Inside JMS

Kevin Stoker

Welcome to Inside JMS: stories from the faculty and staff of the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies. I'm Kevin Stoker, and I'm here with my cohort and colleague, Dave Nourse.

Dave Nourse

Always a pleasure to be here, my friend.

Kevin Stoker

Dr. Dave and I are talking today, we're really excited to talk to Michael Easter, one of our pre eminent faculty members, a terrific guy. And we're just looking forward to get to know you better, Michael,

Michael Easter

Yea well, I'm excited to be here. And preeminent, I mean, I got those are big words, I'm going to I'm going to try my best to live up to that.

Kevin Stoker

Every once in a while I use a big word. But I, you know, I learned as you know, in journalistic training, you're supposed to use the shortest word possible. But be that as it may, Michael, you know, the first question I have for you is going to be kind of a tough question. I follow Michael on Strava. And this guy, you know, most people when they go run the trails, and run in the mountains in the desert and everything else, you know, a couple miles. Sure. Michael does six to eight miles to 10 miles on a weekend with his dog. I just want to know, Michael is as a dog started complaining yet.

Michael Easter

He he won't go past eight. That's basically his limit. Then he just starts to kind of slow down and he looks down the trail back at home and it's like, are we gonna be done with this yet? So that's, that's my cue to head back home. But I will say you're underselling yourself because you do 100 mile bike rides often, which is I mean, that's definitely harder than eight mile run. I would say. I don't

Kevin Stoker

know about that. But the other thing is, what is the weirdest or the strangest or the most scariest thing you've encountered on your ride? You runs?

Michael Easter

Oh, strangest. I mean, we live on the edge of the desert. And anyone who spent time in the desert around Las Vegas knows people dump the strangest things out there. And this is not. And this is not okay, I drove seven miles out in the desert and I put it on the side of some dirt road. I'm talking places that a car could not go. And you're like, Okay, there's a 42 inch television. Box television out here on this peak. There's a vacuum from 1980 There's an old busted out VW that someone managed to roll down a hill like my I mean, it's it's insane. The things you find out there. But it also I mean, that's why Las Vegas desert is so amazing, because you never know what you're gonna find.

Kevin Stoker

Oh, Michael, the other that aspect has been really on my mind about you lately as your latest book, Michael, as you know, this, his first book he completed a couple years ago and then turned around and wrapped up another one

Dave Nourse

just listen for my punishment, one might say

Kevin Stoker

So Mike, let's let's talk about that book that you know this, this latest book, tell us about it. And what inspired you to write

Michael Easter

it comes out in September. It's called the scarcity brain. And it basically looks at moderation. Now, everyone knows that all things are fine in moderation. Well, why are we so bad at moderating? It turns out, there are a lot of good evolutionary reasons for that we evolved in environments where what we needed to survive was scarce and hard to find food stuff, information, the number of people we could influence all these things scarce. But today, we now have an abundance of all those things. Yet, we still have that drive to always acquire and consume and crave more of those things. And so there's a bit of a mismatch. So it looks at that and to sort of report that story and tell that story. I did a lot of different traveling and met with some kooky characters from Las Vegas to Bolivia to halls of different universities and all kinds of different places.

Kevin Stoker

What was most fascinating interview you had? Oh, well,

Michael Easter

as part of the book, I went to Baghdad, and you know, on my email conversations with my fixer there, he's telling me, okay, we got you in the safest hotel in Baghdad, we have a armored SUV, like we're going to be safe, it's going to be good. We have this whole itinerary planned out of who I'm gonna meet all these government officials, you know, like warlords, all this kind of stuff. Great. Sounds good. I get there. The guy picks me up in a base model Hyundai that's maybe like 10 years old. He takes me to this hotel that's completely bombed out. Like the walls are just, I mean, the place has fallen apart and what's going on here? And he's like, oh, yeah, the nice hotel. It was all booked up. Right? And then you know, and then he goes on to tell me, I'm like, Okay, what are we doing tomorrow? He goes, Well, we're gonna try to meet with so and so. And I go, What do you mean, try? Like, we have this whole itinerary, you know, those are proposals. It's just proposals, and I'm like, You gotta be kidding me. So I mean, literally, it's me and this guy driving around Baghdad, and this Neither armored nor secure car, trying to just pull meetings out of thin air. But this guy, I mean, his BS thing was enough to get me all the way to Baghdad. And it starts to work on all these people I want to meet with. So you know, we'd go into a place and he would just talk until like, you know, he's just running and gunning and talking and B, guy just never stops talking. And then suddenly, I find myself in meetings with these high up government officials with, you know, in like, terror compounds. And just I mean, the craziest thing, the guy could just pull meetings out of thin air. And that was a wild ride. So,

Kevin Stoker

I bet. Well, you know, it's pretty heady stuff for a kid from Bountiful, Utah. Yes. Tell me tell me how all that came about. You know, you grew up in Utah, and the great outdoors. And then we're educated in New York City. So what's going on there?

Michael Easter

Good question. I grew up. Well, we live for the first couple years of my life in Idaho, catch him. So kind of like you spent some time in Idaho, and then, but all my family was in Bountiful, in that area. So we moved down there, it was just me and my mom. And yeah, I don't know, just grew up there, it was a good place to grow up, it was safe. And my mom was always kind of one of those people who pushed me to maybe try and explore the world. So she suggested I maybe try going somewhere out of state for college. And I did and that just I don't know, led me to journalism and going to grad school for journalism. And

Kevin Stoker

now I'm here now you did your bachelor's degree at

Michael Easter

it's called Wheaton College outside of Boston. Right. And my Bachelor's was, you could, it was a liberal arts school, small liberal arts school, you could invent your own major if you wanted to. So that's what I did. And it was basically a mix of international relations and environmental studies. Now, what I wanted to do with that, at the time was go on to get a business law degree and basically work for big oil, or something like that. Now, why I wanted to do that I could not tell you, junior year, or maybe a senior year, I took a course in basically, environmental writing nonfiction, creative nonfiction centered around the environment, and I loved it. And I decided from there to go to grad school. And that was a good plan, too, because I graduated in 2009. So my graduating class and undergrad was the class right after the financial collapse. So you either went to grad school, or you went to your parents basement, like well, I guess I'll do more school.

Dave Nourse

So tell us a little bit of Michael, if, if we've read your bio, we understand you know, your time in New York was also punctuated by a period of men's health. We talked a little bit about running in the desert for miles on end, even your dog getting sick of running. What inspired you to kind of be number one, kind of very health oriented, but you know, more so than that, you know, being physically active is really important to you and kind of how you live your life. Talk to us a little bit about what inspired that? Were you just the kid that never stopped going? Or has this been something that's evolved, as you've grown? Tell us a little bit about that, because that's shaped who you've become as a professional in a way?

Michael Easter

Well, I would say that in my life, now I exercise so I don't go crazy. i To your point about being a kid, I was always a kid who was like a power plant just run around a lot, a lot of just pent up energy and interest and like, wanting novel experiences that are at the extremes. Now that got me in trouble in high school. So I had to learn to channel that into something more productive. Exercise for me is that more productive thing. So I had always been into fitness and exercise. But it wasn't like, you know, I was into it in the sense of that a person would go to the gym a handful of times a week that would run. And when I was in grad school, I interned at two popular men's magazines, GQ and Esquire and also at Scientific American. So I had on one hand experience from two popular men's magazines and experience at a very popular science magazine, a job at men's health opened up which is a men's magazine that covers health science, and it was mainly focused on fitness. And so I took that role now the guy who hired me, he basically spent the entire time talking about writing. And then at the end of the interview, he goes Do you do you exercise at all? And I'm like, Yeah, I exercise and he goes, Okay, good. He goes, honestly, I've hired a lot of people who are really into fitness. It's way harder to make a fitness craze person or writer than it is a writer to learn about fitness and report about it because if you know the underlying mechanics writing and reporting. You can write about that and having that job just I think maybe even more interested in it.

Dave Nourse

So what are you interested in now? I mean, you exercise a lot, right? And so how has that we know that you've written a couple of books now. But you know, how has that kind of really inspired who you are professionally now, because you found a way to really merge these two very disparate things into something of, I think, a unique and fascinating professional career.

Michael Easter

I mean, I think, when I think about what I do, it's basically helping people live better in a modern world that is, at times, seemingly designed to make it harder to live better and healthier. So when my first book, The comfort crisis, I talked about how we've engineered comfort into our life, to an extent that that's starting to have repercussions. So for example, you don't have to walk more than 2000 steps a day, if you don't want to. Food is everywhere, it's hypercaloric. It's easily accessible, we tend to overeat all these different things we've done to make our life easier and better, while great in the grand scheme of time, and space. advancement is great. If we lean into them too much, they can start to have drawbacks. And I think you see that when you look at health statistics, especially among Americans, not just physical health, but also mental health problems. And so really, I kind of think about it as sort of a holistic perspective, how can the past and how we lived in the past, inform how we should be living now and navigate the sort of new environment that we live in, which is totally different than how humans lived for two and a half million years. Right. And it's just a All in all, I think it's just trying to give people tools to live a better life. And my unique perspective is pulling in anthropology, modern science, but also, I think that practices that humans have done for a long time can be very informative as well.

Kevin Stoker

Still, the kid writing nonfiction, environmental, still looking and figuring out how our world works.

Michael Easter

Yeah, trying to. But also, I try, and I think about it a lot in terms of making it approachable for the average person to because there's a lot of you know, if people if people really wanted to know, perfect information, all the numbers and data and figures, they'd open a textbook, but no one does that was that. It's because it's boring. And it's hard to understand. So I have to make it entertaining. And I have to make it easy to understand.

Kevin Stoker

Tell me about New York University and your experience there. Oh,

Michael Easter

yeah, it was good. It was a I applied to a bunch of different grad schools. And I got into most of them. But I chose NYU because it was in New York City, and I had an interest in magazines. And most magazines at the time were based out in New York. And it's funny, because I was kind of on the cusp of right when, you know, magazines had been had this, like big growth arc. And then the internet had come in and the Internet was starting to be I mean, it had been around but it wasn't like the internet, as it is now. And so it was at this kind of high point that was just about beginning to slow down in terms of the the, I guess, prevalence and power of print magazines.

Kevin Stoker

So you hear well, you teach interesting, you teach an intro to mass communications, essentially, media foundations, you also teach a media entrepreneurship class, and you teach a digital newsroom. And these are and you can teach health comm and various other things. Tell me about getting into teaching. What was that transition? Like?

Michael Easter

When I came to UNLV, it was before you were here, and the person running the department was running multiple departments. What I got in terms of instruction was hear the name of your classes. Okay, what do I do? Well, here's their names. So figure it out, like, Oh, okay. But I did figure it out. And I think it actually worked out pretty well because at the time, I think the department was really heavy on PhDs which departments absolutely need, but I think journalism you also need the flip side of people sort of on the ground practicing. So I tried to kind of I got Some counsel from, you know, the more academic side, but then also tried to weave the, I guess, practice element, sort of my background and practice into my classes. So I can say, you know, here's the theory. Here's how I use this, when I have to go out and report a story. Or when I think about building a media brand, when I think about integrating advertisers in the context of a world where advertisers are paying less per click yet, we need to keep the lights on and you want a job, don't you? So we got to figure out how do we balance all of this?

Kevin Stoker

You have talked a lot about, you know, in marketing, your work and everything else, that you've moved into kind of the digital realm and become pretty savvy about what's going on there. For modern day journalist, kind of give us if you are kind of going to give instruction manual on what would be the best steps to take to be successful as a digital journalist, what would it be,

Michael Easter

like for a student just graduated student

Kevin Stoker

just graduating someone who's trying to get into this line of work?

Michael Easter

Yeah. So I would say if you're just graduating, you're, you're not going to be great yet. So you need to get great. Now, if you try and get great on your own, you're not going to be getting a lot of feedback. So if you were to be like, I'm just gonna do my own thing. It if you're not going to learn as quickly, so I really think that there's a lot of value in trying to work for a traditional news organization where your work is under their banner, but you are getting edited, and you're getting taught by people who know what they're doing better than you and you can learn from them. Now, in your time there, you want to be sharpening your skills as much as possible. You want to be thinking about building your own audience using social media to build your audience. And then eventually, when you feel like you're good at what you do, ideally, you go on and do your own thing and try and build your own audience. So the journalists that I think are doing the best today, they are one good at what they do. But they've figured out I need people to be coming for my work only. So thinking about how do I get my own audience? And then how can I eventually monetize that audience? Whether that's through a newsletter, whether that's through a podcast, whether that's just being able to approach large brands, and large brands are gonna be like, Oh, we know you? Yeah, we'll work with you really thinking about? How do I build? How do I? How do I build myself up in a way and figure out multiple income streams, because it used to be you know, you think about like a person. Take someone who's writing books. It used to be that like, the, if you only wanted to write books, like you could probably do that. And the book would be your moneymaker. Today, people who write books are doing a lot of other things. Right? So the author becomes a thought leader, they become a public speaker, there, they may be doing some consulting for brands, I mean, there's a million different things someone like that can do. It's not you can no longer as a journalist, sit in the dark office and type and make phone calls. You have to put yourself out there you have to find new ways of communicating with people.

Kevin Stoker

How did you make it what was the turning points in your career that kind of, in which you started implementing things like that?

Michael Easter

The book, so for it, it took me doing the book to realize whenever I would write a story for men's health, one of the biggest magazines in the world, the the biggest men's magazine in the world, 60 countries, 40 different languages. 40 million, like people who read it every month. Great. But when people read an article on that magazine, they don't read a Michael Easter article, they read a men's health article, when I did the book that is a Michael Easter book. So now all of a sudden, it went from, oh, this person's this person is an idea generator, rather than like this magazine with these unnamed people I don't even know is an idea generator, if that makes sense. So once you do the book, now all of a sudden, you can start putting out your own content in a way that can ultimately build something larger and also more rewarding, because now I can steer the ship. Before I'm having to work with an editor who's going well. I don't like that, or we don't like that. Or oh, and by the way, there's only so many words we can use here and you're ultimately under that voice to so once you do something like a book or it could be could be a YouTube series. It could be a documentary. It could be a podcasts, it could be a newsletter, whatever, you start to be able to steer your own ship, and people come to you for information and your unique worldview. So once I realized that, it was like, Oh, okay. Now this makes sense. And I'll quote, one of my friends. His name is Jason Pfeiffer. And he's the editor in chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. And he recently did a book, we have the same editor. And he was saying, you know, it was really funny. When I, when I signed this book contract, I would tell a lot of my media friends, I'm doing a book and they would be like, Oh, that's cool. You're doing a book. And then I would tell all my entrepreneur friends, I'm doing a book and they would go cool, what are you going to do with it? Everything is a key to something else. So the book might be your flagship property, but you're ultimately trying to use it to build something else.

Dave Nourse

I mean, I think, if you can hone in on one word, it's leverage, right? How can you leverage one thing to then build on that and do something else. And so whether that's, as you mentioned, a podcast, or a newsletter, or a YouTube series, or whatever it might be, you've established this brand. Now that is separate from men's health, but it is the Michael Easter brand, and people are coming to you for that. And then you can leverage these various different forms of media and technology in order to continue to tell that story just through a variety of different platforms. And I think you're right. I mean, I think that is, that is, in some some ways, that is the future of journalism. And you look at a lot of very prominent journalists, and they're no longer just associated with one magazine or one newspaper, but if they're still affiliated, they may have their own newsletter underneath the umbrella of the larger organization, or their own podcast, or whatever it might be, or they might just go out on their own and start their own media company.

Michael Easter

Yeah. And I think that media in a way has been when I think about, you know, teaching students like, a lot of how we've traditionally thought about media has been not great for journalists to make a reasonable living in today's environment. The idea that you should never, under any circumstances work with a brand. That's, that's, maybe that worked when, you know, the New York Times was paying people $150,000 A year or whatever it was, but that like, it's just not reasonable today, and especially if you can learn how to navigate those waters, because ultimately, like I go back to what is going to best serve the reader and anything I do, how is this serving the reader? And if there's a brand involvement in that fine, like, that's fine. You know, if this is like, what is going to help the reader, like, what do I care if there's a brand involved.

Dave Nourse

So we are running short on time, and I want to talk before, before we have to let you go, Michael. But I want to talk a little bit about your teaching, because you've talked about how you are taking that experience that you've had and kind of imparting that in the classroom. And given that you teach a variety of our students kind of at the beginning in the intro course. And then towards the end and some of the 400 level courses. Talk to us a little bit about your teaching kind of you've you came into UNLV with the directive. Here's the class Good luck.

Kevin Stoker

But it wasn't me though, Kevin, and I would have said, Good luck and survived the first semester. Here's

Michael Easter

the classes name and subtitle, the subtitle.

Kevin Stoker

So here's a link to something.

Dave Nourse

But but but how have you developed your teaching philosophy? And kind of how did how does your professional experience inform that philosophy or Outlook you have in the classroom?

Michael Easter

Yeah, so a good example is in my 107 class, I start to see a lot of the ideas about what does what does journalism today look like? What does it take to make a reasonable career in media advertising PR? What does that world look like? And part of that is that we're learning history and trends. So we can put things in context, we're learning sort of what things are, what they look like today, what they might look like in the future. And we do that through a mix of textbooks, but also, basically internet newsletters that go over current stories in media. So then, by the time they get to the 400 level class, that's entrepreneurial journalism, started to see those ideas. They've probably learned about them from other classes along the way. And now we're going to put them into practice. So in that class, the main assignment is to create an entrepreneurial media project that you complete over the course of a semester. And what I want to see is growth from that and I also want to see learning from that. So some people, for example, might create a YouTube channel on a topic that they're really passionate about. I've had others who have helped them used media to propel the business they work at forward, I had another girl who had a plan to buy this after she graduated, she was gonna buy the bar in Oregon. And the bar was like, in a cool town, it was kind of what it was like this whole kind of dive bar. And it was like, Okay, well, let's create a media plan for this bar. And when you get up there, you have got your daily, here's what I'm doing every single day, and how I'm going to roll this business out now that it's under me over the next year. And she like 5x the income of the bar over the course of a year using all of this stuff. Alright, so it's like, how can I give people tools that are going to make them a living, because journalism is hard to make a living at if we don't sit down and talk about the realities of money and how the industry is changing financially.

Kevin Stoker

And that may be a good closing question. You know, a lot of people are saying journalism is, you know, in dire straits, that there's no real opportunity in journalism. And I often say, Well, no, it's changed. There's great opportunity out there. What would you say? What is the future? You know, what do you see as the future of journalism journalism? 2.0? For you?

Michael Easter

Yeah, well, I would say two things, I would say, one, if you can do the skills that a journalist know needs to know to do well, you can do a lot of jobs. Well, if you can write well, if you can ask good questions, if you can interact with people well, and if you can research well, like, that's a lot of jobs right there, like a lot. And then two, I would say, there's a ton of opportunity. But it may not be in the places that we've traditionally thought of as journalism jobs, like, are people going in mass to work at the newspaper now after graduating? No. But are they going different places and using the skills and earning like, totally reasonable and good incomes? Yes. Like these are skills that translate. And I would also argue that there is a much higher ceiling for what a journalist can do today, meaning it was hard for a single person with a good idea to create their own media brand in the past, how would you do that? What are you going to do? Start your own magazine? Okay, where am I gonna get funding? Where am I going to do this? Where am I going to do all I want video? Okay, well, we need a big check to call on this production career. Like, that's hard. Now, you can do all those things on the internet and build a totally, like, reasonable, large income, that would be way larger than you would have ever gotten the top spot at the New York Times as like a writer, and you're doing it on your own terms as well. Now, those cases are probably rare. There are fewer big opinion writers across the country. But the people who are doing that kind of work on their own terms are making a lot more money. And more importantly, I would argue having a more meaningful career because they are shaping their own careers rather than being at the behest of a large publisher and media company.

Kevin Stoker

Michael, thanks for your time. appreciate having you here. Appreciate your openness. And I'm gonna make sure we quote that, because I think that's that's real powerful. Well, thanks. Thank you, Michael.

Michael Easter

Thank you. I enjoyed it.