Hi everybody, I'm John Don Van and this is Intelligent Squared US, part of our Discourse Disruptor

series and what we're going to be focusing on are the coming presidential debates.

They are coming sort of starting September 29th, the first of three and of course because

everything's different this year, the debates are going to feel different, almost certainly

going to be in some fashion remote, maybe the debaters, the candidates won't even be in

the same place.

There's only going to be one moderator.

We're not going to have a live audience because you can't have that many people in one

space in this dangerous time.

Also what we have going on is a conversation simultaneously with, which is focused on,

maybe we shouldn't have debates, maybe it's time to wrap up that whole institution and

go back to a time of no debates.

When I say go back, did you know that for most of American history, this institution that

we know as the debates did not exist, that for most of our history there were no debates?

And did you know that once we started having debates that in the first series there was

a remote debate, the candidates were not in the same place and there was no live audience

and there was only one moderator.

So maybe things are circling back.

There's a lot of history here and we are interested in that because an Intelligent Squared,

we are very interested in history and we are also very, very interested in debate.

So that's what we want to focus on and we want to focus in this case of discourse disruptors

with an excellent source of information about the past and the present and potentially

...