Case Study: TechCentrals' Tech Radio Ireland Podcast

About Episode 1000 of the Tech Radio Ireland Podcast 

This is a bumper show to celebrate 1,000 episodes covering Irish and international tech, hosted by Dusty Rhodes and Niall Kitson!

Join us for our special retrospective with old friends, including Martha Rotter and Jason Walsh, as they reflect on how technology has transformed Ireland over the past 18 years.

There are also feature interviews with industry luminaries, including Brian Honan, Maryrose Lyons, and Caragh O’Carroll, covering cybersecurity, social media, gadgets and hardware, and the fickle world of tech.

Topics Covered

• How Social Media Has Changed the Definition of Friendship.
• The rise of crowdfunding, mobile payment apps and crypto.
• Cybersecurity from hacktivists to nation states
• Ireland’s role in space exploration
• Challenges facing virtual and augmented reality adoption
• Apple, Spotify and others transformed music consumption
• Ireland’s growing tech scene and startup culture
• The evolution of entertainment from piracy to streaming

Transcript 

For your convenience, we have provided an AI transcript, which may include some errors.

Dusty Rhodes  0:00  

Now this is our 1,000th episode, so I thought we should open up with something big, with music, crowds, cheering, maybe some fireworks. What

Niall Kitson  0:11  

do you think? I think that’s incredibly bombastic.

Niall Kitson  0:15  

Why not?

AI Voiceover  0:17  

Hi, I’m Artemis. I am a computer-generated AI voice, and you’re listening to tech radio.

Dusty Rhodes  0:25  

2006 was a world before Android or iPhones. Social media was ruled by MySpace, and we had never heard of Netflix. The cloud was a little white, fluffy thing in the sky. The Hot tech toys were Nintendo Wii or the Motorola flip phone. And in a studio in Ireland, a little podcast recorded its first ever episode. Since then, we’ve been here with you online and with RTS digital station, RT radio, one extra giving you the latest in tech from Ireland and across the world. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and the man who joins us every week with the knowledge is our editor in chief, Niall Kitson, Niall, we’ve interviewed so many people over the years. If you only had to pick one as your favorite, who would it be? Oh,

Niall Kitson  1:09 

my goodness, only what? Well, in terms of cultural impact, I would have to say John Romero. I mean it for anyone interested in gaming, anyone interested in gaming journalism, because he was journalist before he was a game designer. Yeah, you have to go back to doom. It’s patient zero when it comes to first person shooters. And you know, just a great guy to talk about computer games. And of course, He’s based in Ireland, so that’s kind

Dusty Rhodes  1:37 

of nice. The guy that I would probably list would be Reed Hastings, and he is the CEO of Netflix, and when they came in and medicine in Ireland, it was kind of a new thing. It was like, hey, that’s kind of neat. Never thought it would end up being one of the top 10 global names in tech. Probably should have given them a longer interview, if I know, but I think he’s the biggest name. So listen today on the podcast. As we ease ourselves into 2024 we are going to celebrate our 18th birthday with this epic episode. 1000 a milestone, but not many podcasts reach so let’s celebrate it coming up, we have got a packed lineup of friends who will be sharing their thoughts and how tech has changed our world in the time that we’ve been in on on air, and the differences are phenomenal.

Niall Kitson  2:25

And we’ll be talking about huge changes we’ve seen in finance, social media, travel, entertainment, virtual reality and more, along with some of the influential people who have shaped our world since 2006 some you might expect, some you might not.

Dusty Rhodes  2:42 

So get ready for an hour of amazing tech nostalgia. Let’s go

AI Voiceover  2:47

from techcentral.ie This is Tech Radio episode 1000 with Dusty Rhodes and Niall Kitson.

Dusty Rhodes  2:56 

Okay, so here’s how it’s going to work. We’re going to be looking back over the next hour, over how technology has changed since we started our little podcast, we’ve got special interviews lined up, and I’m very happy to say that we have, in a way, got the band back together again, because for many years, we had a panel chatting about all things tech, and two of the most regular members of that panel are joining us now. It’s a joy to welcome back the lady who was once our inside contacted Microsoft. Martha Rotter, how are you? Hello. I’m fine. How are you also joining us is our longtime friend and tech writer of note. Jason Walsh, Jason, how are you? I’m great. Dusty. How are you good? Thanks. So listen, let’s start off with a biggie, the most influential person of the last decade or two. I mean, there’s so many to pick from. Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Steve Ballmer, now you’re our editor in chief, and so I’ll leave it to you to lead off the pack.

Niall Kitson  3:50

Yeah. I’m gonna, I’m gonna start with a particular phrase that you know might ring a bell, might not, but I’m gonna say developers, developers, developers, developers, etc, etc, etc. Yeah. Yeah. Steve Ballmer, the charismatic former CEO of Microsoft, I think he’s important because he presided over a period of time where big tech learned to stay in its lane, because Microsoft had diversified into so many things, it had social network in Microsoft spaces, which was also a blogging platform. It had loads of devices in the courier, which he had to kill, and the kin which he had to kill, the Zoom player, yeah, which he had to kill. You know, Microsoft is a company that was really, really good at doing practical software, you know, things for, you know, getting getting stuff done, for businesses to get things done. Microsoft is not cool. Bomber tried to make it cool. You do not trust a salesperson to make anything cool. I remember the last great moment Steve Ballmer had, well, two, really. One was. Laughing openly at the iPhone and going $500 who was going to spend $500 on a phone? Oh so. And what did for him, finally, was the acquisition of Nokia and the release of the tablet that he had, the Windows RT tablet, and the first generation surface.

Dusty Rhodes  5:18 

I think, I think it’s interesting that you say that Steve Ballmer sent out to make Microsoft cool, and I think he was the most uncool person who ever worked in the in the organization. Martha, you used to work for Microsoft. I won’t ask you whether you agree, but do you think that not has a point?

Speaker 2  5:33

I think I, my favorite point was you do not trust the salesperson to make something cool. I think that is very true. When I worked for Microsoft, I think he was a he was a beloved leader for his enthusiasm and for him, like he would be flown around the world to close deals, because no one could say no to this guy. He was an amazing, amazing salesman, and that didn’t really translate to selling the whole world and the consumers on the tech it did translate into business deals. So he was a, he was a great person for a lot of the roles that he had, but

Dusty Rhodes  6:12  

business to business was where he excelled, whereas business to consumer, and I’m just thinking, because you’re all giving out a bit, you know, salesperson, you know, Steve Jobs was the Ultimate Sales joke, marketing person, and he knew, well, I would imagine, from what I’ve read of his book, he knew very little about tech. He knew kind of what was possible, but he didn’t actually do the day to day, kind of designing or coding or stuff like that, but he succeeded in making it cool, whereas Steve Ballmer did the Battle of the Steves. There’s a book in that. Tell me, Jason, what about you? Who do you think is the most influential or non influential person, or over hyped person since 2006 Well, I’ve

Speaker 3  6:47  

developed an unexpected soft spot for Balmer. Now some more innocent days. But yeah, I mean, I think the most over hyped person, and I’m, I’m sort of slightly rueful about mentioning this guy again, but I think the most over hyped person is Elon Musk, who is a fairly unimpressive character we talk about sales or people that don’t necessarily have a terribly good technical background. I know he has some, but someone who made his money on the value of the PayPal shares that he got when his company absorbed by PayPal didn’t find Tesla made a big deal about being called a founder. I don’t personally find Tesla cars particularly interesting as a car owner, but I recognize that as a car guy, they’re not aimed at me, and they are a lifestyle brand. That’s absolutely, absolutely correct analysis. I find his personality unbelievably off putting, and I’m quite enjoying watching the Nordic trade unions strike against the company, making life very, very difficult for Tesla, but you know the hubris of buying Twitter and saying he was going to save the platform and turn it into a free speech zone. Meanwhile, he’s busy suing anyone who criticizes him, such as Media Matters for America. I just sort of rank hypocrisy I find very, very difficult to deal with. And I’m, you know, it’s there’s a broader point here, which is that while there are lots of interesting things happening in tech. In terms of people are always going to be developing interesting things. Developers do interesting things. I just don’t find the industry as interesting as it used to be. And I don’t think that’s just old man ism I think part of the issue is that it has matured to such a point where it is all pervasive. And I think that a lot of what we call tech is actually just marketing or social media. And I’m just sort of looking at newspaper articles and blogs and stories about this tech company. Said, this, this tech I go, what tech company? I mean? For example, in the north of Ireland, there were reports last year about job cuts at Northern Ireland’s biggest tech employer, the big tech company, Allstate. Allstate is an insurance company. It’s not a

Dusty Rhodes  8:43

tech Yeah, it’s very true. I have to say, the person that I would have said had the most influence is Jeff Bezos. And essentially, what he’s taken is he’s taken home shopping to the next level. And we had home shopping all through the 80s and the 90s, and then TV channels in the middle of the night, you know, Hawk and all kinds of stuff. He’s just taken that and elevated it to an art. And I love I love systems, and I love efficiency, and I love good salesmanship, and I think that Jeff Bezos has just kind of kind of encapsulates all of those three things. And the only thing I don’t like about Jeff Bezos is that he didn’t call me in the year 2000 and say, buy some shares because listen, we’ll have more from the panel later. We still have to talk about money and entertainment.

Speaker 4  9:29  

Hello, August cohort. This is Phil mahanil, CEO of the digital hub in the heart of the liberties in Dublin, wishing huge congratulations to Nile and dusty on reaching 1000 episodes of tech radio.

Speaker 5  9:45  

This is Patricia Moore from the Irish space Association. Congratulations on reaching 1000 episodes of tech radio.

Speaker 6  9:52

This is Kieran shower, Deputy Director General of science foundation Ireland. Congratulations to everyone at Tech radio on reaching the milestone of its 1,000th episode and. Good luck for the future and the next 1000 episodes

AI Voiceover  10:02  

tech radio, 1000

Dusty Rhodes  10:05  

the humble PC may not be our direct link to the internet anymore thanks to smartphones, but they still can’t be beaten as productivity tools. To find out more about what people think about computers in the mobile age now, Kitson had a chat with laptop lab boss, Colin Baker,

Niall Kitson  10:22  

when going shopping for for a PC, or, you know, a laptop, or what have you people do have the the shopping list sort of beside them? We need, you know, 512, gigs of storage. It has to be an SSD, etc. What would you regard as being those sort of major milestones that people pay attention to when they’re putting together that shopping list, and perhaps how it’s changed over time. I mean, where were people always does obsessed with Ram? Or is this just a function of when they noticed there was more on their smartphones than in their PC?

Speaker 7  10:58  

Good questions. Well, you’ve got different, very different types of consumers and customers. And there are certain things in the consumer space that people are very familiar with. And when you’re looking at a shopping list or a spec list in a, you know, in one of the the big technology sheds, if you like, the curries or that of this world, you’ll find that some of them, you know you’ve got your leading points, your processor, people will know i three, I five, I said, but that what they don’t often realize is the generations they’ve been out for many, many years. So when you’ve got your i Five, you could have a second gen i Five processor from the early noughties. And you think, Oh, I’m doing okay. I’ve got an i Five processor. It’s they vary significantly over their iterations, and over time. People know RAM very well. Obviously nowadays, eight gig is about the baseline. 16 gig is ideal. And then you go from there. People often know about it but don’t necessarily understand its function. And the simplest way that I tend to explain it is that it is the workspace that the processor gets to use. If it has a constrained workspace, it can’t do as much and it might stutter. If it has a larger workspace, it can spit things out and take things in easily and readily and whereas hard drive space, there is a misconception there as well. An awful lot of people go 256, gig. SSD, I don’t know if that’s enough for me, but then you go on and you have a look at their existing use and their machine, and they’re only using 40 or 50 gigs. So it’s arbitrary whether they’re going to have a 256, or a 512, or one terabyte. So there is notion sometimes where people say, No, I really need a one terabyte that’ll make my machine fast. It doesn’t, not necessarily, well, certainly not at all, unless you start to completely run out of space. I think it’s horses for courses, really. You mentioned gaming is sort of at the spearhead. We would say that gaming machines are an entirely different monster, in that in some ways, they’re a terrible machine. So if you take a gaming laptop, for example, because those machines run so hot, you’ve got, obviously a dedicated graphics card, a much weightier machine, bigger charger, a bigger board with a bigger fan or fans and bigger heat sinks and cooling systems, and ultimately they will get clogged up, and we end up seeing most gaming laptops. And by gaming, I don’t just mean gaming. You buy a machine for AutoCAD or for heavy graphics work, and you decide I need a dedicated graphics card, and you end up with the thing running out of steam and dying a death after two years. So not being a reliable option, whereas you might take a ThinkPad, which doesn’t have a graphics card, and you’re just a regular day to day user, and it’s going to last a lot longer for Business Admin, research study work for college and just the general hoi polloi of computing and on internet news,

Dusty Rhodes  14:03  

and that was Colin Baker, also known as the gadget guy from the laptop lab. You can find them online at back from the future.ie

AI Voiceover 14:12  

This is Tech Radio episode 1000

Dusty Rhodes  14:16  

let’s return to our panel with Martha and Jason and turn our minds to one of the things that has seen a huge change over the last decade or two, which is travel. I mean, we’ve journeys back to the moon. Elon Musk has made Mars a huge topic here on Earth. Electric cars are massive these days. Sustainable aviation fuel is a big story in 2023 Martha, can I start off with you on this one. What do you think is the biggest change in travel over the last few years?

Speaker 2  14:44 

You’d have to say space tourism would be one of the biggest things. I think it’s one of the biggest things, because it’s something that Now should you have a spare $450,000 so you can do that, you can go, you can get. Seat on Virgin Galactic flight. You can go into space, you can experience zero gravity and see the blue planet and everything like that. The other piece of it is that it has enabled a lot of other really beneficial technology for space. It has enabled reusable components, which SpaceX has prioritized, and that means a lot more work can be done, a lot more interesting experiments can be done, because things aren’t getting destroyed on launch. They’re they’re being they’re able to be reused. So I think that that’s a really big thing, but it’s not a thing that affects most people. I think the thing that affects most people today is actually electric vehicles, and that is something that that everybody has started to notice. More and more on the streets, wherever you live, there are more fully electric vehicles. There are more plug in hybrids. There’s more charging stations all around wherever you might be and on people’s homes. The nice thing is that then they see a difference in their wallet as well. I think that’s it’s a really tangible change. I’ve had fully electric and plug in hybrids since probably 2013 and the change in terms of buying petrol and stuff is quite large.

Dusty Rhodes  16:12

So let me ask Jason, because Marty you mentioned going up into space. Jason, do you are you impressed with what Elon Musk is doing?

Speaker 3  16:21 

No, not particularly. I’m impressed with quite a lot of the new space stuff in general. Martha’s made some good points, and there are some interesting companies in the upstream and downstream, in all parts of the space industry. But, you know, at the end of the day, the majority of what’s going on with with these new companies going into spaces, they’re relying on government contracts. I mean, so obviously NASA and the European Space Agency are launching less frequently. There’s problems with Russia, obviously. So we still got to get things into space. And private companies have found an opportunity to make money. They’re effectively rent seeking. I’m not even saying this is a particularly bad thing, but I think that some of the propaganda coming out of musk and people like him, perhaps to a lesser degree, Bezos, he seems slightly less objectionable, is masking the fact that they are basically servicing a single customer, which is the US government, mostly.

Dusty Rhodes  17:11  

And how about you now? Because I know now is the one of us who drives the biggest electric car of them all. It’s called the Lewis. And on the terms of travel. What? What has kind of changed most for you in the last 15 years?

Niall Kitson  17:25  

Yeah, well, there’s no getting away from electric vehicles. I mean, Tesla has become a lifestyle brand as much as a car brand that people are excited about. I mean, if you look at the cyber truck, I mean, the thing looks like an absolute weapon. Elon Musk said, you know, if you crash into someone else, you will win. It’s a, you know, if you crash into someone else, you will kill them. That’s that’s basically it. I mean, if you have a truck with no crumple zones, you’re looking for trouble. However, the big problem that there is with travel and electric vehicles is that issue of infrastructure. If I get stuck in the middle of nowhere. How you know how close is the nearest charging station? I know where the nearest service station is. I know where I can get a tank of petrol. Can I get my battery charged as well? I think that’s the one thing holding electric vehicles back. A personal, personal bug bear of mine when it comes to transport and anyone living in Dublin City, or perhaps any city around the country will have noticed are these god awful scooters that nobody seems to have figured out what they are yet. I’ve seen people lashing around footpaths on them. I’ve seen people on the roads. I’ve seen people with and without helmets. I’ve seen people actually. I saw a guy who owns the shop pull up to open the shutters one day, he was wearing a full motorcycle helmet. And I said to myself, Well, if that’s that’s what the guy who owns the shop is wearing, that’s what you need motorcycle helmet. So yeah, the electrification of transport and also turning transport into more of a lifestyle choice in the same way that apple became more of a lifestyle brand when it came to computing. So I think those are, those are big, big changes. I mean, I think, you know, when it comes to sort of the petrol heads, it’s an engineering interest as much as anything. And maybe, maybe Jason will agree or disagree with me on that, whereas now I think it’s much more of a fashion thing, because it’s much more open and available to more people. I

Dusty Rhodes  19:25  

think the one thing that I have been impressed with the last 15 years is the RE emergence of talk about going to the moon. So I’m gonna have one foot in looking at the past couple of years, and one foot looking at the next year or two. I missed the moon landing in 1969 I would love to be alive for the next moon landing, and they’re talking about 2025 so that’ll be very exciting for me. Anyway. Listen, that’s travel. We’ll have more from the panel later. Hi.

Marie  19:53  

This is Marie head of the beach, young scientist, technology exhibition. I just want to say congratulations to nine. And dusty on their 1,000th episode of Tech radio. Well done.

Mark Kelly 20:04 

Mark Kelly here, founder of AI Ireland, congratulations on your 1000 episodes. Fantastic work.

Lorna Jennings 20:10 

This is Lorna Jennings, Managing Director of Hanover communications. Congratulations to Niall and dusty on reaching 1000 episodes of tech radio.

AI Voiceover  20:22  

Tech radio. 1000

Dusty Rhodes  20:24  

another huge story over the last 18 years has been cyber security, from tightly managed, state sponsored cyber armies to hacktivist collectives. Security threats come in many varieties. Brian Honan is CEO of BH consulting, and he had a chat with Niall Kitson about the changing face of security over the years, starting with a group who shall not be named.

Speaker 11  20:49  

Yeah, I think that we’ve always had hacktivism around. So you would have, you know, even before anonymous, you would have groups who would be hacking websites based on maybe a political move motive or an ethical motive. So for example, you might be hacking a certain country’s website in protest against their international work or whatever they’re doing. So, for example, it was quite common over the years for websites based in Pakistan to be attacked by pro Indian activists, and likewise, Indian websites to be attacked by pro Pakistan activists. Certainly, even today, we have ongoing attacks against Israeli websites, and we’ve got ongoing attacks against Palestinian type websites. Are sites that support those calls, and that has that has always been the case. I think what anonymous brought to the table was a they were very much better organized, and I think, for want of a better phrase, that a much better marketing department than many other activist groups. They were very good at using Twitter and social media to promote themselves and to promote the work they’ve been done. So typically, other hacktivist groups would have defaced a website and would have left it at that, whereas anonymous LulzSec and others would have compromised a website boasted about on social media button is in a humorous way, in a very engaging way, and got a big audience as a result, but they would also publish the information as well. So they got sensory information, they published that online as well to augment or reinforce their messaging. So the motivations probably haven’t changed a whole lot, as you said, No, but they we also the sophistication of the attacks may not have been overly sophisticated, but the methodology they use to promote the attacks and how they did it, it’s still a lot of things we’re dealing with today. It’s social engineering, it’s password reuse, it’s lack of patching of systems, and that’s how anonymous did it. And they also created this mythology about their group being huge worldwide, and that everybody was in it, from people working in government to people working in within the police, working within within law enforcement, working within the data centers. So who could you trust? And, you know, we are everywhere. So it was a very good you know, it wasn’t just hacking computer systems, it was hacking social media from a publicity point of view, and hacking and social engineering people’s minds into into believing that they were bigger than they were.

Dusty Rhodes  23:31  

And that was Brian Honan from BH consulting. You’ll find him at bh consulting.ie, and we’ll have that full interview for you on the podcast in the coming weeks,

AI Voiceover  23:42  

Share the knowledge and invite a friend to listen, search Apple, Spotify or YouTube for tech radio Ireland.

Dusty Rhodes  23:49  

Let’s talk about money and how our financial world has changed over the last 15 years or so. I mean, we’ve got Bitcoin today. We’ve got a stripe for doing business with you’ve got revenue for your day to day, kind of banking, kind of things with all kinds of mobile bank apps, we’ve had crypto crashes and then crypto explosions and runs and all that kind of stuff. Let me start off with Jason on this one. Jason, you’ve kind of got pluses and minuses in the financial world that’s changed over the last 15 years. What are they?

Speaker 3  24:17  

Yeah, I mean, what’s important to understand about the last 15 years is it’s been a zero interest rate environment, effectively, constantly, but it’s not that anymore. So what has been happening in the last 15 years is a lot of things have been inflating. People have felt like they’ve been able to make no money with traditional savings. They shoved it into other places. Obviously, there was enormous speculative boom in shares. But fundamentally, companies do have value if they produce products, things like Bitcoin, which I know people will be talking about later, they that is a function of of a zero interest rate environment. That is not, that is not where we are now. So that won’t continue, but you know, to be positive for once, for a change, I think that crowdfunding has been interesting. A lot of projects and products have been produced that wouldn’t have been produced. I do worry as a little bit of fatigue. I. Everyone seems to have a sub stack, you know, and wants to charge five euros a month to read their ramblings when they can read mine for free. But you know, honestly, that I think that’s a positive thing. We’ve seen a lot of problems, a lot of failures, but that’s the nature of taking a punt on a product or a service that someone has decided to create. I think it’s been quite good for niche hobbies that wouldn’t have got mainstream support. You know, I’m personally not massively into gaming, for example, but a lot of people, you know, a lot of retro stuff has been produced and reproduced, some very interesting products there. And that’s all a function of the ability to give small amounts of money to people to build products that just wouldn’t have got support in the mainstream. So I think that’s

Dusty Rhodes  25:40  

great. I think when somebody figures out a way that you can send five cents to somebody online, then we have something, you know. But anyway, that’s another topic. No bank apps are something that you’ve been impressed with over the last 1015, years. Yeah, well,

Niall Kitson  25:53

the whole idea of Challenger banks. I mean, in Ireland, we’re used to the idea of the pillar banks. And of course, during the financial crisis, we lost a couple, and I think it really opened up a space where people started looking at how they manage their money. So you have the likes of n 26 you have the likes of Revolut and that have come along, app based banking that are licensed overseas. So, you know, there, there is still that sort of regulatory framework managing them, but changing the way people engage with their money, being much more practical, being much more aware of how they can segment, how they can save, how they can transfer money, and how to make it very, very easy to do so because we’re quite used to Using massive online portals that were developed using sort of waterfall development techniques years in the making, that by the time they are deployed, you go, Well, why can’t we do this? Because Revolut have been able to do this for years. And I think looking at banking apps and these challenger banks that are coming in from overseas. I think that has been a massive difference. I mean, you had organizations like Web Summit, where its staff are directly paid, and then 26 you know, so that’s, that’s the kind of landscape that we’re seeing, sort of that, that locus, that sort of conversation, moving away from the likes of AIP, from the likes Bank of Ireland, which we still own big chunks of into foreign financial institutions that we don’t and you know, revolution is getting into loans, and I believe they’re getting into mortgages as well in the near

Dusty Rhodes  27:31  

future. Yeah, and just to be clear, when you say foreign, a lot of them are EU based, so they’re within the European community, so they’re as good as being Irish. So okay, so you don’t have to worry so much. Nile, all right, these foreigners, foreigners. Speaking of foreigners, Martha Rotter, who you have willingly adopted is to be an honorary Irish woman. I can’t believe that nobody has mentioned Bitcoin in detail. I am a big supporter of Bitcoin. I think it’s fantastic. I think the fact that you have one financial system that works across the world, wherever you are, that you’re able to do it with relative safety and relative security and relative ease, I think is amazing. And I put some money into it, and now I’m kind of gently smiling to myself, going this turning into a nice little nest egg. You’re not a fan of Bitcoin. Why not? I

Speaker 2  28:19  

all of the things that you just mentioned, I would contest, I think, like the relative ease, the relative security, cryptocurrencies have been subject to hacking and security breaches. There’s been exchange hacks, have been wallet thefts, there’s loads of phishing attacks that have proven to be problematic for crypto owners, limited adoption. There’s so many coins with dumb names and no adoption. Another problem that I have with crypto is the environmental concerns. So a lot of these currencies, things like Bitcoin, they require a lot of computational power in order to mine new coins. And I think there’s a lot of concern about the environmental issues due to carbon footprint and due to energy consumption. I think that another problem is you can lose your key so you can have plenty of cash, you can have a nice little nest egg, and then all of a sudden, your laptop, which has your one copy of your private key, decides to die, and now your all your money is gone. There’s no way to recover that. And I think for a lot of people who are not tech savvy, this isn’t they are being sold that this is where your money should be, and this is how you should be saving for the future, and they don’t understand the risks. I think this is not something that I want my parents to be putting their retirement savings into, because they would not understand the risks. Nothing against my parents, but I play tech support for them a lot, so I think it is a promising technology for the future, but I think we’re we have a lot of problems to solve with crypto before it becomes a mainstream thing.

Dusty Rhodes  29:54  

And I think I would agree with you on that there are a lot of problems to solve. I think there’s a future in it. We’ll see what happens. We’ll come back in another 15 years. We’ll have a chat about it still to come. On our 1,000th episode of Tech Central, we’ll be chatting with the panel about all things entertainment.

Kieran Macquarie  30:13  

Hello. Kieran Macquarie here. I’m the National Technology Officer in Microsoft Ireland. I’d just like to say a huge congratulations on the 1,000th episode of Tech radio.

Ashley Ray 30:22 

This is Ashley ray from beta Festival, and congratulations to Nile and dusty on your 1,000th episode. It’s incredible. It’s an amazing achievement.

Sean Nolan  30:30  

Sean Nolan from agile networks here, congratulations Nile and dusty on 1000 episodes of tech radio. I don’t see chat GPT or AI taking over from you guys anytime soon, keep up the good work.

Dusty Rhodes  30:44  

Social media has gone from a novelty for college students to a way of life and a way of making money for content creators. Mary Rose Lyons, from the Institute of AI studies, has seen it all, and she had a chat with Niall Kitson about how social media has changed our basic understanding of what friendship is. There’s a

Speaker 15  31:06  

really amazing writer called Sherry Turkle, and she studies how our language has changed over time, and it’s so interesting. But you know the way words come from social media, and they come into our normal kind of parlance, and then they become, just like a nor a normal word, even just kind of, the language of emojis, for example, is perfectly acceptable in business context now that came from social media. And then there’s also the kind of, you know, the hashtag people would sort of, I think it’s a bit naff, like somebody would do something and say, hashtag, you know, feeling all right. I love the way there’s that flow between technology and the way humans engage and the way we engage in real life. But I know that the kind of Gen Z generation coming up, and they don’t really see the kind of the two different realities in the same way as us older folks do for them. It’s just there’s life,

Niall Kitson  31:59

think, something that older people, of which I count myself as one these days, the element of discovery for new material, new books, new music, new films, whatever used to be based on word of mouth, reading magazines, watching TV shows, find trying to find any avenue of information that’s something that people really don’t, don’t have or don’t need anymore thanks to the algorithm. Do you think the algorithm has become an aid or a limiting factor when it comes to finding new material or new ideas?

Speaker 15  32:41  

Well, to answer that question, I just explain how I find new books to read, for example, or new shows to watch. And it’s something I’ve been doing in 2023 and I urge everyone listening to give this a whirl. Screw the algorithm. Don’t have the algorithm. Tell you what you’re going to read, what to do, say for you. Going to go on holidays anymore, but instead, go over to chatgpt or Claude or Bing or Bard, or any one of these new generative AI, large language models. So what I like to do is to put into one of them. The following are my all time favorite books, and I’ll put in maybe five or six titles that I’ve just really enjoyed reading. And I’ll say, give me a list of 10 or 12 or 15 or 100 if I want to. There’s no penal penalty for asking for more. Give me a list of five books that I might like. So I’ve done this several times this year, and when I look at the list, the first thing I notice is that the books that it’s recommending, I’ll have read about 70 or 80% of them because they’re the kind of books I like, and I have gone off and discovered new books and also new shows to watch and films on the basis of AI. So what I’m finding in my experience, is that I’m having a lot more almost like flashbacks to the early days of the web, before semantic web came, and pretty much all of our experience was, is, is pretty much based on what we’ve kind of come to expect. It’s not like that in AI, you’re still getting those kind of random, crazy items, particularly in the world of text video, when you do a text to video on it, on an app like, say, runway, for example, you get these, you can get these crazy looking outputs. And it just delights me that that’s still possible in our in our game. It hasn’t been, it hasn’t been ironed out yet and hasn’t been algorithm

Niall Kitson  34:36 

is, is that where that sort of mid 2000s energy for social media has now migrated to,

Speaker 15  34:42  

yeah, I would say, so there’s a lot of people who are probably sick and tired of it, like, you know, the fact that, you know, Instagram is this kind of, like, beautiful, beautiful world. You know, Tiktok is great. It’s like, it’s a lot of fun. And it can be kind of, it doesn’t have to be as as perfect. You. LinkedIn is, you know the I’m so proud. So if you don’t want to be engaging in any of those spaces and maybe create your own space, go and have conversations with AI and learn something or or ask questions, or ask it to kind of be your coach. Ask it to be your life coach. Ask it to critique your your your long held ideas about a particular point in the style of Freud, or, for example, have a bit of crack with this. You know that

Dusty Rhodes  35:27  

was Mary Rose Lyons from the Institute of AI studies. You’ll find her contact details in the show notes of our podcast. And next week, we’ll have the full interview with Mary rose about all things social media and AI

AI Voiceover 35:39

Tech Radio episode 1000

Dusty Rhodes  35:44  

so let’s check in with our panel once again to chat about how things have changed over the last 15 years since we started the tech radio podcast. Let’s talk about entertainment. Because, I mean, the whole digital thing is there’s no more going down to X Division, come to think of it, there’s no more X Division. So everything is being delivered. Being delivered to us digitally via our media Virgin Media connection or whatever, our fiber and so on so forth. We’re getting our music, our news, our TV, our entertainment, our movies and everything like that. And it’s all developing so fast. The second biggest website in the world is YouTube these days, and it’s something that I have to say I probably need to talk to somebody about, because I am on it a lot, and it’s just like you just I find myself watching a lot of quite interesting stuff, maybe 25% of the time, and utter rubbish, 75% of the time. But if I want to watch utter rubbish, 100% of the time I just go into YouTube shorts and I just don’t understand. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting old YouTube shorts, to me, is just kind of like 30 seconds of nonsense. Wait till the end, you’ll never believe what happens. And then nothing happens that kind of and Tiktok is even worse. And it just it does my head into that part of modern life I don’t get Niall, you’re more kind of into the tunes side of things.

Niall Kitson  37:04  

Yeah. Well, when we started the podcast, one of the big debates was, how do you solve a problem like copyright? Because we were knee deep in pirate bay and that kind of thing. And it turned out, just give people an affordable alternative and they will come. And I think that’s why we have sort of the popularity of Spotify. Yep, it’s a freemium model. But it also means that, you know, the artists are at least getting something for their trouble, and the artists get to submit things off their own bats, so they’re still in control over their own catalog. So however you look at the alternatives to it that are out there, I think an interesting example is Tidal, which is sort of the the alternative of, you know, a streaming service by the 1% for the 1% kind of an alternative, an appalling alternative, with an absolutely hilarious launch event, which had an awful lot of very wealthy people saying, this is going to change everything and everybody else going, No, we really don’t care about what Madonna thinks about streaming services. So I think making more music available to more people, preferably free, but with the artist’s consent, has been an absolutely huge development, and very happy to be part of it. Although Spotify is becoming hugely annoying for the amount of ads that are in it, I find that I’m getting two songs before I get mad these days, which is, which is pretty bad.

Dusty Rhodes  38:26  

There’s a switch you can use within the app that would cure that. And it’s a, it says, Subscribe on it, okay, and if you pay the money, the ads go away. Just little tip for there not speaking of all these absolutely, you know, kind of apple and Spotify and everything do these days. They’re doing music, but they’re also doing podcasts. And you’re a big

Speaker 2  38:46  

fan of podcasts? I am. Yes, I think that this is something that supported by things like serial that really reached out to the mainstream have caused people to realize that there’s some podcasts for everybody now, whereas I think maybe 10 years ago, podcasts were a little more niche, and now I think they’re everyone I know has various podcasts on their phone all the time that they listen to. They can be as niche as you like, and there’s so many different apps to help you find and sort and subscribe to these two different things that you want to enjoy. You can also, if you find a podcast that you like and you want to support them, lots of them now have really easy ways to support them, through something like Patreon or lots of different, you know, micro payment subscription services or one time donations. And I think that that’s also a good way for people to feel like they’re supporting, they’re helping the podcast that they enjoy, to stick around.

Dusty Rhodes  39:46  

Jason, you wanted to jump in on this?

Speaker 3  39:48  

Yeah. I mean, I think what Martha says is undeniable, and I think one of the reasons for it is that Podcasts can be produced quite easily, so you can produce this absolute niche content. You know, Chris Anderson came out with the. Long Tail, the book, The Long Tail in 2004 the then wired editor. It has worked. It has worked for podcasts. It’s worked for music. Um, I’ve got a lot of free jazz LPS here that were pressed because people were selling them on Bandcamp. I don’t think it’s worked for movies. Now, let me be clear, you can find alternative and independent and foreign cinema if you go searching really hard for it, but the studios are just pumping out reboots, remakes, franchises, everything’s becoming more and more mainstream and more and more boring. And as someone that grew up and educated myself frankly, watching Channel Four and BBC Two at two in the morning when I was a teenager, I think the loss of accessible independent film and foreign film. You know, it’s part of the reason, possibly why I live where I do know, I live in France, where this culture is still alive. There are 300 cinemas, 1000 screens in this city. But I don’t know why the film industry has become so dependent on tentpole franchises. And I think there is a certain amount of fatigue around particularly the big Marvel and Star Wars franchises. So it’s just interesting with the movie industry, which sort of we thought was surviving the digital onslaught better than the music industry 10 years ago, maybe it’s not now.

Dusty Rhodes  41:13  

Grant There we go. Listen. Let’s take a quick break from there, and we’ll join the panel one final time before we end the podcast.

Nell Watson 41:22  

Hi. This is Nell Watson of the European responsible AI office. Congratulations on your 1,000th episode. Hi

Michael O’Hara 41:29  

there. This is Michael O’Hara. I’m group Managing Director of data solutions and co founder of techies go green. Congratulations guys. Niall and dusty on achieving 1000 episodes of tech radio.

Yvonne Halpin 41:42  

Hi. This is Yvonne Halpin, head of the Irish Marie Curie office. I want to send a massive congratulations to Niall and Dusty on 1000 episodes of tech radio.

Deidre mortal 41:53  

This is Deidre Mortal of ReThink Ireland. Congratulations to Niall and Dusty on making it to 1000 episodes of tech radio. That is pretty impressive. Well done.

AI Voiceover 42:07  

Tech radio, 1000

Dusty Rhodes  42:11  

since 2006 we’ve been constantly chatting about AI, virtual reality and augmented reality and with AR, despite every price range we’ve seen from Google Cardboard to Apple’s vision pro mixed reality is proving a bit of a hard sell to consumers now, Kitson asked Fujitsu Distinguished Engineer Carol Carroll about how long more we’ll have to wait for VR to happen.

Speaker 20  42:36  

The history of VR goes back to about 1838, right? So when, when Sir Charles Wheatstone first realized that each eye produces a different image, that was, firstly, really important to understand this idea of being stereoscopic. And then the first flight simulator was 94 years ago, in 1929 All right, so we still think that, you know, VR is new and it’s funky, but it’s, it’s really not like the first VR goggles were 1935 called Pygmalion spectacles, you know. So it’s, I think it’s still really funny that we look at the box for the meta quest or something in Smith’s toys, go, Oh, look at that. It’s so new and funky, but it’s not really new and funky, you know, the the first virtual world is 1965 called The Ultimate display. This is, you know, so I’m just picking out these to show that viewer has been around for a really, really long time. And question is, you know, how does it make the leap into does it consumer adoption? Like the the phrase virtual reality comes from 1984 so we’re getting a bit closer. And then we got into the 90s. You had saga games with their VR games, Nintendo with their virtual boy. The Oculus Rift is only 11 years old, 2012 so not, not long ago, then Facebook obviously bought them. Then you had the meta quest pro in 2022 for staggering, what, $1,500 and the apple vision pro this this year. So it’s, it’s, it seems a bit weird to put this forward, but given the slow, ish pace of adoption and the really high unit cost, it still feels like the technology is merging.

Niall Kitson  44:30  

Yeah. So if the pace is that slow, then you can still be quite confident about its ongoing development and adoption then,

Speaker 20  44:42 

well, yeah, so there has been traction for all that length of time in this concept of virtual reality and augmented reality, and the use cases continue to evolve. The devices continue to evolve. The idea of being able to see someone’s eyes be. Mind, the goggles is this year’s innovation. And I’ve, someone has told me about the tick tocks of people walking down the street wearing their AR VR goggles, and how they’re not landing on, you know, into industry, lamps is a good thing. And so there’s a new trend emerging there. So the fact that you have some major brands making AR and VR headsets means there will be continued investment in the segment. I think it probably is a barrier for the smaller players, if there are any in the market. Because, you know, how do you compete against Apple and against meta and so on. And we, you know, there were others in the market before, but you know, they’ve become the big leaders. There will just be more and more development. I think they’ll probably make the headsets lighter, ultimately, and easier to wear, and have more options. And chatting with a colleague about this, and we were talking about the idea of the Assistive Touch that you’ve got with the Apple Watch now the ability to make gestures and do commands by putting your thumb and forefinger together or clenching your fist. So maybe you’re going to be pairing the headsets with other commands over time.

Dusty Rhodes  46:17  

That was Carol Oh, Carol from Fujitsu, Ireland. You’ll find her contact details in the show notes, and we’ll be airing that full interview later on in January, chatting about big wins and losses in tech.

AI Voiceover 46:29  

This is tech radio with Dusty Rhodes and Niall Kitson,

Dusty Rhodes  46:34  

a last stop in with our panel. Then forward today with Jason and Martha and Niall. And I suppose I kind of want to just keep something with Ireland related in mind when you’re chatting about it, Martha, can I start with you, because you, you’ve come from the States, you’ve moved to Ireland, you’ve made it your home here. And as I said, you know, you were working for Microsoft one stage, there was a proliferation of international companies. How does all that sit in your head? And how has it changed?

Speaker 2  47:00  

I think the tech like as a someone who works in technology, the tech scene in Ireland and especially in Dublin, has just gotten to be so good. When I moved here in 2007 it was there were a good few big companies, big multinationals, like Microsoft and like Google. But now a lot of people have left those companies to start their own things, and because of that good talent, because people have moved here to work for those companies as well. So there’s, there’s homegrown talent. There’s also talent that is coming into Dublin. There’s also other companies that have started setting up development offices here. So there are, there’s offices for stripe here. There’s offices for lots of different bigger companies that have, that have opened up there. But there’s also a lot of really successful startups that were grown in Ireland, like teamwork and like log entries and intercom and lots of companies that have have built large bases here, have have capitalized on the great technology talent that we have in Ireland and built strong companies. And I think that that is just a testament to good engineering, good practices, a good environment.

Dusty Rhodes  48:11  

So from your point of view, then Ireland is not just a home for the multinationals. As a result of that, there’s lots of the industry is breaking up and spreading out, and it’s becoming a tech center within it could be. It could be described as the Silicon Valley of Europe. I said Could be. Could be, yeah, sure. Now listen, we do an awful lot of stuff about the science foundation Ireland, how things change with them over the last 15 years.

Niall Kitson  48:35  

Yeah, well, I mean, in order to get to sort of that engineering talent. You’ve also got to look at what’s happening in science and research. SFI being a huge part of that kind of having an awful lot of influence on the kind of research coming out of Ireland. They’re particularly fond of things that can indeed be spun out, or projects that can attract an industry partner. It’s a very successful model in some corners, quite controversial because of a perceived lack of investment and support for basic research. Personally, whenever I go to the young scientists, I’m always amazed by the standard projects there. I mean, when I was there in my sort of teenage years, things were fairly rudimentary. These days. It seems that when I was growing up, we had bands. When the kids these days are growing up, they’ve got startups. It just seems that there’s this wonderful entrepreneurial aspect to younger people and this great hunger for science, technology, engineering and maths, which is great news for the talent pipeline. I mean having a look at CEO points, science, the sciences are doing very, very well. Unfortunately, the art, the arts are doing not so well. But I suppose that’s that’s another, another debate. So the the overall standard on. Stem and research in Ireland has just gone through the roof since we’ve been doing the show, and it’s very heartening to see no

Dusty Rhodes  50:06 

and a lot of that comes through on tech radio over the years. We always go down to the unscientist exhibition every year, and we have several fascinating interviews every year to do with sense foundation Ireland as well. So all good for me. I think that one of the things I’m proudest of being an Irish person over the last 15 years is we’ve mentioned Mr. Musk, Let’s not mention him again. But he did set up PayPal, and was a terrific success, and he made billions and billions out of it, and has been able to go on and do amazing things since, I think we have our Irish equivalent, and it’s the two guys from Limerick, the two brothers from Limerick, went up and set up stripe, and stripe is now an international player in taking credit card payments on websites. And now I’m not a coder like you, Martha, I dabble, but I’m not a coder, but I can understand stripe, and I can do things very easily, and I’m able to take credit card payments and stuff like that. I think what they are doing is amazing from me, but I just feel really proud every time that I see them being mentioned on the world stage as one of the biggest payments. And I hope they become the richest men in the world. I mean, wouldn’t it be amazing to have two Irish brothers who are like, Oh yeah, richest brothers in the world. Well done. From lyric, you know, I knew him. Get all that kind of art like, you know. So I do feel, I do feel proud about them, but another thing that makes me feel proud as well, and we’ve had a lot of it, particularly in 2023 was Ireland in its space, and there’s an awful lot happening in that area, something that you watch. Jason, yeah,

Speaker 3  51:37  

yeah. I mean, you know, I’m not promising you it’s gonna be the next big thing, but it might be. When I was a kid in the 80s, there was an Oracle office in Blackrock, and Apple were down in Cork. But if you told me that Ireland was going to become the epicenter of your tech industry, I wouldn’t have believed you. So maybe that’ll happen with space. There’s really interesting companies, companies like realtor, compass, informatics, icon, Geo, mostly in the downstream. So they’re dealing with satellite imaging, all kinds of uses for things, you know, strange things you wouldn’t think about how satellites can be used in farming, your land, analysis, climate, all sorts of stuff. The Irish space association was launched just in April 2023, April of this year. So, you know, that’ll be lobbying the government and hopefully bringing a lot of these companies together. So I think the space sector could be, it sounds unlikely. People probably don’t think about spaceship. When you think about space in Europe, you think of France, Italy, you know, companies with this kind of large aerospace and military kind of background. But Ireland, actually, you know, got quite a lot going on in downstream and software. So that could be the future for Ireland. Who knows, as

Dusty Rhodes  52:37  

always, we, we punch above our weight. Listen, I have to say we’ve run out of time for our 1,000th episode for now, but I really want to thank Martha Rotter, moved to Ireland in 2007 and was part of our podcast. Is almost the beginning. Thank you so much for coming in on show number 1000 thanks, dusty and Jason, you’ve been with us tons and tons and tons right throughout the entire 15 years, and I love you because you’re not afraid of anybody. You just speak your mind, and I hope you continue to do so for long, for a long, long time to come. Thanks for joining us today. Okay? Thanks, toasty and Niall, thank you. You’ve been, oh, this is gonna sound almost romantic. You’ve been at my side for 15 years.

Niall Kitson  53:19

Oh, good grief. Romantic.

Dusty Rhodes  53:28  

Very true, very true. Anyway, I just wanted to say I really enjoy it, and I love the banter and the fact that we don’t agree on things, and we can take the mick out of each other, and it’s out of all the podcast that we produce. I think this is, well, a it’s the oldest, but also it’s also my favorite, and a lot of that is down to

Niall Kitson  53:48 

you. So thank you very much. Not giving me the warm and fuzzies tech radio,

Dusty Rhodes  53:55  

1000 listen. Let’s leave it for there. We are going to wrap up the podcast for now, because all four of us have got the man off job of figuring out how we’re going to blow out or even put on 1000 candles onto the cake here with us today. So there we go. Listen. That is it for show 1000 thank you to you as well for listening to us and for supporting us week in, week out. And we hope that we will continue to give you a light hearted look at the tech world as we continue through 2024 and 2526 and 27 from tech radio for myself and take care.

AI Voiceover 54:30  

Remember, you can get the latest Irish tech news with Hourly updates, daily newsletters and more at our website, techcentral.ie share the knowledge and invite a friend to listen. Search Apple, Spotify, or YouTube for Tech Radio Ireland, or listen with RTE Radio 1 Extra. Tech Radio is produced by dustpod.io. For techcentral.ie. From me, Artemis, live long and prosper.