Welcome to Z-Pack: a newsletter guaranteed to make sure you’re not the dumbest at dinner.

If this is your first Z-pack, welcome - I'm Zach.

I’m also chronically online, finding out how the world works.

⬇️ Let’s get to it.

🔫 Videogames reduce violence…?

A ton of parents were scared shitless about video games, like Grand Theft Auto.

The more you shoot people in video games, the more prone you are to shooting people in real life… right?

Yeah, that was dumb as hell.

Tbh, parents SHOULD have been scared of new tech…
… but not the video games.

What should the Boomer parents have been looking out for? The harmful effects of social media. 

An average American teen probably spend ~40 hours a week on their phone, give or take - flipping through Instagram’s reels and comparing themselves to the 0.1% wealthy (with *cough* credit card debt) teens and adults showing off their filtered looks, fits, Kylie Jenner lips, rented Lambos, Euro vacation, etc.

Death by a thousand comparisons.

Talk about a recipe for disaster.

I really think this is a huge contributing factor to why young Americans are so unhappy compared to previous times.

Btw, follow Ethan Mollick for 🔥 tweets on how to use AI tools.

👶 Ozempic increasing fertility

If you haven’t heard, people are having less babies all around the world, and sperm count has been declining pretty rapidly since 1970.

And it looks like Ozempic is not only helping reduce obesity AND other things like addiction and alcoholism, but it may be helping reverse the having-no-baby trend (not the sperm count thing… yet 👀).

Theories? Being overweight might make it harder to get pregnant.

Why are people having less babies? Maia Mindel (economist in training in Argentina) has a killer explanation here.

• But in a nutshell: data suggests that women value working and getting higher education than they do staying at home to have a child (and the massive income costs that this brings), so they’re choosing to delay (or not have) babies later in their lives.

💳 It’s a party in the U.S.A

Another case against the doom-and-gloom headlines of the fall of America and collapse of Americans’ well-being.

 🇺🇸, baby

Nick has an incredibly helpful book on personal finance and investing called Just Keep Buying.

🏠 The key to making housing affordable

Upzoning = legalizing more than just single-family homes (that look like this 🏠) to built in an area. When a city or area is “upzoned,” it means that the government will let you build more kinds of housing, like multi-family, apartment buildings, condos, etc.

🚨 The U.S. is currently experiencing a housing crisis. But not everywhere in the U.S.

The fastest and largest increases in housing prices have mainly been happening in California, because the government (at a local level especially) won’t let you just build, for example, an apartment building for 100 people, or a multi-family unit, or a condo complex, wherever you want.

So the problem is not people building expensive condos.

The problem is we aren’t building enough housing - ideally big housing like apartment buildings, so we don’t increase sprawl.

As a country, we still haven’t recovered to pre-2008 levels of home-building, even though our national population has increased by millions since then.

M. Nolan Gray has an awesome, easy-to-read book on how & why we ended up with a country that restricts housing supply artificially here.

💭 Incentives determine your fate

What behaviors are you rewarded for? (be it at work, at home with your partner, with friends, family)

What behaviors are you punished for?

Incentives can reflect how success is defined in a company, and even in a relationship or a family.

If you’re looking for great marketing tips, George Mack is a great follow.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.