How an AI Builder and Strategist Uses Tech to Solve Big Business Problems

In this episode, I’m joined by Lucas Lorenzo Peña, a systems thinker, Creative Technologist, and AI Builder. Lucas sits at the intersection of strategic design, innovation frameworks, and emerging AI tools. This conversation dives deep into how AI is shaping the way we think, not just the way we work.

We explore how tools can be extensions of our thought processes, how engineering mindsets can drive creative innovation, and why resilience in the age of AI is less about learning every tool and more about learning how to think across systems. If you’ve ever wondered how to bridge artistic vision with technical skill, or how to build future-ready infrastructure for the ideas in your head, this one’s for you.

🔥 Topics We Cover:

• How AI tools are helping Lucas prototype and refine complex ideas
• Lucas’s approach to creative problem solving through systems thinking
• The difference between art, design, and engineering in the AI era
• Why learning to “vibe code” isn’t enough, and how to build a real foundation
• His strategy of “backcasting” and imagining from the future backwards
• Why staying adaptable with tools matters more than mastering any one platform

🧰 Tools Mentioned in This Episode:

• For thinking + writing: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek
• For coding + prototyping: Python, JavaScript, LLaMA
• For organizing ideas: Notion

Contact Lucas:

LinkedIn: lucaslpena
Substack: traverseinspace

🔗 Links Mentioned in the Episode:

• Future of Education Instagram
• Lego + Generative AI Article on LinkedIn
• Traverse-in-space Website

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"How I AI" is a concept and podcast series created and produced by Brooke Gramer of EmpowerFlow Strategies LLC. All rights reserved.

Transcript

Brooke: 0:02

Welcome to How I AI the podcast featuring real people, real stories, and real AI in action. I'm Brooke Gramer your host and guide on this journey into the real world impact of artificial intelligence. For over 15 years, I've worked in creative marketing events and business strategy wearing all the hats. I know the struggle of trying to scale and manage all things without burning out, but here's the game changer, ai. This isn't just a podcast, How I AI is a community. A space where curious minds like you can come together, share ideas, and I'll also be bringing you exclusive discounts, free trials and insider resources so you can test drive the latest tools and tech yourself. Because AI isn't just a trend, it's a shift. The sooner we embrace it, the more freedom, creativity, and opportunities we'll unlock. How I AI is brought to you in partnership with the collective, A space designed to accelerate your learning and AI adoption. I joined the Collective and it's completely catapulted my learning, expanded my network, and show me what's possible with ai. Whether you're just starting out or looking to refine your AI strategy, The Collective gives you the resources to grow. Stay tuned to learn more at the end of this episode, or check the show notes for my exclusive invite link.. Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of How I Ai. I'm your host, Brooke Gramer today I have a very special guest. His name is Lucas Lorenzo Pena, he is a creative studio founder. He's also a creative technologist and an AI builder. Thank you so much for being here. Welcome. Thanks for having me. I love to give the opportunity for everybody to expand more on their introduction. I'd love for you to share in your own words more about yourself and your background.

Lucas: 1:55

Cool. Yeah, so I work in creative technology and what that means is essentially using technology in different creative ways. Fundamentally, right? I view creativity as something that is really an extension of. A practice that is creating with intention. Design and engineering are the same thing. I view them that way. And so for me, being a creative technologist, it's a way to really design and construct experiences or provocations, or experimentations for clients, peoples teams, whatever. And I've been in the, let's say, emergent tech space since 2016, more or less. Working in blockchain, civic technology back then machine learning, and now it's called ai. Yeah, I've been in this space since 2016 and I've been teaching creativity and AI since 2018. So I've been in and around the AI space for a while, and I decided to have found my own company last year after leaving big corporate innovation. And before that I also had my design studio. So I've been in and around let's say transformational tech for a while.

Brooke: 2:54

Okay. Wow. Yeah. Long

Lucas: 2:55

time.

Brooke: 2:55

Lots to dig in there. So when did you start? This, did you learn it in school? Did you end up in that area?

Lucas: 3:03

Yeah. So my background is in computer science, right? But before that I was a musician and I found that when I moved to computer science that I was able to have the same, excitement and creativity when I was coding, as I did when I was, being in, on a stage playing music. Cool. And so I've always sought out different spaces that I can experiment with. Technology. It just so happened that I was able to. move to Europe and study design program, which was very different from computer science. And then after that I studied cognitive science, which is a blend of philosophy. Computational neuroscience. I focused on robotics specifically and yeah, modeling multi-agent systems, et cetera, et cetera. It was a lot of fun. And I think after that it was it really just gave me this essence that there is more. Than just creating, there's more in theory than just Web2, right? There's more than just making websites. And more than making products. So I just sought that out and yeah, worked in the smart city space. And then from there I was able to actually come up and essentially create a, create like an AI creative program in a university. E the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. And since then, it's just, I've just been in it really. I've just been in it. And for me it really comes down to the creative practice and how. AI or new technologies really can provoke us to think in different ways. So the work we do is less about building products or building automations. It's more about building new ways of thinking and then downstream from there, building the tools that can really take the thinking into a business sensor, into whatever kind of. More, let's say, tangible goal that we wanna move towards. Yeah.

Brooke: 4:37

Okay. So you transitioned to working for yourself Yeah. In the last year. What kind of clients do you work on? And take me through. How you work with them, because I dunno if I'm fully understanding the scope so break it down a little bit more. It's a lot of

Lucas: 4:52

fun. But it is a bit abstract, I would say. Yes. You and I think that that ambiguity is something that we do like to bring in the space with our clients. We've worked with a handful of Fortune 500 companies as well as a handful of research teams and just small community organizations. And what we really do is, firstly, we essentially do a workshop with them to figure out how does your business look like, what do you care about? What is your way of thinking? And map out in 15, 20, even 30 years, we do a little bit of futuring exercises. What does your business look like? Like how ideally do you want to be operating in the year 2050? From there, we say, okay, what technology can we help you use that can start pushing you towards that? So then we go from the more strategy side into the production side, and we have a team that that I lead where we just write, we write code that can nudge the business or just the objectives, KPI's, goals, whatever into more of this future vision that they have for the company. It's this marriage between strategy and thinking and production and tooling. It's straddling both worlds. We're like a little boutique R&D lab, if you will.

Brooke: 5:51

Okay. Yeah, I think I understand it better. So thank you for elaborating. So my next question is, how many people on your team and what's the technology stack that you all are currently using?

Lucas: 6:04

So we don't we don't subscribe to a tech stack. Okay. Because the space is continuously changing. We're a team of five. Maybe six total right now. There's three engineers and I'm the principal, engineer and strategist. And then we have a production manager, a biz dev person, and like an organizational design person. And and then we also partner with other companies that do some more strategic design work like Jackie you might have. Designed detangling, this kind of stuff. So we. Yeah, as I was saying, we don't necessarily stick to a stack because it's always changing. I really want my relationship with my clients to be such that if they care about the future of generative media and images and video we are the team that says, okay, here is a platform that you can use that can generate you these things and that you can use to uplift your creative process. And it doesn't matter if something new comes out next week or tomorrow, whatever. We can just continuously update this for you. The tech stack is usually Python or JavaScript. Okay. The languages that essentially can run anywhere and everywhere just because for the sake of accessibility and tooling. Yeah.

Brooke: 7:04

Wow. That's good to hear that you just are agile and it's based on every client in different do you say that you spend a lot on those coding systems or do you feel like it's more just in-house?

Lucas: 7:16

We do. The pipelines that we work on. Are large. They're six figure projects. And they take months. Yeah. But I think that really when we are tinkering with these things, we're continuously reminding ourselves that it's more than just the tools, right? It's how the tools, like the tools are not necessarily meant to replace people. They're not meant to remove, if we, for example, have a tool that generates images for a media company, we're not wanting to replace their creatives. We want to create things that can uplift their creatives. So while we do spend a lot of time on the tooling, really the framework and the capstones and the guiding light that we're pushing towards is very much downstream of these workshops. So it's a lot of fun. I love what I do really if I love it. Yeah. Truly. I love what I do. So

Brooke: 7:56

We were just in a mastermind together. And you brought us through a really fun workshop where we did that future scope and. You had these prompts already built out for us. And I'm curious because you have a background in research and development. Yeah. What goes into future planning? How does one plan for the future and create an outcome when things are changing so much. How does that work?

Lucas: 8:20

Yeah, it's scary. Yeah. Looking at the landscape of AI and technology, I was using a tool the other day that. One of my clients was really wanting to use, and then a week later it was like, on Twitter they said this tool is dead, or X, I'm not gonna call it X, but on Twitter, they said, this tool is dead. And it was like, oh, then three days later, the tool that apparently died came back because they had a new release. Yes. It's scary, but I think the best tool is really this. What I like to call just mental models, like different mental models. The way that I work is very much like I have different mental models that I use to look at things in different ways. And I think connecting to these different ways of thinking, whether it's the tool of back casting, imagining how you wanna be in the future and then working backwards, whether it's this idea of the cone of the future. Like these are all the possibilities you might be able to achieve tomorrow. And from each possibility, what might this look like in three years and in five years? And, expanding the scope, the space of futuring is really just connecting to these tools. Being able to, I have I'm a heavy notion user.

Brooke: 9:16

Okay.

Lucas: 9:16

Fucking love notion, plug notion. And I would say that if, if you use it the best thing you can do is really just catalog, right? You use it as a second brain. And in this second brain of mine, I have tons of these tools. I have, different, let's say what I call operations that I can use to look at to look at the world, whether it's asking really weird questions like what is the. What I like to do is I to bridge different, in different modalities together. So like, even just this sofa, right? There's texture to it, but asking a question like what is the texture of X? And if X is really abstract or ambiguous, it invites and invites provocation. Invites you to really think and say I wonder what, what is it, what is the texture of travel mean to me, for example? And how can I incorporate that into my travel or vacation company? Things like these little mini. Really verbs that you can apply on things is something that I just have a list of. And when we're working with the clients, it's finding these interesting ways to poke and prod, because a lot of the times, the problems that they have are, it's like an onion, you have to ask why five times, and then even still, you might not get to the core and you might realize that this one part of a complex system is connected to this other part. And you have to, you can't just pull one thread and the whole thing unravels. You have to really understand and pull multiple things at the same time. For me, just mental models and being really yeah. Say introspective on things. Yeah. Is how my team has been able to really stand apart from others insofar as being able to really introduce this new way of thinking. Yeah, it's a lot of fun, but it does take a lot of mental work. I will say that I nerd out about these things and I know that if someone might not, it might seem like mental gymnastics or just like, why are we doing this? Really? But and I was even talking to someone who was in the workshop with us, Finn, and he was saying that it's a bit even existential in asking some of these questions, but I do think at a point, you, the best way is to ask yourself why. And to ask yourself weird questions. Yes. And to try to answer them if you can.

Brooke: 11:07

Yeah. It sounds like each of the clients that you have are so unique and individual. You might not have a lot of repetitive work in your process in your systems. Yeah. So how does AI benefit you? I'm curious, what is maybe one huge benefit that has automated your workflow, or how exactly does it help you when it seems like every client isn't the same.

Lucas: 11:29

The way that we use AI when it comes to like, internal processes is very much around introducing these really complex, multi-level prompts mm-hmm. to help us. Build some of these provocations, for example, or to figure out how to create sales pipelines and this kind of stuff. Okay. I do really think though, that unlike maybe traditional sale offerings, we don't really have standardized approaches because we really like to build relationships with clients. Mm-hmm. Before we really work with them and unpack their wicked problem. But AI for us is really more about, using chat GPT for example, to interrogate us when we have assumptions about clients and having this list, as I said, on notion to then just dump in and say, okay, this is my understanding of this client and the scope. Here's some research and from the research plus the tools. Ask me a handful of questions that might introduce some new ways of thinking. And then we use this new way of thinking in our workshops with our clients. So it's very yeah, it's not necessarily. It's more of a process goal. Lemme say this, right? Okay. So there is, it's not a means to an end, but it's just a way to help us to use the analogy used. Help us, find some new textures to some of these questions and do so in a way that we can do it faster and faster.

Brooke: 12:39

So you use it a lot on your business Marketing and promoting your own business. Yeah. And more of

Lucas: 12:44

the strategy side. Yeah. Yeah.

Brooke: 12:45

That makes sense. I'm curious if you've had any challenges with AI with adopting it or using it early on in the beginning. It seems like you've been in this space for so long, it's hard to think about the real before and after effect, which is what I love to hone in on at this point. But like, was there ever a learning curve or such a big way that you had to shift and restructure. Around using these new tools and systems, or was it just always organic for you?

Lucas: 13:11

For me, it was organic, but I say that I'm very fortunate because. I view myself as a creative that really has this engineering framework. And for me to know back before AI was called ai, we called it machine learning. It was like, okay, how can I have some adaptive, or how can I have some evolutionary algorithm? How can I have a goal that we can really push towards quickly and play with that was, that's really what it was. Whether it's essentially doing linear regression or finding a point and a plot really, and doing that at scale. Whatever it was. The main thing for me was just remembering okay, that even if I am doing something creative, at the end of the day, it still comes down to code. And realizing that the code is still structured in this way. For me, learning how the code works, being a software engineer from my undergraduate degree has just helped me realize that when I am approaching these problems, I know what's happening behind the scenes. I can better massage, even now, I can better massage my prompts so that it really understands things. Or back then I can really take my inputs and map them to really solid solid goals in the, machine learning algorithm back then and everything in between. There was no real before and after. It was just like a new tool, a new, again, a new mental model that I'm applying things with. But I know that it's not easy and for example, different members of my team had to really understand the value of these things, and especially, with our clients, right? Or my job really is to educate them and bring them along and think about things differently, which of course, at the end of the day comes down to the code and comes down to the algorithm. It's yeah it's always a process, right? The educational pipeline. Yeah.

Brooke: 14:43

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Lucas: 15:52

I have found that a lot of creatives who lemme start with this.

Brooke: 15:59

Mm-hmm.

Lucas: 16:00

It's important to distinguish the difference between being an artist and being a designer or being a creative in this sense. I view art as creating to to ask questions and design and engineering are creating to answer questions. So one is goal oriented, one is intentional, and the other one is a lot more about feeling it's somatic. It's more about. Communicating essence as opposed to communicating information and knowledge. When we go towards communicating information and knowledge, then from there it's, for me, it's easy to break it down and say, okay, if I were to ask someone, what is your formula of creativity? If you think about it long enough, I think you can probably figure it out. If I personally view my formula of creativity as being tension between competence and serendipity, right? I know that I'm capable of writing code. I realize that I have to meet a goal or deadline, and then I have an aha moment, and these three things come together and then bam, it's creative. I would say that AI helps for me insofar as I'm able to, whether it's using prompts. Or whether it's generative images or media, I'm able to create a mechanism that for me, can can create this serendipity, right? The spontaneity that says, okay, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? Having this kind of breakdown of the knowledge or the things you care about, whether you're a florist or whether you're a culinary artist. And breaking it down to these essential essence of meaning for you. And then from there saying, okay, now that I have this essence of, for example, with culinary stuff, salt, fat, grease, fire, heat, all these things. What if I were to make this into some kind of map and throw it into a prompt, right? What if I were to bring all these weird things I have in my cabinet and throw it into a prompt and see what it gives me back? And then it might give you back nonsense. But as a culinary artist, knowing that fat is a delivery of flavor, you might say, you know what? I'm gonna use this random thing in my cabinet, peanut butter, for example, as the base, because I know that the peanut butter is gonna make this thing taste better. AI is really helpful insofar as you can simulate these environments really quickly, right? You can say, okay, it's not gonna work with salt, it's not gonna work with, it's not gonna work with bitterness, but we need fat to be this thing that's gonna do it, right? Or umami whatever flavor you wanna go for. And the same thing works, especially, we've seen it work with products even before ai, right? Like we have biomimicry the space of being inspired by nature to design a backpack that doesn't get crushed when we fall backwards or whatever. So the space of design and engineering has always borrowed from other domains. So now we're just able to borrow from even more domains, right? And use AI to the biggest thing is this, as I said, this simulation. Really, which is a lot of fun because you can simulate a whole bunch of stuff without needing to go and actually like, design something in CAD if you're, simulating a product or, smash things together in the kitchen to see if it tastes good or not. You can ask ChatGPT

Brooke: 18:38

Yeah. That was a lot to unpack and digest. You're very eloquent. Yeah. I spoke quickly. You've already gone through all my questions pretty much. My next question I like to ask people are usually about what they want be creating right now. If you were to wave a magic wand what is it that you're wanting to create and put out there right now that you haven't seen in this? Space yet? If I were using ai, yes, using ai, if I were to

Lucas: 19:03

wave a magic wand I, I have two different answers, right? One is pure kind of absurdity, let's say right now. But right now a lot of the tools that we're using are our built. By massive corporations. And massive data sets, massive components and hardware and all this stuff. If I could wave a magic wand, I would love if we can have a super intelligent system like ChatGPT being able to exist completely offline, locally On a device that doesn't need. Tons of memory, like a cell phone. Yes. The digital divide for me is super important. I really think that we are just continuously pushing up, the top 20% who are, who have access to these tools. And pushing everyone down. So this is more the pie in the sky thing. The other thing though that I think is a lot more tangible is, using AI for the sake of educating and trying to close the gap from the other way instead of creating a new piece of technology. Using the existing one, we have to bring this, let's say bottom whatever percent 80%. Higher up right in, into the 20, then make it 21 and 79 and 22 78, et cetera, et cetera. These types of educational pipelines or whether it's, even something as simple as using the Socratic method and just saying, Hey, I want to learn about X, ask me questions.

Brooke: 20:15

And.

Lucas: 20:17

The questions it asks could push you down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia and then you can actually understand it and then you can keep asking questions. Then maybe after 15 questions you're like, I know about podcast and recording studios and sound compression and audio, whatever it is. So even just these different tools that we can use, I think can be really well structured in the education space. Yes. At the same time. It's really important that we don't try to optimize education. I find that when, I think humans are just notoriously bad at this. Like, we're so good at setting a bar. It's like people need to pass tests. We're both from Florida. We have to pass the fcat. You have to do this, you have, and then it's like you're in school and you're studying for the test. You're not studying necessarily to understand. Yes. And AI can, if done the right way, can really help us to. Understand better. It can provoke us. Really, for me, it's not necessarily about generating this prompt or this text. It's like, how can AI help us ask the right questions? And it's capable of doing so, especially with context. And so it's just that, right? How can we use AI for the more humanistic approach and human based KPIs and goals and not just KPIs and goals and efficiencies that are defined by massive corporations in San Francisco, yeah, that's this, these for me are the long-term things I really wanna work on. Yeah.

Brooke: 21:32

That's awesome. I love that. You touched about education and the future of education. What do you think the future of education looks like in the next five years?

Lucas: 21:45

I saw a paper by Lego and someone else. I think I shared it Yes. In a group chat. Yeah, I read it and they were talking about how, of course it's really cool that the students have access to these things. I do think that we just need to be careful, right? I can see definitely there's going to be a space of education where. Yeah, there's not going to be student teachers in the classroom. It's just gonna be robots. You're just gonna learn from AI and I don't think that's necessarily the best approach. I do think education will continue to bifurcate and you'll have the Montessori of Waldorf schools, these types of, like the green school, the place, beautiful place you went to. Connected with it, and it's like, we're gonna have these spaces where students are going to learn more of the soft skills of the of art of curation. And then we're gonna move into the space where some schools are just purely gonna be production based. And I'm not entirely sure what's gonna happen because of it, I do think that it's going to be quite impactful, but we've already seen that, we have an entire. Generation who grew up, swiping on TikTok and you can tell that there's a bit of you, you might lose on social skills when all day you're, you're interacting and your social. Other is a, is an iPad. And I think that we're gonna have more of that, which is unfortunate. It's really unfortunate, especially with the state of standardized testing, yes, I get it. But when we push things and make them scale, it's like we are going to lose the, the magic that we might need when things need to be boring or slow or messy. You need to figure that stuff out. That's what being a human is. We're not robots. And that's the thing is when we're getting taught by robots, it's easy for the robots to just assume, or use the same algorithms and frameworks that itself understand and knows. But yeah, the humanities need to come in and save us in that aspect.

Brooke: 23:27

There's this Instagram account I follow, I think it's called something like Future of Education, and it's a school in Texas. And they hold this thing called Alpha School for Children. And what they do is they use AI a lot and they are able to condense the learning into a very short period of time. And then do more practical, real life. Yeah. That's wonderful. Hands on. Yeah. Yeah. Skills with people. And so there is like a hyper speeded learning. Moment during the day with ai, but then they build in the life skills and the people skills and yeah, that's super important. Prepare them for the real world. So to say. In it. So I'm hoping that more systems that are mixed that way come out because I agree. Same. I even have nephews that are, gen alpha and, having a hard time with those social aspects. Yeah. I see it already happening in real time. Yeah. And I also love that you touched on wanting to ask the right questions. Because I have a background in coaching and that's so important, right? Yeah. Is to know the right questions to ask and how that can give you the best output. And I've experienced that real time with your prompts and your masterful prompt engineering that you've done already. My next question is more about the future because a lot of people are in this moment where. They're trying to think about how they can position themselves for the future. Yeah. In a skillful manner, in a competitive manner. At one point, does AI just come for everything in all of our jobs and yeah. We are all just like doing what can we do? Hug each other pretty

Lucas: 24:59

much and get paid to

Brooke: 25:00

hug each other. Yeah. Yeah. That machines can't do. But getting your take on the future. And at what point even what it is that you do for a service business, at what point is AI coming for your job?

Lucas: 25:13

Yeah I really I find that some of these interesting and weird ways of thinking will be the last things to go.

Brooke: 25:22

Okay. And I'm

Lucas: 25:22

happy about that, that in, in the luxury, in the industry of luxury, I feel like people are not gonna want to get massaged by robots. We always we're. We will always wanna, they have those already for sure, but I'm sure it's a very different experience, right? Yes. Massage by robots versus a person. While the luxuries space the luxury industry is is a lot more, oriented towards a specific socioeconomic space. I think that the other one, these interesting ways of thinking and provocation is the thing that can really offset as long as we can maintain it, we can offset AI coming for our jobs. So if you are a creative and you. Your job is to just know which tools to click on Photoshop. You are definitely gonna get replaced. But if you are a creative and you really understand the space of semiotics and know, okay, we're gonna have this color and this texture, and we're gonna go on this place and this lighting and we're gonna have this alleyway instead of that one, whatever these types of things, for now, AI is not going to replace. And also it's important to know that we're having a whole bunch of information and knowledge that AI is. That we are creating because of ai and a lot of AI is becoming circular. So I think that there is going to be in a way there's gonna be like a walled garden, like a locked paradigm of things and stuff that gets created from AI and culture downstream that gets created from AI and things that are outside of it. So my invitation is to try to be outside of it as much as you can. Of course you can use ChatGPT to come up with ideas or image generation models for whatever video. Same thing. Yes. But. The real thing is like, just ask yourself why a few times and figure out how to follow it. Because if not, I agree with you. Essentially we are just gonna be used to harvest data for those who are making capital from these systems, right? AI in of itself is a really strong mechanism of consolidating power, and so the question is just how do we wanna make sure that we are continuously trying to smooth it out really. Yeah.

Brooke: 27:13

Very great point. My next question for you is the future of coding, since you do that already. Yeah. I know that we chatted a bit about vibe coding at our mastermind. Yeah. Do you vibe code and do you feel like coding is gonna be obsolete soon?

Lucas: 27:27

There's a talk, I don't remember the name of the speaker, but he gave this talk in maybe 2003 and he was talking about the future of coding. And a handful of things that he mentioned in the future of coding. Even right now, we still don't have. It was funny because he gave the talk, with like a pen, like a pocket protector and on an overhead projector, like how, I'm sure growing up, but it was in early two thousands. Yeah. And it was a satire way of saying like. This, a lot of the, a lot of the interesting innovations that we've seen in coding has been around since since the nineties, eighties, maybe even seventies. But we haven't used a lot of it. And I think now we're starting to really use a lot of it and vibe coding. While again, it's nice. I really think that going into the coding space and just vibe coding is absolutely not going to be the way, because as I said, you are then creating a domain of knowledge that is separate from everything else. So you're not gonna be able to create anything new. The real important thing is if you are a coder to firstly learn how to code. Don't learn how to code, vibe, coding. Learn how to code, and know that these systems are not necessarily perfect. And if you do wanna create things that are novel and interesting and innovative, you can only do that if you blend those two parts of your brain together, right? Of the vibe, coding and the other one. So that's how I would say you can build resilience in the coding space.

Brooke: 28:39

I think you bring up a really good point is that. To not just learn how to do something with ai, to first learn how to do something without ai. Yeah. And really build up that context and that background. And that is gonna help you stand out. It should be the tool that takes you. The system that takes you to the next level and not just getting you there all the way.

Lucas: 29:03

Exactly.'cause it can't get you the other way. Really, it speaks to what I was saying before with the mental models. Like you need to understand, like even if you're in the culinary space, you need to understand you know how to cook vegetables before you can go and make a lasagna if you want to truly make a good lasagna. And it's the same thing. You can't just start going in and doing stuff because not only you can argue it's reckless or dangerous or unethical, but you're just not going to get the value and even individual meaning that you want to get out of it, right? Which is. Again, I think is a push towards moving us away from this sense of purpose. Yes. You'll become a robot if you are not learning anything.

29:35

Yes. And it's

Lucas: 29:35

easy.'cause if you're talking to robots all day and you're acting like a robot all day. Yeah. You pretty much become one.

Brooke: 29:41

Absolutely. I know that you are very caught up on reading and AI trends and everything. So I'm curious if you have anything to share about recent trends and what you see happening in this space. In the next year, I always. Talk about how this year was, the year of the agents and the agent marketplace. Yep. What do we think about 2026 and 2027? What do you think is gonna be like the commonality there?

Lucas: 30:07

I think we are moving into a space where there's gonna be a lot more robots, specifically humanoids, in places like Japan. In other parts of Asia, they have like Roomba style robots and, packing warehouses and this type of stuff. But I do think we're going to get to a place in the next few years where right now we have fairly intelligent brains that we're talking to, like ChatGPT. And it's just a matter of getting the actual motors and cables and wires and everything. To just connect this to some kind of camera. And then we have, a essentially a new robotic servant that's gonna be walking around. I really do think in the next few years this is gonna be fairly common in five years. I wouldn't be surprised if, instead of a Roomba in people's homes, they're just gonna have these types of humanoids walking around and tons of companies are really advancing that. I really think next year and the year thereafter, we're gonna see way more, not just in the factory floors. Yeah.

Brooke: 30:56

Fascinating. I know that you said that you have a background in robotics at one point as well. Yeah. And that's something I've only very lightly talked about with some guests in the past, so maybe we can dig even deeper into it. Okay. Humanoids. In our house. What are they doing? Cleaning and just doing basic stuff, or?

Lucas: 31:14

I would think so, yeah. The thing is, right now a lot of them are used for like elderly care, okay. We have massive populations the populations not making enough children to take care of the elderly. And then of course with that you have not enough workers that are going to the workforce and social security, and then everything's topsy turvy because of that, the biggest space. That I think we'll see at first as elderly care, which is really sad. Personally. I think that multi-generational housing we should move back towards personally. So that everyone lives together. Yeah. But unfortunately the, just the nature of urbanization and the architecture that is downstream of that just means that, our parents will be probably somewhere not near us when we have families and live our lives. And so elderly care with robotics is really the space. And then of course, you have things like, disaster relief and going into, I think some dangerous jobs will firstly replace, people that have to go and, diffuse bombs or, going into burning buildings and this kind of stuff, so that'll be the first, but eventually it will be just like, servants cleaning, doing the dishes, this type of stuff. And I don't think we'll be able to relax because of it. I think we, we'll just probably end up working more, which is part of the problem.

Brooke: 32:17

Really I

Lucas: 32:17

truly think it's gonna be really hard for us to do that. Even look at AI right now, like yeah, I am way more productive, but I am not working less hours. I want to work less hours.

Brooke: 32:28

That I always think that it's important to for sure, like, go deeper on that. And that we should be working less.

Lucas: 32:36

Absolutely. We should be working less. We should be working less. Yeah. Yeah. But I think just the nature of it, you know it because it's very competitive and because it's continuously changing. Yeah. And if you are a business owner, you know that it is, you can feel the competition. You look around and okay, I might be, one of maybe a handful of agencies that are, that is doing exactly what I'm doing and I know that if I'm not faster or smarter or just, it's the nature of, it's the nature of capitalism, right? You must, you have to try to be faster. It's unfortunate, but I really do hope we get to a place where we can relax a bit, but not in this wally esque future where we're just like, laying on sofas, going around and having robots do everything for us. Of course, I do think meaning is also found through a bit of struggle if you will. We have to work, we, we need work for meaning. Yes. So

Brooke: 33:19

I'm not saying go to not working, but what about 75% work? 25% rest.

Lucas: 33:27

That sounds great. Like I, I don't know where the capital's gonna come from though. Yeah, because if AI, as I said, is really a mechanism to amalgamate power, and right now those who are doing that are not necessarily they're not necessarily governments, municipalities, right? They're private companies. So the question is like, then where does the capital come from? If we work 75% less. Do we still get the same salary? Is there some kind of, universal basic income? If so, how does that happen if the government is not necessarily the one who is powering the ai, but meta and Google are are they the ones getting super taxed? If so, can they lobby against it? There's all these, everything is a complex, it's a super complex political system. Yes. So I would hope maybe one day we can work less truly, 75% less, but. I don't know.

Brooke: 34:17

Yeah. Who's paying for all these robots? Is it gonna be just more tax money?

Lucas: 34:22

I think firstly it's gonna be private. Okay. It'd definitely be private money and but the luxury robots, the ones that are gonna be doing dish washing and taking care of maybe even taking care of little kids or walking the dog, they will be private. And I don't see the government just giving robots away and, yeah. From there, of course then you have, these future, these movies like iRobot and these things where like, how do the robots have moral ethics? How do they make decisions? What are their norms? Do they have rights? What if they have to make a decision that ends in someone getting hurt? Moral dilemmas, these types of things. I think we're just opening The Pandora's box with this, I do think in, in a way, it's inevitable, but I don't wanna be a, I don't wanna be a Debbie Downer. I don't want, I don't wanna be here and just talk about how it's all bad. But there is a lot to just prepare for it, really, as I said is asking these questions Yeah. And trying to smooth it out, because if not, it's so easy to surrender our agency. We've already, in theory, surrendered our privacy with social media. Let's not surrender our knowledge.

Brooke: 35:16

Very valid point as well. Mm-hmm. So I think that sets me up for my next question. Yeah. Is for those who are just entering AI or getting into it, in the beginner phase, what point of advice do you have for them? And any key takeaways that you want to give with all of your vast knowledge and experience?

Lucas: 35:35

I would say the most important thing is to remember that when you're using these tools. That they're always gonna be changing. So the cool thing is you can ask ChatGPT to tell yourself, you can write, tell me how to use, tell me how to use ChatGPT, it's wonderful. At the same time, that same protocol might not necessarily work for Google Gemini. Or Claude. The main thing is to just get comfortable with learning new things quickly. And being able to ask yourself, okay. If I'm talking to a large language model, if I'm talking to something that I'm writing with my keyboard It's giving me texts back. What little tools can I use? Whether it's giving context to say, you're a medical doctor, I have a cough, this is really different. Versus saying you're a lawyer, I have a cough. You need to have positioning and context. Yes. So these types of things you can borrow. So it's about just getting little tools and putting them on your tool belt that that you can adapt in different spaces. That's the biggest thing I would recommend. And of course, just playing with the tools if you can. There's a handful of open source tools which people don't need to spend money on. Which I would recommend playing with

Brooke: 36:34

Which ones?

Lucas: 36:34

Deep Seek Okay. Is good. You can run it on a, on your computer in in five or 10 minutes you can run on your computer. And llama is also good from Facebook, deep Sea Car One's from a Chinese company, I don't remember the name. But yeah, there's different ones you can use that you don't need to spend 20 bucks a month for. And I really think that the education part for me is everything. As you go through these things and as you understand the different tools that I was mentioning, it's like continuously asking yourself, how can I use these tools in different ways? If I'm gonna be talking to something that generates images, how does this work? And maybe if I talk to something else that generates images, how can I borrow some things? That's really it.

Brooke: 37:08

I love that. Where do you learn ai? Who teaches you?

Lucas: 37:14

I get a lot of my stuff from Twitter. Okay. But it's mainly because my feed is just, I try to use social media. I know social media is an echo chamber. So if I see something as valuable, I like, and I bookmark and I share, and eventually just Twitter is gonna be like, oh, this new thing came out and that new thing came out. Okay. I try to just construct each social media with that end in mind. For example, my Instagram is not really much of my Instagram is like travel and photography.'cause I like, snowboarding, travel and photography. My Instagram is snowboarding, travel photography. But Twitter for me is this thing. So I would say just constructing your social media around it is good. YouTube is also a good place, good resources there. And as I said, you can ask the tool, you can say ChatGPT, how do I use, how do I use you as a tool? And it can tell you.

Brooke: 37:56

Yes. Yeah, just ask ChatGPT literally

Lucas: 37:58

say, how do I use, how do I use yourself? How do I use a tool? I guess it's weird to say it, but that's what you would type in, right? Yes. Yeah. So

Brooke: 38:05

even if I'm on client calls and they ask me something directly that I don't know the answer to, I'll even just ask ChatGPT Live, be like, let's get to the bottom of this right here. Yeah.

Lucas: 38:14

Yeah. And the cool thing is with the research mode, it connects to the internet and you can, you can expand the knowledge that it's trained on. Yes. Which is really cool. And yeah, these tools are super helpful. It's, yeah, they're just always changing, right? So I would say don't get attached to one. Because if you do, then you're either going to fall behind when something new comes out, or if you don't really ask yourself, how am I using this tool and how can I take this somewhere else? When something new comes, then you have to do this step, which is just takes a lot of work and time. Yeah, I like to view it as like, when you're learning math in school, everything is built on something else, right? Multiplication is just addition at scale. Algebra is practically the same thing. Calculus, okay. It's just, we're just adding different layers and we're going up, and it's the same thing with this as with any skill, the only way to just, you're gonna be a beginner and you're gonna get better and better. Eventually. You might be a beginner again, but you have all these tools that you can bring into your repertoire of knowledge that you can say, okay, I wanna use this or use that. It's just being aware of that really like, as I said, use notion, write things down, make a model or operations page and nerd out about nerding out. Yes. Really

Brooke: 39:17

nerd out about nerding out. Nerd out about nerding out. I think that's an amazing final quote to end on. How can listeners reach out to you? How can they get in contact with you?

Lucas: 39:26

Cool. My my studio is called Traverse in Space. And right now we're doing a rebrand, but we are on LinkedIn. Myself, I'm also on LinkedIn. Lucas Lorenzo Pena Traverse in Space is traverse in space. Okay. Our whole thing is about, in about bridging information across these multidisciplinary spaces, hence. We're traversing the multidisciplinary spaces. And yeah, you can find me there, you can find our thoughts traversing space as a substack where we try to provoke interesting and spicy things. Which might not necessarily are, is best on LinkedIn because LinkedIn's, about scale and likes. But yeah. We're there, feel free to reach out. And we work with mainly big corporates, but we also are thinking about opening different containers for people who are interested, small SMEs, small business founders, solopreneurs, to help them really leverage some of the learnings we've used in. For example, fortune 500 companies, so we yeah, stay tuned because these types of things are in the works. And for me, really it's just about helping everyone get access to this beautiful stuff because if not, then society will just, things will bifurcate in ways we don't want them to, yeah. Thank you.

Brooke: 40:24

Wonderful. I can't thank you enough for being here today. There was a lot to unpack in this episode. So I'm sure it's one of those episodes where people listen to it twice, if not three times maybe.

Lucas: 40:35

Or maybe just have another conversation in the future.

Brooke: 40:38

Yes. I would love to talk again. So thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Lucas: 40:42

Thanks.

Brooke: 40:44

I hope today's episode opened your mind to what's possible with ai. Do you have a cool use case on how you're using AI and wanna share it? DM me. I'd love to hear more and feature you on my next podcast. Until next time, here's to working smarter, not harder. See you on the next episode of How I Ai. This episode was made possible in partnership with the Collective ai, a community designed to help entrepreneurs, creators, and professionals seamlessly integrate AI into their workflows. One of the biggest game changers in my own AI journey was joining this space. It's where I learned, connected and truly enhanced my understanding of what's possible with ai. And the best part, they offer multiple membership levels to meet you where you are. Whether you want to DIY, your AI learning or work with a personalized AI consultant for your business, the collective has you covered. Learn more and sign up using my exclusive link in the show notes.