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This is an installment of The Nightcrawler, a weekly collection of thought-provoking articles on tech, innovation, and long-term investing by Eric Markowitz of Nightview Capital. You can get articles like this one straight to your inbox every Friday evening by subscribing above. Follow him on X: @EricMarkowitz.

For the latest edition of The Long Game, I spoke with Andrew Markell, a conversation based on several interviews over the past few months.

Earlier this year, Andrew and I were introduced through a mutual friend. We first met in person on a trail in Forest Park in Portland, Oregon, where we hiked for two hours, talking about how societies — and people — fracture under pressure. A couple of weeks later, I found myself in his driveway, sweat pouring down my back as we practiced yiquan, the martial art he’s mastered, and a technique that trains the nervous system to stay coherent under stress.

Andrew is part philosopher, part fighter — a trauma specialist and co-founder of The Dawn Collective — and he’s spent decades teaching everyone from special forces veterans to investors to CEOs how to find clarity amidst an increasingly chaotic world.

Of all his provocative ideas, the one that lingers with me most is his argument that while “resilience” is celebrated, it’s often a dead end in practice. He’s urged me to reframe resilience itself as desire. “We’ve glorified resilience as this virtue,” he told me. “Bounce back, return to normal, weather the storm. But the literal definition of resilience is the ability of a system to return to its original baseline after being disturbed.” He continues:

Key quote: “That’s fine if you’re a rubber band. But in nature — and in human systems — survival doesn’t come from returning to where you were. It comes from* becoming something you weren’t before. *The most enduring systems — biological, social, or economic — don’t revert. They evolve. Resilience is static. It’s about homeostasis. Evolution is dynamic. It’s driven by dissonance, by collapse, by moments of rupture that force entirely new structures of being to emerge.”

The link between Steve Jobs and Shakespeare

A few months ago, I spoke with Angus Fletcher about the strange, underrated powers of human imagination.

This week, Angus has a brilliant new essay in Big Think that connects Shakespeare’s King Lear to the life of Steve Jobs. It’s a characteristically original piece: part literary criticism, part business philosophy.

Angus argues that Jobs’s teenage encounter with King Lear shaped his entire approach to innovation, teaching him to “think different” by amplifying what was strange, rather than refining what was conventional. In other words, Jobs effectively broke reality, just like Lear.

**Key quote: **“By asking Jobs why he ‘related’ to King Lear, Isaacson reveals that he himself reads Shakespeare as a source of relatable characters, people with whom we have something in common. This way of reading Shakespeare isn’t unusual; it’s how we’re taught to study literature in school. School approaches literature through logic, and logic has a specific tool for analyzing literature: interpretation. When we encounter King Lear outside the classroom, however, we read it differently. Instead of analyzing it for conventional personality types, we’re struck by its wild originality.”

A few more links I enjoyed:

Finding Quality Through Power Laws – via The Art of Quality

Key quote: “‍Early in life John [Candeto] was struck by the notion that there is a fabric-pattern to reality, and we can learn some of it. That realization sparked a pursuit: to find the patterns that give rise to the good, the true, and the beautiful. As he dug deeper, John began to recognize clear patterns of quality in the natural world — across organisms, species, and galaxies — and saw the same patterns reflected in the social world: in cities, companies, and people. These patterns, he realized, follow power laws. And wherever power laws appear, they serve as a kind of signal — a beacon — for impact.”

What Are We Becoming? – via Tom Morgan

Key quote: “‍If [Tim] Freke’s work is right, the world of ideas is likely to be more important than most of us think. Collectively synthesizing transformational truths isn’t a distraction; it might be the most emergent level of our experience. We have developed the remarkable power to comprehend abstractions like financial derivatives or corporate law. If [Dr. Michael] Levin’s work is right, I believe we need to take the idea of energetic charge more seriously.”

Sign up for The Nightcrawler Newsletter

A weekly collection of thought-provoking articles on tech, innovation, and long-term investing from Nightview Capital’s Eric Markowitz.