This Week in WordPress #337  ## Metadata - Author: [[WP Builds]] - Full Title: This Week in WordPress #337 - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #WordPress - #AI - #OpenSource - #Community - #Sponsorship - #Security Author: WP Builds Podcast (Host: Nathan Wrigley; Guests: Michelle Frechette, Steve Burge, Jesse Friedman) Source: [This Week in WordPress #337](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCJ1Vr_UwQ) Reference: [YouTube Timestamped Transcript] date created: 2025-07-01 13:26 --- # 🎙️ Title: This Week in WordPress #337 — AI, Authenticity, and Community Sponsorship ## 🧭 Table of Contents: - [🎤 Introductions and Weather Banter](#introductions-and-weather-banter-201) - [🌐 What is WP Cloud? (Jesse Friedman)](#what-is-wp-cloud-jesse-friedman-601) - [🤝 Community Projects: Speed Networking & Sponsorship Directories](#community-projects-speed-networking--sponsorship-directories-1440) - [📱 WordPress TikTok and Social Media](#wordpress-tiktok-and-social-media-2201) - [🧠 AI in WordPress & Industry Disruption](#ai-in-wordpress--industry-disruption-2446) - [🔒 Security Concerns: AI Scams](#security-concerns-ai-scams-3310) - [📜 Authenticity and the Future of Content](#authenticity-and-the-future-of-content-3518) - [🔗 References](#references) --- ## 📝 Summary: This episode features discussions on: - The evolving landscape of AI in WordPress, including new teams, tools, and industry impacts. - Community initiatives: Michelle Frechette's speed networking and sponsorship directories for contributors. - The potential disruption of traditional media/advertising by AI-generated content. - Security threats, particularly AI-driven scams targeting vulnerable populations. - Philosophical questions about authenticity in a world of machine-generated content. The panel blends wit, transparency, and a candid look at both opportunities and challenges facing WordPress and tech communities at large. --- ## 📖 Main Content: ### 🎤 Introductions and Weather Banter ([2:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCJ1Vr_UwQ&t=121s)) - Typical lighthearted British banter about weather. - Panelists: Nathan Wrigley (host), Michelle Frechette, Steve Burge, Jesse Friedman. - Each guest introduced with detailed bios and a mix of humor. ### 🌐 What is WP Cloud? (Jesse Friedman) ([6:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCJ1Vr_UwQ&t=361s)) - Jesse explains WP Cloud as a WordPress-first cloud platform by Automattic, positioned as an alternative to AWS/GCP, but purpose-built for WordPress hosting. - Emphasis on: - Bare metal infrastructure, automation, scalability, CDN, and management tools. - White-labeling for hosting providers. - Jesse’s personal journey: From web design side gigs to professor, founder of Brute Protect, and 11 years at Automattic. ### 🤝 Community Projects: Speed Networking & Sponsorship Directories ([14:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCJ1Vr_UwQ&t=880s)) - **Speed Networking**: Michelle’s recurring online event to foster quick connections in the WP space. Designed for global reach with a nominal fee to ensure commitment. - **Sponsorship Directory**: A searchable site for companies to find and sponsor WordPress contributors directly. - Not a payment processor; just a facilitator. - Inspired by both Michelle’s need after job loss and Marcus’ WP World project. - Discussion of feature expansion (allowing companies to sponsor for specific feature work, browse by team, etc). ### 📱 WordPress TikTok and Social Media ([22:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCJ1Vr_UwQ&t=1321s)) - Michelle runs the new official WordPress TikTok, focusing on fun, authenticity, and engagement. - Use cases: ASMR videos, trend participation, live Q&A at events. - Candid insight into the learning curve, content strategy, and how community is built in new digital spaces. ### 🧠 AI in WordPress & Industry Disruption ([24:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCJ1Vr_UwQ&t=1486s)) - Introduction of the new AI team in WordPress, working on LLM abstraction, feature registration, tech debt, MCP integration, and sustainability. - Panel reflects on a $2,000 AI-generated video ad, which would have cost millions to film conventionally. - Anxiety and optimism about AI’s impact: - Potential for entire industries (e.g., ad agencies) to be disrupted. - Value of human creativity, “authenticity badges,” and the limits of AI-generated work. - AI’s dual role as productivity tool and threat. ### 🔒 Security Concerns: AI Scams ([33:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCJ1Vr_UwQ&t=1990s)) - Rise in AI-powered scams, particularly targeting older adults (voice cloning, phishing). - Michelle’s real-life story: Teaching cybersecurity at her mother’s residence after her mother was scammed by a fake McAfee call. - Practical warnings and need for digital literacy. ### 📜 Authenticity and the Future of Content ([35:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCJ1Vr_UwQ&t=2118s)) - Extended debate about distinguishing human vs. AI-generated content. - Ideas floated: “Human-created” certification, watermarks, AI detection tools for education and journalism. - Broader philosophical concerns: What value will audiences place on authenticity? How do we balance innovation with the risks of a flooded, inauthentic landscape? --- ### 🗒️ Notes - **Panelist Dynamics** - Warm, conversational, honest tone. - Banter is used to build rapport and maintain engagement. - **WordPress Community Health** - New community-driven initiatives (speed networking, sponsorship directories) respond to real needs (connection, funding, inclusivity). - Openness to feedback and evolution (e.g., Michelle and Marcus iterating sponsorship features). - **AI’s Industry Impact** - Strong consensus on disruption: Agencies, creative industries, and traditional advertising at risk. - Human creativity still highly valued. - AI as both an efficiency booster and a threat. - **Security and Ethics** - Growing risks from AI-powered fraud. - Importance of digital literacy and personal responsibility. - **Authenticity** - Deep concern about distinguishing genuine human work from machine-generated content. - Calls for innovation around validation, watermarking, or “realness badges.” - Philosophical debate about the future of trust in digital content. --- ## 📖 References: - [This Week in WordPress #337 (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCJ1Vr_UwQ) - [SponsorMeWP.com](https://sponsormewp.com) - [SpeedNetworkOnline.com](https://speednetworkonline.com) - [WordPress TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@wordpress) - [AI Chat Summary (Make WP)](https://make.wordpress.org/) --- ## 🗣️ Paraphrase **Original:** “If you are running a website and you want the highest, fastest standard, you can go to those hosting companies. If you are a hosting company or a registrar, you can come to wp.cloud to learn more.” **Paraphrased:** Website owners seeking premium, WordPress-optimized performance can use any of our partner hosts. Hosting companies and registrars interested in leveraging our platform can get all the details at wp.cloud. **Original:** “I'm worried about how AI is going to become a scammer's dream... I'm going to be talking about that, too. Hopefully a room full of people later today to help them think about how not to get scammed.” **Paraphrased:** I’m concerned that AI will make scams even more dangerous and widespread. That’s why I’m holding a session soon to educate a group about recognizing and avoiding these sophisticated frauds. --- ## 📰 Newsletter Blurb **WordPress Community Update:** This week’s WP Builds panel explored the rise of AI in WordPress, both as an innovation engine and a threat to creative industries. Highlights included Michelle Frechette’s new initiatives—speed networking for contributors and a transparent sponsorship directory for open-source funding. We also learned how WordPress is expanding on TikTok, bringing playful authenticity to new audiences. On the tech front, the new WP AI team is building out core strategy for LLMs, MCP, and more. The biggest debate: Can we protect authenticity in a world where $2,000 AI-generated videos rival million-dollar ads? Panelists urge vigilance around AI scams and digital literacy. As always, the WordPress ecosystem adapts with wit, transparency, and collaboration - Summary: The WordPress news from the last week which commenced Monday 16th June 2025. With Nathan Wrigley, Michelle Frechette, Steve Burge, Jesse Friedman. Join us LIVE at 2pm UK time - https://wpbuilds.com/live, and spread the word too! - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhCJ1Vr_UwQ [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Hello there. Hi, Michelle. Hi, Steve. And hello, Jesse. Uh although Jesse's kind of lurking in the background. He says Yeah, he says he sees the countdown now. He's here. So, I'm gonna I'm gonna press There he is. Jesse, apologies. The reason I didn't press the earlier because we were in this like premble music thing and I had no idea what would happen if I uh No worries. It might have killed I was looping them in all the thing. Uh anyway, here we are. My savior. So uh where we're at this week in WordPress episode number 337 as you can see joined by some uh fabulous um oldtimers to this show if you like. We've got Michelle Fchette the co-host. How you doing Michelle? I am well thank you. It's a little warm here today, but it's it's already 29 centrade and 85 Fahrenheit and about to go up to 35 95 today. So, yeah, we've had unusually season. We love to talk about the weather in the UK. Steve and I could do a whole 90 minutes just rabbiting on about the uh the weather, but we won't, but we've had beautifully hot weather as well, although it it's definitely turned back to normal British greyness. So, uh anyway, let me do the proper introduction for Michelle. Michelle Fchett is the executive director of Post Status. In addition to her work at Post Statatus, Michelle is the podcast barista at WP Coffee Talk, co-founder of Underrepresented in Tech, creator of WP Speakers and WP Career Pages. She is also an author, frequent organizer, and speaker at WordPress events. She lives outside Rochester, New York, where she is an avid nature photographer. The one URL which kind of co coaleses the whole lot is meet Michelle online. So, if you go there, you'll be able to find out all the bits and pieces. Meet Michelle online. And uh maybe I don't know if we're going to show it later. We're She's also quite good on the the Tik Tok, as I like to call it, because I'm not that cool. Maybe it's like when people in the south say they're going to the Walmart as opposed to just going to Walmart. So, yeah. I I deliberately do it to make my kids cringe. Uh, it's a good thing the Tik Tok and they're like, "Oh, dad. I'm going on the Facebook." The Facebook. Um, we're also joined by Steve. Steve Burge. He's right there. How you doing, Steve? Hey, guys. Hey, Mr. Wriggley. Oh, no. No. Makes me feel so old. Uh, Mr. Wriggley, it is. We'll go with that. Steve is the uh the published press founder. That was the entire bio until a few moments ago, I think. And but it's more fancy now. He's written something else. He's part of a team building WordPress publishing plugins with over 1 million users. They are our Publish Press, Meta Slider, Taxo Press, and Logivity. Good grief. Is that right? 1 million users combined. That's quite a lot. Well done. Gosh. Well, we have a we have a lot of plugins. They add up if you Yeah, if you add up all the time. No, no, no, no. Don't Don't be so Don't be so bashful. That is a ton. It doesn't matter which way you cut it. That's still a lot of people. Bravo, Steve. That's amazing. Which is the um which is the most popular in terms of installs? Probably Meta Slider. Okay. So, you can go and check those out. So, let me repeat them. Publish Press, Meta Slider, Taxo Press, and Logivity. And uh Steve's bringing loads of AI goodness uh today. So, we're going to all have an argument and a bunfight about AI, no doubt. And also joined by the by Jesse Freriedman for the first time. Hello, Jesse. I've never met you before as far as I know. Nice to nice to hang out. Jesse and I go way back. I'll vouch for Jesse. Yeah, that's nice. Thank you for joining. That's uh that's really uh valuable. Thank you, Michelle. Yeah, pleasure. I'll read Jesse's bio and it's quite a bio. The first few words alone really impressive. He is the head of WP Cloud at Automatic. Um he says that's fine, but he's happy to add more to the bio if we want. I would like you to add to the bio. just tell us what WP Cloud is because honestly we don't talk about it that much and it wouldn't surprise me if quite a few people listening to this didn't really know uh too much about it. So quick elevator pitch of WP Cloud if you don't mind. Yeah, WP Cloud is a WordPress first cloud platform built homegrown by Automatic uh from bare metal boxes that we created internally to service our own needs uh powering some of the largest, fastest, most uh uh trafficked websites in the world. And so now we've made it available through uh hosting companies around. So you can get it uh via WordPress.com, Pressible, Bluehost Cloud, Conveio, uh Pork Bun, InstaWP, the list goes on. Um it is a AWS, Google Cloud alternative with a WordPress first um uh focus. So you literally bought the bare metal servers and then just got to work install adapting the OS and things like that to your needs and then you spin it out as a kind of white label if you like hosting solution to other hosting platforms. Gosh, that's fascinating. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And it has uh you know because of its WordPress um focus, it doesn't require us to compete uh on the focus that other cloud platforms have. So, you know, a common thing that we talk about here is that AWS, Google Cloud, they have a um they have a lot going on. They they work on, you know, warehouse logistics, shipping, uh virtual reality, gaming, the list goes on, right? It's a very complex list of things that they're focused on. We are only doing WordPress. So we're able to put up guard rails that help us to automate uh scaling of your site the uh caching and CDN deployment uh full management stacks uh tons of development tools. So it's it is in a sense can be completely white labelled but it's other times uh hosts choose to say that it's powered by WP cloud as well. Okay. And so you know if you are running a website and you want uh the highest fastest you know highest standard that we we're setting um you can go to those hosting companies. If you are a hosting company or a registar uh you can come to wp.cloud to to learn more. Can I ask is your background were like were you into all this stuff prior to your work at automatic? Were you like some sort of hosting forgive me nerd um before? No. No. Interesting. Yeah. I started building websites uh as a side gig in high school. So I didn't want to have uh I wanted to get out of bagging groceries and pumping gas. Those were early jobs I had. So I started uh you know getting into web design. Uh went to college for it. Uh became a professor. Uh had a couple of jobs working in web design, multimedia. Did flash websites for years. Um got into WordPress in like 2003 4 when a professor Hillary Mason suggested it to me. never looked back. WordPress has been uh something that I have dedicated a large part of my career to because it has given me so much. The community, everybody involved, you know, we know this, we all know this who's worked in this. Uh you go to a word camp and you say, "I'm struggling with something, all of a sudden you have 50 people trying to eagerly help you, you know, grow because the more people who are doing well in the community, the better the community does overall." Um and so then, uh I wrote a couple books on WordPress. I co-founded a company called Brute Protect uh which was a cloudpowered uh malicious script detector for for brute force protection and that got me into hosting. So I was working with hosting companies to install this plug-in to help us to identify attack vectors across hosting companies. Previous to that hosting companies siloed their information so they didn't get to benefit from those attack vectors. That's where I really started working with hosting companies. We sold that company to Automatic. I've been at Automatic for 11 years. Go ahead. And I started in UX and um user advocacy, moved into business, and then I've been working in hosting partnerships for I don't know, eight or nine years now. What a what a great resume. That's absolutely marvelous. Well, thank you for joining us and um now we know all about you. That's fabulous. So hopefully this will be the first time of many. I'll just go through the usual preamble, which I always do uh for this show if that's all right. So, the first thing to say is if you're joining us live, please please make use of the comments. There's really only two ways to do that. The the best the best thing I can say is if if you're watching this on some platform that's not YouTube, probably the best thing to do is to is to go to wpbuilds.comlive. Um, over there we've embedded the video and we've put YouTube comments next to it. And it really feels like that's where everybody comments from these days on this show. So head to there. The right hand side if you're on a desktop of the video is YouTube comments. So you'll need to be logged into Google. If you don't like that um then you can just click the little black button at the top right hand of the video itself and you don't need to be logged into anything. It's the platform that we use. Uh they have a little widget which enables you to comment. So feel free to do that. That would be really nice. So wpbuilds.comlive if you want to do that and a few people have done that already. So for example, Ryan, hello. uh from InstaWP. I really do need to click a setting in here so that that thing Yeah, what did I say? What did I say? Insta. H sorry. Uh yeah, influence WP. Now there is a setting. Let me make that go away and see if I can get these settings. No, I don't know. They've moved things around a little bit. Comments. No, there we go. Let's see if that Yeah, there we go. That's better. Uh so, good morning, Ryan. He says from a super sunny and hot Charlotte in North Carolina. Tammy Listister is joining us from the UK. Good morning, she says. Uh, Marcus Binette. Happy flipping Monday, everybody. Lovely. And um, and then we got Daveden. Hello Daveton. He's in the UK as well. Or at least he was last time I spoke. Michelle, oh yeah, we got something about the Speed Network in a moment, actually. So, uh, yeah, you got to add that to your bio. We'll we'll discuss that in a minute and then you can add it to your bio. Uh, Cameron is joining usually Australia, so I'm guessing that's where he is because he's saying good evening. And uh Elliot Sersby just down the road from me in sunny Bridlington is uh Hello everybody. Hello. Yeah. Hello everybody. So please make some comments if you've got anything that I don't know you disagree with or you got an opinion on as we discuss through the bits and pieces just drop it in there and it keeps the conversation you know keeps the conversation going which is really nice. Self-promotional bit. This is us wpbuilds.com. If you go to this website and put your email address into this field we'll send you a couple of emails each week. one tomorrow which is which will parcel up what we're doing now along with a bunch of other links about the WordPress news from the last week and one which will come out on Thursday when we release a podcast episode because we do that once a week as well and this time around it was yeah I thought why not uh I knited him on even though the king has you know he's not been involved in this conversation I don't care Bob Dawn uh joins us and talks about his podcasting journey journey. So, if you're into that, it was really interesting chatting about, you know, we've got similarities, but we've got differences in our stories. So, come join us for that. The only other bit of self-promotional stuff, I suppose, is I did a podcast episode with uh two very, very bright, very, very cool people. Uh Tom Wilmott and John Ang. They're both from Humanmade and they um they were at uh Word Camp Europe recently doing a talk and I called them for about 40 minutes and we talked about a new project that they've launched with a a global bank called Standard Chartered. We get into all of the bits and pieces of how how the heck do you do WordPress at that scale? I think they've got something like 83,000 employees and it's literally millions and millions of hits every day. you know, I don't know what it is per minute, but Jesse probably knows this pain. But to me, it's all new. You know, I'm happy with a couple of hundred a day, but not standard charters. So, it's a really interesting conversation. We break that all apart. So, there we go. Okay. One of the things that we're going to do now in this show is if guests join us, so we've got three today, and they want to sort of demonstrate something or, you know, promo something, we're going to put that at the top of the show. keep it quite quite short and and sweet, but the the idea is to get those things aired. It may be something they've brought or just something they found interesting. It used to be at the end that we never had we always ran out of time. Yeah, that was Michelle's idea. We always ran out of time cuz I waffle on. Uh so, here we go. Let's embark on this and get get through what we can. So, this was what Marcus Bennett in the comments was just referring to. Um Speed Network online. This is Michelle's. Tell us more, Michelle. It is. Yeah. So, I was talking with different people. every every Wednesday morning I have an hour that I do open office hours and it's a little bit of a meetup type thing but it's not structured and afterwards June was saying to me I don't really know how to meet people to be able to work you know build my my business and I said what about like speed networking how would that work just like speed dating only networking so we figured out a way to make it happen we're going to do speed networking online every month is going to be at a little bit of a different time so that we can incorporate different you know parts of the Uh, it's probably never going to be at 3:00 a.m. So, if you're on the other side of the world hoping it's in your afternoon, dream on. Um, I love you. However, I love my sleep, too. Uh, but speed networking. So, it's five minute conversations with up to 15 different people depending on how many people sign up. We only have 10 spots left for this Thursday. Uh, and at the end of it, you don't even have to write down people's information because at the end, uh, we will be giving you the list of attendees and their contact information. and then that will be wiped clean for the next episode and the next session. So, so I'll just share the URL into the audio. Um, but then I'll I'll put this into the the show notes that come out tomorrow. So, it's Speednetwork Online. Speednetworkline.com. So, dead easy to remember. When's the It's this Thursday at 100 p.m. New York time. There is a $20 fee just because we want to make sure that people have a little skin in the game so they actually show up and don't uh blow it off because they didn't have to pay for it. So yeah, that seems sensible. Yeah, that's a good idea. Okay, so yeah, good luck with that. That sounds amazing. So speednetworkonline.com. There's the first thing and you must add it to your bio from now on as Marcus suggested. And then the next one uh the next one actually Marcus built the site for us. So this is uh you know having lost my job in February uh within a couple days Kinsta reached out to me and said we'd like to sponsor some of your time and they're sponsoring five hours a month of the work that I put into the open source project WordPress. And so I thought well how can I get more people to sponsor me and I don't like asking people for money. So what if I built in a a database of people and just kind of slid myself into it solve a problem for myself and apparently 111 other people so far. We just launched this about Marcus can can correct me I think two to three weeks ago so it's fairly new um you can sign up it's free you can search the database if you are a company who wants to sponsor people in the WordPress community you don't have the the bandwidth within your own team to put time into this and you don't want to just write a check to the foundation you can sponsor individuals within WordPress um if you click browse contributors real quick and I know that we we won't take a ton of time here but you It it actually Marcus is brilliant. My idea he executed it beautifully. Um it will randomize every single time so that the same last everybody with a name starting with a doesn't show up at the top every time. Um click Tammy for example. You can see Tammy's got a um she was like uh yeah I just there she is. Um and she's watching so she can see how you you see you see her website. You see her X, you see her we're on on WordPress. Um you can see her which um team she's contributing to and her bio. If you want to talk to her, you can send her an email through the site. Um we are using WS form. We're using um turn style with Cloudflare. So everything goes directly between you the company and the contributor. Um we are not taking money. We are not funneling money. We do I do not want that added to my taxes every year. So everything goes between you and the contributor. This is simply a directory and a way for businesses to reach out to sponsors and find people that they're interested in sponsoring. That is such a cool idea. And I got to say, um, Marcus, beautiful, beautiful design. I will say it also it grew not only out of my need, but also Marcus had added on the WP world a place where you could say, I'm interested in sponsorship or you can sponsor me. And so this was like the perfect blend of what he was already doing and taking it a step further. And so he was the perfect person to partner up with on this. Beautiful. Yeah. Really? Can I ask a quick question about that? Yeah. Have you considered uh making it so that a company who wants to see some uh new feature of uh you know WordPress or uh wants to see contributions focused in a certain area because they need it for their business or something like that. be able to post what it is that they want someone to focus on and say that they're willing to sponsor this and then have it come into them via these these contributors. So they could they could like essentially bid on I I would be able to do 10 hours of this for X dollars or something like that. Good idea. So that's a great idea and Marcus take note cuz he's watching. Um, but also I would worry a little bit that you sponsor somebody in the community for a specific feature that doesn't get picked up by the release squads. And so you may be putting money into something that will never see the light of day. Um, what you can do when you browse the contributors is you can browse by work team, make teams. So if you're interested in, you know, let's say you're interested in um, uh, Gutenberg, you can see next to Tammy. It's Yeah. So you can pick any of the teams and you want to focus on people who are working on Gutenberg. Now you can see who who are the people working in any particular area. But I like the idea. Maybe that could be solved by like a feature plugin like they they do it as a plugin first and if it does get rejected then it can always just be released as a free plugin. and and I can't remember who it was, so forgive me if you're watching, but uh yesterday somebody posted um in reply on LinkedIn that they have a project that provides lunch for um independent people who are contributing and could they put themselves in this? And I'm like, I don't have any reason why you shouldn't be able to. So, um you just wouldn't pick one of the make teams that you're contributing to. So, um, so yeah, there's all kinds of different ways it can be used and, um, and we are looking to expand it and give, um, you know, we're looking for feedback. So, that's great feedback, Jesse. And I'm sure that Marcus has written it all down. And if not, I will remember tomorrow. Can I just say that you see the power of WP Builds? You've added a a contributor. One contributor has been added during I wonder who it was. I don't know. But there you go. You've uh not 10xed, not even 1xed, but you've 0.9xed your or something. Uh I'll be looking later to see who we have during the show. There we go. So, sponsor me uhwp.com is the uh the URL. What a great idea. Really, really neat. And I'm glad that we got a chance to surface that as well. So, I'll bookmark that and put that into the show notes for tomorrow as well. But there you go. Reading it into the record. Sponsor me.com. The next one is is the one that you thought was hysterical or like a really good Don't even know what to say about this. Uh oh, no. This isn't the hysterical one. Or is it? No, this isn't the hyster Well, I mean, you do have to if you want people to hear it, you'll have to click the um the the speaker on the right hand side. I don't think the audio will be consumed by this. The platform won't. Do you do you want me to play it anyway? Even though we want you can we talk about it for a second if people want to see. Um so we have launched uh uh WordPress.org or the free WordPress Tik Tok channel. Uh we launched it a week uh a little a little more than a week before um I left for work camp Europe. This is one of my contracts I have with Automatic is I'm the Tik Tok person and you can see on the right hand side there um I did an ASMR video where I speak slowly to the microphone things like WordPress s like just fun things, right? Um and we've done a lot of really fun things. Um, we're doing some Tik Tok trendy things. You will never see me dance on Tik Tok, so don't even get that in your head. Come on. We're having a lot of fun with it. This is um I did I went live with um through the vendor hall at Work Camp Europe. I also went live for the the final Q&A with Matt. Unfortunately, I had not brought a tripod with me because I wasn't anticipating that. So, I held my camera as steady as I could for an hour and 15 minutes. You got the cramp in the arm. I did. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll bet. Uh Marcus, by the way, has dropped in to say thank you. The idea has been noted. So that's good. Thank you, Marcus. And also Tammy, who obviously we were talking about. I apologize, Jesse. There's nothing we can do about that. It will obliterate your face every time. Yeah. Um Tammy says, "Oh, that someone would say that they can do that feature. Might not be able to do matching is ideal." Oh, I see. So excluding, not just including, but excluding as well. So cannot do Gutenberg or whatever it might be. Okay. So there you go, Marcus. Another thing to add into there, right, great. So thank you, Michelle, for all of that's good stuff. That's brilliant. Lots of fun. Um I'm just going to quickly raise this one as Tammy was on the call. Why not? Um AI is this this, by the way, came from Steve. Steve's dropped in a bunch of AI stuff, but um Tammy produced this 10 days ago now, so it's not brand new, but Steve, I think you were raising this one because you kind of felt Well, I'm reading between the lines a little bit. you didn't really know what the AI team was about and now you do kind of thing. Uh Tammy might be able to fill us in more on this, but I think they started they thought it would be a good idea and then afterwards started to hold meetings and put a plan together. So I think this was the first time I'd seen a kind of a public road map for for what they were planning to do with the AI team. Yeah. So this one came on the 13th of June. It's on make.wordpress.org and it's called AI chat summary. obviously summarizing what they talked about the day before. Usually these summaries are pretty short, but this one I suppose given the broad reach of AI, this one does go on and I don't mean it goes on and on like what I mean is there's a lot of detail there uh including you know subjects that they're planning to cover. I'll just read out the the sort of bullet points if you like. So foundational strategy and technical architecture um shared LLM abstraction layer tool and resource registry and MCP integration AI feature registration cross system integration sustainable development and tech debt strategy implementation focus use cases AI you know I could go on and then um open next steps to do as well. So, if you're in the WordPress space and you're keen to follow on with the with the with the AI, I'm doing it again. Um, then this probably is the place to go. Tammy Listister plus whole load of other people. So, Flixios, I think that's Pascal. No, Swiss Pity. He's Pascal Burch. This is Felix Ants. I don't know who these other people are. I could click the link, but I think this is a fabulous moniker, by the way. John Billion. What a great what a great name that is. I don't know who that is, but there we go. So, you can check that out. But that then I think sent Steve off in a bit of a in a bit of an AI uh tail spin because quite a few of the next pieces are related to AI, not necessarily WordPress, but it's a fascinating subject. So, we go here next, which is the verge showing us a video, which doesn't sound all that remarkable until Well, Steve, you explain what the heck's going on. Well, I didn't even intend to put a lot of AI stuff in the show notes. wasn't as if I sat down and said, "I'm going to make them all AI focused." Just afterwards, I looked back and yeah, my reading over the last week or so, the stuff that had been on my mind, all just happened to be AI related, um they they had the big um can festival down in the south of France recent last week, I think. Yeah, it was. Yeah. And uh this dropped during it. And basically all these big advertising agencies are there spending millions of dollars on parties on the waterfront. And suddenly during the NBA finals in the US, one company posts this $2,000 video they generated with AI in three or four days. And I follow a few of the people that were there, kind of advertising related people. And at least a couple of them said it felt like a kind of a uh fall of Rome is what one of them commented that it really felt like a kind of an end of an era for people who are in advertising who were selling expensive advertising packages. I am I watch this in equal measures horror and awe because basically if you're watch I'll link to this in the show notes. I'll put this article into the show notes, but it's a company called Kalshi or certainly looks like that. I think they're a betting company. Yeah. Who say that you can basically bet on anything. This video would have cost tens of millions of dollars to make because you got people on airplanes, you got people, you know, doing jet skiing, the angles all look incredible, and then you realize that the entirety of it was done inside a AI, you know, um generative AI solution. And I don't know which one exactly, but I'm guessing it was something to do with Google. Um, and cost a couple of thousand dollars. And it I guess what I thought from that is if you're in if you're in video making, advertising, video making, your job just disappeared in front of your eyes. I mean, I that could be hyperbole. Maybe I'm overdoing it a little bit, but it does feel as if that video is so unbelievably credible that it feels like how could you possibly go to any brand now and say, "Yeah, this ad campaign is going to cost you a few million dollars. We need to put a few actors. We got this exciting idea involving airplanes and d will it be just well, we'll do it via AI. Thanks. We don't need the airplane anymore. We don't need the expensive this that and the other thing." So it definitely if I was in that industry I would be kind of worried. I don't know if that's where you went with it Steve. Yeah absolutely. that kind of the agency side of things at least seems to be seems to have the potential to get eaten up very quickly by uh by AI and I think there's room for for humans in there still particularly on the influencer space lots of lots of people who who have an audience who who want to uh they can make they can make advertising dollars through uh through the videos they post through through their social channels. Um, but the oldfashioned agency model of filming a one minute or 30 second video for uh a big brand, a lot of that work seems to be going away pretty quick. Um, and I I guess this year in particular, we're going to find out which of those which business models are going to get eaten by AI and which ones are going to be safe because we were talking before that AI is fails in quite a lot of areas. Um, so some of us who are nervous might actually turn out to be safe because of AI. But um I think advertising particularly online video ad advertising TV ads and so on is one way I would definitely encourage people to go and look at this one. So I'll just read out the name of the piece. So it's on the verge. It's called here's the $2,000 fully AI generated ad during the NBA finals. I can can you imagine they probably spent like a thousand 10,000 times more on the ad cost of the app placement than they did on the actual ad itself. But it honestly I am having more and more conversations and thoughts around the hollowing out of entire industries in a heartbeat. You know I mean people constantly talk about things like you know the comparisons between the industrial revolution and you know the the all of the things that were taken over by machinery. I feel that all happened fairly slowly and the building of the machines was probably a fairly labor intensive thing in of itself. So those jobs sort of whittleled away over probably many decades. this is like eight minutes, you know, some some person just put together that video and immediately every every executive with a company is now thinking, well, we're not going to hire that agency anymore. So, it does concern me. I've got to say I'm I'm I'm less and less sanguin about it. Um, not from the point of view of how clever it is because I can fully see how remarkably clever it is. It's just I it just worries me that there's going to be collateral damage and people that I know and you know enjoy spending time with are going to be put through the anxiety of job you know jobs disappearing and things like that. Anyway, there's my rant. Um you know I think I I hosted a a panel at CloudFest on AI and we we went through a bunch of different uh uh ways in which AI is being used. One thing that came up that I've been really trying to push lately is this idea that I think as humans we want things that are authentically human. And so if we if we leverage that and we as creators really pull and uh and and push that into the the community, I think that might actually really help because then you can stand apart from AI. If there was some kind of badge or something like that that uh signified that the content that was created was authentically human, that might actually help to to kind of alleviate some of the stuff. I also would, you know, think that, you know, we at automatic, for example, we use AI very heavily right now, but we're not using it to replace jobs quite yet. I think that, uh, AI is acting a lot more like as if we had like a personal assistant or a chief of staff that could take ideas and and run with them. Uh, it's making us more efficient, making us work faster, but I don't know that it's necessarily replacing, and I think Dammy actually mentioned this in the comments. I'm not sure that it's replacing um creative jobs at least yet. Maybe uh, you know, something like this, I would imagine even that ad uh would still have required a great deal of thought and imagination behind it. um even though they're not necessarily hiring a creative agency, maybe they're doing it more internally, but then that those individuals at those companies become just as valuable uh being able to translate that into AI. Uh so, you know, maybe we're we're going to see that in a few years, but um I'm not sure we're there yet that we have to be super concerned. I am teaching a cyber security class this afternoon at the as my mother calls at the old folks home where she lives because even she got scammed out of $250 last week by a fake McAfee email and and had somebody on the phone and I interrupted the call not even realizing I said hang up now. Call your bank. Make sure they because she even gave them some of her bank information. And part of that is they get you on the phone and now they've recorded your voice saying things like yes and that kind of thing and they're going to be using AI to reproduce that to get access to your bank account and do all the things and answer your security questions. And so I think it has such I am worried about how it can impact certain industries, but I'm even more worried about how AI is going to become a scammer's dream. Yeah. um through phone and email and videos of your grandchild saying, "Grandma, you have to send me the money or else." Those kinds of things. And so I'm going to be talking about that, too. Hopefully a room full of people later today to help them think about how not to get scammed. Oh, good for you. That's brilliant. Yeah. I mean, I share all of the opinions. I don't I think maybe I'm definitely a little bit more on the commodly side of things when it comes to all of this. That's a Well, I mean, I'm just Yeah, thank you. Thank you. I need a badge and it just says that's Bud Krauss's that's my word for budra. Um but but honestly it does genuinely worry me. So you know what you said there Michelle about um creating video oh sorry AI is being used to deploy uh to make it much more trivial to to make it so that you can extract bank details and so on and so forth. And I and I think also that video was so profoundly real like that really was the video for me that for the first time I thought that is genuinely indistinguishable because they didn't try to do something that couldn't be done. Everything in that video could have been done at great cost if you'd have put the actors in those environments. But they did it and it just made me think gosh if we can all do this for relatively no money down. It's just that worry of flooding the landscape. Um, so that then brings me to what Jesse said, this idea of, I don't know, watermarking content or something where you can categorically say I am actual, you know, I am real. And I don't know how we do that. I don't know how we would determine that something truly is real because obviously the AI would just watermark itself and say, "Oh, yeah. This is totally legit. I'm real." Yeah. But but I I think there's going to be I think there's going to be a need for something that's going to genuinely show that something is made is not made by AI. There's we we can already do this. We can take content that was written and pump it back into AI and ask if it was realistically written by a human or how much of it was written by AI. I think there will probably be tools that exist, especially when you think about education. It's going to be incredibly important. uh students are going to need to prove that they they've written this content or their essays or or genuinely created their own videos or whatever it might be unless they're in an AI class. So, I think there's going to be something that's going to exist that's going to uh add uh authenticity to this. And then so we just need to kind of as creators really champion the um the the way in which we we we say publicly that this was authentically human. It was kind of Sorry. Sorry. You go first, Michelle. Yeah. Can we go back to the days where teachers just worried that you were relying on Wikipedia too much? Yeah. Yeah. When cliff notes was uh was was the biggest issue. The um Yeah. Exactly. There was a thing in the British press, I can't remember which newspaper, but you know, an online newspaper that I read this weekend and it was it was a teacher and she didn't discuss where she was, but she was in the UK somewhere. Nor did she discuss the age of the children involved, but she basically was describing this evening, this Sunday evening where she spent marking um pros basically. So, you know, it was narrative. So, it wasn't like a maths paper, it was a English paper, let's go with that. And and it was taking an hour or more to mark each paper. and she had the strong intuition that the majority of it was written by by AI. So this demoralizing moment occurred where she thinks this is taking me an hour and it took the person that's handed it in 4 seconds and like what do you even do with that as a professional? What where do you It's not like you can go back to the kids and sort of like berate well I suppose you could berate them for it but you there's no way of sort of proving that's definitely written by AI. So I think these concerns are just sort of mounting up for me and my my commodly side is growing and my sanguin side is shrinking slowly. Well the the interesting thing to me I think is where we are at this point. We're what, two years into this, maybe two years since open a open open API really went public. And I guess I've been on WP Builds a few times and the the chat is there's a normally a few people sending messages. Um, we dropped in AI into the conversation here and suddenly the chat has gone wild. Everyone has an opinion. We're at that point two years into this AI launch where it's almost the first thing on everyone's mind if they're in tech. It's almost impossible to escape from that everyone is worried about it lapping at their business. Um WordPress just has an AI team out. We're just starting to come to grips with what it means for WordPress and how WordPress can respond. Um it's a really interesting moment right now. I'm going to um I'm going to get myself a nice tinfoil hat and start a farming job. Um that's going to be my my future and erect barriers to anybody who's not actually real. Uh okay, let's go through some of those comments. I'll I'll try to pick up on some of the ones which um which seem to push the conversation a little bit. Uh it triggers So this I presume from Zach. Uh hello Zach is in response to the the video itself. So it triggers my uncanny valley response. So, I don't know if you know Zach, but Zach is a photographer. I I don't know this is a fact, but I'm imagining that Zach also strays into film as well. So, I'm kind of interested to know what you think about this, whether or not you've got, you know, concerns that those kind of things are going to hollow out that kind of work, which I know you do as well as your day job. Real time streaming avatar. So, basically influencers, educators, podcasters that are real time, live, genuine in a sense of playing a character and fulfilling a role coming very soon. I'm not. That feels more like a comment than a question. So, sorry, Max. I've missed what that might have meant. Um, AI is fun, says Daveton, but scary at the same time. Musicians, advert agencies, web designers, AI will take up lots of jobs. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's where I'm at. I'm concerned that that sentence is true. Um, I hope it isn't, but um, maybe we can some come up with some way of proving that we want. AI isn't going to take uh as many jobs as we think. We thought that about digital photography. Yeah, always the voice of reason. Thank you, Tammy. I pray that you are right. And uh just to get us out of AI for a minute. Good morning. There we Oh, thank goodness. Uh that's great. Webber Logic says, "I wonder how AI is affecting Hollywood. I guess AI will have replaced CGI. How long till I get an AI movie?" Yeah, maybe. Maybe an AI movie will be totally watchable. I mean, there was no bit of me already there. Yeah, but there was no bit of me which was looking at Jurassic Park when it first came out. You know that first sort of CGI type of film. There was no bit of me which was looking at that thinking it's graphics. I'm not watching this. It's a computer made that. It's like whoa that's cool. Uh you just suspend all of it, don't you? And say I don't care so long as it's entertaining. Like that video that we just watched that um Steve gave to us. Jess Rick, hello Jess. Long time no see. I'm Oh no, she's training my Wrigley AI GPT on this vodka. going to use it to launch a new show featuring British version of Max Headroom. Okay, keep it clean and I'll be very happy about that. Uh, AI is not creative. It provides an illusion of creativity. Yeah, my concern, I suppose, Zach, is that if it provides an illusion which is close enough to what we humans typically do, then it'll be indistinguishable. Um, there's not many of us that are really, really, really tremendously creative. I think most of us like me, you know, little moments of creativity, but most of most of my life isn't that creative. Um, take plug-in devs for example. Previously a dev tool all the time to create a plug-in. Now people can vibe code it and on it goes. Yeah, you were right, Steve. Uh, Ree, hello, Ree. Uh, I can't remember where I read it, but I like the phrase the world of the world in the world of AI slop can be slop be a crafty human. Uh, in the world of AI slop, I put a comma in there. So, crafty human in the world of AI slop. Be a crafty human. I put the comma in the wrong place. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Do you know that's that's I think where I'm going to have to land with this is that I think really I'm going to get to the point where I'm going to try and find people who are clearly human probably initially because I know they've been producing stuff long before AI uh and follow those people, you know, because I can trust that they are real. One benefit of being old, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. If you're over if you're over 50, you got a chance. Can anybody tell me of a comment? Cuz I there's about 15 more that I haven't yet read and it's hard to talk and read at the same time. Is there any? I think it's it's mostly just continuing in the same conversation. Um there are now jobs being offered or hired for to for AI specialists. how to use how do you use chat GPT for example and come to our company and and show us and use it for us in a way that hasn't been used before. So it may be creating a new industry. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Steve, for bringing this one up. That's that that video is so profound. It's so cool. Uh there's the Verge article once more. Right. So, and then there was stuff c can I do you mind if do you want to go into this one as well or do you want to skip to the Axios one maybe because I think Jesse might have some insight on that. This is fascinating. So, I came across this actually coincidentally you know Steve did at the same time. So, this is Cloudflare stepping in trying to do the good fight. So, do you want to just summarize it Steve? Yeah, basically Cloudflare have got some data together saying that uh the amount of scraping that AI companies does is growing exponentially, but the number of visitors they're sending is growing far more far more slowly. So they might be crawling your site 100 times for one visitor. Um, but the rate the rate things are going in a few months I might be crawling your site a thousand times for one visitor. And yeah, there we go. Those are the ratios. And actually, um, this is where I might have a question for Jesse about this. I saw, um, Josh from Pantheon who was posting similar figures for his platform. He was saying the same thing as Cloudfare that the number of AI bots hitting the Pantheon websites was skyrocketing over the last few months. But the amount of traffic they were sending in order to justify that scraping was minimal. Basically, they're kind of breaking the um uh there was an old kind of unwritten agreement from Google that Google would scrape your site, take your data, and in return reward you with a certain number of visits. That kind of unwritten rule is has broken down now. Yeah. Uh I'm just going to summarize what we can see on the screen for those people who can't see on the screen. So uh essentially um what what we had you know I mean I think really it was getting close to onetoone. Google would scrape and it would serve up visitors on a more or less we scrape we serve a visitor this kind of onetoone relationship. However um six months ago I'll just talk about Google to start with that was six to one. So six scrapes to one that we will provide you with a visitor. uh now it's 18 to1 but then if you look in the AI sphere open AAI six months ago was 250 to1 uh anthropic 6,000 to1 but now uh again this data we'll trust that Axios is telling us the truth I guess open AAI is uh 1 1500 to one and anthropic is 60,000 to1 the message basically of this article is creators you are no longer being rewarded for your endeavors by the institute itions that you imagined were um well actually I would I would actually take a step back if you go back to that number uh for for a second there. The way I interpret this I could be wrong is what it's saying is that Google's crawling your pages more frequently than it is sending visitors to it. However, does not necessarily say that the traffic to those pages is down. So what it's doing is it's saying that it's crawling more visit to the site. Okay, but you don't know if you're getting actually significantly higher traffic. You're just getting slammed with crawling uh bots. So uh something just to think about there because it is something that we are seeing uh you know these AIs are I think uh very actively looking for um valuable data in real time and the problem that we start to see here is is that I'm not an AI expert uh in this field but what I see from my own personal use is that the individual conversations you have with like open AI for example it is it is two separate things happening here there's the AI being trained outside of the conversation that you're having. But every single independent conversation that you have, the information that it gathers does not maintain in a longer term memory. So every single time that you ask for something, it's going out and crawling over again. Whereas Google will maintain a cache of the things that has crawled for x period of time, right? So it is much more likely that AI is going to throw a lot more scraping traffic because it's not quite very good at maintaining that memory long term. But in my conversations with SEOs, uh we actually had one on the podcast recently, they did say that they felt that the uh AIs were sending more traffic um to the to the actual sites than Google is these days because the way in which Google is answering AI questions in the SERs, it doesn't even require you to click through. whereas uh the chat um I think there's still a little bit of uh mentality that maybe we don't trust the AI enough so we always want to go see the source and so maybe it is uh actually uh resulting in more traffic to the site. Um so I would just be you know the way in which I interpret those numbers is that it could still mean that there's significantly higher traffic that you're also getting sl your server is going to you know the cost of that to your your host is going to be significantly higher. Yeah, this is kind of why we can't have nice things, isn't it? Because we we open them up to all people and then somebody comes along and in the case of Anthropic, according to this, they'll uh quite happily go at it 60,000 times to uh to give you a little bit of traffic in return. However, uh Cloudflare to the rescue. So, the person involved in this article, the CEO, whose name is Matthew Prince, there he is, if you can see the video. Um he says, uh bottom line, he's optimistic Cloudflare can stop this. He says, "I go to war every single day with the Chinese government, the Russian government, the Iranians, the North Koreans, probably Americans, the Israelis, all of them who are trying to hack into your customer sites. And you're telling me I can't stop some nerd with a CC corporation in Palo Alto. I I hope that that turns out to be true. I realize Cloudflare is powerful, but gosh, I think these other companies are also fairly powerful as well." So, so to bring this back to WordPress, I think and maybe kind of what the WordPress um AI team are working on or thinking about is how could WordPress be a kind of a database repository to to serve data to AI tools. um not just in a um in an entirely voluntary way, but I've seen quite a few people, including this guy from Cloudflare, talk recently about some kind of microtransactions to to charge AI companies when they come and scrape your sites. So, say you have a a WordPress site with all your data. You can look for a um a visitor from an AI bot. Maybe they're trying to answer a query and you can charge them a fraction of a cent for scraping the data and um and bringing the data back to their customer. Um I'd be so happy for Anthropic to scrape me 60,000 times if they gave me a fraction of a cent. That'd be all right. That's a fairly good uh you would very quickly figure out how to not scrape your site very very often. They would. But that's a great idea, isn't it? If you sort of hobble them at the knees with a tiny tiny transaction fee. Uh that's an interesting I don't know. I just don't know how you would implement that. But what a novel idea that is. That's the interesting time we're in, right? We're throwing up all these problems, but the solutions haven't really emerged yet. So we're Yeah. Cameron is concerned. He uh he thinks it's quite likely that this whole show has been AI right from the beginning. The Can I just say that I have met Michelle in real life. I've met Steve in real life. Jesse, I'm not so sure. I think he might I have. I have. I have. I'm not sure. I believe you. But but but Cameron's saying, "What if he what if Cameron has been AI this whole time?" Yeah, exactly. No, I've met him in real life as well. Uh he's much taller than I expected. Yeah, he is. He is. and Zach. Um, no, it wasn't with our virtual uh lives. I don't know that we'd be we'd know if we were replaced by AI right away. It's true. It's totally true. The uh the thing that Max was talking about that I didn't quite understand. He said, "What I meant is that you looked at an AI video like pre-recorded. So, it's something that had already happened, but the next wave of AI might be trying to uh trying to do things in real time." So, for example, a show like this, I guess, could be could be done by AI. And I would I would probably say that as a as a presenter of this show, it would do a better job. So, uh there is a bright and sunny future chat on vacation for two weeks. Yeah, exactly. The chatbot on your website could be you looking like you giving like selling and pitching and answering questions and it looks like you doing that. Do you remember when you were um when you were Have you seen Hey Jen? No, it's Hey Jen. Hey Jen. uh you can upload a video of yourself talking giving a script and uh it turns your not only your voice but your physical appearance into an AI generated character that you can feed scripts into. It's not going to be very hard for someone to tie that into a trained GBT or something like it to have real time um conversations uh so that you can you can replace yourself in a video chat. This is coming up in a conversation just now. Jesse, this should have been the first thing you told us about. No, it is. Yeah, that's right. Um, can I just say that? Well, you know, I I I I was late to the show and that might have been We were talking about you not being real for many many hours. Um, the my my neighbors have got a a very large machine of some kind operating very loudly. So, if my audio goes berserk, no, it's stopped right at this moment, but I keep muting myself. Um, but if you can hear it, I apologize. It is me. It is my fault. Uh, actually it's not. It's my It's my neighbor's fault. Why am I apologizing for that? Um, okay. So, there we go. That was the Axios piece. However, sort of leaning into this, we're straying away from WordPress a little bit. This is this is kind of more of the same in in effect. I think this this sort of idea that Google is not really your friend so much anymore. You know, it's not you don't have that sort of partnership mode where we'll produce content, Google will surface it, visitors will come. So, uh, Google now have launched this, um, it's in labs, by the way. Uh, you have to go into labs in your, uh, Google account and switch it on, but they're going to start surfacing a kind of a confection of what the search result would have been as an audio. So, a short little, I don't know, maybe less than a minute, something like that. So, a summary of what the search result has been. Obviously, this will work really well if you've got a closed question and you just want an answer to that. a bit like you might chat to your I don't know your Alexa or Siri or whatever, but that's going to come at the top of your search results fairly soon, which again I I feel is kind of breaking the the search engine promise a little bit and it does seem like strange times for Google. Won't dwell on that one too much, but um but I will say that this one is kind of an interesting one because this is the antithesis of all that. I don't know if any of you had a chance to read this. This so this is um Pickle. No, pickalill.I. I'm not even going to try and spell that out for you because it's got too many double letters, but I'll put it into the show notes. This is um this is supported by the Open Collective, which I think also has um a connection with the WPCC, WPC. Yeah, I got that right. Um the WordPress community collective. And this is an organization which is trying to deliver nonprofit websites for no fee. The idea is that you would kind of subscribe to this company and then they will take on the the job of producing websites which they have determined are under represented if you like the kind of websites which might not have been built because the fee structure would be too high. And so they're going to build them um on on our behalf. And I just thought, well, there you go. There are humans out there still. It's not all over. Unless this page was made by an AI just to make me feel good. In which case, I give up. So, I just thought that was an interesting counterpoint to all of that. I don't suppose anybody's got anything to add to that one. Just to say that WPCC used to be housed on Open Collective and they no longer are. They're their own nonprofit now. Okay. Thank you. Um, like I say, I'll put the link into the show notes, but go and check it out. It's kind of like a nice philanthropic thing. It gave me the uh the warm and fuzzies. So, I thought that was worth mentioning. Okay, let us move to kind of definitely WordPressy things. We're we've got an hour in and we haven't really touched much on that. We're only going to take a few minutes for those. Remember, I think it's okay though. Once in a while to stray off, you normally are like WordPress all the way through and today we've gone off a bit a bit off piece, but that's fine. So, um here's the first one. Um WordPress 6.8.2 release schedule has been announced. What can I say? There's not a lot to say. The uh the final release date should be the 15th of July 2025. I don't actually know if this is something which has come back online since Automatic have decided to kind of go back to air quotes normal or if this was something that would have happened anyway because it's not a point. It would have happened anyway. Would have happened anyway. Okay, great. Um it was it was always part of the planning. Perfect. Okay, so get that one in your diary. Next version of WordPress 6.8.2 who should be coming out in July and uh you can link I'll link to that in the show notes as well. Um there is some there is some talk of a 6.9 this year I think there was I think much later in the year was it no that is what has been now yes yeah do we have does anybody have any clarity on that one I'm still in the where I don't know uh arena with that one TBD I think yeah TBD okay this one is above my pay grade because I'm not clever enough but um I'll just put it out there um so this was Yan Jake I think would how you pronounce this. 13th of uh June. Uh introduction to a new SQ SQ light driver for WordPress. And I know that some of you are the are the definition of propeller heads who uh watch this podcast and this is probably of great interest to you. So it goes into the all the bits and pieces, but um I'm not clever enough. Steve, I know you are. Um Jesse, I know you are. Michelle, you may very well be as well, but um I certainly am not, but I thought it was worth raising. Steve, Jesse, anything to that before we move on? That's a big fat no. In which case, we will move right on. I got um tagged by Jonathan D. Rozias this week who wanted me to mention that um WordPress security updates. I think there's this kind of thought in the WordPress community that security updates kind of just go backwards infinitely in time and that WordPress supports every version going back to kind of like one. Um that is really not the case. You basically need to be on the latest version of WordPress to get all of the security guarantees. Um but certainly um support is dropping for version 4.1 to version 4.6. So that's a definitive black hole in your um client's websites from from July 2025. Um I was actually surprised I did read somewhere I think it was from Jonathan maybe certainly somewhere that really if you're not on the the the latest latest release then there is some um or rather I'll say that the other way around there is some definite benefit in terms of security for being on the latest release. So at the minute 6.8.1 in July 6.8.2 too. Um, but certainly if you're on 4.1 through 4.6 as of July, you you are painting a target on your back because no doubt the hackers have got a bunch of security um things all figured out just for those moments. Anything on that? Any of you guys hazard a guess as to when 4.1 came out? Oo. Should we go around go around the houses and see what everybody thinks? Uh, I'll start. 20. No. Yeah. 20. I want to say it begins with a one. 20 for 15. Michelle. Michelle. Uh 2011. Oh, okay. Oh, man. I remember working on what was it? 3 something in 2012. So, I'm going to say 2013 14. We got 11 14 and me 15. What is December 2014? You guys wins the prize. What does Jesse What does Jesse win? Oh, um, let's hear free version of 6.8. Yeah. Yeah. Version 6.8. Actually, can I hijack can I hijack that because I've got something weirdly that I want to want to demonstrate and it's a prize. Um, if you come to WLDDN this uh this coming Thursday, we're giving away an iPad. Uh, so show up and uh Oh, so sorry Jesse, you're not you're not I'm not giving you an iPad, but if any Yeah, I know. I know. But I had a prize sitting on my desk, so I thought a solid segue though. Perfect. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. So I was going to say Jesse got a VA this morning. His virtual assistant gave him the login for this for the show. It'd be pretty sweet if my AI avatar showed up and won an iPad. Yeah, that would be pretty that would be the best best use of an avatar. Go out on the internet, find every contest and win it and let me know what you want. Uh so this is WLDDN. Uh we we do it every last Thursday of the month and obviously this coming up is the last Thursday of the month. We've been doing this thing there called the golden ticket which is pretty cool. Basically, you scan a QR code and every month that you show up in person, you get an entry into the competition. Last year, we gave away a MacBook Air. And this uh this coming Thursday, we're giving away this the uh the iPad, but you have to be in the room. So, even if you uh even if you were the uh the person that showed up religiously over the last five months, if you don't show up this Thursday, then uh you can't win it. So, come come join us. will be there sort of from six o'clock onwards. Uh and you know go to wlddn.uk and uh you can sign up to uh yeah if you just click the get your tickets link just here then you too could be the the happy recipient. However, I uh I've already filled up the tomb with the name Nathan Wrigley. Over 8,000 of those tickets have gone in. So there's a there's a high chance that No, I'm not actually going to do that. I am barred. But um Right. Okay. Sorry. I think I hijacked the thread there. Where where were we just at that moment? We were winning prizes. 200 what 14? 14. So basically we've been pro WordPress has been providing security sport security support security support going back what 10 11 years maybe 12 by the time this gets dropped. Yeah. So I mean nobody could really argue with that. I think it would be unnecessarily kind of all the folk in WordPress to support it right the way back. In fact, that is very very very much more generous than I imagine you would get on commercial solutions. I'm imagining that there would be, you know, a couple of years at best and then open up your wallet because we got a security fix that you need to pay for. Um, I think that, you know, just real quick, I think that speaks to the reason that why uh hosting companies need to take a responsibility around the versions of WordPress. I mean, I I speak to hosting companies all the time. There's this propensity to think that there that them updating WordPress is going to challenge the the loyalty to a customer and whether or not they'll churn. And uh so sometimes there's a reluctance to update WordPress. And I think that it's something that's really important to remember that uh you don't want to end up with uh you know dozens or hundreds of different versions of WordPress across your network. So on um was I right when I said that the latest and greatest version, so we're at um 6.8 at the moment. Does that have some sort of special status in terms of updates? Maybe you don't know that. I'm not entirely sure, but I I definitely read somewhere that that was the obviously it being the latest release, there was some special uh status that it got in terms of security and updates. I can't remember what I read. No, I know that Matt, you know, always likes to point out how fast it gets downloaded and a lot of that is, you know, hosting companies and auto updates uh forcing updates on on those sites, which is great. You know, WordPress does a very good job of taking care of uh sites during that update process, but uh you do end up with uh you know, business and uh profits taking a precedent there sometimes. So, it's important to think about. Yeah. Okay. So, there we go. I will again link to it in the show notes. So, security updates for 4.1 through 4.6. Honestly, what the heck are you doing? Uh, watching this show and being on version 4. Frankly, uh, you're not allowed. Uh, you're barred. Uh, says Cameron Jones. I'm barring them. Uh, okay. So, the next piece then is this is just a shout out for Word Camp Europe. If you were in the room, you would have been there to figure out that Krakow, Kov, I want to say, uh, is the next host for Word Camp Europe. It's Poland. Basically, it's happening from the 4th to the 6th and they are already, can you believe it? Like one word camp finishes and then a year later another one starts and we're already on the call for organizers. So, this is Europe.word.org2026, the numerals. uh click on the call for organizers button and uh if that's your bag, you could get involved. I don't suppose anybody's got anything they want to say around that. Nope. Okie do. Uh just a little hat tip to the accessibility team. One of the jobs that they have got is to produce documentation. Great documentation, but um I guess a part of that job is not knowing exactly what people want. So, you are definitely going to have to find this via the show notes because it's a Google doc and obviously Google doc URLs are just pseudo random noise. It's just a mass of nonsense. So, um anyway, this is the um accessibility team just trying to figure out what it is that they should put into their handbook, but what documentation do you need? And so, they're basically asking only two questions. Well, three. Um what do you what do you do for a living? Where do you live? and what are the bits and pieces that you think um are missing. So it'll take you a moment or two to fill it out. But that work very very important. So uh anything on that one? Okie do. Right. Okay. In which case I'll nip to this. So uh loop conf. Um there's been a there's been a couple of these hasn't there. These on these online events gone back to being in person. So I don't think Loopcom was on maybe it was actually online for a bit. I'm not sure. But um Press conf was just a little while ago over in the United States and now we have one this side of the pond. So this is a oneday event I believe. Uh it's happening on the 25th of September 2025. Um it's uh a full day of conferences you know conference the usual kind of um speakers and presentations and what have you and then also an evening and I think all of it is comes under the ticket price at the minute. I think they launched the tickets like about an hour ago and if you want to get one at the minute it's £299 XVAT. So you'd have to pay another 20% on top of that if you're in the UK. Um but this was an event which was very very popular back in the day. It's been in hiatus for many years. I think as many as five, six, maybe more years. And it's back. Um and yeah, it's happening right in the middle of London. Nice looking venue. They've obviously got a nice afterparty organized as well. And although it says here registration is not available, that's not true. You can now get them if you have joined the way. So they're coming. They're £299 at the moment, but only 50 of them. So they might sell out quite quickly. Interestingly, they were much much more expensive previously. So Loop Comp have taken the uh the idea that things are getting expensive, let's make it cheaper, which is quite a nice idea. building themselves as the premier event for developers and engineers who build with WordPress. So they they were in uh Salt Lake City before which was an interesting trip and then um the last one I think they tried to hold was on the um on the on the Atlantic side of Florida in September just when a hurricane was rolling into town. So I think they're taking a safer option this year with Yeah. Yeah. We definitely don't have that. Uh, so yeah, I've just clicked on a link in an email so I can see uh I'm not going to convert you. You've got to go and register on the website presumably to get that link. But yeah, they're available at the moment. £299. They're calling them the early bird tickets. Uh so there's 50 of those and then I guess they're just going to sort of slowly creep up. If you're interested in sponsoring that event, I don't know if this is an early bird price, but starts at £600 and it's a first come first served thing. So yeah, real world back in the room. Don't know how many people are going to be allowed to attend, but I have a feeling it's around 200, so it'll be fairly fairly exclusive. Anybody got anything else on that? We've had a we do a a publish press podcast and had a bunch of publishers on um and a lot of them are talking about events lately as a a a really good revenue generator and also just a great community builder that they have a magazine, they sometimes even a sub a Substack newsletter or they have a um a local newspaper and a lot of that is it's okay. It's an okay business, but a lot of them are finding that in-person events are really taking off for them at the moment because people miss that connection. They they want to get in a room with people who are interested in the same topic as them. Yeah. And get away from the AI, you know, it's uh I'm not opening that one up again. Uh okay. So, all right. So, there we go. Thank you very much. Let's move on to Oh, this one. I thought this one was absolutely fascinating. So, uh, I I'm not a designer. I don't know that I've ever used Figma. Um, in all honesty, I've probably seen it being used by a variety of other people, but my understanding is that if you are a designer, Figma is like almost the number one tool across the across the industry these days. And um the the guys at Fueled have created um a plugin um and I don't really know what a Figma token is. I don't know that I need to know what one is, but essentially if you're using Figma, I think in the past being able to take something from Figma and turn it into something which might be, let's say, a WordPress theme or something like that might have been a little bit of a pain in the neck. Well, this plug-in uh appears to take care of that. It will automate that process and create your sort of theme.json, that kind of thing, um, more or less by clicking a button. Again, I can't really speak to it because I'm not a designer or a developer, but uh I guess if you are one or both of those things, this might be really interesting. Fabian was uh was on the podcast not that long ago and uh he is the director of uh engine editorial engineering over at Fueled and um I think he's a core committer as well. So, he obviously does know what he's he knows what he's talking about. So, those of you that are into Figma, uh this might be something interesting. Very cool. Figma. So those tokens basically act like variables. So as you're designing through Figma, you can say that a font color is this or a font size is that and you say it is a variable. This, I believe, is just converting that into JSON so that you can pump it right into your styles, which is really great because as cool as Figma is, it also just came out with a um I think it's a closed source um conversion tool to build a website. Uh so now this is a way to kind of keep funneling Figma in back into to WordPress and I think create a defensible position there to help uh you know continue to make Figma into WordPress even better. So it's very cool that the people at Fuel did that. Yeah, really nice. Um Tammy's joining us who is both a developer and a designer. So the perfect person to talk about it. She uh in response to me saying that Figma was kind of the deacto tool of perhaps not. Uh penpot which again I've heard of but never opened I don't think so. Penpot is the is also one of the standard things now. Uh he is I guess that's in response to him being a core committer and uh Figma is closed source. Oh okay. So there we go. Penpot is a an open-source alternative. Does that kind of tooling exist Tammy? You know are there things like what Fabian has built there? uh over on the pen pot side of things because it feels like obviously the more those kind of things exist the uh the happier we all shall be. Uh okie dokie. Let me get rid of Oh, I got rid of the wrong thing. There we go. Right, moving on quickly. Um GoDaddy and uh WP Rocket have joined forces. If you're a if you're a user of GoDaddy, you are now going to be I don't know if they install this as standard. I can't remember. Um B but they are now going to be in collaboration uh with WP Rocket and I think if memory says I read this about I don't know 3 or 4 days ago. I think now this is going to be their SEO sort of sorry this optimization is going to be their weapon of choice and I think you're now going to get that rolled in as part of your uh package. So I don't know if that's uh meaningful or not but uh if you're a GoDaddy customer perhaps it is. Uh D. This I thought was really cool. And I I don't use Grade Suite. Not because I have any I I have anything against them. I just never have used it. You know, you kind of get into your own little tools and use those over and over again. But um I I don't I I don't know why this wouldn't be multi-sight, but this is something that they've come out with called global content. And the idea is that you can save content from one website and make it appear in other websites. So you change it in one website and then it presumably syncs across all of those websites. I I I'm kind of wondering why you wouldn't just lean into something like multi-sight for this, but maybe you just want it to be on a different, you know, an array of different to one site on Pressible, one site on WP Cloud somewhere or other, one site on GoDaddy, whatever it may be, and it would all sync across. Yeah. So, when you think about something like uh like a business that has affiliates, uh like like uh like a radio station company, right? They might have dozens or hundreds of radio stations. And the thing about multicight is is that while it's incredibly powerful for large networks of sites, it does run into an issue where if any one site is getting an increase of traffic, a a substantial amount of traffic, the rest of the sites are taxed as well. And so a lot of times people choose to break apart sites. And so there is a a thing happening and we're actually working on it at WP cloud as well where we're trying to create the benefits of multicight but still allow for siloed independent websites to benefit from their independent traffic and and and resources. So something like this would be incredibly powerful for like think about a higher education uh situation where they need to have a a terms of service across every single website that they they um they uh they manage and it's not in even if it is in multi-sight like sourced content from a single site is not necessarily inherent to multicight. So things like this can be incredibly powerful. Yeah, there's a few companies in the WordPress space. I'm thinking about companies like uh WP Manage Ninja. Oh, actually Steve might be a perfect example as well where they've got multiple kind of brands with completely different URLs. So on the the fluent side of things, you know, they've got fluent forms, they've got fluent CRM, they got fluent this, fluent that. There's lots and lots of different parts of that business, but there's probably bits and pieces of all of those separate.com websites that it would just absolutely make sense to just change once and it just sync across all of the different websites. And again, Steve, that might work for your well, you you mentioned four in your bio at the beginning, your four plugins. Is any of this kind of present does it come across to you as a good idea this or is it just kind of like well I'll just go to the individual websites and update them normally? Yeah, it absolutely makes sense as a possible solution. We've dug into this as a possible business model in the past and found it to be technically challenging. Um, the last time we seriously dug into actually considering building a plugin that would do something like this, there was a plugin called uh WP Sight Sync that was really very good, but they they shut it down right around the same time that we were considering it, which which kind of turned us off as a they were saying they couldn't make it work. they they said the technical challenges were too big and maybe the market or they they'd found the market wasn't quite big enough for this. And then um actually you mentioned Fueled a few moments ago. Fueled is the new tenup um and they have a plugin I think called distributor I want to say that does something like this. So it's definitely something that's been floating around the WordPress world. Um, and it sounds like Jesse is in the weeds with this right now. Um, has been exploring this. It's a great idea, but there's a lot of technical hurdles to to make it work. Yeah, I'm guessing that this is probably and and again, Cavier Emptor, I could have misunderstood it. I'm guessing this is going to work very well if you are using the grade suite of products across your entire network of websites. That's a big help. If it's I think if you have it very closely sandboxed in terms of the content that you're working with this page builder and maybe this set of plugins, then you could probably put a a pretty good package together. Um we we I think ran into complications imagining how would you deal with elemental, how would you deal with beaver builder, how would you deal with right all those different possibilities. But as Grade is working within a much more tightly confined sandbox, they may well be able to make it work and make it work quite well. I think it's a really neat idea. Honestly, I can't quite imagine why it's never crossed my radar before. Like I I genu I haven't seen the solutions that you mentioned there, Steve, the distributed or whatever it was that you could distributor. Yeah. Um but but I'm surprised that nobody's tackled this successfully in the past. Perhaps they have. Perhaps there's a really credible solution out there that which which we just haven't seen before. But Gra taking the point of view that, you know, you've got this kind of capability to create consistent headers, footers, whatever it may be. And then you've got like this dashboard. Apologies if you can't see the screen, but essentially we're looking at a screenshot of what appears to be, you know, things like here's the header and the footer, and this is what it would look like. Sorry, not what it would look like, but here's the location of where it is, the the site title and things. So, you can manage it all in one place. And I'm kind of imagining almost like you'd set up a unique domain just for this install and then create your assets. It would it it would have no consequence for me because I just don't have this kind of a setup. But I can imagine if I don't know you're a big university or something with loads of different departments and each of those departments is on a subdomain. This really seems like a quite a cool idea. So uh yeah, good luck with that. There you go. Um and and down said, not to harp on this, but like they also seems to they offer the option for segments of a website. So just your footer or just the navigation, which actually becomes quite intriguing when you have a network of sites. Uh you can check it out at um grade dot. Well, grade is not straightforward to spell. You would probably put an e in it, but it's not. It's g re.io. So remove the e from the ed at the end of grade.io and then it's called global-content. So grade.ioglobal content and you'll be able to see all about that. I guess if you're an existing customer it's going to be a bit of a no-brainer to check it out. But uh you know maybe it's a kind of nice little thing to convert people. Speaking of um Fluent, as I was a moment ago, they have a new uh product in the market which I I kind of feel they're pulling the trigger on something which is going to be really popular. Let's wait and see. But it's called um Fluent Cart and um because it's not out yet and a few people have obviously got their hands on it. This I just thought this was an interesting video. It's about 30 minutes long. It's on the WP Roads uh YouTube channel and um you can go and check it out and they sort of walk you through it. It kind of seems to be pitting itself, we talked about it a bit last week, seems to be pitting itself against Shore, not really in the marketing at least anyway, aligning itself against Woo Commerce, but that certainly would sure they have their eyes on that target. But um yeah, so you can go and check out exactly what that what that does because a lot a few people contacted me and said I can't actually access any information about it. So there you go. There's a video uh where you can check out all of the bits and pieces. It's half an hour long. And whilst I'm on YouTube, I thought I'd raise another one. Um WP Tots Paul Charlton Paul C uh released a video all about the upcoming bricks 2.0. Again, not being a user of bricks, I don't really know the ins and outs, but I know that it's now incredibly popular. And um and so as a result, people will obviously be dead keen to get their hands on this. And uh so Paul, in the space of like seven and a half minutes or something like that, just shows you all of the different bits and pieces that are in bricks 2.0 that you might be interested in. I think we're going to finish early for once. We never finish early, but I think we've gone through all of the different bits and pieces in spite of the whole first hour being about. I know. Yeah, it was definitely light on WordPress this week, but we managed to fill it up with AI, which was kind of nice. It's a topic which is not going away. This is no, it's just Jesse has a couple podcasts that I think he wanted to talk about, too. So, okay. Please go for it, Jesse. Well, if I wanted to give a shameless plug, it would be to uh impressive hosting. I don't know how to do this. Uh, yeah, it's not easy. that is it beeply? Yeah. So, I'm running a podcast if you want to check it out. It's impressive.host. It's about uh uncovering the core tenants of great WordPress hosting. So, we have a conversation about basically everything, but it's about the responsibility that hosting companies have to agencies and others uh to make sure they're providing a great WordPress experience. But, uh I don't want to spend too much time on that, but I did want to talk about uh real quick. Um, something I think is really valuable to the entire WordPress ecosystem is Kevin O'Hashi's work on orderly ape. You go to orderly ape.com. Let me see if what is it? Orderly ape ape.com. I bet you I spelled that wrong. Yep. Uh, nope. WPhostingbenchmarks.com. Is that where you wanted me to end up? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Orderly Ape is a um side project that uh Kevin is uh working on. And so, basically, he's um taken the K6 uh um benchmarking tool set that uh went uh it got acquired by somebody, I forget exactly who, but it made it uh in inaccessible to folks who were doing benchmarking testing, especially in the WordPress ecosystem, because it became incredibly expensive. So it wasn't the core technology but it was the way in which the data is represented and uh visualized. So Kevin's gone uh above and beyond as someone who has uh constantly worked in the in the industry to be uh somewhat of integrity to to really benchmark uh hosting companies and their speed and performance. And so he does that through review signal. But he ran into an issue where uh the tools that he was using were no longer accessible to do that work. And so he took the time to to build this as an open source project. And he got some support from I believe Pressible and other companies um to help um to make that a reality. And uh and and so I think it's worthwhile showing and I think if anybody out there is doing any kind of benchmarking and they want some you know really um uh you know elite enterprise level tooling there um go to orderly ape and and check it out. Was the review signal was that? So, I've been doing this show for I don't know like seven years or something like that. Was Was that the thing? Did they produce like an annual report and they would put all of the hosting companies up against each other with the exact same metrics tested on more or less all the hosting companies that you could imagine? Was that what review signal was? And then they've sort of stifled it somehow, made it so that you can no longer get to those. Yeah. So, so basically what happened was is that Kevin was running this company uh WP hosting benchmarks and he would do uh or or review signal was the company and the WP hosting benchmarks was the annual report that he would put out. Now because Kevin is doing this work um he he would charge basically for the report. But when I mention that that Kevin is someone of of high integrity, I mean it because the way in which he would run this this program is is that he would have a hosting company pay to be listed in that report. Uh which is incredibly important if you want to make sure that you're standing up against your competitors and showing how well you're doing. But once you paid um you essentially didn't have any input uh and the report would go live. So incredible. That's cool. So exactly. So he wouldn't allow you basically to interpret the results, try and change them or anything like that. Um and so you know he would put out these reports every year and uh and so then he ran into an issue in that the tooling that he was using uh went close source or basically got acquired and was no longer something that he could use inside of the ballpark of what he was charging to make this happen. And so he he dedicated so many of his own hours to making this happen, but he did take some money to to help hire some additional developers and other people to to to bring this to light. And now he's basically made it available. So um anyone who's doing any kind of benchmarking, you should do that. If you're thinking if you run a hosting company, uh you should definitely be signing up for review signals so that you can challenge yourself to do as well as everybody else who shows up there. Um, and if you're trying to choose a host, I would definitely say go to review signal and and use those benchmarks as a way to uh determine whether or not uh the host that you're you're analyzing is going to um stand up to what you have to throw at it. I really like the model of that. The idea that you pay to play like for a hosting company, this $100 is, you know, it's it's not even pocket change. It's less than pocket change. But then from that moment on, all bets are off. You're not paying for a re a good review, you're just paying for an honest review. And uh I think that's cool. I think that's a really interesting model. I I'd seen it, but I didn't realize that that's how it was all put together. Just to surface, um they are looking for sponsorship at the moment. So if you click if you go to uh so orderly ape.com, if you go there, you'll end up being redirected to wphostingbenchmarks.com uh orderly. And over there you'll see a request for sponsorships link just near the top of the page and you can uh you can download you can see a PDF about exactly what you can pay for and how you can assist that project. I think I think it's really important for folks to recognize the fact that if you're uh you know, we're trying to help hosting companies define what are higher standards in terms of performance and and being able to support you know huge loads of traffic. And it also challenges hosts and I've seen this firsthand that when they get listed on this page that they're like, "Okay, we need to really get our butts in gear and really start to optimize our sites." And so it's it's an opportunity for or Kevin's contributing to this like raising of all ships who are involved in this because everyone wants to kind of it's a friendly competition among these hosting companies to continue to rank higher and higher within his uh within his benchmarks. Yeah, we definitely raised it every single time it came out and and it was there was just a deluge of information in in many respects. it was kind of difficult to get through because there was there was there was a lot but it was summarized beautifully and you could really see how one host compared to the other. So that's great. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. So uh go and sponsor that orderly ape. Um maybe just Google it. That might be the best way to go about it. Uh I think that's it then. In which case we haven't finished early at all. We finished exactly the right time. So it only remains for me to thank our co-host Michelle Fchett. There she is. and also Steve Burge who apparently according to Cameron Jones sounds exactly like Paul Lacy. Uh the traitor Paul Lacy I might add. Bless you Paul. You know I love you. I always call him a traitor and he wears it ever so well. U and also uh am I going to point in the right direction? Jesse Freriedman. Jesse Freriedman. Thank you so much for joining us today. And what can I say? Thank you to all of you who um who joined us in the comments today. We now know what it is that gets you commenting. It's AI basically. So, this will be called this week in AI uh from now on. Yeah. As soon as we stopped talking about AI, the comments went down to a normal level again. WordPress. What the heck? Yeah, it was just a massive spike. I know. What we need is like we need five minutes of WordPress and then a quick five minute shot of AI and then back to WordPress and then back to just flip-flop just to keep it interesting. Uh thanks for the show. You're of course Daveton. You're absolutely welcome. Hopefully, I'll see you on Thursday. Uh, and you you could be winning. There is the iPad, if I remember to bring it. We'll see. Okay. What Jesse doesn't know is that he's now got to do the slightly humiliating wave. Uh, maybe he does know. I don't know. Jesse, every time we end an episode, we all put our hands up so that I can create a screenshot. So, if you're willing to humiliate yourself like that, that's perfect. Look, he's really good at it. That's ideal. Perfect. Thank you very much. We will be back this time next week and if you three fine people want to stay on the land, we can have a quick natter. But thanks for joining us. We will see you next time on this week in WordPress. Take it easy. Pop on. Yeah. Thank, This Week in WordPress #337, WP Builds, 01jyz6hcnyqtx8m154hajjzt14.