Thinkers, Not Doers

Richard Lowe: Hello and welcome to the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I’m Richard Lowe, and I’m here with Thiago Ferreira. He’s going to talk to us today about AI and a bunch of other subjects, and we’re going to have some great fun. Thiago, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Thiago Ferreira: Absolutely. Richard, thanks so much for having me on and for taking the time to chat. As you mentioned, my name is Thiago Ferreira. I am the founder and CEO of Elevate AI Consulting, which is a Miami based AI consulting firm working with businesses of all sizes. And I’m also an adjunct professor at the University of Miami, where I teach a course called Human Centered AI for All, which is definitely something interesting that we can dig into.

Richard Lowe: That sounds fascinating. I’ve been getting into AI myself, using it a lot. I wrote a book called… I can’t remember the name right now. Anyway, I wrote a book about AI and how it affects websites and things.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, nice. I think that’s the subject everybody’s talking about right now, right? People are either afraid of it or curious about it or already using it in their daily lives, or somewhere in between. But everybody has a lot of questions about it, and I’m sure we can get into a lot of it today.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, most people seem to be afraid, which is probably the wrong choice to make. But why don’t you tell us a little bit about Elevate AI and humanizing AI and using it in your life?

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, absolutely. In my company we do a few different things. The number one thing that we do, which is really our bread and butter right now, is AI training. Workshops, boot camps, trainings on specific tools. And I find that really important, because as you’ve probably noticed yourself, AI is deceptively easy to use, right? Anybody can enter a vague prompt and receive a vague answer and think, great, I’m using AI. But that’s barely scratching the surface of what it can do.

And especially in businesses, having your employees say over and over, rewrite this email, improve this email, the typical things most people are using it for, is never going to give you the efficiencies you’re looking for from this technology, and it’s never really going to hit your bottom line. That’s why I think the education piece is so important.

Thiago Ferreira: But we also provide other services, like custom development and automations. And the number one thing a lot of business owners are talking about right now is answer engine optimization. That’s the evolution of SEO: how to get ChatGPT and Claude and these other tools to actually talk about you and your business when your customers are searching for it.

Richard Lowe: And I remember the name of my book. It’s called The Day Your Website Died.

Thiago Ferreira: There you go. Don’t forget that. That’s such a unique name.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, it’s just been a long day. Sorry. And it’s about exactly what you just said, how to get your website noticed by all of the AI engines. If you’re not doing that, you’re probably going to get lost. And even if you’re doing it, it’s not an easy thing to do. There are certain things you have to do.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, and it’s really interesting to me. A lot of the business owners I have conversations with find us through ChatGPT and Claude and all these other tools, right? But most of them haven’t made the connection that, wait a minute, if I found you on ChatGPT, people should also be able to find me on ChatGPT. How do I do that? That’s been a light bulb moment for so many business owners. And to your point, if you’re not paying attention to this right now, you’ll probably get left behind, because people are using Google less and less.

Richard Lowe: That was a trend that was already happening. And they’re using it less because Google’s becoming… I have another book, The Enshittification of America. Google’s definitely going through the enshittification phase, where it’s covered with ads and becoming more and more worthless, and AI is even accelerating that process, I think. I barely use Google anymore. I’m on Brave, using Brave Search, which I think uses Bing behind the scenes, though I think they’re moving away from Bing. But yeah, The Enshittification of America was an interesting book to write. It’s part of a whole series called Enemies of You.

It’s about private equity and venture capital and what they’ve done to America, why everything’s gone to shit.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah. For those of us who have lived long enough to see it, there are so many examples, right? Since the invention of the internet, all the things we used to like and use reliably, sooner or later, due to capitalism or greed or changing leadership or changing focus, the unfortunate path of most internet products is the enshittification of that product. There are so many examples.

Richard Lowe: Oh yeah. Everything from Southwest Airlines and its recent degradation to Spirit Airlines, which just failed. That’s all the enshittification process, where they focus on the bottom line and pulling out as much money as they can instead of worrying about the customer. And I hate calling a company for support and getting an AI chatbot. I’ve only seen a couple that are any good. My hosting company has a really good one. I just had a problem, and it answered it the best it could, it actually did stuff, and then it put me through to human support, which is the way it’s supposed to work.

Thiago Ferreira: Right. That’s my experience with those AI phone systems as well. As soon as I hear that an AI picked up the phone, the first words out of my mouth are agent, get me a human. But they have been getting much better. And to your point, they have to be applied with intention. The goal isn’t just adding an AI layer so your customer service agents are answering fewer calls. The goal should be, how does this improve the customer experience? And does that, in the end, result in fewer calls for my customer service team?

Richard Lowe: The goal should always be how to improve the service for the customer. The secondary thing is how do we reduce cost. But the first thing should always be the customer, and it usually isn’t. Usually it’s cost first, and the customer is way down the list, because they don’t care. And that’s a shame.

Thiago Ferreira: And that’s such an important point for me and for my company. One of the things that really differentiates Elevate, and that got us to where we are in such a short time, is that we’re going against the flow. We specifically do not work with companies that are looking to use AI to reduce headcount. When companies come to us and say, how many employees can we cut, what’s the strategy, we usually say, thank you very much, we’ll refer you to another company that does that type of work, but it’s just not what we do.

We’re really proud that the clients we work with are using AI to make their employees more efficient, and therefore hiring more humans, not fewer. Growth for me doesn’t just mean growing the bottom line no matter what. It means growing the number of people as well, growing the impact you have in your local community, your society and the economy as a whole. That’s how we define growth. So we have that very specific boundary around the work we do with our clients.

Richard Lowe: Right. And on that same note, in the writing world right now, and in the artistic world, any kind of creative place, there’s a huge debate going on about AI and its place. There’s the typical writer now who hates it, who is so anti-AI they’re like rabid dogs. If they even smell it, that’s AI, you’re scum, and they start calling people names. And then there are the ones who write everything with AI and pump out 20 books a week, even 20 books a day sometimes. Both of those extremes are wrong. What you need to do is consider AI a digital assistant. That’s my approach.

Or in a company, a digital employee.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah. That’s what I tell companies all the time. Think of AI as a very smart intern you just hired, who needs a lot of direction and oversight. That’s a great way to look at it.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. You’ve got things humans do very well, and you’ve got things AI does very well. I don’t want to be sitting there moving numbers around in a spreadsheet and doing all those calculations. Let AI do that. But AI is not going to write a great book.

Thiago Ferreira: Right. It’s interesting. I had a conversation with one of our corporate clients this week, a very high level VP of marketing at a Fortune 500 company. She’s hiring for a new role on her marketing team, and we were discussing the job description. And she turns to me and says, look, I don’t need any more doers on my team. Claude or ChatGPT can create the Excel. Claude or ChatGPT can create the PowerPoints. What I need are thinkers. People who can think critically, who can use AI as a thought companion, as an assistant, like you mentioned, and push their work to the next level.

Someone sitting there with PowerPoint skills or Excel skills, I don’t need that anymore. AI can do that. So it’s really a shift in mindset, even at those levels, in the roles that are getting hired. The job title itself may not be changing, but the description and the expectations definitely are.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. I’ve been using AI for a lot of coding, writing plugins for WordPress on my website. And one of the problems with WordPress that I didn’t know about is that it can get hijacked. It’s called a supply chain attack. A plugin company sold all its assets to another company, that company turned out to be rotten and put in malware, and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people got infected. I asked Claude, how can we prevent this? And Claude said the only way to prevent it is to write your own plugins. So now I just say, I need this, and boom, there’s a plugin.

Then another session of Claude, it has to be another session so it doesn’t have any context, does a security audit on it. Maybe even a second security audit, and then I put it out there. They’re short, simple plugins that I could probably write in a couple of days. Claude writes them in an hour.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah. And that’s great for people like you and me. I work the same way and create those solutions myself. But with the corporate clients we work with, I usually give the opposite advice. As far as plugins go, unless somebody on your IT team created it themselves and knows what they’re doing, stick to plugins from the official developers. Don’t be downloading random plugins you found on GitHub, because especially at the enterprise level, you’re really putting your data at risk.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Well, if I was in an enterprise of any size, plugins would go through the same testing process as everything else, and that would find any kind of malware inside the plugin. I came from the corporate world. I was in IT for 33 years, and we always tested even operating system updates. We ran them through a test cycle, because who knew what was going to happen, especially with Microsoft. Who knew if an update was going to have a bug and crash? We were happy with Windows, but every once in a while something would come in and your systems would blue screen and not come up.

Who wants that? And those were the easy ones. The hard ones were the subtle ones.

Thiago Ferreira: Oh yeah. That’s one of the things we talk through a lot in our trainings. A lot of people haven’t realized that just because AI told you it did something, or did it securely or correctly, doesn’t always mean that it did. And just because it tells you it can do something doesn’t mean it can. That’s why, to your point, it’s important to have these additional verification and security steps, and to have somebody who knows what they’re doing look at it. Another part of my business that’s small right now but growing is people calling us because ChatGPT told them they could develop this or that thing.

They got 60 or 80 hours into it, just sitting there vibe coding, and then figured out it doesn’t work. Or they get to a point where ChatGPT says, oh, just kidding, I told you I could do that, but I really can’t. So fixing things people started but don’t know how to finish is a growing part of the business too.

Richard Lowe: Or worse is when it tells you it’s done and it works fine, and then you find out it doesn’t quite do what you needed.

Thiago Ferreira: Yes. And this is one of the things I teach my students at UM as well. There’s a huge difference between a demo and a production unit. You can run a demo 100 times, and it works 100 times. Then you push it into production, there are additional variables you didn’t consider, and it doesn’t run. Anyone can create a nice shiny demo. Everyone can create a production version now too, but they need at least a little knowledge of what they’re doing, or how to direct the system to do it for them.

Richard Lowe: Right. Now, I’m a cybersecurity person and a coder by background, and a manager, so I understand all that, but most people don’t. I moved all my stuff to Cloudflare, for example, if you’re familiar with that.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah.

Richard Lowe: That does all my security now and cuts out all the bots and stuff like that before they hit my website. That was really fun. It took a little while, because Cloudflare is not easy. Although I tell you, it puts AWS and Google and Microsoft’s versions to shame. Cloudflare is much easier and much better.

Thiago Ferreira: Much better. Yeah, for sure much easier from a user experience perspective. But there’s also a reason Microsoft makes things a little more difficult. They’re really focused on protecting all the data in the tenant for their enterprise clients, which is a good thing, because your data is pretty safe with Microsoft behind their tenants. But it adds complications when it comes to development and access and things like that.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I wasn’t being quite fair. The suite in Cloudflare is nowhere near the size of the suites at those other companies. There’s a lot you can do in Cloudflare, but there’s a lot you can’t do that you can do in, say, Microsoft, like spinning up instances of machines. I don’t think Cloudflare does that. Maybe it does. But I could host an entire department in Microsoft. I don’t think I could do that in Cloudflare.

Thiago Ferreira: Right. They have different users and different needs. A lot of companies are coming to us right now debating which AI system to use, for example. Should I give my team Claude? Should I give my team ChatGPT? And a lot of times, the easier answer for many companies is, why don’t you start with what you already have, which is Copilot. It’s built in, it’s safe. It’s not quite as good as the others yet, but it’s already amazing how many things it can do.

If your team has nothing yet, starting with Copilot, getting those training wheels on, learning how to prompt and how to create Copilot agents, is a great place to start before you invest in a second tool like Claude or ChatGPT.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I tend to avoid Copilot, just because it’s worming its way into everything.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah. Well, that’s the Microsoft way, right?

Richard Lowe: It’s the big corporation way. I would tend to start with Claude. I’ve had a lot of luck with Claude, especially Opus 5.5. Oh my, the 5.5 versions are really good. The thing about Anthropic is that I think it has a little more, I hate to use this word, ethics than some of the others. It’s built in, and their privacy is built in. And it stops me from doing things. Even as a writer, it’ll say, I’m sorry, I’m not going to write about that. And there’s no way around it anymore. You used to be able to fake it out, but not anymore.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, I agree. It’s such a powerful tool. Claude is our number one recommendation for companies. But for the ones that aren’t quite ready for the investment, don’t want to add a second tool, or are extra concerned about privacy, Copilot is usually a good choice as well. And I do agree with you on the ethics piece with Anthropic. But I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this. I wonder how much of that is just really great marketing, right? And how far down the line do we expect them to keep walking the walk? Those are the questions I usually have when I think about these things.

Richard Lowe: Well, I ask myself, how much can I trust a company that’s worth a trillion dollars, whose goal is money? They got there by making money and getting loans. So you always have to understand that the ethics could be surface level, or it could be real. The way you decide is you test it. You can test ethics. Can I tell it to make me a bot that breaks into systems? With Claude, I think you can’t do that anymore.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, they’ve clearly added some good guardrails.

Richard Lowe: And with some of the other ones you probably could. I don’t know, I haven’t tried, that’s not something I want to do. But you get down to simple things. Define your ethics, then go into the AI and test them. Have a team go in and test to make sure that company is ethical. What about privacy? Is it going to leak? I had something happen with ChatGPT, an earlier version, where suddenly my session was showing somebody else’s session.

Thiago Ferreira: I had the same thing with a client. We were developing a solution for a client, and everything we could find online suggested another company was developing something similar, but there was nothing public about it. We couldn’t find anything on the web. And yet, when I was prompting ChatGPT while developing the solution, ChatGPT was telling me everything that company was working on, because they just didn’t have the proper privacy settings. The model was probably training on all the work they were doing, and now it was spitting it back out to me, and I had all this insider information.

Richard Lowe: When you use these things, you definitely need to understand how the privacy works. With Anthropic it’s a simple click and you’re private. ChatGPT is probably the same.

Thiago Ferreira: It’s the same, yeah. So for any of your listeners who have never done this, open up Claude or ChatGPT and go to settings. In both of them you’ll find something called privacy or data controls, and they’ll both have an option about using your data to train future models. They make it sound really friendly, help us improve our future models. But what you’re really doing is giving them all your data. If you’re on a free plan, unfortunately, you are the product, and you don’t have as many options.

But on a paid account you can go into your settings, turn off model training, and keep your data a little safer.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, I’m checking right now. Under settings, privacy, location metadata and help improve our AI models are both turned off.

Thiago Ferreira: There you go.

Richard Lowe: Those are the two things you want to turn off. Then they have a whole bunch of information on how they protect it and how they use it. What you really should do when you get any new product of this nature is go through all of the settings and make sure you understand them. And the way to do that is real simple. Ask Claude, what does this mean? It’ll tell you.

Thiago Ferreira: In fact, when I do Claude trainings at companies, that’s the first thing we do, before we go into the prompt box, before we create a project. I have everybody open the settings, and we go tab by tab. What does this mean? What does that mean? Is this how you want this to work? These tools come out of the box with specific settings, but that doesn’t mean those are the best settings for you.

If you want consistent results, if you want to be more mindful about your data, your privacy, your notifications, how often you’re getting notified, you can customize these tools to the way you work and make them work better for you.

Richard Lowe: Yep. And I’m looking at their how we protect your data and how we use your data pages. They’re short and easy to understand, and they’re right in your face. They tell you, we don’t sell your data to third parties. It says it right there, and that’s an important thing. They delete your data promptly when requested, unless there’s a safety violation or it’s a conversation you shared through feedback. So now I know they’re going to delete it when I tell them to. They’re not going to wait six months.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, or five years, whatever the other ones do.

Richard Lowe: You have control over your conversation data and can change your preferences any time. These are the kinds of things I want to know as a security person who’s also in charge of privacy.

Thiago Ferreira: Of course. And one of the things I tell my students, when it comes to all this talk about guardrails and safety and security and the big question of whether it’s all good marketing or whether they mean it, is where I land. There’s only one company really talking about guardrails and safety. The others aren’t so focused on it. So even if it’s all BS, at least that one company is talking about it. The others aren’t even concerned with it. So there’s at least one that seems more focused on it, and that’s where I would put my data.

It’s the one I use on a daily basis as well.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, it’s the same as anything in life. You need to understand it. I’m one of those people who reads labels on food. Sure, the words are hard to understand sometimes, but at least I know this thing has this long word in it. If you’re sensitive to red dye, at least you know there’s red dye in it. I’m sensitive to MSG, monosodium glutamate, so I need to know if it’s in there, because it gives me headaches. So I’ve carried that over into AI. I want to know what this AI is doing.

Richard Lowe: I just found a case you’ll find interesting that reinforces the claim that Anthropic is more ethical. A person was accused of typing threats against the Lee County Sheriff’s Office into Claude, and Anthropic reported it to the police. That’s something you need to report if somebody is going to do something horrible. And in another one, somebody bought an AR-15 and threatened Anthropic’s CEO, and they were reported as well.

Thiago Ferreira: And that’s what we expect from these companies, right? But that’s not automatically what’s been happening, even before AI. If we look at social media, Meta and Facebook and these companies have not been reporting these things unless compelled by court order. So the fact that Anthropic is being proactive about alerting the authorities in some cases, that’s what we want. That’s what we need.

Richard Lowe: OpenAI has done the same thing, according to this, and those are the two it mentions. But I’m on both sides of the fence. Obviously I don’t want somebody using it to create bad things or harm people, and that should definitely be reported. But what if I’m writing a novel about that kind of thing and it misinterprets it? Or what if I’m just somebody having a bad day, using it as a therapist?

Thiago Ferreira: Right. It gets into some really deep philosophical questions. I don’t know if you remember the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise. They were arresting people before they committed the crime they were supposed to commit, because they could see it ahead of time. And it raises the same questions. Where is the line? How can you arrest somebody for a crime they were about to commit? The same with AI. The things people type into these tools don’t necessarily mean they’re going to carry out those actions. So where is the line? And it goes back to the question that started this topic.

Which company do we trust to draw those lines in a way that’s positive for our society?

Richard Lowe: Right. It’s almost like Big Brother, only it’s not the Big Brother from 1984. It’s the big brother of corporations. I think it’s called a corporatocracy, something like that. Rule by corporations. The movie Running Man was based on that, and several others were based on corporations being in control. I might be wrong about that, but a lot of movies are based on that. And a lot of the shenanigans we see in Congress are caused by the big companies that actually own things behind the scenes. I’m writing a book about that in my series.

Thiago Ferreira: And the impact of those lobbyists in Washington, DC?

Richard Lowe: I would say even more than lobbyists. Sometimes it goes as far as directly owning. Because if you just bypass all that and invite the person over for tea, or to the mountains for a hunting party, you can talk to them directly.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, and we know we have many coin operated government officials in charge right now. Maybe they’ve always been there, but maybe it’s just more obvious nowadays, because it’s so shameless.

Richard Lowe: Yeah, it is what it is. I’m getting a little older in life, and I’ve got the opinion that nobody came and asked me my opinion, nobody’s going to ask me my opinion, and nobody cares anyway. So what I can do is affect what I can affect. I’m not going to stop the way the world works. That’s not going to happen. But I can get involved in my local community, the Chamber of Commerce and things, and affect my local area. And I can have an effect through writing and through these podcasts, having this kind of conversation, and maybe change a few things that way.

I don’t have to change the world.

Thiago Ferreira: Right. I completely agree with you, and that’s the line we take as a company, and for myself as a person. I’m not going to be able to change the whole world or the way everybody is using AI, but I can make sure my clients, my friends and my immediate circle are using it better, more efficiently and in a more ethical way.

Richard Lowe: Yep. I can be ethical, and I can make sure I’m ethical with my customers and what I do for them. There are customers I won’t take. For example, somebody doing a revenge memoir, which is a memoir where they’re trying to get revenge on somebody, like in a divorce, or a boss they think was mean to them. I don’t do those. First of all, they’re not fun. The person generally isn’t fun, because they’re in that state of mind. I had one potential client who came to me offering a lot of money to do some books.

He was a confidential FBI informant, and he wanted me to name names. I’m like, it’s going to be kind of hard to spend the money with a bullet in my head. And he says, oh no, no, I’ll keep you confidential. And I told him, you’re giving up the names of confidential informants and you expect me to believe you?

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, you’re not the most trustworthy source right now, sir.

Richard Lowe: No. This conversation is over. There’s no sense having any more of it. And he was gone.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, but to your point, you drew those lines. You drew those boundaries for yourself. You have the ethical knowledge and guidelines, and those weren’t given to you by some company. It’s the same thing with AI. We can expect more from these companies. We can expect them to be better citizens and a better part of society. But at the end of the day, we have to draw those lines for ourselves as well.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Did you read about the recent breakout of AI? It broke out of its sandbox, so to speak, and caused all kinds of havoc.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, it hacked into the Hugging Face database.

Richard Lowe: It was much worse than we thought. This agentic AI uses self-training methods and things, and it was pretty bad. All of the AI companies kind of went, oh, holy cow. They didn’t even know it could happen. I saw a video of the whole breakdown of how it happened, and it’s kind of horrifying.

Thiago Ferreira: It is horrifying, and I don’t think people are concerned enough. And that’s not the only example. If you look now, there are other examples of AIs jumping out of their sandboxes. I have my students bring in a news item every week, and a couple of weeks ago one of them shared a similar incident in Asia, where the AI hacked into a government system, a municipality instead of a corporation. So there’s more, and we’re going to see more and more events like this until some regulation is passed or these companies get themselves in line.

Richard Lowe: Well, the scary part is that those are the ones that happen by accident. What about the ones that don’t happen by accident?

Thiago Ferreira: Right. Those had no malicious intent behind them. But there are definitely people out there using it with malicious intent as well.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. Some foreign actors and some terrorist groups could certainly take it into their minds to do those kinds of things. And how do we prevent that?

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah. I think that’s the question everybody’s asking, and why everybody’s reacting to the news of the Hugging Face hack. It is really concerning, and the more you understand how it happened, the scarier it is.

Richard Lowe: I tell you, if I owned a business right now, one thing I’d be ordering is a top to bottom security analysis of the whole company. It doesn’t matter what it costs, because it’s coming.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, but then to what end, right? These systems are becoming so advanced. Hugging Face is a really big company, a technology company, and supposedly they have great security systems, and they still got hacked. So I definitely agree with you. Every business owner out there should take the steps to make sure their stuff is as secure as possible. But the question that comes after that is how long it will stay secure as these systems keep getting better and better.

Richard Lowe: Well, in security you always build a castle. The castle doctrine, where you have the moat, the wall, the stakes, the inner wall. You make sure it’s in depth. It’s not just firewalls. It’s firewalls and then something else and then something else. And you always understand that your weak point is your people, because 80% of hacks come from inside. That’s where you have to focus your attention. Social engineering. Your people are getting social engineered every day, with all these phishing emails and the stupid spam and junk they get.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah. And now it’s getting more intense, with people using cloned AI voices and deepfake videos. My mom unfortunately fell for a scam. This happened in Brazil, where these scams are very common. Somebody called her on WhatsApp from a number she didn’t know, but the WhatsApp photo showed my cousin. And it was my cousin’s voice asking my mom for money, with urgency, of course. Hey, Auntie, can you send me $1,000 right now? I need it right now. And insisting. And guess what? My mom sent, I think, $3,500 or something like that, which she’s never going to see again.

The older generations are more prone to fall for these scams, because they have less technical ability and are less used to having these systems used against them. So it’s pretty concerning.

Richard Lowe: I’ve been hit by those. I didn’t fall for this one. I was in California, at a dance show about 150 miles away. I went up there just for one act, and I met the lead singer. We exchanged numbers and Facebooks, I drove back home that night, went to sleep, and woke up the next morning to a Facebook message saying she was in Britain and needed $1,500 to get home. I was like, that was an awfully fast transition. I knew immediately.

Thiago Ferreira: Were you on a rocket or something? These bad actors don’t waste any time.

Richard Lowe: Well, her account was hacked, obviously, and they knew everything about her and about our interaction because they’d looked at the account. And I, of course, toyed with the hacker and then reported it.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah, you’ve got to try to have a little fun with it, right?

Richard Lowe: Yeah. The way you get around the kind of scam you just mentioned is you say, okay, you need $3,500, I understand. Let me call you back.

Thiago Ferreira: Right. That’s one of the tips I give families and everybody. Number one, I’ll call you back. If your bank calls you about something, or somebody you don’t know, say thank you, I’ll call back. And you call the number you know is correct, the one on the back of the card. The other thing I’ve been encouraging families to do, which I’ve now done with my mom and my sister, is have a code word that only you know. So my mom, my sister and I now have a code word.

If anybody ever calls asking for anything, which hasn’t happened yet, so we haven’t had to use it, it’s there when we need it. Okay, son, you need $1,000? First, let me call you back, like you mentioned, but also, what’s our code word? And if they can’t say it, you don’t fall for it.

Richard Lowe: A big thing that’s been going around here, though I haven’t heard about it as much lately, is virtual kidnappings.

Thiago Ferreira: Wow.

Richard Lowe: Yeah. People put their children on Facebook, so you can find out where their kids are. Then the scammers just call in as if they’ve kidnapped the kid. As long as the parent doesn’t try to call the kid, which they typically don’t, they have a pretend kidnapping going on, when there’s nothing going on at all except some scammer pretending. And with AI, when the parent says, let me talk to my kid, they’ll do that. They’ll put your kid right on, and it’s an AI bot.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah. And we all know this, and we’re still putting all of our information publicly and willingly on social media, leaving our profiles public and adding videos and a thousand different angles of our faces.

Richard Lowe: Without keeping in mind that photos can easily be traced to where they came from. There’s data in the photo, and it can often be figured out, so you can find out right where somebody is. That’s social engineering, and you just have to be disciplined. I’ve almost fallen for a few in my life, and I’m a security person.

Thiago Ferreira: Yeah. And to bring it back to what we’re talking about in our business, and what I’m talking about in the classroom with university students, it’s exactly that: the necessity to be hyper aware. To be knowledgeable, to be up to date on these tools and what they can do. Especially parents with young kids. I get this question all the time from parents: what do I tell my kid about AI? I don’t even understand it.

And my first answer is, well, maybe you should get a little training yourself and learn more about how to use it, and then you’ll be able to talk to your kid about it. And guess what? Your kid probably already knows more about it than you do. So that’s an opportunity for a conversation between two generations. Hey, show me what you’re using it for, how you’re using it, how you’re thinking about it. There’s an opportunity here for parents and kids and grandparents too. But it starts with each of us understanding the subject, not just pushing it forward and hoping for the best.

Richard Lowe: Yep. We’re coming up on time. Is there anything you’d like to say to our audience before we finish?

Thiago Ferreira: Well, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. If your audience wants to reach out to us or talk to me about answer engine optimization, training, security or any of that, they can find us on all the socials at Elevate AI Consulting, and on our website. That’s Elevate, E-L-E-V-A-T-E, AIConsulting.org. We’re based here in Miami, Florida, as I mentioned, but we serve clients worldwide in English, Portuguese and Spanish.

Richard Lowe: Nice. Okay, well, thank you. This has been the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I’m Richard Lowe. Thank you for coming to our show. We publish these several times a week, and it’s growing fast, so keep coming back. Thank you very much.

Thiago Ferreira: Thank you.

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