The Collators

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.

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 building physical timelines on incident room walls to help detectives make sense of huge volumes of information. The conversation also challenges popular myths created by TV crime dramas and reflects on the emotional cost of working the most serious investigations in policing.

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 of the public, not simply the power of the state.