TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Wife Aum Shinrikyo: Bill Ackman’s Quest feat. Ed Zitron

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

We're joined by friend of the show and repeat guest Ed Zitron (@edzitron) to discuss some recent AI 'products,' the total failure of another hyped tech business, a Turkish magician's journey through the world of scamming an entire biotech company, but—and this is very important—we finally talk about Bill Ackman and why he does that. Check out Ed's newsletter here: http://wheresyoured.at And check out Ed's show 'Better Offline'  Get the full episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/wife-aum-bill-ed-98967652 *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

This is from near the articles and I'm going to start with it. While we talked in his office, Ackman told me a story apropos of nothing about a week-long trip he took to Japan in the early 1990s during which he stayed with a family whose patriarch worked in the video game industry. Years later, Ackman found out about a Japanese video game called Go Go Ackman. The game, to quote Wikipedia, follows a demon child named Ackman who harvests souls for the great demon king. The real Ackman spokesperson held up an iPad with an image from the game for me to see.

The demon child, like Ackman himself as a child, had prematurely grey hair. Ackman said, I think that's me and I never got royal teeth. This profile was insane though. This is completely fucking bonkers. And when I say he's a hero to wives everywhere, I am quoting a bit where he describes a meme where someone allegedly emails their wife that they have done the dishes. And then the wife says, oh, that's nothing. Look what Bill Ackman is doing for academia. And it turns out that that was a meme of a text was so clearly faked that like the fonts are the different sizes. It's just- No, but my wife actually just said that to me today.

I showed her like a- Did you email her? I emailed her and texted her and she was just like, yeah, she made a lovely dinner for this evening, but you didn't do what Bill Ackman did. You didn't write 10,000 posts while I was waving at you frantically, they're cutting out gesture. I can't believe my wife is, the cut it out gesture.

Can't believe my wife is leaving me for a Turkish magician. Basically, basically, this is, by the way, this, This is your way, lean forward and try and grab a back. That's right. You saw your wife in off, play them off against each other. The meme you mentioned, Ed, that Ackman quotes to this journalist, is one of the two things in his assistant's hands. The assistant holds in one hand an iPad to make a point about how a video game designer was rude to him in the 1990s, and in the other hand, a physical folder of printed off emails

of people being nice to him. The world's most regular guy. Who printed off emails of people being nice to him. The world's most regular guy. Who prints off emails? Bill Ackman. Yeah, apparently. Yeah. That's crazy. Well, he's assistant as self care. So let's go. The whole, it all starts. The whole episode really is about some things we've talked about at great length before,

such as like the actual proceedings of the blow by blow of his campaign against, you know, Harvard and DEI in general. Yeah, yeah, he unseated President Gay, which sounds a lot funnier than it actually is. Yeah, well, he's part of Jabbat al-Waif, you know, provisional life reign. So he, but this goes into, I think some of the more personal sides of that crusade and its impact on him and others. So the whole, his whole discomfort with Harvard and academia after being, again, we've, we've sort of talked about him a few times in the past as being, seeing himself as a kind of pretty bog standard Democrat. It'd be nice if people had nice things type of

billionaire, right? The guy who gets scratched in order to find a fascist, that guy. Yes. Yes. So it starts with his daughter becoming sort of left wing after attending college after 1990. Yeah. Which is pretty usual. He says that she becomes a Marxist. And I just, I hope in my heart of hearts that she was the most annoying kind of Marxist you can possibly become in college.

I hope she was a Maoist. I hope she was like telling him to read Settlers. I want his daughter to have called Bill Ackman a cracker. Like Bill Crackman. I know, I think the funniest, the funniest version is if she only writes his name like America, like Bill. Yeah, Bill, Bill. My cracker father, Bill.

So his daughter joined the fucking Black Hammer reparations core and because of that, he embarked on a crusade against all things woke. Gotcha. So she called him a honky. My father Bill Ackerman is a honky. We know the story also about how these sort of all got kicked off with a student letter that was sent after October 7th, basically expressing solidarity with Palestinians. Yeah. And how he became sort of increasingly radical and prone to

stakes raising as he tried to get people fired, started to plagiarism argument and so on and so on. He got radicalized on Twitter, which is one of the most pathetic ways to do it. Yeah. It's like him, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Graham Lennon. Yeah, Graham Lennon. He saw one too many pussy in bio. And he was like, I've got to do something about this. Sometimes you screw my wife in bio. The ass was not even in the bio. This is DEI. There was only a link to the illusion of an ass.

These weren't even her pictures, plagiarism. So by January, Ackman's second wife, the glamorous scientist architect, Neri Oxman, was being accused of plagiarism too. And Ackman was then promising not only to sue Business Insider, which published the allegations, but to use AI to audit the work of other college professors as an active spousal vengeance. So cool. Yeah, he's awesome. He's like John Wife.

Yeah. That's awesome. Fuck, I was just about to say that. Oh, wow, really? The drama? I think John Wife was also kind of John Wife. It wasn That's awesome. I was just about to say that. Oh, wow, really? The drama? John Wayne was also kind of John Wife. It wasn't good enough for two people to be thinking about saying it. I'm just saying I was going that direction.

Ackman has been posting daily to his 1.2 million followers, sometimes going on for thousands of words with such a manic persistence, saying things like, I'm posting while on the elliptical for better time management. Yeah. If you've ever said that is the best thing that Elon Musk ever did was remove this guy's word limit. Because he just kind of, the thing is that the Twitter extra long you paid for Twitter, bullshit posts, cut off after, you know, however many characters.

And so what you get is, Bill Ackman has said some bullshit. There's a paragraph and a half of bullshit. And then there's a like a show some more jump. And if you click that, what appears is like a 14 page essay about every way in which his wife has been wronged. I'm loving this totally unreadable. Of course, just completely unreadable. Posting from the elliptical is awesome. I'm training for a scenario in which someone on cross country skis has kidnapped my wife. I'm forced to hunt him down. He's training for a scenario where someone on cross country skis has suggested that his wife is a plagiarist and he also on cross country skis must reply. But like she is though. Like, yeah, she actually did it. She did the plagiarism against it.

It's very obvious. Yeah, I understand being a wife guy, but like, you know, she's hot. Fine. But like, she did the plagiarism. She plagiarized from one of her own students, which is like, catastrophically bad. Like, you're really not supposed to do that. It's generally found upon. You're meant to, they meant to plagiarize you.

Like, I tell you what, though, she could probably make some inroads in the Istanbul magic community. I reckon she's got the source. This I'm going to jump around in the article a little bit. If we want to talk about the impact on Oksmen, which I think we do, Ackman estimated that he had spent 110 hours or so battling the case on his wife's behalf and called one of his several long posts he wrote in an attempt to exonerate her, quote, the best and most important thing I have ever written. I am an extremely fast writer and I am powered by a profound love that is infinite." J-Wow.

J-Is that such a sober and unchemically altered sentence? J-Yeah, I was going to say, is he like on ayahuasca? J-But also, has this guy never had edibles? Has he never played like Madden or Hades? Like there are so many things you could do to waste your time. Well, like, and he's a billionaire too. He's a billionaire. Yeah, he could do, he could make real life Farmville. Yeah, he could do functionally whatever he wanted. And instead, he's just grimly posting because social media is kind of like a bear trap for like idle billionaire minds.

It isn't real life Farmville, just a farm. He could open a farm. He could just buy a farm? Well, yeah, but I mean, no, the suggestion there would be that he'd have little things in their ears to tell them where to go. He fucked up the farm terribly. It's quite profound actually. I am an extremely fast writer and I'm powered by a profound love that is infinite, you know? And that's why everything I write has a kind of soullessness to it.

That doesn't feel like it really implies meaning so much as a grievance between me and people I've never met who have done nothing to me. Yeah, but I've done much to his wife by identifying her plagiarism. But they haven't even done anything to her, she swine. He did most of it. Nothing's fine. He did both things happen By by by identifying her plagiarism you have deployed verbal sarin gas against my wife. I Shall I shall now respond to you wife almschenrico? Oxman okay, mr. Piss let's go oxman for her part wasn't sure what to make of her husband's chivalrous tweeting, which has drawn only more attention to the allocations of plagiarism.

Ackman wrote on X that the pressure from the business insider stories, quote, could literally have killed her and that he had seen others commit suicide in similar circumstances. Don't chemically attack my wife. Well, like being married to Blackman, for example. But then he goes on being like, basically being, yeah, my wife is Yeah. Well, like being married to Bill Ackman, for example. But then he goes on being like basically being like, yeah, my wife is mentally delicate and was going to commit suicide. You almost drove her to suicide and you're laughing. She was in a pretty dark place, Aquin told me, adding that he tried to nudge her towards finding a silver lining.

I thought you were going to say nudge her towards her. She was in a dark place, the honorable way out, handing her the short katana and being like, look, they've got you on the plagiarism thing, but we can make them feel pretty bad about it. Come on, you like Elliot Smith.