Podcast
Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer
Hosted by Matt Stauffer · EN
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.
23episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
AI and Geopolitics: Building Agents That Think Like World Powers
1w ago00:56:05Tap to summarizeThe 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.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.They dig into practical, grounded uses: reducing decision fatigue, comparing dense reports, and priming Claude with current events because "AI is very bad at telling time." Lauren then walks through a standout project — an agent-based war game that simulated the Strait of Hormuz crisis 50 times, modeling how players like the Reserve Bank of India and South Korea's Blue House might respond.The bigger thread is a contrarian one: that AI will make genuine human expertise rarer, more valuable, and more expensive, even as it reshapes entry-level work, deepfakes, and how the next generation learns.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Lauren Dueck on X - https://x.com/LaurenDueckLauren Dueck on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlaurendueck/The Asia Group - https://theasiagroup.com/Strait of Hormuz Report - https://straitofhormuz.theasiagroup.com/-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/
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AI for Virtual Assistants: Skills, Automations, and the Human-in-the-Loop
3w ago00:42:25Tap to summarizeThe 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.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.They get specific about the practical stuff: building reusable Claude skills to process podcasts, fixing stuck Zapier and Tally form automations, and going from playing around in Lovable to building and deploying a full Laravel app with Claude Code — her first being a memorial website for a friend.The conversation also widens out to the harder questions: keeping a human in the loop for quality, how AI is reshaping the future of virtual assistance and the work itself, and what it even means to call yourself a "virtual assistant" when you're shipping internal tools.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Kayla’s Website - http://kaylahelmick.comKayla on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kayla.helmick/Kayla on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaylahelmick/Kayla Helmick on X - https://x.com/kayla_helmick-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/Big thanks to the companies that support the show:Mailtrap - https://l.rw.rw/pragmaticai_4
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The Conversations AI Forces Us to Have
Jun 2401:09:11Tap to summarizeThe 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.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.They get into the generational backlash against AI, the myth that "all the layoffs are because of AI," how building with AI sparked a hard conversation with Justin's own co-founder, and the practical ways Justin uses ChatGPT and Claude in daily life, from meal planning to packing for a trip to London.The through-line is a challenge for an AI world: as the easy work gets automated, all that's left is the hard stuff — so do the hard thing, increase your "luck surface area," and lean into the human connection AI keeps surfacing.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Justin Jackson Website - https://justinjackson.ca/Transistor.fm - https://transistor.fm/Inception Point AI - https://www.inceptionpoint.ai/The Panel Podcast - https://panelpodcast.com/-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/Big thanks to the companies that support the show:Mailtrap - https://l.rw.rw/pragmaticai_3
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Relevance Engineering: How to Show Up in AI Search
Jun 1700:38:17Tap to summarizeThe 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.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.Mike explains why he reads patents and white papers instead of public docs, how he built his own retrieval-augmented generation prototype to understand how these systems actually work, and why visibility now comes from building "surface area" across your whole content ecosystem — Reddit, LinkedIn, digital PR — rather than from links alone. They get into the disappearing line between white hat and black hat, and why AI search has no rulebook yet.The conversation also turns personal: how Mike mandated his team get faster with AI, how he empowers people from the bottom up instead of issuing ultimatums, and how AI frees him to spend more time on the creative work — including music — that he actually wants to do.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Michael on X - https://x.com/VeryWellVersedMichael on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelkingphilly/iPullRank Website - https://ipullrank.com/iPullRank on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/ipullrank/iPullRank on X - https://x.com/iPullRank-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/Big thanks to the companies that support the show:Mailtrap - https://l.rw.rw/pragmaticai_2
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Building a Self-Directed PhD With Claude AI
Jun 1001:15:44Tap to summarizeThe 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.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.They get into the nuts and bolts: an always-on Mac Mini running stacked Claude Code sessions in tmux, SSH access from anywhere, voice-to-text tools, and a self-designed "PhD" where Sonnet plays research assistant and Opus plays a hypercritical dissertation chair, with every critique tracked as a GitHub issue. Dave explains why the book itself was never really the goal.The conversation widens into the bigger questions — what gets lost when AI handles the rote work, whether to retain human connection on purpose, and Dave's honest 80/20 split between optimism and unease about where all of this is heading.Matt Stauffer on X Dave Stanton’s Website Dave on X Tighten Website Blink for iOSSuperwhisper Geography as Destiny on GitHub ngrok TailscaletmuxSolo Please Use AI by Sean Smucker -----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.Big thanks to the companies that support the show:Mailtrap
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Human Marketing in an AI Search World
Jun 300:50:35Tap to summarizeThe 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.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.They get practical fast: why keywords are giving way to 23-word prompts, why your About page suddenly matters, why LinkedIn beats Reddit as a source AI tools trust, and how Meg now runs tech audits and analysis through Claude skills and Cowork to cut payroll and take real vacations.The conversation also opens up into something bigger — how AI lowers the barrier to starting a business, why it changes the math differently for owners than for employees, and Meg's passion for helping more women step into entrepreneurship.Matt Stauffer on X Tighten Website Meg Clarke on LinkedInMeg’s Website Dan Martel BookAllie K. Miller on YouTube-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.
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Using AI As a Thinking Partner, Not a Vending Machine
May 2701:07:51Tap to summarizeThe 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.In this episode, Matt Stauffer talks with Greg Storey — author of Creative Intelligence: Don’t Ask AI, Think With It — about why most people are using AI like a productivity vending machine instead of a true thinking partner. Greg shares how AI can become a creative and strategic collaborator, exploring design thinking, divergent vs. convergent thinking, and the three questions he asks every time he starts a conversation with AI.They also dive into the bigger picture: why AI maximalism misses the point, how to stay creative as the tools become more capable, and what it means to preserve human creativity and curiosity in a rapidly changing world.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Greg’s Website - https://brilliantcrank.comGreg’s Book - https://brilliantcrank.com/creative-intelligence/Creative Intelligence Everyday Field Guides - https://brilliantcrank.com/creative-intelligence-field-guides/-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/
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AI Researcher Michelle Yi on Watson, World Models, and Why AI Should Be for Everyone
May 2001:06:07Tap to summarizeThe 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.Matt Stauffer is joined by Michelle Yi — co-founder of Generationship, board member of Women in Data, and AI Researcher at Basis Research Institute — who shares her 20-year journey across AI research, industry, and startups.Michelle traces the evolution of AI from her early days working on IBM Watson through to modern language models, reflecting on what's changed, what's been lost, and what's finally becoming possible. She and Matt dig into the importance of democratizing AI and making it genuinely useful beyond big tech.The conversation closes on Michelle's vision for a more equitable and responsible AI future — one being built through initiatives like Generationship and Basis Research Institute, and powered by people who choose to engage with AI rather than sit it out.Matt Stauffer on X Tighten Website Michelle on LinkedIn Basis Research InstituteNYC Rat Research in the News Pyro.ai Women in Data Generationship Decile Group Bobiverse Series Becky Chambers Book Andrej Karpathy YouTube Community Usage Tweet Setlist FM -----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.
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AI in Elementary Schools: A Principal’s Take
May 1300:48:08Tap to summarizeThe 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.In this episode, Matt Stauffer is joined by Amie McCaw, an elementary school principal in Southwest Michigan with 19 years of experience leading K-5 buildings. Together they explore what AI actually looks like inside a real elementary school and how teachers, principals, and students are navigating it.Amie shares how she uses AI for communications, observation feedback, and behavior planning, while always vetting the output and never passing it off as her own. She talks about the surprising generational divide on her staff, where younger Gen Z teachers are often the most skeptical of AI, and why she still wants her K-5 kids learning to write a sentence before reaching for a chatbot.The conversation widens into bigger questions: how AI is reshaping teacher burnout, why critical thinking has to come before trust, and why no tool will ever replace the human connection between a teacher and a child.Matt Stauffer on X - https://x.com/mattstaufferTighten Website - https://tighten.com/Amie on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/amiemccaw.bsky.socialAmie on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amie-mccaw-53633464/-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/
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Teaching Non-Developers to Build Real Apps With AI
May 601:07:56Tap to summarizeThe 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.Matt Stauffer talks with Brian Casel about what it means to be a “builder” in 2026—and how that definition is rapidly expanding beyond traditional developers.They explore Brian’s work with Builder Methods and his YouTube channel, alongside the broader shift from writing code to spending the majority of time in planning, specs, and product thinking. The conversation highlights how AI is reshaping software development, enabling both technical and non-technical builders to create real, production-ready tools—not just experiments.They also dig into the rise of internal tools across all types of businesses, the growing importance of building in public, and why product thinking may now be the most valuable skill in the AI era.Matt Stauffer on X Tighten Website Brian Casel on X Builder Methods WebsiteBrian Casel on YouTubeProductize Course-----Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten - https://tighten.com/
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