This morning, at 4:53AM, I smashed a bottle of kids Calpol (paracetamol) all over my kitchen floor.
I muttered “For f*cks sake” to myself - and despite the sticky mess and shards of glass aiming at my feet it produced - I still managed to get the 10ML dose I needed to help sort my son’s toothache.
Afterwards, he went back to sleep.
He didn’t die.
I thought my wife was going to die last year (just search my LinkedIn posts for the keyword ‘ambulance’).
She didn’t.
But I still worry about the safety of my family every day.
So when headlines like this appear - my fight or flight gets triggered.
We’re all going to die
It reminded me of why I don’t watch the news:
As lot of it is sensationalised, and a lot of it is speculation.
In other news (lol) OpenAI is banging the “we’ve reached AGI drum” with GPT-6 Astra.
They deployed 10,000 AI Agents to solve 1 of the 7 historic $1 million Millennium Prize Problems in 88 hours.
It was the Navier-Stokes Equation: It's the equation behind how water and air flow, and for decades nobody could prove whether its solutions even exist, let alone whether they're unique.
Now, I’m a complete idiot when it comes to science and maths - but forgive me for thinking how water and air flow isn’t particularly useful to 99% of the population.
(unless of course I’m missing something - and how water and air flow holds the key to unlimited energy, world hunger, and world peace).
GPT-6 Astra
This week I put the new OpenAI model through it’s paces. And I was underwhelmed.
It burnt through my 5 hours usage window in 5 minutes (twice) and essentially just regurgitated my own ideas back to me.
90% of it was frilly bullsh** (no change there)
When I did the same in Fable 5.1 (that doesn’t claim to be AGI) I found it produced much better results.
Now I’m not going to argue that GPT-6 isn’t a big step.
I’m sure if I connected 72 applications, had unlimited usage and a logic based problem to solve it would be really good.
And if I was in PCB design, game design, or didn’t want to click to add items to my own shopping basket I’d be a lot more positive.
But what I’m getting at here is a lot of our fear around these tools is unfounded.
And if you play around a lot you quickly find that if you’ve got half a brain, it’s not going to replace you (yet).
So I guess, amongst the rambling, to get rid of the first fear of ‘will AI replace me’.
Become an expert in it - answer that question for yourself.
Fighting Fears
I’m a big fan or Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic).
In fact, he’s got a series on the Calm app that my kids and I have been listening to as we go to sleep.
I lay on a foam mattress that my dog has ripped to shreds between their beds, and we hold hands until we all pass the f*** out (awww).
One of the talks is ‘Wake up early’ - thanks Ryan, but I think I’ve got that one covered XD.
Another is ‘Focus Only on the Essential’ - i.e tune out distractions.
You can’t control the direction of AI. But you sure can control what you focus on at home, at work, or deciding what low carb snack to make on your own.
Sorry to have another snipe at GPT-6, but sorry OpenAI, Old Fashioned oats are pure carb!
GPT-6 Astra Demo Shopping for Low Carb Snack ingredients and adding pure carb to the list
So my second recommendations are:
Write lists - Not only do you get a lot of satisfaction from ticking things off, but it gives you focus
Load up your calendar - At the end of each day, I try and block my calendar for the next day. If I block everything to the minute, there’s a lot les opportunity for my mind to wander, get distracted and start doomscrolling.
A lot of people also seek comfort in ‘Fear Setting’ which again, is born out of stoicism.
Michelle Khare (Challenge Accepted, ~6M subs, TIME100, Emmy-ballot) built her channel out of a whiteboard of fears — and used Tim Ferriss's fear-setting to leave BuzzFeed. From the full transcript, The Tim Ferriss Show #860 (Apr 2026):
"Challenge Accepted at its core originally began by me taking a whiteboard and writing all of my fears out and then connecting each fear to a circumstance that would cause me to address it - not just as a personal self-help type of thing, because I am a very anxious person internally, but more specifically because it makes for a better story."
"I think the emotional stability of that decision is important. You want to be able to brainstorm, what should I do in the worst case scenario from a place of safety … So I was able to be creative about thinking about solutions without being panicked at the same time."
If you’ve ever really thought about how many steps it would take for you to lose your house and become homeless, you soon realise just how wrong things would need to go for this to happen, and just how many opportunities you have to save yourself before this ever happens.
Don’t sweat people.
Plus, when AI takes over and we’re all on universal income, I welcome the opportunity to sip on Mojito’s in the middle of winter with the heating cranked up (assuming the copper piping hasn’t been stolen) pretending I’m on a beach in Bali.
Irrational Optimism
I’ve mentioned before that I have a strong negativity bias.
I tried reading the book ‘The Rational Optimist’ by Matt Ridley (and gave up maybe because I’m irrational) but it’s essence is “There’s plenty to be optimistic about”.
People are now safer (in general)
People now have more money (in general)
People will run out of water by 2055 (whoops, don’t know how that slipped in there - it’s not in the book - that’s that negativity bias again)
Either way, sometimes the only way you can get out of a funk is to permanently change you thoughts to ‘what’s the upside’?
Cue Warren Buffet (obvs)
Warren Buffett’s ‘Rule of 3’: For every single negative event or thought that happens, you must immediately force your brain to find three positive spin-offs, silver linings, or solutions.
Instead of dwelling on the problem, you kickstart the phrase "Good thing..." three times:
Example:
The Negative Event:
You’re up all night with kids that don’t sleep:
Positive Reframe 1: Your kids aren’t dead
Positive Reframe 2: You can prove to yourself you can work on 0 sleep
Positive Reframe 3: You appreciate the time you do spend with them until they fly the nest in 15 years (assuming AI hasn’t killed us all by then).
Probabilistic Thinking
Hat tip to Shane Parrish here who’s done some excellent work on mental models.
Here’s my attempt at paraphrasing one of the advantages of the chapter on Probabalistic thinking in ‘The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts.’
The aim: Position yourself to survive or even benefit from the wildly unpredictable future, by being the only one thinking correctly and planning for a world you don’t fully understand.
He uses the example of going to a cocktail party where people you’d like to meet are there, but nothing is guaranteed (you might not meet them, it might not go well) But by showing up you give yourself the benefit of serendipity and randomness: the worst-case outcome is that nothing happens, but if you stay home with your finger up your bum (not his words) you guarantee you won’t meet anyone. By choosing to go, you improve your odds of encountering opportunity - what he calls increasing your “upside optionality.”
Another example = Strength training (although sad to say I’ve been off my game recently)
Say you're planning your next 8-week training plan. You could pick one lift you want to hit a new PR on - say, a 120kg deadlift by week 8 - and focus on that single outcome. The problem with this is either you hit 120kg or you ‘failed’ even if you made progress.
There’s then a high chance you’ll get deflated and give up.
Whereas, a probabilistic thinker reframes this around likelihood of multiple outcomes vs a single one. Going in, you might estimate:
20% chance you hit 120kg
50% chance you land somewhere betwwen 112-118kg range
25% chance a bad week stops you at 105-110kg
5% chance of injury/setback that stops you completely
Instead of acting as it the 120kg outcome is guaranteed, you plan using base rates from your own training history - and how you’ve responded to setbacks before - and you build in asymmetry: a break week might cost you a small amount of the extreme upside, but it protects you from the fat-tailed downside of a setback that destroys months of progress.
Asymmetry means you structure a choice so the likely upside is meaningful but capped downside is small.
The fat‑tailed downside is the rare, extreme “blow-up” outcome that can dwarf all normal losses if you don’t protect against it.
By thinking in probabilities and asymmetric outcomes rather than a single guaranteed target, you make better overall decisions. Because you're weighing a range of futures instead of gambling everything on one.
In short - Think ahead, Use probabilities to your advantage. Always think about the upside.
Probability of AI killing you within the next 24 hours? 0.00001% (hope I don’t jinx this).
Either way, forcing yourself to think logically is often a great comfort.
TL;DR
Have a low tolerance for sensational headlines (and watch Justin Bieber TikToks)
Know thy enemy (by becoming an expert in it)
Focus on only the essential
Go through a fear-setting exercise once in a while
Be irrationally optimistic and use the rule of 3
Think in terms of probabilities and use logic as a comfort
Probability of my kids sleeping through the night 1%.
Probability of getting through it alive 99%.
Until next time
Adam
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