I’ve hosted more than 1,500 people on my Sustain What webcast over six years and have been a guest on heaps of other shows. But I have to say my appearance on The Collators, run by two seasoned British police-intelligence professionals, was one of the most invigorating and refreshing conversations of all. Their podcast centers on how people in various fields come to understand our complex world and convey what they learn to others. I was their first journalist guest. Here’s the YouTube version with other links below:
The hosts are Mark Lockwood, an analyst and historian focused on information science and intelligence analysis in law enforcement and health and social care, and Howard Atkin, a former British police detective with over 45 years of involvement in all aspects of complex criminal investigation, intelligence and analysis.
Here’s their description of the episode, titled “Telling the Untellable”:
Drawing on more than four decades of reporting, Andrew Revkin reflects on the craft of journalism, the danger of becoming captured by a compelling narrative, and what happens when complicated realities are compressed into headlines designed to compete for attention.
From Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and TWA Flight 800 to climate reporting and the rise of social media, the conversation explores how journalists, analysts and scientists can get things wrong even while trying to establish what is true.
Starting with my sidelong journey from biology training into journalism, we explored my concerns about “narrative capture” and the dangers of a journalism model where the product is a “great story” when reality might actually be a tangled one. We talked about the latest climate change science and signals. Atkin and Lockwood weighed in with fascinating insights from their work in police investigations and intelligence. I don’t want to spoil the fun by transcribing. Take the time to listen and then weigh in - and please share this post of course.
You can also listen on Apple, Amazon or Spotify:
I encourage you to explore more episodes. Here are two I greatly enjoyed:
“Orwell Everywhere All at Once - Interview with Mike Hawkes”
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 are we about to use AI to charge into an Orwellian situation
Propaganda - Interview with Konstantin Samoilov
We 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.
That one brought me right back to my discussion with Renee Hobbs and Andrew Ryvkin on propaganda, Kremlin style and Trump style:
And click way back to my pandemic-era show (March 15, 2020!) with former U.S. intelligence official Rod Schoonover to learn about a challenge I discussed on The Collators: faced with a complex, compounding mix of threats, how do intelligence professionals and the decisionmakers they serve winnow and prioritize information? Here’s how Schoonover put it:
In my world in the intelligence community, I was often very proud to be in one of the only parts of the government that either had the platform or the freedom to clearly state some of the risks. In the 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment, it lays out language that’s very, very, eerily prescient of this moment [the pandemic]. But it also landed on, I think, page 21. So, yes, it’s a risk, but we clearly don’t have it calibrated quite right.
That “page 21 effect,” as I’ve come to call this conundrum, exists when competing interests or political expedience cloud decisionmaking. Watch the full episode here.