Category Archives: Podcasts

The Crypto Conversation

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A short post this week – mainly to give a shout out to my colleague, Andy Pickering, and the rest of the team at Brave New Coin. Andy kindly invited me to help celebrate the 250th edition of The Crypto Conversation, his regular podcast that has featured a pantheon of leading characters from the crypto and blockchain industry. On this recent edition, we talk about my journey into crypto, the highs (and lows) after six years in the industry, some aspects of “trust”, the usual Crypto Conversation “Hot Takes” and of course, a slightly contentious discussion on science fiction. Enjoy.

Listen here:

Spotify

Apple

Libsyn

Next week: The bells, the bells….

 

Ask an expert…

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I’m often approached for advice about the work I do. Many of these enquiries come via LinkedIn connection requests, but generally they are thinly-veiled attempts to sell me something, or to gain access to my network, or to get free consulting. So I have developed a number of techniques to flush out the bona fide from the free-loaders.

In principle, I like to pay it forward when I can, where I believe I can add value, without any immediate expectation of material reward. But there are only so many hours in a day, and there’s only so many connection requests I can handle.

On the positive side, recently I’ve been receiving more genuine approaches, where specific expertise is being sought, rather than someone wanting to “connect” or “buy me a coffee”.

A great example is the call I received from a prospective client through my work at Brave New Coin. Dr Michael Kollo is the CEO of Clanz, a new on-line community for crypto traders. Following this initial chat, Michael invited me to be a guest on his podcast, to discuss my personal journey into crypto over the past 6 years with Brave New Coin and Techemy.

The result was a very enjoyable (but hopefully informative) conversation about my views on the crypto industry, based on my particular perspective in market data and indexing. I hope you enjoy it too:

https://blog.clanz.com/crypto-cappuccino-s01e01-rory-manchee-brave-new-coin

Next week: Vinyl on the brain

Synchronicity

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I’m not sure I fully subscribe to Jung’s theory of Synchronicity, where causally unrelated events occur at the same time, and seemingly take on a significant meaning; in many cases, a coincidence is just that. But recently I have been forced to consider the possibility that maybe Jung was right.

Over the past few months, I have been reading the 12 novels that comprise Anthony Powell’s “A Dance to the Music of Time”. Although I had never read them before, the books were familiar to me through a BBC Radio adaptation broadcast between 1979 and 1982, and a UK television mini-series from 1997.

Last weekend, and quite unrelated, a friend posted some music on-line – recordings made by the band we were in during the early 1980s. One of the tracks was a song I had written at that time, and whose title had been inspired by Powell’s magnum opus. But I hadn’t listened to or thought about this song for nearly 40 years.

Separately, and also by coincidence, in the last couple of days I have been listening to “The New Anatomy of Melancholy”, another BBC Radio series that draws its inspiration (and title) from Robert Burton’s 17th century tract on mood disorders. This series was first broadcast in May 2020 – no doubt prompted by the onset of the global pandemic, with its lock-downs, self-isolation and increased anxiety. And now the programme is being repeated, exactly 400 years after the publication of Burton’s original treatise – and at a time when we need his sage advice more than ever.

Until now, I hadn’t appreciated how self-absorbed (obsessed?) Powell’s narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, is by Burton – he even ends up publishing an academic text about this prescient Elizabethan writer. On one level, Jenkins is a proxy for his literary hero (as well as being Powell’s alter ego), and much of the 12-novel sequence is a response to Burton’s analysis on the causes of, and cures for, melancholia.

All of which may or may not prove Jung’s theory, but there is for me something of a personal thread between Powell, a song I wrote, and the BBC’s recent update on Burton.

Next week: The Last Half-Mile

Steam Radio in the Digital Age

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A few years ago, I wrote a blog on how radio had come of age in the era of social media. And despite podcasts and streaming services making significant inroads into our listening behaviour, radio is still with us. Plus it now gets distributed via additional media: digital radio (DAB), internet streaming, mobile apps and digital TV.

Image sourced from flickr

Most mornings I get my first information hit from the radio. Likewise, the midnight radio news bulletin is usually the last update of the day. When I’m on my way to or from the office I’m either catching up on a podcast or streaming radio, via TuneIn or dedicated station apps.

I particularly enjoy the BBC’s catalogue of on-demand content – both contemporary material, and archive programmes. There’s something inexplicable about the appeal of listening to 50-60 year old recordings, themselves being dramatisations of books and plays first published 100 years or more earlier.

The main reason I turn to these relics of steam radio is because I can curate what I want to listen to, when I want to listen. These programmes are also an antidote to much of what gets broadcast on commercial radio stations, which I find is mostly noise and no substance. (Blame it on my age, combined with being a self-confessed music snob.)

Most of these archive radio recordings still work because of two things: the calibre of the material; and the high production values. The former benefits from tight script editing and strict programme lengths. The latter is evident from both the engineering standards and the sound design.

One of the paradoxes of modern technology is that as the costs of equipment, bandwidth and data come down (along with the barriers to access), so the amount of content increases (because the means of production is much cheaper) – yet the quality inevitably declines. And since in the internet era, consumers increasingly think that all online content should be “free”, there is less and less money to invest in the production.

The importance of having a high level of quality control is inextricably linked to the continued support and funding for public broadcasting. With it, hopefully, comes impartiality, objectivity, diversity and risk-taking – much of which is missing in commercial radio. Not that I listen very often to the latter these days, but it feels that this format is destined to increased narrowcasting (by demographic), and parochialism.

In this era of fake news and misinformation (much of it perpetrated and perpetuated by media outlets that are controlled or manipulated by malign vested interests), and at a time of increased nationalism, divisive sectarianism and social segregation, it’s worth remembering the motto of the BBC:

“Nation shall speak peace unto nation”

Notwithstanding some of the self-inflicted damage that the BBC has endured in recent years, and the trend for nationalistic propaganda from many state-owned news media and broadcasters, the need for robust and objective public broadcasting services seems more relevant than ever.

Next week: Craft vs Creativity