How To Fail With Elizabeth Day · Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment

Baz Luhrmann - ‘I self-medicate with creativity’

February 25, 2026·50 min·3 clips

Baz Luhrmann explains how 'Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen' went from a rejected radio oddity to a number-one hit in 48 hours.

Embarrassment opens the door. The cold open has the guest looking back at the shame of being a geek from a small country town, then the conversation eases into love, fear, and work. It takes its time. A relationship comes up as important and openly nontraditional, with more care given to how it functions than how it appears from the outside. Fear gets a real job here. The guest says part of his role is to keep fear out of the room by carrying it himself in the morning. That lands. Creativity starts to sound less like sparkle and more like care, the daily work of taking pressure off other people so they can make something. The show is direct about failure too. How to Fail's premise comes through in the intro, connecting growth and creativity to what happens after things go wrong. Then the ads break the spell a bit. A Shopify read turns into the host describing how she learned podcast production through scripts, artwork, scheduling, and tech. A true-crime promotion follows with its own names, motives, and questions, and it pulls the mood away from Luhrmann for a while. Still, the episode finds its way back. Near the end, he sounds caught off guard by how good it has felt to talk about failure. He calls it therapy. The host receives that with affection, saying he has already paid her through the culture he has produced. It is a lovely little exchange. The best parts are the ones that let fear, shame, usefulness, and love stay in the room without rushing to tidy them up.

As heard by us

Baz Luhrmann talks through fear, shame, love, connection, and creativity as the thing that keeps him steady.

Baz Luhrmann's How To Fail appearance treats creativity less as a triumphal gift than as a working method for living with fear. The strongest moments are personal: his embarrassment at being "this geek from a small country town," his shame around that younger self, his devotion…

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Why you'd press play

Hear Baz Luhrmann reflect on embarrassment, fear, and the work of keeping both out of the room.

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