My latest in @bigthink The 250-year-old company that survived by refusing to lay people off bigthink.com/the-long-game/t…

Sharing my favorite quotes from @EricMarkowitz's recent speech at VALUEx BRK 2026 on endurance and stewardship and the story of Hoshi Ryokan: Outlier of endurance boils down to stewardship. Stewardship is a philosophy of care. It removes the ego from every aspect of life with a total focus on simply serving those around us. It is a belief, a duty, and a moral ambition and obligation to cultivate and maintain the business's eternal health, which requires patience, restraint, and the utmost respect for the product/service. In 718 AD, a Buddhist monk named Taicho Daishi discovered a hot spring, but he did not claim it for himself, commercialize it, or profit from it. He adopted a young man and named him Zengoro Hoshi to help build a small inn around the flowing water. He asked for a promise that the spring would be protected for all future generations, so it could be preserved for weary and sick travelers seeking healing. Since then, 47 generations across 13 centuries, this oldest independently run hot spring hotel welcomes all customers, from "monks to emperors", from the poorest to the richest. It exists to serve everyone, not to maximize its shareholder value or to optimize for the highest-paying customer. Unsurprisingly, a business will go through struggles. Learn from water. Water adapts and finds a way. While one might be an owner of a business, stewardship is to be a caretaker, ensuring the business survives and thrives for the next generation, and a gardener, cultivating the property over time through good seasons and bad. When you treat a business not as something to be "built" or "grown," but instead approach it with care, with duty, and with love, you create the conditions for something that can outlast you. A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit. A steward's goal is to hand the business to the next generation in a better condition than when she inherited it. Ownership is temporary. Everything is temporary within our hands. You own nothing. You are simply passing it down. That is stewardship, a daily act of selfless love. Find your hot spring. Find the thing you believe is worth passing on. Take care of it. And who knows, maybe one day, long after we are all gone, your business will celebrate its 1,308th birthday, too.

AI is not the root problem. According to Eric Markowitz @ericmarkowitz, AI is a mirror reflecting a system that already treats human value as expendable. Read the full article: bigthink.com/the-long-game/i…

My latest essay in @bigthink: How helping your rivals makes you harder to beat bigthink.com/the-long-game/h…

To those in Omaha this week for Berkshire: I’m hosting a Nightcrawler meetup at the Catalyst Lounge on Friday, May 1 from 5-6:30pm. Come say hi! The Catalyst Lounge, Farnam Hotel · 1299 Farnam Street (corner of Farnam & South 13th) · catalystlounge.com

Eric Markowitz @ericmarkowitz shares how a small shop in Kyoto connects mastery with meditation. Read the full article: bigthink.com/the-long-game/m…

100% @tferriss . To add: One of the reasons I’ve been so emphatic about original research and reporting for Outlast is precisely this. So far, I’ve traveled across 5 continents and a couple dozen countries to interview hundreds of folks from a couple dozen countries. No AI could do this, and few humans (besides me) would be insane enough to attempt it. If you want to stand out, DO something original that cannot be replicated easily. The value will be immense. Use AI to help you in the process, but remember it’s just a tool. Also, the *actual* journey of creation will be more rewarding than any finished output. This is true across any field you work in. It’s an incredible time to create. The barriers are low and the opportunity is high. But quality, originality, and authenticity are the key advantages now. NOT speed or scale. Find something you’re crazy obsessed with, and just throw yourself into it. Use AI to help you in the process, but take your fleshy body on a quest. Constraints are good. Friction is good. If you find that it’s too easy, you’re not creating something of value. Make it hard, but make it fun.

One of the joys of partnering with @bigthink for The Long Game column has been watching the company—one of the few media organizations I truly admire—establish a beautiful print magazine. In a world of AI slop, this is the future... an authentic expression of human creativity packaged in a tangible artifact. Congrats to @seantmcvey, @BobbyHugh, @chandlertuttle, @kristinhouser @KristinJHouser, Stephen Johnson and the whole team, including all of the contributors. What a joy to see this vision come to life! Excited to receive my copy

On writing and thinking and AI.