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 earliest days of radio interception to a world of smartphones, mesh networks, and Wi-Fi routers. We also discuss the growing gap between collecting information and understanding it, and whether we are about to use AI to charge into an Orwellian situation?

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 not enough on thinking? And how do our tools, categories, filters, emotions and intuitions shape what we are able to know?

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 when intelligence analysis leaves the traditional intelligence world: how analysts adapt to new cultures, how they communicate risk without causing panic, whether analysts should make recommendations or just assess the situation.

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 state-controlled information system. He opens up about the exact moment he realized as a child, that the narrative he was being fed didn't match reality, and how events like the response to the Chernobyl disaster cemented that understanding.

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-stakes decisions about drug development and partnerships.

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 imagination matters; how stories shape identity, how science fiction helps us ask "what if?", and why the ability to think beyond the obvious may be one of the most important skills we have.

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.