About this podcast
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.
Episodes
The newest 50 of 425 episodes
- Do Data Roles Have a Future? · 21 minDoes data engineering have a future? What about data roles in general? As AI makes it faster and cheaper to write code, build pipelines, and generate analytics/reports, what…
- Is BI Dead? Why Hex Hit Reset and Rewrote Everything for the AI Agent Era w/ Barry McCardel (CEO Hex) · 30 minTraditional drag-and-drop BI is facing an existential crisis. In this live fireside chat at Hex Prompt, I sit down with Barry McCardel (Co-founder & CEO of Hex), right as Hex…
- Why Analytics Engineering Is Changing Forever w/ Tristan Handy (dbt/Fivetran) · 48 minTristan Handy (dbt/fivetran) joins me to discuss the tectonic shifts reshaping data teams, analytics engineering, and business intelligence in the age of agentic AI. Tristan…
- The Great Data Interregnum: Morbid Symptoms of an Industry Between Eras · 32 minThe old data industry is dying. The new one hasn't quite been born. And in between, we're seeing some strange things. In this episode, I explore the Great Data Interregnum, a…
- Why AI Alone Can’t Fix Your Sh*tty Data Models w/ Kyle Nesbit (Credible Data) · 57 minIn this episode of The Joe Reis Show, I sit down at my house in Salt Lake City with Kyle, founder of Credible Data. Before founding Credible, Kyle spent nearly 17 years at…
- Scott’s Tots and the Broken Promise Economy · 17 minEver feel like you've been lied to? In Scott’s Tots, Michael Scott promises a class of third graders he’ll pay their college tuition if they finish high school. Ten years later…
- "Blue Washed": The Rise and Fall of IBM Watson Health and Explorys w/ Doug Meil · 51 minIn this episode, I sit down with Doug Meil, software veteran and author of The Rise and Fall of Explorys and IBM Watson Health. A decade ago, IBM Watson was the undeniable face…
- Build a Career That Looks Like You · 19 minA lot of people ask me for career advice. My latest advice is learn the fundamentals, build useful things that interest you, and stop outsourcing your direction to everyone…
- The Pendulums of Data · 13 minThe data industry rarely moves in a straight line. We swing from centralized to decentralized, batch to real-time, general-purpose to specialized, abstraction to control, and…
- This Year’s Better Mousetrap: New Tech, Same Old Problems · 17 minWe see a lot of hype cycles in our industry - Data mesh. Generative AI. Agents. Now context. Every cycle brings a new label and a familiar promise: this will finally make your…
- DuckDB - The Past, Present, and Future, DuckLabs, and More w/ Hannes Mühleisen · 44 minHannes Mühleisen (co-creator of DuckDB) joins me to chat about the past, present, and future of DuckDB, Ducklabs (recently acquired by AWS), and more. Note - parts edited due to…
- Why Off-The-Shelf AI Fails for Business Analytics w/ Rob Collie · 1 h 5 minIn this episode, I'm joined by Rob Collie, CEO of P3 Adaptive, early pioneer of Power BI and Power Pivot at Microsoft, and author of the new book Fair Game: Customizing AI to…
- Designing the AI-Driven Data Foundations: Architecture, Principles, and Practice w/ Sanjeev Mohan · 1 h 0 minFormer Gartner VP Analyst and principal at SanjMo, Sanjeev Mohan, joins me to break down the reality of AI adoption, data foundations, and why enterprises are hitting roadblocks…
- Why Write Books? · 16 minThis week at dbt Summit, Tristan Handy (co-founder of dbt) asked me why I write books. It's a good question, especially today when reading is declining and any answer is…
- Nobody Knows... · 17 minI talk to executives and practitioners around the world about AI and what comes next. Everyone has predictions and pontifications, and everyone seems to think someone else has…
- Why AI Agents Will Break Modern Data Engineering (And How to Fix It) w/ Christophe Blefari (Nao) · 58 minIn this episode of The Joe Reis Show, I catch up with my good friend Christophe Blefari, co-founder of NAO, to dig into what's actually happening on the front lines of AI agents…
- The Return of Conceptual Data Modeling w/ Sami Hero (CEO of Ellie.ai) · 50 minIn this episode, I sit down with Sami Hero, CEO of Ellie.ai, to talk through the evolution of data modeling and why foundational conceptual modeling is more critical now than…
- Agents, Self-Service BI Redux, and "Death of Data Teams" · 20 minAI agents are being pitched as the “death of the data team,” with CEOs supposedly able to do the work themselves. We’ve heard versions of this promise before, from self-service…
- Bringing Distributed Compute & AI to the Edge w/ David Aronchick (CEO of Expanso) · 53 minIn this episode of the Joe Reis Show, I sit down with David Aronchick, co-founder of Expanso and one of the early pioneers behind Kubernetes, Kubeflow, and the CNCF. We dive deep…
- Are You Still Hands-On? · 24 minI get asked all the time whether I’m still “hands-on.” The short answer: not in the traditional sense. My work has shifted toward writing, teaching, advising, investing, building…
- Building with AI, DuckDB + RDF, and the Semantic Future w/ Dan Bennett (Head of Tech @ S&P Global) · 52 minOn this episode of The Joe Reis Show, I’m joined by Dan Bennett, Head of Technology for the Enterprise Data Organization at S&P Global.We get into what it actually looks like to…
- The Mixed Model Arts Manifesto · 16 minI discuss the The Mixed Model Arts Manifesto. That's it. That's the show.
- Agentic Analytics and the Death of Dashboards? | Oliver Laslett (CTO of Lightdash) · 1 h 4 minWill AI agents solve the data industry's hardest challenges, or are we just amplifying existing chaos?In this episode, I chat with Oliver Laslett, Co-founder and CTO at…
- The Great Recomposition: Why Everything is Blurring Together · 21 minIt feels like everything is converging right now. Data forms and systems are converging. Agile and Waterfall are starting to look strangely compatible. Software engineering, data…
- Stop Overpaying for AI! The Rise of Small Open-Source Models w/ Daniel Svonava (Superlinked) · 51 minAre massive frontier AI models actually worth the cost?In this episode, I sit down with Daniel Svonava, Founder of Superlinked, to break down where AI is actually heading in…
- The "X Is Dead" Fallacy · 19 minEvery 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…
- Building Real AI Systems: Inside "Architected Intelligence" with Jacob Miller and Jeremy Mumford · 49 minIn 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…
- My Podcast is Invitation Only. Please Stop Spamming Me. · 1 minI'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…
- The Post-Literate Engineer · 26 minMarshall 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…
- The AI Backlash Is Real! - AI Journalist Sharon Goldman on Data Centers, Hype, the Future of Writing · 59 minI 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…
- The Data Engineering Lifecycle & Undercurrents - Mental Model Mondays · 9 minIt'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…
- Why AI Agents Are Replacing Traditional Data Engineering w/ Matt Glickman · 50 minAre 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…
- Conway's Law - Mental Model Mondays · 5 minHere'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.
- Party's Over. The AI Market Is Entering Its Accountability Phase · 28 minIt'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…
- The Database Is Not the Data Model · 13 minA 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…
- Why 80% of AI Projects Fail & How to Build an AI-First Company - Steve Brown (AI Futurist) · 54 minIn 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…
- The Data Anarchy Tax: Why No One Owns Your Data · 27 minIn 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…
- How I'm Actually Using AI to Write a Book · 21 minI 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…
- Is AI Replacing Data Engineers? - Kirill Bobrov (Luminousmen) · 39 minKirill 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…
- What I'd Do as a Junior Data Engineer in 2026 · 22 minWith 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…
- Max Beauchemin on Agentic AI and His Claude Code Moment · 46 minMaxime 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…
- The AI Boom Looks a Lot Like the Gold Rush · 11 minStanding 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…
- Why Your AI Agents Die in Testing - Prukalpa Sankar, Atlan · 52 minPrukalpa 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…
- The Semantic Swamp: Snowflake Summit 2026 Recap - Juan Sequeda · 51 minJuan 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…
- Building a Data Career Outside the Coasts - Ryan Dolley · 14 minRyan 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…
- AI, Energy Shocks, and the End of the Old Playbook · 24 minBack 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…
- How AI Agents Are Changing Data Consulting - Chris Tabb · 23 minChris 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…
- Why You Feel Behind in AI (and Aren't) - Eric Weber · 50 minEric 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…
- Tristan Handy: AI Agents Are the New Consumers of Data · 47 minTristan 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…
- Why 90% of Data Teams Are Failing at Data Modeling · 16 minNOTE - 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. •…
