The Balance - May 7, 2026

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:

Coming in a little early this week given I’m out the next few weeks on our ~1.5 year late honeymoon - putting the ‘late’ in latermoon, ha! Enjoy the spring and start of summer y’all. Until next month.

Personal updates: I spoke at the Atlantic Council’s ‘Powering Data Centers in Emerging Markets’ event in London this week.

Must Read/See/Watch/Recs:

• Sabastian Sawe broke the two-hour marathon barrier in race conditions (BBC Sport): A Kenyan distance runner ran 1:59:30 at the London Marathon on April 26 — the first sub-two marathon in an official race, beating Kelvin Kiptum’s 2023 mark by 1 minute, 5 seconds. No human is limited!!! Absolute chills watching this.

• My wife made me try Survivor Season 50 and after a bit of reluctance, I’m hooked. It’s an entertaining show that combines athletic feats, social gameplay, and strategic politicking with a lot of backstabbing. We went back and watched an old season and it was one of the more entertaining seasons of reality TV I’ve seen. Survivor: Cagayan - tony is the man!

• I’m enjoying Your Friends & Neighbors season 2. The plot is outrageous and makes little sense but the cast & universe are fascinating and entertaining.

Seen via Gavin Baker. Customers in the top 25% of AI spend are running ~100% above November 2022 revenue while customers with no AI spend are tracking below nominal GDP. The data comes from Ramp’s bill pay data across 50K+ businesses.

Financial Times. Social media over-represents the extremes vs. AI conversations seemingly get pulled toward the moderate centre.

Seen via Dr. Samuel Hume. Tirzepatide (Mounjaro/Zepbound) at ~$36B of 2025 revenue has overtaken Semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) at ~$35B. For comparison, OpenAI is tracking ~$20B and Anthropic ~$9B on a year-end run-rate basis as 2025. Two GLP-1 molecules are individually larger than the two leading AI labs combined. [Of note, the ARR figures for OAI and Anthropic are tracking $40(!)B+ too now so this is a moot point, but I thought it was interesting to remind folks how massive GLP-1s are!]

Sherwood News. “Almost 79% of American households reported using only wireless telephone services at the end of 2024, with just 0.9% landline-only.” That’s down from roughly 40% landline-only just two decades ago!

U.S. Census Bureau. Of the top 1,000 US surnames in 2020, the fastest-growing 10 are all predominantly Asian or South Asian: Zhang (+74%), Liu (+62%), Wang (+55%), Ahmed (+54%), Kaur (+54%), Li (+48%), Lin (+47%), Ali (+41%), Singh (+40%), Chen (+38%). The prior decade, predominantly Hispanic surnames led the same list.

Seen via tweet. As a share of global GDP, the AI/data center buildout is real but not unprecedented. Global data centers are at ~2.4% of world GDP after 8 years, vs. the global oil & gas upstream cycle at 9.3% (over 11 years), the postwar global auto expansion at 10.5%, and US railroads at 7.4%. The US shale revolution and the late-90s telecom boom were both smaller than what’s underway today.

Sherwood News. As seen above, Sabastian Sawe ran a 1:59:30 marathon on Sunday. The Kenyan beat Kiptum’s 2023 record by 1:05 at the London Marathon, wearing Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3s. Yomif Kejelcha came in 11 seconds later — also under two hours (in his FIRST marathon!), also in Adidas. 3rd place Men’s was also 2:00:28! Tigist Assefa set a women-only record of 2:15:41 in the same shoes… Look at that trend line. Wonder if it accelerates now.

WSJ. Per Layoffs.fyi, 45,800 tech workers were cut in March alone. Q1 2026 layoffs were the worst single quarter since early 2024, with Amazon, Oracle, Block, and Snap leading.

Bruce Mehlman. “Midterms tend to be a referendum on the sitting administration, and presidential approval is the best predictor of House outcomes… Trump’s current approval is 41% — below his 44% before the 2018 midterms (where the GOP lost 41 seats and the House) and roughly the same as Biden’s before 2022 (Democrats lost just 9 seats)… Democrats only need to net +3 seats to flip the House.”

Financial Times. Among US and UK workers, over 60% of the top 10% of earners use AI on most days, versus roughly 16% in the bottom 10%.

Axios. “$31.9 trillion annualized GDP in Q1 surpasses the $31.4 trillion in debt held by the public on the last day of the quarter.” The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio just reached 100% — a level it hadn’t reached outside the early COVID shock since the aftermath of World War II. CBO projects it climbs to 120% by 2036.

Visual Capitalist. “The global sports industry is worth $417 billion, with sports betting at $133 billion — nearly one-third of the total.” Media rights ($61B), sponsorships and in-venue ads ($52B), and pay-TV subscriptions ($49B) round out the top of the stack. Fantasy ($27B) and sports video games ($17B) are not small businesses either.

Seen via tweet. LeBron James is the only player in NBA playoff history ranked top-10 in every major statistical category — points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks.

Separately, you all know I’m a fanboy but what he’s pulled off this post-season as the oldest player in the league at 41, in year 23, and still being one of the best players on the floor every night is UNPRECEDENTED in modern sports, objectively. GOAT & best athlete, ever. Debate a wall.

WSJ. “Just 0.1% of accounts on Polymarket take home 67% of the profits.” WSJ analyzed 1.6 million Polymarket accounts going back to November 2022. Fewer than 2,000 accounts collectively netted ~$500M in profits; 70% of users overall are losing money, with the bottom 10% down ~$4,000 each.

🔥 AI & Big Tech

• Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO, transitioning to executive chairman on September 1, 2026. Senior VP of hardware engineering John Ternus, 50, takes over. Apple’s market cap grew from ~$350B to ~$4T during Cook’s 15-year run — roughly a 11x return, vs. ~5x for the S&P 500 over the same period (Apple Newsroom; Bloomberg)

• SpaceX has filed plans for a $55B Terafab semiconductor facility in Grimes County, Texas, in partnership with Tesla; some reports describe xAI as part of the broader Musk-company collaboration. Future phases could take the project much higher (CNBC, Tesla)

• 59% of Americans 18-29 said AI is a threat to their job prospects — more than immigration (31%) or outsourcing (48%). 41% said AI will make work less meaningful (Harvard Youth Poll, Fall 2025)

💼 Business & Money

• Solo travel was a ~$550B market in 2025 and is projected to roughly triple to ~$1.6T by 2033, ~14% CAGR (Custom Market Insights, via Morning Brew)

• 44 years: the median age of a US home, a record high. New construction hasn’t kept pace, and real structural repair costs are up 14% (Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies)

• Project Hail Mary, the Andy Weir adaptation starring Ryan Gosling, opened to $80.5M domestic / $141M global — Amazon MGM’s biggest debut to date and the studio’s first true theatrical hit since the MGM acquisition. Total gross is now around $630M+, the third-highest film of 2026 (Box Office Mojo; Variety)

• NASA’s Artemis II launched April 1 — the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972. Four astronauts travelled 252,760 miles from Earth, surpassing Apollo 13’s record by ~4,100 miles (NASA)

🏥 Health

• US obesity rate fell to 37% in 2025, down from 39.9% three years prior. GLP-1 use has more than doubled to 12.4% of adults since February 2024. The 40-49 age group saw the steepest obesity drop, ~4.3 points (Gallup)

• Fewer than 1 in 4 patients are still on a GLP-1 a year after starting, per a JAMA research letter from Dr. Jaime Almandoz (UT Southwestern). Adherence remains the open question on long-term obesity outcomes (NPR)

• Facial procedures rose 19% in 2025 to ~1.6M total. 57% of facial plastic surgeons report rising demand from patients under 30 (American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery)

🗳️ Politics & Society

• 57% of Americans 13+ — and 81% of teens — get at least some news from influencers or independent creators. Among teens, only 12% qualify as “avid” hard-news consumers (vs. 35% of adults 65+) (AP-NORC; see article below)

• Nearly 90% of sports viewing still happens on traditional TV/MVPDs, but digital live sports audiences are projected to grow 5.8% in 2026 vs. 0.4% for live sports overall (MNTN Research)

🎭 Culture, Sports & Entertainment

• 52% of American men ages 18-49 now have an active online sportsbook account, up from 22% of all Americans in early 2025 (Siena Research / St. Bonaventure, April 2026).

• Kalshi’s volume during the 2025 NFL season was ~90% sports — a single category basically eating the platform. Sports was also the biggest category on Polymarket last year (Sportico)

• What Young Workers Are Doing to AI-Proof Themselves (WSJ): The piece argues young grads are pivoting hard into trades, entrepreneurship, and emergency services because the jobs they were told to chase — software development, customer service, entry-level analyst roles — are the ones AI is hitting first. 22-25 year-olds in highly AI-exposed jobs have seen a 13% decline in employment since ChatGPT launched. Nearly 9 in 10 graduates in the class of 2026 say they’re worried about AI replacing entry-level roles, up from 64% just a year ago. The anecdotes are striking: a 22-year-old who dropped out of computer science to study electrical work, a 25-year-old who quit a six-figure Amazon AI job worried he was “training his replacement.”

• The Upper Middle Class Trap (Nick Maggiulli, Of Dollars And Data): Maggiulli’s argument: the upper middle class is stuck in a collective-action problem where everyone runs harder to stand still. Home prices per square foot rose 74% from 2014-2024 while average home size shrank 11%. Houses near top-rated school districts trade at a 78.6% premium to surrounding county averages. College applications are up 78% since 2015 while elite acceptance rates have plummeted. People are paying more and getting less — for housing, for schools, for the same access. The piece is short and worth reading in full because the framing reframes a lot of what gets called “lifestyle inflation” as something more structural.

• The Evolving News Landscape: Comparing Media Habits and Trust Between Teens and Adults (AP-NORC): A useful, sobering data set on how media consumption is splitting along generational lines. 57% of teens get news from social media daily, vs. 74% of adults 65+ relying on TV. Trust in any single source is low everywhere; local news still ranks highest. Worth reading alongside the FT chart on AI conversations above — the information environment is being reshaped from two directions at once.

• Live from Transition-AI 2026: Inside Google’s Massive AI Capex (Catalyst with Shayle Kann): Shayle interviews Amin Vahdat, Google’s chief technologist for AI infrastructure, on the $175-185B Google capex plan for 2026. Shayle frames the scale well: equivalent to Hungary’s GDP, 5-7x annual US electricity transmission spending, 7x NASA’s annual budget. Two arguments from Amin stuck with me. First, inference doesn’t require gigawatt-scale facilities. Vahdat says “you could go to much smaller deployments and still be able to do inference,” in the dozens of megawatts. Second, four-nines reliability is a relic — he thinks customers often prefer “two nines of availability and twice the capacity.”

• Jensen Huang LIVE: NVIDIA’s Future, Physical AI, Rise of the Agent, Inference Explosion, AI PR Crisis (All-In, recorded at GTC 2026): Huang outlines the structural shift from model training to continuous inference generation, positioning agentic AI and physical robotics as the next major vectors for compute demand. He pushes back against bubble narratives by detailing the sheer scale of AI factories required over the next decade, moving the conversation away from software speculation toward hard physical constraints and energy demands. Best for grasping the strategic reality of data center expansion and hardware capital expenditures.

• Jensen Huang: NVIDIA — The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution (Lex Fridman #494): Long-form (~2.5 hours) and far more technical than the All-In conversation. Best sections: extreme co-design and rack-scale engineering, the supply chain bottleneck discussion (memory and power), and a long detour into TSMC, Taiwan, and NVIDIA’s moat & history.

• The history and future of AI at Google, with Sundar Pichai (Cheeky Pint with John Collison and Elad Gil): Sundar frames 2026 as a supply-constrained year, with memory, power, and broader infrastructure constraints all in focus. He’s also explicit about the cultural shift back to “Googley” optimism internally after years of more cautious posture. Good companion to the Catalyst episode above.

• Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AI (No Priors with Sarah Guo): The framing Karpathy keeps coming back to: what happens when agents can design experiments, run them, and improve — with humans out of the loop? He talks through where coding agents actually break, the second-order effects of natural-language programming, his AutoResearch project (agents closing the loop on AI research itself), and what skills still matter in the AI era. The most personal section is on his own workflow — he says he’s barely written a line of code in months and is in “a state of psychosis” trying to figure out what’s possible.

• Everything You Know Is About to Collapse — David Friedberg (Modern Wisdom #1084 with Chris Williamson): A ~2 hour optimist’s case across AI, fusion, lunar manufacturing, age reversal, embryo selection, CRISPR, and agricultural innovation. Friedberg argues the convergence of these breakthroughs will reshape work and the economy faster than most people are pricing in. The biotech and agriculture sections are the strongest; the California fiscal sidebar is skippable.