He's 70, Still Working, and Sharper Than Anyone in the Room
Before the Heat Arrives
Jim Newcomb gets to his desk before the Tucson heat does.
By 5:30 a.m. he’s already outside, moving through the field work that has to happen before the temperature makes it impossible. By the time his colleagues are logging on, Jim has been at it for hours. He’s the oldest person in his company by a wide margin. He’s also, by his own quiet accounting, the most technically capable.
He didn’t plan it that way. He just never stopped asking the next question.
The argument made human
A clarifying moment in our conversation was when Jim mentioned, almost as an aside, how he uses AI to set up new client communities for the HOA management company he works for. He takes the governing documents, feeds them into ChatGPT to map the right violations and escalation logic for each community, and gets the setup done in a fraction of the time. His colleagues are still doing it by hand.
He described it without any performance of pride. Just a fact about his Tuesday.
What hit me wasn’t the efficiency. It was the ease.
I’ve been building an argument from research, from cognitive science, from the logic of accumulated judgment: that experienced professionals aren’t AI’s casualties, they’re its most potent users. Jim made the same argument from a Tuesday afternoon in his life.
Most of my readers don’t have a Jim in their orbit. Someone who’s 70, technically sharper than his colleagues, and completely unbothered about proving it. That’s part of why this matters.
He doesn’t prompt. He interrogates.
“Walk me through step by step,” he told me. “Because I get hung up on item one or two, and I want to back up.” That’s not a technical skill. That’s a recruiter’s instinct — thirty-plus years of knowing how to extract useful information from a resistant source, applied to a language model. The tool responds to the quality of what he brings to it. And what he brings is decades of knowing how to ask.
His younger colleagues have the same tools. They haven’t developed the same instinct. Not because they can’t, but because they haven’t lived long enough to accumulate the filter that makes the questions sharp.
This is the part that never makes it into the AI conversation. We talk about learning curves and adoption rates and whether older workers can keep up. We almost never talk about what experienced people bring to the tool that younger people simply don’t have yet. Jim has it. He just calls it Tuesday.
A life that kept leaning in
Look at his path and you might see a résumé that needs explaining.
Inn owner in Idyllwild for twelve years. Recruiter in Palm Springs. Number one in his company. Then three years in a fifth-wheel RV, working from the road, moving through national parks with four dogs in tow. Then a retirement at 68 that lasted about two months before he was back at it, starting as a part-time compliance inspector for an HOA management company and quickly becoming its full-time Director of Digital Communications. Then Tucson, not because he planned to land there, but because a dust devil came out of a clear sky and destroyed their RV rig. The repair was going to take months. They’d been visiting friends in Tucson every year anyway, so they rented a vacation rental and ended up buying a house instead.
That’s not a career arc. That’s a life that kept leaning in.
Jim has an essay he’s rewritten two or three times. It’s called “Lean In.” The premise is this: the way humans walk is controlled falling. Every step is a catch. You lean forward, commit to the imbalance, and your body figures out the landing. Robots struggle with this because the gyroscope wants stability before movement. Humans just fall forward, on purpose, and call it walking.
He’s been writing that essay for years because he keeps living it. The inn wasn’t a plan. Palm Springs wasn’t a plan. The RV definitely wasn’t a plan. Retirement lasted two months. Tucson was a dust devil. And every time the ground shifted, Jim leaned in before he knew where it would land.
You might look at that sequence and feel something familiar. The path that doesn’t look like a path. The moves that made sense in the moment and look like chaos from the outside. The résumé a career counselor would want to tidy up.
That’s not a liability. That’s the method. A life built by leaning in doesn’t look linear because leaning in isn’t linear. It’s just one committed step after the other, taken before the ground is certain.
Building toward yourself
Here’s what else Jim is doing, and why it matters.
He publishes once a week on Substack. He wrote a humorous book about AI, each chapter a conversation between AI assistants gossiping about their humans, because he thought it would be fun and he was right. He built a $9 starter kit for people who haven’t tried AI yet. He just finished a 68-page guide of 50 prompts for home use, priced at $7, because someone he was talking to that morning had never opened ChatGPT and needed a place to start.
No coaching. No consulting. No scale play. He told me directly: he’s done talking to people one-on-one. Recruiting gave him that. He’s building toward something different now.
That something different is a closer version of himself.
Not a new Jim. Not a reinvented Jim. Jim, more concentrated. More on purpose. The writing he always did, now with a platform. The curiosity he always had, now with a tool that can keep up with it. The instinct to help people take one step, now expressed in guides that cost less than a cup of coffee because the point was never the money.
Before you close this tab: name one thing you already do well that you haven’t pointed AI at yet. One skill, one pattern of thinking, one type of question you’re good at asking. That’s your starting point. Not a tutorial. Not a course. Just your existing instinct, aimed at a new tool.
This is what intentional aging actually looks like when it’s working. Not a dramatic pivot. Not a brand-new chapter with a brand-new identity. A deliberate move toward the version of yourself you already are, stripped of the parts that were never quite yours.
Jim isn’t performing relevance. He’s 70, working before the heat comes, more capable with the AI tools of this moment than people half his age, building small things that help people take a step, living in a house he bought because a dust devil made the decision for him.
He’s not trying to prove anything.
He’s just leaning in.
If you’re earlier in the AI curiosity journey than most of my readers, if you’re still in the “I know I should try this but I don’t know where to start” phase, Jim Newcomb is exactly who you need right now.
Jim Newcomb — publishes within BoldTimers . His AI Starter Kit is $9. His 50 Prompts for Home Use guide is $7 and 68 pages. His book about Max Bandwidth and the gossip grid exists and it will make you smile : The AI Gossip Grid.
Start there. Then come back here when you’re ready to go deeper.
I love this! It’s what happens when two guys, who write about the same thing [AI], from different angles, meet for the first time.
One writes a story [Bennie] to introduce the other [Jim] to you, and shares resources because they will help you start learning what they teach.
AI can’t touch THAT!