Bill Ackman's "May I meet you?" pickup line went viral. TJ Walker argues it works because many young men have stopped approaching women in person, relying instead on apps and phones. Walker acknowledges Ackman's wealth and looks helped, but says the simple, polite opener is worth practicing to rebuild real conversation skills.
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Bill Ackman's May I meet you Dating Advice Backfires Billionaire Hedge fund manager and prominent MAGA donor Bill Ackman is going viral for offering a simple piece of dating advice to young men. He said that in his youth he would walk up to women and ask, may I meet you? He claimed the line almost never failed and credited its success, proper grammar and politeness. Well, social media had a field day with us. They immediately turned the frame into a meme. Users pasted may I meet you over awkward party photos, dead silent dating app message screens and side by side images that contrasted how the line plays. Coming from a billionaire versus an ordinary guy, Ackman framed his advice as concern for young men who feel shut out of dating and relationships. Critics called it tone death and out of touch, arguing that wealth, status and power probably did more of the work than the sentence itself. Okay, so what's the real message here with Bill Ackman getting so much guff over telling young men to walk up to women and say may I meet you? As a good opening pitch? Believe me, there are a thousand things to not like about Bill Ackman. There are times I wish he would just get off the national stage. But this advice isn't bad just because you don't like someone. If you have a new excuse, a tool to actually talk to a human being who rather than staring at your phone and being addicted to video games or porn, you should probably follow the advice. Let's go a little deeper here. Easiest thing for any Internet commentator someone like me to do is to mock and ridicule Bill Ackman. He's someone that recently he turned himself into a professional tennis player by using his money and clout to get into a professional tennis. People hated that. He is trying to get university presidents fired and was successful. He's meddling into international affairs. He is backing political extreme There's a million things I personally don't like about Bill Ackman, but I'm here today and every day to be the sane, sensible centrist to give you what I feel is unvarnished truth and insight that will actually help you. And I have to tell you, I think he's on to something. There is a massive, massive problem in our culture where human beings are just not talking to other human beings as much. It's especially a problem with young people and sorry, this sounds sexist. It's especially a problem for young men who have essentially tens of millions of them have retreated from living in the real world. They're so much more comfortable staying at home looking at porn on a cell phone. Maybe they're on dating apps, swiping, and maybe never even go out on a date. But they have retreated. They've retreated from dealing with the real world. Scott Galloway, the famed Internet commentator and author of the new number one New York times bestselling book notes on being a man, talks about this problem extensively in that people, and in this case men, need to get used to talking to women if they have any interest in dating, a social life, mating, procreating, you have to talk to them first. And Bill ackman's line, again, the line is he would walk up to women and simply state, may I meet you? And it's been laughed at, ridiculed, mocked all over the Internet. And believe me, I think bill ackman is someone set up well for mockery. But let's actually analyze the line. His rationale was it's a low risk way for a man walking up and talking to a woman. It's not trying to be funny. It's not anything that would make a woman uncomfortable in most situations. I mean, you can say anyone could be uncomfortable in any situation. But as far as things to say, it's not aggressive. It seems very polite. It seems deferential. He's correct. It seems polite. It's two things. Polite and it's showing good grammar. Because most young men don't ever use the word may. They would say, can I meet you? Which is technically not correct. So you've got those two things going. And it's very easy at that point for a woman to say, oh, I'm sorry, I'm busy. You walk away. He didn't say, then badger them. He didn't say, well, then tell them how rich you are. He didn't say, well then, you know, then I showed them my Harvard degree. He didn't say any of that. He just said, here's a sentence I use. Talk to human beings. And when I was young and single and I wanted to talk to women, that's what it was. I actually think it's good advice if you think it's cheesy or awful. Okay, what are you using? Because we've talked about this on the show before. Everyone's worried about AI destroying humanity and the singularity coming. There's another concept that's getting a lot of talk these days, which is the sofa larity. The point at which nobody gets off their sofa anymore because they can just do everything on their cell phone, in which case no one's ever going to meet or have children. Because you can't do that if you never leave your own studio apartment sitting on your sofa all day long. Of course you could quibble with the context. Bill Ackman is by every sort of traditional metric, he's good looking, he's 6 foot 3, he's athletic, he was on his college tennis team. He is smart and articulate. He went to Harvard and Harvard Business School. He I don't know what he looked like in college but his he is about almost 60 years old now. He has a perfect head of hair, is in shape and is six foot three. So he obviously had factors like that going in his favor where even if a woman didn't know he was rich and presumably he wasn't worth $10 billion when he was 22 years old using this line, it worked for him. You can say it was contextual because he was tall and good looking anyway. All right, it's a fair criticism. But ask yourself if you are a woman and forgive me, I am talking about the most statist commonplace social interaction of young men approaching young women because they are interested in pursuing romance and dating. Is it really that offensive to say may I meet you now? If the person looks and smells dirty or creepy, it doesn't matter what they say, it's going to be get away from me. But if the person is relatively clean and seems well mannered, it doesn't seem drunk or on drugs and ask a simple question. I got to give this one to Bill Ackman. I'm sorry, that's going to offend some people. It'd be much easier for me to go viral here on social media if I just ripped him a new one and said this is the worst thing anyone ever said. But I try to give it to you straight and honest assess because I do think it's good advice. If you don't like the advice, come up with some other conversation starter and it doesn't have to be because you're trying to find a date or romantically. You could be my age and going to a community barbecue and just wanting to make more friends with more families. What are you going to say to people to just get a conversation going? That is something I think all of us can try to improve on on a regular basis.
