Malcolm Gladwell on Why Storytelling Still Matters in the Age of AI

I'm here with Malcolm Gladwell, award-winning, best-selling author, podcast host, journalist, writer. Thank you so much for being here, Malcolm. I really appreciate it. No, I'm delighted. Yeah, thank you. So, and speaking about everything that you've done, right, so many books, Outliers, Tipping Point, so many more, Revisionist History, incredible podcasts, really what you're doing, whether it's there with The New Yorker, anywhere else you're writing for, is your storytelling. So tell us a little bit about the importance of storytelling today, what being a storyteller means to you, and especially for people who maybe are not professional. storytellers, why it's still so important, this idea of telling stories, especially in this kind of new AI technology world? Yeah. Well, I think that stories remain the most kind of natural way in which we absorb information, the way we make sense of the world. It is the oldest. You think about the oldest forms of communication, human beings sitting around a fire telling stories to And if you're trying to compete for attention, In a very, very crowded information marketplace, I think the best story wins, you know, if you can, I try and always embed the lessons I'm trying to impart inside a story because you can just watch people, their eyes as you talk to them, they're responding to the story. And then absorbing the lesson sort of secondarily. Yeah, and in thinking about the stories and the stories that you tell, really infinite stories out there to tell, how do you select what you want to tell a story about and also what medium to tell it, right? Because, again, you have so many different options from podcasts to a book to an article. How do you pick that story and then the medium to tell it in? Yeah, well, I don't worry too much about, I mean, I pick, let me answer the first part of that. I'm always on the lookout for stories. And And I'm drawn to stories that tell me something I didn't know or tell me that I was wrong. You know, I'm looking, I'm almost looking for something that sort of challenges me. Um, and And I, these days I spend a lot of time storytelling in my podcast. And I like storytelling in podcast form because I think that the ear is a much more powerful way to tell a story than the eyes. And it's so much easier to communicate emotion. Um, and the thing about a podcast is it allows you to tell a story about someone in that person's own voice because you're using, you know, you're sitting down and talking to them and using their own tape and that's really powerful too. It's not just me. It's me collaborating with all of these different voices. So that's my preferred mode at the moment. Yeah, I mean, listening to Revisionist History, it's incredible. Thinking about the different types of stories you tell on there, you really can tell that you have this level of curiosity, which is what you're talking about. What are you really interested in? What can you really learn from? Tell us a little bit about the curiosity that not only you have when it comes to writing your stories, but when it comes to... The curiosity that we all could have, maybe even approaching AI, approaching some of these new challenges, this new technology. Why is curiosity so important? Well, it's the first, I mean, curiosity is a very natural human state. I mean, kids are insanely curious. And we somehow kind of train ourselves out of that. And so I feel like as we get older, we have to work harder to kind of keep that spark alive. But it is... It's the kind of delivery mechanism for new information. It's the emotional trigger that makes us want to learn something new. Because if you're kind of closed off to new information, there's no amount of explaining, hectoring, forcing, motivating that will help you. There has to be some part of you that finds pleasure in discovery. That's what, curiosity is another way of saying that this is someone who finds the act of finding something new to be pleasurable. And that's the most powerful of all kind of psychological motivations. And how do you think that fits into everything that we're dealing with now with AI and this kind of revolution with AI? You've talked a little bit about who you think the biggest kind of winners and losers will be in this AI race. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, if you think about agents, they're as good as the questions we ask them, right? So, being able to, being, you know, and they don't, they, you need to exploit the AI, right? The AI doesn't work, at least not yet anyway, independently of you. It's only as good as what you can imagine to ask it. So we're sort of entering an age where there are kind of powerful and immediate returns to curiosity. Yeah, and in thinking about that, who do you think, when it comes to either a person or really a company, an industry, is going to go far with AI and be able to say, okay, we're now taking it to the next level where it's actually useful, it's actually creating something of value here. Who do you think is going to be there versus the people who get kind of left behind and are not really getting to that point? Well, you know, my talk today, Today I talked about Real serious innovation requires us to change our understanding of a problem, our routines around that problem, and our identity as a professional. And I think it's people who hold those three things loosely, who understand that You know, just because you've done something a certain way doesn't mean you have to do it that way. People who are willing to kind of reinvent themselves. So it's, you know, people who have a firm sense of self, in other words, outside of what they do and the kind of routines of their life. Yeah, and speaking of that, I mean, you've talked a lot about identity, purpose, and how that kind of ties into AI and technology. Where do you think that's going when we look down the line, even just five years, how people's relationships, again, with their work and their lives, really this identity is going to play into the relationship with AI? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I just know, all I know, I don't know where we're going to end up. All I know is that there's almost no aspect of professional life, working life, that's not going to require some kind of... identity reformulation, you know, what it means to be a teacher is going to change, what it means to be a doctor is going to change, what it means to be a marketing professional is going to change. And we have to kind of, one of the reasons in the talk I talked about having a customer focus, if you're a business person, is enormous, is even more useful now, because if that, if your identity is tied up with serving your customer, then you're free. To change what you do without challenging your self-esteem. If your identity is tied up in serving your own interests, innovation becomes a lot harder. Yeah, it really does. We really appreciate you taking the time today. Malcolm Gladwell, thank you so much. Appreciate it.