Escape The Downward Spiral With Community And More With Steve Woody From WP Fusion

Chris Badgett and Steve Woody from WP Fusion have an uplifting discussion about entrepreneurship, the strength of the WordPress community, artificial intelligence, personal growth, and creating a meaningful online company in this episode of LMScast.

Chris and Steve talk about how networking at WordPress events like WordCamp and PressConf, building genuine relationships, and surrounding oneself with growth-minded individuals may open doors to possibilities that technology alone can’t.

The quick development of artificial intelligence and its implications for online company owners, entrepreneurs, and course designers are also discussed. Steve emphasizes that critical thinking, creativity, purpose, and human connection are still vital while outlining how AI may be utilized to automate tedious activities, increase productivity, and improve consumer experiences rather than seeing it as a threat. Chris and Steve delve further into the significance of sustaining a growth mindset, conquering a fear of change, and consistently picking up new skills in a constantly changing digital environment.

They also provide helpful tips for breaking out from the “downward spiral” by emphasizing physical well-being, developing a positive outlook, creating communities of support, accepting discomfort, and concentrating on providing value before anticipating outcomes. This episode provides insightful advice on developing resilience, discovering purpose, and achieving long-term success in both business and life, whether you’re a WordPress expert, online instructor, entrepreneur, or someone seeking inspiration to advance both personally and professionally.

Episode Transcript:

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high-value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Steve Woody. I’m gonna start with a story about how I met Steve, and then what transpired over the next week, but first, welcome to the show, Steve 

Steve Woody: Hey, Chris. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate you being here.

Chris Badgett: It’s awesome to reconnect with you. And just to tell the story how I met Steve is I went to a membership site owner conference in the UK called Retain that’s put on by Mike Morrison over at the Membership Geeks. And I was at the hotel bar with Jack Arturo from WP Fusion, and he was like, “My friend Steve’s coming,” and he told me a little bit about Steve, and it’s like really late at night at this point, I think it might be 11:00 PM.

And Jack and I t- tech folks are, like, sitting there, and here comes Steve. He was the nicest dressed guy in the whole hotel. And we just hit it off. We started talking, and then multiple nights, we’d be down there in the hotel bar talking until it closed down, nobody’s around.

Staff is walking around, giving us the eye to go to bed or whatever. But we just hit it up. We had a great conference together. We did a s- seven mile, I think, run together, and visited, like- 20. 

Steve Woody: Felt, definitely felt like 20. 

Chris Badgett: We did, like, all the bridges on the river there. It was awesome.

But the first night I met Steve he just randomly bought me a train ticket ’cause I needed to get to London from Newcastle, and I’ve been in Europe, I’ve been on trains before, but it had been like 20 years, and Steve just greased the whole thing. I had a personal guide. I got a black car in London with Steve, which is iconic.

Some good fish- Fish 

Steve Woody: and chips. Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And, Good day … and then we there was another conference I went to, another after party, meals and whatnot, but it’s really fun. This, this episode is gonna be about community, which is really interesting in this modern world with tech, AI, remote work, location-independent businesses.

Community is really important, but one of the coolest things about community, and I would say community changed my life, and it’s because it’s real human beings that you meet. I call it finding the others. ‘Cause you may have, your unique quirks, but then you end up in some random country with finding a good friend that you’ve never met before, and you’re into a lot of the same stuff, but what, tell, what did I miss, Steve? It was a fun week. 

Steve Woody: It- 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 

Steve Woody: what else happened? It was an incredible week. It was so interesting. Okay I’ll give a little bit of a backstory before Retain because it’s quite interesting my journey and how I got into this space. And thank you by the way for that introduction.

That was very humbling. I’m blessed to know you and you’re a great guy and I just- I you’ve absolutely hit the nail on the head. It’s the connection. Everything to me is about the connection. Yeah, okay, we can sell products. Yeah, okay, we can look at the business and the strategy, but at the end of the day, why are we doing what we’re doing?

Why are we here? We’re here ’cause we wanna make a difference, we wanna make an impact, we wanna have value, but we really wanna connect with people. And I believe in that tribal mentality, and so WordPress is a very interesting tribe for me. And when I started on websites, we’re talking a couple of decades ago now I started in HTML.

HTML sort of progressed into PHP, bit of CSS on the side, and then I saw this guy who I knew who was making a lot… He’s making seven figures. He was doing really well as a web- as a website builder, and he was just churning out websites. And I’m sitting there, one pixel to the left, one pixel to the right, doing these sites and really meticulously taking care over the code to make sure it was commented out, it was written well.

So my biggest fear was another developer. It wasn’t the client, it wasn’t the customer. It was another developer looking at my code. And so what happened was I realized that this guy was using this template builder or this CMS called WordPress, and I’m humble, I’m man enough to admit when I make a mistake, but I hated WordPress.

Like I told everyone, “If you use WordPress, you’re cheating. If you use WordPress, you’re not a proper developer. If you…” All of the stuff that we hear o- over and over with whatever industry, that was me. And I’m sitting there in my pants eating cold pizza, looking at this guy making seven figures, and I said, “Look, I may not agree with him, but he’s doing something I’m not.”

And so I had to make some radical changes, and I got into WordPress, and I started to use it. But I never engaged with the community physically. And so for a decade, I used WordPress. And I wanted to contribute, I wanted to get involved, but I never felt like I was good enough. I never felt like I was of a level or a caliber where I could give back.

And so for me, I used the product, which is what everyone normally does. They start by using. But I did an agency, had designers, developers that were working, building websites for clients, and I went more down the funnel route as, as opposed to the website route itself, and I was more interested in sales funnel, internet marketing.

Around the time a good friend of mine, Russell Brunson, was launching a product called ClickFunnels, and so around that time when that was launching, I pushed into that whole market. And it was around the same time that freelancing was becoming more popular. And what I found is that I live in…

lived in London at the time, in the UK. I had an office in Central London, and I started to see these freelancers that were building on WordPress in India and in the Philippines, and they were just churning out sites, and they were doing it cheap. And I couldn’t… I had rent to pay. I couldn’t afford to be that cheap.

So I had to make a pivot, and this was around 2014, that I decided I was gonna stop building websites, and I decided to write a book. And so I actually wrote a book called Plan Your Website, and it did really well. Became an international bestseller sold the rights to Saudi Arabia. It was used for over a decade in universities.

I ended up building websites for Harvard, and so I really got to expand my my circle and move more from a a website developer and agency owner into more of a a consultant, into a consulting role for business owners. And then I just stopped building ’cause I was just consulting, and so I was giving people a plan, and then they were going to the developers to get the job built.

So fast-forward to today, and the re- and the reason that we met was because of, as you mentioned, Jackultoro. So about- 12, 13 years ago now, I hired Jack from a, from one of these outsourcing websites, and I know enough code to be dangerous. I can get myself into trouble, but I don’t know how to get myself back out.

I’m… That’s my level. And so I stopped coding. I stopped learning code. I never learned script- I never learned to Python or JavaScript or anything. I never bothered. And I needed because I was using a CRM at the time, and to me, it was In- Infusionsoft was the only real product on the marketplace. You had Salesforce, but that was enterprise.

So for the, for a typical business owner, for a small startup or a one-man band, Infusionsoft was the product that pe- that people were using. And I needed a way to connect Infusionsoft into WordPress. And so I think at the start we piggybacked it onto S2Member. I think it was… We used another plugin and Jack, I hired him to come on board, and he made this connection to connect the the CRM to the website, so that if people updated their details in a form, it would update the CRM.

If I updated the CRM, it would update their account area. And then what happened after that is Jack was like, this is cool.” I’d hired him. He’d given me the code. But he said I think I could turn this into a product. I think I can make this something.” And so as a result, he he said “Do you mind if I take this code?”

And I was like, “Sure. Just look after me, and let’s keep me involved, and we’ll… Let’s see what we can do.” And he we… we created WP Fusion. And I say we. At the time, it was us, but I have to give full and absolute credit to Jack because at that time, I had some personal stuff going on in my life, so I had to step back.

And as a result, Jack spent the next decade building this incredible plugin, and initially, it was just for Infusionsoft, and then I would phone Jack up and be like, “Hey, Jack, some of my clients have just moved over to ActiveCampaign. Can you hook it up?” And, “Hey, Jack, some of my clients have just moved over to Zoho.”

And that’s why now it’s like Jack was like, “Okay, I’m just gonna… I’m just gonna preempt that Steve’s gonna need all these CRMs,” and so he just connected them all up. But yeah it’s evolved, and he has spent 10 years building nothing but sanity metrics within that company. He’s done no vanity. He’s done no marketing.

And the 15,000 users are a testament to Jack. They are Jack. I can’t take credit for that. I wasn’t involved in that part of it. And so fast forward to about a year ago, and I was going through a, a relationship breakup and considering what my life was gonna look like mo- moving forward.

And Jack said, “Come over to Berlin. Let’s just get you out of your environment and sort your head out.” And we, we’d stayed friends the whole time. So I went over to Berlin and it was interesting because me and Jack both work nights, as many developers and many people do. And when I flew out there, for s- for whatever reason, my body clock had adjusted to daytime, but Jack was still on nights.

And I didn’t have Jack’s Wi-Fi password, and he’d gone to bed, and I was literally sitting in his front room for about seven hours, and I had nothing to do. I had no phone. I had no laptop. And it forced me to just uncomfortably sit on his balcony and in his front room and just process my life, which at that time I really needed to do.

And I I come away from that weekend, and Jack said, “Why don’t you come back into WP Fusion?” He’s like, “Why don’t you come back and if you’re looking for something to do, I’d” Long story short I pivoted out of websites during COVID. I moved into crypto. I went through crypto made e- enough money that I didn’t need to work at the time, but I lost my self-worth.

I lost my I, I lost my my passion, and I love building. I love building things. And so Jack kinda guided me and helped me get back into that space, and he said, “Hey, we’re going to an event in Newcastle. It’s called Retain. Why don’t you come with us?” And yeah, that brings us up to where… And that was the, that was tail end of the year before I met you, and then, yeah we met and that’s just the start of the story.

There’s so much more that’s happened it’s insane. This year’s been just unreal, unbelievable. But yeah, that, that kinda- Let’s- … brings us up, so yeah … 

Chris Badgett: let’s talk about the power of community. Like in WordPress as an example I would say a very small percentage, single digits actually get involved in the community, and that’s not just WordCamps.

That’s other niche events like PressConf or other marketing conferences or the thing that we went to in Retain. And for me it’s literally changed my life. My current business partner I met at a small conference. My lead developer I met at a, a small conference. A lot of the people that are, have been most impactful in my entrepreneurship gener- journey, there has been an in-person element.

And you don’t know what you’re missing unt- I think until you see the value. I was just like you, an, a freelancer, agency guy building sites. Yes, I used WordPress and all the, and Infusionsoft and all these other tools, I went to like the Infusionsoft conference and then started going to these WordPress events, and quickly e- everything just changes when you kinda have that people side view of what’s going on.

So I’m really curious to ask you, Steve, recently you went to PressConf, a great event and- Yeah … but I really wanna get your perspective of you’re, you had all these chapters in your life. You’re a book author, agency owner. You didn’t even mention it, but you worked with Tony Robbins for a while and- Anyways, you kinda plugged back in to this entrepreneur digital course, coaching, information product industry, and started going to some events like the one we met at called Retain.

But I’d be curious to get your read as somebody kinda reentering the WordPress community, if you will what you noticed at PressConf, and what are some things that you noticed there? 

Steve Woody: Yeah, that’s a brilliant question because just before I went out to Berlin with Jack, I was actually teaching at a university in London, and so I was…

I’d gone from being quite isolated ’cause I went through a period where I wasn’t working. I was… I just didn’t, I just didn’t need to. And the thing is I’ve spent my whole life struggling financially, so I’ve always had that that chasing the carrot, that next paycheck, that making sure I can survive.

And so when that was no longer a thing, it re- everyone thinks you wanna sit on a beach and retire until you actually don’t have anything to do, and then you realize actually it’s quite boring. And what drives us is the need to solve problems, to build things, to do things. And I find that being around people it creates that energy that allows you to find these opportunities more so than if you’re just sat in front of a computer doom scrolling, so to speak.

And yeah, we did Retain. Retain was an incredible experience. Some of the speakers there were absolutely phenomenal. It invoked a passion in me, and we talked about this on the train on the way back down to London, that it made me realize that I’d spent, We get stuck in our stories sometime, and I was stuck in mine, and so having moved elements of my life to allow me to be able to enjoy being back in that environment and I’d never been to a WordCamp.

I’d been to some local WordPress meetups, but I was, again, very much outside of the WordPress ecosystem. And so after we got back from Retain, Jack was like, “We’re going to another event.” And I was like, “Cool. Where’s this one?” And he was like, “Arizona.” And I was like, “Okay. That’s a long flight.” And he was like, “Don’t worry.

We’re flying business.” I was like, “Course we are, Jack.” So we went out… ‘Cause… A- and by the way, that’s not just ’cause Jack’s flushed. That’s because Jack knows how to work air miles and credit cards effectively, and that is a game, if you’re not aware of it I implore you to look into because that man is a genius at getting discounts and deals and business flights for a few hundred dollars.

It’s it’s an art to watch him do it. And so we fly out to Arizona, and we we spent some time at this event and so Arizona PressConf is a very special event for me for multiple reasons. And so one of those reasons is because during the event, I got to witness something that, for me, was incredible.

And it was on day two. It was where, as I was walking into the conference room, there was a group of guys outside the conference room in a circle, and they were sharing, and they were openly talking about some of the challenges that men go through, and it was a… It was an incredibly cathartic mental health I’m not gonna say exercise, but just just an opportunity for just some incredible nurturing, let’s just say that.

I think that’s a good choice of words, for, for men in that environment to really open up emotionally and intellectually and mentally and share some of the challenges that guys go through that they don’t often talk about. And that to me was like, “Wow, this is not just a WordPress event, and this is not just a, a business event.

This is bl-” And you mentioned Tony Robbins, and so I’m very much attuned to that kind of world. And so this was personal development and business development, and the way that it was fused together in a way that people didn’t even realize what was happening, these incredible moments were just popping like fireworks everywhere.

And I got to witness this and I also got to witness Raquel, who as the owner of the, the event is someone who… The first t- the first night I met her, she turned around to me and she said, “I’m gonna change the world.” And I thought to myself, “Okay, people say that. Sure.” And then on, on the first day of the event, ’cause the first night was obviously the mixer and everything, the first day of the event, I saw her on stage and I was like, “Wow, actually, I believe you.”

She had that presence, that energy, that power to be able to really command, and then obviously just watching and seeing what she’d built and coming from the event space. PressConf… And I know it used to be Pressnomics, and it was reborn. It- It’s so much more than an event. To call it an event almost does it a disservice.

It is it’s… I would call it a lifestyle. The people that go to those events choose to be at those events ’cause they want to be in proximity to the people at those events. You have people on stage that have just sold companies for 300 million. You’ve got people that are flying in that, that Raquel is incredible at leveraging these, these people to be able to deliver.

Just like Katie Keefe did a talk and it was such a… And it almost set the tone for the weekend, she was talking about the struggles with her child, she was talking about the challenges with business, and it was relatable. It was so relatable that it allowed people to look at the problems that they maybe weren’t feeling comfortable to share, but then it give them that safe space to do that.

So that to me was phenomenal. So after press conf, went back to the UK for two weeks with Jack, and then pretty much just got on a plane and went straight back out to Arizona and spent a month out there. Come back from there to Poland to WordCamp. And so that was my first WordCamp experience to go to an actual WordCamp event.

That was my first time seeing a WordCamp. And yeah it’s it’s really opened my eyes. And so I got to experience WordCamp from two perspectives as a person who’s been using WordPress for a long time, as somebody who is giving back to WordPress through the plugin ecosystem and through w- products that we offer and also as Raquel’s partner now, ’cause there’s a lot that happened in Arizona

I also got to see behind the scenes of how the event was run and what was happening, and the volunteers and the passion and the love and the people who have made it their life’s mission to create this community. I thought for a long time that WordPress was software. To me, that was my…

WordPress is software, it’s a tool, you use it to make money. I no longer believe that. And I’ve had many a debate with people online about WordPress is dying and the ecosystem’s dying and, WordPress is being replaced by AI and we… all of these conversations. But WordPress, in my opinion, can’t die.

Even if the boss presses the red button, it doesn’t matter. It’s never gonna switch off because WordPress isn’t a company, WordPress isn’t a product, and WordPress definitely isn’t software, in my eyes, in my opinion. To me, WordPress is community. And so yeah, getting to experience the community physically, like in a sense of being together with people.

And I’m not talking about the main events, I’m talking about the side parties, I’m talking about the side tracks and the conversations that happen outside the main room, just absolutely phenomenal. Just blows my mind that… i’m a little bit annoyed at myself for it taking so long to get into this space knowing it’s been there all that time.

So yeah it’s been a absolute whirlwind this year, but one that I’ve I’ve loved every minute of it 

Chris Badgett: You know, it’s, the community is around WordPress and digital software and entrepreneurship and information and products. We’re going through a period of rapid flux and transition. I think it’s a mistake to say, “Oh X is gonna die,” or, “Y is gonna die.”

But the community is a huge part of what makes WordPress and all the people involved special. However, many of the companies are struggling with some challenges with growth and, other tools and competition. Education is changing. Like for example, in my world, why take an online course when you can just ask an AI chat and get your answer there?

So there’s all this stuff happening, but like you said, when you had the financial freedom barrier removed, you got a little lost. So my biggest concern with AI is really that it is awesome to be financially free, and that should be, that’s a great goal. But there’s a part of humans that need to struggle.

We’re literally struggle machines. And and then we also need to connect with other humans.

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Steve Woody: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: It’s so interesting. So if robots and AI take all the jobs, I’m really concerned, but I also have faith in the power of community. And, And also just being flexible. It’s not… Like you said, it’s, WordPress isn’t just software.

What we do isn’t just WordPress. There’s other community stuff. I’m sure you love to help an entrepreneur with a brick-and-mortar business, as an example. It’s still, that’s just another community that’s your entrepreneur vibe that let’s… It doesn’t even matter what tools we’re using.

We’re just helping each other. But how do you see this going forward? ‘Cause I feel like we’re a society in transition, and if you look at AI conversations, there’s the concept of the singularity and then super super intelligence. And so what, where does the human fit? And I think community is going to just become more and more valuable, like human community.

And I’m not anti-AI. I love AI. Oops. I have an AI agent powered by Automem, and it’s awesome. But I can be pro-AI and pro-human at the same time, but I do have some concerns about the future. 

Steve Woody: This is the part of the conversation I really enjoy. So there’s a few books. One of them is called Tribes by Seth Godin.

It’s an incredible book. Talks about bringing people together and about finding your people, and I think that is vital. I think we need that. We’re not designed to be solo on this planet. We’re designed to be in partnerships. We’re designed to be around people. And that goes, some people choose religion, some people choose football, some people choose politics, whatever it is.

I know there’s always gonna be segregation, there’s always gonna be two sides to it. But ultimately we all want to belong and we all want to comm- connemme. I don’t know why, but we wanna… For a better choice of words, I was gonna say wanna fight and the other F word, make love. But it’s just as humans, that’s what we’re wired to do, right?

So I think ultimately, if you look at the cell on a cel- cellular level, the first thing is survival. We wanna survive. And once, once we’re comfortable surviving, then our DNA wants to reproduce. So that’s what we do. And so ultimately, if we can create a comfortable environment, then we get complacent, we d- get a little bit lazy and we need something to push us.

AI is great at, it’s an incredible disruption, and it’s a disruption that’s happening. If you look at, Look at computers and computer software, and then look at the internet, right? The internet obviously increased the the ability to be able to deliver. And then you’ve got mobile phones.

Again, increased the ability to deliver at a level. Now you’ve got AI. So what we’re doing is we’re stacking up these incredible technologies on top of each other, which is just boosting the run- or reducing the runway to time to market is so quick now. It’s phenomenal. You can have a fully functioning CRM with a CMS, with everything built overnight in a couple of prompts.

It’s phenomenal But there’s also social media, and we don’t have enough data right now with social media to be able to look at the mental impacts. We’re starting to talk about it, the negative impact it’s got on kids. Governments are now starting to put limits in place, and we’re starting to see that there’s this, this real addiction to this dopamine hit that we get through this instant gratification.

And This is what scares me right now, and I think that the two biggest businesses that we’re gonna see come out the next decade, going a little bit off topic, but I think they’re gonna be event businesses or retreats, but physical businesses and therapists, because I think everyone’s gonna need me- and we’ve started to see a, a, a slight mental health pandemic, but nothing compared to what I think is coming.

Because when you lose your sense of purpose it really throws out your north pole. And it… and if you’re not prepared… i’ve done a lot of personal development, and I really struggled during that phase. And so if I struggled through that phase, and I’m not saying I’m better than anyone else, but I had tools equipped to be able to use them.

People that don’t have those tools and can’t have access to those tools are going to really struggle, and I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet compared to what’s coming. On the flip side, I think people are freaking out over AI, but I think they’re also missing, and this is just an opinion I don’t have the data to back this up completely, but as an example, if we look at what happened a couple of years ago in Germany a lot of money was invested into…

And I do a lot of macro and micro market analysis, trading and things. But if we look at what happened in Germany, they invested a lot of money in wind power. And then there’s a, a saying, and I can’t remember what it is, but there is a specific saying in, in Germany for no wind, and they had 12 to 14 days with no wind, and it had the potential to cripple the economy ’cause they had to import power.

And if you’ve ever had to import something over your usage, you’ll know you get charged a premium for it. And so AI and crypto together with the, the power that they’re harnessing it does two things. One, it has the ability to cripple a country, to literally cripple the power grid of a country. So some things that people aren’t aware of at the moment is a bit like in Dubai where they had the housing boom, and then it died off.

If… I think it was around 2015 or whenever it was, but the, the… They stopped building in Dubai before they finished it. And so that’s happening with data centers right now. There are so many data centers that were being built as part of a valuation for an, an LLM or an AI company. These data centers are now just sitting empty.

They’re not even finished. Even if the data centers get built, we don’t have the physical components in the world to be able to build the transistors and all of the networks and the grids and the electricity pylons and everything that’s needed to power that infrastructure. We don’t, we, we don’t have… we’re running on a, a deficit right now.

We don’t have the physical components and materials to build at the speed that we need it. So I’m not even that worried about AI, and people don’t even consider this angle, but in order to get to where AI needs to be, where it’s not just a chatbot that you can talk… And don’t get me wrong, it’s clever, it’s smart, but it is still a set of rules.

And yes, you can automate mundane tasks, but it st- it doesn’t think for itself. Yes, you can use an orchestrator, and you can allow AI agents to talk to each other, and it can do a lot of your job for you. It can. It can automate so much. I’ll give you a quick example. Mine– One of mine has the, It’s connected into my Fitbit.

It knows how many steps I’ve done, it knows how much sleep I got last night, it knows my my what I’m doing work-wise and throughout the day through the apps that I use. And as a result, it knows what to order me and put in my shopping basket, and it’s like, “Oh, you haven’t had enough protein this week, but you’ve worked out, so I’m gonna order you some extra chicken.”

It’s got access to my credit card, and so it orders my shopping for me automatically. And so this is just an example of just how we’re starting to use systems now. And yeah, they are incredible. But we’re not gonna see this just continuously go on and on. It’s gonna hit a plateau. It’s gonna, it’s gonna dip.

We’re gonna have a correction. It– the market has to, the world has to. And so there are a lot of people, a lot of people who are scared of AI. And if you look at the people who are using AI, it’s a very small minority, and sometimes it feels like you’re in a bubble because of that. But you talk to most sixteen, seventeen, eighteen-year-olds, they will tell you that AI is destroying the planet.

They will tell you that AI is taking all of the jobs. They’ll tell you that AI is, all… they hate it. And you can argue, yes there’s an energy problem, but until you are faced with a challenge, you don’t have the opportunity. If we look at what’s happening in El Salvador at the moment, they’re starting to harness the power of volcanoes to be able to create new energy sources.

So it– You, you can’t get the ability to innovate until you first have a problem you need to overcome. So crypto and AI together are causing us to innovate energy to a much higher level. And, I’ve got Elon talking about like farming in space, and good luck to him. Crack on. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens.

But I’m not worried in the short term because a lot of business owners, yes, they might use AI. And by the way, when we say use AI, most people who use AI, they use the free version of ChatGPT. Developers will use Claude, and a few people will use everything or their own custom version. But most people will stick to either ChatGPT, or they’ll chat to Claude, and they’ll get it to do some basic tasks.

But I would say the majority of people I’ve spoken to in AI, they’ve built a great dashboard on localhost, and now they have an idea of just how screwed they are, but they don’t actually know what to do with it. And so this brings me to the final point with AI is that a bit like with sat nav, the way that before sat nav existed, we had physical maps.

You’d have to stop at a service station, you’d have to look at a map, you’d have to plot your route, you’d have to understand what the roads meant, how it worked. Now, you turn up at your destination, you don’t even know how you got there. I turn around to my daughter and I’m like, “Drive us into town,” and she wouldn’t even know what roads to take.

She’d have to rely on the sat nav. And so what I mean by this is it’s removed our ability to think critically And so AI is making people dumber because they sto- they’ve stopped thinking, and they’re just relying now on an output, and AI is being trained on previous models, and it’s like garbage in, garbage out.

And so I don’t think AI is evolving as much as the marketing is telling us it is. Yes they’re allowing us more features to connect the dots, and MCPs are phenomenal for being able to allow tooling. You already mentioned AutoMem. So AutoMem is a, a vector database that uses two different vector databases to to mimic short and long-term memory through a dream cycle with relevance to give you a context window that isn’t just gonna destroy your RAM or blow your tokens up.

So having this– having these systems, watching these things get built, they’re incredible. But there are still business owners out there who are scared and are not willing to move. And yes, can we really be able to plug in with one prompt in an evening? Of course, we can. Are people gonna do it? Some will, but there’s a lot of other people that have spent so much physical money, so much emotional bandwidth, so much mental strain to build what they’ve got.

They’re not willing to move. They’re not able to move. And so I don’t think WordPress is going anywhere either not in the short term 

Chris Badgett: Let’s land the plane on the mindset thing. ‘Cause I think that’s where you and I really connect, and a lot of the people, like the vibe you were talking about at Press Conf and some of the pop-up experiences.

And mindset, I’m just gonna throw in one pro tip. One of the things that helps me is I spend a lot of time in nature. I’ve lived through the Alaskan winter in a tent with a wood stove with… When it’s 30 below. And I had- I put in a hand pump well that I had- I would have to thaw with a propane torch in the middle of winter to pump water.

But because I had that base, it just gives me perspective on everything else. So that… So getting out in nature, you don’t have to be extreme- extremo like me, but it’s very grounding in your humanity. The other piece is, goes back to community, which becomes more and more valuable in a world where all this automation and abstraction is happening.

But I wanna dig in a little bit, ’cause I’m the same as you. If I talk to a younger person, including my own children, they’re very against AI. And I get it because, if you’re graduating into an economy where all the jobs are replaced by AI and robots, that’s scary. Everything has an immune response.

I don’t know, just in my niche, for example, if you look at something like university education, which is very expensive in the United States and many other parts of the world people are doing the calculation of return on investment for spending 200 grand on college, and then there’s all the uncertainty about the jobs.

The whole American dream, go to school, get into a good college, get a good job, it’s really under question of does this model work like it used to? And it’s changed in many ways already. But 

Steve Woody: the mindset- let me just say- Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Go on. I was gonna s- just one point, ’cause when I was teaching at university, there was…

i… There’s something that I said to my students. I sat down on the first day. I had about 60 students in the class, and I said to them, “Look, if you leave this university and the only thing that you have is a degree, you’ve failed If you haven’t used this opportunity to build experiences, to build relationships to try and to fail and to learn and to grow, then you’ve completely missed the point of being here.

Chris Badgett: That’s a great point. Learning is what makes us human. It’s not going away, and there’s so many types of learning in addition to tests and textbooks and lectures. But in terms of the mindset, like you and I obviously, and many of the people we connect with and resonate with, your vibe attracts your tribe.

I find myself in a bubble of growth mindset people. So I’m not scared of AI. I have concerns, but I’m I have an open mind. So but sometimes you’ll see, let’s say inside a company where a developer may actually be concerned about their job and being replaced with AI. And in my view, like the better mindset is like why don’t you try to augment yourself with AI and just make yourself 10X more valuable and figure out these things like AutoMem and agent orchestration and, solve problems with AI.

‘Cause essentially that’s what we’re doing at work, is solving problems, and you just have new tools. And while you’re at it, don’t forget that you’re a human being. We’ve seen this m- movie before. Facebook or Twitter or whatever does not replace real in-the-flash human relationships. It’s great to have a lot of shallow connections on the internet.

I love meeting people that I’ve known online forever. This is one of the benefits of community and you’re like, “Oh my God, there’s Zach Katz. He’s seven feet tall. I had no idea.” “I recognize you, but dude, I’m like, I’m usually the tall guy.” You don’t look like your avatar? Yeah. I do. It’s true. And we’re great friends, but, For anybody really, there’s the youth and their mindset, there’s entrepreneurs and their mindset, there’s employees and their mindset, there’s successful entrepreneurs and their mindset, there’s startup entrepreneurs and their mindset.

What do you recommend here or what’s your, what are your pearls of wisdom around mindset in a world that has never been changing faster with exponential technologies like crypto, AI, robotics, and other things just going at a pace that the human being is not necessarily… We don’t have 100,000 years of genetics like we have around you need to eat, figure out how to eat.

Now there’s, like, all this stuff going on.

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Steve Woody: I think that is a fantastic question, and my

Chris Badgett: I was- how do you not lose yourself? Like, how do you not lose yourself? So I start, 

Steve Woody: yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then how do you set yourself up- Start with 

Steve Woody: the outcome … 

Chris Badgett: for success? 

Steve Woody: So get comfortable being uncomfortable.

That’s the first thing. I think it’s important that when we are struggling, and a lot of people are struggling, and change invokes a lot of fear, it involves a lot of uncertainty, and when you’re in that space of being fearful, uncertain, when you’re struggling, it causes pain. And I have a saying that I believe that is hurt people.

And so often when we’re caught in that cycle, and we’re caught in that mindset of spiraling and… I don’t like to label things, and I definitely don’t like to use medical labels, so things like depression or things like, like whatever the, the word might be, but anxiety and all of these things that people suffer with, ultimately, it could be changed quite simply by physiol- Like, you could…

If you get up and move. If you see someone who’s depressed, if you were to picture someone as depressed, they’re probably gonna be slumped over. They’re gonna be sitting like this. They’re gonna be like, they’re gonna be like that. But if you see somebody who’s sitting up, they’re sitting up straight, they’ve got good posture, or they’re walking around, and they’re just more…

it creates in… So for me, the absolute first thing, if you wanna work on your mindset, the base layer has to be your health. You have to work on your physical health if you want to improve your mental health. And by the way, if your mental health is not in a good place, you’re not gonna want to work on your physical health.

So to me, Eric Thomas, he’s a fantastic lecturer, he says, “Until you want success as bad as you want to breathe, you’re not gonna be successful.” So people chase money. They think that’s what they want. Money is a byproduct of value. So if you’re adding value to the world, that’s gonna make money, and that’s gonna help you, and that’s gonna put you in a better place and around better people.

You can’t add value to the world until you’re adding value to yourself. So ultimately, it has to start with yourself. So I would say hydration, absolutely above and beyond. And you might think this is basics and it’s stupid, but it’s true. We often forget to hydrate. We often forget posture. We often forget to just go for a walk.

You mentioned nature. You mentioned the stuff you do to get outside. When you’re up against a crunch or when you’re struggling you almost feel guilty for stepping away from your, what you need to be focused on. But if you look at the productive hours you spend in a day, I can do much more in six hours productively than someone that sits at a screen for twelve hours.

Because I know that time’s gonna be hyper-focused, it’s gonna be beneficial for me, and I’m gonna be locked in. So the absolute best tool that I have in my arsenal is my diary. So my calendar is blocked out every hour of every day, what am I doing? Am I learning something? Am I talking to somebody? Am I spending some time on my own?

What am I doing? Now, it’s very easy when you’ve got a calendar to just start ignoring things. If you set an alert for the same time every day, you’ll just start snoozing it. So you have to make sure and push yourself to… and this is why automation is amazing. It is great. I love it. We build it But there is still something so powerful about doing something manually.

I still do manual bookkeeping. And you might think to yourself, “What is the point? You can just chuck your bank statements into AI, and it’ll do it all for you.” Yes, it will. But when it does that, what it won’t allow me to do is have the emotional connection to, “Oh, shit, I spent too much on McDonald’s this month.

I need to rein that in.” So you get to see the patterns, and you get to connect to the patterns which you wouldn’t otherwise get to do. So yeah, AI’s phenomenal. It can do incredible things, but what it can’t do is it can’t change you in here. That comes from you being connected to something, often through pain, struggling, suffering, or an experience.

And if you’re not gonna experience it yourself, then maybe you can experience it through someone else. If you’re very lucky, you’ll learn by someone else’s mistakes. But often, we have to make mistakes. You don’t grow when you’re comfortable. You don’t grow when you’re happy. You grow when you’re suffering, when you’re struggling.

And so I think it’s important to get comfortable being uncomfortable and to not not to see it for worse than it actually is. If it’s bad, you can see it for being bad, but don’t catastrophize things to make them so bad that… Y- I say this to my daughter, it was a saying that I have as a father is it’s not my job to stop her falling over, and it’s not even my job to pick her up if she falls over.

It’s my job to ensure that one day when I’m not around, she’s able to pick herself up. And so giving people the tools so that they can do things themselves is really important. And so what works for me may not work for you, may not work for the listeners. You gotta find what works for you, but the only way you can start that is by actually doing something.

And I’ll give you an example with this. Yesterday, very good friend of mine, he is a personal trainer coming up to 40 years old, doesn’t wanna personally train anymore. So went out and got a sales job working for a media company in the UK selling advertising space on billboards. Goes into the office on the first day, and there’s 10 sales staff, and this is a real company.

Got about half a million billboards in the UK, very reputable company. 10 sales staff, all of them have an area in the UK, and they’re all responsible for the lo- locations of these billboards, and then they have to go and find all of the companies, be it taxi companies or hair and beauty salons, whatever it might be, and they have to…

a cold ou- outreach to them to try and sell them advertising space. And I took one look at this, and I was like that’s an inefficient system.” And so I sat down with my friend, and I said, “Let me just build you a simple dashboard, a simple system.” We vibe coded it. It was very simple. And the average salesman in that company sends 100 emails a day.

They had a- an Amazon reward thing within the sales team where somebody got a gift card ’cause they did 350 emails in a day. Well done, you. On my friend’s first day in the company, within an hour, he’d done fifteen hundred emails. With auto replies set up through AI to be able to manage that, his commission on closing just one percent, which is what is the industry standard, he gets thirty percent commission on a sale.

By just closing, having a one percent conversion rate on that business, he’s making a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. There’s so many opportunities out there to take a boomer business, to redefine it, to take it to a new level, to be able to get… if you’re just worried about money, there are so many ways to earn money out there.

You don’t need to struggle. But if you want to build something meaningful, if you wanna be part of a community, then sometimes you don’t wanna be on the cutting edge of bleeding technology. You wanna be where everyone’s comfortable, where everyone’s familiar, and that’s why I don’t think WordPress is going away.

You’ve gotta be comfortable being uncomfortable. You’ve gotta be able to push yourself and go to new areas. But also, if you live there, it’s exhausting. So you have to be able to come back to comfort, and you have to be able to balance between the two. So I’d say the key word in all of this is balance.

So be comfortable being uncomfortable and find balance, and if you can do that, you’ll be okay 

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome, Steve. I’m gonna ask you one more question. It’s actually nine questions in one, so this is a rapid- Okay … fire round. 

Steve Woody: All 

Chris Badgett: right. So let me give you the setup. Here’s the challenge. I look at it like the spiral, right?

So you’re either on a downward spiral, or you’re- Okay … plateaued and you’re just level and stuck, or you’re on the upward spiral. And nobody is perfect, and we all oscillate and have plateau periods or downward spiral periods, something that, bad happens in our life or whatever. But ideally, we wanna be generally trending on the upward spiral.

So the nine questions in one is this. I may have done the math wrong, by the way. Math is not my strong suit. I love 

Steve Woody: this. No. 

Chris Badgett: All right. So you only get one answer per question. 

Steve Woody: Okay. 

Chris Badgett: So- 

Steve Woody: And do I have to answer as quick as I can? 

Chris Badgett: It’s more- What- … like one story from your life and one pro tip- Okay

Per area. 

Steve Woody: Okay. 

Chris Badgett: So if you’re on the downward spiral in some way- 

… 

Chris Badgett: What’s something f- maybe from your life that made you continue down faster? All right. 

And then on the plateau, what’s one thing from your life, and then some advice that kept you on the plateau? You could just, could not go…

Luckily, you weren’t going down, but you were flat. And then the th- the last one is the upward spiral. What’s something that pushed you to get that, escape velocity and that upward momentum? So I don’t think that’s nine questions. What’d you do to make a downward spiral worse? What’d you do to ensure that you stayed- I love this

stayed stuck on a plateau? And then what’d you do to achieve escape velocity to go higher? Oh, I think this is- So I think it’s just three questions. 

Steve Woody: No, but I love it. I love it. I’ll be respectful of the the time I answer these as well, but okay. So downward spiral, I’ve done this a lot. So for context I used to be homeless when I left the army.

I lived in a car for six months. I’ve been bankrupt. I’ve literally been in the gutter, so I’ve had to… And I don’t have a trust fund. I don’t have a family wealth that’s afforded me the life I’ve got. I’ve had to build it from the ground up. And I have a saying that I’m gonna be successful because I know I’m running out of things to do wrong.

I have done so many things, and I’ve messed up so many times. And so for me, on that downward spiral, which I know that so well, the thing that keeps me going down is the- Your mindset. When you’re in that place, you can’t… The thing that got you there is not the thing that’s gonna get you out. And so if you keep doing the same thing that got you to that place, you’re gonna keep going.

And what happens, what tends to happen is when things go bad, you start to blame yourself. You start to… Y- you’re not kind to yourself, so you start to beat yourself up, you start to bully yourself, if you took the voices in my head and you personified them as two people and let them talk, you would interject.

You would not allow those two people to talk to each other in that way, yet we do it to ourselves in our head all the time. We talk shit to ourselves all the time. And I think on the downward spiral, the thing that made me spiral more than anything was my inner dialogue, the things that I said to myself and the way that I talked to myself.

And so my tip would be force yourself, make time to meditate. If you wanna get fit, if you wanna get healthy, you go to the gym, you train a physical muscle, and you see the improvement. Why would you not train your mental muscles? Why would you not take time to actively train your brain to meditate, to use mantras, to use affirmations, to talk positively, to inspire yourself?

‘Cause it has to start from within. There’s a, a fantastic book called “The Master Key System” and it talks about for something to exist, you first must think it. When you think it, you can do it. When you do it can be. And so for me, it’s the internal dialogue, getting that in check, and then even if it’s something as simple as breathing.

So the action step that I would take if you’re on a downward spiral is to stop and breathe, and a great technique for that is a guy called Wim Hof. Wim Hof, the Ice Man, he has a, a fantastic, Does a lot of ice challenges, a lot of cold water therapy, but he talks about breathing and there’s a lot of things you can do around breathing.

The, the simple one that I’ll give you right now is the four by four. So you just go in on four, you go four very short bursts of inward breath through your nose, and as you do it, you tap your fingers, and then out the same way. You repeat that for f- for 60 seconds, your state will change. You will feel different.

You cannot approach a problem when you’re in a negative mindset. So yeah, the, the thing that, that made me spiral down more than anything was my mindset, and breathing is gonna be the best way to regulate yourself, meditation to allow… And that’s why yoga is an insane thing to… If you’ve got the opportunity, go to a yoga class.

You’re around other people, it’s a different environment. It forces you to be able to do that. So absolutely recommend that you go and do that. That’s just life advice. That’s through my life I’ve learned that. Plateauing I would say the thing that causes me to plateau o- or to plateau more than anything is arrogance and ego.

Some of the… Three of the, the most dangerous words in the English language is, “I know that.” As soon as you say, “I know that,” you’re cutting off the opportunity to learn something new. And so always be the dumbest person in the room. Always surround yourself with people that are smarter than you. Always ask questions.

There is no such thing as a stupid question, it’s just the one that you didn’t ask. And so the reason I was never able to grow and I wasn’t going up or down, was because I believed I knew the answer, and I was arrogant or unwilling to try something new, and I was just stuck. And a lot of that come from just ignorance, and it come from just the unwillingness to listen.

We have… And ironically, I haven’t shut up throughout this podcast. I appreciate that, but we have one mouth and two ears for a reason, so you should use them in that order. Well- 

Chris Badgett: And the 

Steve Woody: upward spiral You should listen more than you talk. And the upward spiral is absolutely, without a shadow of doubt, proximity.

The people that you’re around. If you are around people… A- and you are the sum of the five people you spend most of your time with. So it really helps to be around successful people. Just today, me and my daughter, we went to we went to visit one of lo- the UK’s largest private car collections today.

Gentleman’s got a collection of 60 million pounds worth of Ferraris in his house, and this is an incredible guy who sold a company, a telecom company, for a absolute fortune. Some of his cars alone are almost worth eight figures. And so when you’re in that environment, and when you see how these people are and how they act and how they are around each other, and you realize that, you always wanna be helping people.

You always wanna be trying to offer value. It’s not about what you can take, it’s about what you can give. If you wanna make money, you have to give value. So it’s not “I wanna take something. How can I take your money?” It’s, “No, how can I give you value first, and then I will get something back as a result.”

And so by proximity, by being around good people, by always offering yourself of giving value first… And I’m not talking about working for free, because you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta respect… You’ve gotta have boundaries. You’ve gotta be able to res- respect yourself. So it’s not about I’m gonna go and work for free until I make it, but it’s about having the respect, being around good people, and having that ability to add value.

And that has every single time when I’ve been on a run, it’s been because I have been breathing. I’ve been meditating. I’ve been physically training. I’ve put myself in the best possible state. I’m hydrated. As a result, my mind is working better. I’m sleeping better, so I’m having better conversations with better people.

Every single time something has gone well in my life, it has been because in that state, I’ve given value, and as a result, I’ve got something back as a result of it. So if you can apply that or find that logic, then that, that’s my advice 

Chris Badgett: That is amazing. And I just wanna highlight the compounding nature, both on the way up and the way down.

Steve Woody: Oh, 

Chris Badgett: yes. These things stack, so when it’s scary living in exponential times, you are also an exponential animal. You can make things drastically better by stacking- Of course … or drastically worse, or stay flat by not stacking at all. 

Steve Woody: If you’re on the way down, and if you’re on the way down right now, my best advice to you is to change your state.

And the best way to do that is just put your hands in the air and treat it like a rollercoaster. You’re going down anyway, right? So just enjoy the ride. It’s not until you start to do that you’ll be able to flip it around. So yeah, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta pull yourself out of the state that you’re currently in order to change it, 

Chris Badgett: i’m gonna do a quick lightning round for myself, and then we’ll close it out. And I resonate a lot with what Steve said. But the downward spiral, I’ve been in that entrepreneur place, working nights, and just not sleeping well, high anxiety, just really going down. And I actually came across an online course called Wake Up Productive by Eben Pagan, and it was like…

And this is before all this was super popular about having a morning routine and everything. So I was like, “Yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna start developing my morning routine.” So I just did a half-mile walk down a dirt road every single morning after a glass of water. That was, like, the foundation. And then in terms of compounding over time, earlier this year, I ran 100 miles, which is insane.

I became an ultra runner. But it all started from just committing on the calendar, even when I didn’t feel like it, to do that morning walk, get sunlight. I’m stacking. I’m moving my body, I’m getting sunlight, I’m getting hydration first thing in the morning. I’m not going straight to my phone.

That’s, that got me off that. In terms of plateauing, I think to stay on the plateau, ignore two things. Ignore community, and ignore learning. Like Steve said, “I know that” are very dangerous words. So being a lifelong learner is really what it’s, what it means to be human. We’re supposed to keep learning and evolving all, all the way through our entire life.

And then on the upward spiral, my pro tip there is to… I got lucky, ’cause I kinda found it. There, there’s randomness, there’s luck, and there’s strategy, and they all come into play. But what I found is that when I could align my life mission with my company mission, everything wasn’t so hard anymore. So my dedication to lifting up others through learning, and like Steve said, first focusing on myself- And then my company does that through software.

It’s so aligned that it literally doesn’t feel like work. I do consider myself lucky, and I… Yes, there’s parts of my job where I have to, quote, “Sweep the floor” and do something I don’t wanna do. But when you can align your work and your life purpose together that really unlocks that upward spiral compounding.

So that’s Steve Woody. Steve, where can people find you if they wanna connect with you? And also if you enjoyed this episode, I’d love a comment below the YouTube video or send us an email. If you want me to do another one with Steve on a specific topic or go deep or do more of the same, just let us know.

I’d love to hear from you. But finding Steve is awesome. I found a new friend. And it’s a brother from another mother experience that you can have when you get outside of the building, your comfort zone. You don’t have the, all the answers. You hang out with people that are… Yeah, you may share some things, but Steve is also very different from me.

He’s an extrovert of the extreme variety. I’m an introvert of the extreme variety, but it clicks. It works. 

Steve Woody: Opposites attract, yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So it’s it’s fun. So where can the good people find you, Steve? 

Steve Woody: On, on my socials, I’m on Steve Woody. But otherwise WP Fusion. WPfusion.com is the best place, or steve@verygoodplugins.com the purveyor of finely tuned WordPress plugins as Jack likes to call it.

But no I’m available on most of the time I only really use Facebook, and I use it for friends and family. I typically try and avoid social media as much as I can. I don’t try and use it for marketing or promotion. I love real-life connections with people, and I love to actually meet people and to talk to people, and I’m happy to connect on socials, but you’re not gonna find me posting too much on there.

You’re gonna, you’re gonna find me at the events. You’re gonna find me in the real world. And I’m always up for going for a run, Chris. 

Chris Badgett: All right. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. 

Steve Woody: Thank you, Steve. When. We need to lock that in. Thank you, brother. Love you, brother. Thank you so much.

Appreciate you. I appreciate you. Yeah, you too, brother. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms.com/gift. Go to lifterlms.com/gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.