MC Fireside Chats – November 26th, 2025

[00:00:00] Brian Searl: Welcome everybody to another episode of MC Fireside Chats. My name is Brian Searl with Insider Perks and Modern Campground. Excited to be back home for the first time in a month in this studio. Been traveling nonstop. Croatia, France, Louisville for OHI, and then KOA last week. Saw Cara there. Everybody keeps inviting me as COE next week. I just, I’m dead. I can’t do it. It’s gonna be a great conference.

[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] Matt Whitermore: Yeah.

[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.

[00:00:36] Brian Searl: We got Kurtis here who’s a recurring guest, Matt, Cara who are recurring guests, and we got Lizzy, our special guest today. And then I have something we’re gonna talk about AI they released to the United States government. And then like I want to hear what all you guys think as well.

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

[00:00:51] Kurtis Wilkins: Yep. Kurtis Wilkins with RJourney. Thanks for having me back, Brian. We run about 50, 60 locations throughout the United States. 43 are branded RJourney and then we have our management company called Advanced Outdoor Management.

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

[00:01:07] Kurtis Wilkins: Yep, we were there. We had our booth. I was running around wheeling and dealing, Brian.

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

[00:01:15] Kurtis Wilkins: I know. I actually ran by you a couple times. I waved, but you were deep in conversation.

[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] Kurtis Wilkins: Oh.

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

[00:01:30] Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah, we had a good show. We met a lot of great people. I always we use that event every year to go run into everybody that we work with all year long.

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

[00:01:41] Matt Whitermore: Hey everyone. Hey Brian. Got to hang out for the first time in person at OHCE there, so that was fun. I guess I wasn’t doing enough wheeling and dealing because I was hanging out with Brian. But I’m Matt Whitermore.

[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.

[00:01:56] Matt Whitermore: I go to bed at 9:00 PM, so I’m still recovering from from the week a couple weeks later now. So yeah, I’m Director of Market Expansion at Unhitched Management and Climb Capital. We own and operate 30 parks across the country and we’re looking to buy more, manage more. So we’re growing.

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

[00:02:19] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, I’m Cara Csizmadia. I’m President of the Canadian Camping and RV Association. I had the pleasure of hanging out in Raleigh at KOA Convention last week, but did definitely not stay up till 2:00 AM any of those nights. Thank goodness.

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

[00:02:39] Cara Csizmadia: Congrats. Not for me. But yeah, it was a great event and it’s always, Brian, I can relate to the kind of burnout at the end of November. It’s always a hectic few weeks as we travel all over to all the events and convention stuff. I too am happy to be at home and getting back into a routine.

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

[00:02:59] Lizzy Bustamante: Yeah. I’m Lizzy. I am the CEO of TillerXR. We are a virtual tour, GPS powered platform that allows campground owners to turn 360 images into interactive virtual tours to increase bookings. I was also at OHI this year. Did not happen to the after-hours time. Unfortunately, I had to get on a flight pretty quickly the next day. So next year I’ll be there.

[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. 

[00:03:41] Lizzy Bustamante: Yeah.

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

[00:03:48] Lizzy Bustamante: That’s wild.

[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?

[00:04:17] Brian Searl: No? Everybody’s gonna be quiet?

[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.

[00:04:44] Brian Searl: Are you using Staylist?

[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.

[00:04:55] Brian Searl: Yeah, I think there’s going to be a necessity by a lot of these vendors and Staylist did some good presentations at OHI talking about AI. I think there’s going to be a necessity from people like Tiller and from the software companies and from other vendors to really push and embrace AI as fast as humanly possible. Otherwise they’re going to get left behind. 

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.

[00:06:34] Matt Whitermore: I saw the side-by-side on that with the, was the picture of the woman with the regular Nano Banana and then the Nano Banana Pro and it is, it’s mind-blowing.

[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.

[00:07:04] Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah.

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

[00:07:10] Kurtis Wilkins: One of the things that I, about that Gemini, their leap is like it is an incredible model and what I do have concern, I have actually concerns with ’cause Google already has all of this information and data about us and we are now, what I worry about is okay, businesses are feeding Google now all of our business and ops information. They have a lot of it already, but there’s certain stuff that I would hope is secret or, I wouldn’t, I don’t want to call it secret, but let’s call it protected information.

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

[00:07:41] Kurtis Wilkins: and I worry that that’s helping them because every single time you do a Google search your Gemini is popping up. I don’t even use Chrome. I use like Brave for example and that’s using that model. And so that’s where I I differ a little bit in terms of I didn’t really know if I wanted that piece of information to go into an AI model. It is going to anyway, right? It’s inevitable. It’s all going to be in there. But I do want to bring that up for business owners is what we push into those models, remember that’s no longer yours, that’s theirs.

[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?

[00:09:04] Brian Searl: like it’s a thing that you had an idea about but could be duplicated.

[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…

[00:09:14] Brian Searl: mine already does. It outthinks me. 

[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.

[00:09:51] Brian Searl: Yeah. It’s a significant impact and all these things have to be considered. Like you’re talking about putting stuff into the model. Like I posted on LinkedIn yesterday and this is a month ago I realized this, but I’m signing releases to appear as guests on other podcast shows. 

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] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah.

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

[00:10:28] Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah.

[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.

[00:10:40] Brian Searl: and you don’t, obviously if you don’t want to do that, you should have no problem adding those things to it. But these are concerns that like it, it’s I just say so many times on these shows and conferences and in person like this stuff is moving so fast, you can’t keep up with it. We’re just still at the exponential curve of it going up. We’re not even straight up yet.

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

[00:10:58] Brian Searl: There was an article that came out today, this is not my big thing that I want to talk about. Actually can you share it Jessica? It should be open. Like it’s an MSNBC article. It’s not a video. See if she can pull it up on the screen in a second. Yeah, that one. There was an MIT study that found that AI can already replace 11.7% of the United States workforce. 

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.

[00:11:47] Cara Csizmadia: 24/7. 365.

[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.

[00:11:56] Matt Whitermore: Oh yeah.

[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.

[00:12:22] Brian Searl: Yeah.

[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] Brian Searl: Yes.

[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?

[00:12:45] Brian Searl: Or the guest experience, you’re not wrong, right? Like we were in a room at OHI with, I think Mike Harrison was leading the conversation for the southwest region of people, and Scott Roberts was in there and there were a few other people who were bigger players in there and the question came up like transient sites are down. What do we do about transients? How do we fill our sites? And then they started a discussion about what they’ve done to change their sites over the last few years. 

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.

[00:13:35] Kurtis Wilkins: and the guest experience I also say a lot too, Brian, it doesn’t require infrastructure development, right? Like I, I look at a product like Lizzy’s product, right? That is, Lizzy, you probably call yourself infrastructure, but I would look at it as like a, it’s a tool for a use case. And I’m like, that enhances the guest experience because it gives them more information or and I think about critical points in the guest experience. When does our guest have the most stress? Showing up to our campground is a very stressful experience on the customer journey. And a tool like Lizzy’s giving them this is what it looks like. 

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] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah.

[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.

[00:15:11] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah, no, I agree. I think, I would say I probably speak to fewer guests now than I used to as a campground owner. I do agree that I think those pain points can be pretty easily addressed with not a lot of resource investment. But more so human attention and the ability to interact and things like 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…

[00:16:19] Brian Searl: Yeah, so you’re talking about… Sorry, continue. I thought you were done.

[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.

[00:16:41] Brian Searl: that’s what I was, we went to SETT in France and I think I talked about it on the show maybe before. But we went to SETT in France which is France’s, not even their national campground conference, it’s the seven southern regions of France in Montpellier, France. There were 20,000 people there. This is for outdoor hospitality owners and operators. There were 20,000 people there and 730 exhibitors. And they had everything there from like walkie talkie companies to washers and dryers to air conditioners to 200 by 200 square foot displays of kitchen tables and chairs and plants and everything that’s focused on the guest experience, right? 

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.

[00:17:51] Kurtis Wilkins: Everybody at this, everybody on this call does.

[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.

[00:18:55] Brian Searl: All this is fascinating to me. I think in five years almost nobody makes phone calls. And I say that as somebody who sells an AI phone agent, right? But I still think it’s voice. I still think you communicate with voice through an Alexa or a, some kind of new device that’s invented. I just don’t think you have to dial a number to talk to people anymore. I think you say let me talk to Cara, let me talk to Kurtis, let me talk to Matt. And it knows who Matt is because it has access to your contacts and your information and it knows the context around what time of day it is and when you might be wanting to follow up with Matt because you talked to him last week in a meeting or it’s just going to know.

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

[00:19:31] Kurtis Wilkins: I, Brian, I go a step further on that. Like I think about so one of the things that you know I think Matt you probably focus on too is like we support those who support our guests, right? And that’s that is like a core focus, like a core brand identity for anyone in hospitality. And I always think, Brian, you said you wanted to call me in five years and I’m like, I want you to get ahold of me, right? But there’s only one Kurtis. 

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? 

[00:20:27] Cara Csizmadia: Yeah.

[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.

[00:21:00] Brian Searl: I think that happens next year and is already happening. I think the next evolution of it is the person doesn’t even need to be there because the owner will be able to ask their Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses the question.

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

[00:21:10] Brian Searl: And the database that you’ve programmed about your campground for your chatbot or your phone agent or something else is going to be available everywhere and connected to all the things.

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

[00:21:19] Brian Searl: No I agree. Like I’m not saying no humans. I’m saying that there doesn’t need to be someone who’s physically checking you in and answering your questions. There should be someone there for the guest experience to walk you to the lodging unit and say I’m a concierge, I’m here to help you. Here’s how you operate the air conditioner, here’s how you do. That hospitality piece should never go away.

[00:21:37] Kurtis Wilkins: And that’s…

[00:21:38] Brian Searl: Yeah.

[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. 

[00:22:17] Brian Searl: Yeah.

[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?

[00:22:31] Kurtis Wilkins: Exactly. And that’s…

[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. 

[00:22:40] Kurtis Wilkins: But that’s what I’m talking about is like and making sure because like I know what, somebody at my front desk might say whoa, I’ve never ran into that problem before. They might try to get ahold of their GM and I’m like no. We can, like they just, it’s…

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

[00:22:54] Kurtis Wilkins: It’s an intense moment with the customer, right? That’s an int-, and the alligator thing’s not an intense moment but they do come up. And that’s where I’m like giving them a way to be like, I don’t know what to do but I could probably go get this information really quick and come back with a very sophisticated answer to deliver a great customer experience even though this thing happened, right? This event. I, we talk in hyperbole a lot because it’s like what does the guest run into and I’m like, I don’t know. Every day I hear something new.

[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.

[00:23:35] Cara Csizmadia: You’re the winner.

[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.

[00:23:44] Cara Csizmadia: just a… What capacity does AI have for processing sarcasm?

[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.

[00:24:02] Cara Csizmadia: Sassy. You might set yourself apart if you’re the sarcasm campground and all the other campgrounds are AI.

[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.

[00:24:55] Lizzy Bustamante: Yeah.

[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] Brian Searl: Yep.

[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.

[00:26:31] Brian Searl: But is it just that? Or does he, what is, what’s different about his guest experience? I bet you something’s different.

[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?

[00:29:15] Brian Searl: Yeah. I mean it’s interesting. Like that’s where it’s hitting. There’s all kinds of data points about entry-level jobs and college graduates being, I think it was, the number I read was 25% of college graduates are now unemployed or can’t get a job right out of school. So that’s where it’s hitting first and then it’s hitting in the no job growth to the second point. 

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] Matt Whitermore: Yeah.

[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…

[00:30:08] Brian Searl: Wait, are you the teacher or are you the teacher? I just want to know what side I’m on.

[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.

[00:31:51] Brian Searl: there’s two things. There’s change, which nobody except me, I have a disease apparently, likes. And the government that gets in the way. So the government is the school system, the government is the hospitals. The government typically slows things down. I’m gonna use this briefly as a transition point cause I want to talk about this real quick. I want to make sure we have time. 

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: [Video playing]

[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: [Video playing: Peter Diamandis speaking]

[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: [Video playing: Andrew speaking]

[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. 

I worked with him as an undergrad at MIT and it’s just really great to see MIT in general and that, that level of scientific influence positioning in again a 1939 moment. Such an ambitious initiative.

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

[00:36:17] Brian Searl: Yeah, I should just mention by the way our other mate so but the rest of the video Peter Diamandis does a pretty good AI podcast that he releases I think once or twice a week with those guys, really smart people. He’s, known Elon for years and all that kind of stuff. But if you want to watch the rest of it, he’s there. But this is what was signed yesterday. Like they’re basically taking the whole United States economy and trying to push it towards AI and data centers and unlocking, the weather data and scientific data at all these agencies, at the FCC and FDA and everywhere else. USDA, everything else. So this is if you don’t think, if you think, if you still think AI is a bubble and you think AI is a fad, like I don’t know what it’s going to take to prove to you that $1.4 trillion is being spent on data centers by companies that report every quarter. Like it’s, I don’t know what else it’s going to take, but maybe this is it. What do you guys think of this?

[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.

[00:38:24] Brian Searl: Yeah, I mean they’ve got tens of thousands of different datasets that they’re going to make available. But it, that’s just one piece of it, right? They’re going to unlock the ability for the whole economy to function. The whole economy in 1939, starting with the Manhattan Project in those years was completely focused on building a nuclear weapon. And that’s what we’re, like we already were pushing that way with some of the executive orders that Trump’s doing, but that’s, this is the next level. 

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. 

[00:39:42] Lizzy Bustamante: Is this Genesis Mission in, in, are we following something that was also on the forefront of China’s efforts and releasing this information or is this us leading that the efforts around there?

[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.

[00:40:10] Lizzy Bustamante: Yeah.

[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.

[00:40:25] Kurtis Wilkins: I see it like, so I look at this as we’ve done, you know in the United States we’ve done this several times throughout history, right? We talk about the Manhattan Project cause that’s the most well known, but also NASA with the race to the moon. A very probably not well known one is rice. And protein in rice. And my alma mater Washington State that was like one of their big things. But the government came in and said we’re actually going to put, develop rice with higher protein levels because it grows better in places like India and China. 

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.

[00:41:23] Brian Searl: Yes, we were. Yeah.

[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. 

And so even you know as we approach that we just need to be embracing it as a tool and we need to be finding ways to use the tool. And Cara, the thing I would bring up is graphing calculators with that teacher. The thing I was all that was coming to my head was graphing calculators in 1990s graphing calculators weren’t allowed. You know what? When I went to school we all had graphing calculators. Now they all have tablets.

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

[00:42:08] Kurtis Wilkins: It’s just another tool they just haven’t figured out how to put it in their curriculum.

[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.

[00:42:26] Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah. Sorry, Brian. I didn’t want to derail.

[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.

[00:43:47] Kurtis Wilkins: I look at a classical education, right? Like where, and it’s not, you’re teaching critical thinking, right? In a classical education and that’s what you talk about.

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

[00:43:57] Kurtis Wilkins: Wait, that, and that’s what I’m saying. Like I, and I think that’s where it evolves is it’s like we’re, you’re teaching first principles, you’re teaching critical thinking processes less, does anyone need to know Pythagorean’s theorem? Probably not.

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

[00:44:13] Kurtis Wilkins: But should they know how to multiply, divide, subtract, add? Yes. And then.

[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.

[00:44:25] Kurtis Wilkins: Exactly. Exactly.

[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.

[00:44:52] Kurtis Wilkins: Yeah.

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

[00:44:57] Brian Searl: We’re what?

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

[00:45:00] Brian Searl: yeah, that’s a whole nother conversation for a different topic about yeah. We’ve already opened up enough can of worms on this show. Lizzy, talk to us about Tiller and the interesting stuff you were talking about AI and with Kurtis earlier because that was interesting to me.

[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.

[00:46:19] Brian Searl: Yeah, the data is super critical, right? And Kurtis, I want you to touch on that because you were saying some interesting things back to her too. But like the data of the virtual tours, the information that we have that we don’t even realize is information, like the photos of the campground, but also Simon Neal was at he runs a great company called CampMap out of Croatia. 

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.

[00:47:02] Lizzy Bustamante: Yeah, absolutely. I think that data structuring element whether that’s like the site specific URLs or image detection or object detection or auto tagging images to understand what is a cabin versus what is a site versus you know what is a tent, right? That, those are all of the type of structured data elements that we’re hoping to leverage AI with and some image analysis with so we can have that structured data.

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

[00:47:28] Kurtis Wilkins: So I, I love all of the data points. Like the things that I would love for exposure is like APIs to like I want to rent, I want to rent an RV pad, right? That’ll probably be the thing everybody says to their AI agent and then they refine that search over time. And being able to do like that virtual tour, having an endpoint into these engines, these AIs right? And being able to display that information. I think that is incredibly useful to the consumer. I think like the anybody anywhere says hey I want to go there probably wants to see a picture of it first.

[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.

[00:49:23] Kurtis Wilkins: I also will say this Brian, it might even say, it’s not the best for me, but the best connection doesn’t match my dates. It’s third, right? But this one was available. But you could change your dates for the one that I think is the best match, right? Cause like consumers shop so many different ways in the RV. They, do you start with dates or do you start with unit? That’s the biggest debate I’ve ever heard in operations ever.

[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.

[00:50:09] Kurtis Wilkins: I hope most people would take control of their life and say challenge the AI and make sure that is internal fulfillment. I hope for humanity that’s what happens, but…

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

[00:50:21] Kurtis Wilkins: I also agree with that as a realist. There, there will be a segment that doesn’t challenge the process.

[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. 

[00:51:06] Kurtis Wilkins: Brian, were you just quoting Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? Was that what you were quoting?

[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.

[00:51:18] Lizzy Bustamante: You might have. I’m just envisioning the pyramid.

[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.

[00:51:37] Brian Searl: Yeah, we have to be fulfilled. Like the answer to who are you is like I’m a, a director at Unhitched Climb Capital, I’m a CEO of Insider Perks, I’m the President of the Canadian Camping, I do virtual tours. That’s people’s identity. That’s not going to be your identity in 10 years. No. You need to, like I’m a musician, I’m a poet, I’m a father, I’m a whatever, right? That’s your identity because you can then get home and spend more time with your kids. You have a, you can have a purpose that’s outside of work. People just, most people can’t imagine that because they’ve never been alive for a period where that’s happened. But it used to be that way.

[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?

[00:52:42] Brian Searl: I think it all depends on what the government does as a society. Honestly. Because this is a problem that I can’t solve, that Kurt can’t solve, that Matt can’t solve, that Lizzy can’t solve, that Cara can’t solve. We can’t even solve it as a group of five people or 50 people or 500 people. The government has to solve this somehow. They have to take care of the people and figure out a way to do it. And the math doesn’t add up the way it works now. The United States government takes in I think $5.5 trillion in taxes or something like that every year. $1 trillion is from corporations, $4 trillion is from income taxes. Setting aside the fact that if people start losing their jobs, income taxes are in danger. But we apparently don’t care about the debt so that’s fine. But setting that aside, if you gave everybody in the United States today poverty level United Universal Basic Income for $16,000 a year, that’s $5.4 trillion a year. Yeah. It already doesn’t work. So somehow, some way there’s got to be a conversation and I think that the people get to a point where they have a different purpose if they don’t have to frantically think about I need a second job or where’s my food going to come from for my kid or that kind of stuff, right? So it depends on how the government handles it I think.

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

[00:53:51] Brian Searl: And I hope they handle it well, but I don’t, I’m not holding my breath. Cause nobody’s talking about it except Bernie Sanders. Which is not my favorite politician, but.

[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.

[00:54:13] Brian Searl: It is temporarily. It is temporarily.

[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.

[00:55:03] Brian Searl: They do for sure.

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

[00:55:09] Brian Searl: We’ve got to get through the transition period where if you go help the old lady bring her groceries home, you’re not making the same amount of money you would at your job. So how do you still pay for your own groceries is what, that’s the thing we have to get through to get to the Utopia on the other side. There will be jobs created. There will be jobs for the next 50 or 100 or 200 years. The problem is those jobs are not going to be anywhere close to enough to give people gainful employment. One person with an AI will do the job of 50 people. And those 50 people no longer need to be, to Matt’s point, the analysts. You don’t need 50 analysts. You need one analyst with an AI.

[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.

[00:55:57] Brian Searl: Yeah, we’re at time as always but alright, final thoughts. Lizzy, anything?

[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.

[00:56:11] Brian Searl: Where can they find out more about Tiller?

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

[00:56:24] Brian Searl: Awesome. Thank you for being here Lizzy. Kurt?

[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.

[00:56:41] Brian Searl: Thanks, Kurt. Matt?

[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.

[00:57:04] Brian Searl: A temporary down note man. 

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

[00:57:13] Brian Searl: Be thank, be thankful. Right before Thanksgiving. We’re giving. Yeah. Cara, final thoughts?

[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.

[00:57:30] Cara Csizmadia: Regarding reaching me, I’m you can email me at [email protected] or visit our site to learn more about the association, ccrva.ca. And yeah, always happy to jump on. It’s like deja vu to be back. Thanks, Brian.

[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. 

[00:57:57] Kurtis Wilkins: I consider myself an eternal optimist but I, I appreciate the realist perspective and understand it.

[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.

[00:58:16] Brian Searl: And again there will be jobs forever. There will be jobs that we want that people will do from a human perspective and then as we expand to Mars and build space stations and orbit and there’s going to be more of those jobs that are created for more of those people.

[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.

[00:58:37] Brian Searl: So thank you guys for joining us for another episode of MC Fireside Chats. Appreciate you Cara, Matt, Kurtis and Lizzy and we will see you next week on another episode. Take care guys.

[00:58:45] Lizzy Bustamante: Bye. 

[00:58:45] Cara Csizmadia: Thanks guys. Happy Thanksgiving!

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