🎙️New Episode: How Global Professionals Can Communicate with Authority & Security with Robert Siciliano | Real English Conversations Podcast for Global Professionals

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This is the Real English Conversations podcast, where we help you to communicate clearly and confidently in the conversations that matter most in the workplace and your professional life. Hey, everyone, it's Curtis Davies here from the Real English Conversations podcast,

show that held global professionals to speak clearly and confidently at work. This week's guest is Robert Siciliano, someone whose expertise every professional needs right now, especially in a world where AI is rewriting the rules of communication. He's a cybersecurity awareness expert, a good guy hacker he calls himself, and the creator of the Strategic Human Firewall.

He's the CEO of ProtectNowLLC.com, and he teaches organizations how to protect their people long before they protect their technology. You've likely seen him on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and The Today Show, or an entrepreneur magazine breaking down complex threats in a way anyone can understand. Robert argues that the biggest communication risk today isn't a language

barrier, its digital deception, and that our biological default to trust makes us vulnerable to AI and has scams, deep fakes, and social engineering attacks. Today we're going to talk about the psychological blind spots, leadership, identity verification, and how global professionals can communicate with confidence, authority, and security in a world where reality can be faked

in seconds. Robert Siciliano, welcome to the show. Hey, thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity. Excellent. Robert, let's start here. You say the biggest communication risk today isn't language. It's digital deception. Can you break that down? What that really means and why global professionals are especially vulnerable? It's been, you know, I really decades of

of receiving phishing emails, gamey phone calls, gamey text messages, and it's just getting worse. It's not getting any better. The inbox now is being populated by what used to get,

you know, moved into the spam folder. They're getting better at it due to the fact that the bad guys, the bad actors, they have access to technology that makes it so.

They're able to avoid the spam folders, able to get into the inbox and the emails themselves look as legitimate as any communication you'd get from your employer, your bank, a charity you might do business with. We're not as consumers as employees really any more effective today than we were quite

some time ago at recognizing that risk. Sometimes you don't even realize it. Sometimes you don't even know. getting so good that you don't even realize that you're hijacked or hacked or this is happening.

So it's scary. And that leads directly into one of your most important concepts, the human blind spot. You talk about the human blind spot, our biological instinct to trust familiar communication patterns.

How does that blind spot make even smart leaders fall for cyber scams enhanced by AI, deep fakes, and voice cloning? Well, I think it's important to define the human blind spot. And basically, it's the psychological instinct to trust.

We trust what's familiar to us, of course. It is that cognitive gap where biological trust overrides digital suspicion. And that leaves the door open for all forms of deception. Understand that human beings are what is considered an interdependent species.

And due to that fact that we are dependent upon each other, essentially for our survival, for our procreation, what that means is, you know, without that interdependence, we would essentially fail to exist. And the basis of that is that we require by default that we trust each other.

Trust is our default. We trust from the moment we come out of our mama throughout the rest of our lives. We pretty much give the benefit of the doubt all day, every day. You know, I have people say to me all the time, I don't trust anybody.

And I'm like, yeah, you do. You do, you know. Yeah. We want to, we need to, you know, you, you, you trust generally the people that you

come in contact with that you meet, that you are, you know, in two or three feet in, in, in their presence. Like you want to, you, it feels better to, to trust them versus like not trusting them means that they're up to no good.

And then you worry that they might hurt you and no one wants to think like that to begin with. Okay. So we trust when emails come in, we trust when the phone rings, we trust when we get text messages.

And certainly, you know, bad guys are eroding that trust. We get that part, right? But they're not eroding it to the point where we still are 100%, you know, looking at every single text, phone call, an email that comes in and scrutinizes it to the degree that we should. And the reality is, is that sometimes they're so good at what they do,

and they catch us at a certain point that we react, we respond because we think that that is legit. legit. It is that natural biological instinct to trust that is that blind spot that makes it very difficult for us to manage risk effectively when the bad guys use the truth against us. And often the biggest attacks don't come from hacking computers but from hacking people.

of these attacks today are what you call wet wear attacks. Social engineering that manipulates human psychology, right? What are some of the most common communication mistakes that open the door