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Shanu Mathew · Jul 7, 2025

The Balance - July 7, 2025

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Shanu Mathew · Shanu Mathew

This is a publication that focuses on what Shanu finds interesting that span markets, finance, investing, sustainability, politics, and more. This includes monthly newsletters or published pieces on sustainable investing! To follow along my writing, subscribe below:

Personal Updates:

I hope everyone had a great 4th! Our country isn’t perfect but it continues to be a symbol of freedom, innovation, and inspiration for much of the world and it’s something we should celebrate and aim to protect.

I got back to personal writing, one personal piece and one work-related piece. Give them a read if they’re of interests and give me some feedback!

  • The AI Competency Tax: AI's current flaws are creating an ‘AI Competency Tax’ where experts use the technology as a cognitive trampoline to launch from rough ideas to breakthrough thinking, while novices get stuck on endless treadmills of polished but superficial content – and this divergence is about to compound as the technology improves.

  • Recent Nuke Deals and What It Means for US Power System: Tech giants are striking billion-dollar nuclear deals to power AI data centers, but don't mistake the hype for a nuclear renaissance – most of these arrangements simply extend existing plants rather than building new capacity, revealing both the promise and harsh economic realities of nuclear power in America's AI-driven energy crunch.

Entertainment Recs:

  • American Manhunt: Osama bin Laden (Netflix): Featuring rare footage and interviews with CIA insiders, this three-part documentary series details the epic hunt for Osama bin Laden from the eve of 9/11 all the way to the SEAL raid that brought justice nearly a decade later.

Must-read Articles/Thoughts:

  • 3-2-1: On the power of relationships, practicing mental toughness, and a little secret of life (James Clear)

    • “But most days, mental toughness isn’t about crossing the finish line. It’s about getting to the starting line: Show up when no one is watching. Keep your eye on the ball. Do a little bit every day. Mental toughness is not skipping the days that are easy to skip.”

  • The Trap of Success & How to Escape It (Sahil Bloom)

    • “The fundamental problem here is the belief that your growth in life will follow a constant upward trajectory. If you believe that's true, then there's no issue with your expectations whether financial or identity-based—growing on a parallel (or identical) path. Unfortunately, growth doesn't work that way. It's more like a series of rolling peaks—you reach a new level, but need to endure a temporary regression before you can experience the next leap forward.”

WSJ: “The S&P 500 on Friday notched its first new high since February, capping a dizzying 24% rally from the depths of April’s tariff-induced selloff. The wild 89 trading days in between records marked the swiftest-ever recovery back to a closing high after a decline of at least 15%"

The Irrelevant Investor: “Most stocks suck. We know from Hendrik Bessembinder’s famous study that only 40% of stocks beat treasury bills. The remaining 40% destroyed $10.1 trillion in value through the end of 2024. If you’re going to buy individual stocks, be right, have conviction, and don’t be wrong. If you buy and hold a stock, at some point you are going to get your teeth kicked through the back of your head. 93% of the stocks Mauboussin and Callahan analyzed got cut in half! They show that the average maximum drawdown is 80%, or in more tangible terms, that would be a $10,000 investment falling to $2,000. And mind you, 40% of them never fully recover.”

Axios: “The median U.S. home bought last year was 36 years old — the oldest since at least 2012”

Axios: “D.C.'s public schools will enforce a cell phone ban starting next school year, the district said yesterday. D.C. joins nearly half the country in the bipartisan push to limit students' cellphone use in the classroom”

Tweet. Has anyone been here? Din Tai Fung the best restaurant chain by a mile in terms of average unit volume.

Epic Research: “More than half of patients are able to maintain weight loss achieved while on semaglutide or liraglutide even a year after discontinuing the medication.”

ESPN: “The Buss family is entering into an agreement to sell majority ownership of the Los Angeles Lakers to Mark Walter for a franchise valuation of approximately $10 billion, sources told ESPN on Wednesday, the highest ever for a U.S. professional sports franchise.”

A Wealth of Common Sense: “Over the very long run, it is the economics of investing–enterprise–that has determined total return; the evanescent emotions of investing–speculation–so important over the short run, have ultimately proven to be virtually meaningless.”

Bruce Mehlhman: “China is the leading trading partner with more nations than any other. A decade of intentional focus on dominating critical technologies & supply chains (via subsidies for domestic champions, non-tariff barriers, massive investments in research, forced tech transfer - the Made in China 2025 initiative) has positioned China as an essential trading partner with increasingly low costs, improving quality and a strategic stranglehold on critical inputs (such as rare Earth magnets).”

Tweet. Surprising as most media would lead you to believe crime is getting worse everywhere. Crime is obvious a very local issue so looking at averages can be misleading but interesting nonetheless.

NBER: “Immigrant inventors are key contributors to innovation in the United States, both through their direct productivity and through the spillover effects of their work with native-born collaborators. While accounting for just 16 percent of all US-based inventors, immigrant inventors produce nearly a quarter of total innovation output as gauged by the number of patents and patent citations and the economic value of the patents.”

A Wealth of Common Sense: “Not only are new all-time highs perfectly normal, your returns are actually better when you invest at those levels than putting your money to work on all other days over 1, 3 and 5 year windows”

  • About 4% of US adults are taking GLP-1 drugs. About half of that 4% take them specifically for weight loss or obesity—up by almost 600% from 2019 (Axios)

  • Obesity costs in the United States are up to $1.7 trillion annually, with indirect costs like lost productivity comprising the majority — $1.2 trillion (Exponential View)

  • It's difficult to stay focused during formal business hours. Knowledge workers are interrupted by a ping from an app — such as email, calendar or messaging — every 1.75 minutes, or 275 times, during the official eight-hour work day (Work Trend Index Special Report)

  • Tesla’s long-promised driverless taxi service is here, finally. The first robotaxi trips were limited to a narrow portion of Tesla’s hometown of Austin, with riders including investors and social-media influencers (Bloomberg)

  • 9% of young adults said they got their news from TikTok in 2020. By 2024, that figure had surged to 39% (Pew)

  • The number of job applications submitted via LinkedIn increased 45% in the last year to an average of 11,000 applications per minute—largely due to AI. Candidates are using ChatGPT to insert job posting keywords into their resumes and getting AI agents to apply on their behalf, creating an ‘applicant tsunami,’ a former recruiter told the Times (NYT)

  • A report, published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, puts Chinese researchers ahead of Americans in 37 of 44 technologies examined, across the sectors of defense, space, robotics, energy, environment, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, advanced materials and quantum technology (WSJ)

  • TikTok saw a 410% increase in travel content views from 2021 to 2024, with 32% of users saying they booked stays discovered on the app (Influencer)

  • Amazon now has more than 1 million robots working in its warehouse facilities — and they're close to outnumbering humans (WSJ)

  • 67% of U.S. adults in a February poll said they believed maximum age limits should be imposed on elected officials (YouGov)

  • YouTube Shorts, boasting 200 billion daily views, now commands a staggering 1% of all waking human hours globally (YouTube)

  • Neuralink revealed that seven participants with paralysis are now using its brain-computer interface, Telepathy, to control devices through thought alone (Neuralink)

  • On average, workers are 33% more productive in each hour that they use generative AI (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Vanderbilt & Harvard universities)

  • The Agentic Web and Original Sin (Stratechery): The web's "original sin" wasn't advertising—it was the perfect model for human attention—but as AI agents replace human web browsing, we need to build native payments into the agentic web now using stablecoins and auction mechanisms, or risk losing the open web entirely to a few dominant AI companies making backroom content deals.

  • AI cheating surge pushes schools into chaos (Axios): Schools are drowning in an AI cheating crisis with 90% of college students using ChatGPT on assignments and no clear consensus on what's acceptable—forcing educators to become "teachers and AI detectors at the same time" while scrambling to redefine academic integrity in real-time.

  • The Most Volatile Decade (A Wealth of Common Sense): The 2020s are shaping up to be the most volatile decade in 80 years with extreme daily swings becoming the norm, yet the S&P 500 is still up 14% annually for the 2020s—creating a bizarre new market psychology where investors panic over each crisis then develop instant financial amnesia and keep buying the dip.

Read the original on shanumathew.substack.com ↗

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