team and we talked at the top of the episode about AI as a job replacement. Where I'm seeing it personally is really earlier in the process. It's a, it's slowing job growth in a lot of ways. Like we're at a point where, I'm working on acquisitions, I'm selling management services.

I've got Brandon Darley who's, my counterpart, our Director of Investments. I bring the deals and he tells me how much they suck and to go back and go find another one. And we're at the point where it's like we might need an analyst. But then we start cooking on how can we use AI?

And it's not that we don't want an analyst, like that would be cool to have somebody else on the team too, but it's just an interesting kind of inflection point of do we hire an analyst, a junior analyst like out of school or something? Or do we just put a few weeks into developing some screening tools and some scoring tools and some research tools which would essentially do everything that analyst would be doing.

Which maybe says something about how we would utilize an analyst. I don't know, but it's just an interesting inflection point. On the marketing side too. It's like we've talked about, oh, do we hire a marketing coordinator? Or do we just put some brain damage into implementing a few AI tools?

And then you're going to see the layoffs start to come in 2026. But I mean to your point, like even if you have a job or a role for an analyst that they could do, an analyst using AI is going to sit around for seven hours of their day because all the work you have to do with them using AI, even if they did a great job, would probably fill an hour or two hours of their day. At, until you grow bigger, right? As you grow bigger then you have more capacity for that person to do something.

[00:29:57] Cara Csizmadia: We're gonna have to see a bit of a shift though in, and I'll speak anecdotally I guess, but I just had this argument with my kid's teacher, going back to my teenagers who...

[00:30:11] Cara Csizmadia: I don't know which side you're on. I, my, my kid got into trouble for using ChatGPT as a tool with a math problem. And I'm challenged by this. I mean I, obviously on one hand as a parent I'm like, do your work and put in the effort. But on the other hand, I'm also, we're on the verge of this massive shift to a society where he's going to have the inherent skill to effectively prompt AI. And he's going to need to learn how to do that really well for almost any job he gets in the world by the time he's there.

Even five years from now when he's transitioning into the workforce, not even, three or four years from now potentially. He's going to need to have those skills. So completely blocking them from utilizing these tools that are available at this age concerns me. I think we need to start to see these tools as valuable, necessary tools that aren't going away in order to help these kids get to a place where, yeah, you can hire an analyst, but that analyst has to know exactly how to prompt AI in the most effective and efficient way to give you the best possible outcomes.

And they're not going to have those tools at their fingertips if their teachers are failing them for using the tools and locking them out at the, I think on the school property, somehow they've got all the LLM sites blocked and you can't even access them if you're using the school Wi-Fi and things like that, which fair. But closing the world down for them like that, I think is going to create a weird dynamic for us here coming soon.

So Jessica, I want you to share this first video that we were talking about. Yeah, the first mission one. This was announced yesterday for those of you guys who, like I know we have all have a love-hate relationship with Mr. Donald Trump. But this is big.

[00:32:33] Brian Searl: All right, so I want to give you guys a little clarity on this. There's another video I want to briefly show. That's, that one. Whoever Secretary Doug Burgum is talking about, but hold on, share another one. But just clarity of what this is. This is an executive order signed by Trump yesterday. They're comparing this to the Manhattan Project and it's just as big. This is why I'm focusing on this. Just play it from right there. It's cued up.

[00:34:19] Brian Searl: Wow. Just wow. What an incredible story coming out of the White House. Again, the title here, US government launches Genesis Mission transforming science through AI computing. So this is Trump's executive order to use massive federal scientific datasets to train powerful AI models. Department of Energy will connect US supercomputers and lab data into one unified platform intended to shrink the research timeline from years to days through AI driven experimentation focusing on biotech, fusion, quantum. It's a big deal. AWG, you want to kick us off?

[00:34:55] Brian Searl: Yeah, I've compared this moment to 1939 and this is the Manhattan Project. And in the Manhattan Project, as I've remarked previously, we turned the country into one big factory for nuclear weapons. In the case of the Manhattan Project, in this case, the country is being turned into one big AI factory. And this is an incredibly ambitious we speak of moonshots, this is an incredibly ambitious moonshot not just to turn the country into an AI compute factory, but also to, to supply some of the limiting reagents as it were, like datasets, federal datasets that are locked up in a variety of different enclaves are now according to the EO going to be unlocked and made available for pre-training.

Probably software tools that right now are unavailable being made available. And I think to the extent that there may be a race dynamic with China whose government is also collecting large amounts of data I think the Manhattan Project positioning is probably pretty intentional. And I think it's just glorious to, to see the sort of ambition, ambitious unlocking of scarce resources. I'll also point out Dario Gil who's been named as the mission director for Genesis Mission.

[00:36:17] Brian Searl: [Video playing: Peter Diamandis]

[00:37:09] Matt Whitermore: Really fascinating. I'm gonna have to watch that because what I've been and I'm a novice at best, I have a lot of catching up to do. But alluding back to my analyst comment and using it for acquisitions research and stuff, really interesting. Something I've been trying to implement and I've been trying to keep it simple, right? I feel like you, you jump on Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini and you look for a solution and something at least I struggle with is that it just jumps to the most complex side of things a lot of times and it depends on your prompting.

But something I've always just been trying to remind myself is keep it simple. Implement a very simple V1 of whatever you're trying to do and then iterate from there. And it, what I was doing was trying to plug into census data and Bureau of Labor Statistics data for a pretty simple like location grading and scoring tool. So hey, we get a, oh new campground for sale, plug in the address and let's do a very simple kind of scoring process. So interesting in that, seems to be somewhat along the lines of what they're talking about. So I'll have to, I'll have to dive into that.

This is serious push from the entire federal government to go all in on AI. And we can't stop. Like I had somebody I shared this article with somebody this morning and the response was is like, okay, is this basically mutually assured destruction between the United States and China? And it's not. It's not mutually assured destruction. And this is probably even scarier than that. But this is basically like whoever gets the super intelligence first will turn off the other country.

Because if you're China and you win and you get super intelligence, are you going to sit around and wait for two gods to be created? No, of course not. Why would you? You want the only God. Like it's going to be a God. And they'll be able to say turn off the United States. That sounds really scary, but that's the race that the United States and China are in right now. And Google and OpenAI and if it's Google that solves it first, you wait and see the United States government tries to nationalize Google. They for sure will.

[00:39:56] Brian Searl: I don't know. I don't know. I know that China I think because of the nature of China's government that's less closed off and they force everybody to share data and all that. I think China has been doing this probably for a while, but I don't have I can't speak to that as an expert level.

[00:40:11] Brian Searl: But normally, like normally government to Cara's point, like with teachers, right? Government gets in the way. This time government is getting out of the way and not only just getting out of the way, they're joining forces with all the companies to say like we are in it with you, let's go.

And I look at like these, there's verticals of research and development that can be accelerated with this kind of funding. I think time is going to I don't know I, I don't know where I sit on either or on side of this issue. It's new and I don't even know if I'm ready to talk about do I think it's good or bad. I do think that regardless of the government involvement, I think we were headed towards this kind of investment.

[00:41:24] Kurtis Wilkins: and that's where, to bring it back to the campgrounds and like what, it doesn't matter what industry you're in like this thing's coming. And so I think it's going to come faster. I'm still a believer in the 2027 number. Right? Sometime September, August, right? The math says that's when we hit the exponential curve.

[00:42:07] Cara Csizmadia: Yep. Yep.

[00:42:12] Cara Csizmadia: and that was her argument back though, was that he should be using his graphing calculator. And I said that to her. I said when I was in school there, we weren't allowed to use a graphing calculator. Good thing we finally got those tools. Yeah.

[00:42:30] Brian Searl: No, I was letting Cara talk cause she had something more important to say than me always. But I was just gonna say like that's the, that's inherently the problem with government and change is that like you already are seeing and I, this is for sure going to cause controversy among some people when I say this and it comes out of my mouth, but you are already seeing school be almost for many professions completely useless. What they're teaching in school.

If you're a doctor or you're hands-on or you're an emotional, like you're training to be a therapist, there's value in all that stuff, right? There's value in the human connection in the early grades when you go and you learn how to socialize and communicate with others and all that. But the stuff that they're teaching now is not going to be anything that child is going to use in their career at all. Because it's not going to be that because they're not going to do the math.

They're not going to, they're going to be able to query the history. They're going to be able to have be taught in so many different ways instantly. You're going to be able to put on a Meta VR headset and go to ancient Egypt and walk around and feel and smell and touch and that's going to be your field trip. You'll be able to take field trips all over the world in school. I don't know how we catch up to all this stuff, but I know a lot of it's got to change because we got to prepare our kids for a different future.

[00:43:56] Brian Searl: you should be.

[00:44:13] Brian Searl: No.

[00:44:19] Brian Searl: And should they want to become a mathematician one day, they should be able to teach themselves how to learn Pythagorean's theorem.

[00:44:26] Brian Searl: That's the difference. This is full circle. If you study ancient Roman history like Rome had two different types of schools. Schools for slaves where they taught you skills and schools for free people where they taught you how to teach yourself to learn in the hope that one day they had no idea what was going to happen to society or how you would be useful. You would teach yourself to be a blacksmith or a bread maker and you would contribute to society. But they didn't teach you how to make bread. They taught you how to teach yourself to make bread.

[00:44:54] Cara Csizmadia: let's hope we don't end up like Rome.

[00:44:57] Cara Csizmadia: I said let's hope we don't end up like Rome.

[00:45:14] Lizzy Bustamante: Yeah. I think the conversation that we were having is how we are leveraging AI in the near future and then you know what does that look like for, 12 months out for us. And I think with the way that we're creating virtual tours a lot of these tours have contextual information inside of them to create more engagement so that when someone is looking at a virtual tour, they're able to take a look around, get site information.

You have to plug in all of that either through an API if you've been able to categorize that information through you know a Newbook or a RubberPass or something like that, we can pull that in. But imagine if we could just speed up that process with prompting AI. Hey, I need, here's my images, the virtual tour has been built, I need this virtual tour for a campground.

And allow someone to build a virtual tour through some conversational AI that then pulls in all of that kind of data and automatically scans, analyzes an image and determines what contextual information should be put there rather than relying on a campground owner or a marketing professional to have to look at each image and build that manually today. So there's one kind of effort that we're looking at.

They don't do virtual tours, but they do the mapping. And the data that he has through his APIs that he can also feed to AI to ask questions to get like how far is this to the bathroom or what's the shortest way here or what's the, and he can separate all the layers. Like the more things you look at as data that you can supplement into the AI systems to allow the guests to discover you and end up choosing you is the win.

[00:47:26] Brian Searl: What do you think, Kurt?

[00:48:03] Brian Searl: here's the interesting thing too. Like you're gonna get to a point, you already are here but most consumers aren't aware of it, where the AI is gonna watch the virtual tour for them. Where the AI is gonna watch the video of the property for them. You can do this in Gemini 3 which is one of the most interesting use cases that nobody's played with it. You can feed it an hour long YouTube video and you can say pull out the most interesting clip you think I should use for social media from this that's the most engaging or controversial or whatever. It won't just pull the transcript.

It will watch the video and it will tell you the frame it starts and the frame it ends and what it should do and it's mind-blowing what Gemini 3 can do. So but to that point right? Then it's going to have to, the more data you have, the more ways you can present your campground through a digital map like Simon has or through a virtual tour like Lizzy has or through data from Newbook or Campspot or any of the other reservation systems. The more data you can pull in, the more ways you have to convince that AI agent that it's the right, perfect tool. And people are just going to trust that.

Like I know it's the, my agent knows it's the best campground for me because I know for sure that it browsed not one page of the website, it browsed every page and looked at every photo and every virtual tour and every 360 video and everything and it knows that it's the perfect one for me. And it's never going to be wrong. Ever. Cause it will read the reviews and read all the things and read all the, like we're a couple years away from that, but it's getting there.

[00:49:51] Brian Searl: and it will know that. It will be connected to your email and your calendar. It will know what job you have, it will know when your kids can get off school, it will know when you can get off work, it'll know how many vacation days you have and it'll just be like, hey you asked me for these dates but you're going camping now. And you'll be like, and how many people are gonna be like, no, I think you're wrong AI. I think I want to go the other. It's not gonna happen.

[00:50:20] Brian Searl: It's not gonna happen. You know it's not.

[00:50:29] Brian Searl: It will, yeah, it'll be a 70% segment. It just is what it is. And that's fine like you need to think of different ways to, to challenge yourself and to think and not to be, like you will be lazy but take that laziness and put it to practice other places just like more time you have for guest experience, right? Like you don't need to just sit on the couch all day like you need to have a different purpose in life. And what, or a purpose in your job or a purpose with things to do and you will have that. That will unlock that for you but you still need to use your mind. So it'll be interesting to see where people put those minds to use. I think there will be a lot of good things that are done as a result of it.

[00:51:10] Brian Searl: Probably not. I don't know what that is. So I don't even know what that is. Maybe I wrote it in a former life.

[00:51:21] Kurtis Wilkins: Oh yeah. We talk about thinking and like fulfillment and we like the top of the square right? Or top of the pyramid is fulfillment. And that's what I was, I'm hoping most people get it to that and they, that's the piece where we should be challenging it and making sure.

[00:52:14] Lizzy Bustamante: How long do you think that period will be? Wait, so once we start to have this, people start to realize I have to find an identity that is not, the director of Unhitched or, a virtual tour software builder, where, how long do you think people sit in this space of uncertainty and just trying to figure out what that fulfillment looks like and then how do they leverage resources or tools to be able to help steer them into trying these opportunities to, to have fulfillment?

[00:53:49] Cara Csizmadia: Agreed.

[00:53:59] Kurtis Wilkins: you I think that jobs change. I we talk about uniquely human experiences. And is, I don't want to believe in that is, that seems like a dystopian future, Brian. It's scary.

[00:54:16] Kurtis Wilkins: But I look at what have we talked about just on this like just this show today? And I go me saying hello to Brian when he shows up to whatever that is becomes so much more meaningful because we get pulled away from, we get pulled away from all of the things like if we have less actual work to do, we focus on that connection between people.

I think more, right? Just you know if we all didn't work we would all, everybody on this call would probably be so much more involved in their community because this is a bunch of doers right on this podcast right now. Everybody would be involved in that community. We're doing a food drive, we're doing this, we're doing that. You know what I mean? And like I look at it that way and I'm like I actually see this more as like those particular efforts become more valued.

[00:55:04] Kurtis Wilkins: And that's might be what the, that's the next evolution. That's where people go.

[00:55:44] Cara Csizmadia: and what does that do to average income and salary levels and you know there, then the economy and kind of buying power in general. There's a whole, we're at time and we're opening a whole new can of worms.

[00:56:03] Lizzy Bustamante: No, I'm just thankful that you guys allowed me to come on as a special guest. Very interesting topics and conversation and I'm happy to come back anytime. So it was pleasure to meet everybody.

[00:56:13] Lizzy Bustamante: www.tillerxr.com is where you can find out more about Tiller. You can also reach me at lizzy@tillerxr.com as well. If you have any specific questions I'd be happy to answer those directly.

[00:56:26] Kurtis Wilkins: Kurtis Wilkins. Thanks for having me on Brian. You can reach me at rjourney.com or at advancedoutdoormanagement.com. And love to have a conversation with anybody about AI tools or camping experience. Let me know.

[00:56:44] Matt Whitermore: Just getting off mute there. Matt Whitermore, unhitchedmgmt.com. You can find me on LinkedIn as well, Twitter. Pretty active on there. Yeah, welcome any conversations. These are always thought provoking. Appreciate it, Brian. Little, I feel like we finished on a down note there with some major job losses and all that so I'm gonna be.

[00:57:06] Matt Whitermore: Pondering pondering how to counteract that for my future life as I digest some turkey here.

[00:57:18] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah. I will say, I think humans are incredibly resilient so regardless of the negativity I think there's a way forward. Maybe we can't see it yet but we'll figure it out.

[00:57:46] Brian Searl: Yeah it's always a struggle and a balance with me. Like I, I really am not negative for those of you who talk to me, right? I'm just a realist as you are, Kurt, right? And I feel like if we don't have these conversations we're not gonna be prepared for them.

[00:58:03] Brian Searl: I'm, yeah I'm an optimist too. I think on the other side of this everything's abundant, you can have anything you want, it's all cheap because intelligence and energy is basically zero. We just got to figure out how to get there. And Cara said, like there is a path there.

[00:58:29] Brian Searl: So good things are hap- good things will be there. They're a good path for all this stuff. We just have to figure it out together. And the only way to do that is to have a conversation.

[00:58:45] Lizzy Bustamante: Bye.

[00:58:45] Kurtis Wilkins: Happy Thanksgiving.