The Creators Podcast
The Creators Podcast uncovers the untold stories of historical figures who defied conventions—rebels, misfits, poets, and prophets. Host Rainier Wylde explores narratives that were buried or ignored because they didn't fit the mainstream mold. Each episode reveals the hidden history of those who challenged the status quo and changed the world.
Episodes
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 nurse Julie Mullard, who became her lifelong partner. Renault worked as a nurse through much of the 1930s
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 saw the devil guiding his bow. And then looks at an ancient Greek legend about what happens when
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 work of the Dutch realists, eventually taking him to Paris to trace the story of Alexandre Dumas, whos
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 published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still in high school. She later worked as a librarian and
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 Stalin got him arrested, exiled, and finally killed in a transit camp near Vladivostok in 1938. His
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 cave was never a home. These paintings weren’t created for public display, but for purposes that remain
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 work emerged. There she began to live a free life and sense of self, publishing Sonnets from the Portu
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 decades apprenticing in kitchens before opening the ten-seat restaurant that would become Sukiyabashi Jiro
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 forged documents, ran a safe house out of a crumbling villa, and built a footpath over the Pyrenees tha
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 artistic career. Over eight decades, she composed groundbreaking music, wrote visionary theological works, p
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 the psychedelic folk-blues band The Spike Drivers before releasing his now-cult 1975 solo album OM, a p
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 imprisoned during World War II, he began writing novels such as Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journ
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 published novels, essays, plays, and political writings that explored class, gender, rural life, love, and soci
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 comes from unconscious conditioning, from clinging to identity, beliefs, and outcomes. He was an inter re
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 and spent nearly twenty years living mostly in Greece, as well as in Italy and Japan, often in deliberat
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 a very different way, long before the West named it as the novel. What starts as a search for a literar
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 attacked the art world and became the original troll. He staged chaotic lectures, anticipating performan
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 band of saxophonist John Coltrane. Their partnership, both musical and personal, pushed her toward increas
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 that can hold it? Because not every great idea becomes a breakthrough. Some become stories. Some become wa
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 madness. In this episode, we follow the rise and fall of Wardenclyffe, the strange experiment that brought
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 current power systems, which made large-scale electrical grids possible. But Tesla’s imagination extended f
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 deliver safe jokes and predictable punchlines. Bruce broke those rules. His routines became rapid-fire expl
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 soul could encounter God directly, without striving, fear, or reward. In A Short and Easy Method of Prayer,
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 industrial ambition, she wrote about attention, insisting that the land was not backdrop but teacher. T
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 unstable. Perkins edited and championed figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas W
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, which won the Booker Prize in 1997. Rather than following literary success with market-friendly sequels
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 teacher and writer, turning her attention to the nature of identity itself. Through her book Taboo: Sacre
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 Merry Mount near present-day Quincy, Massachusetts. There he promoted poetry, music, seasonal celebrations
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 shape both his life and his work. He moved restlessly across Europe, apprenticing himself to lovers, artis
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 those subjects were culturally safe. She engaged with some of the most brilliant minds of her time: Frie
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 newspaper that became a rallying cry for mercy, justice, and nonviolent resistance. Alongside it, she help
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 fusion of sacred lyrics and blistering rhythm prefigured rock and roll by decades. In the 1930s and ’40s she
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 of America’s most astonishing essayists, writing in long, breathless sentences that felt like prayer and
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 and institutionalized in Spain. She was able to escape and remade herself in Mexico City among exiles, mys
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 more about what they stripped away. Each one was a reclamation of selfhood. She became both legend an
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 true teachers of beauty. He preached a gospel of anonymity. This episode asks how we create honest art i
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 verses and scandalous affair with poet Paul Verlaine made him both legend and pariah. In just a few fev
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 brush created the worlds of Conan the Barbarian, The NeverEnding Story, Dune, and The Last Emperor—imag
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 Kandinsky. Her critics called her a fraud. Her followers called her a prophet. The truth is she was bo
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 character. This episode isn’t about the legend we remember. It’s about the danger we forget. About how
Myths: Rosie the Riveter
Rosie the RiveterRosie 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 who built battleships but couldn’t open bank accounts. About art used to recruit, not liberate. About crea
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 from her convictions. Her story, and how she used art to as a form of reverence, and resistance, is powerfu
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 1940s, and in the 1950s, quietly built the blueprint for every computer in the world. He laid the founda
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 mountain caves and wrote Zorba The Greek as his joyful resistance. His later books, such as The Last Temptat
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 Thief and in her solo work, Lenker makes music that feels like eavesdropping on a prayer. Lenker’s musi
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 French woman of letters), she had already carved her name into French literature. Her work—ranging from th
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 following—drifting through levee camps, graveyards, and cotton fields, gathering the broken dreams of th
Rebels: Nazim Hikmet
Nazım Hikmet (1902–1963):Born into Ottoman nobility, Nazım Hikmet traded comfort for his convictions. He was a fiery poet and spokesperson for the people. Nazim wrote verses that made governments nervous because they dared to dream of freedom, love, and the dignity of the working class. Imprisoned for his politics, exiled for his words, he spent much of his life behind bars or far from home, smugg
Sorcerers: Alejandra Pizarnik
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) was an Argentine poet, diarist, and linguistic sorceress whose haunting, fragmentary work continues to pulse with life decades after her death. Born to first generation immigrants in Buenos Aires, she struggled with depression, sexuality, and belonging from an early age. Her writing—urgent, confessional, and often devastating—was her way of surviving the silence. She
Healers: Henry Darger
Henry Darger (1892–1973): A reclusive janitor in Chicago who lived and died alone, Henry Darger spent his nights building a world no one ever saw—an epic 15,000-page novel and hundreds of vivid, violent, and childlike illustrations hidden in his one-room apartment. Orphaned young, institutionalized, and forgotten, he conjured a private cosmos where innocence fought back: the Vivian Girls, child-sa
Outlaws: Victoria Woodhull
Victoria Woodhull (1838–1927) was an American stockbroker, publisher, spiritualist, and political force who shattered 19th-century norms with unapologetic ambition. Born into poverty, she rose to become the first woman to open a Wall Street brokerage and the first to run for President of the United States. A fierce advocate for women’s suffrage, labor rights, and free love, Woodhull used her newsp
Visionaries: Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) was a journalist by trade, an outlaw by instinct, and pioneered Gonzo Journalism, a style where objectivity was tossed out the window in favor of truth-telling. He wasn’t just an observer; he was a participant, an agent of chaos in a world already spiraling out of control.From riding with the Hell’s Angels to turning a road trip into a nightmarish dissection of the A
Saints: Simone Weil
Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist known for her uncompromising commitment to justice and solidarity with the oppressed. A gifted thinker, Weil abandoned a comfortable academic career to work alongside factory laborers and join anti-fascist militias during the Spanish Civil War. Her radical empathy and belief that attention was the purest form of love
Rebels: Sartre, Camus, & Beauvoir
Under the iron grip of Nazi-occupied France in 1943, a group of thinkers refused to be silenced. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus didn’t just write about freedom—they lived it, fought for it, and risked everything to define it. From forging identity papers for the Resistance to running underground newspapers, they rejected passive existence and chose to act. For them, existen
Martyrs: Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) was a Spanish poet, playwright, and activist whose work burned with passion and political defiance. A champion of the marginalized, he wrote of love, loss, and "duende"—the dark spirit that fuels true art. As fascism tightened its grip on Spain, Lorca’s words became an act of resistance. His poetry gave voice to the oppressed, his plays exposed authoritari
Outlaws: Isabelle Eberhardt
Isabelle Eberhardt (1877–1904) was a Swiss-born writer, traveler, sensualist and mystic who defied societal norms to live as a nomad in North Africa. She rejected European aristocratic life in favor of the desert, where she dressed as a man, converted to Islam, and immersed herself in Bedouin culture. A fearless wanderer and writer, she chronicled the beauty and brutality of her existence, embraci
Lovers: Abelard and Héloïse
Peter Abelard & Héloïse were the original star-crossed lovers—12th-century scholars and theologians whose passion ignited scandal, betrayal, and some of the most famous love letters in history. Abelard, a brilliant but arrogant philosopher, met his match in Héloïse, a woman whose intellect rivaled his own. Their affair defied the rigid boundaries of their time, but love came at a brutal cost.
Scientists: Oscar Ichazo
Oscar Ichazo (1931–2020) was a Bolivian philosopher and mystic who sought to map human consciousness and liberate individuals from the illusions of the ego. Founder of the Arica Institute, he blended Eastern traditions, Western psychology, and esoteric wisdom into a rigorous system of self-transcendence.Best known for innovating the Enneagram into a tool for spiritual awakening, Ichazo saw it not
Visionaries: Carmen Mondragón
Carmen Mondragón (1893–1978), better known as Nahui Olin, was a Mexican poet, painter, and muse whose life blurred the boundaries between art, rebellion, and self-liberation. She was far ahead of her time, and defied societal expectations, embracing her sexuality, intellect, and artistic expression with a fiery intensity.Carmen rejected the constraints of her aristocratic upbringing, immersing her
Healers: María Sabina
María Sabina (1894–1985) was a Mazatec shaman, healer, and poet whose life bridged the sacred and the worldly. Known as a curandera, she used psilocybin mushrooms—what she called niños santos or "Holy Children"—in ceremonies to heal the sick and connect with the divine. Her chants, rhythmic and poetic, opened pathways to spiritual realms and marked her as a keeper of Indigenous wisdom.Thou
Outlaws: William S. Burroughs II
William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) was an American novelist, visual artist, and literary innovator whose work redefined the boundaries of art and culture. A Beat Generation icon and counterculture pioneer, Burroughs is often regarded as a founder of postmodernism. Born into privilege but drawn to society’s margins, he spent much of his life battling heroin addiction and chronicling the lives of thos
The Creators Podcast-Trailer
History has its heroes, but what about the outlaws, the rebels, and the misfits? Where are the creators who tore down walls and built something new in their place? Enter The Creators, the podcast that uncovers the lives of groundbreaking individuals who didn’t just change the rules—they rewrote them entirely.In short episodes, released multiple times a week, we explore the trials, triumphs, and tr
