Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer
Pragmatic AI is a podcast about practical AI for business leaders, developers, and thinkers—the stuff that actually works, not the hate or the hype. We cover using AI tools day-to-day across the spectrum of human experience.
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How Laravel Uses AI Across Finance, Legal, HR, and Sales
<p>The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.</p><br><p>In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Tom Crary, President and COO of Laravel, for a rare look at AI on the business side of a fast-growing, PE-backed company — not the coding side everyone talks about.</p><p><br>Tom walks through how his team leads with security and trust (including a custom data agreement and a hard line around fin...
Wax On, Wax Off: What AI Can't Teach a 14-Year-Old
<p>The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.</p><br><p>Matt Stauffer sits down with Bill Van Loo — high school engineering educator, creative technologist, and independent electronic musician — for a clear-eyed conversation about using AI in the real world. Bill describes himself as a longtime skeptic who spent a "summer of AI learning" and came out the other side with a practical framework rather than hype.</p><p><br>They dig into...
A Data Scientist’s Approach to AI
<p>The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.</p><br><p>In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with Apoorva Joshi, DevRel at MongoDB, about what it looks like to come to AI from the inside — seven years as a data scientist in cybersecurity before she ever touched a foundation model.</p><p><br>They get into how she evaluates whether a problem needs machine learning at all, why she gives models her bra...
Ghost.org’s John O’Nolan on How AI Helps Small Teams Win Against Giants
<p>The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.</p><br><p>In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with John O'Nolan, founder of Ghost, the open-source publishing platform he runs as a nonprofit that's deliberately capped at 50 people and can never be bought or sold. It's an unusual perch from which to be one of the most AI-optimistic builders in tech.</p><p><br>They get practical fast: John's Codex Desktop setup a...
AI and Geopolitics: Building Agents That Think Like World Powers
<p>The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.</p><br><p>In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with Lauren Dueck, SVP and Director of Communications at The Asia Group, a geopolitical consulting firm advising the world's top companies. Lauren shares how AI is reshaping geopolitical consulting, decision-making, and communication — across both her daily work and her firm's high-stakes advisory practice.</p><p><br>They dig into practical, grounded uses: reducing decision fatigue, com...
AI for Virtual Assistants: Skills, Automations, and the Human-in-the-Loop
<p>The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.</p><br><p>In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Kayla Helmick to talk about her journey from traditional virtual assistant work to leveraging AI for automations, podcast editing, and app development — and how she turned an early existential threat into the biggest boost her business has ever had.</p><p>They get specific about the practical stuff: building reusable Claude skills to pro...
The Conversations AI Forces Us to Have
<p>The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.</p><br><p>In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with Justin Jackson, co-founder of Transistor.fm, about what AI is really doing to creators, careers, and company culture — and why so little of it is actually about the technology itself.</p><p><br>They get into the generational backlash against AI, the myth that "all the layoffs are because of AI," how building with AI...
Relevance Engineering: How to Show Up in AI Search
<p>The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.</p><br><p>Matt Stauffer talks with Michael King, founder and CEO of iPullRank, about what he calls relevance engineering — the work of getting brands and people seen inside AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.</p><p><br>Mike explains why he reads patents and white papers instead of public docs, how he built his own retrieval-augmented generation prototype to und...
Building a Self-Directed PhD With Claude AI
<p>The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.</p><br><p>In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with software engineer and self-described "Renegade Historian" Dave Stanton, who has built an entire AI-driven workflow that lets him program — and write a 400-page history book — almost entirely by voice from his phone.</p><p><br>They get into the nuts and bolts: an always-on Mac Mini running stacked Claude Code sessions in tmux, SSH acces...
Human Marketing in an AI Search World
<p>The Pragmatic AI Podcast is sponsored by Tighten. T-I-G-H-T-E-N. We will take your AI ideas, prototypes or even vibe-coded apps, and we'll take them to production. Scalable and secure. Check us out at tighten.com.</p><br><p>In this episode, Matt Stauffer sits down with Meg Clarke, owner of Clapping Dog Media, to talk about how getting found online has shifted from gaming search engines to being discovered by AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.</p><p><br>They get practical fast: why keywords are giving way to 23-word prompts, why your About page suddenly matters, why L...
