I am great. It's so good to be here with you. I enjoyed talking to you so much on Unmistakable Creative that when you asked me to come and join you to be on the other side, it was kind of a no-brainer.

Well, I wish that was true. It's funny because with every guest, I have some semblance of a relationship with and others make their appearance on the show. It goes great, and that's kind of the end of it. I think that one thing that we probably already have in common is the fact that we're both of Indian descent. So you automatically have this bond that transcends even the conversation we're going to have on the podcast. So that creates this sort of instant ability to relate to each other in a way that I can't always relate to other guests because we can talk about the cultural context when I ask questions. So I think that makes a big difference. I mean, we've had a lot of Indian guests on the show, and to the point in your introduction, I had a professor from the University of Pennsylvania as a guest. He said I thought I was going to come here and talk about artificial intelligence. Now you have me questioning the purpose of my life. It's like, yes, I've been known to do that to people. I think that it's interesting, like I joked, that I'm a well-connected person that nobody has ever heard of. If you look at the network I built, there are varying degrees of depth in every relationship. People think, oh, Srini knows everybody, and he can call anybody for any favor. And that's not entirely true. But I can probably connect you to anybody who knows how to do something, no matter the skill. If you want to run for president, I know the guy who can tell you how to do it.

I mean, I don't want anybody to share their usual message because that's not interesting to me. One of my core ideas is that if I could learn about what I'm going to learn in an interview if I'm reading a blog post or reading your book, that defeats the purpose of the interview. I want to know what I could never find from reading somebody's bio or looking at their LinkedIn profile due to several reasons. I mean, part of it, a strategic part of it is genuine curiosity. So the strategic part is that human beings are hard-wired for stories and there's a reason NPR has what they call driveway moments where people will sit in their driveway and just quietly listen.

I had a business partner a couple of years ago. He started analyzing the show in more detail, and as he was looking, he said, you're having these profound conversations with people. Still, it's taking anywhere between 15 to 20 minutes to get to the juiciest parts. What he said was don't ask them about their work to start with. You'll eventually get there anyways. So we ask very off-the-wall questions. I knew based on our conversation which question I wanted to begin with. So I usually know where I'm going to start and where I'm going to end. And that is for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons I don't plan questions is that in my life, outside of Unmistakable Creative, I'm not the best listener in the world, which is ironic considering I've made a living listening to people. But I realized that if you don't plan questions, it forces you to listen to every person in very close detail and so I plan every question based on the answer that I get to the previous question. So I describe it as kind of like surfing. If you don't know anything about surfing, you may not know that typically, when a surfer is riding a wave, they're riding parallel. They're not riding straight. And basically, what they're doing is they're adjusting to the wave throughout the process until they get to the end of the wave. Sometimes, you'll get four or five or six turns on a really good wave. Sometimes you'll get one and be done.

So I think that has always been the metaphor that I use to approach these conversations. But almost everything that I'm asking somebody will come out of genuine curiosity. So I remember, I knew you had a daughter who had been raised by Indian parents. I wanted to know you from your perspective. What is it like to raise a kid who's ten years younger than me? What are you teaching her about careers? How does that differ from what my parents taught me? And I also realized that parenting is a very complex job. I think that I have this misperception that somehow asking all these questions about parents will prepare me to be one. But rumor has it that that's not true because kids are all unique. So there are a lot of reasons for that. So the strategic part of it is very much designed to get people to listen.

Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, had this quote in the TV show, The Loudest Voice in the Room, where he talked about how he wanted to create content that made sure people never change the channel, and that stayed with me. I mean, I'm not a Fox News guy. I think Roger Ailes is a horrible human being, but at the same time, I don't think that you can discount that there's something to learn from him. He built Fox News and I'm also building a media company. So in my mind, you don't overlook the value of a message just because you can't stand the message. If you don't seek differing viewpoints, it's very easy to get caught in an echo chamber and just take things at face value and treat gospel guidance as gospel. That's very dangerous to me because it can lead to some terrible consequences.

I can sum it up with one sentence: if you don't feel it, nobody else will. So I don't think of it as a podcast or creating audio. I honestly think of myself as an entertainer. I think there are three components to content that have emotional resonance. You can educate. You can inspire and entertain. In my mind, entertainment is a critical part of it. Like they're not mutually exclusive. But at the same time, this is what I've often told aspiring podcasters. You have to realize that this is an entertainment medium first and an information medium second. If you could go and read ten tips on how to do something, why would you listen to people talk about it on audio? Funnily enough, I don't listen to podcasts despite being the host of one. It's my least preferred form of media consumption because I have such a short attention span. So I prefer reading books, but I like creating podcasts. The real idea is not just me feeling it. Of course, I want that emotion, but I look for emotional resonance. I am very clear on the fact that something has to strike. You have to have an emotional resonance with our audience, which is why I've said no to well-known people, and I've said yes to people that nobody has ever heard of, because what I'm always after is an interesting story more than anything else. I want a good story to come out of it. I started out interviewing bloggers about how they got traffic to their blogs. The more I did that, the further we got down the path of doing this, the more I started to see that my favorite interviews were not those but the ones with people who had interesting stories. So more and more, the direction of the conversation started to change quite a bit and it expanded.

You could have guests from your bank robbers to billionaires, drug dealers to presidential candidates, and so a big part of it is emotional resonance. What I do keep in mind, I also have a background as a musician. I played the tuba for nine years, and I got into the school of music. I made an all-state band three times. It turns out that people who become writers, who are former musicians, really have this ability to create music with words because when I put something on a page, even on paper or reading, I don't necessarily see words. I hear sounds. I want to see if I can get the sort of rhythmic quality to what I'm doing. And other writers are far better at this than I am. Like my friend Sarah Peck is fantastic at doing this. Amber Ray is another one. Piano players, in particular, for some reason tend to have this poetic, almost musical-sounding voice as writers. I think that's very common for people who have spent a lot of time in music of any kind. They tend to think about words more as music. And so, just to give you an example, we did this episode called The Thirty-Six Questions. There's an article in The New York Times about the thirty-six questions to fall in love with anyone. So I had my roommate and the girl he was dating at the time sit down, do the thirty-six questions. We put together an episode based on that. We've done clips from our previous guests, and when I went to the audio engineer, I had only one instruction, bringing the audience to tears.

So Joe is a guy who robbed 30 banks in about 18 months. I had a friend who was a previous guest who had also been in prison. People who've been to prison have really good stories. They are just fascinating because you get a glimpse into this sort of dark underworld that most of us hope to never actually get a front-row seat to. But we're all curious about it. We see it on TV shows like Prison Break, and a part of what you see is true. Part of what you see is not. I've interviewed a venture capitalist who started a tech incubator inside of San Quentin and I got to visit. The prisoners were a part of his incubator, and these guys were building apps and writing code. I'm looking at them thinking I can't do half this stuff, and these guys are in prison, but Joe was fascinating because he was a really articulate and really smart individual. That's not your first thought that you would think when you talk to a guy who had robbed 30 banks. Still, he had a rough upbringing and eventually decided that he was going to go on a bank-robbing spree because, in his mind, he thought of all the criminals that he could be, a bank robber was the best kind because he said if you look at Hollywood, every sort of iconic actor from George Clooney to whoever has played a bank robber at some point and, bank robbers aren't perceived as negatively as murderers.

Bank robbers are cool and hip and sophisticated and master planners. It's like Mark Wahlberg in Italian Job to again, Clooney in Ocean's Eleven. So, people who pull off these huge heists. When we look at them, we don't necessarily see vicious criminals. We're like, damn, those people are brilliant. That was sort of his idea, and eventually, he got caught. But I think what struck me most about him was how well-read he was. In our conversation, he would bring up books, and I think this guy has read more in solitary confinement than I did at Berkeley. I went to college. Joe did challenge my initial perceptions of what people in prison are like. He said that you'd be surprised. He said people in prison are funny. I mean, because the thing is that you have to think about the fact that, okay, somebody does something horrible and they know they're going to be in there for life. They have to find some sense of meaning. You said you'd be surprised by what he said. Sometimes the people who are lifers are the safest people in the prison to be around. The other thing that I think that he did and Brian, what's his name? Bryan Stevenson echoed this in Just Mercy.

He said none of us are defined by the worst thing we've ever done, but people in prison are. And he had a friend who murdered somebody in self-defense. And it's like you call that guy a murderer, and he said, no, he was a murderer for two minutes of his life. But now we've given him that label permanently. So that's kind of the back story. After he got out of prison, Joe became a talking head on the subject of the criminal justice system. And then he started corresponding for some strange reason with Piper Kerman. I don't even know how the correspondence began. For those who don't know, Piper Kerman is the person who wrote Orange Is the New Black and eventually got made into a TV show. She would send her letters and encourage her to write down everything she was experiencing, put all of it in a journal, and tell her stories. You've seen all the black parts of it are funny. It's again, to that point, you're in this environment in which you're going to have stories that you would never get in any other situation, God forbid, that ended up in prison, but at least they make something of it. So that's kind of it. I mean, we literally could take the interview and make a feature-length animation out of it.

Well, there's nothing else to do all day, so you'd be amazed how well-read people come out of prison because you're the ones who take advantage of it.

To be honest, more than anything else, it was a necessity. What is that quote about necessity? It was necessity breeds innovation or something like that. So I don't exactly have the most impressive job history. Now, my resume looks more like a rap sheet. I was either fired from every job I had or left before I was going to be fired, and part of that was because I had made poor choices in terms of the roles I chose. After all, I think there's this sort of temptation to choose something that looks good on paper, both in terms of your resume and your salary. Often, that leads to a great deal of dissatisfaction for so many people because they don't consider match quality, which David Epstein writes about in his book Range. Many of us, we're making decisions about our entire lives when we've only lived a fraction of them. So I think it would be hard for me to say, okay, follow my path. I would never recommend anybody follow my path. I think it would be the height of stupidity to do that because if you tell somebody, go, get fired from every job you've had and move back to your parents when you're 30, live with them until you're thirty-eight, and then you'll become the best selling author, get a book deal and start a successful podcast. That's just stupid advice.

There are two things. One is the job history. The other is timing. Timing played a huge role in this. So I was both the beneficiary and also the victim of graduating into two recessions. I graduated from Berkeley. December 12 was a horrible time to get out of school and start a career, and then I graduated from Pepperdine in April 2009, which was an even worse time to start a career. You couldn't plan timing this bad intentionally, but the thing that graduating in 2009 gave me was this opportunity to be at the forefront of what would happen on the Internet. The summer prior, I had two job offers. One was to work at Yahoo! The other was to work as their social media intern. I could see that neither of those were jobs that I wanted. When people would ask me what I wanted to do when I graduated from business school, I would tell them I knew one thing. As long as it has nothing to do with the Internet, that's what I will do. Fate and the universe have a sense of humor. So I got this job. I wasn't very good at it. But the thing is, it allowed me to be part of a trend or be at the forefront of something that would make a big difference in our lives. And what's funny is I started a blog while I was there, and people who have read that blog, who've landed full-time jobs get into it. I never got a full-time job. So I provided a reference. My boss told me at the end of the summer that they weren't going to make an offer. He said I know that you're disappointed, but trust me, we're doing you a favor. We'd be doing you a disservice if we hired you. So I think the one thing to think about is how do you find match quality? I think that really, what it comes down to is looking at what you find engaging. Tina Seelig at Stanford says that passion follows engagement.

The problem is that we tend to put the cart before the horse when it comes to passion because we have this vague idea that we're passionate about something. So we pursue a career in it, and then we think, oh, well, I'm just bad at this, or I'm not good at this, or you're not passionate about it. So I'll give you an example. A professor in an entrepreneurship class told me that I was an incredible salesperson because I was good at presentations, pretty much better than anybody in the class. Now, the problem with that was that I took the advice so literally that I went and spent ten years working in sales, doing jobs I hated. It turns out I am good at presentations. That's why I get paid to do keynote speeches. But that's the part that I'm good at and it's tough to do. Well, it's something you could care less about.

To me, every job I had was just a paycheck. Like, I wouldn't have cared. And I still wouldn't care if any of those companies went out of business. I'd feel bad for the people who worked there. But that's a big problem: you don't feel any sense of purpose or contribution. So I think there are so many factors that go into what makes a career fulfilling. But I was told I didn't choose this path. I was forced to go down this path because all the other options were no longer on the table. I didn't have the grades to be a banker or consultant. I didn't go to a top 10 business school, and I graduated into multiple recessions and then layered it on top of a resume that looks like a rap sheet. I was not going to get anywhere going down the traditional path.

The idea behind that was that you don't want to let the options in front of you blind you to the possibilities surrounding you. And the thing is that for the most part, all of us are blind to the possibilities that surround us because what do we do in life? People put options in front of us. You are in high school and then your parents come to you with a list of colleges where you can apply. So you now have a set of options in front of you. You narrow down those options and go to college and meet a counselor or somebody who gives you more options than are put in front of you, which are your classes in the majors. And then those majors become narrower. And basically, what happens is the options become even more limiting because these are the majors that lead to this path. And I remember thinking when I first got to Berkeley, I was like, this is supposed to be the ultimate expression of liberalism and creativity. But the place is a breeding ground for conformity, as most Ivy League and schools are because you go there thinking, I'm going to have this original, innovative experience. Then you find out that every person in your class is a future banker, lawyer, doctor, engineer. And you're like, wait a minute, we've limited our careers to four. I remember my dad asking one of my uncles about his son. And he was in high school, being asked what he wanted to study? Did he want to study computers, be a lawyer, be an engineer? You've limited this kid's options to four choices before he's even lived a quarter of his life. And my uncle said the only thing he cares about right now are girls. I'm like, great. That's all he should care about. He's a teenager. And so I think that that's the thing. We make these choices in our lives like we're picking items off of a fast-food menu. So even the process of applying for a job is very similar. What do you do? You go to a job board like LinkedIn, or if you're a student at a top school, you go to your recruitment center. So basically, what happens is people have put so many options in front of you that you don't recognize any of the other possibilities that surround you. Now, the thing is, like I said for me, all those doors shut. So it was easy. I had no choice but to start looking for them.

I think it probably helps to give you some context of how we arrived at this idea. And what I realized was that a lot of this tends to get revealed through the work you do. So this is something that I see many people struggle with when they're trying to build brands or come up with a mission or a message. They go through all these exercises, read all these books, and get frustrated that I don't have a tagline, I don't have this or that. So by the time we came up with the idea for Unmistakable, I'd already been working on this for three or four years.

So we started, as I mentioned, as a podcast for bloggers called BlogcastFM, and I was interviewing bloggers about how they grew their blogs. And eventually, it got uninteresting, but two female podcast guests told me things that stayed with me. One was Justine Musk, who happens to be Elon Musk's ex-wife. And she said that if you have a bold and compelling point of view, it's going to piss people off. And that is so true. And then my friend Terry McMullen said there's great creative potential in the things that make you angry. And I just started to notice a pattern that I couldn't help but criticize where what I kept seeing, particularly with bloggers and online marketers, was they would sign up for some course. They would follow the advice of the person who created the course to the letter. Then they would wonder why they weren't getting the same results. And it was so obvious to me that it's like, wait a minute, you're the blatantly obvious variable. It is going to throw off any formula for success, for that matter.

Any prescriptive advice by nature is flawed because once you put it in the variable of the person following that advice, it falls apart because, again, context matters. It's like every single person here, as you mentioned, could go and do LeBron James training routine every single day. They could follow his diet, and none of them, including me, will make it to the NBA. No offense to those in the chat, unless any of you're amazing basketball players forgive me, but that's the thing. Like we don't think in terms of context, we ignore probability. So I just kept seeing this pattern. And there's a great sketch from The Daily Show where Demetri Martin goes in to see this woman trying to do a story on life coaching. And so he goes out, talks to a life coach, and then talks to one of her clients. And at the end of it, she said yes, we've seen a difference in your life since going to a life coach. And she says I'm now a life coach. And to me, that was a mainstream media example of the trend that I kept seeing. And I thought this was insane. People are robbing themselves and the world of the very thing that makes them stand out because they're trying so damn hard to fit in. And so I think for me, when I looked at what other people did, it was always, okay, how do I do something different or how do I do the opposite? And then finally, my friend Mars Dorian was the one who was able to put it into words. I always joked that I should have given him my book advance, which I will never do. But Dorian has this unique style where anytime you see his work roll through your news feed, or even if it was another client or me, you could take one look at it and say, okay, I know who did that march because it was that unique. And he said I wanted to create things that were so unique that I never had to put my name on them.

So when I need something done by him, we literally can't find anybody else to do what he does because it's so hard to replicate the way he thinks and the way he creates what he does. And to me, that was inspiring. So eventually, that became the idea of Unmistakable, and it really, truly came from him. It was more, hey, how do you create something so distinctive that it's immediately recognized as your work? And that just was so inspiring to me, to the point where we built our brand around that message. And, you've seen my content through your Facebook news feed. Everybody knows it's like, oh, the people who did that are the Unmistakable Creative team. And that's where we wanted a very distinctive signature. I thought that that was the way that other people should do their work, too. I mean, nowadays, standing out in the world today is not even a matter of success. It's a matter of survival. If you don't stand out, you're not going to just linger in obscurity. You're eventually going to become obsolete.

I think that it's funny, as you said, to discover and express. I was thinking, I'm sorry. I tend to want to make up mental models. Okay, what could I create from that? Like, I got an acronym forming in my head. What comes next in this process? First is this process of discovery and then comes this process of expression and, from expression, you basically build but can't always predict what's going to happen. One of the things that I think people have done wrong, particularly in the world that I have been in, is that they have this sense of superiority. There's a certain sense of superiority to people who don't have these unique pasts or lifestyle designs or whatever. And that's nonsense. For some people, the past they've chosen is perfectly acceptable. I think that we have put so much emphasis on extraordinary achievement that we have planted seeds of dissatisfaction in people's lives where there were none before. And so, who's to say that having a nine-to-five job living in the Midwest and raising a family isn't a perfect life? There's a need to acknowledge that without creating the sense of superiority of, hey, I do this unique and original thing.

So everybody should because it's not realistic for everybody. For somebody who has had a tough life, they have to make ends meet. I think I've become hyper-aware of that so much of what I talk about, what I like, encourage, and even create, is ultimately catered for people from privileged backgrounds. And as much as I hate to say that it's true, we can't ignore that. It's kind of funny. I saw somebody here from Chandigarh where I happened to go there last year, or I think it was in 2019. I had this guy who drove me around because if you've ever driven to the mountains in India, it's a nightmare. It's like the same drive that takes two hours in Los Angeles, takes 13 because the roads are so bad and I remember having multiple conversations with this guy and we're asking him, what is this life like? I can't help thinking that this guy makes this trek up from Chandigarh to Manali, what, three, three times a week, 13 hours on treacherous mountain roads. I thought to myself, like, that's a hard life. That's a guy who doesn't have upward mobility. I realized there's a fundamental difference between imagined obstacles and real ones. And the truth is that it made me hyper-aware of what privileged circumstances I was coming from, like this, a guy who drove us around and he wouldn't even eat at the restaurants we did. Like he would ask us, hey, can you guys decide what you want to eat for dinner? Because I can't afford to eat where you guys are and I need to go to a nearby restaurant. So you see these moments and you realize that, okay, wait a minute. We can talk a lot about purpose and passion and it's easy to forget that these are things that only people of privilege can worry about.

So the way that it would break this down, I ended up writing a piece on Medium titled Why Outliers are Bad Role Models for most of us because, by definition, they are anomalies, right? You can't use Bill Gates as a role model because how many of us were born to a relatively wealthy family that happened to be going to a private school that gives us access to a computer center and to be born at a time before this computer revolution began? So my old mentor, Greg, used to say that we tend to focus on the possibility of accomplishing things, but we ignore probability. So the example he gave is that we could all go to the Olympics. He said if you and I were training for the Olympics and we made it, that would be amazing. He was like, what could we do in the Olympics? And our joke was curling because that just looked like a ridiculous thing. And I'm guessing people who are Olympic curlers would probably balk at that because it's probably much harder than it seems. But the thing is the probability of going back to the LeBron James example, the probability that I will make it to the Olympics by my old mentor because there is virtually zero. And yet, people often choose to go and pursue goals where they have no inherent advantages. They have no skills. And it takes us back to that whole sort of delusion that, oh, I'm passionate about this thing, so I'll probably get good at it. Whereas I think that if you get good at something first, you are more likely to discover an opportunity to express it in a way that allows you to get paid.

So as I told you, I don't listen to podcasts. People would ask me if I was passionate about podcasting. I got interested in it because I did it. I found it engaging. I enjoyed it. And as a result, the more I did it, the better I got. But I think that that's something you have to think about when it comes to this. You've got this sort of stirring within and the world at large, and you can't ignore reality and I think this is one of the big problems in the space that I'm in. I'm writing a new book right now called Not Another Damn Self-Help Book because I am questioning a lot of what I've learned, even from my podcast. I think that if you take this advice at face value, it's really dangerous. I believe that the four things I said I've learned from my guests are, one, never to treat their advice as gospel, to question what they tell me in the context of my own life.

You get prescriptive advice from self-help books, advice from parents, and you need to consider that advice in the context of your life. Otherwise, you're going to find yourself making bad decisions that sound good. And there's so much bad advice. There's another piece I publish on Medium, which is an excerpt from the book called Bad Advice. That sounds good in self-help books, TED talks and podcasts and following your passion to me is at the top of that list. And I think that any time anybody says everybody should do something, you should assume that person is full of shit because there's nothing everybody should do. Online marketers are notorious for saying things like this.

Well, let me start by using what you said about your wife as a jump-off point, and for some reason, this seems to be coming up in my conversations a lot lately as people tend to underestimate the value of what they already know and estimate the value of what they don't know, and I think that a mother is such a great example. I watched this TV show, and there is this brilliant moment in that show where she's trying to raise money for a charity and she's been a stay-at-home mother her entire life. And the only reason the investor agrees to go and meet her for dinner is that he was friends with her husband, who had been a successful entrepreneur. When he says that he's concerned about her lack of experience, this was her response, which was so brilliant. She said I organized the schedules of five extremely well-rounded children. I ran carpools, bake sales and Bluebird groups. The problem is no one values the experience of a stay-at-home parent, which is truly a shame because running this big enterprise, as you put it, would be a day at the beach for me. And when I read, I purposely wrote that down because it struck me that we tend to undervalue much of what we already bring to the table. So that's, I think, the important starting point is saying, okay, like what do I have here that is worth bringing here? Because we don't, we tend to underestimate what we're capable of and what we already know. Look, I think that Sally Field sort of is a ticket to the fact that your wife could probably run my company better than I ever could because I think raising a child is far more complex than building a company.

So as far as the resume goes, I started to look at a resume very differently because my resume was useless. It just was not going to open doors. And we were in a really tough time in 2009 where the average recruiter was getting a thousand resumes for a position from incredibly overqualified people. And so the thing that happened was we just kind of said, okay, you have to stand out in some way. And I knew that the problem with the resume in my mind was that a resume is things you say you knew how to do. But it's not tangible evidence that I am the master of spinning bullet points into bullshit because when you get fired from as many jobs as I have, you learn how to be good at interviewing for jobs and spinning it all so you can get the next one. Like I said, I was good at getting jobs but terrible at keeping them. And so that's the thing. I knew how to work that system, but ultimately it didn't work. So that's one thing. But as far as looking at a resume, part of the reason I think that a resume is so limiting is that there's so much more to every single person, as I said to your MBA students than you could express through bullet points on a resume.

If you're this dynamic, creative, innovative individual, there are so many better ways to showcase that than a list of things you say you knew how to do or a list of things you've done in your past and the thing is, you can't. In my mind, it's almost like resting on your laurels. So the other thing is when you have a body of work, it's tangible evidence of the things you say, how to do. And not only that, if you get fired or let go from your job, you can take that body of work with you anywhere. So I think the thing that makes a body of work different from a resume is that it increases in value over time. The value, the more you add to it, the more it compounds. Whereas a resume is a stagnant, static document. And again, most people know me for my podcast. But I've done all sorts of other things unrelated, as you mentioned keynote speaking, writing books. I've also started working in animation. I didn't get into this because I wanted to start podcasts. I wanted to make movies. I wanted to be in entertainment and make films. And in some sort of roundabout way, I'm getting to kind of do what I wanted to, but in a very different form.

You articulated something that I wanted to as well. We had a course on building an audience, and I talked specifically about choosing your medium of expression, but I love the idea of thinking in terms of those three areas. What's your message? What's the medium in which it's best expressed, and who's the audience that it serves? Like, those are three critical questions because certain people are good at video. My videos are full of F-bombs and outtakes and it just gets frustrating. Fortunately, video editing is getting easier now. But that's why I like podcasts because they're easy to edit, quick to create, and the writing is the same. I will tell you, I am a far better interviewer than I am a writer. That's what prompted starting the podcast. One of you, I thought my 13th guest, I had emailed him about creating some sort of multi-author blog and he replied, saying I sent this lengthy email soapbox. You're an average writer, but you're a great interviewer. So I think that this multilayered blog is a stupid idea. I think you should do the podcast or these interviews, spin it out into a separate site. And an hour later, I mocked up a WordPress website, sent it back to him and said, is this what you had in mind? When do you want to start?

Well, I had a fantastic editor and writing coach. Let me just say that. It helps. The other thing is that, really early on, I started to figure out that I could compensate for my weaknesses by working with other people. That's big. And all of this because nobody accomplishes anything of significance without the help of other people. It's just they don't look around. Whether you're a parent, whether you're like, think about where you are in your life and ask yourself if any of what you have done would have been possible without somebody's help, whether it's your parents or a friend. I saw this mainly because I didn't necessarily have any artistic skill, but I realized that if I had a vision for something, other people could execute that vision.

So I would say if we were to break this message down, I wouldn't even think of it as an audience as much as I would a community. Right. Because if you think about it as an audience, you start to see eyeballs instead of hearts. And so, if you think about sort of typical media creation, there's this idea of reach and eyeballs and metrics. And let me just give you an example that I tend to recite frequently to the people in my community. So, Seth Godin has probably one of the most popular blogs, if not the most popular blog. Millions of people read it every day. Now, BuzzFeed is a wildly popular website. If BuzzFeed went out of business tomorrow, I don't think that many people would give too much of a shit. If Seth Godin didn't publish a blog post tomorrow, there would be one reason. It's because he's dead, and there would be tributes all over the blogosphere to Seth Godin because he didn't focus on eyeballs. He focused on hearts. And he has this relationship with his audience, and that's what he's always been focused on. And so I think that thinking of the audience as a community or a tribe is a much better way to view it because then you see them as people, not numbers.

Okay, so this is a great question. And it's something that when you transition from founder to CEO, especially when you have an investor, a lot of things start to change. You have to learn how to delegate so that you're not micromanaging and not compromising the quality of your work. And you're going to make mistakes along the way. You're going to have bad hires. But I think cardinal rule number one is to hire slow, fire fast. There's always this temptation to say, let's get somebody on board as quickly as possible because we need to fill this role. But that usually is always a recipe for disaster. I've seen it in my own life. I've seen in my own business where we bring on somebody thinking that they're perfect, and sometimes they start strong and then we realize that they're just not capable of what we want them to do. And when you're on a lean team that's as small as ours, we need people who can navigate ambiguity, do as much work as they can with minimal direction. So, I was looking for a community manager when we raised our round of funding, and I looked around on LinkedIn, and all these people, like social media backgrounds, emailed me and contacted me. I used the job description of my investor. And I was like, these people are all completely unqualified to do this job. And they're going to come in with their ideas of what they want this to be.

We need somebody from within our community. And so I contacted a friend I'd seen who would write these summaries of our podcasts, and they were better than any summary that I'd ever written. And I'm the host of the show. And so I contacted her, and I said, hey, I'm looking for a community manager. And she said I don't need a job. I'm a civil engineer without a lawyer. And I told her, it's like if you can build a bridge, you can build a community. All that means to me is you're smart and know how to solve problems. And I was like, I'm not asking you if you need a job. I'm begging you to join our team because I just knew, and I gave her incredibly vague direction, and she basically hit the ground running. I mean, I joke that when it comes to running our community, I report to her, not the other way around. I just had a meeting with her. She tells me what to do and that's it. And so I think bit by bit you learn to let go. I'm the most useless employee at my company because I don't do anything other than interview people. But I do three things of value for my company. But the thing is that Seth Godin wrote this book called Linchpin, and he had a great quote. He said any one of you could do Richard Branson's job except for about five minutes a day because it's in those five minutes that he creates billions of dollars in value. So the value I create happens in about an hour a day. Anybody else could do the rest of this job because all it is, is crossing T's and dotting I's. And it's not as complex. But the thing is, there are all these other dynamics. So this is why I joke that business school doesn't teach you a damn thing about running a business. No offense, but the thing is, you get out of business school, and you start a business and you suddenly start to see that

Unlike the case study that we did in my class, this is dynamic. The variables are constantly changing. I have to deal with idiots who are unmotivated. I have to deal with people who have big egos, like you can't account for any of those variables in a case study. You can only kind of assume, so you have all these variables that throw the whole thing out of whack. And so people come out of business school, and when they start businesses, they start to take, like these business concepts and try to apply them to their business. And suddenly they don't find that they don't work. And they don't work because you're now dealing with reality, not static pieces of paper or things you've learned in books. You're basing your strategy on something that worked for some Fortune 500 company and you're a startup of one person.

So that's important. Pre-covid, it was a lot of snowboarding, although I'm finally getting back up on the mountain now like I bought a midweek season. So I usually have a snowboarding season pass every year. You mentioned the unmistakable book. Surfing has been a considerable part of this entire journey. I think partially because it was where I got a lot of my best ideas. But I think it was this parallel. I don't think it's a coincidence that both my surfing and the creative journey started almost simultaneously because one fuels the other. And the thing is, a surfer like you suddenly changes a lot of things about yourself. You have a reason to get up in the morning. Surfers get up super early. And so if you want to be up at 6:00 in the morning to get good waves, that means no more staying until 2:00 in the morning, getting drunk and that kind of stuff. I mean, bit by bit, I think that what happens is that when you find something like that, that ground creates a ripple effect into every other area of your life. And so, I just became a healthier person. I mean, like when I was surfing regularly, I was at my most ideal. Like, I'd been in better shape than I ever was in college.

Somebody mentioned Indian Matchmaking here. I had friends who contacted me from college saying, dude, you look the same. I was like surfing the fountain of youth. That's the thing about water sports. So I think that whatever it is, you need some sort of practice that grounds you. And for me, that was always surfing. The other thing is, I think you need leisure things like this is one thing I've realized just over the last couple of days when we think of that sort of productivity, creativity, almost like we approach this from a place of guilt and think, oh, I'm not perfect. The whole point of being productive is not to get things done. It's to enjoy the rest of your life so you can binge Bling Empire on Netflix guilt-free. So for me, it's video games, in the evening for three hours a night. I play NBA basketball. I think this is a metaphor that I would describe, and I think I shared this with the class. It was this idea of a portfolio of meaning because as I learned this from a guest who had written a book called How to Be Single and Happy, she said that your person couldn't be your everything because that's like being your happiness on one risky stock. And so there's a reason investors have diversified portfolios because if one stock tanks, it doesn't tank the entire portfolio. And I think that that's true for life as well. So you never want one thing to be the sole source of your happiness and fulfillment, whether it's a relationship, whether it's a job, whether it's money, whatever it is, it needs to be a combination of things. And the thing is that those things are never going to be completely in balance.

Think about somebody who has kids for the first time, like they think that, oh, I'm going to have all this joy in my life. Like, it's going to be amazing. This is what I want more than anything in the world. And then reality sets in. And the first year, this kid doesn't let you sleep. So you're sleep-deprived. By the time they become teenagers, you're dealing with an angst-ridden asshole like most of us were to our parents. And you're like, oh, this is not the just bastion of joy that I thought it would be. And that's one thing that one of my mentors, when he said, no matter what you get in life that you want, something about it will suck. So he said, let's say you want to be famous. You have, or you want your TV show. That's great. What sucks about that? Now, you can't go out to a restaurant without people bothering you. And we don't think about the downsides to any of the things that we want. But there are downsides to everything. There are trade-offs and opportunity costs to every single choice that you make.

So there are numerous things, and I've written about this. I wrote an article right after the show came out titled The South Asian Arms Race for Impressive Cultural Biodata. Like I went into this whole thing with zero expectations because I knew right from the start that going into this with expectations would be a recipe for disappointment. The other thing that I think that I brought to it was that I knew how the media worked. I understood how the media could shape public perception. I was hyper-aware, and I was writing about it this morning. You have to realize that they say anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. And the same is true on a reality TV show. So anytime I have to sign a contract that has something to do with me, I have a media attorney cousin. And he gave me some priceless advice. He said it doesn't matter what the media says. Anybody can make you look like an asshole in the editing. He said your job is to make sure they have zero ammo to do that. And that was priceless. The other was from my cousin because I found out that I would have to sit in the car with a matchmaker for an hour. And she said, dude, do what you do best, interview her. And so, for those you've seen the show, you'll notice she got zero questions in on me. And that was entirely by design because I knew that if she cornered me, I would get chatty. And Robert Greene and the 48 laws of powers, as the more you say, the more likely you are to say something stupid or something you'll regret. I knew that going in. I think many people didn't think that, by the way, the things I'm saying are going to shape the perception of me as a public figure once this is done. I think that was important. And people say, oh, Srini took the high road. No, I just knew how to manipulate public perception because I understand power dynamics.

I didn't say a damn thing when I was called a loser because I knew that if I said nothing, the person saying all these horrible things about me would dig themselves into a deeper hole. And it's what I was writing about this morning. I said when you're tempted to retaliate, show restraint and you'll be the one that stays in power. So overall, here's what I think is essential. All that aside, those are the dynamics of the media. I think this started a conversation that people who grew up here, Indians in particular, should have started 20 years ago. I mean, people will talk about how many cringe-worthy moments there are in the show. And the reason they're cringe-worthy is that all of us were indeed experiencing one of those moments. It's like, oh, you're too dark. It's like going to hell. The summer I started surfing, my parents' friends said, you've gotten so dark. And I told my mom the next time I see one of them, I will say, oh, my God, you've gained a lot of weight since I last saw you. Would that be okay? But I think what we did was we called out a lot of issues. I think we've started a conversation that we should have started a long time ago. That's the biggest thing that came out of it. Now, Matchmaking aside, like I personally at this point, I've joked that hiring my matchmaker would be like hiring Hannibal Lecter to operate on a family member because I told her that I was a surfer and she matched me with a girl who said she hates the beach.

Well, so let me just kind of say this. I think that it goes back to something I said earlier. When you listen to advice from anybody, myself included professors, parents, authors of self-help books, seminar leaders, spiritual teachers. It would be best if you looked at that advice in the context of your own life because what's true for me might be nonsense for you, and I learned this actually from a mother who was in one of my courses. I gave all this productivity advice and one of my mentors called me out and he said, dude, you haven't been in an office for ten years. And he said you don't have any kids. And I realized I thought, oh, who doesn't have an hour in a day? And I realized, well if you're a mother with an infant and a three-year-old, you probably don't have an hour in a day. And so I realized that I had to think about whatever I said to people and specifically tell them that the course that I'm teaching is to consider the possibility that every single thing I've said is absolute bullshit because it might be for them because of context. So that's the thing that I would tell people to take away from this conversation, is not to listen to anything that I've said and assume that it's necessarily valid as far as sort of what the next big dream is.

I want people to know me for what I've done with Unmistakable Creative. But funny enough, we were talking to Netflix at one point through a talent agent at CAA. When I saw the David Letterman show on Netflix, I couldn't help but think that's what I want to do. I want to do an interview show like that. And my roommate, who is now my roommate, actually said, well, what's to prevent you from doing it? He said you have an audience. You have access to interesting people in droves. And so we put in like just a quick note on the podcast. You say, hey, is there anybody who could help us make this happen? And the one person who replied was a talent agent who happened to be a listener. And so we shopped it around. They weren't quite into it because they said we just weren't big enough. So, I mean, that's still long-term. That would be the ultimate dream to take this to a bigger media platform like Netflix and get to do it.

Because I think the thing TV gives you that audio doesn't is the ability to paint a much different picture. I think the thing that I love most about Letterman is the interview he did with Malala. We got to see her actual life like we got to see where she lived. You can't do stuff like that in audio. And then I think that that's one thing that it's still a dream of mine: to get to do this on a television platform.

Well, and then that's the thing. Like we're at this point where now everything is about how do you scale? That's the question because the hard part is done, with more content than people could consume in a lifetime at this point. And we're continually creating more. And so ideally, in a dream world, I would love it if somebody like HBO acquired us because that would be in a lot of ways fantastic because we could take everything we've done in terms of our content, and we'd have a platform to turn it into television because you've heard the episodes on our show. Many of them could be TV shows and movies.

Thanks so much.