The Real Ones: Why Some People Will Never Lose You — and Never Choose You

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.”

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.

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