The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

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 others.

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.

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 also covers how to make the delayed consequences of ordinary bad habits feel immediate.

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 getting angry.

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 chair: whether democracy is rising or setting isn't fixed, and Jacobs argues it comes down to whether people stay engaged.

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 Instagram.

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.

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 aversion made him a better founder.