MC Fireside Chats - July 23, 2025 - MC Fireside Chats, an Outdoor Hospitality Podcast

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Brian Searl (00:46):
What is up everybody?
Welcome to another episodeof MC Fireside Chats.
My name is Brian Searl with Insider Perks.
Hi Mychele, I was just like we startedthe intro without you, Mychele, you were
behind camera 'cause Jessica didn't hearyou beep and come in the waiting room.
And so I like turned, where's Mychele?
She's supposed to be here today.
She's right here.
I just didn't toggle theswitch on to let her in.
Welcome to the show.

Mychele Bisson (01:04):
That's okay.

It's exciting here.
We're here for a second week ofsomething that's, I guess maybe
a passion obsession of mine.
Obviously marketing, but also AI.
So this is the show that we'regonna focus a little bit on those
kinds of things going forward.
And so we have a couplerecurring guests here with us.
We're missing Greg Emmert today.
He's gratefully super busy with a bunchof clients and couldn't make the show,
so he's swamped at his desk having alot of success with new company, Verio.

(01:28):
So we're proud of that and we'llhave him back next month hopefully,
if he doesn't get even more busy.
But we do have Kurt Wilkins from Rjourney.
We have Mychele Bisson,it's Bisson, right?

Bisson, if you say French-y.

That's what I tried to do and then I just, I had too many s's.
Is that what like the, one ofthe s's is almost silent or,

I just say, you say it's snotty, it's Bisson,
but we just say it's Bisson.

Okay.
Yeah.
Like everything.
That's why I get into this argumentwith my girlfriend 'cause she's
from Canada and she learned a littlebit of French over the pandemic.
And so like I don't know any of it, right?
But I like the German language betterthan I like the French language.
I dunno either of them.
But when we traveled, like rightacross the border, like it just German
feels like a cooler language to me.
Whereas everything you say inFrench just sounds arrogant.

(02:13):
It just does.
I'm not saying everybody's arrogant.
I'm not saying that's the French people.
I'm just saying it sounds thatway when it comes outta your
mouth, even the English words do.

Oh, no.
I actually say the same thingto my husband when he says no.
'cause I'm like, no.

Exactly.

Because it just sounds snotty.
It's just, I don't know, it'sjust a weird way that they say it.
So I get it.

They're wonderful people, right?
Nobody saying.

They're beautiful people.
Yes.

Anyway.
Okay welcome back Mychele.
And then we have a couplespecial guests here.
We have Kieron and we have Jeremy.
So we'll just go around the room realquick and we wanna introduce ourselves.
We can start with ourrecurring guests if you want.
Kurt, you wanna start?

Kurtis Wilkins (02:47):
Yeah.
My name's Kurtis Wilkins.
I'm with Rjourney.
We manage and own 43 differentcampgrounds, and we have
been in the industry throughdifferent verticals since 2017.

Awesome.
Thanks for joining us again, Kurt.
Mychele?

My name is Mychele Bisson.
I am with Bison Peak Ventures.
I feel like I'm the newbie to thegroup we own six campgrounds from
Alaska to Florida, and we've been inthe business for almost two years now.
And we're just growing ourportfolio and learning as we go.
So I'm excited to be hereand learn from you guys.

We're still learning too, so you might be on the
wrong show, but we'll try.
And then we have, Jeremy,you wanna introduce yourself?

Jeremy Johnson (03:30):
Yeah.
Hey guys.
My name's Jeremy.
I am in the upper peninsula of Michigan,and I'm probably truly the newbie here.
I just opened my first campground.
We've got 80 acres 40rustic tent camping sites.
And we're on the southernshore of Lake Superior.
It took about five years to getthrough the entitlements and
permitting process, so I learned a ton.

(03:50):
Yeah, it was quite the journey.
But I'm like already readyfor the next one, so two soon.

So that's why you're braver than me.
I can't ever own a campground.
Like I would drive myself shit crazy.
If I had to go throughfive years of permitting.

Yeah.

Like I would probably end up in a mental hospital somewhere 'cause
I would just wanna scream at all thecounselors and all the permitting people
and all the 'cause I'm the entrepreneur.
I just want it to be done my way.
Like I know best until youprove me wrong or Chat GPT does.
Like I don't really know best.
But I think I do.
So anyway, but kudos to you.
I'm excited to talk about yourcampground and learn about what
you've got going on up there.
Kieron?

Kieron Wilde (04:24):
Yeah.
My name's Kieron Wilde.
I own a company called First Nature.
We're a destination managementcompany and tour operator focusing
on the west coast of North America.
And I also own a company called Fur Havenwhich is freestanding guest house like
a glamping setup with A-frame cabins inthe Columbia River Gorge and we're the
in-house experience provider for a coupledifferent setups in the Gorge region,

(04:48):
including Under Canvas, which you'reprobably all familiar with, which is just
opened up at the end of May out here.
And the one called Wind MountainRanch on the Washington side
of the Columbia River Gorge.

Awesome.
So experiences for glamping providersand you on your own glamping thing too.
So excited to talk to you aboutwhat some of those offerings are.
Before we get to the regularthing, like I've got a couple
things I wanna talk about today.
We're gonna dive into a little bit aboutjust 'cause the theme is AI, marketing.
I wanna talk a little bitabout the new Chat GPT agent
that was released last week.
We're gonna take a look at a couplebrief videos, see what that's all about.
Talk about how that's gonna impactthe future of is currently impacting

(05:22):
the future of marketing and AI.
And then a little aboutperplexity's browser release.
But is there anythingMychele or Kurtis from your.

Mychele, do you catch any of that?

I actually didn't.
I was hoping you did.

I didn't catch any of it either.
Brian, I'm so sorry.

No, that's okay.
Is my mic is, check my mic, Jessica.
I click.

That sounds better.

Oh, you're back now.

Oh, I just cut in and out.
Can you hear me really deep ordoes it sound like I'm far away?

It sounds perfect right now.

Second.

It was garbled before.

Oh, okay.
I don't know.
Anyway.
All right.
I was just making sure the right mic was.

He was trying his German.

Last week I was at a remote cabin trying to do it from my
phone and I ended up being vertical.
But the week before, like I hadit, it was like picking up from
my webcam all the way over there.
So that's how I was making surethat it was like this nice.
But anyway, typically we ask ourrecurring guests like, is there
anything that came across your deskin the last month or so that you guys
feel is important for us to bring up?
And then, I don't know if youcaught it, but we're gonna talk a
little bit about Chat GPT agent.

(06:19):
And some of those things and how they'regonna impact the camping industry.
So, anything that's comeacross you guys' desk?

I feel like we're constantly getting new things
across our desk, but I mean from,all kinds of things from employees.

Share you think it might impact the industry,
like that kind of thing.

I'm trying to think.
I know like for us, we're gonnastart really heavily going into
using some of the AI stuff, soI'm excited to talk about that.

Okay.
Very cool.
Kurt?

The only thing that's really come across my
desk in the last three weeks hasbeen a lot of acquisition news.
I've been seeing a lot ofconsolidation, big deals, and
so that's really interesting.
But other than that, a lot of the AInews we've talked about in the, in
other episodes, but that's ever evolvingand I'm really excited and looking
forward to a lot of integrations there.

Do you wanna share any of the secret due diligence numbers behind
your potential acquisitions with us?

They're not my acquisitions, they're just

Oh, okay.
Alright.

Deals that are happening in the space.

So competitive, like you have agents out there spying at
everybody else and you just know.

No, we just have clients and I know that
they're making some big moves.

China has that little fly that can land on the wall.
That's like a bug, like literally a bug.
So you can monitor your competitors,just send it right in there.
Have it be a fly on the wall.
It's actually a thing.

Oh my gosh.

It's actually an invention.
But Interesting.
Okay.
All right.
So let's briefly talk aboutto our special guests first.
I wanna make sure we get enoughtime for them and then we can dive
into a little bit of the agentstuff and the perplexity browser.
So let's start with Jeremy.
Jeremy, you said you went through thisfive year process, so obviously it's
something that was important to you.
You're passionate about you.
How long had you wanted to do it?
How did you get in your head thatyou wanted to start a campground?

Yeah, that's a good question.
I would say it is important tome and I am passionate about it.
Obviously spending fiveyears opening one project.
But the actual idea of opening acampground was a spur of a moment thing.
A lot of my background is in residentialreal estate investing, single family
and a little bit of multifamily.
And we were talking about thisearlier, but I'm in Marquette,

(08:18):
Michigan in the upper peninsula,which is pretty tourism heavy.
And right around pretty much, as soon asthe pandemic kicked off as a residential
investor, we went from seeing, threebedroom, two bath house in Marquette.
Go for about $180,000to $250,000 overnight.
And now, a three bedroom, twobath in the city of Marquette

(08:40):
today in 2025 is $400,000.
So over a hundred percent increasein a very short amount of time.
And back in 2020 we came to thispoint where we're like, man, I don't
know if it makes sense for us to bein this residential market right now.
The prices just weren't makingany, the math wasn't adding up.
And then at the same time, like from apersonal perspective I really didn't like

(09:04):
contributing to increased housing and,gentrification of the place I grew up in.
And so we came across this 80 acreparcel on the edge of the city.
It's actually the entrance to ourcampground is the last parcel in
the city of Marquette, which is partof the reason it took five years
to go through this whole process.
We sit in three different municipalities.
But we came across this 80acre parcel that would've been

(09:27):
impossible to develop housing on.
And it just made sense to be a campground.
And I thought what a better cooler way.
It was this beautiful piece ofland that overlooks like superior
that nobody had access to.
And so I thought, I want to open this up.
Even as somebody that grew upthere, I had never been up there.
So I wanted to open it up to the public,but obviously I had to do it in a

(09:47):
financially stable or sustainable way.
And then I wanted to diversifymy portfolio, if you will.
So Camping seemed like a fun thing.
And on the side, I've workedat, in the outdoor industry as
a guide for probably 15 years.
So it was right up my alleyalong with my two partners.

So what was your goal?
What or what was, or is yourgoal with Kona Hills campground?
What are you starting with?
What are you, like just RV sites?
Are you gonna do some clamping?
Are you gonna what's your.
A vision for it.

Yeah.
So originally the visionwas three to five cabins.
We wanted to go higher end.
We wanted to like make itthis glamping experience like
maybe like landscape hotel.
I hear that thrown around a lot, butwe found out pretty early on in our
permitting process that the municipalitythat most of our land is in, anything
more than two units for short term,they require you to get a campground

(10:38):
license from the state of Michigan.
The state of Michigan is one of thefew states that actually requires
licensing at the state level.
And so when we found that out,obviously that kind of changed
the economics of the deal.
And we ended up saying, let'sjust get our campground license.
And we opened with 40 rustictent and car camping only spots.

(10:59):
We're now going through theprocess of permitting, and
raising funds for seven cabins.
Four of them are belowthe cliff that we sit on.
And then three of them are above thecliff with those views of Lake Superior.
A as we go on, like the goal is reallyto continue to develop the property and
add additional types of accommodationsand amenities, but do it in a way where

(11:23):
you're still immersed in nature and we'renot, if you go and look at our Google
reviews, almost every one of 'em mentionslike, I love the privacy, I love that
this isn't a parking lot full of RVs.
People like being immersed.
And so we don't want to take that away.
We wanna add theseaccommodations mindfully.

So what were some of the things, and I'm just curious,
this is about your campgroundand about your experiences.
'cause we've talked aboutthis on the show, previously.
When you talk about the targetaudience that you currently have,
tent campers and car campers.
There are a lot of people in myexperience, in our industry that
are hesitant to welcome less so tentcampers, but more so car campers.

(12:01):
Yeah.
Into their RV parks, let's callit, or glamping establishments.
Because there's a stereotype, and Idon't know if it's entirely unjustified,
but in the past or currently, thereare, I don't wanna say a significant
number, a portion of people who carcamp, who are like long-term seasonals
that don't take care of their sites,they're in every vertical, right?

(12:22):
Yeah.
It just happens, for some reason bea little bit more visible with car
camping and tent camping or stickout in the mines, more of owners.
So what has been yourexperience with that?
Because I pushed back againstthis with some of our clients.
I had a conversation with one, earlierthis week, where they were talking
about how, we're hesitant, we wantmore business, we don't know where
to get it from, and I was talkingabout some of these niche places

(12:42):
that you can open up, like allowing11-year-old rig instead of 10 year, or
allowing, deluxe tents or car camping.
And she said the same thing tome and I said go YouTube and look
at the camping and Tesla Model Y.
It has camping mode and it hasan air mattress that Tesla sells.
And these are $90,000 cars thatpeople are tent camping in.
And she's oh, I'd loveto have those people.

(13:04):
Of course you would.
So I'm curious what your thoughtsis and your experiences with those.

Yeah.
Maybe it's just like theage range that I'm in.
I'm 36, I'm a millennial.
But like truck camping and carcamping was like cool for us, and
I think like when we were goingthrough this permitting process.
We got a lot of pushback fromour local community about this
concept of trucking car camping.
They were like, we don't wanthomeless people at your campground.

(13:29):
I'm like, guys, these are $200,000sprinter vans were servicing here.
I hear you.
Everybody's gotta beresponsible, but man I loved it.
Like it's low maintenance,it's low impact on the land.
I'm not dealing with a 40 foot RV.
And it allows us to be more unique.
Our entrance to our campground, like Isaid, we're 200 feet above Lake Superior.
You couldn't get a 40 footcamper up our driveway.

(13:49):
We got 9% grades.
Open an RV park up there is impossible.
But now I can have sprinter vansor even an old Ford with a Quigley
four by four conversion on it.
They can make it up that hill andthey can go and find like a super cool
remote spot tucked away amongst likethe rock out croppings that we have.
To me that's awesome.

(14:10):
I love it.
And even like one of my neighbors who cameto our grand opening, our ribbon cutting.
He refused to see the project.
He was against it, thiswhole homeless concept.
And when he came up for that ribboncutting and saw what we did and saw
the people that were coming up there.
He came up to me afterwards andhe was like, I just wanna say
this has been a long process,but you guys did a great job.

(14:31):
This looks amazing and we'rehappy to have you as a neighbor.
That was a great moment for me.

It is interesting to me.
We have another podcast that I docalled Outwired after this, and last
two weeks ago, we took last week off,we did a show about the 1975 to 2025
and the evolution of Camping and thedifferent types of pop-up trailers they
had and rigs and all kinds of things.
And it was quitefascinating to learn about.
And today we're gonna do 2025 to 2075and give some kind of crazy predictions.

(15:00):
But it is really interesting to me tolearn about, I'd love to do a show, I
think on Outwired about how we evolveto be the industry we are today, I know
there's a good reason behind it, right?
I just don't know what it is.
'cause I haven't researched it.
But it would be interesting to see whywere many RV parks built the way they
were with sites so close together andso narrow and like they were obviously

(15:23):
built for a certain type of rig, butwhy did they not emphasize more tent
camping or more car camping or morenature experiences or I'm sure it was
built for a specific type of audience.
The people we call boomers today whowere obviously not boomers back then.
But it would be fascinating thing tounderstand how we got to where we are
because I think that the future of wherewe are going is still RVing, is still car

(15:46):
camping and tent camping and all of theabove and glamping and everything else.
But I think it's a whole lotmore of nature and experiences.
And we've seen that peopleare demanding this stuff and
Marriott's getting into the game.
But I think it's way more of that, andI don't think there's a clear guideline
blueprint for many park owners out there.
Certainly people like Kurtis,you own multiple parks,
Mychele, you own multiple parks.

(16:07):
You can look at this and you canstep back and see what works well,
one other place and dozens another.
And you have key takeaways.
But I don't think there's a reallygood blueprint for how do I build an
RV park that's not a typical RV park.

Yeah.
I don't know that there is either.
And I've actually had people tell me,they're like some of these modular units,
whether it's like the zook cabins orthe ÖÖD houses, some of those people
that sell those are like, oh, like wedon't actually want our units to be
located next to tent sites because wefeel that it devalues that property.
And I just don't know thatI believe that personally.

(16:39):
I'm the new guy.
This is my first campground, butfrom my experience and my customers
and the way our park is set up.
You could be at a zook cabin inthe north corner of our property
and there could be a tent camper,and you'd never cross paths.
I think those experiences can go handin hand more than people realize now,
if you put a ÖÖD house in the middleof an RV park, that might not work.

That's the thing.
I think that's what they're talking about.
They're talking about astereotypical RV park.
They think you're gonna put itliterally right next to a tent
site with a paved gravel drivewayand, right, or something like that.
And so I don't think that they haveyour park in the picture of their
head when they're saying no to you.
I also think it depends on thelandscaping and how you design
the park and things like that.
I'm curious for the people herewho are looking at, maybe I wanna

(17:23):
offer tent camping in the future,maybe I wanna offer open myself
up to a little bit to car camping.
How do you market to thosepeople and find them?

So I'm lucky.
I have what I call inherent demand.
I'm 40 minutes away from Picture RocksNational Lakeshore, which sees 1.2
million visitors every year.
I'm the only privately ownedcampground in the city of Marquette.
It's just my entrance that's inthe city, and then the rest of
the campgrounds in Sands Township.
And there's two privatelyowned campgrounds, maybe

(17:52):
eight miles away from me.
And Marquette sees a millionvisitors every year between
summer and winter tourism.
So I also have a backgroundin SEO and digital marketing.
So I list on Google.
I don't list on Hipcamp.
I did.
It was too much of a pain.
I don't.

Can I ask why?

Honestly, the backend of Hipcamp has not been
the easiest to work through.
And it's really hard to setexpectations across multiple platforms.
I think, channel managers aremore popular in the Airbnb
space, even in the hotel space.
But like I use Park, if anybody's familiarwith that, for my reservation manager.
Which is a great team,relatively new company.

(18:31):
But there's not a lot of channel managersfor tent camping, and so there's just too
much confusion with setting expectations.
Like we're a self-service campground too.
We don't have a check-in center.
And so I need to be able to communicateeffectively with my customers via
email and SMS, and Hipcamp justdidn't quite allow for that to happen.
So we, after maybe three or four weekswe delisted from being able to book on

(18:53):
Hipcamp and all these other platforms.
And we're a hundred percentdirect bookings at this point.
So for me it's just all about makingsure I show up when people Google
camping near me, or camping in Marquette.
And then Google reviews.
I've got, I think now we'reup to 36 reviews and we've
got, an average rating of 4.9
stars on Google.

(19:14):
The only other park that ranksabove me has 600 plus reviews.
But I'm right behind him, soit's just about visibility.

Cool.
Thank you.
I appreciate, is there anything wemissed talking about that you want
to throw in there about Kona Hills?
Like we want you to join theconversation as we keep going along, but

Yeah, no, if you haven't been to the UP, I highly suggest it.
It's a lesser-known gem.
Kieron said he is been there'cause he grew up in Wisconsin.
But not a lot of people make it up there.
And I love it and I'm gladthat I get to represent it.

Awesome.
Thanks you for being here, Jeremy, aswe can keep going and we talked to a
few other, we talk to Kieron and wetalk about AI and all the things if you
have anything to say, please jump in.
Just ask questions, feel free.

Yeah.
And I don't mean to discount Hipcamp.
Great platform.
And if you are guys.

Oh no.
Yeah.

If you are getting started in tent camping and like I'm
in southeast Wisconsin right now.
I stayed at a Hipcamp twonights ago because guess what?
Everything in southeastWisconsin is RV parks, and I
don't wanna stay in an RV park.
I wanted privacy, soI booked at a Hipcamp.
And the Hipcamp, most of 'emdown here are one to four sites.
Amazing for that.

(20:15):
But when you get scale, I'm tryingto own my customer relationships.
I don't really like dealing withmarketplaces and having that intermediary.
I want to talk directly to my customers.

Yeah, for sure.
I know Alyssa, I've known her for years.
It's a great company and I frequently tellpeople to list on Hipcamp too, if you're
in a good position like you are, where youalready have the built in demand, it's a
little bit of an easier trade off, right?

Totally.

But if they're not charging you, like we went through
this with a couple sites or peoplewere asking me this I think last week,
where do I list, how much do I pay?
All these people want money fromme, and my stock answer is without
looking at them individually, ifthey're trying to charge you a monthly
fee without guaranteeing they'regonna deliver anything, don't do it.
But if they're willing to charge youa percentage, then really there's no

(20:57):
harm as long as you are doing, otherthan the once in a while the problems,
like you're talking about, that yourun into that maybe it isn't a good fit
for your park, there really is no harmto putting yourself out there as long
as you're doing your own marketing andstill trying to drive your own traffic
because you don't wanna pay that 12.5%
forever.
And the person I was talking to didn'thave online reservations, so I said,
eh, like obviously you need something.

(21:17):
Get your Campspot or your NewBook,or your ResNexus or whatever up.
And do that stuff first.
But yeah.
Kieron, how you doing there?

Yeah, I'm good.

Are you in, what are you in right now?
You said you're in your van.
It's a nice van.

I'm in one of our Mercedes.

I can't even afford a Mercedes Sprinter.

Jeremy probably sees a lot of converted into campers,
but this is a passenger van.

Kurtis, will you buy me a Mercedes Sprinter van
so I can do the show from it?

Oh maybe Brian, come down to watch and we'll see what we can do.

Kieron, tell us about First Nature Tours.

Sure.
So yeah, first and foremost, youknow, industry speaking, but we
call ourselves the destinationmanagement company for the West Coast.
What that kind of means is we packageexperiences together with accommodations,
attractions, all those things.
And we often sell them to tour operatorsthat are sending people from other places
to this destination, especially thePacific Northwest region of North America,

(22:12):
like Alaska, down to San Francisco.
And we have our own guides.
We have our own sprinter vansand we're working on our own
hospitality component as well.
But I've been in the industry for about 18years now, focusing on the Pacific West.
And I saw a need for hospitalitycomponent, especially in the

(22:34):
Columbia River Gorge, butselling the region at large
where those kind of likeopportunity spots exist.
So that's kinda why we decided to get intothe hospitality as well, not just operator
component, but also like a company.

So how do you end up going, obviously 18 years is a long time, I've
been in business 16 years like everybodyseems to think I'm an overnight success,
but I spent 16 years doing it and I know,I'm sure you spent 18 years doing it too.
And Kurt and Mychele, wellMychele is just getting started.
You're only at two years andyou're already at six parks,
you're gonna be at like 800.

Oh God.

By the time you have 16 years in.

That's gonna take a lot of systems in place.

That's all right.
Systems are gonna get easier with AI.
We're gonna talk about that on the show.

I hope so.

But talk us through the story of like how do you get started with this
and then how do you grow to be, you saidyou're a vendor for Under Canvas, right?
Which is probably a highlycompetitive and sought after position.

Yeah.
Just being around long enough and knowingthe right people is nine-tenths of it.
So like I said, 18 years ofindustry experience focusing
mostly on the west coast.
We know the right people.
There's not a lot of people to do thekind of higher end luxury type travel,
custom private experiences that we do.

(23:51):
So there's not a ton of competitionin that realm, honestly, where we are.
And I physically relocated, meand my family moved out to the
Columbia River Gorge, the NationalScenic area about two years ago.
We're just a natural fitfor Under Canvas out there.
Under Canvas, talking aboutpermitting and like barriers,
politically and legally to gettingthese kind of things off the ground.

(24:15):
They struggled for many years totry and get that location approved.
And I think they still haveongoing litigation going on with
some nonprofits in the area.
And we've run into our ownroadblocks, trying to do the
Fur Haven project where we are.
We bought 20 acres, thinking becauseit was a conditional use allowance for

(24:37):
campgrounds, and then found out thatthere's like some fine print somewhere
in there that the conditional userequires some kind of a natural feature,
which was very vague to me or else ahunting and fishing ground adjacent
to it in the county that we're in.
I don't know what that means, but webasically bought 20 acres adjacent to

(24:59):
where our house is, and then found outthat we couldn't, at least without a
ton of probably litigation in many yearsof what Jeremy went through before we
could actually get off the grounds.
We found a property that wasalready permitted that used to
be a Thousand Trails Property,which is kinda like a KOA.

Yep.

And so we found one out here that had been purchased by
somebody who was using part of theproperty for a totally different usage.
And it had a fire go through andburn down, like pretty much all
the infrastructure, but it stillhad all of the level perfect
little spots already set up.
That's actually worked out really well.
'cause then, we're actually able to justpay a land use fee, per booking, for

(25:41):
the spots that we use when we use them.
And we don't have toown the land outright.
And it's already has historicalusage as a campground.
So that was a win-win in the end.
And it allows for a lot more capacity,like if we want to like, grow and expand.
'cause right now we're really inthe early phases of getting units
built and taking group business on acase-by-case basis for like summer camps,

(26:03):
corporate retreats, that kind of stuff.

So what's your vision of it when it's in, let's say it's mid
stages, where do you see it going, ifyou have everything going the right way?

So the focus that we have is really on the mobility of these units.
They're basically on a trailer, but uniquein the sense that they're an A-frame and,
very simple but very elegant styling.
And the key part of thatis they can be moved.
It's not a permanent structure.
If the relationship with thelandowner changes we find a
different location to move them to.

(26:34):
And like in the long run, what I seeis finding places that are attractive
seasonally and have that demand forovernight accommodations and being
able to relocate them to those places.
And we saw that happenwith the 2017 eclipse here.
A big event like that where you'reall of a sudden you have literally
millions of people coming to ruralplaces in a state like Oregon that,

(26:57):
in rural areas does not have theinfrastructure to handle that many people.
You can find a land, find a landowners,put like 12 of these units on it, move
them over to where they need to be.
And then, you've got a instanthospitality set up and you build
the experiences around that,which is what we specialize in.
And, you can meet some of that needat least and make a lot of money

(27:19):
doing it because there's a hugedemand for those kind of things,
concerts, all that kind of stuff.

And I'm told that anything on wheels, and I'm not an accountant to
be clear, but I'm told anything on wheelsis now a wonderful tax deduction due to
a new law we have in the United States.
Or you guys have in the United States.
So depreciation and allthose kinds of things.
So whether you like the man ordon't like the man, I'll pay a
little bit less taxes probably.

Yeah.

I'll be on board with that.
So tell me about some of your experiences.
What are some of the things thatpeople can expect, if they go to an
Under Canvas or go to your campgroundor go to someplace that you service?
What are some of the experiencesthat they can look forward
to that your company offers?

In
region, we are.

We're losing you a little bit, Kieron, I don't know if
you hop back in your van, but youstarted breaking up a little bit.
We'll see if you come back in a second.

Oh no, I was really interested in that.

I was as well.

Oh.
There he is.
He might be back.
You're back.
Kieron, are you back?
There we go.
Okay.

Did you?

No, you were just breaking up a little bit.
So did you hear my question?

Good question, and I was trying to answer it.
I can restate it if you can hear me now.

Yeah.
I think we can hear you now.

Okay.
Sorry about that.
Yeah, so to answer your question thisregion is really diverse, similar to like
I'd say New Zealand in that we can go fromthe ocean to like rainforest on the coast
to 14,000 foot high snow capped peaks thatare snowy year round to high desert that

(29:01):
gets 10 inches of rainy year, sagebrush.
We have all that within a day's drive.
It's pretty crazy.
And a world class wine countryin the Willamette Valley and in
the Yakima area in Washington.
There's a lot you can do in the Gorge,in the Columbia Gorge thousands of
miles of hiking trail and the highestconcentration of waterfalls in North
America are both huge attractions.

(29:21):
We also have really goodwhitewater rafting out there.
And people come from allover for steelhead fishing.
And we have great skiing, worldclass skiing up on Mount Hood.
So it's pretty diverse what you can do.
And it's definitely afour season destination.

So your company will help people like plan those experiences?
Do they take 'em on guidedtours or what do you?

Yes, and yes.
Yeah, we handle a lot of B2B, like I said,where we'll actually create tour packages
for other tour operators or for travelagents that have VIP client where they
want everything, very white glove and liketouchdown to take off everything handled.
We also will do, like for Under Canvasor some of the other Hospitality
Pro, we have a partnership with theRitz-Carlton here in Portland, where

(30:04):
we'll do like bespoke packages thatthey can sell to their guests that are
very unique and tailored to their brand.
And then corporate events,team building, school groups.
We do it all.
We have different divisions thatkind of handle different things.

So you're obviously targeting the high end, but what do you think in
your words, sets your company apart fromthe other people who offer experiences?
I know you said your market'slimited at the high end, but just
from an experiential standpoint.

It's not necessarily limited to high end, but it is all about
the having unique experiences that youcan't just easily access on your own.
So that's that destination knowledgethat we bring to the table.
Our team is like highly trained.
Our guide quality is above and beyondpretty much anyone in the region.
So we're offering like that reallyhigh level of knowledge that can take

(30:51):
you places that you couldn't find onyour own, at least not very easily.
And, we also are verycommitted to sustainability.
We won a global award last year for ourcommitment to regenerative tourism and to
promoting like socially conscious events,L-G-B-T-Q events around the region.
We're really committed to makinga positive impact through tourism.

(31:12):
And I think that's worthmentioning as well.
And probably one of the things that setsus apart the most is that commitment.

Mychele and Kurtis, you've both been uncharacteristic
quiet, I feel like, for the show.
But I wanna make a couple questions here.
So I'm curious what you thinkabout the experiences overall.
If you have questions for Kieron, if youhave questions for Jeremy, ask that stuff.
But I'm curious too, what youguys think of the overall.
We've talked a lot about in the show,not necessarily with you guys, but about
how experiences are the future and I feellike there's just this huge overlooked

(31:40):
opportunity for not all campgrounds,but for a large majority who aren't
thinking about how I can go that extramile to curate the guest experience,
whether it's through a company likeKieron or whether it's just through, like
we were talking about somebody addinglittle store kiosks around the park.
So the kids run up there and say mom, Iwant the little candy that's behind there.
And they see it 10 times during theirstate, they're gonna get that candy.

(32:02):
They will by the end of it, so you'regonna sell more store items or the QR
code by your pool that they can pullup on their phone and they can order a
floaty for their kid who just got in.
They're not gonna pull 'emout and go to the store.
So I feel like there's a lot ofmissing opportunity there that it
sounds like small dollars, but Ifeel like it adds up to big dollars.

I know like for me, I have to say that one of the best things
that I like about the whole campgroundindustry is that there's so many different
things and there's so many different waysand it's so diverse and they all work.
And I think that's amazing.
Like Jeremy with his vision and all thethings that he's got going on there, like
it's not just, let's go to an RV park.
It's let's go and likecamp out next to a rock.

(32:38):
Like I love that you cando that and it works.
And people love that.
And there are people who look for that asthere are people who are looking for tent
camping and people looking for RV camping.
And I love the fact that, likeKieron's created this whole experience
thing where people can go out andhave these full on experiences.
But those things all workwithin the campground industry.
And that's like just why Ilove this industry so much.

(33:02):
I came from investor background too.
I actually started in single family homes,started with long-term rentals, moved into
short-term rentals, then built a luxuryresort in Scottsdale, which I'm actually,
I still own it, but when I moved intothe RV industry, it was, look at all the
different avenues that we can go down andwe can create all of those experiences.

(33:23):
But we can do them in one asset class.
And that was the fun of going intothis, was that it was just, there's
so many different things we can do.
And every single one of our parks iscompletely different from another park.
And that I love too.
Our Alaska Park is literally,it is like a parking lot.
But the thing is peopledon't go there for that park.
They go there for the experience ofeverything that surrounds that park.

(33:47):
And we just play that up.
And so it's just, you can sit in themiddle of our park and see six glaciers.
We don't have the glaciersinside of our park.
But you get access to all ofthem because you stay here.

You have to get a pretty big park to have a glacier inside it, but.

Right.
I know.
But it's actually thelargest park in Alaska.
But it's just, yeah, when you lookat it, it looks like a parking lot.
But how many of those people are there?
None of them.
They're all out exploring.
The beauty that is Valdez andlike hiking or mountain biking
or out fishing for halibut.
And so we will actually have the fishermenbring everything back and we'll do fish

(34:21):
fries on the campground once a month.
And it's just a great experience of allthese people creating this community with
people they wouldn't know anywhere else.
And that is one of the things that I loveabove, like my resort in Scottsdale is,
I don't know anybody who stays there.
But I can tell you aboutJean from Iowa who comes and
hangs out with me in Branson.

Yeah.
I skipped over this.
I touched on it briefly, mypark is that we see again 1.2
million visitors to Pictured RocksNational Lakeshore, which has
cruises and tours and all that stuff.
And then another million to Marquette.
And one of the things that we'reworking on right now, in addition
is so the 200 feet above, aboutseven acres of our property is an

(35:03):
old rock quarry that used to go allthe way to the Two Lake Superior.
And so that Rock Quarry is astraight 90 degree vertical,
200 feet up and 250 feet wide.
And Kieron, you might be familiarwith this, but we have in Munising
at P ictured Rocks, we have MichiganIce Fest, which is the largest ice
climbing festival in North America, andit's been going on for 25 plus years.

Nice.

People from all over the world, come to climb ice on the
Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore fortwo weeks out of the year, and you can
only climb it two weeks out of the year.
And there's been over 25 years, there'sthis community that has developed
and people want to climb more.
And so we now have thiscliff that you could climb.
It's winter, six months out of the yearin the UP you could, instead of two weeks,

(35:50):
you could be climbing for six months andwe could be artificially farming ice.
So when you look at like a Sandstone,Minnesota, you look at Ouray,
Colorado, you look at Key Bodiesdown in lower Michigan where they're
farming ice on a telephone pole.
Like those are the types of experiencesthat we wanna curate going forward.
And even mountain biking too.
We sit directly behind the NTN TrailNetwork, which is one of the largest trail

(36:14):
networks of single track in the Midwest.
not exactly sure, but I think it'sthe largest, the most mileage of
single track east of the Mississippi.
Think the only part trailsystem with more is out west.
So that's huge for us.
And I don't know if any of you guysare familiar, but like Bentonville
is a huge inspiration to what we'redoing and we have in Copper Harbor

(36:36):
a few hundred miles away from me,just North we have Rock Solid Trail
Building company, which is the largesttrail building company in the world at
this point, with over 250 employees.
That's owned by Aaron Rogers, who'slike a crazy amazing visionary guy.
But that's been.

Not the quarterback who held that on the Steelers, right?

Not the quarterback.

Oh, I think the quarterback in my mind for sure.

No he's, you know what Aaron Rogers the quarterback is an
interesting guy, but Aaron Rogers thetrail builder might be more interesting.

I probably agree with you.

Yeah.
Look up Rock solid if youguys haven't heard of it.
But that's the stuff that gets meexcited in the long run is being
able to like, offer rock climbingin the summer, ice climbing in the
winter single track all year round.
Fat tire biking in the winter.
I can't wait for that stuff.

Yeah.
It's gonna be interesting.
Kurtis, do you have anything to add?

I wanted to just piggyback one on Kieron, I love another Pacific
Northwest guy getting on the show.
Shout out the Columbia Gorge.
Our company, we always say it's thebest kept secret of the United States,
it's the Pacific Northwest especiallywith the Columbia River Gorge.
And then Mychele again, piggyback, off of what you were talking
about, like unique experiencesfor each one of our campgrounds.

(37:45):
That's one of my favorite partsabout our campgrounds is each
one is so different, right?
We start off like we have, the coast,the Pacific Coast with Canna and that
park has a very unique clientele.
They're very different thanthe people that stay with us.
Excuse me, by the way, I am havingterrible allergies right now.
I'm crying.

Are you allergic to me or is it something else?

I am allergic to pollen.
But specifically like grass and trees.

And you're in campgrounds.

And you're Yeah, I was just about to say that.

And I'm in campgrounds.
I do, I love the outside.
I grew up Camping I put upwith the allergies, but I
just wanted to warn you, so.

Totally fine.

I'm running outta breath sometimes and that might
be why I'm abnormally quiet today.
We also, I don't know if anyoneknows, but there's a giant
fire outside of our office.
It's actually like 45miles southwest of Austin.

I did not know that.
Is it moving fast?
Do they have it under control or?

Yeah, they're gonna get under control.
We've there's about,there's 40 miles between us.
It's just tons of

Where's your office?

We're in Goldendale, Washington.

Oh, gosh.
You're so close to me.
I didn't realize that.

I know.
I was like Kieron, I think you're

Burdoin.
No, I'm in Bo

What I was guessing.

The Burdoin.
You're talking about the Burdoin fires?

Yeah.

I'm way closer to that than you are.
I'm literally, I'm fivemiles from that fire.
Five miles.

Oh my god.

Yeah.

Moser was just on fire.

Yes, it was.

Wasn't it?

Which makes me feel better about this fire because if it jumps the
river, there's nothing left to burn.

Yeah.
That's stuff tough to deal with.
We're up here, I'm up here in Calgaryand my girlfriend's parents have a cabin.
I was at it last week in on LakeShushwap, but we were dealing with
that for a couple years up here in BC.
Like we still have some firesup here, but thankfully.
Like once in a while, like probablytwo, three days outta the year,
the whole city of Calgary willget like really smoky during the
summer and then it just goes away.
We were pretty lucky, but yeah,we've had to deal with that.

(39:34):
We had to almost evacuate, I thinktwo years ago from our cabin.
'cause you have to go down a road, like45 minute dirt road to get to the cabin.
So that's the only way out.
So if the fire's all the way uphere, even if it's 45 minutes
away, you gotta get out anyway.
But yeah it's tough togo through that stuff.
I'm glad you guys are safe.

Yeah.

Alright.
Do we wanna talk about AI or dowe have any other questions for
Jeremy or Kieron that we wanna do?
Or A little bit?

Kieron I would love to talk to you outside of this podcast

Drive over you could probably be there by the time the show's over.
Kieron, you're in your van.

I know.
I'm like, I'm probablygonna drive over there.
Come see you.

I'm in Portland right now.

Jump in the van.

Yeah let's do it.
Come to Hood River Hole,have a beer and go rafting.

I like Portland.
Portland used to be one of my favoritecities in the US and I say used to
be, 'cause I feel like it was justdifferent like six or seven years ago.
It still really nice city.

Definitely still really awesome.
But yeah, it had a little.

Yeah, the breweries and the food were my top two things
in Portland and that the littlebookstore, like the giant bookstore.

Powells.
Yeah.

Powells.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So bend is my favorite.
I love Bend.

Which one?

That's also very cool.
Bend Oregon.

Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I've been up along the coast there andI'm trying to remember we're at the
border there with California, right?
What's that big, huge deep lake there?
I can't remember the name ofit off the top of my head.

Crater lake?

Crater Lake, yeah.

Yeah, where the Shasta too is down there by the border.

Yep.
Yeah, there's a ton of beautiful places.
I'd love to get there more, but Ialso am super spoiled and 45 minutes
from Banff, so there's a lot ofcompetition for my attention up
here, so I'll try to get down there.

You're from Canada.
You have plenty of natureon your side of the mortar.
I wanna come up there and see some stuff.

Yeah, we're definitely spoiled up here.
All right.
Let's talk about AI for a second.
Last 13 minutes of the show Jessica,there's a couple videos that I have.
We probably won't get to all of them.
I want to start with, let'sstart with just the, let's
start with the research one.
Do the research one instead of the intro.
Hopefully it'll be okay.
This is Chat GPT agent.
This is, you have to share yourscreen, and then they released this

(41:32):
last Wednesday, OpenAI announced this.
So before we play this, and you canhit share, but before we play this, I
just wanna set the preface by sayingfor those of you who don't know what
an agent is, an agent is somethingthat can basically take action on your
computer and do something using a tool.
So send an email or check your calendaror book an appointment or like search

(41:53):
for something without you tellingit every step of the way to do that
certain thing, to follow up, to do more.
These have been out for thegeeks like me who play with AI.
These have been aroundfor two years, probably.
They've gotten significantly better.
But this, as far as last week was thefirst time that Chat GPT or another
company really fully dumped this onprobably tens of millions of people.

(42:17):
I don't think it's available on theirfree subscription, but it's available, I
think on the $20 a month pro teams plans.
And then it's available on the one that Ipay for that's $200 a month or whatever.
It's limited in use right now, butthis is where our future's going.
So lemme play this and thenwe'll talk about it a little bit.

Video Stream (42:34):
So we have been on this journey of not just improving our
models, but the tools the model can use.
And it's like a symbolism of some kind.
Like the better the tools are, the betterthe agent can use it, the better the agent
is, the more powerful tool it can use.
And it like goes on and on.
I am David ish, I'm an engineer andI work on the product team in OpenAI.

(42:58):
People in their daily lives at work orin like personal life, they use like a
variety of tools and we are just trainingthe model to take advantage of all of
these things and you're just givingthe agent as much power as possible.
Today I asked agent to book me anitinerary to go to a tennis tournament
in Palm Springs, next year find me anitinerary that works around the semifinals
because that's gonna be really exciting.

(43:19):
And the agent is basically going to giveme like a detailed itinerary of like how
much it's gonna cost, what activities weshould be doing at every part of the day.
And in order to give it additionalspin, we also ask it to look at my
calendar and figure out like whatflight times would work for me.
My dream has come true.
I just tell it what to doand then I can walk away.
First thing that the model has to do islike figure out, which tools does it need?

(43:43):
It'll bring up the visual browser.
I use connectors to connect mypersonal data, so I give agent access
to my Gmail and my Google calendarso that they can access that data.
Then the first thing that it needsto do is actually figure out what the
tournament dates are like, when amI available, how much would it cost?
Where am I gonna eat, andwhen can I get the tickets?

(44:03):
And it just goes through this processfor all three days of my itinerary.
When the agent is ready, it'llsend you a notification on your
phone or on your laptop and youcan check what the agent has done.
Review it.
It did.
It did pretty well.
It figured out essentially that thetournament is basically happening
from like March 12th to March 15th.

(44:24):
Then it figured out that my meetingson March 12th end at 4:30 and it
takes about an hour to go fromhere to SFO 'cause of the traffic.
So it figured out like what timeof flights actually work for me.
And then figured out basically like whichhotel I'm gonna stay at when I'm attending
the matches and where should I be eating.
Everybody has some sort ofuninteresting part of the job, like

(44:46):
researching, looking here, doing this.
You just want to get to the thingand agent lets me do with that.

Okay.
So I think it's important for us to sayis, and maybe this looks cool to you,
maybe this looks scary to you, dependingon who you are and who, whether you're
watching or on our panel of guestshere like this is just the beginning.
This is the baby step, right?
Like right now, what you're seeing isit like you can connect your Google
calendar, you can connect your Gmail.
There's a bunch of other connectors inthere like HubSpot and things like that.

(45:15):
And it will use those and take actionon your behalf to, like you said,
close the laptop, go away, come back,all the things are done for you.
And yes, you could lightly research pricesbefore you could lightly have it go and
think of itineraries, but you couldn'thave it compare that to your calendar.
You couldn't have it gothrough prices in real time.
And the next easy step of thatlogically is to completely
book the whole thing for you.

(45:36):
And the only thing that's stoppingthat in this open AI case is that
it's doing everything in the cloud.
And so then you have to deal withsecurity of your credit cards
and all those kinds of things.
But where that's gonna change iswhat I'm gonna show you right now.
Jessica, go to Perplexity'scomment and play that real quick,
and then we'll talk about it.
That one.

(45:57):
Yep.
And Google's coming outwith tools like this.
And then OpenAI is rumored tocome out with a tool like this,
and this is available now too.
We'll talk about who's availableto you in a second, but.

Video Stream (46:53):
Pull up the clip of Jensen demoing Perplexity Labs.
I've pulled up a YouTubevideo showing Jensen demoing
perplexity labs at GTC Paris.
It should be at that momentnow to formulate what is now.
A Gentech AI.
Let's take a look at one example.
Lemme show you something.
It's built on perplexity.

Okay, we're good Jessica.
So like this is again, this is early too.
This perplexity, for those of you whodon't know, is an AI search engine
that's been around for a couple years.
They're not a challenge to go.
They are in some ways, right?
But they've only got a couple million,I dunno what a couple a hundred million
searches a day or something like thatversus 96 billion some for Google.
So they're not really competition, butthey are eating away at some of the market

(47:36):
share and they just release this browser.
It's a competitor to Google Chrome.
You can't go download it todayunless you're part of their really
super expensive AI subscription for$200 a month, which I will probably
join after this just for a month totest this out and then cancel it.
'Cause I have other spendtoo much on AI is what I do.
But, so we'll probably tryto demo that either later on

(47:58):
Outwired or in a future show.
But the difference between that isthat it runs on your computer locally.
And so you're seeing the earlystages of this stuff where you
have to type everything in.
Everything is eventually gonna be voiceor it's gonna intuit what you need.
It's gonna ask you what timeof year you want to go Camping.
It's gonna prompt you to say, inFebruary what time or it's time
to book your annual Camping trip.
Where do you think you wanna go?

(48:19):
Here's some suggestions I have foryou based on what you liked before
or what Google reviews you leftbefore, Jeremy was talking about.
I know what you like and don't like.
'cause I have access to all this stuff.
This is moving along at a speedand pace that like I have a
hard time keeping up with.
And it's gonna be really interestingto start to think how this is
going to impact the broadercampground industry as a whole.
Because while we could take this inmultiple different paths, the clear

(48:41):
thing that you're looking at right nowis a non-human entity browsing your
website and making decisions based onyour website and its content with a
human being never setting eyes on it.
And then that human being is getting asummary of what that agent read, and that
agent consumed and that agent understood.
And then the human being is decidingbased on that agent summary and not your

(49:03):
website copy, and not your agonizing,carefully crafted CTA button that you
spent two weeks going back and forthwith the marketing department about.
And all this is changingand all of it's flattening.
And I think it's just really interesting.
Does anybody have any thoughts on that?

My original thought is that I see the internet and
like way we communicate is actuallywe communicate with agents.
We keep UIs available for whenthe human does want to actually
look and explore the website.
But it's gonna be robust APIs that aregonna be running the, like all industry.

(49:39):
And how do we document that APIand make sure that these agents and
these AIs understand and they can useour APIs to make purchasing events
happen and schedule reservations.
And that's where I see thisnext frontier of the internet.

Yeah, the internet, like the online experience,
whatever you wanna call it.
It's like the SEO thing wetalked about a month ago.
Like we don't really need a name for it.
It just is, you just do it like it's,you do good SEO like Jeremy was talking
about, or you do good marketing,it's just something that you do.
But yeah, like I think it's amusingto me sometimes, and this goes to
all technology in all facets ofthings, but specifically with AI

(50:13):
right now is what we're talking about.
It's interesting to me howlike it's only been really
like a good solid 20, 30 years.
Since we've probably closerto 30, I guess we're in 2025.
It keeps getting closer.
A year passes every year.
So good solid 30 years since we'vereally been using the internet
to its capabilities, right?
To browse websites, to doe-commerce, to learn things, to

(50:35):
do social media, to do whatever.
And like people don't realizethat websites suck, like they do.
Like the reason that you agonize somuch over the design of your website
and the navigation and have it alwaysbe at the top, and you can't hide it
under a hamburger menu on desktop, andyou can't put your logo here because
that might look bad or it might confuse.
It's all about not confusing the customer.

(50:57):
They're used to seeing the menu upthere, so you have to do it that way.
They're used to seeing a header imageand being, having another attention
grab, so you gotta do it that way.
And so all of this stuff has beendesigned, or and I hate to use the
word dumbed down, but it has beendumbed down for the general consumer.
Not that they need it dumbed down,but that every website is different.
You have to make sure the CTAsare in the right place, that their

(51:19):
eyes are going to the right place,and all that's about to change.
Eventually it will go to APIs, Kurtis,but all that's gonna be changed and human
beings are going to be better for it.
We're gonna find more information, we'regonna discover more things, we're gonna
have easier booking experiences, and it'sjust gonna be the way the internet works.
And everybody thinks it's impossiblebecause that's all they've ever known.

(51:40):
But they forget that 25 years ago, JeffBezo was in a garage packing books.
This stuff moves fast.

Sorry I was gonna say that, I use AI in a different
capacity where it's not for mycampgrounds at this moment, but I
use it more for my investor side.
So I'm actually a partner in a propAI business that we can actually use
it and it will cold call and make warmleads for people to sell us properties.
And what it does is it actually talksto you, we call her Jen, but you

(52:07):
would think that it's me on the phone.
And it answers in real time.
And it's literally an AI that's almostcreated to be with it, has the investor
information, but it calls you, hasa whole conversation with you, and
it can make 3000 calls in a second.
And so it's just, it's theway that things are moving.

(52:28):
And so when I'm using it on that side ofmy life, we also, I've been demoing this
one AI system called Manus that does what?
That was just talking about whereyou put in the information and
say, I wanna go on a trip toLondon, stay in the Ritz Carlton.
I need extra pillows on the bed.
I need a chauffeur car at the hotel.
I need the guy's name to be Greg.

(52:49):
You can tell it whatever you want andit will book the entire thing for you.

Yeah.
Let's be clear.
Manis is the Chinese company.
I've had a subscriptionto that for a long time.
Manis is far more advanced thanOpen AI's agent is right now.

Yeah.
So it's just, it's been a definitelyit's been an experience to understand
how that all works and to seewhere everything is moving to,
because that's what we're doing.
And I can see, like when we're onFacebook and I see the people in
the, mom and pop Campground owners,they're like I know it was an AI that
called me and I just hung up the phoneand it's this is where we're moving.

(53:22):
And you have to start, I'm not sayingthat you have to jump on board right
away, but you're gonna have to startembracing these things just as we did
the internet way back when and we don'ttake the phone calls as much anymore.
Or like it's bridging that.

Yeah.

Before you, lemme just say it's been an hour, so I just
wanna say if anybody has a hardstop and they need to go, please.
Just we appreciate you having here.
Please feel free to drop off.
You don't have to hang out with us,but we're just gonna keep going until
the conversation kind of wraps up.

I have a couple minutes left.

I have a couple minutes too.
But Mychele, I wanted to say the flipside of the outbound call side is
actually the inbound call side, right?
So like everybody that is, or likethat is getting those calls, they're
gonna be all screened by an agent.

Yeah.

I love that idea.
And so we get a lot of calls,I know right into converted,
and it's such a waste of time.

So I always go back and I think about okay, what do I want
is what would make my life easier?
And so I was down, we all runvery large businesses, right?
And so on the 4th of July, that's ourSuper Bowl, but that's also when our
families want to take a vacation as well.
And so here we are trying to go on afamily trip, enjoy family time, and we're

(54:34):
taking business calls the whole time.
We've got problems.
We're dealing with things.
We gotta make changes on our website.
And the whole time I was sitting therethinking an AI that could field some of
these calls that has a lot of these policymanuals that has these procedures, right?
It's gonna take over thoseresponsibilities immediately.

(54:54):
And I just sat there.
I was drinking a waterand I was thinking that.

Oh, it's easy to do.
I clone my voice to acompany called 11 Laps.
And I was messing withmy buddy the other day.
He's like a deep philosophicalCatholic Christian Guy.
Like it goes back into the deep historyof the religion or whatever else.
And I don't like, like I'm notreligious, but I don't like really
talking to him about that stuff.
One 'cause I feel stupid, buttwo, because it just bores me.
And so I built like a clone of myselfand deployed it and I was like, just

(55:19):
call this number and you can talk to him.
And he was like really into the wholelike, history of Catholic Catholicism
and I gave him a rule and whateverhe was talking to for an hour.
It was in my voice though butlike Mychele to your point, like
they are gonna have to adopt it.
It is here.
Google just announced a feature, Ithink last week or the week before,
where they're gonna start putting abutton in search results where you
can call the check prices and it'snot for travel or hospitality yet.

(55:40):
Like I think it's for a coupleverticals like plumbing and, I dunno,
locksmith and a few other places.
But this is gonna quickly expand towhere you can just click a button.
The AI will then starta call using Gemini.
It will call and talk to thebusiness and report back to you.
And if you don't think this is gonnaincrease your phone calls at your
property, you better believe it's.
And they're gonna be, just likeKieron said, they're gonna be
closer to the top of the funnel.

(56:01):
They're not gonna becloser to the conversion.
So you're gonna have to thendecide, Kurtis, I know you're
in a call center, right?
You're gonna have to decide, doI want more bodies in that call
center for lower conversions,or do I wanna put agents there?

Or do I want to expose an API to the Google Hospitality sector.

Eventually, yeah.
Google's not there yet.
And so for
sure.

And what the hotels are doing, and I think like that exposing
those APIs in our sector will get that.
And I totally agreewith you though, Brian.
Like there's going to be millionsof more phone calls that are
happening, but have you guys seenlike the way AI talk to each other?

Oh yeah.
I believe my AI talk to each other.
It's pretty fun.
I'm sure.

Yeah.
A whole different.

Yeah.
It's an experience.
If you haven't seen it on this, if youlisten to this podcast, go look it up.

It's actually like me at the beginning with the gurgle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It wasn't my AI it was just transitioning
'cause I was late for the show.

I think it's an interesting thing though.
We're in this weird pocket where it'slike we've got to adapt to that, but
we've also got to be able to managethe ones who aren't used to that.
And so we've go back andforth between both of them.
So we've gotta have the people whoare still in the office that are
gonna answer the phone and then we'vegotta be able to handle this AI stuff.
But I think that AI, Brian and I wereactually just talking about this with

(57:17):
one of my operations directors a coupleof days ago when we did a call about
this, is having the ability to havethe stuff taken off of your plate in
your campgrounds to be able to freeup your people to do things that
are more customer service oriented.
It's a wonderful place to be becausewe're never gonna have campgrounds that

(57:39):
are fully AI or robotic or whatever.
And we may, but I just don't thinkwe're gonna take that human element
out of it too much because that'swhat the joy of campgrounds is, right?
Is the human experience.
But to take all of that stuff off ofthe plate of our people who are at
the front desk or on the grounds andbe able to like, make that easier
on them so that they can go curatethose experiences for those people

(58:03):
is gonna be so amazing for them.
It'll just be.

Yeah, the human experience is interesting to me.
We're gonna talk about that in Outwiredwhen we do the 2025 to 2075 thing.
'cause part of the research I didin the prompts with the agents that
I had go out and look at this stufffor me is like the human experience
is important to Camping, right?

And so I think, so.

I agree with you, right?
But what does that human experience mean?
It is an interesting question because thehuman experience is, I would say, arguably
more important from the guest perspectivethan it is from a staff perspective.
So if a guest can still have a humanexperience, whatever that is defined as,
whether it includes a human or doesn'tinclude a human, who knows, right?
None of us can predict more thantwo, three years out right now.

(58:44):
Then that's interesting.
Like I don't know what thatlooks like or what that.

Brian, when you said project two to three months out.

Years.

The last podcast I was on was four weeks ago, and we talked
about, we want to talk about operatorand it is obsolete four weeks later.
Like it's moving way fasterthan like we give it credit.

Yeah.
No, I think that it just depends on,again, like the campground, like we
have a family campground in Virginiathat is completely family based and we
get probably anywhere from a thousandto 1500 people in there during a busy
weekend, which is pretty much almostevery weekend it seems, but with
that, like we have all these differentexperiences that are constantly happening.

(59:30):
And when I've talked to the guests,like one of their favorite things
is our managers just coming aroundwhen they've checked in and just
saying, Hey, are you guys good?
Do you guys need anything?
I'm the manager here, let usknow, you can call us whatever.
And that's like that humanexperience, you can't take away.

I'm gonna play devil's advocate.
I'm not gonna say I don't believethis, what's gonna come outta my mouth.

Okay.

But imagine then a cute little robot that goes
around to every site and asks, isthere anything I can do for you?
And they're like, yeah,I'd love an ice cream cone.
Okay.
And it opens up its head and makes an icecream cone that's better than a human.

Mychele Bisson (01:00:02):
I don't think that experience, I think
that experience will happen.
I don't think it'll flyin every campground.
Does that make sense?

Brian Searl (01:00:08):
No.
Oh no.
And again, I'm not saying I believe this.

But I do think that there are gonna be places where
people go for just that experience.

Yeah.
Like the Tesla Diner that just opened up.

Yes.
Yeah.

For sure.
Yeah.
And again, I'm justplaying devil's advocate.
I agree with you.
I think there has to be some kind ofhuman experience from our side, from
the owner's side that's still involved.
And that's probably the one thing thatI think would probably survive longer
than anything else, is the personwalking around and just being sociable.

Yeah.
But I also think thateverything goes in phases.
Like everything throughout life.
As you're going through, yourealize that, okay, this is
really cool and it's innovativeand everybody's on board with it.
And then a couple years latereverybody's don't you just miss
it when somebody would come up andjust have a conversation with you?
It's just these different things, right?

Sure.

You go through life and you're like, oh, it's so cool that
we can do these things like big rigs.
So you started off with thesetiny little camper vans and they
start getting bigger as they go.
And now all of a sudden I'mstarting to see people go back down.
And it's just the rotation of life.
We just constantly expand.
We jump on board with the newthing and then that becomes normal.
And then we're like, wouldn't itbe nostalgic to go back to this?

Yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see how the
future plays out, for sure.
I usually pride myself on like seeingearly trends and figuring out where
things are going and what's thenext step and coming social network
and what's the next technology.
I can't see more thantwo years in advance.
I don't have any clue what's gonna happen.
We didn't get to it today, but Ihad it pulled up on my screen, but
like Donald Trump has this AI actionplan that he's talking about today.
He's gonna talk about it on the All Inpodcast, I guess live later tonight.

(01:01:37):
So he's got like an action planwhere he is gonna try to, apparently,
like the whole big headline waslower regulations on AI companies.
Which is, I think good and maybebad, but it is what it is right.
Like we're not gonnastop the race with China.
That's a whole nother discussion we canget into at another date and time, but.

I think it depends on which side of the AI you're on.

Kurtis Wilkins (01:01:58):
Yeah, I totally agree with that statement right there.
I don't think anyone here wearstinfoil hats and is thinking Skynet,
but at the same time, we should putin strong regulation against Skynet.

We should, but that's and again, like I don't
wanna go down a rabbit hole.
I know we're already over a few minutes.
But that's the problem is thatexistential race between the US and China.
If we decide to regulate it,China doesn't regulate it.
Like you're gonna get to the pointwhere you get to, and this sounds
crazy, I've said it before, I thinkpublicly, and people look at me
like I do have a tinfoil hat on.
You're gonna get to the point where Chinadevelops a super intelligence first.

(01:02:32):
Or we develop a super intelligencefirst, and then the US is, do I
really want China to be able toget a super intelligence too?
I'll just turn off their power.
And that's what's gonna happen.
That's what's in danger of happening.
Or the general on the Chinese sidewill give the missiles control to
the AI which is your Skynet scenario.
And then then like the US iswe're a little bit smarter.

(01:02:53):
We don't wanna give control of ourmissiles, but you're not gonna be
able to defend against an AI thatcontrols the missiles, so then
you're gonna have to do it too.
And then.

Yeah, no, I always have that like whole situation play.
Oh, I come from a militaryfamily, so there's always.

Yeah, you don't have to worry about Skynet.
Like it's the same thingas us and ants, right?
We don't like ants in our house, but wedon't get so angry at ants that we go and
try to kill every ant in the entire world.
We're gonna be like, and thisis tinfoil head again, right?
You wait and see how well this ageswe're gonna be insignificant to AI.
It will not matter, the pollutionthat we try to put in the oceans,
it will just clean up in 10 secondswith technology that it's invented.

Yeah.

And that is the truth.
It's where we're going and it's just wekeep moving faster and as it's developing,
it starts to move even faster because thenit starts just helping the development and
we're just consistently going, and that's.

That's what Zuckerberg, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
You were just No, you're fine.
Go ahead.
Please finish.

Oh, I was gonna say, so we're either the leaders in it or
we're falling behind, and you neverwanna be the ones who are falling behind
because then you can't control it.

Yeah.
All you have to do is look at this,look at Zuckerberg giving a hundred
million dollar paychecks to peopleto steal them from Gemini and OpenAI.
Buying scale AI or well buying a stakein it, whatever, really bought it for $16
billion, I think, or something like that.
All these companies are signing contractsfor powers and data centers in the tens
and the hundreds of billions of dollars.

(01:04:15):
Google and Meta, and I don'tknow what Apple's doing.
God rest, if you're invested intheir stock, you should sell it now.
But all you have to do is look atthe numbers that are being spent.
This is not a guess.
These companies knowexactly what they're doing.
They're wagering the entirefuture of their companies on this
technology, and it's moving very fast.
And they're beholden to quarterlyreports and they're doing this.

Yeah, that's the thing is that it's just, like I just went through
this whole thing where I was talkingto Chat GPT, and I was like, because at
the end of the day Google and all thosethings, it's great, but you're gonna have
to be able to pop up in your chat like,what's the best campground in this area?
It needs to pop up in chat.
We've gotta start focusing on likegetting those, and you're either
ahead of the game or you're behind it.

(01:04:58):
And so I'm starting to figure outokay, how do I pop up in chat?
How do I get recognized as this in chat?
How does.

I have an answer for you.
You can just call me, Mychele.

I know we had that conversation, so now we're like
working on the backend stuff, going,okay, what do we need to put where?
So but that's the thing isthat's what you have to do.
And now that we're moving intothis new age, a lot of people are
behind the ball already on it.
I'm behind the ball on it.

I'm behind the ball on it.
Like it's literally how fast it's moving.

Yeah.

Everybody looks at me like I'm 10 years ahead of them.
Like I probably am, but I'm still like20 years behind where I need to be.

You're 10 years ahead of me, but, so that leaves
me like 50 years behind everybodyelse or where I need to be.
But it's a learning process and, atleast we're starting to jump on board.
That's where I find it so hardwith some of the mom and pops
who are like, we're not booking.
And I'm like, it's 'cause you're not doingthe right things and you're not putting
the right websites in place and you'renot making sure that you're showing up

(01:05:53):
in these chat situations and you're notputting yourself out there and you're not,
as crazy as it sounds, on social media.

One of the things that I find so hard about the advancement
and like how fast things are movingis so again, Brian, like we talked
four weeks ago about operator.
Well, three months ago we startedbuilding our new website, right?
Where it's gonna be more focusedon AI, and ranking and AI and
like how do we structure our datasets and give it the social proof.
And how do I position myself toshow up in every chat every time

(01:06:24):
somebody is looking for one of thebest campgrounds and our areas.
And
operator is obsolete four weeks later.
And so we were building towards that.
And we're like, okay, so now we'rebuilding toward, and a lot of what we did.
The foundation still soundsgood, but it's, that's obsolete.

(01:06:44):
And so that's it's hard tostay up on it, so Brian.

That was the struggle with us, right?
Like for our marketing clients, like Ispent a year and a half coming together
with a plan and I had to wait to seewhat Google did at their IO in May, but
we had to come up with a plan that wasbalancing, like somebody talked about
the human side of this thing, right?
Like the humans are stillbrowsing the websites right now.
They are.
And so you still need to balance thelook and the feel for them and optimize
the conversion path to them so thatthey're making a booking, but also

(01:07:09):
you need to do the thing for robots.
And it took us a long time, but wecame up with we have master SEO plans.
We're giving our clients now that sayhere's what you need to build, here's
what we're gonna build, here's the pages,here's the content, here's the text.
We know exactly what it is.
Like this is it.
Like just approve it and we're gonna giveit to our devs and we're gonna go to town.
But that took a long time to come upwith, and there was a lot of trade-offs

(01:07:30):
that I wanted to do from an AI sidethat I can't do yet just to create
that perfect balance where we are now.
But yeah, like I'm confident that'll holdup for probably six or 12 months max.
And then like it'll stillbe a good foundation.
Like it'll be a foundationat that point, right?
Like you're talking about Kurtis.

Yeah.
I don't know if you're a firm believerin 2027, but that's what the math says.
It's so sometime in August,2027, that's when AI crosses over
and it's now smarter than us.

It's already smarter than me.
So

I was gonna say, I feel like it's smarter than me.

I know.

Last time I plug things in there.

Sorry, lemme rephrase that.

How do I do this?
And it's pops up with thisformula and I'm like, cool.
Okay, we're good.

It's smarter than the smarter human in.

All combined right?
Is what you're talking about.
That's like the, yeah.

All combined.
And so really interesting to me.
And so that's supposed to happenmathematically sometime August, 2027.

It wouldn't surprise me if it happens before then.
Like whether we know aboutit before then, we might not.
But it's, yeah it's coming reallyfast and I don't know what this
world's gonna look like, but I knowthat you better pay attention to it.
It's not optional anymore.

And I think that plays into all kinds of things.
It's just, like where are jobs gonna be?
Where are people gonna be working?
Like how is this all gonna come together?
It's just, there's so manyup in the air questions.
Just from a broad perspective,not just from a campground
perspective, but it's just.

Oh, yeah.
It's everything.
Nobody understand, nobody knows.
I think 95% of jobs are going away.

I think so too.

Yeah.
There's my tinfoil hat.
But nobody wants to talk about this.
Nobody in governmentis talking about this.
Nobody's talking about this.
There are people in my circles in theAI world who are talking about this, but
nobody wants to say it publicly because itscares people and it gets people nervous.
We have to talk about this orotherwise it's gonna be even worse.

Everybody's just gonna go on vacation, Brian, they're all gonna.

Eventually they will.
But that's a good thing.
But we have to get over this.
It's gonna be five to 10 years.

Yeah.

It's gonna be five to 10 years of really painful, like the
wealth gap is gonna grow even bigger.
That's what I'm afraid of.

I hundred percent agree with that.
It's gonna get wider and it's definitelysomething that as I'm watching
everything, like even the other dayI saw a robot that does massages and
apparently it does it better than humans.
Like you can program it completely todo everything and it's all run off of I
don't know, but it's just, it was amazing.
And I was like there you go.
There's another job that's gonna go.

(01:09:52):
It's just, it's crazy how much allof this is changing and how fast.

Yeah.
You're not even talking about humanoidrobots, which we talked about on this
show and Outwired before that arecoming probably in less than two years.
Yeah.
You wait till you see what the predictionwe have on Outwired is if you guys
have a chance to watch it, but likethe humanoid robots, in less than
three years, you'll be able to, theonly bottleneck will be manufacturing.
You'll be able to buy one for lessthan I don't know, ,75 cents an
hour to work around your campgroundand do everything you want.

Yeah.

And it'll be able to mow the lawn.
It'll be able to clean upthe mini of golf course.
You'll be able to clean the swimmingpool to be able to do everything.

Yeah.
And when they start lookingmore like humans, it makes it
even more of a human experience.
You guys see all those crazy movies.
Haven't you guys seen those movieswhere they like have the AIs that, or
the robots that look just like humans?

That's what I mean when you talk about the human experience, right?
And I won't take credit for this.
I first heard Gary Vaynerchukutter it, but I fully believe it.
Like anybody who's alive right nowwho's under let's say 40, their
grandchildren will have people whoare married to humanoid robots.
They will.

Oh, weird.

I know, but it will happen.

Yeah.
And I can see that happening.
It's such a weird, like when do we startcompletely like moving away from just
having, when you're just at a point of,is that person a human or is that a robot?

That's the whole argument, right?
So it's really interesting.
You should go look it up.
There's a woman, you probably know her,I wanna say her name is Corey or Cody
she's a real estate lady on YouTube.

Cody Sanchez.

Yeah, Cody Sanchez.
So she sat down with Gary Vaynerchukand they talked about this stuff,
and they were talking aboutwhat, where's the line of cross?
And I'm not saying I believethis, I'm just telling you
what the conversation was like.
I do believe the grandkid thing, but I'mnot saying I believe all the other stuff.
But they were talking aboutwhere's that line where you
become not a human versus a robot?
Because there's already all the boobjobs and the lip jobs and the right,

(01:11:43):
the Botox and like all the thingsyou're putting in your body already.
So what's the point, areyou already not human?
Where's the line?

It's that Stepford Wise movie from what was it, the
nineties or the early two thousandsor something where like Nicole Kidman
was in it and they had a little buttonand you could literally change her
physically however you wanted her.

Yeah.
That's.

She'd go make you a sandwich or she'd go to the grocery
store and buy you potato chips, or.

I think that makes society worse when that happens for
the reasons that we stop respectingcertain categories of people.
So I don't know that I want that,but it's absolutely gonna happen.

Yeah.
It's a scary thought to get into all ofthe tin hat situations that you just,
this whole thing can spiral down into.
But I do think yeah.
Going back to all of it, it's just, it'scrazy how fast everything is evolving and
how much we have to adapt and just theresistance against it from so many people.

(01:12:36):
And I just don't think they realizehow much that's gonna hurt their
own businesses by resisting so much.

Yeah.
Imagine not answeringthe call from Google.

Yeah.
Did you guys watch the, so Teslareleased their autonomous cab.

Oh, the Robaxin

Optimist, which is a robot forum, was the catering company
and the bartenders for the release.

Oh, yes.
Except they were human controlledduring the Yeah, that control year ago.
You're talking about when youannounced it was almost a year ago.

No.
This happened three weeks ago.

Oh, maybe I missed it then.
I don't know.
I remember like when he first announcedthe robot taxi, they had robots.
They were catering.

No.
They're releasing robottaxi in response to.

I dunno about that.

And so I'm like, those robots, but the robots
stole a show on that release.
And so like that comment.

They 15,000 dollars humanoid robot you can buy from China right now.
And there's videos on YouTube ofpeople having to wash their car.
It's here guys.
I'm sorry that I'm the bear of maybebad or good news to the people who
are watching, but this is not coming.
This is here.

Yeah.
And all I wanna know is how I can get one.

I'm not against somebody giving me a chef that's
programmed with all of the Michelinrated recipes in it that I could just
walk home and say, Hey, I want this.
And it whips it up.
I totally get.

That's the thing.
If you talk about the 40 year olds oranybody who's under 20, anybody who
has a kid who is in elementary schoolstill, they will never know a world
ever where they grow up and aren'table to have Michelin recipes on
demand, a robot chef in their kitchen,AI with them everywhere they go.
I've had these conversations tothe terrible like detriment of

(01:14:11):
my girlfriend who probably wantsme to shut up a lot of the times.

But Brian's like in his element right now.

Yeah.

Oh, my wife has told me that we can't talk about AI at the house.
So

I wondered, you're gonna see survival of restaurants like for sure.
'Cause there's the same human element.
People are gonna wanna go out andsocialize, but I think there's a
whole lot less physical restaurants.
But does that mean then that youcan license a recipe from the Great
steak shop in Portland that you wantto just download to your robot and
have for one meal and pay them a fee?
I bet there is, there's a business there.

But think about the amazingness of how that would work out
though, is you can go to your littlehometown restaurant and have an experience
from a French chef in France for thisone recipe that he has specialized and
everybody knows about around the world.
That would be amazing.
And they would still get paid on it.

Yes.
And it would be more of asocial experiment as well.
'Cause the reason you go to therestaurant now is to see other humans.
That's the reason why you're goingCamping is you're going Camping
to have a unique human experience.

Yeah.

In that though.

Happens when the robots.

Hopefully not very many people work.

A safe place to have human interaction and all of that.

What happens when the robots wanna go Camping though?
Are you gonna ban them?
Not you guys, but are you gonnaban them like car Camping?
I don't want robots.
We only take humans.
What if they've got a creditcard and they're in society
and they want to pay you money?

I don't know.
There's a lot of credit.

That's an interesting question, Brian.
Oh, you're putting me on the spot.
I haven't even thought about that.

Anyway, we should probably go.

All right.
I actually have a hard stop here in five.

You had a hard topic 20 minutes ago, man.
Nobody believes me anymore.

I bumped it.
They said they were okay.
I was really enjoying the AI conversation.

Alright any final thoughts, Mychele or Kurtis?

No, this was all great.
Like we're gonna have to continuethis conversation on the next one.

It'll probably obsolete by the time we get to the next one.
Mychele.
I'm only able to four.

No, honestly, that's probably true because by that time we're
gonna be talking about, Hey, did youguys see this new robot in a campground?

GPT five might be out by that time, so it's supposed to come
out in the next few weeks, is a rumor.
So we'll see.

All right.

And they already have a model that beat the Math
Olympiad, Google and Chat GPT do.
That's not gonna releasesupposedly for a couple months.
So anyway.
All right.
Tell us where we can learnmore about Bison Peak Ventures.

You can actually follow me on Instagram @MycheleBisson which I
always talk about how we're, innovatingand changing our campgrounds and tips on
how to buy campgrounds with no money down.
And then you can also do itat rvresortinvestment.com.

Awesome.
And Kurtis, Rjourney,

You can find Rjourney at rjourney.com,
as well as our management divisionwhich is advancedoutdoormanagement.com.
Feel free to reach out to us.
We also have our socials as well,Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.

Thank you guys so much for joining us for another
episode of MC Fireside Chats.
If you're not sick of hearing itfrom me, I will be in 34 minutes
hosting another two hour show Outwiredwith Greg Emmert and Scott Bahr.
We're gonna tie into the future ofcampgrounds and all that kinda stuff.
If not, we'll see you next week onanother episode of MC Fireside Chats.
Take care guys.
We'll see you.

Bye guys.

Alright.
See you

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MC Fireside Chats - July 23, 2025

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}MC Fireside Chats - July 23, 2025