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.
Wax On, Wax Off: What AI Can't Teach a 14-Year-Old
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.
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.
They dig into the difference between throwing a problem at AI and getting it to build you a tool, why Bill's laser-cutter workflow became his turning point, and the three ways he thinks about AI: as a thinking partner, a way to handle tedious work, and a way to build things.
The conversation also wrestles with the harder questions: how to prepare students who are anxious and often anti-AI, how to protect learning instead of offloading it, and where a working artist chooses to keep the machines out entirely.
Matt Stauffer on X (https://x.com/mattstauffer) - https://x.com/mattstauffer (https://x.com/mattstauffer)
Tighten Website (https://tighten.com/) - https://tighten.com/ (https://tighten.com/)
Bill Van Loo Website (http://billvanloo.com/) - http://billvanloo.com/ (http://billvanloo.com/)
Bill Van Loo on Instagram (http://instagram.com/billvanloo)- http://instagram.com/billvanloo (http://instagram.com/billvanloo)
Bill Van Loo on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-van-loo)- https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-van-loo (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-van-loo)
Matt Laracon US Talk (https://youtu.be/au9bIQsrh8k?si=WoJ078glcr9CCnv7) - https://youtu.be/au9bIQsrh8k?si=WoJ078glcr9CCnv7 (https://youtu.be/au9bIQsrh8k?si=WoJ078glcr9CCnv7)
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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten (https://tighten.com/) - https://tighten.com/ (https://tighten.com/)
29 Jul 2026
A Data Scientist’s Approach to AI
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.
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.
They get into how she evaluates whether a problem needs machine learning at all, why she gives models her brain dump instead of asking for a first draft, the proxy service she built so workshop customers never have to juggle LLM API keys, and why her trust level still sits around seventy percent.
The conversation also goes somewhere heavier: what happens to an economic model built on the value of human cognitive work, why so much AI discourse quietly assumes coding agents represent all of AI, and the question of where meaning comes from when the thing that gave it to you gets automated.
Matt Stauffer on X (https://x.com/mattstauffer) - https://x.com/mattstauffer (https://x.com/mattstauffer)
Tighten Website (https://tighten.com/) - https://tighten.com/ (https://tighten.com/)
Apoorva on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/apoorvajoshi95/) - https://www.linkedin.com/in/apoorvajoshi95/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/apoorvajoshi95/)
Mongo DB Builder Blog (https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/builder-blog) - https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/builder-blog (https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/builder-blog)
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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten (https://tighten.com/) - https://tighten.com/ (https://tighten.com/)
22 Jul 2026
Ghost.org’s John O’Nolan on How AI Helps Small Teams Win Against Giants
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.
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.
They get practical fast: John's Codex Desktop setup across two Macs, why "goal mode" is the biggest workflow shift of the year, running adversarial red-team sub-agents mid-task, and the risk-based rule for when to ship AI code versus pump the brakes. Matt shares his own turning point building a Laracon puzzle in hundreds of thousands of lines of code between meetings.
The conversation widens into where this all goes — a future long tail of small, niche businesses competing with giants, why "you're bad at prompting" is a more useful frame than "the AI is bad," and John's "made in China" theory for why today's slop era gives way to quality.
Matt Stauffer on X (https://x.com/mattstauffer) - https://x.com/mattstauffer (https://x.com/mattstauffer)
Tighten Website (https://tighten.com/) - https://tighten.com/ (https://tighten.com/)
John O’Nolan on X (http://x.com/johnonolan) - http://x.com/johnonolan (http://x.com/johnonolan)
Ghost Website (http://ghost.org/) - ghost.org (http://ghost.org/)
Incorruptible by Eric Ries (http://bit.ly/4pqxmbD) - http://bit.ly/4pqxmbD (http://bit.ly/4pqxmbD)
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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten (https://tighten.com/) - https://tighten.com/ (https://tighten.com/)
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