This episode of Modern Wisdom features Chris Williamson and George Mack in a wide-ranging conversation covering cultural trivia, evolutionary psychology, historical anecdotes, and personal philosophy, moving fluidly between humorous tangents and deeper examinations of social norms, human behavior, and decision-making.
The Strange World of Names and Nominative Determinism
Cristiano Ronaldo was named after Ronald Reagan because his father admired the actor-turned-president and thought the name sounded strong.
A South American footballer named Osama bin Laden (Jimenez Lopez) has a brother named Saddam Hussein; both were named a year after 9/11, and the player’s jersey typically displays only “Osama” to avoid controversy.
Brazilian footballers often choose single names (Ronaldinho, Fred, Hulk, Pepe) rather than using their given surnames, creating a distinct naming culture.
Rory MacDonald’s Walkout Music Mystery
UFC fighter Rory MacDonald walked out to bizarre, mismatched songs (classical, DMX, MC Hammer, Metallica, Tool, Korn) for years.
The UFC claimed MacDonald chose the songs; MacDonald claimed the UFC chose them.
The truth: the UFC was texting his old phone number, which had been reassigned to a fan who spent years trolling by selecting absurd walkout music.
AI Writing Awards and the Fan Fiction Problem
A Commonwealth Short Story Prize appears to have been awarded to an AI-generated story; the editor’s response was essentially a shrug.
Analysis suggests the “empty metaphors” in AI writing (e.g., “the patience of a reptile”) trace back to human-written fan fiction (Naruto, horror blogs) rather than great literature.
LLMs train on the total corpus of human writing, where bad writing vastly outnumbers good writing; without heavy weighting toward quality, the model learns mediocrity.
Coding LLMs perform better because code has objective success criteria (compiles/runs), whereas writing evaluation is subjective and lacks a clean feedback loop.
Who Could Summon the Largest Crowd of Women?
The debate: Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, David Beckham, or Harry Styles?
Beckham argued as “Apple stock” — globally recognized, clean image, massive in East Asia and Middle East via World Cup/Qatar/ Saudi League advertising.
Pitt and DiCaprio seen as “Intel/Microsoft” — past peak, DiCaprio’s stock tanked, Pitt’s image less pristine with age.
Styles viewed as “Nvidia” — currently leading the charge but volatile; Timothée Chalamet as “OpenAI” — high potential but “private” (in a relationship).
Core tension: global reach vs. current cultural momentum; aging demographics favor older icons.
Dopamine Websites in South Korea: Cultural Export or Cultural Specific?
South Korean services let users browse food delivery menus, fill carts, track couriers — but never order — and join virtual “smoke breaks” (anonymous chat rooms) without smoking.
The “Asia leads, West follows” thesis is a coin toss: Facebook once tested features in the Philippines, got huge engagement, launched globally, and flopped because Filipino phone usage is an outlier.
Montaigne’s lists: the French philosopher collected historical cultural norms (growing hair on one side only, blackening teeth, killing one’s father at a certain age, drinking pulverized dead at funerals, wedding success measured by how many of the groom’s friends sleep with the bride) to prove “normal” is just local consensus.
Modern “normal” (per Montaigne’s lens): 17 tsp sugar/day, $104K debt, 30 lbs overweight, <4K steps/day, 90K hours disengaged at work, 22.3 hrs indoors/day, more toilet time than exercise, no book finished in a year, <10 min silence/day, 20 years watching screens.
1830s Massachusetts: Joseph Parker jailed over a year for wearing a beard; tombstone reads “The right to a full beard is honored by the grave of a man who was attacked in jail due to his facial hair.”
Live shopping huge in China; hasn’t fully translated to West (Twitch/IRL streaming ≠ live shopping). Japanese subway silence culture (no talking, not even whispering) shows how deep behavioral norms run.
California’s “Gay Certification” Program
California Public Utilities Commission pressures utilities ($25M+ revenue) to award contracts to LGBT-certified firms: 0.5% (2021), 1% (2023), 1.5% (2024+) — $633M at stake in 2024.
Certification via Supplier Clearinghouse: letter from LGBT org, newspaper ID, or three personal letters on company letterhead attesting to homosexual orientation.
National LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce also certifies; accepts HR complaints or police records of LGBT discrimination.
Falsely representing as gay: up to one year in county jail.
Creates incentive to hire gay C-suite executives to unlock funding; “if the cost of being gay is less than $633M, you’re quids in.”
Juan Pujol: The Chicken Farmer Who Fooled Hitler
1941: Spanish chicken farmer Juan Pujol, a life failure (hotel manager, bankrupt), repeatedly rejected by British MI5.
Walks into German embassy, offers to spy on Britain; Nazis train him, give him invisible ink, believe he recruits 27 agents in UK.
Returns to British embassy: “I’m now a top Nazi spy; hire me.” MI5 accepts, codenames him “Garbo” (after Greta Garbo) for acting skills.
Builds imaginary network of 27 sub-agents; feeds Nazis fake intel.
D-Day: convinces Hitler/Himmler invasion is at Calais, not Normandy; Hitler diverts key armies to Calais.
Only agent to receive both Iron Cross (from Hitler) and MBE (from Britain).
Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Pujol called the three most important figures for D-Day success.
Fakes death in 1949 (malaria in Mozambique), lives quietly in Venezuelan bookstore; revealed alive in 1980s when former MI5 colleagues recognize him in a pub.
Shavarsh Karapetyan: The Greatest Civilian Rescue
1976 Yerevan: trolley bus (92 passengers) crashes into reservoir, sinks 30 ft in freezing, muddy, sewage-filled water.
Shavarsh Karapetyan, 23, 17x world champion/11x world record holder in fin swimming, training nearby with brother.
Dives repeatedly in zero visibility, kicks in rear window, pulls 37 people out over ~20 minutes; 20 survive.
One dive: grabs leather seat cushion instead of a passenger; haunted him for years.
Hospitalized: lacerated legs/body, septic fever, double pneumonia, nervous prostration; doctors fight for his life >1 month.
Returns to competition, wins final world record while delirious, brother ready to jump in; rescue destroyed his athletic career.
Soviet authorities suppressed story for years; now considered one of greatest civilian heroisms recorded.
Survivor’s Guilt: Evolutionary Function
Karapetyan’s fixation on the one cushion mirrors survivor’s guilt: rumination on the one failure amid massive success.
Group cohesion signal: distress (not indifference) shows you didn’t abandon the group; you’re still a reliable ally.
Reciprocal altruism/fairness: discomfort with disproportionate reward violates fairness intuitions.
Motivation to help: drives care for bereaved, support for injured.
Counterfactual learning: imagining alternatives helps learn from near-misses.
Costly signal of commitment: grief is hard to fake; proves genuine investment in the group.
Why We Cry: Costly Signaling and Biochemical Differences
Tears as costly signal: blurring vision, disabling defense, exposing vulnerability — “I am in so much pain I’ll risk my primary sense.”
Tears of joy: possibly same machinery (costly signal of “this matters intensely”) or spandrel (byproduct); collective effervescence — “we are one.”
Emotion body maps (self-reported heat maps): happiness = whole body; sadness = chest; disgust/anxiety = stomach; fear = chest; depression = low energy in extremities; pride = chest swelling; shame = cheeks; contempt = head.
Topography of tears (Rosalind Fisher): tears crystallize differently under microscope by type.
Three tear categories: basal (lubrication), reflex (irritants), emotional.
Emotional tears contain higher prolactin, ACTH (stress hormone), leucine enkephalin (natural painkiller), different potassium/manganese ratios — crystallize into distinct patterns.
No fixed 1:1 mapping (grief ≠ always pattern X); variation within categories.
High testosterone alters tear composition (Greg Plitt’s “vascular tears” joked as protein shakes).
Men, Emotions, and Femmephobia vs. Homophobia
Men often less accommodating of other men’s sad emotions than women are; same men lament men’s mental health crisis.
Hypocrisy: demanding better resources while refusing to hold space for a struggling friend.
Decentralized friend portfolio: different friends for different needs (break down vs. pull together).
William Costello: much “homophobia” is actually femmephobia — disgust at femininity expressed by a man, not gayness per se.
Evolutionary root: a man who can’t hold emotional control signals “unreliable ally” — will he break on the hunt or in tribal conflict?
Masculine gay men (e.g., Peter Thiel, closeted for years) break the femmephobia heuristic; Thiel’s decade-long revenge on Gawker (via Hulk Hogan sex tape) exemplifies “revenge is a dish best served cold.”
Cash Flow Conversion Cycles: The Unsexy Metric That Matters
Cash flow conversion cycle = time between paying suppliers and collecting from customers.
Negative cycle (ideal): collect from customers before paying suppliers (common in e-commerce).
Positive cycle: pay suppliers, wait for stock, wait for customer payment — cash crunch.
Gymshark’s negative cycle was a key early advantage.
Conversation about this at a bar repelled women; backstage at a metal festival, talking CRO/blended nCPA with “cool metal chicks” produced visible disgust — “watching somebody desecrate a beautiful temple.”
Bachelor parties: partners imagine chaos/strip clubs; reality is Google Sheets, Excel formulas, tracking down a cigar guy in Iran.
Life Lessons Worth Revisiting (The Hypomnemonist Practice)
Ancient Greeks/Romans kept notebooks of insights (hypomnemonist); each morning, meditate on one passage relevant to a current problem.
Modern problem: bombardment of new info; see a pithy tweet, forget in 3 months.
George’s list:
No amount of worrying changes outcomes — worrying feels like progress but isn’t; 91.6% of GAD worries don’t come true (the 8.4% haunts true anxiety).
Pleasure anxiety (Joe Hudson): excitement about future events feels physiologically identical to anxiety; reframe the sensation.
David Ogilvy: “You think you’re advertising to a standing army, but you’re advertising to a moving parade.” — You observe yourself constantly; others see you fleetingly. Repost the book list 17 times; the 17th time someone says “just found this.”
Henry Ford tired of an ad before it even ran; clients tire before audiences do.
Gas your friends up — buy their shirts, share their work, show up. If you support Rihanna more than your friend’s business, you’re a bad friend.
Joe Hudson on communication patterns: relationships have a dance (bully/victim, victim/savior). Show up differently 7 times (calm, regulated, empathetic); the pattern breaks — “like playing tennis with the other person not hitting the ball back.”
Your default choices are almost always wrong — defaults = confused chemical signals, social norms, path of least resistance, past trauma. Design your desires or outsource wisdom to the group.
Meditation exercise: “What’s the next thought going to be?” — sit, watch. First thought for George: Arjen Robben cutting inside on his left foot. Reveals how much “thinking” is automatic associative drift.
Turn awareness on itself (Sam Harris): try to catch your own awareness; mirror catching itself — strange, scary, instantaneous.
