In this episode of Inside the Collective, Brad Amos sits down with Emma Eichbaum, a researcher and strategist with close to two decades of experience across APAC, including 13 years at Kantar working in New Zealand, Thailand and Singapore, and now founder of Oak Tree Insights and Consulting.

They talk about the real difference between research that's rigorous and research that's useful, why she stayed deliberately industry-agnostic instead of specialising, and where AI genuinely helps versus where it flattens insight into averages. Emma also shares what it's like watching organisations ignore evidence that points clearly in one direction, and how her read on a market changes depending on which country she's physically standing in.

A conversation about what it actually takes to turn data into a decision someone will act on.

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 Sam Ward, founder of Playmaker Creative Club and producer of three Olympic Games, who has spent 15 years building brand experiences at the intersection of sport, fashion and culture.

They talk about why Sam believes an idea should be simple enough for his nan to understand and his CMO to sign off, the moments brands get culture badly wrong because the right people weren't in the room, and why he thinks pressure produces the best work rather than something to be protected from.

Sam also opens up about his PTSD diagnosis and how it shapes how he performs under stress, and shares the hardest client conversation of his career.

A conversation about keeping an idea, and yourself, intact under pressure.

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 Steve Kyriakou, a creative director and strategy director with 20 years of experience across Toronto, Singapore and Tokyo, and a Cannes Lion and D&AD Pencil winner.

They talk about why Steve believes creativity has to come from vulnerability, not just prompting, what building a gaming community from scratch taught him about message over craft, and the responsibility the advertising industry has to junior creatives now competing against AI.
Steve also opens up about the Tiger Beer rebrand, the moment he pitched an idea and got it rejected only to repackage it and win, and what he'd have done differently if he weren't afraid.

A conversation about where human creativity actually starts, and what AI can't do without it.

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 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.