I spiraled again, and it all started here:

This kid showing the ChatGPT-produced essays he used to graduate sent me deep diving, like a trash panda. Down, down, down I went; an hours-long rabbit hole. But it worked.

You didn’t ask for today’s thesis, but I think you’ll like it.

From creation to narrative to policy, it now feels harder than ever to guarantee something is real. Fake now travels a five-stop supply chain with AI as its nitro.

We're living through the weirdest collapse of our reality supply chain. From creating b.s., to validating b.s., to measuring b.s., to spreading b.s. narratives that change how we actually live. Every single checkpoint feels like it’s failing _{womp womp}.

“What do you mean?” (as Justin Bieber once sang).

Authenticity didn’t vanish overnight. It’s still here, casually gasping for air. It’s just that AI has exposed what’s been breaking down for years. We’re racing towards a slop-to-gospel supply chain.

Our country may suck at building basic necessities in our best cities, like housing, or pulling off huge feats of construction, like the Empire State Building. But holy shit do we crush it at synthetics. Forget synthetic fertilizers, food products, cosmetics, or biomedicine. That’s boring.

It was only a matter of time until we graduated to synthesizing digital reality _{Thank you, Sam Altman} , which is a problem. Your average person spends collectively like 3 months out of the year on just their phone.

Overnight, we've scaled the manufacturing of plausible b.s.: text, images, voices, entire identities, all at virtually zero cost. Because who wouldn’t want the marginal price of lying to be zero??

Deep fakes, AI-written books flooding Amazon, AI influencers with audiences of bots, and soon-to-be billion-dollar businesses built on pure vapor _{(ergo, no juice)}.

But we don’t even need AI to help us fake it. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is as human as it gets.

Some countries even fake it all.

As an anonymous writer shared, “when an economist visited Zambia in 2010 to figure out how the country's GDP was estimated, he discovered that a single person was responsible for the national accounts data.”

Imagine: one dude, sipping his tea, basically making up numbers for an entire country’s economy.

You thought AI-generated images were wild? HA. This is nutty analog fraud at nation-state scale. It’s not new either! Whether it's a lazy student outsourcing essays to ChatGPT or a government outsourcing its entire economic data to Some Guy™, the cost of creating "reality" has been approaching zero for quite a while now. All AI did was put its foot down on the accelerator.

The only way this b.s. gets loose and accepted is because the traditional gatekeepers are dying; our old (metaphorical) fact-checking bouncers are passed out drunk in the alley somewhere.

The worst-kept secret is that trust in institutions is cratering. Why, though? It’s complex, but in short: technology. Fragmented media, negativity-biased algorithms, and infinite information sources turned everyone into their own little pope of truth. How cute… and terrible.

Opinions are like buttholes — everyone has one, and most of them stink.

But here's what's left everyone jaded: the institutions we built (full of flaws, duh) to separate expert knowledge (real) from charlatan credentials or straight-up b.s. are sometimes asleep at the wheel, or even participate in the con. The problem is that most people can’t differentiate between lies and mistakes made by these institutions.

So you end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Not good, chief.

Case in point: one of the biggest scandals in modern science history.

Eliezer Masliah. One of the biggest names in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's research. Head of neuroscience at the NIH's National Institute on Aging. Author of 800+ papers. The big man, if you will. He was one of those guys you cited when you needed to back up your argument with something credible.

Surprise surprise — he allegedly, for years, was “splicing, cloning, overlaying, copy-and-pasting, duplication of the same image with different captions about different research in different journals.”

Photoshop… basically.

Just like that, millions upon millions spent chasing ghosts.

A field misled for decades, not by bad data alone, but by a trusted insider who gamed the system.

The traditional way of going about one of the most important processes in history (validating scientific research) is full of holes.

And this guy didn’t even use AI to pull off this fraud!

And he didn't even use AI! This was artisanal (and whack).

If we can't catch Some Guy™ with MS Paint faking foundational medical research, what happens when AI floods every journal with plausible b.s.?

Maybe AI becomes the solution though…? Like the ultimate peer reviewer? But damn, right now it looks like we're struggling pretty hard to handle the stone-age scams, like fraud in medical research.

Ok so far we've got:

Now:

As effective as putting your hand up to someone’s forehead to take their temp. _{Yes we all love to do it but it’s like putting a thermometer against a thermometer.}

Writer Cremieux shares a perfect summary: “shocking trends are more likely to be artefactual than signals of real things worth worrying about.”

So if you’re panicking about some half-baked crisis, you should relax. Most likely, we’ve just gotten better at identifying and/or diagnosing… but to a fault.

Exhibit A: The Autism Explosion _{sounds weird when i say it like that}. You’ve seen the TikToks and smelled the crusty vibes in the air. Autism is obviously real, but your self-diagnosis is probably not.

All that’s happened was (1) we told more people autism exists, so they went looking for diagnoses. Like early detection for cancer, just because more people show up and get diagnosed does not mean that more people than expected rates are getting cancer.

(2) We basically stretched its definition until it covered half of human behavior.

Exhibit B: ADHD Pandemic. Same story. Cremieux: "ADHD is a condition that's suffered from diagnostic drift: it's been defined more leniently over time, so more people are getting diagnosed."

People suck at understanding how these things are measured, and it’s like we’re in the midst of a ”diagnostic epidemic,” as Cremieux says.

Exhibit C: Blue Zone Malarky. Remember when everyone was obsessed with those magical places where people live to 100+? Zac Efron made BANK traveling to these places, where in reality, most of those centenarians were dead people whose families wanted to keep collecting pension checks. Ah yes, the secret to living long? Just spread grandma’s lies for the bag.

Exhibit D: Climate Disaster Inflation. To my right-wing, Joe Rogan groupies, climate change is real. But to my blue-haired baristas, natural disasters are NOT suddenly everywhere. As Our World in Data reports, most of the increase in natural disasters in the late 20th century is due to improved reporting.

Simply put: we count better.

Even better news: WAY less people die from natural disasters!

Lastly, Exhibit E: The Masculinity Crisis™

I want to yeet my laptop just typing that.

Dr. Mike Israetel explains:

We mistake visibility for prevalence. Men have always struggled. The main difference now is that they face (1) less stigma, thus the opportunity to scream it to the world, and (2) the tools to do it via the Internet.

You see posts like these everywhere.

The "AI will steal all jobs" threads; the "kids these days" moral panic; "society is collapsing" takes.

Watch how this content flows through this pipeline:

Obviously we have challenges to address. And every time we solve one generation’s problems, new ones take their place. Such is life.

But this supply chain of slop-to-gospel leads us to forgetting the basics.

Because of our media environment, before you even blink, your chill hang with the homies suddenly devolves into screaming over some weird culture war you didn’t know existed, based on data you can't verify, churned out by some mockery of a real institution, and measured by lackluster standards.

You’ve been there before, surely.

These narratives about men in crisis, autism everywhere, and world on fire become like a religion, a cult following for some. The algorithm gods demand engagement, and nothing engages like existential terror.

Here's where the rubber meets the road… or.. rather, where the fake rubber meets the fake road and we all pretend we're driving somewhere.

The fake is everywhere. If you’re not intentional, it crops up everywhere in your media algorithms. And thus it makes its way into our laws, markets, identities, and our decisions.

Investors end up chasing AI “hot” biotech, built on Photoshopped data; Theranos gets valued at billion based on the concept of revolutionary blood testing and acting like a Temu-Steve Jobs; citizens who survived disasters ignore real aid; people refuse to have kids because some random TikTok went viral by convincing them the world ends tomorrow.

You already knew where this was going: more people seem to be making real decisions based on fake crises measured by broken metrics validated by no one. You feel this at a deep level if you have a parent who spends too much time on Facebook.

Welcome to the Resistance, lol.

We're living more and more in a barbell reality. On one end, we're creating actual miracles, like GLP-1 drugs reversing diabetes, the first non-opioid painkillers in decades, AI genuinely solving protein folding. Big deals!!!

But on the other end, companies like Cluely are literally selling services to help you cheat on everything. Your homework, your job, your entire existence. Social nihilism at its finest *chef’s kiss*

The future is both fake and real, like at maximum volume. We may end up curing cancer while plenty of people go faking their way through cancer research papers. We'll solve climate change while groups of people live like it’ll all collapse by 2030. Hell, we’ll probably build AGI while it then convinces everyone we didn't.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
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.}