About John: John is a four-time Emmy Award winning journalist and moderator of the highly acclaimed Intelligence Squared USdebate series. John was also the moderator for the first live debate featuring IBM's Debater system at the IBM Think conference in San Francisco in 2019. In that debate, the Debater system argued in favor of the motion "We should subsidize preschool" and did a formidable job against one of the very best human debaters, Hareesh Natarajan.

In this chat John tells us about his amazing career as a foreign correspondent in the years leading up to and including the fall of the Iron Curtain as well as his coverage of the Iran-Iraq war and two Persian Gulf wars. John is brutally honest about the highs and lows of his career, including a low point as chief White House correspondent for ABC in the Clinton years. John then tells us about the secret of his deep listening ability and the deeply humanizing work he has done on autism, leading to his best-selling book In a Different Key: The Story of Autism, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2017.

Some of our favorite Intelligence Squared debates:

Nationalism is a force for good

We should subsidize preschool (IBM Debater vs. Hareesh Natarajan at the 2019 Think Conference)

Smart technology is making us dumb

More clicks, fewer bricks: the lecture hall is obsolete