A Man Only Has Five Types of Friends | FRIDAY FIELD NOTES

Most men go their entire lives running on substitute friendships without realizing their tank is completely empty. In this episode of Friday Field Notes, Ryan Michler breaks down the 5 types of men in your life - from the convenient neighbor to the group chat clown - and reveals why only one of them will actually stand by you in a crisis. Learn how to audit your inner circle, eliminate friction-free surface relationships, and build genuine 2 AM friendships through intentionality and radical honesty. Ready to surrounding yourself with high-caliber men? Join the Iron Council brotherhood at orderofman.com/ironcouncil. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS 00:00 - The Friendship Trap Most Men Fall For 00:21 - Category 1: The Convenient Friend 04:55 - Category 2: The Default Friend 07:11 - Category 3: The Clown 11:02 - Category 4: The Casual Friend 15:04 - Category 5: The 2 AM Friend 18:10 - Why 2 AM Friendships Still Have Limitations 20:07 - Taking Responsibility for Your Relationships 22:25 - The 80/20 Rule of Male Vulnerability 26:47 - How to Build Intentional Brotherhood Battle Planners: Pick yours up today! https://store.orderofman.com/products/order-of-man-annual-battle-planner Order Ryan's new book, The Masculinity Manifesto https://www.amazon.com/Masculinity-Manifesto-Establishes-Influence-Credibility/dp/1684513316/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1665048672&sr=8-1. For more information on the Iron Council brotherhood https://orderofman.link/iron-council. Want maximum health, wealth, relationships, and abundance in your life? Sign up for our free course, 30 Days to Battle Ready https://orderofman.link/battle-ready-0

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So if I ask 100 friends, what's your biggest fear? 80% of them, 80 in this case, say, I'm afraid of snakes. I'm afraid of spiders. I'm afraid of heights. Cool. You're in the 80%. Now, if I ask the same amount of people and 20% or 20 of them said, I'm really afraid of not being meaningful and significant. I'm really afraid of failing my children. You know when you're being a coward? You know when you're being weak and soft and pathetic? And there are 20% of men who know that about you too.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Men, you've got five types of friends in your life. Maybe you'd call it 10 or 20 or 100 or whatever. Maybe on the opposite end of the spectrum, you'd say you don't really have any friends at all. But if you actually sat down and mapped it all out, every guy you text, every man that you might grab a beer with, every man whose name comes up when somebody asks, who are your guys? Or on your phone, when you get a text, he'd likely fall into one of five categories. And here's the part that I think might sting a little

• 1:20Speaker 00

  if you spend some time thinking about it. None of them on their own is a real friend. Actually, that's not true. There is one. There is one who's a real friend. And I'll hit that on friend number five. And it's not because these guys are bad. It's not because they're malicious or they want the worst for you. It's because these five guys are substitutes. The four guys are a substitute for the thing that you actually need. And most men go their entire lives running on.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Substitutes without ever noticing that their tank was never full, that they never had the depth that they were looking for. So I want to start with the one that you've got the most of. It's the most covered. It's it's called the convenient guy. Okay, this is the guy at the gym, the guy in your group chat, the guy from the the the neighbor that lives next to you. It's your wife's friend's husband. It's the guy that you went to high school with and played baseball with. Maybe if it's an it's the guy that you played.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Well, his son played baseball with with your your kids. And he's around because logistics put him around. You know, he's in the same building. He's in the same neighborhood. He's at the same sports complex. He's he's at the same business events. He he he's running the same errands as you. And when those logistics change, he's gone, not because of a falling out, not because you guys had a difference of opinion be big, but because there was

• 3:18Speaker 00

  never really any glue that was holding anything together, except just proximity. And proximity is fine. I mean, you'll meet some great people, but the difference is intentionality.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  But that convenient man, so that's number one. It's the convenient. He shows up when it's when it's good for him. Uh, when it's easy plans, when it's easy timing, when it's low stakes. You know, he's going to ask you for something that costs him nothing, but it costs you time, energy, money, attention, because he's not willing to invest in his own well being to the extent that it's all about him. And I've often talked about a man is a man when he becomes capable of producing more than he consumes. So the convenient is the guy who's like,

• 4:13Speaker 00

  I I just want to take from this relationship.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  So when you say, hey, man, let's go out and do this thing. He's like, yeah, anytime. Let's go do it. It just becomes silence. And most men mistake the volume of the convenience that they have in their life. You know, you might have 40 guys in your phone contact, or 100 guys, or 200 guys, or 5,000 guys in your Facebook group, or your Facebook page, or whatever. And not one of them would help you get off the couch. Not one of them would help you overcome addiction. Not one of them would step up and help you move. Not one of them would help you when you're dealing with some marital spouts. Not a single one of them.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  It's all about them. It's very selfish. It's self-serving, and you know it. You know it when you see it. All right, so that's number one, the convenient. Number two, and this kind of ties into the convenient a little bit. This is the default. This is that guy, like the apartment complex, the neighbor, the kid you went to high school with, the guy that you sit next to in the cubicle with, the guy that happens to be on your softball team. Like, you didn't choose that guy. Life just kind of, you know, handed him to you.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  Again, it's the husband of your wife's friend, or the guy at work who just happens to be next to you. Not because you chose it, but because it is what it is. It's that high school buddy that you haven't really thought about

• 5:52Speaker 00

  whether or not it's serving you and your life and your goals. But he's been around for 20 years, and so it is just what it is. But you've never actively ended that relationship.

• 6:07Speaker 00

  It's the default. It's the relationship that just runs in perpetuity on loyalty. I mean, and I can respect that. A relationship that runs on loyalty, I mean, that actually sounds pretty good, right? Like, you want a person who's loyal to you. But if that's all it is, it doesn't really make for the kind of man that you want to have in your life. It's inherited. It's not really built. It's by default.

• 6:36Speaker 00

  And the, the, the idea of inheritance is a really strange thing to build a friendship on. Loyalty is a very strange thing to build a friendship on. Loyalty is a virtue, by the way, but it's not going to serve you well because you never had to decide, you never had to actively engage whether or not this relationship was worth it. He was just kind of there. And so the friendship never got tested and never got pushed and never got oppressed upon, um, it never got proven. And here's the trap of that is that the default guys, they feel like old friends. They feel like it's earned because they've just been around

• 7:20Speaker 00

  for a very long ass time. It's the, it's the quality over quantity conundrum. It's actually a good way to say it. I should coin that. Quality over quantity conundrum. Maybe somebody else has already said it, but time isn't really the same thing as connection, right? You know, I can, I can spend 20 years, I can log 20 years next to a guy who says he's a friend and actually know less about what is actually going on inside of him than you

• 7:59Speaker 00

  might actually learn from a stranger in one very simple, quick, honest conversation. We want depth and I'm going to talk about that in number four, number five type friends, but let's get to number three. Okay. So number three is the clown. Okay. Every single one of you guys have a clown. Maybe you're the clown. I don't know. But every single one of you have a clown in the group. It's the guy who makes that group chat like fun and interesting and you open it up and he's just telling a stupid joke or, you know, telling him about his latest escapades or whatever. It's the one who can, you know,

• 8:38Speaker 00

  take a, take a boring or lame party or Tuesday evening or poker night or whatever and turn it into something awesome. Just a really great night. And I want to be clear, this is not a knock on the clown. None of this is a knock on any of these individuals. I just want you to start thinking about the five types of friends that you have because that clown is valuable.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  Laughter and lightness and enjoyment, that's medicine in some ways to a man's soul. A man who can make you laugh when you're carrying something heavy or you've got a burden weighing yourself down is somebody that I think is doing some legitimate work. Whether he knows it or not, but here's where I think it breaks down.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  Try to bring the clown into something heavy. Try to have a real conversation about your marriage or a real conversation about your financial situation. Or a real conversation about your goals and dreams and desires and ambitions and failures and fears and setbacks. You know, try telling him that your marriage is on the rocks. Try telling him that you got this crazy medical diagnosis and it wasn't good. You know, try calling him at midnight and see if he's going to answer the call.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  I think when the clown gets presented with that kind of reality, he flinches. He's going to deflect, he's going to make it silly, he's going to make a joke. He's not going to address the real situations, he's going to self-deprecate.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Or he's going to mock you and tease you and poke at you a little bit, which is fine within reason, but he's going to go a little harder than he thought. Because the joke, like the joke that he has is... It would be like a carpenter who only has a set of crescent wrenches in his toolbox.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  If you need a crescent wrench, great, call that guy. But if you need 99.9999% of what you actually need in your life, probably don't call the guy who only has a crescent wrench. And that's what the clown is good for. He's good for laughs, he's good for lightheartedness. He's good for just breaking down tension and enjoying and having fun. He's not going to go deep. That guy is always absent of weight. And a guy who only shows up for the light stuff, who was never actually walking with you with the deep stuff, he was never walking next to you, he's never carrying your bag.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  That's, that's fine, but you need to compartmentalize. That's not a man who is gonna be in your corner when you need him the most. Which kind of leads me into the fourth and the fifth. And this is where I want you to guy, you guys to start thinking about moving your relationships from one, two, and three to four and five. So the fourth friend that a man has is, is the casual. Okay, this, this is a little deceptive, it's a little bit sneaky. Because it, it looks like a real relationship from the outside. It's good conversations, it's genuine laughs. You know, you like this guy, he likes you.

• 12:11Speaker 00

  You'd call him a friend without hesitation. It's the guy that you talk with at the gym every couple of days or weeks. It's the guy who, maybe even in your, your office, who you spend some time with, or maybe you crack a beer with. It's, it's, it has, it has a purpose. And I don't wanna say that it doesn't, but it does. It does have a purpose. And the purpose for this individual is to be there, to be present, to, you know, have the type of conversations that you might wanna have. It, it has some depth to it. But if you strip it all down, what's actually there?

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Some good times, a little bit of laughter, a little bit of depth. You know his job, but you don't maybe know what he's fearful of. You don't know his goals. You know what he does for work, but you don't know what he actually does. You know what opinions he has on sports and politics and the weather and all the small talk that we talked about last week, but not what he's actually afraid of at 40 years old, or 50 years old, or 60 years old.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  That casual friendship that you have, and this is where a lot of men reside. You have a lot of guys in this category, and you are this guy in a lot of men's categories. He's pleasant, right? You go to church with him. He's your wife's husband, or your wife's friend's husband, or whatever. And you enjoy him well enough, but

• 13:47Speaker 00

  just being pleasant and being kind of on the fringes requires

• 13:55Speaker 00

  nothing from you. It requires neither of you to do any difficult things. There's no friction involved. It's free a little bit, but I think probably by design, subconsciously or consciously. It's like, oh, this is a good friend of mine, but man, if the rubber meet the road, you would not.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  This isn't a guy that you'd rely on. And I don't think men really grow in what I would call friction-free spaces. Men grow when something, or maybe even someone pushes back. I mean, I had a heated argument with two of my closest confidants and allies and friends in this movement earlier today. And not one of us, I mean, we might have been offended with each other, but not one of us decided like, well, this is not worth a friendship because it required hardship. It required me saying, you're wrong, and them saying, no, you're wrong. And we had a really spirited discussion, and I loved it. I loved it.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Okay, you can have a casual friend for 30 years and never once tell him that you're wrong.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Okay, that's not friendship. That's just company or companionship. I don't really think that's friendship.

• 15:19Speaker 00

  Now, there's a fifth, and this is what I want you to be moving towards. So maybe there is a little bit of hierarchy in this. And this is what I call the 2 a.m. friend. Okay, it's the guy who, if I call, and I have a handful of them, I've got about four, maybe five, men who I would call if I needed to at 2 a.m. in the morning. And I would say, and I have, and I'm not joking, I would say, I need you here in the morning. And they would hear, be here the next morning before noon. These are guys who are on the opposite end of the country of me. It doesn't matter the hour, it doesn't matter the ask, it's like that, uh,

• 16:02Speaker 00

  oh, um, Ben Affleck and I can't remember the Hawk's name. The actor who plays the Hawk or Hawkeye, not the Hawk, Hawkeye. You can see how much I know about Marvel or DC characters, I don't give a shit. But Hawkeye, I think you guys know who I'm talking about. And Ben Affleck's character comes to him and says, hey, I need you to, and I'm paraphrasing, I need you to come with me, you can't ask questions, you can't, uh, ask what we're doing or what the consequences are. And he, and the guy says, Hawkeye, says, whose car are we taking? That's the 2 a.m. friend. I could call about four or five guys and I could say, hey, I need you here by 7 a.m.

• 16:46Speaker 00

  And four or five of them would respond, I'll be there. And by the way, there's four or five guys in my life who said, hey, I need you here at 8 a.m. I would say, I'll be there. Any hints? Nope, doesn't matter, I'll be there. You know, if it's, if it's bail money, if it's, if it's body in the trunk. I'm there and he's there. No questions, no hesitation. You know, I'm planning a trip. I'm going in August, I'm going to

• 17:21Speaker 00

  train with Vortex in Wisconsin. And then I'm going straight to Maine and train with the Origin guys for Jiu Jitsu. And I told my buddy this and he's like, don't you have a scout in Maine you need to pick up? I'm like, yeah, I do. He's like, cool. Go pick it up. We'll do a cross-country road trip, you and me. I'm like, hell yeah. That's a 2:00 AM friend. He's the closest of the five to something real. Because he's proven under pressure. It's not, it's not convenient. It's not expedient. It's not something that is easy. It's something that is difficult and crisis and challenged.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  This is one of the first men that I called when I was going through my divorce. And through character, mine and his, he's shown what he's capable of. He's shown that he wants to be in my corner. And I want to be in his corner. If he had things going on, I'd be in his corner too.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  But even this one has a bit of a ceiling, right? It has a, it has, it has a limitation. It has a cap.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  A lot of, a lot of those 2:00 AM friends exist only in the crisis. He'll drive four hours to help you or to bury that body like I was talking about. And then go another eight months without a single real conversation about how he's actually doing. And that's not on him, that's on you. See, he's built for emergency, but he was not built for the everyday. Or at least he wasn't trained for the everyday. And that's on you. And I would suggest to you that every conversation about all of the five friends that you have are predicated on your ability to create those. And you might say, well, I don't have any friends. Well, how friendly are you?

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Well, I don't have anybody I can call at 2:00 AM. Does anybody have in their Rolodex? Because I'm an old man. Have you listed as their top five contacts? If no, then what right do you think you have to be on theirs?

• 19:33Speaker 00

  Okay, your life is never going to know

• 19:38Speaker 00

  who the ordinary ones are, who the convenient ones are, who the clowns are. You actually have to go out and do something. And if there's something that underlies all that we talk about, it's the responsibility that you have to do something. And I hear all the time, guys are like, "Well, she's this, my boss is this, the economy that, my so-called friends are this, my kids are jerks, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." I don't really care about most of that. Can your kids be jerks? Yeah, so can mine. Can your boss be an asshole? Yeah, so can mine. I don't really have a boss, but when I did. Can your wife be just a pile of crap to you? Yeah.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  And my ex-wife was to me sometimes, and I was the same to her. Can the economy be shitty? Mm-hmm, yeah. Again. Can your, can your job go bankrupt? Regardless of the good that you've done to build that company? Mm-hmm, yeah. It can.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  But there is something that you have control on of. It's your effort, it's your attitude, it's the way that you engage with the world. And so here's the, here's the truth about this when it comes to the five friends. Whether, again, it's the convenient, or it's the default, or it's the clown, or it's the casual, or it's the 2:00 AM. The five friends that you have, they all kind of can serve a purpose. But here's the reality is that it requires you to put forth effort. And what I want you to do as a man is I want you to move from the types of friends that we've been talking about, the five friendships that we've been covering. And I want you to move over to

• 21:32Speaker 00

  number four and number five, the casual. Okay, and the 2:00 AM friend. But that requires not them, but you. Can you set boundaries? Can you communicate effectively? Can you dive a little deeper? Can you have real conversations? And you'll find out quickly. If, if I asked my friends, all of my so-called friends, if I asked them, "Hey, what's your biggest fear?"

• 21:59Speaker 00

  It's called the Pareto Principle. 20% of them would answer with a genuine response. The other 80% would be, "Ooh, spiders and snakes." It's fine. I don't need to convince you to be one way or the other, but you're part of the 80. What I'm looking for is the 20. So if I ask 100 friends, "What's your biggest fear?" And 80% of them, 80 in this case, say, "I'm afraid of snakes. I'm afraid of spiders. I'm afraid of heights." Cool. You're in the 80%. Now, if I ask the same amount of people, and 20% or 20 of them said,

• 22:39Speaker 00

  "I'm really afraid of not being meaningful and significant in the world. I'm really afraid of failing my children. I'm really afraid of the financial hardship regarding getting ahead in society and culture that we live in." Those are the 20%. When I listen to that, I'm like, boom, you're in this category. You afraid of spiders are in that category. Look, I don't like spiders or snakes either, but if you ask me what I'm afraid of, I'm not going to tell you spiders or snakes. I'll just squash them. What I'm afraid of is not being significant.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  What I'm afraid of is not giving my kids the tools they need. What I'm afraid of is trying this business, this movement, and everybody saying, "You shouldn't do that. It's stupid, it's dumb." And then it flopping and floundering around. That's what I'm really afraid of. And the guys who are afraid of that are the guys like you. And all it takes is you asking that question. You have to ask those questions yourself. You have to take risk. You have to put yourself in awkward conversations, because the reality is, is you'll say, "Hey, what are you afraid of? I'm afraid of failure." And some guys will be like, "Oh, failure is stupid. You should be afraid of spiders." That's not your guy. That is not your guy.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  He can be afraid of spiders, that's fine, but I ain't going to be with you. Hey, you know what you're afraid of. You know what you've seen in your life that has been a failure.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  Where you maybe didn't flinch, but you just kept going. You know,

• 24:25Speaker 00

  you know, when you're being a coward, you know, when you're being weak and soft and pathetic. You know that. And there are 20% of men who know that about you, too. And if you can't name who that is, if you don't have that, that problem, then I would say you have a depth problem. And it's not going to fix itself by adding a sixth guy into the group chat, another guy on your hunt, another guy who you went to high school with. That ain't it. It's building the kind of friendship that just does not happen by accident.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Every one of them, the five men I just described to you.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Three of them are just a product of circumstance. But two of them are real. Those are the real ones.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Those are the kind that you can build on purpose. The casual, lower tier. The 2am, higher tier. And that means going first, guys. That means saying something true and honest and frustrating and challenging and scary and embarrassing, maybe even, to show that you're in this before that guy even does. It's showing up in his ordinary Tuesday, not just a crisis. It's letting him see that before you're sure it's, it's even safe to be sane or safe to be, to be viewed, safe to be

• 26:00Speaker 00

  challenged, that you're willing to go first. That's the whole game. That's the whole game of friendship. Okay, you gotta stop counting Facebook friends.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  You gotta stop counting the guys you went to high school with. Those guys don't count unless it's been intentional. You gotta stop counting the people that you work with. Somebody else set that up for you. You didn't set that up. Somebody else did that. Real friendships are one that you set up. And by the way, proximity is not bad. And this is what I was saying. None of these friendships that you have are inherently bad. I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that if you don't take it a step further, then you'll never know if these are real individuals who can be part of your team.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  Are these the guys who are actually going to carry the weight?

• 26:53Speaker 00

  Again, it's the convenient, it's the default, it's the clown, it's the casual, and then it's that 2:00 AM.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  Is somebody willing to go first?

• 27:05Speaker 00

  So guys, if you want to connect with more of what we're doing, if you want to find friendships and connections that might turn into 2:00 AM friends and go from

• 27:17Speaker 00

  either the casual or the default and move then into the 2:00 AM friends, join us in the Iron Council. I mean, we've got a thousand plus guys in the Iron Council right now, and we've had over 10,000 men go through the program. And I'll tell you that these guys understand what a 2:00 AM friend is. They understand how to turn the default into the standard, the expectation, and we can show you how to do that. So if you're lacking in your friendships, be a little bit more intentional. And part of that starts with our exclusive Brotherhood, the Iron Council. Head to orderofman.com/ironcouncil. You can learn a little bit more.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  And then on August 12th, we're actually doing a preview call where we talk about these concepts and more in-depth, and I want you to be there for that. So check it out, orderofman.com/ironcouncil. Or if you want to jump on the preview call, head to theironcouncil.com/preview, and we'll get you all synced up. But guys, again, there's, there's five types of friends.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  There's the convenient, only after himself. There's the default, the guy you went to high school with. There's the clown, he jokes around, messes around, no depth. There's the casual, you can have good conversations, but it doesn't go deep. And there's the 2:00 AM friend who you could call any hour, any day, any time, and they would be there for you in a heartbeat. I want more of that for you. I want more of that for myself. And if you found any value in this, then go to orderofman.com, share it far and wide, take a screenshot on your phone right now, share that as well, and we'll continue to put out what I hope is good information that serves you well.

• 29:08Speaker 00

  All right, guys, we'll be back next week for our interview. Until then, go out there, take action, and become the man you are meant to be.

• 29:18Speaker 01

  Thank you for listening to the Order of Man podcast. You ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you are meant to be? We invite you to join the order at orderofman.com.