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Michael  Easter

Michael Easter

New York Times Bestselling Author, Living Well & Performance Expert, Professor of Journalism

Michael Easter

New York Times Bestselling Author, Living Well & Performance Expert, Professor of Journalism

Biography

Michael Easter is a New York Times bestselling author who's made a career of traveling the world to uncover innovative and practical ideas that help people live healthier, happier and more productive and remarkable lives. His research has taken him everywhere—from war zones to the Arctic to the most remote reaches of the Bolivian jungle.

Michael’s work has been embraced by leading institutions, ranging from professional sports teams to the military to Fortune 500 companies. The tactics he uncovers have changed how organizations approach critical issues like physical and mental health, performance, innovation and success. Most importantly, his ideas have helped millions of people worldwide live healthier, happier and more remarkable lives.

His books include The New York Times bestseller Scarcity Brain and The Comfort Crisis. He's appeared in many of the world's most influential media outlets, including Good Morning America, The New York Times, CBS Saturday Morning and The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Michael has spoken to or consulted for various top-tier universities, medical schools, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and some of the country’s largest nonprofits.

When he's not crisscrossing the globe for his research, you can find him living in Las Vegas, where he is a professor in the journalism department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) He co-founded and co-directs the Public Communications Institute, a think tank at UNLV. He lives on the edge of the desert with his wife and two dogs, Stockton and Conway.

Speaker Videos

The Power of Leaving Your Comfort Zone

Michael Easter's Hot Takes on Scarcity Mindset and the Secret Power of Boredom

How to break bad habit loops with Scarcity Brain author Michael Easter

The comfort crisis, doing hard things, rucking, and more | Michael Easter, MA

Speech Topics

How an Abundance Mindset Builds Better Businesses & People

Humans evolved to have a scarcity mindset, one that worries about what we don’t have instead of appreciating and leveraging what we do. This is because our ancestors evolved in environments of scarcity. Everything from food to stuff to information to the number of people we could influence and more was hard to come by. Obsessing about what we don't have gave us a survival advantage. But today, we have an abundance of all the things we’re built to crave. So our scarcity mindset now backfires. It leads to striking inefficiencies in business. But it’s also at the root of our most pressing physical and mental health issues, like anxiety and burnout.

Michael’s talk covers the lessons he learned while traveling the world to understand how we can conquer the scarcity mindset. He embedded himself in the country’s leading neuroscience labs, with Army forces in Iraq and lost tribes deep in the Amazon and more. Based on his latest book, The Scarcity Brain: Fix Your Craving Mindset and Rewire Your Habits to Thrive With Enough, he weaves colorful storytelling with breaking new science, Michael sets out to give the audience simple tips and tricks to shift to an abundance mindset. The result for businesses: happier, healthier employees who accomplish more with less.

The Power of Leaving Your Comfort Zone

In most ways, people today are more comfortable than ever. For example, we spend 93 percent of our time indoors in temperature control. We get our food from a drive-through window or microwave instead of hunting and gathering, and our biggest stresses are presentations and artificial deadlines rather than ferocious tigers.

This lifestyle clearly has benefits but it also has pernicious drawbacks. Michael Easter’s investigative reporting shows that our overly comfortable and convenient lifestyles explain everything from why we feel burnout and get so stressed by events as harmless as traffic jams and work presentations, to why we’re suffering from a creativity crisis and face the highest rates of chronic mental and physical diseases in human history.

Michael spent 33 days in the Arctic and traveled the globe researching his book, The Comfort Crisis. Through vivid storytelling, he reveals the life-changing power of leaving our comfort zones. Along the way he lays out a handful of simple tactics we can use to expand our comfort zone. The result: We’re left healthier, happier, more creative and productive, with calm and grace in the face of even the biggest stressors.

What 33 Days in The Artic Taught Me About Expanding Human

Over millions of years of human evolution, our ancestors had to do challenging tasks to survive. These challenges could be from hunts, getting resources for the tribe, moving from summering to wintering grounds and so on. Each time we faced one of these challenges we’d not only learn what our potential is but also expand it. We’d become more capable, confident, calm under pressure and even undergo profound positive shifts in our perspective and gratitude.

In modern society, however, it’s possible to survive without being truly challenged. We’ll still have food, a comfortable home, a decent job, a family. But we often have no idea of the true power and ability that lies within us.

Michael reveals what he learned about expanding human potential from spending 33 days in the Arctic and traveling the globe to interview the world’s top researchers, athletes, business leaders, doctors and more. His expedition was at the extreme end of a prescription that scientists and thinkers across disciplines say we should make a part of our lives. It was part rewilding, part rewiring. And its benefits were all-encompassing. Through colorful storytelling, Michael presents a practical action plan that allows us to discover our challenges, expand our potential and rediscover what it means to be human.

Testimonials