Thank you very much indeed, Hannah, and thank you to everyone here this evening. It's a great pleasure to host this event on behalf of Intelligence Squared, and it's a huge pleasure to introduce Thomas l Friedman, possibly the world's most famous journalist, although Clark Kent might take issue with that.

He's the, uh, lead for an affairs columnist for the New York Times, and he's won the Pulitzer Prize three times. He's the author of several books, the most recent, those being Thank you for Being Late, an Optimist Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, which was published just a couple of years ago.

And he's well known for filing reports from the furthest ends of the earth, although, I dunno if you've made out a space yet. Uh, Tom, maybe that's next to, uh, to come. So it's pretty amazing that we managed to actually tie him down in London for just a couple of hours today. Tom, a pleasure to talk to you.

And I have to say that you have little competition this evening because to be here, I'm having to miss the international evening at my daughter's grade school. Oh, wow. And they promised Macedonian folk dancing. Wow. So your, your international evening is gonna have to measure up pretty high to compete with that.

I'm gonna work, before we start our conversation though, Tom, I think you perhaps might want to just lay out the ground for us for a few minutes and tell us how the world looks now as you see it in 2019. Well, first of all, thank you for doing this, um, and thank Intelligence squared for, uh, hosting me. And thank you all for coming out.

This is just, um, it's wonderful. Um, I think to understand everything I'm gonna talk about tonight, um, you have to understand how I approach writing a column. And, um, my motto, which I learned from my teacher, Lynn Wells, who teach at the Defense University in in Washington, is never think in the box. Never think out of the box.

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