The Future Impact Of AI On eLearning And The WordPress Platform
Explore the future impact of AI on eLearning and learning to be a developer. Uncover trends that will transform online learning experiences for educators and students.
In this week’s show, we dive deeply into the intersection of AI code development technology, eLearning innovations, and the WordPress ecosystem. We’ll uncover how artificial intelligence enhances educational platforms through automation, adaptive learning pathways, and improved accessibility features. Gain valuable knowledge about emerging trends that could shape the future landscape of online education! Watch until the end for expert predictions—don’t miss out.
#1 – Chris, what are some of the most significant opportunities and challenges that eLearning faces connected to AI over the next couple of years?
#2 – AI will change education in general, especially online education. What are your thoughts on this?
#3 – What are some of the biggest challenges that LifterLMS faces when competing with its main SaaS competitors, and do you feel you are at a disadvantage when integrating AI technology compared to these SaaS platforms?
#4 – What are your thoughts about the Gutenberg project, and are some consistent criticisms of the project fair?
#5— What AI tools do you personally use to help you run your business?
#6—If you had your time machine (H. G. Wells) and could travel back to the beginning of you?
This Week Show’s Sponsors
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Convesio: Convesio
Omnisend: Omnisend
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:00.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back to the WP-Tonic Show this week in WordPress and SaaS. In this show, we’ve got a returning friend of the show and a personal friend. We have Chris Badget, the CEO and joint founder of Lifter LMS, a leading LMS plugin in the WordPress space, an entrepreneur, and somebody passionate about eLearning in general. It should be great. We will be discussing AI, how AI will affect eLearning, how it will affect WordPress, running a WordPress business in the next couple of years, where we are with Gutenberg, and all sorts of stuff. It should be a fascinating discussion. Chris, would you like to quickly introduce us to the new listeners and viewers who may not have heard this show before?
[00:01:31.570] – Chris Badgett
Sure. I’m Chris from Lifter LMS, WordPress’s leading learning management system. We’ve been doing that for about ten years. Before that, I ran a WordPress agency focused in eLearning, so I’ve been at this game for a while. I live in the mountains of Maine. I’m a course creator myself. I like dogs and long walks in the woods.
[00:01:52.800] – Jonathan Denwood
He likes his walks with his dogs. And I’ve got my co-host, my ever-patient co-host, Kirt. Kirt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers quickly?
[00:02:07.530] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called MananaNoMas. We focus primarily on learning and membership websites, and I work directly with WP-Tonic and the great folks at Lifter LMS. So this will be fun.
[00:02:19.570] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it should be a great show. We’ve got some great topics. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this podcast, I’ve got a couple of significant messages from our We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. I’m coming back, folks. Also, I want to point out we’ve got some fabulous special offers from the major sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services for the WordPress professional or power user. You can find all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. There, you’ll find all the goodies, including free or discounted ones. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’ll get from that page. I’m sorry to disappoint you, beloved WordPress professionals. I’ve made a career of it. So there we are. So, Chris, let’s go straight into it. So I think one of the exciting things is maybe how AI could affect education significantly, not solely, but especially online education, in the possibilities of customizing a learning process for an individual. Have you considered how this might affect you? And do you get excited?
[00:04:02.730] – Jonathan Denwood
And also, what are some of the challenges around what I’ve just laid out, Chris?
[00:04:08.750] – Chris Badgett
Yeah, I get excited about it. And there are challenges. And to start with the challenges. Ai in today’s form is not a complete replacement for anything, but it is undoubtedly an amplifier for many things. Looking at eLearning specifically, the first thing is that it’s a complex topic because there are a lot of stakeholders. You’ve got teachers, so how do teachers use AI? You have students. How do students use AI? You have LMS website-building professionals; how do they use AI? You’ve got entrepreneurs selling information, coaching, and building communities online. How do they use AI? We can go down a lot of different paths. But to zoom out for a second, the whole purpose of learning is to get better, improve skill acquisition, and even entertainment. Over time in human history, there have been a lot of disruptions or innovations, I should say, whether it’s the printing press, the internet, online education, or just becoming a thing. This AI thing is a new chapter. If you look at where people go to learn stuff, They used to be constrained geographically and financially. YouTube, as an example, has been a big disrupting force in learning.
[00:05:41.880] – Chris Badgett
People still go to colleges and regular school and grade school. A lot of people go to YouTube to learn things or take online courses to learn things or get an online coach to learn things, join an online community to learn things. What AI does is it affects all of those things, but it’s an accelerant. The biggest challenge is really when any of these stakeholders turns a blind eye and doesn’t invest in learning this new technology. The people that do, who do commit to learning how to use AI, to explore it, to keep up with what’s going on, have a huge advantage going forward. For teachers, specifically, starting with them, I do this. Like, later today, I’m doing a demonstration of how to do an eLearning site with paid memberships, Pro and Lifter LMS, and I needed a sample course. I went to ChatGPT and asked it to create an outline for a dog training course that I could use.
[00:06:55.200] – Jonathan Denwood
You got dogs on the mind, Chris.
[00:06:56.830] – Chris Badgett
I come from a background of training dogs. I used to run slut dogs in Alaska and all kinds of things. But by using AI as a research tool to accelerate progress, I saved myself about an hour of coming up with a dog training course of my own by just letting ChatGPT do it for me. Now, if I was creating a real course that I was going to sell and I was really investing in creating a dog training course, I would not just copy and paste from ChatGPT and possibly find some AI video tool to create my lesson content. But I would use AI to augment my knowledge, find gaps in my knowledge, help me find what the market most wants to learn, how to best structure, how to best order that. That’s teachers. When you design curriculum or let’s say you’re creating a coaching program, I’m a big fan of three legs of a stool to create a strong eLearning platform, which would be courses, coaching, and community. We talked a little bit about instructional design and course outlining using artificial intelligence. But then when it comes to coaching, the way coaching works is essentially either in a private one-on-one or group format, people come to you with challenges, and your job as a coach is to help them better understand their problem and figure out a solution, not You can’t necessarily tell them exactly what to do, though you can consult as well.
[00:08:35.150] – Chris Badgett
But true coaching is helping the person figure it out. When a coach has AI as a resource, it can really help that coach understand the problem, find possible solutions, and basically do research, pattern matching, and help guide the coach. If you think about prompts or prompt engineering or whatever. This is how to think about artificial intelligence. Instead of asking the AI to just give me the answer, let’s say I was trying to help somebody who was having trouble getting clients for their business. If I was coaching an entrepreneur, I might go to the artificial intelligence and say, Help me. These are all the things I know running an agency as an example about how to get clients What am I missing? And then it’s going to fill in some knowledge gaps for me. Then I might ask it, Well, I’m trying to help this person. This is their unique situation. Can you customize it to that situation? So it does it. Then I add my own insights and ideas on top of that. Then as a coach, I might say, Now, help me deliver that so I don’t overwhelm the person and maybe explain it more simply or chunk this into a multi-step process.
[00:10:01.630] – Chris Badgett
So I’m using AI more as a copilot for me than as just trying to get it to do my job for me.
[00:10:09.760] – Jonathan Denwood
What you’re describing there is a blend of personal assistant and coach. But we are far from that, where how far is the debatable? There’s some people who are experts in artificial intelligence that say we’re in a two, maybe five year only span where we’re going to see what you’ve just outlined. Other people say it’s going to be quite a distance out 5-10 years, maybe. What’s your own feelings?
[00:10:54.000] – Chris Badgett
I’ve done a lot of research on exponential technology. I think this issue is actually easier to understand, not in eLearning, but if we look at AI and the healthcare industry. I believe AI is exponentially better. I think we’re on ChatGPT 4 now, and then 5 is going to be amazing. It’s going to come fast. Six is going to come even faster and be 10 times better. I believe we’re rounding out on an exponential curve. I’m in the camp that it’s going to come fast. And the part that we don’t know, like currently, as an example, ChatGPT has an IQ of approximately 110. And it can deduce that by taking various tests and stuff that humans take. If you look at artificial intelligence, we’ve-Well, it just depends how much credibility you give to those IQ tests, doesn’t it? That’s true, too. That’s a whole other debate. But one of the interesting things is we’ve already crossed the Rubicon The big test developed, I believe, in the ’50s, about when do we actually have real artificial intelligence is when we pass what’s called the Touring Test, which is when a human cannot tell the difference between an AI and a real human being.
[00:12:20.920] – Chris Badgett
That’s what the movie, great movie recommendation, by the way, Ex Machina. Highly recommend it, came out a while ago. But essentially, if you were talking to ChatGPT, the response you’re getting could be an email from a human being. If you didn’t know you were using an AI tool, you might just think it’s a human. Essentially, we’ve already crossed the Touring Test. We’ve seen demonstrations on video of AI, placing a food order for somebody over the phone and all this stuff. We’re already past the Touring Test. Where this whole thing gets really interesting in uncharded territory, is when we get into what’s known as artificial general intelligence, where if this is in fact an exponential technology, not only will artificial intelligence be smarter than the smartest person on Earth, artificial intelligence can become smarter than all humans on Earth combined.
[00:13:19.850] – Jonathan Denwood
I see where you’re coming from, obviously, but you might be totally correct. The only remark I would say about that, Chris, is a ever more sophisticated language model is not general AI. Even though it can mimic and You mentioned the Turing test, and the technology that we got at the present moment would probably pass that test. But it is only a sophisticated, a very impressive language model, but it has its limitations, which we can see quite clearly. What you’re talking about is general intelligence, and I’m not sure. I think we are I can, for understandable reasons, confuse in a very sophisticated learning model with the possibility of general intelligence, and we’re mixing it all up into a hot brew. But That’s my interpretation. We’re mixing up question one or two, but I’ve got one quick follow-up question, and then I’ll throw over to Kirk to maybe question three. I’ve been a bit disappointed. One of the reasons why I got into the web and web development and WordPress, Chris, is that I thought access to all information would enable people, the barriers to people to learn and to prosper would expand enormously with access to information, like information that you could only go to a library or information that you would only have access to if you were attending a prestige university.
[00:15:29.400] – Jonathan Denwood
Having all this information in being able to access it through a browser or through your mobile device would fundamentally change society. In some ways it has, but unfortunately, in other ways it hasn’t. It wasn’t at all. The terrible fact, and I think I’m correct in this, I’m sure you’re going to be able to correct me if I’m not, is that most of the population, to some extent, has very average IQ, that the Bell Curve, the difference in their IQ level, fundamentally, would describe the difference in outcome to the happiness of their life or the things they could do. But we’re not seeing that. We’re actually seeing in some ways, a reversal. Have you been surprised and disappointed? And do you got any insight before I throw it over to Kurt?
[00:16:28.850] – Chris Badgett
So just so I understand what you’re asking, you’re saying that you had higher hopes for the open web to transform society, right? And it has for some, but I understand what you’re saying. I mean, a Has the open web contributed to the lives of everybody, regardless of background or intelligence, equally? I don’t think it has.
[00:16:55.730] – Jonathan Denwood
Would you agree with the statement I made that the bulk of the population from 70 to 80 % have a IQ level that other factors are more powerful than their actual IQ level?
[00:17:16.940] – Chris Badgett
I mean, I believe in the theory of multiple intelligences. Just a single IQ level is not something I super focus on a lot because I believe people have a lot of different strengths. But in terms of benefiting from the open web, the way I think about that is information is just media, web pages, videos. Then we have social media, and then we have entertainment media, books or media on paper, magazines, newspapers. It’s all just media. Because of the internet, I think what’s happened, and Artificial intelligence is actually the same. Our human biology and evolution, we’re still… The technology is changing much faster than our biology is adapting to it. So similarly, when everybody got access to the Internet, when our biology doesn’t keep up with the rate of our tool creation and change, being able to build weapons back in the day and forge metal and stuff, literally changed society. But we evolved with that, and culture, and macroeconomics, and stuff changes. But things are changing so fast now with the tools that we create, that it’s disorienting. There’s downsides to it, like people getting addicted to social media, addicted to entertainment media. It’s really easy for things to get out of balance.
[00:18:58.240] – Chris Badgett
Similar to when the technology of alcohol was newly introduced in the United States and how that affected Native Americans because they didn’t have the long history that, let’s say, people of European and RSC had, so they’ve adapted to it more over time. This is what it’s like with technology. It’s like the Wild West, and there’s a lot of stimulation and all these things, and we’re just trying to keep our heads above water. But this is the function of education in society or what it should be, which is to help people learn and grow in a positive direction. So education holds the biggest opportunity to help us healthily navigate forward through rapid change and innovation and try to leverage these things to our advantage, not just personally, but collectively and for all. So that’s one of the reasons why I feel strongly about making Lifter LMS open source, having the free core version that’s really valuable. It’s for everybody. It’s not just for people who can afford to buy the software and come from an entrepreneurial background or whatever. It can be picked up anywhere. And that’s what WordPress is all about. It’s democratizing publishing. I’m trying to democratize education.
[00:20:25.220] – Chris Badgett
And yes, but the world is a it’s a wild place. And with a lot of people quitting Facebook as an example or getting caught up in social media, it’s still real life. I mean, this media is part of us. And that’s why there’s just so many challenges in society, because we’re just trying to deal with the media, and it affects us positively and negatively.
[00:20:55.830] – Jonathan Denwood
It gives us power. To recap, you’re saying that the technology is we don’t, because we’re in the water, we don’t realize how things have changed so rapidly, and we’re just trying to cope with the change. We haven’t really worked out how it will fundamentally We’re in the early days.
[00:21:16.820] – Chris Badgett
We are in the early days. So this is why we write science fiction as a society, is we try to explore the future and what it might look like, and some of it’s dystopian, some of it’s optimistic. All three of us on this call grew up in a world before cell phones. Now I can send an AI agent out in the world to go do stuff. It’s a very different world. That change is only accelerating. I think we can remember to our childhoods, you had the record player, then the tape, then the CD, and then the thousand songs in your pocket, and then Spotify. And that’s just a huge change fast.
[00:22:00.790] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, over to you, Kurt. I think we’re on question three.
[00:22:07.850] – Kurt von Ahnen
Question three deals with what are the biggest challenges that a company like Lifter LMS would face competing against SaaS competitors and stuff like that. So if we think of Kajabi, Udeme, the standard names in the space, of which there are hundreds, right? So there’s lots of tools for learning. Lifter LMS is a standout, obviously, with my relationship with you, I’ve chosen it. But what do you think are the main challenges that Lifter LMS faces with these types of SaaS platforms, especially in consideration of how quickly they’re integrating AI into their workflows?
[00:22:47.170] – Chris Badgett
There’s a lot of challenges. Some of them are just WordPress challenges in general. So it’s the same question in a sense of like, how is Wix doing all this? And then WordPress is trying to quote, keep up, or Wix does has more marketing and things like that. So there’s more money in SaaS, and with more money, it’s just that creates more opportunity for marketing and improving products faster, say building bigger teams and so on. So that’s a challenge. In the learning niche, specifically, sometimes I scratch my head. I was thinking about Anker, who sold Teachable to somebody in Mexico, I believe for $200 million. And this was, and I think it was a company based out of Mexico. And I think about that. And I remember when Teachable started, it was around the same time as Lifter LMS. It used to be called Fedora. And as we When I started, I noticed how we were already further along in terms of what was possible to create than what Teachable could do. If you look at it today, it’s like 10X more opportunity with Lifter by itself, and then you tag on the WordPress ecosystem and all these other tools like you have in the WP tonic hosting.
[00:24:27.910] – Chris Badgett
That platform is way more powerful than what a SaaS tool can do, yet the economics of it is not necessarily the same. So that’s a challenge. In terms of integrating AI into learning software. We play around with it. We actually have it in our academy. There’s what’s called the course plan challenge that helps people figure out what their topic is and outline their first course and stuff. We have some AI tools that interview people to figure out what’s called their icky guy and pick a course topic and then create an outline from that and move forward. Our goal eventually is to make it so that that can create actually an importable outline and just accelerate the friction removal of going from idea to course implemented on the website. Some of the AI tools in eLearning right now are just what I’d call interesting, but it’s trying to do too much in the sense that It’s putting the human out of the way. I forget which tool it is has created a course with AI and like, Okay, well, make me a course about this, and it just spits out an outline, just like I was talking about earlier.
[00:25:58.990] – Chris Badgett
But if I was creating a real course, that’s a nice feature, but I would really need to inject my own personal experience, insights, and work with it to actually make great content. I think the biggest opportunity for AI in eLearning, which is more of an opportunity for WordPress as a whole, is that we have all this open source software that the AI can easily get access to. It’s not a closed system like a teachable or Kajabi that’s just one business sitting over here. So whether it’s the web hosts or other entrepreneurs that can figure out how to prompt engineer an entire website or an entire online learning platform, That’s where the big opportunity is. So for example, this week, Siren Affiliates launched a powerful tool that makes it even easier to build a site like Udemy or Netflix or Masterclass with all these referral programs and royalty shares and all this stuff. So if you could go to an AI interface and say, build me a Udemy clone, it could suck in Lifter, Siren, what other tools you need, and essentially in seconds or a minute build literally a clone. And then as an entrepreneur and as a unique human being, I would take my own touch and customize it further to be my thing.
[00:27:34.590] – Chris Badgett
And that’s possible with open source software. That’s not possible with hosted SaaS solutions. So this is where WordPress can win is by being open source, it allows the people that are the AI tools that can curate and grab and write custom code and stuff to really build something truly unique. And I think that’s where we’re going. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get there. I think we’re probably I know some web hosts are starting to do that like, hey, build me a brochure site. I’m a flower shop or I’m a pizza restaurant, and it does a decent job. But once you start getting deeper into web applications, not just brochure websites for businesses, I think it gets really interesting.
[00:28:22.770] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah. And then just to follow up on almost blending all those three questions together, I almost sense that with AI, there’s a change in the basic formula of what learning is for the vendor and for the student. So I go back, you mentioned cell phones. I can still remember childhood friends’ phone numbers from the first grade. We used to have to memorize all those phone numbers. And now I probably can’t tell you what my son’s phone number is because it’s a speed dial in my cell phone. There’s a certain laziness to the learner. And in my corporate training experience, I had to change my mindset from, I don’t want my students to have to remember everything about how a car is built. I need them to know where to find the information for those specifications. And so I think AI is greatly affecting that easy button learning mentality. So we’re not hard coding our brains with new knowledge in a lot of cases. In a lot of cases, we’re saying, Where’s that quick answer? And it’s difficult in an e-course, in an e-learning platform, to try and come up with that magic switch.
[00:29:36.100] – Chris Badgett
Yeah, my friend Danny Ennie said this many years ago that we’ve moved from just-in-case education to just-in-time. And this is where the coaching industry is born from. You’re going with a specific problem I need help with right now. It’s not about building the library of Alexandria in your head to, Someday I might need this information. We’re much more… I agree with you that it’s lazy, and there is a place for classical liberal arts or general education. But the world, this is part of that exponential technology. Industries are getting disrupted. People lose jobs, economics, and all this stuff. People are moving faster than they ever have before. This creates a lot of stress and anxiety and different things in the world. But just in time, there’s lots of reasons to learn. Maybe you need something or you need to learn how to fix something in your house or your car. Maybe you’re just having fun. You found a passion and you want to learn everything about drones or motorcycle mechanics or pastel water colors or something. And you just learning is fun. And that’s honestly my favorite learning. And it just depends on the context of why do you need to learn what you’re interested in right now?
[00:31:00.480] – Chris Badgett
What’s the reason behind that?
[00:31:04.530] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan?
[00:31:05.630] – Jonathan Denwood
I think that’s a good place for us to stop. It’s been a really interesting first half of the show. We got some other fabulous topics to discuss with one of the powerhouses of WordPress entrepreneurship, Chris Badget from Lifter LMS. We will be back in a few moments, folks. 3, 2, We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a fantastic first half. We’ve had a discussion about WordPress and AI and eLearning, and Chris has coped with it as he normally does with my fragmented thoughts and my wondering. But before we go into the second half, I just want to point out, if you’re looking for a great WordPress hosting partner, and we specialize in learning management systems, membership and community-based WordPress-powered websites, and you’re looking for a great hosting partner, that is much more than that. That also offers some fantastic packages to the WordPress professional. Why don’t you look at partnering with WP Tonic? You can find more by going over to wp-tonic. Com/partners, Wp-tonic. Com/partners, and let’s work together. So let’s go on to Gunberg. Obviously, there’s been a lot of discussion lately. It dies down, it erupts. I get people to come in, come on the show, and then I lose interest, really, Chris.
[00:32:55.020] – Jonathan Denwood
And then I think it’s dying down, and then it erupts Perhaps, again. And last few weeks, it’s come from some major… The eruption has come from some major YouTube influencers in the WordPress space. Really quite severe criticism of where Gutenberg is from people who are not normally just labeled as Gutenberg haters. And then over the last couple of days, you’ve had Kevin Gehry promoting some solution. I’ve signed up for one of his presentations, excellent marketing job Kevin is doing for his own book of business, but you got to admire him. And he’s been on the show a couple of times, and I don’t agree with everything Kevin says, but some of the key areas, I do think he has a position that can’t be just dismissed, which seems to be a bit evident on some part of the WordPress community that just wants him to go away and just have a mindset, which I’m not prepared to engage in. So what’s your own thoughts about where we find Gutenberg and some of the criticisms that Kevin aims at the whole situation? Have you got any thoughts about this, Chris?
[00:34:30.500] – Chris Badgett
I would say, generally, I’m a fan of Gutenberg and full site editing. I’m not a developer, and the tools it gives me to be able to build websites and templates and save patterns and all this, I find very useful. Sometimes I hit challenges with it, though. For some reason on one of my sites, even though I’ve saved changes, every time I exit the tab, it tells me there’s unsaved changes in the blocks, but there’s not. Yesterday, I was actually working on a site, and I could not figure out. I didn’t have a bunch of time, and I would have figured it out eventually, but I could not figure out how to do what I wanted to do on the menu. And so for me, the menu is It’s always been a little bit of a sticking point. The old WordPress way of managing the menu was easy, and it just worked. And I’m still struggling with getting it working properly. However, that being said, as a non developer, if I want to build a fancy header that has buttons and all these elements like a Woocommerce cart thing and menu and maybe an opt in form or something, I could figure that out in Gutenberg.
[00:35:41.750] – Chris Badgett
I would never would have been able to do that before. So I’m a fan. I think it’s just interesting the world where we find ourselves in terms of, okay, Elementor is still big, Beaver Builder, Brizzy, all these things, all these page builders. So there’s this parallel universe happening, which I find interesting. As a product creator, it does make our job harder, particularly in support, when you’re building for these two universes, those that use Gutenberg, those that don’t. And it’s like double work in a way. But that’s okay. There’s a place for that. And I like that people have different choices into how they build their website. We just did at Lifter LMS and Usability Testing. We actually hired a testing service called usertesting. Com. And watching, and they basically record five to hour long videos about we give them a goal to set up a course and sell it, and that’s recorded, and they talk into the microphone about what they’re thinking, what they’re trying to do and all this. And it was very enlightening. And to me, I could immediately see lots of areas of improvement, because when you get used to a tool, whether it’s WordPress, or the old WordPress, or Gutenberg, or Beaver Builder, Elementor, Brizzy, whatever, all those things, you become used to it, and you get blind, and you forget that you had a learning curve there.
[00:37:17.510] – Chris Badgett
So what I’d love to see with the Gutenberg project is maybe for a quarter, half a year, a year, to freeze new feature development and just focus on usability. And I think that would be a problem.
[00:37:33.580] – Jonathan Denwood
I totally. You must have read my mind because that’s what I was going to share. I’m speaking for Kevin, but I think there’s two main areas or three main areas that I do see that, I wouldn’t say I totally agree, but I see where you’re coming from. I think I totally agree with what you’ve just said, because I think there is a usability UX problem with this new elements that have been bolted on that don’t really match with other parts of the CRM. I think that’s disjointing to a large extent.
[00:38:15.270] – Chris Badgett
That’s one area for sure. I just want to say is that design element of when you’re in the full site editor versus in the regular WordPress admin. It’s a little much. I have a lot of sympathy for the challenge. Like, Lifter LMS is complex. It does a lot of things. There’s a lot of settings.
[00:38:31.470] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s hard to design that. It’s linked to this driving philosophy that backward compatibility must be all embracing the Microsoft model. Don’t get me wrong, I personally think there’s a middle road. I think backward compatibility is really important so you don’t end up with a Joomla or Drupal situation, which They’re handling really damaged those open source platforms to some extent. But on the other hand, I think you can take it too far as well. But that’s only my personal opinion. I think the other criticism that Kevin is correct is that there’s different micro-communities that make up the bigger WordPress professional community. One of those micro-communities is the one person or a three-person WordPress agency that has a skill set that’s based on PHB, CSS, HTML, with some graphic design ability that can’t, won’t, or just can’t get into the world of JavaScript, and they’re increasingly getting frustrated with a lot of the power and functionality, which is class-based CSS. And CSS is moving and developing at an enormous pace. They’re getting increasingly frustrated with a lot of the power not being available because it’s locked in to a React JSON platform, and I think that’s causing a lot of resentment.
[00:40:26.080] – Jonathan Denwood
And finally, I think just the way that the project is managed and nobody really… There doesn’t seem to be any clear path. That might be unfair, but that does seem to be the general feel of the thing. What’s your reactions with what I’ve just outlined?
[00:40:51.340] – Chris Badgett
It’s a micro example of a macro story that we’ve been talking about. Exponential rate of technology change for humans is difficult. And in many ways, AI is here to help. So when you have knowledge gaps, let’s say as a developer and you’re trying to cross the bridge into JavaScript, you can use AI as a tutor, even just ChatGPT, to help you learn. But it goes back to what we discussed earlier about what’s your motivation for learning? And I think one of the strongest assets, and this is really And that’s really part of our company culture at Lifter LMS, is that there’s changes happening. So you have to be a lifelong learner to really Excel at Lifter. And I think that’s true in the whole world. If you found your system and your process as a one person agency, but the world’s changing around you, that’s a precarious position to be in. And so investing in your own learning is important. But I also get the idea of being a business. You’ve spent all this time learning tools and perfecting your process, and you just want to keep it the way it is. And there’s nothing wrong with that either.
[00:42:14.930] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think it goes further a little bit than that, because I think with the developments, the ongoing and accelerated developments of CSS and what it can do in a modern browser, the way that Gutenberg has been developed, a lot of these people that can do amazing things with CSS, with modern CSS, they don’t have access to it. They’re divorced from that power by using native Gutenberg builders. They can’t get access to a lot of this increasing and ever accelerating CSS power, and that makes them extremely the unhappy with the whole project. Can you see where I’m coming from, Chris?
[00:43:04.930] – Chris Badgett
I can, and I would just say that ultimately the market decides. So in this case, the agencies decide which tools they’re going to use. And this is how technology has a life cycle or businesses have a life cycle. So it’s a tale of two worlds. The customer or user needs to adapt, and then the technology needs to adapt and pick a market. Or if you want to be abroad, like WordPress and us at Lifter, because people use a lot of different ways, you have to evolve, but also be sensitive to the community of users and try to keep them in the tent, if you will.
[00:43:53.150] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think that’s well put. Over to you, Kurt, for the next question.
[00:43:57.180] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I was just thinking as you guys were talking, I I am really quite a schizophrenia on the whole Gutenberg subject. There’s parts of me where I’m like, Hey, it’s the tool. I’m an agency. I use it. So it’s like, WordPress, it works. I can build sites, Lifter LMS, I can take that, but it works. But then there’s people that are, I think, much more sound when they think things through. Katie Keith from Barn, too, had a post on X, and she listed out all of the things in the user experience that she thought was inconsistent. And then as I read the post, which was a long post, I was like, oh, yeah, that is distracting. Oh, yeah, that too. And I was like, all those things that I don’t consciously think of because I’m just a dude running a business using the tool, right? But other people would come into the environment and see it as a user experience obstacle. But we don’t recognize the obstacle because we’re immersed in it all the time. So that bipolar, schizophrenia side of me is always a conflict because part of me wants to just produce And the other part of me is like, I don’t want to have to figure it out for everybody.
[00:45:03.490] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s just the tool is what it is.
[00:45:05.780] – Chris Badgett
I just want to share. I have a great framework and how to think about that, which is I’d give credit if I could remember where I heard this, but it was basically the great companies have three characters in them. A hipster, which is a designer, a hacker, which is a coder, and a hustler, which is a marketer, salesperson, business builder, so on. And And many of us were a combination of these things. But if you look at the Gutenberg project, when you were saying, Kire, I’m just trying to build a website, that’s what a hustler would say. What Jonathan was saying is, he was getting into the code, that’s what a hacker would say. Katie Keith has a strong design eye, a hipster. So when she’s seeing inconsistency, this is how a designer experiences incongruency and so on. So I often use that framework to try to level up myself in all those areas. I’m not a great designer myself, so I don’t necessarily notice all that design stuff the way a strong designer would, but I try to level up in my design eye over time. Same with, not so much with hacking, I’m just not much of a coder.
[00:46:19.360] – Chris Badgett
I’m more of a hustler, but I try to understand, at least to the high level, what’s going on.
[00:46:26.050] – Kurt von Ahnen
Cool. Well, the next question that we had was driving us back to AI, and And if you just share with us, Chris, what are your go-to AI tools? You’ve mentioned ChatGPT, but I’m sure there’s a couple more in your quiver. What things do you run to for assistance?
[00:46:42.270] – Chris Badgett
I’d say ChatGPT is the main one. I’m on the pro version. I’ve also built custom GPTs. I’ve had one that was trained on our podcast, LMS Cast, so it could literally look at 10 years of me interviewing people and use that as a knowledge base. And it works okay, but that’s an example of where that still needs to improve. Sometimes it hallucinates or it talks about a guest that wasn’t on there and stuff like that. I’m an experimenter, particularly with learning and just communication in general. I’ve experimented a lot with language translation AI, both for videos, audios, and text. I find that really interesting. For the image generation, I use several. Probably my favorite is a public GPT called Cosmic Dream, I think. And it does really wild images. Sometimes I’ll use for pieces of featured images or blog posts and things like that. Those are really the main ones I’ve used. I’ll tell you what I’m not a fan of is like I can tell just the amount of prospecting outbound sales spam I get in my email inbox. I know people are using AI to both write these emails, to build email lists, to maybe run these campaigns for them.
[00:48:15.980] – Chris Badgett
I find that really annoying.
[00:48:17.520] – Kurt von Ahnen
When you get really good at LinkedIn, you become a target, and your inbox just fills up with just absolute garbage. I wish that Microsoft LinkedIn, their partnership would do a better job of filtering some of that out because it’s painfully obvious that that stuff is not from a human.
[00:48:38.050] – Chris Badgett
I’ll say one more that is really awesome as a podcaster and a video creator and course creator is Descript, which is a video audio editing tool. Yesterday, I made a two-minute commercial for Lifter, basically. And they have this feature called Studio Sound, where the AI can take out all the ums and which I’m terrible at, and just improve the audio quality. I have a decent microphone, but it just sounds 10 times better when the AI cleans up the audio. I can’t recommend to script highly enough.
[00:49:15.840] – Kurt von Ahnen
Excellent. Excellent. Thanks. Jonathan?
[00:49:18.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Is there any AI tools or services that the company, Lifter LMS, has been utilizing effectively from your team?
[00:49:29.440] – Chris Badgett
Yeah. I mean, we’re we’re a AI forward company, so like GitHub copilot, our developers use that. Chatgpt, everybody uses. I’m not sure what else what else we might be using, but I’m sure there’s I’m sure there’s more. I know my business partner, Jason and Kim, are big AI people, and they use AI for lots of different things. I’d ask Kurt, what does he use? I think you’re muted, Kurt.
[00:50:05.950] – Kurt von Ahnen
I was going to type in AI forward company into the comments. I thought that was a cool catch line, and I didn’t want my keyboard clacking away. For me, Jonathan brought this guy named Ryan Roberts on the podcast that was pimping this thing called Write Blogger. At the time, I was hurting on creating content for Manana Nomas because I was busy on so many many other things. And so I leverage that tool, and I really like… Because I didn’t have to become a prompt genius in ChatGPT to get something to do what I wanted it to do. He built a tool that the prompts are already built for AI. So I’m like, make me an outline, turn that I’m going to sign into an article. Let me review that article. Let me copy and paste sections of that. Let me add to that. You can put in a YouTube video and it gives you a synopsis article without being a transcript, which is one of the tools I really like. So that’s one my go-tos. And then I play a lot with the different AIs. So instead of relying on OpenAI, ChatGPT, GPT, I’ll go to Claude, I’ll go to LLaMA, I’ll go to different ones, and I’ll try and compare the outputs and then see which one is giving me more bias than another.
[00:51:20.750] – Kurt von Ahnen
But then I realize, here comes the caveat with AI. It’s supposed to save me time, right? So if I’m going to three separate tools and reading and comparison, I haven’t saved any time. So for me, it’s a personal struggle on the balance of AI versus organic work and trying to stay productive.
[00:51:40.420] – Chris Badgett
One more for just you out there listening or watching. Ai for SEO is really powerful. And for me personally, SEO is a lifelong journey thing, figuring it out. But in terms of really good SEO for blogging, starts with what’s called a content brief. And before that, it’s keywords. But when you build a… I can’t remember the name of the tool, but I’ve used this tool. If I’m targeting a certain phrase and sub phrases to help me, it’ll find all the top ranking articles, and it’ll help me figure out the headings and basically the structure of the article, which then helps you build a strong content brief. I found that one really fun and fascinating. When I used it, I brought one of our articles from ranking 23rd to number one. It stays in the number one, two, three spot. And I couldn’t have done as good a job without that AI tool to help do all that research for me. So that one actually did save me time.
[00:52:49.240] – Kurt von Ahnen
I saw Jonathan smirking when you were talking about SEO, and I thought to myself, you know how they have those speed building challenges for websites? I think we should pick a topic and it should be an SEO standoff between Jonathan and Chris to see who can rank a subject higher.
[00:53:06.200] – Chris Badgett
I saw Jonathan get one of his articles above mine the other day, and I was like, how do you do that? That’s one of my best. But we could do a whole different- I’m everywhere.
[00:53:16.760] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m a content producing machine that Kirk will testify. We got our last question, then probably Kirk will have to go off to do some work for Lifter, and hopefully Chris might be able to stay on because I want to have a little chat about burnout and how Chris sees the signs and how he deals with it. Are you okay with that, Chris? Sure. But our final question is my time My time machine, am I Doctor Who? So if you had your own time machine, your own from G. Welles or your TARDIS from Doctor Who, and you could go back to the beginning of your career, and you just, not nothing fat, dramatic, but if you could just whisper in your own ear at the beginning of your career and just give yourself a quick 10 minute bit of mentorship, what would be one or maybe two quick things you wish you had known at the beginning of it, Chris?
[00:54:18.930] – Chris Badgett
Well, one of them is- Don’t come on this podcast. Besides that, one of them is, we were talking about the hipster, the hacker, and the hustler. A really big one is, particularly in marketing, but just really communication and content in general, is that people have different consumption style. Some people watch videos, some people listen to audio, some people read. Those are the main ones. I personally am more of an audio and video consumer. And I’m not a bad writer. I’m not a fast typer. But if I could go back in time, I would encourage my earlier business self to write more, study the craft of writing more, study SEO sooner, younger. But if you’re already strong at those things, I would encourage you to think Try the other ones. Start a podcast, experiment with the audio format, get into YouTube as soon as possible. And just because you like to consume content primarily in a certain way, if you’re business building, you really need to have all those. Otherwise, you’re just missing a third or two thirds of your market. So that would be one big one. The other one would just be to Try not to, try to sleep a little more, manage your energy a little better.
[00:55:54.170] – Chris Badgett
It’s really hard to start a company, particularly when you’re bootstrapping. And entrepreneurs can be really hard on themselves. And I’ve always tried to maintain my health and fitness and sleep and mental attitude and stuff. But building a business is hard on all parts of life. So take care of it, build yourself as much as you try to build your company.
[00:56:20.950] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I think when I’m getting close to it is that I can be very sarcastic, as you have noticed. But when I’m When I’m close to burnout, I tend to have emotional outbursts, and I’m normally… And then it goes away, but it’s a release mechanism. I just get really worked up, and then I just explode. I’m not finally- I’m glad I can be there for you in those moments. You’ve seen a couple of them, Kurt. They don’t happen too regularly. I think you’ve observed about 2-3 of them over 18 month period, but they do happen. But in January, I try to think I’m a reasonably logical person, and you got a logical argument. I think you stand a chance of influencing me. I think you’re the same, Chris. I think you won’t. You listen to anybody, as long as you think they’re not a total idiot, and there’s some logic somewhere in their argument.
[00:57:28.510] – Chris Badgett
But- One The other thing there I just want to throw in is, I’m a lifelong learner. So recently I signed up for master class, and there’s this psychology class on there about relationships. See you, Kurt. There’s this thing about conflict where people are usually either aggressive or blowout, like you describe. And then other people are retreaters. I’m more of a retreater. Based on what you’re telling me it sounds like you’re more of a combustible?
[00:58:03.190] – Jonathan Denwood
I always have been. I think it comes from my mother. My mother could be volatile sometimes. Who knows? That’s a Bless a little heart. So I think we’re going to wrap up the podcast part of the show. If you really want to support the podcast, folks, why don’t you sign up for the WP Tonic newsletter? It has a load of stuff every week about tech, WordPress, and anything else that comes on my radar. It’s quite unique because I formulate it. So you can sign up for that by going over to WP-tonic. Ca WP-Tonic. Com/newsletter, WP-Tonic. Com/newsletter. Please do that because I take that as a great sign of support for the show. Chris, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and Lifter LMS.
[00:59:02.490] – Chris Badgett
Just head on over to lifterlms. Com. Download the free plugin if you haven’t used it yet. I also have a podcast for course creators and WordPress professionals called LMS Cast. On social media, on the easiest to reach at Twitter.
[00:59:17.850] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to have a bonus session where we’re going to be talking about burnout and maybe go back to a quick roundup about eLearning. You can watch the whole show by going over to the WP Tonic YouTube channel and you’ll be able to watch the podcast part and the bonus content there. We will be back next week with our great roundtable show, which hopefully Chris will be part of. Got some guests for that show. It’s always a laugh. I am merciless in the way I take the Mickey out of my fellow WordPress professional community, but it’s all in good jest and fun. We We will be back next week. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. Let’s continue. How do you see the signs of burnout in yourself? What starts triggering that you feel burnout is occurring, and then you got to do something about it? What are some of the signs in yourself?
[01:00:27.520] – Chris Badgett
Well, first, I’d say I, and I think most people usually don’t see it because you’re just in it. I think it’s particularly common in entrepreneurs who are just working hard. And it’s almost like, I would imagine I’m not a soldier, but when a soldier comes back from war, sometimes they can’t turn it off, and they’re just in what’s known as battle fatigue, and they get caught in that loop. But what I notice when things… I try to develop mindfulness and self-awareness. It’s like an ongoing life’s work thing. When I really pay attention, things I notice are lower energy, lower excitement, maybe quick to either either anger or retreating, pulling back, one of those. I notice that I’m just not as engaged in my work or personal life. So I’m just that when people acknowledge it and say, that’s what burnout feels like, it’s just I’m not that engaged with the world. I’m not that engaged with the work. I’m not that engaged in myself. But at the same time, I have to keep all that going forward, and that’s where you’re caught in the loop of battle fatigue or burnout. So that’s what it feels like.
[01:01:58.510] – Chris Badgett
And I don’t think you really feel it or see it until you start to come out of it, or you come out of it, or you make some serious progress in the positive direction.
[01:02:08.300] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, you’ve got a lot more responsibility than me. I’ve got no children, and I’m not in a long-term relationship. You’re married, you’ve got children, plus you’re running a medium-sized company. You’ve got people relying on your leadership for their income to various extents. Plus you’ve got partners. You’ve got a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. And these people expect leadership from you. So that’s a lot, isn’t it?
[01:02:42.890] – Chris Badgett
Yeah, it is a lot. For whatever reason, I’ve always been good at taking on responsibility, but it’s definitely can lead to burnout easily. Sometimes I look at YouTube as an example, and I I see these videos about finding motivation, and it doesn’t click with me because I’m always motivated. There’s plenty to do. I have vision, I know what to do, or I have goals I’m moving towards. But that’s a double-edged sword. It’s a lot to manage, it’s a lot to juggle. Particularly in your 30s and your 40s, particularly if you have a family, and it’s just a challenging time. In your 50s, it’s all challenging at different layers and ages of life. But midlife, if you will, is, I think, where a lot of burnout happens, and the responsibility stack is the deepest it’s going to be in your life, I think. So that’s the challenge.
[01:04:03.750] – Jonathan Denwood
Can I go back to the WordPress community? Obviously, you can’t please everybody. There’s some people that just don’t like you. And I’m fine with it. I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. And there’s some people… It takes a fair bit for me to have real animosity to certain individuals, but it is there because I just find them awful. And I’m sure there’s some people that find me awful. But in general, most people have different views because they’re passionate. And one of the strengths of the WordPress community, the professional, the power user, the real horror, they WordPress, is they’re very passionate about WordPress to a level that you wouldn’t find in SaaS products, generally, in my opinion. And it’s one of the strengths, the wider WordPress community, Because for various factors, as you pointed out in the podcast part of this interview, that unlike Wix or some of the other SaaS, in your own area, Kajabi or Learnable, you just don’t have the marketing budget of some of these SaaS players. But you’ve got, in some ways, something even more powerful, the wider WordPress community, the agencies, the people that use Lifter LMS and love it, and the same to a wider level, WordPress in general.
[01:05:41.680] – Jonathan Denwood
I noticed that Matt Modias was having a chat And he said that for over 20 years it’s been part of him, and he’s very passionate still about seeing the best for WordPress. And I think most of us are. But But there’s also… There seems to be a bad side to that passion, which is a groupful, rejecting any consistent and honest criticism, not accepting that things aren’t going right and there needs to be a rethink. And instead of listening to constructive criticism, that can I might go to a level where it becomes corrosive. I do accept that, but not accepting obvious things and really dealing with them sincerely rather than just saying it’s a communication problem. I think some of the things that we’ve talked about in this show is more than just communication. There are some fundamental problems that need to be sorted out. Do you think it seems to be recently be getting worse, the more corrosive and unhelpful element. Would you agree with that, or do you think you wouldn’t?
[01:07:12.780] – Chris Badgett
Well, I do see stuff that gets out of hand on social media or whatever. But there’s a difference with WordPress in the sense that it’s decentralized in a way. You could make an argument, in some ways it is centralized.
[01:07:30.070] – Jonathan Denwood
It seems to be both at the same time, doesn’t it?
[01:07:34.890] – Chris Badgett
Well, what you can’t do is use methods from the centralized world to solve problems in a decentralized culture. So what I mean by that is, and this is another example of how things are changing so fast, these online communities and decentralization of power and all this stuff is actually pretty new ideas, new technology. In the human experience. But part of decentralization is there’s no police, right? There’s no… That’s something from the centralized world And there’s not… There is people with more or less power in WordPress, but it’s also in the same way people can do things all over the place, and they can do whatever they want with the software. So that creates situations like we have with there’s not just one way to build a website. So this page builder thinks this, Gutenberg thinks that. This person doesn’t want to use WordPress anymore. So there’s just a lot of freedom as well. So and then the other part is, I think, I mean, just my general approach, I’m not the type of person who would quit social media on a tirade. But I do believe and have observed an experience, and probably to some degree myself behave differently on the Internet than if I was in a room with these people.
[01:09:15.170] – Chris Badgett
So I think the challenge for online communities is, it’s harder to be civil for some reason. And I don’t know. I don’t think you’re spot on, but I think I think there’s hardly anybody in the world that I agree with everything they think and say.
[01:09:37.740] – Jonathan Denwood
Now, I really listen to Matt Madeias. I always listen to what he’s saying. I don’t agree with everything, every viewpoint that comes out of his mouth. I doubt if he agrees with much that comes out of mine. But Kevin, Gary, I think he’s got some really good points. I I don’t agree with everything that comes out of his mouth, because most of this is gray. There is no right and wrong.
[01:10:08.440] – Chris Badgett
Right. And here’s the trick I use, and I think this just comes with experience and time. So for example, it’s common in a software company to get somebody who’s angry and rude and support and goes off. And this is that thing where if we were in a room together, they probably wouldn’t talk this way. But I’ve developed thick skin, and user or customer, I care about that. I want their experience. I want them to be able to do what they need to do. But there’s also boundaries of what the software does or doesn’t do and so on. But even when the tone or the delivery is not great, I’m still open to the idea that that person may have an idea or that could help. I think that’s the key with criticism is to always look for the diamond in the rough. Sometimes there’ll be no diamond. There’s just not. But oftentimes there is, maybe a small diamond, maybe a big diamond. And that’s the key to criticism. So when you look at something like the Gutenberg project as an example, or WordPress core, whatever, because it’s Just to finish off, I want to butt in.
[01:11:34.820] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m sorry. But when you were saying that the interface, I think it can’t be disputed that most of the people that have any influence in the WordPress professional power user, apart for one or two, that I won’t call them out personally because it’s not It’s not appropriate, but because it’s just my opinion. I see them as WordPress automatic propagandists, and my own independence, to some extent, is important to me, and I see them as just propagandists. But those that are like Matt Madejas, Paul from WP Tuck, other people in the WordPress influence space, They’ve all called for what you outlined that there should be a sustained period of not adding any more features to Gutenberg and to have a period where resources are concentrated on sorting out the actual interface, the UX, and a serious community discussion about what should be done Gutenberg’s process afterwards. Also, I’m very frustrated with the way that automatic is managed and run because it makes little sense to me because I just see That they’re missing an enormous opportunity to build a real competitor on wordpress. Com, a real competitor to Shopify, and really take the fight to one of the most successful SaaS platforms in the last eight years, which is Shopify, and really take the fight to Shopify.
[01:13:42.800] – Jonathan Denwood
And I think Automatic could be hugely successful in doing that. And they just don’t… It doesn’t seem to be any focus, really, Chris. But there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s not my business, really.
[01:13:57.460] – Chris Badgett
I mean, I like to let everybody run their own race And in terms of that, I mean, there’s no reason. One of the things that’s really fascinating me with WordPress is the opportunity for the WASPs, the website as a service, like you do at WP Tonic. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a big company, a small company, a medium company. Everybody could innovate and build a superior e-commerce solution to Shopify. Would you agree?
[01:14:28.330] – Jonathan Denwood
Because I feel that with Woocom as Wo, I think that WordPress.com is a little bit lost as a platform. And if they concentrated on getting Gutenberg, which will never be finished, but getting it to a bit of a better position and then really focus on offering a superb e-commerce solution with the benefit of when you need to customize the solution, you’ve got all the power and community of WordPress, the WordPress. Org community. It seems to me to be a win-win for both parties. And I don’t understand why they don’t see it or act on it. But what do I know, Chris?
[01:15:16.170] – Chris Badgett
I don’t have a view on the company’s inner workings, but I would say I’ve always been fascinated with the slogan, All the power of WordPress without the hassle. So what I mean by that is that if somebody, An e-commerce, aspiring e-commerce store owner, could come into a service that builds a website that works just as good as Shopify but has ten times the customizability without it being overwhelming. That’s how I think about e-learning as well. I hope many people use the tools to build excellent e-learning sites that their users love and that the platform owner loves and finds easy to use.
[01:16:04.580] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s a-Yeah, and to finish off the WordPress as a service, I think that got popular as a concept, and there’s still… Everybody is trying to find this middle road. But for some reason, I think one of the problems is because it was based on a WordPress multisite, and I believe that it came; it’s retired, but now it’s coming back. You’re seeing one of your competitors in your space. There’s two; there’s you or Learndash. Learndash has a hosted element. I had a conversation with Tom from Convertio, and they know their marketing optimization platform. And you’re seeing various hostings, and to some extent, what I’m trying to offer at WP-Tonic. So I sense that everybody, a lot of players, is looking at this, but they’re all in a darkened room, dark room moving around to find something that will gel, that can be this middle road between fully SaaS and a classical WordPress build-out environment. Would you agree with that? Yeah. Do you think that’s the proper sense?
[01:17:39.640] – Chris Badgett
The multi-tenancy website has always been part of the WordPress story. As you mentioned, multi-site. It’s been around for a long time. It’s part of our shared story and a great area for innovation in our space. And once, as a community, we unlock that, not just for e-commerce and e-learning, it could…
[01:18:07.950] – Jonathan Denwood
That would be the next room for work. To finish, I’m not being rude, but I think the problem is this balanced area, a sweet place where you haven’t… Because it can never be fully locked down as a sas. But also it doesn’t… As Spencer Forum mentions, this flea market. I think people are attempting to find a middle ground, but I don’t think anybody’s found totally the sweet point. I think they’re all having a bit of a dance to try and find it individually, where this sweet spot of not being a total flea market but not trying to be the worst of all worlds, which I think is a WordPress SaaS. Because do you think there’s anything to what I’ve just said?
[01:19:09.040] – Chris Badgett
Yeah, I think it’s a big challenge, and it’s for the entrepreneurs and innovators to figure out. But Balancing ease of use with power, customizability, and flexibility is a big ask. It’s possible, and people are innovating in that area, but I think it’s early days. Because of the decentralized nature of the WordPress technology ecosystem, people are building things in different ways and so on without standardization; I think that’s what you mean by the flea market style. It presents another challenge: how do we integrate the parts to make this clean, elegant solution for a client’s use case or our project? I think We’ll get there. If we talk about this five years from now, there’ll be more… There will be better solutions and more innovation regarding the SaaS-like experience with WordPress. And this goes back to AI as well. If AI can help, we’ll innovate faster in this department.
[01:20:23.400] – Jonathan Denwood
I think it’s time to end. Chris has been very generous with his time. We’ve had a fantastic discussion. We’ve covered a lot in this interview. Thank you so much, Chris. Hopefully, you’ll be able to join us next week, Chris, for the roundtable show. But it’s been a great interview. We’re going to end it now. We’ll see you next week, folks. Bye.
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