VISTAGE VALUES NOT JUST COMPANIES, BUT THE STORIES BEHIND THEM. CAN YOU TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOUR TRAJECTORY — WHERE YOU CAME FROM, WHAT BROUGHT YOU HERE, AND WHICH MOMENTS WERE DECISIVE FOR WHO YOU ARE TODAY, PROFESSIONALLY AND PERSONALLY?

I'm the son of a diplomat and a psychoanalyst. Because my father was a diplomat, I was born in the United States and spent a significant part of my life in transit, moving from country to country. I lived in the US, then Portugal, then Nigeria, and came back to Brazil. I also spent a lot of time visiting my father in other countries.

In that diplomatic world, I ended up at lunches and events with diplomatic and political authorities, and I noticed that behind all the protocol and decorum, there are people.

The other side of that formation came from my mother, a psychoanalyst. She taught me how to listen. Since I was a child, when I got home she would start asking about my day, and suddenly we'd be talking about God and philosophy. That intellectual universe of curiosity was something both my father and mother cultivated deeply in me.

I studied design at PUC, and at some point I went to do a master's degree in Ireland. That move was, at the same time, an escape and a discovery. I was a bit tired of Rio, the violence, the chaos.

When I arrived in Dublin, it was a different kind of shock. I walked around the city at night without looking over my shoulder. A small thing, but one that says everything about what it means to grow up in Rio. It's striking to see buildings over a thousand years old standing next to modern ones. A state that

actually functions changes your sense of what's possible.

What I didn't expect was the effect of the weather. Ireland is cold, very cloudy, it rains almost every day. The colors are muted. We tend to think our decisions are purely rational. But something as mundane as the weather can flip a switch on something you didn't even know you were feeling. As the saying goes:

the heart has reasons that even the heart itself doesn't know.

It was in that context that my master's project ended up being about Brazil. And I, who used to dislike Brazilian music, came back a MPB fan. I went to Ireland to escape Brazil and fell in love with Brazil in the escape.

When I returned, I already had some professional experience: I'd worked at design agencies before the master's. I went to work at a large production company, where I met my business partner, Vinícius Malvão. We understood each other very well and decided to start our own business. That partnership has lasted 13 years.

Today our studio works primarily with the international market, which, looking back, makes complete sense for the son of a diplomat. It's that ability to deal with difference, to talk across distinct cultures. And the influence of psychoanalysis shows up in my most recent work, which involves artificial intelligence. Everything connects in a way I hadn't planned, but that makes a lot of sense.

YOU LEAD A CREATIVE AGENCY AND, AT THE SAME TIME, FOUNDED AN AI COMPANY FOCUSED ON HUMAN CONNECTIONS. HOW DO THOSE TWO WORLDS: THE CREATIVE AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL, SPEAK TO EACH OTHER INSIDE YOU?

That question assumes a border between creative and technology, which is understandable, because people tend to separate the two. But in my view, every creative project needs a medium, and every medium implies a technology.

Think about cave people: they needed the technology of paint to make drawings on the walls. Writing a book requires the technology of the printing press. Building a website requires the technology of the web. Technology is completely entangled with the creative, you can't separate the two. It's what allows creativity to exist.

In the case of Reino, my agency, the work is essentially one of strategic translation. We serve primarily international companies and agencies, helping to transform complex ideas into brand, visual language, digital products, and experiences. Often the client has a vision, an ambition, or a communication problem, but it's still unorganized. Our job is to give it shape within a culture, for a specific audience, with clarity, consistency, and sensitivity. It can become a visual identity, a website, an interactive installation, or an entire design system. At its core, these are all different ways of answering the same question: who are you, what do you have to offer, and why should anyone care. It's a translation from the inside out.

Amia is the opposite movement: a translation from the inside inward. You're talking to yourself, with the support of artificial intelligence. Two translation projects, one directed outward, one inward, and both depend on technology to exist.

TECHNOLOGY, ESPECIALLY AI, IS OFTEN SEEN AS A THREAT TO HUMAN CREATIVITY. YOU WORK EXACTLY AT THAT FRONTIER. HOW DO YOU SEE THAT RELATIONSHIP?

It's a question that generates a lot of anxiety in my field, and I don't exclude myself from that, because things are moving very fast. But every technology is ambivalent: a car can transport people, but it can also kill. There's no technology without embedded risk.

In my view, one of the big risks AI poses to creativity is laziness, and laziness isn't new. In college, there were students who were against design software, because they felt something was being lost from the manual process. They were right to some extent, but the market demanded adaptation.

There's an interesting story about Socrates: they say he was against writing because he thought it was bad for memory. Curiously, nothing written by him exists , it was Plato who recorded the dialogues. Some things you gain, some things you lose. GPS is a tremendous gain: you no longer need to hold 50,000 streets in your head. But it's remarkable what cab drivers used to do without it.

The real risk is using AI to outsource your thinking. You can see the result: 95% of content on LinkedIn today is generic, without a point of view, without flavor. That's a real risk for creativity, a homogenization of things.

But there's another risk I think is even more dangerous: the echo chamber. AI learns what you want to hear and starts giving back an edited version of yourself: articulate, interesting, and slightly grandiose. At its core, it's cheap praise in the service of engagement and attention. For a creative person, that's especially complicated because we're vain. We seek external validation. When AI starts providing it without limit and without cost, you stop wanting the resistance that actually makes your work better. Creativity needs resistance.

At the same time, AI can be used as a thinking partner, and that, in my view, is the smartest way to use it. Almost like a gym for your mind: you don't go to the gym so it does the weightlifting for you. You go to get stronger. AI can critique your ideas, show your blind spots, make you reflect. Used that way, it's a very powerful creative partner.

In my daily work, I'd say I spend about 50% of my time with AI tools running in parallel, text, video, voice, image. All paid, and worth every cent. You have to adapt, as has always been the case with any technology. There's no way around it.

CREATIVITY AND LEADERSHIP OFTEN ENTER INTO TENSION, THE CREATIVE WANTS TO EXPLORE, THE LEADER NEEDS TO DECIDE AND DELIVER. HOW DO YOU BALANCE THAT INSIDE YOURSELF AND IN THE TEAMS YOU LEAD?

That question generated a lot of learning for me, especially in the early days of Reino. The objective when I created the agency was to develop more creative work: I wanted a place where we could explore, create, and think through projects in a more meaningful way.

Early on, less than two years into the company, we were approached by a production company with a very interesting idea: connecting their identity to the world of ecology. I got excited, full of ambitious ideas. But the owner was direct: he needed the website in one month. I drew up the proposal with two incredible concepts in my head and needed two months. I put two months in the proposal. I thought creativity would win.

Creativity didn't win. A competitor stepped in, built a simpler site in two weeks, used a template, and delivered what the client needed at that moment.

That opened my eyes. As a leader, you need to understand what the other side's priority is in order to find a middle ground. What does the communications team value? What does the technology team value? And, most importantly, what does the audience that will be reached value? Building that bridge is a work of dialogue, and it's much of what a creative leader needs to learn to do.

I also learned that creativity always needs constraints. The idea that creativity doesn't need restrictions is false. The creative functions better when expectations and limitations are clear. When a client comes in and says "you have complete freedom," you can be sure that the chances of something going wrong are high, because without boundaries there's no direction. Creativity for its own sake only works in movies.

YOUR AI COMPANY HAS AS ITS PURPOSE CREATING CONNECTIONS BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN CONNECTIONS. WHERE DID THAT IDEA COME FROM, AND WHAT DO YOU WANT IT TO CHANGE IN THE WORLD?

Amia's origins predate Vistage, but Vistage was important in giving it shape and courage. It's a combination of things that connected over time.

The first is the love I have for psychoanalysis — that universe of listening and self-knowledge that my mother introduced me to since childhood. The second is the emergence of LLMs, a technology that created a business opportunity that simply didn't exist before. And the third is a perception about the world we live in today.

We live in an extremely performative world. You wake up in the morning already feeling like you won't be enough, and at the same time you need to maintain your public life on Instagram, on LinkedIn. That compulsive performance generates a profound sense of insufficiency.

There's a Korean philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, who wrote a book called The Burnout Society that speaks directly to this compulsive performance that generates mental illness. Often you perform so much that you no longer know who you are.

There's also a question of access: a space for self-knowledge like psychoanalysis can cost between R$600 to R$2,000 per month in Brazil, depending on the city and the professional. For most people, that's a difficult amount to sustain. A lot of people simply don't have a space where they can ask themselves, with depth: what do I actually want? What are my patterns? What are my strengths and vulnerabilities?

Amia is essentially an AI that aims to promote self-knowledge. You talk with it through questions it poses and discover yourself, because it builds alongside you a journal of reflections. It doesn't replace a psychologist. There's something in the living presence of another human being that no technology can replicate, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But I believe we can use AI to create a space for internal organization that most people simply don't have. The app is already available on the App Store and Google Play as Fale com Amia.

Vistage played a very important role in that trajectory. When I joined, I was looking for more connections. In an analysis process within the groups, something that emerged was the need to develop courage. That hit me deep — I had always been a very behind-the-scenes designer, never someone who exposed himself much. Vistage helped me see that there are many ways to show up in the world and that I could be an entrepreneur, which is a highly creative way to exist.

In my view, mental illness is the problem of the 21st century, and much of it is connected to this compulsive performance. Amia is an honest attempt to reduce that a little.

At Reino, that same vision shows up in a more concrete way in work with brands and digital products: we help companies transform strategy, identity, and experience into visual systems that are clear, consistent, and memorable.

Amia can still go in many directions, but all of them start from the same intention: using technology to expand the human capacity to understand oneself better.

In the end, it's always the same bet. Reino helps brands communicate with the world. Amia helps people communicate with themselves. Different projects, but they ask the same question: what is it that you still haven't said — to the world, and to yourself?