What Is Really Going On_ Chris And Emily Debate Current Reality

Chris Badgett and Emily Middleton from WPCourseGuide examine the quickly changing effects of artificial intelligence on online learning, course design, WordPress, entrepreneurship, and the nature of employment in this episode of LMScast. They talk about how AI is enabling creators to develop courses, produce content, build software prototypes, and automate complex tasks more quickly than ever before. Chris provides real-world examples of utilizing AI to produce comprehensive product specifications and functional software prototypes in a matter of minutes, while Emily discusses how course designers may utilize AI tools to develop course structures, lesson content, and learning materials.

They stress that while AI makes it easier to create, it also increases the bar for quality, making knowledge, originality, and well-considered user experiences more crucial than before.

Key points from the discussion include:

The episode’s main takeaway is that AI is radically altering how individuals start companies, design educational opportunities, and pick up new skills. But those that mix the effectiveness and power of AI with genuine human skill, creativity, mentoring, and community-building will be the ones who prosper.

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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. She’s back on the show, it’s Emily Middleton, and today is gonna be a little bit of a different episode. We’re gonna dive into some trends, some changes that are happening in society that affect online education, website building, how we work as humans with technology, and we’re just gonna dive into some various issues from artificial intelligence to the changing landscape of education, what we’re seeing from our different perspectives.

We’re gonna discuss WordPress. We’re gonna discuss how the economy and economic pressure is affecting things like course creation, building websites, and so on. We’re gonna dive into the interplay of company… Or sorry community coaching and courses, and how that’s changing. But first, welcome back on the show, Emily Middleton, and that’s from wpcourseguide.com.

Welcome, Emily. 

Emily Middleton: Thank you, Chris. I’m excited to be here. And you said we’re gonna jump into talking about AI, is that right? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah let’s start there.

Emily Middleton: Okay.

Chris Badgett: What are you doing with it today? The thing is that blows my mind is that AI just moves so fast. In fact, I love… ‘Cause I’m a technologist, so are you. I like opening Twitter, or X, in the morning, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, Claude does this now. Claude does this now, Claude does this now.” And there’s this master class of somebody of, like, how to do X with AI, or ChatGPT’s doing this now and it’s just increasing exponentially.

But what’s your experience with AI recently? What excites you? What’s going on? How are you using it? 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. I, okay, so I do a lot of vibe coding stuff when I’m putting together prototypes, and you use VS Code now, and I was like, I never thought in my life that Chris would open up VS Code and be, like, building prototype products.

You were like, “I’m never gonna learn any CSS,” and now you can build products, especially prototypes, without it. And so prototyping things that we’re trying to do in WordPress is really awesome. I’ve been releasing some videos on my YouTube channel a bit more lately about how to use AI. For example when creating courses in Lifter, which a lot of the listeners are probably doing, you can consult a bot like Claude now and say “Hey Claude, here’s an export of my LifterLMS course.”

It’s a sample course that LifterLMS imported so that Claude can get a feel for the JSON structure. And then you can talk to Claude and it can build you a course to say “Hey, this is the example course that I want you to learn the structure of how LifterLMS technically works, and I want you to interview me and build a course in the same format that I can then import.”

So there are some things to speed up the course creation process like that, but then it also raises the bar for what a good course looks like. Because I can create a course really quickly with AI, so can everyone else, and so what really makes a course good, I think, will be pushed. It’s I don’t think you’ll have to put less effort into making courses.

I think if you do put less effort into making courses, you’ll have more competition ’cause more people will also be doing it because it’s easier. But then you as a course creator, at least me as a course creator, I spend more time quality assurance. I spend more time picking certain images, creating images, working on the artistic user experience side of things.

So that’s primarily how I’m using AI and helping my clients in their business using AI. 

Chris Badgett: That’s a really interesting point. It reminds me of YouTube. So like when I was a kid, I remember, I remember my parents’ generation had first of all no TV, then it was radio, then they had TV with one or two or three channels.

And then there was cable. And fast-forward, now we have YouTube and everybody has a TV station, and which one is the most popular? It’s MrBeast, who does these giant million-dollar productions, right? So just because now you’re more empowered the bar goes up in terms of quality. So it’s just an interesting thing to look at.

And I heard this idea that one of the cool thing about AI for meetings, like as a in a company, whether you’re building websites and you’ve got like project managers, developers, designers, or you’re building an education company and you have all these ideas and all these things you wanna do, is it instead of showing up to a meeting with some words for the agenda, you can actually show up with a functioning prototype.

And what that like really accelerates things. And I, when I got that idea I was writing a spec for a new product for LifterLMS called Name Your Price, which is where people can, the end user can select a price. Maybe there’s a minimum, maybe there’s a maximum, maybe there’s a suggested price.

And there’s all these like details with this kind of pricing add-on for Lifter. But AI helped me come up with a spec, fill in the gaps of the things I wasn’t looking at, analyze a similar product that w- is in the WooCommerce ecosystem, and at the end of creating this awesome spec, I was like, “Hey, can you just build that for me as an installable plugin?”

30 seconds later, I had it and I put it on a site and it worked, and that just blew, blew my mind. When it comes to an organization, like in LifterLMS as an example, we all wear a lot of hats, and course creators do, too. Let me try to do this quickly, and then I’m gonna pass it back to you, Emily.

So in a software company, there’s seven hats, right? There’s product, there’s engineering, there’s marketing, there’s sales, there’s operations, there’s customer success, there’s design, and then there’s like the CEO role. That’s actually eight hats. I’m decent… a lot of entrepreneurs can wear multiple hats.

I can do all of that to a base level, and some things I’m better at than others, but engineering I could never do. But now I can with AI. Now you can. That doesn’t mean that I want to s- become the lead developer of Lifter. No, I want real developers classically trained to understand everything, like how code works-

and AI has to be managed. But it’s like a huge unlock. So for course creators, we look at the five hats, which is being a subject matter expert, being a teacher, being a technologist, being a community builder, and being an entrepreneur. And wherever you’re weak, just like I’m saying I’m weak on engineering, I can augment myself with AI, and that’s really fascinating to me.

A- even, like- Yeah … where I’m strong, like I can get stronger. If I have a subject matter expertise, I- I’m good, but I can actually f- get… fill in gaps with AI. Yeah. Or if I’m a decent entrepreneur and I’m good at marketing but not great at sales, AI can help me with sales. Or if I’m good at marketing but I don’t really…

I’m not really good at business structure stuff like accounting or should I do a L- LLC or an S corp or whatever, AI can be my little sidekick legal advisor. Just help me figure that stuff out. It’s amazing. But ta- talk to me about multiple hats and how you think about using AI for yourself and with clients and whatnot.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. I, the five hats framework that you came up with is really good. I think things like community building are gonna be really hard to replace, and AI doesn’t really get humans the way that humans get humans. I think it calls for a further development of what art means. How when… I it’s a scary time because things are changing quickly.

There’s a lot of socioeconomic tension on people in a lot of levels But it’s similar to times when cameras were invented, and then portraiture artists were out of business. They were like, “These cameras are just gonna do our job for us. They’re not- They’re gonna capture reality better than we can.”

Abstract art then took off. And then when it came to personal cell phones, all the photographers who existed and had professions in photography their profession diminished a bit. And because everyone can take photos on their cell phone, and it’s a little more rare that someone would hire a professional photographer, but they’re still needed in the ecosystem.

And so I think more people will be building things with AI. There will be more opportunities for mistakes, and so those technical engineers, I don’t think they’re gonna get replaced. I just think there may be more specialization coming to that field to where those experts are gonna be studying things at a higher level rather than a lower level.

Rather than how do we build things, it’s how do we think about building things? Because we can think in ways that AI can’t. That’s how I see it, and people like you and me are product people. We can come up with interesting ideas, solve problems in interesting ways. Now we can talk to the AI and get a technical solution for us in just a matter of minutes.

In a matter of hours we could have a product that’s actually working really well. But if we really want to make that product solid and ship it, we need the, that support from the engineers. But I think it’s creating new categories such as product, and more specialization in categories such as engineering.

What do you think?

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Yeah. That’s very well said. I’m personally an optimist. I do have concerns with AI and the Terminator and everything, but- … for the most part I see it as an accelerator and a amplifier than a like something that’s just gonna replace me. It- or team members.

I just wanna see people using it to do more faster, cooler, better. Yeah … if you look at intelligence as a technology, like artificial intelligence, it’s just another tool. In the same way that WordPress allowed non-technical people like me to build a website, AI is just another layer of abstraction to allow somebody to do something that they previously couldn’t do or do to a level that they can do now.

One interesting thing I know you’ve experienced with your work with LifterLMS I can just have a thought as an entrepreneur and then immediately send a PhD-level intelligence out to do it. And whereas before I- dude, I’m an entrepreneur. I have ideas all the time. But I can’t act on them ’cause I’m limited by capacity.

But with AI, I’m not limited So for example you and I both know there’s this question that comes up with LifterLMS “Hey, I’m not sure what is free and what is paid.” It’s a friction point because there’s only so much information you can put on a pricing page or on product sales pages and product descriptions and whatnot.

But we have an AI agent at LifterLMS named Maurice, and I was like, just in a, as a passing thought on the weekend, I’m like, I’m using WhisperFlow to talk to Maurice so I can get a lot of information across quickly. I’m like– And Maurice is tied into all our code bases and everything, and I’m like, “Hey, Maurice, sometimes we get this particular person who’s like really wants like a super detailed, like spreadsheet report of what is free, what is paid, not just like which products, but like features, like everything.”

I’m like, “Can you create like a co- like look at all the code bases, look at every line of code that makes LifterLMS across the free plugin and the 25 add-ons, and build me a report. By the way, here’s our brand guideline, here’s the Figma files that we use to design our website so this thing can look awesome and really professional.”

So when somebody comes back to us with that question, frustrated ’cause they can’t quite figure it out from our pricing page and our add-ons pages I came back like 15 minutes later and saw the most beautiful 15-page report that was like beautifully designed, and it just blew my mind. Like that’s amazing.

Like you, you and I have dealt with that issue at Lifter. Yeah, I remember at one point you had a, I think it was like a saved reply in Help Scout or something that was like, “Hey, this is what’s free and paid,” and there’s all these bullets and these lists. Like we’re trying to help people. But now I got like the ultimate answer that’s dude, this is the compromise, comprehensive 10-page report organized by category, and it was made in six minutes.

This is, it’s mind-blowing. 

Emily Middleton: Literally. And I love that, and it’s a little bit scary because some people were paid, and the time they spent was g- in generating those reports, right? And now it can generate that 10-page report, something can take someone 30 hours now takes an AI 10 minutes. And so like you said, getting people using AI and learning like how the skills that we have contribute to how we think about things versus just what we think about.

I like the quality of information I think is gonna have to go up across the board for courses, for us as software creators. Like LifterLMS is releasing like a lot of add-ons. I have no clue if Brian is a coding god or if both coding god and AI are a part of the picture. But it creates a software product that can develop faster, online learning that can develop faster, and it gives more power to the hands of those who are those independent creators or doing something on WordPress.

So I’m super optimistic. People say all the time, I- “You’re still building websites with WordPress? There’s AI now.” But people said there’s “You’re still building websites with WordPress? React is faster.” They’ve been saying this kind of thing for a long time, and I think AI is just gonna accelerate the space that WordPress already occupies.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, 100%. And WordPress can move slow because it’s like this open source community project with this core and it is harder to steer a like established thing than it is for like a scrappy startup. And because WordPress already powers, 40% of the internet or whatever, like it’s not a scrappy startup anymore.

Even though it is free open source thing, it’s like it’s… It can be slower, particularly with all the community aspects of it and like collaboration. But at the end of the day, I am… I’ve never been more optimistic about it- 

Emily Middleton: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: because of the open nor- open source nature of it, which means like AI tools can just like immediately extend it and ingest it.

So whereas like a closed software company, they may have an API- 

… 

Chris Badgett: But they don’t… Their entire code isn’t visible. They may use AI internally inside the company. But when you have this ecosystem of creators, like LifterLMS, or WooCommerce, or Pay Memberships Pro, and Barn2 plugins, and PapaMaker, and WP Fusion, all these like creative entrepreneurs who are all not working at the same company, like innovating faster on top of WordPress, it’s super interesting.

And WordPress I believe 7.0 just dropped, which has the AI connector stuff built in. Like it’s getting there. Yeah. And I’ve built like a, I’ve vibe coded a landing page for whatever project I’m working on, like a sales page. But the first thing I do is let me convert that to a structure of WordPress blocks and whatnot that I can, suck into my WordPress site, ’cause I’m not trying to have a static site.

I get it. There’s a place for those kinds of things, but WordPress isn’t going away. It’s like that whole… It feels really familiar to that idea that as a marketer I’ve heard forever, which is like, “Oh, X is dead. Email is dead.” No, email is not dead. Email is alive and well. Are open rates lower?

Emily Middleton: Sure, 

Chris Badgett: yeah, everybody’s overwhelmed. Email is not dead. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Blogging, is it dead? No, people use articles all the time. By the way, most of what the AI is trained on are, is blog articles. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Do you- Is Facebook dead? No, Facebook isn’t dead. Yeah, like older people use it in general, but it’s not dead.

It’s not- 

Emily Middleton: Do you think anything is gonna go away? Do you think anything is gonna is there a- any kind of online product right now or thing people do that you think is going to diminish significantly or go away? 

Chris Badgett: I’m sure it will. Like creative destruction is a part of the process.

I forget the name of the documentary, but there’s an awesome movie about how life is basically death. For example, I forget the s- the science, but did you know your skin is brand new every year? Interesting. Most of what your skin does is die. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And then you get a new one, right?

So there’s this … Yes, things will be disrupted, but it will create new opportunities that we can’t even imagine yet. But if you wanna get ahead of it, the best advice I could give is be a creator more than a consumer. Use AI even if you don’t know what you’re doing. I am writing … I’m in VS Code now, and I never thought I would do that.

Luckily, my business partner has helped me figure out how to just use the basics of a IDE or terminal with Cloud Code, with our custom agent. I’m really fortunate to be more on the cutting edge of what’s happening. But this is why you need people. I need smart engineers who are, like, way in the fut- they’re, like, on the bleeding edge of AI.

What Jack Arturo has done with AutoMem is part of our AI agents. It’s mind-blowing, and it’s so cool, but these are all humans that are leveraging technology. It reminds me of, … with, there will be a ton of d- disruption, so when we talk about economic pressures, sometimes things have to die, but new things will be reborn.

And the key is to be on the path- Yeah … of you don’t have to have it all figured out, but just be working towards where the puck is going. And- 

Emily Middleton: Yeah … 

Chris Badgett: be, like, play around, just experiment. Try. Try and fail, try and succeed. If you succeed, do more of that.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah, and having a content management system like WordPress and all the cool software that exists in the ecosystem of entrepreneurs and agencies like yourself that support businesses and people that have projects, it’s like, this isn’t going away.

It’s actually getting even more exciting. And by the way- Yeah … let’s figure out how to do all this without exploding, because everybody I know that’s using these tools are not working less. They’re actually working more ’cause they’re so excited. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, that, that is a really interesting point. I- they’re working more because they’re excited.

I feel at the same time the terror that I’m not gonna have something to provide for myself. If I don’t have this job, if I don’t have this position, if I don’t have this skill set that the industry needs from me, then I’m gonna have to change my career, and that might just be too hard.

I have that fear of change going on inside me, but I also am embracing things and I have enthusiasm. I’m building products in a new way. But it’s forcing me as a person to change faster, get comfortable with risk faster, try out more things faster, and so there’s an adjustment there. What do you think about that?

This

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reminds me of the internet. I’m old enough where I remember the pre-internet world. 

And the whole reason, like- some of the success that I’ve had is because in the early days of the internet, just like we’re in the early days of AI right now, I really leaned in and figured out this internet marketing thing, this how a non-engineer can build a website thing, how to be a content creator on YouTube and write blogs that the whole world can see, not just a billboard or something I put in my local paper.

Be early is key and and don’t be afraid. There’s, I was listening to the Moonshots podcast recently with Peter Diamandis and some other folks, and there was a conversation around how in this rapid AI and technology change period we’re in, there’s an immune system response when somebody feels like their career is threatened, which I totally get, which is what you’re talking about.

Yeah. And I, and I feel it, dude. I feel it also. There will be a day when an AI will be a better small company CEO than me. I need to come to terms with that and not just reject it and put my head in the sand, right? And by the way, there’s probably a future in which the human is still needed to collaborate with the AI.

In fact, we’re probably already there. As a CEO, I use AI a lot. It’s not replacing me, it’s making me better. But how do we avoid that immune system response? So if we look at education as an example, what’s the first thing that happened when ChatGPT came out in education? I have friends that are teachers, their very first concern is, “Okay, these kids are not doing the work.

AI, ChatGPT is doing the homework.” And then that we can tell “Hey, this 17-page essay was not written by Billy. This was written by OpenAI,” right? Yeah. And now so Billy is cheating, but what is, Billy is actually doing is actually cool, like experimenting with AI. In the same way that students got graphics calculators or they got laptops or iPads came in the classroom or whatever, so we gotta adapt and, but I totally feel it. If we look at education specifically if you wanna learn something AI is putting a lot of pressure on traditional education in terms of learning something. So what does that… If I was a teacher, I would feel very threatened, like my job is at risk.

But what do you do about that? Like- I think the I think the AI teacher, I what it does is it changes roles. So if an AI- like, if a teacher is gonna use AI to help build curriculum, cool. If the AI’s gonna help grade papers, cool. If the AI is gonna provide more personalized tutoring, that’s awesome.

It’s what… It’s the whole point is, like, how do we do education and scale better? That’s the whole point of the modern education system, and you have this technology that’s helping, but it’s disrupting people. What if the AI has better content than the t- human teacher because it’s more relevant, it’s more plugged in, it has a PhD, genius IQ, whatever.

It’s totally disruptive, but that doesn’t mean that teachers like human students won’t be in a human classroom, and the teacher, they need an adult to facilitate a learning process. It’s just changing, and, like, how do we- … bring technology in a classroom? In my day, as a young man or a young boy the teacher would literally wheel in, and you probably remember this too, like a TV on, like a rack with wheels, and we’d watch a documentary about cane toads in Australia or whatever in biology class.

So that TV and that video, that piece of content was, like, a piece of technology, and it actually- Yeah … enriched the classroom, and the teacher’s still there but educ- Yeah … let’s nerd out on education. And there’s so many different types of education, but what are your thoughts? 

Emily Middleton: I have been a firm believer in spiral learning since I heard Julie Dirksen talk about it on your podcast and read her book.

Spiral learning, for those who don’t know, is the process of learning where you learn the basics of something, you learn the intermediate of something, and then you learn the advanced of something. Sometimes when we’re learning, we get a deep dive on one specific component of a learning process. So for example, if we’re talking about a course on cooking, we don’t need to know about every single type of pan, like before we start our cooking process.

Maybe we just need to learn something basic about how to make a rice dish. It doesn’t necessarily matter what kind of pan you use, whether the heat’s too high, too low. We’ll talk about that later. You just need to get access to a pan for step one. But then maybe we could come back around. You’ve made your first couple dishes.

Now it’s time for step two, and we wanna talk about the quality of the pan, whether it’s steel, cast iron, or coated with something that’s hopefully not a PFOA different types of pans. And then we’ll go even more advanced and say what pans should we aspire to have depending on what kinds of food we’re cooking.

We learn about things as we go in deeper and deeper levels, and I think AI will inspire definitely the first level of learning. When you get access to information for the first time, you hear about a subject for the first time. AI can give you really good overviews that we used to rely on humans- we used to rely on industry experts to get an overview on accounting.

We can talk to the AI and have an overview on accounting, and then when we talk to an actual accountant, we take an actual accounting course, what we’re gonna be diving into a little bit deeper with that subject matter expert is that next level, the intermediate level. Why would we consider this? Why would we consider that?

What are the things a real person encounters in the job that an AI wouldn’t think to tell you? That’s how I see it impacting education. So most websites I see will be using AI at least to create their basic content or even have a little AI chatbot talking to people about their subject matter, and then you can take that real human-made content for that deeper learning.

What do you think about that? 

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. It’s like a dance. Humans have been in a dance with technology and machines for a long time. Just like we dance with cars, like we dance with computers, like we dance with the internet, the AI is just… we’ve basically already become cyborgs.

There’s this whole idea that Neuralink, once we get the internet in our brain we finally become cyborgs. In my opinion, as soon as we got laptops and iPhones and our smartphones in our hands, we’re already cyborgs. We’re already connected to the technology. Yeah. So it’s already here.

In terms of the education, s- if we look at it through the LifterLMS lens or the online education lens, there’s this concept of courses, coaching, and community. And one of the, one of the things I’m thinking a lot about is- The course aspect of a learning management system is rapidly influenced by AI in terms of creating content or creating course outlines and things like that, worksheets, quiz questions, curriculum basically.

What- and that’s true, that’s can also be true for the in-person classroom as well. But what is not going to AI is the coaching and the community. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: Yes, we can have an AI tutor, which I 100% am a fan of, ’cause one of the problems with the traditional education system is that humans are not robots. In a cross-section of 30 students in a class, there’s all kinds of personality types, learning styles, learning disabilities, levels of motivation, all kinds of things.

So having personalized AI tutoring is great, but there will always be a place for human coaching and community connection ’cause nobody is like, “Hey, seriously, I wanna be in the Matrix. Just pl- put me in a bathtub and plug something into my brain, and I never wanna talk to another human again.” That’s not really the human experience.

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Coming in, in 2028, your brain in a bathtub. You have that opportunity. I love that. You, so you mentioned community. And that, there’s so much more to the human experience, like you said than just this mental work that we do. There’s physical touch. We hug people, we talk to people, we get a sense…

h- human body warmth is fundamentally important to us. You know how you, you have this background in, in human studies and how there’s a sense of community. It doesn’t just cr- created through the people we’re even talking to. In-person meetups, they feel so great. I’ve been in a course program- Yeah

for three years, and I’ve just met the people who do that course program in person in Texas a few months ago, and they’re actually a LifterLMS customer, and I, It just was so different 

Chris Badgett: to see those people. It’s pretty cool to pierce the veil, right? To pierce the veil- Yeah … of the internet. Just going to a WordCamp or going to a, an event that you always did online.

It’s it’s amazing. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah, there’s so much more to that human experience. Giving hugs, sharing meals, discussing things. What information gets retained in our mind is something I’ve been thinking about a lot. So like oftentimes I need a certain person to tell me something, someone I view as an authority or someone I trust rather than just having the information told to me.

So if the AI tells me a bulk of information about a subject, but then someone in person who’s a professional in that career tells me that thing, I’ll take it a little bit more seriously. And so there’s that aspect too of what information do we retain and that comes a lot from community and coaching rather than just the stuff that we watch.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s super interesting time and, in many ways I think we have to lead because as entrepreneurs we’re, we have a n- like apparently, I read somewhere 3% of the population has the entrepreneur personality type, whatever that means. But what entrepreneurs are good at is risk, chaos, creating value, making sense out of nothing organizing things.

This is, th- these skills are becoming more and more value, valuable. So for example let’s say the truck driving industry, the most popular job in America is a truck driver. There’s a lot of them. If and when self-driving long haul trucking is completely taken over by autonomous driving without humans, that’s gonna disrupt a huge part of the population, right?

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: And th- this is what I’m talking about. First level there’s that immune system response. Let’s form a union as teachers or truck drivers or business owners or accountants or lawyers to not let AI take our jobs. That’s level one, the immune system response. But then there’s the way technology works is like it will break through.

It always does. The internet became… It just did what it did, and there’s no turning it off. And people like it because there’s demand for it, right? And it created so many n- new opportunities. True. And then there’s this concept of unschooling or self-directed learning. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: I think the folks that have already been doing that in a way need to help others just through leading by example.

For example, you built a career in web, in learning management systems, in building sites for clients, in customer success. You figured it all out on your own, not by yourself. You were in programs. You’ve got mentors. You showed up every day. You studied things on YouTube. You just did trial and error, saw what worked, what didn’t work, optimized.

I, I don’t have a academic background in business or engineering, but here I am the CEO of a business with- … a software business and I can’t write a line of code. Why is that? Like how did that happen? And it’s that self-directed learning, entrepreneurship, surround yourself with other humans that can support and you can align based on common vision and goals, and create value together and be on the journey together so you’re not just isolated and alone.

And I think we just need to keep doing that through the AI era. 

Emily Middleton: I completely agree. Completely agree. I, I think about how the working for, like you said, the internet changed a lot and it has a lasting impact. For example, the work at home experience is now a thing. E- you know, the work at home experience, it didn’t used to be a thing. There are some people who prefer working in person and going to work every day, working at an office in person.

There are some people who prefer working at home and not going to the office. And so probably at the end of all this, like you said, with the internet and the wave that it created, AI will create a wave, and at the end of that wave things will go up and down, but we’ll probably be better off overall than we were before, right?

That’s how I see it. 

Chris Badgett: I think so, but it t- it also takes a serious… Like when all the, with all these economic challenges and economic pressures and you gotta provide, you gotta add value, and now this AI thing is competing for market share of the value that humans can create. It’s it’s a challenge, but if what it feels like is like, “Oh my God, I’m too late,” but you’re not.

I thought I was late to WordPress in 20 13 when Lifter launched. 

I wasn’t. I was solidly working from home starting in 2010, and then it was a decade later with the pandemic situation where oh, here comes everybody to work from home, right? And many returned to the office and so on, but many like stayed working remotely or moved forward with a hybrid approach, and the world was just a lot more accepting of remote work or working online or conducting meetings on Zoom instead of spending all this money to get on planes and hotels and all this stuff.

It forced people to upgrade. But it took that event to cause, to force people to upgrade. Yeah. And I think we just need to have an open mind and explore and cross-train and get outside of your lane. What I mean by get outside of your lane is- I try to do stuff all the time that I don’t know how to do.

But that’s never been easier nor more fun with AI to help support me, yeah. ‘Cause I’m not bugging somebody to “Hey, can you show me how to do this thing?” Or whatever. I had the opposite problem. I’m like, “Oh my God, I coulda had my AI agent working for 12 hours on this thing, but I don’t even know what to tell it to do.

I’m too productive.” Yes. I have too much productivity. It’s a weird, it’s a really weird thing to think about. But I do have concerns about … not everybody has the same personality type and thrives in chaos and everything, and I do see a a really challenging time ahead, particularly with like the cost of college education, for example.

I’m a parent with teen- teenage kids right now, and I’m looking at the cost of a college education and I’m like, man, that is serious,

But then there’s… I heard a statistic, I don’t know if it’s true or whatever, but that there are… Right now there’s more unemployed college graduates than high school graduates.

I don’t know if that’s a true thing or not, but it’s that kind of stuff that makes me like, “Wait, hold on a second. Let’s… Maybe the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed, and we need to figure out different ways to learn, like through actual internships or self-directed learning or pop-up educational entrepre- education opportunities through courses, coaches, and communities or mastermind groups.”

There’s lots of different ways to learn. And so it’s exciting- Yeah … too, but it’s also scary as hell, particularly for people that are just not as used to living in this kind of chaos that entrepreneurs just, for whatever reason, innately do. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Reexamining who we are as entrepreneurs and going back to our roots, people who are willing to step out and take risks and try new things.

That’s… Yeah. I think that’ll be a really awesome experience. We’re those people who would put together a boat and see if we could sail across the ocean and inevitably die in the ocean. But we’re the curious humans who wanna push things and see. I like AI also as a forcing function.

For our society, we need to generate things like power in a cleaner and efficient way, and that issue’s being pressed as a part of AI taking up so much power. And there’s a lot of risks that didn’t go well in the past, like nuclear power plants. There were some really bad accidents that happened, and there’s much more safety and governance that needs to go into that kind of thing.

But the- there’s no cleaner generation of power that we have yet, and that’s the kind of thing that’ll support us in our AI journey and quantum computing. I know everyone’s talking about quantum computing as if it’s the thing that’s gonna come next, but it was crazy. AI came out, and it just has been taking the whole world by storm.

Yeah I think that there’s definitely value to giving AI credit for having been a part of your process as well. A lot of people try to take credit for the things that AI makes, and so if you say that your stuff is made in support of AI or it’s very clear that it is, I also make sure to endorse that because there will become a real distinct feel and value to creating something that’s human versus creating something that’s human plus AI or mostly AI.

And so- Just think about that. It makes it easier for- Yeah … yeah. 

Chris Badgett: I think about that kinda like organic food. 

Like organic food is healthier, more nutrient dense, and lacks poisons in other food, right? And I’m not making this the exact analogy, but I feel like organic art, organic music, organic writing, organic videos, like with zero influence of AI, will always be important.

Yeah. But it’s al- it’s also okay to augment those things with AI, right? 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: But to take credit, there is like a plagiarism thing there, and to you can lose your humanity by pretending that whatever you create with AI was 100% done by you. And I think that’s disingenuous in the same way that, it’s kinda like pretending you’re at a organic restaurant and, a lot of the food that’s being served on your table is actually full of pesticides and glyphosate, hormones and chemicals or whatever, and you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t actually organic food,” but you said organic like on the menu or on the name of the restaurant or whatever.

Yeah … so like that raw, organic thing is cool. I, that’s a pro-tip I just wanna put out there is like- I’ve always felt that one of the things that keeps me going in technology and entrepreneurship with all the stress, all the chaos, all the ups and downs, the good times, the bad times, is my connection to nature and also fitness.

If I didn’t have this grounded human experience th- without technology, like this organic experience that keeps me grounded, I would go insane. Sure. And I’ve seen a lot of people burn out or not necessarily go insane, but just have a challenge because they- you lose your humanity.

And having parts of what you do that just remain organic or disconnect or unplug has never been more important to to do that. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. 

Chris Badgett: So like- Yeah … n- don’t lose your humanity in all of this opportunity is what I’m saying. ‘Cause if- it’s like just chasing money for money’s sake and f- and losing sight of your values and humanity and all the non-monetary values of life, you can get really lost.

And unfortunately, I think a lot of people are gonna get really lost in this technology revolution because they’re losing touch with their organic human side. So keep that even if it’s… It doesn’t always have to be, like, perfect, like you live on a island and there’s no te- there’s no t- electricity or whatever.

It’s just don’t lose your humanity in the process. 

Emily Middleton: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good point. And if you don’t have any more questions, we could end on that point. I think that’s a really good point. Don’t lose your humanity in the process. Watch your immune system, and take advantage and try to leverage the things about you that make you unique as both a person and an entrepreneur.

Chris Badgett: I’ll end it there, and I’ll just say I’m a fan of the barbell strategy. This is from Nicholas Nassim Taleb, which basically means the barbell strategy is put the extremes in your s- in your strategy and forget about the middle. And I’ve never felt more strongly that the barbell strategy is more relevant than what we’re experiencing now with technology.

So what that means is if you’re in the middle, you’re fighting AI. You’re also really digging into your current ways of thinking, and mindsets, and everything and productivity, and all the news, and it’s all just crazy, right? But what’s on the end is go be an extreme human.

Get offline, touch grass, hug people, hold hands walk in the woods, put your toes in the sand and in the ocean. And on the other end, be like Chris, who n- who never thought he would code before and start coding apps and stuff with AI, right? Like, why not? Do the extremes. The middle is danger zone.

So w- if you’re having an immune system response with disruption, I would encourage to, you to push out both directions. Be more human, and be more leaning into technology and innovation for good with ethics. So that’s it for this LMScast episode. Emily, thank you for coming on.

In the spirit of being more human, if you want an awesome human on your team, I would encourage you to reach out to Emily at wpcourseguide.com. ‘Cause for one, you’re an awesome human. Two, you’re awesome with technology. You’re on the b- you’re on both sides of the barbell, and you’re delivering that to the people that you work with, which is amazing.

Thank you. So go check out Emily at WP Course Guide. Any final words or any other ways people can connect with you? 

Emily Middleton: No. That’s the best thing, wpcourseguide.com. 

Chris Badgett: All right. Thank you for coming back on the show. And Emily and I have worked together for a long time. It’s great to be with you on the journey.

Reach out to her. She’s a great resource if you’re looking to connect, and we hope you have a great rest of your day. 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.