Ever wondered how tech entrepreneurs catapult their side hustles into full-blown AI revolutions? Rajeev Kapur, a visionary in the Artificial Intelligence arena, President and CEO at 1105 Media and best selling author of AI Made Simple, graces us with his story. He illustrating the relentless hustle that propelled him from tech sales to penning the bestseller "AI Made Simple" in the aftermath of ChatGPT's launch. Merging insights from his time at Gateway and alongside Michael Dell, with his own ventures leading to lucrative exits, Rajeev's narrative brims with strategic pivots and the thrill of seizing tech opportunities the second they arise.
Navigating the global marketplace, our conversation with Rajeev delves into the endurance test of entrepreneurship. He sheds light on the indispensability of a sturdy team and alliances that have catapulted him into the realms of authorship and public speaking, asserting his expertise in tech. Beyond business savvy, Rajeev underscores the power of personal branding and social media's role in sculpting a professional visage that echoes the ethos of a flourishing brand, all while recounting tales from various corners of the globe that have honed his appreciation for value-driven customer engagement.
But it's not just about triumphs and trajectories. We confront the darker side of technology by dissecting a deepfake debacle in Hong Kong, which swindled a business out of millions, and what that means for our digital defenses going forward. Furthermore, we dissect how AI is redefining the landscape of business marketing, with Rajeev offering practical advice on how tools like ChatGPT are reshaping the productivity paradigm. Join us as we traverse the evolution of business into the digital age, celebrating the courage to innovate and the newfound accessibility of technology that brings the luxury of entrepreneurial spirit to the masses.
As you're inspired to embark on your side hustle journey after listening to this episode, you might wonder where to start or how to make your vision a reality. With a team of experienced marketing professionals and a track record of helping clients achieve their dreams, we are ready to assist you in reaching your goals. To find out more, visit www.reversedout.com.
Ever wondered how tech entrepreneurs catapult their side hustles into full-blown AI revolutions? Rajeev Kapur, a visionary in the Artificial Intelligence arena, President and CEO at 1105 Media and best selling author of AI Made Simple, graces us with his story. He illustrating the relentless hustle that propelled him from tech sales to penning the bestseller "AI Made Simple" in the aftermath of ChatGPT's launch. Merging insights from his time at Gateway and alongside Michael Dell, with his own ventures leading to lucrative exits, Rajeev's narrative brims with strategic pivots and the thrill of seizing tech opportunities the second they arise.
Navigating the global marketplace, our conversation with Rajeev delves into the endurance test of entrepreneurship. He sheds light on the indispensability of a sturdy team and alliances that have catapulted him into the realms of authorship and public speaking, asserting his expertise in tech. Beyond business savvy, Rajeev underscores the power of personal branding and social media's role in sculpting a professional visage that echoes the ethos of a flourishing brand, all while recounting tales from various corners of the globe that have honed his appreciation for value-driven customer engagement.
But it's not just about triumphs and trajectories. We confront the darker side of technology by dissecting a deepfake debacle in Hong Kong, which swindled a business out of millions, and what that means for our digital defenses going forward. Furthermore, we dissect how AI is redefining the landscape of business marketing, with Rajeev offering practical advice on how tools like ChatGPT are reshaping the productivity paradigm. Join us as we traverse the evolution of business into the digital age, celebrating the courage to innovate and the newfound accessibility of technology that brings the luxury of entrepreneurial spirit to the masses.
As you're inspired to embark on your side hustle journey after listening to this episode, you might wonder where to start or how to make your vision a reality. With a team of experienced marketing professionals and a track record of helping clients achieve their dreams, we are ready to assist you in reaching your goals. To find out more, visit www.reversedout.com.
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Speaker 1:
Welcome to Side Hustle City and thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevie, my co-host. Let's get started, all right. Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast. Let's get started, all right. Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast. Today's special guest coming to us from California, rajiv Kapoor. How are you doing Great?
Speaker 2:
Adam, how are you buddy?
Speaker 1:
Thanks for having me on. I'm doing okay. So, man, best-selling number one best-selling book about AI on Amazon right now. That's a feat, that's wild. There's got to be a ton of books out there right now. It's such a hot thing and NVIDIA's stock is flying.
Speaker 2:
Yeah Well, you know, the difference is I actually wrote my book. I didn't have catchy PT writing it. So there you go. But that must be the difference.
Speaker 1:
Actually, the quality is probably much better if you don't have a ghostwriter, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely Well, how long did it take you to write the book?
Speaker 2:
So you know it's interesting. You know I got certified in AI about 10, 11 years ago more on the machine learning side from MIT, and I wrote my first book during COVID, a leadership book called Chase Greatness, and that did really well, and so I've been involved in the AI space for a long time. And then, on whatever November 30th of 2022, when ChatGPT was released, I got it. Whatever November 30th of 2022, when ChatGPT was released, I got it.
Speaker 2:
I remember looking at my phone at six, three in the morning, california time. I'm in the bed going what the F word is this? Right, this is crazy talk, what is this? And then I'm like, oh my God, what is this? So, literally the day after, I started taking notes and saying, okay, I'm going to. Every single person on the world is going to have to get trained in AI at some point. And so I uh, I couldn't call the book AI for dummies for obvious reasons. And so there you go AI made simple. That's the so. So, to answer your question, I literally started taking notes for the book probably the day after JetGPT was released and probably got really serious about it early January 2023.
Speaker 1:
Okay, oh gotcha. Well, what I love about you Orange County guys is you move quickly. You. You understand that things have to happen fast and you've got a lot of competition out there. Anybody that's in the tech industry like first mover advantage, right?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, you know. You know, when you work for a company like Dell and all those types of big companies, you know you gotta, you gotta, be nimble.
Speaker 1:
So yeah, and what's and what's your background, like I mean, before you were an entrepreneur. I mean you didn't start out an entrepreneur, obviously you probably you got a history of working in the tech world.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so my first job. Do you remember the old computer company Gateway? Oh, yeah, sure, yeah. So my first job was 100% commission sales selling computers on the phone to people over in South Dakota, looking for gateway. Oh, sales, selling computers on the phone to people over in South Dakota oh rough, and that was my first job. So I did that for a couple of years and from there I got recruited and joined Dell. So in back in the early nineties I joined Dell and I was one of Michael's first assistants back in like 93, 94 and was at Dell for about 12 years and then I was recruited to be the CEO of a e-commerce company, did that for a while and then became and then CEO of an audio tech company that competed with Dolby, built that business up, sold that business to Sennheiser you know, the competitor to Bose.
Speaker 1:
I believe I have that. I believe I have that brand in my car. I believe I have that. I believe I have that brand in my car. I think Genesis uses that yeah sure, yeah.
Speaker 2:
And then from there, you know, now we're at 1105 for the last 10 years.
Speaker 1:
Wow, so a decade yeah, that's about how long I've been in my place too. So it can get. It can get brutal man. It becomes your child in a way, and I think that's what I try to stress to people. It's you know, when you go down and start going down this entrepreneurial path, it's you know you go from working 40 hours a week If it's tough for you to work 40 hours a week.
Speaker 2:
Imagine just double that Easy. You know, yeah, I mean, look, it's a lot of hard work and you know early on it was. It was a ton of hard work. I built an amazing team and got some real good partners in the business. That makes my life a lot easier, which has allowed me to write the book and do some speaking on the AI stuff, which helps the business, the company.
Speaker 2:
We're very much a technology, b2b, marketing and media-focused company. Anytime I can get out there and talk to more people, whether it's about the cloud or big data or analytics or about AI.
Speaker 1:
it helps the business and so you know, yeah, it's going to work out well. I mean the good thing for you too is is I mean, you've got some great accolades. I mean I'm sure that there's people reaching out to you, especially after the book, but I mean you were the finalist for CEO of the year from 11 to 12 from Tech America. Entrepreneur of the year from Orange County Business Journal. I mean you got your MBA from USC.
Speaker 1:
I mean there's a lot that I can see from your career where you were able to probably build a network or get some earned media that brought attention to you and helped you build your brand. So a lot of the times, too, I tell people hey, look, you got to be able to, like, always focus on building your brand. Don't post crazy stuff on social media, you know, unless you're running for politics and you can say whatever crazy stuff you want. But you know, make sure that you're always building your brand, you're doing the right thing, you're taking advantage of opportunities and it looks like I mean, just based on your career, that's what you've done.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, no, I mean, look, I to your point, right. I mean I kind of like, if you go to my Instagram whatever it's pretty sanitized, Like I don't post anything all that controversial. You know, social media to me is, um, you know, unless you are an influencer and helping to drive some sort of brand engagement, you know, really is, you know, really it's more for those around you to understand what's happening in your life, and I don't use Twitter all that much, so, if any place, it's probably more Instagram and LinkedIn, probably more than anything, and, and so that's where it is. And so, you know, I think, look, I'm 56 years old, I'm not 26. If I was 26, maybe things would be a little bit different in terms of how I approach things, and but right now, being 56 years old, you know it's good, it's a fun little playground, it's a nice place to have fun and, looking, quite frankly, I don't even use facebook anymore.
Speaker 2:
So I don't think you're alone in that yeah, I mean, you know there's just, it's just too much nonsense. And yeah, I'm not interested in fighting with people and you know it's. You know it's just there's too much, uh, there's too much disruption happening in a negative way, I think, on some of these platforms, and so that's the way it goes.
Speaker 1:
well. Where do you want to focus your attention? Do you want to focus your attention on, you know, building this reputation up as somebody who just argues with people online, or do you want to build up your reputation as somebody who is building things? I, I mean, and on a global perspective too, I mean, you've worked in 20 different countries. That has to have benefited you in a major way, because Americans are very much isolated and you know, most of us don't travel. Most of us, you know, if you do travel, maybe you go to England, which is, you know, america East, I guess, but you know what? How is your travels and how is all this business in all these different countries? How does that expanded your understanding of entrepreneurship?
Speaker 2:
Look, I think, if anything, quite honestly, adam, what you find is that doing business internationally it's not hard, it's not complicated. The problem is that we make it complicated.
Speaker 2:
And, at the end of the day, people want the same thing. They want to be able to make money, fend for their family and enjoy and live a good life. 99% of the people want that. There's always that 1% of the people that want to see the world burn, but 99% of the people really, really want that more than anything, and I think once you can tap into that and understand your brand value and understand how to engage with your customer. Now engaging with the customer might be a little bit different, but for the most part, because everybody wants the same thing. They want good value. That's it.
Speaker 2:
You know, just want good value and you know it doesn't matter if you're doing a side hustle making YouTube videos or if you're doing, you know, if you're selling whatever B2B lead gen campaigns or whatever the case might be, just make sure you're providing good value.
Speaker 1:
Well, yeah, and in your book. I mean AI, I would feel like, just depending on where you're at around the world, is being adopted in different ways. Depending on where you're at around the world is being adopted in different ways. Do you touch on any of that in your book, or does your experience, your global experience, did that help you at all when you started writing the book, and were you able to tap into some of those experiences and say, hey, look, I can see AI being very important in Asia, in East Asia. I could see AI playing this role in Africa. I could see it playing this role in certain parts of Europe. How do you see that Was that? Did that play into your book at all?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean it did. I mean I didn't specifically write about Africa or India or China when it comes to AI, you know, but what I did was I wrote this book so my 78-year-old mom could understand what AI is all about. To give you an example of that, two weeks ago I was invited to a book club meeting from this group of people, this group of women who are all 80 years old, who really, really love and wanted to learn about AI, and so they had bought my book and invited me to be a guest at their book club discussion. So I jumped in on a Zoom call, like you like right now, and I spent an hour with them talking about AI a bunch of 80-year-old women. It was awesome and they were so engaged and they want to learn.
Speaker 2:
And what I find from an AI perspective and my thought process here was when I wrote the book was I don't want to write a really advanced level book. There's plenty of those right. I wanted to write the ABCs and one, two, threes of AI. So if you're looking for an advanced level programming book, this is not for you. Honest to God, this book is how do you go to ChatGPT and log in? Well, and then now you don't need to log in anymore, you can do this for free, or like oh, it's $20. Like, how do you even pay for a $20 membership or $20 subscription on's? So that's so. That's what this book is. It's literally designed for an absolute beginner Right Now.
Speaker 2:
My thought process when I wrote the book was if you think about AI, anybody with a smartphone, as long as you have access to an Apple store or the Android store, you can download, whether it's Gemini by Google or ChatGPT or the ChatGPT app or whatever case may be. You can download an app and you have AI on your phone. Right, and so you can be a villager in India with a smartphone, with AI on your phone. Like, what does that do? That completely democratizes the way people can live.
Speaker 1:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
Right. And so you can literally be, you know, maybe a small business owner that's got a small stand in Africa and you want to use Chachi, PD or Gemini or whatever it might be anthropic to say, hey, how do I get more traffic to my little stand? Literally in 30 seconds he'll have an answer that he probably which you know, he never, he or she never would have had to have access to. And if they did what, it probably cost him $20,000 from a consultant to come in and tell so now it costs them nothing, Right? So in my mind, my thought process is that every single person on the planet will have, can have access to it. Every single person on the planet needs to be trained on it. The good news is that every single person on the planet can use it. The bad news is that every single person on the planet can use it.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Because what comes from there, then, is these challenges you're starting to hear prop up, which is all this deep fake bullshit sorry for my French that's coming up now, right, and that's the stuff that keeps me up at night when it comes to AI, right, all the deep fake stuff putting Taylor Swift's face on some porn star's body, or these young kids in high school doing stuff, what they shouldn't be doing with, with maybe some of their fellow classmates, or you know just the other. You know, during the election cycle, and you know, the other day, new Hampshire, where they had a fake robocall come in pretending to be Biden, saying don't vote. So that type of stuff is going to get worse and worse and worse. Did you hear about what happened in Hong Kong recently?
Speaker 1:
No, no Regarding AI yeah, no, what happened?
Speaker 2:
Well, I can tell you the answer While I'm talking. Do me a favor, pull it up on your laptop. So I want your listeners, I want your listeners, I want everybody to pull up, I want everybody to Google. Hong Kong CFO AI. And basically, what happened was the CFO of this big company, of this company out of Hong Kong, got deep faked oh, look at that. Yeah, but by a fake, but by his CEO. It wasn't his CEO. Someone deep faked his CEO and, by the way, not just the CEO, but other members of the team and they got him on a Zoom call and they told him hey, we just entered in a new partnership. Why are this company $25 million? And he's talking to literally the screen on a Zoom call which looks exactly and sounds exactly like his CFO and the CEO and his team. So he said, sure, so he wires $25 million. And it was all fake.
Speaker 1:
Oh, five different bank accounts. Wow.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and so that's the type of stuff that keeps me up at night. That's the stuff that worries me. That's the type of stuff that for your listeners who are doing, you know, into side hustles or doing things. Do you want to worry about AI? I'm not worried about the output that AI gives, right? Ai is young. It's going to make mistakes. Double check your work, always. Double check your work, right? Don't ever take it a hundred percent for gospel. You want to verify something? Go to Google, verify something. But man, I'll tell you, the deep fake stuff is what worries me the most.
Speaker 1:
Oh, I 100% agree with that. I mean, especially when it's the young kids to get involved with it. I mean that's that could be, you know, really, really bad. And you know, with the schools and everything, it's just it's they're dealing with enough right now.
Speaker 2:
Adam, look, I mean, look, if you, if you've got a young kid, I mean you know all someone has to do. So let's assume for a minute you have a son and let's say your son is 10 years old and someone gets a recording of your son talking off of some video somewhere. All they need is five seconds of your son's voice to clone his voice and then in the middle of the day you can get a phone call saying hey, dad, I've been kidnapped, send $10,000 and it would sound just like your son, or a video of it.
Speaker 1:
I mean, you could just do a deepfake video with a kid, you know.
Speaker 2:
But that's where you have to get smart about it and come up, figure out a safe word and all those different kinds of things Like what's that safe word going to be right? So maybe your safe word happens to be mighty just because I'm just picking on that, because it's on your sweatshirt. But you know people are going to have to get smart.
Speaker 1:
I is, it is, and that's why it's important for people to read the book and take a look at things. But as somebody who understands this on a different level right, you wrote the book so that you know, like you said, your grandma could understand it. But I mean, you understand this stuff on a different level, especially with that MIT background. You know what. How does this affect your business? Just going into what you do and you know I was looking through your site and everything it seems like you guys have a lot of different brands connected to you. There's a lot of different things you guys could help with. It looks like a focus on B2B. Explain the structure of what you've built.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so 1105 Media is a B2B marketing and media technology services company, right, and that's a fancy way of saying. We help businesses grow. Yeah, so you know, 1105 Media is a B2B marketing and media technology services company, right, and that's a fancy way of saying. We help businesses grow. That's our job, right, we're like a middleman. Our tagline is your growth is our business and that's what we do. So people come to us and say and we're very much technology focused in the technology industry. So companies will come to us and say hey, we're launching a new product. Can you help us with lead gen? Can you help us get our editorial message out to people? Can you do an event with us? Can we sponsor some of your events? Whatever the case might be, help us. We want to attract the people that you're pulling off of your different sites and all the different brands you own, because that's our audience. So the audience they want are CIOs, ctos, network administrators, people who influence the IT and technology decision-making in an organization. So they use us to come and help them get access to those people and then you know. So we basically provide that audience. So we have a massive database and we do a lot of email marketing. But where AI is coming in for us is we're starting to explore AI in terms of how to leverage it for search engine optimization, how to use it for our email creation, how to maybe get the right subject line and a header that goes out in an email, whatever the case might be. But those are just some of the things that we're doing to figure it out Now over time.
Speaker 2:
I would imagine you know if we need to go higher, let's say we need to hire. I think we're staffed pretty well, but if the team came to me and said, hey, we need to hire another X, y, z person, I'll say wait a minute, have you tried? Well, what can AI do for you there? And you know, and we probably, you know, we'll probably see first. You know where AI can play a, so you know.
Speaker 2:
What I want to be able to do is take my existing team and say, hey, if you use AI tools, if that can save you an hour or two a day, do we really need to go hire another person? Or are we good by just using the AI tools, just like you would use an Excel, word, powerpoint, the calculator? Those are all tools, that's right. So if you think about augmenting intelligence and you think about using these things as tools. These tools are designed to make you more productive and so you know, if, all of a sudden, now you can get yourself, because you're using AI, back an hour or two time of your day, do I really have to go hire another person, or can I take that?
Speaker 1:
save that money and put it into the raise pool or do whatever else with it. Well, I run a digital ad agency and I've done this for 13 years now and also had a technology startup. We built it, sold it. But when you start talking about AI, what I use it for a lot of times is recall. There's so much going on in our heads and there's things that you may know that you may have gotten educated on, you don't remember.
Speaker 1:
You know, or just to speed up the process and help you reply to clients faster, I've got a client right now that's working on some blockchain, web three, uh, mobile technology, telecom stuff right now, and all that together at one time. And then throw in ai. Right, it's, it's wild and this guy is at this level, way up here, worked for the defense department, lives in dc. Every time I get on the phone with this guy, it's like he's talking up here, right, and I'm like look, if you want to sell this thing, you want to go. He's looking for investors right now. You want to go out and get investors.
Speaker 1:
You need to take all this and make a simple message out of it, right, and be able to explain to these different persona groups. You know, maybe there is a crazy technology group that he wants to talk to. Well, let's, let's talk in crazy tech, speak to those guys, but your average everyday customer needs to understand this. So what I've done is, you know, I take his deck, upload into chat. Gpt, say, hey, here, here's what's going on. Take some of the emails he sent me, pop those into chat. Gpt, break this down for me, help me to even understand what this guy's talking about. Right, and it's able to do that instead of me doing a bunch of online research. I can have that. Do it, explain it back to me like I'm a teenager, and then I can take what he's got, understand what's happening and then turn that into a marketing message that's palatable for most people, right?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, and the good news is that it's now integrated into Outlook and it's now being integrated. It's now integrated into Word Excel.
Speaker 2:
Word and everything, it's everything, right. So you just need to get Microsoft Cop co-pilot and that's, you know, 30 bucks a month, but it's worth it. It's worth it. So if you can have I, if I told you you can have your own assistant for 30 a month, who's going to say no, right? So the good is what you describe, right, like I can take. Like, right now I have outlook, I can open up my outlook, you can send me an email and I can put that email and I can respond with, uh, with the co-pilot, with the chat GPT version of Copilot right there, and it'll craft the email for me, an email that maybe would have taken me five minutes to write. Now it gets done in 30 seconds, right? And guess what those four and a half minutes add up.
Speaker 1:
Oh, a ton, A ton. I tell my people all the time look, you got a bill for your time. I mean an email to read something, comprehend it and then come up with a reply. Every email you get from a client is at least 15 minutes of your time to put that stuff together. You don't think of that as like a billable thing, but I mean those add up, I mean over the course of a week, that's two, three hours.
Speaker 2:
Just think about if you just say it's let's just say you're using the ai tools in an outlook, for example, right. And let's say it's saving you 20 minutes a day because you're using outlook. You're using the chat, gpt, co-pilot option and outlook and it saves you 20 minutes a day. Times five days, it's 100 minutes.
Speaker 1:
That's an hour, a little over an hour and a half right.
Speaker 2:
Well, that's that, that's 22 minutes a day or whatever. Roughly an hour, roughly by 20 minutes a day. So I guess what you know. My point is that what can you do in 20 minutes? Well, you know what you can do. You can go get a working good, get a quick workout, and you can go go walk around the block, you can. You can follow up and maybe start a little side hustle on the side doing something else. Right, you can start, you can. You know. To me, I love using these, these tools for research, right, and so you know, now that ChatGPT is connected to Bing search, there's no reason why it won't give me accurate information because it's connected to Bing search now and so so to me it's, it's a great research tool as well. So, if you want to research a market, you want to research a new product idea, you want to research a side hustle, that you want to do, you want to. Whatever you want to do, it's all right there.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and I think yeah, you're right. I mean, you know there's large language model and the information that it had access to is now tied into Bing or whatever search engines that it could be utilizing, whatever service you're using. So, yeah, now you're going to get a lot more accurate stuff, and I've noticed that, you know, with GPT-4, I've definitely had much more accurate responses than I had when I first started using ChatGPT. But now tell us a little bit about how your background led you to start this agency, and it sounds like you've got a focus on B2B, but in the technology space. So I'm guessing your years at Dell and things like that, you've built up a network of clients, you've built up a reputation in technology and that's what kind of pushed you in that direction.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean, look, I think for me, I think the opportune thing for me was, you know, this business was kind of constituted a little bit earlier before I joined and it was really struggling and it was, it was, it was something that needed an entrepreneurial spirit or person brought in, and and so we're working with the right partners and we brought, came in and restructured the whole thing. And you know, I was a customer of this business a long time ago, all right. So I, you know, and so I understood, I understood the world, like I, you know, I understood some of the brands that that existed, and so you know, and I knew what needed to be done, like you know, when, when, when we came in and kind of reconstituted this business, you know, I remember looking at some of the, the, the financials. You know this thing used to be pretty, a pretty heavy, you know, initially up front, a pretty heavy print business.
Speaker 1:
Wow, this used to be a print business.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Interesting, Okay, I mean I've seen that evolution firsthand. But yeah, it used to be a pretty heavy print, you know technology you know, think about, right, you remember the pc magazines.
Speaker 2:
Oh yeah, shoppers and all that stuff. This was. You know where. Those were consumer-based, b2c based. This was a b2b. You know, you have your little mini little print magazines and you know, and so that's, that's what this was. And so having to change that whole thing, reconstitute events, fix the digital business I mean we did all that stuff. It took a while, but you know it's been a fun ride. We took a big hit during COVID.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
But we survived and now we're back and you know it's doing well.
Speaker 1:
Well, that takes some kahunas to take a business that was built for print and then change it over to what it is now. I mean that's scary to a lot of people. Right, change is scary and you know you're risking jobs. You're risking, you know, your investment. There's a lot of things there too. I mean I'm sure you stayed up at night thinking about it, but I mean you knew it had to be done and you pulled the trigger.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean. That's why I'm not all that worried about AI in the workplace, right, because, if you think about it, we've been through so many different technological revolutions, right? The first, the first internet browser, came out. Oh, what is this? You know, I remember being in a meeting with Michael Dell and Michael Dell walked in and threw the mosaic and that's gay browser on the desk and said figure out how to sell computers on this thing.
Speaker 2:
We all looked at him like he was stupid, like who the hell is going to buy a computer on this thing, right?
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
You know, we thought he was dumb, but little did we know right Now, when people said oh, who's going to buy a $5 book on Amazon and pay $5 for shipping?
Speaker 1:
Little did we know. Look, oh, amazon's a fad.
Speaker 2:
Oh God, I remember those days, and they were afraid of the the people didn't want to put their credit cards in you remember that Nobody would want to put their credit card in the you know, and then that was figured out. It's you know, technology finds a way. But my point is technology evolved and new companies came from that that figured out how to put your credit card in there, right. How to do deliveries, how to do configuration. You know, you saw the development of you know. You saw the dot-com bust, but then you saw the boom afterwards as well. You saw the mobile revolution. I mean, who thought that our smartphones were going to be as powerful and as strong and we were going to do everything on our phones? Now that our phones aren't even phones anymore, right?
Speaker 1:
No, I don't even use it for a phone. I you know it's right.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, let me look. Do you even answer the phone anymore when you, when you do no, the phone anymore when you, when you do no, it's all go to voicemail. Yeah, if you don't recognize the number, you're not answering the phone, right? So the point of it is from your, from your, from your listeners perspective, the phone has made the side hustle easy peasy, right?
Speaker 1:
That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2:
Now.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and that brings up a good point. Like you know, a lot of people can start side hustles. Like they could start a digital ad agency. Like when we were doing our stuff, it wasn't, you know, the barrier to entry was much higher. Now it's, you know, anybody could start a video business with the phone. Like you could have a video marketing business using your iPhone, honestly and and you know, you got your editing tools in there you could do a social media business. You could do tons of different businesses from that. But I mean, in a way you're you're kind of positioned to help people. Like, if you do have a digital agency and it's a, you know, I'm not sure what kind of revenue you guys are looking for from customers.
Speaker 2:
But I mean, you're here to help businesses like that.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean, look, you know we typically focus more on the larger tech type companies, right, because you know we have a fairly large infrastructure here in terms of people and you know a lot of employees and things like that and so, but yeah, there's a huge market out there, right for for people like, if you want to go service, you want to go to the digital agency to service that mom and pop zero to 20 employee base, fine, look.
Speaker 2:
But I'll tell you, one of the things that's going to happen is that you're going to see a lot. So, you know, 10 years ago, nobody knew what an Uber was, nobody knew what Airbnb was, nobody knew what Shopify was, right. So my point is all these things are not popping up, right. So you know, if you fast forward now, what the future is going to look like. I think what you're going to see here is you're going to see a lot more new companies coming up, but you probably won't need as many people. So in the past, you may have needed 20 employees to do what you needed to do. Well, now, with AI, you might need only 10.
Speaker 1:
Exactly. And yeah, and think about this too All of these businesses somebody made a really good point one time the things that were once available to the wealthy are now available to the masses. So, when you think about it, a private driver right. The only rich people used to have a private driver. You know Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. You know private driver. Well, now you got Uber, you got a private driver, right. Oh, I want to stay in a house in, you know, palm Springs. You know, to buy a house in Palm Springs back in the day you had to have a lot of money. Now you can, whenever you feel like it, go rent a house in Palm Springs. So it's kind of democratizing assets that were only available to the wealthy. And I would say personal assistance, you know. I mean, a personal assistant isn't cheap, you know, necessarily. And now you've got a technology that you have a personal assistant.
Speaker 2:
Did you ever watch the Iron man and Avengers movies?
Speaker 1:
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:
Okay, so look, in the next five years everybody's going to have their own Jarvis.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, there's even an AI right content writer that was called Jarvis. Now they had to change the name. But yeah, you're right 100%.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean, you know robotics are coming. People are going to have their own personal robots in their home. You know there's the Optimus robot demo from Elon Musk. Apple yesterday said they're now exploring putting in building robots in the home, right, you know, Disney, believe it or not, is probably one of the leading companies in robotic technology because of their imaginary group of what happens at Disneyland, right? So you're going to see, I think, robotics start to come into home and the workplace over the next 10 to 20 years.
Speaker 1:
Wow, I love it. Man, Do you have any forecasting in your book? Is there anything that you've put in there where you're like look 10 years from now, 20 years from now, or do you have a blog?
Speaker 2:
or anything where you have thought leadership in the AI space that people can subscribe to or anything. No, I mean not yet. I mean this initially started off as a fun thing that I wanted to do to just make sure people understood what to do and the book's done well. And people hired me to come in and speak and I do a lot of talking now. So if people want to hire me to speak, they're welcome to do that.
Speaker 2:
But in know more stuff beyond that. You know it's hard because I have a day job CEO of a company. It takes a lot of time, right. So but yeah, I mean we'll see where it goes. I mean I've thought about does it make any sense to look at long-term, does it look any sense to have some some you know AI for beginner training courses or things of that nature and all that stuff beyond that? So we'll see where it goes. I think, just like most people I mean most people like who are listening when they have their little side hustles, they have to pick and choose their battles and in my case, you know the book is easy, because I don't make any money on the book, cause you don't make any money on selling books, to be honest with you, and I didn't really do it to make money.
Speaker 1:
I did it.
Speaker 1:
I and I didn't really do it to make money. I did it more for my own personal satisfaction and brand awareness more than anything. When you go through that process, I mean you have to be a determined person and a self-motivated person even to do that, especially if you're doing it on your own and you've got to do research, and one of the benefits of not hiring a ghostwriter to write your book is that you learn a lot more. There's probably things you learned writing that book that you didn't even think you didn't know about before and now that helps your business. And also the fact that you wrote a book and it's I mean, it's doing great. People are going to see that. They're going to say, wow, this guy wrote a bestseller. It's a best. You know the bestselling AI book on Amazon. Bring him in. You know Dell's probably calling like hey, you remember us. You know Michael Dell.
Speaker 2:
Hey, rajiv, you know you would come back in. We need everybody who's listening to go at least buy the book or download the Kindle. So, and then leave a review, because the way Amazon's algorithm works is you need to get to about 100 reviews for it to kick up even further, and I think I'm like 87 or 88.
Speaker 1:
Oh man, I'll go. Yeah, we got to get on that. I get a. Yeah, I'd get on Kindle or whatever. Download that sucker. But it's AI made simple a beginner's guide to generative intelligence. That's the name of the book and the website 1105mediacom.
Speaker 2:
Yep. And then people can find me on Instagram at the Rajiv Kapoor. They can find me on LinkedIn Others quite a few Rajiv Kapoor's, because I happen to be Indian but I was born and raised in LA, but Rajiv Kapoor in India is like Steve Smith. So so make sure you find the right Rajiv Kapoor and then if people want to email me, they can email me at at they want to talk to me about coming out and speaking. It's requestrajiv at gmailcom.
Speaker 1:
I love it man, rajiv, thanks for being a part of this, thanks for giving us some advice. I think you know you are what a lot of us are aspiring to be. You know, taking that background, that experience, those nine to five jobs or, you know, in a lot of our cases you know maybe seven to seven jobs that we used to have, and then turning that into a business and you know selling businesses and, oh man, this is great. Well, guys, check it out. Check out the website. We're going to put things in the show notes so you guys can read it. Click on some links. Check out his book. Rajiv, thanks so much for being on the show. Thanks, buddy.
Speaker 2:
I appreciate it.
Speaker 1:
I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1:
Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of Side Hustle City. Well, you've heard from our guests, Now let's hear from you. Join our community on Facebook, Side Hustle City. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank you.