Hollywood Is Unhinged

Episode 11 of Unhinged Founder = Out now!

There is something deeply unwell about the fact that two kids from North Carolina, both packed up in 2009, moved to Los Angeles, and somehow ended up building careers inside the same industry, just in completely different corners of it.

That’s the backbone of this week’s episode, which we titled Hollywood Is Unhinged. Because it is. Genuinely.

Will Griffin and I grew up a few hours apart. Same Southern politeness. Same public school systems. Same quiet, don’t-make-it-weird ambition that North Carolina breeds into you. And then we both decided that wasn’t enough.

So we left.

When I moved to LA, I had five hundred dollars, no job, and a delusional level of confidence that something would work out. It took me a year and a half to get hired full-time in PR. Before that, I was tray passing, coaching cheerleading, saying yes to anything that paid. I cried a lot. I questioned myself constantly. I kept going anyway.

Will moved into production life. Sets. Crews. The invisible labor that keeps Hollywood spinning. He worked as a production assistant. He wrangled extras. He joined SAG and did background work because it paid more than being on the crew. Which is such a Hollywood twist that it almost feels fake.

We were in the same city. The same years. The same industry. And yet our lives barely touched. Okay they didn’t touch at all.

He was working his way toward a writer’s room. Applying to programs with acceptance rates that are basically nonexistent. Getting close. Getting rejected. Trying again.

I was standing on red carpets holding clipboards. Pitching reporters. Managing crises. Learning quickly that proximity to fame does not equal stability.

There’s this illusion that once you’re “in entertainment,” you’ve made it. What you actually are is in the ecosystem. And that ecosystem is chaotic.

Writers rooms where jokes get rewritten in real time because a live audience didn’t laugh. Studio politics. Assistant hierarchies. The emotional whiplash of being almost selected. The exhaustion of proving yourself over and over again.

Listening to Will talk about finally landing in the Warner Bros Writers Program and eventually writing on Fuller House felt surreal. Not because of the nostalgia. But because I know what those years before that looked like. The uncertainty. The waiting. The quiet stubbornness it takes to stay.

At the same time, I know what my version of staying looked like. Agency burnout. Mental health spirals. The constant low-grade panic about money and relevance and whether I had chosen the wrong coast.

Hollywood is not clean. It is not linear. It is not stable. It is unhinged. And somehow, both of us survived it in our own ways.

There are stories from my Hollywood years that I still haven’t told publicly. The kind that feel too wild to explain without context. One day, I will.

But for now, I’ll leave the soundstage chaos, the writers’ room pressure, and the absurdity of building a creative career inside that machine to Will.

If you’ve ever left home chasing something bigger. If you’ve ever wondered what really happens behind studio gates. If you’ve ever been almost there and had to decide whether to keep going.

Episode 11, Hollywood Is Unhinged, is live now.