AI Made Simple: What Every Business Leader Needs to Know | Rajeev Kapur

Sebastian Rusk 0:04

This is the beyond the story. A show that goes way beyond the story. Hey, thanks for being here. Appreciate you uh taking some time out of your well. The time we're recording this is a Monday morning. Mondays are uh Mondays are great, Mondays are hectic. It all depends on the which way you look at it, right?

Rajeev Kapur 0:36

Yeah, look, you know, I woke up breathing. Uh, you know, it's a nice day outside here in Southern California, so I think it'll be a good day.

Sebastian Rusk 0:42

I mean, in your defense, there's never really a bad weather day in Southern California. I mean 72 and breezy, you know?

Rajeev Kapur 0:51

Yeah, you know what's surprisingly, it rained a little bit last night. Really? Yeah.

unknown 0:55

Yeah.

Sebastian Rusk 0:56

A little bit of aftermath of the hurricane, too, that was over there in Hawaii, right?

Rajeev Kapur 0:59

Yeah, yes. Some of the beaches that you're familiar with took a little bit of a hit.

unknown 1:03

Oh yeah.

Sebastian Rusk 1:04

My favorite one's Corona del Mar. I bet that little nook right there took a little bit of a beating area.

Rajeev Kapur 1:09

Yeah, that that one wasn't too bad. It's the the Laguna Beach ones took a bigger hit. Oh, they wiped off all the sand, I heard.

Sebastian Rusk 1:15

Yeah. Yeah.

unknown 1:17

Yeah.

Sebastian Rusk 1:17

Lovely, uh, lovely areas. Well, I'm sure they'll figure it out. The uh the poor city of Newport Beach and Laguna. I don't know how they'll ever how they'll ever bounce back.

Rajeev Kapur 1:27

Yes. I'm sure they have no money to to fix anything.

Sebastian Rusk 1:31

No, not at all. Not no budgets. No budgets at all. So I love telling people story uh on this show, hence the the name beyond the story. But I always like, for context purposes, I always like to go back to the beginning of the story. Now that's different for everybody, so you decide exactly where the beginning uh is for you. But let's spend a few minutes going back to the beginning of the story when you first started and and some of the experience you had early on in the tech world and what's really brought you to present day. I know we were chatting before the interview here. You said uh AI has a lot of your attention, um, as it should uh this day and age. Um but uh let's go back for a few minutes, talk about when this all started.

Rajeev Kapur 2:10

Yeah, look, I yeah, look, I turned 59 this week, so I'm kind of an old fart, but for me, kind of started back in 1990, 1991. You know, I'd finished school and couldn't find a job, had an internship lined up at an old computer company called AST Research. You might remember them. They're based out here in Southern California, Orange County in Irvine that fell through at the last minute and I had nothing. And through a connection, I found there was this company in South Dakota called Gateway. I don't know if you remember those the old Gateway computers and cows bottom boxes. Yeah and so I did a phone call with the VP of sales, guy named Todd, and he says to me, and I'm and I'm 20, whatever, 22, 23 years old, and he says, All right, I got a job for you. It's 100% commission. It's a Wednesday. He says, but you gotta be here in North Sioux City, South Dakota by Monday for training. And if you can't do that, you can't have the job. And again, it's 100% commission. I'm like, whoa. I'm born a Southern California boy, right? Born and raised online yards. You want me to move to South Dakota like on a whim? So I said, ah, what the hell? I said, F it, and jumped in my car, drove across country, started working there, and that was my first step into selling computers, and did that for a couple years and had a lot of fun there. And then I got recruited to Dell. And trust me, moving to Austin from South Dakota, Iowa, that Sioux City area. Sioux City's great, but I didn't like the cold weather because I'm a Southern California boy. So living in Austin was kind of cool. So I joined Dell and I was one of Michael Dell's first executive assistants for a little while and saw the dot-com launch and Dell's growth and saw my career rise there at Dell, which was awesome. Ended up living overseas for Dell, was in Dell China for a couple of years, Singapore for a couple of years. I have two boys now. My second son was born in Singapore and decided for family reasons to kind of move back to Southern California. We did that and started an e-commerce company, a small e-commerce company. That company grew, and then from there got recruited to what to my first kind of step into the AI space a long time ago. And a lot of people don't realize Sebastian. AI has been around for a long time. There's machine learning AI and then there's generative AI, and then generative AI is all the ChatGPT cloud stuff. But machine learning AI is all the data-related AI, and that's that's been around for a long, long time. So the company I joined was a small audio technology company. We were taking audio data to improve audio algorithms to make sound better, whether it's in sound bars, computers, you name it. And so I was there, I was CEO of that company for a while, and then that company sold to Sennheiser. And uh about a month, uh month later, I got a call from a friend of mine who's on the board of the company I'm running now called 1105 Media, and we're a B2B media technology company, and we kind of report on technology. We cover data, we cover AI, we cover cloud, we cover data centers. So it's a B2B media, like a politico, but it's all B2B. And we do events and we do Legion, we do all kinds of great things. But essentially the goal would be we we connect uh the sellers of products to buyers of products. So we create a ton of content and it's going fine. Uh and when ChatGPT and and before I started at this company, I went to uh MIT after I after the other company sold, and I got a certification in AI, too, a dual certification in AI. So I've been involved with AI for a long time. And when ChatGPT came out, I almost immediately started writing a book uh that came out six months, seven months later called AI Made Simple. And that was a number one selling AI book on Amazon for about seven months. And from there I wrote a book called Prompting Made Simple. And right now I have three books available for pre-order all around in the AI space, and I have a small little advisory thing I do, and and it's been great, it's a lot of fun, and I speak all over the world. So that's my journey from the beginning to how we got to uh AI today. But I will tell you, if anybody's listening, because a lot of kids sometimes listen to these things, people ask me what advice I'd give these kids, and I can tell you the reason why I went to South Dakota was because I had to go to the job. So right now it's a little bit of a tough market, and so if I hadn't gone to the job, I don't know if I'd be sitting here today.

Sebastian Rusk 6:12

Yeah. Speaking of Southern California, that that that was my journey. I had a kid at 20 and moved to Chicago, way too cold. And uh I sold domain names. I worked for like a GoDaddy back in 2000. Imagine there was like 10 iCandid ICANN accredited registers. You you probably were familiar with that world a little bit. And I worked for one of the ICANN accredited registers, and I saw an infomercial at three o'clock in the morning for a guy selling a business in a box on the internet. And I'm like, this guy's registering domain names. I need this account. And I called him for six months straight. He pitched me on moving. I declined and then called him six months later, and he's like, You're ready, aren't you? Flew me out to Orange County, and uh the rest was history. Guaranteed me I'd make my first hundred grand. I thought the guy was out of his tree and finished the year at 103 grand in salesman of the year and came back and quit. And uh that that that's you know, I had to make that move. You got to make that jump. Because when you make that jump, whatever's, you know, what whatever you're you're going after is is kind of is is is gonna swoop you up and and and see you through more times than not. So absolutely, and it's wildly uncomfortable, especially at 20 years old with a brand new baby, not really knowing which ways from you. First of all, you're shit for brains as it is because you're 20 years old, you know what I mean? Uh, but uh being able to to to to make that jump. So yeah, it's a defining factor in your life, right?

Rajeev Kapur 7:32

Yeah, I mean, look, it's the whole bet on yourself, right? I think I think you know, remote work and the fact that we all have really these awesome laptops now and Wi-Fi everywhere, and you can connect and run your you could you can do your job from anywhere in the world, probably, right? I know I can run my company, but like I have to go to a wedding in India here in November and I could probably just take my phone and run my company, you know what I mean? For for a week just off my phone. But you know, I think I think again, I think if anything, that's fine and that's amazing. I'm glad we have these technologies, but again, nothing beats being in an office, working close with people, developing those interpersonal skills, those communication skills, it just becomes so important in life.

Sebastian Rusk 8:15

They do. I I just got back from New York. I was speaking at a podcasting event, oddly enough, the podcast guy at a podcasting event. But um I got asked several times this week, where do you think we're at with AI? Very common question, but specifically with podcasting. And every time I was sat there and I'm in an interview, I said, we're not in a hurry to replace this at all. In fact, you know, you throw the pandemic in six years ago and everybody was stuck at home for a couple of years, and we couldn't wait to get back to in-person events and and shake people's hand and hug people and see friends and meet new people. The onset of AI, I don't think that any humans are in a rush to go, let's replace what we were designed and put on this earth to do, which is connect and grow with each other, you know, which is the good news about AI. But I'm curious to know what, you know, what your your thought process is. And of course the news, I mean, uh, the news, you know, hyping everybody up, but also getting, you know, the executives from these large AI companies saying that, you know, if we don't get this under control, it is in fact going to wipe out humanity, um, which I find somewhat comical and also um absolutely terrifying at the same time. But I'd be curious to know what your thoughts are.

Rajeev Kapur 9:28

You know, um I think it's a really exciting time for AI. And I think it's also a really scary time for AI. And the exciting time is, you know, we have every opportunity to take this tool, and the end of the day it's a tool, and it's up to us to decide how we want to use the tool to create a really cool, awesome, awesome, and amazing utopian future. You know, there's something called the Superman effect, right? So with anytime you have an amazing Superman type solution, there's always a villain. And in this case, the villain ends up becoming the human in the loop. And so if AI can cure cancer, somebody with a really strong, powerful AI tool can create a disease, too. So answering your correctly and answer answering your question a bit more directly, look, I am glad that there are some folks coming out right now, jumping up and down saying that this stuff is really dangerous. In fact, it's as dangerous as nuclear weapons. And as a society, we've we found a way to regulate and control nuclear weapons. We can do the same thing with AI. In fact, there should be guardrails around AI. If nothing else, start with deep fakes, personal deep fakes and deep fakes in our election. Start there. Do those things. Ban deep fakes, ban them. And if you're gonna be and if you're gonna showcase an AI picture or some AI slop nonsense on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, wherever it is, you know, then Meta and Alphabet and the TikTok guys should absolutely label it right away that this is a deepfake. If the technology exists to create the deep fake, that the technology exists to detect the deepfake. And so that's number one. Number two is is it gonna kill us all? Nuclear weapons could kill us all too. Um, you know, and in the wrong hands, AI is very dangerous. It can be very dangerous. So that's why you need the guardrails. But here's the thing: we're not this nobody's ever gonna regulate because you can't get everybody at the table who's got the skin of the game because you can't get China and Russia and India and Iran at the table right now with the US. It's not gonna happen, right? It's just not gonna happen. So it's an arms race, and these guys are racing and they're gonna do everything they can. And you know, and I I struggle a little bit with the guys that are coming out now because they're coming out now when anthropic is valued at $2 trillion. Where were you a year ago when people were saying this? Where were you 18 months ago, two years ago? This this whole thing about AI being dangerous has existed since since Chat GPT 5 started, but Chat 5 came out, right? About three years ago. So it's not new. And I appreciate them coming out now, better late than never. So I do question that a little bit, you know, you know, what does that mean? But is it gonna kill us all? No, it's not gonna kill us all. I think smarter heads will prevail.

Sebastian Rusk 12:14

Um, as a as a fellow author myself, um, you know, I always have a thought when I write a book is this thing gonna matter in five years? Is what I'm talking about going to matter. That's happened every time I've written a book on here. AI's moving fast and it's changing even faster uh than we can start to wrap our heads around on here. Do you ever think, you know, what you're creating and putting out into the world may rapidly change and be drastically different in a very, very short amount of time?

Rajeev Kapur 12:43

Yeah, look, I mean, the hard part of writing a nonfiction book around AI space is when you put that when you finish it, it can take anywhere from nine months to 18 months to publish it. Yeah, depending on the publisher.

Sebastian Rusk 12:55

Sure.

Rajeev Kapur 12:56

Well, by that time, the content in there might be a little obsolete, but the the directionally it's still right. So I it just so happened that the and I have two different publishers, and it just so happened that my publishers decided to launch three of my books all within six weeks, six weeks, six weeks of each other. I didn't want to do that, but that's what they wanted to do. And you know, I have a book coming out in the first week in December called Intelligence as a Commodity, and that one is basically going back to what we started this conversation with, saying you can't replace this. You know, if an if the entire world collective brain power can be surpassed by AI by the end of 2027, well, and intelligence is gonna be abundant, intelligence is gonna be a commodity. What's gonna be different is human judgment, human context, human judgment, context. The ability to be a conductor and conducting different AIs is gonna be really key. Conducting agents. And look, I'm Gen X, and Gen X is the last generation that's gonna manage humans alone. Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha coming are gonna manage humans, agents, and robots in the future. So when you think about it, the world is gonna be drastically changing over the course of the next five to ten years. And it's our responsibility, mine, yours, others, you know, folks you know who who have experience to help prepare the help prepare future leaders, and a job of a leader is to make other leaders. So I believe I I really look at my job as doing everything I can to prepare future leaders to deal with this coming change in society.

Sebastian Rusk 14:37

Yeah, absolutely. So um I gotta ask as a as a podcaster and a guy that helps people start podcasts. I always ask people what their thoughts are, specifically you being a tech a tech and marketing uh mind yourself and and and and being in that world. Where do you see podcasting right now and where it's headed for businesses as things continue to unfold, both with AI and how we communicate and market our businesses differently?

Rajeev Kapur 15:06

Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. You know, I I probably should reverse and ask you that question because you know you you're you're the podcast guy. But look, I I think a couple things. Number one is you're gonna be able to do research on your guests a lot easier. Number one. And number two is you're gonna be able to clip the podcast for social media, whether it's LinkedIn or TikTok or Instagram or whatever, wherever you want to, YouTube, wherever you want to post them, you know, Spotify, whatever. Just gonna be a lot easier for you to do that. The production value, you can up the production value, you can change my background, the music, whatever. It's gonna be really simple. It'll be it won't be the super advanced, it'll be more conversational. It'll just be, hey, change Waji's background to showcase, you know, Newport Beach or whatever. I don't know. You know what I mean? So it'll be those kinds of things. It'll give you, I think it'll give you, I think, real-time questions to ask because the AI will be listening to my answers, and your AI will pop up, your agent will say, Oh, that's a really good point by Rajiv, or probe more on that point with Rajiv and help guide you a little bit more. So I think that's the direction where it's gonna start heading in in more and more and more. But I don't think the one-on-one conversations or the group conversations, or you went to an event last week, I'm hanging up here in a couple minutes, I have to go to an event in a couple minutes myself. And so those things are not gonna go away. But I think it's gonna make your process easier, faster, so allow you to do more podcasts. But more importantly, I think it's gonna be able to work with you, say, hey, how do we make this conversation with Rajiv or the next person coming after Rajiv more unique, more different? How do we play into Rajiv's strengths or his weaknesses or whatever? Hey, Rajiv said this thing controversial. Make sure you probe on this, right? So I think it's gonna make that, I think it's gonna do the do those kinds of things.

Sebastian Rusk 16:48

Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. Absolutely. In fact, the clips are being clipped as we as we record right now. That's where the technology already is. So the best is yet to come, even and even to be in even more so in the world of repurposing content, which is so important because it saves you, A, saves your time, but also make sure that you're showing up uh in at least if again, if you're not in the news feed, you kind of don't exist these days. And that's just where we're at, you know. Uh, Jeep, it's been great to uh to chat with you and get to know a little more about you. I sure appreciate your time and uh wish you ongoing success. Next time I'm in Orange County, we'll have to get out there at Pelican Hill and uh chase some golf balls around. Yeah, sounds good, buddy. I appreciate you. Thank you. Absolutely. Any final thoughts for our listeners?

Rajeev Kapur 17:29

Look, yeah, folks, don't be afraid by this. Be curious, not judgmental. Go embrace that embrace that technology and remember it's a tool. Use it to augment, amplify, and anticipate things in your life. Do those three things, and you'll live a much better life.

Sebastian Rusk 17:46

Couldn't agree more. Great final thoughts. Thanks again, Rajiv. I appreciate you. Listeners, I'm going to put Rajiv's LinkedIn in the show notes. That's the description of this podcast episode. Be sure you connect with him. If you think maybe you'd be maybe able to be a fit to do business with him, hit him up over on LinkedIn and uh share this episode for somebody that actually needs to hear it. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story Podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Signing off from the podcast, launchlab.com studios. We'll talk to you next time.