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Shanu Mathew · May 23, 2025

The Balance - May 23, 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:

Entertainment Recs:

  • Adolescence (Netflix): Eye-opening storytelling about online culture for kids these days and one-hour, continuously shot episodes to boot. Plot: A family's world turns upside down when 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested for murdering a schoolmate: the charges against their son force them to confront every parent's worst nightmare.

  • The Last of US Season 2 (HBO Max), specifically Episode 2: I’m hot and cold on the show overall but Episode 2 was up there with some of the highest tier television I’ve seen.

  • Mobland (Paramount): I haven’t seen this show get much hype but it’s entertaining for anyone that loves mob series. It’s a bit ridiculous but what isn’t in this genre (and directed by Guy Ritchie). Great cast - Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Paddy, Considine. Plot: Two mob families clash in a war that threatens to topple empires and lives.

Must-read Articles/Thoughts:

  • Today, I’m sharing a lot of content from author/investor/influencer/speaker, Sahil Bloom. Sharing his recent book and some great blog posts I saw via his newsletter.

    • His recent book, The 5 Types of Wealth was a great blueprint to build your life around five types of wealth: Time, Social, Mental, Physical, and Financial Wealth. It’s all about prioritizing what matters and reflecting on your life to find meaning and happiness. It was a really great read for this point in my life (early 30s, adult, parents aging, etc.).

    • There are certain taxes of life that we must happily pay:

      • Periods of loneliness are a tax on personal transformation. To achieve the growth we want, we need to accept that there will be periods when we've left our prior environment and have yet to find our new one.

      • Hard conversations are a tax on deep relationships. To build the deep bonds we want, we need to accept the hard conversations that repair and strengthen these connections along the way.

      • Boredom of routine is a tax on long-term success. To earn the win in the light, we have to embrace the boring basics in the dark. Imposter syndrome is a tax on growth. To unlock the growth we asked for, we need to accept that we will be pushing beyond our current competencies and feeling like an imposter in doing so

    • The Most Powerful Asymmetries in Life

      • Spend 30 minutes writing a letter to your future self one year from today. Reflect on the present and sketch out your hopes for the future that you will have achieved by the time you open the letter. It creates a clear alignment between short-term actions and long-term direction.

      • Be the one to catalyze the annual get together with old friends. These things start to slip as you get older and life gets more chaotic, and it'll never happen if one person doesn't take the initiative to set it up. A little bit of upfront effort for a lifetime of laughs and joyful moments.

      • Take on one challenging physical event per year. Sign up for that race, commit to that big hike, set that goal that scares you. The achievement won't change you, but the process of working towards it will.

    • The Hidden Cost of Comfort: Your entire life will change when you realize that growth feeds on meaningful struggle. When you avoid that struggle, you literally starve your growth of the oxygen it needs to thrive. Your natural bias to avoid discomfort, and to prevent those you love from feeling it, does more harm than good. The truth is that long-term freedom is earned through a willingness to endure short-term struggle… Growth isn’t a byproduct of ease. It’s a byproduct of struggle.

    • An Ancient Phrase That Will Change How You Live: "Age Quod Agis" Translation: Do what you are doing. A simple concept, yet so very powerful in the attention-splintered world we live in. Most failure isn't due to a lack of effort, but to a lack of focused effort. We take on more and more, but accomplish less and less. We run faster and faster, but find we are getting nowhere.

Source: The 2025 Top-100 Gen AI Use Case Report lists the top 100 applications now, in 2025, rated according to perceived usefulness and scale of impact (assessed qualitatively by expert review), and includes a quote or several for eac Therapy is the new top use case. There are two other entrants in the top 5: “Organizing my life” and “Finding purpose.” These three uses reflect efforts toward self-actualization, marking a shift from technical to more emotive applications over the past year.

Seen via tweet, citing this article “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?": What he identified as the four horsemen of the pop culture apocalypse

  1. Stagnation: the economics of pop culture nostalgia, the staggering challenges of making big original movies, and the algorithmic and private-equity dynamics elevating old music over new music

  2. Cynicism: how an obsession with identity has flattened creativity in the visual arts and beyond

  3. Isolation: e.g., bands and bars slowly being replaced by music that people make alone in their rooms with computers for an audience of ... people listening alone in their rooms with computers

  4. Attention rot: it's not easy aiming for quality in a world where ppl are losing the capacity to pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds

Source: “Their analysis of anonymized tax data from 2000 through 2022 suggests the importance of such business ownership to the U.S. economy has grown. The share of income that ownership generates has increased to 34.9% in 2022 from 30.3% in 2014 for the top 1% earners. It has increased even more at the topmost levels. The top 0.1% highest-earners saw 43.1% of their income come from such business ownership in 2022, compared with 37.3% in 2014”

Seen via tweet: 80% of Americans think America would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing but only 25% think they would be better off if they worked in a factory.

Source: “According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2025 report, 75% of restaurant traffic is now takeout, with speed and convenience driving consumer choices”

Source: “Many preventable chronic diseases are related to four major risk factors: cigarette smoking, excessive alcohol use, physical inactivity and poor nutrition. In the U.S., people get less exercise, moving less than some European counterparts, studies have shown. The nation’s Western-style diet is heavy in sugars, processed meat and unhealthy fats. Americans also consume more ultra-processed foods, surveys suggest, and such diets have been linked to increased risks of obesity, Type 2 diabetes and some cancers”

Seen via tweet. It’s great to see any waste get cut but there should definitely be some criticism given how much they wanted to be celebrated for all the wins, especially as they were far lower than marketed.

Source: Crazy to see OpenAI still have such a stranglehold on GenAI market share. ChatGPT has ~80% of all GenAI traffic.

Source: Two words, Lebron James.

Source: Never seen a table like this before but it’s really cool to see the playoff baseline and which players can find a next level in Game 7. Again, notably, Lebron’s insane base rate and *still* elevates for Game 7 (best game 7 performer of all time).

Source: The top AI supercomputers are doubling in performance every 9 MONTHS. That's: 2.5x growth per year, 10000x every decade, Far outpacing Moore's Law

Source: Easy to forget that the vast majority of companies in most developed markets are private!

Source: “Five years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. cities are still struggling to avoid commercial real-estate doom loops that have claimed areas such as downtown St. Louis… Office utilization in River North is about 48% of its 2019 level, according to commercial real-estate company Avison Young. That compares with an average of 55% in Chicago’s central business district and 62% nationally.”

  • After one of the fastest papal conclaves ever, Chicago native and Villanova University grad Robert Francis Prevost was elected as the next pope, becoming the first American to lead the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. The 69-year-old Prevost, who is also a Peruvian citizen and fluent in five languages, took the name Leo XIV (Morning Brew)

  • Apple design guru Jony Ive is joining OpenAI in a $6.5 billion hardware deal. The Steve Jobs collaborator who masterminded many of Apple's design breakthroughs is now in a key creative role at the artificial intelligence firm (WSJ)

  • A baby became the first human to receive a personalized CRISPR base gene-editing treatment tailored to a genetic disorder (NYT)

  • Warren Buffett said he will ask Berkshire Hathaway's board to replace him as CEO with his designated successor Greg Abel at the end of this year (CNBC)

  • Gregg Popovich, the iconic head coach who led the San Antonio Spurs to five NBA championships, is stepping down (ESPN)

  • 40% of U.S.-affiliated Nobel Prize winners in the sciences — physics, chemistry and medicine — between 2000 and 2023 were immigrants. (Axios)

  • 25% Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day, up 53% since 2003 (MW)

  • Biotech startup Colossal, which had a $10.2 billion valuation as of its last funding round in January, announced yesterday that it created three dire wolves—an animal that has been extinct for over 12,000 years (Morning Brew)

  • 60% of Coachella attendees this year used payment plans to finance their passes, up from just 18% in 2009. After forking over a $41 upfront fee, festivalgoers spread out the remainder of the $600 ticket over several months (Billboard)

  • Astronomers studying a distant planet, K2-18b, just found something remarkable: dimethyl sulfide in its atmosphere. On Earth, this molecule is only produced by living organisms, mostly marine plankton. That makes it a possible biosignature: a chemical hint that life might exist elsewhere (CNN)

  • First therapy chatbot, Therabot, reduced symptoms of depression by 51%, anxiety by 31% and eating disorders by 19%, proving comparable to traditional therapy (Dartmouth)

  • Using digital technology is linked to a 58% reduced risk of cognitive impairment in older adults, based on a review of over 400,000 people (Nature)

  • The median home sale price was $431,048 last month, up just 2.5% from a year ago (Redfin)

  • Google Gemini hit 350 million monthly users, trailing ChatGPT (~600 million) & Meta AI (~500 million) [Tech Crunch]

  • 48% of Americans age 12+ have both listened to and watched a podcast. YouTube is the service used most often to listen to podcasts with 33% of U.S. weekly podcast listeners using the service (Edison Research)

  • Waymo’s autonomous vehicles demonstrated an 85% reduction in crashes involving serious injuries compared to human drivers over 56.7 million miles (Waymo)

  • Tobi Lütke, Shopify’s CEO, posted an internal memo on April 7, 2025, mandating AI as a core skill for all employees.

  • This article (based on actual events) reads like a Hollywood script. "Over the years, Ranogajec and his partners have won hundreds of millions of dollars by applying Wall Street-style analytics to betting opportunities around the world. Like card counters at a blackjack table, they use data and math to hunt for situations ripe for flipping the house edge in their favor. Then they throw piles of money at it, betting an estimated $10 billion annually. The Texas lottery play, one of their most ambitious operations ever, paid off spectacularly with a $57.8 million jackpot win." How a Secretive Gambler Called ‘The Joker’ Took Down the Texas Lottery

  • Refreshing read on why leadership in sports can take many shapes. Joy: Why one simple word defines Steph Curry’s leadership with the Warriors.

Read the original on shanumathew.substack.com ↗

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