[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 470 entitled Alex Standiford on using AI for personal knowledge management and team productivity. It was published on Thursday, the 28th of May, 2026. My name's Nathan Wrigley and a few bits of housekeeping just before we begin.
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Okey dokie. What have we got for you today? Well, Alex Standiford is joining me on the podcast today. He's been on the podcast several times before, and honestly, this episode really got into my head because Alex has decided that for his agency, for all of his work, for his team, he's going to be using AI to hive his mind into this sort of second brain idea.
The idea is that him and his staff and everybody that's connected with his business is going to be journaling. That journaling will then represent a corpus of information that he can use and get AI to plunder on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.
The whole idea seems, on the face of it, to be quite unusual, but as Alex talks, I become more and more convinced, more and more intrigued about the different layers that he's trying to pull off here.
He certainly seems to express the idea that there's a lot of profound things that you would typically forget, perhaps forget to do, perhaps forget that you wanted to be reminded about. And so this idea of this second brain, this silo, this never forgetting thing, which he calls his Navigator, will enable him to not forget, and to come up with ideas, and help his staff understand the higher purposes of the projects that they're doing.
Honestly, really interesting episode, and I hope that you enjoy it. If you do, give us some comments, go to wpbuilds.com, search for episode 470, and leave us a comment there. We'd love it. Okay, let's begin.
I am joined on the podcast once more. Alex Standiford. How are you doing?
[00:03:43] Alex Standiford: I am Great. It's great to see you, how you've
[00:03:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good. Yeah, really good. We've been having quite a little chat before the, episode began, trying to decide what it is that we're going to talk about and, it's gonna be ai but wait.
Hold on. There. Before that index finger goes to the pause or skip button. 'cause that's what normally happens when we use the words AI these days. I think we've got an interesting angle because, talking to Alex prior to this conversation, I don't actually know what's gonna come out of his mouth because he hasn't revealed the details, but it does sound like you've actually implemented a lot.
What I'm discovering out there in the wider world is that I hear a lot of people talking about AI and what's possible, but what I want to hear from you today, and hopefully you'll deliver, is what you have actually done. The good, the bad, the pitfalls, the, winds and all of that kind of stuff. before we get into that, do you just wanna tell us who you are?
Tell us a little bit about the products that you've built in the WordPress space and stuff so that we know a bit more about you.
[00:04:43] Alex Standiford: Sure. My name's, Alex Standiford. my product is Siren Affiliates. It's an affiliate solution. The simplest description is that it's an affiliate solution for WordPress, but I like to call it Incentive Infrastructure, because it does a whole bunch more than that. It, but that's, so I've been building that for the last several years.
That's been my primary focus. Of course I'm doing, I'm still a little early, so I still have some clients and things like that I serve. before working, for myself and building Siren. I worked as a freelancer for a little while. I worked as, I worked for a couple of companies like, GoDaddy, I worked for Sandhill Development, on some well-known products there as well.
I've been in the space just for a while, in WordPress specifically. And, there's probably not a soul who I don't, I feel like there isn't a soul. I don't know. And I just, love the community and I'm always here to talk about it. And I'm always excited to be on this show 'cause I love chatting with you.
[00:05:45] Nathan Wrigley: you're very kind. Thank you. And it's very nice to have you back. We've met in person as well, which is quite nice. It's always nice to, to have hung out with somebody. Know that you get along with them as well, which is, it's just a bit of an added bonus. So do you remember having that meal on that top floor or that restaurant in
that was,
[00:06:01] Alex Standiford: I do with Bob.
[00:06:02] Nathan Wrigley: of the, my favourite meals of all time.
So I've got really strong memories of you. Yeah. That was so nice. Me, you and
[00:06:10] Alex Standiford: I. I may have went there. I think I went there three times for that
[00:06:14] Nathan Wrigley: After that. Yeah. Yeah. It really was that good.
[00:06:19] Alex Standiford: I did. I did. I loved it, man. I did.
[00:06:21] Nathan Wrigley: And the view was spectacular. Anyway, we're totally digressing. we're hallucinating, as you might say.
[00:06:26] Alex Standiford: yeah.
[00:06:27] Nathan Wrigley: the idea here is to really talk about AI and the things that have happened to you and the, things that you've implemented in the intuitions that you've had and so on, and ways that it's been put into your business, fruitfully, disastrously and otherwise.
let's rewind the clock. When was the first time you, were you like an early adopter of ai trying to figure out where you could leverage it and crowbar it into your business? When was the first time you started to use it?
[00:06:52] Alex Standiford: Yeah. honestly, right around the time chat, GPT started becoming a part of the
[00:07:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. at the beginning then?
[00:07:02] Alex Standiford: so yeah, pretty much right at the beginning. I've been using it extensively since then. obviously it's really transformed a lot in the last six months with Cloud Code and Codex becoming, the normal part of people's conversations.
but, really it started then, pretty much as soon as I started building Siren and I started building PHP Nomad, which is the framework that's underneath Siren, all of that was built with AI in mind. basically once I saw it, I realised, okay, this is, to me, I viewed AI as the one of, there's, not a lot of situations in, your life where you're able to see something transformative that will completely change the world in a lot of ways.
And when those things happen, I always think of it as the veil is thin. That's how I say it. The veil is thin. the opportunity to capitalise on that, the power that bigger companies have is less right now than it was five or six years ago before AI came in. It's a real, it levels the playing field, but these things are fleeting.
That's what it was like whenever the internet first came out, whenever blogging became a thing, whenever SEO happened and all these other things, the veil was thin. There was opportunity there. People were able to leverage, the, internet in a way that even just as a single individual person, they could leverage it in a way that bigger companies were struggling with.
'cause they were able to move faster and they were able to find opportunities and grow. And, that's, so whenever I saw ai, I was like, this is it. This is this.
[00:08:41] Nathan Wrigley: genuinely get that Okay. So there's very few moments in my life where that has happened, that like profound realisation that everything's gonna be different from this moment on. I guess the first child that I had and things like that would be those kind of moments.
But I, confess I did not have that intuition with AI because it was this slow inexorable kind of, a lot of failure and I wasn't really able to see that, yeah, this is gonna get better and it's gonna get better really quickly. I just saw the, oh, that's a cute image that AI made, or isn't it remarkable?
We can type something in and we get this simulation of a human being coming back. But no, it sounds like you had a totally different approach. You could see the, writing on the wall a bit.
[00:09:26] Alex Standiford: day one letter for me. It was day I opened chat, GPT, and I had a conversation with it. And I remember I, I asked it like a really big question. I was just like, what is a big opportunity right now in WooCommerce? What is a, product that I could potentially develop that isn't being served right now?
And it came back with some ideas. obviously today, I, at the time I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. there's so much potential here. Obviously there's a lot of nuance that we've learned since then with hallucinating and you have to be careful and, all that stuff.
But, siren was built with the help of AI helping me research and understand it. I built the code myself. 'cause at the time it couldn't really code yet, but, its architecture was largely formed around me having conversations with ai. even the, and a lot of my positioning statements and how I'm approaching it, all of that was in my head and did come from me, but it came from me by bouncing ideas off of chat and having it respond to me and things like that.
So I was in it. And, like I said, day one, I saw that and I, that, that clicked with me. Now, to be fair, before AI hit, before it was visible in that way from the chat GPT perspective, I had already been thinking about that, phrase, the veil is thin. And I had already been looking for that, so I was already ready for that, right?
I was acknowledging in 20 18, 20 19 that the opportunities of the web was not as great as they were, even just five or six years prior. And I was like, the next time something happens that's disruptive, I'm gonna pay attention and I'm jumping all in as soon as I see it. And I told myself that in 20 18, 20 19.
So as soon as I saw ai, I was like, shoot, that's it. Go run. And never, I never stopped.
[00:11:20] Nathan Wrigley: do you, would, you say a day doesn't go by anymore where you aren't at some way interacting with an ai? Has it literally embedded itself into every bit of your, let's go with working life. We don't need to pry any further than that. is it a fun is truly fundamental thing in the same way that, I dunno, switching on a computer is, fundamental.
Is it at that kind of profound level? You can't now work unless the AI is switched on in the same way. I can't work unless the computer is switched on.
[00:11:53] Alex Standiford: It, has become my default interface for sure. yeah, I, my default I have. Two different max subscriptions right now. One for clo, Claude, and then also chat GPT. And I'm using both of them a lot. and I know when they're, which one is the best one to use and when to use it based on the context.
I can't answer that question right now because which one's the right one changes every other day it feels But, but I am, I'm, I mean I'm using it all the time. and before this call I was talking a little bit about one of the big ways I use it is for, to help me journal to, I, mostly use it to interview me and get things outta my head.
'cause I'm an extroverted person. I talk, I need to talk through problems. and on top of that, whenever I'm talking, I actually do my best when I'm walking and talking. So if I, yeah, so I will, turn on voice mode on Claude or whatever, which, whatever system I'm using on that particular day. And, if I'm washing dishes or something like that, or I'm cleaning around the house, I put earbuds in and I just, I go into voice mode and I have a conversation about something that's on my mind for work or something like that.
And obviously you have to be a little bit careful 'cause it can be very sycophantic and you have to like, make sure that, you take everything it says with a grain of salt as an enthusiastic child that always wants to make you feel good. But, it will often give me really good pointed, advice and thoughts and things like that.
so much so that usually what ends up happening is whenever I'm done, I'll say, okay, this is great. Let's journal this. And I've actually set up my own MCP server privately that, basically it will then take our conversation and it'll turn it into a journal entry. that it then saves into a, like a, server of mine that just keeps track of all these things and it can load and look at those entries and look at that context and look at that knowledge, at any time, whatever.
I'll tell it like before I go into voice mode, for example. 'cause voice mode can't use that service. I'll say. Before we, I wanna talk to you about this topic. I want you to go into my, the system which we call navigator internally at my company. I want you to go look at Navigator and I want you to find all of the things that you can find related to that and preload that in your context so we can have a
[00:14:14] Nathan Wrigley: Oh,
[00:14:17] Alex Standiford: Yeah, it's, very, useful. so then it does that, it goes, it gets all that stuff and then I switch over to voice mode and I talk about it. And when I'm done, it's able to act, it actually has that nuance and that context, and all that information so it's able to understand what I'm trying to do, what conversations we've already had, so I'm not just repeating myself.
And, then I'm able to, I'm able to capture insights and other things like that. And I just keep journaling.
[00:14:46] Nathan Wrigley: gonna just interrupt at this point if that's all right. 'cause I've got a
[00:14:49] Alex Standiford: yeah, no, it's fine.
[00:14:50] Nathan Wrigley: first one is, so thi this is not really related to the subject at hand, but I'm curious, do you find yourself thinking that you are in relation to this thing? So it's a bit more of a philosophical question really.
Do you, always see it as a bunch of electrons moving around in a machine, literally in a box that you can switch off? or have you, found yourself occasionally straying into something a little broader than that? Something akin to, friendship's not the right word, but Somewhere between, it's a box in a corner with electrons and it's my friend. Do you, is there some there, if It's, I'm really struggling to encapsulate that question. But do you know what I'm talking about,
[00:15:36] Alex Standiford: I do. and it's been, interesting 'cause prior to this, my, my, wife, poor woman had to hear these things, right?
[00:15:47] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see.
[00:15:50] Alex Standiford: I,
[00:15:51] Nathan Wrigley: She loves it.
[00:15:52] Alex Standiford: and I, she does not, she was like, please, for the love of God, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't care.
[00:15:59] Nathan Wrigley: No, she loves it now. You don't have to talk to
[00:16:01] Alex Standiford: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. I don't, I, I try to not overly personify, the ai, but, at the same time, it is definitely filling a need that I've had as a person to be able to converse and talk through a lot of things. And it never gets tired and it doesn't have its own agenda right now.
And it doesn't. and it just does what I ask it to do. It lets me have productive conversations and it lets me get it out of the way and, which has been really good, obviously. 'cause then whatever I'm able to talk to other people, I'm able to actually talk to them and be productive, when I'm talking to them about, not just wasting time, just processing outwardly to them.
which is good because now I'm not using people as a way for me to work through thoughts and stuff. And it, so in that context, it's more like a tool. You know what I mean? but
[00:16:59] Nathan Wrigley: that's great. Yeah. Sorry. Carry on.
[00:17:01] Alex Standiford: they definitely, it's okay. They definitely, the different AI agents definitely do have different, personalities, which has been interesting.
Garak is like unhinged compared to the other two,
[00:17:12] Nathan Wrigley: wasn't that the
[00:17:13] Alex Standiford: but
[00:17:14] Nathan Wrigley: about
[00:17:14] Alex Standiford: Yeah.
[00:17:16] Nathan Wrigley: okay. So that's a great answer to that. So you talked to it, but you, it still sounds to me as if you've got this like boundary. It's not, it's not even approximating a member of the family or anything like that. It's this tool that you talk to.
So, here's another interesting, question, observation. Maybe throughout human history, no human has been able to re, actually maybe there are a few exceptions. I can't remember what we call these people, but there are people who have just furiously good memories, but that they're not typical, sance or something, I think is the right word for that.
[00:17:52] Alex Standiford: Yeah.
[00:17:53] Nathan Wrigley: but most people have a fairly ephemeral relationship with their memory. the things that they did, they're there, they fade away. Some, facts stick. Other facts get utterly forgotten. Now, what's curious about what you are describing is you, for the last two years and presumably from now on, are gonna have the capacity to have access to a lot of memory, and you won't be responsible for that.
And so what I mean by that is you'll be able to say, okay, tell me. tell me all my positions over the last, I don't know, two years or increasingly 10 years, 20 years, on the app that I'm building or whatever it may be. And it would be interesting to see over time how you contradict yourself, you disagree with yourself, you've evolved and you've woven your way through problems.
And again, there's no question there, but I'm wondering what that feels like. This, capacity to have basically a faultless memory that is searchable, filterable, that must be fairly strange and quite profound.
[00:19:07] Alex Standiford: it's fantastic. I'm, I love It, it feels like a superpower. 'cause like I have, I, spend so much of my energy in the moment reacting and thinking, I, live in the future. I don't live in the past. I am never very good at looking to the past. So this solves that gap in a big way. I've actually drawn a lot of parallels to, this is a nerdy reference of course, but a dumble door is pensive
[00:19:33] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
Okay.
[00:19:34] Alex Standiford: what I think about the pensive, like him pulling that thing out of his air and yeah, I think that's what it feels like.
It's what it feels like, honestly. You're like, you're talking like, I'll have an experience or something and I'll be like, I don't wanna forget this. And I'll, I will open up the app and I'll say, this happened. Here's what happened. note this. or, I've even gotten to the point to where I'm using some different apps that will.
if I'm, I, I just, I'm starting to just now do this, but my system has a concept of journals, which are journal entries, of course, that I'm writing, or actually people on my team are writing, or actually some AI agents that run in the background for me that are also writing, which is a whole nother thing.
but then also if I find something online, like a source like that, I call it a source. So it could be a, meeting recording that I have with somebody or a webpage that I clipped or something like that, that I'm like, this is something that I wanna be able to reference later. And then my system, I'll say, go look at this source.
I wanna have a conversation with you about this source, and then we'll talk about it. I'll journal about it. And then my journal, the way my system works, the journal entry actually links is linked to that source. So then later, whenever AI is searching for that, it's able to find that and find all the records that are related to that and connect the dots and find all the stuff that's relevant, to that conversation.
And it's, really just become this second brain in a lot of ways. and to your point about, and to your point about, the profoundness of that, the biggest thing that's really where it's really had a big impact is AI's pretty good at matching patterns. I, this is, crazy to me, but, I got an A DHD diagnosis because of this, literally from, doing all of this stuff and from talking about this and I would be frustrated and I would express, I would talk about how like I'm struggling with this and stuff like that.
And literally, I was chatting with Claude about it one day and talking through all this stuff and referencing and talking about my frustrations, and it said, Alex, I think you need to go see a doctor for a DHD. It literally told me that in a chat, based on these patterns, here's what I'm seeing. I think you should go get checked.
And I did. And sure enough, I do, and I got medicated for it. And it's been transformative. and it's just I knew I had a feeling, do you know what I mean? But, it, was literally like, and it, what's crazy is from the conversations, it was able to say, you've got this, I think that this is stopping you.
I think this is holding you back. And I was able to process that and talk about it. And we were able to, like literally from journal entries in the past and talking about failures and things where friction was happening. And in my business, we were able to attribute a lot of that point, a lot of that back to that one problem.
And from that, we actually were able to extrapolate an idea on just how much that not fixing that was costing me in terms of money. And it literally was just like, it was just, there was so much clarity and so much context that. When it was phrased that way and had that, having that conversation and seeing all those things right in front of me with such clarity, it was like, what the heck am I doing?
I need to drop everything I'm doing and go get this fixed right now. Do you know what I mean? And it was just something I was just always in the back of my mind putting off. But it's wild, man, like
[00:23:04] Nathan Wrigley: I, think the, thing that's so curious to me is you seem to be, I, could be wrong, maybe there are people that are running an experiment much more deeply than you are, but it does seem that you are probably one of a handful, let's use that word, but I, dunno how many, hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of, in relation with AI in quite the, profound way that you are.
But, what's curious is that, so you've got this giant corpus of information, which is swelling. it's getting bigger and bigger as you feed it. More data, and I dunno what the boundaries are. It sounds like most of it is work related and what have you, but maybe it's straying into some more personal thoughts as well.
But we don't need to get into that.
[00:23:42] Alex Standiford: Yeah. you're a founder. it's a gradient,
[00:23:44] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
One thing leaks into another. Yeah. Okay.
[00:23:47] Alex Standiford: Yeah. For sure.
[00:23:48] Nathan Wrigley: comes out, it, the pain is real.
[00:23:51] Alex Standiford: Yeah.
[00:23:52] Nathan Wrigley: so it's got this giant corpus of information and we know that the AI is really good at that. You feed it terabytes of information and it can sum up the majority of that fairly succinctly.
However, you as a human, still have the same, I'm gonna go with ram. You've still got the same
[00:24:08] Alex Standiford: Yeah. Ram.
[00:24:09] Nathan Wrigley: you can only process some of that. So you need something to distil it, sum it up, put it back into your head, and then if you want to go deeper, you can then explore those things. Again. I think that's really curious.
And it'll be so interesting to see how the wider tech landscape commoditize that, let's use that word, I don't know, a device or a, or a, like a watch that you put on your wrist that will, you tap it and maybe it'll just take your audio and it'll transcribe that and put it into a silo somewhere.
It'll be interesting to see how many people embrace it in the same way that you have, you certainly seem to be, like, not just sanguine, you are delighted by it.
[00:24:56] Alex Standiford: Yeah. Yeah. it's been life changing. genuinely it has been, that's been more so than, even the coding aspects and things like that. That's all great. Don't get me wrong. And I have plenty to talk about there too. But it's been, that has been the most transformative thing that AI has done for me by a mile.
it's not even close.
[00:25:18] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. let's twist that a bit then into how that's affected your work life. So I, I can, if that, if what you've just described were to happen in my life, which it hasn't because I don't do what you are doing, but let's imagine that you've managed to persuade me to do that, and two years into the future, I too have realised the profundity of that.
Presumably along the way, this is gonna leach out into your, work life, your business, because you can say, look, this is working for me. I'm surrounded by people who I think my staff could benefit from this kind of stuff too. Is that in fact what happened? Did you try to spread this out amongst your team?
And it sounds like you've built a tool, which I think you called navigator. tell us all about how it's got its tendrils into your workday work year, work, colleagues, how you all interact and things.
[00:26:13] Alex Standiford: Yeah. I had one of my, one, my, my developers on my team, came to me and said, I am, he, just kept coming to me with questions, and he is like, Hey, I think the big, one of the bigger problems I'm seeing here is knowledge transfer. You have a lot of knowledge in your head, and I don't have it. and historically we've solved that problem with documentation, right?
That is the, and I think that's a great pillar. but what I realised was these journal entries in this conversation, it's almost like what Twitter was originally supposed to be. where, 'cause before Twitter became a social media platform, it's first use case was to be an internal system for teams, for working teams to be able to just send
[00:26:57] Nathan Wrigley: I've forgotten that. That's right. Yeah, yeah.
[00:27:00] Alex Standiford: way.
so what this is, and writing journal entries, I don't write 'em, I don't write this. AI writes this. I have a conversation with AI and it turns it into a journal entry with the information that it needs to be in there. I don't care what it is, it doesn't have to be pros. This doesn't have to be the next great novel.
Nobody's gonna see it. In fact, nine times outta 10, only AI's reading it. Anyway, so I'm not that, I don't invest in that, but and I realised, like you said, that could be really useful for my team. I started having them also journal as well. I brought them into the system. I got them set up with their own EPI keys.
I gave them access to the software that I created for it. and then they're able to connect to it with their own, their own AI agents to be able to do the same thing, right? So I don't provide them with, I don't provide them with the ai. They have their own plans, they have their own setup. I don't need to tell you how to do that.
I'm just giving you access to, giving your AI agent access to that wealth of information. And what has been so profoundly useful about it, aside from the things that I have already talked about. What's been really interesting is they've stopped asking me questions because I am talking about stuff so often.
I'm probably doing 10 or 12 journal entries a day, right? Like I, 'cause it's just, it's the sickest, whenever you run the business, you can't stop thinking about it, so they have so much information in front of them, just, from me talking about stuff that they can almost always get a, pretty good grasp on.
The spirit of what I'm trying to do whenever I'm on anything I'm trying to do. sometimes there'll be some direct questions or needs, I need access to this. Or, Hey, I saw this. I'm not sure I have some follow ups here, but most of the time that's not the case. And this is especially true with marketing.
I hired an SEO person recently to help me with some of the stuff on Siren's website. And, I mean they, it's amazing how very little they needed from me there. I didn't fill out a spread, I didn't fill out a sheet, a worksheet. I didn't, I didn't do anything other than spend one like hour working with them, setting them up with the system and getting them in.
And they went from there. And what's interesting is even the setup process with this uses navigator to get them onboarded, I actually created a skill called onboarding that looks at the knowledge base that I have that has some preloaded skills inside of it for ai, for my team that, walks them through how navigator works, how we approach, business differently here, how the business is structured differently.
And, it does it by doing exactly what I just told you, it interviews, they don't even know it, but they're writing their first journal entry right there in that moment. So the AI agent is interviewing them, asking them questions, and then giving them context and giving them in information on like how what we're doing is different.
So it'll ask you like, have you ever worked with, what tools have you worked with? Like Jira, slack, what are you using? And it'll say, oh, okay, cool. So you worked with Jira. So we have this process. This is how we do things. This is how it's similar. Here's some of the differences with Jira as opposed to that.
And it like converses with them and invites them to push back on it. And like by the time they're done, it goes, okay, this was a great interview. Now that you understand how the process goes, how about we go ahead and do your first journal entry? And like literally it just, and the first entry for every person who works with me is I did the onboarding, here's some of the questions I asked, and here's what I did.
And of course, that feedback loop lets me make that onboarding flow better. and it's just stuff like that where it's just constantly, there's, a thousand little examples like what I just gave there where something like this has just completely transformed how the business functions.
[00:30:58] Nathan Wrigley: That is so interesting. I've got so many questions. The first one that occurs to me is, do you, so forgive me if this comes out badly. I hope not. have you found yourself. To be consistent or have you found yourself to be a fairly messy character, if So in other words, do your journal entries add up to a direction or is it like, okay, on Tuesday I said this, and then on Wednesday I contradicted myself seven times and then on Thursday I came up with some utterly new thing, which means that those things that we talked about Wednesday, Thursday, they are now low.
You get what I'm trying to say? Or is it more of a refinement? It's getting refined, it's we're getting more of a direction, we're understanding more about this path that we're trying to figure out or is it just chaos and mess?
[00:31:52] Alex Standiford: so it's all
[00:31:54] Nathan Wrigley: It's human.
[00:31:55] Alex Standiford: be honest. But, yeah. but a lot of the chaos you're talking about led me to the A DH ADHD diagnosis, right? Like literally just seeing these patterns. but also even, for example, right now I'm on a big a, a sprint that I'm doing right now is around forming partnerships and, developing more of those 'cause, siren.
so I'm, I am doing a lot of that stuff and I laid out this whole thing on, what the next 90 days looks like, what I'm gonna do, how I'm gonna fill my power hour every morning, and, all that stuff. But that started from a journal entry where I expressed frustration about the fact that I, that I am tired of feeling like I have to go find more clients, and I wanna make sure, and I want to get siren.
I want to lean into siren being siren centric, like my business being siren, and that's it. And I'm right on the edge of that, right? So it's frustrating to have to, I want to push through and to get to that point. And it started with me literally just venting about that, right? I just, I feel something.
I'm talking about this and I just vented and I talked for a little bit. I talked through it. I was walking, I was aggressively just like frustrated, And, as we were talking, it, I talked myself into realising what I need to do is focus on this specific aspect of it and of, growing the business, right?
And two weeks prior to that, I was all in on getting siren, the SaaS version of Siren Outdoor, because I wanted to expand my markets. I wanted to do all these things. And, after having that frustrating conversation, I realised there is so much untapped potential sitting in WordPress today, right now, that I don't have to do any more development with.
I don't have to do anything else with, and I should probably be leveraging that. And that became apparent from the conversation because six months prior I wrote a journal entry where I, about my very nasty habit of thinking that I can code my way out of every problem. And, how sometimes you just have to do the hard thing, which is, oftentimes prospecting, growing, working on distribution instead of building even more.
And, because the AI agent had that context from that previous entry, because I had it preload as we were talking, it really helped me understand and see that in myself and see that's what was happening with the SaaS launch. And no, I really need to sit down and do
[00:34:32] Nathan Wrigley: That
[00:34:32] Alex Standiford: So it is messy.
[00:34:35] Nathan Wrigley: So it dredged up a previous proclamation that you'd probably forgotten about and then brought that to bear and that tweaks your neurons a little bit. Okay. I've addressed this before, but I've forgotten about it. Okay. Alright. What I think so interesting because, okay, let's be very clear.
I do none of this, absolutely none. But what's really interesting is I'm trying to figure out what my process would be and essentially I would sit on a couch and I would think but the thing about that is that only gets you so far because. I'm sure some people are very effective of that at that, and you were talking about Dumbledore earlier, JK Rowling apparently had the capacity to have that entire seven book series rattling around in her head just waiting to come out.
And all she needed was the time and the typewriter, but it was all in there. I could not do that. And so when I sit down, and I think it, it is this very short term process, it often, I don't think will relate to previous things unless I've written it down in a way that's easily accessible. All of that will be lost.
And so each day, in a sense, feels a bit like a silo. It's like today's a day and tomorrow's another day, and they don't really merge into each other. And this bigger plan doesn't, doesn't really materialise. I can imagine there's quite a few people listening to this thinking, I don't want any part of this.
And that's fine, right? That's really, you've got your own thing and whatever, but I am fascinated by that through line of how this enables you to be quite intentional, in a, over time. Yeah. Wow. This is
so
[00:36:26] Alex Standiford: it just feel, it just feels like for once in my life, my personal information is actually something I'm able to use.
[00:36:33] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Yeah. Have you had to, have you had to find members of staff who will buy into this? or curiously, have they all just been like, okay, this sounds weird. We'll give it a go. And it's been all right. They've leaned into it, have you had any pushback of any people refusing to do it or any of that?
[00:36:53] Alex Standiford: I haven't, ran into anybody with that, but that's because I am filtering based on that now. I know, I need people who can look at this and go, oh, that's a, that's really useful. and they understand why. And if they don't, and if they don't get that or they're not willing to think about that, then you're, honestly, you're probably not a good fit for me anyway, if you're not, know?
[00:37:14] Nathan Wrigley: you've got any criteria for a job interview. So c can I, drill down a little bit into your navigator thing then? So it sounds like this is like the bedrock of it all. This is a tool that you've built, which sits somewhere. I guess w just try to explain the, what's going on.
without giving away your secret sauce, maybe there's a commercial product in there at some point in the future.
[00:37:34] Alex Standiford: Yeah, I'm, yeah, there could be for sure. I, it's, so basically, honestly, people could build this a, version of what I've built with, obsidian or something like that, plus ACL I. so it's, something, that's, it's definitely the way I've done it. I had to do it the way I did it because I needed, the cooperation aspect of it.
I wanted other people into it. I wanted them to be able to submit stuff. I have some, like I said, I have some AI agents that are automatically, capturing things on the web and journaling about what they're finding as well. there's a lot of synthesis happening there. But, the pieces really do boil down to, journal entries, which are just, I call 'em journal entries.
It's really just a thing, right? An event, something that's being written from the perspective of a human or an agent. it has sources which are, which is content that is not being written by, from the perspective of a person, but it's being ingested, by the system to reference inside of journal entries or things like that.
and then there's also knowledge base, which are, codified. This is what we do. This is, if you're not sure, like standard, your documentation, this is the manual. and those are the key three pieces that's, I've been able to pretty much break down everything in my workflow to those three things.
And then there's also this, ability to create, what I call internally. We call 'em charters. 'cause everything in my business is nautical. so we call 'em charters and there's ex and, it has like a, a Jira like flow with like expeditions and voyages and bounties, which are like epic stories and something smaller than a story.
But, and all of that. So you can associate entries with initiatives that you're trying to do and things like that. and it just creates this web, but the spirit of it is you're creating a web of, knowledge, a graph of information that the AI agent is able to search for. but the key thing there is, around the ability to link records together, so that, the AI agent can do a search for it, and then after it searches, it can say, okay, I have found this.
Now there's 15 different entries, or five entries or whatever, or sources and other things related to this. I'm gonna go grab that information too, so I have the context. And what ends up happening whenever you're talking with ai, is it, I don't know if you've ever watched The Good Place, but it feels like, the character Janet in that, where she's, she basically is an AI agent in a lot of ways it feels like.
but it's okay, let me go. It's like you'll phrase it like, I want you to go look at this topic and I want you to learn everything you need to learn in this conversation that I've ever had about it, right now. And it's, just it's so surreal for it to be like, okay, I'll do that. And then 10 seconds later it's okay, I know everything you need to know, let's talk.
But it's exactly what it is.
[00:40:45] Nathan Wrigley: like watching an episode of Star Trek or something, isn't it? Okay. I have a strange question. maybe humans capacity to not memorise everything is actually evolutionary quite a good idea. because pain and hurt and suffering and all of those kind of things that you had, if you were to have access to all of those all the time, who knows what life would be like, you'd probably be dwelling on all the horrible things, and we seem to have some idea to forget that.
But equally, maybe we'd just forget things because we can't, with the finite capacity that we've got in our head, it's, good to not be able to not have to marshal infinite amounts of content and what have you. And I do wonder if, there's a bit of that, I wonder if there are moments where you say, oh, by God, this is too noisy.
we have to figure out moments where it cuts out, anything beyond two years old is no longer needed, or I, don't know. what I'm trying to say is in the same way that social media seems to have captured our attention and flooded the landscape with just noise that we are increasingly becoming, annoyed by.
I'm just wondering if this is another opportunity for your brain to be befuddled by too much noise from your own past in this case.
[00:42:07] Alex Standiford: Yeah. and the jury's still out on that, right? I haven't quite got to the point to where that's been a problem. I do think that what's interesting, the distinction here is that I don't remember everything. Ai remember, AI doesn't remember everything either. It goes and looks up the information and knows it timely, so it feels like memory, but you're actually you get the best of both worlds.
'cause I think having a short memory is a superpower. Ask any golfer if, how, good having a short memory can be. You know what I mean?
[00:42:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The last hole. Oh
[00:42:39] Alex Standiford: yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. and there's definitely, but there's been times where I'll have a conversation and then before I put the journal entry, and I'll say, have we talked about this already?
Go look. And it'll be like, oh yeah, you don't need to write this. You already wrote this right here, so I just don't do it. and I didn't know, I completely forgot I came at it from a different angle, but it, was like the same conversation. it's, I think it's definitely feels like a superpower in that regard.
I think about, obviously for me personally, but also from a, from the team, my team's perspective, I just think about the, my SEO person and I watched, they just published a blog post on Siren that talks about, how that, that how talks about how to, manage and run, how to find your first affiliates or your first partners in any kind of product that you're launching.
because, these days, building is easy, but, distribution is hard, right? so we're, really hitting on those notes a lot right now and talking about how partner ships and, connecting with other people and affiliate programmes can in pretty much every business in some way help you grow your distribution.
and so we've been talking about that a lot, but he got all that context and all that information, with, by leveraging an S-E-O-S-E-O tooling, right? But also cross-referencing that with my, information and context. Never, he never interviewed me. He never asked me any questions, nothing. He literally just had everything he needed already because I've already talked about
[00:44:20] Nathan Wrigley: That is so interesting.
[00:44:22] Alex Standiford: yeah, so many content. if I need to write a content, I, if I need a content idea and I'm hard up and I'm wanting to write something, I literally, first thing I do is I go to AI and I say, what are some things that I've been talking about lately that are you think are worthwhile as a conversation for a blog post?
It gives me five or six every
[00:44:38] Nathan Wrigley: am so interested in this. I can imagine there's a bunch of people also maybe, I don't know what the jury will decide. Maybe half the audience will be like, no, Alex, this is, doomed to failure. the two years from now you'll be a, ified mess on the floor as it all collapses around you.
Maybe the other 50% are like, oh no, I want a bunch more of this. This sounds like just what I need. are you willing to obviously you've shared things with us. Would you be willing if anybody contacted you from this podcast to have a chat? And if so, where do you make yourself available?
Is it kinda like a social network type of thing or, yeah.
[00:45:18] Alex Standiford: there's several ways to get ahold of me. you can go to alex standiford.com. I'm on there. I'm on the Fedi verse through that. you can also find me directly on x, on LinkedIn. there's no shortage of different places to find me. I'm pretty much always just Alex Standiford all one word.
you could just search for my name, some kind of botched version of my name, even you'll find me, one way or another. and I'm always looking to talk about this stuff. Actually, I've just started to, Get hired for it, weirdly enough. I didn't expect that. That wasn't, the, that wasn't the goal necessarily.
But, I, have a client right now who has this big problem with their team not being able to accurate, like fetch and leverage their documentation or any of that stuff. And I was like, oh, I've solved that problem. this is how I did it. And as I'm talking about it, I'm realising, oh, crap, I could do this.
do you want a proposal? I can give you a proposal. so it's becoming where I'm starting to position myself from a consulting standpoint, as well. So opportunists, I need another opportunity or another idea, like freaking, I don't know, but,
[00:46:32] Nathan Wrigley: will say during that call with Nathan, you mentioned that you
Alex, you're busy enough.
[00:46:39] Alex Standiford: that is gonna contradict with your 90 day goals of this. Yeah. I, wish that was a joke. It is not a joke. It is dead serious. But, yeah, that's, yeah. I think, that obviously the biggest concern is privacy, around that, because the AI agent does see everything you're writing, it may not, it may or may not be keeping that information.
I can't control that. I do have the information on my own server at least, so it doesn't just get to keep it forever, but if it decides any conversation that I'm having it wants to keep, I can't stop
[00:47:10] Nathan Wrigley: I think there are, I think there are interesting contractual ways that you can at least protect yourself from that, but I, don't imagine they're very cheap or easy to set up. I think it's possible for the AI agents to guarantee that your data will not be used for training purposes, and it will be deleted the moment it's been consumed and so on.
I would imagine in the future if this kind of thing becomes more widespread, which I, assume it will, there'll be a subset of people who wanna really lean into this. I would've thought they, there would have to be cast iron, guardrails around that because there, there's just too much opportunity for mining that for all sorts of nefarious purposes, isn't there?
Yeah.
[00:47:51] Alex Standiford: yeah. My hope is that, for this kind of thing that the, I'm, really looking to open source. I'm, really hopeful that, the open source models and things like that will, continue to develop and that we'll be able to run these things locally. would, I would buy the hardware for it, do it locally, and have a conversation with an agent over A VPN right now
[00:48:17] Nathan Wrigley: That's where I want it to be as well. I wanna know that it's being held on my phone or my Mac or whatever it may be. Yeah. Or, even if it's just some sort of hashed, tokenized thing that I just know that the actual gobbins of it has not been brought to bear anywhere. I agree.
Yeah. that's, a really good point. I think we'll probably knock it on the head there. Honestly. I'm gonna talk to you some more after we click the stop button, but I think that is such an interesting subject. I've never heard anybody talking about this before.
[00:48:51] Alex Standiford: Yeah.
[00:48:51] Nathan Wrigley: genuinely fascinating.
I would, like to carry this conversation on, maybe we'll come back in a few months and you can tell, me exactly what we said.
[00:49:03] Alex Standiford: Yeah. No kidding. No kidding. Yeah.
[00:49:05] Nathan Wrigley: So Alex Standerford, great appreciation. Thanks for opening up about that. That is really interesting. Cheers.
[00:49:12] Alex Standiford: Yeah, Thanks.
[00:49:13] Nathan Wrigley: Right. That's all we've got time for today. I hope that you enjoyed that. As I said at the top of the show, if you've got any commentary on that interesting episode, head to wpbuilds.com. Search for episode number 470, and leave us a comment there.
What an interesting subject that was. You could tell that I got somewhat carried away. It was very, very interesting to me. I don't use a lot of AI, and so when somebody comes along with something which is atypical, and seems to have some actual practical benefit, I'm really intrigued and Alex certainly has been doing that.
Once again, if you want to help keep the lights on over on the podcast, you can go to wpbuild.com/advertise, or send us an email [email protected]. Or if you would like to meet up at WordCamp Europe, which I'm coming to next week, use that email address as well.
I don't know if there'll be a podcast episode next week because I am gonna be at that event, and it might just mean that I can't get to the editing of such an episode. We'll see.
If there isn't an episode, I'll see you in a couple of weeks. If there is, I'll be back in a week's time.
You stay safe. I'm gonna fade in some cheesy music. Bye-bye for now.
