Open Doors Manifesto

Welcome to Open Doors, a digital living room where kind, introspective, and curious people gather to dream, connect, and create. Svitlana and I use this podcast to bring this serendipitous energy to your room. Grab a cup of Ukrainian Sea Buckthorn tea or Moroccan mint tea and join us. Our conversations are open but all threaded together by:

Curiosity-maxxers

• Deep understanding over judgment.

• Learning horizontally, instead of always looking up vertically.

• Being radically honest about the unknowns and approximating truth through first principles. “The further one goes, the less one knows.” –- Lao Tzu

Fierce & kind nerds

• Using kindness as armor against feelings of inferiority and superiority.

• Daringly exploring intellectual rabbit holes, unafraid of the unknown.

• Fiercely pursuing knowledge and community, driven by a burning love for learning and creating.

Infinite game players

• Finding infinity within ourselves, instead of focusing on external societal limitations.

• Actively choosing to be authentic selves.

• Pursuing long-term positive sum games based on cooperation, not competition.

• Spreading open-minded energy to the imperfect world and imperfect selves.

• Pursuing antifragility via active self-knowledge and fear-breaking.

High conviction meaning makers

• High agency over life design and choices.

• High conviction powered by even higher humility.

• Using courage to make great ideas and progress persist.

• Purposeful contrarianism, breaking free from banal platitudes.

• Rigorously building foundations and solutions.

Where is it going to live?

All streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Add it to your blogpost or personal website if you want, as a little cultural memento from our conversations.

Why do we want you to be our guest?

[a personal invite to our guests]

Why did we choose conversation?

We (Svitlana and Asma) often find ourselves deeply immersed in conversation about everything: AI, community, governance, digital constitutions, self-improvement, martial arts, human-centered design, etc. We hustle ourselves into the craziest, most interesting, entrepreneurial, and thoughtful communities. We are addicted to the magic of people doing and thinking with an impressive depth in intention.

We feel deep admiration and a sense of aliveness when we engage with these profound minds and non-dogmatic communities. To be clear, we seek more than just ideas and projects we agree with: we seek rigorous understanding above all. We believe that sharing this felt sentiment is powerful and often results in a call for action: to be kinder, work on more meaningful stuff, and grow and connect. We want to go far, beyond conventional wisdom and achievement. This podcast is our attempt to build a deep and broad tree of people, communities, ideas, and projects. A digital conversation is an attempt to capture a glimpse of the unique essence people we invite have. We believe that this ‘essence’ is what makes them produce beautiful thoughts and actions.

We also believe that there are many circles where this sentiment would be welcomed but where it is not as accessible. Creating a digital living room helps us break walls built by echo chambers, and differences in social, spiritual, economic, and political capital. In some ways, doing this podcast is our attempt to be more courageous and commit to ideas we wish to embody while remaining open to understanding the mendable systems governing our reality.