After our fourth collection of six great guests, it’s a wrap for Season Four of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. Your host, master data storyteller Dr Sam Knowles, picks out common themes and chooses his highlights from a lively series of conversations – recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, between July and December 2023.

Thanks as ever to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

In Season Four, our guests included:

Tracey Brown, director of the charity, Sense About Science.

Mark Montgomery, Vice President and International Head of Integrated Insights at Novartis.

John McFall, military and civvy street logistics expert, and the founder of Supply Chain Wise.

Kieran Maguire, leading football finance academic from the University of Liverpool’s Management School, and co-host of The Price of Football podcast.

Ian Makgill, founder of Spend Network, a database keeping tabs on the worlds’ Governments’ $13tn spend.

And Mike Bell, data visualiser extraordinaire, who uses the iconography of the London Underground to tell the stories of bands, albums, films, and political careers at his eponymous business, Mike Bell Maps.

Data Malarkey will have its usual, between-season break for a couple of weeks. We’ll be back with Season Five on 8 May 2024, and there’s another glittering array of guests from an increasingly diverse set of professions. We’ll be hearing from women and men at the top of their game from the worlds of statistics, risk management, consumer goods, academic publishing, financial analysis, and autism research. Their common approaches to using data smarter have lessons for us all. And we start with the blockbuster guest, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, a man who had perhaps the best pandemic of any data storyteller in the public domain.

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.