Creative Effort

Today I’m talking with Myke Hurley, who is best known as co-founder of the Relay podcast network, and as host of Cortex, a show about how creative people work. Out of that show came a much harder challenge: a physical product business. Lots of creators sell merch, but this is something very different. Cortex Brand makes premium notebooks and planning tools, and in this episode, we go deep on what that process really looks like.We talk about why he once paid hundreds of pounds just to produce a sample notebook he never planned to sell, why “everything is a trade-off” when you’re making physical goods, and why he refuses to release products unless they genuinely “say something.”Relay Podcast NetworkCortex PodcastCortex BrandThe Enthusiast (Myke's blog)

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former president of Walt Disney Animation Studios, joins the podcast for a conversation about how great creative work actually gets made. We talk about why Pixar chose directors before ideas, what it meant to support “ugly” early concepts, and how the Braintrust created honest feedback without hierarchy. This episode explores creativity as problem-solving and leadership as the work of protecting ideas long enough for them to become something real.Creativity, IncWant more Creative Effort? You can read a version of this interview and sign up for the email version at creativeeffort.substack.com

In this conversation, 3D street artist Nate Baranowski walks through how an unconventional creative career actually works in practice—from getting paid to draw chalk in college, to building a global niche creating anamorphic illusions for brands, festivals, and public spaces. What looks playful and ephemeral from the outside turns out to require deep discipline: idea filtering, client negotiation, physical endurance, and an almost obsessive attention to perspective.Throughout the interview, Nate shares hard-earned insights about creativity that apply far beyond street art: why execution matters more than novelty, why clients don’t want to stand inside advertisements, how constraints improve creative work, and how new tools like VR can fundamentally reshape a craft. The result is a grounded, honest look at what it takes to make creative work that actually connects.Nate's InstagramWant more Creative Effort? You can read a version of this interview and sign up for the email version at creativeeffort.substack.com