Why We Lost the "Third Space" And How Blurrt Is Bringing It Back

In this episode of What the Tech from Boast.AI, we sit down with Benhur Bosco, Founder of Blurrt, a Vancouver-based entrepreneur and filmmaker who spent the pandemic discovering that human connection—not content, not vanity metrics—is what actually matters.

What You'll Learn:

→ What happened to Benhur during the pandemic (isolation, ego death, and what came after)
 → Why social media failed to replace the "third space" we lost during lockdowns
 → The difference between connection and performance (and why social media optimizes for the wrong one)
 → How vanity metrics (likes, follower counts, profile pictures) actually prevent real connection
 → Blurrt's radical solution: voice-based conversations without performance layers
 → Why voice changes everything (emotion, vulnerability, authenticity without visual curation)
 → How Blurrt solves the Gen Z isolation crisis (letting young people be themselves, not perform)
 → Building from authentic pain, not cynical opportunity (why founders should solve problems they feel)
 → The ecosystem approach: bootstrapping + government funding (IRAP, SR&ED, BCIDMTC)
 → How Claude helped Benhur prototype and iterate rapidly
 → The 18-month runway: from prototype to V1
 → Why "rationales and opinions" divide us, but "human emotion and experience" unite us
 → The role of voice in fostering real humanity (the ups and downs you hear in a voice, not the curated image)

About Benhur Bosco:

Benhur is a Vancouver-based founder, filmmaker, and honors graduate of Vancouver Film School. He spent years in Hollywood and the film industry before the pandemic forced a confrontation with identity, purpose, and what actually drives human connection. That realization sparked Blurrt. He's building from authenticity, not cynicism—solving a problem he felt acutely during isolation.

About Blurrt:

Blurrt is a voice-based platform for authentic human connection without vanity metrics. Instead of likes, followers, and curated images, Blurrt enables asynchronous voice conversations across multiple threads. No profile pictures. No performance layer. Just voices, humanity, and organic community formation. Users can share thoughts, respond with voice notes, and watch conversations evolve naturally. Currently in prototype/early access phase with an 18-month runway to V1.

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome to What the Tech from Boast, where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world. I'm Paul Davenport, Boston Resident Tech Journalist, and today I'm thrilled to welcome the show Vancouver-based entrepreneur and founder, Ben Her Bosco. Ben Her is a part of an amazing community of British Columbia-based entrepreneurs who are building innovative technology at the forefront of emerging industries. In Ben Hur's case, he's creating innovative solutions for podcasters like yours truly and businesses with multimedia content strategies that deliver more engaging content that enables real-time interaction with customers. There's so much more that his product can do there, too, that we're going to dive into throughout the show. And I can't emphasize enough that it is an exciting mission, but hardly Ben Hur's only experience in the startup innovation ecosystem. Along with experience in Hollywood and as an honors graduate from Vancouver, which shorts up his credibility in the multimedia and podcasting space, he also has experience helping businesses across industries overhaul their systems and processes to reduce costs, drive sustainability, and enable scale. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Benner.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

Hey Paul, thank you so much for having me on here. I'm super excited to share what I'm building and working on. I'm really excited to chat with you about it.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

It was so great to get introduced to you because I went to Emerson College. It's not the same as Vancouver Film School, but I was there for journalism, and everybody who I was in classes with had their big dreams on Hollywood. So I think that is a sympathetica between us that hadn't been addressed in our previous conversations, but I think it explains why I think we vibe so well. But I in a very brief intro about you, I'd love for you to actually take it away and say in your own words, what sparked your interest in entrepreneurial, entering the tech space and doing everything that you've done across your varied career, but also very focused career in terms of what you are building today.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

I think it's an interesting journey. When you look at the overview, I've done a bunch of stuff. But then it's always been about a personal journey. It's about coming from a personal space and being very cognizant of where it's coming from. Being a part of Hollywood has always been a dream and being a filmmaker and writer, director, and that was something that I always wanted to do. But for me, it didn't come for from a personal space. I mean it became business, and I couldn't be as honest a creator as I wanted to be. And that was a conflict for me when I was in the film industry. And I didn't get into entrepreneurship because I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I got into entrepreneurship because I went through something in life. And during the pandemic, I know everybody went through something. But I had the unfortunate experience of having to live through that. I found myself in a room locked away, not knowing what I was gonna do, where I was gonna go, what the next day is gonna look like, if I was gonna ever see my family again, if I was gonna see my friends again, or you know, what what that entails, right? Because everybody was seeing everybody else as a threat as well. So which is a very strange thing to go through. And there's something really here, you know, interesting. It brought to light something really interesting about the human experience, is that when you lose your sense of purpose, when you lose your sense of, you know, I wake up and do this for a particular day, you lose your sense of value, and your validation system falls away, and then then your validation system falls away, your ego is shattered. Right? And that's what happened to me during the pandemic. And I was very cognizant of that process as well. And when that ego shattered, that entire process of wanting to be a filmmaker, writer, director, and everything just kind of you know drifted away. Do I still hold the fact that I'm a storyteller out of my heart and never passionate about it? It also that ego death was the idea, was the birth blurred, was the idea of bringing human connection and realizing our value as a community comes from being connected to one another and not from being connected to our opinions and rationales or trying to live up to vanity, but to actually be connected, not from your intellect or from your heart, to feel humanity, and that's why I'm building blurred.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

I love I'm gonna pull up on that last thing you just said there. It's not about intellect, it's from the heart. And it's not about also living up to the vanity of it all. So, Ben Hur, I love everything you just said there. So I'm gonna backtrack on a few of the things just to make sure that we can bring them to the fore here. Because first off, you hit the nail on the head at the beginning. You are not just an entrepreneur for the sake of being an entrepreneur, you're not just in the tech space for the sake of being in the tech space. That is a gold rush of the past. And if I'm gonna be honest, it's a gold rush that predates the COVID era. Um, and something that I think is really an unspoken thing when people are talking about why they're motivated to do what they're doing today. There was a big switch in how we all lived a few years ago that we really don't address enough, uh, to be honest. And I don't think that we need to live in the past or anything like that, but I know that my life fundamentally changed just like yours did. The isolation and the ego death that you experienced through that, it might sound dramatic, but it's literally what happens. The validation systems, your words, I didn't have those in place while the pandemic was happening. And I was sitting in my bedroom, I had my laptop, I could go to one of three other rooms in my small Boston apartment and like try to pretend I'm getting some sun or touching grass. But like you said, the outside world where I used to actually thrive and get validation and be able to actually express myself was closed off, and it almost seemed like a combative if I wanted to go out there. And so I just need to emphasize that everything you said there feels something I know I felt acutely, and that everyone listening, I think, was feeling over that period. And so you felt it personally, and I think because again, you were in the media space, so you are trying to build creativity and trying to build things that literally need human interaction and human validation and kind of that human support. So without that, you're kind of siloed away. And um, what do you do with that? So a common theme on these podcasts is that the best entrepreneurs aren't the ones who got into it just for the sake of it. We're the best people building tech, they felt an acute problem and they built something to solve their problem. And the only reason it becomes something that is marketable or becomes a product is because other people feel that acutely. If you're trying to chase something and you don't know the whole story, that you're never going to get to that plateau of an amazing entrepreneur or a unicorn. It's just it's cynical. But you actually want to make sure that you are putting your best foot forward, build a solution for yourself, and then see the surrounding kind of arena of people to batch onto that. So I thought that was incredible. And I'd love to learn a little bit more about blurt, too. I know I didn't say it in the intro, but blur, that's the name of the pro the solution that you created. And I know that I kind of framed it as a commercialization piece, but I'd love to learn a little bit more about just what blurt is, how it works, and how it actually solved a lot of what you were feeling, or how it could solve a lot of what you were feeling at the heights of the pandemic when that isolation and that validation system was just completely rock pot.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

So blur, think of it this way, put it very simply, right? Let's say you're listening to a podcast. What if you could reply to the podcast? What if you have something to say? You share it with the podcast, and that becomes a part of the podcast. And other people can listen to it and they reply too, and that also becomes a part of the podcast. And you have multiple threads multiple branches, all voice-based, entirely voice-based. You don't need to know who the person is, where the person is from, how they look. There's no likes, there's no dislikes, none of that. You just listen and just listening to humanity, and you can converse. And that conversation is always evolving, it's always growing, and you can always be a part of the conversation. Since it's not life, it's asynchronous. You can listen to something and then come back after a week and then put your thoughts there, right? And it's not just limited to podcasts, right? You can just wake up in the morning one day, have a thought, have an idea. It might not be entirely crystallized, but you can just share it to the world and see how that crystallizes among the community, among the world, right? It's never one person's idea, one person's thought. We're all a collective voice. We all want to be heard, we all want to listen and hold space for each other. And that's our humanity, and that's what I want to be able to give. Not be able to just see the rationale and opinions and text or the vanity and pictures and stuff that you and I can't live out to. Because vanity causes a disconnect, not just with the community, but with yourself, with your self-image. Right? And rationale and opinions, when you connect to rational opinions and they become your identity, what happens is when someone challenges that rationale or opinion, immediately you get a defensive reaction, right? And you're not connecting to humanity at all. Because rationale and opinion can differ. But the human emotion and that human experience is the bottom line. Everybody has that. That will never change. And we can always connect on that. Right? And that is the essence of a wars platform. And that's what you feel in a voice. The ups and downs of a human voice. And not knowing who they are, what they look like, what they do, and just listen. That is what blood is. It's voice of humanity.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

I'm so happy that you framed it that way, actually, because it just made it all so much easier. And also just something clicked there when you're talking about how because it's voice only, again, you remove the vanity out of the scenario, so that doesn't become the distraction that actually removes all humanity from the entire interaction. Yeah. At the risk of pulling some news into the conversation, too. Like, I know that Facebook just had a landmark settlement here in the States, and I'm thinking about how it's affected kids. And I have a lot of teachers in my family, as well as I'm Uncle Paul. I have a lot of nieces and nephews. So I'm very worried, and I've never felt older than I have in the past few years, of being like, oh my God, this is what you guys do. I'm like, you're not engaging with any of your peers, actually. Or hear each other. I think that's the biggest piece, honestly. And so by literally just making this, I think, audio and I think like voice, and also just like responsive, and it's something that can grow and something that can evolve. I framed it as a podcast thing in the past, but that is not at all what we're doing here. You are putting your thoughts out into the ethos, out into the atmosphere, out into the world, and finding the community there who are gonna latch onto it. And like you said, there's no urgency. I think social media pushes people to be just like, all right, when are we gonna post? When are we gonna get engagement? But not human connection. Whereas I wake up in the morning, I'm frustrated, I need to log on to work, and I know that like I'm like, I just need to get this off my chest. Is anyone else out there? Because I can't leave my house. I work from home and I'm not near any of my colleagues. They all work in Canada. I'm here in Boston. Does anybody know or can anyone relate here? Other stakeholders have raised other things, and maybe there were other concerns or other challenges that I was facing that I didn't even bring up at that initial outpost. Yeah, it brings that humanity together in a way that I think gets distracted on social media.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

You hit the nail on the head there, Paul. I mean, that's exactly what it is to be able to be there for each other, to guide each other, and then not just say, hey, this is what I think a relationship should be, or this is what I think this should be or that should be. But just see it in each other's experience, right? And just feel it. And you don't have to be right all the time.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

You know, I think that's the biggest thing. You don't have to be right all the time, if anything. I would like some people to gut check me on this, and I would like the discussion, and then like let's have an actual human discussion about this.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

And I think again, like being heard, I think that's something that everybody wants today. And I think that's at the crux of social media, but that's not what social media delivers at all. So yeah, if you have thoughts on that, I'd love to hear them.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

I mean, because today what social media delivers is how can I get maximum validation? What can I represent myself as so I get maximum validation for what I throw out? But that is not who you really are. And when you get that disconnect, you're then worried if you meet with your friends, will they see you for who you really are and will they validate you? That's why people are not connecting in real life, because they aren't relating to themselves. They've built a personality that they want validation for, but they don't know who they are in real. And that's what I'm trying to address here. That's the void I'm trying to address. The younger kids, the Gen Z and the Gen Y, I've lived through life to a certain extent to realize this cognitively, to realize this disconnect cognitively, right? To realize that attaching yourself to these rationales and attaching yourself to these to these ideals doesn't work. It doesn't work for you. You lose yourself in it, you don't see who you are. I want to be able to give that to the younger generation, to be able to let them see themselves for who they are and be able to interact and accept each other for who they are, and not represent and try to be someone else.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Yeah. And I think also too not be assigned your community, be able to have it organically come around you. Like again, because when you're speaking in your own words, when you're speaking your own truth, and it's not because you're putting up a front or some kind of like vanity thing when you're not cultivating something and you literally just want to put yourself out there. Yeah, this is a safe space to do it, and also a space where, again, we don't have those third spaces in reality anymore today. So this is an ability for you to actually be honest, be yourself, and then find your community globally. Uh or absolutely, and I I think that is so pivotal and such a missing piece of everything. Like I said, we don't have third spaces. Like I I leave my apartment to go out to dinner sometimes, but like, yeah, it's huge.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Yeah, it's huge that you've identified that as that third space. I think that's incredible that you've identified it that way. You know, you know, sometimes as a screenwriter, when I was working as a screenwriter, you'd write certain things into the screenplay thematically. When someone else reads it, it'd be like, oh shit, I didn't even see that, you know, then I wrote it. And the fact that you identified it is incredible.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

Yeah, I mean, I not to go on uh tangent about like screenwriters, but I'm even thinking about like writer rooms. Like I know I have friends again. I went to Emerson, so I have friends who work who used to work in physical writer rooms, and then the pandemic switched it all. And I'm not gonna digress about the writer strikes and everything like that, and how it changed how everything works, which you know better than I do, probably the human element of it all, and also it like it it improves quality if you're actually trying to get a product off the ground, but also it improves your sanity if you actually have people that you can bounce things off of and also just relate to, like Claude, Chat GPT, great tools, but they aren't people, and also they're sycophants, they're gonna tell you what you want to hear. Yeah, like so. You really you don't want to ask these lunatics who are robots to be your best friends. You want to put that out into the world and have an actual human who has some lived experience, or maybe who is also searching for lived experience to find yeah, the the sky's a limit. All right, so we gotta move on to other segments of the podcast because I'm just happy that we've really grounded what we're talking about here. But building this product, what's gone into it? Like, tell me about just kind of some of the tools you've used, some of the ecosystem partners that you've used. How are you bringing this to life?

SPEAKER_01 16:23

So currently, I'm I used some of my friends in India who helped me and my advisors in India. They have a tech team back in India who've helped me build the prototype. I also used Claude, so I don't overclock them. Claude to build it out myself and build the prototype and clean up everything. And yeah, the prototype is ready for people to test out. The website, the landing page is up, and you can leave your email and I can send you an access code, and that way you'd be able to test out the app and let me know. As long as you don't say, hey, Ben's full of shit, I'm totally fine.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

The access code, I haven't delved in yet. I really wanted to have a use case before we chatted today and tell you about my experience, but but that'll be for the follow-up episode that we do. I don't think you're full of shit from everything that we're talking about here. I bet you gave me the keys to test it out too. Shows you believe in the solution. Like, I think that's another thing that the founders who are listening to this who are really focused on just like the products and how they can build brand evangelists. This is how you do it. Believe in what you're doing, test it out, see the proof and the pudding because he used it yourself, and then share it with people who actually show genuine interest in it and they become your advocates. So, like, Ben, that's exactly what you're doing for me today. I'm gonna be your advocate because not only have you opened my eyes to exactly what the ethos of all of this is, again, making sure that we just aren't in isolation and also just like not in an echo chamber or not being told who our audience is. Who is our actual audience? It's gonna be the people who want to hear what you as a human have to say. I think that's critical. So the human side of it all is really what I want to push out there. But again, I know I sound like I'm probably poo-pooing AI and Claude and everything like that. Absolutely not. I've used Claude all afternoon for brings, yeah, not to take over my work, but to give me the superpowers that I need to make sure that I can accelerate things because it is busy season here on the tag side. So moving on to what's next for your team. I know you talked about how you have the landing page live. I'm gonna put a link to that in the show notes with your permission, and make sure that again, people know how to reach out to you to try out Blur. But what what's on the roadmap and what do we have to look forward to for Blur, you and your team?

SPEAKER_01 18:34

We've said to the community here in Bank of the Tech Community, and I've got an 18-month runway. I'm in the process of raising money, pre seed money, and I've got an 18-month runway to get the product live to V1. And I'm still testing out my prototype, getting as many reviews as possible, people telling me, hey, this feature is working, this is not working, and all of those will be valuable, and all of those will be put into building the actual V1. And I'm also reaching out to other government grants like IRA and Shred to extend my runway as much as possible.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

I love it. And I think I mentioned this before when we were talking. You're in Vancouver, and so yeah, the BC Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit is right up your alley. So that is another one above and beyond Shred. So for podcast listeners, you're getting into a sales call right now, but basically, Ben, I'd love to connect you with a member of our team just to talk about IDMTC because that is something that people don't really know about a lot of the time because it's a provincial tax credit. It is above and beyond the RD of it all. It is for digital media companies, which I think you definitely would fall into that column of. And it's similarly, it's similarly about RD and development, but it is for businesses that are building tools exactly like this, that are making sure that like communication, honestly, I think they say digital media, but it's all just about communication. And those are tools that we need to build and solve problems. So I'm gonna say solutions instead of tools, but we have a lot of resources about BD, B C I D M T C so many acronyms and initialisms in my field that I will make sure I put into the show notes here too. And then we're gonna connect about that separately. I do have to give a shout out to Clea Gagantes who connected us uh originally. And yeah, Clea is awesome. Clea is awesome. How she knows and can connect so many thought leaders is incredible. Best thing I ever did was meet her at Sass North like four years ago, and she has stayed my buddy. I cannot wait to go back to Vancouver and actually go do some yoga with her, honestly. That's been a promise. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

I'm actually doing a road trip with her this Saturday, going after Whistler.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Then separately, I want pictures of Whistler, and I want selfie Vemir and Clee Clea, the vanity of it all. But I'm yeah, I'm gonna activate my blurt trial. And I'm like, how can I get to Whistler this weekend from Boston? How? How? And see what answers I get. But yeah, no, Ben, this is fantastic. Again, this is an incredible mission. I think it is timely in so many ways, and also you are doing it the right way. It's from a place of purity, it's not from a cynical place, it's addressing a problem that you felt and that also so many people feel, and it is again just non-cynical.

SPEAKER_01 21:35

It is an opportunity for people to better themselves, but also learn about humanity and yeah, something that's all we have is our humanity.

SPEAKER_00 21:47

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

It's all we have. If we lose that, then what is the point of waking up every day?

SPEAKER_00 21:53

Ben, I cannot thank you enough for joining me on the show. This was fantastic. Yeah. And uh for everybody, again, we're gonna have the details in the show notes so that you can engage with Blur and engage with Ben directly. And yeah, if you have any questions about IDMTC or any of the other programs that we talked about here too, I'll make sure that we have details in the show notes. So thanks again.

SPEAKER_01 22:13

Thank you so much, Paul.