>> Voiceover: Live from San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube. Covering QuickBooks Connect 2016, sponsored by Intuit QuickBooks. Now, here are your hosts, Jeff Frick and John Walls. >> Welcome back here on the Cube as we continue our coverage here at Quickbooks Connect 2016 live from San Jose at the Convention Center. 5,000 attendees, the third year of this event, more than ever, and certainly that explosive growth is personified in what's happening here. On this floor and the key note station, and of course at home, if you're a small business owner you know exactly what we're talking about. Along with Jeff Frick, I'm John Walls and we're joined now by probably one of the most popular authors, most widely read authors in America today. Malcolm Gladwell, five times New York Times Bestseller Author. Congratulations on that. And the Revisionist History Podcast, which we love. I love the Wilt Chamberlain podcast, Big Man Can't Shoot. Thanks for joining us. Great to have you. >> Delighted to be here. >> So, first off, tell us about, and the whole spirit of this show is about the entrepreneurial capabilities of so many people in the workplace today. What's your thought about entrepreneurism if you will, and what does it take to be a good outside the box thinker? Like so many of these folks are. >> Well there ... The explosion ... Here we are in the middle of Silicon Valley and what this part of the country has done to change the culture of the entire world's economy in the last 20 years, 25 years is nothing short of incredible. Entrepreneurship has gone from something that people thought of as the province of wackos and weirdos and strange people to a kind of thing that kids aspire to do and be. That's an amazing transformation. And I think when we ... What's happened over the course of that transformation is we've discovered that the definition of what it takes to be good is a lot broader than we thought. That many different kinds of people using many different kinds of strategies can be effective at starting businesses and achieving. I think that's been the great take home lesson of this entrepreneurial explosion of the last generation. >> I think probably in all of your works, there are pieces of it that you could extract and apply to this world, but what really struck me I think about David and Goliath, about advantages, disadvantages and making the most of your strengths basically, how do you see that translating or how would you want to communicate that to somebody, a small business owner, who thinks "Man, I'm up against the wall"? "How am I going to cut through the clutter?" "How am I going to get there?" All this sweat equity. But yet, there are advantages that they have. >> Yeah. Yeah, because this goes to this issue of learning strategies that there's a kind of learning called compensation learning, where you are learning out of weakness, not out of strength. You're learning from your failures and that kind of learning is a lot harder to do, but it's a lot more powerful. So the task of the small business owner, who is facing a whole series of disadvantages and weaknesses relative to much larger competitors, there's no question, it's a harder way to go. But, if you can pull it off, you'll end up in a much stronger position. If you can be one of those people who can do compensation learning, and in that book I talk, for example, about how many entrepreneurs are dyslexic, and that's a beautiful example of that. Some portion of people who suffer from quite a serious learning disorder, not all of them, some portion of them manage to turn that around into an advantage. To take something, to take a basic inability to read, and turn that into developing skills or delegation and leadership and problem solving and developing an incredible resilience, the ability to cope with failure. They turn a weakness into a strength and they end up being far more powerful than they would be as a result. And when I interviewed all these successful, dyslexic entrepreneurs for that book, what was amazing was that all of them said, "I did not succeed despite my disability, I succeeded because of it." And that's the crux of it. And so I think there is a silver lining to many of the clouds that small business owners face. >> It's a really powerful statement because so often, people are using drugs and medication and other things to kind of normalize people that are maybe not in the mean, that are on the fringe. But in fact, it's their ability to put a different lens, and see things differently that opens up an opportunity that the regular person just trucking down the road didn't see right in front of them. >> That's what I meant when I said earlier, talking about how our kind of definition of what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur is expanding. I think we're beginning to understand that lots of traits that we once thought of as just problematic have unexpected benefits. Like I remember once reading someone who was putting out that basically, most of the great research scientists in the world have OCD. And you kind of have to have OCD if you want to be ... 'Cause what are you doing? You're spending hours and hours in the lab doing the same incredibly precise experiment over and over and over again, and measuring your results to the slightest. That's OCD behavior that has found a beautiful home. Right? Has found a world where you need to be that way, right? And I read that as like, "That's lovely." These are people who we drugged up and pushed off to the fringes two generations ago, and now we've found a home for them in labs where they're doing incredibly productive and satisfying work. >> Yeah, I think you profiled in one of the podcasts, a cancer researcher who you said nobody really likes the guy, he's kind of an ordinary guy, but he was just so laser focused on the very specific problem that he was trying to solve. He didn't really care. That's what he was all about. >> Yeah, no, this has been a lovely development in our understanding of human capacity. >> So where do the ideas come from? I'm one of the many fans and I've read, and every time I read one of your books, it never ceases to amaze me how much you make me think. Which is, I think, why we're all so attracted to it. Because it seems so obvious, right? After you present this beautiful, elegant case, like "I never thought of that." Where do those ideas come from? What motivates you to say "I'm going to write blank. I'm going to do tipping point." >> I wish I had a system, 'cause right now I'm planning the next season of my podcast, so I need 10 more ideas for that, and I'm starting to write a new book so I need 80,000 words for that. And I'm wondering, I wish I had a big bucket full of ideas. (laughter) So I'm running around with my head cut off talking to people, but I spent the summer ... I probably read 40 books this summer to do with ... Apart from, I'm not talking about novels and fillers, and serious books that I'm trying to get. And I've been going around talking to people, just talking to interesting people trying to work out what I'm interested in. And trying to just uncover interesting things that will prompt me to go in cool new directions. There is a kind of, you have to let your mind ... It's like, the farmer lets his field go fallow for a while. You've got to have a fallow period where you just let everything regenerate and then you plant the crop again. >> But somehow reading 40 books doesn't sound like, to me, you're letting your mind go fallow. >> Well I didn't have a ... I was literally just lying around reading books. It seemed pretty fallow to me. >> What was your favorite one out of that read? Or the most enlightening one out of that read? >> I got on these weird side tracks this summer. I became obsessed with Churchill's Best Friend. Churchill had a best friend who betrays him. And it's this incredibly moving story. And I don't know how it fits in what I want to do, but I want to try and make it fit, 'cause it's such a weird and troubling story about this, I mean a truly transcendent figure in history who has a best friend who stabs him in the back with consequences for the world. Anyway, so I read like seven bizarre, weird, obscure books about this guy. And I was like "There's something there I think." >> He's out there, yeah. >> Alright, so we'll pick something that was a little more topical. Last night, they had a drink making robot machine over in the corner making drinks. And it just brings up, as we get into more automation, more connected systems. We had the huge knockout of the web last week from the East coast. As you look at the future, there's the happy future, where the machines do all the hard work and we get to sit around and read books like you did, which is fantastic. And then there's the darker potential future, where the machines take everyone's jobs. What are people going to do? And if it can make drinks and it can diagnose disease and read every manual that came out. How do people fit? And then there's the middle ground, right? The best chess player is the best chess player and a machine, not either or. So I'm just curious to get your thoughts as we look to the next big wave of AI and machine learning and automation, how you see that shaking out. >> I think it's important not to overstate how much of our lives we will be willing to let machines take over. So it's been very interesting for me as a writer, to observe, for example, what happened with eBooks over the last 10 years. So eBooks come along and everyone says, "The printed book is over. It's going to all going to be on ... Why would you go and lug around a big, heavy book when you can get for a fraction of the cost something that'll be ..." And so there were all these gloom and doom, and expectations, and what happens? Well, it turns out that eBooks are still a fairly sizeable portion of the market place. But it turns out that most people actually want to read a book, a physical object, that that's more pleasurable somehow, that the interaction with this thing, this pages and paper, is pleasing. It's part of the experience. And I think that's a useful ... No, that's not a robot and that's not AI, but it's an important reminder that the interactions and the activities that make up our lives are not just functional activities. They are opportunities for enjoyment and engagement, and part of the reason you go to a restaurant is not just to eat the food, but to engage with the people in the restaurant. Part of the pleasure is the person who brings you the wine bottle and gives you a little spiel. Now, I can replace that person with a robot, but the question is do you want to? Now, you can do it. And I can imagine a future where the robot brings you the best wine in the world and does some algorithm and gives you the finest wine. But I don't know, if I'm having a nice night out and I'm paying 60 dollars a plate for my dinner, I kind of want the human interaction. I mean, it's part of the pleasure. Same thing with self-driving cars. It baffles me as a kind of car guy how everyone assumes that "Oh, well, by 2020, it'll all be self-driving cars." Wait a minute, what if I enjoy driving a car? We've forgotten this. It's actually quite a pleasant thing to go and to make decisions unconsciously and consciously and drive down the road. And I like a manual transmission, I like the feel of driving a car. I don't want to give that up. Why should I have to give that up? So it's like, we can't get ahead of ourselves. You mentioned the chess thing, which is a great example of this. Can you make a machine that will beat a person at chess? Yes, you can. But it's not chess. Chess is a gameplay between two people. That's why it's interesting. If it's played between two machines no one will watch it! So it's this absurd thing. I can also make a machine that can run faster than Usain Bolt. It's called a car. Do I want to watch a race between a car and Usain Bolt? No. Why? Because what's pleasurable is watching human beings race. >> But Jeff hit on something, and then you touched on it with the car, and I think about GPS. And how it wasn't that long ago, and I kind of sound like my grandfather now or my father, that we just drove around, right? And if you came to the traffic, "Oh God, I've hit traffic." But now we use applications that take us, and they're using their intelligence. Is it possible, can you see with this generation of kids coming up now, that artificial intelligence kind of makes our personal thinking obsolete? And we don't process like we do, we don't evaluate, we don't analyze, and so we're raising a whole different kind of human, because of the interaction with technology or what we can sign to technology, because we give up on it. >> Well it'd be different. I think that, so let's stick with cars for a moment. I think now we have a world where a whole class of people drive their car to work in the morning. And when they're driving their car, the number of things they can do with their imagination and mind is limited. They can listen to music or the news or a podcast, or they can just sit there, but they can't ... They can maybe talk on a phone even though they shouldn't, but they can't do work and they can't lie in the back and take a nap, and they can't daydream, and they can't have a meaningful interaction with more than one person. What we're going to move to is a world where some people will give up whatever kind of pleasure or interaction that came from driving a car, and replace it with another kind of interaction. So driving a car becomes ... The time that you're in a car becomes a place where an infinite number of things can happen, as opposed to five things can happen. And I sort of think that's what the world looks like, is we get this incredibly complicated mix. Medicine becomes some mixture of the computer is going to do all the easy stuff, but half of medicine is about being reassured. It's about your personal fears. It's not about the diagnosis, or which drug you take. And for that stuff, I imagine that we're going to have much longer, deeper, more meaningful conversations with our doctors 15 years from now, when the computer has taken all the easy stuff off the table, or the AI, the robot. So in many ways, that world allows for much richer, personal interactions than the one we're in now. The doctor really will have ... My doctor has no time for me now. He's like "I got to move around." >> "Got to go." >> In ten years, it's possible my doctor will be able to sit down with me for half an hour or 45 minutes twice a year and really talk about what's going on with me and that's the promise of the future. I don't think we're going to have a situation where everything's done by the robot. >> Well this is one of those occasions where I truly wish we had tons of more time, but you have a busy schedule and so we're going to allow you to go on, but thank you so much ... >> Thank you. It was super fun. >> John: For sharing this time with us. We've thoroughly enjoyed it. >> Jeff: Look forward to the KeyNote later this afternoon as well. >> And we look forward to the next 80,000 words, so good luck with that too! >> Thank you. >> Malcolm Gladwell, joining us here on the Cube. Back with more from San Jose right after this. (upbeat music)