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 imitate the physical sciences. The conversation examines the limits of objectivity, the uneasy relationship between evidence and narrative, and why being willing to revise our beliefs is a strength rather than a weakness.

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?