Comparing Our Modern Gurus: Malcolm Gladwell & Yuval Noah Harari
By: Chloë Alicia Fraser
Tags: Books, Malcolm Gladwell, Modern Life, Yuval Noah Harari, Pop Culture

What makes hoards of people flock to a particular book is exactly what characterizes an era: the hopes, dreams, and fears of thousands.

Books, and particularly bestselling books, reflect modern times. And the 2000s, amongst other things, have encouraged the blend of academic subjects with entertainment. Don’t get me wrong: infotainment, pop science, and pop history aren’t new, but they’ve certainly enjoyed a meteoric rise in the past few decades. In some cases, infotainment books acquired a new significance, melding with subtle spirituality and advocacy to become pseudo-intellectual lighthouses. Two authors’ work, in particular, can illustrate this.

Yuval Noah Harari and Malcolm Gladwell have many things in common: they both write pop non-fiction and are well-respected by celebrities and politicians alike. They both enjoy one-word titles, like Sapiens and Outliers. And they both have a striking influence on the way thousands think around the world. Let’s face it: these two authors are some of the strangest gurus to ever have walked this Earth.

In fact, Harari and Gladwell are deeply complex, multifaceted public figures who are frequently misunderstood, at times simultaneously underrated and overrated. Most of the disagreements we have about them really just stem from our beliefs about what we want and expect from them. So Harari and Gladwell’s careers are well worth studying, not just because they’re tremendously successful writers and interesting for their own sake, but because an analysis of their work might help us glimpse into Western society’s subconscious.

Who are these bookish superstars?

Yuval Noah Harari is the author of 3 best sellers: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which has already sold at least 12 million copies since 2011, its sequel Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, as well as a collection of essays entitled 21 Lessons for the 21st Century that came out just two years ago. Sapiens was actually inspired by his lectures as a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2019, he created his own sort of think tank and consulting enterprise with his husband, Sapienship.

Malcolm Gladwell, on the other hand, started out as a journalist for the Washington Post and then for the New Yorker. He first wrote the best-seller, Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, in 2000. Building upon his early success, the Canadian writer then published Blink in 2005 and Outliers three years later, followed by collections of essays, and David and Goliath in 2013. Gladwell eventually created the quixotic Revisionist History podcast series. His latest book, the controversial Talking to Strangers, came out last year with a bang.

Okay, but who are they really?

When it comes to Gladwell and Harari, quick facts and quirky pics don’t cut it.

I wanted to know more about them. I wanted to dig. I wanted to make a mess. I wanted to pull out all the weird and wonderful things people have said about them, and see for myself how similar or different or wacky they really are. The result is my entirely personal interpretation of their writing, personalities, and careers.

Now, when it comes to their writing style, both authors make sweeping claims, crack funny-not-funny jokes, and break their content down into bite-size subsections.

But Malcolm Gladwell, “arguably the most spellbinding non-fiction writer of our time,” loves grabbing your hand to take you on a journey. For him, it’s all about the story, the details, and even the personal opinion or two, which he lays out in purely colloquial language. The Canadian author starts out with a simple premise, something we generally assume to be true — like David and Goliath’s story. Then, he goes on describing that thing-that-is-so-obvious in such a way that it suddenly seems ludicrous. And while you sat there absorbing seemingly unrelated but cool, quotable-in-cocktail-parties data about wealthy parenting or the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Gladwell repeated his thesis over and over and over again. By the end of it all, you’re practically begging him to plainly state what you now know to be true — bad is good, local is global, context is everything, yet isn’t, and flaws definitely lead to success — so he does. Gladwell’s ultimately mastered one thing: an idea is interesting because it is counterintuitive.

Although Yuval Noah Harari also likes asking questions in his work, they are not quite as provocative, unless “Why do we fear terrorism more than sugar?” makes you splutter with shock. Some of his arguments, like the one about hunter-gatherers being much happier than us, have caused some eyebrow-raising, but I’d argue much less than for Gladwell’s stories. After all, Prof. Yuval is more of a big picture, let’s-dive-into-historical-patterns kind of guy. Many of his claims, such as ‘gossip helped us cooperate,’ are counterintuitive, but most, like ‘fire gave us power,’ are statements people could rally behind quickly. Having studied eyewitness accounts, military memoirs, and autobiographies before in his doctoral studies, Harari knows “how dangerous it is to make personal experience your main basis for authority.” Although some of his sentences are simple and bland, like “Hunter-gatherers had no money” (Sapiens, p.320), his Oxford-educated vocabulary is a step-up from Gladwell’s vernacular discourse. And despite indulging in the occasional sardonic anecdote or quip, Harari’s tone is not as playful as Gladwell’s. The history professor is here for business, he’s stating facts and he’s being interesting, and that’s that. Oh, and unlike Gladwell, once things are laid bare, there’s definitely no going back, since there’s no single, overarching thesis to much of Harari’s work.

Clearly, both authors have made a name for themselves by exploring non-fiction in new ways. But with all of those quirky one-liners and unorthodox writing, they must have their enemies, right?

Right. Malcolm Gladwell published his first book in 2000, and… What can I say? We swooned, we giggled, we fell in love. But much like a marriage, it took a few years for things to go awry. By 2009, Steven Pinker, in an acerbic New York Times review, wrote that “the reasoning in ‘Outliers,’ which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry, and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle.” In 2005, another Harvard lad, Richard Posner, had deemed Gladwell’s Blink full of platitudes and contradictions, “written like a book intended for people who do not read books.” Fast forward to 2019, when Gladwell’s latest piece came out, and this Wired critic made a stark appraisal: “To the intelligentsia, Gladwell’s an oversimplifier on his very best day; on his worst, a conspiracy-theorizing spinner of mass delusion.” Another reviewer noted that, “Although pitched as descriptive, Gladwell’s books are essentially prescriptive. Trust your instincts! You too may be (or can become) a connector, maven or salesman.”

Well, that’s great.

More recently, a Globe and Mail review shared a different perspective about the defamation Gladwell endures: “These critiques are usually caustic and condescending in tone and they have the unmistakable tinge of envy about them. And they miss the point. […] The assumption that intellectual inquiry should not be entertaining comes from an academy hoping to maintain its authority behind a wall of jargon.” Alright, bud, you may have a point there. However, we could certainly expect more complexity from Gladwell’s work. For instance, in Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell was a firm believer of the Broken Window Theory, which states that visible signs of crime and disorder, like graffiti, encourage further civil disobedience. The author’s parading of this theory as the cure to crime involved exuberant amounts of simplification, with potentially dangerous consequences.

“The goal,” of it all, Gladwell says, “is simply to give people an opportunity to reflect on things they otherwise wouldn’t reflect on.” Fair enough. But the writer continues: “What they do next is out of my control.” In another interview, Gladwell explains that “You’re of necessity simplifying. If you’re in the business of translating ideas in the academic realm to a general audience, you have to simplify … If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them: you’re not the audience!” He definitely has a point here, but I’m not sure reviewers are ready to let him off the hook. Ultimately, Gladwell, who left the world of journalism with thick skin, doesn’t mind the heat too much. In fact, he says that critics aren’t “reflective of the audience” and are no longer “gatekeepers.” Touché.

On the other hand, Professor Harari seems to have mostly evaded ruthless commentary. In fact, his first book “thrived in an environment of relative critical neglect”, as Sapiens, which covered literally all of human history, spanned a time scale that’s hard to mock with the appropriate credentials. As Oxford professor Steve Gunn says, “nobody’s an expert on the meaning of everything, or the history of everybody, over a long period.” Harari’s two other books, however, encountered more disapproval. The author was bashed for his “idiosyncratic campaigns about religion and vegetarianism” in Homo Deus as well as for calling communism and capitalism religions (again). One reviewer mocked his stoicism when delivering blood-curdling predictions [italics mine]: “Harari cares about the fate of animals in a human world but he writes about the prospects for homo sapiens in a data-driven world with a lofty insouciance.”

Well, somebody took that personally, didn’t they?

And while Gladwell is bashed for delivering prescriptive work disguised as descriptive, for Harari, it’s the opposite. Readers were disappointed to find that 21 Lessons, despite its accurate diagnosis of humanity’s problems, rarely discussed potential solutions beyond name-dropping a few — “his big idea boils down to this: Meditate.” One parody in Private Eye reads: “If you are in a falling lift, will it do any good to jump up and down like crazy?” Academics, too, are frequently enraged by the historian’s inability to bring anything new to the table. The anthropologist Christopher R. Hallpike implied that “whenever [Harari’s] facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously.” Still, the Israeli professor’s blunders are apparently hard to pin down, unlike in Gladwell’s case. This leaves even the most critical reviewers confused, perhaps upset, but ultimately thrilled. One Guardian critique of Harari’s 21 Lessons encapsulates these feelings perfectly; “The best reason not to throw this book out of the window is that, occasionally, Harari writes a paragraph that is genuinely mind-expanding.”

So yeah, to my eyes, Gladwell went from Beatles-like adoration, to getting punched in the face repeatedly, to “It’s not you, it’s me.” And Harari, despite a few snarky reviews, is still more or less top of the class in PHIL Sounding Smart 101.

It’s time to talk about influence. Mirror mirror on the wall, tell me, who’s the most powerful of them all?

Who has met Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Netherlands PM Mark Rutte, French Emmanuel Macron and German Angela Merkel, Mauricio Macri of Argentina, and Ying Yong, mayor of Shanghai? None other than Yuval Noah Harari, that guy who once presented a TED talk as a digital avatar (the first ever to be delivered that way, mind you). Bill Gates loves him and he’s one of the privileged few who’ve chatted with Mark Zuckerberg in his living room. Nowadays, the so-called “prophet” employs a team of twelve researchers to help him in his endeavors. But in 2019, Harari and his husband, Itzik Yahav, co-created Sapienship, an organization aiming to “clarify the global conversation, focus attention on the most important challenges and support the quest for solutions.” The author has, in fact, built an entire system around Sapiens, including the special speeches he gives at places like the World Economic Forum.

Professor Harari essentially reproduces his writing style in real life; many questions, few answers, and very few solutions. Why is that? Well, with books that hint at looming mayhem, it’s hard to prescribe a cure without it seeming paltry. It would also interfere with the image of Harari as a man of depth and perspective, somebody who can analyze problems from a distance. And ultimately, it would lead to controversial calls to action, perhaps costing him his popularity with world leaders. “We are very careful, the entire team,” Harari says, “about endorsing anything, any petition.” Why take the risk? Even worse, what if the solution is implemented… and turns out to be a mistake? It is perhaps much easier to conclude conferences with a policy shrug; this is a part of brand protection for intellectuals everywhere. Although vehemently against Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Harari’s discussed his work with him and attended one of his dinner parties. Having read Sapiens, Netanyahu now endorses Meatless Mondays: a small victory, perhaps. But Harari is wary about taking any political stance. “I could start making speeches, and writing, ‘Vote for this party,’” he explains, “and maybe, one time, I can convince a couple of thousand people to change their vote. But then I will kind of expend my entire credit on this. I’ll be identified with one party, one camp.” Pronouncing himself as little as possible on specific solutions and policies allows him to remain versatile, a friend of everybody, securing his financial future and his long-term influence for good. Okay, so maybe that’s a little harsh. Some, like Bill Gates, believe that Harari simply doesn’t condescend to “handy prescriptions.” In fact, “it’s no criticism to say that Harari hasn’t produced a satisfying answer yet. Neither has anyone else.”

Malcolm Gladwell, on the other hand, is the epitome of a nerd. It makes him appear harmless, just another clever guy in a hoodie, but it’s also a definite part of his phenomenal success — the bestsellers, the first-on-the-charts popular podcast, the six-figure speaking fees. Nobody knows how much he is worth, but like Harari, it ranges in the dozens of millions, and it’s certainly more than your average scientist, entrepreneur, or writer. Over the years, Gladwell’s been included in Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers and made it into the TIME 100 Most Influential People. Concepts he’s come up with or written about have become famous clichés (e.g. the 10,000-hour rule, the power of context, etc.) The author is often credited for the “birth of the modern pop idea genre”: Gladwell was not the first to write infotainment books, but he was the first to pinpoint an immensely successful approach to it.

But following the criticism he received for his books, in 2016, Gladwell moved on to another medium: the podcast. While reviewers seem wary of his Revisionist History series, as audio content renders its audience “helpless to the host’s narrative,” the podcast world (and public!) has so far been a lot kinder to Gladwell. Podcasts allow the thinker to expand the reach of his books, both in written and audio form, letting him cross-advertise his work himself, the way he wants, as many times as he wants. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you create a brand… or the Gladwell Media Empire. The intellectual cringes when commentators bring this up, specifying that podcasting was simply a better way to reach his one-book-a-year fans. In one interview, Gladwell explains a conversation he had with a busy middle-aged dad: “…Now, if I don’t participate in the world of podcasting, I don’t reach him in all the years between books, he’s lost to me.” The greatest advantage of podcasts, Gladwell adds, is that they’re new, interesting, and… don’t cause a backlash, for now. “A book comes out and there’s a whole world out there that pounces on it and tells you why it’s bad. Podcasts, there’s no critical infrastructure.” Much to his satisfaction, the Revisionist History podcast show has up until now attracted many of his I-love-the-fun fans and driven only a few reviewers crazy. That’s also what makes his new book, Talking to Strangers, which confronts campus rape, sexual assault, suicide, and police misconduct, such a risk. It was like a U-turn in branding for Gladwell, and a surprisingly political one, too. Time will tell if he’ll be rewarded for it.

Awe, reverence, respect. That’s what both of these authors convey when they show up on TED Talk stages and at talk shows, global business conferences, interview panels, high-class universities, or Silicon Valley pep talks.

How do they manage the fame, fan the flames, and engage with others?

Harari, whose husband believes is “somewhere between Madonna and Steven Pinker” in terms of global influence, spends part of almost every public talk dismissing his guru status. To my eyes, his demeanor is ultimately that of a professor, somebody who is there to explain, clearly and simply, whatever is asked of him in the same, steady tone (see the perfect example here). Enthusiastic, full of biting sarcasm and grim examples, both a careful listener and likely to interrupt, Harari makes sweeping statements with sweeping hand gestures. His is not a loud personality, but he is all too ready to resist and argue. In his clasped hands and slight slouch, we can almost detect the prodigious but shy Israeli young man who struggled with culture shock while completing his Ph.D. studies at Oxford University. A friend described his attitude to life at the time: “It was ‘I need to conquer the world — either you win or you lose.’” To this day, Prof. Yuval is not the kind of guy who makes people burst out laughing at conferences. But he does leave people wondering.

In contrast, Gladwell is slick, smooth, and humorous, somebody who’s gotten used to getting his way. He, too, has a bit of a slouch, but he’s somebody who, when his reputation as “a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud” is brought up, can immediately answer that “whatever brings him closer to Mick Jagger must be a good thing.” Don’t get me wrong, Gladwell is still nerdy, still a bit awkward, still quizzical. His hands draw strange figures in the air, his eyebrows accomplish the equivalent of a roller coaster ride in a few minutes’ worths (you can check this out here). He freely admits that he is much more comfortable in a library than in an interview. But Gladwell, with his Canadian lilt and his smiles, does know how to work a crowd. His intonations surprise, his pitch rises and falls, and for the really important stuff, his voice drops to a soft, pondering murmur. From what I’ve seen, Gladwell is easily overpowered in a conversation, yet relentless, constructing an argument so discreetly you don’t realize you’re being convinced until you are. He punctuates each of his statements with colloquial expressions and, in the end, a quiet “Right?” The thinker’s examples are personal or at the very least relatable, pulled from news headlines, encounters he’s had, and matters of public interest. When you think Gladwell, then, it’s easy to think “someone who is always fun to talk to” and later “cocktail chatter bait,” as Stephen Colbert describes him.

Despite their distinct public personas, both the authors have something in common: underdog vibes. One revels in whatever could make him sound unique, the other doesn’t like being cast as a just-got-lucky underling.

After all, there’s a certain allure to an unknown small-town Israeli professor who creates a new course on “the history of everyone, ever” that students fall in love with. The lecture notes get passed on from one pair of hands to another, and soon enough the professor wonders if he can pull off publishing them himself as a book. So he does! And when this paperback is translated in English a little later with a publisher, it ends up becoming.. a bestseller! A bookish happy ending worthy of a Disney movie. But the thing is, as little-known as Yuval Noah Harari used to be, he doesn’t like advertising his differences, and especially not the fact that he is a liberal thinker, a married gay writer, and more into Buddhism than Judaism while living in Israel. Did that last tidbit surprise you? Prof. Yuval discovered Vipassana meditation in college and hasn’t stopped since; he still practices it at least one hour a day and regularly leaves for silent retreats to India, where he is left alone to think, for weeks, in silence, in a cell the size of a table. Buddhist practice is an important facet of his life, but not one he likes to highlight. Instead, Harari, from an obscure middle-class background, likes to play ball with the big and the rich. His husband and manager, Itzik Yahav, actually turned down an invitation for Harari to speak at the World Economic Forum in 2017 because his allocated slot wasn’t good enough. The couple did accept the next offer from the forum: an important panel on the main stage, right between Macron and Merkel.

Regardless of the fame, in his lectures, Harari gives out the impression that he is truly in love with the topic at hand, not himself. The professor’s wary of scandals and controversial statements. That is perhaps reassuring to those who invite him to the living rooms of political leaders around the world, to conferences in Ukraine with contentious funding, or to the United Arab Emirates, which normally refuses entry to any Israeli citizen. But there are times when Harari will always remain an outsider, like in his discipline, where traditional historians cringe at the broadness and superficiality of his work, or in Israel’s political climate, where he doesn’t quite fit in. Today, few people know that as a young man, the professor was a strident right-winger; he wanted to belong. In the context of the first intifada, Harari became a stereotypical zealot. In a recent interview, he ironically explains his past state of mind: “Israel as a nation is the most important thing in the world. And, obviously, we are right about everything. And the whole world doesn’t understand us and hates us.” Shocking, considering what he writes about today. And even when his nationalism dimmed, Harari was “very keen to believe” in orthodox religion, but he never quite managed. That makes his persona as a man and writer today is all the more impressive.

Malcolm Gladwell’s a different breed and he loves saying so himself. Born to a Jamaican mother, a therapist, and an Englishman turned Canadian maths professor, Gladwell grew up in “a small, conservative, Bible Belt town” in Ontario. At the time, he was a bit of an outlier. “I can’t tell you how many times I was 16 or 17 in my hometown and was pulled over.” Racist profiling? His looks did set him apart in his mostly white community, and even today, heaven knows there is rarely a review, an op-ed, or a talk show host that fails to bring up his characteristically tousled Afro hair. But more generally, as far as I can tell, Gladwell enjoys being different. As a young man, he had right-wing beginnings like Harari’s, but for entirely different reasons. Since Canada was “essentially a socialist country,” Gladwell says that “being a conservative was the kind of fun, radical thing to do.” In the Mennonite community where the author grew up, “you couldn’t outflank the orthodoxy on the left the way that people traditionally did when they wanted to be rebels. There was only room on the right.” So that’s what he did. Graduating from the University of Toronto with a bachelor in History, the young man’s grades barred him entry to graduate school, and he was rejected from every job in advertising that he applied to. Gladwell ultimately accepted a position in journalism for the conservative paper American Spectator and ended up in Indiana as a result, where he also wrote for Insight on the News, the brainchild of Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, a bewildering cult led by a Korean evangelist. “I was a basket case in the beginning,” Gladwell once said about these stints in journalism. His iconic breakthrough came when the Washington Post gave him a business and science position. Ten years later, he had become a reputed journalist in the New Yorker.

Today, Gladwell leverages his left-wing differences — or his nationality. “I hate to be this reductive,” he says in one interview, “but an awful lot of my ideology, it’s just Canadian. Canadians like small, modest things, right?” Right. Sure, buddy. He continues: “We don’t believe in boasting. We think the world is basically a good place. […] And it so happens that to be a Canadian in America is to seem quite radical.” Really, Malcolm? In any case, one thing Gladwell correctly identifies is his ability to dig through academic papers and pull out interesting theories, saying, “There’s that bird on the back of the elephant that picks off the ticks — I am the bird.” Gladwell is indeed exceptional at what he does, and he’s leveraged what he could to jump on the underdog bandwagon.

Neither Harari nor Gladwell has a rags to riches story, mostly because they never faced exceptional hardship. Nonetheless, both acquired almost shocking reputations for small-town, middle-class chaps.

My biggest question, at this point, is why? Why do these two men do what they do? What drives them, what pushes them forward, what inspires them?

Much of Gladwell’s work is anti-deterministic. Your shortcomings? Keys to success. Your poverty? It can uplift you. The author doesn’t mean to push readers into complacency about societal issues. Instead, Gladwell remarks, “I’m just trying to say that it should reassure us that the inevitable traumas of being human do end up producing some good. Otherwise,” he adds, “the human condition is overwhelmingly depressing.” Okay, Malcolm, you might have a point here. Go on. “We used to be genetic determinists. We used to say poor people had lousy genes. Then we decided that wasn’t okay, but we transferred the prejudice to upbringing. We said, ‘You were neglected as a child, so you’ll never make it.’ That’s just as pernicious.” It’s true that by peppering his books with success stories, underdog tales, and the once-in-a-lifetime, against-all-odds anecdotes, Gladwell generally leaves his audience brimming with hope. Perhaps advertising for his work should read: “You have free will, I’ll tell you why!” It’s a message many of us crave to hear, for better or for worse.

Malcolm Gladwell, out of the many biographies he’s penned at the New Yorker, identifies most with that of Nassim Taleb, who trades stocks on rare events like natural catastrophes — somebody who’s “doing something about the possibility of disaster as opposed to simply turning a blind eye to it.” Gladwell blandly stated that “to be someone who does not believe in the power of the situation is to be a defeatist about the world. And that I can’t abide by.” The danger of this attitude, as we’ve seen, is its reductionist and simplistic take on bleak, oftentimes intergenerational, and systemic issues. The upside of this approach, however, is that Gladwell tackles important topics that matter to people, and he does so in a way that makes readers want to learn more about curing cancer, improving education, challenging the way we think about power, fighting crime, etc. Those readers are left hoping, wondering, believing. Ultimately, Malcolm Gladwell is at the pinnacle of a recurring debate of our time about why and how to write nonfiction. It boils down to what we want — reach more people with greater entertainment and inspiring stories, or focus on the duller, more reliable, more complex technicalities of academia? Gladwell has clearly chosen his side of the coin, and this has deeply shaped his life’s work.

Harari’s Sapiens, in some ways, embodied a similar attitude to Gladwell’s. “Readers were offered the vertiginous pleasure of acquiring apparent mastery of all human affairs — evolution, agriculture, economics.” What a feat, what a way of making someone feel powerful and hopeful! The catch? In contrast to Gladwell’s, Prof. Yuval’s fans have to watch “their personal narratives, even their national narratives, shrink to a point of invisibility.” For instance, President Barack Obama, in a 2016 interview with CNN, compared reading Sapiens to a trip he’d made to the pyramids of Giza. Obama noted that he learned about “not sweating the small stuff” because all we get is a “very brief moment in history.” And that’s because Yuval Noah Harari is almost but not quite nihilistic about human suffering. For him, learning about the world (and therefore, yourself) is the path to serenity, an approach that surely stems from his Buddhist beliefs. The story told in Sapiens, after all, is one of unavoidable suffering and perpetual change. In his books, Harari attempts“to show how everything is impermanent, and what we think of as eternal social structures — even family, money, religion, nations — everything is changing.” This is an aspect of human life that Buddhist principles spotlight. Harari synthesized his Buddhist-not-Buddhist views in a conversation with Steve Paulson: “Things are better than ever before. Things are still quite bad. Things can get much worse.” But he rejects claims that his work is pessimistic, remarking that “this adds up to a somewhat optimistic view because if you realize things are better than before, this means we can make them even better.”

This is still an entirely different approach to world problems than Gladwell, as it focuses on the macro rather than the micro, societal changes rather than the individual difference. The Israeli author, in a self-penned Guardian article, explains that “humans certainly have a will — but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have… Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social, and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself.” In one essay from 21 Lessons, Harari explores how nothing of essence can ever be discovered, regardless of one’s breadth and depth of knowledge; “…‘What should I do?’ ask people, and the Buddha advises, ‘Do nothing. Absolutely nothing.’” This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, readers may access a certain form of nihilistic optimism, detachment from superficial beliefs, or a sense of perspective that can only benefit us. But there is a fine line between detachment and indifference. One fan of Harari, Hannah Hrabarska, is a young Ukrainian photographer who partook in the Orange Revolution and later the Euromaidan protests. The impact of reading Sapiens, for her, has been the knowledge that she could live her own life, that she could be insignificant, that she could care more about people around her. And that’s amazing! But Hrabarska also mentioned her newfound political disengagement, noting, “you kind of relax, don’t feel this pressure anymore. […] No one cares, and I don’t care, too.” And this? This is something we should think about.

Harari, in typical Harari fashion, has a detailed plan for his new organization, Sapienship. The enterprise, a sort of think tank taking the high road, stems from the author’s vision of the three great threats in the future: nuclear warfare, climate threats, technology. Since his public is often well-aware of the first two, Harari focuses much of his work on the risks posed by technological developments. Harari insists that artificial intelligence and biotechnology, for example, can read us in dangerous ways. We can now determine whether someone is homosexual or not, to identify people on the spot, or to detect whether someone’s blood is boiling during a political speech. These are the kinds of things a government can exploit, for better or for worse. And in the end, Harari’s vision of the future explains his approach to life, like his detachment and his ‘know thyself’ mantra. “Freedom depends to a large extent on how much you know yourself, and you need to know yourself better than, say, the government or the corporations that try to manipulate you.” Professor Harari believes that the effects of a technological dystopia can be opposed by “citizens cultivating greater mindfulness.” And with this in mind, everything he’s done so far makes more sense.

The bottom line

Malcolm Gladwell and Yuval Noah Harari are unique, troubling, multifaceted personas who’ve succeeded in catching the public’s eye for several years now. It’s not that they’re similar, or different, it’s that both have distinct ways of approaching the role of a modern guru. Gladwell is pretty comfortable under the spotlight, enjoys leveraging interesting aspects of his background, has had quite a lot of mixed reviews in the past few years, and seems to be transitioning towards the podcasting world with Revisionist History. Harari, on the other hand, is a more discrete character, quiet about his past, sort of steadily increasing his reach through Sapienship and in speaking events, who’s gotten more and more criticism but seems to have evaded the worst of it. And both of these authors, while clearly self-interested, seem to genuinely want to help us cope with modern living ⁠ — whether that’s through cultivating hope and self-motivation, in Gladwell’s case, or prompting a sort of detached mindfulness and self-knowing, when it comes to Harari.

Despite all of their shortcomings, I am truly grateful that these two men have dedicated several decades to pondering big topics and big questions, so that we in turn may grow from their reflections. In learning about Gladwell and Harari, we also learn about our society and our zeitgeist. It’s obvious, after all, that these two authors are similarly famous because they both fulfill some need of ours. And we would benefit from knowing what that need is exactly — knowing more, that is, than what can be gleaned in a Medium post.

So what is it that we’re craving? Is it that we feel hopeless, that we want someone to make us feel informed and clever, or that we want to know more about the future, about ourselves? What solace do Gladwell and Harari give us in their books? Answering these questions will ultimately help us redefine what we expect from our public thinkers, our academics, and our decision-makers. And that will shape the way we think for decades to come.