The Creators Podcast

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 warnings. And some… wait. This is an episode about creativity itself. How it appears. How it’s received. And what it asks of the people willing to follow it… even when no one else does.FOR MORE:The Art of Grief: Creating Through Despair begins April 6. Through weekly teaching, tangible assignments, live gatherings, and an in-person closing ceremony, we’ll explore how loss becomes language, and how sorrow can become structure for a new life. If you’re standing in the aftermath of something, and ready to make art from what remains, this is your invitation.Sign up here

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 imagination into direct conflict with power, who get’s to control imagination and the unwritten future.For More:The TowerWardenclyffe by Ernst Willem van BerghWant to go beyond listening about creators and actually begin living like one?I’ve been expanding The Creators Collective into something much deeper: weekly craft workshops, immersive masterclasses, live salons and open mics, and a growing vault of teachings and creative prompts designed to move you out of consumption and into creation. This isn’t just a class anymore. It’s a living, breathing creative ecosystem.Right now, there’s a short window to join at the Founders Rate, which means you lock in the lowest price the Collective will ever have. If you’ve been feeling the pull to create… this is your invitation.Find out more!

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 far beyond practical infrastructure. He envisioned wireless communication, wireless power, and a planet connected through invisible fields of energy. Through inventions like the Tesla coil and experiments in Colorado Springs and Wardenclyffe, he pursued ideas that often ran ahead of the technology, and the institutions, of his time. For creators, Tesla stands as a reminder that imagination often sees the future long before the world is ready for it.For More:My Inventions — Nikola TeslaWizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla — Marc J. SeiferThis spring, I’m leading a twelve-week immersive journey: The Art of Grief: Creating Through Despair. Grief strips away what is excess. It clarifies. It refines. Through weekly transmissions, real assignments, live gatherings, and an in-person closing ceremony, we’ll explore how loss becomes language, and how sorrow can become structure for a new life. If you’re standing in the aftermath of something—and ready to make art from what remains, this is your invitation.Find Out MoreThe Creators CollectiveTHE SALON THE INNER CIRCLE

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 explorations of religion, race, hypocrisy, censorship, and the strange contradictions of American life. By the early 1960s he was being arrested repeatedly for obscenity, with police officers sitting in clubs transcribing his jokes as legal evidence. In 1964 he was convicted in New York after a controversial trial. Bruce died of a morphine overdose in Los Angeles in 1966 at the age of forty. He is widely recognized as one of the architects of modern stand-up comedy, paving the way for comedians who bravely dared to question the system. For More: How to Talk Dirty and Influence People — Lenny Bruce Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware — Lenny BruceWant to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This month, March 22nd, we’re exploring the life and work of Robin Williams in a session called The Cost of Joy, an honest look at the strange emotional territory where comedy, sensitivity, grief, and creative brilliance meet. Together we’ll explore what Williams’ life reveals about creativity, emotional depth, and the courage it takes to stay fully alive as an artist.Sign up here

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, she described prayer as a simple act of surrender. Her teachings, later labeled Quietism, were seen as destabilizing to the institutions of her time. She was imprisoned for years in the Bastille. Yet her insistence on interior freedom quietly influenced European spirituality, philosophy and psychology for generations. For More: A Short and Easy Method of Prayer & Spiritual Torrents— Madame GuyonThe Seeking Heart--FenelonThe Art of Grief: A Course for Creating Through Despair. April 6. Through weekly transmissions, real assignments, live gatherings, and an in-person closing ceremony, we’ll explore how loss becomes language, and how sorrow can become structure for a new life. If you’re standing in the aftermath of something, and ready to make art from what remains, this is your invitation.Sign up NowThe Creators CollectiveTHE SALON

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. Through works like The Land of Little Rain, she articulated a radical cosmology of conservation and care for a living land. For creators, she stands as a reminder that attention itself is an ethical act, and that restraint can be a deeper form of abundance.For More: The Land of Little Rain — Mary Austin The Life of Lozen, Apache WarriorThis spring, beginning April 6, I’m leading a twelve-week immersive journey: The Art of Grief: Creating Through Despair. Grief strips away what is excess. It clarifies. It refines. Through weekly transmissions, real assignments, live gatherings, and an in-person closing ceremony, we’ll explore how loss becomes language, and how sorrow can become structure for a new life. If you’re standing in the aftermath of something—and ready to make art from what remains, this is your invitation.Sign up now!

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 Wolfe. He believed editors should remain invisible, that the book belonged to the author, and that the highest creative labor was helping something become fully itself without claiming it. For More: Editor of Genius — A. Scott BergGenius (The Movie)Consider joining The Creators Collective, the community Rainier started for people who want to make art that is alive, grounded, and aligned with their deepest convictions. Inside: live teachings, historical deep dives, creative prompts, and a shared refusal to numb out. Next class is February 22 on PRINCE!Sign up here!

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, Roy turned her attention toward essays confronting nationalism, empire, caste violence, environmental destruction, and the quiet brutalities of modern power. Her nonfiction has made her one of the most influential and controversial public intellectuals of her generation. Roy is a creator who refused separation between art and conscience, choosing witness over comfort, and clarity over safety, even as that choice narrowed her life. She stands as a reminder that creativity is not merely expression, but orientation: a lifelong practice of attention, courage, and refusal to look away.For More:The God of Small Things — Arundhati RoyThe End of Imagination — Arundhati RoyArundhati Roy — Encyclopædia BritannicaWant to go beyond listening about creators and become one?Consider joining The Creators Collective, the community Rainier started for people who want to make art that is alive, grounded, and aligned with their deepest convictions. Inside: live teachings, historical deep dives, creative prompts, and a shared refusal to numb out.Create yourself alive.Sign up here!

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: Sacred, Don’t Touch and years of intimate teaching, she explored how the self is constructed in response to fear, desire, and expectation. She passed away from cancer in 2022. For More: Taboo: Sacred, Don’t Touch — Kay Parker Archival interviews & reflectionsWant to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one?Consider joining the next Creators Collective class. This month, we’re diving into Friedrich Nietzsche—not as meme or misquote, but as a companion for creators dismantling borrowed identities and learning how to author their own lives. A potent evening for anyone standing at the edge of change, ready to stop playing the role and start telling the truth.THE SALON THE INNER CIRCLE

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, and social mixing that openly defied Puritan norms joy. Authorities raided the settlement and arrested Morton, eventually exiling him to England, where he wrote New English Canaan (1637), a satirical and critical account of Puritan society and colonial practices; the book was banned from entering the colonies. FOR MORE:The New English Canaan of Thomas MortonThe Lord of MisruleWant to go beyond listening about creators and actually live like one? Consider joining the next Creators Collectiveclass. This month, we’re diving into Friedrich Nietzsche—not as meme or misquote, but as a guide for creators dismantling borrowed values and learning how to author their own lives. A potent evening for anyone standing in the aftermath of certainty, ready to create from what’s real.THE SALON THE INNER CIRCLEAre you interested in claiming one of the THREE spots for the Re-Wilding Imagination Retreat, February 12-15? If so, you can learn more here.