Having more diversity is not some woke idea.
It's more of a security principle.
And so my favorite way of talking about it is informed by the context I come from,
which is working on security in the Bitcoin network.
Hey everybody, Frank here.
Just wanted to drop a quick message before we get started with this episode.
First, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who's been tuning in.
Our listener and watcher base continues to grow, and we really appreciate your attention.
If you could hit the like and subscribe button, that would help even more people find us,
which we would greatly appreciate.
And also, if you could leave a comment or a review, that would be even more helpful.
So thank you in advance, and thank you again to everyone who has been tuning in.
Second, I just wanted to say this episode is a little bit different than most new Renaissance Capital episodes.
Usually we look at Bitcoin adoption in one particular country.
For this episode, we're going to be looking at the well-being of open source developers
and how Amiti Uthawar, founder of Way, is supporting these open source developers.
I think it's 150 of these developers in total from over 35 countries.
So in a sense, this episode is focused on something global, the well-being of these developers, but just not focused on one particular country this time around.
Thirdly, we had some technical difficulties with this recording.
That's all been smoothed out in the editing, but I just wanted to let you know that towards the end of the episode, you'll see Amiti's outfit shift from one outfit to the other.
It's because we had to stop recording one day and then re-record the end of the episode on a second day.
So just wanted to alleviate any potential confusion there.
And then finally, if you have any cool leads for me about really cool stuff happening with Bitcoin adoption around the world, please email me at newrentcap at gmail.com.
That's N-E-W-R-E-N-C-A-P at gmail.com.
I would love to hear about anything cool that's happening again with especially grassroots Bitcoin adoption.
All right.
I think that was everything.
With that said, let us get to this interview, to this episode.
Here is my conversation with Amiti Otharwar, founder of Way.
All right. Welcome, everybody.
I am here today with the special guest, Amiti Otharwar.
I'm super, super excited for this conversation because I really, really like the topic of psychology,
psychosocial coaching, mental health, all this stuff mixed up.
I have a bit of a background in it myself, so super, super excited to have this conversation with Amiti today.
Amiti, just a quick introduction here.
Amiti was the first confirmed female Bitcoin core dev, but she has since pivoted from doing technical work in the open source community.
She's now coaching developers.
She's an executive coach for developers, providing them with psychosocial support.
I believe she's working with upwards of 150 devs from 35 different countries, which is quite exciting.
and I was very inspired to have this conversation after I saw her present at the Human Rights
Foundation's Global Bitcoin Summit, where she did a little bit of an overview of what
she does and kind of an hour-long, I think I'll let you describe what it was, but basically
like a little bit of an overview of what she does as well as kind of a walkthrough of ways
to preserve your mental health if you're working as an open source developer in the community.
and I don't want this just to be about developers
because I think there's plenty about working in Bitcoin
that challenges our mental health.
So we'll talk a little bit more broadly about it as well.
But I will stop rambling right there.
Hand the mic over to Amiti.
Amiti, if you could please introduce yourself,
I would greatly appreciate it.
Yeah, hi.
Thanks for having me on.
Okay, so the workshop at GBS,
that was so much fun.
It was called Rewiring Burnout,
the neuroscience of staying in flow and had a lot to do with practical techniques from
the world of neuroscience that I've been nerding out about. Huge disclaimer, I am not a neuroscientist.
I have no reason to be going around talking about neuroscience other than I find it very
interesting and I am a nerd. Certified. She has her license and everything.
Yeah, exactly. Just check my GitHub.
Let's go.
It's an open source certification.
But with Way, Way is a nonprofit that was started a year, a year and a half ago.
And with that, we've been exploring how to find different techniques from the world around and bring it to our community of permissionless builders.
So I know there's the word dev everywhere, but we have seen that the actual kind of grouping of similarity has to do more with working not just in open source, but working in this permissionless way.
There's a lot of essentially solopreneurship.
We don't necessarily use that term, but that's a lot of what's happening.
And so devs are a big part of it.
a lot of these devs, you know, my past self included, but working on the grant ecosystem,
you have to be some level of solopreneur. You might not be a Instagram creator or running,
starting a company, although many people are leading different apps, whether in the Bitcoin
ecosystem, Nostra ecosystem. But there is this element of having to navigate all the different
parts of your job that if you were working in a traditional company, it wouldn't be as
boundless. So I think something I've really enjoyed about working in Bitcoin is that
I get to decide what I think is the most important. It's not being told to me by some boss CEO or OKR
or OK, now pivot, stop working on what you were working on for the last two weeks and work on this
mission critical, whatever, I get to decide. And sometimes I do pivot. Sometimes I do get that
feedback, but it is in my judgment and discernment. And that feels very empowering in an individual
manner. And it feels really important in a collective manner because we can have
various ideas of what's important. Different people can put forward work of what's important.
But then there's also this flip side of it. Our research paper done by Laura Lotti, amazing researcher, she has kind of coined this term, the tyranny of permissionlessness.
And the idea here is that the same values that attract us all into this ecosystem, when gone unchecked, can actually be the source of huge challenge.
And over the last years, we are seeing a rise of it.
so many people are experiencing burnout. And we've seen, I think there was, I should go remember,
but was there a New York Times article about how several maintainers of Bitcoin
stepped away citing burnout? It was in some large publication.
Sure. I mean, if they were doing it to say that working for Bitcoin is bad,
then I would not be surprised to have seen it in the New York Times. But yeah, I remember you
talking about this and I remember hearing it where I remember hearing about this I should say
could have been the New York Times I'll look into it maybe include in the show notes if we can find
it let me know I should remember but anyway that's all right it's it's clearly on the rise
in conferences on Twitter in our community in individual conversations I think that
I've definitely heard tons but um way kind of came out of of this uh way was founded
I mean, Way became a concept walking out of the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2024, where a lot of people in this community said, you have to make this a thing.
Everyone's talking about the problems, but you're the only one talking about solutions.
And so I was like, OK, I guess I'm starting an org.
And so far, I've just been figuring out what that means.
But anyways, we have some time to dig into all of this.
This was a bit of a ramble.
I don't think I really introduced myself.
Yeah, there'll be a little bit about you and about what you're doing, but we'll get into more of both as we go along here.
It's super, super exciting. And I just want to reiterate on my behalf here, I was an educator for a while and training to be a clinical social worker.
So working with people, I find super, super fascinating. And I think the work you're doing, I can't wait to sort of continue to watch it unfold and to talk to you about it.
but I want to dive into some of that today.
But before we get into that work in particular,
what I'm curious is a little bit of,
if you could just give a little bit of your technical background
and maybe what led you to Bitcoin.
And I only ask for that, not so that we dive so far into it,
but just to kind of contextualize for the audience,
you're working with these developers who are doing this work you once did.
So I just want to give them a little bit of an overview of your experience
doing that work before we talk about the ways in which you're helping
the people you work with.
Yeah, totally. So I was a Bitcoin Core contributor full time for many years. I think my first PR was merged into Bitcoin Core at the end of 2018. And then I, from then on, I primarily worked on Bitcoin Core. It took me some time to become full time.
That was 2019 was when I became, was able to quit my fiat job and work on Bitcoin Core, where I focused on the peer-to-peer network.
And I was doing that up until starting way.
And yeah, so my area of focus was the P2P network, which essentially, you know, Bitcoin is a bunch of computers all over the world running software.
and that software somehow creates a ledger that's agreed upon.
And a lot of that is determined by consensus like the blockchain and the mechanisms of that.
But a lot of that is also heavily influenced by peer-to-peer logic.
So questions like, who do I connect to?
And how do I know if they are malicious or if they are actually serving me information from the real blockchain?
How do I send transactions and get them onto the network so it can be mined while maintaining my privacy so somebody cannot link my Bitcoin address with my real world identity?
These kinds of questions around network level operations are the domain of P2P. And that's where I happily focused and tinkered. I did a lot in terms of privacy and security. Those were my main focuses was trying to make sure the system is resilient for the long term.
Appreciate that. And thank you for the work that you did as a Bitcoin user. Not as the host, but as a Bitcoin user.
Thank you. That's great.
No, it's really, really inspiring work to me. I'm not a super technical minded person. So I'm quite grateful to people like yourself out there who are doing this extremely important work.
And just to clarify for the audience, too, when you talked, you mentioned your fiat job. From what I read, I think you did some work in Silicon Valley. Is that when you say fiat job, is it working for traditional software companies that or startups or something in that world that was your quote unquote fiat job?
uh yeah i it was a series of uh i mean you know i was working for a while i worked at different
startups in silicon valley um the one that i was working on when i first started falling down the
bitcoin rabbit hole was actually really cool this platform called simbi which was an online
marketplace for trading and bartering goods and services primarily focused on services
and there is where I really started to question what is money, what is the utility of it versus
the idea of it that we currently have because there were some ways in which I felt more able
to be rich through a bartering services economy. For example, I have never been certified in yoga
and so I should not like I would not take money to teach yoga but it's something that I'm have
been studying independently has brought me a lot of benefit happy to share with friends and family
and on Simbi I would teach people yoga and I would get massages and so to me I was just like
getting a free massage but the other side of it was cool too I was like wait what do you mean I
have something I can share. And I realized that, yeah, I mean, it had been over a decade that I
had learned about yoga. And sometimes people don't need a certified expert. What they need is
personalized attention. And sitting there and being like, oh, that post doesn't work for you?
Okay, let's figure out one that does, was more valuable than going to a class with somebody who
is more experienced, you know, it comes with its own caveats. But it that that working on that
platform really challenged my ideas of, of money, economy, expertise, those sorts of things. And it
was actually a user of the platform that came into our office and was like, you all need to learn
about Bitcoin. And orange pilled me and I think did an amazing job because the next thing I was
doing was reading the white paper. And ever since then, I was curious, like, what is this thing
kept falling down the curiosity rabbit hole that led me to working on the crypto team at Coinbase.
And that was my last job where I had conventional, you know, bosses and managers and
performance reviews and health benefits and things like that before I started working on Bitcoin.
Amazing. So you work on Bitcoin. You work on Bitcoin for a number of years starting, I think you said, 2018. You had your first PR merged. You then you've since, as we just talked about, shifted over to providing this psychosocial support via way. I'm assuming that maybe given that you're now trying to help people not burn out, maybe you went through this yourself. Is that potentially what happened? Yeah, you're laughing. So I'm assuming that could have been the case. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I wonder, I don't really know. Burnout is such an umbrella term. And it depends what we mean by it, right? And so I have had periods of time where I've stepped away from working on the project. And so I think we could totally call that burnout. But also, I don't know that I necessarily perceive it as such.
um so yeah i don't know but i definitely have gone through some things there's been a lot of
awesome stuff about working in this ecosystem and there's been a lot of huge challenges as well
and in my own experience firsthand having lived through some of the challenges i have a very
nuanced perspective as well as having talked to a lot of people and witnessed a lot of journeys i
have that exposure as well. But I think that way is very organically created. But I also feel like
it was a bit more informed by my journey of doing mentorship and then seeing that something else was
more valuable than technical mentorship. And that kind of led to it. So there was an element of
solving problems, but there was also an element of kind of leveling up both myself as well as others.
and curiosity around like,
rather than having to always solve this as individuals,
what does it mean like to get systemic support
in a different decentralized development ecosystem,
which is a new model.
We've had open source for a long time,
but the decentralized development ecosystem
of Bitcoin and friends,
which like Bitcoin and now Nostra,
to me still I haven't seen examples of that existing previously.
Okay. So your pivot to doing this work is more a matter of you feeling that you're more currently more valuable doing something like this, especially because there's really nobody serving this need. Maybe need isn't the exact word, but nobody sort of playing this role, doing this thing that you find very important and necessary at this point versus sort of you went through it yourself. So you want to be there for other people who are going through it. Is that a fair way to put it?
yeah yeah yeah totally yeah i mean i i think there are elements of number two but um definitely
and i would totally say need i think people in the community convinced me that this is a need
and that's why i said okay i'll give it a shot um but i also saw that myself you know amazing and
i think you also touched on something really cool we'll pull on it a little bit more in a second but
I think you made a really good point when you were talking about providing a service to somebody else and sometimes just providing someone attention is maybe more important than having the proper credentials or doing whatever.
And I think that level of sort of I'm focusing on you, I'm in this present moment with you trying to help you correct your posture in yoga or do whatever or just to be there for you, I think really does have a tremendous amount of value that's often overlooked, whether it's by professionals who educate or by mental health professionals.
I think there is something really to be said about that.
So just wanted to highlight that.
That's really important.
Yeah.
So you decide to do this.
you decide to do what you're doing with the way do you go through any training do you start
educating yourself about it what is the process like to to bringing way to to bring what yeah so
there's kind of two different journeys or timelines we can talk about one was the journey into
coaching myself and that uh was this organic process where i um you know when i came on to
the bitcoin scene i received a lot of attention for being the first woman and it's kind of ironic
because um i've been a female in male-dominated spaces my whole life uh primarily computer science
But I also do a bunch of intense mountaineering, which is also very male dominated.
But never has my gender been so talked about.
Yeah.
Been here, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it was done so in a very positive way where people are like, congratulations, what a success, blah, blah, blah.
But I was kind of like, no, this is a failure of us as a community.
It's 2019 and we have no women.
like just like straight up 50% not represented in the builders of this thing that we call global
money like that's so dumb and so I was curious from day zero of how do we get more and people
would ask me left and right how do we get more women I was like I don't know I'm here I think
this is dope like I don't know why everybody else is in I like how you just used the word dope too
by the way that was that fantastic yeah anyway please please continue yeah um so um yeah so i i did a lot of kind of working with other women who are interested technical mentorship etc But over time I realized that the technical mentorship wasn what was the highest leverage or the most impactful
It was something else.
and it i now have better understanding or words for it where when you have amazing problem solvers
people who are are devs who are working at the bitcoin core level if they can't solve a technical
problem the solution is so rarely actually technical usually there's some kind of psychological
technical blocker that it's some sort of narrative that's restricting you that prevents you from being
able to source your own solution. Because especially, I mean, at this point in time,
AI has taken over the world. Like, if you could solve a problem and the solution's out there,
you can find it, you know? And so when it does feel like I'm blocked by something technical,
Well, I've just seen higher leverage and impact around going a little deeper of why are you not able to solve this yourself when you know you're an incredible problem solver.
And I think that started with how I did my own work in Bitcoin Core.
I worked on some incredibly complicated P2P stuff.
but repeatedly I saw that when I couldn't figure something out it was rarely code or C++ that was
this blocker it was much more my own state of mind and colloquially we know this right like
the amount of times if you ask any dev that you've gone to bed like I can't figure out this bug and
I've been working on it for three hours and then you wake up and you're like oh right and beyond
And devs, like we've all experienced some flavor of this.
So anyways, in trying to support other people in their onboarding journey, it was a lot of women.
And I was also very passionate about people from other countries.
When I started contributing to Bitcoin Core, there were no contributors, like full-time contributors from all of Asia, from all of Africa, and all of South America.
So it was really narrow.
The representation has gotten a lot better in the past several years.
But yeah, working with these communities, I just saw what was more impactful was something else.
And over time, began calling that something else coaching.
Because I was like, it's not technical mentorship, but like, what is it?
And then as I was doing this new thing that I started calling coaching, eventually started away from the community saying, hey, this needs to be more widely available.
The results you're talking about, the possibilities you're talking about is much needed in this community.
then I started looking at, okay, how do we make it kind of a systemic offering rather than an
individual one? And that query is what WAI is. And so we've made a lot of awesome progress in
the past year. Some of those stats you mentioned at the beginning, I want to clarify. It's like
Way who's supported over 150 FreedomTech builders from over 35 countries. I think I need to update
those stats. I suspect it's more like over 200 and over 40 countries at this point, but
just trying to keep up. There's been incredible engagement, incredible stories of impact. People
are really taking this and running with it. And it's so humbling and so inspiring to get to work
with incredible builders and see them level up.
And some of it are people who are like, oh, my God, I'm burnt out or I'm on the verge
of it who are able to kind of transform and reignite.
And others are people who are like, I'm going strong.
But like, OK, what is this stuff?
And then find out that they can level up.
You know, so that's I was reading one of the programs.
I'm going to read you some because I was reading this for somebody asked me the other
day. And I was so just humbled and shook, like, by what people said. So some people, like,
like this group program we have called OS Reboot, what people described it as participants in their
own words. They said that it's metacognitive work. Somebody said it's cheating at life.
It's a guided group where you are in your journey of self-improvement, a group to level up your
thinking, somewhere to stay accountable to. But then in terms of the feedback that they give,
like, can you summarize the biggest impact that the program had on you?
Some of the answers were things like,
linear growth was not going to get me to where I needed to go.
This is a good reality.
These are different ones.
This is a good reality check that work is holistically part of me
and demands more of me and can elevate me.
somebody else said this made them reconsider how they were approaching the project that they were
launching and because of that they've been able to get exponentially more work done
and and here just one more I mean I can I can keep going for a while but
this is the realization that when you care about the work you're doing and its impact on the world
this implies a different psychological frame than most people inhabit so you need a different set of
strategies than normal advice making work-life balance a goal in its own right has never felt
relatable to me i've always chosen to do the work i do because i find it valuable enough to spend my
life doing it putting so much creativity and so much energy into creative work is something i want
to do and i appreciated that this approach suggested in the program didn't talk me out of
maintaining this identity and so like and then some of the takeaways just a couple more is like
like identity shift is bigger than coping strategies linear growth is for chimps
focus on the essential use leverage being effective is not doing more of the same but better
impact requires experimentation and course correction 10x is easier than 2x um so anyways
That's super organic. I didn't prepare it. This is literally just pulled off of our final feedback form of one program. I need to do better at like compiling and sharing. But I was just reading that last night because somebody was asking me about something and it was like, oh, my God, it's so humbling what people are doing with this material. And so that's what lights me up.
That's amazing. And I think that's actually really I'm happy that you read all those because it gets I think it's a really good example of like it's not like you're sitting there working through childhood trauma with devs.
You're talking about mindset shifts and different ways of conceptualizing what they're doing, which I think is really important.
not only the work itself, but the distinction between you're not their psychotherapist or
their therapist, you're helping them to sort of reframe, reconceptualize what they're doing in
efforts to do it better, to feel more comfortable in their own skin doing it, all this kind of stuff.
And it's really, really inspiring and super cool to see. I don't want to stray too far from the
point you made about women. I want to touch on it quickly for two reasons. One, I saw you recently,
I think you did a session with the Bitcoin Dada group.
And I recently wrote a piece focused on that group,
not only Bitcoin Dada, but Dada devs.
So for those unfamiliar with these groups,
Dada is Swahili for women in, I'm sorry, yeah, Swahili for women.
And this program is run by a woman named Lorraine Marcel in Kenya.
And it's a program for African women.
Bitcoin Dada is a program for African women to learn about Bitcoin.
Dada Devs is a program to help get women, African women, to start developing on Bitcoin.
And she's recently done this really cool thing where she's actually trying to create now a physical space in Nairobi and Kenya for these women to work together.
And, you know, I wrote this piece, Making Space for Women, Female Bitcoin Developers, because I think to your point, you know, even still, you maybe knocked down certain walls and, you know, your first confirmed female Bitcoin core developer.
Great stuff. Exciting. As you said, it's kind of weird that nine years into Bitcoin, you're the first confirmed female working on it.
But OK, that's like a story for another day.
You know, but it was weird.
You know, I published this piece and I get a lot of people pushing back, like, you know, keep this woke stuff out of Bitcoin.
Why would Bitcoin need African women?
Just ignorant bullshit, to be blunt.
I'm sorry about the language.
But is that still just deeply prevalent?
Do most women feel that that's the case?
And I'll say one last thing before I pass it over to you is, you know, when Lorraine Marcel started this program,
I was talking to her about it and the women, the developers were like, we want a space as developers, much like the space you gave us when we were just learning about Bitcoin.
We want that space for it to be not only women, but African women in this situation where they're comfortable working with one another.
You know, a lot of times we talk about Bitcoin as global open system, freedom, money.
But on the social level of it, these women still don't feel comfortable just being a part of the broader community.
They want some space for themselves.
I don't I don't want to say that, actually.
Let me let me rewind.
They do want to be part of the broader community.
But in doing their work, they also want to save space to do the work that they're doing and to sort of be maybe in a place where they don't feel judged or put into a certain container, whatever it may be.
I don't want to put words or or I don't want to put words in their mouths.
So what is this dynamic? Why does it still exist? Shouldn't we be on this sort of open permissionless network? Shouldn't we be embracing a diversity of developers and input? And if we should be, why is that not necessarily happening?
Yeah, totally.
Bitcoin network. So nodes themselves, one of the fundamental questions of a Bitcoin node
running in a peer-to-peer network of unknown size, unknown trustability, yet you have to connect to
nodes in a way that you're not going to fall over, like you're not going to be DOS attacked,
and you're staying connected to the main chain. Then on top of that, hopefully you're able to
maintain some level of privacy. And our main mechanism for ensuring security of am I connected
to the main chain, the most fundamental question of Bitcoin, like the blockchain can be perfect,
but if you are connected to one entity, then that's an eclipse attack. And the amount of
different issues that they can create if you're eclipsed is like practically infinite. It might
take some time, but they can, you're not on the main chain. You're not even participating in the
Bitcoin network. That's how fundamental this is, right? Could I clarify for maybe some of the
technical minded people out there, or could I ask you to clarify? So what happened? You spin up a
node, you believe that you're interacting, engaging with the main chain, but you're not necessarily,
what is actually happening in this scenario that you're talking about?
Yeah, there's a couple different ways that it could happen. An eclipse attack is essentially
the idea where you think you're connected to several different entities, but you're really
connected to just one entity. And then if you have one malicious entity between you and your
perception of the network, then different things they can do. They can make sure your transactions
never actually make it to the network. They can make sure you don't get the blocks. They can make
sure that like they can have a really long time to mine fake blocks. So your idea of the ledger
is no longer the actual ledger.
Like, essentially, there are some mechanisms that matter
in terms of Bitcoin that are part of Bitcoin's brilliance,
but the amount of damage they can do is pretty unbounded, you know?
And so that's one main one.
Also, there could be, like, partition attacks,
which if there's a partition,
whether intentional and malicious or unintentional, you essentially have multiple different ledgers.
And I personally think that if that occurred, it's game over for Bitcoin. So these are pretty fatal.
Big issues. And now I'm anxious, too. So I'm going to get off this topic. I'm just kidding.
This, I think, is a different rabbit hole we could go down, but I would love to maybe just
bring it back to what you were saying. You were using this as an analogy or a metaphor for the
situation with the female Bitcoin developers. Just wanted to maybe bring it back if you don't mind.
Yeah, yeah, of course. So basically, these are worst case things that we don't want to happen.
And as a P2P dev, worked a lot on preventing those thinking about it ways it could, right?
The main strategy for as a node, what you do, and this is in your individual best interest,
as well as in the network topology best interest.
The main strategy is to diversify your peers.
On the P2P level, any information you can get a hold of,
what's their IP address, what's the ASN range of them,
what's the ping time, who provided me the last block,
any information, what kind of connection is it that you can get a hold of,
You just try to diversify as much as possible along all indices.
That's it.
That's our security principle that runs Bitcoin Core and runs the Bitcoin network.
I have a question here because this is something I think about often.
So I'm not just asking this for the sake of the show and the listener, but for myself here.
So when I think a lot about this, I often go over to ChainCodeLabs, where I think you actually worked for a little bit.
beautiful on the 38th floor or something in this gorgeous building in New York,
overlooks New York City, all this kind of stuff.
It feels kind of very ivory tower-ish, if you will.
It's very sort of like, here's a place where the really smart developers go.
But that almost feels a little bit antithetical to Bitcoin.
Don't we want the brainpower that's working, that's contributing to Bitcoin
to be spread out around the world?
So when you talk about diversification, is that what you're referencing to some level?
that we want people from around the world to feel welcome to contributing to this,
that it's actually necessary for the security of Bitcoin for that to be the case,
for people, for there to be some sort of, at the very least, sort of people spread out jurisdictionally,
but also from an input standpoint that people are looking at problems through all different lenses
and all different lived experiences and then addressing those problems in those ways.
Is that a little bit of what you're getting at here,
or am I just taking that and running with it in some strange direction?
No, absolutely right. If we want Bitcoin to be resilient for the long term, then the people who are building it and we need developers, that whole idea of ossification is extremely ungrounded because security is an arms race and privacy is an arms race.
and that is completely true in the digital world and so maintaining software is also something that
doesn't just end so maintenance privacy and security are things that are going to need to
be ongoing even if you think the feature set doesn't need to change so we need developers
okay then who if you want resilience then what you want is a diversity of perspectives
And that's harder to measure. That's harder to evaluate. So what you can do at minimum is make sure there's diversity on indices that are easier to measure.
You can make sure that gender is varied, that cultural context and geographic population is varied, which is not to say that places like Chaincode can't exist.
But it would be a very, very different conversation if Chaincode was the only place that Bitcoin developers were making impact versus Chaincode being one of the places that Bitcoin developers are making impact.
like taking it to the other extreme and saying no to bitcoin developers can talk to each other
because then they're just going to have the same narrow perspective would also be irrational and
harmful you know so it is about finding a balance of non-homogeneous thought and so
this to me is a security principle it's not some like woke agenda i'm not saying
let's employ people based on exactly how they look or where they're from.
It's let's have high-quality contributors who come from different backgrounds
because that's the only way we're going to meet the goal of being global money.
Beautifully put. I appreciate that. Thank you.
It's comforting to hear from you.
It's a thought that I have often, but as someone who has worked on Bitcoin, it's very comforting to hear that.
One of the things that I often think about here is, generally speaking, I think it can be difficult or trying to work in the Bitcoin space because you're building on a network that's largely misunderstood.
You're building a new form of money unlike anything the world has ever seen.
Most of the world still thinks Bitcoin is a scam.
And I'm thinking on a certain level, is there a, whether you're a developer, an open source dev, or maybe you're an activist, or maybe you're running a Bitcoin circular economy, or you're doing what Lorraine Marcel is doing with Bitcoin data, is there a mental health, are there mental health challenges that innately come with that, doing something that, I wouldn't call it countercultural so much anymore, but it's definitely not the norm.
I mean, I know that Bitcoin is becoming a little bit better understood, a little bit more well known, but some of the culture, it's still a relatively small group of people, you know, compared to the global population.
Are there psychological challenges that come with that in and of itself being looked at by the mainstream population as different as what are you doing over there?
What's happening over there?
Why are you talking about privacy?
What do you have to hide?
Why do you want to use a different kind of money?
What's wrong with the money we have?
it does all that great on anyone like i said from devs to some of the people maybe doing some of the
educational work on the front lines or activism work or running a circular economy
yeah i mean well the life of an activist is really easy
super relaxing martinis and lawn chairs yeah
um yeah and so i would say the cognitive burdens are very real uh definitely i think there are
a lot of mental health challenges that people face um but i i am kind of careful to to acknowledge
like my limitations in speaking to like exactly the mental health side of things like i think the world would be a better place if everybody had a therapist they love uh I not trained in any of that And so I do want to kind of like be careful
And I think people's experiences are so individualized, right?
It's not just what you're working on.
It's also like your lifetime of context.
But that said, I definitely think there's plenty about like shared cognitive burdens
that we can talk more about.
is this loops back a little bit to being a builder in this space,
permissionless builders.
And that feels like the focus of who it is supporting.
It's people building freedom technology.
And part of that is doing it in a permissionless or unaffiliated way.
There are a lot of cognitive burdens.
some of them are shared by all for example the struggle of being a solopreneur means you have to
you have to figure out what you're working on figure out how you're going to work on it
figure out when you work on it figure out who you work on it with figure out how you talk about
what you're doing in order to raise money figure out how you talk about what you're doing in order
to get buy-in from the community, whether it's a review on a PR, whether it's people
using your application.
There's different layers of communication, marketing, all that.
And that's just off the top of my head.
I'm not even yet mentioning things like, oh, mentoring others is important for the ecosystem.
If nobody mentored anyone, the ecosystem would essentially die off because knowledge is,
A lot is captured on GitHub, but that is not a good way to get a full picture.
I have seen tons of people onboard into Bitcoin Core specifically.
And out of like tens, if not maybe even a hundred people I've seen, there's like five tops who have really just lurked around GitHub and then become meaningful contributors.
Almost everyone talks to people, gets some, like, the GitHub contributions might help them build up credibility in order to create a direct relationship.
But whether it's a collaborator relationship, whether it's an onboarding program, whether it's a mentor, whatever it is, everybody has to talk to people to get their work forward.
So anyways, all of these different aspects in a company, you have support, right?
You have team offsites and you have a Slack channel and you have a manager and you have
different elements of support that is divvied up between the company.
And when you're a builder in Bitcoin, whether you're running a circular economy, whether
you're being an educator, whether you're writing code, whether you're building a Nostra app,
you have to take on a lot more different roles.
and the cognitive burden of that is real.
And if you don't put conscious attention into prioritization,
into strategies for how you turn your brain off sometimes,
into these aspects of what is most important,
then you're paying a constant cognitive tax
and that really, really adds up.
And so that's very real. And the other thing I'll mention, since we have talked about global majority countries and being a woman and, you know, you mentioned a little bit earlier some of the BS that people are like, this is a woke agenda, whatever.
Unfortunately, I think that the people who have experienced systemic bias in our world have additional cognitive taxes or burdens to pay.
And this sucks, but is the truth of the world we live in.
This is my perception of how it works.
And so when you grow up either looking different or being told that you're different the whole time, there are, I call it shackles.
That might be a little bit vague, but essentially that's how I refer to those cognitive taxes that are put in place.
And it requires an extra effort to overcome that.
um while that is definitely unfortunate in terms of the world that I want to live in that is fair
and equitable and just I also think that means there's a lot of opportunity because
everyone not everyone but the vast majority of people have some story of of why you're other
and so if you understand where that's weighing you down that's really where there's a very high
leverage opportunity and that's also where external support can be really valuable from
helping like cut those chains and then and then if you're free of it then you can just express
your creativity and those individual creativity ideas things is where I think true innovation
comes from. That's what I believe. That's what Way is founded on. That's what Way is desiring to
help elevate. It's not telling people what to do or how to do it. It's helping unleash what's
holding you back so that your own perspective of the world can release itself. And that's where
some of the most inspiring stories have come from. Another story that's coming to mind is
Kochi, who I've worked with personally, who she has a very technical, straightforward, like very,
very practical point of view. And we worked together for a while. And she, at some point,
was like, you know, you were always saying, like, follow your curiosity, follow your curiosity. And
I was like, what does that mean? How do I do that? That's very, you know, I don't even know how to
represent her without using my own words like nebulous or something but she was just like I
never knew what that meant but then finally I understood that my ability to to conceive of this
problem is is unique and and if I can put forward my own conception of the problem then that's going
to add essentially meaningful intellectual value to the shared collective and and this was her story
of how she transformed into going from like being intimidated to review PRs on the Lightning
protocol into putting forward a protocol spec and development, bringing together a different
world of study that exists in a distributed knowledge system that is not in our software
world as the grounds for a lightning protocol improvement. And that's like, you know, to her,
I can't even understand all the details of exactly what's going on. I haven't dug into lightning and
it's just like brilliantly technical and I've sent it to smarter people than me who are, you know,
better versed. But I kind of loved that, her feedback of like, I had no clue what you were
talking about but now i'm kind of getting it and it translating into this like protocol spec
improvement you know that's a and that's amazing and that's a really beautiful thing i think sort of
spirituality i don't maybe this isn't the best way to put it but i think you'll get the point
like spirituality 101 it's that idea of like being present getting rid of these constraints
the normal way we think about the world creating space for us to sort of be who we are and for our
brilliance to come forth and to shine and then to, you know, become what it became in this instance
that you just defined. I think that that's really the work and that's what you're helping people do.
The technical ability is there in all of these cases, it seems like with what you're talking
about. It's now just finding, it's allowing it to express itself. Is that a fair way to,
like a fair synopsis or a fair way to, you're creating the space for people to express it or
giving them a framework or a new way of looking at what they're doing for them to be able to sort of
release what it is they have inside of them. Not that they know exactly what that is, but to give
them space to see a problem and to come up with a solution for it, that they have the technical
capabilities to solve. But maybe, as you mentioned earlier, have maybe an emotional or psychological
hurdle that might be impeding them from getting to the core, no pun intended, of what that issue is.
So what I wanted to just kind of maybe finally touch on, and actually I'll stop there for a second, but I get anything wrong there.
Yeah.
I just wanted to really agree with that.
And that is the space that Way is coming in as.
It's essentially if you have ever had a really good manager, how they support you.
But it's doing that in a open source first, decentralized first kind of way.
and it's not to say that there isn't importance of technical material and support.
It's very important and there's amazing onboarding programs that are going on for devs all around the world
and there's also all sorts of different, you know, if you're an educator,
you do need to understand the subject matter material.
It's just that way is coming in to provide this other element of support that is valuable and saying, OK, you're already resourced in learning the domain knowledge in a different way.
You know?
Yep. Appreciate that.
one of the things the last thing that i'd like to touch on is maybe just some practical things for
people listening um that they can do uh just maybe two or three maybe takeaways things that
they can practice on their own to help maybe create space for these sorts of things to happen
certain breakthroughs or their ability to express something and again if if possible you know anyone
from the open source dev to again i have in my mind someone putting together a community somewhere in
Africa or Latin America, circular economy, some takeaways for them, things they might
be able to practice to enable that sort of expression.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Let's get into it.
So I think the number one thing that I like to start with is relevant to absolutely everyone
and is understanding your deepest why.
Why are, why do you care? Why are you doing this? And that should really inform what you do,
you know, but first getting very tangible, because when we make space to explicitly ask
that question, sometimes the answers, it's not that they're usually surprising,
but it is surprising how often we're motivated by things that don't correlate with that deepest why.
So starting with really, really knowing why you care can inform what you care about or how you go about it.
and that relates to the other part which is to focus on the most important thing
and and both of these are very universal and it's not novel it's not creative you've heard
these concepts in a hundred million different ways but that to me is the essence of any
any improvement that you try to do on yourself whether you're like oh I want more flow state or
you are I want to um stop feeling terrible or whatever it is um understanding that that
that two-part thing of why am I motivated for something and what is the focus of that.
It helps you figure out what the most important thing is.
And that is harder than ever in today's world.
We are all slammed by so many pulls on our attention from a million different directions.
And it's so funny because a little bit of explicit time to answer these questions goes such a long way.
And yet it's extremely uncomfortable to actually spend the time doing that.
So one of the things that we've been doing with Way, and it started prior but has been going on, is there's a template.
It's available on our website called AIR.
It's short for Actions, Intentions, Reflections.
You look back at the last month and you say, what were the actions that I did?
And that's kind of very practical and literal.
And then you have the reflections.
those are your more narrative storytelling feelings whatever about how you feel about it
like wow I did so much or I did so little most of the time people in the space we hear over and
over again they're like wow I thought I didn't do anything but then I listed it out and then I was
like I actually did a bunch and experience intrinsic value there and then and then you move on to
looking at the next month and that's the I that's the intentions and you might set goals you might
set more of direction of what you want to achieve. And doing this, it's a short amount of time that
it's one hour a month. And often it's even just 30 minutes of that hour. But doing that is so
game changing for so many of us. And yet, we all drag our feet. We're like, we have to make each
other accountable because none of us it's like, no, no, no, it sounds like one hour. But it's like,
no no no i can i'll do backflips before i spend this hour
no i don't know how to do backflips but i'll figure it out yeah i'll do that i'll read a
book on backflips for that hour instead of actually reflecting yeah exactly yeah so it's
such a powerful thing and the challenge of doing it is just as hard as it is powerful
that's but can i ask yeah can i i have a question there do you find that with the with most of this
work, you know, oftentimes, you know, whether it's in self-help books or the advice that we get,
whatever it is, it's the same thing over and over. It's that most people read the book,
but never actually practice anything in it because the practicing it is the tough part.
Sometimes it's just sort of the mental, I don't want to do this. I'm not conditioned to do this.
I don't want to have to reflect on this thing. Sometimes it's just not prioritizing it. Maybe
you're feeling good that week, that month, whatever. I don't need it. Everything's sort of good.
so you don't feel like you're in this state of anywhere from crisis to frustration.
And, you know, those are the places we often do kind of force ourselves to make some sort of change or reflect.
So I think on some level, it's just the doing.
It's not that what you're doing is all that profound.
It's just actually doing it that becomes the problem a lot of the time.
Would that be a fair way to say it?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, what's coming to my mind in agreement is it's like the activity itself isn't that profound.
Getting yourself to engage in the activity is what's profound.
Yeah, I like that.
I like that.
Yeah, totally agree.
Amazing stuff.
Any other, maybe one or two other small, I guess, not technical things, just tips, things to keep in mind maybe as you're working on whatever you're working on?
Well, I would love to dig into that specific one a little bit more through a couple more lenses because I think that's what makes it giving us more material to engage with.
So the idea of figuring out the most important thing, one framework.
So I want to talk about it from two different lenses.
One is a metaphor that's been a framework that's really resonated with a lot of people.
And two is a bit of the neuroscience of why this matters.
game cool so um i think we've talked about this 10x framework but this idea is that 10x is easier
than 2x um it came from there's there's a book about it i haven't read it but um noemi boyer
who is the ceo of demo labs and chief happiness officer at uh the reynolds foundation she was a
lead facilitator for one of the group programs, OS Reboot, that we ran last year and introduced
this model, which resonated with people. And then I've been going around sharing it and
experiencing similar resonance. So that's the context of where this came from. But the idea is
that like, okay, you're building a plane, right? You're already working on whatever project you're
working on. Let's say you are a Bitcoin writer, for example. So you have your plane and it's going
along and you realize that there's places you got to go, right? There's dictators that need to be
overthrown. There's unbanked people. There's all this lack of information that needs to be
resolved. So you're like, okay, how do I build a faster plane? And that is where most of us are
naturally at. We're looking for how do I speed this plane up? And that's a 2x mindset.
Those are 2x improvements. What maintenance can I do? Can I upgrade the engine? What
trade-offs should I do of when I fly it versus when I have to fuel it, etc.?
but the question that's really impactful is asking where can we shift into a 10x mindset
and the process of doing that is stepping back which is extremely uncomfortable that's the
discomfort we're talking about what does that mean as you say is that sometimes there's a little bit
of letting go of thinking we're doing it the right way i don't want to give up my my methods my
approach to this thing is that is that would that be a little bit extra context to add there
totally totally definitely have to let go um have to have to realize that hey
the improvements the 2x improvements i do this week are never gonna get me as fast as if i
truly step back and i don't know what's coming next yet but i have to believe that i can design
a rocket ship. And that's why I love this metaphor, because then you're like, oh, yeah,
a rocket goes way faster than a plane could. But I really try when I communicate it to communicate
that process of when you step back from building a faster plane, you don't know what's coming.
You're not like, I'm designing a rocket. I'm designing a rocket. Like you have to just step
into this unknown, uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and say, I believe, you kind of have to take
a leap of faith, say, I believe I can do this in an exponentially faster way.
And then if you believe that, then you can imagine a rocket.
And I've seen evidence of this time and time again.
and in this past year have been blown away by freedom tech builders who are adopting this and using it to leverage their own projects
But it is so, so uncomfortable.
And I don't want to understate that.
It's great to look back and be like, oh, rocket, obviously, you know.
But the process of doing that and I think it's an ongoing process of us constantly integrating those loops into our life because then there are times if you've designed a rocket ship, don't continue to step back in like forever.
Go implement it and then repeat the process, you know.
So it does need to be a full cycle. But that aspect of where can I go into the exponential growth curve, how can I unlock that is really, really meaningful. And I'll pause there, but then let's dive into a little bit of my understanding of the neuroscience of why that matters.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you for that.
And there's a good book on this called, well, I won't say on this, not exactly what you just said, but another good book on that note of kind of not necessarily improving upon an airplane, but building a rocket ship.
It's called Play Bigger.
I think it's written by some Silicon Valley people.
It was actually recommended to me by Jeff Booth, one of my favorite people in this space, and highly recommend it.
And I think it's a matter of just either broadening your perspective, shifting your perspective.
You're going to end up putting in the same or less energy and get bigger results when you do that.
I won't say that as a default.
We don't know, but that's the intention, right?
It's to say, okay, I really want to accomplish this big thing the way that I'm currently going about it.
I'm not going to do that within this time frame or within the time frame that I would like to accomplish it in.
Or maybe I'll get halfway there, not necessarily reach all the people I was planning to reach or have the impact I was hoping to have.
And I think one of the things that's a little bit difficult, I'll share a very quick story here.
I used to work with the manager of an artist named India Airi.
She was an acoustic singer-songwriter.
And he said a lot of the work that he had to do with her was she was a really good singer-songwriter.
and he wanted to have, she was just like, look, I'm a coffee shop.
I'm a coffee shop musician.
Maybe I'll get a little bit bigger than that,
but I like intimate performances, blah, blah, blah.
And he saw something different.
He said, no, no, I think there's something bigger here
that we could tap into.
And I won't get into all the process,
but it took some reframing for her to eventually,
she got to a point where she co-headlined
Madison Square Garden with Sade.
And it's like, you sit there,
And sometimes I don't think it's I think sometimes correct me if I'm wrong.
Sometimes there's even a self-confidence component to this.
Can I be the person that creates this exponential change, believing that you can be that person, but not blindly just believing it, then coming up with a strategy.
But the step back is the hardest part, the stepping back.
And I think also not being not flinching at your vision.
So if you do have that bigger vision, not convincing yourself that you're thinking too big, actually the opposite, maybe you're not thinking big enough, that tends to be people, the issue in a lot of cases.
And this extends, in my opinion, beyond open source or Bitcoin development.
But just, yeah, this is difficult.
This is really, really challenging stuff.
not even I would say less to conceptualizing the strategy, but more the stepping back and saying,
hey, maybe I'm doing this wrong and not clinging to like, but this is the way I've always done it.
This is the way I'm going to brute force this thing. I'm going to make it work. It's really,
really hard to let go of that kind of stuff. It takes a little while, but I don't want to,
I want you to get into the neuroscience of it. Yeah. It's a perfect setup. You don't even know it,
But that's a perfect setup because what you're really talking about are identity shifts.
And everything I've learned about the neuroscience has it points towards those identity shifts.
So I want to share a couple of things.
I can't remember if I mentioned earlier, but yes, I'm not a neuroscientist.
And however, these claims have been reviewed by neuroscientists.
So I'm not making them completely unwarranted.
But I just want to make sure to share with the audience, engage with this with skepticism.
If I'm wrong, let me know and let me know why and send me sources.
You know, I'm learning in open and want to involve people in that process.
And so the best way to take any of this neuroscience understanding I share is to treat it skeptically.
Okay.
So with that disclaimer.
So identity shift.
that is such a big deal. And most of what I learn really reinforces that. So here's one example.
We have a system called the reticular activating system. And it is its job is to filter out
sensations that we experience. It's to filter out stimuli. And it's hard to get a precise number,
But there are research papers that have claimed that over 99% of stimuli that hits your sensory body that is taken in by different receptors all over your body gets filtered out.
And only 1% of it even makes it into your brain to possibly influence whether it's action or conception, you know, your understanding of what's going on.
And so if you have a deeply held belief, whether it's about yourself or the world you live in or somebody else, whatever it is, then your entire body is working and in a very layered, nuanced way to reinforce that belief.
And so that belief can be influenced.
It can change over time.
But these are the identity shifts that are really, really impactful and hard to access at the same time.
It requires consistent work.
And so doing that specific active energy to believe in a bigger version of yourself or a bigger game.
And a lot of how we engage with it is at the mental narrative layer, right?
finding places in your mind if you have a fear story if you have an anxiety that constantly
comes up I mean I do this all the time um if if I was anxious uh I was recently looking for I just
signed a lease for a new place um to live and when I was in the search it was so anxiety producing
and I I dug into it and I saw that the fear was that I'm never going to find a place I like
and so doing the work to recognize here's a pattern on my mind, here's the fear and then
figuring out what is the flip of that narrative of just oh I will find a place I like and practicing
creating just flag when I see myself feeling anxious like put a flag and say okay can I
practice believing that I'm going to find a place even if it doesn't feel available to me right now
Can I just like test out putting this story there?
See how it feels.
Like that's one way to engage with this kind of identity layer, you know.
And so there's different ways to practice it.
You can do it at a somatic layer.
You can do it at a psychological layer.
You can do all sorts of different techniques to it.
But that is how you train your body to be open to information that helps reinforce the type of existence you want rather than reinforcing the shortcomings that you perceive.
beautifully put yeah i think it's a huge stopping stopping yourself in your own tracks when you're
having that thought realizing that it's a thought that it's not reality that it's something you're
going to choose to feel you know almost like that you're i'll use some some terminology here some
open source terminology are you going to merge this into your reality are you going to say no
we're not we're not going to make this part of my reality today actually we want to make it the
opposite part of my reality today and make that change appropriately. I think it's a really
difficult thing to do because there's a comfort in sort of falling into our old habits, even if
that does produce anxiety for us, because we've either convinced ourselves I'm an anxious person
or that's just the way I think or whatever it is. This is all part of us constructing our own
reality. And in those moments, it could be really difficult to halt it because I would imagine most
people, and I say this, I'll just say my own experience with this, is that who will I be if
I'm not that person, if I'm not the anxious person, if I'm not the developer who does this,
if I'm not the manager who does this, then who will I be? And I think, to your point,
it's similar to saying, well, I don't want to create a 2x faster airplane. What will I create?
That thought alone, that's the part that I think is hard for people. Is the future an open
canvas or is it the sort of limited scope future that I've always envisioned or the way I've
approached things? It's a really, really difficult place to get to, even though it sounds like it
wouldn't be. Why wouldn't you want the whole world to be whatever? I don't want to stop you there.
It seems like you have something to say. Yeah. You're setting me up so perfectly.
Way to plan this, everybody. We didn't plan it. I know. I know. It's like we did though, because
because our brains are wired that way.
And so I want to talk about the DMN versus the TPN.
The DMN is the default mode network.
And that's our autopilot.
It is literally named that because when they did the brain scans of people,
this is the default.
Most of the time, what is there, it's kind of like named after the average of what they see.
then the TPN there's several different names for the an alternate network and and there's different
like the salience network helps decide which one is in signal goes to but we don't have time to dig
into all of that but I'm the TPN is the task positive network in the literature is used as
the inverse of the default mode network okay cool DMN autopilot TPN the opposite TPN is going to be
what we associate with I'm present, I'm in flow, I'm aware of what's going on. DMN is like, whoa,
I drove to work. I don't even know how that happened. Or, you know, wow, I guess I am putting
this candy bar in my face right now. I didn't even realize I stopped working, whatever it is, right?
So the DMN is evolutionarily meant to keep us safe.
And so the way it does that is it uses all past information of threat to figure out actions,
to surface information that can show you that threat is occurring to inform action to prevent the threat.
so our brains from a survival point of view have evolved to say I would rather prefer a known bad
thing to an unknown possibly good thing so exactly what you're saying that's why I got so excited
because it was a perfect setup like it's not just oh some of us are like this or not
we are all like that by default and it's a feature not a bug but we I this is why I find the
neuroscience really exciting because I think that if you understand how this is a strength that has
led us to where we are you can work with it to make sure it doesn't limit you you know we from a
mammal point of view would rather fail in the same way than expose ourselves to something that
maybe is growth, maybe is good, sounds practical from a human point of view. It's like, yeah,
obviously, I want to share my music with more people. But your brain has intensely fortified
structures to say, oh, but then people might hate you, people might throw tomatoes at you,
Like, whatever. I don't know. So let's just do the thing that we know.
Yes. And the magic lies within doing these things you were just talking about that may cause people to throw tomatoes at you.
I think the magic lies in doing these things regardless. It's not that the tomatoes won't get thrown.
I think the tomatoes oftentimes do get thrown and all the things that maybe you were scared were going to happen when you go and do something like you said,
like share your music with the world or share something you created with the world.
And maybe it's not as severe as tomatoes getting thrown, but maybe people just don't react to it.
It doesn't have the intended impact you hoped it would have.
And this is oftentimes, I think, what happens when you create stuff.
And this isn't me just projecting years of being a musician that nobody paid attention to.
So I'm just just putting that out there.
So, yeah, I think it's really important what you said.
I think that the one thing to note, though, is that if you can sort of find it within you and maybe find help and support to put your ideas out there, to put big ideas out there.
And those ideas that maybe come to you when you make space for them to come to you that maybe feel a little ridiculous, potentially even unorthodox, those ideas tend to be special oftentimes.
And I think if you could figure out a way to give them space and to put them out there, it feels good.
One thing that comes to mind, actually, as I'm saying this, is sometimes from myself at least, I would get into a certain habit with the type of information I would put on Twitter.
And it was, ah, we're on X these days.
And it would often be related to the beat I was reporting on.
But once in a while, I'd have just a unique idea or a thought on something.
And maybe that didn't totally fit in with my, I don't know, whatever persona I've created, whether intentionally or not intentionally.
And it's a little bit weird because sometimes those tweets or those ideas, when you put them out there, they don't really land right away.
And I think then I've sort of practiced sort of like, should I just delete this?
Why did I even say that?
What was I thinking?
And then, you know, some mornings you wake up and all of a sudden, you know, a bunch of people have shared it and it actually was a good idea.
Sometimes these things, I think, just take time, right? Give yourself some space, put these ideas out there and do so in a way I think that feels comfortable to you. I think that could be, that's a whole different conversation, I think. But I think on some level, just sort of trusting that you're, especially if you're doing something like developing on Bitcoin, you're an incredibly intelligent human being. You're doing really, really important work and that your perspective is valuable.
So just wanted to add a little bit of my two sats at the end there. I want to bring it back to you, though, to bring it home for us, Amiti, if you don't mind. Any final thoughts? And also, obviously, please do a little bit of shilling. Where can people find you? Where can they find and connect with Way?
yeah totally yeah so just to to wrap up where where you um left us off i i i totally agree i
think there's two different ways i look at it from the neuroscience point of view that expanding your
identity is a really big deal your body your brain is working to reinforce your beliefs and so if you
believe you can do something, then you are seeking evidence for that information. And if you
go without intentionality, then you're by default not going to shift out of anything
like that you haven't already seen or have already done. So if you want to have any kind of growth,
whether it's personal, whether it's professional, there does require some level of intentional
training in your body in order for your brain to organize around that. And then beyond that,
I totally agree with what you were saying. And this part is more of my deeply held belief. And
what Wei is founded on is essentially the idea that innovation comes from individual creativity.
Each of us have unique, whether it's an idea, whether it's an expression, whether it's art,
whether it's code, we all have a unique kind of perspective and offering. And that's something
uniquely human, uniquely you, uniquely me, you know, and that's where real innovation comes from.
And so that could be the start of an entire other episode, but instead we'll just end it here.
that's the fundamental principle that in terms of why we exist we we talked a decent amount about
that and challenges that are in this ecosystem for builders but our approach to to how we support
people is essentially this how can we support you to to unshackle some of the baggage or chains or
whatever you want to call it and and help release some of your own creativity and so that's that's
what way is about um so yeah let me do a little bit of shilling um we've we've had amazing um
traction this past year and we're excited to to continue playing this out and offering our support
the best way to find out when we are doing new stuff
is signing up for the mailing list
you can go to way.dev
please include it in the show notes
and sign up for our mailing list there
next time we release a program
that's available with slots
we will definitely be mentioning it there
Right now, over this year, we're partnering with HRF and supporting 52 of their grantees, which is really exciting with group coaching and individual coaching.
It's a whole amazing network of experts, facilitators, coaches, neuroscientists, blah, blah, blah, blah,
that are rallying together to bring the support that exists in the ecosystem,
things that are evidence-based, things that are well-established, to uniquely our space,
and customizing it to the challenges that we face both as a group as well as individuals.
And so I'm super excited.
we are we are not the best at talking publicly it's been so amazing the engagement so I'm happy
to be here sharing a little bit more with all of all of you audience and hopefully over the course
of this year you'll hear more because I'm I'm so blown away by by what people are doing really and
I think that so many of us in the community want to support the builders, and this is a really cool
way to do it. We are very interested in donations, so if that is something you're interested in,
you can do it on our website or email us, hello at way.dev. If you have any questions,
hello at way.dev. I read all the emails, me and some other people, but like, yeah, we definitely
are very attentive to everything that we are sent. And so hit us up. We'd love to hear from you.
A little bit. I really appreciate your taking the time to do this. Really respect the fact that you
felt that something inside of you that caused you to pivot from doing the more technical work to
this work. And I think that the impact you're going to have is going to be incredible and
exponential. I think that the amount of people you reach and then the exponential changes that
they create as a result is going to be beneficial to us all as human beings, as
Bitcoiners, as people using open source tech. So from on a personal
level. Thank you very much for the work you're doing. And I look forward to continuing this
conversation. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. And it's truly been such an amazing ride.
And it's an honor to get to do this kind of work. Very cool. Well, you heard it here, everybody.
Check out Wei. We will be back. We'll be back next week. I think we have a guest from Cuba
joining us. But let's leave it here for now. Thanks for listening. And we will talk soon,
everybody. Take it easy. Pretty awesome, no? Amiti totally rocks. I absolutely love the work
that she's doing. I'm looking forward to maybe working with her in some capacity or supporting
in whatever ways I can. I think that what she does is so incredibly important. We often maybe
take for granted the fact that all these people are doing this hard work on Bitcoin and other
freedom tech and maybe working themselves to a point of exhaustion, burnout. And we're just using
these tools without necessarily thinking twice about that. So it's good to know that there's
someone like Amiti out there supporting people who are doing this incredibly important work.
Please help people find this episode. You can do so by hitting the like and subscribe button. You could leave a comment. You could leave a review. All of these things would be greatly appreciated. And as always, I'm always looking for really interesting stories, people around the world that are doing really good work to help foster Bitcoin adoption, especially at the grassroots level.
So please feel free to reach out to me at newrentcap at gmail.com.
That's N-E-W-R-E-N-C-A-P at gmail.com.
Beyond sending me some leads, please feel free just to let me know what you think about the show,
to tell me what I could maybe do better, improve upon, what you like, etc.
So with that, let me stop there.
And thank you to everyone for tuning in.
And we will talk next week.
Take it easy.
Thank you.