High Agency

MO DHALIWAL

[00:00:00] Welcome to High Agency, where we ignite conversations that drive change and spark momentum towards transformative action and professional mastery.  From eternal September to the dot-com bubble, from Web 2.0 through to the net neutrality debates, up to and beyond Web 3, a decentralized internet.  And the burgeoning AI revolution.  There are movements and cultures that burst forth, evolve, die, and are born again amongst the people who are developing the code, the protocols, and the tools that drive our experience of connectivity and this thing called the internet.  It's hard to believe that an entire civilization that today seems defined by technology, connectivity, and a culture of content creation and consumption just didn't exist a few decades ago.  Today, as AI explodes.  Hot on the heels of a mass movement towards trustless networks and decentralized computing.  There are communities of people that are out in front, riding the edge of these emergent technologies and feeling their way through the fog and uncertainty of an unrendered future, moving us towards high-fidelity visions of how to empower humanity through technology.  So today we have the privilege of speaking with Boris Mann, a pioneer in building and nurturing these very communities.  Boris is most recently focused on bringing decentralized web technologies to the wider development community, exploring fundamental shifts in the way we host, deploy, and run software for humans.  His expertise spans open source, community building, and developer relations, complemented by his experience in operations and finance for early stage companies.  As a venture builder, advisor, and investor, Boris founded the first startup accelerator in Canada and was a driving force in Canada's development.  He's also been a key partner in the development of the company's entrepreneurial ecosystem through the full stack seed fund and Open Angel investment dinners.  In our conversation today, we'll explore Boris's insights on the evolution of internet technologies and communities, his experience in fostering decentralized technologies, and his perspective on the inevitable debates about the agency of AI.  We'll explore how his work continues to impact the landscape of technology and what lies ahead for the communities he's helped build.  Boris continues to show us the power of collaboration and innovation and community in driving technological progress, and we're excited to learn from his journey.  Welcome, Boris.  Thanks, Mo.  Well, first off, I like asking this question right at the outset before we do anything else.  What does high agency mean to you?

BORIS MANN

[00:02:48] It was really interesting when you reached out and asked me about this phrase because it's exactly a thing that I've been thinking a lot about.  And, you know, I am a technologist, but ultimately, I find myself translating because the only thing that matters is actually communication between people.  And high agency is a starting point for some of that, which is people feeling empowered that they can take actions in their work, in their life, in their interested pursuits.  And very often, they find themselves constrained.  They are constrained by their lives.  They are constrained by their local environment, their city, their province, their country.  Ultimately, those are a set of rules around which we have a certain level of agency as citizens.  And on the same side, a lot of people don't really think about the agency involved in technology that's kind of everywhere that you kicked us off with.  And so for me, agency is understanding what it means to own, share, and collaborate in the digital realm and how that goes back and forth into the physical, physical realm and that people actually feel really actually emotionally able to make changes for themselves, for their friends, and for their family.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:04:10] And it sounds like an area that you're obviously very passionate about.  And you described yourself as a technologist.  And I touched on some of your background, which felt a little bit like dancing across various mountaintops.  And I should point out that that was the version of your bio that you actually chopped down.  So that was the reduced version.  But.  You know, why do you describe yourself as a technologist?  How did you come into this?  Let's let's maybe talk about your background a little bit before we move.  Sure.

BORIS MANN

[00:04:33] Yeah, absolutely.  So, I was born in Vancouver.  My parents are both German.  I think of myself as German-Canadian, spoke English first and German, sorry, German first and then English.  And and grew up on Bone Island, which is a small island off of Vancouver.  I ended up going on a tall ship that traveled around the North and South Pacific right after high school.  And my parents are from a decidedly middle class background.  And I went to a very upper-class high school.  And so my first piece of agency was actually going like, well, I'm not one of those people.  I can't afford it.  And I actually fundraised from my community to help make that trip back.  And I came back.  Incredible trip.  That's a whole presentation.  I can send a link to a video where I talked about that.  And I came back from that and I'm going to be a marine biologist because that's what gets me swimming with dolphins.  Oh, so went to UVic and found out that boring memorization of undergrad bio was not for me and ended up in computer science.  And so by training, by background, I have a degree in computer science.  So technologist starts there.  But I really found myself translating.  So I think technologist ultimately roots people like I'm not saying software developer.  I'm not saying software architect or other things like that.  I'm saying technologist as this broad space.  We have public policy technologists.  We have all these other labels that you can add on to that.  Right.  And so for me, technology is a certain level of understanding of what is and isn't possible and how to translate that into people's day to day experience.  Because if you're not doing.  If you're not doing that, which so often engineers do, what's the point?  But why was that important to you?  I would say, you know, and I apologize in advance.  I feel like we're going to use the word agency a lot in this.  And I found it really empowering.  So, actually on Bone Island, I was part of a I actually went through and had a computer from kindergarten onwards.  That's rare.  It's very rare.  I was born in 1975.  So, I turned 50 next year.  And however, I actually had computers all the way from kindergarten.  And that was because the local community school association pooled funds and bought them to be used by both the community and by the school.  That's incredible.  And that has been a through line.  Something I've been saying recently is pooling collaboration and pooling capital.  That's been another through line of a lot of my experiences.  When we say capital, I actually don't mean.  Only money.  I mean, social capital, time, effort, and other things like that.  And so it's important to me because I've found all the way along that even on this small little island and just off of Vancouver to a small university on Vancouver Island in UVic, those really the Internet, Internet connections, right?  I went into university and right around the time the first web browsers came around, about a year or two after HTML was invented.  And I found myself being able to connect with people around the world.  Just me.  Me and the machine. Amazing.  And now we all have the experience of the people who live in our shiny rectangle.  And, you know, we need to moderate that a little bit.  It's amazing.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:08:12] I'm having some epiphanies right now.  There's occasions when you meet someone and then later on you understand their origin story.  So you described it as experiences, but I would say it's almost even just influences.  Because what you described, What you described from having access to a computer in kindergarten onwards is a community-organized initiative to connect you with technology.  So, shocker that decades later, most of your life seems to be spent in community-engaged initiatives to connect people through technology.  Yeah.  Right.  Exactly.  And so, you know, with those influences, you know, to the present moment, you've been creating community for a long time.  You know, some of the communities that you've created.  Are more immediate because they're in the decentralized computing space.  Our meeting actually began around building community as well.  You just reminded me recently that this was a decade ago.  But we were together involved with Startup Week Vancouver.  Yeah.  And, you know, a decade has passed.  So this is going to be as much a retrospective conversation as talking about what's next.  But why was it important to you at that point to create a startup community in Vancouver to get involved and try to kick that off?  Yeah.

BORIS MANN

[00:09:25] So 10 years ago, 2014, we were kind of in the middle of an understanding that you could go beyond just building businesses or, you know, B2B.  It's something software is companies that bought.  Right.  Like so we'd gotten to the point that a lot of community tooling was going into a wider market.  And was available.  And part of that work was really, again, making people understand that, you know, if they read an article or they or they watched a TV show about this concept of startup.  That there were actually no barriers to having them be a Vancouver startup.  And again, the person on the street still doesn't necessarily know what that means.  What does it mean to create a company?  Right.  I can envision what it might be to open a bakery or a barbershop.  But like, how does it work with computers?  You buy a laptop, then you have a startup.  And and I think the other part was that in Vancouver.  Yeah.  For everyone to see that we could be a part of this and and really part of a global hour.  And the first part is getting people locally to kind of see each other as partners.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:10:55] And that, are people seeing each other like what's changed in the last 10 years?

BORIS MANN

[00:10:59] Yeah.  I mean, I've recently reconnected my career, generally has shifted back and forth between an extremely local focus and then more of a global focus.  And I've just come off a phase of of of very globally focused work, in kind of, I now have a desk at a great creative technology space that's a block away from the studio here.  So, I've been commuting back into Gastown.  I've had a desk in off in Gastown for something like 20 years.  There was the the pandemic in the middle and a few other things.  And we need to rebuild, is where we're at right now.  I think a lot of people are feeling this generally about our city, about our province, about our country.  And I'm seeing, you know, I've met.  I've met a bunch of folks in their mid-20s and they are eager and excited to get involved.  I think we're now at this point where we actually have to reimagine what the word 'startup'  means.  So I think that's where we're at.  We've actually once again gotten the point where where it's like, oh, yeah, you built a tech startup.  And I want people to regain their agency to say, maybe you can build this as a digital small business.  That isn't constrained by the physical constraints in Vancouver, but yet can take advantage of that locality to supporting locally by local and but also sell to the world.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:12:40] So you mentioned the word rebuild, but I want to unpack that a little bit, because I think you've got some specific meaning around that.  When you say rebuild, are you talking about the startup community?  Are you talking about like the relationships or maybe some of that connective tissue?  That was, you know, or was it lost over COVID?  Like, what are you referring to specifically?

BORIS MANN

[00:12:57] Yeah, yeah, definitely.  So what I'm seeing generally with this word community, with in-person events, there was this period where people over COVID where where basically everything went away.  And so.  But.  Even.  Remotely, right?  So all the way along.  So not just in part, people are burnt out on like, I don't want to get on another Zoom call sort of thing that happened pretty quickly.  But, yeah, we have to rebuild a lot of the connective tissue for in-person meeting.  So I'm a huge advocate for doing a lot of things with collaborative technologies online.  And I'm a huge advocate for strengthening ties, having strong ties by meeting physically in person.  So it's actually super great.  It's great to actually be recording this, this podcast live and in person instead of just in another rectangle.  So thank you for that.  And then so that you can do that collaboration at a distance with that real experience and strong ties that you have in person.  And so with that, the collaboration muscle has gone away.  The venues have gone away.  The sponsorships have gone away.  The small group of people who keep stepping up - like you, like me, the list of others is incredibly short, who step up and organize and get involved.  And I think meeting a lot of folks in their mid-20s, we also didn't pass the baton basically at all.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:14:40] So a bunch of people did their thing and for whatever reason went away or kind of melted into the background and left a void.

BORIS MANN

[00:14:48] I mean, for whatever reason, there's a whole startup.  Government grant funding thing here, which I'm not going to go into other than to say that Brad Feld's Startup Communities is a book that everyone should read.  And the summary of it is that institutions, so whether that's an online group or a physical building, need to be entrepreneur-led.  And all of the things, many of the things.  Canada, pretty much all of them locally are, in fact, not led by people who are entrepreneurs.  And so they will basically lose touch with the needs of entrepreneurs.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:15:42] So there's, you know, and I want to maybe just kind of zoom out a little bit because there's a sort of like a thesis behind most of what you talk about.  And I want to hone in on that thesis a little bit.  Because you come into a conversation with a lot of, I think, very valid assumptions.  But you come in assuming that humans should get together, shockingly.  You come in assuming that we should collaborate on things.  And you come in assuming that we should all understand technology, right?  Why is that?  What's the thesis behind this?  Why do you think we need to have such an intimate relationship with technology and tools?

BORIS MANN

[00:16:21] I want people to have agency around technology.  Which is subtly different than understanding it, right?  So part of this, you know, like so early part of my career, technically Web 1.0, moving to Ottawa for Nortel, which was hiring 90% of new grads in the year 2000 still.  And then the dot-com bomb.  So getting laid off in Ottawa and being like, well, minus 40 in the winter, plus 40 in the summer.  I'm going to move back to the coast where I love it, at least, right?  So you got laid off from Nortel during the dot-com boom.  Yes.  Yeah.  That's a very Canadian story.  Exactly.  And then hung out here with the beginnings of Web 2.  And so there was a couple of things there, right?  So the first part was, is that I got a bachelor's degree in computer science.  I got hired straight out of school by a large enterprise.  Those were supposed to be forever jobs.  So I learned right at the beginning of my career.  That's not a forever job.  And that, in fact, so that I had to be entrepreneurial because there were 25,000 people laid off in Ottawa.  There wasn't anything coming back.  There was no like remote work was limited at that time.  Right.  So came back here and really was like, well, I'm going to have to like do this myself.  And so went down this entrepreneurial path and then realized as I went that, in fact, this was the new shape of the world.  And that led me down a path of actually discovering open source.  So the way and open sources has become something that is more understood.  So this was 2003 when I joined the Drupal community.  I think you've done some work with that as well.  And open source CMS.  This was very early.  And so, OK, let's let's pause and say, well, what is open source?  And you're right.  I carry a lot around a lot of these things when we just skip past them.  Right.  And that's also kind of what I see happening is certain people have internalized them, but then they never get questions anymore.  So the definition of open source, one, it's a legal innovation that some people on this goes back to.  So it's a law that's ...  I mean, there's a lot of people on this, some of them are, you know, some of them are sort of pioneers of the Internet who didn't want their code owned by the university they were working for.  There was a change in copyright law.  So they locked it open and said, if you use this source code, then you have to make it available to everyone.  You have to share.  You have to share it.  Two, it actually means a way of working together.  You know, you can't really collaboratively build a business.  Building at a distance, right?  Uh, but with software, um, there's this way of working, uh, of peer production of multiple people working together for the benefit of all, and then third, it's an ideology thinking that information should be free, related, or at no cost, kind of thing.  Why, because there's no cost to copy bits; I don't lose anything by giving you a copy of my source code, go for it!  Right in fact, I'm adding a license that says, 'No, you too need to keep it open.'  Um, and of course, a lot of those things don't translate to the real world, or do they?  And those are the parts that I'm exploring: how can we take some of those things that are fluid and easy in a digital realm, and how can we translate them?  And many people were like, 'Oh, you're just describing co-ops or religion or political parties or a block party or other things like that,'  and I'm like, 'Yeah, we should do more of those.'

MO DHALIWAL

[00:20:29] So the pieces behind this is that through community, through an open-source approach and philosophy that the average person, humans society at large, we can have greater control over this thing that has massive impact on our lives.  Yeah, like technological innovations are accelerating um and are actually getting far more profound in their impact because conversations are happening now around AI right and the idea of agency and what that means.  In AI and even agenda computing, which we discussed earlier, handing over control of some level of decision-making to these agents that are existing in the world without us, and can operate freely or so is the promise.  And actually, it's been pretty fascinating, even in the last couple of days I've just been reading about you know, I've mentioned assumptions, but so many articles are being written assuming that AGI, artificial general intelligence, is now just you know a year or two away, right?  So we're gonna have AGI in a couple years and let's start thinking about what that's going to mean to our lives and so things are.  Accelerating like beyond our common level of comprehension to some extent, right?  Like I'd say for the average person AI is still just that automatic thing that wrote some things for you or you know made an image.  But the effects it's gonna have on us are so much more profound and it's gonna be hard for us to keep up because exponential effects, right?  It's like we're very linear thinkers and we overestimate the change in the short term and like drastically underestimate the impact on the long term.  So if this is accelerating away from us exponentially, our ability to make change...  What do we do about bringing some of?  Your principles around community, open source, all of that, when we have companies like OpenAI that are becoming increasingly closed?

BORIS MANN

[00:22:31] Yeah, I mean, I think this is exactly it, right?  If there's one message to take away, it is to have people be curious about this stuff and ask, well, where is the software running?  Who's running it?  Is it a company?  Is it a nonprofit?  Who's making money?  Whose computers does it run on?  Are those computers running in this country?  Cloud.  Right?  So exactly those things.  And I think we've gone through a phase where technology and cloud and other things like that, people have ended up in these situations where unless something goes wrong, they don't really think about it.  But then when something goes wrong and they realize that they put their life's work in a proprietary platform and there is an oops and it's all been deleted, only then do they wake up to be like, oh, I didn't have any agency all along at all.  And so in there, I want to go that into investment decisions.  I want to go into purchase decisions.  And I want us to think about these things.  And from AI, we may be.  There's a there's a crisis that's happening right now within the open source community because there's a vast number of things happening with AI.  So can it just scoop up a copy of the entire Internet and train stuff and not pay any artists or writers or anything like that?  Unclear.  And then the other way it can, but should it?  It has.  I mean, there's a funny thing where the where the big record labels are suing and I'm always against the record labels.  So I'm.  And then there are a lot of people who are like, look, we're all weirdly on the side of AI in in in that one.  We could say it's complicated.  But once again, we would know if we talk to a bunch of people, it's like, well.  I pay for a Spotify subscription and I never pay artists directly and right again, like people.  Mostly, it's painful and hard work to, like, think about agency and other people around.  So with with a, I think a lot of the interesting parts of it is.  Um, it's bringing these things to the forefront and I want people to start asking questions about local AI.  What if you ran a couple of servers here in the office?  And what if we connected over to my office?  That's a block away, which in turn has a fiber connection hilariously to the Vancouver public library.  That's a couple of blocks away.  Um, cause we just got a new internet connection and around thinking about these same things.  Um, and, uh, again, AI by default will take away people's agency unless they get a little more informed.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:25:22] So there's a parallel that you drew there that actually I hadn't thought about until you just mentioned it, which was the same sort of thing that happened with the advent of the cloud, right?  Um, cause cloud computing, it sounds nebulous and decentralized, right?  Cause it's, it's a cloud, right?  But in fact, it's actually in many ways, um, kind of the opposite, right?  It's just a bunch of servers, but it's super centralized and it's very singular, uh, in regards to what you're, what you're using or what service that is.  And there's that loss of agency.  And we're starting to see some of the same social effects with AI, right?  So where, where are my files stored?  How are they stored?  Who's hosting it?  You know, what are the legal ramifications around ownership?  We stopped thinking about those things with cloud.  And now with AI, it's the ease of use.  Um, makes these tools become so ubiquitous that we've stopped thinking about things like, okay, what are the rights and ethics around this generated content that I just received or whose code or whose art was this, was this based on?  And so when you talk about things like, um, you know, what is local AI, uh, again, it goes back to that idea of being decentralized, taking control, uh, and perhaps forming your own communities.  Um, you know, you, you, you did some of this even recently with, with Fission, where you were working on, um, do we call it edge computing, decentralized computing?  How would you describe it?  Yeah.  So with Fission, your intent was to, uh, I'm going to paraphrase here and I'm sure I'm going to botch it.  Please correct me.  The idea was to create a set of protocols and a toolset that would allow people to create and potentially monetize apps for themselves and for their own communities that weren't reliant on decentralized clouds and these centralized servers and powers.  Is that, is that right?

BORIS MANN

[00:27:07] I would flip it around and say it would enable people to, um, individuals to run apps locally, local first on their own computer.  And also to have control, uh, over their data.  And when I say control, that's again, a nebulous term.  So we have to dig into it a little bit where, um, you know, I think the other, the other thing that I'm really thinking a lot about is, um, the death of the professional desktop operating system.  So there's certain professionals that will use, uh, desktop operating systems, but most of humanity will have a mobile device as their one and only computing device.  It's actually great.  Um, but we need them to not be just consumption devices.  Um, so on your mobile device, when you install a new app, it says, can I access your photos?  Great.  That's super convenient.  I have my photos.  Let's ignore whether it's only sitting locally or syncing or whatever at the, at the conceptually you've got your photos on your mobile device.  And then the apps ask permission to get access to that.  And that's the pattern that we should have everywhere.  Most business apps, most cloud apps like this, that you, that you pay for, uh, happen the other way around.  They say, 'Give us your photos, put them on your mobile device.'  If we shut down, oops, you lose everything.  Um, and this kind of, um, more distributed compute means that, well, you should be able to have all of your photos on your phone and attach multiple apps to it.  So it's a genetic in the sense that instead of, um, reluctantly putting data in a big pile owned by the app, the app asks the individual for permission to access to their data.  And that's the pattern I'd like to see us moving towards.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:29:07] I mean, it sounds quite attractive, uh, because it puts control back in the hands of the individual.  Um, for some, it might introduce some friction because it's easier to just give up, right.  And have, you know, Amazon just run everything.  It's like those old cartoons back in the day, like Bugs Bunny, it was like Acme company just owned and ran everything.  So there's a section of society that could probably allow that to happen without ever noticing.  Right.

BORIS MANN

[00:29:29] This is, this is a national policy level.  This is, this is a world government level type of thing.  Um, and there's a lot of people that have been very ideological about this.  Uh, I'll never use anything run by Microsoft, actually hilarious.  Microsoft was the big enemy, the beginning of open source.  Uh, and they're now one of the like largest contributors to the Linux operating system as an example, we won.  Well, except for corporations just captured the entire concept of open source.  Uh, oops.  Um, three American companies run the three major, hyper clouds in the world, uh, Amazon, Microsoft, Azure, and Google cloud.  Um, Europe has been ringing the alarm bells being like, ah, we should maybe build some clouds, our Europe clouds.  Um, Canada, um, actually there's this amazing, um, uh, research project, the Canary network.  Uh, we'll get the link later.  Um, that's a high speed research network connecting a lot of our academic institutions.  And they also used to run servers on it.  Um, and they used to, um, it was too hard to run servers.  So they now hand out Amazon credits.  So ultimately a Canadian research network that puts money in the pocket of an American company, we have the capability to run our own stuff here locally.  And we should in the same way that buy local or the concept of co-housing or co-ops, right?  All of these things are possible.  Um, but we have to get people interested enough to even just asking these questions. Okay.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:31:08] What are your challenges?  And because, I mean, the, the conversations and the particular perspective you have on them, we're not just talking about cutting-edge technology.  You're, you're moving so far beyond that, of that technology's impact on society and decision-making for humans.  So it's seeming like a pretty esoteric conversation.  It is.

BORIS MANN

[00:31:26] Um, so I ran a conference, uh, last year, causal islands, uh, casual because speed of light, because that's one of the things related, uh, where we're connected by, why does it matter to have things?  More local in different ways.  Um, and it was esoteric, and it was a bunch of people talking about the future of computing, but a common theme actually ended up being, how do we build the software?  How do we fund the software?  Uh, how do we work on it together?  Um, and so, um, absolutely it can seem esoteric.  Um, I care about this stuff and I get, uh, animated around it.  Um, because I mean, ultimately I want us to have agency.  If you use software and you probably have some gripes about it, how do you make it better?  Well, you can't reach in and change it the way it exists.  You can't reach in and change it.  Right.  And I, and I think there's, there's a leap here where people have some of these experiences.  Everyone, everyone, I bet, I bet there are at least four or five load-bearing Excel spreadsheets within Skyrocket.  Right.  Um, which ultimately you, that's software for you.  Right.  Um, but people don't really think about that as an app.  And I want us to get, to be able to have that, um, special purpose app that maybe you just only use with you or your family, right.  In the same way that you have other routines, but right now that feels really far away.  And I want to say to people, we're there.  You can start doing that.  You can start participating in those things.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:33:02] Yeah.  As long as the framing of that is beyond just the features, right?  Because between ClickUp and a variety of other tools, they're actually kind of selling that, right.  They're saying, well, Hey, you can build this yourself, but it's still a centralized cloud, you know, software, which is amazing.

BORIS MANN

[00:33:20] So you're, you're already going like, Oh wait, there are some no code tools.  I can do that.  Oh, does the, does the, does the cloud stuff matter or not?

MO DHALIWAL

[00:33:28] Right.

BORIS MANN

[00:33:29] Um, and I'd actually, uh, possibly maybe I'd want to get even further.  Well, how are they funded?  What does that look like?  Is it a Canadian company?  Could you switch to a Canadian company? Um, right.  And why do I say 'like', Oh, pick a country?  I'm like, well, you know, most of us ultimately carry one or two passports and, and I would argue should care about, uh, giving back to our local area at some level.  Uh, and so that's why it's important to me, right.  That we, uh, that we get involved and engage with these sorts of things.  Mm-hmm.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:34:01] So that's where, to me, it sounds like a protocol's level of conversation almost, right.  Because a lot of open source tools and, in fact, the early days of the internet, the things that I got right was that it wasn't prescriptive about how people interfaced or interacted because nobody had figured it out yet, but there was a handful of protocols, right?  And it was like, here's how we're going to message.  Here's how we're going to send files.  And here's how we're going to stream other bits of content that you may or may not be able to render properly.  Um, and so the protocols were established well.  And so what are you seeing happen today on the protocol level that people can build on in the ways that you're describing?

BORIS MANN

[00:34:37] Yeah.  So the, the, the, the phrase, um, uh, Mike Masnick has a, has a great article called, uh, protocols over platforms, uh, that we'll get in the show notes, uh, recommended reading.  Um, so when we say protocol, we mean things like email or HTML, uh, means you can use different browsers and browse websites that all are built by HTML.  Um, you can use, uh, Gmail, Gmail or Outlook or Spark or Missive or a bunch of other things and connect to the same email inbox because it runs on a protocol.  So it's, it's, it's a lever, uh, it's a, uh, it's a lower level even.  Right.  And we have protocols in the world today.  Like, you know, North America uses one 10-volt for the electrical grid.  A lot of Europe uses two 20 volts.  And then, you know, you start thinking about like the different plugs and other things like that, but you can kind of buy that from anyone and put it together as long as you follow those standard specifications or protocols.  So when we talk about cloud and where my stuff is and other things like that, I want people to say like, oh man, it would be great if Dropbox or Google Drive or OneDrive were a protocol rather than a platform.  Right.  I don't want to have to continually re-upload my photos or re-upload my Word docs or, or what have you.  Um, ideally what I should be able to do is pick and choose from a number of different providers, uh, who still like provide a service to me.  And you might pick someone locally, you might pick someone internationally, uh, but you could make a choice.  And I think that's, I think, it's a great way to make those choices because you weren't locked in, uh, by the fact that none of these things interoperate.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:36:10] Mm-hmm where are you seeing this happening right now?  Like, are there some places that are exciting to you where you're saying, okay, they're getting it right.  This is starting to happen.  It's emergent.

BORIS MANN

[00:36:19] Yeah.  Um, there's some really interesting new stuff happening.  Um, so, uh, pass keys, um, are a new consumer-facing technology that replaces passwords. Mm-hmm.  Um, and people have been trying this for a while and there's, um, uh, standards body, um, and that came together and all of the major providers, Windows, Amazon, Apple came together.  Google, uh, came together to agree that, uh, oh man, we should really make the experience of people getting hacked because we just use hand-type strings.  That's not super great.  Um, we're going to give people cryptography.  Yeah.  Exactly.  And then we want to identify that privacy with pass keys, um, and that's one building block because if we can take the realm of encryption out of the hands of geeks and make it broadly available, then people can have secure and private communications and, um, a secure identity based on, um, these past keys on their devices.  At the same time, world.  Some governments are once again saying, well, but we need a backdoor.  Yeah, we don't like those levels of encryption.  We need a backdoor just in case so that we can peek at the bad guys.  We all know that there were multiple elections in multiple major democracies in the world this year.  India's election and then the US one coming up in November and Europe is going full tilt for saying they want backdoors.  A great reading on this is science fiction.  I read a lot of science fiction.  Mostly my challenge with science fiction today is that our world is outpacing the older science fiction, but it's actually great because you can go, 'Oh, how did people write fictitious stories about this?'  So Rainbow's End by Werner Winsch is a great read that talks about we've got really great privacy encryption built in with secure devices on all of our hardware.  Sounds great.  Except world governments have a backdoor to all of the encryption, just in case.  Just in case.  Unless you have locally made hardware, Hecho and Paraguay.  Made in Paraguay is the kind of tagline that you can get special non-backdoored secure hardware if you buy it from the small state of Paraguay that in the future is hand-building, hand-building computers.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:39:04] That sounds fascinating.  And kind of realistic when you think about it.  Yeah, because the promise is we're going to peek in on the bad guys, but we might once in a while peek in on everybody.  And who gets to decide who's a bad guy is the main thing, right?  What's happening that's exciting in the space of community?  So, I mean, that's the technology side.  So you're interested in passkeys.  What's happening with community?

BORIS MANN

[00:39:27] Yeah, I mean, I'd say community.  So again, another esoteric area, is most people in the world will not create a company with shares.  They won't create a co-op with members.  They won't create a non-profit society.  But those are this interesting legal layer.  BC is actually a leader in this, has been for a really long time.  Delaware in the US is known as the state where people all register companies internationally.  And BC is actually the Delaware of Canada.  And a lot of people don't really know this.  We've got great innovation in co-ops and non-profits and stuff like that.  So there's some structural things happening there that are super interesting that I'm interested in.  I just went through BC's societies online.  You can very easily create a couple of different non-profit societies, literally with just a couple of clicks in BC, which is great.  Why would you want to create a society?  Because all of a sudden you have a bunch of structure that defines how people work together and something that's not, it's not an individual like, oh, hey, Mo, you got this one, you got this meal, you get the next one, right?  Like this coordination through an entity is actually super interesting.  It's a way for people to work together.  So there's a governance layer that you create.  There's a governance layer there that's super interesting.  And then from there, there's a bunch of financial tooling that's around.  So a company called Open Collective is really great.  Basically, there is actually quite a lot of overhead still in like, oh man, creating an organization, creating a bank account, doing the accounting.  So you have a fair bit of overhead, but there's lots of ways that we want to pool funds, pool capital without just running it through someone's bank account and having some governance.  So Open Collective lets you very easily spin up collectives where a fiscal host will host that bank account for you.  So there are no excuses for pooling funds anymore.  If you want to pool a couple of hundred, a couple of thousand, a couple of tens of thousands of dollars, that is something that you can get together with a group of people and do right away and have leverage to make something happen.  That's amazing.  We're way further ahead than we were.  Another one actually is the ability to hire people around the world.  That again may seem obvious.  A commercial company called Deal, D-E-E-L, let my last company, Fission, we had staff who worked for us around the world as employees.  They had a lot of different people.  German employee, Belgian employee, Nigerian employee, Japanese employee.  That's huge.  And that's something that I can see us leaning into more.  And so they come in and sort of provide like the jurisdictional translation.  Exactly.  All these spaces.  Exactly, right?  Because you want, you know, there's a reason that people want to work as full employees.  And it used to be only the largest companies could afford to do that.  So many entities, so many legal situations.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:42:36] Exactly, exactly.  Yeah, we've worked with a couple of clients and just working in multiple states in the US.  And that is akin to trying to work globally.  It's wild how different it is.  So, you know, I'm actually curious that you're working with Deal, but I feel like Boris of the future or maybe of the present would say that what Deal is doing should actually be a protocol.

BORIS MANN

[00:43:01] Great.  Thank you.  There is a Web3 entity in the US called Opalus.  And they are for people who work as contractors, independent contractors, freelancers in the US.  And they can join as an owner of Opalus, but that also then becomes their employer record and they've pooled together to get great medical benefits.  And there's structures like this.  Co-ops are another example, right?  And so, yeah, I mean, the US has a larger challenge to this than we do in Canada, which is why it hasn't come along quite yet.  Where your healthcare is tied to employment.  And this fixes that.  You can switch who your employer is, but you always work for this Opalus entity, right?  So, yes, I totally agree.  There's many more of these things that we should be able to plug and play in different ways.  Mm-hmm.  So.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:44:01] You know, we started the conversation in kind of framing up what open source is, the importance of community within that, and now what's happening technologically.  And there's moves that you're making as an individual and as a member of various collectives that you've created or are leading and or shepherding in some way.  What is the next big lever that you're trying to really lean into to create some change?

BORIS MANN

[00:44:26] Yeah.  So I am thinking a lot about how at a city level, regional, provincial level, and at a nation level, I think that, in fact, people want agency, but they, in some ways, by the system that we're in, feel like, like they don't have it.  And so I think that we, I want many more people to form into small and large groups and take on challenges at those three different layers and say, 'We can do this.'  We have a lot of, like, again, financial tooling, technological tooling that have come along, right?  We're all the way together, right?  Like, so commercial real estate.  So my first office, 21 years ago in, 20 years ago in Gastown, the space that we're in now is cheaper than 20 years ago, including in $2,004, which in turn has would be much more in today's dollars, kind of like that.  So what do we do with commercial real estate if lots more people are working remotely?  Maybe now is a good time to band together and set up collective, and have long-term, long-term collectives that do interesting, creative things in those spaces.  And all of these things are possible.  So I want to, in many ways, just awaken people to train the muscle of rather than being like, 'I've got to do this all myself.'  And a lot of, like, small business owners, artists, a bunch of others, actually think about, like, just having to do this all themselves.  And I want to start saying, well, which of these things could I get help with?  Right?  There's a whole other thing around where I actually really think that, like, I'm coming to terms with the fact that I have a certain level of neurodiversity.  Back in my day, it wasn't something that was mentioned or even known that that was a thing.  So how do we lean into that and be like, oh, yeah, let's get a bunch of weirdos together and work on stuff together, right?  And I think, like, really grabbing those people that we could get good energy from and saying, hey, let's work on this together.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:46:59] Yeah, I think that's a fantastic, I'll look to have and a pretty good call to action.  So, you know, my personal takeaways and funny enough, I didn't come into this conversation thinking that I was going to, frankly, learn so much, but thank you.  My personal takeaways are around the power of collaboration, which I feel societally, we've kind of moved away from quite a bit because especially, you know, and again, this is going to sound like such a cliche, but especially with social media, there's such a focus on individualism, everybody's a brand, everybody's a content creator, and this individuation of people has actually removed and undermined a lot of our collective power.  And the other one's actually around information asymmetry, right?  Because a lot of the topics that you're talking about are pretty accessible, but there's these assumptions that that's too hard, I've already lost it, and it's too far away.  We can probably correct a lot of that information asymmetry as well.  And both of these lead towards, hopefully, an expanded sense of, of agency, of actually being able to make decisions, set up systems and protocols such that we have control over these systems, technologies, protocols that have so much influence over our lives.

BORIS MANN

[00:48:14] Yeah, that's, that's a really, really great summary.  It, I think maybe the, the non-hopeful part that I will like, kind of try and light a fire under people is that, no one's coming to, to save us.  Grab your neighbors, grab your friends, work on stuff that personally matters to you.  Ask for help when you need it.  Technological help, financial help, energy help, huge thing, right?  One of my huge advices to a lot of people often is like, 'Where's your peer group?'  And I feel those are muscles that, that are kind of atrophying in, in different ways.  So that's like very, very general, but at the same time, like apply that to art, science, tech, music, food, right.  And we, we can make these changes happen if we figure out how to work together, rather than hoping that some other company or level of government is going to do it for us.

MO DHALIWAL

[00:49:30] Awesome.  Well, thanks for your time, Boris.  Appreciate you coming in.  Thanks, Mo.  Well, hopefully we've given you a lot to think about.  That was high agency like and subscribe and we will see you next time.

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