Michael Easter

Michael Easter is a New York Times bestselling author, investigative journalist, and professor in the journalism department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He is the author of The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self, as well as the book Scarcity Brain, and his work focuses on how integrating modern science with evolutionary ideas about discomfort, challenge, and “mismatch” can improve health, performance, and meaning. A longtime health and fitness journalist, he has served as a contributing editor at Men’s Health and columnist for Outside magazine, and his reporting and essays have appeared internationally in outlets including Men’s Journal, New York, Vice, Scientific American, and Esquire.

Easter’s research and reporting have taken him to settings ranging from war zones to the Arctic and remote regions of the Bolivian jungle, experiences that inform the explorations of discomfort and modern convenience in The Comfort Crisis and his later work. In addition to his books, he co-founded and co-directs the Public Communications Institute at UNLV, and writes the Two Percent (2%) newsletter and hosts the Two Percent podcast, which extend his ongoing examination of health, behavior, and the benefits of challenging experiences. He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, on the edge of