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I recently visited Paris,

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and on that trip this last March,
I made a discovery.

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It was a fascinating thing that I noticed.

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I discovered the loneliest place
at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

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I can tell you where it is.

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It's on the first floor, south wing,
room number seven.

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North side, not the south side.

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It is an amazing place,
and I'll explain why.

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But first, I'm just struck
by a thought, actually,

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looking at the timer that is in my face,

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if I were to end right now, this would be
the shortest TED Talk in human history.

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So, on that note, in under a minute,
do you guys want to make history?

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Shall we?

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(Audience) Yeah!

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Finish it here?

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Thank you, thank you, you've been amazing.

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(Laughter)

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In an earlier talk this morning,
you heard about the Louvre Museum.

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(Laughter)

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No, but why is this room
the loneliest place at the Louvre Museum?

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Room number seven.

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There are two sides to it,
north entrance and south entrance.

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I entered though the north entrance,

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and there is a wall
in the middle of the room

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that divides the room into two parts.

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So as I entered,
this big wall is in front of me,

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and there are five paintings
mounted on the wall.

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And I am just super excited
because there is nobody around.

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I have these five beautiful
paintings all to myself.

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So I stand there and I take it all in.

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But soon I realised
something very strange:

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that I was the only one
looking at the wall.

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Nobody was coming towards the wall.

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People were walking away
from the wall or around it.

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Why? Why wasn't anybody
paying attention to these five paintings?

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So I beg the question,
What is on the other side of the wall?

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I had a look.

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More than 300 people
were on the other side.

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And they were all trying to catch
a glimpse of Da Vinci's masterpiece,

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the Mona Lisa.

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The wall epitomizes
a core vulnerability for all of us.

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A fear that we share.

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Which side of the wall
are you going to end up on?

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Is what you're working on today
going to stand the test of time?

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Will you matter?

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And it is not all about,
not at all about fame or fortune;

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it is about values, about beauty.

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It's about creating
something that has impact.

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So let me share with you
my personal beacon of guidance

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for how to choose projects that have
the best chance at having impact.

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I call the process "lygometry."

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"Lygo," L-Y-G-O,
is Latin for shadow or darkness.

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"Metry" is measurement, quantification.

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Lygometry means quantifying
things you know you do not know.

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The open questions.

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Picture a circle.

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Inside the circle is everything you know.
Outside is everything you don't know.

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Lygometry is the edge of the circle.

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The segue to creativity.

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Things you know you do not know.
Quantifying lack of knowledge.

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This is quite powerful

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but is not as prevalent
as you would expect it to be,

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given that it is the segue to creativity.

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I have a degree
in artificial intelligence,

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I studied economic policy at Harvard,
I got an MBA from Stanford,

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and I am quite grateful
for the education that I got.

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But in 10,000 hours of lectures
that I have sat through,

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never did I see a professor
walk into the room and say,

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"Here's everything
we know about this topic,

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and here's everything we don't."

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Why?

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Why not?

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Why is that our educators feel compelled
to project perfect knowledge

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when there isn't any.

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Our education system is predicated
on the needs of the Industrial Revolution.

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They needed to dump a lot
of information on a lot of people.

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But guess what?

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Information has become abundant and cheap.

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Imagine what we could do

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if instead of asking our students
to regurgitate established knowledge,

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we expose them to the open problems.

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Imagine the type of creativity
we could tap into,

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the type of passion we could fuel.

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Lygometry is a bit counterintuitive.

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We all seek certainty
in an uncertain world,

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so it creates cognitive dissonance
to talk about open problems -

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problems that might not be resolvable.

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Our brains love solving problems
that are solved.

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I believe we're going to look back
at this period in human history

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and recognise a big flaw
in how we're doing this.

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We are mistaking abundance of information
for sufficiency of knowledge.

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Mistaking abundance for sufficiency.

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I have a picture of Isaac Newton's house

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on top of my desk.

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It is a reminder to me about lygometry.

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In the picture, you can see the tree.

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Yes, the tree from which
the apple fell on his head,

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he discovered gravity,

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and as a result,
we all had to take physics.

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(Laughter)

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And we did.

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In those physics courses,
we learnt about gravity, all the formulas,

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how to do calculations.

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But did any of your teachers ever say

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that gravity as a whole
is a big open question in physics?

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We don't understand it, can't explain it,
don't know where it comes from.

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The best theory we have
about gravity is from Einstein.

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And even that theory has not been
reconciled with quantum mechanics.

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Big open question.

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But why is it

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that today is probably the first day
that a lot of you hear about it?

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Why don't we talk
about these open questions?

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I decided to do something about this.

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I have started a project
called "Reversopedia."

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It is a reverse encyclopedia
of things we know we don't know.

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And it is online.

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It's an open-source project,
and I encourage you to check it out,

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especially if you're an educator -

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go there and incorporate some of
the open questions in your lesson flows.

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But the challenge is absence of lygometry
does not affect education only;

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it affects how we run our organisations.

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The modern workplace suffers

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from an epidemic of knowledge inflation
and knowledge pretension.

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Folks believing and claiming
to know more than they do.

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Collectively we have failed to create
a safe environment for people to say,

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"This is what I know I do not know."

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So we compound our assumptions
and pretensions and lack of knowledge.

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I coach executives on this,

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and it is amazing the type
of discoveries they make

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about new opportunities
and about how to handle threats.

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I personally believe we
could have avoided the financial crisis

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through a lygometric process.

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It is important to recognise
that the most important type of knowledge

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is lack of knowledge.

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But we have stigmatised it
in the workplace.

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I'm positive we will get over this

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as our language around
knowledge becomes better,

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as we increase
the calibre of that dialogue,

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as we become more sophisticated
and more secure in what we know,

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we'll be better prepared
to talk about what we don't know.

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But let me switch to a positive note.

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Who does lygometry well?

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Two groups:

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children and artificial intelligence.

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Children are born with
an innate ability to do lygometry.

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They're very good at keeping track
of things that don't make sense to them.

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And they're not shy
about asking, are they?

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They ask those questions;
their egos don't get in the way, yet.

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We're all born with an ability
to do lygometry,

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but we are educated out of it.

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We're educated out of it.

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Surprisingly, machines
do this extremely well too.

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Our best methodologies
in artificial intelligence

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keep track of things
about their hypothesis

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that don't map the data they're given,

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the difference between
what they know and what they don't.

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So effectively, they are following
a very methodical lygometric process.

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They're honing in on the open questions,

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and as a result,
they're adapting in real time.

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This is my hope for humanity's future.

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I started with a conversation
about vulnerability.

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Lygometry,

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acknowledging the open questions,

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acknowledging things
you know you don't know

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is a very vulnerable process.

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But if you endure the pressure,
if you can get through it,

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on the other side there is creativity,
there is innovation, there is liberation.

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No pressure, no diamond.

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I want to share with you a personal story.

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If you google the phrase
"the world's best guitar player,"

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I'm it.

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(Laughter)

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You can try it.

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You google that -
"world's best guitar player" -

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search for it, I'm the first result.

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There's a video of me somebody posted,
I don't know who; it went viral.

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It has 32 million views.

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By the way, 32 million views -

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I want to share a secret with you guys,

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privileged information,
please don't share outside this room.

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(Laughter)

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Of the 32 million views,

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31 million is my mother.

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(Laughter)

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Big fan. That's how you become
the world's best guitar player.

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I'm definitely not
the world's best guitar player.

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The reason I share this story with you

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is the fact that I've only had
seven hours of lessons in my life.

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I'm grateful for those seven hours.

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But I've benefited from the absence
of my instructors in a strange way.

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I could see what
other guitar players could do,

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the types of sounds they could create.

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And I knew I couldn't.

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Lygometry.

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But that led to a creative process.

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I tried to create my own sounds.

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The easiest way to think outside the box
is to not know where the box is.

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I have big belief in lygometry.

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And I think, over time,
a paradigm shift is in order

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to upgrade our conversation
about knowledge,

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about how we think about
humanity's big problems.

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Because if we do, and we should,

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because children are doing it,
machines are doing it,

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there's no reason why we can't.

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If we do, our biggest problems
will become our biggest solutions.

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I would like to end
by playing you a little song.

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It is a song that I wrote
called "Gratitude."

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I call it "Gratitude,"

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and the title perfectly captures

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how I felt for the opportunity
to be here with you this morning.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)

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(Music)

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(Music continues)

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(Music continues)

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(Music ends)

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(Cheers) (Applause)