Welcome to The Nightcrawler—my weekly collection of essays and interviews about technology, science, investing, and the art of long-term thinking. I’m the Managing Partner at Nightview Capital—and author of the forthcoming book OUTLAST. Follow me X and Instagram.
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In this evening’s email…
Quote of the week: “Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Read our deep-dive on Amazon robotics and AI
A few months ago, I ordered a bottle of vitamins on Amazon. Nothing special. But about two hours later, the package was already on my doorstep. That moment triggered a bigger question for me: What invisible machinery springs into motion every time we hit “Buy Now”?
To find out, Daniel Crowley, CFA (my partner at Nightview Capital) and I went deep. We toured a nearly one-million-square-foot Amazon Robotics fulfillment center just outside Denver. We spoke to former Amazon engineers and logistics leaders around the world via our partnership with InPractise. We sifted through hundreds of pages of internal documents, analyst transcripts, and primary interviews.
And this week, we published our findings: a full-scale investigative research report on how Amazon’s AI and robotics strategy is quietly reshaping the economics of retail. The report also explores why we believe Amazon’s early bet on automation is beginning to pay dividends—and how it could catalyze a meaningful margin inflection in the years ahead.
- Key quote: “Years of infrastructure buildout, automation, and logistics optimization are beginning to bear fruit, and we expect operating margins to expand meaningfully over the next 2–3 years. In our view, Wall Street continues to underestimate this margin inflection, which we believe could serve as a powerful catalyst for stock appreciation as the true earnings power of Amazon’s retail engine becomes increasingly evident. To tell the story of how Amazon makes it happen and why we believe it gives Amazon a competitive edge, we’ll start with what happens the moment you place an order on that bottle of vitamins. We’ll then follow the high-speed journey of a single package, as it travels through fulfillment centers, regional hubs, and finally into the hands of delivery drivers racing the clock.”
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Why quality matters more than ever
For a recent Long Game column in Big Think, I sat down with David Perell—a prolific writer and thinker who’s built a following of nearly half a million people on Twitter. But here’s the twist: despite the size of his audience, Perell believes audience size is now overrated. “If you want to reach top people, it’s all about quality,” he told me.
In an age of infinite metrics and mass reach, he argues that true leverage no longer comes from how many people you reach—but from who actually cares. As he says, we’re shifting from the “age of distribution” to the “age of engagement.” And in this new era, depth beats breadth. If you create something genuinely valuable—whether it’s content, products, or services—the right people will find it, amplify it, and stick around.
- Key quote: “The age of distribution was about getting your work seen. You’d post on social, drive people to a newsletter. Audience growth was slow but sticky, like the revenues of a SaaS company. Consistency was everything. Publish three times a week, grow your list, build over time. But now? We’re in the age of engagement. If you publish something that pops, it doesn’t matter if you have 100 or 100,000 followers. The algorithm will push it. Even tiny accounts can get millions of impressions because reach is decreasingly about how many followers you have and increasingly about how much people are engaging with what you’ve shared.”
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OUTLAST field notes:
I recently spoke with Luca Dell’Anna, author of 11 books on long-term thinking, risk, and behavioral psychology. We discussed ergodicity—not just the idea that survival is necessary for long-term success, but that it is the defining constraint. In business, individuals and organizations often optimize for short-term growth, but that pursuit typically increases risk—ironically reducing the probability of ever realizing long-term exponential outcomes.
“I’m not just saying survival matters,” Luca told me. “I’m saying it matters more than performance—at least over long time frames.” In other words: staying in the game beats winning early.
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A few more links I enjoyed:
Join the Integration Economy – via Tom Morgan
- Key quote: “Money is one of the biggest causes of energetic dissociation in the Western world. Money is neither intrinsically good or bad. Like everything else in the universe, money is energy and it needs to flow freely. And, like everything else, dissociation makes it potentially destructive. A cancerous approach to money would be pursuing it for its own sake, then stockpiling in bank accounts rather than letting it flow through the system. Money then starts growing at the cost of life.”
The Case for Sabbaticals – via Rohit Krishnan
- Key quote: “Today, it’s nearly impossible for most professionals to enjoy such intellectual freedom. In the always-on economy, taking months or a year for unstructured exploration has become extinct. Two weeks of hurried vacation is the norm, if you’re lucky. Sabbaticals are a quaint relic, reserved for tenured academics. Yet history reveals the immense value of this “long time.” And we’re paying the price. Creativity has stagnated across industries. The few who escape enjoy epiphanies like Einstein in 1905. The always-on economy has robbed most professionals of this gift.”
From the archives:
The Map Is Not the Territory – via Farnam Street
- Key quote: “The map of reality is not reality. Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because maps are reductions of what they represent. If a map were to represent the territory with perfect fidelity, it would no longer be a reduction and thus would no longer be useful to us. A map can also be a snapshot from a point in time, representing something that no longer exists. This is important to keep in mind as we think through problems and seek to make better decisions.”
Click here to learn more about Nightview Capital, the long-term investment firm where I am Managing Partner and Director of Research.
