Hi everybody, John Don Van here, host of Intelligent Squared US, the debate series.

America's premier debate series, as we like to say, this podcast, however, not strictly

speaking a debate episode.

It's more of what I now think we can call an Intelligent Squared US Thanksgiving tradition,

which I'm going to get to in just a minute.

First though, I want to say what a great year we've had at Intelligent Squared, our audience

growing all the time.

I'm betting a lot of you listening only came on board this year, so thank you for that.

And some really great debates we've had.

I checked in with our team to get some of their recommendations for favorites, recommendations

for you to check out just from year 2018.

So here's a short list to start with.

We return to the subject of God and mixed it in with the subject of consciousness and

human evolution, along with a good strong dose of Deepak Chopra as one of our debaters.

That one was called the more we evolve, the less we need God, and it's still getting

a lot of downloads.

So it was the debate that we built around Valentine's Day.

The resolution was swipe left, dating apps have killed romance.

There was some real scientific insight in that one, and also some very sweet moments.

Check out the closing argument put up by the vice president for engineering at OKCupid.

It's got a big surprise in it, and it's really lovely.

And then a quite recent debate, one we staged just before the midterms, the resolution

...