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Hi everybody. This is John Donman. Today we're sharing a conversation we had live on

Substack as a kickoff to our move

to Substack and as a way of showing you the types of behind the scenes insight and additional

conversations you'll get if you become a paid subscriber. It was really fun, so I hope you'll

enjoy it. Tadda! Hi everybody. I'm John Donvan and welcome, and I also want to welcome the other people you see on the screen, Naima Raza and Nick Gillespie. This is a rare, a rare gathering of open to debate moderators. I think this is the first time the three of us have ever been on a screen together. So thank you. And why are we here? So we are here to celebrate the launch of our Substack. And for us,

now, Substack is a new home that we have built for the thing that we want to encourage among

you, our fans, our followers, and that is Open Dialogue, genuine connection with our community.

So Naima and Nick are here to talk with me today a little bit behind the scenes about the art of

moderation, how we do it, why we do it, what we think about when we're doing it, what our

goals are, and why it's important to be doing all of this right now.

So we want you to ask any questions that you have, and we will

try to get as many of them as we can. But before we launch into that, I have a little bit of business that I want to get out of the way, and that's to talk a little bit about what we're up to these days. First, you may have been noticed that we've been doing a lot more live events in the recent past. And this is a big effort for our small team,

but it's a very fun thing for us after the pandemic kind of put us all virtual, now that's

years behind us, and we have been gradually and now much more fulsomely, returning to the live

real stage. And we want to be bringing you more of those live events in the coming years because

there's nothing like being in front of a live audience having the debaters be in front of a live

audience and know that they are trying to talk with real people but we are also launching a series

...