Roundup: Why your sales team shouldn't query Gong directly
The Analytics Engineering Podcast
Release Date: 08/21/2026
The Roundup: The post-AI data stack, physical AI, and the fight over data centers
The Analytics Engineering Podcast
Four stories: The political fight over data centers, claims about a physical AI model, Ian Macomber on the shape of the post-AI data stack, and an update on the Hugging Face story and what it means for how data teams think about evals. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at with comments and guest suggestions.
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You can’t scale vibes (Guy Podjarny)
The Analytics Engineering Podcast
Guy Podjarny has built developer tools three times over: Blaze (acquired by Akamai), Snyk, and now Tessl. He joins Tristan Handy to argue that skills need the same lifecycle as code or teams end up scaling nothing but vibes, and to make the case that most companies will end up owning their own harness rather than renting one from a frontier lab. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at with comments and guest suggestions.
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Roundup: Why your sales team shouldn't query Gong directly
The Analytics Engineering Podcast
Tristan Handy and Jason Ganz are back for Roundup. This time: Stripe's $7 billion acquisition of OpenRouter, two new benchmarks showing data engineering agents are reliably good now, Exponential View's latest "are we in a bubble" gauges (verdict: no, not yet), and why your sales team shouldn't query Gong directly. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at with comments and guest suggestions.
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Don't hand a bazooka to an agent making a sandwich (Jeremiah Lowin)
The Analytics Engineering Podcast
Jeremiah Lowin built FastMCP as a side project days after Anthropic announced the Model Context Protocol. It's now downloaded millions of times a day. He joins Tristan Handy on why a skill file is a polite note rather than a workflow engine, why enterprises are choosing MCP over CLIs, and why the buyers he meets aren't ready to talk about the context layer at all—they want the security plumbing first.
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Roundup: a rogue agent, Kimi K3, and data teams in the AI era
The Analytics Engineering Podcast
Something new. Tristan Handy is joined by Jason Ganz for the first Roundup, a recurring conversation about the stories moving the ecosystem right now. This time: the OpenAI model that escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face, Moonshot's Kimi K3 and what a restrictive license on open weights really means, and Katie Bauer's read on what changes for data teams as agents arrive. The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at podcast@dbtlabs.com with comments and guest suggestions.
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Data lessons from inside Meta (Shridhar Iyer)
The Analytics Engineering Podcast
Shridhar Iyer spent more than 13 years inside Meta's data organization, most recently leading AI and the data stack. He joins Tristan Handy to talk about how deleting a single column can save millions at Meta scale, the abstraction stack that quietly powers the company, and the two steps every company needs to become AI-native. Plus a detour through the hard problem of consciousness. For full show notes and to read the podcast's companion newsletter, head to . The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
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The scarce resource is consensus (Ian Macomber)
The Analytics Engineering Podcast
The last time Ramp’s Ian Macomber joined the show, the episode was titled, "Ramp's $8 billion data strategy." Ramp is now valued at $44 billion, and the data team's job has completely changed. Ian Macomber returns to talk with Tristan Handy about self-serve analytics at 50x scale, routing agents through the data lake, and why consensus is the scarce resource in a post-AI world. For full show notes and to read the podcast's companion newsletter, head to . The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
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The context engineering playbook (Claire Gouze)
The Analytics Engineering Podcast
nao co-founder and CEO Claire Gouze shares a practical playbook for building a context layer your agents can actually rely on. For full show notes and to read the podcast's companion newsletter, head to . The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs.
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DuckDB's agent moment (Jordan Tigani)
The Analytics Engineering Podcast
Jordan Tigani helped build BigQuery, then left to bet that most data isn't big. Three years on, agents are proving him right. The MotherDuck CEO joins Tristan Handy on why local-first databases fit the agent era, and what an "agent swarm for data management" looks like. For full show notes and to read the podcast's companion newsletter, head to . The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by
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The Iceberg ecosystem today (w/ Anders Swanson)
The Analytics Engineering Podcast
Tristan sits down with Anders Swanson, a developer experience advocate at dbt Labs, to talk about the state of the Apache Iceberg ecosystem. They unpack the “open standards” shift, define the core building blocks (query engines, object stores, catalogs), and dig into why external catalogs have become a fourth namespace tier across platforms. Anders outlines a pragmatic, phased adoption model for Iceberg integrations, explains why metadata performance and resiliency are hard requirements, and clarifies why vended credentials exist and what they solve. For full show notes and to read 6+...
info_outlineTristan Handy and Jason Ganz are back for Roundup. This time: Stripe's $7 billion acquisition of OpenRouter, two new benchmarks showing data engineering agents are reliably good now, Exponential View's latest "are we in a bubble" gauges (verdict: no, not yet), and why your sales team shouldn't query Gong directly.
The Analytics Engineering Podcast is sponsored by dbt Labs. Reach us at podcast@dbtlabs.com with comments and guest suggestions.