Latest: Episode 20

Everything's a Fad (Including This Podcast) — with Benn Stancil

Benn Stancil built Mode Analytics, spent a decade in the data trenches, and now writes some of the sharpest, funniest essays in the data world. On The Test Set, he talks about the cultural shift from Nate Silver to Rick Rubin why AI might kill the analytics dashboard, and what happens when a thousand startups all build the same thing. Plus: boy bands as a model for collaboration, and why the best creative work starts with cheating.

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Episode 19

Deeply Unsexy: SQL's Redemption Arc — with Tristan Handy

dbt Labs CEO Tristan Handy drops into The Test Set to map the fault lines between the data science world and the enterprise data world — and explain why analytics engineers are basically pissed-off data analysts who decided to organize the bookshelf. We get into SQL's glow-up, the community magic of dbt Slack, what AI agents mean for data warehouses, and why everyone's building iOS apps with Claude now.

Release date: 6 April 2026
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Episode 18

Your VP Is Doing a Rogue Analysis in Cursor Right Now — with Nell Thomas

Nell Thomas has spent two decades in data — from equity research to the DNC to Facebook to leading a 400-person data org at Shopify. She walks Michael and Wes through the modern data stack role by role, gets honest about what AI is and isn't changing about data work, and admits the semantic layer has been her greatest leadership failure. Plus: Sneakers gets the respect it deserves.

Release date: 6 April 2026
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Episode 17

Sleeping Rats and Sociopathic Agents — with Phillip Cloud

Phillip Cloud has been shaping the Python data ecosystem since the early pandas days — and he has *opinions*. Now a principal engineer at NVIDIA leading the Ibis project, Phillip talks about how he stumbled into open source via an eye movement lab, why he prefers his coding agents cold and emotionless, and what happens when you ask an LLM for woodworking trig. Plus: terminal user interfaces, the file hierarchy standard hot take nobody asked for, and the pineapple-on-pizza hill he's willing to die on.

Release date: 9 March 2026
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Data Scientist and Software Engineer at Posit, PBC

Michael Chow

Michael is a data science tool builder at Posit, where he works on open source tools for data analysis. He received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Princeton University, and is interested in what drives expert data science performance. When not wrangling data, you can find him in Philly writing tiny poems, baking bread, and embroidering.
Hadley Wickham Headshot
Chief Scientist, Posit

Hadley Wickham

Hadley is Chief Scientist at Posit PBC, winner of the 2019 COPSS award, and a member of the R Foundation. He builds tools (both computational and cognitive) to make data science easier, faster, and more fun. His work includes packages for data science (like the tidyverse, which includes ggplot2, dplyr, and tidyr)and principled software development (e.g. roxygen2, testthat, and pkgdown). He is also a writer, educator, and speaker promoting the use of R for data science.
Wes McKinney Headshot
Principal Architect, Posit

Wes McKinney

Wes McKinney is Principal Architect at Posit and an open source software developer focusing on analytical computing. He created the Python pandas project and is a co-creator of Apache Arrow, his current focus. He authored two editions of the reference book, Python for Data Analysis.