Neal Stephenson is Better than the Movie
and Movies are better than Streaming
Did you know that if you read enough unusual newsletters, or spend enough time wandering the corners of X, you eventually stumble onto a writer named Neal Stephenson?
He writes long, wonderful books.
Books that predicted many of the historical moments we are living through right now.
Not predicted like a fortune-teller but predicted because he understands incentives better than half the analysts on television.
And since today’s cover starts with a book, let me say something clearly:
The book is always better than the movie.
And the movie is always better than streaming.
Because everything begins with the idea.
If it “ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.”
Cinema is downstream of writing.
Streaming is downstream of cinema.
Streaming is strictly for business, while writing is not.
Writers don’t “sell out” to big corporations.
They don’t retire into the sunset.
They keep writing.
And very often, it’s the obscure writers — not the blockbuster — that ends up predicting the future.
Stephenson is one of those writers.
Remember Back to the Future II?
The old sports almanac?
The kid who finds a book from the future and suddenly knows exactly how the next chapter plays out when he revisits the past?
That’s the feeling I’m talking about with this writer
Not prophecy but Pattern.
Not magic but Recognition.
Because every now and then you come across a book, an idea, a framework —
something that quietly tells you where the world is heading before the world gets there.
For me, Neal Stephenson is one of those discoveries.
Maybe he is prescient.
Maybe he was exposed to the right circles.
Maybe, like Scott Adams or Mike Cernovich,
he has an ear for where incentives and technology collide.
Whatever the reason, he saw things early. Just Google his name and you will be blown away.
The Netflix buyout of Warner Brothers and outspending one of the world’s wealthiest men shouldn’t surprise anyone who has read him.
We are now living inside the worlds he wrote decades ago.
Let’s talk about Warner Brothers.
The legendary studio.
Humphrey Bogart.
The Wizard of Oz.
Bugs Bunny.
The foundation of American cinema.
Imagine that entire institution being bought out by Netflix,
a company that began by mailing DVDs in bright red envelopes
and ended up becoming the algorithm that controls half of America’s imagination.
It sounds like a movie plot.
And honestly, it feels like one.
From 2000. When AOL the big new media company that was changing the world buys Time Warner and in a matter of months the entire stock market collapses.
Will history repeat? Or will it Rhyme?
So for my illustration and what you are probably asking is:
How do you know which book is the almanac for the future?
How do you know which idea actually matters?
It’s simple.
The book has to speak to you.
It has to sharpen the way you see the world.
It has to give you a frame of reference
to navigate the chaos that confuses everyone else.
So you can fact check this in your world of day to day living.
Stephenson did that for me.
He helped me see patterns long before I had words for them.
And if I’m being honest,
another person I’ve seen develop that same pattern-recognition,
at least in markets and incentives,
is myself.
I tend to spot things early.
I tend to see narrative shifts before they hit the headlines.
And more importantly,
I tend to translate them into something an investor can actually use.
How? I spend a lot of my time and money investing in great writers and research that a few people on Substack help me with. Just visit the section in my profile that shows who I am paying for.
I try hard to understand the writers frameworks and see if it make sense to my world view or if I need to revise my conception.
What you are receiving is clarity a bit earlier enough that you can position yourself before the crowd wakes up.
That’s why I write this.
That’s what this newsletter is for.
And let me add something practical about investing when you suspect a market crash:
Shorting the market is not the same as being right about the future.
If you short something, the most you can make is 100%.
If you’re early, you get steamrolled.
If you’re wrong by a week, you get carried out.
Option premiums eat you alive.
This is why most people make money long, not short.
You can be early.
You can be wrong.
You can be “approximately right.”
And you still win over time.
But shorting requires perfect timing.
You must predict the exact moment the world loses belief in the story.
That’s all markets are:
stories people believe in strongly enough to commit capital to.
Stephenson understood that before Bitcoin existed.
Narratives create sentiment.
Sentiment creates participation.
Participation creates price.
And belief turns price into inevitability.
Netflix buying Warner feels inevitable.
AI shaping markets feels inevitable.
Sovereign AI feels inevitable.
Not because they must happen.
But because the story is working.
As I build out my online presence and business, you’ll see more of the patterns and opportunities I see forming in real time.
The five-dollar tier isn’t about revenue.
It’s a signal.
It tells me you value this lens enough that I can commit real time to it every day.
And as a dealmaker,
the more we spend wonderful time together,
the more opportunities I’ll start spotting for you personally.
Tomorrow we switch gears and do something practical.
How to impress your wife with AI. Believe me you will be impressed.
Sunday we talk Oracle. But not from Omaha.
And next week — some additional crypto news important for any investor.
Seize the Day
Eric
Here’s just some of what Stephenson predicted long before we lived it:
The two books to highlight are: Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon
• The Metaverse.
• Encrypted money and digital banking.
• Media companies acting like sovereign nations.
• Information monopolies shaping reality.
• AI advisors.
• Independent compute power as political force.
• Decentralized identities and virtual tribes.
