PODCAST · society
The Creators Podcast
by Rainier Wylde
Remember history class? Ever wonder about the ones they didn't talk about? The rule breakers? The rebels, the misfits, the poets, and the prophets who refused to follow the script? Enter *The Creators Podcast* ( https://www.thecreatorspodcast.live ) bringing you the untold stories of those who flipped the world upside down. These are the footnotes of the encyclopedia, written in a trail of blood—stories buried, burned, or ignored because they didn’t fit the mold. This is history like you’ve never heard it before. The voices they didn’t want you to know? You’ll know them now.
Episodes
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Sorcerers: William Blake
William Blake (1757–1827): William Blake was an English poet, painter, and engraver born in London. He developed a method of relief etching that combined poetry and images on copper plates. His wife, Catherine, helped print and color his books. His major works include Songs of Innocence and of...
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Visionaries: Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster
Jerry Siegel (1914–1996) & Joe Shuster (1914–1992): Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were the writer and artist who created Superman. They met as teenagers at Glenville High School in Cleveland, and created The Superman hoping to make a comic book.. After years of rejection, Superman was finally...
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Myths: Creativity Will Save Us
In this episode Rainier explores the myth that art can save us or that making beautiful things necessarily makes us better people. He travels to Córdoba, Spain, following the strange history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Jewish manuscript that survived expulsion from Spain, censorship…
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Heretics: Mary Renault
Mary Renault (1905–1983): Mary Renault was a British novelist best known for her historical fiction set in ancient Greece. Born Eileen Mary Challans in London in 1905, she studied English at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, before training as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary. There she met fellow...
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Myths: Deal with the Devil
In this episode, Rainier goes looking for the myth insisting that talent isn't earned, that it's beyond our control. He traces the story of blues legend Robert Johnson, who allegedly made a deal with the devil for his skill. The search widens to Niccolò Paganini, whose own audiences swore they…
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Myths: The Lone Genius
In this episode Rainier explores the myths of the lone genius and the idea of authorship itself. He travels to Amsterdam to look at the work of Johannes Vermeer, discovering that what is often credited to the master is actually the work of an anonymous hand. The mystery pulls him further into the...
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Outlaws: Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde (1934–1992): Audre Lorde was an American poet, essayist, librarian, teacher, and activist whose work explored race, sexuality, gender, motherhood, illness, and the uses of power. Born in New York City to Caribbean immigrant parents, Lorde began writing poetry as a teenager and…
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Rebels: Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam
Osip & Nadezhda Mandelstam (1891–1938 / 1899–1980): Osip Mandelstam was one of the 20th centuries great poets and founder of the Acmeist movement in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, Osip composed his poems aloud, committing them to memory rather than paper, until sixteen unwritten lines mocking...
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Myths: The First Artist
The Chauvet Cave (c. 36,000 years ago): Chauvet Cave preserves some of the oldest known works of human art. Discovered in 1994 after being sealed for more than twenty thousand years, its walls are alive with animals, many of which are now extinct, rendered with astonishing technical mastery. The...
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Lovers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861): One of the great poets of the Victorian era. Confined for years by chronic illness, family control, and fear, she produced remarkable poetry from an isolated room. It was only after secretly marrying Robert Browning and escaping to Florence that her fullest...
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Sorcerers: Jiro Ono
Jiro Ono (1925– ) Jiro Ono is a Japanese sushi master whose life's work has become one of the clearest modern examples of craftsmanship. Born in rural Japan, he began working in the kitchen at the age of seven, served in a munitions factory during the Second World War, and spent nearly two…
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Visionaries: Varian Fry
Varian Fry (1907–1967): Varian Fry was an American journalist, classicist, and magazine editor who became one of the most consequential rescuers of the twentieth century. In August 1940, he arrived in Vichy France to do what his own government refused to do. Over thirteen months in Marseille, Fry...
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Healers: Hildegard of Bingen
Hildegard of Bingen was a Benedictine abbess, composer, mystic, scientist, healer, linguist, and one of the most extraordinary creative minds of the medieval world. Enclosed in a monastery from childhood, she transformed the apparent confines of her life into an astonishing intellectual and...
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Musicians: Ted Lucas
Ted Lucas (1939–1992) was a Detroit-born guitarist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist whose music blended folk, blues, psychedelia, raga influences, and intimate singer-songwriter traditions. Emerging from Detroit’s vibrant 1960s underground scene, Lucas first gained attention as a member of...
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Outlaws: Jean Genet
Jean Genet (1910–1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, and political provocateur whose life and work transformed twentieth-century literature. Genet spent much of his youth in reformatories, prisons, and on the margins of European society as a thief, drifter, and sex worker. While...
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Rebels: George Sand
George Sand (1804–1876), born Aurore Dupin in Paris, was one of the most prolific and influential writers of 19th-century France. She married Baron Casimir Dudevant before leaving the marriage to pursue an independent literary life in Paris. Adopting the male pseudonym “George Sand,” she…
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Saints: Anthony DeMello
Anthony DeMello (1931-1987) Indian born Jesuit priest and trained psychologist. He was the founder of Sadhana Institute in Pune. DeMello spent his life trying to wake people up. His method was short, funny, disorienting stories and his core teaching was awareness. He taught that human suffering...
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Lovers: Jack Gilbert
Jack Gilbert (1925–2012) An American poet born in Pittsburgh, he published his first collection, Views of Jeopardy, in 1962; it won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and brought him immediate recognition. Gilbert left the United States on Guggenheim Fellowships…
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Myths: The First Novel Is a Lie
Rainier sets out on a journey to uncover the origins of the novel. Starting in Madrid, researching Don Quixote and Miguel de Cervantes, he ultimately follows the trail around the world to Japan in the 11th century. He discovers the story of a woman known as Murasaki Shikibu who began to write in…
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Rebels: Arthur Cravan
Arthur Cravan (1887–1918?): Swiss-born writer, poet, boxer, and provocateur who turned his life into a deliberate act of artistic disruption. Born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, he adopted a new name and drifted across Europe and the Americas, publishing the short-lived magazine Maintenant! in which he...
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Musicians: Alice Coltrane
Alice Coltrane (1937–2007): Alice Coltrane was a pianist, harpist, and spiritual composer who expanded jazz beyond form and into devotion. She grew up in a rich musical environment shaped by gospel, classical training, and the city’s thriving Black artistic culture. In 1965 when she joined the…
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Sorcerers: Nikola Tesla (Part Three)
In this final episode, we follow Tesla’s final years, the strange signals, the obsessive rituals, the rumors of new inventions that would revolutionize the world, death rays and disappearing ships and time travel. We ask a deeper question: what happens when imagination outpaces the conditions…
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Sorcerers: Nikola Tesla (Part Two)
Nikola Tesla set out to build a machine that could change the way energy moved through the world. A tower on the north shore of Long Island designed to transmit power and information across the planet itself. It was bold. It was expensive. And depending on who you ask… it was either genius or...
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Sorcerers: Nikola Tesla (Part One)
Nikola Tesla (1856–1943): Nikola Tesla was a Serbian American inventor and electrical engineer whose ideas helped electrify the modern world. Born in the Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia), he arrived in the United States in 1884 and became a central figure in the development of alternating...
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Outlaws: Lenny Bruce
Lenny Bruce (1925–1966): Lenny Bruce was the comedian who transformed stand-up from light entertainment into cultural confrontation. After serving briefly in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he drifted into the nightclub circuit of the late 1940s and 1950s, where comedians were expected to...
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Saints: Madam Guyon
Madame Jeanne Guyon (1648–1717): Jeanne-Marie Bouvier Guyon was a French mystic who taught that dissolving into divine love was the highest spiritual path. Born into minor nobility during the reign of Louis XIV, she wrote in an age defined by monarchy and church authority. She taught that the…
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Visionaries: Mary Austin
Mary Austin (1868–1934): Mary Austin was a chronicler of the American Southwest who refused the myth that the desert was empty. Born in Illinois, she moved west where scarcity, wind, and water refined both her perception and her prose. In an era intoxicated by expansion, railroads, aqueducts, and...
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Sorcerers: Maxwell Perkins
Maxwell Perkins (1884–1947) Max Perkins was an American book editor whose greatest work was not authorship, but fidelity. He spent thirty-six years at Charles Scribner’s Sons, where he reshaped American literature by standing beside writers at moments when their work, and their lives, were most...
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Healers: Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy (1961– ) Arundhati Roy is an Indian novelist, essayist, and political thinker whose work insists that beauty and moral clarity belong to the same sentence. Born in Shillong and raised in Kerala, she emerged onto the global literary stage with her debut novel The God of Small Things,...
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Lovers: Kay Parker
Kay Parker (1944–2022): Kay Parker became an unexpected icon during the so-called Golden Age of Porn in the 1970s and ’80s. She was widely recognized, intensely projected upon, and narrowly defined by roles she would later outgrow. In the early 2000s, Parker quietly re-emerged as a metaphysical...
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Rebels: Thomas Morton
Thomas Morton (c. 1579–1647) Thomas Morton was America’s first banned poet and one of its earliest heretics of joy. A classically trained English lawyer with a humanist soul, Morton immigrated to New England in the late 1620s and became best known as the leader of the short-lived settlement of...
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Heretics: Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926): Rainer Maria Rilke was the poet of inwardness, solitude, and becoming; a writer who refused answers in favor of deeper questions. Born in Prague at the crossroads of cultures, Rilke grew up exquisitely sensitive and perpetually displaced, a condition that would…
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Visionaries: Lou Andreas-Salomé
Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937): Lou Andreas-Salomé was born in St. Petersburg and later living across the great nerve-centers of German-speaking culture, she published novels, essays, and criticism on religion, eros, selfhood, and the inner life, writing about desire and identity decades before...
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Outlaws: Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day (1897–1980): Dorothy Day was a journalist-turned-organizer whose greatest creation was community itself. Born in Brooklyn and raised amid the changes of early-20th-century America. After a conversion to Catholicism in her thirties she co-founded The Catholic Worker in 1933, a penny...
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Musicians: Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973): Sister Rosetta Tharpe was the gospel virtuoso who rewrote the DNA of modern music. Born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, and raised in the Pentecostal revivals of the American South, she became a national sensation in her teens as an electric-guitar prodigy whose…
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Saints: Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle (1956–2017): Brian Doyle was the joyful warrior of wonder. Born into a roaring Irish-Catholic family, he learned early that holiness hid inside the ordinary. After years in journalism, he landed in Oregon and became editor of Portland Magazine. Here his voice was transformed into one…
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Healers: Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington (1917–2011): Born into English aristocracy she rejected domestication and fled to Paris, falling into The Surrealist movement. Her paintings were characterized by dreamscapes of witches, wild animals, and rebirth. In 1940 she suffered a nervous breakdown, was declared insane…
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Lovers: Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) Georgia O’Keeffe was the woman who chose to be both the maker and the muse. She came of age in a world that wanted women to be owned, creatively, emotionally, and relationally. She refused to be anyone's possession. Her paintings were less about what they showed and...
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Heretics: Sōetsu Yanagi
Sōetsu Yanagi (1889–1961) Sōetsu Yanagi was the quiet heretic who declared war on speed. In the 1920s, alongside potters Shōji Hamada and Kanjirō Kawai, he founded the Mingei (“folk craft”) movement: an act of philosophical resistance that insisted usefulness, humility, and imperfection were the...
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Rebels: Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) Arthur Rimbaud was the teenage prodigy who detonated modern poetry and then walked away before his twentieth birthday. Born in a small French town to a devout mother and absent father, he fled to Paris during the chaos of the Franco-Prussian War, where his hallucinatory...
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Sorcerers: Renato Casaro
Renato Casaro (1935–2025): Renato Casaro is the Italian painter who gave cinema its mythic face.He began painting movie posters as a teenager outside his local theater and rose through Rome’s Cinecittà Studios to become the go-to artist for filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Dino De Laurentiis. His...
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Visionaries: Helena Blavatsky
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891): Madame Blavatsky was the mother of modern mysticism who turned Victorian reason on its head. She claimed to speak for hidden Masters in Tibet, mixed Eastern philosophy with Western occultism, and wrote books that helped shape everyone from Gandhi to Yeats to...
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Musicians: Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong (1901-1971): Louis Armstrong was the sound of jazz itself. His horn was once considered too dangerous to be on the airwaves, too alive to be contained. But America has a way of sanding down what it fears. Armstrong became the smiling face of jazz, a Hollywood star, almost a Disney...
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Myths: Rosie the Riveter
Rosie the Riveter Rosie was the face of wartime feminism; the rolled sleeve and red bandana, the icon of “We Can Do It.” But Rosie the Riveter was a symbol, a myth, made by men, to serve the purpose of war. This episode isn’t about who Rosie was. It’s about who she wasn’t. It’s about the women…
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Outlaws: Mariya Yudina
Mariya Yudina (1899–1970) Mariya Yudina was a radical classical pianist born into a Jewish family in Tsarist Russia who later converted to Orthodox Christianity under Stalin’s atheist regime. She was banned multiple times, living in poverty, and never silenced, she refused to separate her art…
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Scientists: John von Neumann
John von Neumann (1903–1957) Born in Budapest to a banking family, von Neumann was a child prodigy who could divide eight-digit numbers in his head by age six. By his twenties, he was helping formalize quantum mechanics. He immigrated to America in the 1930s, helped design the atomic bomb in the...
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Saints: Nikos Kazantzakis
Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Born in Crete under a strict, war-shadowed household, Kazantzakis spent his life chasing the unanswerable. He studied law in Athens, philosophy in Paris, wandered across Europe and Asia, and wrote like his soul was on fire. During the Nazi occupation, he hid in...
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Musicians: Adrianne Lenker
Adrianne Lenker (born July 9, 1991) is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Raised in a Minnesota Christian cult and trained in classical guitar before she was old enough to vote, she writes songs like they’re secret doorways—tender, precise, and cracked wide open. As frontwoman of Big...
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Lovers: Colette
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (January 28, 1873 – August 3, 1954) was a French writer, actress, journalist, and sensual force of nature. She wrote with feline precision—every sentence clawed its way toward the body. Toward touch. Toward truth. By the time of her state funeral (the first ever for a...
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Visionaries: Frank Stanford
Frank Stanford (August 1, 1948 – June 3, 1978) was an American poet. raised in the muddy backroads of Arkansas, he wrote poems that bleed childhood, violence, love, and death into a single long breath. At twenty-nine, he shot himself three times in the chest. By then he had already built a cult...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Remember history class? Ever wonder about the ones they didn't talk about? The rule breakers? The rebels, the misfits, the poets, and the prophets who refused to follow the script? Enter *The Creators Podcast* ( https://www.thecreatorspodcast.live ) bringing you the untold stories of those who flipped the world upside down. These are the footnotes of the encyclopedia, written in a trail of blood—stories buried, burned, or ignored because they didn’t fit the mold. This is history like you’ve never heard it before. The voices they didn’t want you to know? You’ll know them now.
HOSTED BY
Rainier Wylde
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Creators Podcast have?
The Creators Podcast currently has 65 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Creators Podcast about?
Remember history class? Ever wonder about the ones they didn't talk about? The rule breakers? The rebels, the misfits, the poets, and the prophets who refused to follow the script? Enter *The Creators Podcast* ( https://www.thecreatorspodcast.live ) bringing you the untold stories of those who...
How often does The Creators Podcast release new episodes?
The Creators Podcast has 65 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to The Creators Podcast?
You can listen to The Creators Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Creators Podcast?
The Creators Podcast is created and hosted by Rainier Wylde.
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