 We were supposed to write something about education, so I'm again the musician, so no idea about education. So I went to the dictionary, so what is that education about actually? So wonderful, I opened up the dictionary and the definition of education in an official English thesaurus is the action of teaching somebody something in a school. So I'm not joking. I turned the page looking for that bit where it continues and that and that and that. Well, the next page had something else. So that is the official definition in the English language of what education is about is the act of teaching somebody stuff in a building. So I realized we have a problem. Then I started thinking about that and I realized that in a sense that's exactly what it has become. So anyway, I'm repeating what Rob said before, but this is exactly the situation. I started thinking about that and end up writing this little survey, which I will summarize, I promise, of the past few decades and what's been going on with what we used to consider education, which has now become a farce in many ways. So in the 60s we had this wonderful situation where we wanted to take education away from those evil, elitist people where you could only be educated if you were rich or noble or something like that and make it available to everybody and add a few other slogans to that. So education for everybody and all that. And we thought it's going to lead us somewhere absolutely wonderful. Well, it's led us absolutely nowhere and elitism in every possible way became like a swear word. It's like, oh, if you're a elitist you are, you know, your right wing and you're a capitalist and you're here and you're there and you know, the privilege, everything which was about the privilege people became some sort of a swear word, which is an interesting movement. I mean, of course, many things in that notion are very, very important that they have happened, but it also led us to a situation where we have trained people over the past 40 years, I would say, in a completely, completely destructive way. So if education has to be reachable to everybody, then it means everybody should be able to A, get a degree, B, finish a degree, then get a job in it. So since anything which is remotely connected to the world, talent or sensitivity or disposition is, of course, evil because it's elitist, then we have to find a different way of making sure everybody can be trained. So if there are sensitivities cannot be approached, then we have to find something that is the same for everybody. It's all about being the same for everybody. So what's the same for everybody? Stuff that you can measure, stuff that you can count, stuff that you can define. So we've found wonderful ways to train people with these tools. If you do follow this and this and this and this rule and this and this and this and this and that, even if you have absolutely no talent for this specific job or notion or direction, you'll be fine. You'll never be very good, but you'll be all right. But it's not about being very good because that's elitist. So just be all right. So we became extraordinarily good in being mediocre, and that became the common denominator to everybody. Let's find a way to make sure the whole society is mediocre so nobody gets too good, or they're not elitist. Only those that understand the system and manipulate it. And so then we had this wonderful system developing of training people through measurable and definable criteria to make sure they have the widest common denominator possible, which is mediocracy. Now, since we have this huge mass of people that now all have a degree, we all have to give them jobs somehow. What people do, they start specializing because there is no time anymore to actually be curious about anything because you have to earn a living and you've got the 400 billion other people that have just finished business school. So you have to specialize in something. So you mentioned this wonderful term. The Renaissance man has died with the student revolution basically because we don't have time to read anymore. We don't have time to be interested in anything that does not directly and practically give us something useful. So don't read, don't go to the theater, don't travel. It's completely useless. You will not make more money if you travel. And definitely don't be interested in anything. Just go pick up one tiny niche of whatever it is that is your job. Specializing that niche as well as you possibly can till the point that you do it better than anybody else and that is the key to success. And what is success? Success is this great thing that we have been brainwashed to seek for so long. It's money and it's possessions and it's power and it's a position and all those things that we can never really reach because the more we have of it, the more we want of it. It's a wonderful system by the way. It works perfectly making people go on working and working and working than die. So it's a part of exactly that same thing. So specialize, specialize, specialize, get absolutely nowhere with it. Now I have to tell this tiny little anecdote which I put in my essay. I promise it's not going to get that long. I'm getting to the point. So this briefly is about music. There was in the 1980s a professor of piano in the University of Indiana which used to be a very important school for music. Now it's a bit of a factory but it used to be anyway. Who one day decided to change the little sign on his room which used to say professor of piano because everybody became professor of early music. Professor of electronic computer, blah blah blah. Professor of how to turn a chair from blue into red. So he just decided to write professor of music. Then nobody noticed except one guy who told me this story 30 years later. And I think this man was incredibly innovative and incredibly sensitive and worried about he's been long dead now. Maybe better for him because if he saw what's become of music he'd be very, very, very, very sad. To realize that there is no such thing as a professor of piano or professor of how to turn this glass, well, yeah. Musicians, we are artists, we are members of society, we are members of a larger culture, we are members of a larger array of different cultures. Now point number two which is a result of this whole specialist movement. I called my essay, by the way, The Age of Specialists. It's just one part of it. Let's say 50, 60, 70, 80 years ago, varies in different fields. People used to define themselves through belonging to a collective of some sort. It used to be countries and religions. We realized that's a really bad idea about 80 years, 70 years ago. So we stopped doing that. So we decided to find something else to define ourselves through. So we would be part of a great company or part of a great movement or a great party or some sort of idea. And then at some point the more that people had access to education and to, now it's the internet and YouTube and what all not, all these things that give people the chance to specialize so well. And people think, okay, now I can do all these things. I'm so good at this and this and that. I'm not going to define myself through belonging to this great prestigious collective that is, you know, it's a great honor to be this little element of a big collective. It's all about me. I am so special and so important. So even in music, if, let's say 100 years ago, a violinist would not have a greater dream than to join a great orchestra because it was about the music. Well, no, now I can, you know, I can play better than everybody else because now there is 3 billion people who are incredibly mediocre. So everybody wants to be a soloist because it's all about me. And that through that developed this, and this is just a little example of the sort of transformation between collectivism to individualism where it became all about this beautiful word of self-fulfillment. Now, before the American writers decided that it's a great idea to make money by selling books about that, it still existed. Only that many, many years ago self-fulfillment was something so natural and subtle in many ways that people derived it from very, very small and very, very beautiful actions in their day-to-day life. People were happy if they could earn a living, if they were healthy, if they had maybe a family and were very content with that because they were part of this cycle of culture and of society. Nowadays, it's how am I and my individual self, which is going from here all the way to that wall, can fulfill ourselves. So we're not fulfilled by being belonging to a collective as we've established. We're fulfilled by being special. So we came into this wonderful era of everybody trying to stick out and be as special as they can. So if you have a mass of specialists that are already specializing in one tiny thing and then it suddenly, exactly the opposite started happening, you have to distinguish yourself from this mass of specialists because there's so many of them that if you want to even be noticed, you have to be different. So it's not anymore about being good or honest or have any sort of substance, it's just about being different. So you're surrounded by this. And we have here somebody from the world of theater, somebody from the world of music, you have that in every kind of art and actually you have it in every kind of part of society. It's not anymore about being good. It's about doing the most crazy shit just to make sure that somebody notices you. So funny enough, actually we ended up exactly where we started because sticking out is just as elitist as where we started out. Now it's only that it's not anymore the nobility, it's not anymore the privileged, rich and so on that are born that have access to education and to culture and so on. Now it's all these extremely mediocre and ignorant people that decided to turn education to a money machine basically that have control over it. So we've replaced this with that. But we're exactly in the same place. Now sticking out is not elitist anymore, it's a trademark. So it's a wonderful way of making sure you will not be forgotten yet another extremely important goal to aspire to. So what is knowledge actually? What is education? I mean we have, I think we live in a time that if people describe knowledge or see knowledge as information. So I want to know something about something. I go on Google or Wikipedia and read the first line in half if I'm very curious two lines and then I really master the subject. I've known all about Leonardo by having read where he was born, where he died and that he painted this one really famous painting, what was her name again? Well that one. So that's all you need to know, you're done with that subject. So that's the same symptom of this whole specialist thing and I personally strongly believe that knowledge is about an identity and it's about a cultural identity to start with and it's not about actual information, it's about making connections between different kinds of information between different kinds of observations, between different kinds of experiences. And I'm going to finish all this with coming back to what both of you have said. We have educated people over the past decades to know more and more facts that make it more and more possible for them to be very successful in a specific field to a very high degree of specialization, someone would have already described. But we have completely abandoned the notion of empowering people to become humans, which is, for me, first and foremost, the act of questioning. We're giving people masses and masses and masses of facts and of information and say this is the truth, this is the truth, this is the truth, you do this, you get there, you do that, you get here. But I think the only way to get anywhere is to doubt. We have to question all these things that we know and make sure the next moment that we are absolutely sure we don't know anything at all, then we may be made one centimeter of progress. So, if we ever go anywhere with this whole act of individualism or what I call pseudo-individualism and turn that into real individualism, that would be about learning how to question our own identity, question our knowledge and maybe then make a tiny little bit of progress by realizing how little we know and not how much we know. That's a little bit for me. Thank you.