Michael Sartain - High Status Networking Expert

Early Life

Born and raised in Dallas, TX, Michael Sartain grew up in two worlds. His family was comfortable and successful, but his high school was rife with gangs, drugs, and poverty – a far cry from the Beverly Hills 90210 high school experience he saw on TV.

Determined not to end up dead or in jail like his classmates, Michael studied hard and went to UT-Austin to study business. Along the way he discovered a lifelong passion for learning, side-questing from his business degree to study physics, astronomy, psychology, and more.

Both in high school and in college, Michael’s nerdy, awkward nature doomed him to unpopularity. He was never friends with the “cool kids,” and girls never looked at him twice. He tried to follow the rules that society and earlier generations laid out for him, but his attempts to raise his social status and improve his dating life only met with brutal rejections.

Manager in Nightlife

Michael graduated with his BBA just in time for the Dot Com crash to kill the job market. With no jobs available, he got the best job he could find – first as DJ and then as manager in nightlife in Austin, TX. His friends and colleagues were stunning cocktail waitresses and the people in their orbit.

This was Michael’s first experience in the “real world” – how people with money treat people in service roles, how people stay in toxic relationships despite abusive treatment, etc. As a manager, it was the hardest introduction to leadership imaginable – trying to direct and guide people with no integrity, no accountability.

Military

Michael was working in nightlife on September 11, 2001 when he saw the planes flown into the towers. Consumed by patriotism, he began meeting with military recruiters and was ultimately commissioned as a KC135 navigator in the US Air Force, where he would eventually rise to the rank of captain.

Through his military training, Michael discovered a whole new dynamic of leadership – leadership of people with extreme accountability and integrity. He also began to notice the difference between good leaders and bad leaders. The good commanders gave clear directions, never belittled their subordinates, and admitted when they were wrong or if they didn’t know something. Bad commanders gave muddled directions to preserve deniability, passive-aggressively talked behind peoples’ backs, pretended they knew more than they did, talked down to subordinates, and never admitted a mistake.

Tragedy and Present Moment Awareness

In 2006, Michael’s father was killed by a drunk driver, mere hours after the driver had been released from jail for DUI. Michael’s commanders gave him a brief respite to mourn, but then duty called – Michael’s first deployment to the Middle East. Six weeks later, Michael found out that his girlfriend had left him, leaving him deployed to Iraq with a broken heart.

Across 500 combat hours in KC135s over Iraq and Afghanistan, Michael searched for meaning in the grief and discovered The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, his introduction to the importance of present moment awareness. Through present moment awareness and gratitude, Michael began to experience peace and confidence for the first time in his life.

Rat Race and Rediscovery

Michael visited Las Vegas briefly after the military and was struck by how he had more fun on a Tuesday than all year in any other city. Nevertheless, he began his professional career in Los Angeles, a rat race of traffic and cutthroat energy.

After two years in LA, Michael returned to visit Las Vegas and was again struck by the absolute abundance – the food, the women, the celebrities, the activities, the lack of commute. There was no other place in the world he wanted to be, so he moved to Las Vegas and never looked back.

High Status Networking

Upon arriving in Vegas, Michael started a side-gig as a VIP event host, starting with small pageants and progressing to hosting and working the red carpet for some of the highest-status parties and bikini contests in the world. Never having been one of the “cool kids” and ignored by girls in his youth, he became a “local celebrity” in Vegas, close friends with celebrities, influencers, superconnectors, and models with millions of Instagram followers.

Social media was a new phenomenon, and Michael began experimenting with Instagram – the most popular social media app among high-status people. He came to understand it as one of the most powerful tools ever invented for elite networking, encapsulating the ability to meet, engage, and stay relevant to a gigantic network of the most attractive, successful, and connected people in the world.

Evolutionary Psychology

Michael’s network brought him into contact with some of the earliest “men’s dating” coaches. He admired their work in helping men become more confident, but he was struck by the gaps in their instruction – how they ignored social media, disparaged the idea of female friendships, and discounted the importance of a high-status network in attaining a high-level dating life … or a high-level life in general.

At about the same time, Michael became aware of evolutionary psychology, a scholarly approach to human behavior – especially mating behavior – that made accurate predictions about person-to-person interactions whereas other fields of psychology seemed terminally clueless.

In evopsych, Michael found a scientific basis for everything he had observed across decades of field study in human behavior – from his high school failures, to his time in nightlife, to the Air Force, to the Las Vegas VIP nightclub scene. It explained why his approach to dating didn’t work in his youth, and why his new approach as a Las Vegas local celebrity did. It also made clear why the advice of so many dating coaches produced lackluster results for men of value with so much to contribute, both to women and to society in general.

Men Of Action

In 2019, Michael resolved to distill everything he had learned through study and experience – high-status networking, leadership, present-moment awareness, evolutionary psychology, the whole nine yards – into the most comprehensive masculine self-improvement coaching community ever conceived. This was the genesis of Men Of Action.

More than 2,000 students have joined Men Of Action since its inception. Their results have been off the charts – ordinary men elevating their social status to stratospheric levels in months rather than years, with more high-status networking and dating opportunities than they ever imagined. Their Instagrams speak for themselves with irrefutable visual evidence of their transformations.

Since launching Men Of Action, Michael has launched The Michael Sartain Podcast, where his guests have included some of the most prominent thought leaders in networking, business, and evolutionary psychology. He has also launched the panel podcast Access Vegas with author Rollo Tomassi where men and women debate the most pressing issues affecting dating, mating, and relationships in America. His guest appearances on countless podcasts have been watched by millions of viewers.

Today Michael is recognized as one of the leading experts in high-status networking, social-circle building, and masculine self-improvement.