I had an incredible chance to talk to Caitlin Burns, the producer behind the story worlds of Pirates of the Caribbean, Avatar, Halo, and Batman. She’s a pioneer of the concept of Transmedia Storytelling in Hollywood, best known for her work creating multiplatform narrative strategies for major global film franchises, AAA console games, television shows and global brands. Along the way, she developed a reputation as the producer to call when you need a new storyworld launched, new experience type developed, or to scale a sustainable story business across platforms. Her past projects include: Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, Tron, James Cameron’s Avatar & Halo and work for companies including DC, UNICEF and The Coca-Cola Company. Find more about her work here.

We talked about taste (Godzilla is, in her words, “her homegirl forever”), about why creative limits produce better work than a blank page, and about the piece of editorial advice that rewired how she gives feedback: “If someone tells you something isn’t working, they’re right. If they tell you how to fix it, they’re wrong.”

It’s a conversation about storytelling, taste, and building real relationships in an industry built on them, and about why the people who create the biggest creative worlds are usually the ones brave enough to ask the “dumb question” out loud.

📌 Connect with Caitlin on LinkedIn, subscribe to her Substack and check out her website.

Here are a few ideas that stuck with me after we talked:

On feedback and the creative process

* “If someone tells you something in your work isn’t working, they’re right. If they tell you how to fix it, they’re wrong.”

* “The worst thing that can happen is no one will remember it.”

* “I will let you fail a few times and then I’ll come in, and we can work through it together.”

On “they won’t let us”

* “If you can’t specifically describe or point to a verifiable place that is blocking you, “they” is meaningless. If you can’t identify who ‘they’ are, you’re the one doing it.”

* “Don’t talk yourself out of doing something because you think there is a mysterious or vague block.”

On parameters/limitations

* “I love the French term of art: paramètres. Even with complete freedom, we have physical bodies, the scope of our own imagination, the space on the canvas — there are always parameters.”

On networking-but-not-networking

* “Networking is the New York City national sport. But it is all about making friends. That is its primary function.”

* “It’s who you know (not some magical cohort of fancy Hollywood execs). Most teams that do significant creative work come from communities and friendships built over months and years.”

On art and quality

* “Quality does not mean expense.”

* “If we do it well, it’ll inspire a feeling in someone. With those feelings, people can craft the reality they’ll live in. If we can’t imagine futures with us in them, we won’t make them.”

* “It’s really hard to make a movie. It’s a bold thing just to create a video of something you’ve imagined and put it online.”

On curiosity

* “I still really want to ask the dumb question — there are probably 3 other people in the room who need it clarified too.”

On identity/meaning

* “I felt very isolated, and through community theatre I found a place where my contributions meant something — even if people didn’t like me, we got this thing together.”

* “This is work that allows me to be the fullest person I can be.”

* “Just because you don’t reach a lot of people doesn’t mean you don’t reach people deeply.”

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Today’s conversation deserved to be shared in every form. Audio is above, video is further down, and the full transcript is attached.

On this page:

* Who Candice is, in one paragraph.

* The video version of the conversation.

* The rabbit holes, every reference from the conversation, linked.

* Chapters, timestamped, so you can jump straight to what pulls you.

About Candice Walker

Candice Walker is a cultural analyst and the writer behind The Fashioned Mind, a Substack that dissects the psychology of fashion: the human insights and motivations underneath consumer behavior and cultural shifts. Based in the UK, she digs into why we buy what we buy, why trends take the shape they do, and what our aesthetics say about who we are trying to become. In this conversation we mapped the full spectrum of what gets sold to women as a life: girlboss, tradwife, soft life, and the third thing quietly being built in between. Check out Candice’s newsletter below:

The video

The rabbit holes

Everything we referenced, for your own falling-down:

* The Fashioned Mind, Candice’s Substack. Brands, trends, theory. Start with her piece on masculinity and the looksmaxxing trend, the one we discussed on air. Read this: The psychology of: Male beauty article

* Sophia Amoruso’s 2014 memoir #Girlboss, the book that named an era. Nasty Gal, Glossier, The Wing, Outdoor Voices: the whole 2015 to 2018 arc, and the 2020 collapse.

* Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the corporate ancestor of the girlboss, and a reminder that every generation renegotiates what ambition is allowed to look like.

* The podcast Candice and I were both listening to on the rise and fall of the girlboss.

* Ballerina Farm and Nara Smith, the 2023 to 2024 face of tradwife content. Nara has said she doesn’t consider herself a tradwife.

* Despite the appeal of quick internet money, creator jobs are declining in appeal. Instead, young people crave stability and offline success.

* Soft life in its original context: Nigerian influencer culture and Black Twitter in the late 2010s, rest as resistance for Black women specifically, before global TikTok flattened it into matcha and Pilates.

* Sharmadean Reid, founder of The Stack World (and before that WAH Nails and Beautystack). Candice brought her up as the proof point: a Black single mother from London building in public, and what her visibility made possible for the women watching.

* Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now? Chanté Joseph’s British Vogue piece that lit up the internet, and the reframe underneath it: work and fulfillment quietly replacing romance as the dominant dream.

Conversation chapter list

00:00 Meet Candice Walker, cultural analyst

02:19 Girlboss: empowerment measured in valuation

03:58 Lean In vs. the brattier girlboss

04:20 Tradwife: submission reframed as serenity

07:42 Soft life, and what it meant before TikTok got it

09:12 Commodified rest: selling ease back to women

11:50 Aesthetic without credentials: can we trust what we see?

14:20 Fake empowerment: the system monetizes its own rejection

16:02 Who’s allowed the lifestyle: class, race, resources

17:58 Enter the portfolio career

20:13 US, UK, Canada: same trend, different speeds

22:07 Women leaving corporate: social media trend or job market reality

23:31 Work replacing romance: the Vogue piece

25:26 The silent assumption: a partner behind the scenes

26:50 What about the men: peacocking and the leisure gap

30:25 The third option, and who’s building it

32:26 The end of the template

34:20 Six months from now: we’ll check our own predictions

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This one's about refusing to let the day job suck the artist out of you. We get into Michael's taste, his references, the artist hiding inside the strategist, surviving a creative life mid-career, and more.

On this page:

* Who Michael is, in one paragraph and where you can connect with him.

* The rabbit holes, every reference from the conversation, linked.

* Chapters, timestamped, so you can jump to what pulls you.

About Michael LaVallee

Michael is an award-winning creative brand strategist with ten years across creative, connections, and GTM strategy, 360 campaign execution, social (paid and organic), thought leadership, experiential, and digital content. He’s been called a scrappy strategist who doesn’t settle for “good enough,” a creative team’s best friend, and a “yes, and” collaborator who’s never scared to be the hand raiser in the room. He’s worked across CPG, retail, gaming and entertainment, music, cloud and tech, B2B, and healthcare, for a client roster that runs Google Cloud, Live Nation, PlayStation, Oreo, TUMS, ChapStick, Hanes, Champion, Nexium24HR, Amazon, DSW, HBO, Halls, and the IL Lottery. He studied theatre at Columbia College Chicago, planning to act, before a senior-year solo performance class rewired his whole relationship to creativity (see: the steak). When he’s not doing strategy, he’s producing music, singing, songwriting, and shooting and editing content for his solo project, Kyzr Blue.

Music: Stream + watch Michael’s music

Instagram: @KyzrBlue @thatscreaminggay

TikTok: @Kyzrbluemusic

The rabbit holes

Everything we referenced, for your own falling-down:

* Ionnalee (also known as iamamiwhoami), the Swedish electronic artist Michael kept secret for years. Visual-album pioneer.

* Vivaldi, The Four Seasons, specifically Winter, Michael’s favorite. He played upright bass for eight years and somehow made first chair without ever practising, a mystery to this day.

* RAYE, “Winter Woman”, off This Music May Contain Hope, which samples Vivaldi’s Winter. Michael’s bridge for anyone who wants the classical thing in a modern wrapper. Play both back to back.

* AI cat soap operas on TikTok, the joy-core rabbit hole. Fat cat gets dumped, hits the gym, revenge-bodies his way back into her regrets. Now episodic, now voiced, now with villain cats stealing fur. No single link, just go find them and lose an afternoon.

* Group 7, the TikTok experiment from earlier this year where an artist promoting a song split the whole app into “groups.” Everyone wanted to be in Group 7. It made headlines and died in a week. A perfect little case study in how fast a thing can get born and buried.

* Cruise culture, the one trend Michael will cop to being late on. Cruise-tok is a whole universe and he wants in.

Conversation chapter list

00:00 Meet Michael LaVallee, and his creative diary called Kyzr Blue

03:00 The monthly trend roundups, and the “hot gay POV” that started it all

04:15 Quick hits: night owl, cooked-for, film over photography, concert girl

10:00 Eclectic taste, and why he thinks visually first

12:00 The steak: a solo performance piece that rewired everything

16:30 Joy-core, AI cat soap operas, and cruise-tok

23:00 Ionnalee, UK Garage, and the music he kept secret

29:00 First chair on the upright bass, and a case for Vivaldi’s Winter

31:50 The strategy advice he thinks is wrong: stop piling on the data

36:00 AI, corporate America, and losing the plot

44:30 “Thank you, Diva,” on trying to be AI’s bestie

45:45 The notes app: a niece’s gift list, a lyric, and a spider haiku

51:00 What the work gives him, and the accidental path into strategy

56:00 The version of Michael that hasn’t made it to the work yet

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A stranger at a San Francisco bar once looked Michael Bolognino up and down and said three words: cute, weird, cute. He's been living by them ever since. This conversation is about what happens when you stop explaining yourself and start trusting that verdict. It's also a philosophy of taste built on one idea: buy less, hunt more, and never be too much for the sake of being too much. Today’s conversation is all about Michael’s taste, references, approach to coaching, mid-life career pivots and more. It is available in audio, video and transcript.

On this page:

* Who Michael is, in one paragraph.

* The video version of the conversation.

* The rabbit holes, every reference from the conversation, linked.

* Chapters, timestamped, so you can jump to what pulls you.

About Michael Bolognino

Michael Bolognino spent twenty years in tech, the last thirteen at Google, before a quiet but total reckoning led him to coaching. He works with people who got what they thought they wanted and discovered something got lost along the way, helping them reconnect with themselves and use the careers they’ve built as a foundation rather than a cage. He and his husband spent two years renovating a falling-down house in the Berkshires, a project that became the unexpected origin point for both of their current careers. Michael describes his taste as “cute, weird, cute,” is a devoted thrifter and eBay obsessive, and is, by his own admission, a huge Mariah Carey fan.

The video

The rabbit holes

Everything we referenced, for your own falling-down:

* Rec League, the whisper network for great recs. Human recs only, on everything. Michael's collections run from vintage high-heeled Frye boots to a discontinued Comme des Garçons Dover Street Market cologne he tracks on eBay. Follow Kima while you are there too.

* Mariah Carey, as vocalist, writer, and lyricist. Michael singing one of her songs is here, and yes, it holds up.

* The Filomena, Architectural Digest feature on Michael’s house renovation

* Michael's inspiration list: Pee-wee Herman, Elsa Schiaparelli, Björk, tarot, Rossy de Palma, Pedro Almodóvar. More arriving on his website in autumn 2026.

* Thrifting and Goodwill as a regular practice. No link here, go outside and do your research.

* Uncompromising curation the Substack I brought up mid-conversation, but didn’t remember the name. Amazing resource by Martha Stewish. Martha writes essays on money, identity and the art of building quiet wealth while living beautifully. Check her work out.

Conversation chapter list

00:00 Meet Michael Bolognino, golden handcuff breaker02:38 Thirteen years at Google, then the crash05:45 Quick hits: vintage, vintage, vintage08:46 "Cute, weird, cute" and the discipline of restraint11:36 Goodwill as ritual: the treasure hunt14:23 Fifty eBay emails a morning, and his dad's Frye boots17:34 The Mariah Carey confession21:53 On not over-explaining your work22:40 Why AI won't replace coaches: the fresh pasta argument26:20 Sharing the quote vs. absorbing the nutrients32:23 The Filomena: raccoons, two years of Thursdays, two new careers39:24 "I make money serving humans"

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