Interview with Richard Hanania
Richard Hanania is a writer.
Richard Hanania’s Substack can be found here.
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Max Raskin: I want to start with tools of the trade. You spend a lot of time online — is it mostly on your phone, iPad, computer?
Richard Hanania: It depends on what I’m doing. When I’m writing an article, I’m usually on the laptop in the Substack dashboard. I’m also doing research as I’m writing articles, so I have a computer monitor, where I’ll look at papers, I’ll talk to ChatGPT. I’ll look up stats and figures that I need. I’m doing that for a good portion of the day. That’s my work-work, that’s what I try to do before everything else.
When I’m taking care of kids, or in the afternoon after I’m done writing for the day, I’ll spend a lot of time reading books or articles on my phone, and I’ll browse Twitter. And of course, I’ll be browsing Twitter while I’m on the laptop too, and I’ll be talking to people on Signal too, so I’ll do that. But yeah, the laptop is When I’m taking care of kids, or in the afternoon after I’m done writing for the day, I’ll spend a lot of time reading books or articles on my phone, and I’ll browse Twitter. And of course, I’ll be browsing Twitter while I’m on the laptop too, and I’ll be talking to people on Signal too, so I’ll do that. But yeah, the laptop is the base when I’m writing, and then the phone, otherwise.
MR: Do you have any apps on your phone that the average person wouldn’t have heard of?
RH: That’s a good question. I mean, I got ChatGPT, I got this weight loss thing where I have the scale that it tracks every single day. Substack.
MR: Do you draft your tweets or fire them off as you think of them?
RH: I just fire them off as I think. I proofread them obviously, and I look over them. But I don’t draft them and then say, “Tomorrow, I’m going to release.” I rarely, if ever, do that.
MR: Does ChatGPT help you with any of your tweets?
RH: No.
MR: Does ChatGPT help you with any of your writing?
RH: Yes, actually. I wrote an article a couple of weeks ago about how I use ChatGPT. It’s very good for just getting basic facts, like dates, right. The bigger one is putting together data. I think it’s probably increased my productivity maybe 33%. It maybe gives me another extra article a week. I mean, it’s really an amazing tool.
MR: Are you married?
