Our offices are closed. Everyone’s home for the holiday…

And here I am, pacing around my kitchen, haunted by the worst kind of ghosts: a weird idea.

Not “weird” as in “why did the barista call me ‘champ’ again but she NEVER says it to anyone else?”

Not even “weird” as in “the gym receptionist congratulated me on ‘showing up emotionally.’” What does THAT mean?”

It’s just something that keeps tapping me on the shoulder every time I look at markets, crypto, AI, or the general chaos of… everything.

It’s this: We were led to believe the world was deterministic. We now live in a world that’s infestedly probabilistic.

Put a different way…

We were led to believe reality was a mostly-predictable machine. In reality, it’s warm taffy: bending, warping, inconsistent.

Problem is, we keep trying to use deterministic mental tools—and that mismatch explains 72% (approximately) of our day-to-day anguish.

It also explains why:

• careers are no longer linear
• markets behave like mood rings
• dating is roulette, and sometimes of the Russian variety
• news cycles are complete chaos and contradictory
• odds feel warped
• the old playbooks don’t work

This isn’t a small shift.

It’s a total reframe of the underlying operating system of how we should move through reality.

And it’s the premise of one (of 100) ideas I would write into a book if I could stop refreshing the crypto prices for 5 minutes.

So let’s talk about how it’s changing everything (even if nothing actually changes)... and a practical way to stop merely surviving and thrive in this new environment.

Simpler Times

For a long time, adults have talked about the economy like it was a washing machine.

Put capital in the slot. Push a button. Get output.

Deterministic. Predictable. If x, then y.

Your boss, your economics teacher, your accountant—they all used the same models:

• “cycles”
• “fair value”
• “risk premium”
• “supply and demand”
• “fundamentals”

While useful concepts, they made a messy nonlinear world sound like a spreadsheet.

That was the illusion we all, no matter your age, have inherited. And for a long time, the illusion held.

• Stable demographics
• Fixed exchange rates
• Slow information
• Industrial jobs
• Predictable policy
• Consumers who acted like consumers

A world so constrained it felt deterministic.

The Fed pressed a button. The economy moved. Stocks went up (yay). Stocks went down (boo). Stocks went sideways (boo).

Everyone always understood why they went up, down, or sideways because the papers always came up with a reason.

You could put this whole thing into a neat little model, slap a 12% discount rate on it, and sound really smart at a dinner party.

Then, somewhere along the way, the container cracked.

When the Deterministic World Died

Here’s the actual list of things that blew up the old model. There are lots more, but I don’t want to bore you:

• Social media
• China shock
• Covid lockdowns
• Derivatives
• HFT
• Passive flows
• QE (then QT, then QI, then whatever alphabet soup comes next)
• Narrative markets
• Leverage cycles
• AI
• Bitcoin/crypto
• Supply chain chaos
• Geopolitical entropy

In short, we went from a world that sort-of obeyed rules…

To a world where the rules are late, scattered, or being written by a 17-year-old coder in Singapore.

The big mistake? Thinking the market changed.

The market didn’t change. The illusion shattered.

Markets, like reality, were always probabilistic. We just lived in a deterministic zoo enclosure long enough to forget.

Then someone opened the door…

…and the animals inside wandered out.

Enter Bitcoin: Fat Tails Get Fatter

Here’s a really good example of pure probabilism in action.

Recently, a miner running six terahashes per second—the power draw of a hairdryer—mined a full Bitcoin block and made a cool $265,000(!).

That’s like winning the lottery with a ticket you found in a gas station parking lot.

From a deterministic mindset, it shouldn’t happen. More power equals more rewards. Small miners should never win. Big farms should always dominate.

Should. Should. Should.

It happens in Bitcoin because Bitcoin’s entire security model is pure probabilism: winning is attempted, but never promised.

You can’t buy a block. You can only buy attempts.

Complexity amplifies probabilism.

As the world gets more complex, the dominance of probabilistic dynamics over deterministic ones accelerates.

Practical example: If user-friendly devices like Heatbit proliferate (home space heaters that mine Bitcoin), the Bitcoin mining small-winner rate will rise—not because individual odds improve, but because the number of tiny participants explodes, thickening the tail of improbable block wins.

In rising complexity, fat tails get fatter.

This is a microcosm for the new mental model:

• Nothing guaranteed
• More experiments > more conviction
• Outcomes emerge from attempts, not certainty
• Small players can spike more into the stratosphere
• Massive players can get embarrassed more by randomness

It’s the difference between:

“Do X → get Y”

vs

“Attempt X → sometimes get Y → keep attempting.”

I’ll give you another example.

AI: The Probabilistic Brain

Large language models don’t “know” anything.

They sample reality.

Every answer is a probability distribution dressed in a paragraph.

AI is turning entire industries—writing, trading, hiring, planning, even dating—into weighted probability machines.

You can’t count on certainty. But you can scale attempts faster than ever before.

That’s the new alpha.

We’re moving into a system that behaves less like a machine and more like a swarm.

You don’t predict swarms. You survive them (or you don’t). Or you ride their currents.

The latter is more fun than the former. The former mostly happens because you think you’re in a machine, but you’re really in a swarm.

One Practical Way to Thrive

This is the argument of the book (that doesn’t exist): Those who will thrive in the next decade are the ones who understand that most outcomes can’t be purchased—only attempted.

You don’t “win” by finding the right answer or buying the right credentials or coming up with the right plan. You win by scaling more attempts:

• more experiments
• more models
• more income streams
• more shots on goal
• more optionality
• more asymmetric bets
• more hedges
• more parallel processes
• more entropic probes into reality

That’s what Bitcoin miners do. That’s what AI models help you do. That’s what successful founders do. That’s what resilient investors do.

Not prediction. Attempts.

It’s designing your days so that multiple things can go right over time, while also ensuring fewer and fewer things can catastrophically go wrong.

It’s building “optionality constructs”: uncorrelated bets, asymmetric positions, and leaning into barbells.

That’s what’s always worked, by the way. But we were tricked into thinking there were “rules” to success.

There are no rules. Only numbers of tries.

If the 20th century was governed by: “Work hard and X becomes inevitable.”

The 21st century is governed by: “Attempt enough times, and X becomes highly probable.”

It’s physics.

The Economics of Probability

What would I call this book? 

The Economics of Probability: How Bitcoin, AI, and your sleep-tracking mattress reveals the new rules of how everything has always worked anyway.

A book about:

• how we lost the illusion of determinism

• why probability is now the dominant economic and psychological force

• and how you can survive—and even thrive—inside a system that doesn’t care about your goals, models, and plans

A book about randomness, luck, incentives, entropy, and how to structure a life around attempts instead of certainties.

But maybe nobody actually needs it to be a book.

If you’ve read this far…

Maybe you already get the gist.