Lessons from two of the greatest investors of all time
- Main Story: In his new book author/investor Alex Morris distills decades of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger’s wisdom into something timeless.
- Buffett and Munger taught that endurance often comes from saying “no.”
- Also among this week’s stories: The resilience of oak trees, soul over scale, and humanity’s last invention.
I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Alex Morris over the last few years. He’s one of the most thoughtful investors I know: measured, patient, and relentlessly focused on quality over noise.
This week, for my Long Game column in Big Think, I spoke with him about his recent book — Buffett and Munger Unscripted — which draws entirely from primary sources: decades of Berkshire Hathaway transcripts and letters.
Many books have been written about Berkshire Hathaway’s architects, but Alex’s stands out for its clarity. He distills decades of Buffett and Munger’s wisdom into something timeless. “Optimism without discipline is dangerous,” Alex says. “But discipline without optimism is paralyzing. Buffett and Munger managed to hold both.”
We talked about many themes, including restraint, scale, and why authenticity compounds over time. Like Berkshire, Alex’s own work at The Science of Hitting embodies those same principles: stay small, think long-term, and focus on what endures.
Key quote: “From the beginning, I made a bet on quality over scale in my own business, The Science of Hitting, an investment research service. I never aimed for 100,000 subscribers. I wanted the right readers — the thousand true fans, as Kevin Kelly put it. That shaped everything: pricing, cadence, consistency. Yes, growth is tempting — launching podcasts, videos, new products — but every expansion dilutes focus. Buffett and Munger taught that endurance often comes from saying ‘no.’ They weren’t empire builders in the traditional sense; they acquired selectively, avoided bad businesses, and stuck to principles. For me, it’s the same: better to serve a smaller, dedicated community with integrity than to chase scale at the expense of quality.”
Roots — and the art of endurance
Speaking of Berkshire — at the shareholder meeting in Omaha this May, I spent some time with my friend Paul Higgins, who shares my fascination with systems thinking and long-term endurance.
Paul recently wrote a beautiful piece titled “What Oak Trees Teach Us About Building Enduring Companies.” Drawing on Laurent Tillon’s Being an Oak, Paul explores how a single oak grows for 250 years, and argues that enduring companies do the same.
Most businesses are built like machines: they are optimized for control and efficiency. But living systems evolve. As Paul writes: “The oak doesn’t try to grow. It creates conditions where growth is inevitable.” A simple truth — and a profound one.
Key quote: “I started with an oak tree because it captures something essential. When you stop trying to control outcomes and start creating conditions for health, something remarkable happens. The organism begins to organize itself toward outcomes you couldn’t have commanded into existence. The oak doesn’t try to grow. It creates conditions where growth is inevitable. Where each element contributes to the health of others, where resources cycle efficiently, where regeneration is constant, where adaptation happens continuously.”
OUTLAST field notes: The return of the small
Something I’ve been thinking about lately: we’re living through a time of overwhelming abundance.
Too much of everything — information, media, products, choices. I was reminded of it while moving homes recently and realizing just how much stuff we’ve accumulated. (How, exactly, did we end up with 12 cutting boards?) It’s a ridiculous kind of privilege — to have so much when so many people don’t — but it still says something about the world we live in.
Everywhere you look, there’s more. More noise, more sameness. And yet, the more we have, the more we crave what’s rare. So in a world of abundance, scarcity holds the real value.
Why does this matter? For the last few decades, scale has ruled business. Bigger platforms, larger networks, infinite distribution. But with the rise of AI, that logic is flipping. When algorithms can generate anything — text, images, even products — what matters most isn’t scale. It’s soul.
So here’s a view I’m forming: I think we’re entering an age when small companies, led by small teams, will rise again. The winners will be those who make something truly unique.
As consumers tune out the infinite sameness, they’ll seek authenticity: the handmade, the local, the deeply considered. Big companies shouldn’t fear other giants — they should fear the thousands of small ones built on care and craft. Quality will be the new moat. Success won’t be measured in scale, but in sincerity.
In a world of infinite replication, the rarest thing left will be something — or someone — real.
A few more links I enjoyed:
The Last Invention – via Longview
Key quote: “The AI revolution has begun — the product of a seventy year quest by scientists, mathematicians, and visionaries who set out to build machines that could think. But what began as a fringe idea has now become one of the most powerful forces of the 21st century. This is the story of that journey: its rivalries, its competing visions of utopia and apocalypse, and the race to build what may be humanity’s last invention.” (H/T Steve Schramm)
AI diffusion – via MBI Deep Dives
Key quote: “Overall, the big takeaway from the paper is while global AI adoption is currently concentrated in wealthy nations and strongly correlated with GDP, usage rates among connected populations in developing countries are pretty similar across the world which implies that the primary barrier to worldwide AI diffusion is access to internet itself.”
