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I myself I love printed newspapers. I find it more easy to absorb and I love given a choice of a printed newspaper or an electronic one in the morning I'll always take the print. But it's a hard business because you need to move from a paper today with a given income to an uncertain future. You now have to be electronic eventually, but to get there is pretty difficult because at the moment an advertisement on your electronic website gets you about one-tenth the income of your printed paper. That's the ratio that in the U.S. applies. So if you have a hundred thousand circulation today, it's a printed paper, you need about 10 times that, about a million readers a day, to have a comparable income. So I think most newspapers will actually die, the few will survive in electronic form, but most along the way will go out of business.

We innovate as fast as we can. Now some sites are free, so they depend upon advertising income. But in certain sites where you have a unique feature, for example high quality business news or a local language (we have Afrikaans in South Africa, you have Dutch here), there you have a chance people might pay for it. And so we try to distinguish which site should be free and try to move them as fast as possible, and then for some sites we try to build a pay audience.

I think it's entirely possible and that one language will have a limited number of sites, five or six or some small number. But if you take the Dutch-speaking world, I do not think those sites need to be owned by Pearson or The New York Times. They could be owned by Dutch and Belgian companies because language is definitive. If you give people an adequate product in their home language, it always knocks out a similarly adequate product in English. So language is a barrier, and behind that barrier I think the Dutch media groups can hide.

You know, the biggest industry in the world is retail. It's bigger than banking, bigger than oil. It's the biggest single industry in the whole world. Of retail, a very high proportion will move to the Internet. So just consider this: in the future, there'll be no travel companies with physical offices and desks where you can meet them. It'll all be done on the internet. They're just so much more effective. And likewise, certain types of advice, right, certain even certain medical services, you could do a lot better on the internet. You have some services that will not move on, for example hotel bookings will be done electronically, but the physical act of eating needs to be done in a restaurant. Virtual food isn't as good as real food, right. So if you try to predict what portion of any economy will move to the internet, my guess is about 40 or 50 percent. And where are we now? Consider Europe. Britain is about 11, right? So 11 percent of the total retail activity in Britain goes to the internet. The consequence is that the main streets, as you drive through the British countryside, the main streets are empty. So there are gaps: there's a shop, there's a gap, there's a shop, there's a gap. It's a tragedy for small towns. But I think it's a process that can't be stopped. It'll continue until some portion, 50 percent, 40 percent, somewhere there, of the total retail economy passes to the Internet. So that's the reason we're keen on that. It could still in a country like Holland probably quintuple, go five times the present size, before it starts to slow.

Yeah, I think global news sites are too competitive. It's too hard to make money. There are so many of them, and to be better than Mail or The New York Times or Financial Times, just too hard. But you know, e-commerce is not far from a newspaper. Consider your local newspaper makes a lot of money from advertising. The subscription fees are usually less than half the income. That's exactly what we do on the internet. So if we run a classified site, all we do is we bring a buyer and a seller together. We're not really a trader, we're a marketplace, like a newspaper is. Or if you take in Holland Marktplaats, it's exactly the sort of thing we do. We don't own Marktplaats, we're too stupid or too late to buy it, but we own in other places, Poland, actually in 11 countries in Europe, from Switzerland to all the way basically through the old Soviet block, all the way East, we have e-commerce sites now. That is not far from what the newspaper does: it brings buyers and sellers together in some sympathetic environment, we lead them to connect.

You know, China fascinates me. I think China will become the biggest economy in the world, not because they run sweatshops or do evil things, but just because they're so good, they work so hard. If I compare the typical engineer in China at seven o'clock on Friday evening, he's working. If you look at Holland, including our own companies, no one is working at seven o'clock on a Friday. I mean, give me a break, it's weekend. So China simply outperforms the West with a better educational system, harder work. Especially the Chinese mother, you know, she's got one child, she drives that child fanatically: homework till nine o'clock tonight, on Saturday morning extra maths, on Saturday afternoon extra violin class. So in the end, when the guy gets to the final year of school, he's a year or two ahead of the typical European school. And then he goes to the university, and then he works in his career just harder. So China's got great entrepreneurs, great engineers, and sort of a work ethic. When I look at Europe, it's a wonderful place to live, but frankly, if you work 35 hours like the French government wanted to, or I see the German governments now saying when a Mercedes manager gets back from holiday having taken four weeks of holiday, they shouldn't face a whole lot of emails because that's stressful, those emails should be wiped out so that they can start now. I mean, it's so idiotic what's happening in Europe.

The net result probably is that Europe will first become poor before they turn around and recover. Because China and India to some extent just completely outperforms Europe at the moment.

I think yes. It's the balance. Europe tried to create a sympathetic, soft society where it's nice to live. And I have a house in Holland and I love living there. I think for example the Dutch, the quality of life is possibly the highest in the world: the transport cheap, and all pervasive medical services, safety, the fact that you have almost no poverty. I mean, it's such a wonderful place to live in. And yet that comes at the cost of growth. There's a lack of edge, so there's not that naked ambition. So mothers don't drive their children in a fanatical way, and consequently the children don't quite feel so compelled to perform, and every weekend everyone relaxes. So if you project it out for 20 years, you just say the energy of China will make them wealthy, and the good quality of life in Holland softens everything. And the net result is that a Dutch kid born today could end up flipping hamburgers in the Shanghai Hilton. It's a reasonable prospect.

Yes, and I think there's much benefit in it. For example, the reason people want to restrict working hours is an assumption that work is nasty, it's unpleasant. That's an old 19th century Marxist view of the world. If you ask me how many hours do I work, I don't know, 60, 70 something. Do I resent it? Not at all. I love it. My work is interesting. I fly, we do business in 130 countries in the world. I fly to interesting places, I drink expensive wine, I talk to interesting politicians. It's a wonderful life. So if you say to me, okay, the alternative is you can cut down your hours by half, I'll say no, what the hell do I want to do? Do I want to sit and drink a Grolsch on the canal and look at the swans? I mean, it's miserable. I want to work, I enjoy it. So I think the problem, in ethical terms in Europe, is that in China, if you live in a poor neighborhood in a very small flat on the 13th floor, going to work isn't so bad. It's not necessarily worse than being at home. So work becomes the place where you fulfill yourself. And often in Europe, there's a perception that you fulfill yourself in your private life with your family at home, your own hobbies, and work is a schlep. And if that's your attitude, you can lose.

Yes, it's true that you have to create something interesting for yourself. You know, I see there's a recent study in Britain by the London School of Economics that analyzes happiness. It tries to check on what are the components of happiness, and I say the two things: to have a purpose to your life and to have pleasure. Now the purpose is to do something that you think worthwhile, and the pleasure is the enjoyment of everyday engagement. It's interesting that right careers, they did an analysis of 100 careers, and at the top, the very top of the pile, the most happiest people are gardeners and florists. And you can just see it why: because you bring satisfaction to people. Right there's a sense of purpose. People get married, they need flowers, I deliver it, oh I feel good about that. There's a sense of pleasure participating in these relationships. Now that's not a high-powered, highly paid career, but it's meaningful to someone. So I think if a young person starts out in the world, you say to yourself, what will give me a sense of purpose? You know, what will make me feel that I've lived my life to some end? And secondly, what gives me joy? Try to compile it and try to find yourself a job. And there are many interesting jobs in the world.

I think Holland has very good management talent. And we have, we've recruited a lot of new managers. We have a headquarters at Hoofddorp near Schiphol. How does a particularly good quality? If you take a Dutch manager, give him international exposure, show him different countries in the world, they do particularly well. And I've often wondered why. I think it's because for three, four hundred years Holland was a trading nation. So you know, sometimes you get people who are so locked into their own culture, they often get with an American that they cannot see other people on equal terms. The very interesting thing about Dutch business people, the international class that have traveled and seen the world, is that they know Holland's a small country, and you know, sort of a permeable, open society, that they can engage with almost every other nation on Earth on equal terms and get along. So I think Dutch managers in general are one of the best cultures to recruit managers from.

Yes, I think definitely. When I was young, the word entrepreneur was still French, you know, it wasn't used. I think now there's a perception that it's very sexy to be an entrepreneur and everyone should try to be. And I think that's a great mistake because the economy does not need 100 entrepreneurs. It needs about one or two percent of people to be an entrepreneur, and the rest work in structures. I also think temperamentally, entrepreneurs maybe are some oddball. The best ones I know are defective. So someone's father's a drunk so he wants to prove that he is better. Another one is a total geek, you can't meet girls, so he ends up working more, develop an internet site, eventually become a sort of entrepreneur. They're often extremely competitive, they often also cause damage to their families because they're so unbalanced. The majority of entrepreneurs fail in their background. So to be an entrepreneur is not particularly attractive, and it's not something everyone should do. And not every temperament is suited to be an entrepreneur. It happens, I happen to like it, I like freedom, trying my own fortune. But I think for a great many people, it's better to work in an existing structure, find someone who could lead the company, and slot in somewhere useful in the structure and support team rather than try your own shop.

I get an idea that money is less important than people want fulfillment. And if you speak to young people, it's very seldom that someone says my only purpose in life is to make money. I think they say I want to do something useful with my life, and as a consequence of that, if I'm very good then maybe I'll make money. That's quite a helpful sign. I think young people are more idealistic, in a sense more positive than our generation.