If there was ever an outlier, it was Bill Gates. Netflix has just released a three-part documentary called Inside Bill's Brain that, as the title promises, digs deep into the Microsoft cofounder's cranium. Once ensconced, we find him as unusual as we expected. His brain, says his wife Melinda, is "total chaos," but then she explains that there's a method by which Gates can organize his thoughts, merge them with huge amounts of information that he Dysons up (Hoovers are too flimsy for this simile), and then puts them to work. We see the brain in action as he cheerfully puts his obsessions on display. These days they include getting rid of polio, creating cheap toilets in impoverished nations, and designing a nuke plant that won't melt down.

These are all, obviously, noble pursuits. But even as filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) makes every effort to make those enterprises entertaining, Inside just leaves viewers wanting to spend more time with his subject. Amazingly, Gates has agreed to an open-ended Ask Me Anything session with Guggenheim, and throughout the 157-minute runtime touches on nearly all aspects of his thinking. In his unmistakable nasal drone, Gates examines his own life with a candor that lets him describe his big decisions with bemused attachment. His intellect is unmistakable, as is his weirdness. I've been interviewing Gates for 35 years and I can testify that this is the real thing.

Though Guggenheim had no intention of doing so, as far as I can see, Inside Bill's Brain also does something else: It demolishes the premise of Malcolm Gladwell's nonfiction book Outliers. Gladwell proclaimed in that tome that he had decoded the formula for genius, deciding that it was 10,000 hours of practice, a nurturing background, good timing, and a bit of luck. The Beatles pounded on their instruments in months of all-night sets in the Hamburg demimonde, he wrote. And Bill Gates, barely a tyke, was programming almost 24/7.

I have never bought this. Anyone can spend 10,000 hours doing something, but in the whole world only one band made the music of the Beatles. Adele, I am sure, has crooned for 10,000 hours (undoubtedly why she has so many throat problems), and, although she's good, she's not a genius. Amy Winehouse, on the other hand, genius! And I bet she died before 10,000 hours singing with the Dap Kings. And what about Steve Jobs? If you wanted to be Steve Jobs, how would your 10,000 hours be spent?

That's why it was so disappointing the time I asked Bill Gates himself about Outliers. Gladwell had written about Gates in the book, wrongly, I felt, because no formula could explain him. But Gates agreed with Gladwell! Yes, he told me, he spent much more than 10,000 hours programming, and was also hardcore about business, blah blah blah, but, he concluded, the hypothesis was correct.