Gianfranco's December 2025 Reading List

What’s worth reading this month—and why does it matter?

Each day, I devote three hours to reading. Occasionally an author writes a piece that feels like a gift—crafted with intention for the reader. It tends to be a piece that encourages a reader to pause, invites them to feel how a strong idea, delivered with empathy, can resonate.

Few writers achieve this.

Each selection did one of three things for me: it sharpened a thesis, challenged a prior, or opened a new line of inquiry. That’s the bar for inclusion.

In this curation practice, I believe the hero of this story isn’t the author of any single essay, nor me as curator, but you—the reader.

If these pieces don’t move you, I haven’t honored the attention you’ve given me. Hold me to that.

Use this as a tasting menu: no set order, categories for context, and a brief note on what each means for builders and capital allocators.

AI Systems & Interfaces

• How to Sound Like an Expert in Any AI Bubble Debate - Derek Thompson & Timothy B. Lee
  • The AI-bubble conversation now runs on a fixed deck of 12 stats about capex, productivity, circular financing, adoption, and agentic capabilities. Thompson and Lee show how the same numbers can support either a looming overbuild or a rational, profit-funded bet on compounding model performance. The real disagreement hides in assumptions about how fast organizations learn to turn generic capability into durable revenue.
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• Everything Is Television - Derek Thompson
  • Thompson argues that all media—social feeds, podcasts, even AI platforms—are converging toward television’s defining trait: continuous “flow.” What began as text or radio now resolves into endless video designed for distracted, half-present viewers. This shift erodes literacy and inwardness, turning culture from paragraphs to scenes and thinking to scrolling. The algorithmic feed, not the program, becomes the product—television as both medium and metaphor for modern attention.
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• Agent Labs Are Product-First; Model Labs Are Product-Last - Akash Bajwa
  • Bajwa argues value is tilting to agent labs that own users, context, and traces—then retrofit models below, above, and around them. Data visibility creates a moat—diffs, tests, CI, acceptance—enabling narrow models and routing to cut COGS while keeping frontier optionality. The constraint is Business-Model-Product-Fit: consumption pricing and multi-model substitutability determine durability more than raw model IQ. Agents win where they design rewardable surfaces and close the loop between telemetry → rewards → releases.
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• Thoughts on the AI Buildout - Dwarkesh Patel & Romeo Dean
  • The constraint has shifted from fabs to everything upstream of the data hall: power gear, turbines, transformers, and especially labor. Hyperscalers can pull forward supply by overpaying on the 30% non-chip stack and by going off-grid with fast-to-deploy gas, favoring modular prefab compute halls over bespoke builds. If AI demand underdelivers, the lasting asset is an industrialized data-center supply chain and expanded grid. On long timelines, China’s manufacturing scale becomes the default advantage.
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• Short Form Video Is a Cancer of the Mind - Adam Singer
  • Short-form video is framed as a mass, legal addiction: a review of 71 studies covering 98k people links TikTok-style feeds to weaker attention, poorer impulse control, worse sleep and higher stress across youth and adults. The design trains “rapid disengagement” from anything not instantly rewarding. Singer connects this to surging remedial math rates and a phone-native generation’s loneliness and nihilism. At scale, the format quietly degrades the human capital modern economies depend on.
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Operator Playbooks

• There Are Two Kinds of Investors: Top Down and Bottom Up - Pace Capital
  • Edge compounds when it’s concentrated: top-down investors excel at underwriting people; bottom-up at underwriting businesses. Their sourcing mirrors the bias—referrals for the former, outbound for the latter—and even reading habits signal the lens. Crossing lanes degrades outcomes because conviction forms from the wrong evidence. The market is the shared constraint, and alpha accrues to clarity of edge rather than balance.
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• Focus on the Monkey - Sangeeth Peruri
  • Peruri reframes “focus on the monkey” from a product metaphor to a go-to-market lesson: the hardest problem in startups isn’t building the thing, it’s getting people to adopt it. Listerine’s 50× leap—from floor cleaner to cure for “halitosis”—proves distribution and framing can outperform innovation itself. His own startup and education nonprofit echoed the same truth: even great products stall without a scalable GTM. The monkey, it turns out, is always distribution.
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• How to Keep Winning - Amjad Masad
  • Masad reframes winning as survival plus compounding: avoid terminal risk, pivot into the biggest wave, and score progress on an internal scoreboard when external milestones lag. He favors building hard infrastructure to keep option value high and escape vendor ceilings. Clean play and giving back compound trust, talent, and distribution. Subtext: durable advantage comes from paranoid downside management paired with a public, repeatable idea-generation engine.
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Capital & Macro

• Surviving the AI Capex Boom - Kai Wu
  • Wu argues the AI buildout echoes rail and fiber cycles: massive capex, supply gluts, and weak equity returns for the biggest spenders. The Mag7’s pivot from asset-light moats to utility-like depreciation and circular deals raises valuation and balance-sheet risk tied to AI’s prisoner’s dilemma. Historically, asset-heavy and high capex growers underperform across sectors and regions. A value lens favors diversified “AI early adopters” with lower capital intensity and saner multiples over infra leaders.
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• Thoughts on Frauds - Byrne Hobart
  • The scariest frauds don’t come from cartoon villains, but from competent managers who treat a tiny earnings miss as intolerable. Smooth 15% growth targets, discretionary accounting, and easy access to liquidity quietly convert “just this once” tweaks into a parallel fake balance sheet. The fraud ends when cash and reported profits diverge too far, usually in a downturn. As careers and status get more tracked, that underlying pressure intensifies.
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• Vendor Financing - Byrne Hobart
  • Nvidia’s $100bn OpenAI deal is less a quirky financing structure than a classic move by a choke-point supplier: front the capex, capture upside, and accept that some assets will later look absurd in hindsight. Historical analogs from Cisco to Brunswick show vendor financing often ends in overcapacity and write-offs, yet the arms race logic for customers makes such deals unavoidable. Nvidia is effectively choosing its potential price-setter before someone else does.
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People & Purpose

• Interest Is Everything - Oliver Burkeman
  • Burkeman argues that orienting work around what genuinely interests you reliably produces more useful output than guessing what others want. “Interesting” beats “successful” as a life goal because it engages fully with experience instead of treating life as a problem to solve. True interest attracts others, whereas chasing external relevance drains energy. In an age of AI-generated content, felt human curiosity is the differentiator.
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• The Perils of Audience Capture - Gurwinder
  • Gurwinder shows how creators become caricatures built by their metrics: the “looking-glass self” shifts from loved ones to strangers and algorithms, so feedback loops harden a persona that soon feels like the only authentic self. Examples from Nikocado to political pundits illustrate escalation and radicalization. For anyone building a public-facing product or brand, the real moat becomes audience selection, because audience expectations can quietly set your roadmap.
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• Notes on Being a Man, and Advice for Young Men Who Are Feeling Lost - Tim Ferriss
  • Tim Ferriss spotlights Scott Galloway’s mission to rescue young men from drift and despair through structured mentorship and self-mastery. Galloway’s “Scott Method” starts with four controllables—fitness, nutrition, money, work—before relationships. His approach blends blunt realism with behavioral engineering: reclaim time from screens, build financial independence, seek community, and develop resilience through rejection. The core thesis: meaning follows discipline, not the other way around.
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