Sorry. Not sure if this will make you LOL, even a bit. Luckily, Malcolm Gladwell covered this very conundrum in his latest New York Times Best-Seller, What The Dog Saw. It’s called the “other minds” problem. So, I guess, deal with it? I suppose in this space it would make sense to respond somewhat to a story I read in Deadspin a few days (weeks? Oh man…) ago, one that just sort of posited the new Gladwell-Simmons pal’in around phenomenon. I now think that Malcolm Gladwell just is Bill Simmons. Bill Simmons is a robot that Gladwell built (he’s really smart, that Gladwell!) in order to make public appearances and toss off chunks of the mountain of casual pop culture knowledge he’s (Gladwell has) accumulated over the years. Take the conclusion of Simmons’s latest, on the Miami-LA game: “Americans love when false arrogance comes back to kick someone in the teeth. Heck, that’s what created our country in the first place: In 1774, the British easily could have been LeBron, Wade and Bosh dancing on a stage and pretending to be immortal. We love underdogs, upsets and comeuppances.” This comparison is, I believe, historically fatuous, but it’s the sort of connect-the-dots thinking that Gladwell excels at. This isn’t at all a knock on Gladwell or his robotic homunculus, Bill Simmons AT ALL. I enjoy reading both of them. I just think, perhaps, unpacking what it means for Gladwell to have built a Bill Simmons robot would make a good story. ↩