The Collators

Historian and educator Dr Roy Casagranda joins The Collators to explore how the past is reconstructed from incomplete evidence and how easily interpretation can harden into accepted fact. Roy discusses why historians must be honest about their assumptions, why entire people and perspectives disappear from the historical record, and what happens when disciplines studying human behaviour attempt to...

Surveillance has evolved from intercepting what people deliberately communicate to detecting what they involuntarily reveal. Who controls these capabilities? Can legislation and oversight keep pace? And what happens when surveillance no longer requires us to communicate or even carry a device? CTO and Inventor Mike Hawkes returns to the Collators to trace the evolution of surveillance from the ear...

Carmen Medina, former CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence, returns to The Collators to discuss her new project capturing the hard-won lessons, adages and mental cues that help analysts think better. The conversation becomes a deep exploration of what analysis actually is. What happens between reading and writing? Is insight something that can be taught? Are analysts too focused on argument, and no...

Dean Baratta joins The Collators to discuss a career that has taken him from Cold War military intelligence to law enforcement, homeland security, and the private sector. Dean also reflects on the future of the field, the danger of losing apprenticeship style learning, and why the next generation of analysts will need more than technology to remain useful. The conversation explores what changes wh...

This week, we are doubly blessed to welcome back a very special guest:  Konstantin from the Inside Russia YouTube channel . Moving past regular news cycles, we sit down for a deep, philosophical, and deeply personal conversation about the global information shift and the decaying trust in our media institutions. Konstantin shares powerful personal insights into what it's like to grow up inside a s...

Mark and Howard are joined by Sarah Holland, Chief Business Officer at Swiss biotech CDR Life and President of the Swiss Healthcare Licensing Group, to explore what intelligence looks like in the private sector. Sarah explains how biotech companies use competitive intelligence, scientific data, market insight, expert networks, conferences, regulatory signals, and even industry gossip to make high-...

Mark and Howard are joined by Ian Jackson for a wide-ranging conversation about comics, science fiction, nostalgia, imagination, and critical thinking.  Ian shares his journey from archaeology, theatre, travel, and art handling to running a one-man comic shop built around nostalgia, community, and geek culture. This is not just an episode about comics or science fiction. It is about why imaginatio...

In this episode, Mark and Howard are joined by David Allen, a former Metropolitan Police officer who joined the job in 1966 and later became a collator at Bow Street. David shares what policing the West End was really like, how the Collator's Office worked, and why apparently trivial scraps of information could sometimes become the key to serious investigations.

In this episode of The Collators , Howard and Mark are joined by veteran intelligence professional David Jimenez , whose career spans military intelligence, federal law enforcement, counter-drug analysis, and higher education.   The conversation explores what really transfers across intelligence, law enforcement, and the private sector; the pressures analysts face when decision-makers want certain...

Mark and Howard explore the reality of murder investigations through the lens of Howard's 34-year police career. Together, they unpack the complexity of homicide inquiries, from scene guards and incident rooms to timelines, evidence, scrutiny and the sheer weight of responsibility involved. Howard shares how his first experiences of murder investigation shaped his career, including his early work...

What does it really mean to be situationally aware? In this episode, Mark and Howard speak with Dr. Mica Endsley about how people and teams make sense of complex, fast-changing environments, and why situational awareness is crucial for everyone, not just the military.   Dr. Endsley is a leading authority on situational awareness, an engineer, and a former Chief Scientist of the United States Air F...

A simple but urgent question: what is policing actually for? Prompted by recent events and troubling examples of law enforcement in action, Mark and Howard step back from the headlines to explore the principles that are supposed to define good policing. The conversation traces the history of the Office of Constable , the Peelian principles , and the idea that police should operate with the consent...

Konstantin Samoilov grew up in Russia, lived in the United States, then returned to build a successful life in Moscow, until 2022 changed everything. In this conversation with Mark and Howard, Konstantin explains how his YouTube channel began as a hobby to translate everyday Russia for a Western audience, and why the invasion of Ukraine pushed him from observer to daily documentarian, and ultimate...

Mark and Howard are joined by Deborah Osborne. R etired intelligence analyst and educator whose career spans the Buffalo Police Department and the U.S. Secret Service.   A wide-ranging conversation about what analysis actually is, why the profession so often struggles to define itself, and what "good" looks like in practice.  Debbie's journey into the craft is anything but linear (she didn't becom...

There's an old joke in intel. Three analysts, six opinions. Well in this pod, three intelligence nerds walk into a podcast and end up debating about standards, ethics, and the limits of what humans can explain about their own thinking. Jeremy Levin (analyst, trainer, and long-time intelligence practitioner) sits down with Mark Lockwood and Howard Atkin to discuss how analytic standards evolved fro...

Dr. James Wilson returns to the collators, and this time the topic is trust. Jim shares what it's like when families walk into the clinic sceptical, anxious, or armed with competing "expert" advice, and how he had to rethink his own approach: less authority-as-command, more humility, disclosure, and coaching. Mark and Howard connect the dots to policing, courts, and the wider attention economy whe...

What does a banking crash have to do with frontline services quietly collapsing a decade later? In this episode, Mark and Howard are joined by award-winning political scientist and economist Mark Blyth (Brown University) to trace the "breadcrumb trail" from 2008 to today's brittle institutions, hollowed-out state capacity, and a politics increasingly powered by distraction — mostly in the UK, but...

For our special Christmas episode, we're honoured to speak to Paul Chato, comedian, TV executive, and YouTuber. We talk about his journey, comedy in general, and more than a fair share of Star Trek nerdiness (spoiler: Paul and Mark are pre-Kelvin fans; Howard denies all knowledge…). Some laughs, banter and occasional hot takes.  All the best for 2026, take it steady folks.  https://thecollators.co...

In this episode, Mark and Howard unpack what "professionalisation" really means for intelligence and analysis, and why professional bodies can be both a career accelerator and a hidden constraint. They explore the "guild vs club" problem (who controls standards, entry, and accountability), why silos persist across sectors, and why this matters more than ever as AI-driven decision support becomes w...

Mark and Howard sit down with Prof. Andrew Dillon (UT Austin) to ask what information really is and why the answer starts with people, not machines. Andrew maps the triangle of data, people and technology and argues that information is an experience, not a spreadsheet.  A discussion of the lure of AI, why judgement still matters, and how we might regulate misinformation the way we regulate food; t...

In this episode, Mark and Howard explore why forecasting is so often wrong and what prediction really requires. From homicides to the stock market, prediction sounds simple until the future fights back. Statistics and logic can take you far, but judgement, context, and humility do the rest.

In this episode of The Collators, Mark and Howard explore the promises and pitfalls of virtual reality. Not as a gaming gimmick, but as a tool for intelligence, analysis, and decision-making. From Minority Report-style data walls to simple post-it notes, they ask whether VR and data visualisation actually help us see the world more clearly, or just distract us with prettier illusions. Transcript,...

From Tandy Radioshack to nuclear submarines, this episode traces an extraordinary journey through the intersections of technology, curiosity, and courage. Mark and Howard talk with Mike Hawkes, a technologist, inventor, and pioneer of secure digital systems whose career began in fixing computers in a local store and ended up influencing the security architecture behind global online transactions t...

In this episode of The Collators, Mark and Howard dig into the firehose of the digital age. From the days of cereal-box reading and limited TV channels to today's infinite scroll of TikTok, Twitter, and AI-generated content, how has the internet reshaped the way we process and perhaps fail to really think about the information we receive. Visit us at https://thecollators.com

From crime scenes to classrooms, boardrooms to briefing papers, the tension between numbers and narratives runs through every profession that tries to make sense of the world. Mark and Howard ask whether everything that counts can, in fact, be counted. What happens when we mistake measurement for meaning? Why do humans crave certainty even when the evidence is uncertain? And how do analysts, scien...