Srinivas Rao

Host and Creator of The Unmistakable Creative

What do you like to be known for?

Most people know me for The Unmistakable Creative Podcast, but I like to be known as an artist and digital storyteller that uses technology to tell stories about inspiring and interesting people.

We usually talk about design in the aesthetic sense, but there is design behind an interview as well, even though it’s harder to see. When designing your interviews, how do you decide on an appropriate structure?

We think about interviews and our entire body of work from the standpoint of creating experiences that are unmistakable; so distinctive and unique that you immediately know they’re ours.

I always view interviews as blank canvases. I don't usually go in with a plan or scripted list of questions, which allows people to really open up. People tend to tell much more engaging and interesting stories this way because I don't have an agenda going into a conversation other than having the conversation. The spotlight is always on our guests and is never on us. I think that's critical to understand if you’re interested in the craft of interviewing.

How do you decide who to interview?

That's a question I get asked a lot because we have had such a wide cast of characters on The Unmistakable Creative. We have had bank robbers, drug dealers, entrepreneurs, performance psychologists, visual artists - all across the gamut.

When deciding who to interview, I ask myself, am I genuinely curious about what this person is up to? Have they done something that gets my attention? If I am curious, it will naturally lead to a good story. There's no question that somebody who robbed thirty banks (one of our former guests), probably has a pretty damn interesting story.

Morbid curiosity always drives guest selection.

“I always look for somebody interesting over somebody famous.”

When you find someone that fascinates you, like a bank robber, how do you get in touch with them?

Almost all of these people have some sort of public presence. Very rarely do I find somebody that has no public presence at all, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to find them. A lot of our really popular guests are not the most famous people, yet have an amazing amount of wisdom. I think we take wisdom for granted in a world that is so celebrity obsessed. We look at who has the most followers on Instagram and Twitter, and consider them to be the only people worthy of our time. I always look for somebody interesting over somebody famous.

When it comes to finding them, I mostly just keep my eyes and ears open. While I'm browsing through my Flipboard every week, I'm looking to see if there's somebody here that might make for an interesting conversation, or if there's a story that caught my attention more than all the others.

When did you discover you had a passion for interviewing and for learning about other people?

It evolved somewhat organically. I graduated from business school in April 2009, and I didn't have a job. The job market was awful and I wasn't sure what to do with myself. I ended up starting a blog, the blog led to the podcast. I'm not sure that I started off passionate about it, I just found something that I was interested in, and I got better and better at it. Of course, as my skills developed, my passion followed suit.

“When we see a project in its final form, it’s easy for us to assume that’s the way it looked right from the start, because we don’t get to see all the ugly parts that went into building it.”

Did you start off as an avid reader or listener of different types of interviews?

Funny enough, even today I don't listen to a lot of podcasts or interviews. I started off as a blogger, and the interviews were an offshoot of my blog. Once a week I interviewed someone in a series I called Interviews with Up and Coming Bloggers, which evolved into what today is The Unmistakable Creative. The process took five years and involved a ton of ups and downs.

When we see a project in its final form, it's easy for us to assume that's the way it looked right from the start, because we don't get to see all the ugly parts that went into building it. Every now and then I like to go back to the most popular websites and run them through the Wayback Machine, because you can see where somebody started and where they are now.

You are not going to be amazing when you start. Ira Glass talks about that in his famous video, and you have you be okay with that. We started out just interviewing bloggers, and eventually it started to expand and we had the foresight to do some major branding and design overhaul. We had great content, but we didn't really have an identity or brand.

Speaking of identity, what inspired the art style for The Unmistakable Creative? It has a very raw, marker doodle look.

It came from a thirty day project where I was teaching myself how to draw. I was bored one day and watching all these friends of mine practicing visual arts. I was morbidly curious about their craft. As a kid I was always written off as somebody who couldn't draw, so I embarked on a thirty day journey to teach myself how. At the beginning, I could draw like a kindergartner, and by the end I could draw like a first grader. I never got any good, but my only goal was progress. To this day I believe the project was incredibly worthwhile and informative, because drawing teaches you to see. I finally understood how shading, light, and shadow worked, and why none of my drawings ever looked real. 

Around November I asked Sarah Steenland, who worked with us for about two years, if she would be willing to draw a cartoon for each interview. I didn't realize what she was going to come back with, but her cartoon album covers became the aesthetic of The Unmistakeable Creative.

When we gutted the old BlogCastFM brand, our designer and developer came to us with the first version of the new site, and I distinctly remember thinking that a site called The Unmistakable Creative needed to be a lot more unmistakable and a lot more creative. The drawing project enabled me to see what was wrong with it. I decided we needed to illustrate all the icons. We went to Mars Dorian, an artist based in Germany who has played a huge role in the branding of our work. He has such a distinctive style, and really is the most unmistakeable artist we know.

Although I am not a visual artist, I realized I didn't have to be in order to incorporate the form into my work. I am skilled in the art of collaboration, and I brought together a group of tremendously talented artists who ensure that our work is always instantly recognizable.

“I just take a blank page and start writing. I don’t really think about what I’m doing, and a lot of it starts out as nonsense.”

Ira Glass has this great line in the video you mentioned about how most people get into an art form because they have good taste, but don't necessarily have the skill set at the beginning. With your drawing project, how did you approach becoming a beginner again, and how did you ensure that you made progress?

I documented the entire thing via Instagram. A lot of people find that silly - here you are, this thirty-something guy, who is drawing things that look like a kindergartner would draw. It was really important to be okay with knowing that most of what I drew wasn't going to be very good, and then to publicly share it.

I am also a prolific writer, so I understand how to embrace the blank page. My writing process mirrors this in a lot of ways, I just take a blank page and start writing. I don't really think about what I'm doing, and a lot of it starts out as nonsense.

There's this line in the movie “With Honors,” where Joe Pesci tells Brendan Frazer his senior thesis is “really coming out the wrong end." I feel like that often when I write, but that's just part of the process. The number of iterations that have led to the work we are doing now is in the hundreds. I started multiple blogs that nobody ever saw when Blogger first came out, YouTube videos that never saw the light of day, and all sorts of stupid things to play with the tools and technology we had. I never stopped making things.

In your book, you talk about how you have received both glowing praise and severe criticism for your work. When you put one of your creations out for the world to see, how do you separate the good criticism from the bad?

As artists and creators, we are all going to experience criticism. The nature of our work is incredibly subjective. We can keep watering down are work until it caters to the lowest common denominator and is for everybody, or we can say we're not going to be for everybody - we're for a small subset of people. Amazingly enough a small subset can be several thousand who happen to like what we do.

I happen to really enjoy Dave Matthews' music, but I have a friend who doesn't like Dave Matthews at all. It's funny because here's a guy who has 20,000 people in a concert venue going nuts, and yet, you can find a person who hates his work.

There are people who are going to hate what you do, and you have to learn to decipher between constructive criticism and criticism that's just designed to be spiteful. There are people, especially on the open platform that is the internet, who are just going to go out and be trolls because they have nothing better to do with their time.

In terms of constructive criticism, I think you have to ask if the criticism is valid. One of our listeners wrote in and said, "I'm a really big fan. I love what you do, and I am telling you this in honor of your work." He prefaced his email with praise, but continued to write, "You say ‘let me ask you this’ way too much in an interview, and it's annoying.”

I actually went back to one of my interviews, and I counted how many times I said “let me ask you this,” and oh my god, this guy was absolutely right. That one little critique made me a much better interviewer, because I was willing to listen. I emailed him back, and said "you know when I first saw this I rolled my eyes, and then I went back and listened to an interview, and you're right. Thank you for pointing it out, I will work on it."

It's funny how our first instinct is usually to put up our defenses. Criticism is so much easier to swallow after distancing ourselves from our own work.

Right, I look back at the book I self-published on Amazon and think to myself, “this is immature and needs a lot of work.” The book demonstrates the level I was at two years ago, and I have worked and worked and worked on my craft every day since. There's one woman who wrote a two-star review that said, "I hope this guy is a better surfer than he is a writer."

If you're going to reach a significant volume of people, you have to accept that some of them are going to hate what you do.

“If you’re going to reach a significant volume of people, you have to accept that some of them are going to hate what you do.”

Since you brought up surfing, I want to talk a little about creative outlets that aren't tied to professional pursuits. How important do you find these outlets, and do they ever make there way back in to your main craft?

It's funny you mention that, I was just working on a piece about creative cross-training. I think that having an outlet of some sort that has nothing to do with your primary work is very, very powerful. Surfing is one of mine, and the drawing project is another. It's a bit like putting Google's 20% policy into your life: 20% of your time should be spent on projects that have nothing to do with your professional pursuits.

I'm writing a book with a publisher right now, and my writing coach suggested surfing as a structure. I went back to one of my moleskins from a year or two ago, and sure enough there's actually notes about structuring a book based on surfing.

One outlet that seems like it has absolutely nothing to do with the other can end up playing an instrumental role in its development.

I just read a great New York Times article that discussed how smartphones have diminished our conversational abilities and capacity for solitude. When you're thinking about your work schedule, how do you find a way to separate from technology at the right times, but still embrace it when needed?

I agree with that article based on my own experience. I know my creative rhythms really well, and I think it's important for everyone to understand their own.  Some people work well at night, while others have to be logged on to social media in the morning. I can't use technology in the morning - it will throw off my entire day. My most productive time is from six to eight in the morning.

I leave the phone out of the room that I'm in so I don't have to check it. If I do a meditation session using Calm, I'll put the phone in another room right after the mediation session, so I'm not tempted to use it. I use a distraction free writing program called MacJournal, that makes the whole screen go black except for text. I also use a tool called HeyFocus which blocks distracting websites, and I'll block stuff for 80-90 minutes at a time. Right now for example, I know I'm going to go on Facebook and waste an hour, so I set HeyFocus to prevent me from going on Facebook or checking my email until 4 pm. These are my rituals.

I interviewed Gretchen Rubin recently, and she said all of the discussion and self-help books surrounding habits usually fail to acknowledge that everyone is different. Different things energize us, and give us rhythm. I am very much a morning person. I always have been.

I'm the complete opposite.

There you go. 

“An interview isn’t the end of a conversation, but the start of one. I want to create a ripple that sparks conversations between my readers and listeners.”

Besides Dave Matthews, are there any other artists you look to for inspiration in style or creative process?

I once prepared for a conference by watching Michael Jackson's “This Is It.” There was an element of his live performance that I thought could work in a conference room. I’m not talking about the crazy pyrotechnics (we didn't have that kind of budget), but his overall thought process.

There's a graffiti artist named Eric Wahl who says that live music has engaged participants, while keynote speaking has passive consumers. When you watch “This Is It,” the sheer commitment to craft and excellence is so obvious. The attention he brings to the smallest details reminds me of Steve Jobs’ philosophy about making even the smallest parts no one notices beautiful.

Even if an audience can't articulate why something is great, I think they usually know it subconsciously.

Exactly.

The point you made about active and passive engagement hits close to home. My main craft is video game design, and I have always found it alluring because it demands an active audience. When it comes to interviewing, how do you go about bridging the gap between these two types of engagement?

An interview isn't the end of a conversation, but the start of one. I want to create a ripple that sparks conversations between my readers and listeners.

One of my listeners once told me that every week when my interviews come out, he and his wife exchange text messages to share notes and insights. Here is a medium that supposedly is happening in solitude between two people, and yet there are thousands of people sharing ideas all over the place. I love that. It's like a ripple beyond any measure.

“When you’ve reached the point where the process itself is so rewarding, it carries so many intrinsic benefits that the external validation is just an added bonus.”

How do you define success?

You know it's funny, I've heard Tim Ferriss ask this question to so many people on his podcast.

I promise I didn't steal it from him.

Even if you did, steal like an artist as Austin Kleon says! This question is fresh on my mind because it's what the last chapter of my book is about.

We live in a world where there is a lot of opportunity for external validation - Facebook likes and Twitter followers provide endless hits of dopamine. That said, the more I build my body of work, the more I believe that the greatest reward is that I get to keep doing it.

Why does anyone really want to make money? The idea of an exit is weird to me. Do I really want to exit from doing the thing I love? Money should allow you to keep doing what you're doing. When you've reached the point where the process itself is so rewarding, it carries so many intrinsic benefits that the external validation is just an added bonus.

There’s a strong analogy to another one of my creative outlets. Surfers don't surf for waves, but for the feeling they get when they leave the water.

We’ll chase that feeling until the grave.

Asher Vollmer

Independent Game Designer

The scene felt awfully familiar when Asher sat down across from me at the 2-9 Cafe on a typically beautiful day in Los Angeles. While he greeted me over the sound of sirens and energetic USC students bragging about their weekend hijinks, my mind wandered to the last time we had lunch at this spot less than a year before.

Asher had just joined thatgamecompany, I was getting ready to graduate, and we had a long chat about making video games. The latter remained the same, but both of our lives had drastically changed. Now that the Bay Area is my home, I was just a visitor in LA, and Asher was no longer employed by the studio we both deeply admired. 

And yet, he couldn’t stop grinning. His gamble turned out to be a huge success.

We know each other well, but why don’t you introduce yourself to everyone else?

My name is Asher Vollmer, and I am a game designer. I just released a game called Threes, which I’m excited to say was number one on the App Store! I graduated from the USC Interactive Media and Games Division in 2012.

When did you start making games?

Well before I started making games, I made silly Flash cartoons with my friends in high school. They were full of terrible ninth grade humor, but my friends seemed to like them. Eventually I figured out that I could program in Flash too, so I taught myself how to make a simple little platformer and a few physics simulations. I found games fascinating, and luckily USC had a summer program for high schoolers to learn how to make games.

During the program I met Matt Korba, who at the time was prototyping his grad thesis, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, but had no idea how to program. He saw that this high school kid could actually program, so he approached me and asked if I would work on his thesis, which was absurd, but I said yes of course. I ended up programming his grad thesis, which helped me get into USC.

“The game we were working on felt like such a big deal, like something that everyone would talk about for ages, and I wanted to be a part of history. The hardest thing was to realize my happiness ultimately comes first.”

Recently you left your job at thatgamecompany to go indie. Walk me through that decision. Did you imagine that you would have this level of success?

Oh god no. Quitting thatgamecompany was both an incredibly hard decision and an incredibly obvious one. The job was basically the perfect gig that anyone could ask for because it was as indie as humanly possible. The game we were working on felt like such a big deal, like something that everyone would talk about for ages, and I wanted to be a part of history. The hardest thing was to realize my happiness ultimately comes first.

So I started considering what makes me happy, and I like doing my own things, following crazy projects on a whim, and not being tied down to a job. I weighed my options and figured I could do contract work to keep myself alive while making my own games. The best advice I got was from Zach Gage, creator of Spelltower. He said, “you should probably just ask your mom what she thinks.”

I asked my mom and she said, “Yeah you’ve been miserable since you got this job you should quit.”

So I did. I started doing contract work, which was good way to branch out to solve interesting design challenges that were not my own. 

I thought of Threes as a small game that would never do as well as Puzzlejuice, but would keep me afloat so I could work on my next idea.

Threes was your third game on iOS. What sparked your interest in iOS development?

When I think about games, I don’t have stories or worlds in mind. I wish I did, but usually when I pursue games I’m thinking of them in terms of design challenges. I give myself a constraint, and I try to figure out the best thing I can make within the constraint.

The reason I’ve been pursuing iOS games is because they present really cool design challenges that haven’t been solved yet. People are getting close and apps are getting better, but games still have a long way to go, and I am interested in pushing the limits of the mobile device and tackling the design problems that have yet to be solved.

What kinds of design problems specifically?

The design problem I faced with Threes was to find a game that would fit naturally on mobile in the puzzle space, require only a single swipe, and could easily be put away. Threes fits the mobile design philosophy in all those ways. Next, I want to pursue story in mobile games, because I don’t think anyone has done it right yet since it’s so incredibly hard. People pay attention to story in mobile games for like half a second, so how do you tell a story in 500 milliseconds?

But like I said, I don’t think in terms of story and worlds, so I’m going to have to get some friends to help me out. 

Puzzlejuice and Threes were both puzzle games. What keeps drawing you back to the genre?

Puzzles are natural to approach when you’re thinking about design constraints. One of my design constraints with Threes was to make a game that you could play forever, and puzzle games fit really well into that constraint because you’re chasing a score or trying to improve. There’s no finite story to pursue or finite challenges to overcome. I also didn’t want to make a twitch game.

Was there a reason that you were avoiding twitch games?

I’m not good at them! I don’t want to ask people to get good at them, because I feel like I’m not doing them a service by helping them get better with reflexes. There’s enough games that already do that and I personally don’t find it interesting. 

Do you think that twitch games as a whole are less accessible for people who are less familiar with games?

Absolutely. Puzzlejuice alienated a lot of people because it required reflexes and timing. The moment you put a timer on a game, a huge chunk of people will just get up and leave. I wanted to make a game without that, so those people could participate.

How did you meet Greg Wolhwend and Jimmy Hinson?

I met Greg at IndieCade and recognized his art from the internet. Later, when I was working on Puzzlejuice, I came to a point where the game was fun, but ugly. Since the game was so minimal, I had planned on doing the art myself, but Greg popped into my head because he makes minimal games look great. I tweeted him to ask for advice, and he told me to email him.

So I sent him Puzzlejuice and he gave me all sorts of wonderful tips, and eventually asked why I was trying to do the art by myself. He offered to help, and I gladly accepted. Now we’re buddies and I fly to Chicago to hang out with him all the time.

I met Jimmy in a similar way. One day, his music popped up in my Twitter feed, and I started playing it while playing Puzzlejuice. It fit perfectly, so I emailed Jimmy to tell him about the game, he said, “yeah dude that sounds great,” and jumped on.

We had never met, but thanks to the internet he joined the team.

How much of your success do you owe to Twitter?

Roughly, at minimum, one hundred percent. 

It really is a great tool isn’t it?

It’s wonderful! When Puzzlejuice came out, its rankings on the store directly correlated to how many people were tweeting about it. The moment that people stopped tweeting about it the rankings dropped. It was amazing.

“My goal was to release the game as fast as possible, but after a month of experimenting, I was frustrated. I didn’t think it would ever come out. It didn’t work.”

Threes must have been tricky to balance, as an infinite puzzle with math based mechanics. Tell about your balancing process.

I came up Threes a year ago in a frantic night of prototyping, and I ended up with this sort of fun game that you could play for about a half an hour. A half hour is pretty good for what was basically a game jam, so I knew there was something there.

The main difference in the prototype was that any number three or greater could be combined together, so it was the easiest game in the entire planet. The game of one plus two equals three was good, but it fell apart from there and stopped being interesting. 

I was stuck on that forever. The game needed one more rule to make it good, so I tried imposing all sorts of constraints. My goal was to release the game as fast as possible, but after a month of experimenting, I was frustrated. I didn’t think it would ever come out. It didn’t work.

What was the major bottleneck?

It just felt like there was a derivative strategy after a while. The game wasn’t holding my attention, and if I didn’t care a month in, people were going to stop caring five minutes in. I shelved it for three months, because everything has to be in threes with this project. I worked on other projects while it fermented in my brain, and one night my girlfriend played the prototype on my phone and said, “hey this game’s fun you should finish it.”

So I opened up Unity, tried changing this one rule about matching threes, and suddenly the game was just amazing.

It was really funny because I thought the game was so much better and finally something we could release, but all my play testers were just like, “I guess it’s a little different.”

“I could never make a change now that affected the core of the game because it would upset too many people, including myself.”

One of my favorite aspects of Threes is the characterization of the different numbers. What inspired that decision, and how did you go about developing the different personality types?

From the very beginning Greg and I had been trying to shove as much character into the game as possible. We threw a lot of ideas at the wall, and it was a painful process because as we kept iterating, I didn’t like any of the additions.

After I figured out the big design change, suddenly there were a finite set of numbers that would show up, and we realized they could be characters. We came up with the monster designs, but when I gave my friends a version of the game that had monster faces instead of numbers, they didn’t understand what was happening. One of them said it was like reading hieroglyphs. 

Greg and I were having this battle where he was trying to add character to the tiles, and I was trying to make the game as understandable as possible. We got a very sobering email from Zach Gage, who said he hated the art. Greg was crushed, but it made us step back and redefine what to do. We shrank the faces to the bottom of the tile, and once Greg ran with that, he thought it was awesome.

The latest update reveals when next tile is greater than three. I always find it interesting in the iOS world to see iterations come in after launch. How much post launch revision do you think is acceptable?

The only reason that change is acceptable is because it’s improving players’ experiences by addressing a major complaint. I used to always show what number was next, but near the end of development someone figured out the derivative strategy, and I freaked out. I overreacted and hid the next number, which I later realized went against the design principles of the game. I wanted you to be able to look at the game and see the entire game state in front of you, but in the current version you have to remember if the last few numbers were higher or lower. If you put your phone away, you might forget and that screws up the flow.

This change makes the game what it was supposed to be. I could never make a change now that affected the core of the game because it would upset too many people, including myself.

You bucked some trends by releasing an entirely paid app with no in app purchases. Do you think the free to play business model is inherently evil, or something that will be done right in the future?

I go back and forth on this question. My next game was going to be free, and I was going to try to do ethical in app purchases, but after the response Threes is getting, I’m becoming more optimistic about the idea that you can still package a product. People who wouldn’t like Threes are also the type who wouldn’t spend money on it, so it sort of worked out. The game design for my next project supports free to play, but I might get rid of it because people seem to resent it.

One of my current ideas is to release expansions for games, like old school PC games, that are literally just other apps.

Sounds like a paid update.

Exactly. Both apps could detect that the other one is installed, so they could grow each other’s experience.

Do you have a design mantra, or a set of qualities that you want all of your games to embody?

I think I stumbled into one. Puzzlejuice and Threes feel very clean, elegant, and self contained. My next game idea was messy, sloppy, and full of old fashioned fantasy elements, but now I’m thinking about adapting it to the clean experience that people expect. 

On that note, what does the future hold for you?

I’m going to focus on updating and maintaining Threes for the near future, and then I’m going to take a little break from iOS games and just work on weird stuff that doesn’t need to generate income, like art installations and experimental apps. After that, maybe I’ll pursue a bigger idea.