[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how WordPress Credits bridges education and industry in the WordPress ecosystem.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Ivana Ćirković. Ivana is a digital marketer with 18 years of experience working both in and out of the tech industry, and currently leads marketing at WPBakery. She’s an active participant in WordPress events, having attended, and spoken at, numerous local and international word camps over the years.

In this episode, our focus is on the WordPress Credits initiative. We learn how this program, launched by the WordPress Foundation, connects students with real world opportunities to contribute to the WordPress ecosystem, earn certifications, and increase their competitiveness in the job market.

Ivana discusses her own experience as a WP Credits mentor, working with students as they learn about digital marketing, remote work, and other open source contributions. We explore, how universities can modernise their curriculums, and real world value for students by participating in the initiative, and how businesses can get involved, not just to support the community, but to help shape and discover future talent.

The program’s evolving structure also gets attention, and we learn how students are guided through hands-on activities such as translation or documentation, and how their progress is tracked publicly via profiles on wordpress.org. Ivana shares the opportunities and challenges for both educators and businesses with thoughts on accountability, mentorship, and the need to bring new faces into the WordPress community.

If you’re interested in the future of WordPress, education, or bridging the gap between academia and industry, this episode is for you.

If you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Ivana Ćirković.

I am joined on the podcast by Ivana Ćirković. Did I get that right?

[00:03:14] Ivana Ćirković: Yes. Excellent.

[00:03:16] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. This is my first interview at WordCamp Europe 2026. I’m guessing because we’re on the first day of the event and it’s quite early in the morning, it’s 10 in the morning, I’m guessing you cannot have done your presentation yet?

[00:03:30] Ivana Ćirković: Not yet. Tomorrow.

[00:03:32] Nathan Wrigley: Do you get nervous with these kind of things?

[00:03:34] Ivana Ćirković: I get nervous all the time. I’ve been doing this for 12 years, it never gets easier. It is what it is.

[00:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: Well, the presentation that you are doing is going to be the focus of what we’re talking about today. So do you just want to tell us a little bit about the topic that you’re talking about, but also just give us a bit of a general bio about who you are and what you do. So just tell us about you and about your presentation basically.

[00:03:56] Ivana Ćirković: Okay. First thing first, I would like to introduce my presentation, or the talk, that is build up around WordPress Credits initiative, which is something that WordPress has rolled out late last year in December. And I applied to be a mentor to support students into their entering into WordPress. Got accepted, did my courses, passed them and started working with students on their, first entering the WordPress society, how everything works, contributing.

And out of all of this, I came up with the idea of sharing the story about WordPress Credits. What it is, why it is important, not just for the WordPress community, but also for universities all around the world for businesses to support, because there is an angle and huge opportunity for them too. And hopefully inspire people to join and become part of it more.

As far as I’m concerned, my name is  Ivana Ćirković and I am a digital marketer for 18 years. I’ve been working inside tech organisations, tech industry, but also outside of it. So I’m the multiverse. And lately, for past couple of years, I’ve been working in WPBakery, in marketing their product, and talking to people, sharing knowledge of what we do, how we do it, and so on. In the meantime I am attending many, many WordCamps, local and international ones, giving lectures, giving talks about digital marketing and all things related.

[00:05:39] Nathan Wrigley: So are you here at this event, not just to give your presentation, are you also here on behalf of WPBakery to represent them and the products that they have as well?

[00:05:47] Ivana Ćirković: Yes, we are sponsors. I am speaker, I was table lead for marketing on Contributors Day. So we are wide into the ecosystem.

[00:05:56] Nathan Wrigley: I have to say, having only been in this event space for about an hour, I’m actually deeply impressed by this particular event. It really is a gigantic venue. It’s so pleasurable as well to see the WordPress community in such large numbers here. And so we’re looking forward to a really good event.

Okay, let’s kick off with the topic at hand then. So it occurs to me that many people listening, whilst they’re using WordPress and they’re kind of, I don’t know, they’re building websites for people, and they’ve got products and plugins and they’re just general users. It may be that the community piece, and the educational piece, is nothing that they’ve heard of before. So would you just tell us a little bit about what WP Credits is as far as you’re concerned, just to give us that broad background of what it is?

[00:06:40] Ivana Ćirković: Okay. So WP Credits program is initially made to bring new young people into the WordPress, to broaden the ecosystem with the new fresh blood, new contributors. And to do so, WordPress Foundation initiated this program to connect with universities all across the world. To connect students to some programs, to learn about WordPress through contribution. For that, they will get graded and get certification, which in the end will help them be more marketable, and have more modern knowledge of what is needed in today’s job market, and to be more competitive and more appealing to potential employers.

So by doing so, WordPress Credits aims to broaden the ecosystem, to strengthen the WordPress community, and WordPress itself. But also to put new generations in more marketable place, and to help them get more profitable jobs.

[00:07:45] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. That was a really nice summary. In terms of your personal commitment to it and what have you, how did you fall into it as a thing that you were doing? And is this something that you get sponsored for from WPBakery, or is it personal and simply a sort of philanthropic thing that you are doing on the side?

[00:08:01] Ivana Ćirković: Yeah, so basically, I’ve been doing education my whole professional life. So it’s something that comes natural to me. In my local country, in Serbia, I do informal education for high schoolers and primary school’s children about digital marketing, digital literacy. This is like very natural to me. I’m being sponsored by WPBakery to do so.

And the program works like, initiative needs people, needs more mentors to get involved. More than it needs like product and businesses to support with their products. So if there are businesses who are maybe interested in support through their product, know that you need to put your people first to actually get involved and contribute, and then you can offer products as the side piece, so to say.

[00:08:52] Nathan Wrigley: So yeah, it seems that you’ve got a lifelong interest in education as well. Okay, that gives me some sort of hook there.

Okay, if I was to say WP Credits to the people outside, the people who already knew about it, I think would probably peg it as entirely educational in nature, just an education initiative. But curiously, your presentation, the notes that went with that and the blurb that went on the WordCamp Europe website, you kind of make the point that it’s much bigger than that, and you get into businesses and the students themselves and universities.

So the students in universities bit, well, that’s the education piece. But the business bit, what’s going on there? Because I definitely hadn’t drawn that intuition. I thought education from top to bottom. But business, okay, where does that fit in?

[00:09:37] Ivana Ćirković: I will get the hot insights from the talk. So basically, there is more than what meets the eye, so to speak. Businesses have unique opportunity to shape people they want to employ by getting involved as mentors. They also get the chance to see firsthand how those young minds work in real environments, in real contribution. And they get the chance to pick and choose who they want to employ by seeing them work on some real things. Whether it’s documentation, whether it’s translation or programming, developing something, AI.

We need more people who know what they do, although they are young. By having students in this program, they are working on not fictional things, but actual things that really contribute to community and businesses as a whole. By supporting this initiative, businesses then in relations to that can get more insights into who they want to employ. So on top of that, they are building the better market for themselves as well.

[00:10:42] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the student university piece is fairly obvious. You know, WP Credits and the people working on that project communicate with universities, they’re probably easy to find. You know, if you go to a phone directory for example, they’ll all be there. And it’s an easy thing to do. You phone up the university and see if there’s interest. And I know that some universities have taken up the WP Credits program. And it seems to be, as far as I can work out, it seems to be working very successfully.

How are you going to make the connection with businesses? Because that seems like a much more scattered, I don’t know if you’re going to be working with big businesses, you know, huge companies or if it’s going to be kind of more the businesses on the street, the smaller businesses, that kind of thing. So, I’ll just sort of hand it over at that point.

[00:11:23] Ivana Ćirković: So basically, web agencies, businesses around WordPress, we know they have an issue with new employees onboarding last, let’s say three to six months. That cost time and money and other people who are teaching them what needs to be done and how.

Then we have WordPress Credit students who are already doing that junior type of work within contribution. They’re already onboarded through using Slack, knowing how to do remote work, what needs to be done. So businesses supporting WordPress Credits initiative can choose those students and spend less time and money and energy in onboarding them because they already went through that by doing WordPress Credits program.

[00:12:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess if you are a small web agency, it’s highly likely that you won’t necessarily have an induction program finely tuned, so that the young people that are coming through have this sort of specialised system where they can get some accreditation. It’s probably more, okay, I’m going to assign you to John this week and then next week you’re going to go over to Susan and follow what they’re doing.

So is there a sort of structured program that, let’s say a web agency based in London could drop into and receive documentation about? Where are we at with that whole process for the busineses?

[00:12:44] Ivana Ćirković: Yeah, so since this initiative is still fairly new and we already have just one generation of students that are passed the program, this is something in development. So at the moment, we still don’t have like a specific structure that is based just for agencies and businesses in general, but it is something that we are considering and working towards too. So definitely.

On the other hand, the upper management organisational team might not be aware to the fullest what am I about to talk. So it might come as a surprise to them, but also it is something in the works as well. So give us some time and we will come up with something.

[00:13:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it feels like that would be something really credible. Because if you’re a small business owner, the last thing you want to be doing is kind of wasting time. And onboarding somebody might be something that you’d have to divert weeks into, you know, syphoning employees off, writing documentation, SOPs, those kind of things. And if you could just pick something up off the shelf that was tried and tested over many years, that would actually be really handy. So good luck. I hope that that initiative comes off.

In terms of students, if you were a student, let’s say you are at a university, or you are looking for work, what would you say would be some of the top line items that you would mention as to why WP Credits is worth looking at? Because, you know, if I’m at a university, there’s probably a thousand different things that I could be doing. WP Credits would be in competition with all of those. Why do you think it’s something that young people should be taking care of to look at?

[00:14:17] Ivana Ćirković: Yeah, I would think differently, in that sense. Universities curriculums are outdated comparing to the industry that we are living and working in. So WordPress Credits gives something that is in trend. That is happening now that people are using and working now. So students who choose to go to this program are gaining the most efficient and not outdated curriculum, and things that are being worked on in this moment.

And this is bigger than WordPress. It is initially for WordPress, but the knowledge students get, nobody can take that away. They learn to be outspoken. They learn to use all the necessary remote work tools that is applicable in all the industry.

So we are really encouraging them to be very marketable employees and people who have portfolios, whether they choose that category that brings them portfolio. That is very transparent throughout whatever they do. Because on wordpress.org, every contribution is noted. So they’re building their own business brand by doing WordPress Credits. And in that way they are more marketable and can get more business opportunities.

[00:15:42] Nathan Wrigley: I didn’t realise that the wordpress.org profile, is it the profile that you mean?

[00:15:47] Ivana Ćirković: Yes.

[00:15:47] Nathan Wrigley: Each time you participate in one of these credit programs, that will be a badge, for want of a better word, that you can display and it will be freely available for the public. And presumably that will be difficult to acquire. That’s the wrong word. What I mean is, it won’t be simple to acquire. You will genuinely have had to.

[00:16:07] Ivana Ćirković: Yes, you need to do the work. Let’s say students are interested in translation. So they go to Polyglots team and they get assigned to a mentor who is on weekly basis working with them on onboarding, helping them how to navigate through wordpress.org website, translation, what needs to be done. And basically, for that student, they need to translate to have approved translation, 150 strings approved.

So that doesn’t mean, okay, I will translate 150 words. No, no. You might need to translate 500 words out of which 150 is approved. And this is the bare minimum you need to do in order to get that badge that you contributed. Because that contribution, each contribution needs to be something very specific and tailored to help other people. That is very open and helpful.

[00:17:00] Nathan Wrigley: So you mentioned translations there, which obviously is just one of multiple things that you could do, and we could list them all out, but we won’t. How is that curriculum, I’m doing air quotes, how is that curriculum decided upon? In other words, how do you decide, okay, I’m going to do a bit of translation, I’m going to do a bit of work on Core, I’m going to work for the Plugin Review Team? How is that decided? And, how is it decided by the institution, I guess that that’s going to equal something which our university will stamp as part of your degree, let’s say?

[00:17:33] Ivana Ćirković: Yeah. So basically, that is all arranged between the foundation and universities. You won’t get IT students doing marketing if that’s not their preferable choice. So students opt in. They’re given the whole like curriculum, categories of things they can contribute to. And the one they choose, this is the one they stick to throughout all the programs.

So you cannot switch in between like translation and documentation, or plugins, or WP-CLI whatever. The whole program stick to one chosen category. And that is all aligned with the, let’s say, topic of university. So IT is preferable for IT related contributions. Communications are also more favourable towards translation community, marketing. So it’s aligned that way.

[00:18:23] Nathan Wrigley: So flipping that round, so we’ve been talking about it from the point of view of the students. Now let’s just flip it around to the point of view of the university. I guess the same thing applies. They would have to communicate with the Foundation and say, okay, these are the kind of things that we wish our students to do. These particular strands, we will, you know, if they do 500 translation strings, that will count as something. I guess there’s got to be some interface between the Foundation and each university to establish what a credit equals.

[00:18:50] Ivana Ćirković: Yeah, common ground as to how WordPress Credits adds to the official curriculum of the university. And the thing that university get out of it, they are in position to offer modern, in trend, teachings, and that makes them more appealing to next generation of students. Because the more their existing students who are in the WordPress Credits program are succeeding, the more desirable the university gets to newer generations because they don’t teach outdated curriculums. They’re aligning to what is now efficient and needed in the job market.

[00:19:30] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose also as well, when I was at university, there was a choice of about, I don’t know, four things to do each year. Something like that. You could do this or this or this. And you had to pick one of them and that was your pathway. This feels much more wide open because knowing the WordPress ecosystem, I know that there’s dozens, maybe multiple dozens of different things that you could be involved in.

So that’s quite appealing as well, isn’t it? You know, you can just take a little nibble of this one thing, and another nibble of this. And so there’s potentially multiple dozens of different pathways that you could pick. And whilst you say that, once you’ve decided you’ve got to stick to that, well, that’s fair enough, but the fact that you’ve got so many different ways that you could choose. That to me as a university student would’ve been really appealing. The fact that there’s so many different things that you could do.

[00:20:15] Ivana Ćirković: Yeah. And once they got in, the overall input that we get from students that, first they don’t know that something like this exists. And once they go deep and start work, it’s like, wow. The whole mind just shifts, and they are amazed by all the possibilities that they can do within WordPress that isn’t talked about.

[00:20:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And I presume they get to do it in the way that the WordPress community works, which is remotely distributed and when you wish to do it. So long as I, you make the end of the university period of whatever a semester is or something, so long as you make the deadline, you can do it at night or in the early morning or.

[00:20:57] Ivana Ćirković: Exactly. So they are training to be like workers as we all are today, that are not restrained with some deadlines or by official university rules. They’re accountable for the final output. How will they come to that output? It’s entirely up to them because, yes, they are young but they’re not so young that they cannot be held accountable for their actions. So they need to do the work. We got weekly mentorships and assessments. So it’s a fun ride.

[00:21:31] Nathan Wrigley: So just touching on that, the sort of ongoing support that every student needs, because with the best rule in the world, there’s a proportion of students who will leave everything to the last minute. I’m looking at myself in the mirror when I say that. So that ongoing support, it’s a weekly sort of huddle. And is that like a one-to-one thing or is it a one to many thing?

[00:21:50] Ivana Ćirković: Yeah, so depending on the number of students, if a mentor has a one or two students, it can be one-to-one. If there are more like five or six, it’s better to have a group meeting on a weekly basis, and then Slack chats in between if anything is more needed than that.

So basically we go through what they did last week, are there any setbacks or they need additional help, or do they need information from other parts of the team? Are they interested in something else? So we are really trying to get them involved in a way that matters to them.

One of the things that each student needs to do, no matter section they chose, is to create a blog and to have weekly blog posts. So we discuss about that. What interests them. Whether they want to be something personal like, or professional like. So it’s very interesting to see how they think and how they express themself and how they build their online persona.

[00:22:55] Nathan Wrigley: Do those huddles take place on a, let’s say university by university basis? So for example, when you join and you mentor students, are they from the entire WP Campus project, or are you doing it from the university of this town and the university of that town?

[00:23:13] Ivana Ćirković: No, it’s mixed and matched.

[00:23:14] Nathan Wrigley: So, okay, well that’s a real strength as well it feels, because presumably then you’re on a call with people potentially from all over the world. Certainly people that you may not have encountered before. And those sort of serendipitous chance encounters can sometimes be some of the more meaningful ones. You know, work comes out of those things, and meetups come out of those things, and unexpected things come out of those things. So that must be really nice as well, watching those kind of things happen.

[00:23:42] Ivana Ćirković: Yeah, it’s like nothing I experienced before. And just to have the privilege to talk and work with those people, you never know what can come up out of them, and out of our connections. And I get inspired every time we have chats and they make me want to be a better educator.

[00:24:03] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s interesting.

[00:24:04] Ivana Ćirković: So, yeah, that’s my take out of all this.

[00:24:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, so there’s actually some psychological benefit for you as well. You get a real nice feeling of it. Okay, that’s really good.

So with the best will in the world, a university, every year there’s a cohort of children, young adults, whatever it may be, whichever institution it is, and a proportion of them will work diligently and hard and they will succeed. And some others maybe not so much.

How does that work? How do you ensure that everybody gets through it? And I don’t know if there’s enough data to answer this question. Again, I’m doing air quotes, how is the pass rate? Do most people that embark on this get through the necessary things? Or is there a fair bit of, I don’t know, discipline, for want of a better word, that needs to be applied and cajoling people to get through it?

[00:24:46] Ivana Ćirković: Yeah, so I touched base on the accountability. So we have not strict rules, but recommendations. Weekly mentor chats, async communication through Slack. They all have weekly tasks that needed to be done. So if a student don’t answer the message or come to weekly mentor call three times, they are no longer WordPress Credit students. And that is the accountability.

You need to show yourself that you are willing to do the work. So if you don’t care, we won’t force you to do that if you don’t want to. We will set reminders, we will call back, we will reach out. But if you are no show, no tell anything for three times, then evidently you are not for that. You don’t wish to be there, and we won’t force you to be there.

[00:25:40] Nathan Wrigley: And then in some way, are you required then to report that back to the institution and sort of say, okay, we’ve reached the end of the road here, and then it’s for them to figure out how that impacts. And presumably the students can.

[00:25:53] Ivana Ćirković: Their grades, yeah.

[00:25:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, their grades what have you, okay. Touching back on the sort of business side, because we’ve dwelled a lot with students and universities and we’re going to stay with students, because that’s really the underpinning of the whole thing. How has the business side of things, is it taking off? You were describing that it’s kind of like a new thing. Have you got any sort of success stories or anecdotal evidence that people do in fact want this?

[00:26:15] Ivana Ćirković: Yeah, so it’s still fairly new, so we don’t have those anecdotes yet. One of the reasons why I’m here at the WordCamp Europe is to find out and to get new perspective from businesses to like reach out to them to see what they think about the program. Would they want to be evolved. And how to give tips, maybe how we can improve. So stay tuned for more.

[00:26:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And it is interesting, when you walk around an event like this, I don’t have the exact numbers, but the demographic is definitely skewing older. There’s not so many 18 year olds. And if this community wishes to carry on, at some point the age demographic will get to retirement age.

[00:26:57] Ivana Ćirković: Yeah. Just last night we were talking. I’ve been in the community for 11 years. And for 11 years all the same faces are here. And we really need new faces. But to get new faces, WordPress Credits is one part of the solution. But then again, we need to meet young people where they are. And they are not on the conferences, they are not on websites, they don’t use websites, they don’t care about websites. They are on very specific social media channels. And if we want to get fresh, new, young blood, we need to go there and to present what we do in a way that matters to those kids.

[00:27:35] Nathan Wrigley: In terms of success, if you were to, I don’t know, let’s imagine that we could cast our minds forwards five years, let’s go for that. What would you like to have happened with WP Credits? Would you like, for example, to see a bunch of 20 somethings wandering around in an event like this? Does it matter that they’re involved in the community and doing WordPress events and contributing to Core and those kind of things? Or is success just more broadly, people are using WordPress? You know, it’s still a project. What’s your take on, what does success look like in five years?

[00:28:08] Ivana Ćirković: For me, I would like to see more young people involved. Yes, we will always have users because in its core, WordPress is a very useful tool. And I’m happy to stumble upon that tool many, many years ago to use it both personally and professionally. But I really want to see young people involved in a way that we were involved 10, 15 years ago, and to see what can happen with WordPress.

I strongly believe it’ll be transformed, not with AI or all other flashy trends. WordPress has always been about people. And we need new people, we need young people to get it where it needs to be.

We are getting older and don’t have strengths or stamina to do so for how many long years. By having new kids, fresh perspectives, I’m really excited to see what they can come up with next.

[00:29:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s kind of handing over the baton in a way, isn’t it? Seeing what the future holds. Yeah, I definitely have concerns that the age demographic is skewing. And no matter what has happened in the past, I don’t see it being backfilled with younger people moment.

But I think that’s largely because we just assumed that that age demographic would fill itself, because we were excited about it, so the younger generation will be excited about it. Well it turns out the world moved on. And TikTok came along, and YouTube became a massive thing and mobile phones and all the different platforms became a thing. And so the attention was put elsewhere by many young people.

And so I suppose we needed to come up with a system where we are, in a sense, just putting it in front of their face and saying, look, it’s here. You know, you’re a university student, you are somebody looking for work in a small business. Here’s a credible way of getting involved in something which potentially could change your life. That seems like the most credible way of doing it at the moment. And I guess we’ll just have to see what the next five years brings.

In which case, is there anything that you felt you wanted to touch on that you wanted to get out of this chat before we finished?

[00:30:15] Ivana Ćirković: No, I think you did it masterfully. And we touched base on everything that needed to be said.

[00:30:20] Nathan Wrigley: Perfect. In that case, I will say Ivana, thank you for chatting to me today. Fingers crossed that your presentation goes well tomorrow, and that you pack the place out, and that by this time next week, you are extremely busy with the WP Credits program. Thanks for chatting to me.

[00:30:34] Ivana Ćirković: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, redefining WordPress product growth in a crowded ecosystem.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Matt Cromwell. Matt has been an influential figure in the WordPress ecosystem for many years. He co-founded GiveWP, led its growth, and continued his journey as part of the StellarWP leadership after it was acquired.

Recently, Matt has shifted gears, launching something new. It’s called Roots and Fruit, and is an agency dedicated to helping WordPress product businesses thrive. In recent years, WordPress has gone through a period of flux. There’s been shifting stats about WordPress’s market share, tightening budgets, and increasing competition from both within and outside the.org plugin repo. Despite these changes, Matt remains optimistic about the opportunities for product makers, especially as WordPress evolves alongside emerging technologies like AI.

Matt starts off by sharing his background, his experience with GiveWP, and the unique perspective he gained navigating growth, crisis, and the challenges facing plugin developers. We then talk about how the WordPress product space has matured. Why building a plugin, or theme, and hoping users will simply discover it is no longer enough, and how focusing on the customer journey, branding, and marketing is more crucial than ever.

Matt is now positioning himself as a mentor and guide for solo founders and product teams, helping them prioritize growth efforts, refine their product experience, and avoid the scattered approach that many developers fall into. He brings practical insights from years of hand-on experience, and explains why a successful WordPress product business relies on process, diligence, and wise prioritization, not just code and hope.

If you are building digital products in WordPress, and want to learn how to make them stand out in a crowded, competitive ecosystem, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Matt Cromwell.

I am joined on the podcast by Matt Cromwell. Hello, Matt.

[00:03:22] Matt Cromwell: Hi. Happy to be here.

[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: Matt and I have chatted many times. In fact, we were having a nice chat just before we realised that the time was going to get away from us. So we’ve diverted and pressed record. We were getting into AI, but we’re going to park that because that’s a whole different episode. Well, maybe not. Maybe there’ll be bits of that leaking into this episode.

[00:03:39] Matt Cromwell: It’ll come up.

[00:03:39] Nathan Wrigley: I’m sure it will. But as I say, Matt’s been on the podcast before. He has had a significant sort of reshaping of his career in the recent past. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about what the new direction is, and where he’s going to be focusing his efforts in the near to long term.

But Matt, just before we begin, do you want to tell us a little bit about you and what you’ve been doing in the WordPress space these many years?

[00:04:01] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Thanks so much. I’m Matt Cromwell. I am was, it’s hard to figure out how to introduce myself anymore. I was co-founder of GiveWP and sold that product in 2021 to Liquid Web and stayed on and came on the leadership team of what became StellarWP, and took all the things I learned from Give and got to apply them across lots of products, in an excellent learning journey.

Recently exited back this last fall, 2025, and went on a journey of discovering in what I want to do, and found that I could not prime myself away from the keyboard enough and decided that now’s the time I get to invest my time and efforts and energy in the WordPress product ecosystem like I always have. So I built a new agency called Roots & Fruit, which I have basically said is your fractional chief growth officer agency. I just launched a couple weeks ago and it’s going well. So that’s what I’m doing. That’s how I say it.

[00:05:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I love the domain, by the way. The minute I saw that, I think I got where you were going without even having read a word. Roots & Fruit sort of says it all, doesn’t it? It’s the growth to the actual harvesting at the end. And so we will get into that.

Can I just ask you though, we’ll begin this way because we’ve had several years now of flux in the WordPress ecosystem. You have charted the growth of many products in the WordPress space. You’ve been involved in them personally, and you’ve seen the journeys of other founders and what have you.

Do you have the same level of optimism that the Matt Cromwell, let’s say from the year 2020, when everything was going gangbusters, that 35% went to 38%, went to 40%, and on it went. Do you have the same level of optimism? Do you think there still is fruit to be harvested in the WordPress space in 2026?

[00:05:59] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely I do. There’s a lot of caveats in there, I have to say. Being at GiveWP, we had a unique perspective when it came to things like a pandemic. It was like an internal thing where we were afraid of becoming ambulance chasers, okay? Because, especially in the US, when a crisis would come, suddenly our sales would go through the roof. And it’s because when bad things happen, people need to do fundraising. And the worst thing we wanted to do was start capitalising on trauma or things like that.

And so when COVID came along, we were like, woah, this is going to be significant. And it was. It was a very significant thing. But we had been through the motions, so we knew that it was going to have a downside on the tail end of it, sales-wise. And I think a lot of folks understood that conceptually as well. But we had experienced it a lot.

But what a lot of folks found out on the tail side of COVID was that the downside was worse than it was pre COVID. A lot of folks felt that, even GiveWP to some extent and several of the Stellar products were like, oh, we’ve leveled out, we’ve come down off of the COVID high, and actually it feels a little bit worse than it was before. Budgets got tight in terms of businesses and agencies, nonprofits, things like that. There’s lots of circumstances to those things. But over the last year or so, a lot of product companies have started to see things start to slowly climb again.

But in the WordPress space, I think it’s important that everybody also look at our ecosystem in the bigger ecosystem of just the web. On the web there are small to medium to large companies launching all the time with huge amounts of success. Just a couple years ago, nobody knew what Lovable was. Now it’s a billion dollar company. Things like that do happen and they happen regularly. That to me means there is still lots of appetite for the kinds of solutions that we are trying to bring to the world through the web. And we can be part of that solution.

Now, the conversation you and I had a little bit before was more about like, what about WordPress and the threat or the opportunity of AI? I do think the way in which WordPress Core has been tackling AI and trying to bring tooling into WordPress Core is making sure that WordPress itself as a platform has not only a future, but it has a lucrative future. I think the way that they’re going about it is really smart and really intelligent, and it is going to actually build the platform in a way that makes AI understand how to build with WordPress better than anything else out there.

WordPress is the most, one of the most documented, open source projects in the world, and it’s been open source this whole time, and AI loves that kind of stuff. So it just has been able to scrape the WordPress database, the WordPress code, all the WordPress documentation over years and years and years. AI now knows WordPress really, really, really well. So I think there’s lots of opportunity.

[00:09:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, no, it’s really great because you covered a lot of ground there. I should say, dear listener, at this point, maybe go and have a look at Matt’s domain. I mentioned it, but I’ll just read it into the record. So it’s Roots with an S. Roots and fruit singular, .com, rootsandfruit.com. So go and check that out. Maybe pause the podcast if you’re at a screen and.

[00:09:28] Matt Cromwell: Singular and plural.

[00:09:29] Nathan Wrigley: Both. Yeah, you’ve managed to get all the goodness in there. Go and pause the podcast and have a little poke around and you’ll get some intuition as to what Matt is doing over there.

I’m going to sort of sidestep a little bit though, because I want to frame this question slightly differently, and that is to, I’ll frame it like this. I, as a consumer of WordPress things, I’ve spent the last 15 or so years pottering around, having a problem, then going to Google and discovering that there’s typically a WordPress plugin or theme or what have you, for that. And then I go to their website and perhaps there’s two or three websites that I might be juggling and thinking which one is superior for the needs that I have. And then I purchase something, you know, I go and I buy a premium version of something or maybe download the free version to give it a test.

But the point is, I have this really abstracted concept of what it is. I’m buying a commodity. So I buy the finished thing and it comes as a zip file, and I typically don’t interact with a human being. And that’s the interesting bit that I want to get into to begin with, is the human behind all of this, which was you for many years.

And so can we just explore that a little bit? What is the stuff that somebody like you, when you were with GiveWP, but maybe now the clients that you are going to be servicing, what is their day involved with? What do these people do? What are the anxieties they have? What is the stuff that makes up a plugin or theme developer’s life and business?

[00:10:55] Matt Cromwell: Generally speaking, product folks are nerds, love to be behind the screen. And they like this kind of industry, specifically because they don’t have to be the person dealing with the customer as much. That distance that goes between the screen basically, is something that gives them a sense of safety, where they get to focus on the work that they love and they enjoy, without having to deal with the noise of the people.

The exception to that are all the folks that are highly motivated to help with technical support. And I love those people. Those are my people. My focus as a founder was more on the customer support and marketing side of things, so I enjoyed being more of the face of things for our brands over the years.

But the allure there is both being able to have that separation from the noise of the public, but also having a little bit of the security of what might be called mildly passive income. And that’s the big difference between folks who are running an agency and folks who love to run product. Agencies are service oriented folks. They have to be with the customer and the client all the time. You are paying for hours. You’re being paid for the time that you put in, in many ways. With agency service work, there’s ways to get away from just purely time-based charging, but by and large.

In the product space, you’re not being paid for the time you put in. You’re being paid for the product, and for the outcomes that the customer experiences. And that’s what you bought Nathan, when you went and bought a utility or a tool or whatnot. You weren’t looking to hire a person, you were looking for a specific outcome on your website, and you felt that that one product could provide you that outcome. And once you had that outcome, you’re happy.

And that’s exactly why product shops are, in my mind, have to be customer oriented first because all of the success, all of the success of the product, of the marketing, of the business, all starts with whether or not the customer is happy.

[00:13:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. We have this expression in the English language which is, a rising tide carries all boats. And essentially what it means is, when there’s this sort of groundswell of growth, everything touching it grows. And I think we had that in all sorts of ways recently, over the last decade or so.

The mobile phone app ecosystem, that just was taking off and all the developers over there were doing incredibly well. Same with the WordPress space. Just year on year growth. And so there was this notion, which you reference on your website quite a lot, of build it and they will come. And that phrase essentially is, okay, I am one of those people. You said, nerds.

I’m going to build a product, and I have a complete expectation that I am part of that rising tide. I’m one of the boats. I’ll build this thing, I’ll mention it a few times on social media, and this thing that I’ve spent hours and hours doing will take off and I will be able to have some kind of passive income from it.

Now, I don’t know when you started saying that those days were gone, but you are definitely saying those days are gone. Why are those days gone? What happened? What changed to make it so that the rising tide carries all boats analogy, possibly no longer fits?

[00:14:17] Matt Cromwell: It depends on the context. I mean, it fits in several different ways. But when it comes to product in the WordPress space nowadays, we used to depend so much on the wordpress.org plugin, or theme, directory as a primary outlet for discoverability. I want people to find that I exist and that I am a solution for their problems, and this is where you find me.

The plugin directory in particular, when we launched GiveWP, I think there were 30,000 plugins at the time, or approaching 30,000. And now there’s over 60, and they are growing every day more or less. They grow and they shrink. They get rid of plugins too, actually. But that does increase the amount of surface area where you have to break through in order to be found. If you try to be an AI alt text generator right now, good luck. There are three dozen of those that got shipped yesterday. It’s crazy.

But even more so than just the noise and the volume on the plugin directory, it’s also that the consumers that are building their websites, they are not thinking about WordPress as much anymore. They’re building with WordPress, but they kind of don’t care that it’s WordPress. They’re just building a website. They have specific outcomes and they know that there are lots of products out there that can serve their needs, and they don’t care if it’s a SaaS, or a platform, or a plugin, or a theme. They don’t care. They’re just going to look for that outcome and they’re going to plug it into their website in one form or another, if that solution is pluggable.

And that space, the SaaS space in particular, has gotten a lot more crowded and a lot more competitive for being applied directly to the WordPress customer. So we’re not just competing WordPress to WordPress, we’re competing WordPress to the rest of the whole world.

[00:16:18] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s interesting. So my analogy, when I said a rising tide carries all boats, what I’m imagining 10 years ago is that there was a really nice looking harbor with a few little boats. And the tide came up and these little boats just bobbed along and they all rose up. Whereas now it feels like the harbor is just chockablock. There’s boats cheek by jowl with other boats. They’re slamming into each other. And instead of it being a gentle rise, it’s stormy, clouds. The sea is choppy all over the place, and everything is sort of bumping into each other.

In other words, it’s saturated. If you are going to be doing the alt text plugin for AI, well, there were six that came out this morning. There’s going to be nine more by the time we close the doors this evening. Whatever it is that you are doing in the WordPress space, chances are somebody’s already done it. They may already have an existing audience. They may already have paid subscribers.

So this all sounds very bleak. It sounds like we’ve got no way out of this. But your endeavor, what you want to turn your attention to in the years to come, is to persuade people that’s not the case. So what is the rainbow? What is the shining light on the horizon? How would a plugin developer, a theme developer, somebody in the WordPress space, how do they cut through all of this and get noticed?

[00:17:28] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. A lot of things have changed over the years, but I would say the majority of things, when it comes to digital products, have not changed. And that’s really the brass tacks of what it takes to be a winning product on the web in general. SaaS companies have known this for a really long time because they didn’t have the obvious distribution channel of wordpress.org that we have.

So they knew if they were going to ship a product, they’re going to have to market it a ton. In the SaaS space, there’s very, very, very few just handy developers who are like, hey, I just built this cool thing, I’ll just put it out there. And then all of a sudden it just goes off like crazy. It doesn’t work that way, and they know it. And so they partner up with marketers.

And in the WordPress space, for way too long, we got lazy because we had the .org distribution channel. And we assumed that we could build it and people would come. And that’s not like one hundred percent wrong. The directory is still a good tool, and it’s still helpful, and I love the freemium model for products in general. But the thing that WordPress product folks in particular have to learn is to learn how to be a product business, not a code business.

And that’s even more significant now that everyone is learning that code was never the product, because now nobody is building with code anymore. The humans do not build the code anymore. The machines build the code. And you’ll find lots of marketers or CX folks who are building their own apps now as well because they’re savvy enough to use the tools to be able to generate the code that they need and that they want.

[00:19:11] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just pause for a second there Matt, is that all right? Just because there’s a couple of things that you said, and clearly for you it’s common knowledge. You know, you’ve been in and out of this all the whole time. You painted a strong definition there between a product and code. What’s the boundary between those two things? I mean, I think I can encapsulate, I just want to be clear that the audience know. What’s the difference between product and code businesses, if you know what I mean?

[00:19:33] Matt Cromwell: Let’s go back to when you said, I’m building my website and I have a problem that needs to be solved, and I see this plugin and it solves my problem. And I installed it, or I bought it and I installed it and it worked. That process that you went through, all of those things that you said, you never once said, I inspected the code to figure out if it was good enough or not. You never once said that. All of the things that convinced you to use that product had nothing to do with the code at all.

You went to the website and there was marketing involved that told you that we know what your problem is, and we know how to solve it. And there was a checkout experience that was calm and soothing enough and giving you enough confidence that they’re not just stealing your money. Then you installed the product and there was a user experience involved that made you feel like it’s actually going to solve your problem, and then it did actually solve your problem. All of those things cannot happen without code, but that is what a product does. And that’s a product experience, is the whole entire customer journey that happens from discovery, to purchase, to adoption is what a product is actually made of.

[00:20:43] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m going to infer from that then that from the year 2026 and onwards, what you are saying is that the focus now needs to be on the product. More than ever, the product and the way that you market the product and the way that you pitch the product, and all of the things that wrap around the sales process and the discovery process of the product. That’s where a significant amount of the effort needs to go once the code is in place. Have I parsed that correctly?

[00:21:11] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, I might even go at it from the perspective of the customer because you only understand the product when you look at that whole thing through the lens of the customer. If you think about everything from, oh, I can build that, I just need to pipe these APIs and do this kind of thing, and then you get the outcome, it’s like, well that’s not really what the customer’s ever going to experience.

They’re going to experience a website first. They’re going to try to have trust first. Look at the whole thing through the customer lens and then you’ll start to understand your product. I mean, you’ll understand your brand in the first place. A lot of WordPress folks don’t think about brand particularly well either. They just name it like Advanced Custom Fields. Now, I love that product. It’s a great, but it’s one of those things where like, let’s just name it what it is. Okay, I guess.

[00:22:04] Nathan Wrigley: So this is really interesting. So presumably then, if product is the way forward, it feels like you have now kind of invented a new career angle for yourself where you are going to hopefully kind of helicopter yourself in, or be helicoptered in, to businesses who maybe have got this product bit missing. You know, there are bits of that they, I don’t know, maybe they feel that they’re weak on that, or that past endeavors haven’t really worked out. Or maybe they’re at the first step of that journey and they just want to try and figure out what direction they should point themselves in to have some success.

So that’s kind of interesting. That’s the role that you are going to be taking on in the future. And I can see you nodding. Dear listener, he’s nodding away, so that’s good. But, do you have like a one size fits all template here, or is the endeavor very much to be, okay, I’m going to go in, have a long listen, figure out how you differ from the other people that are on my roster? There’s not really a question in there, but I’m kind of asking you how you are going to position yourself for the different clients that you’re no doubt going to be taking on.

[00:23:06] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, yeah, Well, one thing I’ll caveat a little bit is I’m trying to position myself towards two related audiences. The primary one, for the fractional CGO, is the teams. Product shops that are a team of people. A small team, medium sized team. They’ve built something, it’s successful, they are paying employees, but they’re looking for that next level up, in order to start growing into what they hope to be, more sustainable growth in the long term.

The other one is what I call the solo lab, where I am trying to position more towards solo individual founders who are by themselves and maybe just got their product out the door and are trying to grow from the ground up. That’s more of like a coaching environment and it’s a group environment and things like that. But both of them are, it’s not that there’s a, I don’t believe really in playbooks. I don’t believe in silver bullets. I believe in process and diligence.

And that’s what I am trying to bring in both of those circumstances is I help the solo folks understand the type of activities that they have to force themselves to do. The solo folks typically are very dev oriented. They know how to build more things. And if you ask them to write a blog post, they’re like, okay, I’ll do that tomorrow and tomorrow never comes. You know, helping them to focus on the work that they have to do to grow their product.

While the teams, it’s more generally about, they have founders who have done all the things. They have been the dev, they have been the HR lead, they have been the marketer, they have been the support guru. They’ve done all of it, and they’re just tired. And they need the growth but there’s just a missing gap. They need somebody to kind of put on the hat of, you are going to be responsible for finding growth in this team, so that that founder can focus more on other parts, the things that energise them more.

[00:24:59] Nathan Wrigley: I’m curious as to whether or not, when you were doing the busy work of being at GiveWP and then StellarWP, whether you drew the intuitions that you are now going to be helping people with. Whether you were aware of this in your head, or it was just the busy work that you were doing. You know, day in, day out, you do this task and over the decade or more that you were doing it, you just kind of perfected it. And, okay, when this thing arises, I do this thing. And when this thing arises, I do this thing.

Now I expect you’re in that curious position where you are having to lift yourself away from the whole process, stare back at it, and sort of examine how you would do it with a third party. Again, there’s no real question there, but I’m curious as to how different that is for you being the outsider, but relying on the insider knowledge that you must have acquired over time.

[00:25:49] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. I think that’s one of the reasons why I felt a certain amount of confidence in moving in this direction is because I’m helping people that are in the position I was in years ago. I’ve been there and I have done that, and I have absolutely failed. And I don’t have a perfect record or a perfect playbook, but I know what it’s like, and I have done the hard work to see successes.

I think what also makes my experience a little bit unique is that I had the experience of GiveWP and I honestly, going into being acquired and working at Liquid Web, I had that whole feeling of like, what if I’m a one hit wonder? What if I like did a great job with Give, but I try to apply this anywhere else and it just is like, well you got lucky with Give, that doesn’t work anywhere else? And it turns out that most of the things that I learned can be applied to other products with success as well. It does give me a fair amount of confidence that I do believe I can be helpful with these other shops.

[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: You’re not sort of saying there’s a formula, you know, that kind of snake oil mentality. But there are wise things to do and less wise things to do. Let’s just put it that way. And by repeating the wise things over and over again, you give yourself kind of a fighting.

[00:27:05] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, and there’s a process and there’s also the ability to form smart priorities. That’s, I think, a lot of what I’m trying to help provide is being able to help founders learn how to say no to a lot of things. Because sometimes, especially when it comes to anything that’s growth oriented or marketing oriented, we see a million opportunities. And so then we start dabbling in all the things because we don’t know what else to do.

We’re like, oh, there’s like, I can go and jump into Reddit and find a whole bunch of leads, or I can like spend a bunch of time on LinkedIn, or I could write a whole bunch of really good emails, or I can maybe do a paid ad campaign. And then we start doing just like a million small things. But that doesn’t lead to growth, you know? So the ability to prioritise around growing rather than noise and activity.

[00:27:57] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s just really nice to be able to put down the scatter gun. You know, that thing that you’re firing tiny pellets in a million different directions. But you put the scatter gun down because somebody says, put the gun down because that’s not effective, and here’s why it’s not effective, and here’s some things that you could do to try which might be more effective.

There’s just something nice in listening to the words of wisdom coming out of somebody else’s mouth who’s obviously been there, done that. It’s kind of hard to put that into words, but just knowing that somebody’s got your back, and that somebody’s been through that before. And the million, gazillion little things that you are trying without a great deal of success are things that you can put away and listen to your advice.

I feel that you’ve hit a real vein of, well, let’s go fruit. You’ve got that in the title of your business. And the reason I say that, and I’ve said this in this podcast a few times before, it really does feel like there are an awful lot of people who have done the code side of things in our ecosystem. They are, as you’ve described, you know, you used the word nerd or something like that. They have built this thing with very little thought for the business side of it because WordPress, for many people, has been like this sort of hobby thing, this passive income thing, this side gig kind of thing. But they don’t know how to do it. And I get email, no doubt you get email, and certainly will be getting email, about this kind of thing. And so I feel that there is a real undercurrent of people who hopefully will tap into your service. Let’s hope so anyway.

[00:29:29] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, let’s hope so. So far, so good. I’ve already secured a couple folks.

[00:29:33] Nathan Wrigley: In which case, we’re sort of around the half an hour mark, which is exactly perfect. So I will just point the people to the domain once more. It is rootsandfruit.com. Go check that out. Where would we find you, apart from the contact us form, which no doubt exists on that website? Where might we find you elsewhere online, Matt?

[00:29:52] Matt Cromwell: I have been on LinkedIn a lot. So look for Matt Cromwell on LinkedIn. You can also look for Roots & Fruit on LinkedIn. That’s kind of where I prefer, but I’m also on the nefarious x.com as learnwithmattc.

[00:30:06] Nathan Wrigley: Well, good luck with the new adventure, Matt. I really hope it works out well and, yeah, speak to you soon.

[00:30:12] Matt Cromwell: Thanks.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, the hidden settings page you never knew existed, options.php.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast, player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Russell Aaron. Russell is a longtime WordPress enthusiast, power user since 2004, and developer since 2011. He’s organized WordCamp Las Vegas, played a key role in the Las Vegas WordPress meetup group for years, and is dedicated to helping beginners find their feet in the WordPress world. Support has been his main focus throughout his career, always keeping the needs of newcomers in mind.

If you’ve ever wondered about the lesser known corners of the WordPress admin, today’s episode will be right up your street. Russell introduces a hidden feature, the little explored options which is accessible from your site’s WP admin area. Many seasoned users, including myself, have never heard of it, but this page exposes the entirety of your WordPress options table in an editable format. We talk about what this page does, why it exists, and the ways it can be both helpful and hazardous.

Russell shares his own use cases, how it can be useful for plugin development and database management, but we also discuss concerns around its discoverability, and the risks of making changes without understanding the consequences.

It’s a short episode, but there’s a lot in here for anyone curious about WordPress’ inner workings, or eager to learn about hidden tools that most people don’t stumble upon. So if you fancy poking around behind the scenes, or have ever wondered what might be right under your nose in WordPress, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you can find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you. Russell Aaron.

I am joined on the podcast by Russell Aaron. Hello Russell.

[00:03:02] Russell Aaron: Hello. Thank you.

[00:03:03] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. I didn’t know Russell until just a few minutes ago, but we’ve probably spent, I don’t know, 20 minutes or so already, just shooting the breeze. And I’m getting to know you a little bit. But it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

I put a tweet out, or whatever you call it on X these days, a couple of days ago, asking if anybody had an interesting topic. And what you are going to hear about today is what Russell came back with, and I had no idea this thing existed. So let’s get into that in a minute, but it’s very curious. Stay tuned.

But Russell, would you mind just telling us a little bit about your, what I now know is a long and storied history with WordPress. Just tell us all about yourself.

[00:03:40] Russell Aaron: Sure. My name is Russell Aaron. Nice to meet everyone. I’m a WordPress enthusiast and a fan, first and foremost. That is what keeps me coming back to WordPress every day. I’ve been a power user since 2004. I’ve been a developer since 2011. I organised WordCamp Las Vegas 2015 and then our meetup, I was a co-organiser from 2011 all the way up to 2018 or so. So I’ve been around, I’ve spoken at many WordCamps and stuff like that.

I’ve worked at all the places, all the things. I mean, you know, yet another WordPress developer shop is just like the plugins, yet another, whatever. But I’ve mostly been doing support for my entire WordPress career. And I always like to take things back, even though I’ve been using it for X amount of years, I still like to learn what it’s like to be a beginner walking into WordPress. Because no matter what, we always have beginners coming in and they need help. They need to be pointed, where to go, who to see. And I kind of own that side of the world when it comes to like what I do. I’m very beginner friendly.

[00:04:52] Nathan Wrigley: Do you still get the same excitement? I remember the first time I ever opened up WordPress, which was probably something like 2014, something like that. So I was definitely not right at the beginning. I was much later to the party than a lot of people. But I’d been using Drupal and Magento and things like that.

I remember getting really excited, like genuinely looking around thinking, oh, and it can do this. And then, you know, a week later, oh, and it can do this. And on and on that went. At some point, that level of curiosity, it never really left me, but I kind of managed to learn the things I needed to learn. But then that was just because I was doing stuff that I needed to do.

But if you’re in a role where you communicate with customers, presumably that’s a never ending conveyor belt of new things that you’re constantly having to learn, because some curious person comes up and says, I’ve broken it in this way, and you’ve got to figure all that out. So long question, but are you still excited about it?

[00:05:42] Russell Aaron: I’ve had this saying, and I say it every day when I sit down is, the hardest thing I have to do is log into WP admin. From there, I’ll figure everything else out. Make a backup is number one. Second thing is, the hardest thing I have to do is log into WP Admin. And you know what really gets me excited is, you know, you have a blog, I have a blog, and essentially we do the same thing, but underneath the hood, how we got to the same point, those are different paths. You use this caching plugin, I use this caching plugin. You use Yoast, I use Rank Math. So the different configurations and stuff like that, that’s what keeps me coming back. And that’s why I’m in support.

[00:06:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, this almost kind of infinite permutations of ways that you can do WordPress. And I guess if you’re like me and you’re just using it on a few sites, that’s fairly trivial. But if you, like you, you’re having to support every possible permutation, oh.

Okay, so as I said, I went out on X and I suggested that if anybody would like to get in touch and put themselves on the WP Tavern Jukebox Podcast, fire me a message back. And very quickly Russell came to me with this. And I have no idea, I had no idea that this was even a thing.

Like I said, I’ve been using WordPress for over a decade. I didn’t know there was a page that you can navigate to, once you are logged into the WP Admin. So, okay, we’ve logged in, and then if you append options.php to the end of your WP admin URL, so example.com/wp-admin/options.php. Maybe pause the podcast. If you’re logged in, go there, click return, then move away from the keyboard.

[00:07:24] Russell Aaron: Yeah, don’t touch it.

[00:07:25] Nathan Wrigley: Don’t touch the keyboard. I didn’t know this existed. Tell us, what the heck is this?

[00:07:31] Russell Aaron: I mean, just like you, you know, I’ve been knee deep in WordPress and installing it when it was the famous five minute install, you know, and Custom Post Types before they were cool. And still, same thing is, it was something that was shown to me a very, very long time ago. But what I like to imagine is that WordPress, when it first got started, it was always user forward, so they wanted to show you either what was on the page or what was in the Post. And so options PHP, or wp-admin/options with an s, you have to add the s, but .php, it basically spits out your entire options table.

So from your database, it spits out your entire options table onto one page. And I mean, depending on how big your options table is, you can have a very small page or, you know, I’m still scrolling. I can doom scroll on my options page and just keep going. But it’s one of those things that I believe was there from the beginning to help you see maybe some information that’s in your database and then, you know, like you could tweak things. And then a database admin, or whatever tools you have on your host to see your database, you know, stuff like that came out. And I think it’s one of those legacy features that’s just always been there, but it gets ignored all the time.

[00:08:58] Nathan Wrigley: No kidding. I mean, basically I’m looking at, not a vanilla WordPress website, but I’m looking at a WordPress website with a third party block-based theme, and maybe four plugins. And the four plugins are not that heavy, as far as I’m concerned. But it says, so I navigated to that in that website. And the page is just entitled, all settings. And then underneath that is the warning. So I shall read that out because this is important.

[00:09:21] Russell Aaron: That should be giant H1. Like, I don’t know what a 235 pixel font looks like, it should be that.

[00:09:28] Nathan Wrigley: Blinking as well. It says, this page allows direct access to your site settings, you can break things here. Please be cautious. And then it’s just two columns. On the left it’s just the name of the key. And then on the other side, the value. And so it’s just a list of things on one side, a list of things on the other. Now obviously the key is uneditable. It just shows it to you. But more or less, now that’s not entirely the case, but more or less every value is editable, meaning that, I don’t know, if some of this was particularly important. Let’s start at the top. I’ve got the admin email. You know, if I change that I’m going to lock myself out if I don’t remember what I’m doing.

[00:10:07] Russell Aaron: Or emails are going to go to the wrong place.

[00:10:08] Nathan Wrigley: Emails are going to go to the wrong place. And then it goes down, and you’ve basically dumped yourself in the options table. So it’s like you’re in, I don’t know, some sort of database manager, phpMyAdmin or something like that. But there it is inside of WordPress.

Now you mentioned it’s probably a legacy. Do you think it should be here anymore? Because so much of this is exposed in such an easy to fiddle way, that it strikes me that somebody could easily go in here, not really know what they’re doing, amend something, delete something, click return, and bork the website entirely.

[00:10:43] Russell Aaron: I mean, it’s not a bad idea. If you have a database plugin and it’s active, and for whatever reason that lets some kind of intrusion in, yeah, somebody could get into that information and start wreaking some havoc. And so it would be one of those things where, maybe it should be optionable or maybe it should be stepped into a plugin itself.

But I mean, I’m also not against it either. For what it’s done, I’ve never really heard of this page being the cause for whatever malware or whatever Core file is being overwritten. Like it’s usually, knock on wood, it’s usually a plugin that allowed some kind of intrusion or just a bad code that allowed something, and it’s never really been like, well, this site was hacked and it went to this file.

So it seems to be okay. But it’s probably, what I would say is it’s the biggest difference. Because like when you write a plugin and you submit it to wordpress.org, they’re going to go through it with a fine tooth comb and they’re just going to make sure that things are working. They want a tool tip or they want some kind of explanation of like, what this field does. But you go here to this page and it’s just kind of key, pair, and it doesn’t say like, well, this value comes from here, or changing this. Like, there’s no information on it whatsoever, you know? It’s one of those things where like, I see WordPress has a default standardisation of how they want things done, but then you come to this page and none of it’s there.

[00:12:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so as an example, so if you scroll down, I’ve just literally scrolled down and there’s hundreds and hundreds of entries. And I’ve ended up at fresh_site. Now that has zero, a value of zero. I have no idea what that does. I don’t know what would happen if I turned the zero into a one, but there it is. Right above it is finished updating comment type. That’s got a one. And you are right, there’s absolutely no text in any of the fields to give you any indication.

[00:12:43] Russell Aaron: Other than like site URL like, you know, you kind of know what that is. But everything else, yeah. Unless you kind of know what that key, or what that pair is supposed to be, yeah, you really have no idea.

[00:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: And there’s no way of knowing that other than presumably going out and finding it. And so that in itself is quite curious. Just the idea that this entire list of things doesn’t give you some sort of helping hand to kind of say, okay, this one in particular, be mindful of this one. This one’s very important, or at least, here’s what it does. There’s none of that. So it’s just curious.

[00:13:13] Russell Aaron: Well, I mean even with the Core post types that come with the Core install, they have that documented. I think there’s seven now, Core post types. And out of seven of those, three are hidden, you know? You have the menu stuff. And even that, I wouldn’t expect it, but I would say that when you install just a very basic install WordPress, you set it up for the first time, no themes, no plugin, you just spun it up.

At least that page should say all the default stuff that’s there. When the database gets created, wp-options table is created, these values go in. I would maybe hope that a default thing of just says like, this is a default field, or this is a default option that gets installed and here’s what it does. But again, there’s just none of that.

[00:13:59] Nathan Wrigley: No, no. So again, caveat emptor. Right at the top, obey the warning. Don’t modify anything in here.

[00:14:04] Russell Aaron: Right. Mind the gap, that’s for sure.

[00:14:06] Nathan Wrigley: Well, I say don’t modify anything. Presumably it’s there so that things can be modified. And so I guess my question to you is, you’ve brought this to my attention, have you found a use for this? Have you ever been in there and, is it like a daily thing that you are fiddling with? What’s the purpose?

[00:14:22] Russell Aaron: I can tell you my use case. And I think for me, it’s not being lazy, but I don’t want to have a SQL program running on my computer, or I don’t want to have phpMyAdmin up, and I have to refresh and go to page two to find my option or whatever. What I like is that I have been rebuilding some of my plugins. And some of my plugins set options. And so when you deactivate my plugin, I have a uninstall.php file that should remove information from the database, right?

So that’s where I go to check, is my plugin doing its job? Well, let’s go look for this option name. And if I uninstalled and deactivated my plugin and it’s fully gone, but I still see whatever option name, I know my uninstall PHP file didn’t do its job. That’s the biggest use case I have.

I have a local site for everything that I develop, like my personal website, I have a local site. All my .org plugins, I have a local site for that where I do development. And that’s the same thing is, I use that option thing and okay, did I set my option? Do I see it? Okay, there it is. Here’s what I see it in the database. Here’s what I can query against. Like, it gives you all that information. All you have to do is one refresh. You don’t have to rebuild your database or go searching through it in like a MySQL kind of program. It’s all just spit out there and you really just, you know, find search and stuff like that. That’s my use case for it.

[00:15:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s no search or filter anything in there. You would have to use the browser search to find the thing that you need. But that’s a really interesting use case of it. And also, thank you for having that feature in your plugins whereby you actually remove the data in the database that, obviously, at the point of uninstall is no longer required. I know why people leave that stuff there, but also it’s quite nice that you make it so that it doesn’t remain.

[00:16:21] Russell Aaron: That’s one of those interesting arguments. If I accidentally deactivate WooCommerce, I don’t want my stuff gone. So that shouldn’t have it, but my tiny little plugin that I built for a contest 10 years ago, it should probably remove it’s stuff.

[00:16:34] Nathan Wrigley: So obviously you can see that, but again, there’s no way of searching for things. You’d have to manually search through the browser and what have you. Now, the curious thing is, I’ve never stumbled across this, and I’ve clicked every single link in a WordPress install. There’s no doubt I’ve clicked every link multiple times over and over again. Presumably this is not linked from anywhere within the WP Admin at all. And yet when you land on it, the sidebar, the WP admin sidebar ends up at settings, so the settings is highlighted.

[00:17:05] Russell Aaron: And settings is expanded.

[00:17:08] Nathan Wrigley: Settings is expanded, but it’s not, you know, it’s not a child item which suddenly appears. It’s just settings. So is that true? It’s not linked anywhere.

[00:17:15] Russell Aaron: Not that I have found anywhere. Other than people like you and me talking about this, it’s not very spoken about. It’s kind of one of those things where if you know then you know, or if somebody like myself is a developer, they can say, oh yeah, hey, there’s this other thing. But other than that, I mean, it tends to be skipped over from a beginner perspective.

Like you said, you’ve been using WordPress for 10 plus years at least. Never been there before. Didn’t even know this thing existed. Now you’re kind of like, what else is there that I don’t know.

[00:17:48] Nathan Wrigley: That is exactly where my head has gone, is what else is there that I don’t know about? You know, other curious things that are there.

[00:17:53] Russell Aaron: Is there a gold pot at the end of the rainbow? We don’t know.

[00:17:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, some little Easter egg that I never spotted that’s somewhere buried in a menu. Yeah, that would be kind of cool.

[00:18:01] Russell Aaron: What if you go to that page and there’s a coupon code for Gravity Forms and it says like, free updates for life because you visited here.

[00:18:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a great idea. Yeah, okay, so developers hijack this page and add those. No, don’t. Don’t do that. But you were saying earlier that the fact that nobody is really talking about it, I suppose that leads us into the idea that, it’s not really a problem. If this was exposing problems that, let’s say for example, I don’t know, hackers were leveraging, I don’t know quite how they would do that, but you know what I mean. Then presumably this would’ve been pulled out years and years ago because it would be easy to remove this. But presumably it doesn’t have a great attack surface. It’s not widely known about. This is the first time I’ve heard about it, so there it is. It’s going to stay, I presume.

[00:18:47] Russell Aaron: I always make the joke that it’s the largest form in WordPress.

[00:18:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it really is.

[00:18:53] Russell Aaron: I mean, that’s all it is. It’s a giant form that pulls data. And, you know, you can hit save at the bottom. So it’s the biggest non Gravity Form that you can have in WordPress.

[00:19:03] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if it’s possible for, so for example, the site that I’m logged into, I am an administrator. That’s the account that I’ve got. So the level of permissions is equal to administrator. I’m wondering how far this goes down. So, for example, I don’t know, if I’m a contributor or a subscriber or an editor, I’m guessing that this wouldn’t be available, but I don’t know if you know the answer to that.

[00:19:24] Russell Aaron: It’s only, you have to have the manage options permission, which I think is tied to administrator, and I think that’s about it.

[00:19:32] Nathan Wrigley: So in that sense it is also, I suppose, fairly secure because it’s hidden behind an administrator account. And by the time an administrator account.

[00:19:41] Russell Aaron: If logged in and administrator is true, yeah.

[00:19:43] Nathan Wrigley: Right. So you can more or less kill the site if you wish to, of your own volition by going to the, and I’m doing air quotes, the normal settings anyway.

[00:19:51] Russell Aaron: At that point, you can’t complain. You’re an admin. You did it yourself, you know.

[00:19:54] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know if, this isn’t something curious that sort of hopped in like the last five years, six years, something like that? Do you know if this has a history which goes back right to the beginning of WordPress?

[00:20:06] Russell Aaron: I would be curious to go figure out when this file was introduced. I want to say, like, if I had to guess, I think it’s at least in 2.0. It might go further back. 2.3 is when I started using WordPress. So I mean, as far as I know, I think it’s that far, but I haven’t actually dove back to see like, when it was introduced.

[00:20:28] Nathan Wrigley: Have you ever used it and killed a site accidentally?

[00:20:33] Russell Aaron: Yes.

[00:20:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you have. Oh, go on, tell us. What did you do?

[00:20:35] Russell Aaron: So, I see this argument all the time where it is, you know, too many plugins, slow your site down or whatever. There’s actually an option in your database and it, you know, when you activate a plugin, there’s this wide array, it says akismet-1, so it’s active. And then it says jetpack-0, so it’s not active.

And so it tells you what’s an active plugin and what’s not. And I’ve gone in there and I’ve thought, oh, I’ll just change this value or, can I activate a plugin just by changing this value? And it’s one of those things where, whoops, probably forgot a comma or forgot a period somewhere. I mean, it’s very finicky. I mean, it’s the same thing as editing your database. If you go in there and you make a mistake in your database, it’s going to blow up the site. Same thing with this.

[00:21:30] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, the curious thing about the database, I suppose though, is that obviously not many inexperienced people presumably would be given an administrator account. So there’s that.

[00:21:38] Russell Aaron: Hopefully.

[00:21:38] Nathan Wrigley: But also they’re never, well, okay, alright. Yeah, I’ll take that back immediately. Well, okay, in an ideal world, an administrator account would not be given to somebody inexperienced. Plus the fact that almost nobody, until now, knew that this whole thing existed. And I bet I get loads of emails saying, we’ve known about this, Nathan, forever. It’s just you that didn’t know about it.

[00:21:59] Russell Aaron: No, this is one of those things where like, you show up to WordCamp US and it’s like, what do you know that I don’t know? And you go, have you ever been to options.php? And then people are like, wait, what? It’s one of those things where like, look at the big brain on Russ, it’s one of those kind of things.

[00:22:16] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a cabal of just me and you now, and then anybody who’s listened to this podcast. But also, the inexperienced user, presumably wouldn’t have the access to the tooling to use a database tool. So that’s why I find this so amazingly curious, that essentially you’ve just completely listed out everything in an editor. I mean, I could understand it if it just showed what the content of that.

[00:22:37] Russell Aaron: Just read only?

[00:22:37] Nathan Wrigley: Right, just show what it is and then you could go into a database tool and amend it if you needed to. But the fact that almost everything is editable and saveable, that is the bit that I find so curious.

Do you know of other things like this, or is this the only one? What I mean by that is, any curious, hidden Easter egg, strange things inside of WordPress, or is this the one and only?

[00:22:59] Russell Aaron: Sure, sure. I mean, as far as I know, I mean there’s other block visibility controls and stuff like that, that aren’t really displayed anywhere. It’s not like you can make those adjustments. But I mean, as far as I know, you know, like that’s all controlled by either the code in a plugin, or by a Core file, or it’s in the options. So I mean, you have both worlds right here. You have a Core file in WordPress showing you your database. This is kind of where it all is.

I would also say that I’ve spent many moons looking for my Gravity Forms license or, why is this not updating or whatever? And this is one of those things where, if you’re looking in a database, it’s all kind of black and white, squished, and it’s like tiny little tables that are off color. At least with this, there’s a margin, there’s some padding around things, there’s some gaps. So it’s kind of more user friendly than a database would be.

[00:24:00] Nathan Wrigley: Actually that’s a curious way of thinking about it, isn’t it? Because you’re right. If you do go into.

[00:24:05] Russell Aaron: You go into phpMyAdmin you’re kind of like.

[00:24:07] Nathan Wrigley: It’s not pretty. There are definitely some tools that you can have that make a database a pleasure to look at, but most of the ones that we’re all familiar with, that we use day in, day out, you’re right, they’re hard to use. Also, they have curious dropdowns and inadvertently, you click return on something and suddenly you’ve dropped the table entirely, and we’re in a bit of trouble. So this is at least easy to see.

I think we’ve probably used up all the oxygen in terms of this. I’m going to encourage you to go and have a poke around.

[00:24:34] Russell Aaron: It’s multi-site as well too, so if you go to a multi-site, you can’t see, like if you go into the backend, it’s per site. So it’s not every database option for the multi-site. But if you go into just the actual network site, yeah, then you could see all that there.

[00:24:50] Nathan Wrigley: So I’m going to encourage people to go and have a little poke around, but I’m also not going to encourage you, don’t fiddle with anything. Just leave every single field exactly as you saw it. It’s example.com, so your domain.com, whatever that would be /wp-admin/options, with an S so plural php.

Go and have a look, and I’d be very curious, if you’ve got anything that you think is interesting in there, or indeed you’ve also found something in the same way that Russell has which is unexpected and unknown. I’d be very curious to hear about that, and maybe we can get you on a podcast episode as well.

So, Russell, thank you so much for enlightening me. What a peculiar episode that was. I really appreciate it.

[00:25:30] Russell Aaron: I appreciate you putting it out there. Like, blow my mind, what do you have? And I’m glad that I can at least register that in some sort of of way.

[00:25:38] Nathan Wrigley: There’s always something new, and this definitely was something new. Thank you, Russell.

[00:25:41] Russell Aaron: Thank you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case Elementor’s decade of growth and its future plans with AI.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Miriam Schwab. Miriam has been deeply immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for around two decades. Starting out offering WordPress as a service, she went on to lead a custom WordPress agency serving major tech companies and nonprofits before founding the startup Strattic, pioneering static WordPress architecture. After Strattic’s acquisition by Elementor in 2022, Miriam took the role of Head of WordPress acting as the key liaison between Elementor and the wider WordPress community.

Elementor growth over the last decade has been prolific. Miriam says that it now powers over 13% of the entire web. She gives insights into the challenges and responsibilities that come with maintaining such a large user base, especially around major updates and backwards compatibility.

Much of our conversation centers around the rise of AI in WordPress, from built in AI tools for generating images and content to the standalone Angie plugin that introduces agentic AI capabilities across WordPress. Miriam outlines Elementor’s multi-pronged approach to innovation, talking about how their Site Planner tool uses conversational AI to guide beginners and professionals from an idea all the way to a wire framed website. And how the upcoming AI integrations promise even more granular design control.

Miriam also shares her perspectives on how the new Abilities API is set to change what’s possible inside WordPress, and what this means for developers, designers, and support teams navigating the complexities of AI driven workflows.

For those interested in how AI is shaping the future of WordPress, Elementor’s strategy, and the evolving role of creators within this ecosystem, this episode is for you.

If you’d like to find out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Miriam Schwab.

I am joined on the podcast by Miriam Schwab. Hello Miriam.

[00:03:23] Miriam Schwab: Hi.

[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: Nice to have you with us. Now, dear listener, I have to be very grateful to Miriam because about three weeks ago we tried to capture this exact podcast. In fact, we did. We captured this exact podcast. Unfortunately, the tech failed and Miriam’s audio was entirely silent. So we had a nice long conversation, Miriam divulged her experience and wisdom, and I got to put it out on the podcast and there was nothing there. It was completely blank. So firstly, an apology for that. And secondly, enormous thanks for coming back and talking to me.

[00:03:54] Miriam Schwab: Well, I have to thank you for giving this another shot because I have a feeling that the technical difficulties were also on my side. So thank you for giving this another go.

[00:04:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, well, I appreciate it. So Miriam has a long and storied history in WordPress. She’s working with Elementor at the moment, but the story goes back way further than that. Let’s just do the little potted bio at the beginning, Miriam. Just tell us a, just a short version of who you are in the WordPress space, and what you’ve achieved in the past.

[00:04:20] Miriam Schwab: Okay, so about 20 years ago, I discovered WordPress. Loved it, decided to work with it, started offering it as a service. Eventually that expanded into being an agency, and working on custom implementations of WordPress for tech companies and large nonprofits, which was a lot of fun and a great learning experience.

Did that for about 13 years. Sold the agency and founded a startup based on one of the many ideas I had had over the years. I had many ideas for products over the years, but I knew that I needed to make sure I wasn’t over spending my abilities, like between family and work and everything.

But I got to the stage where I was like, okay, I can do this. And I actually really loved the idea. So I founded a startup that was called Strattic. It published WordPress websites in a static architecture while retaining dynamic capabilities. And by doing that, it solved pretty much all the issues related to speed security and scalability. Raised venture capital funding for it, and it was acquired by Elementor in June, 2022.

And after joining Elementor, continued to lead the Strattic team for about six months, and then they offered me this new position that hadn’t existed before. Initially, we called it the Head of WordPress Relations, and then it evolved to just being called Head of WordPress, where I act as a liaison between Elementor and the broader WordPress community on many levels. Practically, strategically, community, like you name it and I’m probably doing it. So that’s a bit about me.

[00:05:43] Nathan Wrigley: Do you have like a job description? Because when you say sort of Head of WordPress, there really seems to be almost no bounds in terms of the WordPress and Elementor connection. Do you have constraints on what is out of bounds? Or is it literally anything that’s connected with WordPress comes under your purview?

[00:05:57] Miriam Schwab: It is literally anything, pretty much. It suits me because I was the CEO of two companies, right? I led them. So I have an entrepreneurial character, I guess you could say. And I’ve always been involved in a lot of aspects of the businesses that I’ve been running, and I like that. I actually like to be involved in marketing and sales and even the financial side of things, and internal and external and all that kind of stuff. So it allows me to continue to embrace that side of me, even though I’m now like corporate. And I really appreciate that Elementor allows me that flexibility. It keeps the work that I do very interesting.

[00:06:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’ll bet. And you’ve always me as an extremely curious person, who likes to be busy, let’s put it that way.

Does Elementor continue to grow? I mean, I guess Elementor for me feels like it’s coming up to a decade old or something along those lines.

[00:06:48] Miriam Schwab: Yes, exactly. June is going to be 10 years since it was founded. We’re in our 10th year now, like heading up to it.

[00:06:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and when it began, the plugin offered an incredibly valuable free version. And this was a real good way of kind of promoting growth because page builders were becoming all the rage at that point, and the market was already becoming saturated. But Elementor managed to put some daylight between themselves and the competitors because of the fully rounded free version. And then obviously, you know, built the pro version on top of that.

And then when you chart the numbers of WordPress’s growth over the last decade, I don’t know what the exact numbers are, perhaps you can fill us in on that, but it feels like quite a bit of the WordPress growth, so WordPress generally, that 43% figure that we constantly like to refer to, it feels like quite a bit of that belongs, well, not belongs, but you know what I mean, is because of the popularity of Elementor. So the growth was meteoric. And I don’t know how that’s carried on, whether the line continues that trajectory, or whether it’s kind of flat lined, but still growing. Can we just get into that a bit?

[00:07:50] Miriam Schwab: After Elementor was launched, it really quickly reached a million active installs, I think within a year or something because it was the right, very much the right product at the right time, bringing a lot of value to users. And like you mentioned, like with the free version, for sure, that definitely helped power its growth and adoption. But also because it was a valuable, and is a valuable product for web builders to use.

In terms of the growth, so amazingly, Elementor’s adoption continues to grow. So you know W3Techs? Every year they publish like top stuff. And the various categories is based on the absolute number of sites that that particular technology accrued over the course of 2025. For the third year running, Elementor was given the title of Top Content Management System by W3Techs, beating out Wix and Shopify and WordPress. WordPress was the winner for many years.

And I’m not privy to the exact numbers or their exact calculations, but based on what they say, if Elementor is the top CMS, it’s because over the course of 2025, it’s usage base grew by more websites than those other platforms grew, which is wild. And like there, they even states, I think Elementor started off 2025 with 11.7% of the internet, and ended off 2025 with 13.1% of the internet.

[00:09:12] Nathan Wrigley: Wait. Do that again.

[00:09:13] Miriam Schwab: Of the entire web, yes, of the web. Not WordPress.

[00:09:17] Nathan Wrigley: We use the 43% figure to be WordPress. So that same kind of sentence, but substitute Elementor for the word WordPress in there. 13%?

[00:09:27] Miriam Schwab: Yeah, over 13%. So over the course of 2025, Elementor continued to grow at a very significant pace. So Elementor is still growing.

[00:09:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s remarkable. Do you know if that’s because of new adoption or is that that the current users of the platform, you know, who have a license for multiple sites and what have you, are just using it more and more, so that number kind of creeps up? So I guess the question there is, do you have a growing user base or is it just more broad use by your current user base?

[00:09:54] Miriam Schwab: Our current user base definitely contributes to growth, but by our estimation, we grew by something like three and a half million sites over the course of 2025. So a significant number of those sites are new. New users, or new sites, or whatever, that kind of thing.

[00:10:12] Nathan Wrigley: What a phenomenal story that, I mean it is the story really inside of the WordPress space over the last decade. I presume there’s nothing that can touch those kind of stats. That’s really remarkable. And I suppose it’s a blessing and also a curse. And what I mean by that is, you’ve got this giant platform, enormous user base, but I suppose it also means that anything that you do with the Elementor platform, there’s a lot of care that needs to be taken on every single update. So if you’re going to update to the 4.0 version, which you recently did, big overhaul, but a big user base to get annoyed if things go wrong. So I guess a lot of care and attention required because of your popularity.

[00:10:52] Miriam Schwab: Yeah. Backwards compatibility, you know, it’s a very important aspect of WordPress development in general. So at Elementor it’s the same. It’s super critical in terms of every update that we push out, determining how far back we’re going to support things, et cetera. So every version that goes out, it has to be super duper QA’d.

And even so, you know what WordPress is like, it’s like the wild west. Every site is like a snowflake. It has its own combination of themes, plugins, server configuration, PHP version, you know what I mean? Like, good luck with that. But the team does an amazing job of really managing to make sure that pretty much every version doesn’t cause issues.

And with regards to version four, that is an overhaul. And the team, while moving ahead with creating version four, because it’ll bring a lot of value to our users and it pulls Elementor even more towards the future, it’s being done so carefully. Like every step is considered.

And in terms of how it’s being developed and also how it’s going to work in conjunction with the previous approach to Elementor. Because the assumption is, not everyone’s going to just jump over to version four. Migrating an existing site to version four may be complicated. There’s discussions around how to do that in the best way, but it may be complicated.

So even an existing site, it might have pages still built on version three and prior, while new pages will be built with version four to gain the benefits of version four. So they have to live side by side for some amount of time. It’s incredibly complicated, but it’s a really important, exciting project because, like you said, Elementor is 10 years old, which means a 10-year-old code base. That means it’s time to give it an overhaul, even with all the risk and complication involved.

[00:12:32] Nathan Wrigley: What’s the staff count that you’ve got over there now?

[00:12:34] Miriam Schwab: It’s something like 350 now, I think.

[00:12:37] Nathan Wrigley: So enormous. But again, I presume that speaks to the things that you’ve got to do. You know, if you’re going to ship a big update, you need a lot of bodies doing the coding for that. But also, you know, checking the backwards compatibility and things.

Okay, so you mentioned the future. In the year 2025, the words, well, the letters AI, I think probably were said by more people than just about anything else in the English language. Apart from maybe the word the. Everything else seems to have gone AI. If you look in the WordPress space, all of the media, all of the excitement, all of the interest, all of the everything, the oxygen is being sucked out of the room by AI, let’s put it that way.

And so Elementor, I presume, has to keep up with those current trends. What is happening over there? In terms of the page builder, and also I know there’s other ancillary products and plugins that, whilst built by you, aren’t necessarily part of that page building experience. What’s going on?

[00:13:26] Miriam Schwab: So we have like a number of approaches to AI and each one is getting a lot of attention. And while users are enthusiastic about them, we’re trying to figure out where to give them the best experience and how with AI. I think just like the whole world, we’re also working on figuring out AI and how to implement the best way possible.

But we strongly believe that WordPress must have strong AI capabilities in order to secure its future. And we want to see WordPress have a strong future for many years to come. But not only that, AI in WordPress will actually give it a big leg up and advantage over the more proprietary platforms in our opinion. So there’s like intense effort being made on our side to create amazing AI tooling in order to try to secure WordPress’s feature.

So what do we have? We have the kind of basic obvious stuff, which is, you’re in Elementor editor, you want to generate an image, here, you can generate an image with AI. You want to create copy, text, add title, all that kind of stuff, the content release stuff, there you go. HTML, CSS, okay. Kind of like check the box, pretty expected stuff.

Then we have Angie which is its own standalone plugin, which applies to all of WordPress, not just Elementor. And it gives agentic capabilities to WordPress in general. So whatever you would think an AI assistant would be able to do for you in your WordPress environment, it can pretty much do that. As we know, AI is non-deterministic. You tell it to do something and it will do it one way, and it tells you to do something else and it’ll do it the other way. So there’s a lot of guardrails being developed by our team to direct Angie to give the results that the user probably wants.

But you can do things like around managing your site, managing users, creating content, changing categories, WooCommerce management, product management, things like that. So it streamlines a lot of stuff. And the team is working on some like really exciting capabilities, which hopefully will be released soon. And then we’ll be able to talk about it. But in the meantime, it’s free to use. Anyone can go into the repo, install it, start using it, and of course we want to hear feedback about that. So that’s Angie.

And then the third approach with AI is our Site Planner. So Site Planner is a very cool tool. You chat to it, and you chat your way to a very robust website. It’s not like a one line prompt, build me a flower shop website, and then it just kind of guesses what you might want. It asks you very specific and useful questions so that it can get the fullest picture of what you want to build. And it guides you along the way by asking you the right questions, and then it generates a site for you in Elementor, and then you can export that site into your own hosting environment, or into our hosting environment, or you can download it as a zip file or whatever.

So the Site Planner can be the first stage in your AI website building journey. It takes you, let’s say from zero to 80, I would say. And then the last 20% of the site you can do with Angie, you can do manually, you can do with Elementor, you could do not with Elementor. You could do however you want, and launch your site.

So that’s pretty much what’s going on with AI. We have some more stuff coming out soon, but we’ll talk about it when we can, you know?

[00:16:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so let me just reprise that and make sure I’ve understood. So the first piece of that jigsaw puzzle was the things with inside of Elementor, the page builder itself. And if we rewound the clock just five years, even though you are now saying, oh, the expected stuff, that stuff was the stuff of Star Trek. You know, oh, ask it for an image and it’ll make an image. Yeah, okay, that seems like a distant future that we’ll never reach. And yet now that’s kind of de rigueur. Everybody expects that stuff. So that’s the stuff inside of the page builder as you’d expect. Text, images and what have you.

But then you’ve got this Angie product, which if I’m parsing that correctly, enables you to leverage the abilities of WordPress. So I would like you to create me a post and assign these categories to it and publish it on this particular date. Do you know, does that leverage the sort of Abilities API, or have you done the foundational work yourselves as opposed to the Core Abilities API, which the teams have been working on more recently?

[00:17:32] Miriam Schwab: That’s a very good question. So the Angie team started building Angie at least a year ago, which was before the Abilities API was, I don’t know, even a twinkle in someones eye. So the team, in order to make Angie work, built their own tools, like it’s called tools, exposing WordPress’ capabilities, so actually invested a ton in exposing something like 200 tools in WordPress to Angie.

And not only in Angie, the team actually also did some work to expose tools in WooCommerce and ACF as like a starting point for, because they’re very popular plugins. So when the Abilities API came around, the team already had a lot that was done and also more than what the Abilities API has. The goal is to sync up with the Abilities API and leverage it. At the moment there’s still some issues, at least on our end using it. But we’re in constant communication with the WordPress AI teams and giving feedback and things like that. So hopefully we’ll be able to resolve that. But the team did build all of that themselves, which is pretty amazing.

[00:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that is amazing. But I guess given what Elementor touches, and the fact that you’ve got that enormous staff there that can try to build that, it kind of made sense to go at that because you didn’t know that the team were working on the Abilities API. I remember when that dropped. So I’ve been covering WordPress news for, I don’t know, a decade or something like that. I remember thinking, this is probably the most consequential piece of news that I’ve ever covered.

The idea of binding AI, so AI in the scenario that you described first, where I’m in Elementor, I want an image, I’m in Elementor, I want some text. That’s interesting, but it’s really confined. There’s lots of boxes around that, there’s only a certain permutation of things that you can do. But the minute you start to bind an AI to all the things that WordPress can do, so create a user, delete a user, create a page, schedule it for this time. Oh, I don’t know. Just imagine clicking around inside the WordPress admin interface and wherever you end up, there’s a thing, there’s a box or a field to fill out, and there’s an ability that can be done by that thing.

And uncovering those and making it so that the AI agent can understand what that is, it’s very hard to me to encapsulate in English why I think that’s so impressive. But, do you know what I mean? Can you see the thread of what I’m trying to say there, how important that is?

[00:19:49] Miriam Schwab: It is super impressive. What you’re saying about AI being like, if we had thought about it five years ago, it would be amazing. Even agentic AI, everyone talks about agents as if it’s like obvious that AI can be agentic. But for quite a bit of time in the beginning, and of course AI years are like a million years.

So for the first year and a half or something of us, of the world using AI, something like that, there wasn’t even agentic AI. So the fact that there’s agentic AI, and that it can be applied to WordPress is pretty wild. And I’ll tell you why I also think it’s wild. Because WordPress is 20 years old, 23 years old, whatever it is at this point. It’s a legacy platform. And the fact that it can be, the Abilities API is a really smart approach to it because it kind of slackens the exposure of everything that’s going on behind WordPress.

Instead of needing like a million different APIs and different approaches and that every plugin’s creating their own way to integrate with WordPress. It standardises it in a way that actually is also good for development, but also is good for the AI future, because it means that the way AI will interface with WordPress is straightforward and standard enough that regardless of what the LLMs end up doing going forward, if there’s more capabilities, if we move beyond agentic to who knows what, I don’t know what, like implants in our brains, then we can still interface with WordPress even though it’s over 20 years old. I think that’s amazing. So kudos to the team for accomplishing that.

[00:21:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and it was a penny that just didn’t drop for me. I saw AI as this interesting thing where it could create content, but I didn’t make the connection with all of the myriad things that WordPress could do. I just thought, okay, it’ll be inside the block editor, or it’ll be inside of Elementor or wherever it lives. That’s where the AI will belong. And then when I first read a summary of what the Abilities API was going to achieve, and that then binds to a whole other layer of APIs surrounding that, that was when the penny dropped. And I thought, okay, so basically what you’ve done there is you’ve opened the door and you’ve said, here’s all the things that a WordPress website can do. Until now, the AI was just in the interface and you could, you know, words and images and what have you. Now it’s, okay, we’ve opened the doors, now you can do the whole range of things that you’d like to do with the AI. And so it opens up all of those capabilities.

Again, the words fail me, but the import of it, the importance of it, I think only time will tell. But it feels like it’s probably one of the more important things. And again, like you said, 20 year old legacy system, there could have been a moment where the two paths split and, you know, AI became more interesting outside of WordPress, and WordPress sudden decline and what have you. But by opening the doors and saying, actually let’s just let all of the AI in and you can explore that if you wish to, kind of interesting for those people that want to.

[00:22:29] Miriam Schwab: Yeah, WordPress could have struggled to keep up with AI and we, I’m not saying it’s not a struggle. I think we’re a bit late to the AI game in general as a, like an ecosystem, which is understandable. We’re open source, things like, you know, move slower and by committee, so that’s just how it goes. But the fact that it picked itself up, the team was established and within six months of being established or something like that, it already had accomplished their four pillars of work that they had set out for themselves, is really amazing. And it’s super important for the future of WordPress, and it’s great to see that they were able to accomplish that.

[00:23:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and also it feels like the moment has arrived where a lot of the people that write in the WordPress space, so content creators and what have you, they’ve sort of got this now and they’re now creating content. And some of the people that no doubt, you and I both follow, who may be writing on their own blog or on social media or what have you, there seems to have been over the last couple of months, a real, a sense that, okay, WordPress has a place. We don’t need to worry about that anymore. We’ve now got a path with this AI team. State of the Word AI team sort gathered there and pressed the big red button and all that kind of stuff. There seems to have been so much focus that it’s built itself into relevance again. And there seems to be less worry. People now writing content about the things that WordPress can do with these abilities bound to it.

Okay, so let’s move on to the third strand of what you mentioned, which was, forgive me if I get this wrong. You said Site Planner, right? Was that correct?

[00:23:51] Miriam Schwab: Site planner, yeah.

[00:23:51] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And this is a conversation that you have. This is something that I always find kind of interesting. You know, getting into a conversation with something which is essentially an AI, that’s kind of curious. But you mentioned that whole process was a back and forth. So it’s not, I want a website. You write this great, big, long prompt, click the button, wait for five minutes and kind of cross your fingers and hope for the best. This is more of a dialogue, is it? Where you repeatedly get asked a series of smaller questions, which hopefully then build up to the sort of final thing. Tell us a little bit more.

[00:24:19] Miriam Schwab: The way that works is, yes, you can like paste in some kind of giant prompt, but even then, whether you start with like one sentence or a prompt, the Site Planner will ask you questions, clarifying questions, and also suggestive questions. Do you want any of these types of pages, or content on your site? And things like that. It’s really good for guiding non-professionals.

It then creates actually a brief, like it writes out a brief for your website based on this conversation. So it’s really good for non-professionals who don’t know the questions to ask, right? They don’t know what they should be even considering. So it asks questions for them.

But it’s also great for professionals. It cuts down a lot of time in the research stage of building a site for a client. And the AI can actually like give them added value in terms of asking questions they might not have thought of. That conversation process can be cut short whenever the user wants. Like it can go on for as long as they want, but they can also say, that’s enough, let’s build the site based on what we discussed.

When the AI is creating the brief, it will tell you the strength of the brief, like in the top right corner of Site Planner. So once you get to the stage where it says strong brief, you could stop there, but you could keep going. The more information you give it, the better the outcome will be. Just like with AI in general.

So once you finish that conversation, you say, let’s move to the next stage. It creates a site map. So it shows the hierarchy of the site based on the conversation. But also, on each page it shows you like what type of content it will have, and it actually gives you the content. The nice thing about the way the AI builds the site is that, first of all, content is king, which it always has been on websites. And here you really get to see the strength of that.

So the content that it creates is really good because it’s based on this conversation that you had with it. At that site map stage you can drag and drop things around, add different pages that it didn’t include, remove sections from pages, but it’s just content chunks. Once you are happy with that stage, you go to the next stage, which is the website stage.

We call it the wireframe stage because it’s not like a fully designed site, it’s more like the site with a structure, but it’s like 80% of the way there. It could have like testimonials section, contact page form, gallery. I created a demo site for a cafe that also has community events. So it has an events page. It’s really great. It like really gets you 80% of the way there. It saves a lot of time, and if you’re a professional, you can show your client that at that stage and work off of that.

If anyone works with clients, you know that communicating and getting to a point where everyone’s happy can be very challenging when you don’t have something to show. But here, when you have something to show, you get past that blank canvas stage, which is very hard for people to like even imagine anything, and then you can work from there.

So once you have the wire frames done, also at that wire frame stage, by the way, you can also there edit things, remove things, et cetera. Change the colour palette, upload a logo to be used across the site, and things like that.

Then you can publish the site. You can publish it into our own hosting environment in one click, but you can also publish it into any existing Elementor account. You just kind of add your It hooks up to your account and it will send it to wherever that site is hosted. Or you can download and upload it somewhere else. So it gets you from zero to 80, or 90% of the way with a site through a conversation and then you can like tweak it, polish it, and finalise it from there. So it’s really useful in my opinion.

[00:27:34] Nathan Wrigley: So prior to the publication of it, you mentioned that you could show it to your clients. Is the capacity to have a public facing yet not public facing, if you know what I mean? So a URL, which is visible to you, but not the wider world for SEO and what have you. Is it possible to sort of take an up and running version, give it to a client so that they can have a little bit of a poke around?

[00:27:52] Miriam Schwab: That’s an interesting question. At that point, when it’s still in site planner, I think it’s only visible to you. So you would have to download and put it somewhere. But then you could put it in like a staging site or wherever you want to put it. You could share your screen with the client. But yeah, I think you can’t share the URL to that particular project within a third party.

[00:28:09] Nathan Wrigley: Because that’s all so very instantaneous compared to, you know, it may be that you get into this dialogue, which takes half an hour or what have you. But, you know, compared to the old way of building things, it’s more or less instantaneous. I had this notion that a service like that would be kind of interesting if it spat out four or five variations of the same thing at the same time.

So I realise there’s a sort of, you know, a burden in terms of technology and overhead and all of that, cPU time and what have you. But the idea of entering that client meeting with five versions of the same basic thing. So, okay, I have a, I don’t know, a bricks and mortar store and I sell widgets. So I build the one version, but Elementor, for example, in this scenario, builds me four others as well. And then I can go through and cherry pick which bits of this one do you like or, I like the colour scheme of that, if you know what I mean? So I don’t know if it’s possible to do that. In other words, is it possible to spin up multiple versions of the same thing, or would you have to sort of start from scratch each time?

[00:29:02] Miriam Schwab: Well, what you can do within the project is you can ask it to regenerate a section. Like, you could be like, I don’t like that. So you could say like, do it differently and then it will suggest something else. You could theoretically, I guess like create a second page, let’s say a second about page and then be like, okay, suggest a different format for me for this. Like a different structure because it’s not exactly design.

The design afterwards can be worked on with a client or whatever. It’s more like the structure of the page. So, and even though it’s a live website, it is like structure. So you could be like, no, I want the testimonials to be a different style, like suggest something else. And then you could show, I guess the customer various pages within the site. It’s an interesting idea.

I know that the team is working on Site Planner, and it will be more rolled into the WordPress Elementor environment, like in the site. Right now, it’s an external tool, so once it’s in there, you could like duplicate pages, you could regenerate pages, things like that. I don’t have an ETA on when that’s happening but that’s the general direction.

[00:29:58] Nathan Wrigley: It’s a fascinating conversation. And the other thing I was going to say is that there’s obviously, in your community, there’s a lot of people who are, they have a lot of history of building things with Elementor. They’ve learned the UI inside and out. They’ve become experts. They know where every checkbox is. If you show them something in Figma and then give them 10 minutes, they’ll mimic that perfectly.

And I was wondering what kind of capabilities the AI has within the Elementor interface. So in other words, does it do a sort of cookie cutter job of creating rows and sections and what have you, based upon things that have already been prebuilt? Or can it, in its AI wire frame stage, can it do, I don’t know, unique padding or crazy CSS things? Can it get into all of the bits and pieces that Elementor offers, all of those rich experiences? Or is it more kind of, okay, somebody in the team built these testimonial elements, and so we’re going to basically pick one of those and mimic that onto this wire frame?

[00:30:52] Miriam Schwab: So there’s Angie as it exists now and there’s Angies that will be over the next few months. So I’m going to be giving like, I guess kind of a sneak preview into what’s coming.

At the moment it can do a lot within Elementor, but it is kind of constrained within what Elementor classically does. However, v4 is going to enable the AI, or let’s say the v4 AI partnership will give it a lot more creative capabilities, and extend basically to whatever you want it to do, that you can do with Angie. From custom code snippets, to custom widgets, to custom anything, or working within the Elementor. There’s going to be a lot of interesting things that people can do, basically in some ways just limited by their creative ideas.

[00:31:38] Nathan Wrigley: Right, so much more granular. Because I have this vision that at some point in the future, and maybe some tool out there can do this. But I have this vision that, let’s say you’re inside Elementor, you’ve got 99% of the way there, and then you suddenly realise that that picture of the cat is the wrong cat. And so you just sort of say, can we have a different cat? No, not that one. Okay, that cat. And now, could we make the borders rounder on that particular image and give it a bit of a box shadow? That would be nice. Oh, and then swap it around so the text is on the other side.

So you end up in this sort of dialogue, almost like you’re chatting to the designer and you are watching over their shoulder as they build it. That seems to be the kind of place where we would love to get to. And then of course we enter this curious, difficult moment for the web developers and web designers, where these things become so dreadfully straightforward and easy that we then have to start questioning, how do you offer this as a client service if almost everybody can speak to a website and get it to do whatever you would like it to do?

So there’s two things in there. I sort of smuggled the last one in. But the first one is this sort of dialogue with the website, and then the second one is whether or not these tools are making it more difficult to be in the industry that we all love so much.

[00:32:44] Miriam Schwab: With regards to the dialogue description, so AI in general, it’s become like our team members for certain things. You know, in the past, if I wanted to, let’s say, post something on social media on behalf of Elementor, I would go to the design team and ask them to design something and go through that process, and then get what they gave me and then post it.

And now my design team is Nano Banana, right? Or ChatGPT. I get two versions, they compete against each other. Whichever one works best for me is what I take. And so it’s like that in almost everything we do if we’re using AI, and also in the world of website creation, design, development, and management. Our team for many aspects of it will become AI, which will create greater efficiency and also it seems like greater redundancy.

But I think like anything with a tool, the results will be defined by the abilities and skills of the person directing it. AI needs direction and that conversation to happen. And the quality of the results will be dependent on the skillset of the user, not skillset in terms of, how do I get AI to do stuff? But skillset of, what should an excellent website be?

So the human in the loop, I think, will continue to be a very important part. It’s just we’re kicking the can down the road kind of thing in terms of where we bring value. So instead of us bringing value, sitting and clicking on an image and changing the background using Photoshop, our value will be in being the director and producer of what output we want it to have and getting it there.

So we’re not like the tinkerers and like the hammer or nail people, we’re the contractor or the strategist, or the blueprint creators. So the conversations will take place, but the human in the loop part will still be really important. We all, whether we’re web creators or whatever profession we have, have to figure out how to use AI to help us do what we’re doing better.

I actually don’t exactly agree with the idea that AI helps us do more. It does, a lot of things become faster, but I think the value is that a lot of things get done better and a higher quality. So there’s that.

So how do we use AI to the best of our abilities to help us do our work even better. But also, how do we continue to provide value in a world that’s dominated by AI? And that’s like, I don’t know what the answers are. 2026 is going to be the year of, who knows? Because AI changes every second. They could invent a new model or release a new model tomorrow that changes this whole conversation.

[00:35:19] Nathan Wrigley: One of the things that, sort of round it off with this one maybe. I’m thinking about your support system. So your support system, which has built up over 10 years, and presumably worked to help your clients. But the clients themselves probably started with a blank canvas and then, you know, made mistakes along the way, but were able to describe the mistakes that they made along the way to your support agents. Like, okay, I was doing this and then something went wrong. Can you unpick that for me? Where did I go wrong?

The realignment that needs to take place for your support team with the advent of AI, I suppose is fairly profound because you’ll probably have a lot of users who will just know that they did a prompt. And now this thing happened and I didn’t want that thing to happen. How do I go back? I mean there’s obviously a case of click undo, or don’t save the changes or whatever. But I’m also imagining the support that you provide has to pivot a lot as well.

[00:36:06] Miriam Schwab: The development of AI has to include implementing a ton of guardrails to prevent users from doing things that can damage their site. I’ll give you an example. In the early days of Angie, I generally love pushing tools to their limits, so I was pushing Angie to its limit and I got it to kick me out of my own site and remove my user. And I was like, well that’s not cool. So guardrails were put in place around that.

There’s concepts of, first of all, not allowing a user to implement something until they’re sure. Like meaning, not just be like, hey AI, can you do this? And the AI is like, done. No. AI is like, okay, here’s what it will look like, here’s what it will do, that kind of thing. Do you want to go ahead? Then, of course, undo buttons.

But then even with all of that, yeah, support could be different. We can have logs and things like that about what happened and why it happened and things like that. And that can help troubleshoot things. But on the other hand, I think support can become much better because while still the human is in the loop, getting the answers to issues, you know, you end up with this huge knowledge base of stuff, and a support agent can only know so much. Our brains are finite. We don’t know what someone discovered yesterday as an issue and as a solution and all that kind of stuff. So once you have AI kind of like analysing your corpus of knowledge and then pulling out what can help you or the user, then that becomes much better.

But I’ll give you another interesting angle of where support becomes complicated, where you have the Abilities API, or Angie or both, and a user is interacting with Angie, let’s say, and Elementor and also a third party plugin that is also working with AI. And then there’s something borks. And then the user is like, was it Elementor that was a problem? Was it WordPress that was a problem? Was it this third party plugin that was a problem? How do I even ask for support when I don’t know what just caused that issue? I guess it’s another version of plugin conflicts, but it’s just taking it to another level.

[00:38:01] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s a different level altogether. I said that was my final question. Turns out I was being insincere. I have one more. And that is, I know that Elementor has done a lot of work trying to make websites more accessible in the recent past. And so that’s the final question, I promise. The idea that we hand over the agency of this to our AI builder and so things like accessibility, there may be other things that we could smuggle in there as well, but we’ll go with accessibility. Is work being done to ensure that the output follows WCAG guidelines and things along those lines?

[00:38:32] Miriam Schwab: So something that I’ve seen as we’re working on implementing AI capabilities is that there’s this idea that I had, and I think others do as well, that AI is the all powerful whatever. And if you just say to it, make my site accessible, it will make my site accessible. So it turns out it’s not like that. Maybe one day it will be. But AI needs tools, needs direction, needs the capabilities, and it doesn’t just have it just because it’s AI.

So it’s kind of the same with accessibility. So actually Elementor created an accessibility plugin called Ally, which is very useful because it goes through the website, analyses it, tells you where there’s issues, but doesn’t just tell you where there is issues, it gives you solutions. And it can, with AI, implement those solutions. Like you can click and be like, fix that.

And that kind of ongoing accessibility assistance means that a person can, first of all do like a once through of their site and bring it to a better level of accessibility. We don’t guarantee like 100% accessibility, I don’t know if anyone can, but it improves accessibility on many levels.

And then as you’re going along, it can keep an eye on things or you can like trigger it and it can help make sure that whatever you’re doing going forward also stays within accessibility guidelines. So it’s like a really useful assistant, slash solution, slash tool that users can implement on an ongoing basis with their site. So worth checking out.

[00:39:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I’ll put that into the show notes as well. And if memory serves, I could be wrong about this, if memory serves it’s not an Elementor specific solution.

[00:40:06] Miriam Schwab: Oh, right, exactly. It’s for all sites, all WordPress sites.

[00:40:08] Nathan Wrigley: So any WordPress website can benefit from that. Okay, that’s interesting. Okay, so who knows what the year 2026 will bring. It no doubt will be chaos, turmoil.

[00:40:18] Miriam Schwab: It won’t be boring.

[00:40:19] Nathan Wrigley: That’s the words. Yeah, it definitely won’t be boring. And, yeah, good luck for Elementor in the year 2026.

[00:40:26] Miriam Schwab: Thank you. I’m excited, by the way, for 2026. It’s like a whole new world, and I think in some ways, at least for me, and I see this with others, it like reignited a spark for innovation in WordPress. WordPress is amazing, it’s been amazing for over 20 years and we’ve always, you know, been seeking, looking for ways to innovate. But AI takes it to a whole other level and makes innovation more accessible, if we’re going to use that word. And it’s really fun to see what people are creating around AI for WordPress. And I think we’re going to see some amazing things released over the course of 2026, not just by Elementor, that will make WordPress, wow. Anyways, that’s just my thoughts about 2026.

[00:41:00] Nathan Wrigley: Miriam Schwab, thank you for chatting to me today.

[00:41:02] Miriam Schwab: Thank you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, using WordPress to enable a digital nomad life.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Charly Leetham. Charly’s journey with technology spans over four decades, from tinkering with amateur radio as a teenager in Australia, to working in electronic engineering and eventually building a career in WordPress and small business tech support. With a background in field service, sales, and running retail businesses, Charly pivoted to helping people with their websites and tech needs right around the time WordPress was in its infancy. Today, nearly 20 years later, she’s still involved in the WordPress ecosystem, providing troubleshooting, support, and plain English tech translations for business owners who need their digital lives demystified.

But in this episode, we are focusing less on her technical skills and more on her unique lifestyle. Charly is a true digital nomad. Someone who’s not bound to a fixed address, but instead lives and works from a camper van fitted with a Starlink system traveling and working all over Australia.

We talk about what it was like to embrace remote working long before it was commonplace, and how she built a business that supports complete flexibility. We explore both the upsides of the digital nomad life, the freedom to travel, spend quality time with family, and work from beautiful locations, as well as the trade-offs such as limited space, and having to ruthlessly prioritize her longings.

Charlie discusses the essential tech setup that empowers her nomadism. From laptops and microphones to how Starlink satellite internet lets her work reliably from almost anywhere, even in places with little or no mobile signal.

There’s practical advice on working with clients, so support can happen on her schedule, and reflections on building a business that matches her values, even if it sometimes means saying goodbye to clients who aren’t the right fit.

If you’ve ever imagined trading your desk for the open road, or wondered what’s technologically, and personally possible, as a remote WordPress worker this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Charly Leetham.

I am joined on the podcast by Charly Leetham. Hello Charly.

[00:03:29] Charly Leetham: Hi Nathan. It’s really good to be here, and we are literally on other side of the world from each other.

[00:03:35] Nathan Wrigley: We could probably not be further apart. You are in Australia, and we’ve never met. We spent probably the last 20 minutes or so having a good old natter. It’s been really interesting. And actually, the way that this podcast was going to go, I think has been upended by the conversation that we just had. Because you talked to me about your digital nomadism, I’m going to say, and I want to lean into that.

But before we get into all of that story about how you’ve ended up working remotely and things, do you just want to give us a little bit of background about how you’ve come to work, be on a WordPress podcast? What’s your background with tech, your life in general? Whatever you wish.

[00:04:09] Charly Leetham: Okay, well, look, I’ll try and keep it short. There is like 40 years to sort of condense into three or four minutes here.

Look, I have always been interested in tech from a very, very, very young age. My dad kind of encouraged me, if I was showed interest in anything, he’d say, well, go and find out about and let’s do this and let’s do that. The age of 13, I had my amateur radio license. By the time I was 16, I’d just left year 10, grade 10, and I went and did an associate diploma, electronic engineering. I worked full-time as a junior laboratory technician in an electronics lab at the Australian University while I was doing that.

And from there I went to be a field service tech with a private company. I’ve done field service, I’ve done pre-sales, I’ve done sales, I’ve done contract management. I’ve done customer service management. Done bid management.

And then I had a need after I decided, I was really, really sick and tired of doing all of this, so I went and bought myself a business with a franchise. We ran retail businesses for four years. They failed spectacularly. And I had a need that I had to actually get some money through the door so that I could feed the kids, pay the bills, eventually feed myself, and the husband is part of it.

So this was born. And this was, people need help with their technology. People need help with their websites, people need help with their emails, people need help with all of this. And at that point in time, that was 2007 and WordPress was just in its infancy. I think it was, maybe three or four generations in at that point, but it was still in its infancy. And I learned, WordPress from that.

Someone said, I’ve got a WordPress website, it’s not working. Can you look at it? Sure. I can look at it. I know C++, I know Pascal, I know Basic. Oh, this is PHP. What’s that? I learned PHP, I learned themes, I learned plugins, I learned how to troubleshoot things. And here we are nearly 20 years later, doing the thing that I love the most.

[00:06:16] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a lot in there, Charly. Genuinely, there is a lot in there. But what I’ve taken from that is that you have always been a bit of a tinkerer. You’ve always been somebody that’s fascinated by the technology side of things. Not just the software, but also, you know, the engineering side of things. And so, gosh, what a history you’ve got.

We’ll get onto all the WordPress stuff a little bit later. Obviously that’s a big part of why you’re on this particular podcast because we are a WordPress focussed podcast. But it was the conversation that we had about half an hour ago that captured my attention and is just going to divert us for a little while.

And that is, you got on the call, we started talking about where we are in the world and the fact that you are over there and I’m over here, and isn’t it amazing that we can talk to each other? And the fact that this technology is here and, you know, when we were both children, this was the realm of science fiction. Being able to speak to somebody on the other side of the planet without prearranging it, and organising it with a telephone network and a great expense and all that.

And then we started talking about literally where you are. And I was kind of curious about your location. It turns out you are a digital nomad. Now, for those people tuning in who don’t know what this is, a digital nomad, I guess is somebody who is not bound to a specific location. I live in the UK. I have a house and a mortgage and all those kind of things. So I’ve kind of saddled myself to that, and I’ve got this definite spot in the world where I call home. You’ve decided to kind of get rid of all of that. And so just tell us about your life and what it is that you do, and how you move around and how you empower that with technology, and what technology you use to make that even possible.

[00:07:53] Charly Leetham: Okay. Let’s start by telling you a story. When my kids were all, all my kids are now in their early thirties, late twenties, so they’re adults. They’re gone, they’re out doing their own thing. But when my kids were born in the mid nineties, I wanted nothing more than to be able to stay home with them. But because of my experience, because of what I was doing, I was the breadwinner. I was the one that had the money coming in, so I had to go back to work. Went back to it when my kids were really young.

And as much as I loved my job and I loved what I was doing, I really hated not being able to be with him. And what I wanted to do was what I’m doing now, then. The ability to help people with their tech. The technology didn’t exist. We couldn’t remote into computers, we couldn’t do video conferencing. We couldn’t even do audio calls like phone networks for what we had. So if you just think about, you know, a young 20-year-old woman with two kids, working in IT, wanting to do this.

Now we come forward nearly 20 years, or nearly 30 years because my kids are 30. I can do exactly what I wanted to do 30 years ago today. I can sit wherever I am, I can run up my computer, I can get an internet connection, I can talk to you. Someone says to me, my computer’s not working, or my email’s not sending, I can’t do this. I can remote into their computer. I can do a face-to-face call with them. I can remote into their computer. I can give them that support. I don’t have to be on site to do that.

That is what a digital nomad is. That’s what me as a digital nomad does. I provide tech support to people wherever I am, literally in the world. I said to you, I traveled in the US for a couple of years. Well, I got stuck in the US for a couple of years. And I didn’t work over there. I want to be really, really clear because you’re allowed to work in the US when you’re over there on a visitor visa. But I was helping people. People would say to me, my computer’s broken, well, let me remote in. I’ll have a look. Let me go and do this, I’ll help you. My dad would ring me from Australia and say, my email’s broken. What can I do? I’d fix it for him.

So that’s what I do. So how does that work for me today? There is a housing crisis. That’s the first thing that we really need to recognise is there is a housing crisis. Finding a house is really, really difficult. Finding a house that is affordable is even more difficult. Rather than stressing on the fact that I can’t find a house, or I can’t afford the rent for a house, or I don’t want to have that stress of having a rent for a house. I fitted out a vehicle, I got a Starlink system. My brother fitted the vehicle out for me. My son, who is the electrician, put the electrical into it. And I literally live on the road. I go from place to place. I find somewhere I can hook into power for a couple of days. I throw my Starlink out the site, and I work. I support people.

You could talk to me tomorrow, well, not tomorrow. Talk to me in a month, and I’m going to be in far North Queensland. A month from today, I will be in far North Queensland doing things up in far North Queensland because I’ve got to be up there for something. That’s what my life is like.

[00:10:55] Nathan Wrigley: If we rewind the clock, I don’t know, 10 years, did you desire something like that? From what you said, it sounds like you did. You always had some sort of intuition that if the technology allowed, you would wish for something like that. But obviously, kids and bills and all of that kind of got in the way. Has this been something which, if you sort of look back on your life, you think instinctively this was something that you wished to do?

[00:11:17] Charly Leetham: Not on the road. Not mobile like I am. Being able to do it from home, being able to be a work from home mum, absolutely. Being on the road and moving around, no, not even my wildest dreams would I have even imagined it. I didn’t even know that was available to us. I had no idea.

Look, I’ve met people, just to sort of segue very quickly. I have met people while I’m doing this, and they are young families. They are mum and dad and the kids, and they’re living on the road. They’ve got homeschooling curriculums for the kids. The kids do all their schooling. They get all these extra education of the places they’re in, all the things that they’re doing. Mum and dad will arrange to take the kids out on a bushwalk, and go and see a place that very few people in Australia will ever get to see. And these kids are living this life. I didn’t know that was available. If I had known that was available, I might have done that with my kids.

[00:12:08] Nathan Wrigley: I think one of the curious things is that, if you are working in the tech space, and obviously we’ll talk more about WordPress in a moment, there is a significant chance that this is available to you. I mean obviously you may have a job which is office bound. We understand that that means that you’ve got to show up to the office and what have you. But I’m imagining that there’s quite a few people listening to this podcast who, if they were to really examine it, these possibilities are open to them.

But it may not be something that they, A, wish to do, or B, they’ve not really thought about it too much. You know, they’ve decided that, okay, life is fine, I like my local environment or what have you.

What are like the key benefits, if you know what I mean? If you were to advertise this lifestyle to our audience, so we’ll do this in two parts. Let’s do the benefits first and then we’ll do the drawbacks later. What are the key things which you look at in your life at the moment and think, I’m so grateful for that? What are they?

[00:12:57] Charly Leetham: Freedom. Absolutely the freedom. I mean, we’re going to talk about drawbacks in a minute, so that’s going to get balanced out. But it is the freedom. It’s the ability to say, it’s getting cold in the south of Australia, remembering we’re in the southern hemisphere. So, I actually have to say that because people like, it’s hot in the south. No, it’s cold in the south. So as the winter months come and it gets colder, we migrate north. So I can literally say, no, it’s too cold here, I’m going to go north. Going to go to Queensland and spend winter in Queensland. It still gets cold, but not as cold as it does in the south. So you’ve got that ability.

I guess one of the biggest benefits is my dad is, he’s in his late seventies and I get to travel with dad. Dad’s traveled for many, many years and he still is. But I get to travel with dad. I get to spend these years with my dad. There’s not many people that can say they get to spend this sort of time, and this quality time, with their parents at this stage of life, because life gets in our way. But we make it work.

We will, once a week, arrange to go and do something. He’ll come and knock on the door and say, you are working too hard. I’m like, I’m working, go away, leave me alone. But then it’ll be, okay, yes, you’re right. I’m working too hard, so why don’t I take this morning off and we go and visit this place where we are staying. Go and find a touristy place or a bush walk to do, or go for a swim in the sea, or go and do something together so I can spend time with my dad. If the family needs me to be somewhere, I can be there, generally.

I also just to sort of pad this out a little, I also house sit while I’m doing it. So sometimes I’ll get to a place, someone will be advertising, we need a house sitter. We need someone to come and live in the house, or live at the house, for a couple of weeks while we’re away. So I’ll go and house sit for them, and I get another experience in all of that. So that’s the benefits. It’s just that flexibility. I would be doing exactly what I’m doing, but I would be stuck in a house. I’d be stuck in a room, in a house, grinding. I can grind and be in some of the most beautiful places in the country.

[00:15:02] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, it’s so curious because I’m imagining there’s a proportion of the people listening to this who are just so in awe of that description. You know, oh gosh, you can really spend the time in the locations that you wish. I’m imagining there’ll also be other people who think, no, that’s not what I want at all. But I’ve got to say, I’m really drawn to what you’re saying. The idea of being able to go and, I don’t know, work with a spectacular view. Or work in a particular city for a period of time, and then go somewhere slightly more rural. In other words, it’s not the same view that you get every day when you wake up. There’s that variety in life which, certainly for me, there’s a lot of appeal there. Okay, let’s do the drawbacks. What are the downsides?

[00:15:44] Charly Leetham: The downsize is I live in a car. Literally, I live in a little camper van. My workspace is probably, because I fitted out a little commercial vehicle, a little commercial van as my van and as, you know, as my income improves, my savings improve, I will probably upgrade it. But my workspace is probably a metre by a metre. It’s not very big. And when I finish up for the day, I’ve got to pack everything up so I’ve got room for relaxation. I can’t sort of just walk out of a room, shut the door and say, well, that’s work done.

Now, work’s done for me, I’ve got to pack everything up, I’ve got to put everything away. You are living on the road, so you don’t have all of your stuff. And I’m going to put stuff in double quotes, they’re in inverted commas. You learn very quickly what is important to you, and what is necessary, and you have what is necessary. And then you have a few of those things that you go, these are really important to me and I’m not going to give them up.

So it is not like you can say, oh, I’ve got that plate that is really good for this entertaining thing, and go to a cupboard and pull that plate out that you use maybe once a year. No, you don’t have that. You’ve got the plates that you use every day.

[00:16:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The plates.

[00:16:52] Charly Leetham: Yeah, well, I travel on my own. I could literally live with one plate, one cup, one bowl, knife and fork. You are trading off that flexibility of having a house where you can have things stored, and all of storage space. You really have to think about what it is you want. I have a rule. I literally have a rule and I think everyone should live with this rule anyway. I have to have needed it four times before I go and buy it. If I haven’t needed it four times, then I’m not going to buy it. If I look at something, I go, oh, that’d be really cool and it’d be really convenient. Then I go, but would I use it? Have I needed it four times? Have I needed the functionality that gives me four times? No, don’t buy it. Because where the hell am I going to put it?

[00:17:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I guess whatever you’re buying, you have to buy the tiny version of it as well. You can’t get the sort of jumbo version of whatever it is.

[00:17:44] Charly Leetham: There’s your other trade off is you can’t buy food in bulk. Like, I used to go and buy several cans of food and put them in the cupboard. Whether I used them or not immediately, there would be several cans of the same thing in the cupboard just in case I needed it. And if it was sort of, oh, I’m down to the last can, I’ll go and buy a few more. Well, now I’m down to buying two or three cans at a time. And once I’ve run those out, I’ve got to go and find the nearest shop and go and buy another one just to sort of keep it topped up.

You’re not buying in bulk, you’re not buying your meat, you’re not buying your fruit veg in bulk. Does that matter? No, because when you get to certain places, you normally find the local providers, you normally find the local fruit seller or the local fruit and veg shop, and go and buy there. You go and support the local community, and you pick up a few things there and, yep, that’s what you’re going to use. That’s what we do.

[00:18:31] Nathan Wrigley: Just to interrupt there, Charly, do you try to spend a significant portion of time in a particular place so that rather than just sort of driving through it, I guess, and spending a couple of days here and a couple of days there, do you spend significant amounts of time there, and therefore begin to have some feeling of what that community is like?

I guess the underpinnings of that question really is, how do you get that sort of human interaction that so many people think is important? Because clearly you are meeting fresh people every day, and you probably don’t get the chance to form those roots and what have you. So there’s a lot there. But do you know what I mean? Do you try to sort of spend a bit of time so that you gather some of those human connections along the way?

[00:19:12] Charly Leetham: Okay, so there’s a couple of things there that you’ve touched on. On my way to a location, I may only spend a day in a location, as I’m heading to a final destination or the next stop along the way. When I get to that next stop along the way, I do try to spend a bit of time, because I like to put my roots down. I like to be able to just settle on in, be able to work for really long periods and not have to worry about, oh, I’ve got to pack everything up and be on the road again. I’ve worked for three days, now I’ve got to spend the next two or three hours packing everything up so I can get on the road and drive for another couple of hours. Yes, I know English people are going to say, couple of hours driving, you’d be across the country.

We’d spend a couple of hours driving and then you get to the other end and you’ve got to set it up. So you’re losing a day when you’re doing that. So my preference is when I get to where I want to be, getting my feet down and staying there for a couple of weeks if I can. And then from there, I use that as a base of, okay, what is within a hundred kilometers that I can go and visit, and do the site seeing, and do the local colour, and make that a hub for my activities.

You then asked about human interaction and honestly, I think I’m a little different to people. I don’t need it as much as others. I am really, really quite happy to just be in my sphere. I’ve got my online connections. If I need to speak to someone, I’ve normally got someone on the other, on Discord, or one of the chat programs that I can chat to. And then if I feel like I’m getting to that stir crazy point, you go to the local pub or you go to the local cafe and you sort of sit around and you have a chat to the locals.

That fills that need for me. I’m not a person who is, it sounds terrible, I’m actually really good in a public environment, but it drains me. So I really, once that’s done, I’m done for a couple of days and I can just go sit in nature and not worry about it.

[00:20:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think everybody can totally see that. There’s just so many different personality types, isn’t there? I can identify exactly with what you’re saying. I can go for extended periods of time, and not really require that human interaction. And then occasionally I sort of crave it, and so I satisfy it and go and meet people and hang out with all sorts of different people.

And so I guess really that is the piece that you would need to examine in your own life. Because if you were going to go nomadic, for want of a better word, you’ve got to really understand that bit. What is your need? On what level do you need to be with other people and interact with other people? Because that’s really the fulcrum around what makes this whole thing possible.

Speaking of what makes the whole thing possible, I’m interested to delve into the tech a little bit. Because you mentioned this sort of one metre square, and the fact that you’ve got to pack things away and what have you. I’m curious as to what technology do you have which enables this? Ignoring the vehicle and all that, I’m just trying to imagine what you might put in your shopping cart. If you were telling somebody this digital nomad life was available, what would be the requirements to make that happen?

[00:22:01] Charly Leetham: So I’m doing this with my laptop computer. Now, I buy as top of the range as I can when I buy, and it lasts me for years. So I’ve got, I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, I have an MSI gaming computer, because it’s got the extra fans in it. So it really, really works well when you’re doing a lot of processor intensive stuff. So it’s not just for gaming, because I do a bit of graphic design and I do a bit of this and I do a bit of that. So the extra fans make the world a difference.

So I’ve got an MSI gaming computer, or an MSI computer. I have an external microphone. I’ve actually just recently bought an external webcam. I was using the webcam on the computer. It was perfectly fine. I’ve changed my setup to where I now have an external monitor mounted on the wall in my van. So when I settle in, I pull my 21 inch monitor out and I plug my computer into it and I’ve got this beautiful big monitor. I’ve got my external keyboard, and I’ve got my mouse.

[00:22:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I mean it’s the bare essentials, isn’t it? I think we can all understand that. And then I think you mentioned the internet connectivity bit, which I suppose is also a crucial part of the tech. Because where I am, it’s a landline. I obviously have, you know, I’ve got a mobile phone, so there’s the cell signal, which will allow me to roam within Europe and North America and what have you, but there’s all the cost and everything associated with that. Where you go, I think it’s fair to say that you would quickly lose all manner of possibilities because the reception in Australia, you said is not that great in terms of the internet. So how do you overcome that? I think you said Starlink.

[00:23:30] Charly Leetham: Yes, Starlink. I kind of looked into it for a very long time. I was relying on our mobile data and using my phone as a hot link. But in Australia, I was joking with you about it when we started this call, I’m on the NBN here. And if anyone knows anything about the NBN, you’ll know that most Australians hate the NBN. It’s terrible. If it works, you’ve got to consider yourself lucky.

It’s great if you are in a capital city, but you go a hundred kilometers, and I’m being a little flippant when I say that, but I’m not too far wrong. Go a hundred kilometers away from a regional center and you’ve got nothing. There’s no radio signal. By radio signal, I mean mobile signal. You can’t make phone calls. You’ve got that little, there is no signal icon on your phone. You can’t actually get a connection. I say a hundred kilometers, maybe it’s 200, maybe it’s 250, but that’s not a very long way in Australia. It really isn’t.

So I bought Starlink. I spoke to someone who was traveling along the way. And I actually want to come back to just the nomadic lifestyle when we’re done here, Nathan. And I met someone while they were traveling. They said, oh, Starlink, it’s wonderful. And it was still relatively new at the time. I’m like, oh, really? Are you sure? And he explained it to me like, oh. So when I got the car, I went and bought myself the Starlink and it’s fantastic.

Oh my goodness, it’s so good. You’ve got to have power because the routers take power. You can just get, you know, one of the, I don’t know if you’ve got them there, the power stations, the USB power station that you charge up and you can run all your devices off it for a couple of hours. You could do that. I’ve seen people run them off of just car batteries with the clamps on the battery terminals. I’m an Australian, this is pretty normal.

So you’ve got to have the power for the router, to run the router. That then powers the dish and you’ve basically got, in inverted commas, uninterruptable internet for as long as your power lasts. For as long as you’ve got power, you’ve got uninterruptable internet. I have found where I’ve been, I house sat for my sister-in-law during winter, and her internet was terrible. So I went and got my Starlink out and threw it up and connected to it, and I had better internet. The connection speed on the internet on the Starlink versus her landline connection was like 10 times. I had 10 times better internet connection using Starlink than I did on a landline.

[00:25:50] Nathan Wrigley: With the Starlink technology, do you have to, so I really am ignorant of this. I mean I know it’s to do with satellites, and I know that you can have it bolted onto the side of your house, I guess if you live in a rural area where there is no regular landline. But yours is this sort of peripatetic, mobile version of that.

Firstly, do you have to point it at a particular part of the sky? Do you have to spend time lining it up or do you just have to, just plonk it in daylight? So you know, outside basically? And is it bulky, or is it the kind of stuff that you could throw in a backpack if you were nomadic in that sense? You know, you didn’t have wheels, you didn’t have a vehicle, you were just sort of backpacking around. So two things. Where do you have to point it and is it big?

[00:26:27] Charly Leetham: Okay. You asked some really great questions. I’m just going to say they are really, really inspired questions. The first thing I want to say is that the stuff that you see bolted onto the side of a house is typically the stuff that we would use when we’re out mobile. It’s the same hardware. They’ve just got mounting technology, or mounting systems, that will allow you to mount it to the house.

Quick story before I answer the second question about how big is it and all the rest of it. I had a version 2 Starlink, which, it would now be five or six years old, and it’s got a pole and it’s got the dish on it. And the dish is, I say dish, it’s a rectangular panel and you’ve got put it on a base so that it’s stable. That’s heavier than the version three. I had that last week, the week before I had a problem with it and I was a bit concerned. So I contacted Starlink and I said, listen, it’s doing this, here’s all my, being a tech I had all the diagnostics and stuff I’d done and I laid it all out and I said, and I just really want to say that I’m a little concerned. Because I’m traveling and I’m often outside of mobile range, I don’t want to get outside of mobile range, put my Starlink on and have it fail. I’m concerned that I’ve got an intermittent fault that is going to be a problem.

And they said, no worries, we’ll send you a version 3, no charge. Because I’ve been with Starlink now, probably two, two and a half, no, two years now. And they just sent me the new hardware. So I’ve just upgraded to the version 3. So I can actually talk about both. So the version two is a little bigger. You’re probably talking, I’m just holding my hands up. It’s probably about 40 centimeters wide and 70 centimeters tall, the panel. It’s only 10 mil, five centimeters deep, I guess.

[00:28:06] Nathan Wrigley: It’s like the sort of size of a modestly big laptop screen. Something along those lines.

[00:28:13] Charly Leetham: Actually, it would be about the same size as my, I’m just looking at, it would be a little larger than my computer here. And I’ve got a 21, is this the 15? No, this is a 17 inch. This is a 17 inch monitor. So I’ve got a 17 inch laptop.

[00:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so we’re in the order of, got my hands out and I’m imagining how big that is. It certainly answers my backpacking question anyway.

[00:28:32] Charly Leetham: Well, let me answer that question for you in a different way. There is now actually what they call a Starlink Mini, which is designed for backpacks. It’s designed to fit inside a backpack. It’s got a portable power supply so that you can go hiking, you can go backpacking and take your Starlink with you. I don’t know a lot about it. I do know that the plan that you put it on is a little different to what you would put our plans on, the plans you would use for ours, because it’s designed for you to be really, really mobile, not just mobile like we are. And it’s really light. It’s designed for a backpack.

So that answers that question as well as like, you’ve got the technology. The version 3, and I wanted you to say this, the version 3 would probably be half as light as the version 2. So it’s much lighter. And one of the things that I really liked about the way this all works is that they’ve got ground mounts, right? So you just put them down on the ground, which is going to answer your next question. Do you need to position it? No. You just put it out. You’ve got to make sure it’s got a clear view of the sky. You’ve got to make sure that there’s no real obstructions, and that means no trees, no buildings. So nothing that’s going to sort of overshadow it as the satellites go over. And it will find the satellites for you. You don’t have to do anything. You just hit the button and it just works.

[00:29:45] Nathan Wrigley: Miraculous really when you think about it. I mean, actually think about it. You’ve got this box that you just plonk out under the stars somewhere, and a bunch of, I mean, I’m just actually thinking about what I’m about to say, and it is ridiculous. There’s a bunch of satellites, so they had to go into space, moving around the planet. And they connect to the little box somehow send TCP IP packets all over the place, literally off the planet, which then get bounced down somewhere and, you know, end up in this case talking to me. Insane that any of that works.

[00:30:19] Charly Leetham: So let me just add to that, at faster speeds than your standard internet will give you in Australia. I don’t know what it’s like in the US, I don’t know what it’s like in Britain, the UK, but it’s faster and more stable speeds than you get in Australia in general.

[00:30:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I actually, so it’s probably about six months ago I looked at Starlink. I’ve never seriously looked at it. I’m always just curious about it so I’ve ended up on the Starlink website. In terms of the speeds that you can get, they’re not comparable to what you can get through a landline. You can get significantly faster. But they are still impressive. And there’s nothing that day-to-day use wouldn’t be afforded by a Starlink package. I mean, maybe if you were sort of streaming 4K video left, right and center, maybe it would struggle in that scenario. But for any normal, and I’m doing air quotes, any normal use of the internet, more than enough. Absolutely incredible.

Okay, so all of that stuff, absolutely amazing. I’m so impressed with everything that you’ve just said. It really, it speaks to me. I think there’s an awful lot in your life that I think, oh gosh, wish I was Charly. But I’m kind of curious then as to the kind of work that you do actually do, because you painted this picture of all these infinite possibilities and what have you. And now I’m turning the attention really to what is it that you do do? What are the kind of things that you’ve been able to create in your life in this nomadic way? What kind of work are you able to pull off?

[00:31:43] Charly Leetham: So what I do, what my business is, is I help businesses manage their tech. I like to sit between a business and they’re tech. Some people might call me their CTO, some people might just call me their technical team. I try to translate tech into plain English for business owners so that it takes all of that stress out of it.

When your business owner says, I need an email address, or I need a new email account, or whatever it is, and they’re talking to a provider, and the provider’s giving them all of the marketing guff, and all of the sales thing, and then it’s not working. So then they’re speaking to the technical people and the technical people are talking their jargon to them. It’s overwhelming for them, and they’re not spending time running their businesses when they’re dealing with that.

They need someone who can sit between them and that morass, if you like, and then say, okay, what is it you want? Oh, right, cool. Let me go and talk to people. Let me get you some answers and I’ll come back to you. So I often say, I don’t walk into a business and say, the answer is this, now what was the question? Which is what a lot of product salespeople would do. And I don’t want to, I’m not trying to bag salespeople here, because they’re needed. But I don’t go in and say, the answer is this, now what was the question? I go in and I say, okay, what is it you’re trying to do?

I don’t want to know about the technology you want to use. I want to know about what your business application is. I want to know, what is your input and what is your output? What are you trying to do here? Cool. Now, what systems do you already have? Let me go and investigate those systems. Let me see what they can do for you. Let me see if we can make those systems work to do what you want them to do. They can’t do it, okay, let me go and find some technology that we can plug in and we’ll work with what you’ve got.

The big thing I find with a lot of small businesses is, two things. They get caught with the bright shiny object syndrome. Oh, this new technology’s coming out. It’s going to make my business run well, it’s going to make me money. Technology never makes you money, by the way. Technology only ever helps you make money if you use it right. So they get caught with the bright shiny object syndrome. Or they get caught with the sales person said it would work. I didn’t understand what it did, and I bought this system and now it doesn’t interact with the rest of my systems and I’ve now got to put all these other processes and all these other things in places to make it work.

That’s kind of where I sit. But I’m a tech as well, so I can make it work, I can troubleshoot it. I build websites, which is how I got into WordPress. I build websites. I fix websites. Like I actually also troubleshoot plugins. You know when we upgrade something or something’s not working and you’re getting all the error message? I’ll go and actually troubleshoot a plugin and say, oh, that plugin’s doing this. Can I fix it? No. Okay, I’ll send a support response off to the plugin provider and say, here’s all the logs, here’s what I’ve done, here’s what I’ve found. Can you get this fixed up for me? Or can you get it fixed up for us? Or, I’m really stuck because I’m getting to this point and it’s just not working and I don’t know where it’s going wrong, but I’m pretty certain it’s between here and here.

The other thing I do in all of that is, when you get the two suppliers going, it’s them with the fingers going both ways. I tend to be the one that sits between it and mediates to try and get that sorted out. So that’s what I do, and I do that all remotely.

[00:34:54] Nathan Wrigley: I’ve totally understood all of that. You know, you’ve got this, you’re sort of sitting in between, and being that kind of agent that helps people with the tech because they’re busy and they’re doing all the things and they haven’t got the time to gain that expertise in all of that.

So the follow up question, I guess from that, and it’s kind of leaning into your nomadic thing a little bit as well, is I guess that kind of work, the kind of work that you’ve got for yourself there, you can do it because, and I’m going to say this like it’s true and then you can correct me if I’m false, because you can do that when you have time available.

And what I mean by that is, it’s not like if you were working in an office and you need to be there from nine o’clock in the morning until five o’clock at night, because the telephone lines open up and you’ve got to field all this support. I’m guessing you’ve built a business where the channels of communication are a little bit more async than that. I don’t know, like an email exchange, or Discord, or Slack or whatever it may be. In other words, you can be in the car driving at 7:30 in the morning or 5:30 in the afternoon, or 3 or whatever it may be, because you are not needed at that exact moment by, I’m going to say your employer, but in this case, your clients. It’s more async than that. So I’ve said that like it’s true. Is that true?

[00:36:07] Charly Leetham: It is true for me. You are entirely correct. I’m sort of laughing because you’re like, oh, you can be driving in the car. The amount of times where I’ve been traveling with dad and my phone’s buzzed at me and I’ve gone, oh. And he goes, okay, hang on, I’ll pull over. Because we’ve got radio signal, we’ve got mobile signal. And he pulls over and I’ll fix the problem. Like, it might be a five minute fix and I will actually fix the problem then and we’ll keep moving. I’m sitting having a cup of coffee somewhere and one of my clients messages. And they message. I rarely spend time on the phone, or on video conferences with them. They know that the best way to get me is to book a time. I’ve trained my clients.

[00:36:44] Nathan Wrigley: That’s fascinating. So to you, that piece of the jigsaw puzzle is entirely obvious. And so it kind of just gets glossed over in your head. But you have created a business where that bit is the kind of foundational piece. If you had clients that wanted you on call 24/7, that really wouldn’t work because you’ve carved out a life for yourself where you don’t want to be on call 24/7. You want be able to do what you want to do when you want to do it, with the understanding that the clients are important, but the async nature of it is, they’ll message you. As soon as you can get to it, you’ll get to it.

And I’m guessing that when you onboard these clients, there’s that whole education piece. This is what I do, this is the way we respond to support. You’ll get an answer with, I don’t know, 12 hours, 24 hours, whatever it may be. And it may be that somebody listening to this podcast is firefighting all the time and they kind of haven’t figured that piece out. So I think that’s really interesting that you’ve got that, but yet it’s self-evident to you.

[00:37:39] Charly Leetham: I think I want to also add to that is that my clients trust me. So there might be point in time where I am always on for that client for a while at least. And when, I’m always on for them. If they message me, I will, and I do this for all of my clients actually. If they message me and say, hey, this is a problem, and I’ve got access, I actually have the ability to respond to them. I will normally respond to them and say, I’m letting you know, I’ve seen this on the road today, or I’ve got meetings all day. I’ve got this, you are in my queue, I’ll get to you as soon as I can. And they know that actually means not tomorrow, not the next day, not, whenever it is. I really do mean as soon as I get a space available, they’re going to get my attention. We’ve built that trust relationship.

[00:38:26] Nathan Wrigley: I think probably that is another foundational piece of your business. Without that trust, that’s going to be difficult to onboard clients. Do you tend to gather clients by word of mouth more, or do you have a marketing website where people onboard to you and you have to build that trust up over time? Or is it more a case of your clients recommend your services to other clients who then bring in that trust with them, if you know what I mean?

[00:38:49] Charly Leetham: Mostly column A, little bit of column B and more of column C. So yeah, it’s a bit of everything. I am actually just starting to ramp up my marketing as I start to get more comfortable with what I’m doing. And it sounds strange, right? Because I’ve been doing it for a while, but I’m starting to get more comfortable.

So now I’m starting to ramp up my marketing, because I can talk to people about how it works and what it does. And I have very frank conversations. It’s one of my things is to be, make sure that I am upfront, I am frank, I am honest about what goes on. I don’t like. I can talk salesy. I prefer not to. I prefer to be plain English and real world with people.

I think the other thing because, if we are talking to your audience, the other thing that I really wanted to highlight there is that I have had clients sack me because they don’t like the way I work. That’s not a reflection on me. That’s not a reflection on the surface I provide. It was a reflection on the relationship that was developed, and that relationship didn’t work for them. I’m good with that. I hope I found someone that can actually work with them the way they need them to work.

The other side of that is I have actually suggested to some clients that they would be better off with another provider. And as a service provider, that’s something that we have to be utterly comfortable with. Being able to say this client is not the client that works for us. We are going to spend too much time, too much energy, too much money supporting them, than we are going to get out of that relationship. It is commercial, and it sounds mercantile, and it sounds cutthroat, and it is. But by doing that, what you’re also doing is making space for another client to come in that is actually going to fit your ideals better, it’s going to fit the way you work better. You’re also allowing that client to find a provider that works better for them.

[00:40:39] Nathan Wrigley: This has been such an interesting conversation Charly. This is your life, right? So it’s just oh, this is the way I wake up and I do these things and what have you. But it’s in such contrast to my life at the moment, and yet there’s so many bits of the jigsaw puzzle that you’ve just described that are really fascinating to me.

I would imagine there’s going to be quite a lot of people listening to this who have intuitions that, I got into tech and I got into building WordPress websites so that I too could have a little bit more of that freedom. Maybe even going as far as you’ve done to make it more nomadic. So they own their own vehicle and potter about all over the place. Or they backpack for three months of the year. It’s just fascinating. And because it’s your life, it probably doesn’t seem that extraordinary, but from where I’m sitting, totally remarkable.

[00:41:24] Charly Leetham: No, it doesn’t seem like it’s every day to me. I will say that I think I have a concept of how blessed I am being able to do it. I try not to become so blase about, oh, this is just the way my life is. It’s yeah, I worked hard to get it to this point. So I’ve got to accept that I’ve put in a lot of work to get there, but I’ve also got to accept that there is a lot of blessings that have come from it. And I thank the Lord every day for the life that I have.

[00:41:50] Nathan Wrigley: Well Charly, we’ve reached the 45 minute mark, and although we had a whole range of different things that we could talk about, I hope that you are happy that’s where we ended up. We talked mostly about digital nomadism. We didn’t really stray into WordPress too much, but what a fascinating conversation.

Maybe we’ll have a conversation another day, and lean in heavily to the WordPress side of things, but digital nomadism it was.

Charly, where can people reach you? And I don’t mean that in a physical sense because obviously we have no idea where you’re going to be, but if they were to reach out online, or try and find you on a social network, or a website or whatever it may be, where would be some of the places where we could find you?

[00:42:27] Charly Leetham: The best place to find me is on my website. If you go to askcharlyleetham.com, and then at the end of it put /connect-me. So connect to me with the dashes between it, you will get wherever you can find me. All the networks I’m on. You can book a free 30 minute breakthrough session. And guys, if you just want to come and talk to me about how you can set up your business, or the things that you’re doing and the things that you need to consider, I’d happily talk to you for 30 minutes about that. That’s not a problem at all. And just so you know, I’m on Facebook, I’m on X, I’m on LinkedIn. I’ve got a YouTube channel.

I do a podcast every other day. I do a podcast, Making Tech Easy for Small Business Owners. It’s a 10 to 15, or 15 to 20 minute episode about something tech, and tries to try to simplify it out. I do interviews every now and again, much like this that I put up on there. I’m on Rumble, I’m on Odyssey.

[00:43:22] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to all of those different bits and pieces. Anything that we’ve mentioned just then I will put into the show notes. So if you head to wptavern.com. Search for the episode with Charly in it. And Charly, I should have said at the beginning is not a typical spelling, it’s c h a r l y. So if you search for that this episode will surface.

So absolutely fascinating, Charly. Thank you so much for chatting to me today and good luck. I hope that you managed to get wherever it is that you are going in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. Thank you so much.

[00:43:52] Charly Leetham: Thank you Nathan. I have had an absolute ball. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I love talking about the life I’ve built, so thank you.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case how life has changed during the internet era.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Marc Benzakein. Marc’s story is one that spans nearly the entire history of the internet, with roots reaching back to the mid nineties. He explores, how curiosity and an enthusiastic embrace of technology led him from running a small coffee importing business, accepting payments by snail mail, fax, then email, to helping wire up schools for internet access when modems worked incredibly slowly, and only a handful of people were online.

This episode is a departure from our usual topic about plugins, themes, and WordPress community news. Instead, we are more in the business of reminiscing this week, taking a reflective walk down memory lane to look at how the internet has evolved, not just as a technology, but as an integral part of society that’s transformed how we work, communicate, and think.

Marc shares some personal stories, building bulletin board systems, forging long distance friendships over phone lines and slow modems, and watching as internet access shifted from an intentional, difficult to navigate hobby for a few, to an invisible always on utility that we all take for granted.

We talk about how technology has affected not only business and productivity, often creating more work instead of less, but also our attention spans, expectations around entertainment, the pace of life, and even the social fabric that binds us together.

We discuss the cultural shifts that came with always connected living, digital minimalism, and the recent push by younger generations to step back from tech and reclaim a bit of analog life.

We chat about the early optimism of open standards, the rise of walled gardens and social networks, and the challenges of regulation, commercialisation, and the balancing act between freedom and responsibility online.

Marc’s perspective is shaped by decades of direct technical experience, as well as thoughtful observations of how technology is reshaping the world around us, sometimes for the better, sometimes in ways we need to pause and question.

Whether you are nostalgic for the old days of dial up, intrigued by how the internet’s culture has shifted, or curious about how these transformations might play out as new technologies like AI reshape society, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Marc Benzakein.

I am joined on the podcast by Marc Benzakein. Hello, Marc.

[00:03:44] Marc Benzakein: Hello, Nathan. How are you?

[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. This is going to be an episode unlike one I think we’ve ever done on the WP Tavern podcast. Because usually we have a conversation about, I don’t know, a plugin, a theme, a community idea, something along those lines. And today we’re just going to do memory lane. We’re going to go hand in hand down memory lane.

I think Marc’s memory lane is a little bit longer than my memory lane because it’s all about the internet and the way we’ve been using it and how it’s evolved and all of that. So if you’ve got an expectation of a plugin show, this is not the one for you. This is going to be a little bit different.

So before we crack in properly and have that conversation, Marc, would you just sort of paint the picture a little bit about your bio? Maybe go back right to the beginning of your experiences on the internet. When did you first get online and all that kind of stuff?

[00:04:30] Marc Benzakein: So I want to go back to, I think it was 1995 or 1996. There was a, of course people hear about, and it still exists, AOL and things like that. And then there was Prodigy. I got involved as a user of the internet with a company called Netcom. And it was kind of one of the first true internet service providers that I knew of at the time. It wasn’t like, it didn’t have like this interface and kind of guide you through where you needed to go and everything. You had to use things like Gopher, and you had to do research in order to be able to use the internet.

I of course, became fascinated with it always being a, kind of a tech head or just curious. I’m just infinitely curious. It doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t have to be technology. It can be anything and I find it, like I said, I’m infinitely curious and that leads to distractions sometimes, but it also leads me down paths that I never would’ve thought.

And while I was working on the internet, so this was at a time that I was actually importing coffee from Africa. So yeah, so related. So related. And I had actually made some pretty good money with the coffee business. I was doing the email thing. I had like my three friends who had email addresses and we were like, oh, this is cool. Look at this, instant gratification. And I thought, man, it sure would be cool to see what this looks like from the other side of things. Because I have no clue how any of this works.

And so curious thing happened with the coffee company. I was importing from a country called Burundi in Africa. Some people know where it is, some people don’t. I actually never visited, but my uncle was actually a big shot in the agriculture department there which is how I had the connection to be able to import coffee into the United States. They had a lot of civil and political unrest, and essentially burned the coffee fields. And my uncle fled the country because it had become so dangerous.

So one day I’m, basically I had set up a system in which I import the coffee, it goes to a distributor. Once a month I would go out to the mailbox and collect a cheque. And that was my job. It was the easiest thing I ever did, once I got the system built. And so, lo and behold, civil unrest and all that, which was just awful by the way, but I’m out of business because I can’t import coffee from Burundi. And I was really young, and probably not smart enough to think, maybe I should back this up with other countries too.

But coincidentally, a person that I had gone to high school with, they built computers for schools and things like that, so they had some government contracts and things like that. And they had this crazy idea that they wanted to connect schools to the internet. And they wanted to give them high speed access. Now, keep in mind that back in these days we’re talking about 14.4K, it was, well, we thought it was fast at the time. You know, you had US robotics with their HST standard. And we thought that we were doing well, but most people were actually on 24 hundreds back then.

So if you can imagine that, 2,400 baud modems. I remember it like it was a meal ago. I mean it was just crazy. And so now, I was like importing coffee and I was trying to figure out what to do next and Greg Franklin, who I have partnered with since like the eighties, we’ve been through a lot. We were partners at ServerPress. We’ve been through it all. He and I, you know, we were always good friends. And he says, hey, I’m going to work with Phil and Steve on this internet thing, and it’d be kind of cool if you help me out because I have no clue what I’m doing. I’m like, well, I have no clue what I’m doing either. And he said, yeah, but between the two of us, we can figure it out.

So the idea was, they had already set up, Phil and Steve, who were the other partners in this company, they had set up digital ISDN access. Now, ISDN, let’s see, what did that stand for? Something, something, digital network.

[00:08:32] Nathan Wrigley: I can’t remember what the acronym stood for, but it was banded around a lot, I remember that.

[00:08:36] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And what made it fantastic was you had a modem, okay, but it was kind of on demand. So when your computer sent out a network request that was outside of your internal network, which nobody had home internal networks back then. You know, if they had a computer, that was it, right? Back then, internal networks were things like, there was like LANtastic was one of them, and then there was Novell networking and all that stuff. So it was like that token ring network stuff, right? Okay. So you have to go way back, right? So I can’t believe I’m remembering some of these terms because it’s been so long.

[00:09:11] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I remember all of the ways that they could be connected. I remember seeing the, you know, you’d read through TCP IP documentation and there’d be diagrams of computers connected with T cables all in circles because that was the most efficient way to connect them all. Oh gosh, you’ve taken me back.

[00:09:26] Marc Benzakein: It wasn’t just the most efficient way, it was, if any part of that ring broke, the whole network broke down. You had have it, you know? So this concept of plugging into a switch or a router or something like that was like completely, pardon the pun, but completely novel. Not Novell, novel.

[00:09:45] Nathan Wrigley: Novell, yeah, very good. Very good.

[00:09:48] Marc Benzakein: So I built a lot of token ring systems for local businesses and things like that, but nobody had a network at home. They generally, at most had one computer at home. And when they wanted to go online, I should go back even before that, I used to run a bulletin board service, a BBS, which was even more ridiculous than a 2,400 baud modem.

[00:10:11] Nathan Wrigley: This was when there were like three people in the United States online.

[00:10:14] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And essentially I would have my computer, I was living in an apartment at the time. I would have my computer set up and only one person could connect at a time to my computer, which was set up with this BBS software on it. And they would play games. I had downloads of different files and things like that. I was the first BBS in our region to have a one gigabyte SCSI hard drive. And so I became very, obviously my BBS became very popular, not because I offered anything incredible, but because I had a one gigabyte hard drive.

[00:10:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you had the badge of honor.

[00:10:48] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. And word spread quickly and all that. In the old fashioned ways, which was carrier pigeons and things like that.

[00:10:53] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. There was no, yeah, or the bulletin board.

[00:10:57] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, or the bulletin, yeah. And I think that was probably where I got kind of this taste of like how cool it could be because I would modify my own stuff. So I would, we used a bulletin board software called WWIV. It was all C++ coded. And there was this guy that somehow I found, I don’t even know, in Virginia. His name was Tony. And he and I got to be really good friends because he ran a bulletin board system too in Virginia and I’m in California. And we would get on phone calls, long distance mind you. If you remember what long distance was.

We would talk for hours and this guy was one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met. I mean we would, he would just call me up to tell me, we got to the point where he’d just call me up to tell me jokes and we would just laugh for hours. But he was in the military. He worked on the helicopters that flew George Bush senior around. He was in the Marines.

And we met up one time because he flew out to California. But that’s a whole side story. So that’s where I got started. And then I invested in a US Robotics 14.4 HST modem. So I could do, yeah, 14,400K per second, which was like, I don’t know what the time of $500 modem or something ridiculous like that.

[00:12:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’ve suddenly taken your computer onto the highway instead of being stuck on back lanes.

[00:12:16] Marc Benzakein: Right. So not only did I have my one gigabyte SCSI drive, but I also had high speed BBS connection.

[00:12:23] Nathan Wrigley: You got all the bling that you can have.

[00:12:26] Marc Benzakein: I had all the bling on my 286 computer. It might have been a 486, I don’t know. I don’t remember the computer. But what was funny was like you would sit there, we’d be watching TV and I’d hear my modem go off because someone would be connecting to the BBS. I would drop what I was doing just so that I could go and see what they were doing, right? Because at my end I could see everything that people were doing, so on top of it all. That was probably my foray into the internet, even though I didn’t realise it at the time.

[00:12:53] Nathan Wrigley: Although for a proportion of the listeners, they’ll be kind of nodding their head and going, oh yeah, all of the things that you described make perfect sense. I guess for a significant proportion of the audience, all of this will sort of sound like a mystery. But hopefully you’ll have got some impression, deal listener, the internet as we now know it, where it’s ubiquitous, it really is everywhere. You know, you’ve got a connection if you’re walking down the street with your cellular network and what have you.

In the part of the world, certainly where I live, and I imagine where you live, there’s no real black spot where the internet does not really exist. And everything’s really straightforward. You buy a device from a shop, turn it on and it connects almost immediately. And yet that really wasn’t the case. It was kind of like more pioneering days. Most things didn’t work, but it was a heck of a lot of fun, and a heck of a lot hobbying. So more of actually. Now that I think about it, that’s the best way to phrase it. It was a hobby, things to do.

[00:13:48] Marc Benzakein: It absolutely was a hobby. Very few of us actually had, well, I don’t think any of us had the foresight that the internet would become what it is right now. At least none of the people in my circles. I think it was, it would be the equivalent of like being a Ham radio operator. You know, it’s kind of the same sort of thing. You kind of felt like you were part of this like little elite group of people who understood how it worked and could make it work, and it made you feel special. And for those of us who grew up kind of being that nerd in high school and things like that, and especially back in the seventies and eighties when, I mean I went to school, there were only three people who even knew how to use a keyboard on a computer. And of course we, I mean they made a fricking movie called Revenge of the Nerds. They made fun of us.

It’s amazing that we haven’t had, well, I think a lot of us have had to go through years and years and years of therapy. And I think that I just probably deflected a lot of that sort of treatment of nerds with like a very sharp tongue and a, you know, a very, I would laugh at it and things like that. So that was kind of my coping mechanism probably. And I probably have some trauma from all that that I don’t even remember. But there’s probably something there, but that’s a whole other show. We can talk about that another time.

[00:15:00] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So the fact that it was a hobby and also the fact that, so my recollections start a little bit later than yours, but we’re not like a whole decade out of kilter. I think you definitely started at times where I can remember some of that stuff. You certainly got the march on me. But nevertheless, I don’t think in my estimation I had any conception that it would grow beyond a thing that hobbyists did.

So I think it was always going to remain this sort of niche hobby thing. Maybe some sort of place where you would communicate with a handful of people, and that handful of people would be, you know, equally nerdy in the same way that you or I were. But no expectation that it would be adopted en masse. No expectation that every single human being would have some sort of device, either that they’re walking around with or just in their home or anything like that.

And so I think, looking back, I predicted it would just be this hobby thing and would never grow into anything else. And so it was just a bit of a lark, a bit of fun. Something that you’d put away from time, you know, you would set it down, go and do your regular day, then come back. There was no email, nothing like that. So you could safely put it away and then come back to it.

I look back on it very fondly. It’s almost like halcyon days. And so many things that the internet has been connected with, and is connected with now are fabulous, but there’s also a lot of downsides which have come serendipitously along the way as well. Nobody foresaw those either. So I think, like I say, it was sort of halcyon days. Just this notion that it would be, I don’t know, unicorns and rainbows all the way down.

[00:16:33] Marc Benzakein: Right. The closest prediction that I had made back then was I said, you know, one day we are all going to be connected. But I thought it was going to be one of these kind of like, we go on and we intentionally connect with each other, not like we’re always connected all the time kind of thing. Of course I was young and quite the gamer at the time. I said, here’s what’s going to happen is, I predict that one day games will exist where we keep all the files on our own systems, and the only thing that’s being transmitted to each other is just data to like, so we can like play together all at the same time in these games.

That was my prediction and people would laugh at me. And now of course it’s gone way, way, way beyond that. But every once in a while I’m like, see, I told them and I did nothing about it. I just knew it was going to happen and I did nothing about it.

[00:17:20] Nathan Wrigley: I remember when I was at school, sitting in a physics class, and I for some reason got sat next to probably the nerdiest nerd I’ve ever met. I won’t name him, but he is still very nerdy. He really was like on the extreme end of interested in all of this kind of stuff. And I remember we got into a conversation once where he said, do you know what I think is going to happen in the future? I think you’ll be able to, so we still had cathode ray tellies, so you’d turn the tele on, you’d wait for three minutes for the TV to warm up, and then the picture would slowly appear. And that was the level that we were at, and you had to walk over and press a button on the screen if you want to change it between the four channels or three channels that were available in the UK at the time.

[00:18:01] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, the kids were the remotes back in those days.

[00:18:03] Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. We were literally, either that or a big stick that you could try and prod from the sofa. But he said to me, in the future we’ll have televisions that are just connected to computers somehow, and we’ll pick what we want to watch, and we won’t have to just watch what’s provided to us. We’ll be able to say, I’d like that now, and this now, and watch this film now. And he just predicted this future. And I remember sitting there thinking, that’s never going to happen.

Now that’s kind of like the starting gate for children growing up in this era. That’s like the basic provision. If you haven’t got, you know, the computer switched on and the TV and the music and the radio and all of that on demand, yeah, that’s not life, that’s just some sort of poor version of life. It’s so interesting how it’s transformed what we expect.

[00:18:55] Marc Benzakein: It’s funny because, yeah, you hear the kids being like, what do you mean you had to wait till Tuesday night at eight o’clock in order to watch? And if you didn’t see it, you’d miss it completely. What do you mean by that?

[00:19:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. But even map that further back and, you know, you go back a whole generation or a generation and a half prior to you and I, even the notion that you could watch anything on a box in a house, what do you mean, the theater? Somebody brought the theater to your house. Well, yeah, kind of, in a little box. What, they shrunk the people down? How? It’s insane.

And yet, every single generation, this is now the assumption. The technology of the magnitude that we’ve got now, and the complexity that we’ve got now, and the miniaturisation that we’ve got now, this is now the benchmark for the beginning of the next generation. And it’s so interesting watching it happen.

I don’t know what you feel. I’m probably jumping ahead because I want to go back and talk about some of the things which have gone wrong. But what’s your, do you see yourself fully able to engage with all of the new things that are happening?

So we’re in the year, we’re at the very, very end of 2025 and, you know, we’ve got things like AI. We’ve had all sorts of interesting things happening. And I do wonder, for me at least anyway, I do wonder if there’s a point in time where it just races ahead at such a speed that somebody like me really does genuinely struggle to kind of keep up. I don’t know if you’ve got the same intuitions.

[00:20:13] Marc Benzakein: I actually think everybody does. I think that kids do too. I just think that kids are focused, for instance, on what’s important to them. And they’re at a different point in their life, so what’s important to them is not important to us. And so the technology that’s important to them like, say for instance, TikTok or whatever, is just an example, right? I only care about TikTok insofar as, what can it do to boost my brand? Or something like that.

Although it is interesting that kids are interested in boosting their brand on TikTok and they’re kids. But that’s, they may not realise that that’s what they’re doing, but that’s what they’re doing. But as far as technologies go, I think we just tend to use a technology, I think we’ve reached an age where, with the exception of maybe teleportation, we really feel like, if I can think this, we can do this. And so we just kind of like, now we’re just like, okay, I want to do this, what do I have to do in order to do it? Not, that’s impossible. You know, I think we’ve crossed over that hump of things being impossible.

[00:21:15] Nathan Wrigley: I remember sitting in the car with my children. So this is going back several years now. I mean quite, maybe a decade or more. And I remember my child asking to play a certain song on the car radio. I said to him, we don’t have that. And he looked at me and he said, what do you mean we don’t have it? Because the setup that I had in the car still required compact disks. You know, the old CD player. You would put the CD in and so the arrangement of CDs that we had in the car was the available catalog of songs.

But he could not get over, unavailable. What? What do you mean? I mean, genuinely, it was a real moment where he had to think, the song is bound to that round thing. It’s not just coming out of the ether somehow. And that was quite a profound moment for me thinking, wow, your world is a lot bigger than mine, well, smaller and bigger at the same time, but your expectations are so different to what mine were when I grew up.

[00:22:10] Marc Benzakein: I think that, oh, I mean I hate to sound like, oh, kids today, but kids today, I mean they barely know what an iPod is. And how long ago was that? That wasn’t even that long ago. Because it’s like, what, you had to download your music onto this device? Yeah, because it could hold more music than a CD. For us, the iPod was groundbreaking, right? But I remember the first time I could put music on my phone and I was like, oh, this is awesome. I don’t even, once again, I don’t even know why we call them phones anymore. I hardly ever use it to talk to people.

[00:22:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, your pocket computer.

[00:22:40] Marc Benzakein: It’s way more powerful than anything I ever had in the past. I think because kids are in a constant state of having to adapt anyway, that’s just what growing up is, is a constant state of adaptation. I think that it’s easier for them. I do find that I’m a little bit slower or I might be just more selective. I might just be like, you know, this doesn’t interest me. And it may this be like I’m becoming more and more, get off my lawn as I get older. Or it may be that I’ve always, even back when we started the internet service provider, my feeling was that we have all this power at our hands and we are still children when it comes to us as a society and our ability to be responsible.

[00:23:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s a curious insight isn’t it?

[00:23:28] Marc Benzakein: Technology has always been kind of a double-edged sword for me. It’s amazing what you can do, but going back to the coffee days, I remembered how the speed of business changed for me because we had fax machines. And so I would fax to the people in Burundi because we would, coffee would go to auction. I’d have to bid on it and, you know, get the lot and then have it shipped over here. And the next morning I would, you know, because of the time difference, I would send them a fax in my morning and then the next morning I’d have a fax from them.

And we’re talking about not even 10 years ago, everything had to be done by courier and things like that. And it would be days and days and days before you got information or you’d have to make a phone call. And so that was like the first part of, you could sign contracts in a fax machine. And then we got email, which became even more instantaneous. And as a result, going back to like when personal computers came into our homes, a big part of it was, hey, these things, well, you can do in two hours, what you used to be able to do it eight hours.

And I very quickly learned that nobody was working a two hour day once technology came into our homes. In fact, people were not only bringing their work home, but they were working 14 and 16 hour days. And my thought, I was probably 18 or 20 years old, and my thought even at that time was like, we are not responsible enough to have this kind of technology at our fingertips. And I still feel that way. And so I’ve always struggled with this like, we have technology but we do not have the ability to limit ourselves or to discipline ourselves to say, okay, but how much is actually enough here?

[00:25:06] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know? That’s really curious. It’s not something I dwell on a lot, but when you say it, it makes perfect sense. It’s not like the amount of work that we were doing 50 years ago, the amount that needs to be done objectively is the same now than it was then. I don’t think that’s the case. I think the amount of work always fills up the available time.

And so this promise, which has been offered in multiple generations over hundreds of years, you know, you can go back to the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution, just the idea that the technology will free up time. Clearly it does, but I think it’s true to say that other things occupy that time because there’s an efficiency gained over here. Well, that leaves you a little bit of time to do this extra other task over here. And because everybody’s bound up to the technology, everybody has this available time, which they then fill up. And so the cycle begins.

And in many ways, I feel exactly like you’ve just described. Instead of going from an eight hour day, the fact that we’ve got the technology in our homes and we can check the email during the middle of the night, and so on and so forth, I think it is entirely possible that the workday could be longer now than it ever has been. I mean not for everybody, and not all the time, but it certainly could be.

Curiously, last night I went to, there’s a history society that I attend locally and we had a magic lantern show. And I don’t know if you’ve come across a magic lantern show, but a magic lantern show is, it’s a wooden box with a whole bunch of candles in it. They put painted glass slides in, and some of the painted glass slides, if they manipulate them in a certain way, they can simulate movement, or arms moving around or.

[00:26:41] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, they’re really cool.

[00:26:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I really was hit by a sense of, that was entertainment. And there was such pleasure and innovation in that. And it’s the same now, right? Along comes the internet and we get the same pleasure out of that. And along comes AI and the next generation will get the same amount of pleasure out of that. But it was also curious to see, and I’m just going to use the word slow, how slow that activity was.

There was a lot of breathing room. There was a lot of space for you to inject your own thoughts. There was a lot of time waiting for the chap to pull out one slide and put the other one in. Whole minutes would go by and nothing would happen. But there was no expectation that, well, we just lost a couple of minutes there.

So I think that’s kind of leading me onto an unexpected consequence of the internet is maybe that we’ve lost the capacity to think in that kind of slow manner, which I really hadn’t parsed it until last night when I saw what entertainment was 150 years ago. And it was so gentle and slow and enormously pleasurable. Once you’d suspended that there’s no CGI, there’s no Tom Cruise there, it’s just a person on a glass slide. But it was absolutely fascinating. It gave me a real window into the pace of life and what that might have been and how that has changed. And it will, I presume, never, that genie will never go back in the box.

[00:28:05] Marc Benzakein: Well, no. I mean it’s impossible for any of that. I mean I can bring it to modern day terms. When you watch or listen to a podcast, do you listen to it at regular speed or do you listen to it at 1.5 or 2?

[00:28:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, most people I think.

[00:28:18] Marc Benzakein: Yeah. If I have a day where I am doing nothing, I even watch my movies now, I watch them at 1.5x or 2x. And it’s crazy because your brain adapts to it very quickly. But then what happens is, if I’ve gone through a whole day of like listening to podcasts or something like that, which I’ll have going on in the background and I have no interaction with people, when I’m done listening to them, it is dreadfully dreadful. I become impatient talking to people because they talk so slowly.

And then I wonder, am I speaking faster than I normally do now because I’ve been listening to this podcast. And I have to reset my brain. And the thing is, I kind of feel like, I have this theory on ADHD, which I definitely have. My theory on ADHD is, there’s this misconception that ADHD is something where you can’t keep your attention on any one thing, which we’re finding out that’s not true. You either hyperfocus or you’re not focused, in simple terms.

And I feel like what it boils down to is a ADHDers have to have 100% of their bandwidth taken up all the time. That’s what it boils down to. So if what I’m working on requires a hundred percent of my bandwidth, I can hyper focus on it and do nothing else. If I don’t then, I’ve got four screens on my computer. I used to have six, but I’ve got four. I’ve pared it down to four and I’ve got something going on on all those screens. If I’m doing something that’s kind of mundane and just, because I have to have that filled all the time.

But I think that as a society, you talked about time, and it’s really kind of a rule of economics, right? You spend what you make. No matter what you’re making, you’re going to spend it all. That’s kind of like this echo. And it’s the same with time. Unless we actually discipline ourselves to say, look, mental health is just as important, so that means downtime, meditation, all these things are just as important no matter what society tells us. Those things are just as productive as putting out a widget or whatever you’re doing.

And so I think that what has to happen at a societal level, in order for us to gain back some of this discipline, is we need to recognise that while, yes, we need to take up a hundred percent of our time, what are the important things that we need to do in order to take up that a hundred percent of the time? And the reality is, some of that is downtime. Some of that is sleep, some of that is eating, some of that is interacting with people or whatever it may be. And I think technology, because it is constantly the shining new object, takes us away from all of that.

[00:30:45] Nathan Wrigley: I think for me, the profundity of the internet, let’s just use that term, you know, whatever is bound up inside that term, is enormous. You know, it’s probably the most, up till now, maybe AI will come to surpass that, but up until this point, I think the internet is probably the most profound technological invention of all time.

[00:31:04] Marc Benzakein: I call it the eighth wonder of the world.

[00:31:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, right. So the capacity for all that it brings. The fact that you can communicate with people, as I am with you. You are literally on the other side of the planet, and I’m talking to you as if you are stood next to me. The mind boggles. But also access to news, access to publishing your own information, seeking out communities that are just like you and the myriad way, oh, commerce. Let’s not forget that. That whole thing. The capacity for that, remarkable. All of it, remarkable and amazing.

But I think fair to say that there’s always swings and roundabouts. All of those wonderful things that we’ve just described, there’s probably some missteps along the way. And that was one of the things that I wanted to ask you. Are there any bits during the internet’s evolution to where we are now, where you think, do you know what, maybe we shouldn’t have done that? Maybe that wasn’t a good idea. Have you got any sort of thoughts on that, where you look back and you think the internet probably could have avoided that aspect?

[00:31:58] Marc Benzakein: I could think of a lot of little things. I think it’s one of those million little things, right? So going back to those days, it was really quite interesting. You know, I didn’t know what DNS was. I didn’t know, I barely knew what an ethernet cable was. We had this box sitting there that was a Cisco router. I had no idea what a router was. I mean, all this stuff because it was all pre-configured.

And I think the thing that blew me away back then, and this doesn’t really answer your question, but the thing that blew me away was, here we had people that we would get on phone calls with each other to work through problems, because this guy understood DNS, this guy understood routing. The two didn’t both understand both. It was really insane that it worked at all.

And I remembered sitting there going, this is a worldwide thing and it’s going to become a worldwide phenomenon. I mean it’s already working on a worldwide level. And it’s a bunch of people who don’t know each other, who probably if they were in the same room as each other, wouldn’t like each other.

I mean there were guys that I dealt with, there was this one guy, Frank, every time there was a DNS problem, I had to call him. I would dread calling him because his first question would be, what did you do now? It wouldn’t be like, ironically, it would be like, accusatorily, right? If that’s a word. I hated calling this guy, right? But somehow or another, we knew that we were working on something bigger than all of us, and so we tolerated each other at these various levels.

[00:33:22] Nathan Wrigley: Can I just inject a couple of my things? Yeah. Is that all right?

[00:33:25] Marc Benzakein: Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Absolutely.

[00:33:26] Nathan Wrigley: Because where I was going with this was, at the outset of the internet, I think there was a widespread assumption, and hope, that open things would win. And for a period of time, I think they did. So an example would be, I don’t know, things like RSS and things like that. Just widespread, open standards, everybody understood. And I think a lot of that has been upended, you know, the social networks came along, and made these utterly beguiling interfaces, which consumed lots of time. I’ll get onto that as my second point in a moment.

But the standards sort of got, not thrown out the window because they’re still there and, you know, you can still build on top of them, but they got usurped. More utilitarian things that were more easily understood because you were in this silo worked. And so closed things started to dominate.

I have this notion, I have this hope that we are maybe seeing a little bit of a pushback against that. Obviously you and I are in the WordPress space where those kind of things are incredibly important. So that would be one of my things.

And the other thing, which I think I can say for me, and I think it maps across many people, but I can’t be certain about that, is the time that can be consumed on the internet, which with the benefit of hindsight could have been better spent doing other things. I think it’s easy to become, not addicted, but for me to really get lost in the internet.

[00:34:51] Marc Benzakein: What you’re talking about is a natural evolution though, because there’s no real way to regulate that. That’s like, you can’t. How do you regulate that? And I mean that was of course the appeal of all of it back then. Just like blockchain, that’s the appeal of blockchain is like, how do you regulate it? We knew that eventually people would figure out how to regulate it, even then. Because I remember us having these congressional hearings and things about monopolies and things like that, and all these things that had to do with the internet.

And it was very clear that the people asking questions had no clue what they were asking, because they had no clue what the internet really was other than they used email. They had no clue how far reaching. And so they would try to put standards in that just didn’t make sense. But we all knew that eventually people would be in those positions that actually grew up with the internet, understood it. And, of course, you can be cynical or whatever, the government is going to figure out a way to regulate everything so they can get their piece of the pie somehow.

And we saw a little bit of that with the regulation of, say, for instance, IP addresses, which back then were a lot harder to come by because there was a big concern about IP address shortages because we were on IP v4 and there was no such thing as what they call network address translation. So like every single website, if you had a web server, every website had its own IP address. If you were at home, you had a static IP address that was assigned to you.

And I remember filling out the forms, which was like a 20 page application, it may not have been 20, but it sure felt like it, application for more IP addresses, more blocks of IP addresses because after, so we had ISDN, which was kind of a big flop, and then we went to the modem standard which was dial up, which was actually, became very highly profitable for us. But then we got into DSL, which was the digital subscriber line concept. And it was cable or DSL. Those were the two high speed or broadband options.

And even when DSL just came out, we had to assign people IP addresses. So it’d be like, here’s your DSL modem. We would go out, we would install it in their home. Here’s your IP address. And with your DSL subscription comes a dial up subscription, so that when you’re traveling, you can access the internet and you can dial in from your hotel room or whatever.

And I’d say that the only thing we could have changed maybe was the messaging. Because everything else, and it’s still a matter of, look, the internet represents freedom. It represents the freedom to do what you want, when you want, how you want. And hopefully you’re not doing anything illegal. But of course there was a lot of that going on as well. But I don’t, the whole point of the wild westiness of it is that it was the wild west and you could do whatever you wanted. And people loved that freedom.

And so I don’t know, you know, my big frustration is I’d have people call me at two in the morning on my home phone line, because their internet was down and they were going to go on a raid on World of Warcraft or something like that, and they were the raid leader and, by the way, true story. I’m not making this up. And somehow this guy got my phone number and death threat. I mean, I got a death threat because he couldn’t go on this raid.

I mean the stories during that time are crazy. And I think it really is just a matter of, I think as always, with everything, messaging is everything, but people are still going to do what they’re going to do, whether it’s legal or not. So I’m not sure that there were any mistakes that were made because it was an evolution. It wasn’t, there was nothing intentional.

[00:38:21] Nathan Wrigley: I mean, it’s a technology which is just flooded with all of humanity. So the idea that it was going to be unicorns and rainbows all the way down was misguided because it was just waiting for humans to come in with all their interesting, fun, curious, illegal, time wasting stuff, and pour all of that into the internet. I am so fascinated about where all of that will go.

The bit that makes me most interested is that I had quite a significant portion of my life when the internet didn’t exist. And so I had a childhood which was completely inoculated from the internet. And so I have that perspective and so, okay, here’s the bit where I sound like the curmudgeonly old man and, you know, the youths of today and all of that. And that’s not really the intention.

But my children’s generation have never had that. And it’ll be curious to see how they grow up in a world in which always on was always a thing. From very early age, they had access to technology. The endeavor to acquire information is now more or less trivial. You just log onto something and all of that is available to you. We’ve got AI coming at a breathtaking pace. It would just be so interesting to see how this goes. And also very interesting to see how my generation cope with its onset because, sure as anything, it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down. And so we are going to have to try and keep up, and hopefully we will, without becoming too curmudgeonly.

[00:39:52] Marc Benzakein: My son is going to be 21 this next year, and he hates everything that has to do with technology, which is really fascinating. He’s in college and outside of college, he works at a Barnes and Noble. He has his girlfriend and they go hiking every single day. He takes a hammock with him and puts it between two trees and lays in his hammock and reads books. And this is not something that I trained him to do.

This was, I mean I appreciate that about him other than he’s, you know, not nearby so the only way I can contact him is texting and phone calls, but he prefers phone calls to texting. He prefers email to texting because emails, you check your email when you want to, you don’t get interrupted by the text message notification. And he’s very, very bright and his whole circle of friends are very, very bright and they’re not into technology either.

[00:40:44] Nathan Wrigley: I was just going to say, I’ve noticed that that seemingly would be a bit of a trend over this side of the pond as well. There does seem to be a groundswell of turning things off or minimalising, tech minimalism, let’s call it that. So things like vinyl is coming back as a format for consuming music. The phone’s getting simplified so that there’s less on there. Apps being deleted because the assumption that it’s good to have more things coming in and that more connection is a good thing has been sort of pushed to the back.

Actually many of my children’s generations seem to have now grown weary of that, and they realise that actually that’s not in their best interest to be engaged all the time, every day. And so that will be a curious pushback. It almost seems like a sort of Hollywood plot that, doesn’t it?

[00:41:24] Marc Benzakein: Maybe it’s just that it’s so taken for granted now just like a car is or anything else, that they don’t think of it as anything other than what it is.

[00:41:36] Nathan Wrigley: So we were sort of caught up, our generation were caught up with this constant cycle of innovation, newness, the shiny thing. And actually for a whole sort of 20 years, there was no let up in that, was there? The internet came along, home computers came along. They got smaller. They became laptops, which you could then take everywhere. Internet and mobile phone networks got switched on. Then the advent of a computer, which you could hold in your hand came along. Social networks came along. All of that completely switched on, connectivity came along. There was a constant churn of evolution and next new thing. Maybe you’re right.

[00:42:09] Marc Benzakein: It’s like you’re talking about the television set. In our house growing up, the TV set was something that was kind of always on, and so when we turned it off, it wasn’t a big deal or we didn’t feel the need to watch it constantly. We didn’t need to, I mean let’s say that you live in a place where, out your front window, you have like this beautiful view. But every single day you see that same exact view, to the point where you can acknowledge that it’s a beautiful view, but you’re not as likely to acknowledge it every single day.

I think that that’s the way that technology has become. And of course, I welcome that because I want our kids to have some of the same experiences that we Gen Xers had, you know, where we had to drink water out of the garden hose because our parents told us to go out the door and not come back until after dark. And I don’t want to go that extreme but the point is that they have these things at their disposal, and they just know that they’re there, so they don’t feel like they have to constantly pursue it.

And I mean, I remember last year when my son was out visiting, I took him to this place called, it’s called the Medicine Buddha, which is about, it’s out by Santa Cruz. And it’s about, I don’t know how many acres it is, but it’s redwoods. It’s nothing but redwoods. And we were out there for about two hours hiking. He’s like, Dad, why didn’t you bring me here two days ago? We could have spent the whole weekend here. I mean, it was like, to give you an idea of what it’s like, it is so quiet there because the trees are so tall that the birds don’t even come down,

So I think that the pendulum is swinging in the right direction. I do think that youth today has a lot of the right ideas. You know, hopefully our generations haven’t screwed it up too much for them, that they get to appreciate all of that. But I’m not as worried about it.

But I will also say that with our kids, we were not super restrictive with the screen time with our kids. And it was always funny, you know, we kind of started it out as an experiment and what we found was that they’d play on their tablets, or on their computers for an hour or whatever, and then they’d be like, let’s go play basketball, or let’s go play football, or whatever.

And they would just put the things down and they’d go out and explore on their own. And my kids, it’s crazy how sometimes hard it is to get a hold of them because, oh, I left my phone at home, sorry Dad. And so I see it going in a good direction. But that’s the funny thing is like we went from this period, and I know this was supposed to be about the whole evolution of the internet and we kind of, as you and I do, went down.

[00:44:36] Nathan Wrigley: We segued.

[00:44:37] Marc Benzakein: We segued. But there was a time as crazy as it is, that when you wanted to get on the internet, it had to be intentional. You had to deliberately want to get on the internet. So if you went traveling and you had dial up access, you would have to hook up your laptop computer to a modem, unplug the phone line from the hotel phone line, plug it into your computer, and then hope that the dialing worked, right? That you could get an outside line and that it would take you to the internet and that you’d be able to have a connection. And then it would, nine times out of ten, it would be a long distance number that you had to call because you were in a hotel somewhere else. And now if we go into a hotel that doesn’t have WiFi, we freak out.

[00:45:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s like, what’s going on? This isn’t normal.

[00:45:25] Marc Benzakein: Welcome to the 20th century, I mean.

[00:45:27] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like we’ve grown up in such an interesting time. If you look back and if, like me, you’re into things like archaeology. Archaeology really does show that for most of humanity, especially if you go pre-history, thousands of years go by and the innovation is very small. You know, there might be one or two little things which built up this growing corpus of things which humanity use.

But it might be that somebody invents a slightly new way of cutting the wheat down, or it might be a new way of building a wall or what have you. And that’s the pattern of history. Slow, fairly slow, pedestrian until you get to much more recent times, couple of hundred years ago, and things start to pick up speed. And now we’re at a point where, goodness knows what is going to happen even in the next six months, especially in the realm of AI. We really are at a rate of change, which is very difficult to keep track of.

But it’s exciting. It’s a time when everything is up for grabs. It really is exciting. And hopefully we are going to maintain that enthusiasm, maintain that interest. Make sure that, you know, we’re all safe and well fed and everybody’s looked after. Let’s hope those kind of things happen. But what a breathtaking time to live in. What an interesting time we are in.

[00:46:43] Marc Benzakein: Well, I mean the idea of the internet, and I remember saying this when we started our internet service provider. I said, look, we have an opportunity to level the playing field for businesses. It doesn’t matter if you’re small or if you’re big. On the web, it all looks the same. And I think that that’s always been kind of one of the drivers for a lot of us, especially in the open source world, is this idea of leveling the playing field between kind of the haves and the have nots, right?

So we have the same access to knowledge that people with means might have. We have the same access to products. We have all the same accesses. So in many ways, from a consumption level, I’m talking about consuming knowledge as well as products, but from a consumption level, we have a level playing field. From the other side of things, it’s not as level as it used to be.

A Walmart or an Amazon obviously is going to show up in every search for everything, as opposed to back in the day, all you really had to do was just put in a few keywords and somehow or another you’d show up on Yahoo or AltaVista or Ask Jeeves or whatever it was at the time, you know, before Google came along. And then Google came along and the same thing was still true for a while, where you could like do just minimal amounts of SEO and get attention to your website and get business.

So the idea and I think the mission of the internet kind of should always be to keep the playing field level. I just don’t know that that’s necessarily possible because obviously the people who have the power and the money are going to be able to tilt things in their direction. But having said that, it is still the greatest opportunity for us to level the playing field of anything out there.

[00:48:33] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s such a good way, I think we should probably end it on that, because that’s such a nice and optimistic note actually, in many ways.

We began this conversation not really knowing where we were going to end up, and that has proved to be the case. We really did go in all sorts of different directions there, but absolutely fascinating.

You know, we revealed a lot about our own past and our sort of heuristics and intuitions about how it’s going to be for our children’s generation, and what we’ve enjoyed and what we think might be of concern in the future. That was absolutely fascinating. Marc Benzakein, where can we find you online, 24/7?

[00:49:05] Marc Benzakein: You can find me online, not 24/7, I actually do try to take some time off of technology. But I am with MainWP. I do their marketing and partnerships, for MainWP, which is a fantastic WordPress management dashboard. That’s my plug. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter, Marc Benzakein. I’m pretty sure I’m the only Marc Benzakein out there. I’m marcbenzak Twitter and Bluesky and those things. And then you can find me on Facebook and I’m just kind of generally all over the place.

[00:49:38] Nathan Wrigley: I will endeavor to find those links and I’ll drop them into the show notes. So if you go to wptavern.com and search for, well, I suspect if you just search for Marc’s first name, which is Marc with a C, M-A-R-C. If you search for that, you’ll probably come up in the search. But Benzakein, B-E-N-Z, as we say in the UK, A-K-E-I-N. Marc Benzakein, thank you so much for a really interesting chat today. I appreciate that.

[00:50:03] Marc Benzakein: Thanks for having me, Nathan. Appreciate it.