The Most Important Questions Of Our Time - George Mack
In a Nutshell
George Mack explores how AI struggles with creative writing because its training data is dominated by low-quality content, while coding succeeds due to objective feedback loops. The notes highlight extraordinary real-world stories of high agency—like double agent Juan Pujol deceiving both sides in WWII and swimmer Shavarsh Karapetyan rescuing 20 people from a sinking bus—alongside cultural observations on emotions, social norms, and male mental health dynamics.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Cristiano Ronaldo was named after Ronald Reagan. Ronaldo's full name is Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro. In a GQ cover story, Ronaldo stated his father admired Reagan and that Reagan was his dad's favorite actor. Ronaldo was born February 5th, 1985, while Reagan was still president. His father was a fan of Reagan long before he became president. Ronaldo noted his dad would likely not approve of the non-conservative outfit he wore in the GQ cover.
Reagan was an actor before entering politics.
The conversation notes the nominative determinism of Ronaldo being named after Ronald Reagan. Other unusual footballer names discussed include a South American player named Osama bin Laden, whose brother is named Saddam Hussein. In Spanish, the pronunciation of V and B are the same, making the name even closer to the original. The player's jersey typically displays only "Osama" rather than his full surname to avoid controversy. He was named after Osama bin Laden a year after 9/11.
Brazilian footballers often choose their own names rather than using given names. Examples include Ronaldinho, Fred, Hulk, and Pepe.
UFC fighter Rory MacDonald used unusual walkout music that mixed classical music with tracks like One More Road to Cross by DMX, Can't Touch This by MC Hammer, Light Work by Lupe Fiasco, We Found Love twice in a row, Saint Anger by Metallica twice in a row, 46 and 2 by Tool, and Got the Life by Korn. When asked about the song selection, MacDonald claimed the UFC chose the songs, while the UFC claimed he chose them. The resolution was that the UFC was texting his old phone number, which had been given to someone else who was a UFC fan and continued selecting increasingly bizarre songs as an ongoing joke for multiple years.
George Mack appeared on Take Me Out, a British dating show. Producers rejected his choice of Jamie Jones' Hungry for the Power for the walkout, opting instead for Example's Love Kick Starts Again due to it being low-energy deep house. Mack noted the song played while everyone clapped above their heads.
The show operates on incentive structures where girls keep their lights on longer to remain on television for more weeks. Mack appeared in episode two, facing harder conditions with girls incentivized to turn lights off, yet still had 11 girls remaining at the end.
When asked what song he would want to walk out to for either Take Me Out or a fight, Mack selected In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins, noting it serves as both his fighting music and love-making music. He suggested adjusting the speed to 1.6x for fighting and 1.4x for dating.
A Commonwealth Short Story Prize was awarded to an AI-generated story that appeared in Granta magazine. The editor responded with a shrug when questioned about AI involvement. A computer scientist noted the empty metaphors characteristic of AI writing also appear in human-written fan fiction.
The phrase "the patience of a reptile" from the prize-winning story also appears in Naruto fan fiction. Other examples include the sentence "But a belly sound as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there," which resembles "He swallows a shout of pain, breathing heavily, his whole body trembling" from a fan fiction story called The Fall of a Phoenix. Another sentence about eyes narrowing against a glare was traced to a random horror blog and fan fiction.
The fundamental issue is that LLMs train on the widest available data set. Since more people globally play football poorly than play it well, an AI learning football would learn to be bad at it. Similarly, the volume of bad writing vastly exceeds good writing in training data. James Clear's Atomic Habits has far less training weight than anime and manga blogs.
AI currently performs better at coding than creative writing because code has objective success criteria: it either compiles or does not compile, a button appears or does not appear. Writing lacks this clear feedback loop because quality assessment is subjective.
Even when fed high-quality writing, LLMs struggle to replicate it because they must understand word meanings based on the broader corpus surrounding any individual text. The physics of how LLMs function means they always work against the headwind of their larger training data, making it difficult to weight toward great pieces of work.
The question posed is which living man could post his address and attract the largest number of women to his house. Requirements identified include international appeal and skewing toward an older demographic given aging populations. Candidates under 35 would struggle significantly.
Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio were initially considered top contenders. Drake was mentioned but dismissed. David Beckham was proposed as the strongest candidate due to greater global recognition, particularly in Africa and Southeast Asia, clean public image compared to Pitt, and consistent advertising presence during World Cup coverage. Beckham was characterized as more of a blue-chip established brand compared to Pitt and DiCaprio.
Harry Styles was described as the Nvidia of the moment in terms of current cultural cachet. Timothy Chalamet was compared to ChatGPT or OpenAI, noted as currently private due to being in a committed long-term relationship. Beckham was compared to SpaceX pre-IPO: established with investment from multiple countries, with potential to cash out if he separates from Victoria.
South Korea has developed dopamine websites allowing users to browse food delivery menus, read reviews, fill shopping carts, and track couriers without placing actual orders. Virtual smoke breaks enable users to join anonymous chat rooms and socialize without smoking. The concept delivers dopamine hits without spending money or engaging in the actual habit.
Testing new features in the Philippines often produces misleading results because phone usage patterns there differ significantly from the West. Filipinos spend substantially more time on phones than other populations, leading companies to stop testing features there after repeated failures to replicate results elsewhere.
Michel de Montaigne maintained lists of cultural practices across history to demonstrate that norms are socially contingent. Examples include cultures where people grow hair only on the right side of their body and shave the left, where white teeth are considered unattractive and teeth are deliberately blackened, where sons kill their fathers at a certain age, where funeral attendees chop up the deceased, grind them to pulp, pour into wine and drink it, and where wedding success was measured by how many of the groom's friends slept with the bride.
Current accepted norms include consuming 17 teaspoons of sugar daily, carrying $104,755 in debt, being 30 pounds overweight with Ozempic pending, averaging fewer than 4,000 steps per day, spending 90,000 hours disengaged at work, staying indoors 22.3 hours per day, spending more time on the toilet than exercising, not finishing a book in the past 12 months, experiencing under 10 minutes of silence daily, and spending 20 years watching TV or scrolling social media.
In 1830s Massachusetts, beards were so uncommon that Joseph Parker was mocked and shunned for wearing one. Assailants attempted to forcibly shave him, but he fought them off with a knife and was imprisoned for assault. He refused to pay his fine and remained in prison for over a year. His tombstone honors the right to a full beard.
Live shopping has not fully taken off in the West despite predictions it would follow Asian adoption patterns. IRL streaming involving people walking around, causing nuisance, or conducting predator stings is unlikely to succeed in Asia due to honor culture. Japanese subway culture demonstrates extreme reverence for silence, with people not speaking or even whispering on phones while riding.
Changing environments significantly impacts behavior because much of identity is shaped by ecology and postcode rather than intrinsic characteristics.
Little Boo-Boos are stuffed animals that became the Dubai chocolate of the stuffed animal world, with people queuing up for ages to get a keyring and collect them.
Asia is often treated as one big hegemon despite being a massive continent. The same applies to how Europe or Africa are discussed as single entities. Neighboring places are often assumed to be similar, but historically they tend to be the opposite. Britain and France are 23 miles apart yet have fundamentally different cultures.
In Asia, used period pants can be bought in vending machines. The pants come in a little Pokéball in a specially sealed bag. Craig Jones documented this on a vlog.
California is pressuring public utilities to award $633 million in special contracts to LGBT-owned firms. To qualify, residents must go through the state's official gay certification program and face up to a year in jail if they're not gay enough.
By 2022, the California Public Utilities Commission established goals for utility companies with annual revenues exceeding $25 million: 0.5% of procurement in 2021, 1% in 2023, 1.5% in 2024 and beyond. If large CPUC-regulated utilities meet these goals in 2024, they would send $633 million to LGBT-owned firms.
Supplier Clearinghouse certifies firms. Applicants can secure certification by providing a letter from an LGBT organization attesting to their sexual preferences, proof that a newspaper identified them as LGBT, or three letters from personal contacts written on company letterhead attesting to their homosexual orientation. Corporate officials who falsely represent their business as gay face up to a year in county jail.
The National LGBTQ+ and Allied Chamber of Commerce also provides certification letters. Accepted documents include human resources complaints or police records claiming LGBT discrimination. The Chamber states on its website: "Certification is a journey, not a destination."
Hiring C-suite executives that are gay would unlock CPUC funding in California. This is described as real founder mode, with the comment that you either get fucked by investors or get fucked by someone else.
The source for this information is cityjournal.com, titled "Inside California's gay certification program. The state is pressuring utilities to award $633 million in contracts to LGBT businesses."
Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the US. It powers Gymshark, Skims, Alo, and Newtonic. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. Shop Pay can boost conversions up to 50%.
Juan Pujol was a Spanish chicken farmer and manager of a one-star hotel who had gone bankrupt. In 1941, at the start of World War II, he walked into the British Embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis for MI5. He was rejected multiple times.
He then walked across the street to the German embassy and offered to spy on Britain for the Nazis. He expressed love for the Führer and the Third Reich and hatred for Great Britain. The Nazis trained him, taught him how invisible ink works, and he recruited multiple agents inside Great Britain.
He then returned to the British embassy claiming to be one of the most valuable spies for the Nazis. He built a network of 27 sub-agents inside Britain that the Nazis believed were real, but they were all imaginary. MI5 called him Garbo, after Greta Garbo, for his acting skills.
During D-Day, Juan gave so much fake information that he convinced the Nazis the invasion would happen in Calais. Hitler and Himmler sent important armies there. Juan was so convincing that Hitler gave him the Iron Cross. He is the only agent to receive both an Iron Cross from Hitler and an MBE from Britain.
The three most important people for D-Day are considered Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Juan Pujol. He died in 1949 in Mozambique from malaria. In the 1980s, three MI5 agents who worked with him saw an 80-year-old man in a pub and realized he had faked his own death in 1949 to live in a bookstore in Venezuela so the Nazis would never find him.
He had strong theory of mind: after being rejected, he figured out what the other side wanted to become invaluable to them.
In 1976 in Yerevan, a trolley bus carrying about 90 passengers crashed into a reservoir due to either the driver having a heart attack or an altercation with a passenger. The bus sank roughly 10 meters (30 feet) into freezing, murky water.
Shavarsh Karapetyan, a 23-year-old 17-time world champion and 11-time world record holder in fin swimming, was training nearby with his brother. He jumped in without much thought and ordered his brother to help from the shore.
Visibility was zero due to mud, sewage, and debris. He kicked in the rear window underwater, made dozens of dives over about 20 minutes, and pulled out about 37 people. 20 of them survived.
During one dive, he accidentally grabbed a leather seat cushion instead of a passenger. This haunted him for years because he believed someone may have died while he carried up the cushion.
He lacerated his legs and body from broken glass, suffered septic fever, double-sided pneumonia, and nervous prostration. Doctors fought for his life for over a month. The polluted water caused severe pneumonia and sepsis that ended his athletic career.
He returned to competition and won first place and set another world record while delirious, with his brother running alongside ready to jump in if he lost consciousness. Soviet authorities initially downplayed the story. The rescue is considered one of the greatest acts of civilian heroism ever recorded.
The Carnegie Medal is given to civilians who risk their lives to save or attempt to save strangers. Historically, about 90% of recipients have been men.
Survivor guilt has an adaptive explanation from an evolutionary perspective: it is a byproduct of mechanisms to help humans maintain social bonds, cooperation, and group cohesion. In ancestral environments, surviving while others in the group did not could have social consequences. Showing distress rather than indifference signals that one is not selfish and remains part of the group.
Survivor guilt may arise from the same psychological machinery that makes people uncomfortable receiving disproportionate rewards. It encourages caring for bereaved families and supporting injured group members. Counterfactual thinking helps humans learn from near misses in dangerous situations.
Tears function as a costly signal of commitment because filling the eyes with water makes a person vulnerable—they cannot fight, see, or defend themselves properly. This demonstrates the depth of pain or suffering.
Tears of joy may be a spandrel or crossover between the same emotional mechanisms.
Emotions such as peak joy, beautiful experiences, and sad or dreadful experiences share a similar physical resonance. Intense emotional experiences, whether positive or negative, are often felt across the top of the shoulders and traps, creating a sensation of being lifted.
A visual reference shows how different emotions manifest as heat maps in the body. This is based on self-reported data of where emotions are felt physically.
- Anger: concentrated in the upper chest, arms, hands, lower face, and head
- Surprise: concentrated in the head
- Sadness: concentrated in the middle of the chest
- Happiness: felt throughout the body
- Disgust: concentrated in the stomach
- Anxiety: concentrated in the stomach
- Fear: concentrated in the middle of the chest
- Depression: low-energy state felt in the extremities
- Contempt: felt exclusively in the head
- Pride: swelling sensation in the chest
- Shame: felt in the cheeks
- Envy: felt in the head and heart
Happiness appears as a lower-intensity version of love. Anxiety is described as a more active version of depression.
Rosalind Fisher's photography project examined tears under a microscope. Different emotional states produce tears with visibly different crystalline structures.
Examples shown include:
- Tears of laughter
- Tears of change
- Tears of grief
- Tears from cutting onions
- Tears of catharsis
Emotional tears contain higher concentrations of proteins and hormones compared to basal or reflex tears:
- Prolactin
- Adrenocorticotropic hormone (stress-related hormone)
- Leucine enkephalin (natural pain-relieving peptide)
- Differences in minerals such as potassium and manganese
When tears dry on a slide, these dissolved substances crystallize into distinct patterns. There is no simple one-to-one mapping between specific emotions and tear patterns; patterns vary considerably even within the same emotional category.
Three main categories of tears exist:
- Basal tears: constantly produced to lubricate the eyes
- Reflex tears: produced in response to irritants (e.g., onions)
- Emotional tears: triggered by psychological states
Men are often less accommodating of other men's sad or vulnerable emotions than women are. This creates a hypocrisy when men advocate for better male mental health resources while simultaneously rejecting emotional displays from other men.
The visceral discomfort some men feel toward other men's sadness is linked to evolutionary programming: a man who cannot hold it together emotionally may be perceived as an unreliable ally in dangerous situations such as hunting or defending against attacks.
William Costello suggested that much male aversion to gay men is actually femophobia—an aversion to femininity presented by a man—rather than homophobia per se. The same mechanism that flags emotional vulnerability as unreliability also flags femininity as a potential liability in high-stakes contexts.
Peter Thiel was outed by Gawker years before publicly coming out. He later funded the Hulk Hogan sex-tape lawsuit against Gawker as a form of delayed revenge. Ryan Holiday's book Conspiracy details this story.
British tabloid journalism historically involved "honey pot" operations in which publications paid individuals to initiate sexual encounters with targets (celebrities, athletes) and then report the stories. The distinction between a "kiss and tell" and a "pay and kiss and tell" is primarily the timing of payment.
A cash flow conversion cycle measures the time between paying for inventory and receiving payment from customers. A negative cash flow conversion cycle (receiving payment before paying suppliers) is common in e-commerce. An example given involves running Neat Tonic and negotiating credit terms with manufacturers versus supermarkets.
Partners often imagine male gatherings involve chaos or sexual activity, whereas actual conversations frequently revolve around niche topics such as football statistics, conversion-rate optimization, or business metrics. The men perceived as most likely to engage in risky behavior are often the least likely, and vice versa.
Function Health offers access to over 160 lab tests, including a full hormone panel, for $365 per year ($1/day). Results are clinician-reviewed with flagged values and personalized protocols. A $25 discount brings the price to $340 using code "modernwisdom."
Ancient Greeks and Romans maintained personal notebooks of insights (hypomnema). Each morning they would meditate on a relevant passage when facing a current problem. Modern equivalents include collecting memorable quotes or lessons that are frequently forgotten.
Key under-applied lessons include:
- No amount of worrying changes outcomes; worrying feels productive but is not
- "Just calling to connect" business calls often masquerade as work without producing results
- 91.6% of worries tracked by people with generalized anxiety disorder never came true
- Excitement about upcoming events can feel physiologically similar to anxiety ("pleasure anxiety")
A story is shared of an elderly woman who realized past worries that once felt catastrophic had been completely forgotten within months.
David Ogilvy's line states that you think you're advertising to a standing army, but you're actually advertising to a moving parade. This applies beyond ad campaigns to the observation that people constantly observe themselves significantly more than anybody else observes them.
A list of the best books read is available at highagency.com/books. The concern that people have already seen the list is misplaced because nobody has seen it, as it's always a moving parade.
Henry Ford had a layout of the company's latest print ad tacked to his wall that he saw every time he came into his office. He loudly announced he was tired of the ad and it was time to create a new one. His assistant replied that the ad hadn't even started running yet. It is only natural for a client to get tired of an ad long before its intended audience does.
When a Brit does some new creative endeavor or starts a business, they almost feel past the first initial ask to follow up. It is very un-British behavior. The example of the tagline "if you support Rihanna's new single more than your friends' new business, you're a bad friend" illustrates the principle to gas your friends up by buying their shirts, supporting them, sharing their work, and telling them they're doing good. At minimum, buy the ticket and go to the show.
People sometimes see their friends weirdly as rivals because they have more similarities in common with them. Narcissism is small differences.
If you show up in your relationship differently after about six or seven times very differently, there is a typical flow that you and your partner go through. They get to be the bully and you get to be the victim, or they get to be the victim and you get to be the savior. There is a dance, a tone, and a rhythm to the way that you communicate. If you show up in a very different way, presumably a much more positive way that is more regulated, more calm, more peaceful, and more empathetic, it only takes seven times on average for the pattern to break. It's like playing tennis with the other person not hitting the ball back. If you want to change the situation that you're in, the best thing to do is change your own behavior.
Default choices are almost always wrong. If you don't step into your programming and just think a little, you avoid the rumination trap where you think thinking is good so you do an infinite amount of it. You need to do just a little bit and practice something before you end up relying on instinct. Most of your defaults are confused chemical signals coming from your body, social norms, paths of least resistance, or the way that you've dealt with past trauma. Almost all of those are not things that you consciously chose. The things that you want aren't the things that you want to want if you don't take some time designing your desires. You end up following the path that everyone else does, and outsourcing your wisdom to the group is usually a bad idea.
Questioning the first thought assumes the first thought isn't necessarily you. A meditation exercise asks what's the next thought going to be. You sit there and ask yourself you're not going to think, but let's just see what the next thought appears as. You just become the watcher. When first doing this exercise, the next thought was simply the Bayern Munich player Arjen Robben cutting in on his left foot. This leads to realizing a lot of thoughts are just an automatic response.
Talking about meditation makes one look like a wanker, and learning meditation is like learning Japanese where you tell everybody how wonderful it is but do so in Japanese. A cool exercise is to try and turn awareness in on itself by thinking of your awareness and then trying to become aware of it. It is almost like this mirror. Sam's quick hit thing is to try and catch your own awareness quickly, which is strange because most of the time when doing any meditation or mindfulness, it is slow, but this is more like trying to get an animal in a trap where the animal is you and the trap is also you.
highagency.com/books is recommended for reading the books listed.
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