We react to Bill Ackman's advice to young men

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
I got the best opener. I meet you, Sam?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
Oh my God.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:16)
Did you see this, the may I meet you thing?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:18)
I did see the context, but I saw the quote. Bill Ackman said, this is how you meet women.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:22)
I meet you.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
Is that right?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Yeah, dude, we're doing a deep dive, by the way. This is not a casual reference. I'm going all, this is my first topic.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
Okay, so tell me about it. What happened?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:32)
The great Bill Ackman. We won't just call him Bill Ackman. He's going to be called the great Bill Ackman. It's not only has he proven to be a prolific billionaire investor, he's also just the best at Twitter because he uses it all wrong. It's like, have you seen how Magic Johnson uses Twitter?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:50)
No.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:51)
All right, so Magic Johnson, the great basketball player, does not know how to use Twitter. So if you go to his Twitter, he just tweets the most obvious thing. So it'll be like, Lakers playing the Celtics tonight, whoever scores more points tonight is going to take it home. And he's like, what? Yeah, that's how all games work. Whoever scores more points wins or he'll be like, they're losing now. If this stays this way, they'll lose the game. But he's not joking. He's been doing this for like seven years.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:22)
And so Bill Ackman, if you don't know, originally famous for being controversial and prolific investor, right?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:28)
Yeah, he basically owns this company called Pershing Square Management. He's an activist investor. So what he would do is he would buy stakes in companies that he either really believed in, that he thought were undervalued. But he's also an activist in that if he sees sort of corporate wrongdoing or he thinks a company has had some sort of malfeasance, then he will come out and talk about it while taking a big short position against it. And so he did that with Herbalife because he's like, this is an MLM and this is not right, the way that they do their MLM, and he got kind of burned on that one. But that's what he does. Okay, so he's a billionaire, activist investor, awesome, whatever. Great story. I want to have him on the podcast. His life story and his approach to investing is pretty legendary.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:11)
Yeah, he's got one of these stories, I think, where he was successful in his Harvard dorm investing, like that type of thing, I think.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:17)
He's also like hit bottom many times and like bounced back. Okay, so he said, I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting. In other words, online culture has destroyed their ability to spontaneously meet strangers. I'm reading this, I say, yeah, true. I'm glad you're speaking on this.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:37)
Nodding head.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:37)
Nodding head, nodding head. So he says, as such, I thought I'd share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:43)
Don't go there, that's when it stops.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:45)
That's when you start thinking, no. Now that the head nod went from put everything I was doing down, what is he about to do? It's like when I saw the dude from Red Bull jump out of the space station and skydive, I was like, oh my God, he's talking about pickup lines he used in his youth. Let's hear this. He goes, I would ask, may I meet you?
Maybe I got the tone there. I meet you? I don't know how you say this, but may I meet you before engaging further in conversation? I almost never got a no.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:16)
Oh my God.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:18)
That's evidently opened up the way for a further conversation. I got to meet a lot of really interesting people this way. He goes, I think it's the effectiveness of proper grammar and politeness. Oh my God. That is the peak to effectiveness. You might try. And yes, this will also work for women seeking men as well as same sex interactions. This is versatile. Just my two cents from a happily married guy about our next generation. So this thing goes wild.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:43)
I meet you? You know what I told my wife when I saw her, I picked her up in real life. I said, what's the difference between a chickpea and a lintel? I don't pay $500 to have a lintel on my face. I made a joke about peeing on my face and it worked. Thank God I didn't say may I meet you.