What is The Culture of WordPress Good, Bad, or Ugly in 2026

Discover the culture of WordPress — the passionate community, heated debates, and controversies that shape the world’s most popular CMS. The truth revealed.

With Special Guest James Laws, Joint Founder of NinjaForms and SendWP

In this enlightening show, we delve into the multifaceted culture surrounding WordPress, examining its strengths, weaknesses, and the less-discussed ugly truths. From the collaborative community that fuels innovation to the challenges of fragmentation and misinformation, we cover it all. Discover what makes WordPress a powerful platform and where improvements are needed. Join us on this exploration and find out how it affects developers and users alike.

This Week’s Sponsors

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

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The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:08.620] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic Show, episode 1014.

[00:00:13.200] -Jonathan Denwood

In this episode, we’re going to discuss WordPress culture, AI, and a load of other business topics. You should find it really fascinating. We’ve got a great guest, we’ve got James Laws. The joint founder of Nyjah Forms and SendWP. He’s got a ton of experience in this area. Should be a great discussion. Also got my co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

[00:00:40.950] – Kurt von Ahnen

Sure thing. You went to me first, took me off guard. My name’s Kurt, Kurt Van Ahnen. I own a company called MañanaNoMás, and we work directly with the awesome team over at WP-Tonic.

[00:00:50.670] -Jonathan Denwood

That’s fine.

[00:00:51.390] – Jonathan Denwood

And James, would you like to quickly, a 5, 10 seconds intro before we go into your background in the main part, if you—

[00:00:59.330] – James Laws

Sure, absolutely. My name’s James Laws. I am the CEO of Saturday Drive, and we offer a lot of products and services across coffee, wellness, and WordPress, just doing a lot of stuff.

[00:01:13.490] -Jonathan Denwood

Sounds great.

[00:01:14.890] – Jonathan Denwood

Like I say, it should be a fascinating interview.

[00:01:17.010] -Jonathan Denwood

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. 3, 2, 1, we’re coming back, folks. Um, just want to point out we’ve got some really fantastic special offers from the major sponsors, plus other free goodies and a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services for WordPress freelancers and small agency owners. You can find all these goodies at wp-tonic.com/deals. Wp-tonic.com/deals. And we’re very appreciative of our major sponsors. So let’s go straight into it, James. So maybe you can give listeners and viewers more insight into how you got into the world of WordPress and the online space, basically. How did you get into the area?

[00:02:13.240] – James Laws

Yeah, I mean, you know, when I came into WordPress, first of all, I just want to say the longevity of this podcast is amazing. 1014. This is episode 1014. I was here 9 years ago for episode 175. That’s amazing. I can’t keep a podcast going past 40 episodes. So very, very cool stuff. I, you know, when I came into the WordPress space, I was mostly doing design work and pastoring. So I was pastoring a church. I 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 an easy outlet for someone who wasn’t a developer to start tinkering 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?

[00:03:13.240] – Jonathan Denwood

Mm-hmm.

[00:03:13.300] – James Laws

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 all started. I was building a website for my church. Building a website for a friend, finally starting to get some clients here and there and designing websites for them. So that was kind of how I got into it, more out of necessity and then kind of became a passion.

[00:03:33.630] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, so what led to Ninja Forms then?

[00:03:39.290] – James Laws

So Ninja Forms, the funniest 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. I was managing, you know, servers. I was managing their website and stuff like that. But our CEO was on the board of Junior Achievement 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.

[00:04:42.930] – James Laws

And so I kind of told them what I thought. I called them out and I was like, I just think this billing is wrong. I just don’t understand why you’re gouging a nonprofit profit. 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 forms. So I built a really ugly, Form builder, 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 them. And then 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 said, I wonder if other people would like this.

[00:05:39.430] – James Laws

And I didn’t know the WordPress space well enough, Ana, 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.

[00:06:07.090] – Jonathan Denwood

All right. Over to you, Kurt.

[00:06:49.530] – Kurt von Ahnen

Muted. I was muted and nobody told me. Now I feel like a jerk.

[00:06:53.550] – 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 can’t hear anything.

[00:06:59.770] – Kurt von Ahnen

Oh, this show’s going to heck in a handbasket, Jonathan. So anyway. What I was saying that was so unintelligible was 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 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 lady? “Right now, 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 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 an online learning platform to get, you know, teach people before they came to class.

[00:08:03.060] – Kurt von Ahnen

And the company was like, what’s going on? We’ve lost total control. Everything seems to be going, you know, like everything, you’re doing everything online. And 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?

[00:08:34.240] – James Laws

Yeah, I think, you know, ultimately what we find out is, you know, customer, you know, now of course the, 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. 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. It’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 9 years ago when I was on this show. Forms to me are like a WP-Tonic is 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.

[00:09:35.670] – James Laws

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, 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?

[00:10:31.570] -Jonathan Denwood

Yeah.

[00:10:32.210] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I’m gonna burst into question 2 there, and that was, ’cause 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. 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?

[00:11:13.580] – James Laws

Yeah, I’m Let me— I’ll try to be as diplomatic as I— and calm, cool, and collected as I can be. 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 years ago between, you know, and it’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. Yeah. 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 the direction of WordPress, with the drama of WordPress, with the market consolidating, big players kind of consuming independent businesses that were running smaller shops. Product shops, agents, 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 my keyword of the community today.

[00:12:31.560] – James Laws

And that’s not necessarily good, bad, or anything. It’s just—

[00:12:34.480] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah.

[00:12:34.860] – James Laws

There’s a lot going on.

[00:12:37.740] – Kurt von Ahnen

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

[00:12:50.260] – James Laws

Yeah, I think that’s where I stand. When I came in, you know, understand, right, WordPress open source, there is an ethos, there is a 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 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 back to remembering there was this time, I don’t remember if it was like PressNomics or if it was one of our, one of the WordCamps I was at, where it was like, it was me, it was Carl Hancock, it was, you know, Steve and Steph from Formidable, it was all these like form builders, and we’re just hanging out, having a good time talking.

[00:13:53.330] – James Laws

We’re competitors. We, you know, there’s sometimes there can be this feeling of like no love lost, but in the community at that time, there was 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 a 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 to plug in anymore. I don’t know where the community hangs out as much. Where are those honest brokers who are like, Hey, if you’re generous. And so that’s— it’s a little bit harder to see.

[00:14:53.180] – James Laws

And I’m not saying they don’t exist. I just— I don’t know where to find them as easily.

[00:14:57.500] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. Yeah. That’s great feedback. Jonathan?

[00:15:02.420] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, it’s kind of— it’s a difficult situation, isn’t it? You know, I think— What do you think could regenerate the WordCamps? Do you think that it’s, if there was some changes they can, or do you think that was an era and it’s, because I would’ve 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. I’m not talking about the meetups here, I’m talking about regional WordCamp conferences. I know a few people have been talking about WordCamp Miami, having that come back. Do you think, do you think that’s possible and what some of the changes that are needed for that?

[00:16:08.240] – 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, 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 desire to get back to community and to connect with real human beings on a real human level. And so I think WordCamps are an amazing place where that can take place, certainly around the open source community and around WordPress, you know, a platform we all love.

[00:17:02.260] – Jonathan Denwood

Um.

[00:17:03.700] – James Laws

So I think it can happen. Now, how do we do it? That might be above my pay grade to truly understand like how these ecosystems flourish. One is we have to put them out there. You can’t attend something that nobody wants to, that nobody’s running. Like if they don’t exist, you can’t go to them. So the first part is, you know, WordCamps 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.

[00:17:50.580] -Jonathan Denwood

It’s these—

[00:17:51.060] – James Laws

and I don’t know if meetups are the right way to go about that. Meetups are certainly a thing that could happen that could help kind of be a feeder to that. 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. But I think having them has to start happening. I think it’s gonna— we’re 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. I think if that happens, I think people will engage. I think people want to be a part of something, to your point. Mm-hmm. Post-COVID, you know, all this, you know, and in an AI world, how do we get back to connecting to people again? 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.

[00:18:46.540] – James Laws

I love that. Let’s, let’s get back to that again.

[00:18:49.940] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh yeah, we’re real. We’ve had a few technical differences with this podcast, folks. James, James has been We’ve been very patient, but it’s been out of our control. I think he realizes that. So what do you think, what would you like to see happen? What do you think a couple of 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? 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? Yeah. 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?

[00:20:00.250] – James Laws

Yeah, I think it’s gonna be hard for anyone to predict how AI is gonna impact the world at large. I mean, we see glimpses of it, but I don’t think anybody, anybody who says in 3 years, in 5 years, in 10 years, this is exactly what the world’s gonna look like, is probably talking out of— well, I’m not gonna be crude, but you know what I mean. Like, 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, I will say I predict that WordPress’s market share is gonna continue to shrink. I think that is a— it feels to me like a foregone conclusion in a lot of ways. You know, WordPress, we talk about WordPress is democratizing publishing. 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.

[00:21:07.340] – James Laws

Anybody can build a piece of software and it’s only getting better. 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 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 and install a couple plugins, install a theme, and I was good to go. Today, WordPress— it’s the old analogy, right? When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. And 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— I don’t need all this scaffolding around it. And in fact, I’m lazy and I don’t want to have to keep updating software all the time. So I don’t want to increase my security vulnerability by having something that is a user management database driven system that can be hacked because I didn’t maintain it properly.

[00:22:19.560] – James Laws

‘Cause 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 the right direction overall, whether or not it’s exactly how I understand it. A year ago, last year I was at WordCamp US and one of the conversations I was having with everyone, ’cause 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. Why WordPress? What does WordPress bring to the table in this new era of the web? Nobody really had an answer yet, but I think they’re heading in that right direction. I think what WordPress does need to learn how to be is more modular. It needs to be the building blocks, the AI building blocks of the web. I don’t think that’s a bad idea.

[00:23:19.920] – James Laws

A lot of people use Laravel.

[00:23:21.340] – Kurt von Ahnen

Mm-hmm.

[00:23:21.500] – James Laws

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, so 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.

[00:23:47.160] – Jonathan Denwood

If it’s—

[00:23:47.390] – James Laws

but still you have to use all of WordPress. I don’t know that that works in the future of the web. So it’s a little— I 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, you know, kind of pull it off. And I wouldn’t, you know, 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. Yeah. But I think the growth will decline.

[00:24:19.620] – Jonathan Denwood

And do you, just to finish off before we go for a mid-break, do you think some of these challenges also apply to the leading SaaS competitors like Squarespace, like Wix too? I know Wix, but they’ve got their, I think it’s Base66, I’m not sure, 33, they’ve got their own AI builder, haven’t they? But they cut back their staff on the Wix platform. But do you think the SaaS is also facing challenges just as much as WordPress?

[00:24:51.290] – James Laws

I do, actually. I think there’s some real challenges for SaaS products all around. And we could, we can, 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, those block toys where you put blocks in different shapes. Into the hole and they’re like, “This is a square shape. Where does a square shape go?” “Oh, 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. 10 years ago, 5 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— you know, you may have been a 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.

[00:25:50.310] – James Laws

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 used portions of them. Basecamp for communication, Notion for project management, BambooHR 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 SaaSes. I can just build the solution for me. That’s going to impact SaaSes. On some capacity, right? 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 and 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 gonna mess, mess around with.

[00:26:54.930] – James Laws

And you can be, it’s more affordable, it’s more, so I, I do think it does impact SaaS on some capacity. Now, to the degree, that remains to be seen, but certainly I think it impacts everything.

[00:27:06.040] – 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 for one of our sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Free. 3, 2, 1. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out that if you’re looking for a great hosting partner, you’re building out a large, a large membership website and you need a learning management plugin or a community website, BuddyBoss or Fluent Community, why don’t you look at partnering up with WP-Tonic? We’re a great hosting partner, plus we provide all the technology and the support. If that’s interesting, go over to wp-tonic.com/partners, wp-tonic.com/partners. Let’s build something special together. Over to you, Kurt. Oh, is he hearing me? Oops, have we got a problem?

[00:28:13.730] – James Laws

I think he looks frozen.

[00:28:15.210] – Jonathan Denwood

He’s frozen. I think it’s something to do with this tornado. We had a tornado come through. Last night, and I think it’s affecting things. Not sure, but I’m not sure. So let’s move on, see if he joins us again. So let’s go on.

[00:28:32.640] – Kurt von Ahnen

There he is.

[00:28:33.380] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh, here he is. He’s returned.

[00:28:36.600] – Kurt von Ahnen

Maybe that tornado touched a fiber optic line somewhere, Jonathan, because we’re both having some issues today.

[00:28:44.160] – Jonathan Denwood

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

[00:28:47.150] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, 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 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, it’s just there’s, there’s, there’s gonna be so many options that by nature, it’s, you’re gonna lose some market share.

[00:29:28.160] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s, that’s pretty much— 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 can log in and that. 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, Kirk, but who knows?

[00:30:02.810] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I was just talking to one of my clients yesterday, and we have a great WordPress website, lots of e-learning. 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 and 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 in 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 even be worth migrating content. You know, if you’re paying $20 a month for this thing and you’re happy with it, maybe that’s just where it stays. 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? James, I’ll just ask because you’ve mentioned AI in like 3 of your answers so far. So 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.

[00:31:07.030] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’ll toss it over to you. What are your general thoughts on AI?

[00:31:13.570] – James Laws

I tend to be— I like to think of myself as kind of moderate. I think 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. I think we need to make sure that we’re not stealing people’s, you know, IP when we’re training AI. And that needs to be dealt with. I think we need to worry about all of the evils of AI with deepfakes and mis— Misinformation. Misinformation, that has to be dealt with. I think we need to get out of this mindset of creating sentient AI. It’s a ridiculous, it’s a ridiculous pursuit. AI is powerful enough without it having to be sentient or, you know, truly 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 son my kids’ school, we were talking about AI and what are they gonna do.

[00:32:26.380] – James Laws

And, 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.

[00:32:48.460] – Kurt von Ahnen

Mm-hmm.

[00:32:48.720] – James Laws

And it’s only gonna get worse. That’s why at many commencement speeches, AI was being booed off the, you know, like commencement speakers were being booed off the stage ’cause 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 the way that we’re going about it. So there are real concerns. But all that being said, I use AI for a majority of everything I touch. I do, I work with AI so much. Yeah. So much. But I did realize early on, even a year to 2 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 and I was being flattened, homogenized into like the common norm. And I had to change the way I used AI in my process for thinking. Mm-hmm. Because it was changing me in a direction that I didn’t, it wasn’t helping me. It wasn’t making me an idea, an innovator. It was just making me bland and I had to shift.

[00:33:54.280] – James Laws

And so when I started to see that, I started to really be concerned about like this future generation coming up. My kid’s in 6th grade, about to go into 7th grade in the fall. And I’m really concerned about what the landscape looks like for him. As he progresses through his education and moves into looking for a career or something that fulfills him and work that he can do and actually get paid for. 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 not going anywhere.

[00:34:29.100] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:34:29.440] – James Laws

But it is our responsibility to steer it and make sure that we’re doing— the people who are using it are using it right. And not harming themselves in the process. And so that’s been a 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.

[00:34:59.910] – 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, human in the loop. 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?

[00:35:23.340] -Jonathan Denwood

Sure.

[00:35:23.480] – Kurt von Ahnen

And so I fancy myself a writer. I like to write 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 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 AI’s packed me full of all this 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’s— 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 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 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.

[00:36:19.270] – Kurt von Ahnen

They don’t want a Zoom, not a Zoom, a, you know, an AI support channel that responds to their questions. Yeah. Blandly. They want to talk to Curt. I had a customer recently, because you had mentioned faith stuff and church stuff, I had a customer recently. We’re working on a fantastic project. It’s faith-based training and 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 HeyGen, and I was like, you cannot, you cannot have HeyGen pray 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, you can’t do that. It’s at least got to be a video you recorded of yourself walking down your street.

[00:37:23.350] – Kurt von Ahnen

Like, if it’s not going to be real time and it’s going to be a recording, it’s got to be you.

[00:37:28.590] – James Laws

Yeah.

[00:37:28.910] – Kurt von Ahnen

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. And the amount of false confidence people have through AI is alarming. Like when a startup do-it-yourselfer web person is like, hey, you run an agency. I just vibecoded this cool plugin, but I don’t know how to install it on my site. Could you put it on my site for me? No, no, I can’t. I can’t just take some weird piece of code, especially if it’s on my server. I’m not putting that junk on my server.

[00:38:03.310] – 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, 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 for 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 some, a comment somewhere on LinkedIn. I said like, yeah, if you ever see an em dash in my writing, it’s because I used AI. Cause I’m, 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 heart, intrinsically what I know.

[00:39:02.960] – James Laws

And I get that information into a document 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 format, but then I physically edit.

[00:39:18.020] – Kurt von Ahnen

Mm-hmm.

[00:39:18.200] – James Laws

Through the whole entire process. ‘Cause 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 fix the things that you didn’t even see yourself that you didn’t like. So I spent a lot of time in editing, a lot less time now getting the words on the page in the first place. Okay. And that has worked really well for me. And I have friends who I’ve, 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 going to write well with AI if they take the time to do it right.

[00:40:08.560] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:40:09.200] – James Laws

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 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, for me it’s verbally, but I can use it to write, better because I’m not a writer. 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, 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 gonna make slop. Right. ‘Cause they were gonna make slop whether AI was there or not. And most of us have, now let’s, it’s so obvious now too, right? How is there any one of us even on this call, right?

[00:41:09.900] – James Laws

Who don’t read something and goes, yeah, that’s AI. Like, like immediately, like our, like this, 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 cuz it’s just garbage. And, you know, people recognize quality.

[00:41:35.070] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. Unfortunately though, AI has put the demand of volume. That’s like your keyword in that answer that I picked up on. It’s almost made it like an insurmountable task. Like if you are a crafts person, like you’re crafted in your speech, you’re crafted in your writing, you’re crafted in your design, you’re expected to create now at 5x and 10x of what you used to do 5 years ago.

[00:41:58.540] – James Laws

Yeah.

[00:41:59.160] – Kurt von Ahnen

It used to take 6 to 9 months to write a half-decent course for an e-learning program. And now people want you to whip that out in 2 weeks. And it’s like, there’s a lot of demands. They still want that quality, but they think the timeline should be shortened regardless.

[00:42:14.820] – James Laws

That’s a thing we have to resist. Certainly, I think, like 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 gotta publish, I’ve gotta put out this. 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.

[00:42:48.760] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:42:48.860] – James Laws

‘Cause 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 gonna put that out into the world. But you’re right, it’s there, and that is a draw. It’s something we have to resist. We can all move faster, but we probably need to be careful about how fast that is and what the pressure point is for that speed. Is it actually necessary to move at that speed? You know, I have a problem with myself, I’m an idea person with AI. None of these ideas is off limits anymore.

[00:43:26.370] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:43:26.930] – James Laws

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.

[00:43:56.120] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, that’s perfect to lead over to Jonathan.

[00:43:59.000] – Jonathan Denwood

Jonathan? Yeah, I think, I think we’re gonna drop the last question and we’re gonna end the show now because we’ve had some technical problems. It’s been a good interview. So Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to, Kirk?

[00:44:13.640] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I’m the only Curt Van Onen on LinkedIn, so I’m easy to find there. Just don’t spam me. And then Mañana No Más, that’s my company name, and it’s my handle on almost all my social channels.

[00:44:24.610] – Jonathan Denwood

And James, where’s the best place for people to learn more about your thoughts and what you’re up to?

[00:44:31.910] – James Laws

Yeah, I mean, you can head over to my website, jameslaws.com. 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 you actually act like you know who I am and what I do.

[00:44:45.890] – Jonathan Denwood

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

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