Wisereads Vol. 123 — Inner Excellence by Jim Murphy, How Warren Buffett Did It, and more

Last week, we shared the autobiography of self-help pioneer Benjamin Franklin. This week, we’re featuring a preview of Inner Excellence, Jim Murphy’s viral guide to mastering the mind for peak performance.

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Andrej Karpathy, AI researcher and this newsletter’s most-highlighted author of the year, recounts the paradigm shifts that defined LLM progress in 2025, from reasoning: "The LLMs spontaneously develop strategies that look like 'reasoning' to humans - they learn to break down problem solving into intermediate calculations," to agents: "It's not just a website you go to like Google, it's a little spirit/ghost that 'lives' on your computer."

In a profile of the Bay Area’s biggest internet prankster, Riley Walz, writer Aadil Pickle recounts his most memorable hijinks and explores what makes Riley an unstoppable idea machine. "Find My Parking Cops: Find My Friends but it tracks San Francisco parking cops and all the tickets they give out" and the "Fast Food Index: Showing price disparities of fast food across the country to determine an area's cost of living."

Legendary value investor Seth A. Klarman, Baupost CEO and author of Margin of Safety, reflects on Warren Buffett’s legacy as he steps back from Berkshire Hathaway. "No one else has ever built such an investment fortune from scratch; it was as if he hit a lottery with an ever-growing payoff, though one based not on luck but on the consistent application of skillful effort."

Sandeep, a CEO turned advisor and investor who goes by "theMITmonk," shares a system for learning like the best. It begins with honoring your brain's limits: "If you dump a gallon of theory into a 4 oz bowl, how much do you think it will retain? Well, exactly 4 oz of it, right? And it's a trap that has an almost 100% failure rate. Today's AI can run millions of processes in parallel, but our human brain cannot do that. We're built for serial learning, serial processing, one transfer at a time."

Likening AI to breakthroughs like the steam engine and steel, Notion cofounder Ivan Zhao predicts that a transformation of the knowledge economy is just around the corner. "Every miracle material required people to stop seeing the world via the rearview mirror and start imagining the new one. Carnegie looked at steel and saw city skylines. Lancashire mill owners looked at steam engines and saw factory floors free from rivers.We are still in the waterwheel phase of AI, bolting chatbots onto workflows designed for humans."

In their latest paper, researchers at Google DeepMind reframe AGI and its safety recommendations for a "patchwork" of agents. "AGI, in this view, is not an entity but a 'state of affairs': a mature, decentralized economy of agents where the primary human role is orchestration and verification, a system that discovers and serves real-world needs far more efficiently than any centralized model ever could."

Former Cubs outfielder turned Olympic coach Jim Murphy shares his formula for peak performance in Inner Excellence, the book that sparked national curiosity when Philadelphia’s A.J. Brown was spotted reading it on the sidelines during an NFL game. Though Murphy’s work began with athletes, his approach to cultivating mental clarity resonates with high performers across every field.

"We don’t pursue peak performance for the trophy or adoration, but to discover something within us and experience something we’ve never experienced before. We compete for the competition itself, to fully experience the moment and feel fully alive. We do this to help others—including our opponents—do the same thing, so we can all learn and grow and raise the level of excellence in our lives. We crave adversity and challenges as a means of seeing the truth about who we are in that moment and therefore who we can become."

If you enjoy the preview, you can grab the full title wherever you get your ebooks. Starting Monday, Inner Excellence will be on sale for one week at $2.99 in the US and Canada.

Ex-poker pro and lawyer Cate Hall writes Useful Fictions on agency and truth-seeking. From Rightness is a prison: "But once you get used to loosening your grip, the same beliefs can transform into lenses you can slip on and off, experimenting with how the world looks in each tint... What began as constraint becomes play, and that play is the beginning of real freedom."