The Joe Reis Show

It's been a few months on the road, bouncing through San Francisco a bunch, across Asia and Europe, and a quick stop in Detroit. In this audio-only Freestyle Friday I unpack what I've been seeing out there. If I had to pick one word for the mood worldwide, it's uncertainty: energy and supply shocks rippling out of the Middle East, fuel and resource shortages, flights getting canceled with no notice, and AI scrambling the playbook for vendors, practitioners, and leaders alike.
I get into why so many data tooling companies are quietly having existential conversations, how Atlan tore its product down to rebuild AI-native (a full conversation with Prukalpa is coming next week), and a fun experiment I shipped this week with DuckDB Quack.
I also dig into the split I keep seeing: senior practitioners getting superpowers while juniors face a brutal job market, leaders being asked to do far more with less, and why I think the industrial-age org chart is finally on its way out.
Plus some personal updates: the new book is now targeting late July and a companion course is on the way.
Finally, I'm mixing audio and video formats going forward (Freestyle Friday will probably be mostly audio), the Practical Data Community newsletter is live, and there's a Salt Lake City conference brewing for late January. Lots in the hopper...
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Timestamps
0:00 — Intro & travel recap — Sets the stage: months of globe-trotting across Asia, Europe, and the US
1:10 — Global uncertainty & resource scarcity — Fuel/water shortages in Southeast Asia, flight cancellations in Europe, ripple effects of geopolitical tensions
5:30 — AI dominates every conversation — The #1 topic at conferences worldwide; vendors facing existential questions and forced to rethink everything (Atlan pivot, DuckDB agent idea)
10:14 — AI's impact on workers at every level — Senior practitioners gaining superpowers, juniors worried about jobs, leaders expected to do more with less
17:51 — Key takeaway: everyone feels behind — Even top AI insiders are uncertain; give yourself grace, upskill, and consider building something for yourself
20:38 — Announcements — Book drops July 27th, course coming, Practical Data Community Newsletter live, fall travel schedule (London, Paris, possible Salt Lake City conference)

If you're a consultant and you're not using AI agents yet, your competitors are. No surprise, but they're delivering faster, cheaper, and better than ever.Chris Tabb, founder of LEIT Data, joins me live at Confluent Current London 2026 to talk honestly about how AI agents are reshaping the consultancy model, from billing structures and team rollouts, to building internal tribal knowledge and outpacing firms that are still staffing up the old way.Timestamps:0:33 — How Chris is Going Agentic1:56 — Token Maxing Leaderboards5:26 — AI Agents: Year-Over-Year7:08 — Tagile: Agentic Development9:00 — AI in Consultancy17:22 — Prompt Management & Context Quality

Everyone in tech is telling you to go faster. Eric stepped away from his role to do the opposite.In this conversation, we get into why so many people feel like they're falling behind in AI, and why that feeling is mostly manufactured. Eric makes the case that we're miscalibrated: assuming what's true for the 0.1% (the SF AI inner circle) is true for the 10%, when by definition almost no one is keeping up with that group.
We talk about why judgment, not throughput, is the real bottleneck right now, why most AI products feel boring even as code output explodes, what the "flatten the org" experiments are actually measuring (spoiler: yesterday's stock price), and why people are leaving corporate roles at a rate that's hard to ignore.
We also get into the parts nobody wants to say out loud: layoffs by email, the gap between who people are in private vs. on LinkedIn, the ghost routines after you leave a job, and what walking around San Francisco actually feels like when every billboard is AI and every person you pass looks depleted.If you've felt the FOMO and wondered whether the problem is you or the framing, this one's for you.
Eric Weber is a data and product leader formerly at Grammarly, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Stitch Fix.

In this episode, Tristan Handy and I sit down to unpack a massive shift coming to the data industry: over the next 12 months, the primary consumers of data won't be humans. They will be AI agents. We dive deep into what this means for data infrastructure, compute costs, and the tools we use every day. We also talk about processing high-volume agent queries, building "context stores", and why the industry shouldn't just build "horses with wheels" when designing agentic data engineers. We also take a fun detour comparing the current AI landscape to the early days of dial-up modems and Mosaic browsers , and discuss why stepping away from the screen and going old-school might be the ultimate productivity hack.

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.
Freestyle Friday, May 15, 2026
Walking around Salt Lake City and unpacking the April 2026 data modeling survey results (334 respondents). Across three surveys now: January's State of Data Engineering (1,100), March's AI usage poll (193), and April's data modeling deep-dive. Not surprisingly, the same two pain points keep surfacing: time pressure and lack of clear ownership.90% of respondents have a data modeling pain point. When asked what would actually help, only 4.8% wanted better tools. Training, business requirements, time, and ownership crushed tooling in the rankings.
Will AI improve things or make them worse? Time will tell...Also covered:
Why physical data modeling has become the default (and why that's a problem)
Data modeling vs. schema design - they're not the same thing
Semantic layers (yay or nay?), Lloyd Tabb, and Malloy
Conway's Law, Reis's Law, and what changes when org charts get flattened by AI
Why leadership is under more pressure than ever
The June half-year survey is coming
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