241: The AI Shift That Will Change How You Run Your Company with Thanh Pham

Thanh Pham has spent 15 years studying productivity, and over the last five he’s gone deep on implementing AI inside real companies. That means he’s seen the difference between AI that actually changes how a business operates and AI that simply helps someone finish a task a little faster.

That’s the problem we dig into. If you’re still using AI to shave a few minutes off work you were already doing yourself, you may be missing the bigger shift: changing who does the work in the first place.

We talk about what Thanh hands to AI versus a person, how AI is changing the roles founders should be hiring for, and why companies that get this right could start moving dramatically faster than everyone else.

We also get into what separates a million-dollar founder from entrepreneurs running much larger companies, why Thanh deliberately blocks several hours every week for something most founders never put on their calendar, and where human judgment still matters even as AI takes over more of the execution.

Mic Drop Moments

• “Anything that is repetitive, annoying, or time-consuming is the first thing I would offload to an executive assistant.” – Thanh Pham

• “Self-awareness is the ultimate productivity hack. The better you understand yourself, the better you can leverage yourself.” – Thanh Pham

• “Even though we all have the same 24 hours in a day, certain hours of the day are more valuable than others.” — Thanh Pham

• AI’s Biggest Productivity Lever
• Strategy Versus Tactics With AI
• The 10/80/10 AI Work Model
• What It Means To Be AI Native
• What Should You Delegate to AI?
• Why AI Agents Shouldn’t Send Emails
• The Time, Energy, Attention Framework
• Using AI to Plan Your Week
• Time Arbitrage for Entrepreneurs
• The Ultimate Productivity Hack
• Why Entrepreneurs Lack Accountability
• Skills that Separate $1B Founders
• How to Curate High-Value Events
• The Fastest Way To Build A Network
• How Gary Vee Expanded Thanh’s Network
• Productivity Habits Founders Ignore
• Advice For New Entrepreneurs

Brad Weimert: Thanh Pham, I met you many, many years ago because you started Asian Efficiency in 2011, which I thought was hilarious, as a title for a business. It’s a productivity training company, and my whole life I’ve thought about sort of optimization. I refer to myself as a recovering perfectionist. And through the path of knowing you, the business has grown to a lot of interesting things for me. But you have a podcast that has 20 million downloads, hundreds of episodes, and you’ve got a couple of cool frameworks that I want to talk about. But in the last five years, you have leaned incredibly heavy into AI and helping implement AI in people’s companies.

I want to dive into all that stuff. But in June of 2026, as a productivity guy, I want to know if the answer has changed from a pre-AI era to today. What do you think the biggest lever is to increase productivity today?

Thanh Pham: Pre-AI, it was all about systems and habits, and these are the things oftentimes were the most difficult to implement in people’s lives and businesses, I would say. Now, with AI here mid-2026, I would say the biggest lever is using AI because the results are pretty much instant. When you start using the tool, you get the results right away. When you build some sort of workflow or a skill, the results are pretty much instant as well. And so, I’ve been pretty much focused. Everything that I do is around AI, and then also how do I lever the agentic workflows that you build, but then also the contacts that you build, and then I call these, like, AI assets. Like, what are the AI assets that you can build? Because when you use Claude or Chat or any form of an agent on top of it, you start to create these compounding results over time.

So, for example, I have a whole folder called Context Files. That has everything about me, my businesses, my projects, my priorities, my goals, my Oura Ring stats. Like, whatever is there, it’s all there. And so, if I ever ask a question or an agent can act on a piece of information without prompting me, it just moves things forward a lot faster so that I’m not the bottleneck moving forward, and that’s where I think the biggest lever is today.

Brad Weimert: Well, that sounds terrifying from a permissions perspective. If I’ve got my sleep, health, sex, and substance consumption data mixed in with my business goals, I don’t know if I want that agent talking to other people.

Thanh Pham: It is segmented, fortunately. But I’ve built a lot of role-based access systems, and so when you think about permission, especially with your company being a payments company, I mean, compliance and permission levels, I think, are so important. Luckily, on a personal level, that’s less of an issue. But when I was working with this VC firm, they have different levels of employees, and partners were able to see some things, and some people were not. And it’s funny when you see what the partners want to have in the system and what they want to hide from everybody else. And you see behind the curtains, it’s like it’s quite interesting to see what’s in there sometimes.

Brad Weimert: I think that’s a quandary. Well, I wanted to start with that because the… And I want to actually dig a little bit deeper before we back out. We’ll get into a bunch of AI stuff as well later, but the question really is like you talk about the tactical thing, tactical elements, and saying AI has immediate results, and I think that that can be very true, but it’s also very true that you have a huge range of how AI is getting implemented right now. Which leaves me to the remaining question, which is, is it more important to have a better strategic framework for the use of productivity in AI today, or to know the tactics?

Thanh Pham: Well, the models are changing so fast and so often that the tactics keep changing, and they’re being outdated and phased out almost every few months. So, what worked two, three, four months ago might not be a thing anymore just because the models get updated, and they’re really fast right now. So, for example, if you think, really just in simple terms, if you think even about a year ago, you had to prompt them, the tools in a very specific way to get the best results. And as the models got better, you can now actually just talk to the model and just Wispr Flow or just use the voice chat feature, and you can blab, you can talk for 10, 15 minutes, and it will be pretty good at understanding what you’re trying to do. And even if you have typos in your voice outputs, it will still understand what you’re trying to do.

This is something that wasn’t possible before, so it completely changed the workflow of how you did stuff and the tactics of how you used AI tools. And this goes same thing with the context window. It’s gotten longer and better, so you actually have more optionality now to do stuff. And so, now when I think about improving the productivity of a company, pre-AI, it was, how do we get the team members, the executives, aligned and have clarity in their business, and then making sure that everyone’s rowing in the same direction? And then you would install some tools, some systems, some habits. But those were pretty difficult to do. And if anybody has ever done change management in an organization, that’s one of the most difficult things to do.

With AI, you kind of can flip the script where the work is now being done by a tool or a bot or an agent, and then the work is being shifted from, “Hey, we need to define the first ten percents of any task or process.” The agent or the tool will do 80% of the work, and then the last 10% is being reviewed by the human. So, if you think about flipping the work in an organization, it’s really about how do we define the first 10% of the work and then review the last 10%, and everything in the middle is not done by people as much, but it’s actually done by the tool. So, that flips the whole organizational workforce around in the sense that we actually get to do “less work” but we actually have to define the vision and cast what the definition of done is or the DOD, and how we define quality, and that it’s good. And that actually allows organizations to move faster, but then also requires people to be trained up to be able to take advantage of that.

Brad Weimert: How do you think about the adjustments needed in roles and responsibilities, and who you hire, that being the case? So, if you make the assumption that a lot of jobs now can fit into this 10/80/10 framework, spend 10% of the time defining the task, 80% is now done by a robot, 10% is again the human, qualifying, and making sure that it’s right, finishing it, the skill sets and values for a human that’s good at that is fundamentally different than the values or skill sets for the person that’s good at doing the 80% in the middle.

Thanh Pham: Yeah. A common frustration I have that I hear from people is, so I teach all these AI workshops, and there are different levels of AI, from beginner to intermediate and advanced, and I teach different workshops. And so, oftentimes people will come, they go home, go back to work, and they’re really excited, and they’re doing all these things and getting more productivity, and then they go, “Why isn’t the rest of my company on the same wave?” And when they then try to instill what they’ve learned on them, it never translates because they just don’t have the same time and level of commitment to learn and do stuff. And so, it is a shift in how you think about work, and this is why I call it being AI native.

Being AI native means you’re trying to do the work in a way where you’re not trying to do it yourself. You’re actually trying to have the tool do it for you. And if you’re stuck or you don’t know what to do next, instead of going to your manager or to somebody else in the company, you actually go back to the tool. And the tools now, the models are so smart and so good, and they’re only getting better every few weeks, that they oftentimes have the answer to what you’re trying to do. And so, it’s a different way of thinking. And when I see other people talk about what they’re looking for in people, they oftentimes talk about grits. They oftentimes think about curiosity. And I never understood it until maybe six, seven months ago when the models have gotten so much better.

There was something that happens like Thanksgiving of 2025 when Opus 4.5 came out, which was I think one of the best updates ever, that allowed the AI to go from, “Hey, we’re just chatting now,” to actually having the tool execute tasks for you and run for a really long time to be able to move end to end to do something. And that requires a different level of skill to be able to kind of like drive the tool to say, “Hey, here’s a vision or an idea that I have. Could you go ahead and execute this, and then also review the work?” And so, a year ago, I ended up replacing my executive assistants by building all these tools and workflows and agents.

But now I’m actually tracking that back a little bit because I’ve seen supercharged executive assistants now, where instead of me trying to replace them, I’m actually trying to empower them as much as possible, where If you think of all the things that an executive assistant does, there’s still human judgment that is needed to be able to say, “Hey, this flight correction is correct,” or, “This meeting schedule doesn’t make any sense.” And now, when I try to build all these, what I call digital chief of staffs, I’m really empowering all the executive assistants of all these founders and executives to be able to spend less time doing the work that they’re doing, but more time reviewing the work.

And reviewing the work is something that they all know how to do. And so, if the person is open-minded enough to go, “Hey, I want to do less of the work, but I still know that I’m important because I have the skill and the experience level and the judgment to be able to make a call and say, ‘This is good,’ or, ‘This is bad,’” that’s great. And so, I don’t think AI is going to replace necessarily a lot of humans or human jobs. It’s going to displace them a little bit, but we see the stats already. There’s more software engineering roles ever than before, right? The narrative is changing in the sense of us replacing humans. And it’s just changing the shift from, “Hey, I’m going to be doing all the work,” to, “I actually have to be able to have the experience to review the work.”

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I think that that’s, I mean, certainly there are spaces where jobs are gone, that I think the common historical framework that is incredibly relevant is that through every technological revolution, new jobs emerge, right? The need for humanity continued. Now, the obvious shift here is the speed of change. So, as these things happen, the question is, how quickly this displacement’s going to happen, and if the roles will be there quickly enough. I don’t know the answer to that. But I think in transition, what you’re saying, like with software developers, is very clear, which is they can just produce a sh*tload more now. And so, that doesn’t mean that we want to have less software developers. It means that everybody can do 10X more.

And what that really means is that the marketplace is going to be radically more competitive in that space because people are going to be moving so much quicker. And so, the norm is that instead of the software taking three years to build, it can take six months or nine months, if you have the staff to do it, but you still need the staff. How do you think about a system or structure for what you should be delegating to an assistant, for example, and what should be done by an agent at this point in time? Do you have any kind of overarching frames for that?

Thanh Pham: Yeah. This is something I actually borrowed from a friend of mine. His name is Blake Eastman. He and I do AI workshops together, and it’s called RATs. So, if you think about your day, your routine, your business, something I always like to ask is: What are the RATs in your businesses? And a RAT is something that’s repetitive, annoying, or time-consuming. So, what are the RATs in your businesses that are just something you do every single week or every day that is something you don’t enjoy, it’s annoying, it’s very time-consuming as well? And if you start answering that question, you start to realize, “Oh, there are so many things that are things I do on a recurring basis that I really don’t want to do anymore.” And then there are things that you have to do that are important, but they’re very time-consuming.

So, for example, producing commission slips for the sales team is very important, but for a lot of organizations, it’s very time-consuming. And every finance department will say that a lot of things that they do is very recurring and time-consuming, but important work. And there are a lot of things like that in every single business. So, what a lot of people don’t know now is because they think of the tools as I’m just going back and forth with it, and we’re having a conversation, the tools are powerful enough to be able to do a lot more things that previously wasn’t possible before. And so, if I think about what you would offload to an executive assistant, anything that is repetitive or annoying or time-consuming is the first thing I would think about. So, for example, checking your email inbox is important work. But something you probably do 5, 10 times a day, and could be very time-consuming.

Brad Weimert: Or 45.

Thanh Pham: Or 45, whenever you’re standing in a grocery store line or whatever.

Brad Weimert: Right.

Thanh Pham: And guess what? That can be done twice a day, and you can still be responsive to people, but have that be done either with your executive assistant or with an agent. And oftentimes when I work with people, I tell them, “Hey, don’t let the agents reply to people,” because you still want to be on top of what’s actually being communicated. And also, your reputation is on the line whenever you’re sending those emails, right? So, anything that affects humans, people, reputation, cash, financial stuff, don’t have the agent do it on its own. Actually, have you making sure that you’re always reviewing it before it sends out.

And so, when you’re meeting that person in the near future, you know that you’re the one who sent that email, not the agent, because how often would it happen where if the agent were to do everything for you, and you have no clue, even if you had an overview of what actually happened, by you not sending that email, if I ran into you, Brad, and said, “Hey, how’s it going?” And you go, “Hey, I really enjoyed that email that you wrote me.” And I go, “What? Like, I have no clue what you’re talking about.” But if I send that email myself, I at least have a reference point to know what we’re doing and where we stand.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. For context, I probably should’ve teed this up, but you, at this point in June of ’26, have implemented several dozen OpenClaw instances for organizations, some small, some big. Also, Hermes also played with every other possible permutation. But I think that that’s really relevant for context today because when we talk about AI, and I think hopefully this has come out in the conversation already, it’s such an exhausting topic, and part of it is that you either get people pontificating about sh*t that may or may not be, that doesn’t have a real answer, or they’re not equipped, they’re not actually educated enough or experienced enough to have an opinion or answer on, but they sound like they do.

Or it’s just this redundant nonsense that is like, yeah, obviously. That’s what everybody says all the time, and it’s not really relevant. So, I like talking to you about it because you’ve thought about it a tremendous amount, but you’ve also had a ton of action associated to it, and I think that very often when you get your reps in, you have more insight. Beyond that, with you, you have been doing Asian Efficiency for 15 years. AsianEfficiency.com, yes, is the productivity company that you’ve owned forever, lest somebody be confused about my racial slurs here. But I want to talk about the frameworks that you’ve used for 15 years for productivity and then pull that into how they intersect with AI.

But you started with the TEA framework, which is time, energy, attention, and that sort of rolled into 25X productivity. Can you just tell us kind of your general productivity frameworks that have been time-tested, that have existed for the last 15 years, and what that journey looked like and what people can learn from that today?

Thanh Pham: Yeah. So, when I dropped out of college, I’ve always been somebody who’d publicly shared everything online, and so I just started a blog, Asian Efficiency, where I was writing when blogging was still a popular thing back then, about goal setting, time management, productivity. And I was reading all the books, I was experimenting, just like you, I’m always trying to optimize stuff. And so, I thought, “Hey, why just not publicly share all these things I was learning?” And so, it accidentally became a business because the blog started blowing up. I got picked up by a lot of outlets, and people started asking, “Hey, Thanh, I would love to learn from you or get coaching, or do you have any workshops or training?”

I said, “Oh, I don’t really have anything, but just go through my blog, and you’ll get it all there,” right? And so, people just kept pounding me with requests, and I said, “Oh, maybe there’s a business here.” Like, I have no intention of starting a business, but I eventually did. And so, by working with all these people one-on-one, you start to see patterns over time of what people need, what problems they’re having, what challenges, and then also the solutions I was developing and creating were kind of similar. And I started to notice a pattern of most people, when they first come to us, they lack time in their life, and that’s the first thing they want to solve for. It’s like the pain point that they’re fixing.

And then once they kind of get a grasp on that, oftentimes the next thing is energy. So, even if you have the time to do something and it’s on your calendar to say, “Hey, between 2:00 and 3:00, I’m going to work on this particular task or this project,” when that time arrives, and you don’t do it, was it a time issue? No. You already had it blocked off. It was already there. So, oftentimes it was an energy issue where people weren’t paying attention to what they’re eating, their sleep habits, and, oftentimes, addressing that without changing too much anything else allowed them to then follow through on the things that they wanted to do. So, it became a natural progression of, hey, let’s fix time first. Let’s then focus on energy.

And oftentimes when you’re flourishing, and things are going well, especially when your business is booming, guess what? The third piece was then attention. Because now you get so many things coming to you and on your plates that you have to ruthlessly prioritize and say, “This is the thing I’m going to say yes to, and this is what I’m going to say no to.” And so, when you know how to prioritize and focus your attention in the right place, that’s when oftentimes, when you have all three in place: time, energy, and attention, that’s when I think you really start to flourish, and that’s where I think productivity ultimately is at its highest. And so, I was doing this for a while, so whenever I had a client, I said, “Okay, what is the T framework here that we need to optimize? Is it time, energy, or attention?”

But then once I started doing that with every single client, I started to realize, oh, there’s a very predictable path of how to maximize your time, how to maximize your energy, and how to maximize your attention. And so, I started to develop these little what I would call skills. So, for example, if you want to maximize your time, one of the most important skills you can learn is planning your week, being able to forecast and say, “This is what my next few days are going to look like. Here’s how I’m going to allocate my time.” And that is a skill I would teach everybody. Same thing with attention. One of the most important things to do there is what I call a weekly review. Right?

So, how do we reflect on the past week so that we can catch ourselves and say, “Am I focusing on the right things? If not, what adjustments do I have to make so that I am focusing on the right thing?” Same thing with energy. Oftentimes, it’s getting more sleep. So, there are very predictable patterns of how we fix time, energy, and attention, which eventually became the 25X Productivity System, which is 25 different skills. And if you master them, that’s how you maximize time, energy, and attention.

Brad Weimert: I love that. Also, it seems like planning and weekly reviews are ripe for AI intervention and assistance.

Thanh Pham: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: How has AI impacted the way that you do your weekly planning and your weekly reviews? So, it doesn’t seem to help with sleep optimization, but.

Thanh Pham: Yeah. I’m actually staying up later, no, because I can do more work. So, I’m an AI vampire, as I like to say. And if I think about this topic a lot because it is augmenting how I work, and it is still ever-evolving, so I don’t have, like, a finite answer to this in the sense that this is what it’s going to be. However, if I think about planning my week and reviewing my week, they’re kind of like opposite ends. And planning my week used to take me, let’s say, 30 minutes or so, because I would run through a checklist, right? So, I have a checklist somewhere, so like simple text file and say, “Hey, look at the last seven days.” And it would answer really basic questions of what is repetitive, what’s annoying, what’s time-consuming, like the RATs. So, I can start identifying things on a regular cadence.

And now, with AI, with all these LLMs we have at our disposal, if you give them access to, for example, your calendar and your email, they can do a lot of the prep work for you. So, they can go through your calendar and say, “Hey, it seems like this past week you went out for dinner every single night. How are you feeling?” Or, “Hey, I went through your email history. It seems like you had a lot of meetings this week and a lot of email volume and follow-ups. How is that going?” So, it can do a lot of the admin stuff that maybe I wouldn’t have the time for to be able to do. Or even if I give it to an executive assistant, it would be maybe too expensive or too time-consuming for them to do it as well.

So, now I can get even more granular, and same thing with planning my week, because I can now give the tools access to my calendar, my email. I can even say, “Here are all my existing projects. Here are the commitments that I’ve made. Here are the SOWs and proposals.” Like, help me allocate my week now based on this. This is something that used to take a lot of thinking time to do. Whereas now, if I say the first 10% of, “Hey, I’m trying to plan my week,” 80% is done by the AI, the last 10% is me reviewing it. It’s the same pattern that shows up there. And so, I’m trying to always think about what’s the first 10% and what’s the last 10%, and how do I have AI do the middle 80? Whether it’s planning my week, reviewing my week, whatever skill I teach nowadays.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, I think that it’s incredibly valuable, and this is why I keep toggling back and forth, but I think it’s incredibly valuable to think about the frameworks and know the frameworks, so that you’re using AI to continue to improve yourself and your own skills and not try to delegate the whole thing out, even if it’s an iterative process that you’re completely using it to learn that structure and framework. But there’s a big difference between going into plan your week with a checklist or without a checklist, for example. There’s also a big difference with going to try to implement an AI system when you have a framework in mind or when you don’t at all.

Thanh Pham: Absolutely. So, the reason I was able to plan my week over the years is that checklist was an iteration of 12 years of planning my week, and that’s still changing. Whereas, for example, a few years ago, before I had my Oura Ring, I would never check my Oura Ring stats because I didn’t have one. Now that I do, it’s part of the checklist to go through it, and I would then open up my app and go, “Hey, well, what are the stats?” Look at the trends and everything and try to understand what was going on. Now, luckily, Oura has an API now. So, guess what? Now the tool can go through the API call and say, “Hey, what are the stats of Thanh for the last seven days? And let me digest it and then summarize it to him and say, ‘Here, here’s what actually happens.’”

So, instead of me spending five minutes going through the data, it’s now being processed for me in, let’s say, 10, 15 seconds. And so, now I can have consistently the same outputs and the same thought process being done and offload it so that I have more time to say, “What does this actually mean?” And if I have very little energy, I can still do all the things I want to do on a more consistent basis. Because we talked about training the other day, how even when the weather is bad, you’re still going to go out and run and train for the things you have to do, right? You don’t even think about it. But there’s a certain level of energy that is still required to do all that work. And by offloading it to the AI, if you have your existing frameworks, you can just kind of quickly see where the AI plugs in and remove all the barriers and remove all the friction points so that you’re still more likely to follow through even though you don’t feel like it.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I think that the time, energy, attention framework in this context is incredibly valuable because of what you just said. Look, you can have a calendar block that says, “Hey, I’m going to plan for next week.” Guess what? I have that block in my calendar every day at 4:30 on Friday. Rarely do I do it. And part of the reason is it’s in the wrong place. I shouldn’t be planning at 4:30 on a Friday, me personally. Also, though, you sit down for some of these tasks, and your energy’s not there, or your energy’s not there relative to the complexity of the task, right? So, if the task is easier, you have less friction, you’re much more likely to do it. And so, if the Oura data is just in front of you, and it’s part of the system that just is fed to you, you’re much more likely to do it.

In addition, today, there are more and more and more and more paths for distraction. And so, I don’t know about you, but if my task is to open up my Oura app and look at my sleep data, there’s a chance that before I make it to the Oura apps, something else has derailed me, right? As soon as I pick up the phone, who knows where I’m going?

Thanh Pham: Yeah. There’s this concept called time arbitrage, which says that even though we all have the same 24 hours in a day, certain hours of the day are more valuable than others. So, to your point, I, for example, am most energized and creative between, say, 9:00 and noon, right? And then I have, like, another burst of energy between 6:00 and 8:00 in the evening for whatever reason. And so, if I try to schedule tasks that requires a lot of energy and focus, but I do it in the afternoon when I typically have less energy, that’s a misalignment. And if I did that same task between 9:00 and noon, I would have the same unit of time available, like let’s say an hour, but have a completely different output, right?

Or another way of saying this, if you were to ask me to write a newsletter by hand from scratch that requires a lot of energy and focus, if you ask me to do it at 11:00 at night, there are a lot of things that could be happening. One, I could be out socially. Two, I’d probably be very tired after a long day. So, the likelihood of me doing that is very low. Even though it’s the same unit of time, that hour, if I take that and put it in between 9:00 and 10:00, the likelihood of that happening is very high, and the likelihood of me being distracted is very low because I tend to have the most control about my day in the early parts of the day, versus the rest of the day. We would have meetings. We have teams we have to manage. There’s interruptions and emails coming through.

The rest of the world wakes up. And that’s a reality, too, and they need us for whatever reason. And so, just misaligning how you think about your task can hurt you over the long run. To flip that around is to say, “Hey, what are your most important work that you have to do? What is your top three? What are your most important task? And how can you think about aligning your schedule in such a way so that you do your most important work during the time windows of the day when you have the most time, energy, and attention available?”

Brad Weimert: So, on the one side, I mean, basically what I heard was sort of energy efficiency, right? Like, try to organize things in a way that you’re going to optimize for your natural skills or your natural behaviors or natural energy patterns. A lot of that, as you mentioned, is planning, right? Create the blocks of time to focus on the things that you’re going to be best optimized for in that block. The other side of that, which I think is a common… There are sort of divergent schools of thought here, but if you find yourself in a block and you find yourself distracted and feeling like, “I’m not optimized in this moment to do it,” do you think it’s more productive to push through and do that sh*t anyway? Or to defer it and say, “Hey, I’m not optimized for this right now. I’m going to try to do this another time”?

Thanh Pham: I think there’s always constraints, and something I always like to say is that self-awareness is the ultimate productivity hack. The better you understand yourself, the better you can leverage yourself. So, for example, some people are more inclined to just push through because that’s how they work best. And others, they can defer it, and they have enough discipline, willpower, whatever you might want to call it, to say, “Hey, if I’m going to defer it, I know I will still follow through on it at a different time and day,” right? But some people, if they defer it, it will just actually never happen.

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Thanh Pham: So, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution here. You really have to understand how you work best, and this is where working with somebody else sometimes is very helpful because they can point out, “Hey, this is the pattern that you have. When you defer stuff, you never follow through on it. So, if you are in that moment where you want to defer, this is the moment where we have to then push through and say, ‘Hey, I’m not going to do this because my pattern says that I won’t follow through.’” So, everyone’s a little bit different in that sense. Me, personally, I can defer something and then do it again later, but I have clients who would never be able to do that. So, you have to kind of understand how you work best.

And so, when you’re listening to this, and you go, “Hey, if I am in that moment and I defer something,” you probably already know the answer if you’re actually going to do it or not. But this is also a helpful tool in the sense that if you’re going to defer it and you’re not going to do it, it’s probably not that important to you either. So, that could be a natural byproduct where, hey, if that is consistently happening, one way to fix that is actually getting better at prioritizing, and what you have to do on a day-to-day basis, that is actually important. Because most of the time, if something is important enough, you will find a way to do it. If your relationship with your spouse is important, you will find a way to get it done, even if you don’t feel like it.

If something is not that important, it’s really easy to defer it, but sometimes we confuse something that we think is important when it’s actually not. And that clarity is actually the thing that we’re always seeking.

Brad Weimert: I mean, ultimately, I think what I heard there was self-awareness is super important, and a path to self-awareness is accountability, mentorship, coaching, whatever, or structure and effective planning. I find a tremendous lack of discipline across the board in humanity, and certainly in entrepreneurship, too. But I think that it becomes more challenging in entrepreneurship because there are so many more things to do, and there are so many more shiny objects. And they’re ever-present, but they seem, the chaos of entrepreneurship makes it more and more difficult to effectively prioritize if you don’t plan ahead and if you don’t have some form of accountability.

Thanh Pham: There’s that, but also I think as entrepreneurs, we have a unique situation. Unless we have a board, there’s nobody else that we have to report to. We only report to ourselves. And so, if we have a team member or anybody else in our company, they oftentimes have to report to you or to somebody else in the company. There’s a sense of accountability there. With entrepreneurs, if we have no board, guess what? It’s up to ourselves to then decide what’s right, what’s wrong, what we’re going to do, what we’re not going to do, and that is really hard. It is really hard, and that’s where peer groups are really helpful. Having a board is extremely helpful for that reason.

If you have a mentor or a coach, that’s really helpful for that because at least you’re reporting to somebody. And we all know that feeling that if I told you, Brad, “Hey, I’m going to be here at 9:00 a.m. to record,” if I don’t show up, there are consequences, both personally, professionally, and everything else. But if I just have to report to myself and I’m going to say, “Hey, I’m going to record today at 9:00 a.m. by myself,” if I don’t do it, what happens? Nothing. There’s no consequences there. So, having accountability and understanding the consequences is helpful, and that could be done in so many different ways, and doing it on your own, I think, is the most difficult thing to do.

So, even if you have the skills to build self-awareness by journaling or whatever it might be, it’s still not quite the same compared to having an actual human on the other end that you have to be accountable for.

Brad Weimert: I think that for me, that is explicitly why discipline and commitment to those time blocks is so important to me, because if I see myself drift or if I give myself the excuse to not do something in a moment because I’m not feeling optimized for it, I’m violating the accountability that I have with myself. And said another way, in my own head, I’m violating my integrity to what I committed to. That’s how I keep myself accountable, or that’s how I think about it. Certainly, clearly not the only path, but I don’t know any other way to do it. And it’s actually to me quite frustrating to hear or talk to. And I have lots of friends like this, people that live much more in the moment and do not have such a rigid approach to life.

I don’t think there’s a right or a wrong way to live. There are clearly people that are incredibly effective and live a thousand different ways, but that’s my personal, you know, that’s my accountability to myself, I guess.

Thanh Pham: I need the other human as much as possible. So, for example, I have a personal trainer, and I’ve had him for eight, nine years, and I see him multiple times a week. Could I work out on my own? Yes. Do I do that sometimes? Yes. But just having him on the other side, forget about the financial impact of it. Just by me having him there, just the fact that I might have to text him 20 minutes before our workout and go, “Yeah, I don’t really feel like it,” has eliminated so many occurrences of me not showing up. And where I tend to fail is if I am accountable to myself, it’s really easy for me to defer it to then to do it the next day, which would oftentimes happen. But there are also instances where I go, “Hey, there’s too much going on.”

In a business where attention is all over the place, there are a lot of ways to rationalize why you shouldn’t be doing something. And sometimes we’re too smart for our own good, and I am definitely that, where I can rationalize anything to say, “This is not in alignment.” Even though it is very important, health and wellness is very important for many reasons. Even if I feel violated internally, I go, “I can live with this because it’s me, right? I live another day, it’ll be fine.” And I would rationalize it. Well, if I miss one workout in a whole year, in the grand scheme of things, that’s not a big deal. I have a personal one, and I learned this from James Clear. If I skip something twice in a row, that’s when things really go off the rails. So, just avoid skipping something twice in a row. But if you miss it one time, in the grand scheme of things, like you’re going to be okay.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, man. That’s funny. My longstanding, and I think I know that this comes from an endurance background. My longstanding perspective is if you allow yourself to slip once, you are creating a data point that gives you an excuse in difficult moments. Meaning, if you, in the endurance framework is like, if you’re running and you’re tired, how many times in a five-hour run do you get tired, or do you feel like stopping? Fu*king thousands probably. It doesn’t get easier by nature. It gets easier from the frequency of the data points that you have that you make the right choice with. And so, the moment that you say, “I’m tired, so I’m going to take a break,” the more common it is for you to go to that answer in the moment that you’re tired. And so, I like the framework of, hey, if I’ve done it twice, that’s my corrective mechanism. I guess I just tighten the reins on that and think if I do it once, I’m fu*ked.

Thanh Pham: Well, that’s, I think, the beauty of life, where if we were all the same, guess what? Life would actually be pretty boring. And these conversations would be boring as well because, “Oh, you do the same, I do the same. Yeah, we’re all the same.” And that’s not great at all. So, I love the fact that you have to do it for yourself in that way, and I can zoom out and look at myself and go, “Hey, if I did that, I would go absolutely crazy.” And I think that speaks to kind of like what you said earlier, your perfectionism tendencies, where you’re like, “Hey, if I said it, made a commitment, I’m going to do it regardless.” And I have a little bit of that, but I can also say, hey, if I miss one time out of the whole year, in the grand scheme of things, life will move forward, and I can still move forward and be okay.

If I, for example, have a Snickers every now and then, like, life will be okay, but it just can’t be a recurring pattern. And I think that’s where I halt and say, hey, if it’s a recurring pattern, now we have to sound the alarm bells and go, “Thanh, this is not good. We have to make a change.”

Brad Weimert: Well, there is an argument to be made that my tendencies have actually made me crazy. But to that end of this variety of performance and individuality and patterns for success, you’ve worked with thousands of different humans and entrepreneurs, through the lens of productivity. What do you think the difference is? What’s the productivity skill that separates a million-dollar entrepreneur from a $10 million or a $50 million entrepreneur?

Thanh Pham: Well, I think one of the skills is definitely intensity. If I think about the people I’ve worked with who run, let’s say, a hundred, a billion-dollar company, there’s a certain level of intensity that is unmatched compared to what I see with other people. Their intensity shows up in different ways, for example, how they run their meetings to how often they work to there’s no time wasted. Like, I have so many clients who run a company of somewhere between $500 million to $2 billion. And if I think about what their day looks like, you would think they’re absolutely insane. They’re all on planes the whole time. They’re on meetings a lot. Every moment that they’re working is because they’re alive and breathing, and their eyes are open.

And that’s just a different level of intensity versus somebody who, for example, can run a lifestyle business for, let’s say, a million dollars a year. And there’s an intensity of, “Hey, I can work whenever I want to, and I really enjoy the work that I do,” and that’s great. And then the people who are super intense will do whatever it takes, even if they don’t like the work, and there’s a lot of drama, there’s a lot of politics, there’s a lot of internal struggles that they have to follow through on, and just push through, is just a different level of intensity that I rarely see. So, I think that’s one skill, and that’s the skill that everybody, I think, can develop because it’s just a matter of, like, how important is this to you and how committed are you to the thing? And if you are committed to it, you’ll just push through and do whatever it takes.

I think another skill is understanding unspoken currencies. And when I say that, it’s like the people who understand social capital and relationship capital, I think, is an underutilized skill. But the people who run big businesses really understand this on a fundamental level, where it’s not like doing something tit for tat. It’s more about how can I utilize and leverage my networks to grow the business in a way that couldn’t be done by just me working harder. And it’s identifying who are the top people I have to convince or persuade or include or have on my team or be part of my network that they’re always constantly thinking about, versus somebody who runs a smaller business doesn’t tend to think about that at all.

And so, any business that is doing let’s say eight or nine figures, they will usually have people at the top that will think about their networks and think about who are the partners, who are the people I should be recruiting, who are the people I want to align myself with, who are the people in my industry that if I had them on my side, would actually grow my business. And that’s, again, a skill as well, where you can think about when you wake up every day, who should you be talking to and what should you be saying to them or communicating with them. And that’s all a skill.

Brad Weimert: Well, that’s interesting that you bring up relationships because you are known for optimization. You’re so deep into AI, which everybody has this general feeling that it’s like the disconnection from humanity. I shouldn’t say everybody. There’s this huge narrative around it being this disconnection from humanity and the progression from living in your phone to like now you’re just interacting with robots all the time. Yet, you have been incredibly deliberate about building relationships. You have events that you consistently put on in Austin. You’ve done dozens of these handcrafted dinners that you’ve hosted. Do you think that entrepreneurs fail to see the value in relationship capital, they fail to understand how to forge relationships, or they fail to prioritize it?

Thanh Pham: I think it’s definitely the latter. It’s the fail to prioritize because the payoff that you get is not instant, and it’s not clear and obvious that it’s going to be there, and it’s kind of an unknown. You don’t get to control the outcome when you’re building relationships and how fast you get something in return for that, right? So, when I start hosting dinners in Austin, this was like 2017. I paid somewhere between, let’s say $25,000 to $40,000 a year just on hosting and doing events and doing dinners, and this combination of food and staff and all this stuff, and I had no idea if I was ever going to make a return on that money.

But I knew it was a good thing to do, and if I get a return on it in some time in the next 5 to 10 years, it’ll probably be worth it. Now, looking back, I was like, “Man, I wish I spent more money,” because seeing where I am today compared to what I did a little less than 10 years ago, all that money was so worth it, and the time, energy, and attention that was spent on that as well. So, I think for most people, they don’t see the power of networks or relationships because when you start to host a dinner, or you bring somebody out for lunch, you have no clue what’s going to happen. And if you think about outcomes, and you go into that lunch with an outcome, the other person can feel it as well.

They go, “Hey, you’re using me as a transaction. You just want something from me.” And there’s a time and place for stuff like this, right, where we go, “Hey, I need this to get this done. I want to talk to you about this. Can we make something happen?” And there are instances where that is needed, but oftentimes you won’t always get the results you’re looking for right away because oftentimes the bigger dollar amounts, the more time it takes to get somebody else to sign off and multiple people to sign off on it. And not everybody has the cash flow or the stamina to do so, right? But if you are in a position to say, “Hey, I can weather the storm for the next few years. I can build all this relationship capital,” you’ll start to get to an inflection point where now instead of you going after people or you taking people out or you’re doing stuff, it’s actually reversing, where now people are coming to you.

And there’s a weird inflection point where, and I’m sure you’ve seen this too, when you start to grow your name, and you start to host more stuff, opportunities come your way that you would never be able to account for. And that’s, I think, is the hidden benefit from hosting and doing a lot of events and building relationship capital. And so, when you’re an entrepreneur and you spend X amount of dollars per year, and it’s a line item on your P&L to say, “Hey, we did all this on marketing and events,” and you don’t know how to tie it to ROI, that’s okay, as long as you understand that it will come back to you in some shape or form, but maybe not in the timeframe that you think of.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think that, I mean, I agree wholeheartedly. I think that it’s really important. There are many things in life like this, but it’s really important to lay the foundation before you have to make an ask, right? And I also think when you talk about the deliberate ask and saying, “Hey, I need this thing,” or, “Let’s talk about this thing,” the best advice that I can give any human, but entrepreneurs in particular, is if you need to make an ask, make the ask, and don’t wrap it up in some other way, right? The worst feeling is when you invite somebody somewhere through the guise of fun, relationship, etcetera, and then you get pitched on sh*t, and you’re like, “Bro, wrong place, wrong time.”

If you have the relationship capital, you can ask somebody anything. And if you have no relationship capital, sometimes the direct ask is still a better path to go than pretending you’re there to build the relationship. I think about the curation of the events, but also the unique experience as both deliberate and important mechanisms to drive relationships deep. Because you can have a unique group of people, but if you’re in a mundane environment, you’re then reliant only on the people to engage and for it to be memorable. And the more emotionally engaging and unique the experience is, the more it’s going to drive, certainly, that seed being planted in somebody’s head for it to be a persistent memory. How do you think about the structuring of events when you want to pull people together, in terms of curation versus event versus activity, or location versus activity?

Thanh Pham: Yeah. So, first of all, I would say the people is probably the most important product or feature of the whole thing you’re trying to do. Because if you can get the right people in the room, even if it’s a mundane experience, that’s still inherently valuable for everybody just being there. So, that’s the first part, because if everyone else in that room is not that great of a person or there’s not a lot of alignments, even if you have a great experience, it could still feel off as well. And oftentimes getting the right people in the room is actually the hardest part of the whole thing. The experience and everything else is the easy part. So, getting people in the right place, in the right room, is the first thing. And oftentimes, the more successful somebody is, the further you have to plan ahead, the further you have to get them on their schedule, work with their team to make sure that that’s happening.

So, that’s the first part. Curation is always number one, and then experience is level two, and then venue or location, I would say, is the third one. And so, if you and I, and let’s say Elon were hanging out at a dumpster, we would still have a good time somehow, and everyone would still want to come out even if the environment is not that great, right? So, I think about that first. And when I think about curation, I also think about, okay, if I invite Brad to something, I want to understand where’s Brad in his life right now? What is he focusing on? What matters to him? And that’s a combination of just being in touch with that person on a regular basis, kind of getting a sense of what’s going on so that you can see who would be a valuable person for them to meet, whether that’s in the immediate to in the long term, or over time.

And if you think about that person individually and you think about every single person that you invite, you start to curate a room that’s really powerful and interesting. And sometimes it’s getting access to people that they would otherwise never get access to that makes it really inherently valuable, right? Because you can probably reach anybody in your own industry, but somebody else in a completely different vertical or industry that maybe on the surface level doesn’t seem like that interesting, could actually be very beneficial, because I think everyone does appreciate, for example, access to hospitality people. Like, how often do we want to go out for dinner? And if we just knew the head chef somewhere would make things a lot easier.

And guess what? Getting access to that person is actually very valuable, even though maybe on different metrics it might not seem that way. And so, when I think about curation, I also think about not just in terms of stature, but just in terms of what would be a beneficial relationship for these people to have in that room, because the chef might actually look for investors as well, right? And there’s a level of camaraderie and interest there that it could be interesting, too. And so, when I think about curation, I always think about what would make the room interesting for everybody to be at, and it doesn’t have to be the same industry. In fact, I would avoid the same industries as much as possible because they’re the ones who are already doing that anyway.

Brad Weimert: What do you think the fastest path is for a newer founder to build their network?

Thanh Pham: Host something on a regular basis that is something that you can always invite people to. And the reason I say this is so I hosted about 25 dinners in one year, and I did this for two years in a row. And because I knew whenever the next dinner was, if I met somebody in the elevator and I go, “Hey, we had a great chat. I would love to invite you to my next dinner.” Even if I don’t have the exact date scheduled, but I know roughly when it’s coming up, I have a natural tendency to then stay in communication with somebody, right? So, I’ve had a lot of instances where I met somebody for a very short moment because I’m always hosting and doing the next thing, I could say, “Hey, I’m doing this dinner in the next month or so. I would love to invite you.”

Even if that dinner doesn’t happen, at least we have an excuse to stay in touch, so when that dinner or event does happen, I can now invite them. And then it’s a matter of just being pretty decent. Not even great, just being decent at follow-ups and saying, “Hey, how do I spend enough time every single week where I spend maybe an hour or two just on follow-ups and staying in communication with the people around me?” Because most people don’t even think about that, right? If you look at someone’s calendar, how often do we see a calendar block there that says relationship building or follow-ups? Most people have none of that at all. But if you look at my calendar, you’ll see there’s probably three or four hours a week where I just spend time on follow-ups and just say, “Let me text people. Let me check in with them.”

And I have, in my CRM, I have a list what I call the core 50, and these are 50 people in my life that are most important for me to stay in touch with. And it’s a combination of people that have been with me for a long time. It’s also a list of people that I want to get to know, but I don’t really know very well yet. And the reality is, even if I have a network of thousands of people, there’s a small group of people that I can intently focus on, and I get to choose who they are. And so, every week I’m spending time on my core 50 because I know building those relationships is important for my own health and sanity, but also for potential future business. And that is all done strategically and intentionally.

But it’s a reflection on my calendar as well, and I think that’s the thing that most founders are missing is that they work really hard. There’s a lot of deep work, there’s a lot of meetings and stuff, but there’s very little to none on building relationships on their calendar.

Brad Weimert: I love that. When it comes to relationships, you either pick deliberately who you’re going to invest time in or they pick for you. And so, I love the idea of carving out time to do that. I’ll also say, from a tactical perspective, if you meet somebody in an elevator that you want to keep in touch with and you’re not hosting dinners once a week, just fu*king tell them that you have a dinner coming up. There have been… And from a sales perspective, too, if you’re talking to somebody that you want a face-to-face with and you don’t live in the same city, you can happen to be in their city next week, and at any point in time, you can say, “Hey, I happen to be in San Diego next week. Are you open for a coffee meeting?” And then just fly there.

And that’s something that I think doesn’t… I think all these things are so relevant for people to hear because, if you haven’t done it, if you’re not in the habit of doing it, it hasn’t occurred to you. And so, just getting the idea and planting the seed and sort of getting permission to do it and be like, “Oh, that’s something I can do,” is incredibly valuable.

Thanh Pham: Something I also like to do if you’re thinking about tactics, let’s say, so Brad, I’m going to have you at a dinner of mine, and you’re going to be the headline guest, right? I will then work with you first to figure out, Brad, when are you available for a dinner? And you’ll give me a bunch of times, and I’ll say, “Okay, great. Let’s pick Thursday at 7:00. That’s when you’re available. Let’s do a dinner then, and I would love to host something with you. And I’m going to handpick the people that are going to come that I think you are going to find helpful as well.” And what’s helpful there is then I get to do this thing with you, and then because we’ve made a commitment, now it’s up to me to fill up the rest of the seats.

And oftentimes giving me that excuse or reason is enough for me to then reach out to other people and say, “Hey, I’m hosting this dinner with Brad. I would love for you to meet him. I think you’d be getting along with him about X, Y, and Z. Would you be interested in coming?” And all these people that I’ve been wanting to invite for dinner can now come or being invited. And even if they don’t show up, guess what? Just by the fact that I reached out to them via text or email is another way for you to stay in touch with them. Even if they don’t come, it’s still a gift to them because I see it as a gift whenever I’m inviting somebody. It’s not a request or an annoyance, or I’m bugging them.

It’s like I’m literally giving you a gift to either spend time with me or somebody else, and that’s a mind shift that I think will be helpful for founders to go, “Hey, you’re not bothering them.” When you’re inviting people, you’re actually giving them a gift of spending quality time or meeting somebody interesting. Because everyone is so busy that they don’t have the energy or capacity to even host these dinners, but if you’re the one who can do that, you get to grease the grooves in a way that is impossible in many other ways.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think that’s right. I also think that it’s much easier to do when you’re in the position that you or I are in, which is you entertain and host all the time, and are more established, etcetera, etcetera. It’s much easier to feel comfortable giving out those invites, and they’re also much more well-received. But I bring that up because I think that it’s important to reframe it as a gift, and when you’re brand new, when you’re an early entrepreneur, to recognize too that it is an ask, and you’re probably going to get shot down a lot more often. And that’s fine. And as you get those wheels moving, like you said, it is an opportunity to connect with people regardless and to build the relationship regardless. So, I think it’s a great mechanism if you have the right mindset and pursue it the right way.

Thanh Pham: What helped me was, because I did so many dinners, when I did 50 of them in two years, when somebody came into town, they were essentially like business partners with Gary Vee, and he said, “Hey, I’m going to bring Gary Vee to Austin, and I’ve been to one of your dinners. I would actually love for you to host him that weekend. Would you be open to that?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure. I would love to do that.” And so, Gary ended up flying for Austin for just one day, and I was like his host, picked him up from the airport with my buddy Tim. And guess what? When I hosted a lunch and a dinner, anybody I ever wanted to meet in Austin was willing to come because I said, “Hey, I have Gary in town for a whole day. We’re hosting a lunch and a dinner. Which one can you make it to?”

And everybody wanted to meet Gary, and guess what? Because I was able to have Gary in town, I could also set up meetings for him with other people that he wanted to meet as well, even though I’ve never met them, because I was the one facilitating the whole thing. After Gary left, my network just exploded because I now had access to all these people I didn’t have access to previously. But then also they’ve seen me in an interesting new light to go, “Oh, hey, this guy, Thanh, can hang out with Gary, and doing all these things. Like, that’s probably a guy I want to get to know,” and then that whole flywheel started. And that was only possible because I did so many dinners with people with names that you probably didn’t even know about, and these are just good friends of mine.

But those reps, to your point, allowed me to get to a place where someone else recognized and said, “Hey, this is super valuable. This is super important. Let’s do it with this person,” and then that flywheel started. And now if I host a dinner, there’s enough capital and relationship capital and reputation to then say, “Oh, this is going to be a good experience. I’m going to say yes to that.” And then you start referring other people, and then people say, “Hey, Thanh, I’m thinking about hosting a dinner,” or, “I just moved into town. I would love for you to host a dinner with me. Could we do something?” And then the flywheel just keeps growing.

Brad Weimert: I love that. Well, I have roughly 1,000 other questions around AI as it comes to structuring things. And it’s going to progress in a never-ending fashion. I also know we’re coming up on time, so a couple of quick questions before we wrap. The first is, what is a productivity hack or a habit that you have that you do every week or every day that most entrepreneurs would think is a waste of time?

Thanh Pham: Something that I do quite often is, I always think about relationships and my network. And so, texting people that I haven’t talked to in a while, anytime somebody comes up in my mind, I will text them right away. That’s a habit I’ve developed over time where I know checking in with people and pinging people, just being on top of mind, is super valuable because when you’re on top of mind, they’re also the first person you’re being thought of whenever something comes up. So, for example, because right now most people are interested with AI stuff. As long as I’m on top of mind of people, when they have an AI question, or they’re looking for an AI solution, or they have a question about something AI in general, I’m the first person they think of.

And if you look at my marketing online, there’s very little marketing around me and my AI services, and everything is done through referral, and it’s because I’m just on top of mind of a lot of people in my network. And so, when something AI comes up, they always think about, “Oh, you should talk to this guy, Thanh,” or, “I should reach out to Thanh.” and that’s the thing that I think most people never really do is when somebody comes up, just reach out to them, because again, it’s a gift when you’re reaching out to them or when you’re inviting to them. It’s not an annoyance or something like that. So, that’s the first thing I would say.

The second one is when I think about using AI in general, use voice over texting or typing because you actually get to do the work a lot faster, and a lot of people think it’s weird that you’re typing or texting with your AI when in fact, when you do it with voice, even if you’re in a room, you’re going to be a lot more efficient and faster. And it’s a new habit that you kind of have to develop, but once you do it, there’s no way of going back.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. No, I completely agree with you there. Wispr Flow, I don’t know why Apple hasn’t bought them yet, like…

Thanh Pham: Agree.

Brad Weimert: Good God. Every other entry point for voice-to-text is terrible compared to Wispr Flow. They’re not our sponsor, but they probably should be. What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs starting out?

Thanh Pham: For new entrepreneurs, I would say one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made is not validating a product before you launch it. So, I’m a huge fan of just lean startup ideas of how do we validate something on a small scale before we blow it up. And this could be as simple as like an ad creative to an offer that you’re making to a product or service you’re launching. Because if a small number of people don’t validate your idea, the odds are it’s not going to do very well. And I’ve seen that mistake happen in my own life, in my own business so many times. And so, for example, I’m building an indoor paddle facility right now, and we’re launching, like membership soon.

And just the fact that we’re testing this on a small number of people, we can iterate and get feedback so much faster before we announce it to the public. And that’s a feedback loop that I think most people are missing when they’re first starting off, is they think about an idea, and they think it’s good, and then go out to the market, and try to validate it, when in fact you can validate it much quicker and faster with people in your own network, even if you don’t know that many people, to get clarity about what’s good, what’s bad, what resonates, what doesn’t resonate. And I think that’s a mistake most founders make that could be easily prevented and could be also very much time saving, but also dollar cost saving as well.

Brad Weimert: That’s awesome. Thanh, where do you want to point people?

Thanh Pham: Yeah, if people are interested in AI services, they can go to signaladvisory.ai. It’s my boutique agency where I help implement AI solutions in businesses and also train staff members as well. So, if you just go to signaladvisory.ai, or if you’re following me on Instagram, super casual, @humanrouter, and I’m also prolific on LinkedIn as well.

Brad Weimert: Love it, man. I’m looking forward to many more conversations. Appreciate you coming out.

Thanh Pham: Thank you.