2442 - A Tech Educator’s Guide to Using AI Without Losing the Human Touch with Your Tech Makeover's Frank Bravo

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0:46Visit podverify.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, it is the Frank Bravo. Frank, you're a technologist and you are the host of Your Tech Makeover. It's a technology podcast focused on helping everyday people better understand and simplify technology. Frank, from your lips to God's ears, thank you for the work that you do. And I'd love to, by the way, thank you for joining us. Hey, Josh, thanks for having me. I really appreciate being here. I love listening to your show and I love getting what other people are saying out of it as well.

1:25Yeah, thank you. Now, as a tech guy, my suspicion, and I know this, it's no longer a suspicion, it's been confirmed, you geek out on some fun tech things outside of work. What have you been into lately? I do, you know, so at the beginning of COVID was when I started my podcast and I wanted something fun that I could just do on the side. And one of those things that I looked at was a full-scale video game of one of my favorite, which was the original Star Wars game with the yoke, you know, not this joystick, not the stuff you can play online on your computer, but like a legit game cabinet. And I thought I'd go look at those, but they were super expensive.

2:07I found one that was reasonable. And by the time I went to go buy it, they were gone. They were all sold out. So a couple of years later, fast forward, I found them that they were being sold again. On the day they released it, I put in my order. And if you're watching this on video, it's sitting over my right shoulder. And I love just kind of when something, when a problem comes up and I just can't get my head around it, I'll turn around, play a couple of games. And by then my head will be clear and I'll be able to get back into whatever it is I'm working with. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, you know, for those down times when I, you know, I just need to reset the brain.

2:47I see you got some guitars on the wall, like music, you know, just playing a game for a little bit, you know, just something where in that moment, I'm not thinking about work. like if i'm trying to blow up the death star uh you know that last call is the last thing on my mind uh i'm thinking about darth vader coming after me and you know gonna blow me out of the sky if i don't if i don't sink this death star so right yeah and then you know i do a lot of coding i sit up behind my computer screen a lot of time and just some of those problems are hard to come by the solutions and just stepping away from the computer is the way to do it i have a 10 year old labradoodle that has my attention a lot of the time as well.

3:27So I'll go outside, I'll throw the ball with her, I'll pet her for a few minutes, and I'll be like, Oh, I know how I can solve that. And again, it gives me clarity on how to come back to those problems. And that's what I try to do for customers. And for people that are listening to my podcast is just give clarity to tech problems that are out there that they don't have to be confusing. If you just take a step back and kind of think about it. Or if you have somebody who can describe those problems in a very simple way to understand what the technology behind it is. So you don't have to know what everything is, but you are able to kind of distill what's important to you.

4:06I love this. You know, I hear this so often from folks who've been doing what they're doing for quite some time, just how much they value that processing time or that integration time. You know, even if I'm reading a book, you know, just to be able to set it down in between chapters and just think about like what I've been learning. And it really helps me just make it integrated is the best term. So thank you so much, Frank, for sharing that. Tell me about, and I also know that you work as a bit of a consultant too in IT. But tell me a little bit more about your tech makeover and the work that you do for clients and others.

4:49Sure. So I've been doing, you know, hands on tech work for a long time. I was very lucky as a kid growing up that we were one of the first generations that had computers at the high school, grade school level. And that obviously very different than people today. But I was able to understand the technology early on. And then I had a special skill of being able to explain that technology to people who really didn't get it. And one of the first jobs I had was teaching the Internet to seniors. Now, that may seem like not a big deal today as I approach those senior ages, but it was, you know, early, mid-1990s where computers were just starting to show up in people's houses.

5:31We didn't have smartphones. And at the senior center, they were looking for somebody who understood the Internet. They had a computer class, but not the Internet. And I went in and was able to understand it or able to explain it to them because in my regular full-time job, we had just gotten online in 1994 and were producing content for the web. So I was able to explain it to them, a generation that didn't grow up with technology, didn't grow up with computers in their hands, didn't understand what the internet was and able to explain it. And I was told at that point that if I could explain the internet to a 80-year-old in the early 1990s and they understand it, then that is a very special skill to have.

6:13And what I've tried to do is hone that over the years. And Your Tech Makeover kind of came out of that where I want to take very simple or very complicated ideas and boil it down into something that people can understand. For instance, like I have an episode coming out. By the time this airs, it'll already be out. But talking about the dark web, because so often people talk about the dark web and they're like, oh, my gosh, my data's online. That is super scary. But when you really boil it down, it's really not as scary as you think it is. And so I've tried to explain things in a way that the normal person can understand.

6:48You don't need to be a technologist to understand it. And I think that it's important for not only people to hear that, but business leaders as well. I mean, there's a lot being written about AI, a lot of scary things about AI, but it doesn't need to be as scary as it is portrayed in the media. Yeah. Well, your audience includes just grandmas, I'm sure. It includes regular old people. And then I think about just higher level leaders and how being able to manage our technology in our personal lives really allows us to perform a lot better. You know, if I'm not frustrated by something that's going on in my personal life, I could show up a little bit better.

7:38And, of course, technology blends into, obviously, what we're doing during our day jobs as well. What are some of the – you'd mentioned, you know, the dark web. What are some other areas that you cover quite a bit as part of your tech makeover? And then, yeah, we'll start there. Sure, sure. So two things. One is passwords. passwords are one of those things that you can't go anywhere without a password and there's a lot of people that share passwords with multiple people or they use the same password across multiple accounts and i used to be super paranoid about this i used to be of this opinion of don't write down passwords and while i still have that opinion the it has kind of morphed over time it's don't write down those passwords and put it on a sticky note on your computer so i don't mind people writing down passwords, but password managers are better because password managers, you now have one password that gets into everything.

8:36And it's allows you to create multifunctional passwords that are not super easy to break. And you don't really need to know what they are, because your password manager is saving it. So that's kind of number one is that, you know, use passwords that are good, but you don't have to be 50 characters that you have to remember. You have to be 50 characters that you have a device that is able to remember them for you. Then the second thing is travel tips. You know, technology, when we go on planes, when we're traveling from place to place, it's important to remember the things that are important for those technologies.

9:14I mean, in my house, I know I have a charger. I know I have a plug that I can plug that charger into. If I'm traveling, I may not remember that cable. And now all of a sudden I'm at the airport, I'm buying a $5 cable for$50. And that's a horrible experience, right? That literally just happened to my daughter and was stuck. And yeah, they those cables really are 4050 bucks at the airport. It was mind blowing. So one of the things that I do now that I travel almost monthly is I have a package of cables that travels with me, I don't need to worry about the cables that are here on my desk, They sit in my suitcase.

9:49And I know that when I go, those tools are going to come along with me. So just hints like that. What kind of batteries can you bring on an airplane? That's a huge thing right now is if you have battery packs, you can't just bring any old battery pack on the airplane. They'll stop you if they're of a certain size. And if you go to use it, they want it out in the open because they don't want those things catching fire, which happens from time to time. So it's those kinds of things that I talk about that is, yeah, the little old lady who has the computer problem, it would be definitely useful for them to listen.

10:23I don't mean to harp on little old ladies, but, you know, but it's also everyday life, people that are traveling, people that are out there with their technology, you know, what's good, what's bad, Wi-Fi, all those good things. Frank, I'm sure you address AI quite a bit. You know, here we are, it's middle of 2026. What are you currently talking about on the topic of AI? So I love AI. I mean, not to be mince words about it. I use it all the time every day for lots of different things. And I use it as a tool. And I think that's the one thing that people should take away from AI. Yes, there's a lot of bad things it can do.

11:02Yes, there's a lot of things that are out there that make AI not great in everyday life. But if you think of it as a tool, as a virtual assistant, I use it for code writing. And it can write a lot of code in a very short amount of time that would take me a long time to do. Now, I would never push any of that code live to a site by just doing it. I'd make sure it's good and everything. And you should do that in general when you're using AI. writing letters with it, cleaning up vocabulary, you know, checking spelling, making sure you're using the correct word, as long as what you're producing is what you meant to produce, as opposed to letting it give you ideas.

11:46I think that's the that's kind of the trick in using AI. I know a lot of newspapers are not allowing letters to the editors by AI written tools. And the reason is they're afraid that AI is going out and changing the meaning of what the person meant to say. And I always look at it as if that person is sending in the letter, they're the ones putting their name on it. And even if AI has changed it, I am hoping that they have read it and they actually understand what they're sending in. So using AI as a tool, not as the end all be all, I think is really the magic of what AI is going to be able to do for us as a community.

12:26Yeah, I think that, you know, there's such a big pushback on slop. And, you know, that to me comes from inexperienced or just users that aren't using the tool well, and they're letting the AI sit in the driver's seat. And I don't think that that's going to give you slop. And slop looks like both, you know, we know what slop looks like visually. But the same thing happens with copy, with whatever you're trying to do, social media engagement. Like, folks are getting more and more sophisticated as to what AI slop in writing looks like. And let me just tell you, I mean, I don't think I can say this warning big enough.

13:09But, you know, if you're using AI to represent you in human person-to-person communication, it really can come back to, it's a huge net negative. And you could lose the trust and relationship of people that you've worked hard to build that human capital with. So do be careful. But on the other hand, Frank, I'll give you an example. My son, looking for an internship, he's a mechanical engineer student and just finished his second year. And so, you know, using Claude, he has software that will automatically scour all of the best opportunities for him based on, you know, everything about him, his background, his GPA, what he loves, what he's good at.

13:52And then it scours looking for opportunities. It takes his resume and writes unique versions of his resume for every single position. it strategizes with him on how to land each of these positions based upon everything that it's able to learn. It gives him all of the advice for the interview and how to land the role and then just, you know, how to negotiate. And I mean, good luck if your children are competing for the same roles that my son is right now, good luck if they're not using AI. And I don't say, I just, I share that, you know, I mean, he did this on his own. And that's what we're, you're not, I like, and I've heard this said many times, right, is, you know, you may not get replaced by AI, but chances are looking more and more likely that you very well could get replaced by a human using AI.

14:51And I think you're exactly right. You know, we've always talked about this, you know, the wealth gap, the education gap, the technology gap. And now, you know, there's this AI gap, you don't have to like AI. But if you choose not to use these enhanced tools, there's just going to be that that gap is going to become more and more pronounced. And, you know, you and your family members are not going to get access to opportunities that others will. And again, I want to be real sensitive to how I'm saying that. And I'm sorry if I said that in kind of a cold and callous way, but my son just happens to be someone that I saw on the back end of what he was doing.

15:28I'm like, wow. Yeah. Well, and that's a great example. I mean, so if you, if you train your AI properly, it will give you a lot of great information, but I would guess that he's not turning around, sending those letters out verbatim as it's being written. And I'm sure he has trained the AI to understand how he likes to write, how he likes to express himself. I look at that in the coding that I do. And I sat through a demo of a new piece of software that I was thinking about using. And in that demo, there were probably half the people that had never even written a line of code. And that's what scares me most about AI is that, and the slop that comes from it is, yes, yes, you could do what I do, but I'm always going, I feel like I'm always going to be able to do it a little bit better because I understand the concepts behind it.

16:21And this, I think, is where business leaders kind of miss the point on AI and they think, oh, well, I'm just going to replace this entire department with an AI bot to go out and do things. Because yes, you could probably do that and you probably could do okay for a little while, but at the end of the day, you're going to end up with problems that you don't even know you have because you don't even understand the technology or the reasoning behind doing certain things. So that's what scares me most about AI. And again, I am the first person to say that I use it all the time. I love it. I would not give it up now.

16:55I'm way more productive. But, you know, in the wrong hands, and both from a criminal standpoint and a personal standpoint in the wrong hands, it can be a tool that is not used well and not good. Yeah. No, I agree. I think we do need good people to be, you know, to keep up with those that might not be, you know, at that level. Frank, listen, this has been such a great conversation. I think we all got a taste of the kind of content that you share. Let's make sure that our friend here knows exactly how to connect with you. First off, really simple to our friend that's listening to a podcast right now, just search for your tech makeover.

17:39Frank is the host. He's got great content, everyday, you know, kind of advice that you can use. You just produced one as of when we're recording this on travel tech tips, how to use public Wi-Fi without putting your accounts at risk, QR codes, are they safe? Really, really practical content, no matter your level of technical prowess. Frank, where else should people engage with you? So very easily, you could search for Frank Bravo. It's spelled exactly how you would think it would be spelled. And you can find me at yourtechmakeover.com or if you wanna just shoot me an email, you can send me an email at hello at frankbravo.com and that'll get to me.

18:23but really searching my name online is pretty much the easiest way to find me. I love it. Frank Bravo, you're a technologist. You got a sub stack. You're all over the podcast world. Thank you so much, Frank. Again, your website, yourtechmakeover.com and then your professional services. Bravo, looks like ITC. Yep, for Bravo IT Consulting. Thank you so much, Frank, for joining us. Thanks, Josh. I appreciate the time.

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