This Week in WordPress #232

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress. Episode number 232 entitled Alexa Make Us Sustainable. It was recorded on Monday, the 28th of November, 2022. My name's Nathan Wrigley, and today I'm joined by three very special guests. First of all, we have Bob WP or Bob Dunn, as we better know him. We also have Lindsay.

And James Guru, we're here to talk about WordPress and there's an awful lot to talk about. WordPress is discontinuing upgrades for anything prior to WordPress four. So if you are on those older versions of WordPress, you need to get that sorted. We have a very long conversation all about what's sustainability in WordPress.

Could mean that might touch on things like the carbon footprint of websites, but also more broadly about the community and the kind of events that we want to attend. The state of the word is happening in December, and you can find out where you can see that. We also have a new website for the developer docs [email protected].

We also, on that site, have a page written by Justin Tadlock about Pattern First Mindset. We delve into that very briefly, and then towards the end we have a long conversation about the fed averse masteron and all of those things that everybody seems to be talking about at the moment, and then finishing off about Alexa and about the gigantic amount of money it is not making each year. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress.

This episode of the WP Builds podcast is brought to you by GoDaddy Pro, the home of manage WordPress hosting that includes free domain SSL and 24 7 support. Bundle that with The Hub by GoDaddy Pro to unlock more free benefits to manage multiple sites in one place, invoice clients, and get 30% of new purchases. Find out more at go.me/WPBuilds.

Hello. Good afternoon, good evening. Good morning. There are, Others, I'm sure, but good something. It's episode number 232 of this week in WordPress. Very nice to have you with us if you're joining us live. That's really appreciated. If you're listening to this on the audio afterwards, thank you for doing that.

If you want to make a comment during the course of this show, and hopefully you do, then there's a couple of quick ways to do that. If you're over on our WP Builds live page, that's over at WP Builds.com/live. You'll need to be logged into Google because it's YouTube comments, and if you are over in our Facebook group or Facebook page, you'll need to go for one further little step.

You'll need to go to chat.restream.io. Click the link in the message at the top of the post and chat.restream.io/fb, and that will take you to our platform, which is Restream, and over there, you can then authorize it to send us your picture. And your name and so on and so forth. You can remain anonymous if you like.

That's fine. But keep it clean is all I'd say. I don't want any incendiary bombs landing during this episode, but please feel free to go and share it. And if you wanna tell us where you are, that'd be very nice. Whilst you decide whether you want to make any comments or not. I will introduce today's guests.

Bob, Don. If you don't know Bob, he's there. That's Bob. How are you doing?

[00:03:45] Bob Dunn: Hey, I'm doing good, Nathan.

[00:03:47] Nathan Wrigley: It always sounds so good. You sound familiar though. There's this podcast that I occasionally listen to. It's not a very good one. And there's a couple of guys. sound a lot like you and me. I'm not saying anymore, but yeah, it is.

It is spooky. It's weird. Yeah, it is spooky. Yeah, cuz they're also English and American, which is quite weird. Let's introduce Bob properly. By the way, Bob has decided that he wants to come on the show far more often. The reason for that is I wrestled him to the ground at Word Camp in US and threatened his life as he decided to come on more.

And so he is coming on as a co-host on a much more frequent basis. So I am. So pleased about that's really great. But if you don't know Bob Don, aka Bob WP loves building community through the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystem. He thrives on connecting people, growing partnerships, elevating voices, and occasionally discussing.

Read that bit before now. Discussing world domination with Nathan. Okay. should have, I should have read that. That's very good. So that's Bob. There he is. Where are you at the minute, Bob? I know that you're moving to Portugal, but not yet.

[00:04:58] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I'm still on the Washington coast, so it's I'm just counting down the days to wait for our visa to be approved.

[00:05:06] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Oh, good luck with that. I hope that all comes. Thanks. And for the first time on this show, we've got Lindsay Miller. Hello Lindsay. Hi.

[00:05:16] Lindsey Miller: I'm so happy to be here finally with the Cool Kids.

[00:05:19] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, . I joined. Click the wrong button about 10 minutes ago when you joined. But it's a real pleasure. It's lovely having new faces.

We hope that you come back. We hope that, you enjoy it enough that you want to come back. Lindsay is well, when she's not traveling the world with her partner and two tiny humans or helping save the world, she can be found creating magic for clients at her business content journey or over on Slack at post status.

She's a native, I don't know how to say this. I'm gonna give it a go Oklahoman. I can't wait. That's perfect. Yeah, she's a native Oklahoman, a former Ty girl she put in brackets. I know, right? Is that sorority? That's another word, which isn't in our Lexi.

[00:06:01] Lindsey Miller: Yeah, it, yeah, we, I was actually taking the kids by the university over the weekend we went to a volleyball game and showing in the sorority houses and trying to explain it.

And there's, there really isn't even a translation to anyone.

[00:06:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. It's got something to do with the university, though. It's probably just, it's

[00:06:17] Lindsey Miller: a, it's a club. It's a club at the university.

[00:06:20] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Okay. Thank you. Anyway, I failed to finish your introduction. She's also a whiskey enthusiast and her old fashions are legendary whiskey like a real dev devote t.

Yes,

[00:06:33] Lindsey Miller: I love whiskeys and SCOs and all that good stuff, so

[00:06:37] Nathan Wrigley: yeah, that's kinda nice. Thank you. Anyway, thank you for joining us. We'll we'll devote you to our other whiskey based podcast and you can that as well.

Yeah, , it's definitely an element of drinking in there somewhere. And then finally, thank you so much, joined by James Shau. How you doing James? I am doing well. How are you doing? Yeah really nice. I gotta say, I love the setup you've got going on there. Really nice audio and a beautiful look at it.

Look at the background that he's got. That's fabulous. James has been part of the WordPress community for over a decade. He's been an agency owner, product developer, marketplace employee community Wrangler, and is now a blogger and the director of brand and product marketing over at Stellar WP. And did I hear right when you joined the call, you were talking to Lindsay for a minute.

Did you say you're in Costa Rica? Is that.

[00:07:34] James Giroux: No I'm just getting ready to go on holiday to

[00:07:37] Nathan Wrigley: Mexico. Oh, I see. I thought

[00:07:40] James Giroux: at the same time Lindsay's gonna be in custody. Oh, I

[00:07:42] Nathan Wrigley: see. Sorry, I was bit busy. Where are you James then in

[00:07:46] James Giroux: that case? I'm based in Kingston, Ontario,

[00:07:48] Nathan Wrigley: Canada. Okay. All right. Thank you very much.

Thanks for joining us. All of you. If you've put a comment in, I'll try to get to it now very quickly. As always, we're joined by Peter Erso. He always puts a nice cheery comment and usually gives us some weather update, which is lovely. He's in Connecticut, us, where it's currently a pleasant 51 degrees. Oh, check it out.

He's even included The degrees integrate this time. This is awesome.

[00:08:12] James Giroux: Yeah, I can understand what the weather is. That's

[00:08:15] Nathan Wrigley: amazing. Do you have degrees centered in Canada? We do, yes. Well done, . That's all I'm saying. It just makes no sense to me, Fahrenheit at all. It's 11 degrees centigrade over there, partly under partly cloudy skies.

This is brilliant weekly weather update from Peter, and we've got Rob Cairns joining us. You let Bob back and I know, like I said, I encouraged him with violence. We also have, oh yeah. Hi Lindsay, James and Nathan as well. And James. He says he's in the Toronto area and get down your way quite a lot.

Oh, there you go. You guys should say hi at some point. For coffee. Yeah. Nice. Okay, let's get stuck into the word pressy. Bits and pieces for this week. She, first of all, a couple of bits of blatant self-promotion. I hope you don't mind. It won't take me long. Firstly, this is our website. There's a sign up form there if you want to keep updated with all the bits and pieces that we do, stick your email address in there and then click subscribe and we'll send you two emails a week when we've produced new content.

Nothing more. So it's not that. Too bad. This is our Black Friday deals page. It's over at WP Builds.com/black. As of this moment, it's got 270 deals on it, I suspect in about, I don't know, 12 hours time. It'll have gone down to about 80 or 90, something like that. There's a lot that are disappearing. So if you are in the space for WordPress products and various bits and pieces, and check this out as if this wasn't cool.

Look over our little sponsor there, right at the top. We've got Stellar WP supporting this page. Thank you. Also, gravity Forms Manage w sorry, WP Manage and Ninja. We've got WS form goad Pro and WP Engine. They all helped support and put this page live. If you go past there, you can click this little search and filter bottom, and then you can hone down a little bit on what it is that you might want to.

See if there's anything there of interest. And if there is, you've probably got a little bit of time. Some of the deals go right through the middle of December, some of them actually right into January. I don't quite know how they're naming themselves Black Friday, but there you go. So there's that WP Builds.com/black.

I am gonna take my screen off and I'm gonna ask the question about Black Friday. Black Friday is been, it's gone. Did you get sucked in? Let's start with Bob.

[00:10:42] Bob Dunn: Yeah, I did. Actually I got a little sucked in. I, it was like I needed a couple SaaS things, so that was nice. I didn't buy anything extra.

And then we bought some extra lugg.

[00:10:57] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, you on, you got on a trip something.

[00:10:59] Bob Dunn: When we move, we're not taking anything with us except about eight or 10 suitcases. So I got on and found some extra kind of temporary bags and some stuff so yeah. So it was nice. I normally don't, spend a lot on that day.

Yeah. But it seemed like it was worth checking it out and stuff,

[00:11:20] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. I'm set. That's cool. Lindsay.

I

[00:11:24] Lindsey Miller: did a little bit, I had my eye on some stuff and we also offered our. Black Friday deal from content journey. So that was interesting to watch that as like a service based offer and what that would look like in the ecosystem too.

But yeah, there were a couple of products that we use that I like at our agency that I purchased previously that were renewing. So I was like, oh, okay, so I can wait a week and renew and take advantage cuz I had looked at the pages that were out there and so I was a little meticulous about that.

And then of course some things for the family that I was like new. I had Christmas coming up and trying to get that out there. Yeah, I tried to take advantage.

[00:12:09] Nathan Wrigley: Can I ask if you are willing and you are more than happy to decline to answer this question, how did it go with the Black Friday for your own product content journey?

How did that, was that something you'll, you've enjoyed and you'll do again? Or it was like, no, never doing that again.

[00:12:25] Lindsey Miller: I would do it again. It was a good test. So for us, we have a lot of services that we provide that we don't talk about because usually there are things that we just do for existing clients.

And so it was an opportunity to help us do a few things. One of like talk about this other service we do. And then secondly, just. I don't know, tell people about it in the year strong. Try to get a few more people in to start the year off. So I would do it again. And it was a good test of our pricing structure too, to be honest.

Nice. Yeah. Of just putting that out there and see how people responded. So Yeah. Yeah, I would do it. And I think we may do it again, like with emails or something else later. Okay. And like first or second quarter next year and

[00:13:10] Nathan Wrigley: do it again. Yeah. Oh, thank you. That's really interesting. And James, from the Stella side, how, or let's deal with you personally first.

Did you get sucked in on anything?

[00:13:23] James Giroux: I'm in the interesting position being in Canada where our Thanksgiving's actually in. Not in November. So we've already done all of our Thanksgiving stuff and then Black Friday is this big American thing, but all of the Canadian retailers get involved and start offering their own Black Friday things.

So it very much parallels. I just think the international buying power of that one day, and it's just it's the psychology of it as a marketer is really interesting to, to sit back and analyze. When you look at literally, around most of the English speaking world, you've got everyone primed and ready to go for this one day of the year where everyone comes with their wallet's open, ready to buy.

So it's a really interesting thing to watch as a marketer. On the stellar side, it was great. So far I've been looking at the numbers coming in and the goals that we have, and even with the economy being what it is, I think we're all pleasantly surprised by how robust Black Friday has been for us.

So very exciting. But

[00:14:31] Nathan Wrigley: the one, one thing that I always find curious is, let's say that you've got a subscription service. So you've got a, I don't know, one of your plugins give or something like that. And if a lot of people buy it on the Black Friday Day, and Lindsay just alluded to this, you next year you get so close, you're within three or four days of that renewal period.

Does it do you have any insight into whether or not you basically are just doing a perpetual Black Friday deal for customers every year and they stick, or do they then go back typically onto the normal pricing? The reason I'm asking is cuz if you time it right and black Friday falls reasonably close each year, you could end up just having.

Cut price customers all year, and that could, I don't know, skew the whole sales process for you. I can give you some

[00:15:19] James Giroux: of my own personal insight yeah. Into that as a marketer. So there's a couple different ways to do that. I think the first thing is at least a, probably the ideal way to do it is it's geared toward new customers and new customer acquisitions.

So a new license gets you a new discount. If you're renewing, typically you're renewing at full price. Sometimes as engine piece you can offer maybe a secondary discount, right? So it's maybe not the full amount, but it's like a secondary amount depending on the partnerships that you have or the ecosystem that you're creating.

I think of a company like Gravity Forms for example, where they have a whole bunch of. Third party certified add-ons that offer deals as well. So perhaps your second year is an opportunity to take advantage of deals from the wider ecosystem to extend the functionality of your core plugin.

Learn Dash would be another example of a plugin where you could do that. Yeah, looking for different ways to add value in a year over year. Black Friday type experience I think works well for product companies.

[00:16:33] Bob Dunn: Yeah. Nathan, I was just gonna, I was just gonna add Nathan cuz I had a whole a boatload of stuff renew.

Obviously I bought it last because it was, for me, it was when I redesigned, had my site redesigned. It was right before it was in October. So then when I bought my own license for everything, I did it Black Friday and I saw a mix of everything. I saw just some usual, here's your renewal. Full price.

Somebody, I can't, I'm not gonna mention who, but somebody gave me a renewal and it was comparable to the Black Friday price. It was real close. And then a couple of them do have, in a built in, like James said, a price that's lower when you renew, which gives you some loyalty, okay, you're renewing and stuff.

So it was a mixed bag for me. I had 'em popping in Lyft and Right. It was like, my God, I'm spending more money than I thought on Black Friday, unintentionally because, but yeah it's all over the board,

[00:17:33] Nathan Wrigley: but here's a couple of things. Firstly, I bought a load of Google stuff like, the Google Home devices.

I bought a bunch of those. And the speakers, I really like the speakers cuz we've got this, we've got this idea that we want to flood the house with the exact same song. I dunno why, but we want every room to play the same music at the same time. I just think that's a stupid idea, but we wanna do it. And so we keep periodically buying speakers and connecting them to the network and it's quite nice.

It's quite a nice effect when the whole house is full of the exact same sound. So that was what I bought, but here's a couple of observations for me. Yes, Bob. Firstly, my inbox was for. Full of renewals. So it's pretty obvious that I've totally given into the whole Black Friday thing over the years. And secondly, it was quite interesting what Renewed without telling me.

So the I, I have a really interesting relationship now in my head with companies who renewed and didn't tell me, and I'm not ticked off about it, but it definitely creates a little bit of bad blood, if it's oh, that missed. Done. Okay. I've got another year of it and I, but I would like to have thought about whether or not that was something I wanted to do.

Yeah.

[00:18:44] Bob Dunn: I got a couple that were, a couple that gave a week before, and then I had some that just sent and said, Hey, it's renewed. It's oh okay. Then in

[00:18:54] Nathan Wrigley: my case it was in one case it was just through stripes. Stripe was the way that I knew it didn't come from the company itself.

So I dunno if that's, I dunno whether odd not that's weird or it's just an observation. Yeah. In the UK we've totally bought into the whole Black Friday thing. Everything is Black Friday. It's totally massive. And I feel like the nation's combined wallet's just empty on that day. It's yeah, there you go.

Retailers have all the cash and then we all regret it on, Saturday morning, wake up, think, did I really need that thing? But here we go.

[00:19:28] James Giroux: Traditionally in Commonwealth countries, I think Boxing Day the day after Christmas has been our version of Black Friday. So I know in Canada that's the typical retail discount day and everyone queues up at the shops in the morning.

Yeah. To be first in line.

[00:19:44] Nathan Wrigley: So do you do Boxing Day? Is that even on the calendar? Bob and Lindsay in the us? Is that a day? Okay, so in, in on the 26. Oh, that's interesting. I thought that was international. Oh, wow. Okay. So yeah, in Canada, maybe it's Commonwealth and the uk it's, if you buy a printed calendar it's 100% guaranteed to say Christmas Day 25th, boxing Day 26.

That's just what it's called. And it was when all the sales came. And it was after Christmas. The idea being that there would be this sudden sort of pandemonium to go out and buy things with probably money that you received on Christmas Day potentially, or just people saving up through Christmas, being a little bit more penny pinching, knowing that if they could steal themselves for an extra 24 hours, they could probably go and pick up the things.

But the crazy thing about that was it always ended up with like cues outside the stores and then this mastro of chaos when the doors opened and literally people were falling over themselves to buy tellies, and fights would break out over. Toilet roll, goodness knows what but Black Fridays now replace that and we all do it online.

We just fight online instead, which is, yeah, there you go. But

[00:20:54] Lindsey Miller: Bob and I are in the US like we're probably, there's consumerism and fighting that's happening all the time. Like give it a lovely name like Boxing Day. That's sounds

[00:21:03] Nathan Wrigley: awesome. Yeah. I dunno why it was called Boxing Day, but for us it's like a Tuesday

Yeah. I dunno why it was called Boxing Day. I presume it's got something to do with actual physical boxes one, but I really don't know. Just a couple of comments quickly. Hi Elliot. Elliot lives just down the road from me. Very nice to see you. Dennis Donan, he's the the founder of Main WP. He says he's bought a bunch of total of toys.

That's nice. That's a nice thing to spend on, isn't it? Pete Everett from Sheffield in the uk. Hello. He says nine degrees and the sun is finally shining. Oh, he is giving us a weather update. as well. Yeah, we definitely have sun here. I'm

[00:21:40] James Giroux: assuming nine degrees is Celsius, so

[00:21:42] Nathan Wrigley: what's I'm, yeah. Yeah. I'm hoping it's Celsius.

Happy Monday says Michelle Frache. That's really nice. And Peter on message here, he says, I appreciate discounts on renewals even on over initial deals. It makes the original purchase more attractive and then renewal decision easy. I won't, he, it won't need much help over time, so I'm a chapter to, sorry.

A cheaper to keep. Yeah. I'm a total sucker for that. If I read that in the marketing, if I. If I pay a hundred percent today and I see 30% off next year, that really puts me in a good mood. I'm totally more willing to buy if I see that thing and I, why wouldn't the company do that?

It's much harder to convert existing, sorry, brand new users than it is to keep existing ones. And Michelle Frache says, years ago I got a lifetime reveal from elegant themes. I still use it. I've never used support. Nice. That's cool. Okay, let's go onto the word pressy stuff, shall we? Let's share the screen and crack on with.

Was this the first one? No, I don't feel like it was. I think I've dropped an article somewhere. Oh, no, this is, that's fine. This is everyone Make WordPress dot org, make wordpress.org. It's a piece entitled What's New in Gutenberg 14.6. I'll just go through the bullet point items here. As the block editor, AKA Gutenberg, is constantly going through change.

It's really different than it was just a few years ago, and I think a couple of these are really nice. I won't mention them all because some of them are just very trivial and probably really edge case. But there's an variation picker for the group block placeholders. So now if you throw a group blocking, you can see it on the screen, you now get some options for what that group block should.

Right away. Two columns or split horizontally or something like that. You've seen this in products like, oh, I don't know, cadence and so on for ages, but now it's in there. The ability to change your navigation is significantly improved. I think this adds a list based editing experience.

So imagine a list in the WordPress block editor. You can see it on the screen if I press plan this video. But essentially you get a list and it looks in the navigation panel. It looks just like you would see a normal list in the WordPress block editor. Really. And you can drag things up and down, indent them, make them children, make them parents, and so on.

So I think that's really nice that now makes it as good as I want it to be. I can't see anything that I'm missing from that Now. You can hide the block toolbar when space thing visual. Is shown, that's when you're just trying to figure out what will this look like on this wi screen. The editor panel on the right hand side, the just collapses, which is strange on this screenshot, it doesn't really show that.

But and then there's a few various other bits and pieces. I'm gonna hand it to you three. I dunno if anybody's got anything to say. Feel free to just jump in, crosstalk each other. I don't mind. But if any of you have got anything about that, say it now or I'll move.

I

[00:24:54] Lindsey Miller: don't know. I love Gutenberg. I'm a huge fan. I love the new additions. I love whenever they're making changes to it. We use Cadence a lot at Content Journey. And and teaching that to people who have been used to classic as soon as they get in there is, for content creators has been really nice.

And so seeing these features is you were showing them earlier even. I think it just makes it a lot more user friendly. Especially when we look across other CMSs. I like that we're adding it and they're making it easier for. Yeah,

[00:25:26] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like that navigation one especially just makes it like what it should be.

Whereas before it was difficult to say the least. That just feels like the UI that I would've hoped for. There's probably some things that are better. One thing that I forgot to mention that was a little bit further down the article, there is an auto generating color palette feature where you can click a button and it will just come up with a, there's an algorithm and I dunno what that algorithm's tuned towards, but it will just come up with a color palette for you.

And I thought that was a nifty creation as well, cuz I, I go to sites like cooler all the time and just click the randomized button and just to see what comes. And so having that actually built in and see how it looks on the site, that's fun as well. James, Bob, anything?

[00:26:10] Bob Dunn: No I just sympathize with anybody that's trying to keep up with Gutenberg tutorials.

Yeah. Yeah. Video

[00:26:18] Nathan Wrigley: tutorials. Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot. Okay. In which case we'll go on, right? This next piece, this is, I guess this probably isn't important to our audience so much, but it's an important piece of news for the word, the WordPress ecosystem. The final release of WordPress 3.7, all the way up to four is happening in just a couple of days time.

That is to say that WordPress 3.7, all the way through WordPress 4.0 will no longer be updated. So for most people, let's hope you're not anywhere near those versions of WordPress at this point. But if you, are, you really. Sort your stuff out and get yourself on a more recent version of WordPress. The real implication of this is that because it's not getting updates, it won't be patched.

And so if there's some security vulnerability in there and there will be this is potentially a problem. So there will be a big message within the ui and I think in most cases, people want there to be less messaging. But this is good. The message is basically gonna say, sort it out.

This is gonna stop being updated and it's really a security thing. You can't keep going back and supporting WordPress 1.2, WordPress 2.3, and so on. There's just too much legacy there and especially with things, the new performance team and things like that, it must be hard even trying to keep that stuff up.

So get yourself updated. Again, up to you if you want to talk, but I don't think there's probably too much to discuss in there. It's just an interesting little point. If you've got any client websites on 'em, Get them off it. Okay. I will go to this one now. I'm hoping that we want to get deep into this conversation.

I think I genuinely think this is fascinating and I am so guilty of this. We delved into it a little bit, tiny little bit last week and decided I wanted to go into it much more deeply this week cuz of a few pieces that were written. I'm just gonna show you the pages to begin with and then you can go either Google them, go and find them, or you can wait till the show notes get published tomorrow because they're all about broadly the same thing.

The first one is on a the whole grain digital.com website and it's called What would a Sustainable WordPress Community look like. The next one is [email protected], and this is a very minimal site and I would encourage you to have a look at this cuz it gives you a real sort of slideshow view of the.

Enterprise. We've also got an episode that I recorded with Hannah Smith from the Green Web Foundation. That was that came out this week, and also Bob did an episode, but a while ago now in March. So he's way ahead of the curve. He's six to eight months ahead of me and getting on the bandwagon here called Sustainable Web Design Now and in the future with Tom Greenwood.

The whole point of this is, We as a WordPress community, we're directly involved with plugging things into the internet. We're consuming power. We're encouraging people to come to our websites and we totally have an impact. Now, when I was talking to Hannah on my podcast episode, I made the point that, and I'm sure this, I bet this is the same for so many people, I just don't equate my use of the internet with the environment and the damage that it's causing.

I just see, there it is, it's a phone. It's like clean and shiny. I don't even allow it to get dusty cuz it's picked up that frequently. If anything gets spilled on it, it gets a polished, my computer's shiny. The, it's all, it's sleek. It's just nice and sleek. Whereas the thing that I said last week, the.

There's no way if you say to me, go round the back of the car, I'm just about to start it and stick your mouth around the exhaust and just breathe deeply a bit. I'm not gonna do it because I've connected the dots there. The car is horrific for the environment and so I have my head around that.

But the internet not so much. And I wondered what you guys thought about this, whether this is anything that you care about, whether this is something that you want to care about but haven't. And yeah, let's just open up a discussion and see where it goes. So anybody chip in and let's see where the conversation takes us.

[00:30:45] Bob Dunn: Yeah, when I did the interview or was at least listened to it back in March, it, yeah, it was surprising cuz I, I, a lot of stuff I hadn't known and the two things that occurred to me right when I did that was. Adapting this whole idea. It's look how long like accessibility and things have taken in the industry to click with people, this is important.

This is something we're gonna have to do. And I also think it wades into that space of yeah, a lot of people are like, oh yeah, I'm still going to drive my car. It's really not that big of a deal. It's, I'm still gonna do this. It's not that big of a deal to the environment. So it's gonna be, I think it's, yeah, I think it's eyeopening is what I found.

Yeah. And I think that it's going to, it'll probably be like those, it'll be a slow adaptation of it, people are going to, like you said, how can you look at your computer? It's a real weird thing to fathom in your mind that this is doing something like I think he, in the podcast he was comparing it to Jet Flying, with the admissions it sends off and stuff, and it's people Yeah.

My computer's doing that. Yeah. Tell me more. So it is a big, huge education process that I think is gonna be needed. And the other interesting thing is, somebody the other day heard the talk about that. In fact, I know that wordpress.org has started a channel just on sustainability, and I've been following that and. What a lot of people jumped on right away is, oh, they're talking about sustaining sustainability and WordPress. Does that mean financially through products? How we can make a living. So everybody's been talking about that sustaining sustainability in WordPress for quite a while, and now there's sustainability and WordPress.

Again, but a totally different subject. So it's, there's a lot of things that are gonna have to get sorted out and a lot of education, but I think it's definitely worth checking into and it's anybody that hasn't checked into it, I think it's gonna be an

[00:33:09] Nathan Wrigley: eyeopener. Here's here's something which Hannah said, and forgive me, Hannah, if I've got this number wrong, then it's my fault and not yours.

I think that she said that the internet would be the seventh biggest country if it were a nation in terms of its polluting potential. And when you actually say it like that and you draw, if you imagine the seven biggest polluters and you go down, and number eight it says internet.

That suddenly makes it feel really different. And of course at the minute, all of those countries are probably trying, I dunno how successful each country is, but they're trying to do things to bring down that this is completely a deregulated country, if you like. So country with no jurisdiction at all.

So you can imagine in a couple of years if those countries start to bring their emissions down and the internet just doesn't do anything, maybe it rises to six or five or whatever it may be anyway. Also, I'm pretty sure she said that the internet produces more carbon than the aviation industry.

And I've always got in my head that the, a aviation industry is the supremely bad actor on the planet. And the internet is worse, she said. So I'm finished. You guys carry on. James or Lindsay, if you got.

[00:34:30] Lindsey Miller: I actually heard Hannah say that stat in a talk that she gave. I can't remember which WordPress thing it was, and it was astounding to me as well.

Cheryl and Mike Han, who run cause labs, they're, they went through like the certification process and became a B Corp. And I've learned so much from them. And like Bob was talking about in both of you, did this education piece. I think one of the questions you asked Nathan is do we care about it or should we I think it's something I need to care about and I do care about.

And like you said, it's easy for me to say how do I drive my car less or how do I switch to more efficiencies at home and make an impact? But I didn't know that leaving a bunch of tabs open was also incredibly inefficient for the environment and was making a difference or how I'm sending out an email or how many images I'm putting in that email.

And I, my love of gies and my Slack channel, things like that, like I'm so guilty of pollution with all of my gifties. Not to make light of that, but all of. Adds up exponentially across all of our gorgeous machines that we take such great care of. Cause I have tabs open on my cell phone. I have tabs open on my computer and probably on my iPad too, right?

And all of that is just sitting there doing, the polluting work, right? It's using energy. And that exponential impact it really. Incomprehensible, I think, and how we can, we, like we are all people who are making, living using the internet. So we want it and we need it, but at the same time, if we want to take care of our planet and have it here for future generations or even for us whenever we're still here in 50 years then we have to make, changes as we can and not just rely on everybody else to do that.

[00:36:30] Nathan Wrigley: So it's kinda like the, sorry, record by no, go ahead. I was just gonna say, it's like death by a thousand paper cutts, isn't it? Because my contribution feels so teeny tiny that I feel almost It's all right. I'll just scroll a bit. Take an example where you lose an hour on Facebook where you just go down a rabbit hole and you lose an hour on Facebook.

There's no way I'm gonna go out for an hour's drive and I'm not suggesting the two are equivalent, but you take my point. I would quite happily burn the carbon scrolling through Facebook because I don't see the connection. But if you said, just go out and drive, just drive for no purpose at all. And so there is a bit of me which wonders if A, we need to consume less.

And I made this point to Hannah because that was what I thought the whole debate was about. I thought it was, we need to. Make everything more efficient, do less, consume less. And she was no, that's not really what we're trying to say. She was trying to be much more sanguine about it. Her point was more, we can still have the nice shiny things.

We can still enjoy the beautiful creation that we've created this internet, but we need to be savvy about it. We need to be better at it. We need to reduce what is being output. And we'll show that some of those ideas on the screen in a minute. But I realize, James, I've not even allowed you to get into this, and I'm sorry.

[00:37:56] James Giroux: Oh, no worries. Happy to hear everyone's thoughts. I think everyone's pointed out education and I think it's like awareness. I think of now when I go to book a flight, I get a carbon percentage or a carbon footprint that's shown to me every time I book a flight. So I know what my impact is every time I do that.

And I wonder if there's opportunity within the WordPress ecosystem for us to be much more upfront about the carbon impact of the events we're running of, what's the carbon impact of the latest build of WordPress, right? Or the latest core release of WordPress going to be what's the reduction or what kind of targets are we setting?

We're not having those conversations that I know of at a broad level because we don't actually have an understanding of the impact. So I. I think as we've discussed, education and awareness is probably the first peg, right? Like just even being aware of the carbon impact of one plugin versus another plugin, that'd be really interesting to explore

[00:39:10] Nathan Wrigley: that.

So I know your thing, your bag is marketing. That really does feel like an interest. Marketing piece, doesn't it? So let's say I'm a freelancer and I'm going out making WordPress websites. If I could get some sort of bonafide credential from, I, I don't know where I would get this. I presume no place, no vendor provides this at the moment, but if I could demonstrate categorically, provably that I was endeavoring to make a site ecologically friendly, sustainable, I was reducing the impact.

I wonder how many people would take that as a metric in the buying decision. Choosing me over another agency. I can't see it hurting, but I wonder how persuasive it is. It would, it persuade me. I think it would if I could see that, it's comparable on price, but this guy's talking about the environment.

I like that. I think, what do you think?

Oh, that's where we're

[00:40:11] James Giroux: moving, right? As, as a society as a globe we're becoming much more conscious of the fact that our planet hurts when we don't take care of it. So the more we can do to not hurt it, I think it's gonna become more and more part of our decision making. We already see it.

Even just looking at green tech and green and the green industry, right? That's, there's growing cloud there, there's growing opportunity. So ev and even as Lindsay was saying you think of B Corp certification as companies are looking to be purpose and profit in their approach to the way they operate.

Or sustainability forward companies or sustainability forward thinking is gonna be much more important, even for their own certification within B Corp or other organizations. Or you think of like lead scoring for buildings, right? We're gonna have that at a corporate level. That's gonna become important for companies as legislation comes in to regulate that.

So I don't think we're far off, at least in Europe as a, as maybe a beach head there to think about environmental impact of all the things that impact our business. Yeah. It's,

[00:41:33] Nathan Wrigley: can I ask a question? Cause both you, both Lindsay and James have used the word B Corp and I don't know what that is. Is that like a classification you've achieved a certain standard in What does it mean really?

[00:41:47] James Giroux: I can explain it, but Lindsay, do you know, go forward. Yeah,

[00:41:51] Lindsey Miller: go ahead James. You were

[00:41:52] James Giroux: talking. Okay. Oh yeah. So I can speak about it from personal experience. Most people may not know, but in Vato which is part of the WordPress ecosystem is a certified B Corp. And what it is it's a series of benchmarks that you have to meet across a variety of different areas.

And one of those areas is environmental sustainability. And you score yourself and then you submit those scores to the B Corp certifying body and it's an international body. And they have certain requirements. Things like public or public impact statements would be an example. And you'll see that from Invato if you go to lovato's website that every year they have to talk.

What they're doing from a sustainability point of view, from a community advancement point of view to not just be about profits, but to also be about purpose. And so it's a really neat way of getting a better balance there between like just pure commercial interest and like the responsibility we have to our world as well.

So it's worth looking into I think even actually whole Grain Digital is a where this article is coming from is a B Corp. So you can click on the B Corp link and take a look there. Okay. At yeah, what it means.

[00:43:14] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's really interesting. Yeah. Thank you. A couple of things.

Firstly, at the risk of sounding disingenuous I do fully get the foot in mouth moment. Here we are talking about this. On the internet do I dunno what to say about that, but Hannah's point made me feel like, we can have some of these shiny things. Here's an idea, which I think might be interesting.

What if say Chrome or Google or let's say browser vendor, what if they built like a think into the browser that we're using, which gave you some metrics about this. So it cuz be, if you think about Lighthouse, it's making all sorts of computations about how long things are taking to load call web vitals and all this kind of stuff.

Now, the metrics might not be perfect, but at least they would give you some indication of what's flying across the wire and point that towards the users of websites. And in that way maybe outrage is the wrong word, we don't wanna create outrage, but at least people would see I've got the red.

Symbol on, I dunno, WP Builds.com, but if I go over to do the woo.io, it's all green. Because they've done the work at optimizing the images, they've done the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in some, so there's like a public shaming aspect to that, but also in the word press backend, so that there was some equivalent.

We talked very briefly about this last week so that you could yeah, have a similar experience if you're creating a page and editing a page and putting a video on there, and it all starts to add up. And eventually you get like the Yoast traffic light score thing saying, this page is now, sorry guys.

You're in the red. The browsers are gonna show this as a nasty page, not a good page. So there's just some thoughts that I raised last week. Yeah, I

[00:45:04] Bob Dunn: think that the public shaming, it's no different than you really think of the environmental stuff that's going on now. We all know what cars do, what you know, other stuff does.

So if you take it to the internet and you're showing people whether through the products or through the browsers that you know this and maybe it's optional, maybe you don't have to see that. Whatever the case is, it's just gonna be like the public's doing with any environmental thing right now. There's going to be a chunk of people that really give a damn and there's gonna be a chunk of people that just say, oh yeah, whatever.

But that chunk of people to give a damn would probably be enough to impact what's going

[00:45:44] Nathan Wrigley: on. Yeah. But also imagine that Google took a position on this and I'm, please, I'm not advocating this cuz I know the backlash that we, that Google would definitely face, but imagine if a metric. Was that was carbon.

It's your page is really awful. You are just gonna sink lower down. Can you imagine how quick we'd all change if, it'd be like within a month we'd all be worrying about it. There'd be summits and podcast episodes made about it. We'd all be upskilling ourselves. Pretty done quickly as a few comments come in, which I think would be nice to show here.

First of all, mark west Guard from WS form. Thank you, mark. Join us. Data center pollution is expected to grow 14% of the world's carbon emissions to grow two 14% of the world's carbon emissions as much as the United States. Ah, Is that, is really, is that right? As much as the United States of America by 2040 blam neck mark?

If that's true that's much worse than I'd actually feared. That's astonishing. Thank you for that. Mark Marcus Barnett from GoDaddy. There's a bit of an addiction mentality too. I think. I know soda is bad for me, but I drink it because I really enjoy it. It's hard to disconnect for lengthy periods of time.

Yeah. We have been in, like before social, I was on the internet for work and buying stuff or Google searching. Now I'm just. Consuming carbon just for kicks, really. And as is everybody essentially watching this. Sorry. And then he also goes on to say, plus we as people tend to be okay with consequences far enough into the future, will deal with the problem when it gets here.

Like my inevitable soda health complications. Yeah. I feel the prism of children. Having a family really changed that metric for me as soon as my kids came along. There was an awful lot of stuff that made me feel a bit different about the environmental debate. Yeah. Thank you Marcus, for those comments and thank you.

Mark as well. I'm gonna put the screen back on and just show, go through these articles because what we're not saying, or sorry, what the people who've written these posts are not saying is, here's the answers guys. Here's what we need to do. We're far from the answers. This is very much, God, we've got a problem.

How are we gonna fix it? What at all can we do? So I'll, like I said, I'll link to this in the show notes, but whole Grain Digital are basically saying, we need to collaborate with other, we've got the technology and so on and so forth. We need to maybe cut down on things like event use.

I thought this was really interesting because I know I attend WordPress events. Do we need swag? Do we need to go to events that are far away and therefore use aviation? And I know that it's not necessarily connected, but the community, the WordPress community, this is not just about the bits flying across the internet avoid swag, serve, plant-based food, even, were some suggestions there.

And then this piece, which is what could the sustainability initiative for WordPress be like? They're just trying to lay out what the ideas might be. And they're very much saying that it's an idea that there's no sort of absolute runaway targets here, but they're saying, first of all, take it as red that the environment is changing.

If you don't believe that. Then, okay. I haven't even got anything to say to you. I think we just have to assume that's true and then put all your politics away. Let's just see what we can do. And these are the four areas that they, that this project thinks it might be possible to work in. The community Collaboration sustainability fund, that's quite an interesting one.

And a CMS that relies on sustainability. So the first one our community knows about digital sustainability, I'm just gonna quote cause I like this page. Free accessible education from trusted sources enables the community to learn about the broad, often complex subject of digital sustainability. So basically, More education and there's a link there to digital college, to Iog.

I confess I haven't clicked on that link, so I dunno where it goes. Number two, collaborate and gather sustainably. The way our community works together online or in real life are sustainable by default. Our core tools are chosen because they meet sustainability guidelines. Number three is sustainability fund and no barriers to participation for individuals from diverse backgrounds.

So that's a real different part of sustainability that we didn't even get into. And finally, the bit that we've been talking about most a sustainable cms. So WordPress doing its job, cutting down the amount that we do. There was talk in the post that Hannah Smith contributed to that. Wouldn't it be nice to have a default, super lean theme for WordPress?

Anyway, there we go. I've I think I've run my course on that unless you guys have got anything that you think we missed.

[00:50:48] Lindsey Miller: When you said swag though, did anyone see principals? Word camp us. It

[00:50:55] Nathan Wrigley: was coil's. They,

[00:50:56] Lindsey Miller: yeah, they didn't do swag. Yeah. Instead, you got to vote for the charity that you wanted to donate to.

They went, we're gonna, we were gonna spend this amount of money, why don't we donate it? So they chose three or four different places, and your swag was donating to the charity of your choice. And so they ended up donating thousands of dollars at an event that was really, important for them to be at.

But it got people to go over there and be like, oh, I want to go to the place I wanted to go to. And it's brilliant. And I don't think anyone missed having a Pressable t-shirt. And Jessica Prick and the team over there I applaud them for thinking outside of the box and, going right into this sustainability space, but also leaning into just a really creative intelligent marketing tactic at the same time.

, I had people talking about them and knowing that they had their hearts in the right place for the community.

[00:51:55] Nathan Wrigley: As a body of software, there is quite a lot that we can do, isn't there? You mentioned the community there, if we do have a lean default theme, if we cut down the amount of images we use, if we source carbon free, and I really don't know that, what that phrase actually means.

I use it all the time, but I don't really understand it. Carbon free hosting and all of those kind of things. I think there is, I think there is work that we could do and credentials that we could have to keep ourselves in work. We're not trying to get rid of the internet and Michelle, for sure. What a comment.

I love this. How interesting is that once upon a time email was saving trees. That's so true. And we've gone like full circle here. Haven't we Just got down the rabbit hole of the internet when email was saving trees. Like nobody was using mobile phones. Were you? It was like, turn a computer on, do 10 minutes stuff.

Turn it off again. Now it's eight 30 in the morning with your morning coffee. Turn the computer on, go to bed at night. Probably don't turn it off. Maybe do, that's another thing with the hosting, right? You imagine the hosting that you're purchasing my computer when I'm finished here tonight, it's going off.

I'm gonna switch it off and leave it on the desk. My hosting is not that's staying on what's the point of having a website which goes to bed at the same time as me. So anyway, there you go. I think, I

[00:53:20] James Giroux: think there's some interesting things too just on that, that one comment from Michelle of there was a time as well where we used to delete all our emails, right?

Yeah. So they weren't saved. And then goo Google with Gmail came around and said, never delete an email again. We'll keep it forever. Yeah. Yeah. I io right is your photo stream forever. So think about that. Has to live somewhere, has to be stored somewhere, whether that's passive or active storage, it's gotta be maintained. Energy consumption is gonna happen. So our, I wonder here, if our digital need to just keep everything and not get rid of anything right? Is also contributing to this a little bit. I

[00:54:15] Lindsey Miller: did have, my car did not have to delete emails.

[00:54:20] Nathan Wrigley: That's a really interesting thought. Think about it. I have no conception of, I think the only thing which I wanted, in perpetuity was photographs prior to the internet. If I took photographs, that was basically it. Every piece of paper that came through the door nobody recycled anyway.

We were just shoving it all in the bin at the trash. But the photos got kept cuz there was just something wonderful about looking back on your own life and your kids' lives and all that. But now you are right. I'm like habitual in keeping everything now, like nothing is gonna be destroyed. I fully think I could do a better job with that.

So I was talking to somebody a little while ago. I use Evernote. I really like that service and I've totally got into the, if a bank document arrives, I'm gonna photograph it, keep it in Evernote and trash the original, what the actual am I doing there? Just keeping a meaningless document, which I'll never look at again for no good reason.

Yeah, that's a really interesting point. Yeah. Or all those

[00:55:23] Bob Dunn: photos you accidentally took of somebody's foot. Just, oh, I'm not gonna delete it. It's just, it's too much work. So you go through and there're 900 of those.

[00:55:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I've got so many of you, Bob. There's just no point. I know. That's it.

[00:55:37] Bob Dunn: I delete, delete or when

the

[00:55:40] James Giroux: kids, or when the kids take the iPad and decide that, Sesame Street screenshots times a thousand is the most important thing

[00:55:48] Nathan Wrigley: that you have.

Do you know this is a really interesting point as well, and it makes me feel like a bad parent and forgive me for what I'm about to say, but I really don't think I. Done a job of educating my kids about this. They've been born into a world where the internet was always on. We've had like broadband as we call it over here.

I dunno if you call it the same, so a fairly first internet connection from the moment my first child was born. Everything switched on all the time. They, I don't think, I think they're worse at connecting it than I am. And they are the next generation. And I think getting the kids involved with this and explaining, as you just said, don't take a picture on the iPad of something ephemeral on Sesame Street.

Do you really need it? And the answer is no. And I've done none of that. And. I'm gonna well up. No,

[00:56:38] Bob Dunn: our parents. Yeah. And our parents didn't tell us to not drive everywhere, yeah. Same thing. So yeah, it's like we grew up around cars and I walked two blocks, yeah,

[00:56:49] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Okay. There's a few comments coming.

Firstly, Jess Frick in reply to Lindsay, just saying she loves that. I presume it's in reply to that. Oh, no, it looks like it's coming from the. Prior to that so Lindsay mentioned Pressable and their initiative at World Camp us of not giving swag. You put basically little paper dollar bills into a tray, shall we say.

And the more that went into a particular tray that Tray's charity would get the money. And I dunno how that all worked out in the end. Wait, they used paper? Was it 100? Wait, I was just gonna say . It was small bits of paper. So let, yeah. And yeah, they could have survey, couldn't they? You gotta do it somehow.

Yeah, it's a good point. So she says thank you. That's great. Max, hello Max. He says he tried to imagine a world without internet, suddenly was thinking about yellow pages and telephone books. Yeah. I imagine if the internet stopped tomorrow, I genuinely have no idea what my life would look like, particularly because I am online all the time.

It is my job. I suspect that my wife would be way more acclimatized to that sort of normal life, but it would really impact me. Marcus says hosting downtime is now a sustainability feature. Get in. That's right. We have 10% downtime every site. Last week we featured a website in Barcelona that is powered by a solar panel.

And when the website, when the sun doesn't shine, so the sun is charging a battery, when the sun doesn't shine, the battery gets drained, and as soon as the battery's on zero, the server collapses. And the website just goes offline. So the message on the website basically says, this website won't be here possibly next time you come back, this is what we're doing.

And then the sun charges the battery. Once, once there's enough power, the software kicks itself into life. And off we go. It was just an interesting take. They're not, it was a project. They weren't, that wasn't their commercial website. So yeah, hosting as a feature and Peter's saying, it's so complicated.

I'm on the internet all day. But I no longer spend two hours a day commuting to and from work. Okay. Maybe that's a win. Probably is. Yeah. Interesting. . Okay. Lots of nice comments about Marcus's comment about server features as a down. Oh, she says it's recycled paper. There you go. Father, we, yeah, max.

My parents were totally paranoid of the census. Funny how now shared documents on Evernote. Yeah, exactly. It's all changed and then everybody's saying hello to everybody else. Okay.

[00:59:34] James Giroux: I just wanna say before we move off of this, that swag is a really interesting topic, I think for just ongoing conversation because it really is, it's the intersection of sustainability, accessibility, and diversity.

Because when you think about what the traditional swag is, It's carbon heavy. It doesn't work for diverse body types. It often, gets recycled or disposed in ways that has impact around the world. There's just so much conversation around swag. We probably. Can and should have, but

[01:00:12] Nathan Wrigley: Definitely interesting that Lindsay's memory of, one of Lindsay's memories of Word Camp US is that lack of swag.

So that, that's really ingenious. Yeah. I made the mistake going to my first few word camps of doing that thing that you, I would imagine most people do typically is just like you fill the suitcase and then you get home and you filled with what the, what was I even doing? I'll never wear that.

That's not even the right size. That cup is not even, you can't put it through the dishwasher, whatever. You get the point now. Yeah. Some of it

[01:00:46] Bob Dunn: doesn't even make it beyond the hotel. Yeah. ,

[01:00:49] Nathan Wrigley: you are right. And that's just now for me, it's more like this stuff, it's more. I pick up the pad of paper, which I'm hoping is gonna be recyclable.

Maybe the odd cop, I confess, I was quite taken by. There was a lovely cop that I got this year at Word Us. No company's mentioned, but it's become my default cup for consuming everything. Anyway, thank you. James, that's a really good point. I feel like we're gonna come back to this conversation a lot more.

We do have these sort cycles, don't we? We have core web vitals. A few years ago, diversity has now taken a massive step forward accessibility and now sustainability. Yeah. Thank you for your contributions in that. Let me let me move it on from one thing to another. Let's all go to New York.

No, some of us can go to New York. I

[01:01:40] Bob Dunn: was just thinking, I'm flying there on a plane across the US for a four or five hour event. Yeah now I feel terrible. This was perfect segue into this, yeah.

[01:01:53] Nathan Wrigley: I didn't mean you feel terrible. , , oh dear. But and it was a perfect segue. Let's do the news behind it first, then we'll do the sustainability piece.

State of the word, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress each year does an address. My understanding is that last year, Bob, you went to that event. It was a standalone event in New York, but that was because of the pandemic. Maybe that's now a new direction that we're taking. So it's not connected to a word camp.

You were able to invite yourself if you could commit to going and you were able to go to New York on the following day. But basically, here it is, we get Matt's take on what's happened in WordPress in the last year, and what's coming tends to be in WordPress at least. Anyway. It's one of those sort of big big events.

Lots of people sort go onto Twitter and talk about what he said. I don't know of any surprises that are coming. I've not heard anything on the grapevine. I think it'll just be summing. What's coming with concurrent editing, I would imagine, and also full site editing. But the date, if you wanna mark it in your calendars is the 15th of December 2022.

They had really limited numbers, Bob. So I guess if you are going at least, you are only one of a few people, I dunno what the exact numbers were. I'm trying to make you feel better. I dunno if it's working.

[01:03:18] Bob Dunn: Yeah, it's not. Yeah, I don't know if it really did. They just yeah I'm not sure exactly how many were there last year and I'm sure that people, yeah it's quite a a commitment and stuff.

I I just. Seen some of the people hearing that and yeah it's not, for a lot of people, go back to that sustainability thing. A lot of people will be watching it on the internet. Yep. And we can't get away from that. But yeah it's definitely a fun event if you're able to, especially if you live closer.

Not crazy, like me flying across the states, at least I'm not taking the train this time. I could hitchhike do some results across the planes. I don't know. But that's right. Yeah. Anyway, it's definitely if you're, closer, it'd be worth checking it out and yeah, you get to see some of the people in this space, and I know they're gonna have some contributors there.

So it's always cool to meet up with some of them, some of the people that are doing the work behind the scenes.

[01:04:23] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Hannah's point in the podcast episode I did about sustainability was that the purpose of all of this initiative is not to feel bad. It is to discover new, clever, thoughtful ways of making ourselves able to carry on doing some of the joyous things that we are doing.

I'm sorry, Bob, if I sort turned that around. So anyway, there you go. Word camp sorry. State the word 2022. Stick it in your diary. Links as always will be in the show notes. There's a nice new developer blog on on WordPress. Be a get ply hack who's a frequent guest on this show.

She has written an article about it. It's gonna be the new online home for all WordPress developer documents at the moment it's pretty Spartan cuz it's new. But I like the design. I gotta say, I think it looks really nice. This is it if you're looking on the screen. It's got that new WordPress.

Blue theme going on. It's, I just, I like it. I like the typography. I like all of it to be honest. And you can find it a developer.wordpress.org. And I'm linking to the news page, which is developer.wordpress.org/news. And if you go there, you'll be able to see a growing list of articles. One, which was this one.

The fine and mighty, just Tadlock. He's written a piece called creating Themes from a Patent First Mindset. I'm gonna link to this in the show notes, but because of time we've only got about 20 minutes left. I'm not gonna deep dive into it. Maybe I'll save it for another week. But he's talking in this article about how he thinks block patterns are a perfect mechanism for building out your block based themes if you're considering the move over to block based things.

He's encouraging people to look at. Patterns approach. And yeah, it's quite, and from a sustainability point of view the whole dry methodology, don't repeat yourself. He makes the point that he's really, typically he would be able to get 33 lines of code in a normal theme down to three. That's not a bad investment in time, is it?

If we coincidentally talk about sustainability again, any of you guys wanna talk about that or should I just crack on?

[01:06:40] Bob Dunn: The only thing I'd add is that I talked to, we talked to a lot of developers on the podcasts and I've heard this from many of mouths as far as patterns being the thing. A lot of them just kept saying as far as themes, keep your eyes out on patterns.

This is a direction. And it doesn't surprise.

[01:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: I'm using patterns a lot. Now in the, I've got a pattern for everything that I do on WP Builds, I've got the pattern for the post, I've got the pattern for the newsletter and so on. And it's great. You just click a ad button, find the dropdown, and there it is.

And it's just, it's such a simple, unique little way of doing it. If you haven't played with them, it's really cool. It takes a bit of getting used to, but once and made the effort to build them up, it's really fabulous. What have we got here? Let's have any comments coming in. Where did we get to?

Oh, it's limited. There you go. That's Michelle's take on state of the word. It's limited to 50 people, Bob, so it's gonna be a really small event. Just seeing if there's anything I spy. What's that? I spy a lot. Mastered on your livestream. Footer there. Cracking platform. Oh, okay. Thank you Lee. Let's move on.

Next one. Okay, this is my weekly Now it seems, dig into all things fed averse and ex, all hail masteron. This is where, but where Bob basically leaves the screen. . Bob and I have been having a chat about Masteron over on Slack recently, and curiously not on Masteron, which is interesting if you.

Any any ideas around doing your social, not on the traditional platforms, aka Facebook, Instagram Twitter, and so on? It would, it really would appear that there is a bit of a groundswell. I'm not saying it's a tidal wave, it's more like a fairly decent sized ripple which has got people leaving those platforms and trying things out.

Now again, I'm not saying that people are jettisoning those platforms and closing down their accounts, but I have seen over on Master on at least quite a lot of people joining and it's opened up lots of conversation around whether or not we should really get back to a more open web. I feel this conversation never went away for our community because we've always been banging on about the gpl, about the fact that WordPress is open.

But I suspect that the vast majority of internet users haven't given this a moment's thought in a decade or more. It's just I just use Facebook, don't I? What else would I. Bother with, it works. Everybody's on it. And and Michelle, sorry. Sarah nearly said Michelle Frache over on WP Tavern.

Sarah Gooding over on WP Tavern has wrote, has written a piece called Dig Into the Open Web. And over there she talks about the fact that this conversation seems to be coming back to life. Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, mentioned him a moment ago. He has put out a tweet saying that they are going to be supporting the protocol behind Master Don, which is called Activity Pub.

They're gonna be adding that into Tumblr. They don't say when or how quickly, but they are hiring. And the reason that he posted this was because somebody said, looks like everybody at Automatic Has, sorry, all hiring at Automatic has stopped. And Matt said, no, we're definitely hiring, but we're moving to a more generic entry point rather than listening out individual jobs, which now have a lot of regulations across states and countries in particular, I'd say people leaving at Twitter, so people leaving jobs at Twitter.

We are putting on a fast track to see if we can. Sorry to see how they can help supercharge Tumblr. We can't absorb thousands of people, but I'd be open to hiring entire teams if they already work great together. And if you don't know what the Fed averse is, it's basically a bunch of open protocols which talk to each other.

In other words, if you're using Masteron, it'll talk in the future, hopefully to Tumblr, you'll be able to follow people on Tumblr, they'll be able to follow you on masteron. And there's a whole bunch of other pieces of software like pixeled, which is like Masteron, but for posting images. So think Instagram.

And there's one called Peer Tube as well, which is think YouTube. And I just think the time is right for this. I know I keep banging on about this, but I really like it in my master Don. There's no algorithm. The feed comes in as I expect it. It's time based. There's no sort of algo saying, here's an ad.

You haven't had an ad for a while, have you, Nathan Fancier. Dunno, some Black Friday deal, none of that. And I really appreciate it. So I'm gonna, having wound Bob up, , I'm gonna I'm gonna let him go. You've had real problems with it, Bob, you haven't, I,

[01:11:55] Bob Dunn: I, I just the ui, it was quite a learning curve and, I'm adapting to it and as I look at it and as I see basically, I mean there's Macon, everybody from Twitter is also going to, I can't name the other three or four, but there's, it's basically being fragmented all over at different.

Different platforms. So that's another whole thing. And different audiences, I see certain people, kind of developers are going to Mastodon. They're real techy people. Some of the other people that are maybe more into marketing social might be going to, I can't remember the other, there's probably two or three other names.

So I think it's odd that way cuz there seems to be a little bit of fragmentation, which is fine. Whatever. The concept behind Mastodon, I like. Yeah. And I like this conversation where it's going now. The focus just on Mastodon just was overwhelming to me and was like, okay, I go in there, I don't see the excitement, the, that everybody else is seeing.

But I like the idea, the bigger picture. So as I've. Over the years, forever. And ever since social media's been on, I still have my foot in Twitter. I still have my foot in a lot of places. I'm not opening it up and, all these new accounts on all these new platforms. I'm just kinda sitting back and watching and I'm, I've started to get a little more, bit more involved with Macon.

I yeah, it's I think there's potential and I'm riding that wave like I always have. And I think there's things that are gonna happen and, I think it's good. I like the idea of it. Yeah. It's just, I think people are freaking out right now and doing abrupt decisions and it's my God, the world is ending here and you know me, I'm just like, Hey, I'm here, I'm there.

I'm just sitting back and watching and using it. However it works for me and for the people that are still on the platforms, wherever I

[01:13:56] Nathan Wrigley: am. What about you two? Lindsay and James? I've no idea cuz I haven't spoken to you for a while. But or in Lindsay's case, more or less ever , what's your thoughts on this?

Did have, has this interest captured you, have you made any attempt to try out these new federated technologies or is it just nah, not interested?

[01:14:18] Lindsey Miller: Even as Bob was talking just now, I was thinking any grand types as they respond to Twitter, like people are like, I'm out.

Those are our sixes who are like scared of the world ending and moving on. But anyway, that's another conversation as well. But for me, we're, we stand and where I stand personally, I guess with my Twitter usage, it was a really fun social network. I really like it. It's where my WordPress community is.

It's not really where I'm building. It's not really where my clients are building business. And so for me it hasn't been a reactionary of oh my gosh, where do we go find this next place? So I haven't needed to do that or necessarily needed to do that on the behalf of someone else. Because we build business and social networks and different social networks than Twitter.

As far as that's concerned, I see all the talk of Macon. I see a lot of jokes about an open source social community and people learning about, Watching people that you like, build something that maybe doesn't work perfectly, and so you're polite and don't say anything about it. , those types of things.

And so that probably isn't my social space. I don't know, like maybe I'll figure out this whole server thing. I see people talking about it in post status slack, and I'm like, okay, maybe I'll dip my toe there. But I don't know if that's my people necessarily

[01:15:47] Nathan Wrigley: here. Here's the thought, Lindsay just interrupting you.

Sorry. Is I think the it truly, I feel is a better place for social than it is for business. That it, what I mean by that is you can't pay your way into the feed. So you can't just interrupt and say, look, we've given gonna give you, I dunno, $10,000. Can you serve up hundreds of ads over the next week or so?

There's none of that. But also you can't search for things. So for example, let's say that you were putting out content journey, the only things you can really search for are hashtags and. Obviously I could block particular hashtags. So it really does feel like it, I get the sense that it's gonna be anti commercial.

I, that could be completely wrong. Maybe somebody will fork the software and come up with an implementation where all of that's possible. But it does feel like it's gonna be much more of a social experience, in other words, it's just, I'm hanging out and now I'm thinking about sustainability again.

[01:16:46] Lindsey Miller: There you go. Full circle

[01:16:48] Nathan Wrigley: back to that over and over again. Yeah. It's a puzzle, right? Yeah. James, what are your thoughts?

It's that, yeah, that's,

[01:17:00] James Giroux: that's the meme of the

[01:17:02] Nathan Wrigley: episode right there.

[01:17:04] James Giroux: I am not on Macon. I think, I don't, it's not a negative thing against Macon. I just don't necessarily buy into the Twitter doom and gloom. That is leading to it. If I put a different hat on the New York Times this weekend did an article on Tumblr and talking about the exodus from Twitter to Tumblr and what that means for the existing communities that are on Tumblr.

And it got me reflecting a little bit about what has made WordPress so successful as an open source platform. And it's open community as well. And if we're gonna see any kind of traction with any platform or any move toward open social, it has to be accompanied by open community. And until we have a space where that exists, I think we're just gonna see people stick with what they have.

But I will say we already have in the WordPress ecosystem, a little bit of that with GraBar, right? We have some of these patterns that exist where, what you create in one space follows you anywhere you go. Maybe there's any opportunity there for gravita to expand beyond pictures into.

And seeing

[01:18:37] Nathan Wrigley: what that looks like, I really hadn't thought about that. I just really like the idea that my open CMS of choice, WordPress in the future may well have activity pub built into it. Now there's no word on that. That's just where I would like it to go, and that then it could post to social and I could consume social into my WordPress website and all of a sudden it has this angle to it.

Maybe I don't want that. I just want a website and it a little silo all by itself. But having those kind of social interactions, everybody loves the whole social thing on the internet is very few people are, I know who are not into it in some way, shape or form. It just does feel a little bit different.

And my feed, one of the things that I do, and I know Bob does it as well, is that I follow the WordPress hashtag and right now, Great, because the critical mass, it's not in the millions. It's there must be several dozen posts in there a day and it's nice and quiet and you get to read it without it scroll down.

It's 25 a minute, so it's calmer. It feels like a, just a different setup. I would encourage anybody who hasn't got an account, go and explore it. Don't expect it to be like Twitter elsewhere, because it isn't. Bob can tell you about that. I just have good feelings about it and it gives me, I just like the idea of something being open.

We're not hopefully it can't go bankrupt in the same way, which, I think that word has actually exited Elon Musk's mouth at some point. It is possible for Twitter to become insolvent and nobody wants that. But nevertheless, hopefully mastered on because of the federated nature of it that couldn't happen.

Okay. Thank you for that. Let's see if there's any comments about there. Yeah. Max saying that we could put activity pub in and it would be a good hub for WordPress could be a good hub for federated nodes. Activity Pub allows people to follow across different platforms, so Tumblr supports it. I can see, somehow see someone via my master on, that's right.

Yeah. You get to choose where you consume your content, but the content all comes in regardless of where it's made. Very excited. Thank you. I guess that's Lee Jackson. Who has

[01:20:48] James Giroux: the same one thing, one thing to consider in that and I think one of the challenges we have is the echo chamber of our own opinions, right?

So if you look at the benefits of these, town square type environments like Twitter, it's that you get the ability to have multiple diverse opinions shared and communicated and spread. Not everything's positive. I get that. But one worry would be that if you're moving toward owned audiences and more self-directed or self self-lead communities like that, that you actually remove the diversity of thought.

You remove the diversity of opinion. And what you end up with is people who look and sound like you and agree with everything that you say. . So there's something to consider at scale with these kinds of tools. Is that without that, that openness to community and diversity and diverse thought we could be actually perpetuating some of the things that Twitter has been trying to be and deal with.

[01:22:05] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you're right. And I've I think all of that, all of those weeds are starting to grow even on the Macon side. There's been some news recently about those kind of things. Developing, people essentially being told if you don't like the kind of conversation over here, go and join another instance.

It's oh, okay. That's an interesting approach. Humans, it's the old get

[01:22:29] Bob Dunn: off my lawn type. That's

[01:22:31] Nathan Wrigley: right. Yeah. My server follow the rules. I'm not gonna share what I shared with you, Bob, but that was quite funny. Somebody on Twitter, I'm not even gonna carry that sentence. Okay. I'm gonna share a couple of things on the screen that Bob wanted to share.

Firstly, this one I realize we're running short of time. Bob, I'm sorry about that. We'll go through It's okay. Reasonably quickly. So first one, this is Word Camp EU 2023. Do you wanna introduce this or shall I just,

[01:23:01] Bob Dunn: yeah, it's just showing the organizers for Word Camp Eu, and I guess every time something comes out like this for a flagship word camp, I'm always amazed at the, the force behind it.

Oh, what it really takes and all the volunteer hours and stuff. And just, just looking through that gives you a good idea of exactly what it takes to put on that big of a word.

[01:23:28] Nathan Wrigley: I'm gonna scroll through. So this is the list of organizers three side by side, and I'm gonna scroll through with my Mac Track pad.

I'm gonna do it as fast as I can, right? Let's just see how quickly I can get through. So this is the organizers announced already for Word Camp US 2023. And on your marks, get set, go. Hang on. All right. Stalled, right? Go. Keep going. And I realize that didn't do anybody any justice, but there's dozens and dozens of people, so I applaud you.

Thank you. Having been to quite a few of these big word Camp events, I am staggered that they are of the quality that they are and they are largely run by volunteers. So yeah. Thanks Bob. And there was an ancillary to that you wanted me to post here how to own your own expertise and start speaking at Word Press events, hashtag WP Diversity.

Over to you, Bob.

[01:24:23] Bob Dunn: Yes. Again this is on the WordPress make, WordPress slack channel. They have a diversity channel and they do these events and they're really, it's pretty amazing the extent they go to not only do these events and help people, but follow up. They have mentors if you need, questions on, they, they'll actually do it on Slack, even they have these in person, these online events, which is amazing, and they walk through and they're pretty intensive, but they also have a lot of follow up too, through the slack.

So if you're even having difficulty coming up with an idea or you have any hesitancy at all for speaking, there's just. There's a lot of resources there to help you. So I think that anybody that's been wanting to do this should check out this. And like I said building the diversity and trying to get that more.

Encompassed in the space. Yeah there's a lot of stuff going on that we don't know about, and I follow a lot of these channels on the WordPress Slack, and it's it's pretty amazing a lot of the people that are doing this stuff.

[01:25:39] Nathan Wrigley: I will link to this in the show notes, which will come out tomorrow, but the time and the place is online Wednesday, the 7th of December, 2022.

And it says to paraphrase, does the thought of speaking at one of the WordPress meetups or word camps intrigue you? Do you identify as a person from alar, marginalized, or underrepresented identity who is thinking about speaking at a WordPress event? I'm gonna paraphrase. Do you think you don't know or haven't anything worth speaking about the diverse speaker training group invites you to join us for a workshop in a fun and interactive transformational watch party?

I think the idea is to remove fear and to give people confidence if they've got the notion that they would like to speak, but don't feel they're quite there yet. So hopefully that's a good event. Again, links in the show notes. And finally, to all of those people who bought Amazon Alexa devices in their Black Friday Mad Sale.

Amazon Alexa is a colossal failure on price to lose 10 billion this year. I just fully assumed that these voice activated devices were just an out and out success, but apparently Amazon, when it initially launched the devices, if you go back like five years, everybody was talking about how this was gonna transform the internet.

We're gonna talk to our devices. Turns out the vast majority of us do little more than ask it to play a song, turn on a light, or, do something like, say what the capital of ula what the capital of, I don't know. Madagascar is those kind of questions. And Amazon cannot monetize. What time is it in?

There's just no way apart from shoving ads in, and as soon as they shove ads in your audio feed, I know for a fact 90% of the people are just gonna switch that sucker off. And so the question now, the genuine question is being raised, is this gonna go away on the Amazon side? Now I feel like Google and Apple have got a bit more skin in the game because, you've got the voice assistant built into the phone which follows you around.

So you may wish to do that. You might want to ask the map something when you're out and about, but still Google are posting similar concerns. At the bottom of this article, it basically says Google have got the same kind of problems. So we've been led up the garden path. I feel a little bit, I've just, like I said, I've bought, load the devices, I go chuck 'em in the.

[01:28:10] Lindsey Miller: Yeah, so Amazon said something, I don't know, maybe six months ago about an elder care integration that they were working towards. And so we have an aging population, right? We have a, speaking specifically, US based I have a father with multiple sclerosis and one of the first things that we did for him was put all of those echo dots all through the house and everything's on.

He can turn on his lights, he can turn on and off his television. He can do everything, all with voice commands. And we also have his emergency bracelet connected to his Amazon, and this is before Amazon is releasing their own integration in that space. And so as soon as you mention this, my thought is, I wonder if.

New space they're moving to. And there's an article that I read somewhere that's in, probably in an open tab, sorry, sustainability talking . Just kidding. But that talked about this new service that they're doing. So I wonder if that's part of saving, that revenue is moving into this new area. Area.

Cause sure, my kids we're doing the capital of the whatever, it's our kitchen timer. It's that. But for my father and for other, elders or even younger people in my life that need that accessibility piece, it is a phenomenally life changing and free for my dad to know that someone's at the front door and to say, Hey Alexa, turn on the front porch lights, and then it does.

And having all of that being voice command. And so that's something I think. Could potentially save their revenue future. And I think it's an important part of life. I

[01:29:53] Nathan Wrigley: had no conception of that. And that scenario just explains why this stuff probably now that it's here, we need to make it be Wow.

Okay. So it's, for me it's a gimmick. But for your father, it's transformational, right? Huh?

[01:30:10] Lindsey Miller: Absolutely. So for per people with disabilities, the connections that it can make and do to allow that, the accessibility pieces, he changes the tele, the television with his Alexa commands.

And I think as more and more people are, Open to that usage. I hope they

[01:30:32] Nathan Wrigley: don't go away. So Michelle Frache in the comment says she uses Alexa for the same reasons. It's amazing for those of us with disabilities. Wow. Just what I just need to be schooled about so many things that, that's really interesting.

So this is concerning, right? If Amazon are posting 10, you can't lose 10 billion a year on year. This has to be figured out, right? If we've, if they've promised this I don't know. It's a commercial thing, isn't it? But it would be interesting to see if there's a layer of subscriptions that could go on top, which could then trickle down into Amazon's coffers, if like the services that you were talking about. Yeah, absolutely. If you could pay them a subscription fee. Yeah. Keep

[01:31:14] James Giroux: in mind that Amazon historically is not profitable and does that intentionally. It's a business practice of them to. Take on these kinds of big challenges and play it out. Obviously you can't do it forever.

10 billion in losses is not something sustainable that you can just keep going. But it doesn't scare me as much. Maybe as it might if it was from a different company. Cause Elon came and said, Hey, I'm taking over Amazon and it's losing 10

[01:31:44] Nathan Wrigley: billion. So one of the pieces of low hanging fruit, I think, is that the, they sell the hardware at cost.

Yeah. You know those deals. Black Friday, I think the mini one that, I think it's called the DOT or something like that. I think it was 19 pounds. I couldn't even buy an equivalent sized piece of wood for that amount of money, and yet it was being offered. And so maybe this profit to be made, maybe they need to experiment with, is the actual tech inside of it worth more than, $49 or 19 on Black Friday?

Maybe it's more like 200 with a voice subscription. If you like the voice thing, give us $5 a month and you can have all the voice you like. But yeah.

[01:32:28] James Giroux: I think you, you pointed it out. I think part of the issue is people don't even know what they can do with the devices. Yeah.

Yeah. So the first hurdle they're trying to get over is, let's get, let's just get these things into as many houses and into as many rooms as possible. Because outside of all of the data collection that we can do, and the learning that we can do, we at least get people experimenting or getting accustomed to.

Checking the weather, checking the time, doing those kinds of things, using their voice. Once that becomes this established UX pattern that everybody is accustomed to and using over and over again, then it becomes, Hey, Alexa starts prompting you. Hey, by the way, did you know you can use me for this?

Hey, by the way, did you know you can use me for that? And that starts to open the floodgate cuz we are still in a, people don't read culture here, unfortunately. So everyone's gonna buy the device and just assume they can use it. Yeah. And then, that guided experience of growth will lead to the revenue.

It's just a bit, maybe more of a longer play. And Amazon made me expected, I'm

[01:33:40] Nathan Wrigley: really sorry. Yeah,

[01:33:41] Lindsey Miller: Nathan, you're putting all those speakers in your rooms for long, but now for lights,

[01:33:47] Nathan Wrigley: firstly, can I just say a couple of things? Firstly, we've overrun, I'm sorry. If any of you need to leave, feel free to leave.

If you wanna carry on for a couple of minutes, I'm game. But so for that, I should say thank you to all of you, but if you don't wanna leave Bo you alright for a minute or two more? I'm no pressure. I'm fine. Yeah. James? I'm good. Yeah. Lindsey? Yep. Okay. I'm good. I'm enjoying this. Okay. The first thing is every device that I've had from Google that so far has not had a screen.

It's been a little pod. It just sits there and you have to communicate with it through voice. However, the other day, for the first time we got, I forget what it's called like a max Hub or home hub or something. It comes with a screen and you switch it on and it starts showing you. What you can do.

It's got like a 1 0 1 here's a bunch of stuff that you can do. And I, I follow tech fairly regularly, but I was immediately shown curious things that I could do that I thought, you know what, that's I had no idea it could do that before. So it wasn't just the, what's the capital city?

It was about creating events. It was about broadcasting, it's time for your meal to my son's bedroom. All of these quirky little things. And it looks like Michelle down here again, thanks Michelle, for all these comments. She says you can use it for mental health hacks. I dunno what that means, but that's a curious one.

But here's another problem. Jeff Winchester. Hello Jeff saying his mom's got one. If you ask anything, if I ask anything of substance, the answer is ne never relevant. Yeah, that's the pain, right? The the, just the completely wrong ended response is just infuriating my ability to play the right song. I reckon it's a.

Toss of a coin. I say a song name and a song artist, it gets it right 50% of the time. So I go back to the phone. But yeah, this is really curious. And

[01:35:41] Bob Dunn: I don't have any voice activated any devices. I guess for me it would be that use case as soon as I can find a use case that makes sense to me.

My wife is the activated voice. I say some cause she always has something to say back, that's not, I don't need Alexa. I don't need more people talking to me. So

[01:36:03] Nathan Wrigley: by the way, every time we say the A word on another podcast, they listen to, they call it, they say Madam A, they never say the A.

Cause it triggers it, doesn't it? So Jess's device is going off. Yeah. We could order something in Jess's house right now. Yeah, that's right. Nobody say those words. So she, but yeah, I just don't think that I

[01:36:22] Bob Dunn: would, unless there was something really, The desire came because I don't feel the need to do that.

I, so I almost like the manual. There's still probably, maybe it's my age or whatever, there's some manual part of me that likes to, when I'm curious about something, not just sp it into the air. Yeah, I'd like to seek it out. So yeah. And that's me personally.

[01:36:48] Nathan Wrigley: There's always gonna be some people who don't wish to participate and that's fine, isn't it?

But I think you're right. I think the killer use case is still to be found. Whereas like it felt to me like, do you remember when the iPhone came out? There were a bunch of like really frivolous apps that did absolutely pointless. Things like mimicked you drinking beer and stuff like that. Have a fire.

Yeah, . But there was no killer thing. And then I don't even remember what it was suddenly like a to-do app pop up or the calendar app got better and I was like, oh man, it's a computer, I get it now. It's not just Frivol. And if somebody invented that killer feature inside of the voice activated thing, that would be really interesting.

And it sounds to me, Lindsay you've already got it. You've got the killer feature for your dad. And I didn't even know that kind of thing was possible. And my dad's got Alexis all throughout his house and I'm gonna explore that fairly soon. Yeah, absolutely. And

[01:37:45] Lindsey Miller: also too, that's a really great small business idea.

if you wanted to set those smart homes up for people in a small town or in your city that would be a really good businesses start.

[01:37:57] James Giroux: But you

[01:37:58] Nathan Wrigley: know Yeah. That's what

[01:38:00] Lindsey Miller: how we start Monday mornings, right? With business ideas.

[01:38:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. We start Monday mornings by overrunning. I do apologize Neil Robinson.

Hello. Neil says that there's a C two CV TV series called The Secret of Modern Life. And in it they were talked about the Madam A devices and how they were designed. Ah, interesting. Thank you. That's a good hot tip if you live in the uk, right? I've totally overrun. I've squandered lots more of your time.

I have, I'm not being glib, I'm being serious. I've. Put more carbon into the air. I'm sorry everybody. And I shall do it again next week. . I'll be back next week with a different panel of guests. Bob, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Lindsay, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

And James, again, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Lindsay, you d know what's coming. Here's the humiliating bit. We all raise our hands and do this wavy thing at the end all at the same time. I didn't know comes. Would you all mind raising your hands and waving and go for it, Linda. Yay.

That's it. That's enough. We've got all the waves we need. That's great. We will be back next week. I appreciate it so much. Take it easy guys. Thank you. Cheers.