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: Been 2 months of radio silence so apologies! Been busy traveling, planning a move, and enjoying some time home after being on the road.
I was on Modo Energy’s Transmission podcast last month chatting data centers, AI, public equities, and sustainable investing.
I got two appearances coming up soon on Build, Repeat. (A Paces Podcast) and Sunya Stories in the coming weeks!
Must Watch/Read:
All Her Fault on Peacock was an awesome ‘whodunnit’ series, starting Sara Snook (Shiv from Succession!). There are some ridiculous twists & turns but it is wildly entertaining and the best one since The Undoing imo.
Brett Caughran recounts his shift from a high-status hedge fund role in NYC to Scottsdale life, where initial relief from burnout gave way to 18 months of depression triggered by lost professional identity and external validation. Referencing Richard Rohr’s “Falling Upward,” he interprets this identity loss as a vital threshold in mid-life spiritual growth, where ego detachment, often via failure or necessary suffering, fosters inner purpose over achievement.
Source: Gallup: “After peaking at a record high of 39.9% in 2022, the U.S. adult obesity rate has gradually declined to 37.0% in 2025. This is a statistically meaningful decrease representing an estimated 7.6 million fewer obese adults compared with three years ago. Diagnoses of diabetes — a lifetime disease that can be managed but not cured — have now reached an all-time high of 13.8%.”
Source: Axios “HBO dominated the Emmys for years, in both drama and comedy. It’s still a major force — it tied Netflix this year for 30 total awards — but this year’s results show power shifting toward Big Tech.”
Source: Gallup: “Americans have been placing less importance on the value of a college education over the past 15 years, to the point that about a third (35%) now rate it as very important… When last asked to rate the importance of college in 2019, just over half of U.S. adults, 53%, said it was very important, but that was already lower than the 70% found in 2013 and 75% in 2010”
Source: Bruce Mehlman “America will owe more in 2035 as a percentage of GDP than we did after the Revolutionary War, Civil War & WWI / Great Influenza combined.”
Source: CSIS. Polarizing time in America and it’s a tragedy to see political violence of any stripe. Interesting graph of the trends over time by orientation given a lot of false claims out there. Lot of caveats with this type of analysis but interesting nonetheless.
Source: Bloomberg. “OpenAI has completed a deal to help employees sell shares in the company at a $500 billion valuation, making it the world’s largest startup.”
Source: Axios. New articles generated by AI briefly outnumbered those written by humans online, but the two are now roughly equal, per a new report from SEO firm Graphite.”
Source: Polymarket. The aggregate accuracy of all past resolved polymarkets over different time slots is 90%+ accuracy.
Source: Paul Kedrosky. “OnlyFans generates $37.6M per employee, over ten times more than Nvidia’s $3.6M.”
Source: Stefan Schubert. “It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline.”
Source: Derek Thompson/Nate Silver. “in the last 20 years, The share of drives ending in punts, interceptions, and fumbles has declined by 20 percent. The share of drives ending in touchdowns or field goals has increased by 30 percent.”
Source: Derek Thompson “Studies evaluating tens of millions of miles driven by Waymo have found that, compared with human-driven vehicles, the company’s cars are involved in 96 percent fewer vehicle-to-vehicle crashes at intersections; 90 percent fewer bodily-injury claims; 92 percent fewer pedestrian injuries; and 88 percent fewer property damage claims.”
🔥 AI & Big Tech
OpenAI releases Sora 2 and the Sora app for creating AI-generated short videos (OpenAI)
OpenAI launches Atlas, an AI-native web browser competing with Chrome and Perplexity (OpenAI)
Amazon Web Services outage disrupts ~30% of global internet traffic; losses likely in the billions (The Guardian)
75% of large U.S. firms report positive ROI on AI; two-thirds spend >$5M annually, >10% spend $20M+ (Wharton)
Meta cuts hundreds in its AI unit amid concerns over weak breakthroughs while hiring aggressively in a newer division (Axios)
YouTube paid creators $100B+ over four years but income remains top-heavy; <6% earn $200K+, ~50% earn <$15K (Morning Brew)
💼 Business & Money
Elon Musk wins approval for a Tesla pay package worth up to $1T over the next decade (Reuters)
Private air travel spend among major U.S. companies is up 76.7% since 2020 (Equilar)
🗳️ Politics & Society
Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction (PRRI)
Nancy Pelosi will retire in 2027 after nearly 40 years in Congress
~50M Americans live with limited or no access to local news (Medill School)
🎭 Culture, Sports & Entertainment
Bad Bunny to headline the Super Bowl LX halftime show (ESPN)
NBA scandal: Chauncey Billups and Terry Rozier arrested in a game-rigging gambling probe (WSJ)
🏃♂️ Lifestyle & Consumer Trends
Consumers will spend $860M on pet costumes this year (NRF)
Top 50 marathons generate $5.2B annually; 7 majors make up half (Brand Finance)
🕵️ Crime & Wild Events
Four-minute Louvre heist nets eight priceless French Crown Jewels (Al Jazeera)
AI Will Not Make You Rich (Colossus) – Jerry Neumann argues that generative AI looks less like the early PC boom and more like container shipping: a transformative technology where brutal competition and capex mean most of the surplus accrues to customers and incumbents, not today’s model or app startups.
The End of Thinking (Derek Thompson) – Derek Thompson argues the real AI crisis isn’t “thinking machines” taking our jobs but a post-literate culture where students, professionals, and parents are outsourcing reading, writing, and even diagnosis to LLMs and infinite scroll. It’s a well-written wake-up call to treat deep reading and writing as “time under tension” training for your brain in an age that rewards mental atrophy.
Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead (Consumer Reports) – Consumer Reports tests 23 popular protein powders and shakes and finds that more than two-thirds exceed its own safety threshold for lead per serving, especially plant-based brands like Naked Nutrition and Huel, raising serious questions about daily use.
Colleges Face a Financial Reckoning: The University of Chicago Is Exhibit A (WSJ) – This case study of UChicago shows the precarious financial positions many universities find themselves in: 14 straight years of deficits, ambitious expansion funded with debt, and now a $288 million budget hole forcing hiring freezes, construction slowdowns, and deep cuts to Ph.D. programs.
AI artists blow up on country music chart (Axios) – Two artists generated by AI are #1 and #3 on the country digital-song sales charts!
Plain English – “This Is How the AI Bubble Could Burst”: Derek Thompson and investor Paul Kedrosky dissect the $300–400B/year AI capex boom, showing how off-balance-sheet financing and concentrated data-center bets could morph into systemic risk.
Invest Like the Best – “Inside the Trillion-Dollar AI Buildout” (Dylan Patel):
Dylan Patel maps the physical and financial plumbing of the AI boom from GPU supply chains and multi-GW “AI factories” to OpenAI–Nvidia–Oracle deal loops. Most helpful podcast on the AI landscape this year.
BG2 – “NVIDIA: OpenAI, Future of Compute, and the American Dream”: Jensen Huang makes the full-throated bull case that general-purpose computing is over, detailing a $100B+ OpenAI partnership, an annual GPU roadmap, and a world where AI factories, not CPUs, power white-collar GDP. This is the bull case for AI.
Dwarkesh Podcast – “Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away”:
Andrej Karpathy argues we’re in the decade of agents and walks through why today’s models lack continual learning and robust employee-level reliability, why reinforcement learning is overrated, and how AGI will likely blend into boring 2% GDP growth rather than arrive as a sci-fi singularity. Also, one of the most helpful podcasts on understanding the AI landscape this year.
Dwarkesh / Satya Nadella – “How Microsoft thinks about AGI”: Satya Nadella sketches Microsoft’s AGI thesis: frontier models face a “winner’s curse” because they’re one copy away from commoditization, so durable value will sit in the scaffolding—distribution, data, and platforms. Pragmatic layout of what the future of AI looks like and where Microsoft plays in that future.
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