Malcolm Gladwell on Tesla, RFK, and Why AI Could Save Us

Can generative AI help us close the gap between expertise and access? This week on a special episode of Digital Disruption, we're joined by New York Times best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell, recorded live in Las Vegas at Info-Tech Research Group's LIVE tech conference. Malcolm Gladwell is the author of eight New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, Revenge of the Tipping Point. Named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People and one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers, he is renowned for his unique perspective on the forces shaping human behavior and society. An extraordinary speaker, Gladwell combines eloquence, warmth, and humor to both entertain and challenge audiences. Through masterful storytelling, he unpacks complex and often misunderstood ideas, from decision-making in Blink and the roots of success in Outliers, to our underestimation of adversity in David and Goliath, and the missteps we make when interacting with strangers in Talking to Strangers. Malcolm Gladwell sits with Geoff Nielson for an engaging conversation on the future of AI, the power of storytelling, and the evolving forces that shape society. From AI’s role in closing the expertise gap to how unexpected narratives drive lasting cultural change, Gladwell offers his signature perspective: thoughtful, contrarian, and always surprising. He talks about why the most transformative uses of AI may be the simplest, how generative tools can elevate human capability, and why culture never changes in ways we expect. Malcolm provides insight into how the media, brands and politics are changing and what that could mean for leadership, while touching on the surprising truth about misinformation, expertise, and AI as a corrective tool. In this episode: 0:00 Intro 0:24 AI's biggest promise? Strengthening weak links 1:33 AI in developing vs developed countries 2:12 Should AI replace or empower teachers? 3:13 Closing the expertise gap with AI 4:18 AI as a safe place to learn without embarrassment 5:08 The human side of AI 5:32 AI in surprising places 6:15 Malcolm’s personal use of AI 7:57 Where Malcolm finds ideas and why AI can’t replicate them 9:52 Why creativity can’t be automated 12:42 Will AI ever replace storytellers and thinkers? 14:24 Paul Simon’s genius explained 17:27 What makes a great story? Tesla example 22:26 Are people the new brand? Apple vs Chevy 25:13 The power of "overstories" in shaping behavior 26:57 We live in multiple narratives at once 29:26 Can organizational culture be changed? 30:37 How cultural narratives evolve 31:37 Politics, power, and social media’s new role 35:07 We’re still figuring out what tech is for 38:10 Why AI disruption might not be as bad as we fear 39:34 Is Malcolm an optimist or just realistic? 41:22 Can AI restore trust in expertise? 43:43 The power of narrative over facts 44:15 Poking the bear Connect with Malcolm: Website: https://www.gladwellbooks.com/ X: https://x.com/Gladwell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/malcolmgladwell/ Visit our website: https://www.infotech.com/ Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InfoTechRG

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Geoff Nielson?

  Hey everyone, I'm here with Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling 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?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I mean, the theme of my talk today was about how AI is a, it's 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

• 1:06Speaker 01

  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, you know, medical decision-making to some rural area, or I can get a, give a subsistence farmer,

• 1:25Speaker 01

  you know, cutting-edge advice on what he should be planting and when he should be planting, I don't know, 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 developer 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

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Replace a teacher will be there, but I just think it's up to us to decide what we think the right choice is.

• 2:12Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, it's it's super interesting. And one of the 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, you know, the the the the top of the mountain use cases? And the the use case that you showed is more about like, can AI be dumber, right? If I if I can kind of just shorthand it like that, right? For 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 is just kind of rife for conflict or frustration.

• 2:58Geoff Nielson?

  And AI can actually

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:01Geoff Nielson?

  can actually support that and train people on this. And you you talked about it, as you said, in the context of of schools. But, you know, have you thought about more? Do you see other potential use cases? You know, in in any other field?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, it's it's, I mean, it's really limitless.

• 3:15Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  You know, once you think about that to the the 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. You know, people or environments. So think about medicine, for example. The 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?

• 3:59Speaker 01

  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 really on the internet, no one knows if no one knows you're a dog?

• 4:27Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 4:36Geoff Nielson?

  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 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.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  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. So that's a, that's a wholly different kind of.

• 5:45Geoff Nielson?

  Sure.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  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, is extending the use cases into less obvious areas. And that's, that's where I think there can be equally significant trade-offs.

• 6:14Geoff Nielson?

  So outside of IBM work, do you find you're experimenting with generative AI or AI in your personal life? And if so, you know, what does that look like? And, you know, how have you found it?

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Not as much as I'm beginning, 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?

• 6:50Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Or how can I find very specific little details that serve a narrative function of sparking people's interest or, and that's actually not what, those two tasks are not what AI is good at.

• 7:04Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  What AI is really good at being is mastering that kind of conventional wisdom in a really, really thorough and, and that's actually, that's not the hard part for me.

• 7:14Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  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 mountain of information I'm dealing with is enormous, it's become a data problem. And I'm, and I'm finding that AI can really, really help me efficiently manage that pile of data.

• 7:40Geoff Nielson?

  So when you, when you do a new project, whether it's a new book or any sort of, you know, kind 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, you know, coalesce them into a broader theme?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I typically, it can go both ways, but usually it starts from the bottom.

• 8:02Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  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 of years ago, the Houston Astros were discovered to have cheated. They were decoding their opponent's signs, pitching signs.

• 8:25Geoff Nielson?

  Oh, wow.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:36Geoff Nielson?

  It's like breaking the Navajo code or something, yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. They would bang a drum and the batter 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-

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Possible reasons why this is true. Now, I read that study and I was like, oh, I'm gonna use that one day. I have no idea where or how, but it's been stored away. And I, I promise you, in the next five years, that will show up somewhere. But I'm gonna find, I gotta 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, that what looked like advantages, not always advantages, you know, I mean, there's any number of things.

• 9:44Geoff Nielson?

  Right. More information isn't always.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Not necessarily better or whatever. I don't know what it is yet, but that's very much how I work is, is thinking about those kinds of things.

• 9:51Geoff Nielson?

  And, and that was kind of what I figured intuitively. And, 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'll, you know, I'm curious to run it by you, but they didn't really, in, in my mind, maybe you'll find differently, like, 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, it's not that top level that makes what you do fascinating. It's the, it's the whole thread, right?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or I would say that you could ask ChatGPT, if you fed, like, I, I spend 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 it to ChatGPT, 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 there's a clear pattern to that kind of academic research.

• 11:07Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  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 just a half the, you know, I do stuff for the most serendipitous.

• 11:20Geoff Nielson?

  You're an interested guy, right?

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Someone tells me something or something turns out to be unexpectedly interesting. Or so it's not, it's hard to do a prediction.

• 11:30Geoff Nielson?

  Right. Can I, can I run a few by you and just see what you think?

• 11:36Geoff Nielson?

  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 examines snap judgment, the book could interrogate when and why algorithms outperform or undermine human instincts.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  That sounds interesting. Not going to do it, but it sounds interesting.

• 12:03Geoff Nielson?

  Now 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.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:29Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  So again, ChatGPT is telling me some, telling us something, is giving you the conventional answer of, but you know, my value in the world is not in giving conventional answers.

• 12:42Geoff Nielson?

  Right, right. So, 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, you know, weak link and elevating weak links.

• 12:59Geoff Nielson?

  You know, you're someone who I don't know, people are very touchy, I find, about the word experts. You know, I don't know if I can call you an expert if you are an expert, but you're someone who, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, what this technology can do?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  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,

• 14:14Speaker 01

  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 got a very weird background.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Grew up in kind of very religious, southern environment. Has a PhD in theology, smuggled bibles into Eastern Europe in the eighties.

• 15:11Geoff Nielson?

  Wow.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  He's just like, that's what makes him interesting. Cause 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.

• 15:27Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  On the other hand, he will tell you that AI has sped up his research process by an order of magnitude to increase his productivity. But it's increased productivity of someone who is bringing some distinctive, interesting, weird thing to the table.

• 15:43Geoff Nielson?

  Right. 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, right? That attract us to it.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:53Geoff Nielson?

  No, it's.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, I was gonna give a call. You know, there's a famous thing with Paul Simon. One of, um, he had a long thing. I don't know if you know the song, uh, take me, come and take me to the Mardi Gras. It's an old classic. Paul Simon's, come on, take me to the Mardi Gras. That's a song that, where he took a, a falsetto, uh, a guy, a, a, a reverend from Harlem, who's one of the great falsetto singers in gospel music, took him to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, which is the center of R and B, imported a marching band from New Orleans and they

• 16:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:46Geoff Nielson?

  Wow.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  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 biblical traditions.

• 16:57Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  That's not, AI is not going to give you that. ChatGPT is not giving you Come and Take Me to the Mardi Gras.

• 17:05Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:13Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  It's not giving you like all of the things that are kind of iconic.

• 17:17Geoff Nielson?

  It doesn't have that unique human filter of I happen to be, you know, exposed to these inputs that, you know, created this out.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:24Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:27Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah. 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, 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?

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Interesting. I don't, I mean, I think that,

• 18:16Speaker 01

  I mean, the audience just, one definition of a story is, it is simply a, 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.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  So it's not the assertion of a fact.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  It's not the description of a situation. There has to be some distance traveled. And if along the way in that journey, the the listener's expectations are violated in some way, then we have a real story. Right? And by the violation of expectations is this crucial thing as well, like, there has to be a

• 19:09Speaker 01

  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?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Valued at a 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.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  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 this classic primal idea of the genius who applies his, you know, the genius returns to cars.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Haven't had a genius since Henry Ford or Ferdinand Porsche or whatever. And then Tesla falls apart. Why does Tesla fall apart? Because the story is violated. Because he no longer, 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 is 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 users of the brand, to the adherents

• 21:16Speaker 01

  of the brand. And you have to honor that story if you're going to keep the brand afloat.

• 21:23Geoff Nielson?

  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.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Like, oh, it contrasts. So if you're Chevy, the story is not about Chevy. The story, all of your narratives are about, you know, the person who buys a Chevy, 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 knows 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 who runs GM, but like, on a grand level. But yeah, no, that was a very particular relationship that people.

• 22:26Geoff Nielson?

  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?

• 22:56Speaker 01

  I'm not sure. I mean, I think there's, I have, 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

• 23:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:11Geoff Nielson?

  Right. Yeah. And I'm still thinking, I mean, for them to, 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.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Or it's what I've done with my phone. What's on it.

• 24:26Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, my story, my phone story begins with like, hold on, she just disappeared. My daughter.

• 24:38Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Right? 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.

• 24:47Geoff Nielson?

  No, it is interesting. And my background's the same thing. It's my, 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?

• 25:15Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, how do I want to ask this? Do you think that extends beyond just sort of geography? Does it, does it work in terms of brands, organizations? You know, some of the institutions that we interact with on a daily basis?

• 25:31Speaker 01

  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

• 26:16Speaker 01

  time. You know, it's, I'm always reminded of, years ago, I went with a friend to visit the Lubovitchers, the Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn. And, you know, they're this sort of messianic strain of Orthodox Jewry. We were chatting to a guy, and he was talking, who was a Lubovitcher. 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 was a TV show back then. And I realized, it was very just shocking, and I realized, oh, no, no, there's nothing

• 27:00Speaker 01

  shocking about that at all. One of his overstories is just someone who belongs to a close-knit ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn. Another of his overstories is he was an Australian guy. Who watch 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.

• 27:43Geoff Nielson?

  Right, and in a way that's, you know, actually, I think, 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 and it's, you know.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, my assistant told me that, he's like, where are you going? He's like, I'm going to New York today. I was like, where are you, 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 Dungeons and Dragons, it's a live taping of a Dungeons and Dragons podcast. They filled Madison Square Garden.

• 28:19Geoff Nielson?

  Wow.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Like, I'd never heard of this. I didn't even know this existed. But that's my point, like, that was one of his identities that I had no idea was a part of it.

• 28:28Geoff Nielson?

  Wow, and that's, I mean, that's also just culturally so interesting. And it, 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, you know, 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, that you don't get from a higher budget production that's, you know, less personalized.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, that intimacy is a big calling card.

• 29:06Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah. I wanted to come back to the overstory piece, and, you know, 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...

• 29:21Geoff Nielson?

  These kind of 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?

• 29:43Speaker 01

  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'm doing a project right now on the death penalty in the United States. And it's a big deal in the 40s and 50s and 60s. It goes away in the 70s, and America's overwhelmingly turned their back on the death penalty. And then it comes back. Right?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  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 not frivolously lightly held beliefs. These are deeply held beliefs that nonetheless changed twice in the span of a generation.

• 30:50Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  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, to Boulder, and their conception of what it means to be an effective medical specialist changes instantly. These things are... Are volatile.

• 31:12Geoff Nielson?

  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, that 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, uh, 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 can find, you know, dozens of examples is, you know, and I, this is not a political podcast, but the, the Republican Party kind of before and after Donald Trump, where this guy comes in and says, well, actually this is my view.

• 31:53Geoff Nielson?

  And, and suddenly there's, you know, 180 is, is too strong, you know, description of the shift, but there are these huge kind of tectonic changes in how, you know, identity is viewed and, you know, people view this. And I, 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 shift and there's more subtler forces. But I don't know, i- is that true? Are both true? How, how do you see the impact of, you know, more monolithic forces versus more decentralized forces in the coming years?

• 32:32Speaker 01

  It's a hard question, you know, because we don't, we sort of 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, um, certain, we're discovering the difference, the differences between those two forms are, are significant. Um, 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

• 33:16Speaker 01

  I don't think Trump gets elected in 1972.

• 33:21Geoff Nielson?

  Oh, I agree. I agree. Yeah.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  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

• 33:50Speaker 01

  collective discussion of who we are and what we mean.

• 33:54Geoff Nielson?

  So let me ask you another difficult question and feel free to just, you know, kind of,

• 34:00Geoff Nielson?

  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 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?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  I mean, I would say,

• 34:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Telephone, for the first 25 years of the telephone's life, the telephone industry actively tried to discourage people from using it to to gossip, to catch up with friends. They thought it was a business tool.

• 35:20Geoff Nielson?

  Beneath the function of the technology, yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  This should not be, shouldn't squander this thing on chatting with your mom. You should, it's a business tool. And they actually. Like I said, actively discourage people from, they didn't realize what it was until the twenties, which is, you know, when does Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone? Eighteen seventy-three? And it's, it's, it's the end of the nineteen twenties before they wake up to what it is. So, and the telephone is a bigger deal than Facebook and Twitter.

• 35:52Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  But it strikes me that Facebook and Twitter are, are still in their infancy. They're really young. Do I even, it's quite possible that if we have this conversation five years from now, not, neither, you know, both of us would have only a dim memory of this thing called Facebook.

• 36:10Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Or Twitter, or, I don't know, or the opposite.

• 36:13Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:22Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  In the future, but I, but no one can predict what those unanticipated ways are.

• 36:28Geoff Nielson?

  I, I think that's well said, and I, 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. Um, I did want to ask you, Malcolm, you know, one of the things, you know, I, I know you're

• 37:11Geoff Nielson?

  not a technologist, but I'm, I'm always curious to hear your perspective on, you know, what you're hearing and the way things are changing, but one of the things I like to do in these, 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 the zeitgeist, that you're like, you know what, I think that's bullshit. I think, you know, it's BS that's being sold because it generates a good story, but that you don't think is necessarily going to have its day.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  I think I have a lot of confidence that whatever employment dislocation is caused by AI will be.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Uh, will be short and not painless, but less painful than we think. I certainly the gloom and I don't buy the doomers, the gloom and doom on it.

• 38:01Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Just think like, we always say this every time something comes along and never pans out that that everyone has nothing to do.

• 38:10Geoff Nielson?

  It's become kind of Malthusian, right? Like this wave is gonna, you know.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  And I, I think people have more ingenuity than that. Um, uh, and also I think that we're probably a lot further off from truly transformative AI than we realize. I just, I'm a, I'm on the kind of, my expectations are, but I also, I also simultaneously believe that a lot of the most, you know, revolutionary uses of AI are some of its simplest ones. And it doesn't need, 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

• 38:58Speaker 01

  to give good answers to problems is huge. I mean, if that's all it did, it would be transformative.

• 39:05Geoff Nielson?

  Well, and 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.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exponential.

• 39:17Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah. Are you, you know, I, I was just listening to that response. Are you a natural optimist with, you know, just kind of forward looking in general? I get, 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?

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Well, I have a little bit of doom right now in my vocabulary, but um, yeah, I generally think, you know, I think a problem is simply arms raises between the problem and a, and a, and a solution. And, um, we're generally pretty good at keeping up in our, our end of that arms race. Um, uh, I must say that the.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Well, not to get political, but RFK Junior has shaken my...

• 40:07Speaker 01

  I find him...

• 40:10Speaker 01

  I find what is going on now, I did not anticipate this would ever happen in any kind of developed country in the 21st century. I am utterly gobsmacked.

• 40:20Geoff Nielson?

  The anti-science approach to public health.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:35Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a fair one. I was gonna 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 certainly a wide chasm between experts and non-experts. And it feels like it's become very in vogue to be like, while 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.

• 41:19Geoff Nielson?

  You know, Louis Pasteur be damned.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:25Geoff Nielson?

  What the hell do we do about that? Like, and does this training piece that we were talking about 20 minutes ago play a role in that?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, this is the best... One of the best-case scenarios for AI, which is... I had a little hilarious version of this where I had done this podcast that was very critical of RFK Junior and of Joe Rogan for...

• 41:51Geoff Nielson?

  Sure, platforming these people.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and not...

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Elon Musk retweets some angry tweet about my work and it gets a ton of views and blah, blah, blah. And one of the things that happens is that people on Twitter start asking Grok,

• 42:13Speaker 01

  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, now, this is a personal version of a larger, 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, for AI to lie about the big issues, right? You're not gonna get, your AI is never gonna tell you, or is not gonna tell you that vaccines cause autism,

• 42:58Speaker 01

  because it's gonna 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've, we've built an institution that can, that can answer it.

• 43:20Geoff Nielson?

  Right. Which, which in some ways is really reassuring. I'm still like, I'm still processing what you mentioned earlier about storytelling, right? Which is like, facts are not a story. It's, it's the narrative. It's the, you know, emotional journey you go on. And, you know, 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, 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

• 44:02Geoff Nielson?

  out there. Like, there's just certain areas of social media that are just like, and you've sort of talked about it in the context of this, where there, 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, 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.

• 44:25Geoff Nielson?

  I don't see any sort of negative force in anything you've ever done.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:29Geoff Nielson?

  I'm curious what your stance on it.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  It's gone on, I would say, it's actually less now than it used to be. It's 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, commentators, 90% of their consumers approve of what they, what they're reading. If you sell 10 books, that means you have nine fans and one critic. Right? It's gonna seem, you probably never hear the one critic. You're gonna, and if you hear anything at all, you hear from the fans.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:33Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Like, and I think that's what, and the haters are more motivated.

• 45:40Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Than the non-haters.

• 45:41Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  And 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.

• 45:51Geoff Nielson?

  Sure.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  If you go after Joe Rogan, Elon.

• 45:54Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  And RFK Jr., you're gonna get.

• 45:56Geoff Nielson?

  They mobilize their forces.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  You're gonna mobilize their forces.

• 45:59Geoff Nielson?

  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, you know, they treated me like garbage and gave me food poisoning in my entire family."

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:14Geoff Nielson?

  So.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  The extent to which social media is not a representative sample.

• 46:19Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  In other words, it cannot be underestimated.

• 46:22Geoff Nielson?

  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.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 46:28Geoff Nielson?

  Thanks.