There are plenty of ways to spend an evening in Dublin without having an actual conversation with another person.
You can scroll through TikTok, watch YouTube, listen to a podcast or spend an hour asking ChatGPT questions you probably could have asked a friend. We have more access to information, ideas and expert opinions than at any other point in history. Yet somehow, the simple act of sitting down with other people and talking about something interesting can feel increasingly rare.
A new Dublin event series called Tap Talks is taking that idea and putting it in a very Dublin setting: the pub.
The concept is straightforward. Bring interesting speakers out of lecture halls and into pubs, give people something worth thinking about, and then let the conversation continue over a drink.
It’s not quite a lecture, and it’s not really networking either. Tap Talks describes itself as an evening of fresh ideas, good conversation and good company, with talks covering subjects ranging from artificial intelligence and medicine to psychology and the future of society.
The first season, Making Sense of a Changing World, gets underway at The Purty Kitchen in September, with AI expert Mark James kicking things off on 3 September with Useful, Powerful, Dangerous: Thinking Clearly About AI.
Next up is technology entrepreneur and former RTÉ journalist Mark Little, who will ask Can We Take Back the Internet? on 8 October. Professor Luke O’Neill follows on 22 October with The Future of Medicine: What Will Healthcare Look Like in 20 Years?
There is something particularly appropriate about discussing these subjects in a pub rather than a lecture theatre.
AI, the internet and the future of healthcare are hardly niche topics anymore. They are things we are all encountering in our everyday lives, but much of the conversation around them happens through screens. Tap Talks is essentially asking what happens if we take those conversations offline.
The idea came from founder Darren Glynn, who felt that while technology has made expert knowledge incredibly accessible, something has been lost along the way: the conversation that happens when people are physically in the same room.
And that’s really the interesting part of Tap Talks. The speaker isn’t necessarily the end point. The talk is intended to give people something to argue about, question, agree with or completely disagree with once the formal part of the evening is over.
It’s a fairly old-fashioned idea, in a way.
Get a group of people into a room. Give them something interesting to talk about. Get a few drinks in. See where the conversation goes.
Tap Talks is also deliberately positioning itself away from the corporate events circuit. There are no conference rooms, name badges or networking exercises. Instead, the organisers describe it as a social experience rooted in one of Dublin’s oldest institutions, the pub.
The timing feels right, too. There has been plenty of enthusiasm in recent years for activities that get people out of the house and into real-world communities, from running clubs and book clubs to everything in between. Tap Talks is essentially trying to do the same thing with curiosity.
And there are plenty of questions to get people talking about.
After the first three events, the series continues in November with science communicator David Robert Grimes asking Can We Trust What We See Online Anymore? Navigating Misinformation.
The tagline for Tap Talks is Conversations Worth Leaving the House For.
It’s a good one.
Because sometimes the best reason to leave the house isn’t to see something spectacular or do something particularly exciting. Sometimes it’s simply to sit down with a bunch of people you’ve never met, hear an interesting idea and see what happens when the phones go away and the conversation starts.
Tap Talks takes place at The Purty Kitchen.
Find upcoming events and tickets at taptalks.ie.
