“You need to write another book. To help. To save this planet.” -a neighbor and grandmother, on AI.
A 75-Year-Old Grandmother Just Told Me to Save the Planet.
I was walking my dog this morning when Mrs. Del waved me down. She didn’t wait for me to get close. What she said next is proof that AI anxiety has reached further than I expected.
Regular readers met Mrs. Del a few months ago. She’s the grandmother in my neighborhood who once stopped me mid-walk to tell me Distinct or Extinct was brilliant, that her son had already bought a copy and was applying what’s in it.
This morning was different. She wasn’t paying me a compliment. She had a request.
“You need to write another book,” she said. “To help. To save this planet.”
She’d Already Read About Jacob Coxon
She told me she’d read online about Jacob Coxon, the researcher who helped build AI at OpenAI and Anthropic, then quit and warned it could kill us all by the end of the decade. I’d published a piece on Coxon’s resignation the day before.
She was scared. Genuinely, visibly scared. Scared enough to interrupt her own walk with her granddaughter to flag me down and tell me about it.
I mentioned I’d just written about exactly that story. She didn’t ask a single follow-up question. She turned around and walked home to go read it.
AI Anxiety Has Left the Boardroom
I spend most of my working life talking to Fortune 50 executives, HR leaders, and meeting planners about AI disruption. I’m used to that audience being anxious about it. Helping them plan around that anxiety is the job.
Mrs. Del is not that audience. She’s not on LinkedIn. She doesn’t read AI newsletters. She isn’t weighing a technology budget or writing an AI governance policy. She’s a 75-year-old grandmother, who walks her granddaughter around our neighborhood two or three times a day
If she already knows enough about frontier AI to be frightened by one researcher’s resignation, the AI anxiety I hear about every week in boardrooms has moved well past the boardroom. It’s in kitchens. It’s on porches. It’s on neighborhood sidewalks, interrupting a walk with a grandchild.
That’s not a small thing. That’s a cultural shift, and it happened faster than most of the people whose job it is to track it noticed.
Being Scared Is Not the Same as Being Prepared
Here’s what I told Mrs. Del, and what I’d tell anyone else who feels the way she does this week, being frightened by a headline is not the same thing as being unprepared for what’s coming. But fear curdles into something worse if it’s the only thing you’re left holding.
The five ingredients I write about, Ideas, Speed, Talent, Distinction, and Leadership at All Levels, were never just a framework for boardrooms. They’re what determines whether a person, a family, or an organization absorbs disruption or gets flattened by it. Mrs. Del doesn’t need an AI governance policy. She needs to know her family is thinking about this the right way, together, before the fear does the thinking for them.
That’s why I wrote Distinct or Extinct in the first place. It’s also why my next book, Future-Proof Your Children, isn’t written for the boardroom either. It’s for every parent and grandparent trying to figure out what their kids and grandkids actually need to learn, do, and ask, in a world that’s changing faster than anyone can explain it to them.
AI Anxiety, for Every Mrs. Del
Not for the boardroom. Not for the Fortune 500. For the grandmother on the sidewalk who just found out her AI anxiety has a name and a headline, and didn’t know what to do with it except pass it on to the next person walking by.
If you know a Mrs. Del, and increasingly, all of us do, point her to two things, the piece that scared her, so she at least understands what she read, and the framework that answers it.
That’s the Kryptonite Scorecard.
And if this resonated, Distinct or Extinct lays out the full framework these ingredients come from.
Those prepared need not fear the forces at work.