#1014 - WP-Tonic Show: What is The Culture of WordPress Good, Bad, or Ugly

Kurt Von Ahnen: You're listening to the WP tonic. Um, WordPress and tech focused on building a successful business in WordPress aimed at the WordPress professional and power user. Join Jonathan Denwood and Kurt Von Ahnin as your host and co host as we bring you great discussions from around the globe.

Jonathan Denwood: Welcome back folks to the WP Tonic show, episode 1014. In this episode we're going to be having the discussion about WordPress culture AI a load of other business topics. Should find it really fascinating. We've got a great guest, we've got James Laws, the joint founder Nigel Forms and send WP got a ton of experience in this area. Should be a great discussion. Also got my co host Kirk. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Sure thing. You went to me first, took me off guard. Uh, my name is Kurt, Kurt Von Ahnen. Uh, I own a company called Manana Nomas and we work directly with the awesome team over at WP Tonic.

Jonathan Denwood: That's fine. And James, would you like to quickly. Five, ten seconds intro before we go into your background in the main part of the interview?

James Laws: Sure, absolutely. Uh, my name is James Laws, I am the CEO of Saturday Drive and we basically have a lot of products and services that we provide across coffee, wellness, WordPress products. Uh, just doing a lot of stuff.

Jonathan Denwood: Sounds great. Um, like I say, it should be a fascinating interview. Before we go into the meat and potatoes, I've got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments folks.

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Jonathan Denwood: We're coming back folks. Um, just want to point out we've got some really fantastic special offers from the major sponsors plus some other free goodies and a created list of the best WordPress plugins and services for the WordPress freelancer. Ah, and small agency owner. You can find all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic.comdeals wp-tonic.com deals and we're very appreciative of our major sponsors. Um, so let's go straight into it, James. So maybe you can give the listeners and viewers, um, more about how you got into the world of WordPress and, and online, basically. M. How did you get into the area?

James Laws: Yeah, I mean, you know, when I came into, uh, the WordPress. First of all, I just want to say the longevity of this podcast is amazing. 1014. This is episode 1014. I was here nine years ago for episode 175. That's, that's, that's amazing. Um, I can't get a podcast to stay over 40 episodes. So. Very, very cool stuff. Um, I, uh, you know, when I came into the WordPress space, I was mostly doing design work and pastoring. So I was pastoring a church. I, uh, was doing design work and had kind of gotten into the web. I was mostly doing like, brochures and business cards and rack cards and kind of physical print design and then just started to fall in love with kind of the web. And of course WordPress was just, uh, an easy outlet for somebody who wasn't a developer to kind of start tinkering to, with more technical things. And So I just. WordPress kind of became my gateway into the web, as it has been, I'm sure, for, you know, thousands of other people, if not millions, right, that had, that kind of found their way into the web through WordPress. So that's kind of like what it. Where it kind of started. I was building a website for my church, building a website for a friend, uh, finally starting to get some clients here and there and designing websites for them. Uh, uh, so that was kind of how I got into it more out of necessity and then kind of became a passion.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. So what led to Nigel Forms then?

James Laws: So Ninja Forms? The, the. The funny story about that is I wasn't looking to become a product owner. I wasn't looking to build a product. I was working for Tennessee Valley Federal Credit Union, which is kind of the regional credit union in our area, as their web administrator. Uh, uh, I was managing, you know, servers. I was doing, managing their website and stuff like that. But our CEO was on the board of Junior Achievement, uh, in our area, and he had asked me to step in for a consult because they thought they were getting ripped off by this agency that was building them this website. And so I sat in, kind of unassuming, not sure what was going on. And I was looking through their itemized sheet and one of the things that kind of always kind of stuck out to me was they were charging like a lot of money for each individual form on the website that needed to be built. And pre form builder logic says, well, sometimes your rehab, the processing is different and how you handle information and validation is different. But I kept thinking like, you build processing once, that's a heavy lift. But the forms themselves are pretty easy. And so I kind of told them what I thought. I called them out. I was like, I just think this is. Billing is wrong. I just don't understand why you're gouging a nonprofit. So I'm like, I just don't understand the concept here. And so I walked away from that meeting giving them my opinion. And they, they ended up firing the agency. And the CEO came to me and said, uh, you can do it on our time. Will you build their website? And I'm like, sure, uh, I'll do it. And so I set out to do what I said should be able to be done right, like processing handled once. Figure it out. And then the forms are really easy and they can build their own form. So I built a really ugly form builder. It was, it was hideous looking, but it worked and they were happy with it and they could build out all kinds of registration forms as they needed. And then, uh, as I was going, I had a friend who was helping me do the high, more technical side of things. Kevin Stover, my business partner. And we, uh, said, I wonder if other people would like this. And I didn't know the WordPress space well enough on it to be completely clear. I knew WordPress. I didn't know about the ecosystem, I didn't know about the community. I didn't know about any of this stuff. And so I just had this thought, like, maybe this could be a product that people would want. And so we started to clean it up and get it ready for something that could be released. And of course, after we launched, we found out, oh, my gosh, there's this whole ecosystem and there are already form builder plugins. And that could have saved us some time.

Jonathan Denwood: All right, over to you, Kurt.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Muted. I was muted and nobody told me. Now I feel like a jerk.

James Laws: I was trying to find text, guys. I was trying not to interrupt. I was trying to find a text box. I couldn't find it to say, hey, I gave anything.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Oh, this show. This show's going to heck in a handbasket, Jonathan. So. So anyway, what I was saying that was so, uh, unintelligible was, uh, your story just reminded me so much of. I used to work for this very large, recognizable company. I was the training manager. And every year we would have to update our fillable PDF forms. And so because, uh, they use fillable PDFs for people to register for classes. So they told me they go, oh, you got to send these forms to this lady, you know, email these forms. Why am I emailing these forms to this lad?

James Laws: Right?

Kurt Von Ahnen: And then they go, oh, she makes all the changes to the PDF forms, But you want to make sure you have all your changes for one change event, because she charges us $600 every time she alters a PDF form. And I thought, well, a, how do I get a contract like that? And then b, why in the world in, you know, in this year, in this time, in this era, are, uh, you guys doing anything like this? So literally, I just changed all the forms myself, and then I started putting them on the web. I built, uh, an online learning platform to get, you know, teach people before they came to class. And the company was like, what's going on? We've lost total control. Everything seems to be going, you like, everything good, you're doing everything online. I'm like, yeah. And at the end of the year, we doubled the amount of people we certified in their training program, and we spent half as much money out of the budget to do it. And so, you know, I look at that and I go, and so how much of the work that you run into is, like, where you see, like, someone's grossly taking advantage of a situation and you're like, I just gotta fix this. Like, is that the inspiration where a lot of stuff comes from, you think?

James Laws: Yeah, I think, you know, ultimately what we find out is, uh, you know, customer, you know, now, of course, the. It's changed a little bit. The pivot has changed because now it's our customers that are trying to solve problems, and we look at all the tools that they're using to solve those problems. And forms are a great solution. Uh, especially a gateway kind of DIY solution. When you need to solve a problem really fast. They're not always the permanent solution. So I think about, like, if you're trying to sell a product, if you have a single product, a form can be a great way. That's really easy. Collect a payment, send an email, get it done. But if you start getting into full E commerce, where you're selling several products and you need other specialized services, forms start to break down a little bit. They can still do it. I've always said. I think I may have said it way back nine years ago when I was on the show. Forms to me are like a Swiss army knife. They've got tons of tools that can solve a problem in a pinch and in the short term. And there are certain things that they are very specifically created to do on the long term. But a lot of the things that people use them to do eventually grow out of forms and go into a more specialized service like an E commerce or a membership site or something like that. Can you use forms to do that? Absolutely. So what we try to do is we try to say how do we help people who are starting to do a thing for the first time solve that problem quickly, efficiently, uh, do it yourself, kind of solve that solution knowing that many of them are going to outgrow us for that thing that they came to us for, but they'll keep us for the other things that are the long term stays that you need a form builder for. And so that's kind of our philosophy as customers come in. So we are trying, yeah, we're trying to absolutely try to save where they're spending money that maybe they don't need to yet because they're just getting started. That's kind of our whole add on model is why buy a huge product when the thing you need is I need to collect a payment. That's it. I just need to collect a payment. So why would I spend a huge amount just to do that thing or some other area?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Well, I'm going to burst into question two there and that was um, because you had mentioned you didn't know about the whole ecosystem. I was the same way. I ran an agency for a dozen years before I knew there was a community. So everything I learned and trained myself on was like the hard way school of hard knocks. And then all of a sudden I found out there's this whole community I could have ask questions to. Um, what do you think if you could like easily kind of classify the WordPress space right now? Like how do you feel about the community now? Like at the, in the present moment, do you feel like it's. If you were new, if you were a new agency in the space, do you feel like man, this is, this community is amazing, it's going to be easy for someone to onboard and grow?

James Laws: Yeah, um, I mean I try to be as diplomatic as and, and calm, cool and collected as I can be. Uh, the culture to me today is uncertain. That's the word I think I would kind of anchor to the WordPress community today. There's just a lot of uncertainty. We remember the drama a couple of years ago between, you know, that's still going on obviously between Matt and WP Engine. And we think about how WordCamp attendance has been. Kind of fewer WordCamps, not as much in attendance. I hear WordCamp Europe just had a great attendance and was doing really well. That's exciting to see. But it feels like there's a lot of uncertainty with AI, with uh, the direction of WordPress, with the drama of WordPress with the market consolidating, big players, uh, kind of consuming independent businesses, uh, that were running smaller shops, product shops, agencies, things like that. All of that is creating, I think, a layer of uncertainty that makes people nervous and it makes it harder to know how to engage and kind of connect and find your way in this community because there's just, it just feels so. Yeah, I think uncertain. That's, that's my key word of the community today. And that's not necessarily good, bad or anything. It's just there's a, There's a lot going on.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, well, you and I both came from not having community and managed to build something that held over time, so. So I don't think it's a requirement, but I think it sure could be a heck of a blessing.

James Laws: Yeah, I think that's, that's where I stand, uh, when I came in, you know, understand, right. WordPress, uh, open source, there's a, uh, there is an ethos, there is

Jonathan Denwood: a

James Laws: value system of open source in the open source software community. And what WordPress had when we, I think when we were coming up was the community was also very open. I always said, like, to succeed in the WordPress community 10, 15 years ago, you just had to be an honest broker. You just had to be willing to work, give it a shot, be generous with what you knew and were learning. And the community just kind of accepted you. Open arms. And there was a community there to accept you. Open arms. Come on in. You're a part of us. We're all in this together. Even I come, um, back to remembering there was this time. I don't remember if it was like press nomics or if it was one of our, one of the Word camps I was at where it was like, it was, it was me, it was Carl Hancock, it was, you know, uh, Steven Steph from Formidable. It was all these like form builders and we're just hanging out, having a good time, talking. We're competitors, we, you know, there's sometimes there, there can be this feeling of like, no love lost. But in the community at that time there was a. Still a little bit of like, we may have our differences and we may be competitors and maybe online in our marketing, we poke and dig at each other a little bit. That feels normal. But when we're all together, we're still part of this open source community that is meaningful to us and we value. And so we kind of put all that aside. And I don't know that that community is quite there anymore. And I'll be the first to say I drifted. Personal reasons, focus reasons. I kind of pulled back from that. And so now coming kind of from the outside, looking back in and saying, hey, what's going on? How do I reengage? It's a lot harder even for somebody who did it. It's hard to look in and go, I don't know where, plug in anymore. I don't know where the community hangs out as much. Where, where, where are those honest brokers who are like, hey, if you're generous. Uh, and so that's, it's a little bit harder to, to see. And I'm not saying they don't exist. I just, I don't know where to find them as easily. Yeah.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, that's great feedback, Jonathan.

Jonathan Denwood: Well, it's kind of, um, it's a difficult situation, isn't it? You know, um, you know, I think. What do you think could regenerate the word camps? Do you think that it's. If there were some changes they can or do you think that was a era and it's because I would have thought you could. Because I think there's a movement now for people to. After Covid because of AI, there is a movement to have conferences, to have one to one meetings and that, uh, I'm not talking about the meetups here. Um, I'm talking about regional word camp conferences. I know a few people have been talking about Word Camp Miami having that comeback. Do you think, do you think that's possible and what some of the changes that are needed for that?

James Laws: I 100% think it's possible actually. I think you touched on it right there. I think there is a hunger, a desire to kind of get back to community. We live in such a divided world right now. Our social media algorithms are all feeding us a very, uh, a diet of exactly what we believe and what we hate so that we can be angry at each other. There's all this stuff kind of being pumped at us and AI is certainly serving to kind of disconnect us from humanity and kind of put us into kind of this machine mode. And so I think there is a, a desire to get back to community and to connect with real Human beings on a real human level. And so I think Word camps are an amazing place where that can take place. Place certainly around the open source community and around WordPress, you know, a platform we all love. Um, so I think it can happen. Now how do we do it? That's. That that might be above my pay grade. To truly understand like how these ecosystems flourish. One is we have to put them, we have to put them out there. You can't attend something that nobody wants to, uh, that nobody's running. Like if they don't exist, you can't go to them. So the first part is, you know, we're. Camps weren't always big. They were small little community things and some of them blew up and got really big. But it didn't, we didn't require huge audiences to still have these camps. And we kind of have to get back to that kind of grassroots. I don't need hundreds or thousands of people to show up for this to be a successful camp because I'm serving my community of WordPressers in this area and I can do that. So I think we have to start there is these. And I don't know if meetups are the right way to go about that. And meetups are certainly a thing that could happen that could help kind of be a feeder to that. That's what they had been in the past, kind of a feeder to build a community. And then out of a strong meetup a camp might appear. Um, but I think having them has to start happening. I think it's going to work kind of rebuilding. I think there's a starting over phase that kind of has to happen and say, let's rethink what camps look like. Let's start doing them again and let's swing. Uh, I think if that happens, I think people will engage. I think people want to be a part of something. To your point, post Covid, you know, all this, you know, and in an AI world, how do we get back to connecting to people again? Um, I know I welcome it. I'm constantly looking for new ways to engage with people again. That's why I was excited to see your invitation here. I'm like, oh, I can talk to people face to face. Even though it's through a screen. At least I'm. At least they're there and I know they're there at that moment that I'm there and talk. I love that. Let's, let's get back to that again.

Jonathan Denwood: Oh yeah, we're real. We've had a few technical differences. With this podcast like James. James has been impatient, but it's been out, it's been out of our control. I think he realizes that. Um, so um, what do you think? What would you like to see happen? What do you think a couple things might Happen connected to WordPress over the next 18 months. What do you think things you would like to see or you think is going to happen? You know, I think fundamentally can WordPress adapt to this world of AI? And secondly, is it going to really see a lot of agencies stop using it, stop using WordPress? Because I think it's been the agency usage that has kept it at stable, growing to some degree. It's debatable, isn't it, about the figures. But I think the bedrock is the freelancer. Small agency, medium size, even large agency. What do you reckon James?

James Laws: Yeah, I, I, I, I think it's going to be hard for anyone to predict how AI is going to impact the world at large. I, uh, mean we see glimpses of it, but I don't think anybody, anybody who says in three years, in five years and in 10 years this is exactly what the world's to going, going to look like is probably talking out of uh, I'm not going to be crude, but you know what I mean, like uh, they don't know what they're talking about. We don't know. I just, I don't think we know because it's moving so fast and it's moving at a rate like no other technology we have dealt with. And so I think that matters now for WordPress specifically. Uh, I will say I, I predict that WordPress's market share is going to continue to shrink. Uh, I think that is a, um, it feels to me like a foregone conclusion. Uh, in a lot of ways, you know, WordPress, we talk about WordPress is democratizing publishing. Ah, AI is kind of the new kind of democratizing publishing in a lot of ways because with AI, anybody can build a website now it may not be good, it may not, it may have problems, but anybody can build a website, anybody can build a piece of software and it's only getting better. Um, and so we're going to continue to kind of have to keep watching that and see how that, how that changes. But I do think, um, we see that market share start to shrink as less people need WordPress. I think about when I was building websites, the reason I used WordPress from a DIYer, it was really easy to get a WordPress site up and running, install a couple plugins, install a theme and I was good to go. Um, today WordPress, uh, it's the old analogy, right? When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. And in, in the early days WordPress was that Hammer and everything was a nail, you know, and so we just use WordPress for everything. But like now for my personal site, I'm not using WordPress for that. I'm just building a flat file HTML site because it's really all I need. I don't need user management and I don't need a big like I don't need all this scaffolding around it and in fact I'm lazy and I don't want to keep updating software all the time. So I don't want to increase my security vulnerability by having a, something that is a user management database driven system that can be hacked because I didn't maintain it properly. Because you still do have to maintain it properly. Like you still have to update software and take care of those things. So I think you're going to see that market shrink. That being said, I think the direction that they're going is right if I understand it. I think what they're trying, what we're trying to do in WordPress with AI is, is the right direction overall, whether or not it's exactly how, how I understand it. A year ago, last year I was at work camp us and one of the conversations I was having with everyone because I was curious, trying to see if anyone was talking about it was like why WordPress in a world of AI when I can build things so rapidly and AI was much dumber even then than it is now. Um, why WordPress? What does WordPress bring to the table in this new era of the web? Uh, nobody really had an answer yet but I think they're heading in that direction. I think what WordPress does need to learn how to be is more modular. It needs to be to the building blocks, the AI building blocks of the web. I don't think that's a bad idea. A lot of people use Laravel easily right now. Like, oh, I need a user management system so I'll just install a Laravel package and do something there. Or I need a database, I'll use Supabase and use that for my authentication or something like that. They'll piecemeal things together if WordPress is those pieces. Oh, you need to manage content. Well, we have a content management module that WordPress can install. I just don't think it's going to be an all situation. Uh, if it's still you have to use all of WordPress. I don't know that that works in the future of the web. Um, so it's a little. Come back to the first thing I said. It's a lot of uncertainty with AI and what's going on, but I think they're headed in the right direction if we can actually kind of pull it off. And I wouldn't bet against WordPress. It's been here for 23 years and has navigated its challenges and so I think it's not insurmountable that we navigate this one, but I think the growth will decline.

Jonathan Denwood: And do you, just to finish off before we go for a mid break, do you think some of these challenges also applied to the leading SaaS competitors like Squarespace, like Wix to. I know Wix, but they've got their, I think it's base 66, I'm not sure. 33. They've got their own AI builder, haven't they? Um, and they, but they cut back their staff on, on the WIX platform. Um, but do you think the SaaS is also facing challenges just as much as WordPress?

James Laws: I do actually. I think there's some real challenges for SaaS products all around. And uh, I could talk about that for a little while. I think about like for me, have you ever seen that? My, one of my memes that make me laugh is this woman with this, um, those block toys where you put blocks in different shapes, uh, into the hole and they're like, this is a square shape. Where does a square shape go? It goes in the square hole and then she pulls out a circle. Where does the circle go? It goes in the square hole and everything goes into the square hole. If you turn it right. This is how I think of software. Ten years ago, five years ago, you had to use whatever software existed to solve the problem you want. It was too expensive to pivot and do something else or to just build for a very specific niche. And so you ended up, uh, you know, you may have been a, uh, different shaped business and you're forced to fit in the shape of whatever software exists at the time and people are competing for your shape, if you will. And so you end up having to be something that you're not to fit into. Whatever communication tools exist. We at Saturday Drive we've, we got rid of notion, basecamp, bamboohr, all of these SaaS tools that we were using because we only use portions of them. Basecamp for communication, Notion for project management, Bamboohr, uh, for time off and PTO and Stuff like that. And I was like, I'm paying way too much money for these things where I'm only using like one feature of them all. So we built a holistic tool for ourselves where we all live and work and exist and it does it all for us. So now I don't have to fit into the shape of these different sasses. I can just build the solution for me that's going to impact sasses on some capacity. Right? Uh, it also means that like, there are places or sectors of a market that we weren't able to serve because they were too small. So why build anything to solve that sector? But if you're an independent creator and you have AI that can solve that problem, you know that problem really well, you can build a solution and do really well serving a very small niche that the big players aren't going to mess around with. And you can be. It's more affordable, it's more. So I do think it does impact SaaS on some capacity. Not to the degree, uh, that remains to be seen. But certainly I think it impacts everything.

Jonathan Denwood: All right, fantastic. Thanks for that, James. I think it's a great place for us to go for our mental break. When we come back, we've got some other great questions. Got another spot, uh, for one of our sponsors. We will be back in a few moments folks.

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James Laws: Enjoy the rest of your show.

Jonathan Denwood: We're coming back folks. I um, want to point out that if you're looking for a great hosting partner, you're building out a large, um, a large membership website and you need a learning management Plugin or a community website. Buddy Boss or Fluid Community. Why don't you look at partnering up with WP Tonic? We're a, uh, great hosting partner. Plus we provide all the technology and the support. If that's interesting, go over to wp-tonic.com partners. WP partners. Let's build something special together. Over to you, Kurt. Oh, is he hearing me? Oops. Have you got a problem?

James Laws: I think he looks frozen.

Jonathan Denwood: He's frozen. I, I think, I think, I think it's something to do with this tornado. We had a tornado come through, um, last night and I think it's affecting things. Not sure, but yeah. So let's move on, see if he joins us again. So, um, let's go on. Oh, here he is. He's returned.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Maybe that tornado touched a fiber optic line somewhere. Jonathan, because we're both having some issues today.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. So do you want to do the next question, Kurt?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Um, well, I, I feel like we kind of already have been touching on it. I actually wanted to creep back into James's answer. I see a little bit of brilliance in that. Because you were like, well of course I think WordPress's market share will decrease. And then all at once it, it was just like, well yeah, because there's going to be, it's not that a player is coming up and a player is taking all the attention. It's like there's literally hundreds of thousands of players that are coming up and taking little tiny bite sized pieces. So I don't think that it affects WordPress by the strength or quality of the platform. I think it's, it's just there's, there's, there's going to be so many options that by nature it's you, you're going to lose some market share. That's, that's pretty.

Jonathan Denwood: Oh yeah. But, um, but the good thing is that you might use WordPress as the core, as the core platform and you add the customization but you still need something that can be the core of the product. So people log in and that, um, I don't know, it just depends on how complicated. But I could see the core of WordPress being the stable, being a key part and allows agencies to do much more customization. Kurt. But who knows?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah, I was just talking to one of my clients uh, yesterday and we have a great WordPress website, lots of elearning. It's a, it's a beautiful website. But then she drops it on me that she's got this other WIX site and you know, would I be willing to help her change some content in that and things like. And then the obvious answer is, well, no, let's just convert it to WordPress, bring you over to your server account like the, the agency and you takes over. But then reality hits and you go, wait a minute, use case. Let's see what you're even doing here. You might not be worth migrating content. You know, if you're paying 20 bucks a month for this thing and you're happy with it, maybe that's just where it stays. Um, and I think that, that from an agency perspective, I think a lot of us are starting to see that very plainly. You know, that that use case really does dictate what the requirement is. Right? Um, James, I'll just ask because you've mentioned AI in like three of your answers so far.

James Laws: So

Kurt Von Ahnen: what are, what are your general thoughts on AI? I tend to be pretty opinionated here, so I'm not going to give my thoughts just yet. I'll toss it over to you. What are your general thoughts on AI?

James Laws: I tend to be, I like to think of myself as kind of moderate. Um, I am bullish on AI. I think AI is extremely powerful. I think it gives us a lot of tools and expands what we are capable of. But I also think there's a lot of dangers and I think there's a lot of concerns and those shouldn't be taken lightly. I think we need good legislation on AI. Uh, I think we need to make sure that we're not seeing, stealing people's uh, you know, IP when uh, we're training AI and that needs to be dealt with. Uh, I think we need to worry about all of the evils of AI with deep fakes and misinformation. That has to be dealt with. I think we need to get out of this mindset of creating sentient AI. It's, it's, it's a ridiculous, it's a ridiculous pursuit. AI is powerful enough without it having to be sentient or you know, truly, uh, its own thing. I think that those things I think are ridiculous pursuits. They're great marketing for these AI companies that want to sell this kind of thing. But I do think AI is extremely powerful. I just met with my, my kids school. We were talking about AI and what are they going to do? And we're forming a committee to kind of make some decisions on how do we educate our children. Because let's be honest, this is the first year where you know, we had, you know, people graduate from college who started college and while they were in college, their entire careers were disrupted by this technology. I mean, this is the first graduating class that has really felt this impact. And it's only gonna get worse. That's why at uh, many commencement speeches, AI was being booed off. The commencement speakers were being booed off the stage because they're afraid. And not only are they afraid, but there are real ethical reasons to be concerned about how AI is being pushed upon us and, and the way that we're going about it. So there are real concerns. But uh, all that being said, I use AI for a majority of everything I touch, I do. I work with AI so much. But I did realize early on, even a year to two years ago, I started to realize as I was using it that I was losing my edge. Like the things that made me me, the things that made me sharp, my opinions, how I came to conclusions, like I was losing that I was being uh, flattened, homogenized into like the common norm. And I had to change the way I used AI in my process for thinking because it was, it was changing me in a direction that I didn't, wasn't helping me, it wasn't making me an idea, an innovator. It was just making me bland and I had to shift. And so when I started to see that, I started to really be concerned about like this future generation coming up. My, you know, my kids in sixth grade about to go into seventh grade, uh, in the fall. And I'm really concerned about what the landscape looks like for him as he progresses through his education and, and moves into looking for a career or something that fulfills him and work that he can do and actually get paid for. Uh, it's a real concern. And so I don't think we can close our eyes and kind of bury our heads in the sand and be like, if I just ignore it, it'll go away. It's, it's not going anywhere. But it is our responsibility to steer it and make sure that the people who are using it are using it right and not harming themselves in the process. And so that's been a, um, chief in my own business, in my own life, and now in my kids schools. Like how do we do this in the most effective way possible that gives them a leg up and doesn't actually harm them in the long run. But I am, I am, I am, you know, I'm ultimately positive towards AI. I just think there's a lot of real concerns.

Kurt Von Ahnen: I struggle with so much of the, the line that I expect to be drawn for like human in the loop, right? So that's like the new phrase now,

Jonathan Denwood: human in the loop.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Um, there's a line that I've drawn, and I feel like if you're on this side of the line, that's a human's task. And the other side of the line could be AI optimized or AI modified, powered, whatever, right? And so, um, I fancy myself a writer. I like to write. And. And then you start using AI to help you, and then AI starts packing in all this extra information that you didn't think of because you're, you know, not as brilliant as of a writer as you thought you were. And then, and then you're like, oh, that's a good point. That's a good point. That's a good point. Now. Well, now I've got War and Peace that I've written instead of a short blog piece, right? Because now AIs packed me full of all this information. Information. And then when I go through it, you know, sometimes it's my voice and sometimes it's not. And I'm like that. No, if someone's reading my stuff because they know me, they expect to see me in the pages, right? And if I'm not there, what makes them want to come back for the next thing? Like, I, I really, I stress the point that, like, my value in the space as an older person that's been in WordPress for a couple of decades is, is my personal expertise. People want to meet with me face to face. Like, clients want to get on Zoom with me and have a conversation. They don't want to assume, not a Zoom, a, uh, you know, a, uh, an AI support channel that, that responds to their questions blandly. They want to talk to Kurt. Um, I had a customer recently because, uh, you had mentioned faith stuff and church stuff. Had, uh, a customer recently. We're, we're working on a fantastic project. Uh, it's faith based training and it's, it's a lot of great courses. A lot of it's AI generated content in the course side. But then they thought, well, we want to open each lesson up with a prayer. And I thought, well, that's wonderful. You know, so you're going to get moderators or instructors together on a group zoom call, maybe do a group prayer. He's like, we were thinking about using hey Gen. And I was like, you cannot, you cannot have hey Gen free for people. Like, no, I can't. We can't do that. Like, I, I realized I'm just, I'm just the agency. And you are the client. I know that, I know that. But as your consultant, I'm telling you, people are going to reject AI praying for them. Like, it's. You can't do that. It's at least got to be a video you recorded of yourself walking down your street. Like, if it, if it's not going to be real time and it's going to be a recording, it's got to be you. Um, yeah. The AI thing to me is a huge block because I think so many people are trying to leverage it in ways that it just should not be leveraged. Um, and the amount of false confidence people have through AI is alarming. Like when a startup do it yourself or web person is like, hey, you run an agency. I just vibe coded this cool plugin, but I don't know how to install it on my site. Could you put it on my site for me? Like, no, I can't. I can't just take some weird piece of code. And especially if it's on my server. I'm not putting that junk on my server.

James Laws: Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. And I think that is a real challenge now for me. And like, full disclosure, I have a newsletter I write on my website, um, and I post on LinkedIn. And oftentimes I use AI to help me through that process. Because I am not a good writer. I feel like I'm a fairly decent verbal communicator. That's where my strength kind of lies. I think it's from preaching from many, many years. I'm very comfortable in that environment. But when it comes to writing, that's very difficult for me. So I have to build systems. I told somebody I wrote a comment somewhere on LinkedIn. I said, like, yeah, if you ever see an EM M dash in my writing, it's because I used a hikes. I'm not smart enough to use EM dashes properly. Like, I'm just not. I'm not a good writer. But I do use AI heavily. But I had to create a really specific process to get to where I was comfortable with it. So my thinking process is I spent a lot of time working through what I believe on a topic in my, uh, heart. Intrinsically. Intrinsically what I know. And I get that information into a document, uh, that is 100% my points of view, my turns of phrase, how I think about this particular subject. And then I use AI to help me draft out an outline and kind of form it. But then I physically edit through the whole entire process. Because to me, real writing comes in the editing More than it does in the draft. In the draft, you're just kind of. You're just dumping everything out there. But editing is where you go in and you put your voice and you put your point of view and you feel fix the things that you didn't even see yourself, that you didn't like. So I, I spent a lot of time in editing, less time now getting the words on the page in the first place. And that has worked really well for me. And I have friends who I've. I've had, you know, who came to me and said, I really like your newsletter. Are you using AI? Because every time I hear it, I hear your voice. Like, I can hear you saying those things. And I'm like, well, then it's working. Because that's ultimately what I'm trying for. Like, I don't. I do not want it to be just AI slop. But here's the thing. Like, with AI, a person who knows how to write is gonna write well with AI if they take the time to do it. Right.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah.

James Laws: Uh, to go through that process. The people who are putting out the most slop, if you will, we call it AI Slop. But let's be honest. Slop is slop is slop. We have always had slop on social media, on blog posts, on websites. We've always had slopes. Slop. AI has just made easier for people who create slop to create more slop at a much more rapid pace and at much greater volumes. But the people who actually care about their art of communication, uh, for me, it's verbally, but I can use it to write better because I'm not a writer. Uh, the people who actually care about communication, care about their ideas, care about their thinking, care about their sharp edges that make them who they are, uh, can use AI to do great, great quality work. And I think that's what we're always trying to figure out is how do we help people who have that do really good things? We can't stop the people who are going to make slop because they were going to make slop whether AI was there or not. And most of us have. Now let's, uh. It's so obvious now too, right? How is there any one of us, even on this call, right, who don't read something and goes, yeah, that's AI like, immediately. Like, like, it just doesn't pass the sniff test. It's immediate and you know it. And I think most of the world is getting that way. We have kids who are reading this stuff and Going that's AI like that. So I think that stuff, I think it weeds itself out automatically because it's just garbage. And you know, people recognize quality.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Yeah. Unfortunately though, AI has put the demand of volume. That's like your keyword. That answer that I picked up on, it's almost made it like an insurmountable task. Like if you are a crafts person, uh, like you're crafted in your speech, you're crafted in your writing or crafted in your design. You're expected to create now at 5x and 10x of what you used to do five years ago. Yeah, it used to take six to nine months to write a half decent course for an elearning program. And now people want you to whip that out in two weeks. And yeah, uh, like there's a lot of demands. They still want that quality but they think the timeline should be shortened regardless.

James Laws: That's a thing we have to resist. Certainly. I think like m. In my writing I'm lucky if I get out a blog post every week. That's a lucky thing for me because it takes me time to edit. It takes me time to actually feel like I have something to say to publish. So I have to resist this idea of well, the machine tells me I've got to publish, I've got to put out this. You know, I try to be pretty legit on my newsletter because that's a weekly kind of commitment that I've made. But everything else is up for grabs. I may or may not have it. If I just don't have anything to say, I'm not gonna force it. Cause I'm not gonna put out garbage. Because to me my edge is the fact that I have opinions. And if I don't have an opinion then what I'm writing is gonna be slop because I haven't taken the time to form an actual point of view that means anything. And so I'm not going to put that out into the world. But you're right, it's there. And that is a. That is a draw. It's something we have to resist. We all can move faster, but we probably need to be careful about how fast that is and what the pressure. What is the pressure point for that speed? Is it actually necessary to move at that speed? Um, you know, I have. The problem with me is I'm an idea person with AI. None of these ideas are off limits anymore. Yeah, things that I would. Things that would die because I just didn't have the resources. I have the resources. Now I can just sit here and tell Claude I want to do this thing. Here's what I'm thinking. Build it out. And so I can build everything. But just because I can doesn't mean I should. And I have to kind of come back to that and say, what are my goals? What am I actually aiming for? What am I trying to accomplish in my life in this season, in this product, in this business, in my, you know, personally? And reject some things. Just because I can doesn't mean I should.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Well, that's perfect to lead over to Jonathan. Jonathan.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah, I think, I think we dropped the last question and we're going to end the show now because we've had some technical problems. It's. But it's been a good interview. Um, so, Kirk, what's the best way for people to find out more about you, what you're up to? Kurt?

Kurt Von Ahnen: Well, I'm the only Kurt Von on and on LinkedIn, so I'm easy to find there. Just don't spam me. Uh, and then Mano Nomas, that's my, my company name and it's my handle on almost all my social channels.

Jonathan Denwood: And James, what's the best place for people to find out more your thoughts and what you're up to?

James Laws: Yeah, I mean, you can head over to my website, james law.com. um, and of course I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me there. I also agree, please do not spam me. I generally will just delete messages unless they actually. You actually act like you know who I am and what I do.

Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. And if you want to support the show, folks, um, it's best to leave a review I either on, um, Apple or you're on Spotify, Just leave a review. It's really easy if you're on a mobile device. Or leave a review on the WP Tonic, um, YouTube channel. Leave a comment on there. They're the best ways to show your support. We've got. Got some fantastic guests this month like James. We'll see you next week, folks. Bye.

Kurt Von Ahnen: Hey, thanks for listening.

James Laws: We really do appreciate it.

Jonathan Denwood: Why not visit the Mastermind Facebook group And also to keep up with the latest news, click wp tonic.com forward/newsletter. We'll see you next time.