Creative Careers in the AI Era — Who Adapts, Who Struggles, and What Comes Next

Okay, I'm just gonna say it... I went down a two-week research rabbit hole for this one and came out the other side with a lot of feelings and about 15 open browser tabs. This episode is me walking through the actual data, live, reacting to it in real time, and trying to figure out what it means for us. Some of it is not great, some of it is genuinely wild. One story involves Tyler Perry and $800 million. We get there. What we cover: Why graphic designers went from "moderately growing" to top-11 fastest declining jobs in two years (WEF Future of Jobs Report) The Upwork/Organization Science data on how AI actually hit freelancer incomes — and why the most experienced people took the steepest hits The four types of creative professionals I'm seeing right now, and how to figure out which one you are Three real-world stories: the gaming industry layoffs, Tyler Perry pausing an $800M studio expansion, and the Klarna Effect Six things you can actually do about all of this The legal stuff: WGA deal, SAG-AFTRA, copyright cases, EU transparency requirements, and why it matters more than people realize Links mentioned: WEF Future of Jobs Report 2025 McKinsey Superagency Report Hui, Reshef &amp; Zhou — freelancer earnings study (Organization Science) Upwork Future Workforce Index 2025 Brian Merchant, Wired — AI and video game industry jobs Tyler Perry — Hollywood Reporter Adobe AI Creative Frontier Study Fairly Trained — nonprofit certifying AI companies that use only licensed training data Ed Newton-Rex — Music Business Worldwide Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick — referenced throughout, genuinely recommend it The line I keep coming back to: "We're going to need to reconstruct meaning in creative work, find the parts of it that are irreducibly human. Where musicians once made money from records, they now depend on being excellent live. The economic model changed, but the human skill remained central." — Ethan Mollick That's the challenge. Figure out your version of being excellent live. Thanks for being here and for caring about your craft enough to think hard about its future.  Let's Connect! <li class="whitespace-normal br