We’ve been fielding a strange number of reader emails lately, all circling the same complaint: cold approach isn’t working anymore and it isn’t just an execution problem. It’s a perception problem. Men are walking up to strangers at bars and malls doing everything the old dating gurus taught, and instead of admiration they’re getting filmed, mocked, or quietly avoided. So we started digging into what actually replaced it, and one name kept surfacing across podcasts, forums, and coaching circles: Men of Action.
Our First Assumption
Our first assumption was the obvious one: that this was just another repackaged pickup system with a shinier name. Cold approach coaching has rebranded itself a dozen times over the last two decades, and we’ve seen enough “new” methods that turned out to be the same three moves in a different jacket. So we went in skeptical, and we started looking for something more specific than a rebrand.
What we wanted to know was whether Men of Action addressed the actual reason cold approach is collapsing, rather than just dressing it up. Several pickup-adjacent creators have been deplatformed from YouTube in recent years, and the activity itself has picked up a reputation problem that no amount of confident body language seems to fix. For a program to be worth writing about here, it needed a different theory of why that happened, not just a different script for the same behavior.
Where Men of Action Entered the Picture
That’s where Men of Action entered our research, and its explanation was more specific than we expected going in. The program’s position is that a cold approach signals low status by definition, because high-status men don’t need to walk up to strangers to access people in the first place. It’s an evolutionary framing, and Men of Action leans on published research to support it rather than just asserting it.
The company cites Dr. David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at UT Austin, whose work including a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that the highest-status males were able to carry out their preferred mating strategy, while lower-status males were constrained by their social ranking. That’s a checkable claim rather than a vague appeal to “confidence,” and it’s part of what gave the Men of Action framework more substance than we expected.
What We Found: The Three Pillars
We looked more closely at what Men of Action proposes as the replacement system, and it comes down to three components the program calls the Pillars of High Status. Each one is built to target a specific failure point of cold approach:
| Pillar | Old Approach (Cold Approach) | Men of Action’s Alternative |
| Social Media | One-on-one, arithmetic outreach; approaching strangers in person. | A “Social Media Funnel” that scales status signaling to an entire following at once. |
| Female Teammates | Women treated as an obstacle to get past. | Genuine female friendships used to build “preselection,” a concept drawn from evolutionary psychology. |
| Exclusive Events | Going out multiple nights a week to “stay sharp” in low-quality venues. | Attending curated events to batch networking into fewer, higher-density opportunities. |
The social media pillar is framed as a scale argument: where cold approach is arithmetic, one interaction at a time, a single profile update reaches everyone following it at once. Whether that reach converts into actual outcomes for a given reader isn’t something a framework alone can prove, but the logic of scale holds up.
The female teammates pillar stood out to us the most, mainly because it directly inverts a core pickup assumption. Instead of treating women as competition to overcome, the program teaches building authentic friendships with women as a route to what it calls preselection — the idea that men are perceived as more desirable when women are already comfortable around them. Men of Action cites a meta-analysis in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology on this specific point, which again ties the claim to outside research rather than leaving it as an assertion.
The exclusive events pillar is presented as a time-efficiency argument as much as a status one, positioning curated venues as a way to consolidate networking instead of requiring several nights out a week.
What Stood Out: The Person Behind the Program
We also looked at who built the framework, since that context matters for a program this personality-driven. Men of Action was founded in 2019 by Michael Sartain, who developed his networking background as a VIP event host in Las Vegas before hosting red carpets and bikini competitions at venues including Wet Republic. According to the program, more than 2,000 students have gone through it since launch, a figure the company states rather than one we independently verified.
What Readers Should Still Consider
A few things worth keeping in mind before treating this as settled:
- The cited research (Buss, the preselection meta-analysis) supports the underlying psychological concepts, not the program’s specific individual outcomes.
- The 2,000-student figure and other results are company-reported, not third-party audited.
- This is a self-improvement framework built around one founder’s personal case study, not a peer-reviewed method with independent outcome tracking.
Final Thoughts
After looking at the available information, it’s clear why Men of Action keeps coming up in conversations about cold approaches’ decline. It isn’t offering a better version of the old script, it’s arguing the entire premise was backwards, and it ties that argument to research citations rather than confidence-building alone. That’s a more specific pitch than most alternatives we’ve come across in this space, even if the individual results still rest on the company’s own reporting.
