Episodes

Alex Johnston spent six years trying to build a family: three and a half years of fertility treatment, two surrogacies, and a daughter who was stillborn, before ending up with three children in fifteen months. She walks through what the process actually involves - the cost, the limits of the technology, the strain on a marriage, and what the relationship with a surrogate is really like - and why most of what people believe about getting pregnant in their late thirties comes from magazine covers ...

Alex Jamieson co-created Super Size Me and healed her own body with food after collapsing at 25. She talks about why diet changes only stick when you change the job and the relationships around them, how the Super Size Me idea came out of ordinary conversations on a couch, and the vicious backlash she got for publicly announcing she was no longer vegan. Useful if you are weighing a creative risk or trying to figure out what your cravings are actually telling you. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/...

Alex Jamieson and Bob Gower walk through the four-part conversation framework they built - intentions, concerns, boundaries, and dreams - and explain how to use it before a vacation, a business project, or a hard talk with a partner. They also cover what they learned about money and uncertainty from their own careers, why clear boundaries made their relationship work, and where the framework breaks down. Useful if you avoid important conversations because you do not know how to start them. Host...

Alex Fink grew up in the Soviet Union, where his parents hid in the bathroom to listen to Voice of America at 4am, and now runs Otherweb, an app that filters news quality. He argues the collapse of information quality is not a conspiracy but an incentive problem: almost all content is monetized by clicks and views, so everything drifts toward clickbait whether creators intend it or not. The conversation covers why pleading with Facebook will not work, what a nutrition label for an article looks ...

Alecia Lawyer is an oboist who went from a small East Texas town to Juilliard, hit the wall of an audition circuit where you wait for someone to die to get a job, and then built her own professional ensemble, ROCO, in Houston. She talks about what music education in Texas actually taught her, why she practices to remove limitations rather than to be perfect, and the years of rejection between Juilliard and starting something of her own. Useful if you are trying to make a living in a field with a...

Professional poker player Alec Torelli walks through how he thinks about risk: separating life-altering risks from recoverable ones, managing a bankroll so variance cannot wipe you out, and creating distance from his own ego by talking to himself in the third person at the table. He also describes losing $2.2 million in a single day in Macau and the routine he forced on himself to recover. The conversation moves between poker and ordinary decisions about money, careers, and creative work. Hoste...

Alberto Savoia spent a decade at Google and ran two startups - one acquired for $100 million, the other burning through $25 million in Sequoia money before it died. He argues that 80 to 90 percent of product failures come down to building something the market never wanted, not to bad execution or bad marketing, and he walks through the method he teaches at Stanford for testing an idea cheaply before committing years to it. The conversation covers turning a fuzzy idea into a testable hypothesis, ...

Network scientist Albert-László Barabási explains the five laws behind his book The Formula, a data-driven account of why success is decided by the community rather than by the individual. He walks through what happens when performance can't be measured and networks take over, why the order you're judged in changes the outcome, how previous success compounds, who actually gets credit for a team's work, and why creativity has no age limit. Useful if you want research instead of anecdotes about ho...

Poet and memoirist Albert Flynn DeSilver traces the path from a failing photography student to a writer with a multi-decade career, built on one night at a poetry reading that redirected his life. He talks about getting sober at 22, why trauma lives in the body rather than the head, and what actually released it. He also breaks down how to learn to see - the sensory attention that feeds good writing - and why the only definition of a writer that matters is someone who writes. Hosted on Acast. S...

Alastair Humphreys spent four years cycling around the world, largely to prove a point to the people he went to high school with. He talks with Srini about what that need to prove yourself actually costs, why he traded big expeditions for micro adventures that fit around a job and a school run, and what he learned walking 500 miles across Spain with no money and a violin he had only been playing for seven months. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Al Pittampalli is the author of Read This Before Our Next Meeting and Persuadable. He makes the case that most recurring meetings exist only because they are on the calendar, shows what happens when you cancel them for three weeks, and then argues that the scarce skill is not persuading other people but being genuinely willing to change your own mind. He also covers his six months in Seth Godin alternative MBA, publishing with the Domino Project, and why some ideas spread far more easily than ot...

Akshay Nanavati came back from Iraq with survivor's guilt, drinking a bottle of vodka a day, and a plan to return to war to justify being alive. He talks about how he climbed out of that, why he now treats pain and fear as tools rather than enemies, and what losing a fingertip to frostbite in Antarctica taught him about knowing when to quit. The conversation covers post-traumatic growth, seven days in total darkness, and how to make the consequences of your own habits feel immediate. Hosted on ...

Akshay Nanavati is a former Marine who served in Iraq, came home with survivor's guilt and a bottle-of-vodka-a-day drinking problem, and now skis across Antarctica and sits in week-long darkness retreats on purpose. He explains why he thinks pain is the most effective driver of change available to a human being, why post-traumatic stress is not the same thing as post-traumatic stress disorder, and how he decided when to quit an expedition after losing a fingertip to frostbite. The conversation a...

AJ Jacobs spent a year inside the world of puzzles - crosswords, corn mazes, the unsolved Kryptos code at CIA headquarters, and the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship, where he competed as Team USA. He makes the case that a puzzle is a better frame than a battle for almost everything hard: disagreements, parenting, career decisions, changing your own mind. The conversation covers holding beliefs in pencil instead of pen, why frustration is a sign of progress, and the mantra he now uses instead of ...

AJ Jacobs spent a year living by the original text of the Constitution - carrying an 18th-century musket around the Upper West Side, writing with a quill pen, voting out loud at his polling place, and quartering a soldier in his apartment. He and Srini work through what the founders actually meant by free speech, privacy, voting, guns, and the Supreme Court, and how far those words have had to stretch since. The thread running through it is Ben Franklin's half-carved sun on George Washington's c...

Aerosyn-Lex Mestrovic is a multidisciplinary artist whose work has shown at MoMA and who has collaborated with Kenzo, Nike, and Kanye West. He talks about growing up a first-generation immigrant with no financial safety net, the business partnership that collapsed into police reports and threats, and how he rebuilt from it. The conversation digs into what a creative identity actually is, why most people misread their calling, and how the definition of being an artist has changed in the age of In...

Business operations consultant Adrienne Dorison talks about growing up with an absent mother and a feast-or-famine household, and how that shaped a money story she had to unlearn. She walks through taking on student loan debt she didnt understand, paying it off, and why she started giving money away before she felt she could afford to. The second half covers why she left a fast-track corporate career and what actually made her own business grow quickly. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy fo...

Adii Pienaar built and sold WooThemes and Conversio, then nearly lost his marriage and his health chasing the next milestone. He talks about life profitability - treating your business as one line item in a wider life portfolio rather than the thing everything else gets sacrificed for - and why the measurement habits that work for revenue quietly wreck the parts of life that cannot be quantified. Also covers growing up white in post-apartheid South Africa, compounded privilege, and why risk aver...

Abigail Clarke is a somatic teacher and writer who rebuilt her own body after a spinal injury doctors said would leave her in permanent pain. She explains what embodiment actually means beyond the yoga-industry version of it, why telling a traumatized person to just breathe can make things worse, and how to tell the difference between listening to your body and making excuses. The conversation also covers what mitochondria and skin reveal about interdependence, and why domination is a learned be...

Srini and co-host Greg Hartl walk through why Blogcast fm became The Unmistakable Creative: the show had outgrown the word blog, and the wrong name was costing them listeners, guests, and sponsors. Greg explains branding as the parking space you occupy in someone mind, why knowing your essence makes hard decisions easy, and why he thinks solo founders fail without a team. They also answer listener questions on what counts as a creative and what was hardest about the rebrand. Hosted on Acast. Se...

Srini hands the microphone to his roommate Matthew Cook and his girlfriend Laura Foster, who work through Mandy Len Catron's 36 questions that supposedly make two people fall in love. Their answers move from how they were raised and what they would change about it to what they actually admire in each other, and clips from past guests Megan Poe, Bob Goff and Jenny Taitz sit alongside them. Listen if you want to hear what the experiment sounds like when real people run it instead of reading about ...

Holly Shaw, performer and coach, discusses how she discovered her creative DNA through a lifelong relationship with performance—from childhood dancing at jazz concerts to conquering stage fright with an acting coach. She explores how creatives can uncover their unique wiring, treat intuition as a compass rather than a map, and why physical embodiment is the missing piece in the creative conversation. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Former NFL player Bret Lockett breaks down the mindset gap between athletes who flame out and those who build sustainable careers, using Tom Bradys systematic approach as the benchmark. The conversation covers the financial traps that bankrupt 80% of NFL players, the cognitive vs physical divide in professional sports, and why most athletes lack the business literacy to translate athletic success into post-career wealth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrew Thorp King, author of Failure Rules, shares how losing everything multiple times taught him that safety is an illusion and failure is the true teacher. He discusses the spiritual nature of money, the portfolio pursuits mindset, and why building multiple things creates resilience against life inevitable breakdowns. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.