Julianne Fraser

This week on Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with Julianne Fraser, founder and CEO of Dialogue New York, to talk about what it actually takes to protect your creativity in a world that’s trying to flatten it. We get into the tension between algorithms and originality, why setting boundaries with social media isn’t optional anymore, and how carving out real time for yourself can unlock better ideas than any scroll ever will. Julianne shares her Five Rules for Cultivating Creativity, from building guardrails around your digital life to creating space for “creative mornings” to trusting your own taste instead of chasing trends. It’s a conversation about getting back to yourself, doing the work offline, and making sure your ideas still feel like yours.What I appreciate most about this conversation is how practical it is. There’s no fantasy version of creativity here. It’s about being intentional with your time, attention, and input. It’s about knowing when to step away, when to go outside, when to talk to people, and when to sit alone with a notebook to actually think. That balance is hard to find, especially when everything online is designed to pull you back in, but it’s the difference between reacting to the world and shaping your own point of view. Once you start to feel that shift, even in small ways, it changes how you show up in your work and in your life.My latest profile for Fine Dining Lovers is on Chef Brad Alan Mathews, the chef and co-owner of Bar Le Cotê in Los Olivos, CA. He shares his lifelong love of food and music, and his journey to sobriety. Thank you to Paul Feinstein for his guidance and support with this piece. For anyone in the industry struggling with substances or looking for options for a different approach to a work/life balance, Ben’s Friends is a good place to start. INTRODUCTIONHello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz. Today, I sit down with Julianne Fraser, the founder and CEO of Dialogue New York, a digital media agency. She shares her Five Rules for Cultivating Creativity.She talks about the irony of her process in setting social media guardrails, carving out time in anyone’s busy schedule for creative mornings, and that by following feelings and not trends will lead you to your best ideas. It’s a great conversation for anyone who’s looking to add more creativity into their life and to ground themselves with daily practices of making space to allow for new ideas. So let’s get into the rules.OPENING CONVERSATIONJulianne, it is so nice to meet you. So great to see someone coming all the way to Brooklyn. I miss my hometown. Welcome to the show.Thank you for having me. Excited to chat. I’m a child of the 80s and 90s. I still remember the DIY punk era of the hard line between creativity and brands. Today’s generation seems not to care about that. Why has creativity come to be such a commodity? Why do you think that shift happened?I think it’s been a slow erosion of creativity over time. I’ve been in my career for 15 years in the digital space. Little by little, the way that social media has grown and the power of the algorithm has just kind of shrunk original creativity over time. This year, in the last five years with AI, it’s compounding a really frightening degree. It’s just the nature of technology and innovation.What’s interesting is as we’re seeing it shrivel away in many facets of social media, I think people are really championing it. Such desire to get back to nostalgic, old ways of analog. I’m hoping for like a renaissance. I’m hopeful that people will go back to kind of old-fashioned ways of sparking their creativity.IAN SCHRAGER & HOSPITALITY INSPIRATIONLooking backwards at people who might be inspirations for that spark, you worked with Ian Schrager, someone who turned the idea of going to a hotel into a story and experience. What did you take away from your time with him?That was my most inspiring brand I’ve ever worked with in my career. What he did with the hospitality industry in the 80s, first with Morgan’s Hotel Group, really just kind of revolutionized the notion of a lobby as a space of socialization an