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Digital Disruption with Geoff Nielson
Malcolm Gladwell on Tesla, RFK, and Why AI Could Save Us
00:46:37
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- [00:03]
Interviewer
Hey everyone. I'm here with Malcolm Gladwell, best selling author and you know, just had an amazing keynote. Malcolm, I just wanted to, you know, jump right into it and ask you, you know, as you look at the future, as you look out over, you know, this wave of new technologies, you know, generative AI obviously at the forefront, what, what kind of excites you most and what concerns you most as you look over the horizon?
- [00:24]
Malcolm Gladwell
Well, you know, I mean, the theme, the theme of my talk today was about how AI is its clearest and maybe most promising application is strengthening weak links and so upgrading, bringing lower performing things to some higher level. And if you just think about it in those terms, it's unbelievably exciting, right? So that you can think of, you know, everything, you know, I often think of any argument about AI is clarified if we remove the developed world and we just say, just think about this, if we're only talking about less developed countries, do we think, what do we think the kind of pros and cons of AI are? And it's just overwhelmingly pros. I mean, if I can bring world class medical decision making to some rural area or I can give a subsistence farmer cutting edge advice on what he should be planting and when he should be planting it and what the weather is, and I could go on and on and on, so that is the clearest win. And then I think it gets a little more complicated in the developed world where what we choose is our kind of favorite approach because we do have like in the talk I was giving today, which was all about the use of AI to train teachers, you know, the very clear choice is you can use AI to replace the human teacher or you can use AI to make the human teacher a better teacher. I think the second is a lot more, is a lot bigger win for society. But the temptation just to remove, replace a teacher will be there. But I just think it's up to us to decide what we think the right choice is.
- [02:12]
Interviewer
Yeah, it's super interesting. And one of the pieces of sort of conventional wisdom around AI that you completely flipped on its head, which I had never heard before, is I feel like there's so much talk about is AI smarter than the smartest human and is it going to replace us? And all the top of the mountain use cases and the use case that you showed is more about like, can AI be dumber? Right. If I can kind of just shorthand it like that. Right. For so many of us and for so much training there's. And you probably have better language around this than I do. But there's a transfer from a high expertise individual to a low expertise individual. And that mismatch is just kind of rife for conflict or frustration. And AI can actually support that and train people on this. And you talked about it, as you said, in the context of schools, but have you thought about more? Do you see other potential use cases in any other field?
- [03:13]
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh, I mean, it's really limitless once you think about that. The question as you pose it is right. There is a persistent problem that is growing larger over time of this gap between high expertise and low expertise people or environments. So, so think about medicine, for example. Not only is the medical profession required to know medical professional required to know a lot more than they were required 25 and 30 years ago, but they also have the job of explaining it to their patient, which is getting harder and harder and harder to do. Right. So is there a role for AI to assist to get the patient up to speed so they can have a productive conversation with a real person when they get into the office? That would be an equivalent use case. That's a really where. And because so much of the problem in those kinds of interactions is there is a degree of social embarrassment on the part of the person who is on the low end of that encounter. They just don't want to feel dumb in front of somebody else. But AI, you know, remember that the famous thing from earlier on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog. Well, with AI, no one knows if you're an idiot. Right. Like it's this wonderful, it's a place for you to get smarter before you go out and encounter the world.
- [04:37]
Interviewer
Yeah. Well, and you know, there's this long history, and I'm certainly not the first one to say it, that in high expertise professions, traditionally training is around the expertise. Right. It's around learning medicine. Right. It's, you know, I've said before, it's, it's more about health than it is about care. Right. It's not about that person to person impact. And I don't know, maybe it's, you know, against the grain, but it feels like, as you said, that the people side of it is actually the best application of this technology in some cases.
- [05:10]
Malcolm Gladwell
I mean, not all. I mean I, we do this really fun project with IBM where we, we interview a bunch of their clients and we did this totally hilarious thing with l' Oreal, which is a major IBM client, is basically using an AI to make better lipsticks because making a great lipstick is a data problem. And it's gotten so complicated that there is almost no way for an unassisted researcher to sort through all of the iterations and variations. And so that's a wholly different kind of. And so we know, but we knew that already. We knew that that was going to be AI was going to be brilliant at running through a billion different permutations in a blink of an eye. Right. That part we knew. So what I'm interested in is extending the use cases into less obvious areas. And that's where I think there can be equally significant trade offs.
- [06:15]
Interviewer
So outside of IBM work, do you find you're experimenting with generative AI or AI in your personal life? And if so, what does that look like and how have you found it?
- [06:24]
Malcolm Gladwell
Not as much as I'm sort of tentatively beginning to explore it a little bit. The problem is that from my perspective, it's not solving, it's solving a problem I don't necessarily have. And that is my problem is how do I find an unusual way to tell a conventional story or how can I find very specific little details that serve a narrative function of sparking people's interest? And that's actually not what those two tasks are, not what AI is good at.
- [07:05]
Interviewer
Right.
- [07:05]
Malcolm Gladwell
What AI is really good at being is mastering the kind of conventional wisdom in a really, really thorough. And that's actually, that's not the hard part for me.
- [07:14]
Interviewer
Right.
- [07:15]
Malcolm Gladwell
So I've been a little bit. But I am beginning to understand how in terms of, you know, when I'm doing some kind of large, complex project, I'm doing one right now, a nine part series on some legal case and where the amount of information I'm dealing with is enormous. It's become a data problem. And I'm finding that AI can really, really help me efficiently manage that pile of data.
- [07:41]
Interviewer
So when you do a new project, whether it's a new book or any sort of deep, meaty topic, do you typically start with the thesis and kind of work down for examples, or do you try and find interesting stories and correlate them into a broader theme?
- [07:57]
Malcolm Gladwell
I mean, I typically, it could go both ways, but usually it starts from the bottom right that you, you hear a story or you hear a little snippet and it makes you. So somebody, a friend of mine sent me a paper that just came out. I don't know if you're a baseball fan, but a couple years ago the Houston Astros were discovered to have cheated. They were decoding their opponents signs, pitching signs.
- [08:26]
Interviewer
Oh, wow.
- [08:26]
Malcolm Gladwell
And communicating the pitches to their batters in advance of the pitch, right? So catcher would give a sign that fastball and they would bang a drum.
- [08:36]
Interviewer
It's like breaking the Navajo code or something.
- [08:38]
Malcolm Gladwell
Exactly. They would bang a drum and the battery would know, oh, fastball's coming. So this guy does this big analysis of it and they discover you can't find any advantage to the Houston Astros from this cheating, even though it would seem intuitive that if you can tip off a batter to a pitch that's coming, the batter should do better. Turns out the batter does not do better. And so they give a whole bunch of possible reasons why this is true. Now, I read that study and I was like, oh, I'm going to use that one day. I have no idea where or how, but it's been stored away. And I promise you in the next five years that will show up somewhere. But I'm going to find a. I got to find a home for it, right? A context in which that particular story can have real meaning, right? Because it is telling us. It's telling us something really kind of fascinating about when does rule breaking is it, you know that what looked like advantages are not always advantages. I mean there's any number of things.
- [09:45]
Interviewer
More information isn't always necessarily better or whatever.
- [09:48]
Malcolm Gladwell
I don't know what it is yet, but that's very much how I work is thinking about those kinds of things.
- [09:52]
Interviewer
And that was kind of what I figured intuitively. And the reason I brought it up is I ran a little experiment myself which is I asked ChatGPT like what are some what do you think could be the next book Malcolm Gladwell writes and try to get it to come up with some hypotheses and what I found and I'm curious to run it by you, but they didn't really in my mind maybe you'll find differently. They didn't nail the mark. And to me, my hypothesis for why they didn't nail the mark is because you don't start writing a book with a title, right? Like it's not that top level that makes what you do fascinating. It's the whole thread.
- [10:30]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah, right. Or I would say that you could ask ChatGPT if you fed like I spent a lot of time with academics so and lately for this project I'm working on being a lot of time with. With law professors. If I take a law professor's published work over the course of 25 years and I give to Jet GPT and I say predict what the next paper will be in this person's research, I'm guessing ChatGPT would do a very good job because. Because there's a clear pattern to that kind of academic research.
- [11:07]
Interviewer
Right.
- [11:08]
Malcolm Gladwell
You have patterns of inquiry and they point in certain directions. But the difference with me is I don't have formal patterns of inquiry. I'm. I'm just a half the, you know, I do stuff for the most serendipitous.
- [11:21]
Interviewer
You're an interested guy, right?
- [11:22]
Malcolm Gladwell
What someone tells me something or something turns out to be unexpectedly interesting or so it's not. It's hard to do a prediction.
- [11:30]
Interviewer
Right. Can I, can I run a few by you and just see what you think while workflows called. So the first one is called. And I didn't tell it to do anything about AI, by the way, but the first one is called the Algorithmic Instinct. How AI is Rewriting Human Judgment concept. Gladwell could explore the tension between human intuition and algorithmic decision making. Much like Blink examined snap judgment, the book could interrogate when and why algorithms outperform or undermine human instincts.
- [12:00]
Malcolm Gladwell
It sounds interesting. Not going to do it, but it sounds interesting now.
- [12:04]
Interviewer
I guess you're not going to do it. One more for you here. The Network Effect, Social Contagion and Influence in the Digital Age. Building on the tipping point, it could revisit social epidemics in the context of social media and decentralization, exploring how ideas now go viral and how influence has evolved.
- [12:21]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah, well, I sort of did that with my last book, but I'm not going to do that because I don't think the world needs that book. I feel like that book's been written 10 times.
- [12:30]
Interviewer
Right.
- [12:31]
Malcolm Gladwell
So again, ChatGPT is telling us something is giving you the conventional answer of. But, you know, my value in the world is not in giving conventional answers.
- [12:43]
Interviewer
Right, right. So, you know, to that effect, you know, you talked today a little bit about being able to, you know, help everybody develop more expertise. This world we're moving to, of more weak link and elevating weak links. You're someone who, I don't know, people are very touchy, I find about the word experts. I don't know if I can call you an expert if you are an expert, but you're someone who practices expertise in things, learns deeply about things as someone sort of at that pinnacle. Are you worried about a world where there's an army of Malcolm Gladwells and what you're doing is devalued? Or do you see something unique for you or for. I don't even know who people like you are, to be honest. But for people Kind of in this space that transcends what this technology can do.
- [13:34]
Malcolm Gladwell
I'm not worried. I mean, I. Mostly because a lot of what. And this is true of any kind of creative field, that what excellence is in a creative field is very often unquantifiable. Or it's not. It's not intellectual capacity or access to information or efficiency at sorting or it's some kind of ineffable thing that. You know, I did a project with Paul Simon, the musician, and he has this lovely riff he would always give about how the ear is drawn to the discordant note. The thing that draws you into a melody is that little deviation. Weird, unexpected, bizarre sometimes, or deviation from the conventional path that the listener thinks that they're on. Right. And so that's what creativity is. It's this discordant thing. So, I don't know. Like, one of my best friends is a very successful screenwriter, and one of the reasons he's very successful is he's just weird in a really good way. He's had a very weird background. Grew up in kind of very religious Southern environment. Has a PhD in theology. Smuggled Bibles into Eastern Europe in the 80s.
- [15:12]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [15:13]
Malcolm Gladwell
It's just like that's what makes him interesting because he's always doing things that should have. You know, I don't know whether I may be wrong, but that part of it doesn't seem to be replicable with our current iterations of AI. Right. On the other hand, he will tell you that AI has sped up his research process by an order bank, too. Increases productivity, but it's increased the productivity of someone who is bringing some distinctive, interesting, weird thing to the table.
- [15:44]
Interviewer
Because we don't. We don't want the perfect song. Right. We don't want to smooth out all the wrinkles. It's the wrinkles that make it good.
- [15:52]
Malcolm Gladwell
Right.
- [15:52]
Interviewer
That attract us to it. Yeah.
- [15:54]
Malcolm Gladwell
Like. Yeah, I was going to give a call. You know, there's a famous thing with Paul Simon, one of. He had a long thing. I don't know if you know the song Take Me. Come and Take Me to the Mardi Gras. It's an old classic. Paul Simons, Come On Take Me to the Mardi Gras. That's a song that. Where he took a. A falsetto. A guy, a reverend from Harlem, who was one of the great falsetto singers in gospel music, took him to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which is the center of R B, imported a marching band from New Orleans, and they got together and they did a calypso Song. So he combined four different musical traditions and he was a white Jewish guy from New York.
- [16:46]
Interviewer
Wow.
- [16:46]
Malcolm Gladwell
Right. And like, that's one of his greatest songs. That's not. That's what we're talking about. Like, only he would think to combine. He's actually combining five musical traditions. Yeah, that's not. AI is not going to give you that. ChatGPT is not giving you Come and Take Me to the Mardi Gras. It might give you a Taylor Swift song, like the fifth best song on her album. It's not giving you. It's not giving you Graceland. It's not giving you like all of the things that are kind of iconic.
- [17:17]
Interviewer
It doesn't have that unique human filter of I happen to be exposed to these inputs that, you know, creatives.
- [17:24]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [17:27]
Interviewer
So. So, you know, on that note, one of the things, you know, Malcolm, that I've been talking about lately is just, you know, for everyone, certainly for leaders, just the power of storytelling as a vehicle for influence. Right. As a vehicle for leadership, as a vehicle for, I don't know, in some ways, you know, get, get getting your will to actually be accomplished. And this is something that, you know, I certainly view you as kind of a, you know, a world class storyteller. Is there a recipe for a good story or what? What actually makes a story compelling? And is this is your version of storytelling, do you think, broadly applicable to, you know, everyone?
- [18:12]
Malcolm Gladwell
Interesting. I don't. I mean, I think that, I mean, the audience. Just one definition of a story is it is simply an experience that leaves the listener in a different place at the end than they were at the beginning. So there has to be movement. So it's not the assertion of a fact, it's not the description of a situation. There has to be some distance traveled. And if along the way in that journey the listener's expectations are violated in some way, then we have a real story, right? And the violation of expectations is this crucial thing as well. Like there has to be a turn, like to give you an example of a story. For years and years and years, one of the most powerful brands in America is Tesla, right? Valued at many multiples of any other automobile maker, Incredibly successful, first successful automobile startup in God knows how many years. And it has a really incredible story with a violation of expectation. And the incredible story is a very weird, obsessive, brilliant guy is devoting all of his time and energy to creating a car that didn't exist before. And it's all like every part of that is every other Car manufacturer is this big, corporate, bland colossus. And here we have a weirdo out in California who, you know, went to college in Canada and grew up in South Africa and has this bizarre father and is just obsessed. Right? That's the story. Like, oh, my goodness. And he wants to do something, create an electric car. Like, in a way, it violates our expectations about where cars come from. Right. And it's satisfying and meaningful to us because, you know, we've had it's. It's this classic, primal idea of the genius who applies his. You know, the genius returns to cars. Haven't had a genius since Henry Ford or Ferdinand Porsche or whatever. And then Tesla falls apart. Why does Tesla fall apart? Because his story's violated. He's no longer devoting his attention to it. That's why I bought the car, because I thought the story was the genius was obsessed with every detail, and now the genius is doing a million other things, why the story's gone. Right. So, like, those are that idea, that implicit in that brand was this really interesting, weird, particular, detailed story about why it was important to the. To the users of the brand, the adherence of the brand. And you have to honor that story if you're going to keep the brand afloat.
- [21:24]
Interviewer
It's a really, really interesting example. And I'm realizing I never processed that for the Tesla brand, how integral apart Elon as an individual is of the brand. Right. Like, if you take Elon out of the equation, like, what is Tesla? Right. It's this abstraction. Yeah. The story is no longer there.
- [21:43]
Malcolm Gladwell
Oh, it contrasts. So if you're Chevy, the story is not about Chevy. This story, all of your narratives are about, you know, the person who buys a Chevy. Their. Their brand identity is all caught up in people they knew who drove Chevys. My dad had one of these cars. It means something to me. It's a completely different kind of story. You could have the weirdest, craziest person run Chevy. Wouldn't matter. No one even knows who runs Chevy. Like, who know who runs Chevy? Do you know? No, I don't know. I'm a car nut. I have no idea who runs Chevy. I know I knew who runs gm, but, like, on a grand level. But, yeah, that was a very particular relationship that people.
- [22:26]
Interviewer
So when we think about stories, you know, one of the adages, you know, you hear in marketing these days is that people are the new brand. You know, I've heard a few people say that. And, you know, certainly the Elon story kind of reinforces that the Chevy on the Other hand doesn't. Do you buy that? Do you think as storytellers we need to be more conscious of our role in the story and our role in kind of the brand that's being created either personally or professionally?
- [22:56]
Malcolm Gladwell
I'm not sure. I mean, I think there's. My problem is that I have such a kind of Catholic, small C Catholic definition of what a story is that I feel like it can take many, many forms. I think it's certainly true of some things but not others, you know, and also I think these stories differ from. Not all users, not all customers of a brand have the same relationship to that brand. So there may be multiple different stories appealing to multiple different people. So I don't know, like, certainly to someone of my. I have an iPhone and Steve Jobs matters. My conception of what Apple is. Steve Jobs continues to loom large. If I was 25. Most 25 year old people with iPhones have no idea who Steve Jobs was. He's vanished. It's now, do they care about Tim Cook? Not a wit? Like they have some other kind of. So I guess I'm more impressed by the kind of diversity, the many different roles that stories can play.
- [24:12]
Interviewer
Right. And I'm still thinking, I mean for them too similar to Chevy, it's probably more about who has or had an iPhone. Right. Like it's people driven, but it's not monolithic in terms of the person or.
- [24:24]
Malcolm Gladwell
It'S what I've done with my phone. What's on it. Yeah, right. I mean my story, my phone story begins with like, hold on, she just disappeared my daughter. Yeah, well, it's a personal object now. It's like full of all my personal things. So maybe my story has nothing to do with Apple whatsoever. I mean, I don't know. It's interesting.
- [24:48]
Interviewer
No, it is. And my background's the same thing. It's my daughter as well. But I was just reflecting on that, Malcolm, and I was thinking about, you know, Revenge of the Tipping Point, your last book, and over stories. Right. And how there's these. You know, the point you make in the book is that you use it geographically, that there's these. In these communities we're in, there's these sort of invisible narratives that guide our behavior. Do you think that's true? How do I want to ask this? Do you think that extends beyond just sort of geography? Does it work in terms of brands, organizations, you know, some of the institutions that we interact with on a daily basis?
- [25:31]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah. Oh, I think very much. I mean I chose in that book to focus on overstories that had a kind of dimension of place, a geography attached to them. But I think that you can conceive of these kinds of organizing narratives in any number of ways. You can conceive of them generationally, you conceive of them professionally. You can. Yeah, I think that. I mean, I think this idea can be kind of played with, particularly because, you know, one thing I don't go into in the book, but which I think is very clear, is that most of us are kind of operating within multiple overstories at any given time. You know, it's. I'm always reminded of years ago, I went with a friend to visit the Lubavitchers, the Orthodox, ultra Orthodox community in Brooklyn. And, you know, they're this sort of messianic strain of Orthodox Jewry. We're chatting to a guy and he was talking, who's a Lubavitcher, at the time, they thought that their Rebbe was the Messiah. He's talking about how the Rebbe is the Messiah, and he goes, you know, it reminds me of an episode of Mork and Mindy, which is a TV show at that point. And I realized it was very. Just shocking. And you realize, oh, no, no, there's nothing shocking about that at all. One of his overstories is someone who belongs to a close knit ultra Orthodox community in Brooklyn. Another of his overstories is he was an Australian guy who watched a lot of American tv and he also existed in that universe. And he probably had seven other. For all, you know, his son played soccer and he was obsessed with soccer, and he was, you know, I could go on. Like, we all have these. It's very easy for us to think that we're only functioning in one universe, where, in fact, maybe one of the hallmarks of the digital world is it's permitted us to belong to many different kind of worlds all at once, right?
- [27:45]
Interviewer
And in a way that's, you know, actually, I think he hidden, or at least kind of below water in a way that never was before. Like, it used to be that you could, you know, you could. If there was someone you cared about, you could see all those influences. But now, you know, they live in your device.
- [27:59]
Malcolm Gladwell
And it's. You know, my assistant told me that. I was like, where are you going? He's like, I'm going to New York today. I was like, why are you going to New York? I'm going to a show at Madison Square Garden. I was like, what's the show? He goes, it's a. It's a Dungeons and Dragons. It's a live taping of a Dungeons and Dragons podcast. Podcast. They filled Madison Square Garden. Like, I never heard of this. I didn't even know this existed. But that's my point. Like, these. That was one of his identities that I had no idea was part of it.
- [28:29]
Interviewer
Wow. And that's. I mean, that's also just culturally so interesting. And, yeah, it comes back to community and identity that there's now enough people. I mean, podcasts. I don't want to get too meta here, but the fact that podcasts have become so popular and people see them as a medium that in a lot of ways has become more popular than a lot of traditional media, I don't know. To me, it feels like people want to imagine that they're sitting at the table with you. Right. Like there's something deeply personal about it that you don't get from a higher budget production that's less personalized.
- [29:02]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yes, I think that's true. That intimacy is the big calling card.
- [29:07]
Interviewer
I wanted to come back to the overstory piece. And for me, you know, I talk a lot about organizational leadership and culture. Right. And how we can kind of define organizational culture for overstories and, you know, these kind of. These kind of, you know, invisible forces. And this is something you don't really get into in your book. But I was curious about, on your perspective, like, to what degree they're actually steerable and moldable versus just being emergent. Like, can we harness them in any way, or is it better just to understand them and take advantage of our deeper understanding of them to get to our outcomes?
- [29:44]
Malcolm Gladwell
I do think that they are fluid and changeable. I don't think we can ever have complete confidence that we know how to change them or can change them at will or can. But it is pretty clear that the ways in which we organize these kinds of common narratives shift all the time. I was. I'm doing a project right now on the death penalty in the United States. And, you know, it. It's a big deal in the 40s and 50s and 60s. It goes away in the 70s, and Americans overwhelmingly turn their back on death penalty. And then it comes back. Right. I mean, so like, in the span of 30 years, it's big, not big, and then big again. And at no point in that cycle did anyone predict the next stage in the cycle. But that is a. These are deep. These are not frivolously lightly held beliefs. These are deeply held beliefs that nonetheless changed twice in the span of a generation. Right, Right. So there is. These things are in ways, I think, and in the book I talk about, you know, the doctor moves from Buffalo to Denver and to Boulder, and their kind of conception of what it means to be an effective medical specialist changes instantly. These things are volatile.
- [31:12]
Interviewer
Yeah, well, and the other thing you talk about in the book that I thought was interesting is, you know, when it comes to shifts in perception and adoption of certain ideas, the impact the media has, whether it's traditional media, whether it's, you know, traditional voices, singular voices, you know, and I'm thinking specifically about. I think you talk about, you know, will and the will and grace effect on, you know, people in America's perception of gay marriage. And, you know, the one I was thinking about more recently, and I'm sure you could find, you know, dozens of examples is, you know, this is not a political podcast, but the Republican Party kind of before and after Donald Trump, where this guy comes in and says, well, actually, this is my view. And suddenly there's, you know, 180 is too strong description of the shift. But there are these huge kind of tectonic changes in how identity is viewed and people view this. And I'm curious on your perspective, because my sense, and especially in a weak link world, you would think it would be more democratized in terms of how these things. Things shift and there's more subtler forces, but I don't know. Is that true? Are both true? How do you see the impact of more monolithic forces versus more decentralized forces in the coming years?
- [32:32]
Malcolm Gladwell
It's a hard question, because we have swapped one model for another, or at least in many realms. We've gone from these highly centralized forms of cultural production to decentralized ones. And we're discovering that certain. We're discovering the difference. The differences between those two forms are significant. You raised the question of Trump. Do I think that Trump. This shift to Trump would have been possible in an earlier, more centralized environment? And I would say I do think that. I don't think that. I don't think. I don't think Trump gets elected in 1972.
- [33:21]
Interviewer
Oh, I agree. I agree. Yeah.
- [33:23]
Malcolm Gladwell
I mean, I think there's something that's somehow distinctive of the kind of moment that we're in. And the idea that politics is playing such a different function culturally today than it did back then. It's really become entertainment. It's the only common conversation we're having now. Sports and politics are the only common conversations we're having. Whereas we used to have far more outlets for this kind of collective discussion of who we are and what we mean.
- [33:55]
Interviewer
So. So let me ask you another difficult question, and feel free to just, you know, kind of, you know, muse on it however you want. But, you know, I think I completely agree with your comment about Trump. You know, he's not happening in 1972, and I feel like. I don't think I made this up, but he's kind of the. He's the social media president. Right. Like, Twitter was the vehicle that kind of propelled him into office. Are. Are we going to see more people like that? And now that we're, you know, in terms of the technology zeitgeist, it seems like we've like social media. Sure. But now we're talking about generative AI and the impact some of these technologies can have. What impact does that have on the dissemination of culture and how that kind of translates into power structures?
- [34:42]
Malcolm Gladwell
I mean, I would say I don't know and I don't know for the following reason, which is that we have to remember that all of these technologies we're discussing are in their infancy and that historically, when you look at the advent of new, particularly media, forms of media, it takes years for society to figure out what they're for. The telephone. For the first 25 years of the telephone's life, the telephone industry actively tried to discourage people from using it to gossip, to catch up with friends. They thought it was business tool beneath.
- [35:21]
Interviewer
The function of the technology. Yeah.
- [35:23]
Malcolm Gladwell
This should not be. Shouldn't squander this thing on chatting with your mom. You should. It should. It's a business tool. And they actually, like I said, actively discouraged people from. They didn't realize what it was until the 20s, which is, you know, when does Alexander Graham Bell invent telephone? 1873. And it's, it's, it's the end of the 1920s before they wake up to what it is. So the telephone is a bigger deal than Facebook and Twitter, but it strikes me that Facebook and Twitter are still in their infancy. They're really young. Do I even. It's quite possible that if we had this conversation five years from now, neither of both of us would have only a dim memory of this thing called Facebook or Twitter or. I don't know. Or the opposite.
- [36:14]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [36:14]
Malcolm Gladwell
That it completely dominates our life. I just don't think the only confidence I have is that we will be using these technologies in unanticipated ways.
- [36:23]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [36:24]
Malcolm Gladwell
In the future. But I. But no one can predict what those unanticipated ways are.
- [36:29]
Interviewer
I think that's. Well Said, and I, I completely buy that. And the reason I was kind of chuckling is I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but even something like Facebook, I feel like if you go back in time, rewind the clock five or 10 years and look at Facebook, then it's completely unrecognizable from what it looks like now. And even I found if I look at how I used it then I don't even recognize myself in it. You know, I'm like, oh, I was, you know, just using it in this very nascent, sort of now feeling bizarre way. But the technologies and our, you know, patterns are just evolving so fast that, you know, and I have to only imagine that's going to continue into the future. I did want to ask you, Malcolm, one of the things, I know you're not a technologist, but I'm always curious to hear your perspective on what you're hearing and the way things are changing. But one of the things I like to do in these formats is ask people what you're hearing about now that there's a lot of hype around technology or otherwise that tends to be in the zeitgeist that you're like, you know what? I think that's bullshit. I think it's BS that's being. Being sold because it generates a good story, but that you don't think is necessarily going to have its day.
- [37:39]
Malcolm Gladwell
I think I have a lot of confidence that whatever employment dislocation is caused by AI will be, will be short and not painless, but less painful than we think. I sort of think the Glumman. I don't buy the doomers, the, the gloom and dooming on it. I just think like we always say this every time something comes along, it never pans out that everyone has nothing to do.
- [38:10]
Interviewer
It's become kind of Malthusian, right? Like this wave is gonna.
- [38:14]
Malcolm Gladwell
And I think people have more ingenuity than that. And also I think that we're probably a lot further off from truly transformative AI than we realize. I just, I'm on the kind of. My expectations are. But I also simultaneously believe that a lot of the most revolutionary uses of AI are some of its simplest ones. And it doesn't need to be this incredibly mind blowing technological accomplishment to make a difference in our lives. Simply holding and organizing information and standing at the ready to give good answers to problems is huge. I mean, if that's all it did, it would be transformative.
- [39:06]
Interviewer
When you talk about it from a research perspective as kind of A data organizer. Right. If even if all it does is you feed it all your data and then ask it questions about that data, you know, it's still exponential.
- [39:16]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah, that's exponential.
- [39:18]
Interviewer
Yeah. Are you, you know, I was just listening to that response. Are you a natural optimist with, you know, just kind of forward looking in general? I sort of get that sense about you that you don't, you don't have a lot of doom in your vocabulary or are you just an interested observer?
- [39:34]
Malcolm Gladwell
Well, I have a little bit of doom right now in my vocabulary, but yeah, I generally think, you know, I think a problem is simply arms races between the problem and the solution. And we're generally pretty good at keeping up in our end of that arms race. I must say that. Well, not to get political, but RFK Jr has shaken my. I find him, I find what he's going. What is going on? I know I did not anticipate this would ever happen in any kind of developed country in the 21st century. I am utterly gobsmacked.
- [40:21]
Interviewer
The, the anti science approach to public health.
- [40:23]
Malcolm Gladwell
He does it. The idea that a guy could be running the greatest scientific institution in the history of mankind who believes Louis Pasteur was wrong is just. I did not anticipate that.
- [40:35]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, that's.
- [40:37]
Malcolm Gladwell
That.
- [40:38]
Interviewer
Yeah, that, that's a fair one. I was going to ask you. Yeah, that's. I understand why there's a sense of doom when you see that. Well, and that's. So let's maybe loop that back around to the conversation about expertise. Right. Because there's. I don't know if this is too dramatic, but I feel like there's sort of a war on expertise going on right now. Like there's, there's certainly a wide, you know, chasm between, you know, experts and non experts and it feels like it's become very in vogue to be like, well, the experts are like, they're as self motivated as anybody else. They're manipulating you. Right. You can't trust them. We know better. Common sense prevails. You know, Louis Pasteur be damned.
- [41:22]
Malcolm Gladwell
Yeah.
- [41:25]
Interviewer
What the hell do we do about that? And does this training piece that we were talking about 20 minutes ago play a role in that?
- [41:33]
Malcolm Gladwell
I think, I mean, this is the best, one of the best case scenarios for AI, which is. I had a little, a little hilarious version of this where I had done this podcast that was very critical of RFK Jr. And, and of Joe Rogan.
- [41:50]
Interviewer
For sure, kind of platforming these people like and not.
- [41:55]
Malcolm Gladwell
And Elon Musk retweets some, some angry tweet about my work and it gets ton of views and blah, blah, blah. And one of the things that happens is that people on Twitter start asking Grok is Gladwell, you know, does he make stuff up? Is he a hack? Is he all the things that I was accused of being and Grok defends me. Now this is a personal version of a large, bigger thing, which is, you know, we are actually, we have rarely been better equipped to deal with nonsense than we are now. I mean, we shouldn't. We have a tool at our disposal which finds it. It's very hard for AI to lie about the big issues. Right? You're not going to get. Your AI is never going to tell you or is not going to tell you that vaccines cause autism because it's going to look at the data, right? That's what it does unless you corrupt it in some spectacular fashion. So like it's, you know, we are building a corrective to a lot of this nonsense. At the same time as. So at the same time as the nonsense seems to be peaking, we built an institution that can answer it.
- [43:21]
Interviewer
Right. Which in some ways is really reassuring. I'm still processing what you mentioned earlier about storytelling, which is like, facts are not a story. It's the narrative, it's the emotional journey you go on and the impact that these outsized voices can have because they put their own ribbon on whatever series of facts or falsehoods that they want to. But you, you know, we sort of backed into something that I wanted to ask you as well, which is, you know, I think I mentioned off the top that, you know, I've been a fan of yours for a long time and like, to me that's kind of a no brainer. I just, like, I just personally relate to your worldview and as I was looking at some of your stuff online, there's like, there seems to be like a Gladwell backlash out there. Like there's just certain areas of social media that are just like. And you sort of talked about it in the context of this where they're, I don't know, like if you want to call them haters or what, but just people who, like, you can say anything and they're like, you're the devil. And I'm curious why in your mind that is, like, what's led to that. Because I don't, like, I don't know, I don't see any sort of negative force in anything you've ever done. So I'm curious what your stance.
- [44:31]
Malcolm Gladwell
It's gone on. I would say it's actually less now than it used to be. So been going on for a long time. And I think it's simply. There's a. I can give you a kind of, like, flippant, mathematical response, which is. It's a function of if 90% of people like your work, which would be high. But let's assume that across the board for all writers. Com to 90% of their consumers approve of what they. What they. What they're reading. If you sell 10 books, that means you have nine fans and one critic, right? It's going to seem. You probably never hear the one critic. You're going to. And if you hear anything at all, you hear from the fans. If you have a million readers, it means you have 900,000 fans and 100,000 critics. Right? And that's if you have 90% approval from your. So it's just, it's just a function of, like, how many people are reading your stuff. Like. And I think that's what. And the, the, the. The haters are more motivated.
- [45:40]
Interviewer
Right.
- [45:41]
Malcolm Gladwell
Than the non haters. So you're gonna, you're gonna have this perception of. And also the other thing I would say is I do love poking the bear. So.
- [45:51]
Interviewer
Sure.
- [45:52]
Malcolm Gladwell
If you go after Joe Rogan, Elon and RFK Jr. You're gonna get.
- [45:57]
Interviewer
They mobilize their forces.
- [45:58]
Malcolm Gladwell
You're gonna mobilize their forces.
- [45:59]
Interviewer
Well, and I was thinking, too, it's like, it's kind of like the Yelp review effect, right? Like, you never have people like, just saying, like, the restaurant was good, right? Like, it was either the best meal they've ever had or probably even more likely like, oh, they treated me like garbage and gave me food poisoning in my entire family.
- [46:15]
Malcolm Gladwell
So the extent to which social media is not a representative sample, in other words, this cannot be underestimated.
- [46:22]
Interviewer
Very well said. Malcolm, I want to say a big thank you for joining me here today. I thought this was really interesting and really appreciated your time.
- [46:28]
Malcolm Gladwell
Thank you so much.
- [46:29]
Interviewer
Thanks.