I had my childhood friend on the podcast recently.
Not just any friend—someone who actually made it in Hollywood. Poull Brian is an executive producer and the director behind Charles Bradley: Soul of America, a critically acclaimed Netflix documentary.
In other words, he did the thing so many people dream about.
And yet, when we started talking, it didn’t feel like we were discussing success.
It felt like we were talking about an industry in free fall.
The version of Hollywood most of us grew up imagining—the one with steady work, career ladders, and long-term stability—is disappearing.
Poull told me that after the massive boom of the streaming wars, the industry has sharply contracted. Entire segments, especially unscripted television, have been gutted. The work simply isn’t there anymore.
He shared a story that stuck with me. An Oscar-winning sound mixer—someone who worked on Whiplash—only had ten days of work last year.
Ten days.
There’s something unsettling about that. Not because we expect fame to guarantee stability, but because it reminds us that even the most accomplished among us aren’t immune to systemic change.
And it’s not just isolated stories. People with Emmys, decades of experience, real careers…are quietly leaving. Teaching. Bartending. Trying to figure out how to support their families.
Sitting across from Poull, I couldn’t help but compare his world to mine.
Medicine, for all its flaws, has been relatively stable. The path is defined. The demand is predictable. There’s a sense that if you follow the rules, you’ll be okay.
That illusion doesn’t exist in film anymore.
And maybe, if we’re being honest, it won’t exist in many fields for much longer.
Part of what’s happening is something we usually celebrate: democratization.
Poull talked about how technology has completely changed the game. You no longer need a massive budget or a studio backing you. With a relatively affordable camera and editing software, you can create a film that would have been impossible twenty years ago.
That’s a beautiful thing.
It means more voices. More stories. More access.
But it also means something else.
When everyone can create, the value of creating shifts.
The barriers to entry drop, and so does the economic security that used to come with clearing those barriers.
For someone making films purely out of passion, this is an incredible moment. For someone trying to build a traditional career and support a family, it’s destabilizing.
At one point, I asked a question I’ve been thinking about a lot.
Does this shift come at the cost of quality?
When you can spend years crafting a documentary and still get fewer views than a quickly produced YouTube video, what does that say about what we value?
Poull didn’t dismiss the concern, but he reframed it. The line between “amateur” and “professional” is blurring. Many YouTube creators are building massive audiences and producing content at an incredibly high level.
In some ways, the system isn’t lowering quality. It’s redefining it.
For young people looking to enter the industry, Poull had some surprisingly direct advice.
Don’t go into massive debt for film school.
Not because education doesn’t matter, but because the industry is changing too quickly. By the time you graduate, the rules may have already shifted again.
Instead, he suggested something that would have sounded radical a decade ago: build your own audience first.
The old model—create a sample, get an agent, pitch to a network—is breaking down. Distribution deals are harder to come by. Gatekeepers have less power.
Today, creators need to flip the script. Start with the audience. Develop your voice. Own your work. Then figure out distribution.
It’s a completely different way of thinking about a career.
And then, of course, there’s AI.
If everything we talked about before feels like disruption, AI feels like something else entirely. We described it as a coming forest fire, one that hasn’t fully hit yet, but is impossible to ignore.
He’s currently working on a sizzle reel for an AI-generated feature film. And even as someone embracing the technology, he admitted something that many people are quietly thinking:
This could replace a lot of traditional jobs.
When the cost of creating content drops close to zero, when you can generate scenes without cameras, crews, or locations, the economic incentives become hard to ignore.
That doesn’t mean human-driven art disappears. Poull doesn’t believe that. Neither do I.
But it does mean the landscape changes—permanently.
At some point in the conversation, I found myself reaching for a different kind of analogy.
Think about diamonds.
We now have the technology to create lab-grown diamonds that are nearly identical to natural ones—and far cheaper. And yet, there’s still a market for the “real” thing. For something that feels authentic, scarce, human.
I wonder if storytelling will follow a similar path.
Maybe there will always be space, maybe even a premium, for work that is unmistakably human.
So what do we do with all of this?
It’s easy to fall into a scarcity mindset. To look at these changes and see only loss—jobs disappearing, industries shrinking, paths becoming unclear.
I’ve felt that pull myself.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, both in medicine and in life, it’s that mindset matters more than we think.
When I was burned out as a physician, I felt trapped. It seemed like there were no good options. But shifting to an abundance mindset—seeing possibilities instead of limitations—changed everything.
And I think the same applies here.
The world is changing. That part is undeniable.
The question is how we choose to interpret that change.
After the recording, Powell told me he’s been spending time studying YouTube creators and digital strategists—trying to understand where things are going instead of clinging to where they’ve been.
There was something hopeful in that.
Because underneath all the disruption, one thing still feels true:
We are wired for stories.
No matter how complex technology becomes, no matter how much AI reshapes the landscape, we still need people who can make sense of it. People who can translate chaos into meaning. People who can connect.
That doesn’t go away.
If anything, it becomes more valuable.
The cameras might be changing. The platforms might be shifting. The business models might be collapsing and rebuilding in real time.
But the need to tell stories, and to hear them, remains.
And maybe that’s the part worth holding onto.
I love this so much. It’s thought-provoking about change, but I especially like your thoughts on the value of story.
I’d like to extend your point just a bit, to our personal relationships. It occurs to me that story is vitally important in that context as well.
Authentic Belonging, one of our three sources of meaning, requires us to know each other’s stories. To ask great questions and listen with intention. And to share our own stories. That’s when we start to feel that we matter to each other.