Pragmatic AI with Matt Stauffer

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 talks with Karen Maria Alston, a 20-year communication strategist turned AI governance advocate, about why AI is impacting everyone, whether they use it or not.

They get into the real-world ways AI is already shaping daily life: deepfake photos on dating apps, AI-generated social media influencers with millions of followers, voice mimicry scams draining retirement accounts, and what it means that most Americans, including most politicians, still have no idea any of this is happening. Karen breaks down the case for voter mobilization, legislative action, and why individual abstention from AI doesn't actually change the trajectory.

The conversation also gets into identity, the social contract, and the deeper human cost of automation, including what it means to lose a job that was part of who you were, and what it looks like to be hopeful about AI without being naive about it.
Matt Stauffer on Twitter 
Tighten Website 
Karen Maria Alston on LinkedIn 
Karen Maria Alston on Instagram 
Karen Maria Alston on Substack 
Karen Maria Alston’s Website 

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

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 talks with Nick Peterson, PhD, Assistant Professor of Homiletics at Christian Theological Seminary, ordained AME minister, executive pastor, and grant director, about the deep history between religion and technology, and what AI is really doing to knowledge, credit, and labor.
They explore how Nick uses AI as a tool for falsifiability rather than content generation, why the plantation economy is a useful (and uncomfortable) lens for understanding who benefits from large language models, and how the same dynamics that shaped the Gutenberg press, televangelism, and colonialism are very much alive in the age of Claude and ChatGPT.
The conversation raises harder questions about what it means to own an idea, what students lose when AI does their thinking for them, and whether the consolidation of knowledge in the hands of a few tech platforms is something new, or just the oldest story in human history, running faster.
Matt Stauffer on Twitter 
Tighten Website
Nick’s Website 
Nick on Instagram 
Nick on Facebook 
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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

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 talks with Reuben Johnson — aka YoBigRube — founder of Fly Duo, a storytelling studio specializing in high-trust narratives for complex and sensitive messaging. Reuben brings a perspective shaped by decades as a self-taught developer and outsider to the tech establishment.

They explore what it looks like to engage with AI when you have real criticisms of the industry — from choosing the least evil tool to running local LLMs, using AI as a writing accountability partner, and refusing to let a machine call itself human.

The conversation covers AI bias, abstracted accountability, the vulnerability of kids to AI characters, and why the answer to symbolic activism isn't more symbols — it's showing up in community, staying curious, and never deciding you've done enough.
Matt Stauffer on Twitter 
Tighten Website 
FlyDuo | High-Trust Storytelling
Reuben Johnson on LinkedIn
Sam Cole Deep Fake Podcast 
The Tech We Want
404 Media
Small Technology Foundation
PBS 
Sex Tech N Chill 
Community Tweet 
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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

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 Sam Rose, developer educator at ngrok, to unpack what’s actually happening inside the AI models we use every day. Sam breaks down ideas like parameters, gradient descent, embeddings, and vector search in a way that makes them intuitive, using simple analogies such as converting Celsius to Fahrenheit. Along the way, they explore Ethan Mollick’s concept of the “jagged frontier” of AI capability and discuss why benchmarks like SWE-bench don’t always tell the full story.
The conversation wraps with a thoughtful look at the ethical tensions around modern AI: intellectual property concerns, the massive financial momentum behind these systems, and what it means to keep using these tools thoughtfully even when you’re still wrestling with their implications.
Matt Stauffer on Twitter 
Tighten Website 
Sam Website 
Sam on Twitter 
Prompt Caching Blog Post 
Co-Intelligence Book 
Benchmark Blog Post 
Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality 
Stephen Welch on Twitter
Welch Labs on YouTube 
Julia Turc on YouTube
Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) Book 
Nathan Lambert
Aaron Francis Website
Faster.dev 
Mitchell Hashimoto 
Armin Ronacher 
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts Blog Post 
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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.

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 AI strategist Blessing Richardson about how businesses can use AI in practical, responsible ways. They explore the importance of data literacy, building personal AI tools, and creating a culture of experimentation inside organizations. The conversation also looks at the deeper questions: how AI is changing the way we work, how it affects us as humans, and what the future of AI in business might look like.

Matt Stauffer on Twitter 
Tighten Website 
Blessing’s Blog 
Blessing on LinkedIn 
Blessing on Threads 
Sayla 
Coda

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Editing and transcription sponsored by Tighten.