(interview writings for my book coming in oct 2026)
I’ve known about Joe Reis for a couple of years now.
We met when I was helping with go-to-market for his groundbreaking data engineering course with DeepLearningAI. Before we started working together, I read his book – ”Fundamentals of Data Engineering” – and was immediately struck by the premise. He called himself a “recovering data scientist” who realized you need solid data foundations before you can run experiments on top.
Joe is someone who refuses to be put in a box.
He’s a data engineer, advisor, entrepreneur, DJ, rock climber, writer, and now he’s launching something working with other authors. He’s writing his second book. When we recorded this a few months ago, he described his morning routhine – he wakes up every morning to have AI agents build things while he makes coffee and reads.
He has talked and written about what this era of abundance means to career builders, entrepreneurs, and creators.
The Era of Abundance
“Everyone’s back at the starting line,” Joe told me. “You don’t have to accept the world as it was anymore.”
We’re living through something unprecedented. The barrier to creating – to manifesting ideas into code, apps, tools has dropped to near-zero. Joe said it’s cool to have this super power where you can just build stuff and bring your ideas to reality.
But there’s a shadow side to this abundance. Primarily, when you can build anything, how do you know when to stop?
“I think right now it’s more impulsive,” Joe admitted. “Like I want to build it, I’ll just go build it. I’m blowing through tokens like there’s no tomorrow.”
The real issue is getting something useful in front of the right people.
I totally get that in my job of helping founders, entrepreneurs, and solo practitioners get their deep innovation or capability in front of the audience that values what they’ve built.
Distribution Is the Scarcest Currency
We also talked about distribution. In a world where everyone can create, attention becomes the bottleneck.
“Everyone thinks the world’s going to hand you something,” Joe said. “That’s far from the truth. You have to have the ability to get an audience to pay attention to you. Attention is the scarcest thing we have right now.”
His advice? Just start. Stop waiting for permission.
His kids are already on YouTube. One has hundreds of thousands of views. They understand distribution in a way older generations never will.
So What Remains Human?
But the most powerful moment for me came when I asked him about how AI is impacting writing. “If AI can match your writing style, what remains distinctly yours?”
“What’s left for the human to do is inject the human side of themselves into the book,” Joe said. “People are going to want to buy books because they want to escape AI. They want something where it feels very human and very experiential, written from the experience of a person.”
It’s something I continue to notice the more I interview builders, engineers, researchers, and entrepreneurs for my upcoming book.
Your experience and the things that are in your head that only you have witnessed, that’s your data.
The writing is just the tool you use to communicate that.
In a world where AI can generate anything, the only thing that can’t be automated is your lived experience.
In this case, AI can’t replicate the experience of Joe and I having this real, human conversation.
Your data is what happened to you. It’s the things you witnessed, felt, learned. Everything else is just tooling.
Finding True North
I asked Joe how he stays grounded when everything keeps changing.
“You just gotta know what your true north is,” he said. “As long as you’re aligned to that, I don’t know what else you can do.”
His daily practice includes Random acts of kindness. Giving money to homeless people. Being a role model for his kids. Creating mental space for himself. And above all, building community.
“We don’t have a sense of community anymore,” Joe said. “If we’re gonna resurrect society from whatever cliff we’re about to fall off of, I think community and just being kind to one another is one of the things we need to be doing more of.”
Watch the Full Conversation
The full episode is embedded above (paid subscribers get early access to Practice Ground episodes).
[Embedded video]
You can also watch on YouTube or listen on Spotify/Apple Podcasts.
This conversation reminded me that in the age of abundance, constraints move elsewher.
The constraint now is: attention, lived experience, true north, community, kindness.
Yours truly,
Nifemi
