The Joe Reis Show

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 your PR agency sends me these types of messages, I will ignore them or berate you for spamming me with this nonsensical and offensive slop.

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 this Freestyle Friday, I look at the gap between production and comprehension, why judgment is becoming more valuable than cranking out code and diagrams, and how software and data engineers may evolve from writing code, shipping widgets, and building pipelines to creating the context and semantic infrastructure that machines need to act.
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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 out Ground Level AI: https://www.groundlevel-ai.com/
Timestamps00:00 – Intro & Sharon Goldman’s background in AI journalism 01:48 – April 2022: Covering DALL-E 2 and the early AI landscape 02:40 – The unexpected boom of ChatGPT and public reaction 06:31 – AI Slop vs. Original Human Writing: Does human content still stand out? 10:21 – Will AI replace journalists and writers? 13:28 – Going solo: Transitioning from Fortune & VentureBeat to Substack 20:47 – How AI tools transformed modern writing & editing workflows 23:21 – The growing societal backlash against AI & data centers 28:07 – "Mutual Blindness": Power dynamics, tech hype, and public anxiety 35:11 – Younger generations' views on AI, job safety, and Waymo 38:21 – San Francisco vs. the rest of the world: The AI bubble 42:30 – Sovereign AI and global perspectives (Europe & China) 51:42 – Enterprise adoption vs. AI expectations 57:22 – Where to find Ground Level AI & wrap-up

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 Engineering over the years. It's super cool to see the massive impact that the book has had on the data industry and its practitioners around the world.

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 expensive code completers, simply writing code faster to feed legacy data architectures. But if you look at the industry from first principles, humans were never meant to be data machinery. In this episode, Matt and I break down how true agentic data systems work, why current enterprise architectures will fail under agent-scale query volumes, and what it really takes to capture institutional knowledge before it leaves the building. We also cover Matt’s front-row seat at Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis, his early days turning Snowflake into an enterprise giant, and how AI-native companies will outpace traditional enterprises. If you're building, architecting, or leading teams in the AI and data space, this is a conversation you don't want to miss.