Interview with Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor at the New York University Stern School of Business. He is the author of a number of best-selling books, including The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind. His latest book is The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.
Jonathan Haidt’s Screen Time
Contents
Max Raskin: I’m interested in how your research has affected your personal habits. Your career is very much about publishing and getting your ideas out there — and social media is definitely a way to do that today. How do you limit your own tech usage?
Jonathan Haidt: I severely limit my social media usage. I’m only on Twitter. My team runs Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads for me. I’m also on Substack, which is not exactly social media, but it’s developing some social media elements to it. I don’t touch those.
There were times over the last 10 or 15 years when I was spending an hour or two a day on Twitter, and I could see that it was a waste of time and it often made me more anxious, because I’d see bad things that people were saying about me. So I do make it a point to just use Twitter as a tool that I use to promote my work and that of others.
MR: Do you find yourself checking the number of likes or retweets you get?
JH: I never look at likes, though I do often find myself looking at the number of retweets, and a few times a week I’ll look to see when people mention me. I know I shouldn’t — and most public figures say just don’t ever look.
But to your larger question, my phone doesn’t pose any problem for me because I’m not on social media and I turned off almost all my notifications. So my phone is just a digital Swiss Army Knife. I pull it out when I need a tool. I like to listen to audiobooks at night or if I’m trying to take a nap. I use the flashlight. I use the mapping function.
I love my iPhone, and I don’t have a problem with it, but that’s in part because I’m almost always at one of my four computers.
And while I don’t do social media, there are so many distractions on my computer. I’ve really seen this in myself — whenever the thinking gets hard, I’ll do something easy. I’ll often go check email, because that’s easy. Email is like a slot machine. You never know what you’re going to get. Some of it good, some of it bad. So I’ll check email, I’ll check the weather.
Especially when I have a new book out, I’ll check how it’s doing on Amazon several times a day. So I’m very subject to digital distractions, but I’ve just arranged my life so that my phone is not a source of problems.
MR: I’m so excited to ask you this: What’s your daily screen time on your phone? Can you check?
JH: I don’t check it because my phone is just a tool, so there’s no issue. I can check it now if you want.
MR: This is something people definitely will want to know.
JH: Okay, let’s see…my daily average is one hour, 41 minutes.
MR: That’s fantastic.
JH: No, because as I said, I only use my phone as a tool. I do everything on my computers.
MR: I have a theory that you can just gauge a person’s mental health from that number alone.
JH: Oh, that’s a very interesting idea. Well, of course there are studies of that, which is actually part of what my book is about. And the general finding is that there are correlations, and they’re not large in an absolute sense, but there are almost always correlations driven by the heavy users. So whether it’s one hour a day or two hours a day, it doesn’t matter so much. But the people who are doing five, six, seven hours a day, they do have substantially worse mental health. So actually, yes, you’re correct about that.
Texting vs. Email
MR: Do you text?
JH: I try never to text on the phone. I do text from my computer, and my friends and family all know that I’m not very responsive to texts because I don’t get notified of them on my computer. I had to shut that off because of the constant distraction.
And this is one of the major things for everybody to understand. We have very little attention each day, and when you let people interrupt you, you’re giving it away. My students at NYU have given away almost all of their attention. They have very little to do anything productive with. So I am concerned about the way older people are beginning to use texts rather than email. Email doesn’t interrupt you — you go to it when you need it. I think texting should be reserved for, “Honey, I’m half an hour late for dinner…on my way.” I’m very slow to chime in on text threads, because I just decided if I’m responsive on texts, then I won’t get much work done.
MR: Whenever I send you an email, I always get a vacation auto-response. Are you an inbox zero person? Do you look at every email you get?
JH: Oh, I look at every email, but I’ve never even been inbox 100. I’ve never been able to get it down. Now I’m at 2,000 because I’m just overwhelmed. I do look at everything, but I can only respond to a small portion. So I had to use the autoresponse. I feel guilty about doing it because everyone’s drowning in email, and now I’m adding an automatic response to their emails.
I wish to God that Google would make a simple change. Google, if you’re reading Max’s interviews, please, please, please change the default feature on auto-response that responds to each correspondent every four days and allow me to set it to “only respond once.” I don’t want my friends to get the autoresponse from me every four days
MR: Other than email, is there anything you do to unplug? Do you watch TV? Doomscroll?
JH: No, I’m really mission driven, and especially when I’m working on a book, I’m thinking about it all the time. So I don’t really watch television. I watch the news — I enjoy watching the news, but I don’t really watch much television. I don’t doomscroll. Although especially with the book out, I do check Twitter a couple of times a day. But then when I was writing the book, I would go a week at a time without checking Twitter.
I have to do Twitter for lots of people. I have obligations to all kinds of organizations and people, so I have to promote their stuff. So Twitter’s very useful, but my next book is going to be called Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We May Never Again Share. And Twitter will play a starring role as one of the things that shreds shared reality and that puts people on the defensive.
Changing Your Mind
MR: What do you do for exercise?
JH: I ride my bicycle around New York City, I go for rides along the Hudson River, and I work out at the gym three times a week.
MR: Are you very fastidious about that?
JH: No. I try to work out three times a week, and probably average two.
MR: What’s the longest bike ride you’ve ever done?
JH: My buddies and I once did a full lap around Manhattan.
MR: That’s pretty cool.
JH: Yeah, that was really cool. It was hard, but it was really gratifying.
MR: I noticed on your hand you have a smart watch.
JH: Yeah, I got an Apple Watch about nine months ago. I’ve always slept very little, but about a year and a half ago, my sleep dropped from six hours a night down to four to five hours a night, which is terrible. And I felt tired, and I’m concerned about memory decline. So I’ve been working to improve my sleep, and my doctor suggested an Apple Watch as a way to track it. And it’s been really informative, and it allows me to experiment and do things to improve my sleep.
MR: Do you experiment on yourself at all? Are you into life hacking?
JH: I do, but I don’t keep careful enough records and then I forget what I’ve done. So when I was younger, I experimented with smart drugs —whichever the common ones were…like piracetam. We’re talking back in the ’90s. I did some of that.
MR: Have you ever done psychedelics?
JH: Oh, yeah. Those are some of the most important experiences in my life. And I have spoken about this a few times. Before Michael Pollan’s book came out, there was still something of a taboo in talking about drug experiences. But since Michael Pollan’s book came out and was widely talked about, I feel much freer to talk about it.
MR: Is it fair to say you’re a cautious person?
JH: I’m not sure. In what way?
MR: You just seem very deliberate in how you present your ideas and you’re very composed.
Do you ever just go nuts and raise hell?
JH: No, I don’t.
MR: Is that just not in your character? Or is it something you have to fight?
JH: Well, it’s two things. It’s a little bit my character. I think I am pretty measured and analytical. But it’s also that once I switched my research over from culture to politics, and once I began criticizing the ideas on the Left and the Democratic Party — for many years I was doing it to try to help them win. But once I started criticizing them around 2008, I was now doing my work in a minefield, and I have to be very careful what I say.
And since then, the academic climate has gotten so much more unforgiving, in part because of Twitter. So yes, I am very careful. I’m very aware that I have to choose my words carefully.
Haidt of Power
MR: You seem too measured to be a team player — like a committed Republican or Democrat. If you had to define yourself politically, what would you say you are right now?
JH: I am a philosophically committed centrist. It doesn’t mean I think the answer is in the middle, but because of what I know about moral psychology and cognitive psychology, I know that being on a team means you can’t think straight. You can’t think openly. And as a social scientist and as someone who wants to think constructively, I think it’s essential to seek out ideas and criticisms on all sides and then integrate them. So I am a centrist who is despairing at the rise of illiberalism on the far-left and far-right.
MR: Do you find it weird that so many intellectuals on the right think you’re the best?
JH: No, because we’re in an era of negative partisanship where we’re defined more by who we oppose than by who we like. I have been a steady critic of what we now call woke ideas, going back to my early writings on trying to understand Republicans. My first essay in this area, back in 2008, was “What Makes People Vote Republican?”
I was originally rather gently criticizing the Democrats and saying, "Here’s what you’re missing about moral psychology. Here’s why George W. Bush won twice in a row when we all thought that he shouldn’t." So if I’m criticizing the left, then of course the right likes me. A lot of people on the center-left like me too, because they share those critiques. The only place that I’m really unpopular is the far-left. There, they hate me.
MR: There’s this H.L. Mencken quote that goes something like — every normal person is tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats.
JH: Oh, my God.
MR: No?
JH: Are you kidding me? No. Never.
Actually, I’ll tell you, the only time I ever had a desire to slit throats was when I went to Romania in 1987. I traveled across the Eastern Bloc in 1987 by myself, and Hungary was reasonably nice, and people had some quality of life. But Romania was kept poor and sick and cold and dirty. They didn’t have soap and they didn’t have much electricity. And this was all because of one man and his secret police force.
So, I did have long-running fantasies of killing him with my bare hands. That’s the one time I really thought about killing someone.
The Righteous Tribe
MR: What’s your heritage?
JH: Ashkenazi Jewish. All my grandparents are from Southern Poland, Belarus…that whole area.
My father’s family is from a town called Kielce in Southern Poland. My grandmother is from Bryansk, which is now in Russia.
So there’s a Jewish museum in Warsaw that has no artifacts, but it really tells the story of Polish Jews. I always said I was Russian Jewish, but that’s not true, because Ashkenazis were mostly Polish Jewish. It’s just that when the Russians took Poland, they pulled some people east.
MR: Do you have any religious practice?
JH: I belong to a synagogue in New York City. My wife and I decided to join because we wanted to give my son some Jewish education and Jewish identity.
MR: Do you believe in God?
JH: No.
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
JH: No.
MR: Interesting.
JH: Why is that interesting? Why is that not just totally what you expected?
MR: Because I thought you were going to hedge.
JH: My theory is that when you ask Christians, “Do you believe in God?” They say yes. But when you ask Jews, unless they’re Orthodox, they’re not going to say yes or no. They’ll give you the, “Well, it depends.” But no, I know what you’re asking, and my answer is no.
Vitamin B-52
MR: Do you have any woo-woo practices? Do you meditate? Do you do yoga?
JH: At times in my life I’ve tried to meditate for 10 minutes each morning, and I’ve sometimes kept that up for a month or two, but never for six months. And then the main woo-woo practice I have is that I really like and value psychedelics. And so once every year or two, depending on the situation, I will do some sort of psychedelics.
MR: Will you do LSD or mushrooms?
JH: Both.
MR: Oh, wow. Do you listen to music while you do it?
JH: Yes — it’s always part of the trip.
MR: What kind of music?
JH: Something very rich and layered. I haven’t learned much new music in the last 15 to 20 years, so more stuff from the ’90s. William Orbit has some incredible electronic music.
MR: Wow. That, I also wouldn’t have expected.
JH: There’s just certain things that just go with psychedelics.
MR: What’s the last album you listened to start to finish?
JH: Well, I’ve been in a real B-52’s phase recently.
MR: What?
JH: Yeah. So on Spotify or Apple Music, I have a couple of B-52’s albums that I…what was the word…ripped? What did we used to say? I copied them onto my computer.
I have a bunch of my old music on my iPhone in my library. But now that I discovered that I can just pick somebody and listen to everything they’ve done. So recently I’ve been in a real B-52’s phase, because Kate Pierson’s voice…there are some moments that are just so beautiful and the lyrics are interesting. Like the song “Mesopotamia.” There’s a line that keeps going through my head:
I ain’t no student
Of ancient culture
Before I talk
I should read a book!
MR: For someone who’s never listened to the B-52s before, what is the album you would recommend?
JH: Listen to “Revolution Earth” and listen to “Roam.” They’re just beautiful, exuberant songs.
MR: I’m going to make a bet: you like the Talking Heads.
JH: I used to. I never choose to listen to them, because they were interesting and they have some great musical moments, but it’s just not a band that I go back and listen to. But I like them, and I used to listen to them a lot when I was younger.
MR: What do you think is the band you’ve seen most in concert in your life?
JH: I don’t go to concerts that often, but with my buddies, we sometimes do. I’ve seen Cracker, Social Distortion.
MR: I don’t know these bands.
JH: Well, I’m older than you and the things you listen to. My musical taste was formed in the ’80s and ’90s, and I haven’t picked up a lot since then.
MR: I listen to old bop and jazz from the 1940s to like 1959 and a lot of Grateful Dead. I think this is a Gen X thing. Are you Gen X?
JH: No, I’m a Baby Boomer, although it’s close — I’m 1963. I’m the second-to-last year of the Baby Boom, so I didn’t have any of their formative experiences. My only memory of the 1960s is the moon landing when I was five. So I’m not a typical Baby Boomer, but technically, according to demographers, I’m a Baby Boomer.
Dr. Haidt, Professional Social Psychologist
MR: What was the last TV show you binge-watched?
JH: Schitt’s Creek. I’ve only binge-watched two or three shows in my life. I don’t watch a lot of TV.
MR: What are they?
JH: Well, Schitt’s Creek and Curb Your Enthusiasm with my wife. There was an old show in the ’90s called Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, which I adore. It’s very funny. It’s a comedian pretending to be a psychologist. And I’ve always loved The Simpsons.
MR: Are you an aficionado or a deep fan of anything in particular?
JH: I guess I’d have to say no. I love my work. I’m really interested in psychology and morality and politics and technology and society.
MR: What are you reading right now?
JH: Well, right now I’m on book tour. I don’t have a moment free, so I’m not reading anything. I’m just trying to read a portion of my email. That’s it.
MR: You mentioned before you go to bed, you might listen to 15 minutes of something.
JH: The one place that I’ve been consuming books is audiobooks.
MR: What are you listening to?
JH: Well, let me see. So I’m listening to David Brooks’ book, How to Know a Person. I love David.
I just started a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. I loved Build the Life You Want by Arthur Brooks. I’m listening to Brave New World, which is really freaky to listen to now. I hadn’t read it since high school, and I’m really enjoying Brave New World.
MR: Is our future 1984 or Brave New World?
JH: Brave New World.
MR: Why?
JH: Because it’s about how we lose our humanity when our technology makes everything easy for us. In high school, I thought it was great that everyone got as much sex as they wanted, but re-reading it now, it’s a far more disturbing book, and our world is far more like it than it was in the late 1970s.
MR: Do you floss?
JH: Yes, I do. Once a day, every evening before bed.
MR: Do you use a mechanical toothbrush or a regular toothbrush?
JH: I use an electric toothbrush. Why do you ask? No one’s ever asked me these questions. Is this the idea that I’m cautious? What are you trying to investigate?
MR: I ask a lot of people these questions. It’s like Freud’s book, The Psychopathology…
JH: of Everyday Life, right?
MR: Yes!
Questions From Babel
MR: I crowd-sourced some of these next questions from my friends who were all eager to ask you questions.
JH: Oh, good. What’d they say? What’d they want to know?
MR: So you talk about different kinds of playgrounds expressing different cultural values. It reminds me of Žižek’s theory that toilets reflect ideology. What’s your ideal playground — for you specifically today? What’s your fantasy home?
JH: It would either be beach or mountains. I think I love water so much, and I’m a big fan of E. O. Wilson, Biophilia. I believe that savannah landscapes and beach landscapes are the places where our ancestors did best.
MR: Do you nap every day?
JH: Yes, every day. But I don’t really fall asleep. Apparently, I get into a state of alpha waves or something. I’m in some sort of dozy state, but I don’t really fall asleep. It’s about 20 to 30 minutes a day.
MR: If you had kids today that were going to college today…
JH: …which I do. My son is leaving in a couple of months.
MR: Well, where would you want them to go? Or would you not want them to go?
JH: Well, I would want them to take a gap year. I don’t think 18-year-olds today are ready for college. I wish colleges would give preference to people who take a gap year. They’d have more mature students.
Childhood has been getting longer and longer for many decades, maybe for a century or two. And so the idea that kids go to college at 18 is not quite right. So I would urge them to take a gap year, which I did with my son. I would urge them to apply mostly in the South and the Southwest, because in the South they never went in for a lot of the really nasty norms that swept through the Ivy League schools.
Good Advice
MR: I don’t know if you remember this, but we took a cab downtown together after a book club many years ago and you gave me a great piece of advice. It was before I got married and I was asking what kind of dating advice you had.
Even though you’re a social psychologist and look at population-level data, how often do people come up to you and ask for personal advice?
JH: I’d say you’re about the only one.
MR: Really?
JH: Yes. It’s very rare. My students do, but that’s because I’m teaching a course on positive psychology — a course called Flourishing. So we do a lot of advice then. But no, people don’t see me as some sort of sage or oracle.
MR: Why not? This is very surprising to me.
JH: It might just be because I’m an introvert and I hide away. I have no idea, Max.
Fritos, Hub’s Peanuts, and Nicotinamide Riboside
MR: When you write, do you snack?
JH: Yeah, sometimes.
JH: I have salt cravings at 10:00 or 11:00 AM and then again at 3:00 or 4:00 PM. Salted peanuts or Fritos are my favorite snacks.
MR: Fritos are your favorite?
JH: Yep. My favorite junk food snack is Fritos, but having lived in Virginia for 17 years, I know about Hub’s peanuts and Virginia peanuts, which are the best in the world. So I buy cases of Hub’s peanuts.
MR: Do you have any unique diet?
JH: I experimented with intermittent fasting. But then some things I read suggested maybe it’s not so great. I read a book called Lifespan by David Sinclair that I thought was really compelling. He writes that we evolved to have periods of fast and periods of plenty, and that our biology actually benefits from having at least an occasional fast. I’m thinking about basically doing Yom Kippur every Friday. So just basically you skip breakfast and lunch basically.
MR: We actually have built it in already. There’s something called Yom Kippur Katan. Before the beginning of every Hebrew month, there’s a custom to do a fast day called little Yom Kippur.
JH: Maybe I’ll start that way. I’ll start once a month, because once a week might be hard. If you have anything written on that, please send it to me, even though I’m just going to do it as a medical thing. But I am a Jewish atheist who believes that spirituality is a part of life, and that religion is good for people. So please do send me something. I may incorporate that practice.
MR: I’ll send you something.
Do you take any vitamins?
JH: I do. From having read David Sinclair, I don’t know what to say about it, but I take B3. Nicotinamide riboside (NR). Resveratrol — the thing that’s in red wine. Although I think I heard something on Huberman that said maybe that’s not really very effective.
And I take vitamin D, but I’m just reading in The Atlantic now, an article about how we need sunshine. And some of the benefits that we thought were from vitamin D are actually from the sunshine, not the vitamin D.
MR: Is there anyone out there whose word is gospel to you with respect to these things? Like if Sinclair or Huberman or Jordan Peterson says something. Or maybe some random researcher at the University of Podunk? Is there someone you’re like — "Ah, that guy, he got it."
JH: Well, no. Nobody is gospel, but I do go to Huberman. I’m working on my sleep. And so I’ve been listening to Huberman’s podcasts with Matt Walker. So again, not gospel. And I know some of the sleep research is disputed and debated.
MR: You like him?
JH: Yes. I find Huberman to be really helpful, because he’ll go into specific studies, and he’ll give his opinion. I find it just the right level for me as a social scientist and not an expert in biology.
On Writing
MR: Your new book is out — do you ever have writer’s block, and how do you deal with it?
JH: Never.
I’ll share the secrets of writing that I learned when I wrote my first book. I wrote The Happiness Hypothesis, I was in my 30s, and I’d never written a book before. I was an academic who wrote academic papers. I wanted to write a trade book that would be academically rigorous — other psychologists would read it and say, “yes, this is true” and “yes it’s got footnotes.” But I wanted something that would be enjoyable to read. And so I read a book on writing, and one of the things it said was to wake up several hours early and do all your work by noon. That way when you break for lunch, you’re done. The rest of the afternoon can be meetings and other things.
MR: That’s what Hemingway did.
JH: A lot of authors do this. I always thought I was a night person, because I always stayed up late. But once I tried it and I realized if you get up at 5:00, it’s the most amazing thing. No one else is up. No emails coming in. So I work in the mornings. I try to keep my mornings sacred. I try to never do meetings in the mornings when I’m writing.
MR: Do you listen to music when you write?
JH: Never. Could never do that.
MR: What other tips do you have on writing?
JH: The other thing is the note-taking process. For all of my books, by the time I sit down to start writing, I’ve got hundreds of pages of ideas, notes, illustrations, things, photos that I might put in. I use Evernote. I have one note for each chapter, which links to other sub things. So by the time I sit down to write, I’ve got hundreds of ideas for that chapter. And then the creative process is you read it over and you ask what order should I put these in, and which ones are where should I go deep?
Arepas, Dumplings, and Beef Bourguignon
MR: What restaurant do you think you’ve most ordered from in New York City?
JH: There are a bunch in my neighborhood. There’s a Vietnamese restaurant, Saigon Shack and an arepa place, Classic Arepas on 8th Street. But my wife cooks a lot, so we mostly eat her home cooking.
MR: What’s your favorite thing that she makes?
JH: She makes really good Korean dumplings and she makes very rich and saucy beef bourguignon.
MR: I know you have to go take a nap now, but just for the record, I could have kept you, if I didn’t just say that right now. But I know how important you are to the cause so you need your sleep.
JH: I appreciate it. Thank you, Max. And thanks for all the help you gave my when I was trying to learn about AI.
Now I’m going to go take a nap. I had lunch just before we spoke and after I eat lunch, I always get tired. And so I go through that process, and then I go down and I’m sleepy and then I wake up and I have caffeine and then I can stay up late, with good energy.
When all this calms down sometime next fall I’d love to see you.
MR: It’s never going to calm down.
JH: That’s probably true.