Creativity is the magic of nothing existing and then something does. That's how Adam Jennings put it to me, and it's stuck with me since we stopped recording. Adam runs Contour, a studio that builds brands for founders who've outgrown the one they started with. We worked together a decade ago, and it turns out neither of us has changed much. He still rides bikes and colours in for a living. I still ask too many questions. This conversation kept circling back to one idea: AI can help you create, but it can't be the thing doing the creating. Not because it isn't clever, but because it only knows what's already happened. Brand growth, like all real creativity, lives in the space where nothing has happened yet. We talked about the danger of everyone reaching for the same tool. If every business builds its brand with the same AI prompt, you don't get a market full of distinct companies. You get an average nobody asked for. Good branding was never about beating the competition anyway. It's about being different from them. There's a cost to skipping the hard part too. Adam still sketches on Post-it notes before he touches a screen. He talked about creativity as a muscle, one that weakens if you stop using it. Are you outsourcing your workload, or are you quietly outsourcing your thinking? That's the question I kept sitting with long after we finished. We also got into the murky business of what AI-assisted work is actually worth. If a brilliant answer takes ten minutes instead of ten years, is it worth less? Or more, because it solved the problem faster? Neither of us landed on an answer. Some conversations aren't supposed to end tidily. We ran long on this one, partly because it was hot enough to melt both of us, mostly because neither of us wanted to stop. Adam's staying on the side of earned creativity, and after this chat, so am I.

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Your host - Shaun Phillips

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