 Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon everybody and thank you to the organizers of inviting me to give a talk this afternoon. I have to admit I'm not sure exactly what they were thinking but we're gonna go for it. I've been asked to talk about the relationship between innovation and freedom and I think the first point that is crucial to make is how important innovation is to our lives. I mean we've been pretty pessimistic all day today. Things have been drawn in very black cloudy perspective and I appreciate that. I can be as good of a pessimist as anybody in this room. But at the end of the day we live in pretty amazing times. We're pretty rich. We live long lives, healthy lives. We live in relative freedom. We can argue about how free we are and how free we are relative to history but we're pretty free. You know we've got enough free speech that we can have this conference and we can complain about the powers to be all day long and you know with little consequences. Now it's true you don't want to be a university professor these days and complain about the powers to be. Certain powers to be. But life is pretty good and I think it's a mistake to forget that. And the reason it's a mistake to forget that is one of the most crucial things that all of us should be devoting time to is trying to understand why things are so good in spite of all the bad that exists in the world. What is it that brought us the kind of wealth and prosperity and relative freedom that we have today? What is it that made the modern world pretty good? Could be better, much better. But it's pretty good. The big part of that is economic growth. We take economic growth for granted. But the fact is that we wouldn't be here today if not for the last what Deirdre McCluskey calls the Great Enrichment over the last 250 years. Now we might talk nostalgically about Europe of the 18th, 17th, 16th, 15th centuries. But the fact is that I look around this room most of you wouldn't be alive in those centuries. We'd be long dead. Life expectancy was 39. Life is pretty good today. So, nostalgia is great. But what's important is to understand the changes that have happened. And why, again, life is so good today. What is it that happened? What is it that changed? And of course, the Great Enrichment was fueled by significant economic progress over the last 250 years. Massive economic progress in the West, in Europe, in the United States, and much, much later in places like Asia and the rest. Where did that economic progress comes from? Well, the core, the thing that drives economic progress, the thing that I think is driving the slow economic progress, the lack of it, is slow economic progress across the West. Economic progress comes from innovation. It comes from entrepreneurs. It comes from people coming up with new ideas, taking risks, going out there, producing, creating something new that did not exist before. It comes from people who think outside of the box, who are willing to challenge the status quo and who change our lives. Economic progress is not a result of government. It's a result of, if you will, the absence of government. It's a result of the freedom of individuals to pursue their dreams, their imagination, their ideas, their ingenuity. The job of government is to create an environment in which that can prosper, in which that can happen. Our job is to create a culture in which that can happen, that can grow and accelerate. And where we all can benefit from the economic progress that results from it. So it's interesting to me that we haven't really talked yet about progress, innovation, economic success, which are the hearts of everything that we believe in for the future. Because without economic progress, let's not kid ourselves, imagine, if we now enter in Europe, in the United States, a period which I fear we might be entering of no economic progress or negative economic progress, of negative growth, how long are we going to stay free? How long before the people rebel against what is going on? So economic progress is crucial to the success and the prosperity and the achievement and the maintenance of a Western civilization. So again, understanding where it comes from is so crucial. And one of the questions you as Europeans need to really think about is why is there so little innovation in Europe? Why is there so little economic progress in Europe? What is happening in Europe that you are not there with the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution innovates very little. You're good at improving and making things better, but not at the big changes that are happening in the world. If you look at technology, Europe is not on the map, not in a significant way. What is lacking? We can be critical of Silicon Valley and technology companies all day long, but they're changing the world as we speak. They're changing the way we live, mostly, I believe, for the better. They're creating jobs, they're creating opportunities, they're creating new ways in which we can communicate. They're creating excitement. They're creating something that we should learn from. What is it unique about Silicon Valley? What was unique about Europe in the 19th century that made it possible for it to grow as fast as it did? What is it that leads to innovation and success? What's at the foundation of all of this? I just want to give you one little statistic, which I think is interesting in terms of progress and in terms of economic growth. Let's say Europe grows 2% a year for 40 years. What does that result in in terms of the average wages? Let's say the average wage is 20,000 euro. I don't know what it actually is, but 20,000 euro. What does that become if you grow 2% a year for 40 years? Anybody know about? Yeah, it doubles. It goes to about 40 something thousand, which is OK. This is real terms, right? Real terms to take the poorest, some of the poorest parts of your populations and it will make 20,000 euro a year. And now we grow 2% a year and they're making 40,000 in real terms. That's good. That's wonderful. Now grow the same economies at 5% a year. Something that's quite possible. How much is 20,000 growing at 5% a year over 40 years? It's seven to eight times. Now your poor population, they used to make today, makes 20,000 euro is making 140,000 euro. That's world changing, life changing, society changing. That's a beautiful thing. Poverty has disappeared. There is no poverty anymore. When you make 140,000 euro a year in real terms, economic progress is crucial. And without it, without it, people will rebel. People will rebel. What makes economic progress possible? What makes innovation possible? Having a culture that accepts new ideas. Having a culture that accepts failure, one of the problems Europe has with innovation, with progress is you don't like failure as a culture, not just politically. You don't have the bankruptcy laws. You don't have the cultural attitude that treats failure not as a disaster, but as a learning experience. Silicon Valley, on the other hand, people fail all the time. They learn from it. They start new companies. They go at it again. Venture capitalists invest more in failed companies than their successful ones. They're the ones changing the world. So a change in culture that has to do with innovation, with failure, with risk-taking, exploration. And one of the biggest opportunities we have today to innovate and to grow our economies is to connect with others. We have this amazing opportunity today to leverage seven billion minds around the world all connected in an internet. Yes, we can complain about all the downsides of the internet. They exist surely, but there's an enormous upside. You can collaborate with somebody on the other side of the planet. You can work with somebody anywhere in the world. COVID has shown us how wonderful their technology is. We can stay home and we can collaborate in teams, compose the people all over the globe. And yes, sovereignty is important, but let's also think about the openness that the modern world has today and its advantages and how we can leverage those advantages to benefit ourselves, our countries, our populations in terms of wealth, in terms of innovation, and in terms of culture. So we want people to explore. We want people to think outside the box. We want people to be willing to fail. We want people to connect across countries and across cultures. We wanna use the human mind to provide for growth, for progress, for this, for innovation. And we need to create the kind of environment that is necessary for that. And this is where government comes in. What is the purpose of government? What does it mean to say freedom? It's a big word. It's interesting that nobody in the world is against freedom. If you had a conference of leftists, they would all be pro-freedom. Now they would define it differently and that's why definitions are so important. So what does freedom mean? It means each individual having an opportunity to live their life based on their values, based on their mind. It means the freedom to pursue your life based on your judgment as an individual. And the government's role is to protect that ability. It's to shield us from people who would impose their will on us. It's to shield us from authoritarians, from authorities, from crooks and criminals and fards. But other than that, to leave us alone. That's what freedom means. It means your opportunity as an individual to live your life as you see fit in pursuit of your happiness. And let me just say, I heard some negative comments about rights earlier. So I wanna just a minute to defend rights and I'll move on to the panel. Rights are how we conceptualize freedom. What do rights mean? Not in the sense of the left. There are no 300 rights. The European constitution is a travesty and absurd and ridiculous. But does that mean we should give up on this concept that came out of the Netherlands and came out of the writings of John Locke and came out of the Enlightenment that we should just grant it to the left and say, okay, they've abused it so we're gonna give up on it. No, this is a concept at the core of our civilization, at the core of what freedom means. Rights are freedoms of action. Rights are what governors instituted to protect and here I'm defending American founders view. That's what governments are there for. That's what sovereignty exists for to protect your people. So the idea of rights, we should not grant it to the left which it distorts and perverts them. They're very good at doing that to a lot of concepts. This is a concept we should be protecting and preserving in its original sense. The freedom to act, the freedom to live your life as you see fit, the freedom to think and speak, what you want to think and speak without authority telling you no, you can't. And the freedom is declared by Thomas Jefferson to pursue each one of our individual happiness. That's what we need to be preserving. That's what we need to be protecting if we care about progress, innovation and freedom. Thank you all.