Welcome to Z-Pack:.your antidote to the 24/7 news cycle. Cut through the noise, understand what matters, and get on with your week - in less than 10 minutes.

If this is your first Z-Pack, welcome - I'm 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.}

⬇️ Let’s get it

You've never heard a presidential candidate mention it. No DEI task force has dared touch it. No government in the world has managed to solve it.

But it’s one of the biggest, insidious drivers of inequality between the “haves” and “have-nots.”

Most importantly, it’s “larger than the racial income gap, and among Black people, it’s larger than the gender wage gap.”

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Ugly Tax – the (ironically) invisible penalty we collectively pretend doesn't exist.

While you intuitively understand how hotness built Kylie Jenner's billion-dollar empire and how OnlyFans' subscriber base is nearly the size of the entire U.S. population, you remain oblivious to how attractiveness shapes your economic reality.

Is this why Trump is obsessed with tanning? Does this explain why Republican women are getting blasted on TikTok for having the same terrible makeup?

Are they just responding to market incentives?

It feels like the U.S. economy has a giant booger on its face that nobody wants to point out.

Being Hot Pays Off

Sure — rizz, personality, BDE, and humor matter too, but hotness is like a cheat code.

Economics writer Maia Mindel lays out the cold, hard facts about our attractiveness-based economy:

The Education Premium for Hotness:

• For starters, attractive children are educated longer than unattractive children, which results in higher earnings down the line, even after controlling for things like social outcomes and self-confidence. _{(sorry to my ugly ass older brother}💋₎

• Attractive professors get significantly higher performance ratings (especially women)

• Higher chances of admission into top PhD programs for economists
  

The Career Advantage:

• Better performance for financial analysts

• Higher earnings and better professional outcomes for lawyers

• Attractive hedge fund managers tend to perform worse than “uggos”, this is because they have it so much easier, since “objectively attractive” people have an easier time being hired, so they can get hired on a thinner resume.

• The best looking people earn an extra $250,000, on average, during their careers than the least attractive people and are more likely to remain employed, get promoted and even secure loans.
  

Hot-itics _{(i tried)}:

• Hotter politicians win more votes 

• And U.S. Presidents? Tall and photogenic. Coincidence? Please.

• Political consultants won't say it publicly, but they know: in the voting booth, hotness gets a premium that policy positions don't (womp womp).
  

Your social life:

• Men with hot wives are perceived as being higher status.

• Unless you're really hot, you're probably wasting your time on Tinder: ‘the bottom 80% of men are fighting over the top 22% of women and the top 78% of women are fighting over the top 20% of men.’

Being hot isn’t just about thirst traps!

The Male Hotness Industrial Complex

Today's world gives you unfiltered access to the hottest people on the planet. There's a running joke that giving a pilgrim a Sour Patch Kid would make them explode. Now imagine showing them Henry Cavill or Beyoncé — your ancestors never had to compete with genetic demigods on a 24/7 loop.

Incomprehensible. Infinite Trojan Wars would ensue.

This is hard on all of us, and many of you are already very familiar with women’s cosmetic procedures, but maybe we should obsess less over the “military industrial complex” and bear witness to the growing male beauty economy that nobody is talking about:

• The Height Tax: worried about the impact of every inch (😉), more men are trying out height extension surgery.

• The Testosterone Gold Rush: TRT clinics are booming as men seek to blame their crap sleep, diet, and lack of exercise (mostly) on “low T”.

• The Male Cosmetic Boom: Male cosmetic procedures have been skyrocketing 

Call it male body dysmorphia or an alpha-male arms race; either way, lots of men are trying to climb up the perceived hotness hierarchy.

This explains the growing "looksmaxxing" communities and increasingly desperate attempts to “hack” attraction through everything from "mewing" (jaw exercises) to questionable supplements.

But is hotness even all it’s cracked up to be?

When Beauty Becomes Beastly

Here’s the rub: hotness isn’t always an advantage. Yes, I know. This may sound like a “champagne” problem — some rich guy telling you “it’s not all what it’s cracked up to be,” but it looks like there are real downsides.

Hot women get bullied. According to writer Rob Henderson, “more physically attractive women are disproportionately targets of aggression from other women. In one study on adolescent females and males, attractiveness increased females’ odds of incurring same-sex aggression by 35% and decreased males’ by 25%.”

Being hotter than others can also make you… suck. You’re likely to be more self-interested and less empathetic. Why? Probably because you think you’re hot shit!

So, people talk all day about “up-skilling” yourself, but.. should you try and just get hotter?

Well, here’s the cruelest twist: you can’t really fake it.

Going back to Maia Mindel’s explanation:

The Future of Hotness Inflation

As the saying goes, you’re not ugly, you’re just poor. But what happens when everyone tries to buy their way into hotness, despite the data showing us it doesn’t really work?

Turns out, people don’t care! They want to feel hotter.

We’re accelerating into a future where:

• Reality is faker: It’s harder and harder to know what’s real in the growing ocean of AI images and filters.

• Worsening manosphere: in the U.S., with more men opting out of college, the primary integrated space where they can meet women is no longer university but online, where reality is thoroughly distorted. As they struggle to understand “what women want,” more may shortcut to “easier solutions” like manipulating their appearance via steroids and cosmetic procedures _{(god forbid they try therapy).}

What’s wild is that these beauty struggles may soon become obsolete as we enter a biotech revolution.

IVF already allows parents to select specific embryos, primarily to screen out genetic diseases. But the technology isn't stopping there. 

Gene editing costs are plummeting faster than Moore's Law _(fancy) predicted for computer chips:

If the Trump administration succeeds in speeding up FDA approval cycles (despite hacking research efforts at the knees via huge cuts to the NIH), we won't just be dipping our toes in the water of Black Mirror — we’ll be living in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

Parents won't hope for attractive children, but rather scroll through options and select them like features on a car.

And given current spending patterns on cosmetics and procedures, I doubt this will lead to a stratified society run by the "beauty elite" that many people, like you, may fear. Instead, genetic enhancement will democratize like smartphones did, rapidly moving from luxury to necessity.

We won't need government regulation to prevent attractiveness inequality or insurance coverage for "beauty engineering." Beauty itself will simply become the baseline, as ubiquitous as having a phone.

The premium won't be on being hot, fit, or even smart — because everyone will be.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

In other news:

• No idea how to understand these tariffs? See this ~10 minute read

• Why NVIDIA’s stock plummeted the other day after the government stopped them from shipping chips

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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.