The Power of Hosting Epic Events to Curate Relationships & Accelerate Wealth with Thanh Pham – EP 272

Justin Donald: What’s up, Thanh? Welcome to the show.

Thanh Pham: Hey Justin, thanks for having me. Excited to be here today.

Justin Donald: Yeah. Well, I got a chance to hang out with you just recently in person. You guys have been putting on some incredible events. I think we’ve got a bunch of mutual friends. And I had heard of you for a while. We had met through a few different people. We actually hung out on the pickleball court. You’re a heck of a pickleball player.

Jack Munro, who is a top 25 player in the world, he coaches both of us, and we’re just talking about him and how awesome he is offline. But I got to know your partner, Tim Francis, in one of the businesses that you operate, and we just did a really cool event with Tom Shipley and with Matt. I mean, that was a killer, killer event on M&A and just really insightful, really fun, and a really great room of people. So, I’m excited that we could do this fresh off of that event.

Thanh Pham: Yeah, thanks for having me. I think Austin is such a special city where you can be in a city where it’s small enough to kind of know most people, but big enough to have a big city experience and adventure if you want to. And that’s one of the reasons I moved here was to be able to have that kind of lifestyle where you can have the small hometown feel where you can go to the grocery store on a consistent basis and they get to know you, but it’s still a big city where you can do all the fun things that most major cities have.

Justin Donald: Yeah, I agree with you on that. I mean, I think there was a draw for me that the people were really interesting. The thought leadership was really cool. The tech scene was awesome. The entrepreneurship scene was really booming. You really had this investing in wealth creation scene that was emerging, which intrigued me. You’ve got an influencer scene, so it’s like all these different avenues, like this convergence of these different major fields. And it’s been fun. Like, Austin’s such a cool city. People that come and visit, they’re like, oh, I get it now. You see them coming back over and over again. But people ask me all the time like, what do you think Austin? I just say, it’s the best city I’ve ever lived in. I don’t ever want to move. It’s my favorite place. Like I used to, whenever I was on a trip or a vacation, I never wanted to go back home. When I lived in St. Louis or Chicago, I always wanted to stay on the trip longer. And here in Austin, I’m like, I can’t wait to get back home. I love it here.

Thanh Pham: Yeah. I moved here in 2014 and people think I’m some sort of genius coming here so early. And I honestly didn’t have a clue that it would be such a big trending city. But one of the things I’ve kind of learned over the years is that for some reason I have a knack for finding trends and getting in on them early. So, moving to Austin in 2014, something that I think will happen in the future is– so I’ve been car free since 2014. I’ve never had a car since then, living in Austin. And that was part of kind of like the lifestyle decision that I made when I moved to California. My parents moved from the Netherlands to Southern California. I stayed with them for about eight months to kind of help them transition and get ready for their own lives. And so, I looked at the map and I said, “Hey, where could I live within the US that is warm, walkable, and is up and coming?” And I looked at the map and New York was not an option. Boston is too cold. San Francisco is too cold.

And long story short, I had two friends who moved from San Diego to Austin and they had beachfront property. And I said, “Why did you move to Austin?” This makes no sense. San Diego was like the perfect place to be. And they moved for tax reasons. They would save so much money on taxes by moving here. And so, I followed them and I said, “Okay, I’m going to come visit you and we’ll see how things are going over there.” So, I came to visit them, had such a great time. They lived downtown, they walked everywhere. And that’s how I discovered Austin. And I said, “Okay, you know what? I’m going to move to Austin,” because I used to travel the world for three years, being nomadic out of two suitcases. And so, when I moved back to California, I was just so sick and tired of being in my car for two hours a day, even though I was working from home. And so, I thought, I got to find a place where I can work from home, be walkable to everything, and downtown Austin just happened to be the spot.

Justin Donald: Yeah. There’s no doubt, man. I’m glad you’re here. I moved two years after you, so you beat me here. But it was a nice kind of beating the rush of people, the mad dash to Austin. Today, we’re going to get into all the cool businesses that you have. You’re an expert in AI, so we’re going to talk about AI.

But before we get into any of that, I think that you have a superpower that people should know about because you are a great networker. And we are talking a little bit before hitting the record button about how we’ve both done well financially. We’ve both done well at building our wealth, but one of the keys to building wealth is actually not just the dollars side of it, it’s the relationship side of it, the networking side of it. I wanted to hear your thoughts on that and I wanted you to share how you’ve been able to level up through relationships, through relationship capital.

Thanh Pham: Yeah. So, when people see me now or they meet me at an event or we go to a conference together and people see me there, they think I’ve always been this person who was just super outgoing and knows everybody. And honestly, it didn’t really kick off for me until 2017, funny enough. So, that’s not actually too long ago. So, I moved to Austin in 2014 just knowing this couple that moved here. And funny enough, they actually left within 30 days after my arrival because they had a kid on their way.

Justin Donald: Oh, my goodness.

Thanh Pham: They’re originally from Florida, so they ended up moving back to Florida to being closer to parents. And so, when I was here, I really didn’t know anybody. So, for the first two years, I was at home working on my business, just trying to grow it. It was a great time to be in business at that time as well for me. I was hyper-focused. And I remember reading a book in 2016, it’s called 30 Lessons for Living. And the author interviewed people who were about to die, and he asked them, “What’s one life lesson you’d like to pass on to the next generation?”

And so, a big theme of the book is that we don’t have to work so hard because at the end of the day, people don’t care or remember that you worked so hard. They remember how you made them feel and that you were there for them. But a major overarching theme is that a big part of our happiness comes from our relationships with people. And I know you are like, you always tell that you’re a professional matchmaker. And when I was reading this book and before I knew you, I always thought, hey, I don’t know if I could ever be that person. But that series of chapters just really struck me because I was in Austin not really knowing anybody. I would maybe see you on the street and I say, hey, that’s Justin, but I actually wouldn’t know you as a person, right? So, I would know you by first name, but not actually know your story, what you’re into, who you are, what your upbringing was like.

And so, I kind of realized, hey, I have a lot of shallow relationships here in Austin, and that has to change because if I’m going on the same path, I’m not going to live a happy life. Like, business was good, I was making money, but it was kind of like one cup was full, but the other cup was completely empty. And so, I knew something had to change. And so, my business partner, Tim Francis, that we both know very well, long story short, he was one of my clients and I ended up convincing him to move to Austin. And so, when he moved to Austin, I said, hey, remember that dinner party that you hosted for me when I came to visit him in Canada? Let’s do that here when you come to Austin. And it’s a great way for you to meet the people in the city. It’s a great way for me to establish and meet people as well. If we do this together, I think we do a great job because we’re both very process-oriented people.

And so, we ended up doing 50 dinners in two years together. And so, every other week, it was just dinner, me and him, eight other people. We never had an empty seat, funny enough, over 50 dinners.

Justin Donald: And I’ve met so many people that went to one of your dinners, right? So, I mean it’s cool actually seeing the byproduct of what you built and the reputation you established by doing these dinners.

Thanh Pham: Thank you. Yeah, if you do the math, 50 times eight people, that’s 400 people that you’ve spent four or five hours with over one dinner because that’s the duration of one dinner that we did. And so, you really got to know everybody individually and their stories. And we did a very specific format. It was a Jeffersonian-style dinner. So, if you were to come, everyone would sit at the dinner table and we would only have one conversation going on at the same time. And so, there would never be side conversations or you and I talking to each other and nobody else hearing. So, you really got to give the floor to people who were at that dinner and really get to know them.

And me and Tim would kind of emcee and kind of be the host and make sure everyone had speaking time. And so, after four or five hours, you really get to know somebody. And after each dinner, I felt like I made a closer relationship and a friend. And for me, the litmus test is always, can I text or call that person and feel comfortable enough to say, hey, could you do me this favor? Or hey, I would love for you to come to this. And if you have some form of discomfort, you probably don’t feel comfortable enough to say, like, we’re good friends, we’re buddies. But after every dinner, that discomfort was completely gone.

Justin Donald: Well, Thanh, I love that story and I love what you’ve been able to build, the community, the relationships. I like that litmus test that you talked about on how well you know someone. Can you ask them for a favor? Like, have you actually created a friendship there? Powerful stuff. Yeah, I love it.

Thanh Pham: Thank you. Yeah, that just led to one thing to another, and after having done 50 dinners, you get to know a lot of people and then, obviously, you get the network effect of, hey, you should meet this guy Thanh. He hosts awesome dinners. And the wait list just blew up from 10 people to 125 people before I knew it. And then when the pandemic came, obviously, the whole thing got kicked off. Or really, we didn’t really do that much.

Justin Donald: You wound it down, yeah.

Thanh Pham: Yeah. It was the first time I ever wounded something down in my life. And so, after the whole thing got lifted, we started saying, hey, let’s do this again, but maybe we do–instead of dinners, we started doing more happy hours and different formats, trying different things. And I just kept doing that for every single year I was in Austin. And little did I know I would be hanging out with very famous people here in town. Like, I was the host for Gary Vee when he came to Austin. So, I picked him up from the airport and I was his host for the whole day, set up meetings for him, hung out with him till three in the morning.

Justin Donald: That’s awesome.

Thanh Pham: Like people would text me and then introduce me to people, say, “Hey, I have this buddy coming into town. I can’t show him around. But I know you, Thanh, like I would love for you to hang out with him and show him a good time.” And so, now, I have like a few billionaires on my phone that I could just text and go, hey, do you want to hang out? Do you want to smoke some cigars? Do you want to play pickleball? Like, can we watch a game together? And it just all came from just hosting these dinners consistently over and over and over again.

Justin Donald: Well, I think that’s the key right there to like– it’s like the power of intentional connections and purposeful relationships. And then there’s this offshoot of business growth that comes from it because you’ve spent the time harvesting, right? I mean, so now you can reach out to all these people. Your Rolodex is a lot thicker. You have 400 extra people that you’ve spent four-plus hours with for an extended period of time. And I always like to talk about the power of immersion, right? Like, you could do a call with someone for 30 minutes for four weeks, or you could spend two hours diving deep with someone, and that immersive event, likely you’re going to gain a lot more traction, build a stronger foundation, build a deeper-rooted relationship. And so, I love that approach to meaningful relationships, curating communities. And this is not the only community you’ve curated, so we’ll have to talk about some of these other ones.

But you’re also helping put some of these people in touch with others and accelerating their journey. So, you’re impacting them and you’re impacting their income, you’re impacting their relationships because you’ve evolved beyond just the dinner to the happy hour, because now you’re hosting these really cool events where you’re bringing in top-notch speakers from all across the globe that are doing immersion sessions. You have the really cool, like kind of coffee and dance party program and concept that you’ve rolled out here in Austin that is taking off, which I’d love for you to talk about that. So, feel free to dive into any more of these events that you’ve been curating, you and Tim. And I’ve been to several of them now and have been very impressed, coming from a guy that throws a lot of events, I’ve been throwing events for about 20 years and I think you guys just do a top-notch job.

Thanh Pham: Yeah. As somebody who hosts events, you know the power of positioning. Like I’ve been to your mastermind before. And when I see you speak, like you have a presence, you have authority, you can share value, you can create a lot of connections for others, like that’s a very powerful position to be in. And you will probably agree with me, that is a skill that anybody can develop all the time. Like, I was not born with it. I am an ISFJ, if you know what that is in Myers-Briggs, like naturally pretty introverted, but I can be sort of extroverted when it’s scheduled on my calendar and I didn’t know it’s coming up.

Justin Donald: Yep. And you have time to recharge afterwards. Because I remember at the end of this event, we were going to go to dinner and you’re like, I think I have to bow out. I got to recharge the batteries. And I relate to that. I’ve been there before for sure.

Thanh Pham: Yeah, and I have good sense of boundaries now where I can say, hey, that was going to be a great dinner. There were going to be great people, including yourself and others who were going to be there, who led the events and the speakers and such. But I just knew like, hey, if I’m not the best version of myself, that’s not going to be a fun dinner for them and not fun for me. But I’m fortunate enough I already know these people, so I can always reach out to them later and we can spend time together some other time.

And so, when you do these events, you position yourself in a certain way and one, that’s very powerful, but two, you can also accelerate a lot of things that otherwise wouldn’t happen. So, for example, kind of in a similar way, if you want to do great networking at a conference, the best way I find to do that is actually to speak at the conference, because when you have the speaker badge, guess what? You get to go to the speaker events, you get to go backstage, you get to meet all the other speakers who are oftentimes paid to be there and are notable and fluent sometimes.

And so, it’s kind of like a cheat code again there to network and meet people, versus if you just go as an attendee, you don’t have that same positioning, even though you might actually be of similar stature. And so, positioning, I think, is always very key when you’re trying to do events, speak, host when you’re introducing people. And over time, that kind of becomes your brand in a way. And that’s kind of what it is for me now. Even though I wasn’t engineering it in such a way, I was just kind of doing it naturally.

And so, when people are now coming to me, like the different types of events range from, to your point, like the coffee parties, which is more like Gen Z. We wake up on a Sunday morning at 10AM and we have live music and a DJ and we kind of dance and drink coffee. And it’s this whole sober movement of people who don’t want to drink late at night and pay the alcohol tax the next day. Like, people are a lot more health and wellness conscious here in Austin specifically too. That’s a big movement and that’s kind of an early trend that I took on and noticed.

Justin Donald: Millennials too. Gen Z, but the millennials too, like you’re seeing just a total disruption in the amount of that generation that’s drinking out or abstaining from drinking alcohol.

Thanh Pham: Yeah, including myself. I’m a millennial at heart. So, I feel that way as well. My buddy Tim is like that as well, and I know you’re very health and wellness focused as well, and so, you see how alcohol sales are just not the same as it used to be.

Justin Donald: They’re not. And I think this is a great trend, yeah. Now, so what I’d love to know is like, what is some of your secret sauce in creating these transformational events? So, you’ve done it here on kind of like the social side, but you’ve also done it on the business side with quality speakers and a very curated audience. Like you guys are very detailed about everything that’s going to happen. Who gets in? Who makes the cut? Who doesn’t make the cut? Making sure it’s not bigger than the amount of people that you want to have there versus opening up to a lot of people. So, I’d love to just get some insights to like, how can people host epic events that go beyond just networking, right? Fostering real, genuine connection, collaboration, long-term business growth, those sorts of things.

Thanh Pham: Yeah. So, I think curation is the number one thing for great events. It’s not the venue, it’s not the food. That’s what people always think. I could have a great event at a parking lot as long as the right people are there, right? If I told you, Justin, I’m going to have Elon Musk hang out with me at this parking lot in the middle of nowhere, guess what? I’m pretty sure you’re going to show up because you want to meet the guy.

Justin Donald: That’s right, I will.

Thanh Pham: Right? So, one of the best things you can do, if possible, is to have somebody who has some sort of a name or a reputation to come first. So, if I try to host an event, I might say, “Hey, Justin, I would love for you to kind of be my lead guest here.” And if you and I agree that we’re going to do an event together and you would like to meet some people, I’m actually going to ask you first, like, who are the people that you want to meet, right? So, you might say, “Hey, I want to meet other business owners. I might want to meet other investors. I might want to meet people with a certain net worth,” like whatever it might be, right?

And so, I would leave with that and then go, okay, I can then figure out a way to find people that kind of match the criteria of the people that you want to meet. And so, that’s where I would start first. Now, not everybody will have access to a lead guest in a way. So, another way I would do that, and this is how I did it in the very beginning, is I would put a curated group of people together that are very like-minded and similar. So, I might say, hey, in the beginning, I’m going to host a dinner for everybody who is making six figures in income and has an online business, like that could be a very specific group.

Another one could be, hey, I want to put a dinner together for people who are just starting out with their journey in starting a business. Right now, they have a side hustle. They have a full-time job, but their dream is to transition to go full time, right? Then there could be another group that says, hey, this could be a group of people who are actively investing and they want to deploy capital. Let’s get them together because they love meeting other investors and sharing deals and kind of seeing what they’re working on and maybe they can co-invest together. Because I know entrepreneurs and investors, they love to socialize, they love to hang out with each other.

Justin Donald: Totally.

Thanh Pham: And so, if you can kind of put the right people who are similar in many ways together, that would make things 10 times easier because then, if I’m inviting you, Justin, and say, hey, I have a group event here that’s going on Wednesday at 7, everyone that’s coming is an investor, like you have the option to then say, hey, this resonates with me. I would love to go and meet them. Or if you’re like in hustling mode right now and you’re like trying to launch a book or something and this is not the right audience that you want to spend time with right now, you have the options to say no too and say, hey, love the invite, but I got to work on this book, right? And so, when you make it easy for people to say, hey, this is a group I want to be part of when I go to this, that makes the event itself much easier to pull off.

Justin Donald: Yeah, I love that. I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about some of the cool experiences that you’ve had. As an entrepreneur, you’ve started many companies. You’ve built many businesses. I’d love just some key takeaways from your journey, including challenges, like challenges of scaling or balancing multiple ventures at the same time or staying focused on lifestyle over hustle, like I’d just love to kind of hear some of that story and some of the lessons learned and successes had.

Thanh Pham: Yeah, so I’m sure you’ve had a lot of guests who read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad. I was actually one of them.

Justin Donald: Me too.

Thanh Pham: I was 10 years old when I read that book. So, I was hanging out in the online chat channels on the internet, back then, were called IRCs. And this guy who was a virtual buddy of mine said, hey, you got to read these books because I know you’re very technical. You’re like a hacker. You’re like a coder. But you got to learn these business books because I think this is going to change your life. So, he told me three books to read. One was Rich Dad Poor Dad. The other one was Think and Grow Rich. And then the third one was The Richest Man in Babylon.

Justin Donald: All great books. Three great books.

Thanh Pham: And so, I read them back to back to back. And when I hit Rich Dad Poor Dad, it was exactly the opposite of what my parents told me. So, my parents are Vietnamese. They’re immigrants. I was actually born in a refugee camp in the Philippines, even though my parents were Vietnamese. And so. we ended up in the Philippines because my mom and dad were from different parts of the country. They fled the country on boats to escape communism. And so, they’re on boats. They ended up arriving in the Philippines in a refugee camp. They met there. They started dating. They were there for three years. And so then I was born inside of a refugee camp, and then when I was about six months old, we ended up moving to the Netherlands where I grew up.

So, I have a Dutch passport. I speak Dutch, consider myself Dutch, even though I look very Asian. And so, I grew up there. But because we immigrated there and didn’t have any family, didn’t speak the language, we kind of had to start from the bottom. Like we have very little, like there’s a photo of me and my parents at the airport when we left the Philippines where my mom was wearing a diaper bag. My dad has a briefcase and there’s like a big suitcase behind us, and that’s all we had, right?

And so, when we were growing up, like I never knew that we were poor. Like this was just life as it was, right? We lived in the bad neighborhood, literally was next to the train tracks, and so, the reason I’m a deep sleeper now is because I grew up around a neighborhood where train’s running 24/7, all day long.

Justin Donald: You could sleep through anything now.

Thanh Pham: Yeah, exactly. So, when I was reading the book, my parents were always saying, “Thanh, I want the best for you. Go to school. Get a good education. Get a government job because that’s how we’re going to set you up for success.” And they want to, like any parent, what’s best for their children. But when I was reading Rich Dad Poor Dad, I thought, oh, my God, I’m not going to get a job. I’m going to start a business. This is more stable. This is actually more predictable. I’m in control of my destiny. And so, long story short, after reading the book, I started my first company not knowing what I was going to do, but I remember taking my mom to the office where I had to register my company because I was too young to register for myself because I was under 18. So, my mom was the co-signee on the incorporation of my company.

Justin Donald: That’s awesome.

Thanh Pham: And so, the way I got started was I was– this is back when RSS feeds just started taking off and this is the technology that kind of empowers now podcasting behind the scenes. And so, long story short, I wrote a piece of code that everyone can use on the internet to digest websites at the time. So, I don’t know if you remember Digg.com or those kind of websites that were aggregating news.

Justin Donald: That’s right.

Thanh Pham: I basically created a clone of it and I made it open source for everybody to basically copy it and use it.

Justin Donald: That’s cool. Because the others would have like a paywall or something, right?

Thanh Pham: Exactly, yeah. And so, I released the code, made it available, and put my email address in there. And lo and behold, all these companies started emailing me and say, hey, we love your code. We would love for you to build our website and make this news clone website. And so, when I was 12 years old, I was making 80 bucks an hour coding.

Justin Donald: Wow.

Thanh Pham: And I remember my buddies were working at grocery stores, working for two bucks an hour, and I was just like…

Justin Donald: That’s unbelievable.

Thanh Pham: Absolutely absurd. So, long story short, I got really overconfident. I worked on that business. I recruited my high school team members to come work with me. I taught them how to code. We had a little agency. We were probably making like $600,000, $700,000 a year. And I was in my teenage years, and I was like, oh, my God, I’m on top of the world. Nothing can hurt me, right? I’m making great money.

And then long story short, when you want to go to the States to go to university, you have to, obviously, do the SATs and write papers and stuff. So, I did all that. But the way the education system works in the Netherlands is that, in your last year of high school, you have to do one big test that takes about a week. You have a whole year to study for it, essentially. And long story short, I never studied for it because I thought, oh, I’m so smart. Like, I’m doing well in business. Like I got this. And then when the test week came, I totally flopped and I got the results back. And I failed. So, when you don’t pass, you have to do your last year of high school all over again.

Justin Donald: Oh, my goodness sakes.

Thanh Pham: And so, I was devastated because I had to tell my parents, obviously. And so, long story short, I found a loophole of how you could get into university without being officially graduated from high school. And so, I took advantage of that loophole. So, I got my F-1 visa, ended up moving to the States, went to college for the first three years, and then guess what? Dropped out after three years and start working for…

Justin Donald: Start another company.

Thanh Pham: Not quite. I was actually– I sold my first company that I built because back then, working in LA and then Netherlands at the same time, the times of difference was really tough and the technology wasn’t great at that time where you could really work remotely. And so, I sold that company and then I thought, okay, what do I do next? And I was kind of lost in life. I wasn’t quite sure what to do.

So, I saw a public speaker speak on motivational things. And I thought, this guy’s so smart, like, I want to work for this guy. Like, I could learn so much from him. And so, after he spoke, I went up to him and said, “Hey, Nick, I would love to learn from you. How can I be a mentee or how can you be my mentor in my life?” He said, “Hey, why don’t we go out for lunch next week?” I said, “Okay.” I said, “Let’s do that.” So, lunch is on me. And so, what I did was, this is when YouTube just started taking off and he just started a YouTube channel. So, I said, hey, I knew the thing about SEO at the time and optimizing YouTube channels. And so, I created 25-page documents that I remember going to Kinko’s. I had to print it out and make it laminated, look all pretty. And I basically told him like, hey, here’s how you can optimize your YouTube channel so you can go from a few hundred views to like potentially thousands of views. And so, I showed up for lunch and I said, “Hey, Nick, here’s the report I want to give you. I think if you implement this, you’ll benefit from it and you’ll get bigger impact on what you’re doing now.” And after lunch, he said, “Hey, why don’t you come work for me and implement this stuff and just come intern?”

Justin Donald: Oh, that’s awesome.

Thanh Pham: I said, “Let’s do it.” So, I started interning for him. After class, I would drive over and go onto 101 freeway. He had his office in West Hollywood. So, I would go there. And then I was done in like two weeks and he was like, “Okay, why don’t you just come work here? You’re obviously doing great things.” Like, I said, “Perfect, let’s do it.” And I basically dropped out of school, started working underneath him, learned so much from him about business and marketing and positioning. And like, just the one year I worked underneath him, I learned more than I did running my own business. And so, after that one year, I had to leave because my visa expired because I was done with my visa.

Justin Donald: Oh, man, what a pain. The US does not make it easy. I am so sorry. We should be opening the doors to all the brilliant people out there and making it easy to get them in and making it challenging for those that are not trying to benefit society to get in. But ah, I know it’s a pain.

Thanh Pham: Yeah, it was a tough place to be. So, I had to get rid of all my stuff, and then move out. So, that’s how I ended up being nomadic for three years, I was kind of referring to earlier. So, I had just two suitcases, but I knew I was going to come back to the States because my grandparents are from Southern California and long story short, they submitted some paperwork for my parents to come and because I’m their child, I can come with them.

Justin Donald: Perfect.

Thanh Pham: I just didn’t know when that was going to happen. It could be within the next three years. And so, for the next three years, I started another business, which was an online business. It was all about productivity and executive training. And that was kind of like the first lifestyle business I built, where I said, “Hey, I read The 4-Hour Workweek. I like this idea, but how do I implement it myself? How can I design a business that actually works for me, not me working for the business?”

Justin Donald: That’s right. Love that question.

Thanh Pham: So, there’s focus since day one. And so, I said, “Hey, I want to be able to work whenever I want to.” It makes revenue income whenever I’m not working. And so, I tried to figure out a way to make this happen. And so, I tried different business models and ended up selling online informational products for many years and still have it today. And so, now it’s a pretty much a– I would call it almost passive, like five to eight hours a week of work.

Justin Donald: That’s great.

Thanh Pham: And still have it today.

Justin Donald: Yeah, that’s awesome. So, you’ve had that business a long time and you’ve had a lot of success. I mean, I would just say, I mean, you were born to be an entrepreneur. You got started super early. You’ve had many different iterations of business. One of the things I think is really interesting about what you’re doing now is we live in this world of AI. AI is the talking point. It’s the hot topic of most conversations. And it’s funny to me because I’ve shared this before, but I’ve been investing in AI for over a decade, at least a decade before it was ever cool, before anyone knew what it was. It wasn’t a buzz word, but I could see the future.

And like you, you had mentioned something earlier how you could spot trends and kind of move towards it. So, you’re an early adopter. You can see these things before they’re mainstream. I’m the same way from the standpoint of businesses I’ve started, bought, or investments that I’ve made. And so, AI and robotics is one of them. But when we think about how AI is reshaping productivity and lifestyle design, I would love to get into some practical ways that entrepreneurs, investors, W-2s, whoever, can leverage AI to save time, make better decisions, create more freedom in their personal and professional lives. I’d love to just touch on that.

Thanh Pham: Yeah, so I’ve been teaching productivity since 2010 and I’ve seen a lot of things come and go, right? And some trends or some major shifts in tech have stayed where, for example, when email was introduced, it was a major change in how we worked and got stuff done, right? When mobile phones were introduced, it changed the way we got work done as well. Remote working has changed the way we do business now, too.

And I think the next big shift now is AI. And the reason I’m such a big believer of it is, one, I’m a personal user of it myself as a consumer. When ChatGPT came out in 2022, I thought, okay, this sounds interesting, but I don’t know if this is going to change the world. But I kept using it and then I saw the potential of it. And now, I teach AI workshops here in Austin every other month.

And there’s this great platform called Lindy.ai. If you haven’t heard of it, I highly recommend everyone checks it out. It’s kind of like a no-code version way of building AI agents. So, if you think of something like Zapier, which I think most people have probably heard of…

Justin Donald: Yeah. If you’re in business, you’ve heard of Zapier, I would imagine.

Thanh Pham: Absolutely, right?

Justin Donald: Game changer.

Thanh Pham: You’re connecting a lot of different things. So, think of that, specifically for AI.

Justin Donald: For code, for AI, for agentic AI.

Thanh Pham: Exactly. So, you’re still clicking and pointing what you want it to do, but it has more AI power behind it. And so, now, I have all these agents working for me. I have about 45 of them, and every week, I got a report of how much work they do. And like last week, I had a report that said it saved me 83 hours in the last week alone.

Justin Donald: Oh, my goodness. That is beautiful. That’s brilliant.

Thanh Pham: So, what’s exciting about it right now is as somebody who teaches productivity and educates people on it, like when I teach you a morning routine or an evening routine, you still have to have the discipline, the habits formation, the time to get the results you’re looking for, whereas with AI, you build something within a few minutes and you have these results. Exactly. And it can do stuff while you’re sleeping.

Justin Donald: That’s right.

Thanh Pham: And so, Lindy is a great platform I recommend people use. One of the key skills I think moving forward that anybody should adopt and incorporate is actually prompting. So, prompting is not just, hey, I’m talking to ChatGPT, I’m trying to put something in there and get something back, and that’s it. Like a common mistake I see people make is, hey, I want to write an email to Justin and invite him to speak at my conference or something, right? They talk to ChatGPT. it will spit something out, and then oftentimes what they do is they’ll copy it and then they put it into Gmail, and then they modify it themselves.

But what you miss is then the AI doesn’t actually learn the feedback of how you write, how you think, how you make a copy, or how you generate a copy. So, what you should be doing is actually iterate with the AI and say, “Hey, I don’t like how you start this sentence. I actually like this. Start sentences this way. This is how I like to do punctuation.” You iterate with the AI and you do that enough times, so they’ll be smart enough to go, oh, this is how Thanh likes to write an email. Guess what? The next time I ask it to write an email, it will now know how to generate an email. That is exactly how I would write it.

And so, that feedback loop is very important. And it’s the same thing when you’re like, for example, uploading pitch decks or investment decks and you’re trying to do your own due diligence on it. Like, you probably have your own methodology and format of what you look for or specific formulas that you have, right? Guess what? You can build custom GPTs around it where you upload something and then you maybe have it generate a quick report of what your formula is for an evaluation of a deal, and then you can ask your follow-up questions where you just answer the same questions you would ask every single deal that you would like to do.

And then now, you have an objective measure to say, hey, this is a good deal for me based on my buy box or what I’m looking for, or this is not a good deal, right? Because we can always talk ourselves into doing a deal, but when you have a GPT or an AI kind of like evaluating a deal objectively based on a formula that you’ve created for it, you kind of quickly can do DD on something that would normally take you hours to do.

Justin Donald: Totally. I love that. We have built a due diligence GPT for the Lifestyle Investor Mastermind and then we have some outsource groups that we use their GPTs that they’ve built. One of them is just a really cool program with Richard Wilson because he’s kind of the authority with billionaires, owns Billionaires.com. I’ve had him on the podcast. They’ve got, what do they call it? Dili? I think Dili or something like that. Dewey, maybe it’s Dewey, their due diligence tool. And so, we’ve been able to take a deep dive with theirs.

We’ve got another company that we invested in Copia Wealth Studios, and they do, think about Addepar but on steroids and specifically for alternative investments, and they’ve got a due diligence vehicle or GPT that’s really nice that we use. And then we have our own, which we’ve been able to build and tighten up and customize to the deals we do, the questions we like to ask. Every investor, every member that joins the Lifestyle Investor Mastermind, one of their first, I guess, responsibilities or to-dos is to build their investment criteria. And so, we’ve got all these questions that we’ve asked that we preload, deals that we love that we’ve preloaded, like that have checked the boxes.

And it’s amazing the amount of information you can get, the amount of diligence you can do, how analytical it is. So, what you’re talking about, I am living it and I’m the hugest fan, and I hope more people kind of take advantage of it. And for our members, we just want this to be a value-add to being part of the mastermind.

Thanh Pham: Yeah, I think that’s a great way to codify someone’s knowledge and just make it accessible. That is something that used to be very expensive and not easy to do at all, and now it’s relatively affordable and easy to do and fast. And so, imagine, somebody who’s listening to this and they just write your book and go, “Hey, how would Justin evaluate this deal?” They had access to your GPT and they just could upload something and would follow exactly your playbook and your criteria and they would know within seconds if this is like Justin approves, right? Like that would be so difficult to do a few years ago.

Justin Donald: That’s right. And now, I mean, someone could build their own ChatGPT, load all my stuff in it, everything public facing, my 10 commandments, my book, like everything that is public facing and you could have, I mean, we have built a Justin GPT and a Lifestyle Investor GPT. We’ve got a public facing one, which is all of the stuff that I’ve put out for free, and then a private facing one, which is all the stuff that we’ve done only for mastermind members. So, yeah, huge fan.

Hey, this has been awesome. I mean, you and I could probably do a full ‘nother hour or more just on the AI productivity tips and hacks that you’ve figured out. We unfortunately don’t have time for that, but hopefully, this is getting some people started. Where can people learn more about you and kind of enter your ecosystem for the cool stuff you’re up to, Thanh?

Thanh Pham: Yeah, the easiest place is my website, AsianEfficiency.com. Hard to forget, easy to remember, as I always like to say. And just sign up for the newsletter there. I like to write a weekly newsletter, and I also have a podcast called The Productivity Show, where every Monday, I release a new productivity tip. So, the easiest way to get in touch with me is through those channels.

Justin Donald: I love it. Well, thank you for taking the time. This has been super valuable, and I like ending every episode that we do with a question to our audience. So, if you’re watching this or listening to this, what is one step you can take today to move towards financial freedom and really living a life that you truly desire, but on your terms? So, how do we stop or avoid living a life by default and start living a life by design? And what’s something that you can take from Thanh here today that you can put into action immediately that can help you move towards financial freedom and more productivity, more happiness? Thanks so much, and we’ll catch you next week.