[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam Foreign.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Camp Guys podcast. We are here this morning at Crowders Camps. I am Jay Oliver, founder and executive director of Crowders Camps, and today my special guest is Nate Flowers. Hey, Nate.
[00:00:48] Speaker C: It's been a while.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: It's been a while. Yeah. You're back.
[00:00:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: He's back off of Camp Battle Goal Camp at. Instead of Sabatica. Took a camp out of.
[00:00:57] Speaker C: What was I supposed to take a vacation? Because you're about to. I missed that memo.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: You're about to go to Italy.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:01:02] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: So good for you.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Come. Coming up.
[00:01:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Nate is the director of ministry development here. He does incredible job with technology, with sales, with all those good things in that department, and I thought he would be a great person to bring on here today as we talk about our first.
First category of what's Camp Ministry going to be like in 10 years? If you missed the last broadcast of the Camp Guys podcast, go back and check that out, because we have about seven categories we're going to be talking about. What is camp ministry going to look like in 10 years? Now, Nate is a huge Jetsons fan. The Jetsons cartoon, he thinks, going to be. They're going to be flying cars.
Campers want to wash themselves. They'll just hold their hands up and walk through the shower, you know, so I'll have to hold him back a little bit today.
[00:01:53] Speaker C: I hope all of you are being nice to your Alexa at home, because she's going to run the world one day.
No, just kidding.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Hey, I'm sure. Just be. I'm totally honest. Just. I'm. I'm sure that there's some people listening to this broadcast that is going to be like, yeah, I'm a Terminator fan. I believe that robots are going to take over one day.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: And kill us all.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Because Terminator had a huge impact on. On my generation and beyond.
[00:02:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:20] Speaker B: Up. You know, that's. That's what we think of sometimes when we think about AI. And plus, you see all these reels and stuff of these little AI robots with real. Real flesh. Plastic flesh on.
[00:02:31] Speaker C: There's definitely some ethical things to watch out for. Though I will say a lot of that is a little bit doomsdayish. It is a little bit doomsdayish.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: It is. How can we spread the gospel and yet stay relevant with a generation that's going to be all digital, that's going to be.
Have a lower attention span, and they're going to be so used to screen. So how can we do this? So Today, let's dive in. Everybody might be thinking, man, that's less. That's crazy. It's kind of like the Christian rock coming out in the 80s, you know, don't do it. We can't do that. But you guys have to. You got to, you got to take your mind to ten years from now. Everybody's gonna be used to it.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: What Covid did to all of us is made it really easy for us not to leave the house and not get out of the car. You see, drive thrus are more packed now than. Than dining rooms and restaurants.
[00:03:25] Speaker C: There are restaurants opening up that are doordash only concept. Yeah, it is a kitchen and doordash drivers come and pick it up. There is no physical sit down.
[00:03:34] Speaker B: And just for the record, Chick Fil a started with just drive through.
I mean, how that came back around I don't know. But they started out with just drive thru. Now you can go to Chick Fil a here in Gas Gastonia, North Carolina. The dining room. Dining room's barely full. Just you can find a seat anytime you want to. Drive thru is wrapped around the building.
[00:03:53] Speaker C: Oh yeah. Probably 60 cars at any given point in that drive through.
[00:03:56] Speaker B: So people, people are going to be used to this type of tech.
But when does camps need to integrate it? I want to tell a story about my iPhone experience 2007. I go and I stand in line at the Gaston mall, which is not even there anymore. I go and have to. They want no prepayment or installment plan. You had to fork out 900 bucks at one time for the phone. Nobody does that, you know. And you literally paid the price for the brand new tech. And I did that day. But I've. I went to several youth events after that. I was a youth pastor during the time that time. Went to several events. Everybody thought I was a superhero because I had the brand new iPhone. It was amazing to have that brand new technology.
But I paid the price and the price was money. And right now, if a camp ministry, Bojangles can't afford it, but camp ministries can't go to this AI vendor, whoever is doing this for Bojangles, KFC and Taco Bell and say, hey, we want to integrate this at our camp because right now you are going to pay the price. But 10 years from now, it may be included in your toast or whatever POS system you have at your camp. If you don't have a POS system at your camp store, you're definitely trending towards the wrong direction because there's no financial accountability to that at all. And that's something we've ran into here. We've invested in toast, which I wish I could say they sponsored this podcast.
[00:05:23] Speaker C: But they're a restaurant industry leading POS system. They're the best in the business right now.
Other people have used square clover.
There's multiple different POS systems. They're all good. But for us, TOAST checked a lot of the boxes. But I know people that work at TOAST and they are already looking into this AI ordering, how do we integrate? I mean, you want to have partners that are on cutting edge. And so for us today, even a lot of the technology we talk about today, right now, a lot of camps can't afford what we may talk about.
But as the cost goes down, as more people do it, the cost will go down. And as the cost goes down, then camps may be able to adopt some of this.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: I would say this, this series of this season five series, if I could give it a name, it would be trending up. Yeah, because what we're trying to do is give resources to those who don't have resources but are in these certain areas. Are you trending up or are you trending down because technology is not going away?
No, I don't want to be a camp where there's no human interaction. I always want kids to sleep in a cabin, jump in a lake. That, that is the whole vision. But the part of what we do, we have to trend up. Another great example and is extremely relevant for camp ministries is our operations guys at Big Belly Trash cans where they compact themselves. You are also seeing this at Chick Fil A's and other different restaurants. Right now they're a hassle when they're, when they're compacting because you're standing there with your tray, your lemonade is about to fall over and you're waiting on it to compact. But think about how many times at camp we go around and have to empty trash cans when it could be compacting. And that brings in sustainability as well, you know, being less bags, less room type deal. So that was another great aspect. Let's talk about ropes for a second. Some of our other staff had the idea of digital ropes equipment like auto brakes. We already have the true blue technology that is, is really helping the safety of kids getting, you know, jumping off a 25 foot platform. But what if brakes and stuff, you know, had that technology to automatically start slowing you down and so, so there's not a huge jolt?
[00:07:37] Speaker C: Well, what if on a zip line, all of a sudden the trolleys can be set to different speeds. If you have somebody who's really scared, you can set it to five miles an hour.
[00:07:46] Speaker B: Hey, that's a great idea.
[00:07:47] Speaker C: And there's a motorized bearing in there that will control your speed. Whereas if you got an adventurous ready to go at 30 miles an hour and let them take off, turn it off.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:57] Speaker B: And then what if the trolley came back? Does. When me and my wife went on a cruise to Alaska, there was a four person zip line and they went, you know, the zip line went down those suckers, they went back on their own.
[00:08:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: So I'm assuming the technology is already there.
[00:08:10] Speaker C: Yeah, that's already there. But I think it's just going to keep getting better. Yeah, we also, you know, there's different things like if you go to, to Tweetsie Railroad, a leader was talking to me about it the other day, they have a auto flight device where it's actually calibrated to allow you to free fall for a certain distance and then catch you and slowly lower you to the ground. So like, let's just say It's a platform 70 foot in the air. You jump off, you're free falling for 20 foot, 30 foot.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:08:40] Speaker C: And then you kind of slowly, gently lower from there.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:45] Speaker C: It's calibrated to a certain distance.
But then also from the top, you only ever see somebody free jump off. You never see it catch them because you're so far off.
So there's stuff like that from a rope side that definitely could be integrated.
I think there's a lot of wearables or sensor based technology that could impact a lot of these different areas.
A good example that I like to use that could go with ropes or with waterfront is what if you had sensors and gates at the top of your water slide? There's a sensor at the bottom that says that this area is clear. There's no activity in this area. Then the gate opens and all of a sudden a camper can go down the water slide next and then the gate closes and stays shut until the way is clear. Same thing with ropes.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:30] Speaker C: Could you have a section where a light comes on or a gate opens only after the carabiner has been unclipped.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:38] Speaker C: Is there sensor based detection where from any particular place you can see if a gate is secure on a carabine?
Those type of safety practices are all applicable. They are very easy. Probably close to being rolled out by a lot of companies right now.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: I think everybody's thinking probably one question, you know, where do you find this Tech.
[00:09:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:09:58] Speaker B: You know, what do you look for? What do you find? And honestly, you guys are just going to have to search that. We don't have resources like that to give you or we would already be doing some of these things.
Another thing some of our staff came up with was, you know, again, security cameras, facial recognition, taking pictures of people as they come in the gate. So, you know, you got the extra line of security. Some people already have cameras and stuff around their camp. We do, we have 28. I call them all my buddies, my friends. Yeah, because they help accountability.
[00:10:30] Speaker C: Yeah. There's also more technology now where those cameras can be ingested into software and they can actually track a particular person's movement through the camp. So if you did have a rogue player come through the camp, the cameras would do the work for you as far as tracking them through the camp instead of you having to scrub through 28 different camera feeds at this particular time and try to figure out where they went, what they did. The other thing that I saw, you sent me a list last night and I was looking around and robotics was one of the categories. Did you know that there are now security rovers being sent out? A lot of government facilities, water treatment plants, stuff like that. Think like the Mars rover. Look, big off road, tires, and it has certain braces in it to unstuck itself, but it has cameras and alarms on it. And it literally drives around and you GPS map where it goes and it drives around and roams your property for security issues. So let's say that again, camp, 10 years from now, you've got a sensor on a few specific doors that are sensitive. Right the middle of the night, 2am, a sensor pops off.
That rover can go out there, check on it, and all of a sudden you realize it's just a raccoon getting into a trash can.
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Yeah, right.
[00:11:46] Speaker C: It saves your team a trip, but it also can help keep people safe. So there's robotics integrations too, that are happening now. We can't afford any of it right now, but it's super cool.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Willing to pay the price, right?
[00:11:58] Speaker C: It's super cool, yeah.
[00:11:59] Speaker B: Any new tech, you are going to pay the price. Again, example, LED wall. We have a 9 by 16 LED wall in our worship building. It was $106,000 when we bought it. We just got a price for our new camp we're building. And that same size wall is now $55,000, what, three years later? Two. Two years later.
[00:12:17] Speaker C: Two and a half years.
[00:12:18] Speaker B: Two and a half years later. So we paid the price up Front, Even though LED walls were out a little bit.
How long you think LED walls have been out before?
[00:12:26] Speaker C: We got 12 to 15. They've probably been out 12 to 15 years, you know, 20 years. But nobody could afford them. Yeah, they were just so expensive. It was something that you just rented for special events because you couldn't afford to buy them, but because they're half a million dollar investment. But now clearly not.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: Right. So before you go and buy a $10,000 projector, please check with AE Global in Charlotte, North Carolina. They're huge friends of ours.
Get a price on the LED wall and you will not regret, I promise. Let me just say this before we go any further. Don't be afraid of technology. I know a lot of us, we are a little Jewish, especially if you are older. I'm 49. If you're in your almost 60, you probably. I don't need that. I don't even like playing on my phone. Don't be afraid of technology because ministry can event advance with technology. I'm not afraid of technology. I'm afraid of trending down. And I want to be relevant to a digital world and keep the gospel first and foremost. So that was some stuff that our, our staff kind of just rambled off and our staff meeting. But here's some research. I found future technologies that could transform camp ministry.
We talked about a little bit about wearable biometric.
You're seeing this at Disney. You're seeing this at a lot of different places.
[00:13:42] Speaker C: As an organization, we have this stress flow where safety is the first thing we consider when rolling anything out. And whenever I thought about wearable tech, we haven't even talked about the health and wellness sphere popping up. Everybody's wearing an aura ring, heart rate tracker. Yeah. And so what if now all of a sudden your campers that come to camp with type 1 diabetes, their glucose monitors can be ingested into their counselor's system so that they can check on them.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:09] Speaker C: Their glucose monitor can be monitored. What if you have somebody who's anaphylactic? Shock to bees.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:15] Speaker C: Bee stings are a huge problem at camp. Well, what if they can wear a wearable that senses whenever there is a bee around? Or maybe not a bee around, but maybe their body's having a response and it can automatically flag it.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:28] Speaker B: Or all the way down to hydration.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:31] Speaker C: Like hydration monitors and different things like that. Like, I think a lot of this tech that the health and wellness space is using for fitness and things like that can very easily keep people safe at Camp, they're already people. We have somebody on our team who has a pacemaker and he has an app on his phone and his doctor told him that you have to keep the app running non stop 24 7. And that's how he is able to check and make sure it's working well. Campers now may be able to use that, but then as technology becomes more integrated, we can help them to take care of themselves.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: So you got the health aspect of wearables. We're going to call it wearables from now on. You got location tracking. So even as a camp, you could potentially maybe even see if there's some way to kind of put in an algorithm. How many people went down to your water slide? How many people went to the giant swing?
[00:15:22] Speaker C: The most common thing right now, even for Disney or other places, is they're using RF ID technology.
That's the most common right now. And I would say whenever we get down to talk about infrastructure, RFID is not going anywhere.
Now, there are newer, more advanced stuff, but basically RFID chips can be put in anything from a bib in a marathon running race to a bracelet to a chip, to a card, like a swipe card, like a hotel, like any of those. So what a lot of people are doing is every camper must wear a wristband. And then you've got RFID sensors all throughout your camp at different spots. And you kind of build this log of, hey, this person was here two minutes ago. They have to be around there.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:06] Speaker C: And able to track down your campers now a little bit better.
Another thing that we have seen is more and more people are using RFID tags just to keep track of things.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: Of inventory.
[00:16:19] Speaker C: Right. And so what if you had an RFID tag on your AED so that you would know when it was deployed without anybody making a phone call.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: You were sued because the reaction time was not fast enough, but then you can go back and show, hey, the AED was down there.
That's kind of proof in a pudding, right? So I'm serious thinking about how does RFID tags make us money? You know, because there's got to be a business side to our ministries. So how do they make us money? Think about food counts, on retreats. When you think, hey, you know what? They said they would bring in 175, but they feel like it feels like they're 215 here. Now you can go back in and see how many people scan in for dinners. You can.
[00:17:05] Speaker C: Or how many people are skipping breakfast.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Or how many that you know, and.
[00:17:08] Speaker C: So that, you know, you don't cook extra food all the time, right?
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great idea. And also load of money, you know, on these bracelets as well, kind of. Kind of helps kids be able to spend money, you know, as that technology.
[00:17:22] Speaker C: There have been companies doing that for a few years. We have never found a partner that we just had a really great intuitive system we are still shopping around.
A lot of it is capturing that money from the pa, from the parents ahead of time.
What I'm seeing more and more of is that relying less on integrated systems like that. And more people have Venmo cards, cash app cards that they're giving their kids, and the kids can just swipe the card, but it's going to an app that the parents can track and load money remotely.
[00:17:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:56] Speaker B: If you guys missed all that, that's all technology, you know.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:00] Speaker B: Even Venmo and all that stuff, still technology.
So, you know, don't be afraid of it.
So we talked about health with these wearables. I love it. It shows parents that you're. You care about safety, help staff stewards, help that steward health. And just. It's an extension of the pastoral role of camp ministry with all these wearables in this tech.
[00:18:21] Speaker C: For some of you also, that maybe do very remote camping. Let's say you have a particular camp program where you go into the wilderness to do that. That very rugged camp experience. More and more satellite technology is coming out. Garmin Inreach is a great example.
It used to be $10,000 for satellite tracking devices. Now they're 500 bucks. Now. $500 per camper is still pretty expensive. So you probably couldn't do that for everybody right now, depending on your volume. But as we keep going down this path, you're seeing now Apple Airtags can be tracked via satellite.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: Right.
[00:18:55] Speaker C: So iPhones can now have satellite connection. You just pay a fee.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:00] Speaker C: So even the rugged camp experience, those devices save lives.
And so I think it's important for us to just consider maybe somebody should have one.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: I think about Perry weather. We use Perry weather here at the camp.
It is a neutral person that says, run. You know, a storm's about to come, you need to take cover. So it's not our staff going to leaders saying, hey, you can get your kids inside.
Our leaders that come to our camp understand Perry's in control. If Perry goes off, then that means a storm is 10 miles away and you need to run. That's great technology.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: I would love to look at. Look at all these people, like Perry Weather Toast Square, all these kind of vendors all of us camps use and say, what's your vision for the future? What are you working on? That's a great question. All right, let's go into number two. And again, if you have any questions or you have a comment, maybe you just had a great idea. I'd love for you to go and connect with us at the Camp Guys podcast on Instagram, or you can email
[email protected] we love to get your feedback and put what you have to say on the show. Naturally, you can be on the show with us, too, via telephone or whatever you want to. So let's talk about these two things. Virtual reality and then augmented.
[00:20:16] Speaker C: Augmented.
[00:20:16] Speaker B: Augmented reality. That's. That's. Those things scare me. So let's talk virtual reality first.
Virtual reality is a fully immersed. You're entering into a completely digital environment, but you're wearing a headset.
[00:20:33] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:33] Speaker B: Have you ever did it?
[00:20:35] Speaker C: I've done it just a little bit. I.
I never really got into it.
I. I personally believe that augmented reality is probably a better step for camps.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: We gotta tell them what, augment.
[00:20:48] Speaker C: Yes. So augmented reality is where you're normally wearing a wearable, like a pair of glasses or goggles, something like that. And it is adding to what you see in here, Right. So it's augmenting, adding to, taking away. Like, it's. It's adding to it.
[00:21:04] Speaker B: Like the Pokemon in a city.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: Right?
[00:21:08] Speaker B: Pokemon cartoon character in the city.
[00:21:10] Speaker C: So, like, think about this now. Whenever we wanted to go play a certain game on the rec field where you split into teams, what if augmented reality could shade you as the yellow team? And I'm on the red team, and it's keeping score in my glasses. Like, in my glasses, I can see the score in real time.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: That's cool, man.
[00:21:31] Speaker C: I mean, that's really cool.
For me, virtual reality is hard for camps to adopt because we want them to disconnect from some of that technology at camp.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:42] Speaker C: I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm saying that there is a harder step. For me, augmented reality is a way. Okay. How can we bring technology to the same camp experience they know and love?
[00:21:52] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:53] Speaker C: The other thing is, like, even something as simple as navigating around.
[00:21:57] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: Well, they're already doing augmented on, like, Google Maps, where you hit the little arrows and you can go down the streets.
That's also included in augmented reality.
[00:22:07] Speaker C: Yeah. So I think for me, augmented reality was a Better option. I think one statement I wrote down is we can use this technology to add to the mystery of camp.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:21] Speaker C: Like what if augmented reality, whenever you look up at the sky, we're 30 minutes from the Charlotte metro area. We still have light pollution here. What if you could look up at the sky and actually see the stars that are supposed to be there?
Now you're adding to that mystery that what they should experience at camp.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: How can we teach the Bible better?
[00:22:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: Through augmented reality. Through vrbo.
That's the wrong session right there.
[00:22:46] Speaker C: Through VR.
[00:22:47] Speaker B: VR. Vrbo. That's funny.
[00:22:50] Speaker C: There are like AI reading helpers that maybe you could put on glasses to help people understand, like understand the Bible more. Where is it referencing to? What cross references can you take away? The other thing is that I think we do need to talk about. Whenever you talk about ar, sometimes augmented reality can be used to help with disability access.
Think about someone who has dyslexia can take a normal camp book that we print that is printed in very standard font. That may be problematic for people with dyslexia. What if they had a pair of glasses on that could change the font to make them be able to read it?
[00:23:28] Speaker B: My wife has the new Ray Ban, so she can take camera pictures with her glasses and she can talk to her glasses. When we were in London, Nate's about to go over to London area. Are you going to London?
[00:23:41] Speaker C: No, I'm flying direct to Rome.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: You're going to stay in Rome the whole entire time?
[00:23:45] Speaker C: Rome, Florence and then Lake Como.
[00:23:47] Speaker B: Okay. I wanted to go Lake Como.
[00:23:48] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:23:49] Speaker B: We're going to be beautiful three or four days. But she was able to look at a sign and say, meadow, tell me where the sign says. And it was written in Italian.
[00:23:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: Or whatever. And it would immediately interpret it for her. So, guys, again, technology is. Is. It can be a huge helper to us to advance the kingdom of God, or you can be afraid of it and then trend down and be Left out. And 40 years from now, you can't pick up on stuff that people are doing actual. Now. Number three, artificial intelligence and adaptive learning.
So AI can help us personalize devotion plans with campers for a specific age. I do always recommend, if you use in chat, GPT or any type of AI, please read over it, because AI can. It doesn't know what your core beliefs are and it can always insert a word that can literally send somebody in a whirlwind.
We can do summer staff simulations with AI by prompting AI for crisis management questions. Or what if you have that kid that says something about abuse.
They can actually practice with AI going through those type of response and conflict resolutions. Those are things that can happen right now that's adaptive. Adaptive learning for sure. Chat based discipleships.
There's things I don't recommend any type of chat based discipleships. I know they're big, I know they're big, but you just don't. You just want to be there for the content.
But definitely ministry impact.
[00:25:25] Speaker C: A lot of AI tools that I'm working on right now that I haven't even rolled out to the rest of the team yet is just automating very basic stuff.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:37] Speaker C: How much time do you spend clearing out an email inbox?
[00:25:40] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:41] Speaker C: AI can do that. It can do that.
Something stupid, simple as turning in receipts.
[00:25:48] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:48] Speaker C: AI can help with that so that we don't have a backlog either. Somebody not turning them in. Jay goes on vacation for a week. He comes back to 1200 receipts from people doing stuff.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: I'm spending some cash while I'm gone.
[00:26:03] Speaker C: So I'm just thinking about like basic stuff. Right. Stuff that really should not take up your time.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:08] Speaker C: How do we automate that? And AI can do it for you.
We actually use it some in sales too. We'll make call sales scripts. I'll use it to help sleuths on large churches where they go into camp and do that. I mean, AI will do the research for me.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Number four, drones and robotics.
Most of you probably, if you've had a promo video done for your camps, you've used a drone. I love drone footage.
It's great.
[00:26:35] Speaker C: That's only getting better. That will keep getting better.
[00:26:37] Speaker B: The tech's getting cheaper.
[00:26:38] Speaker C: Oh, yeah. Now you can get a good drone for 100 bucks, 200 bucks.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: Everybody paid the price, you know, five years ago. And now they're cheaper. You can give one to your kid and they can learn to take a video of your camp for you.
[00:26:50] Speaker C: There were a few categories that I think are coming for robotics. One you actually see, I'll make quick trip. QT is cleaning.
So they have a cleaning robot. So everybody think about like Roomba, what Roomba did at home where you have an automatic vacuum that rolls around the house. This is a higher, more advanced version of that. It's about waist high and it actually has everything. It has a vacuum, it has a mop and floor scrubber.
And so you can actually schedule it to come out at specific intervals.
And I was actually in QT whenever it was running. And it would Say out loud, hi, I'm cleaning the floors. Excuse me.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: That's cool.
[00:27:33] Speaker C: Like, it was literally going around like that. So for some of you, for cleaning, like your larger spaces, think dining halls, large meeting or worship spaces, places like that, that cleaning tech is coming, right.
If QT can roll it out at all of their stores, it can't be that expensive, right? Like, we, we probably are not very many years off from having one or two around and think you can schedule it to come on at 2am I'm.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: Surprised we hadn't seen more of the box stores get into that already. Target, Lowe's.
[00:28:04] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't, I don't know about those, but that's one that I saw. We talked about the security rover. I think that's a good option. The other thing is food service.
If you actually go stay at certain Hilton properties, you see it now already they're using robots to deliver food.
Basically, it's like a plate's put down on a drawer, on a little drawer that comes out. The robot pulls it back in. It's a warmer inside of there, so it keeps the food warm. And then it knows how to navigate the elevator and then go to the room service.
So for us, it may be something about delivering food for some of you that have different types of meal service that could be an option for you. There also are more robotics being introduced into actual food cooking and prep and service. There are restaurants now where you can actually see a robot arm stirring pasta in a bowl.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: I know I've seen some on tv. Like bars and stuff.
[00:29:04] Speaker C: Yeah, it's just. It's still a little bit too expensive for a lot of places to roll out universally, but I think it's definitely coming.
So food service was another one. The other thing that we don't have a lot of, though I could see us doing more in the future, is actually medicine distribution.
So hospitals are using this more and more where the pharmacy department will have specific capsules or drawers or places in this robot where they put the specific medication. And the. Either the nurse there or the person that the medicine is going to, has to scan their wristband or use some sort of wearable tech to. To get into the robot. And the robot will stop by the hospital person's room, deliver the medicine, but it only opens for their medicine. Like you can only get theirs. So for us at camp, what if all of a sudden you didn't have to pay a nurse for the late night people?
[00:29:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:29:56] Speaker C: You paid a nurse to be there during the day, and then the late Night medicine can be delivered automatically.
So I think those are all robotics options that you know, some of them too expensive for us to roll out, but I think it's coming. I think we're on the way again.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: People paying a price for this tech right now and hopefully one day to be affordable for camps to get involved in. Number five, Internet of things. I've never even heard of this. It's called lot and smart camp infrastructure. Internet of things. Everybody's like, what the crap is that? And the truth is you're already doing it right now.
[00:30:29] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:30:29] Speaker B: Your nest thermostat.
[00:30:31] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:30:33] Speaker B: Do you know a lot about Internet of things? I mean, have you heard of that before?
[00:30:36] Speaker C: Well, it's actually on my project list because just of some recent experiences we've had. So we're investing in a few different things that are at least on the list. Not going to say we're going to do it right this second, but number one is very basic things. Access control, doors, getting into doors, right. Which is rd, RFID technology, you know, getting into doors, access control. Can we have a system where at any point our camp staff that have the right credentials can open an app and pop open a door from across the camp.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:09] Speaker C: So hey, I'm locked out of my cabin, nobody has a key around. Okay, pop that door open remotely.
[00:31:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:16] Speaker C: There's a lot of places now that it's all app based so you can actually send a guest access to somebody and it expires seven days later. So you send it to them, that adult leader or the counselor, whomever that's there for that week has access.
[00:31:30] Speaker B: So this, this tech's got to be out there right now.
[00:31:33] Speaker C: Oh, it's out there right now. I mean it's an. Honestly, I don't think the price is that. Yeah, is that bad? I think we're, honestly, we're probably ready to roll out here soon is going.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: To be the company that can roll out all this package together that can literally be a la carte to businesses that can do doors, do money on cards, do location tracking, do all these great things. But it don't, it doesn't stop with doors. You can control climate, control, lighting, lighting.
[00:32:01] Speaker C: And we, we always talk about people leaving lights on everywhere. Well now here soon you're going to hear me roll out in a meeting. Hey, these light switches, if we make these five light switches smart, put them on schedules and now all of a.
[00:32:14] Speaker B: Sudden money because your worship building lights aren't on all night, right.
[00:32:19] Speaker C: Or your big old building that's sitting.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: There Burning lights or your interns, your clue, your camp leadership university people aren't up here in the the video room until 5am Then they decide to go to bed right where they are. And they don't turn off the lights.
[00:32:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: No. Carter, who's over there on the podcast thing. Oh, these are all automatic.
Let's talk about kitchen stuff. I know for a fact you have an app that control you can see the temperature of the freezer.
[00:32:46] Speaker C: Yeah. So now we have more monitoring solutions for the freezer in the fridge. It has like down outage detection so it will determine when things are not running.
Now if you it's available right now. Rationale, the oven company that we use, it's a combi oven, smart oven. I can log in on my phone. If we get it hooked up right. It's not hooked up correctly. Right this second. I can log in on my phone from home and see what temperature the oven's at.
[00:33:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:13] Speaker C: I can turn the oven on from home.
[00:33:14] Speaker B: And that oven requires no hood. No hood.
[00:33:17] Speaker C: Yep. They have ultra vent compatibility and it's.
[00:33:20] Speaker B: Which means that you save so much money, you spend money on the oven, but you don't have to buy a 10, $10,000 hood.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: Right.
[00:33:28] Speaker C: And you also don't have to buy a grill station, a fryer, an oven, a steamer, a broiler.
[00:33:33] Speaker A: Right.
[00:33:33] Speaker C: You don't have to buy all those different things. It does all of it. So like rationale, you can control the oven right now from my phone, I can literally throw a food item in there and check on it from home.
Now of course you wouldn't want to do that for everything, but there are certain applications where that would work.
So there are certain.
[00:33:51] Speaker B: I see nothing but money savings right here in this category.
[00:33:53] Speaker C: Oh yeah, yeah.
The other infrastructure piece that I just want to mention is like there are more and more stuff that is completely wireless, just WI fi based.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:06] Speaker C: So whenever we're talking about Internet of things and all this stuff, there's a lot of camps and us included. We're about to start on it. You got to get your WI fi and Internet access right in all your main places of camp. If you don't have that, let's start there. Because it's only going to get more connected.
[00:34:24] Speaker A: Right.
[00:34:24] Speaker C: It's only going to get more connected from here. And I think for us using very basic technology to turn stuff on and off is a no brainer.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: Yeah, it's so cool. All right, so this next category is probably my most exciting category.
Number seven. Number. Number six, holograms.
I've been thinking about this for years, man.
What if you were talking about a missionary doing something in China, but yet you were able to make the missionary appear.
Zoom calls are huge. Team meets are huge.
Holograms are coming to where you can face to face. We're going Jedi, man. Or what is it? Star Trek.
Yeah. Where that person can appear on the stage.
[00:35:13] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:35:13] Speaker B: Unbelievable.
[00:35:15] Speaker C: I, I do not feel qualified to talk about this topic, but. Well, you, I feel very, I, I do feel like it's coming. I don't know how many years we're out because that's, that's talking about very advanced, but I think it's, it's exciting.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: But you, you're going to see it on watches. Watches and phones first.
[00:35:31] Speaker C: Oh, yeah.
[00:35:32] Speaker B: You know, before the technologies where you can mount a projector type deal over your stage and somebody can appear. We'll probably see it at a TED Talk or something. Pretty soon somebody's going to say, hey, we got the tech. Yeah, we got the tech. I remember on the Avengers, they also all appeared in holograms. You know, I think it was Avengers in game too. But man, what an opportunity for just bringing in people from all over the world to present the gospel, to give updates.
It just makes the global church real and vivid for, for students, I think.
[00:36:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: All right, number the next one. Number seven, Sustainable energy and green tech. I've not been a huge fan in this area, but I'm starting to fan. I'm starting to feel the breeze because we have our power went out here at camp probably twice this summer. What if we had solar panels on top of those cabins? That would give us five or six more hours of time because we had them there.
So I'm starting to be a bigger fan.
[00:36:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I saw it the other day. I was at a middle school track in Charlotte and they actually had their camera system there, which I'm glad they did for security's sake. But their camera that was mounted on telephone pole had a solar panel and a battery pack. And it looks like they were actually completely powering that thing from solar.
So basically that meant that they didn't have to trench power all the way to that remote site. It was probably 400 yards from the closest building, so they didn't have to get power there. So I think that is one, one thing to consider with camps if you're trying to get power for smaller devices.
[00:37:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:37:09] Speaker C: Yeah, solar is definitely a good option. And that technology is getting better. It gets better the more we go. We have a staff member here she has solar panels on her house and it's gotten to the point where now she's actually giving power back to the utility company and making money on it because it's generating enough power. So that technology is only getting better.
I do think it will be in the future. And I think camps do need to think about sustainability.
Whenever we're talking about all this technology integration, we, we still have a prerogative to take care of the earth. And I think some of the sustainability practices we need to think about, the solar one is an easy, low lying fruit of just, hey, can we, can we power this one little thing from a solar panel and not have to run power to it?
I think that that's probably the easiest, easiest way to think about sustainability right now.
[00:38:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I think with being able to control, you know, your climates and lights, you know, that's one step towards some good, you know, sustainability of energy.
But then being able to jump on solar as well, especially, you know, I've thought many times, how much will a generator be for this set of cabins, the worship building? You're talking almost a million dollars probably to put that, put all that in.
[00:38:26] Speaker C: So a lot of generators.
[00:38:27] Speaker B: How much longer will solar power last when the power goes out? Not sure, but also just as great sustainable energy as well.
Nate, do you know any digital platforms that are creeping up on us right now? Because I don't think digital platforms like apps and things that we can communicate on, none of that's dying anytime soon. It's only going to get better and better. But you know, are there anything that we, we can, you've seen come up that maybe can help ministry impact year round discipleship?
[00:38:57] Speaker C: Yeah, I think number one is everybody needs to figure out their particular choice of how they want to automate things.
Your software, whatever you use, there should be a way to automate it. Even something as simple as automated emails going out. So for us, we, I use Zapier to automate basic tasks around here. We have also have software that automates email sending and things like that.
Everybody should start there. If you're not using a system that can do basic things like that, automatically send an email update automatically send a receipt when somebody pays, automatically do the start there because that, that is kind of the basics of where we need to start. We're using Zapier now and Zapier is a platform that can connect multiple different apps together. And so it has over 8,000 different apps on that platform where you can say when this happens on this app, make this happen in this app. And it kind of connects them all together. So something as simple as every morning at 5am the schedule sent out to our summer staff. So they can never say that they didn't know where they're supposed to be.
[00:40:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:40:02] Speaker C: Something as simple as that.
So I think the interconnectedness of apps is coming more and more popular where apps are required to talk to each other for the way we work. That's the way people are working now.
Now there are even other options other than Zapier. There are code solutions. If you have a developer on your team or want to hire a developer to build something out, you can basically integrate more together. What I'm seeing more and more of is getting more integrated together, where you have these tools doing multiple different platforms for you. Because everybody's realized that there's a lot of different platforms online right now and there's a lot of different tools everybody wants to use. And all of them are trying to make money. So the ones that are making money now are the ones that can connect them together.
[00:40:51] Speaker B: So if you're sitting out there and you didn't understand a thing, single thing Nate just said, he's laughing.
I'm with you. I'm with you. And that's why you need a Nate Flowers. That's why you need a director, ministry development.
And that's not just talking to a group about coming, but he develops everything that we have. I'm the visionary. I have all kinds of crazy ideas. You should see our coffee shop we just built this summer. He's taken that and kind of ran with it and put all the tech in it and it's been really seamless. But definitely if you don't have a staff person that's into tech, there's little Noah Carter's all over the country, guys that are into tech that could come and be a part of your organization, but hire people where you're weak. So I hope that you are planning on and thinking about trending up in technology and digital innovation, because that's what this session's been about. Here's the big picture. In the next 10 years, camp ministry can marry timeless values with cutting edge tools. And still our heartbeat can remain the same. Christ centered about discipleship, relationship, relationships and adventure. But technology can make camp safer. We've talked about that. Make teaching more immersive. It can extend discipleship year round and can open doors for more innovation of the gospel to be spread. So I hope you guys got a nugget from today's podcast.
Next time we will be talking about cultural and generation shifts. We're going to be looking at a generation 10 years from now with a higher anxiety, shorter attention span, and less outdoor experience. But before I give you the podcast, I want to talk about it with my staff and get their ideas and bring them to you. So see you next time on the Camp Guys podcast.
[00:42:43] Speaker C: SA.
