Satya Nadella is one of the world’s most inspirational business leaders, as much a humanist as a technologist and executive. In September 2017, he came to the Intelligence Squared stage to discuss his personal journey from a childhood in India to becoming CEO of Microsoft, the culture change that...

In 2016, on stage at Wembley Arena in front of thousands of fans, Dr Ruja Ignatova promised her followers a financial revolution. The future, she said, belonged to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. And the Oxford-educated, self-styled cryptoqueen promised that the cryptocurrency she had created –...

Behavioural geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden discusses with author and journalist Helen Lewis why we're getting it wrong when it comes to genetic inheritance.

Does our refusal to recognise the power of DNA perpetuate the myth of meritocracy?

Drawing on themes from her new book, The Genetic Lott...

The Sackler name adorns the walls of many hallowed institutions – Harvard and Oxford Universities, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Louvre. But the source of the family’s wealth has become an international scandal. They are the main owners of Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical com...

Let’s assume efforts to decarbonise society over the next eight years, from now to 2030, go better than many of us had anticipated, thanks in large part to the Inflation Reduction Act and the incentives it gives industry and business and the bi-partisan appeal of the law. What happens next? There...

We are at war: cyberwar. Cyber attacks are becoming the weapon of choice for states, terrorists and criminal organisations. Through the fragile, interconnected structure of the web, anything can be hacked – from national infrastructure to an individual’s identity. The recent worldwide Ransomware ...

Blockchain, the technology on which Bitcoin is based, has gone mainstream. Until recently a subject confined to tech blogs and Reddit pages, it is earning huge amounts of column inches and airtime. Stories abound of Bitcoin millionaires and multimillion-dollar ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings). New c...

A monumental turning point of more hot air? How will COP change the world?

This debate is a part of Intelligence Squared Energised, a series of debates within climate and clean energy in partnership with Iberdrola.

Join ScottishPower CEO Keith Anderson and Professor of Energy Policy and Offici...

‘A global star … given his track record as a zeitgeist thermometer, we should all pay attention’ – Financial Times

The world in 2019 is looking increasingly chaotic and unpredictable. Trump has declared a ‘national emergency’ over immigration at America’s southern border. A humanitarian catastro...

Hooray for porn! What would we be without it? Bored, repressed, frustrated. Porn nails the lie that sex is something we should be ashamed of. Porn tells us that that sex doesn't just come in vanilla flavour. Porn lights up the lives of the depressed, the lonely, the sexually unadventurous. It sp...

Daniel Dennett is one of the world's most original and provocative thinkers. A philosopher and cognitive scientist, he is known as one of the 'Four Horseman of New Atheism' along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens.

On May 22nd he came to Intelligence Squared to sh...

Award-winning author of the best-seller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari sits down with Professor Shahidha Bari to discuss the themes of his new book, Unstoppable Us Volume 1, aimed at a younger audience.

Harari's latest book is aimed at children so it’s on the smaller...

Zero day: a software bug that allows a hacker to break into your devices and move around undetected. One of the most coveted tools in a spy's arsenal, a zero day has the power to silently spy on your iPhone, dismantle the safety controls at a chemical plant, alter an election, and shut down the e...

Politicians are unconstrained by facts. Science is conducted by press release. Start-up culture elevates hype to high art. The world is awash in bullshit, and we're drowning in it.

Based on their popular course at the University of Washington, Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West give us the tools to s...

It is time to call the tech companies to account. In the space of just ten years, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have become the biggest companies on the planet and have accrued a level of power that threatens us all. They control our data, warp our democratic discourse, and exert ...

In May 2021 world renowned scientist Suzanne Simard came to Intelligence Squared to share the secrets of a lifetime spent uncovering startling truths about trees. As she explains in her new book, Finding the Mother Tree, Simard did not set out to be a scientist. She was working in the forest serv...

In many ways, the internet is still living up to its original promise to be a place where people can express themselves without judgment. Online anonymity also allows whistle blowers and activists to speak out without fear of harmful consequences to themselves.

Yet it is this very anonymity that...

Are Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies the answer to financial inclusion?

This debate is part of Intelligence Squared Crypto, a new series from Intelligence Squared debating the rise of cryptocurrency and future of money.

On the 9th of September, Peter McCormack and Yaya Fanusie deba...

The New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang see Facebook's missteps in the last five years not as an anomaly but an inevitability: this is how the platform was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the single focus of Zuckerberg and his COO Sheryl S...

At the outset of the pandemic, May 2021 In his 2019 book Winners Take All, Anand Giridharadas launched a searing attack on the global elites. Now he turns his thoughts to the post-pandemic world. Is the crisis an opportunity to create a more egalitarian society? How can the powerful be prevented ...

On January 6 2020 Big Tech unplugged President Donald Trump. For years he had used social media to communicate with his supporters.

Liberal commentators in the US argued that deplatforming Trump was the right decision — in spite of their concerns about the power of Big Tech. Tech companies, they...

In the wake of the 2021 Olympics we have seen a resurgence of misunderstanding around testosterone, its role in gender transition and its effect on athletic performance. In July 2021 Harvard evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was in conversation with Tom Whipple, science editor of The Times, on...

Despite Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine, traditional conflict — fought with guns, bombs, and drones—has become less common around the world. For many nations it's almost too expensive to wage, too unpopular at home, and too difficult to manage. In this conversation, transnational crime and Ru...