About

What I do.

I help people understand how to live well in today’s world with a brain that isn’t built for it.

I am an academic, but my presentations are anything but. I translate hard science into concrete stories that resonate and inspire lasting change.

My work sits at the intersection of evolutionary science and everyday life. I take the kind of research that usually stays locked in academic journals and turn it into something people can actually use before their next hard day, not just something they read about.

That’s the throughline in every talk, every article, every session: not just “here’s what the research says”, but “here’s what to do with it on a Tuesday when your inbox is full and your brain is fried”.

Topics I speak and write about:

Every topic below comes with a prescription for what to start doing tomorrow, backed by real research, not recycled talking points. Book one, or build a keynote around whichever mismatch is costing your team, or your audience, the most.

Old Brain, New World: The Science of Living Well

The human brain is not designed for the world we live in. This talk traces the story of human history to show what our minds and bodies were built for and just how mismatched that design is with today’s complexity. This sets the stage for us to walk through the SIMPLE steps that help you see the modern world through an old-world lens so living well stops being something you chase and becomes something you already have.

Serendipity

The Science of Serendipity: How to Be Present So That Good Things Happen to You

Living in a world of abundance provides real benefits, but it also exacts hidden costs. Endless choice has crowded out something we used to have more of: a sensory awareness that lets serendipity in. This talk explains why we love options even though options tank life satisfaction and how staying present, rather than chasing more options, is what lets good things happen.

Belonging

The Science of Belonging: How to Build Real Connection in a Superficial World

Belonging used to be automatic, built into the fabric of daily life. Today it isn’t and the brain treats that loss as a threat, getting stuck ruminating over who our people are, which drains both mental and physical health. This talk traces why connection matters as much as food and water, and how to rebuild it in a world that keeps both just out of reach.

Purpose

Meaningful Roles: Finding Purpose in the Life You Already Have

Despite being more fed, medicated, and entertained than any generation before us, many of us feel more unmoored than ever. Our feeds are full of platitudes about finding purpose because the brain needs one to function well but isn’t good at finding purpose on its own; it never had to. This talk reveals the purpose hidden in the life we already have.

Pleasure

Front-Load Joy: The Science of Pleasure, Motivation, and Habits That Actually Stick

Today’s world has upended our relationship to pleasure. Most of us spend our days chasing a happiness we expect to feel once we’re done only to find it’s either missing or gone in an instant. This talk shows how to reset the brain’s relationship to pleasure, using the rule of pleasure at the beginning to move reward from somewhere ahead to the here-and-now and build motivation that lasts.

Stress & Emotional Wellness

The Stress Mirage: What the Brain Gets Wrong About Stress and How to Get It Right

Many of today’s stressors are chronic and not life-threatening but the brain still reacts to them as if survival were on the line. That’s because threats like social rejection, which we encounter constantly now, used to mean real danger: the brain can’t easily tell the difference between being left out of a group chat and being cast out of the tribe. Left unchecked, that confusion is a major driver of the emotional dysregulation behind today’s mental and physical health struggles. And no self-help tool survives contact with a stressed brain. This talk shows how to retrain the brain to tell the difference, so it stops bracing for extinction every time it feels excluded.

The Childhood Mismatch

The Childhood Mismatch: How Your Early Environment is Sabotaging Your Adult Life—and What to Do About It

One of the most critical mismatches between what the brain needs and what the modern world provides shows up in early caretaking. Healthy brain development requires a shift from intense physical contact in infancy to increasing independence later, but modern life makes that shift harder. The result is an adult brain that struggles with self-regulation. This talk traces how caregiving has changed throughout human history and what emerging research shows about how early unpredictability shapes adult sensitivity, leading to real deficits in decision-making, focus, and resilience. Most of us didn’t get the kind of training our brains needed the first time around. There’s still a way to finish the job, no matter how old we are.

The Art of Storytelling

Mastering the Art of Storytelling: The Brain Science Behind Which Stories Persuade

Humans have been transmitting knowledge through story since long before we had data because the brain is built to remember stories, not statistics. Yet most of us still try to persuade with numbers and facts instead. This talk traces the science of why stories move people to act, shows how to turn data into a story people remember, and reveals how to choose the right story to make any idea land.

The Science of Attention

The Science of Attention: Why Some Messages Stick and Most Don’t

Why do audiences tune out? Why do some products and ideas catch on and others fail? Why do some people and firms gain steadfast loyalty and others never do? Successful leaders, marketers, and communicators must not only make the right decisions—they must also influence others. Doing this effectively requires understanding the science of the human mind. This talk provides a toolkit for creating and delivering persuasive communication that people pay attention to, understand, remember, and care about.

Attention is the most contested resource in the modern world, and most brands, speakers, and messages lose the fight without realizing it. This talk breaks down the brain science of what actually earns it, and why most messaging fails to.

How I got here: the bio stuff.

I was born in Milwaukee and grew up in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. (1973)

Spent the 1980s trying to be someone cool.

Spent the 1990s pretending to be someone cool.

Graduated from small town high school

Received a bachelor's degree in mass communication from Boston University

Worked as an entertainment publicist because I thought that seemed cool—only it made me feel more uncool.

Took a night class on the evolution of human nature and I started to understand myself for the first time.

Joined a lab at the Institute for Mind and Biology at the University of Chicago

Received a master's in psychology from the University of Chicago

Received a PhD in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin

Worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota

Currently a professor of marketing at Rutgers Business School, Rutgers University

My research, writing, and commentary have appeared in news outlets such as Fast Company, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Magazine, and The CEO Magazine.

I write opinion articles when I have something worth sharing.

I grew up in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, a small town I couldn’t wait to leave. I was sure my life would be better somewhere else, somewhere that felt more like success. So I chased it: college in Boston, then a publicist job at a movie studio in LA, then New York. I read every self-help book I could find along the way. None of it worked. I always felt like the better version of my life was somewhere ahead of me, never where I actually was.

Then I got laid off, got evicted, and moved back in with my mom. That’s when I signed up for a community college class called the Evolution of Human Nature, almost 30 and starting over. It cracked something open. I went on to earn a PhD in evolutionary psychology from the University of Texas at Austin, and I’ve spent the years since researching why people do what they do, work that’s been covered by the Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC, The Atlantic, Forbes, USA Today, Newsweek, and New York Magazine.

Here’s the part that isn’t in most bios: becoming an expert in human behavior didn’t make me an expert in living my own life. I had a job I liked and work that felt meaningful, and I still wasn’t okay. It took a divorce in 2017 to make me actually stop and use what I knew about the brain on myself instead of just studying it in the lab on other people. SIMPLE is what came out of that, nearly a decade of research and self-testing, built on the idea that no self-help tool survives contact with a stressed brain. Calm the brain first. Then the rest of it can actually work.

So many books shaped my thinking along the way, The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, The Way of Integrity by Martha Beck. I read them all, and they’d calm me down while I was reading, then the calm would disappear the moment I made contact with regular life again. That was the piece I was missing: you have to prepare the brain to accept self-help before asking it to change, calming it first, based on what we actually know about what a brain needs to feel safe.

This book took nearly ten years to write, because I refused to publish anything I hadn’t tested on myself first. If a principle didn’t survive contact with my own bad days, it didn’t make the final six.