In this episode of Inside the Collective, Brad Amos sits down with Willie Mack, a creative and commercial strategist and partner at The Jays and The Carrot Collective, who has led over $1 billion in licensing and partnership deals and co-authored the legislation that opened New York's cannabis market.

They talk about the difference between brands that genuinely move culture and ones that just borrow from it, what most people get wrong about partnership, and how staying human matters most in categories built to sensationalise or sanitise, like cannabis and death tech. Willie also connects his photography and meditation practice directly to how he approaches business problems, and shares an unusually grounded take on where AI does and doesn't belong in creative work.

A conversation about building things that are commercially real without losing what made them worth building.

Inside the Collective is a podcast from The Carrot Collective, exploring the thinking behind how people work.

In this episode of Inside the Collective, Brad Amos sits down with Lorenzo Petrillo, urban placemaker, design strategist and founder of Loop Lab, a Singapore-based consultancy that has spent 12 years helping governments and organisations unlock the value of underused public space.

Lorenzo and Brad talk about why he pitched “measuring the number of smiles” to government stakeholders instead of a financial return, how his team finds the people a space was never designed for, and why placemaking should be tested cheap and fast rather than planned to death. They also get into desire paths, gentrification, the fight for pedestrianisation and colour on Singapore's streets, and what stops good ideas getting signed off.

A conversation about building public spaces that people actually make their own.

Inside the Collective is a podcast from The Carrot Collective, exploring the thinking behind how people work.

In this episode of Inside the Collective, Brad Amos sits down with Frances Gaillard, brand strategist, self-described advertising nerd and founder of 43 Elephants, a specialist brand and growth collective for founder-led and challenger businesses.

Frances and Brad talk about why literal, word-for-word localisation is a wasted opportunity, and what “freedom within a framework” looks like when it works.

They dig into how ambition and taste shift across Singapore, Shanghai, London and the US, why “feedforward” beats feedback, and how easily good teams slide into what Frances calls the “vortex of doom” — months of committee-driven churn that produces work nobody actually believes in. They also talk candidly about trust, friction, and the disappearing courage to call bullshit.

A conversation about building brands and client relationships that can hold structure and nuance at the same time.

Inside the Collective is a podcast from The Carrot Collective, exploring the thinking behind how people work.

In this episode of Inside the Collective, Brad Amos sits down with Sushma Panchawati, co-founder and CEO of a stealth AI startup and a strategist with nearly two decades in consumer insights and brand strategy.

Sushma reflects on why strategy so often feels like starting from scratch, what causes good insights to die quietly inside organisations, and why AI produces mediocre output in the hands of non-experts but becomes a superpower for people who already know their craft.

She talks about the difference between an insight that's interesting and one that actually changes a decision, why leaders should ask "what do we already know?" before commissioning more data, and how strategists do their best work by holding many lenses at once without drowning in them.

A conversation about signal over noise, expertise over automation, and why the simplest question is often the most useful one.

Inside the Collective is a podcast from The Carrot Collective, exploring the thinking behind how people work.

In this episode of Inside the Collective, Brad Amos sits down with May Seow, who has spent her career building systems across tech, consulting, banking and creative environments.

May reflects on what happens when you use structure to unlock better thinking rather than constrain it. She talks about why leaders are defined by the questions they ask, how small experiments can lead to outsized change, and why the role of technology should be to free people and imagination, not flatten them.

Along the way, she talks about abundance versus scarcity in teams, what separates a healthy creative engine from a shiny but hollow one, why cost-cutting so often fails as a growth move, and how to keep human judgment sharp when AI makes it easy to move fast and sound certain.

A conversation about clarity, curiosity, systems and staying meaningfully human while everything else speeds up.

Inside the Collective is a podcast from The Carrot Collective, exploring the thinking behind how people work.

Saul Betmead de Chasteigner has worked across agencies, Oxford, the United Nations and leadership programmes designed to help people think more clearly.

In this conversation, he reflects on the deeply personal experience that first drew him to psychology, why he believes every business problem hides a human one, and what it takes to create the kind of trust where people finally say the thing they have been avoiding.

He talks about leadership as earned authority rather than status, why so many organisations get trapped by their own success, what culture does to the way people interpret the world, and how becoming a parent radically sharpened his sense of what actually matters.

It is a rich episode about change, assumptions, perspective and the hard work of helping people see differently.

In this episode of Inside the Collective, Brad Amos sits down with Nathan Bell, who has spent years inside traditional agencies but is here to talk about why he no longer believes the old model is enough.

Nathan reflects on the limitations of specialist agencies, the moment he realised The Carrot Collective could become a genuine alternative, and why he now sees access to talent as more powerful than ownership of it. Along the way, he talks about what people are actually seeking when they join a collective, why generosity and entrepreneurial energy matter more than passive membership, how the team is solving hard structural problems that most agencies never have to face, and why the only sensible response to AI is to learn, experiment and keep moving.

A conversation about building systems for trust, creating room for better ideas, and shaping a future of creative work that is more flexible, more human and a bit less stuck in the past.
This episode is part of the Origin Sessions, the first six conversations that shaped Inside the Collective before Season 1. Recorded early and released as a set, they capture the show finding its voice.

In this episode of Inside the Collective, Brad Amos sits down with Patrick Carr, who has built a career across China, Bangkok and the wider global media industry, working on stories designed to travel without losing their humanity.

Patrick reflects on China's creative rise, the projects that helped audiences see more than headlines, and the commissioning culture that now pushes so much content toward the safe, familiar and easily marketable. He talks candidly about why too many streamers are making the same old stuff, what gets lost when originality is squeezed out, and why the future of good creative work still depends on bridge-building, perspective and values, not just technology.
A conversation about storytelling with heart, and what it takes to keep making work that matters.

This episode is part of the Origin Sessions, the first six conversations that shaped Inside the Collective before Season 1. Recorded early and released as a set, they capture the show finding its voice.