Thank you so much for being with me today. Thank you for having me joanne. Absolutely fill in the blanks. What did i miss about who you are and what you do. Oh boy. I am a montana toddler. Mama which means that. I spent my time outside. Four seasons of the year chasing my one year old around right now league us. My background is in social science. So i'm actually a trained social scientists in published research on persuasion so that was kind of made. I love if you will. I married my husband. Eric works medicine. And so this has been a very interesting time Yes australian co bed. I'm sure you can imagine for all of time spent apart. We have a one year old wilder. Tell me about how you came to be part time professor. Yes i went into academia. Because i love people in their brains since i came out of the womb. My parents would say that. I asked why about everything. Why why would you now. I understand as a mom myself. So i found that social science was the key to why people do what they do and i fell in love with the idea of studying people's brains and how we form relationships in dot world of communication research. There's as little tiny nisha research called social influence or persuasion. And so it's basically the science of how we get people to say yes to things and within that i researched health communication so basically how we get people to say yes to wear seatbelts or donate their organs or in my case have safe sex so like use a condom and that was a really interesting topic to study. Oh my gosh. that's so fascinating. Yeah i think. I missed my calling. I listened to several podcasts. That are along this line hidden. Brain and invisibly leah and i like revisionist history with malcolm. Glad well even. Though i know that he's more of an observer at he's not as much of a scientist but i just find anybody who thinks about humans and what they do and how their brains work in a different way or a unique and new way. I'm so fascinated with i. I just can't even get enough of it. So i love eating this. Yeah you hit. The nail on the had hidden brain is exactly my realm of study. I love it. And i actually wrote a blog post about one of his episodes about tunnel vision. I almost felt like it unlocked. A part of my understanding about other people that was missing about how people can make such terrible decisions because they're under duress and there's a whole episode. I think actually unsafe sex. And you're rational decision making in your thought process when you're sitting in your office chair. Drinking a cup of coffee talking to a girl felt like well. Of course. I would never put myself in harm's way but then when you're under the influence of infatuation and the moment somehow suddenly our brains make different types of decisions but that that episode about tunnel vision. There's so much more there. I think he just kind of grays. The tip of the iceberg on why people make unexpected unpredicted decisions and why people kinda dig themselves into a deeper when all of the outside observers are going wait. Why don't you just stop doing this and start doing this. But because they're already in that whole they just can't you know yacht. We get super married to our convictions. In so our brains are really uncomfortable with information that goes against our beliefs so we end up seeking out and believing information that even if it's not really good information as long as support previously held beliefs. We just roll with it. I haven't heard the tunnel vision episode but that sounds exactly like the type of research that was doing which kind of explains like people who believe that cohen is a really scary disease will contain to believe that more and more staunchly. Yeah they will reject data to the contrary they will collect data to the consistent. Exactly that is exactly the same thing we do with politics and so many things all right. Well let's do rapid fire questions. If you had to describe yourself in one word. What would it be bold awesome. What is your number. I'm in achiever. Which i think is a three with an individualist swing so achiever in midwest yes okay. So three wing four. Fold your baby. I love it. What is something unexpected. That has changed about you in the past few years so i became a mother which wasn't unexpected. Because i didn't know if. I wanted to have children but i became a mother in a very unexpected way which i'm sure we'll talk about. Yeah gosh. I can't wait to hear more about that. Wow becoming a mother is like the earth shattering and paradigm shifting. I opening and exhausting. What's the scariest thing you've ever done for fun moved to africa. Wow you did it for fun. And when was that twelve years ago. I was in college. Amazing and africa is a continent. Where were you in africa. Yes i was in ghana which is like no armpit carnival area of the west coast. So we're kind of curves.