RESONANCE

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Reflections on Love and Loss: Ten Years After Hosting the Dalai Lama Oct 14, 2026

Show notes

Ten years ago, Michael Trainer hosted His Holiness the Dalai Lama for his 80th birthday. It took seven months, an idea that arrived in the freezing Pacific, and a reason that was deeply personal: his father had been diagnosed with dementia, and Michael wanted to make him proud while he could still understand.

What he learned surprised him. His father didn’t need any of it. He would have been just as happy with an ice cream cone down the street.

In this solo episode, recorded in Uluwatu, Bali, Michael shares a moment he has rarely told publicly. At the photo, his father was turned away from the camera, lost in his dementia. The Dalai Lama took his hand, closed his eyes, sent him a blessing, and gently turned him to face the lens.

Michael is also honest about the harder truth beneath the anniversary. The last decade was spent caring for family and doing deep inner work, and he doesn’t feel any closer to the partnership and family he wants most.

From there, he offers a practice: look ten years ahead and separate your resume goals from your eulogy goals. What are you actually optimizing for? Which experiences will matter when you look back on a life well lived? And what is the cake, metaphorically, that you’re sailing toward?

“Who we are and our worthiness isn’t about our doing. It’s about who we’re being.”

Michael Trainer has spent 30 years learning from Nobel laureates, neuroscientists, and wisdom keepers worldwide. He's the author of RESONANCE: The Art and Science of Human Connection, co-creator of Global Citizen and the Global Citizen Festival, and host of the RESONANCE podcast.

Featured in Forbes, Inc, Good Morning America. Follow on YouTube

The Real Ones: Why Some People Will Never Lose You — and Never Choose You Oct 10, 2026

Show notes

There are the people who are clearly not for you. There are the people who are unmistakably yours. And then there is the messy middle.

The messy middle is where most of us get stuck. These people like the idea of you but won’t invest in you. They watch your stories but never call. They keep you in their orbit at no cost to themselves.

We are living in a toe-in-the-water culture. This episode is about finding the people who dive in.

Recorded solo at sunset on the southern coast of Bali, Michael gets honest about the reckoning that came when the music-festival years ended and when he stopped drinking. Many of his friends turned out to be party friends. They weren’t bad people. They just weren’t there when it cost them something: the hospital visit, the cross-country move, the hard conversation, the accountability.

From there he goes deeper:

The lost art of initiation. Our culture has abandoned the process of individuation, and the result is a generation of man-children. Men’s work is one of the few places he has found real accountability.
Knowledge vs. wisdom. Knowing what the Buddha taught is not the same as embodying it. Michael explains why the people most certain they’ve arrived are often the furthest from it.
Follow the laughter. The wisest people he has met, from indigenous elders to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, are also the most humble and the quickest to laugh, especially at themselves.
Composting the shit. When life knocks you off center, you can turn the challenge into soil for new growth. He also talks about finding the people and places that feed you rather than drain you.

This is a short, intimate episode about choosing depth over volume. It is also about becoming the kind of person someone else would choose.

“Real ones don’t need you to know how fabulous they are. They already own it.”

Featured in Forbes, Inc, Good Morning America. Follow on YouTube

Who Would Go to War With You? Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

There was a time when your word was your bond. A handshake was a contract. If you said you'd be there, you were there.

That time is gone. We ghost, we flake, we swipe. We treat the one finite resource we have, our time with each other, as disposable.

In this solo episode, Michael Trainer issues a call to become warriors in an age of the artificial. That doesn't mean fighting. It means finding the signal in the noise, and finding the people who would go to war with you.

Drawing on Sebastian Junger's work on the bonds forged in combat, Michael explores why coming home from war can be as devastating as war itself: the loss of knowing, without question, that someone has your back. He shares his own dark night of the soul after a betrayal, when he was drinking, numbing, and lost, and the four years he spent in a men's group that showed up every single week. They didn't show up because it was convenient. They showed up because they said they would.

Michael also explores:

Why we regulate or dysregulate each other's nervous systems, so choosing your people is a biological decision, not just a social one.
The lost rite of initiation, and what happens to boys who are never shown how to become men.
Why people reveal themselves through action, consistency, and accountability, never through what they say.
The true meaning of the warrior: someone who gives himself to something bigger than himself.

This is a clarion call to rigorous discernment about who is for you, and to becoming the kind of person someone else can count on.

"People reveal themselves through their actions. Who are the people that show up, not because it's convenient, but because they said they would?"

Here's to the real ones.

Featured in Forbes, Inc, Good Morning America. Follow on YouTube

Your Word Was Your Bond. What Happened?: How to deal with Ghosting and Flakey People Sep 28, 2026

Show notes

Description

A week ago, Michael Trainer was on top of the world. He'd just met six or seven wonderful people at a gathering in Uluwatu, Bali, and made plans to see each of them. By the end of the week, every one of those plans had fallen through.

The reasons were ordinary: work, a sick pet, something came up. What stayed with him was that almost nobody tried to repair it.

In this solo episode, Michael looks at a quiet crisis in modern relationships. A generation ago, your word was as good as a contract. Now, in a culture of dating apps, algorithms, and swipe-right, swipe-left disposability, we have started putting how we feel ahead of what we promised. The cost is higher than we think. Time is the one resource none of us gets back, and every careless cancellation tells the other person their time doesn't matter.

Michael offers a simple way to cancel without closing the door: acknowledge their time, name what came up, and offer a real way to reconnect. He also makes the case for radical directness. That means a clear yes, a clear no, or an honest maybe, and saying early and plainly what you're looking for and what you're available for.

Then the episode goes deeper, into why this matters so much. Michael draws on the reunion scene in Antwone Fisher, a young soldier alone at his graduation until a senior officer steps forward to hold him, and a Māori family welcoming their son home with a haka at the airport. Each is an image of what every one of us is still wired for. We are tribal beings, and for most of human history being cast out of the tribe meant death. Underneath our schedules and our excuses, we all want to be seen, to belong, and to be honored for who we are.

This is a call to be someone who shows up, and to go find the people who will show up for you.

"Go out and find that table where you are greeted as family coming home."

Featured in Forbes, Inc, Good Morning America. Follow on YouTube

3 Ways to Protect Your Energy From Draining People Sep 28, 2026

Show notes

Ever walk away from a conversation feeling more drained than when you arrived? You've encountered an energetic black hole.

Three ways to protect your energy:

1️⃣ Notice your body. Your nervous system is a tuning fork. When someone feels off, trust it.
2️⃣ Stop feeding the dynamic. You don't have to defend, escalate, or people-please.
3️⃣ Leave early. "Great seeing you, I need to get on with my day." No explanation needed. Shorter is better.

Your energy is your own. Keep it clean, keep it protected, and give yourself permission to move on.

📖 More in Resonance: The Art and Science of Human Connection: http://www.resonance.biz
📬 Weekly letter: https://substack.com/@michaeltrainer

#relationships #boundaries #nervoussystem #energy #peoplepleasing #selfcare #resonance

Featured in Forbes, Inc, Good Morning America. Follow on YouTube

You Deserve People Who Show Up Sep 27, 2026

Show notes

The reasons were ordinary: work, a sick pet, something came up. What stayed with him was that almost nobody tried to repair it.

This is a call to be someone who shows up, and to go find the people who will show up for you.

"Go out and find that table where you are greeted as family coming home."

Featured in Forbes, Inc, Good Morning America. Follow on YouTube

The Life I Imagined at 50—and the One That Showed Up Sep 26, 2026

Show notes

Michael imagined his 50th birthday differently: a partner, a family, and a big gathering of friends. Instead, he found himself in Bali, facing the gap between the life he expected and the life in front of him.

In this solo episode, Michael shares how an unexpected birthday celebration and a two-week motorcycle trip through northern Bali helped him meet that moment with openness. From water blessings and mountain coffee to swimming with dolphins and connecting with strangers, the journey became a reminder that meaning can emerge when we loosen our grip on how life is supposed to unfold.

He reflects on the people who do and don’t show up, the stories we tell ourselves about our worth, and what it means to become a source of love and energy in our own lives. If you’re standing at a threshold of your own, this is an invitation to honor what you hoped for while staying open to what’s possible now.

Featured in Forbes, Inc, Good Morning America. Follow on YouTube

You Chose Your Art—and Your Art Chose You Back: Allie Michelle on Love, Courage & the Creative Calling Aug 15, 2026

Show notes

Full episode description

What might become possible if you stopped keeping an escape route—and devoted yourself completely to what you love?

In this intimate and poetic conversation, Michael sits down with bestselling poet and author Allie Michelle, whose work explores love, loss, creativity, lineage, and the courage to remain fully human.

Allie shares the moment she closed her businesses and committed herself entirely to writing—only to receive an unexpected book offer from HarperCollins. As she describes it: “You chose your art, and your art chose you back.”

Together, Michael and Allie explore what it means to create in an age of constant distraction; why boredom may be the birthplace of art; and how the parts of ourselves we suppress often return through the people we love. Allie reflects on walking the Camino de Santiago without her phone, becoming “Freedom Wolf,” and moving from being a writer holding a pen to becoming “a pen in life’s hand.”

They also journey through the unsent words we carry, the courage required to keep the heart open, the wisdom of lineage, and the beauty of making something no one may ever witness—from a pianist playing alone in a forest to an Indigenous flower blessing offered at sunrise.

This is a conversation about burning the boats, letting failure deepen the work, loving people beyond our projections, and singing your song even—and especially—when no one is listening.

In this episode:

Why distraction is the death of art and boredom its birthplace
The danger of living like a personal brand
How to recognize the work that is truly calling you
What Allie learned from a samurai master
Burning the boats and abandoning your escape routes
Why failure is a comma, not a period
The connection between suppressed identity and romantic attraction
Reclaiming the wild, “feral” parts of ourselves
The practice of identifying your unsent letters
Creating as an offering rather than a performance
Why sensitivity can become an artist’s greatest instrument
Honoring endings, impermanence, and the many lives we live

Allie closes the episode with a breathtaking poem imagining a life lived in reverse—a reminder to find magic in the ordinary and return to the only moment we ever truly possess:

Just here. Just now. Just this.

Featured book: Don’t Forget to Light the Candles by Allie Michelle.

Featured in Forbes, Inc, Good Morning America. Follow on YouTube

Exponential Leadership with Ryan Hawk Jul 23, 2026

Show notes

Get Ryan Hawk's new book: The Price of Becoming: The Compounding Practices of High Performance

There's a sentence most people never recover from.

"He gives us a better chance to win than you do."

That's what Ryan Hawk's college football coach told him, benching a highly recruited quarterback in favor of a freshman who would go on to win two Super Bowls and a Hall of Fame induction. Ryan calls it one of the luckiest things that ever happened to him — because it installed a question he asks himself before bed every night since: what did I do today to add value to someone else's life?

In this conversation, Michael Trainer sits down with Ryan Hawk — host of the Learning Leader Show, author of The Price of Becoming — for a wide-ranging exploration of what actually compounds a life. Not just money. Not just skill. Relationships, proximity, and the rooms you choose to sit in.

They get into the uncomfortable underside of Ryan's own thesis: if consistency compounds, what happens when you're consistently investing in the wrong people? Ryan doesn't dodge it — he talks about outgrowing friendships as a marker of growth, not disloyalty, and the discipline of choosing rooms that force you to level up rather than settle in.

From there, the conversation moves through Ryan's answer to what love actually is — curiosity, full stop — the tactical, specific ways he and his wife make people feel seen (down to remembering someone's favorite bourbon), Jim Collins' definition of leadership as "the art of getting people to want to do what must be done," and the four-book journey of learning what it actually takes to launch work that spreads.

This is a conversation about the architecture of a well-lived life — told through a man who has spent eleven years and 700 interviews studying exactly that, and is still, by his own account, trying to live it out one morning at a time.

"We learn who we are in practice, not in theory."

Featured in Forbes, Inc, Good Morning America. Follow on YouTube

The Person You Want Requires a Person You're Not Yet — Adam Roa on Love, Polarity & Creative Life Force Jul 14, 2026

Show notes

To attract someone honest, you don't need to be honest. You need to be a space that can hold honesty.

That distinction — the match, not the mirror — is one of a dozen reframes in this conversation that will quietly rearrange how you think about love.

Adam Roa is a poet, artist, and coach whose spoken word performance "You Are Who You've Been Looking For" became the most viral poetry performance in history — over 250 million views. But the man behind the poem spent years unable to express emotion at all, raised in a home where feelings weren't safe. His new book, Crazy Love, opens his actual journals from nearly two decades of searching for love, finding it, losing it, and putting himself back together.

In this episode, Adam and Michael go deep into:

— The mechanics of masculine and feminine energy — and the two karmic wounds ("I am not enough" / "I am too much") that every relationship will eventually force you to face

— Why the Gottman Institute found that couples together fifty years are still fighting about the same things they fought about on their first dates — and why that's actually the key to lasting love

— The "goddess time" problem: what to do when your partner's relationship to time (or anything else) triggers you — and how to build agreements instead of resentment

— Why your triggers in dating are rarely about the thing itself — the body count, the lateness — and how to gather the data that actually matters

— Creativity as life force: why your unique frequency is the most healing thing you can offer the world, and how to find the clues your soul has left you

— The practice behind the virality: how showing up to create, over and over, without needing to know where it leads, is what makes you ready when the moment arrives

Adam also performs two poems in full — including the one that reached a quarter of a billion people.

"Vulnerability is the gateway to connection. If we are seeking connection — to each other, to ourselves, and to life itself — we have to be willing to be vulnerable through the authentic expression of our creative energy." — Adam Roa

Adam's book Crazy Love is available now. Find Adam at adamroa.com and on Instagram @adam.roa.

Featured in Forbes, Inc, Good Morning America. Follow on YouTube

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