With Yuval Noah Harari, historian and philosopher
1 What do you eat in a day?
I eat mostly vegetarian food. Usually, for breakfast, I eat fruits and porridge. For lunch, probably rice with vegetables or dal, or something similar. In the evening, usually salad and bread. I don’t have a very specific diet.
I would say, though, that the same way people think very carefully about food, they also now need an information diet. You know, information is the food of the mind. Too much food is not good for the body; too much information is also not good for the mind. We need small amounts of high-quality information, and then we need time to digest it. Like with food, you eat for an hour, two hours a day, and then most of the day you just digest the food.
So it is with information as well. You read a book, you watch the news, you have a conversation. Then you need time—you don’t take more information in. You just think and meditate on the information you got; you digest it. And digestion is often the most important part of the entire process.
2 Your fitness regimen?
I try to meditate two hours a day and do some kind of exercise—walking, yoga. I would say that, with regard to both exercise and food, that it is very dangerous to take the regimen of somebody else and adopt it for yourself, because every person is different.
Every person has a different body, a different occupation, lives in a different country. So, if you live in a very cold country and you eat something, and then somebody in a very hot country hears about your diet, eating the same thing may not be good.
I would say people should experiment with food, with exercise, and see what makes them personally feel better, healthier, and then do that instead of trying to copy the exercise regimen or the diet of somebody else.
3 How do you unwind when you are alone?
I meditate—that is one very important thing. I start the work day with an hour of meditation, and at the end of the work day, I do another hour. I spend a lot of time with friends. I watch television. At night, if I want to just completely shut down the mind—not think about anything—I watch some TV series.
4 How do you decide what information to ingest and what not to take?
Yes, first of all we need to develop the ability to tell the difference between reliable and unreliable information, because we are flooded with too much information. The key question is, what is the evidence on which the information is based?
Science is all about evidence. Something can be very attractive, interesting or exciting, but there is no evidence that it is true. So, this is like junk food. It is very tasty, but it does not really do good for your body. So the question is, what is the evidence that this story, article or book is really telling me the truth?
Most information is like junk food; most information is not the truth. The truth is costly. It takes time, money, energy to do research, to gather evidence, to write the truth. Whereas fiction and fantasy and lies, they are very cheap. You just write anything you want. You don’t need to invest anything. So this is why most information is not the truth.
Also, the truth tends to be complicated because reality is complicated. Whereas fiction can be made very, very simple.
5 Fiction is bad?
People prefer simple stories over complicated ones. And the truth is often painful. There are many things we don’t want to know about ourselves, our nation, our world. Fiction can be made very, very flattering. So again, it is all like junk food. It is very tasty, very cheap, but it is not good for your body.