generally what happens is the speaker says something along the lines of you need to chase your dreams.

But I'm not going to say that because I don't believe it.

Inception had something to say about this.

Uh, and I apologize to those of you who haven't seen it, because I'm about to spoil the ending of it for you.

But at the end of the film, there's a spinning top that's spinning and if it falls or doesn't fall

is the key idea. Is it a dream? Is it a reality?

And the way the end of that film worked, Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Cobb, he was off with his kids, he was in his own subjective reality,

and didn't really care anymore, and that makes a statement that perhaps all levels of reality are equally valid.

The camera moves over to the spinning top and just before the spinning top appears to be wobbling, there's a cut to black,

and I skip out of the back of the theater before people catch me.

And there's a very, very strong reaction from the audience, uh, usually a bit of a groan, but, um,

but the point is, objectively, it matters to the audience in absolute terms, even though what they're watching is a fiction, is its own virtual reality.

But the question of whether that's a dream or whether it's real, is the one I've been asked the most about any of the the films I've made.

It matters to people enormously, and that's the point about reality. Reality matters.

It's time for something of a reframing and it's something that your generation could do that my generation can't.

We are firmly embedded in the belief that we have changed the world in all kinds of incredible ways.

And we have all kinds of ways of selling this to you and you know, we use fancy words, like disruption, um, which is essentially a form of sort of economic nihilism whereby,

you you judge the value of a company by how much it can stop other companies making money, rather than what they actually make themselves.

That's there for those of you going into finance by the way, just trying to lay a little groundwork there.

And we use words, slippery words, uh, like algorithm, okay?

Now if you hear someone use the word algorithm and they're not a mathematics professor or a computer scientist, they're probably trying to obscure what it is they actually do, what their company does.

At the very least, they're trying to evade any responsibility for what it is that their company does or what it actually does.

Oscar Wilde once said, the old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

You do know everything.

Uh, I'm clearly in my suspicious phase.

And I'd love to impart some of that to you because I think there's an enormous amount of work to be done, and in the great tradition of these speeches, I don't have to tell you how to do it.

I just have to tell you that it's your problem now.

And in the great tradition of these speeches, generally what happens is the speaker says something along the lines of you need to chase your dreams.

But I'm not going to say that because I don't believe it. I don't want you to chase your dreams.

I want you to chase your reality, and I want you to understand that you chase your reality not at the expense of your dreams,

but as the foundation of your dreams.

It's very, very important that you take the elevator position

that you have achieved over these four years, the advantage is that this fantastic education is conferred on you.

And you do everything you can with it to improve the world, to improve reality.

In whatever field you're going off to work in, I think looking at fundamentals, looking at how people are really affected by what you do.

Uh, I think you have limitless potential.