Be Weird, Be Personal: Storytelling as a Competitive Advantage in the Age of AI

One of the first tours we published was by Shireen Habib, whose family has been in Borkup for over a century. She just understands the place really well and is able to take you to parts of it that wouldn't otherwise be interesting. So I think by prioritizing the personal, you actually changed the geography in a sense. You're able to open up parts of it. Most people here go to Borkup, they go to the place where you take the photos of the colorful houses, then you get back in your bus and off you go again. But if you do our tour, you go right up to the top of the hill where there's a tomb for a Sufi saint that I think most captonians don't know about. And it just changes your perspective on the place completely because now the geography of it has shifted through that kind of subjective take on the place. (upbeat music) - Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of the Tour of Printer Travel Business Podcast. I am your host, Mitch Bock, as always. And the topic today is near and dear to my heart. As many of you know, I run a tour guide training school called Trip School and one of the main things that we spend our time doing is getting human beings that come into our training program and turning them into great storytellers. I don't know if there's an exact definition, but I do know that I see every single tour business website claiming we have the best storytellers. And yet when I say to that tour operator or that guide, what is storytelling? I get as many definitions as I do people that I ask that question for. And part of it is because I don't think it is ever a single definition, I think it's evolving. And today in 2026, it is evolving largely faced with its enemy AI, a machine that can suddenly spit out and entertaining informative, extremely compelling narrative about a place, about anything you want, and do it instantaneously. So what is the tour guide doing if the technology can do that immediately? And I will say sometimes better than a human being or at least more confidently, it pretends anyway that it knows everything. And AI humans also wanting to feel a deeper sense of a place of story as we feel dehumanized by AI or by technology in general, by a sense of disconnection out there. These are the things that occupy a lot of my brain. And I wanted in 2026 and tour operator to have this ongoing conversation with smart people in our industry who have real points of view on this. And the first one that I thought of was a friend of mine, Ian Manley, who runs VoiceMap. VoiceMap is an audio guide for travelers who largely don't book guided tours. They're independent, they're solo or they're couples, but they still want that deep storytelling. And the reason I like Ian in particular is that not only does he have a lot of thoughts about AI because it does enter into conversation with what he's doing as an app developer, but he is also a former journalist. And so I think his viewpoint on AI and on digital storytelling on app-based tour guiding is an interesting one because he contends with this stuff every day, but comes from a very human point of view. And so Ian Manley, CEO, founder of VoiceMap, welcome to TourerPrinner. Hi, Mitch. I've wanted to do this for a while. Do you agree or disagree with kind of the framing of this conversation? From the point of view of me at VoiceMap, the ability of AI to tell a convincing story is potentially an existential threat for us, right? If AI is able to do this as well, or potentially even better, then a human can, then what does that leave for all of the publishers that we've worked with, right? VoiceMap has close to 1,000 publishers in 80 plus countries now, and we've been working with many of them for years, some of them for over a decade. And we've built this incredible library of fantastic storytelling. And what happens to that in a world where that can just be simulated away? And so, yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about it and thinking about what the community that we've built needs to do to carve out a part of this experience economy that can't be reproduced, that can't be imitated by AI. It's interesting, a lot of the tour operators and tour-punner fall into two camps, one that sort of see you a little bit as the enemy, sort of like you're stealing their customers by providing the digital alternative. And some also, some, in opposition to that, who see you as a complement to the service they're providing, because they can't be there for tens of thousands of customers if they're one tour guide, but they can, a version of them if they have sort of a digital product that complements their human products, that is part of your library or sold white label. What do you say to the tour operator community in general that sort of divides down this kind of binary of thinking about digital storytelling? And there are quite a few ways to respond to it. I mean, I think that the first thing to say is that voice map is now 12 years old. We've been working with tour guides since the beginning. And no single tour guide or tour operators ever come to me and said, that was a mistake. We've lost business because we created a voice map tour. And so the best sort of evidence I have for this not cannibalizing the market is that it's never happened, not to my knowledge. I must have done our tours with over 1,000 different people. I've got on calls with our top users. We survey our users regularly. And with almost no exception, there are people who don't do group tours. They may do private tours, but a private tour is something that people will do infrequently on a long trip. It's quite expensive. And they'll do it around something that they're really excited about. But they still need general information around a place. They need to get oriented. They are looking for ways of doing that at times that are convenient. On demand often very experienced travelers, travelers who want to go out there and use the efficiency of a self-guarded tour because without having to kind of move as a group and stop and then have the guide speak and then follow the guide again and then stop and gather around. You get a much more kind of efficient way of getting through the space and getting some context. And then I like to say that the tours then an invitation to spend more time now that you have a better understanding of where you are and what it's about. But then I think that the type of guide is really important as well. I would say that any guide that is really strong probably has more people to take around than they can take around. And often the type of tours where there's a lot of demand is not the type of tour that they want to lead necessarily. So the stuff that they're bought of, they can switch over to self-guarded and then focus on something new, something interesting, something that is maybe high paying niche. I think that the way that there's into play between guided and self-guarded creates opportunity for operators and for guides instead of taking away something. I think what makes voice map interesting is that you as a app developer come from a perspective, not of having worked in Silicon Valley and looking to scale something without the messiness of human beings, which I meet a lot of those people. You used to be a journalist. How did your journalism background inform what you set out to do in terms of guiding your creators or your storytellers in the direction of a compelling story? So I studied journalism at university. The University of Cape Town. I'm in Cape Town right now. So straight out of university, study and journalism, I went to London, ended up working at the Daily Telegraph on the Travel Desk, which was really exciting because at the time I was just super keen to break into journalism. But I found myself working on travel news and that was winter sports travel insurance or the price of duty free shopping. And I was working with people who had been doing travel news for a decade and realized this wasn't a great way to see the world and to experience the size and beauty of where we live, right? And so I left London, worked in a pub, saved up some money, and then traveled overland from London to Shanghai by land. And at the same time started one of the world's first travel blogs. I didn't like the word travel blogs, I called it a travel log. And founder, I guess a niche in long form journalism, self-published long form journalism. My focus was on trying to create an audience for this blog. That went reasonably well, but I also then, through that process, realized that if I was reporting on what I was seeing, it's only resonated to a point. But when I met somebody in a place and they showed me their little corner of the world, and I was able to relay that to my readers, to show them the world through this other person's eyes, that those stories were by far the most compelling. Carried on with the blog for close to a decade on and off, ended up living in Shanghai for three years, then picking up and traveling through Southeast Asia for a couple of years, a bit more time in India. And then eventually just before my 30th birthday came home and wasn't sure what I was gonna do. I didn't wanna turn into an X-bat with no. sort of links to my friends and family at home. I got this job that kind of fell into my lap of editing a manuscript for a self-guided audio tour of Namibia. It was 12 days in a four by four driving from lodge to lodge to lodge, but while this GPS unit was one of those hardware GPSs that you stick to the the windscreen, you know, that would take you from lodge, help you get from lodge to lodge, but also tell you what was around you. It is the second least populated country in the world, and so 12 days is a lot of contents, a lot of space to fill. And I just fell in love with this idea that as a journalist, as a storyteller, you could scale yourself to know where people would be when they heard a story and you would be able to grab their attention in a way that just isn't possible other than by being with them in person, right? It's the closest you can come to being there next to a person. And one of the biggest compliments our users will pay to our publishers, I think, is to say it felt like I was standing there with you or you were standing there with us. And so kind of looked at that business that I had done this Namibia to a four and thought, well, the hardware is going to go away. Mobile phones with their apps and with their own GPS are going to make this this hardware invalid. It's not going to be needed. And through my own experience of self publishing, having worked at a newspaper, I could see that by building a platform and opening it up, you could do something bigger than having writers to sit in an office in Cape Town and try and tell the stories of Namibia or the Rhine or Singapore. And they had no ownership over that story that it wasn't connected to their life and to their own experiences. And so creating a platform that allowed people to really talk about what a place looked like through their own eyes. And talking about their hopes, their fears, their memories, and creating a subjective version of this kind of audio guide experience by building out a platform was the goal from the start. You made me think of this psychotherapist named Carl Rogers. He coined this phrase or became famous for this phrase, what is most personal is the most universal. The idea that a human hearing another person's subjective experience connects with them much differently than if I only spoke in encyclopedic facts, generalities about Namibia, about the Namibian people versus this person. And I think the more things get couched in the authenticity of your own shared human condition, the more what you're saying is relatable and connecting to an audience. I think there's something really profoundly important about that lesson. Today is the day when guides need to be leaning into the personal and not the universal, the subjective and the vulnerable and not the objective and the safe. I mean the neuroscience thing is really clear. I've also been been looking at some research around this and some I think it was at UCL that neuroscientists put people into an MRI and told them two versions of the same story. One was subjective and one was objective and then they watched what parts of the person's brain would light up. And there was such a strong response in the subject of story that the person was actually trying to map their brain onto the brain of the person telling the story. Their brain started to light up in exactly the way that the person who was telling the story's brain was lighting up. We are sort of so hardwired to want to empathize and to try and sort of put ourselves in the shoes of the person telling us a story if that person makes it subjective. If they are situating a subject in that story, right? It kind of affects us neurologically at a very basic level. And the physical response that we get from audio is greater than the response we get from video. This has been clearly studied and you can look at temperature, heart rate, all of these physiological indicators of the sort of emotional impact that a person has from from something and audio upperformed video for that kind of emotional connection. The neuroscience thing is so interesting. I think the the the discoverers of this phenomenon were a tall an Italian neuroscientist. They became known as mirror neurons. The history of it is so interesting because it was discovered. I'm just trying to remember this based on monkey research. A monkey's brain that watched another monkey perform an action was lighting up inside with the same physical reaction as if they were doing it themselves. When I teach storytelling for tour guides, one of the ways that I try to think about it is I call it cinematic storytelling. You need to be painting images, creating scenes with emotional arcs because the more you do that, the more the human that's listening to that is living the experience along with you versus rationally taking this in as information and judging it or whatever. It's the difference between September 11th was a terrorist attack in which two giant buildings were hit on September 11th, 2001 by terrorists. You're just receiving information. If I were to tell you where I was the morning of September 11th, immediately just even the promise of me being about to hear where a human was positioned physically and what their emotional experience was going to be on that momentous day is it's turning your brain into a different type of receptive organism. I think that that creates a bit of pressure to say, you know, it has to be about where you were on September 11th and if you can't do something that is as powerful or that gives you that kind of authority, I mean, you're talking about living through a moment in history that you know is transformative and obviously it makes sense that people are going to be interested in that. But I think that you can do it in much smaller ways, that you know, you can talk about your relationship to a place in very ordinary ways and still connect with people in that way. You're right. The principle can be applied to absolutely everything and that for me speaks to your word ownership. You talked about kind of owning the story and to own the story you have to sort of acknowledge or understand your situatedness in the story. I think about this, for example, like in New York City, which is a patchwork of ethnic enclaves and there's one way of talking about it, which is just parachute in yourself and talking in generalities about the people of the place. The other way is to talk about the people you know or your perspective based on who you are and I think that latter has to be what we lean into today because I just don't think it's a satisfying and be ethical for anybody to enter in as a tour guide to a neighborhood and just say, this is who these people are. This is how their way of life is. I take a lot of tours professionally and me as a random white guy from Wisconsin that moved to New York 20 years ago talking about Chinatown is a perspective. Now, I know people I have experience there, but I shouldn't come in as this general authority with a scripted list of objective remarks about what this place is. I think it's unethical and uncompaling. So I talked about the hardware company and how I could see that going away, but also this possibility of creating a platform that allowed anybody to create this kind of story, this kind of content. And I was giving you the kind of the brief version of that story, but that company brought me into build a team and we got the job actually of updating the content for the city site scene bus here in Cape Town. And Cape Town obviously anywhere in South Africa complicated history where a middle class white guy should probably be a bit circumspect about taking too much ownership of other people's stories. And so in that process kind of was trying to figure out how you could do this and really didn't find that many tools to do it in a way that would be okay for city site scene, right? They wanted that bird's eye view that varies middle of the road, not going to upset anybody, not really going to move anybody either type of storytelling. So one of the first tools we published was of a neighborhood just above Cape Town's city center called Borkup. Borkup just means sort of upper Cape. And that was where when the slaves from mostly from Indonesia but from other places too, we're freed here. They moved up to live on this the side of this hill above the city. And it's this really unique neighborhood that just we could not do justice to through the lens of a kind of a corporate tour. One of the first tools we we published was by Shireen Habib, whose family has been in Borkup over a century. And that is still just a great tour because Shireen understands the place really well and is able to take you to parts of it that wouldn't otherwise be interesting. So I think by prioritising the personal you actually changed the geography in a sense you're able to open up parts of it. So most of Most people here go to Boa Cup, they go to the place where you take the photos of the colorful houses, then you get back in your bus and off you go again to whatever's next. But if you do our tour, you go right up to the top of the hill where there's a tomb for a Sufi saint that I think most kept onions don't know about. And it just changes your perspective on the place completely because now you are, you know, the geography of it has shifted through that kind of subjective take on the place. The story makes the place. One of the things that I fight against is the idea that there's this canonical way to talk about a place. That if I'm in Midtown Manhattan, I talk about the Empire State Building, the Christ they're building, Grand Central Terminal Fifth Avenue because those are the things that the tourists want to hear. How you talk about those is completely up for grabs. What stories are you choosing to surface about the place and why? There's a French guy, Guy de Boer, who coined the term, I think, psychogiography, which I love that word because it's like geography is largely this mental understanding of the place. It's a mental mapping of the city or of the location based on the stories you hear the way your brain thinks about it. There's a lot of things wrapped up until like what that means, what kind of psychogiography you're creating for a person. I think of in New York the way that there's like these imaginary boundary lines where that's where crime happens and this is where safety is. And it might just be across the street. I'm certain there's similar psychogiographical tendencies in a place except Africa. And so one of the core questions is how do I do justice to this place and doing justice to the story, to the struggle, to the physicality of the place by who you choose to highlight and where you choose to go? Yeah, I am a little worried about saying that you know you, Mitch or me and can't talk about Chinatown because we don't have roots there that we're sort of interlipers and imposter's and we should stay away from it. That I think is also not helpful. I agree. Yeah. So what's the solution? I don't know. I'm trying to think of one, but I'm a bit stuck. I mean, if I think about how I would tell some of the stuff that I've learned from doing Shereens to a book up, I would probably foreground the fact that this is the person who told me the story, right, that that I've got this friend and she told me about this thing, and that kind of is what I was doing with the travel blog Old Old Dwondering was always looking for somebody. That was a journalistic shortcut because there was no way that I could compress the experience of a place into the time that I was there. But again, you just come back to whose eyes are you actually looking through when you look at the place? If you don't feel that it's useful to show the person that place through your eyes, whose eyes can you show it through? And that doesn't have to be you, maybe. And actually in New York, we've got Tom Darbyshire, who I think you've done one or two of his tours, actually. And he is reluctant to position himself in this story, but he always puts a human clearly kind of in the frame, right? He's always talking about somebody and how they were relating to the place. You're right. We're not at Monashine in the sense that nobody that isn't Chinese is allowed to speak about Chinatown. I think it's about acknowledging, first of all, that I have a perspective based upon who I am is important because it does color everything that you say. And I think second of all is to lean into the personal versus speaking in a kind of authoritative generality. The first point is solvable by just saying, don't show up in a neighborhood and say, this is how the Chinese are. But rather what I've learned and I'm on a learning journey as everybody is. And this is what I've learned. And then also acknowledging that your sources are people and highlighting that person sharing the story of your friend X or people that you've spoken to. That has profound implications for how a tour operator thinks about training their guides. It might mean that you hire and train guides that have relationships with place that involve them as a person. And not just are you an entertaining, entertaining human being that can memorize the script? Perfect. You're hired. Now go into this neighborhood and deliver my script and deliver my product. That's actually kind of the thing that I'm criticizing and probably not winning fans for right now because I think that's the dominant way that a lot of like day walk into a race do operate. I am thinking that probably some people listening to this would think that there's a lot of work nonsense that doesn't help anybody run a tour business. Yeah, absolutely. By the way, that is why I started this whole year with somebody who specifically spoke against that on your tire not. There is no separation between thinking about these things and the practical implications for your business is bottom line because you already get five stars, but underneath the hood or the bonnet wherever you are. It's your tour. The experience is the emotional resonance that your customer has and I spent 25 years as a tour guide watching people leave after two hours together, crying or hugging each other or feeling like, wow, what just happened. So I think there's a direct business case to be made for thinking about this stuff, whether people do or don't. That's up to them. But I think it's one of the most important things we should be doing. We've got somebody who is a Cambridge graduate and the tour of Cambridge is popular, but they refer to getting married in a chapel at one of the colleges and they personalise the tour and it's great if that's what you're after, but you do get the kind of, comogenly, personally saying, well, this was full of personal waffle and I wanted more dates and names and raw information here. But that's a retreating that's going to become increasingly hard to defend that with AI's encroachment on just parroting facts in a presentable way, in a way that is super convenient and in many cases adapted to what it knows about the user so that it's tailoring the information that surfaces and the way it presents it to the person who they understand really well. And so the more that a tour is taking somebody outside of themselves, the more defensible it is as a product, I think. I live in Dumbo, Brooklyn and every single time I walk my dog, I bump into a tour and I'd spy on those tour guides and more than looking at the tour guide, I look at the faces of the customers. I am looking for attention and engagement, I'm looking for smiles, I'm looking for something that indicates that something special is happening. I see a lot of people half listening and we are in an age of half listening in general, right? Netflix literally creates movies for people who are also scrolling on their screens. And to that point, I think that the reason TikTok is so compelling is that it has created this vocabulary of emotional content that hooks people in in a pretty dramatic way. How you tap into the detention span has definitely changed and we're not ready to just sit there and possibly listen unless it's particularly compelling. I don't know, do you agree? Well, I'm not going to answer directly. I'm going to ask if you have heard the New Rosalie album Lux and what your thoughts are? I study classical music at a music conservatory for four years. And so I find the opening orchestral scoring cheesy and basic and it annoys me that people find it profound. My husband loves it. And I think what I love is that it inspires reactions because it's so weird. Even if you don't like the music, you have to admire that she took some risk and she did something that could have been pretty unpopular, but ended up being really worthwhile. And so I take a lot of heart from that and also take a lesson about how it's better to take risks to be weird, to put things together that people wouldn't have thought belong together and make these unusual connections and because imitating the generic has never been cheaper or easier. So be your weird self, that's my lesson from it. I think of my friend, Ben, who's building a sandwich to her because he's obsessed with sandwiches. My friend, Sam, who built a bagel tour because he loves bagels and turned it into a festival called bagel fest, which took over a baseball stadium in New York City when they hosted it last year. So be as you say aggressively different. Take a risk. Make unusual connections. This is the age of embracing your weird. I think those are all brilliant takeaways for how we should be responding to the title wave or tsunami of generic that is overwhelming us. The Commudians can get their facts more easily than ever. So you kind of want to reshape the geography around what is personally relevant. I'm working on my first voice map tour since forever, right, of Cape Town. And trying to figure out how to make it something that is still generically relevant to people from outside of Cape Town that they will feel by the end of it, that they have learnt an enormous amount about how the city was put together. But also how that still means something today. And the best way to talk about how it still means something today is to talk about how it means something to me and to the people around me, right? And I think that that's often the steps that people miss. And you know, you're talking about food tours. I'm more of a sort of a history tour person. And if you just leave it there in the past, you kind of miss this real opportunity to make history relevant, right, to bring it forward into the world that people actually have around them. And I think that you feel this more keenly sometimes if you're doing a self-guided tour because it's just you and the headphones, right? And if the person doesn't bring you into the here and now, often, then you're left thinking, well, this could have been a podcast, right? I didn't need to go out and do this in the world. I could have just consumed this, you know, while washing the dishes. And again, it's that subject that kind of, it's through them that you connect to the place. And so you've got a foreground that subject. You bring up podcasts and that that makes me think audio storytelling seems like a great opportunity for conversations. Imagine right now you and I are pushing against each other or saying yes and offering different perspectives. I don't know. Shouldn't there be more of that in audio guides? I think of, for example, something that Cape Town where why does it need to be told through just one storytelling perspective when you could record something with two different points of view, the point of view of somebody who lived. The point of view of Elon Musk's father and of Nelson Mandela. Well, I've nothing to do with him, please. It's not quite so. Unfortunately, the technical and business case for that is sort of complex. The conversation thing, I don't know how well that works. If you want something that's tight that feels effortless to use, we don't want people stopped for long stretches. Not really knowing how long they're going to be there for and why they're there. Because we're trying to manage attention spans just like a guide would and a conversation obviously has to have time to develop and go in its own directions just like this one. You know, I was thinking, how do you solve for that? I had mentioned earlier in this conversation the imaginary line that exists on the upper side of Manhattan upon which crossing it you enter into the dangerous part and that line is East 96 Street in East of Central Park and below that is the upper east side endless billionaires and millionaires and old ladies with a bedroom for each of their 19 cats. And you cross East 96 Street and you're in Spanish Harlem. Ethnic enclave, this kind of phrase that covers a lot of racism and also just thoughts of kind of like, oh, exotic or different. You're just crossing a single street. So give me a freaking break. The actual geography or topography is never that. So imagine, I don't know, the storyteller switches as you cross that line. I'm taking the voice map 96 Street tour and I'm just hearing about wealth and all of these dumb rich people and their rich lives and their rich buildings and I cross it and I'm in a different psychogiography, right? With a different storyteller. You could do that in South Africa, in London, in Paris. You could do that anywhere. I think there's creative ways in which you start to bring in multiplicity of views. But also I'm not running the company. So I don't know the distance case for creating that. I mean, I like the idea. Mitch, you should get started. I've promised you a voice map in the past. I would love to. So I would include myself. I would create a tour of Dumb O and I will one of these days. Get off, get off my get off my back. And I wouldn't definitely include myself. I've been such a pissed about it. I know. I think one year ago you brought it up once. But what I wouldn't do is say this is where I got married. So I want to circle back to that because I think that's a false impression of what injecting the personal means to just say little dilatantish facts about your life. Like, oh, this is my local pub where I get a pint. I think that's dumb personal or it's like selfish personal because you're not doing anything to build a scaffolding or a bridge of understanding. Between the listener and yourself. And I think that's what good storytelling or good teaching does. The guy who says this is where I got married. That does nothing to propel the conversation forward. It does nothing to create an opinion in the listener that allows them to enter into even an imaginary dialogue if I'm just listening through an audio tour. So maybe that's the divide because there's no risk. Right. When you are giving your guides a script and saying God can do this. And then you're trying to say, but make it your own. That's a difficult thing to suggest that somebody does unless you are willing to yourself take risks and allow them to be weird and be themselves and adapt that script and trying to work on this Cape Town to a while testing a version of it. So the in front of the CrotaCourque which is this the big church, the Dutch reform church here, the Africans kind of their church Cape Town for a while didn't have a church because people would just go into the Dutch fort on a Sunday to go to church. But then they eventually built this thing and that's got a statue of a guy who was an advocate for the Dutch and emerging Africans language once a year. And it's got on the base of the statue the words, are we serious in Dutch? And that was his thing about, you know, are we serious about our identity as Afro-Canos? Right, it was this rallying cry for what eventually kind of led in some ways to apart that. But before that, the Afro-Canos were going to define their identity as opposed to the British here. And I was sitting there thinking about it and thinking, you know, are we serious? It's still really relevant today, both to any South African particularly to white and maybe especially to Afro-Canos. Because so many of us leave. So many of us go and make our lives in Australia and New Zealand, the UK. As refugees in America in small numbers, Canada, lots of South Africans. And so this idea that, you know, I think many people here have really warm feelings about home, but are they really serious? So you've taken this thing that's kind of sitting on a statue that's that's calcified and talking about how it still speaks to the present and this idea of South African identity. You know, I've spent as much of my adult life outside of South Africa as I have in it. And I grapple with my own sort of sense of belonging and fear about the future of South Africa versus going somewhere that would be a safer bet potentially. And I think that those sorts of feelings about a place where, you know, it's not just sort of a shallow anecdote but connects to insecurity, to dreams, hopes, hates, loves. And that is definitely more powerful. Yeah, you know, if I were to go to South Africa and ask 100 South Africans, what is an Afri-Conor? I think those 100 people would all have emotional reactions before they have informational reactions. It's so interesting to even think about it through the prism of today versus during apartheid versus before. So I don't know, like what service are we doing as place-based storytellers to say to a group of travelers coming from afar landing in South Africa? And then you say, well, an Afri-Conor is a word that denotes the Afri-Con speaking descendants of Dutch Huguenots from the 17th century. Like what are we doing as an industry as storytellers by reducing it to these like generalities and platitudes? I guess that's what I'm trying to get at when you say there's hopes, dreams, fears, contestations, fights, bitter, bitter fights, underlying it. And so like, how do we get to the truth of a place? If your travelers leave three hours later, being like, I think I know Afri-Conor's now. They're the white Dutch people that speak a weird version of Dutch, but have tried to form a national identity in South Africa. It feels like they've left without trying to grapple or understand they would what an Afri-Conor is. If you've got guides that you're encouraging to say, well, say whatever you want about Afri-Conor identity, that could go badly wrong for you as a business. So yes, but let me pause you there because a lot of tour operators with their guides do kind of say this thing. Like here's the script, but we leave room for you to make it your own and then give the guide that freedom. And I understand that the justification I hear of that kind of mentality is that the guide is the professional and they know what they're doing. I think from my perspective of working with thousands of guides, this is a terrain that requires conversation and a new skill set that not every guide is necessarily equipped to also have. and what I would do in that case is Part of my guide trainer, part of the ethos or the identity of my tour company is to gather the guides together and have this conversation about these things. And hopefully you have a diverse group of guides that offer a diverse set of perspectives so that first of all, I can be informed by a variety of different perspectives. And then you as either the tour operator facilitating this or you bring in somebody skilled to lead this kind of conversation, you build the parameters for your tour, kind of in public with your guides teasing out the limits of speech or the limits of where you go with kind of identityarian politics. So that you as the tour company then aren't simply reacting to the moment there's a one-star review because a guide to something too far, you know, which is usually kind of how it goes, right? Whereas you confront load it by having a group conversation with a diverse group of people that understand kind of like the context of what we do as play space storytellers. I actually learned that when I was doing that tour through Namibia, right at the beginning, was that you can very easily go beyond what's right in front of you. 12 days of driving, you've got a lot of narratives of space to fill and for most of that it's desert, it's a fence, you kind of have to very quickly look at something and then kind of look at what it could be a symbol of, you know, you get three kinds of fence in Namibia. You get one that is for cattle, one that is for Angora goats and one is for game and you can teach people to spot what kind they're looking at. And then quickly enough you're talking about who owns the land, what kind of economy Namibia has, its environmental issues and you know, you just started by looking at a fence. So I often find that people kind of get stuck at the surface there that maybe you know, they just need to kind of spend a little bit of time thinking, pulling the thread and thinking about where something really goes. For me, it's the difference between asking what is that versus why is that? I love the metaphor of pulling the thread, like keep going down that rabbit hole a little bit often when I'm training guides and thinking about doing research on a place, like ask why five times about the thing and you get really, you get into really weird places, right? So you know, that fence in Namibia, you could say, what is that fence? Oh, it's made out of wood, it's got wire, it's for cattle, it's for bowl, but why is that fence there or like, why is that fence? It's kind of a different question because it very quickly might become about why was this area settled and that might be a geographical topological geological answer. It could be a sociological answer and all these types of answers. That was revealed to me when I went to Nicaragua last year. It was a country I'd never been to before. I just noticed everything was built up touristically on the on the ocean side and nothing really as much on the Caribbean side. And I was like, why? Why is it really hard to get over there? And so go like the roads aren't easy to get to. You're going through a letter reinforced. Why aren't there a lot of roads? And very quickly, the Nicaragua that I was talking to about this was in the dense territory of indigenous rights of political regimes of all sorts of like large scale things and deep identity things. So that's where another kind of Nicaraguan is and we Nicaraguan don't want to go there. What do you mean we Nicaraguan? Who are these different kinds of people? Really, really interesting. What does that imply about what we're trying to do in developing products that are meant to be sold and enjoyed by a tourist? How far down the rabbit hole do we go? And when and why do we stop? I think increasingly if you look at AI, it is being forced into very sanitized answers. Right? Because in the early days, you know, Gemini got itself into all kinds of trouble for, you know, black Nazis. You remember that? Black George Washington, every famous historical leader suddenly was black in America, yeah. Yeah. So they will avoid politics. They will avoid difficult uncomfortable subjects that are contentious. And so the more you can deal with those without losing perspective and balance and the ability to see both sides, the more you're getting into a place that is and will remain kind of uniquely human. There was a study done about writing produced using AI and the idea was essentially that the quality of the output is more consistent, but the range is much more limited. Because everybody is starting with a prompt instead of a blank page, let's say as a writer. They kind of all end up in more or less the same place. Prompt tends to be something that's fairly shallow because the whole promise of AI is that you can put less in and get more out. And so where you still kind of step away from that and really kind of think through the thing for yourself on a piece of paper or whatever that is, but if it's not mediated, you're creating something that couldn't be created with AI. And I think that that's where we all need to be doing our work these days. Because it's just going to get better and better at simulating what on the surface looks like great storytelling. I'm on LinkedIn regularly and already months ago, there was the crisis of the M-dash where the minute that showed up and somebody's post, it indicated it was AI and everybody was using that as shorthand detection. But what I found in a deeper way is almost instantly now, I can tell if AI touched this post. And it's not so obvious. It's like an intuition that develops inside of you. It's a flatness. Yeah. You spoke about this very early in our conversation three hours ago when you talked about that kind of nutritionless M-d. It's there, but it's not really there. It doesn't feel real or tangible. And there's a hollowness to the words of the mediocrity of the language, which does like everything right and yet doesn't really say anything and happens to like cause me to like lose faith in the person posting. I'm like, well, you don't really respect my time enough to like have a real thought. I'm just thinking about some of our publishers who do play it safe and do end up with really sort of generic tours. And what we've noticed in the last 12 months or so is that we get negative reviews for these tours because people think that the real human is AI. And they're reviewing that kind of thing much more negatively than they did before. So these tours have maybe been available for three years. Good reviews in, you know, 2023, reasonable reviews in 2024, 25 people like, this is AI, you're wasting my time. I've been had. I've been duped. I didn't want an AI's opinion on a place. I wanted a real person and he has one star. And that is definitely not going to go away. That is absolutely fascinating. I mean, the, the, the soul of this conversation that were, you know, approaching from a million different points of view is what is good storytelling in the age of AI? And you've just shown the clearest example yet of the fact that it needs to look different than even three years ago. Our little spidey senses are up, noticing anything that feels AI because the voice imitation has gotten so well. And so you can't sound like, like you're reading a script. You have to like be better than that. You have to sound real in a new way. I wonder if that changes the level of quote unquote professionalism that you've spent so long taking so much care for. Does it actually end up making a story teller sound like to AI and they need to be a little messier? I think that if we left in some of the stumbles and the, the mass noises and the mistakes that people make, it would be clear it isn't AI. So, so yeah, I think you are in a position of having to forefront the humanity and part of that is the mistakes, the, the, the stuff that isn't professional. And there's again neuroscience around us, right, the, the prep fall effect you heard about this. If you have two competent people that come in for say a job interview and one of them spills coffee, the person who spilled the coffee is remembered much more fondly than the person who didn't make a mistake. It's interesting because I think we're all kind of, I use AI all the time, right? I'm using it to do things at a speed that was just not possible before and, and to do things technically that I just didn't have the time to learn and it's very alluring, right? But because we're all doing it and we all know that the work that goes into creating an email using AI or a LinkedIn post using AI is minimal and the worst is that these, you know, these emails you get from salespeople that try and like summarize you and who you are and what you do and sometimes they, they forget to, to, to remove the prompt. But you just know that this person has indefinitely not spent the time trying to understand you, they've just told AI to paraphrase what you do and it doesn't. It doesn't work, right? I would be very interested to understand from people who do these email outreach campaigns, whether their conversion rates are actually better using AI, or if people are actually responding more negatively to, you know, some AI version of what they think people want to hear. There's this viral post that had thousands of comments on LinkedIn, which was this guy who was like, "I've cracked the sales code, sent out 4,000 DMs to a targeted audience with this automation," and it converted at whatever. I got 40 new leads out of it or something like that, converted into all of this business. All of the comments were just like hailing this brilliant thing. You just pissed off 3,960 people and devalued the joy of interacting on this platform through direct messages. I wrote that and I got a bunch of comments or a bunch of likes because I commented and I was like, "I'm so glad that worked for you, but it's the reason why I spend less time on this platform," you know? And so the cost barrier is so much lower to inshidifying the internet and just creating or adding to this mountain of content that is causing us to be more aware. And for me, it all keeps coming back to what you said about being aggressively different, being human. I was on Amazon yesterday because I am currently holding a nine-week old puppy and. He's the heading incredibly well. He is asleep and if you notice, I'm not just tickulating at all. Only my arms are fully and in these conversations, my arm has not been up once because he's asleep, but I went on to Amazon to buy the spray that you get to make sure they just didn't eat all my lovely tables and things made out of wood. And there was a product that had five stars in 800 reviews and another one that had 4.7 stars and like 180 reviews. And the first one I skipped over because I said they've gained the system, those are all fake. How could it work 100% of the time? And I went to the slightly crappier review product with fewer reviews. That was my innate customer tendency now. That, to me, has a lot of implications for what we're doing as experiential businesses, whether digital or inhuman. Yeah, for sure. I think being in perfect creates trust, right? And being honest about that. But I see it on the Tuppernau Facebook group all the time. I'm freaking out because they've got a one-star review. Seth Goedin talks about this a lot, right? Screw the one-star review. It wasn't for them. You didn't make it for them. Obviously if you genuinely screwed up then you've got to iron it and fix it. But a lot of the time it's just, well, it wasn't for you. And that creates trust, right? And letting that stay out there without scrambling to try and remove it is how you can at a distance build trust. That's a useful point. It is. And yet, this is what pisses me off about the kind of state of our industry today. It is so dependent on reviews that when your business is based in a decent percentage on a platform, all you're trying to do is make sure you get the five stars because your listing position is like overwhelmingly dependent on the reviews that you get. And so if I'm on any of these tour platforms, the difference of my business bottom line is severely affected by being number three versus number one. Forget it if you're number seven. And so that one-star review can suddenly drop you down in a major way to the point that you've lost major business. And so to my eyes, it's created an industry where OTA dependency is only increasing in the sense that the market share is like rising and rising and rising. So like it's just going to drive us more and more towards the safe middle because otherwise I can't run my business. I can't risk that. It will be interesting to see, you know, we've talked obviously very much about the product side with AI, right? There is a future where the distribution side gets better because of AI, where that moat that all of these companies are trying to create for themselves through personalization, through understanding the user, through being able to customize any answer that they give to the personality and the preferences of that person. Mean that you don't have to be on the front page of a viator or, you know, get your guide to be doing good business because we're going to see more things going to the long tail. And so you're maybe, if you're thinking about how you optimize for AI, you're better off maybe talking about who the tour is for, right? Up front and saying like this isn't for, you know, talk positively about who you think it's ideal for, but indirectly you're talking about who it isn't for, right? And I think that increasingly that is going to be hard discovery works. I agree with you in principle or in theory that sounds like a plausible option for the future. Here's what I'm worried about. It's the underlying assumptions on the data set that these recommendations operate off of the LLM, it's like a black box. We largely don't know what its surface is as a recommendation. And right now we don't know who's going to win, but basically the structured data is going to win. And so if it's largely surfacing recommendations because it's Gemini and it's trained on millions, billions of Google reviews, then it's just going to surface reviews. It's going to surface the things that are already like surfaced because they fit into these boxes. And exactly I think of is my business partner Peter Sein. So he's my partner at tour, and remember when we're going into business together. You know I had no choice. The crustiest, the most contancorous, the most opinionated and weird. And that's why I love him. You don't know what's going to come out of this mouth, but you do know it's not going to be a platitude and you do know it's going to be from lived experience. He was a tour operator. And I remember looking up one of his businesses and it had like a 2.7 on Google. Do you know how bad you have to be to get a 2.7? You have to be basically a scam. It was his business which took people on multi-month trips across at least a thousand miles of a journey. You know how you feel with a group of people after traveling for a thousand miles in the most unforgettable or unforgettable, but also unhospitable terrains possible through deserts. You hate it. You hate it. You hate it. You hate everybody. You want to hate yourself. The lodging was insane. Peter Sein as a guide is insane. And then you go home and your life was absolutely changed. And then you find yourself still talking about it at dinner parties 10 years later, right? And it is your personality, right? That time you went on this trip, it's like all you bring up and you don't realize how you were stretched and how you were changed and how you were remolded by this basically shitty experience for several months with a bunch of people. That's what I want more of because that is definitely not marketing buzzwords. He ran an insane and successful business through this and that's kind of always been his model. That's why I love him so much because that's what I want our industry to be versus a slick website that says transformational travel experiences to Costa Rica that are just still good, but they're safe, but they're not extreme. And so I just feel like we're like losing the extremes every day in our industry and that makes me kind of sad. So I hope this is my answer to your question. I hope that AI brings us back to those kinds of extremes, being able to surface, surface that to our, my fear is that it's going to just rely on structured data sets that are just the same old, which is like easily digestible pricing and review information. Well, I guess there's also this bifurcation around whether you're paying for AI or you know, you're a free user and probably the majority will never pay and they're using chat GPT and there they become the product and that structured data that drives some revenue to open AI is going to be the experience for the majority of people. And as of taping, you just saw the introduction of chat GPT ads showing up for the free users popping up. Yeah, and so it's going to become just another place in which there's this kind of tax on people who kind of fall to pay. Whereas the people who are paying for AI actually to get a much more personalized experience. And so you'll get this kind of entrenchment of the luxury versus kind of mass market. It makes me think of an absolutely horrific thing that Mark Andrews and the VC guy wrote in which he said in the future, we're going to be talking about how the wealthy have what's called reality privilege. And he basically said, it's a value judgment to think that the real world is always better because if you're poor, then you might enjoy your headset that takes you to a better world, a better digital world where you're happy. And so only the wealthy get to enjoy reality and actual things because for them life is better outside of the metaverse. That was a real thing said by a real person. with some of the deepest pocketbooks in the world to fund technology. So I don't have any faith that the promise of distribution being more personalized in a good way is going to win because I think OTA is having to dismantle and pocket books. - Yeah, commissions are going to win. And you're probably right there. I mean, the stuff that's coming out of some of these brilliant minds and Silicon Valley at the moment is quite terrifying, right? The idea that it's fine if everybody's poor because there's no work left because of AI, they'll have the AI be customers for other AI. And so, you know, our feudal Silicon overlords will be fine because they'll have the AI's continuing to pay for them. That's maybe more dark than we need to. - Maybe we don't exactly end on this, but you're not wrong. I mean, feudalism is the right metaphor because you need to keep your underlings hungry to keep them working. If they're too satisfied, then they're not providing extractive value for you. - I mean, the feudal thing sort of makes me think about pilgrimage, right? The idea of this transformational journey that we now go to Notre Dame Cathedral or to Santiago de Compostela and have I think these somewhat flat experiences because they've been commodified to a point of being too dimensional. I've always kind of fascinated by what does pilgrimage look like in the present. I think when I was 20 and embarking on this this overland trip, you could pick up the lonely planet and that would be your Bible and you felt good about yourself and putting yourself out there into the world and travel was seen as a positive thing. I think we think of it much more ambiguously now that travel is really complicated and we all feel guilty about how much we fly because of all of the greenhouse gas or the carbon emissions, sorry. And so if we're going into a techno feudal future, what happens to pilgrimage? - There's a wealth poet that I've been in love with for the last 25 years since I got one of his books, just randomly Aris Thomas had this one poem in which he had this phrase, "In cities that have outgrown their promise "people are becoming pilgrims again." And I just think about that a lot because tourism isn't that old in the shape of mass tourism and the commodification of it and everything else that we are currently currently in. And so we shouldn't take anything as too written in stone. I think we're entering into a period of pilgrimage as creators of experiences because humans are evolving, the tools and the things that we are showing people are changing meanings for people. We are becoming more aware of different kinds of things like all of this stuff is changing. And so I think the cities in this kind of metaphorical way are outliving their usefulness. This idea of what a tour is, this idea of what a guide should be doing, the idea of what a customer wants, the idea of how to run and create tours and sell it as a company. I think all of those promises are sort of no longer delivering in the same way. So for me, the posture we should take is a posture of pilgrimage, which is like a posture of seeking and of journey. And one thing a pilgrim knows is that you don't get to your destination very, very quickly. And that the going on the journey is the point. The point isn't to get that shell in Compostela. There's easier ways to get a shell. The point is that you just spent a month of your life journeying. It's a transformational experience, right? That you come back has something different to the person you left. Now, I do think that somewhat ambitious for an audio tour. I'd like to think we could have a little sort of, you know, like a micro vision of that. Now, but the creator should be on a pilgrimage right now. You should be on a pilgrimage. You are. You're not just a guru sitting down in order to tell me exactly why you have everything figured out. I know you wrestle with these questions because there aren't perfect answers for audio tour app that needs to be distributed through OTAs and needs to be professionalized and scaled. I know you're seeking what the story telly mean in 2026 for you as a company and for our world. I guess I'm saying we should all be seekers right now. Yeah, and ultimately, you know, it's about what resonates with an audience, but if you don't risk, right, to me, that the, and I'm not a person who easily forefrants myself or wants to risk looking incompetent or looking like I have weird opinions and really unusual way of seeing the world. But if you're leading a company and you're asking other people to do this, you have to do it yourself, right? You have to be willing to put yourself out there to be vulnerable to make a few mistakes. And the thing that I like in doing research around this is that the evidence is that it's a really powerful thing to do that is perhaps less risky than it feels. The journey is less dangerous. The, you know, the territory is less unsafe than it might feel when you embark. Our audience, as largely made up of small and medium-sized businesses, who can take risks that the big boys can't. And one thing that, for example, the tech industry does show is that startups can win against incumbents all the time because they're built for change and for speed and for innovation in a way that the big boys aren't. And so I hope that it's the golden age of lots of new experiments that grow our industry and widen the scope of what we think is possible as place-based experiences, whether digital, led by a human, off-guided mountain hikes through the hills of Ireland, whatever it might be, I think the lessons are applicable, whatever the shape of your business is. I will ask you this to close in after this exploration, this verbal pilgrimage with you. What is good storytelling in the age of AI? I think ambition is part of it. Do something that have a vision that perhaps you can't quite achieve, try and go beyond what you've seen elsewhere and be OK with it not quite being perfect because then it's in a really sort of interesting and human way. But I think it's potentially the ambition to tell stories in new ways, to tell stories in ways that have not quite been done before and using media that potentially are not widely used. I keep coming back to this ambition. And it partly is old Rosalia who was ambitious in using 13 languages and putting that out there as pop and then kind of bringing together Flamengo and Regatin and classical that she pulls that off. And so it's about being brave and authentic, I guess. She took risks. She was authentic to herself. She was experimentative. And she was taking the vocabulary of music into new directions. And it was wildly successful. Ian Manley, thank you for thinking through this meaty topic with me. And thank you for expanding my mind and leaving me with even more questions to spend my time thinking about than when we started. I appreciate it. Thank you for making space for it, Mitch. And I'm glad we've-- I think we've skirted around this conversation and multiple conferences. And the conference is always so busy that there's never been a good long stretch of time, at least while sober. So-- Yeah, I was going to say that this conversation goes very different night when it's done over a few drinks. We solve things pretty quickly at that point. Yeah, that's for sure. Yeah, well, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for being a true partner. Thanks, bitch. [MUSIC PLAYING]