Podcast profile
By Joe Reis
I’m Joe Reis, co-author of Fundamentals of Data Engineering, creator of Mixed Model Arts, international speaker, and long-time observer of the tech industry’s favorite recurring mistakes. Weekly broadcasts from somewhere on the road. Expect raw solo rants and long-form conversations with the engineers and leaders actually building things. I dive into data, AI, architecture, and career survival. This podcast is invitation-only. Unsolicited guest pitches and PR outreach are not considered.
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Every so often, the tech industry declares something dead. Data warehousing is dead. Data modeling is dead. Semantic layers are dead. SQL is dead. Now AI is supposedly making entire professions obsolete. I get it. Ragebait gets the clicks and comments. But it's also lame and disingenuous. In this Freestyle Friday, I un
In this episode, I crashed Pattern's office to sit down with Jacob Miller (VP of Platform Intelligence) and Jeremy Mumford (Lead AI Engineer) from Pattern to discuss their newly co-authored book, "Architected Intelligence." We dive deep into the reality of building scalable AI systems, explaining why companies cannot s
I'm getting a ton of emails from individuals and PR agencies asking to be on my podcast. Almost all of it is AI slop spam of the most bland and uninteresting kind. "I have an AI startup solving X." Yeah, you and everybody else... my Goldendoodle also has an AI startup. As a reminder my podcast is invite-only. If you or
Marshall McLuhan predicted a post-literate world in The Gutenberg Galaxy. That world may now be arriving: humans are reading less, AI is reading more, and engineers can increasingly produce code, schemas, documentation, and infrastructure without fully understanding what they created. Perhaps this describes you? ;) In
I sat down with Sharon Goldman - AI journalist, formerly at VentureBeat and Fortune, now running her own platform, Ground Level AI on Substack - for a conversation that went a lot further than I expected.We cover a lot of ground about the AI backlash, data centers, AI hype vs. reality, and the future of writing. Check
It's been four years and a day since the Fundamentals of Data Engineering was published. The big mental models of the book are the Data Engineering Lifecycle and its Undercurrents. I also discuss what would change about the book if I write it again today. Thanks to everybody who has supported the Fundamentals of Data E
Are AI agents replacing traditional data engineering tasks? I sat down with Matt Glickman, CEO & Co-founder of Genesis Computing and former Snowflake and Goldman Sachs executive, for a conversation about where data engineering is actually heading. Most organizations today are stuck in "demo mode" or using LLMs as expen
Here's a new show where I quickly cover a mental model that applies to your work as a data leader or practitioner. Kicking things off is Conway's Law.
It's been a crazy summer for AI. AI enthusiasm remains high, but the market is starting to ask far harder questions. Semiconductor stocks are in a bear market. IBM’s shares fell sharply. Data-center projects are facing political and community resistance. Enterprises are adopting AI, but many are struggling to turn expe
A short rant based on my new article this week, "The Database Is Not the Data Model" "In discussions with data practitioners, I keep seeing the same confusion. Someone pulls up a DDL file, a folder of dbt or SQL, or an ERD reverse-engineered from a Postgres instance and says: “Here’s our data model.” Not to be pedantic
In this episode, I chat with Steve Brown, an AI futurist, independent consultant, and former professional at Intel and Google DeepMind. Steve shares his insights on helping global leadership teams decode the future of artificial intelligence. We dive into the common pitfalls of corporate AI adoption, including why so m
In this Freestyle Friday episode, I break down results from the June 2026 Pulse Survey on organizational dysfunction among data engineers. I also dig into why data product ownership (or lack thereof) is one of the fundamental issues standing between companies and success with data and AI. ----------------------- Sponso
I walk through exactly how I use AI for idea generation, review, editing, and drafting on my upcoming book, Mixed Model Arts. This is also the first in a new Wednesday format where I answer listener questions about what I'm building. -------------------- Mixed Model Arts will be out soon. If you want to get a good deal
Kirill Bobrov, a senior data engineer at Spotify and author of the blog Luminousmen, joins me to talk about his viral "Drunk Post" repost, whether the AI boom is real infrastructure or another bubble, why engineering judgment can't be automated away, and the process of writing a technical book on concurrency. Luminousm
With AI reshaping employer expectations, junior candidates in data are facing real anxiety about the job market. I share the technical and personal skills I'd focus on, my top five traits I look for in a candidate, and how to build a network from scratch. ----------------------- Sponsor: Revefi Save serious money on yo
Maxime Beauchemin, creator of Apache Airflow and Superset, joins me to talk about his path from data orchestration to the frontier of AI. We cover his "Claude Code moment," his new agentic workflow tool Agor, and what a software-utopia future might actually look like.
Standing on the high plains near South Pass, Wyoming, where the Oregon and Mormon trails once crossed, I look at the remnants of the 1800s gold rush and draw a direct line to the current AI boom.
Prukalpa Sankar, founder of Atlan, joins me to unpack the piece most AI projects are missing: context. We get into building an enterprise "second brain," why agents get abandoned in testing hell, and what it actually took to rebuild Atlan as an AI-native company.
Juan Sequeda joins me straight off a month of travel to unpack the real state of AI agents in the enterprise, the danger of a "semantic swamp," and why pragmatism beats pedantry every time in data architecture.. 🎙️ SPONSORS Revify - surprise Snowflake bills? One customer cut theirs 50% in 48 hours.→ https://revify.com
Ryan Dolley and I record from the historic Guardian Building in Detroit to talk about building a data career away from the coastal AI bubble, and why Detroit's comeback energy makes it a city worth watching. 🎙️ SPONSORS Revify - surprise Snowflake bills? One customer cut theirs 50% in 48 hours.→ https://revify.com/dem
Back from months on the road across Asia, Europe, and the US, I unpack the mood I kept running into: uncertainty. Energy shocks, supply chain chaos, and AI upending the playbook for vendors and practitioners alike. Plus updates on my book and an upcoming Salt Lake City conference. ------------------ This episode is spo
Chris Tabb, founder of LEIT Data, joins me live at Confluent Current London to talk honestly about how AI agents are reshaping the consultancy business model, from billing structure to internal knowledge management.
Eric Weber makes the case that the feeling of falling behind in AI is mostly manufactured. We're miscalibrating what's true for the top 0.1% in San Francisco against everyone else. We get into judgment as the real bottleneck, and why so many people are quietly leaving corporate roles.
Tristan Handy and I unpack a shift coming to data infrastructure: within 12 months, the primary consumers of data won't be humans, they'll be AI agents. We dig into compute costs, "context stores," and why the industry shouldn't just build horses with wheels.
NOTE - Sorry for the edits in this video. I used Descript to edit out the umms and uhhs, and it was a bit too aggressive. Will make it less jarring in future videos. Thanks. Walking around Salt Lake City, I break down results from the April 2026 data modeling survey: 90% of respondents have a modeling pain point, and o