Episode 30 of Season 2. The 80th episode I’ve recorded since starting this show. And honestly, I couldn’t have picked a better guest to mark a milestone like that.

We started this conversation talking about goat cheese pizza toppings in the UK. We ended it somewhere very different — talking about the cave you fear to enter inside yourself, about why his ADHD diagnosis at 25 first devastated him before it freed him, and about a line from his podcast Right Side Out that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.

This is one of those episodes where I want to give you a heads-up: it goes deep. Not in a heavy, performative way. In an honest one. The kind of conversation that makes you sit with yourself a little longer than usual after it ends.

Andy J. Miller, Andy J. Pizza, and the act of choosing your own name

Most people in the design world know him as Andy J. Pizza. Almost nobody knows that his real last name is Miller.

He picked “Pizza” because his original domain — andy-j-miller dot com — looked ugly and read like a tongue twister. People started calling him Andy J. Pizza online. And at some point he had to make a decision: keep correcting them, or accept it.

He accepted it. And the reason he gave me is the kind of thing I’ll be turning over in my head for a while.

He said he never really felt like a Miller. His family was broken up, he was the odd one out, he related more to his mom’s side. There wasn’t much to hold onto with the name. And professionally, he realised that if he kept going by Pizza, it wouldn’t be what his heroes would do — it wouldn’t be the polished, MoMA-vibe move. But that was kind of the point.

He compared it to Luke Skywalker disobeying Yoda. The moment Luke ignores his master and goes to save Han and Leia, he becomes his own hero. Andy doing the same thing with his name was, in his words, “dumb as it sounds, kind of a good acceptance of yeah, that’s me.”

A Midwestern guy who eats too much pizza and grew up on SpongeBob. And once he stopped fighting that, his whole creative practice started to make more sense.

ADHD: the diagnosis that broke him before it freed him

Andy was diagnosed with ADHD around 25.

At first, he was devastated. His framing of why is something I think a lot of people will recognise: “I can’t hustle my way out of this. There is no — yes, there’s medicine, there’s different things, but this is who I am. This is in my core kind of wiring.”

The grief of that took a while. And what pulled him out of it was discovering what he now calls the neurodivergent lens — the framing that came out of the positive psychology movement.

His point on that movement is one of the sharpest things he said in the whole conversation: psychology as a discipline was built almost entirely through the lens of our negativity bias. The DSM is literally a catalogue of what’s wrong with people. We could have just as easily spent the last hundred years figuring out what’s great about people and what to cultivate. We didn’t.

The neurodivergent lens, the way Andy describes it, is the same kind of inversion. Brains are different. Not worse, not better. They perform differently in different contexts. In some contexts, your brain is a disability. In others, it’s an advantage.

Once that clicked for him, he stopped trying to overcome himself and started trying to cultivate himself. Which is the whole point of this episode, really.

“I had to cultivate myself rather than overcome myself”

This is the shift I think will hit hardest for anyone listening who’s been quietly fighting themselves for years.

Most creative advice treats your flaws as obstacles. Get more disciplined. Stop procrastinating. Sit at the desk for eight hours. Push through. The whole industry of productivity hacks is built on the assumption that the version of you that struggles is the version that needs to be fixed.

Andy’s reframe is that the version of you that struggles is probably the version that’s been repressing parts of itself to fit a system that wasn’t built for it. And most of what we call dysfunction is just the cost of that repression.

He brought up Joseph Campbell’s line — the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Most people interpret that as “do the thing you’re most afraid of.” Andy disagrees. He thinks it means the cave inside yourself. The parts of you you’ve disconnected from. The things you’ve been pushing down for years to be acceptable.

You can’t love your art if you hate yourself, he said. Because art is self-expression. And you can’t love self-expression if you hate the thing it’s an expression of.

That sentence stopped me. We sat with it for a second.

“You can’t find yourself if you don’t like yourself enough to look”

Andy has a second podcast called Right Side Out. Episode 5 is about his relationship with his mum and everything that came with it. I told him during the conversation that it’s one of the most emotional things I’ve heard online — and that’s not something I say lightly.

What stuck with me wasn’t just the vulnerability. It was the framing on his website. He didn’t make the podcast to talk about himself. He made it to help people in similar situations find themselves.

And the line that anchors the whole thing: “You can’t find yourself if you don’t like yourself enough to look.”

I asked him how long it took him to actually start liking himself the way he is.

His answer wasn’t a clean number. It’s a thing he has to keep returning to, he said. Loving himself is a continual battle. But his values and his core beliefs are right. They’re in the right place to help him return to that and remember: this all works better if you work with yourself instead of against it.

Taste, the end of perfect, and the counterculture that’s coming

About halfway through, Andy reframed a word I’ve been hearing in design for years: taste.

He doesn’t think of taste as preference or trend literacy. He thinks of it as the palette of your soul. Your soul’s taste buds. What lights you up. What you have a hunger for.

And he made a really sharp point about it: you can’t just do what you’ve always loved, because things expire. Things lose their flavour. If you eat the same thing every day, eventually you’re going to hate it. So listening to your own taste means staying in conversation with what’s actually feeding you — not what was feeding you ten years ago.

This is where the AI conversation came in. Andy is roughly 98% anti-AI, by his own count. But he was careful to add the 2% caveat — he doesn’t want the creative world to slip into anti-intellectualism the way the food world slipped into anti-science with the GMO panic. He has friends with PhDs in computer science. He respects the people who built the underlying technology. His issue is with how it’s being deployed, how unregulated it is, and how it’s quietly forcing everyone in a corporate job to use it whether they want to or not.

But the thing he said that I keep coming back to is this: “We are never going to love perfect ever again.”

His thesis is that AI ending the era of polish is actually a gift to humans. Lo-fi is coming back. Indie is coming back. DIY is coming back. The bands he loved twenty years ago are seeing renewed interest. The counterculture is rebuilding itself. And the only thing AI can’t replicate is the most important thing in art anyway: why a specific human made this specific thing.

He used a metaphor I’m going to steal forever. Pianos have been able to play themselves since the early 1900s. We don’t find that interesting. It’s interesting when a person plays a piano badly, brilliantly, drunkenly, in love. The why is the soul of it.

Working with his wife, the Beatles, and hard ≠ bad

Andy collaborates closely with his wife Sophie. They’ve made children’s books together. They argue a lot. He thinks that’s the whole point.

His comparison was the Beatles. Paul McCartney cared about pop. John Lennon cared about art. They fought. And the work was better because they fought.

The Foo Fighters quote he pulled from comedian James Acaster was: the first two albums were difficult and hard, then they decided to have fun, and after that nothing they made was good again.

A lot of making art sucks, he said. A lot of it is hard. And his favourite lesson from his dad has become his entire creative philosophy: “Life is hard. But it doesn’t mean it’s bad. Hard and bad are not the same thing.”

I think every freelancer and every creative who’s been doing this longer than five years needs to hear that line in their bones.

The conversation I wasn’t ready for

I’ll be honest with you. I prepared a list of questions for Andy. I wanted to ask him about Creative Pep Talk’s evolution, about the business side, about how he chooses which voices to amplify on his platform. We covered some of that. But the conversation kept pulling itself toward something deeper.

At the end he told me this was the most personal interview he’d ever done. I told him it was probably the deepest conversation I’ve ever had on this podcast. Both of those things are true. And neither of us planned it.

If you take one thing from this episode, let it be this: cultivating yourself works better than fixing yourself. And you can’t find yourself if you don’t like yourself enough to look.

The full conversation is live now.