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This is walk-ins welcome with Bridget Pettasy and Bridget Pettasy and you are welcome

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This week on the podcast I'm excited to welcome Jonathan Height.

Jonathan Height is a social psychologist at New York University Stern School of Business. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and taught for 16 years in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia.

Height's research examines the intuitive foundations of morality and how morality varies across cultures including the cultures of progressive conservatives and libertarians.

His goal is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other and even learn from each other despite their moral differences.

Height is the author of the Happiness Hypothesis finding modern truth and ancient wisdom and of the New York Times bestsellers the righteous mind why good people are divided by politics and religion and the coddling of the American mind how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure.

I'm with Jonathan Height, everyone. Welcome to Walkins. Welcome. I think you definitely hold the record as maybe the most cited other person on my podcast that everyone references.

I do kind of feel like my time has come. I've staked out certain positions a long time ago and the academic world is kind of like I bought Tesla and Bitcoin a long time ago.

Now unfortunately in my stock market investing if I just did the opposite of everything I've ever done I would be a much richer man.

You wouldn't be caught in the culture wars.

Who doesn't want to be here. My first question was just jokingly going to be what what's it like to be a profit because like you said you you were a light years ahead of a lot of these trends we're seeing all across the board. How are you feeling today?

Yeah so it is it is really it's a really strange and funny time so you know aside from all the normal awfulness and doom and gloom that we're all talking about thinking about it's an incredibly interesting time to be a social scientist.

It's like there's this you know this decade or these recent years and then there's the 1960s and then there's the 1930s like those are the three times that really stayed out as super exciting times to be a social scientist.

And where the things we're doing are really needed and valuable because so many people and governments are making such terrible mistakes and whole institutions and schools and companies are making terrible mistakes in how they're responding to the pressures of the moment.

So that's exciting and I guess your question about being a profit because what I study is is social is moral psychology which is kind of the operating system of society.

It's not self-interest it's not greed it's it's really much more about relationships and judgments and who can we trust and who's on our team.

And so it's actually really gratifying in a way it's really gratifying that things are blowing up and going completely insane because it's kind of like oh yeah moral psychology really you know it really is important this is really exciting.

So so that's what it's like.

And do you feel optimistic or pessimistic I feel like this is a question I I get a lot from people myself but also a lot a lot of the people in my community had this question for you specifically.

Yeah so long run long run optimistic but that's more with my head than my heart and that's because books like Stephen pink you know Stephen pinkers been talking about this for a while the decline of violence is astonishing and no matter how bad things get it's nothing like it was in the 60s when there were bombs going off every week more than once a week.

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