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."

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 (March 31, 2026), 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

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.

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 (March 31, 2026), 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

Something is wrong, and most of us can feel it without being able to say exactly what it is.

61% of Americans now identify as lonely. Anxiety and depression are at historic highs. We've never had more mental health professionals — and we've never had more mental health crises. We are more "connected" than any generation in human history, and more isolated than any we have ever measured.

In this conversation, author Michael Trainer (Resonance: The Art and Science of Human Connection) and Mark Groves go deep on the question that most of the wellness industry won't touch: what if this isn't a personal problem? What if we are biological beings — with nervous systems built for fire, proximity, and tribe — being asked to function inside a machine specifically designed to exploit every vulnerability we have?

They cover:

— Why your gut feeling about a person is not a hunch but precise physiological data — and what the HeartMath Institute's 40 years of research says about who gets to tune you
— The difference between a battery and a black hole — and why some traditional "givers" are draining you
— What Beethoven going deaf, a chef losing his sense of taste, and a nonverbal man in a nursing home hearing Chet Baker all have in common
— Dave Chappelle walking away from $50 million, going to Africa to find himself, and weeping when a tribe sang him back
— Why there is no medicine, no biohack, and no supplement on the planet that can approximate having one person you can call at 2am — and what the Harvard Study of Adult Development (80 years of data) confirms about what actually determines how long you live
— The seventh-generation Sri Lankan healer who had no word for privacy, no word for possession — and who healed people by placing them at the center of a circle and bringing the whole community together to return them to the collective heartbeat
— Why the revolution, when it comes, will be analog

This is not a conversation about self-optimization. It is a conversation about remembering what we are.

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 (March 31, 2026), 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