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

Your Special Access to the Inception Science

There is NO WAY you missed this blowing up your feed last week.

If you didn’t, well.. I guess I’m doing you a favor:

No, I’m not talking about Ashton Hall’s insane (alleged) morning routine. I’m talking about the style of the image.

ChatGPT dropped their new image generator on March 25.

The Internet promptly lost its mind. Everything from family portraits to iconic movie scenes had to be reimagined in Studio Ghibli style.

Even though Spirited Away scared the piss out of me as a kid, I actually do love Hayao Myazaki’s work, but this trend was more ruthless than that girl you vaguely knew from college blasting you with MLM deals.

It was inescapable, just like everyone trying to avoid getting COVID in the early days.

Human behavior actually has a lot in common with disease transmission.

This concept (social contagion) explains how behaviors, emotions, and ideas spread through networks just like viruses spread through populations. It accounts for everything from harmless trends (Ghibli-mania) to genuinely dangerous mass hysteria.

But most people have no idea how or why ideas spread, leaving them totally defenseless.

You, however, won't be one of them!!!

The Science Behind Social Transmission

Just like I was born with an innate obsession for crispy Sprite, humans (and many other species) are biologically wired to mimic each other.

From yawning and laughter to vomiting and even peeing, mimicry is hardcoded into our DNA. These behaviors evolved as survival mechanisms. Even laughter, which we think of as spontaneous joy, is primarily a social signal, not just a response to a joke.

But this goes beyond copying physical behaviors. Beliefs, emotions, and trends transmit the same way. We're fundamentally a mimetic species.

Three factors determine whether something "breaks containment" and goes viral:

• Social proof: You do what others do — this is why every startup's landing page is plastered with suspiciously similar testimonials.

• Emotional resonance: You share what makes you feel something — and what triggers more emotion than a cute as hell Studio Ghibli reimagining?

• Identity signaling: You spread what says something about you, from resharing political content from your fav Insta account to joining certain clubs.

The Asch conformity experiments demonstrated this perfectly. Subjects would knowingly give wrong answers on simple visual tests just to conform with the majority group. Here’s the kicker, though: The majority group deliberately chose wrong answers as part of the experiment, while the test subject (the minority group) caved to social pressure rather than trust their own eyes!

On the Spectrum: From Trivial to Transformative

Not all contagions are created equal.

You can classify social infection like this:

• Low-stakes contagions: harmless things, like laughter, language, fashion trends, viral dances. Who could forget how we all did the Harlem Shake in 2013 for like two weeks and then.. dropped it like it never happened..
  

  

  Giphy

• Medium-stakes contagions:

  • Take UFO sightings. Major waves of sightings tend to cluster suspiciously after media coverage. It’s kind of like the current obsession with plane crashes — they haven’t actually been happening everywhere all the time.

    

    Google search trend on plane crashes

    Also, is nobody wondering why basically NOBODY ELSE reports UFO sightings outside of the U.S. and UK? Is this not SLIGHTLY sus to anybody?!
    

  

  • Or what about when everyone suddenly needed to own a stupid cartoon jpeg of a monkey? The NFT hype was textbook medium-stakes contagion. People thought they were buying art when it was just a collective hallucination of value.
    

• High-stakes contagions: consider these like mass movements and moral panics that can totally upend societal norms _{(no bueno).}

  • Wild historical examples include _{(but are not limited to)} witch hunts and McCarthyism, where accusation itself became contagious. Once someone was labeled a witch or communist, the label could spread to their network just by associating with the accused!

  • Exorcisms: Based on historical data, you can see how exorcism reports spread through communities in identifiable waves. When the movie The Exorcist dropped in the 1970s, it literally became a ‘thing’ (dubbed the "Exorcist effect") to experience demonic possession (more so than wearing pink on Wednesdays [iykyk]). So this showed us how cultural zeitgeist moments can give people a kind of “permission” to experience a phenomena.

  • Even more disturbing: self-harm and anorexia, which may be the most documented examples of behavioral contagion.

But is this really that surprising considering that THIS was the media environment you were raised in? 👇

Each of these examples represents how exposure to media and narrative can be powerful transmission vectors _{(fancy phrase)} — vehicles that accelerate social contagion.

The Illusion of Contagion

How do social contagions spread even when most people privately have doubts about the dominating belief or norm? The answer lies in what you can’t see 👀 🧠

In free societies, thinking looks something like this below — mostly transparent.

But weird things start to happen when just speaking your mind goes from low-stakes to high-stakes contagion. This can happen when authoritarian governments restrict freed of speech and protest, or social stigma adds so much social pressure that a topic is no longer openly discussed, even in a society that protects freedom of speech.

So then this happens:

This image shows how social pressure hides what others truly think. If you're the blue brain _(sad), despite swimming in a sea of viewpoint diversity, you might assume you're the only one thinking differently because you’re only everyone's orange exterior. This convinces you that everyone actually believes the orange viewpoint.

This is formally called pluralistic ignorance, when people mistakenly believe their private thoughts differ from the majority, when in reality, most others secretly share their opinion (like how all the new Star Wars movies are TRASH, but no one thinks that others believe it too!!!)

C’mon, I know you get it.

When a CEO has terrible idea and everyone fawns over it, you have to do a sanity check and hit up the group chat about how stupid the idea was, because you can’t really ask EVERYONE ELSE, even though they’re probably thinking the same thing as you!

Try and remember the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes.

Ironically, pluralistic ignorance can actually accelerate social contagions by:

• Giving you a false perception of consensus

• Silencing dissenting voices around you

• Forcing "preference falsification”, like when you pretend to enjoy the meal you were served at a friend’s home, but secretly you'd rather spit it out, but the social consequences are too great to speak the truth!

You don't need to live under an oppressive regime to experience this in corporate environments, family gatherings, or political discussions.

Immunity and Vulnerability

So how do you know if you'll catch the next “social virus” that’ll take your family group chat by storm?

Just like with disease, certain factors can affect your immunity:

• You have strong prior beliefs (ergo stubborn as hell): take the Amish — these communities deny themselves every social contagion under the sun, like technology, through prior belief alone.

• Intellectual humility: The more certain you are that you're immune to influence, the more susceptible you actually become.

• Exposure diversity: Getting in touch with different viewpoints can help you strengthen your intellectual muscle (please don’t go deep-diving on 9/11 conspiracies — use critical thinking plz).

You can also check on these contributing environmental factors:

• Echo chambers: When everyone around you (physically and especially digitally) believes the same thing, contagion accelerates. Just look at any subreddit - so many are just verbal circle jerks!

• Crisis and uncertainty: We all saw how conspiracy theory adoption skyrocketed during early COVID lockdowns.

• Information velocity: TikTok literally supercharges contagion more so than legacy platforms. Visibility creates permission!

• Social need: The stronger your desire to belong, the more likely you'll adopt group behaviors and beliefs.

But don't panic too much. We're inherently social creatures, so it's impossible to avoid all mimicry. The key is awareness of high-stakes contagions that carry real consequences.

Speaking of which, here’s this curveball..

Moral Contagion: The Power of Super-Spreaders

Remember the notion of super-spreader events in COVID? Well, it turns out that some people spread social contagions faster than others, and this can actually be harnessed for good.

A recent study in Honduras involving more than 24,000 people across more than 170 isolated villages demonstrated how targeting specific individuals in social networks dramatically improved the adoption of health practices.

By identifying and recruiting natural "super-spreaders" (basically influencers of these communities), researchers were able to achieve the same results of adoption while only targeting a fraction of the population.

Just like how subscribers like you may consider me to be good enough to be a super-spreader of wisdom 🥲

The Grand Finale: the Inception Effect

We've dramatically increased life expectancy partly because we understand how germs spread. Why else would you wash your hands after using the bathroom??

But something similar is happening with social contagion.

A weird paradox _{(if you will)}: awareness of social contagion is itself becoming contagious.

Like the movie Inception, where planting an idea requires entering dreams within dreams, today's most powerful social contagions operate on multiple levels of awareness, or context.

We now see this playing out in real-time. People share viral articles about "how outrage is engineered to spread" (which themselves spread through outrage!!!).

This awareness has created a strange feedback loop:

• Increased resistance to obvious social contagions

• Heightened detection of manipulation attempts

• Development of "meta-resistant" messaging designed to overcome awareness

• The emergence of "awareness signaling" as a status display (like the origins of the phrase ‘being woke’, or how Andrew Tate and his followers endlessly talk about the “Matrix” attacking them).

It’s like our awareness of manipulation becomes a kind of Trojan horse carrying new forms of influence.

This has spawned entire anti-contagion movements — communities formed specifically around resisting perceived social contagions, from anti-woke groups to “natural-only” communities.

As a result, you're forced to track infinite levels of context simultaneously, like what you saw at the beginning 👇

All these layers of social contagion via multiple layers of contextual trends are driving popularity. There’s no intrinsic value to these.

So as you scroll and see your 1000th Studio Ghibli-style image, remember that you're witnessing not just a trend, but a sophisticated social contagion with multiple layers of meaning - a dream within a dream.

This may become an endless, infinite loop - contagion awareness as its own contagion. Perhaps the final frontier of social transmission and understanding the news — forever condemned to try and decipher weird shit like this:

We're fast approaching a world where, like Cobb at the end of Inception, we might simply stop checking if the totem is still spinning and accept the most disturbing social contagion of all: our collective shrug at being incapable of perceiving what’s real.

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.