In this special episode of The Collators, Mark and Howard speak with Carmen Medina, former Deputy Director of Intelligence at the CIA and one of the most respected reformers in modern intelligence analysis.

Carmen’s career spanned three decades at the heart of U.S. intelligence, leading analytic teams through the end of the Cold War, the information revolution, and the challenges of a world where secrets collide with the open internet.

Together, they explore:

- What it means to think critically inside large institutions.
- How bias and diversity of thought shape intelligence work.
- The tension between secrecy, sharing, and truth.
- Why categorisation, curiosity, and dissent are vital to good analysis.
- The impact of AI and automation on human judgement.

Reflective, candid, and often funny, Carmen’s insights reveal the reality of analysis as both craft and calling, and a human attempt to make sense of the world.

Transcript and more at https://thecollators.com

Musical spreadsheets, a string of car thefts, and a chance observation spark a question at the heart of this episode: what exactly is a pattern, and how do we recognise one?

Mark and Howard explore Florence Nightingale’s statistical diagrams to modern AI pattern recognition, exploring how humans find meaning in data and how sometimes, meaning finds us. They discuss the risks of seeing structure where none exists, the value of curiosity, and why luck and lateral thinking still matter in an age of algorithms.

Shownotes and more available from https://thecollators.com