Episode #569: Essence Over Analytics: Duff McDonald Explores Purpose, Presence, and People in Entrepreneurship

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0:48 It's easy to use. Go to the prospectwizard.com get a free 30 day trial. Talk to my boy Dave Gallen. He will get you all set up and let the leads flow based on the Wizard. Go get him. This is Pete Moore on Halo Talks nyc. I have the pleasure of bringing straight from Woodstock, New York, a legendary author and expert specialist in how to think about business and how to think about life. Duff McDonald. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Pete. Glad to be here. So I met you up on Terry Hill, Terry Hill Road on the third house on the right with the lights with the Mastery family.

1:28 So give them a shout out for connecting us and hopefully they get a, they get a wood chopper that does not create any kind of workers comp injuries with the, with the child labor over there. Exactly. That's a concern. So jumping in here, you've written several books. I've read several of them before I met you. The Golden Passport because I went to Harvard Business School. And then on my way out of Woodstock, I had the pleasure of driving four hours up on my trip to Syracuse listening to tickled and trying to figure out what tickled me that we'll talk about. And one of the quotes that I love that you, that you had in the, in the book was I'm the only person I'm responsible for.

2:14 Which was a quote that I've taken with me and put up on our website. But do you want to give our audience just a quick background on you started investment banker and then became an author. And then I'd love to get your perspective on how to think about life and how to think about your career. Sure. So I went Wharton undergrad, started work on Wall Street. I worked at Goldman Sachs for two years. I was investment banker in their analyst program, left that and went into business journalism and spent 20 years as a magazine writer, left that or sort of stopped doing so much magazine writing when the Internet kind of destroyed the economics of print models and weirdly, ironically, ended up writing books after that.

3:08 Wrote a book about Jamie Dimon, wrote a book about McKinsey, wrote a book, as you say, about Harvard Business School. Wrote a book with a friend of mine, Christiane Lemieux, called Frictionless, about Internet era business models. Then during COVID shifted gears entirely and wrote a memoir called Tickled. Because during early quarantine, my. Everything sort of exploded for me mentally in a good way, and I sort of re thought or sort of came to a new understanding of how I would look at life and sort of re architected my entire approach to living. So numbers, numbers, numbers, banking, business, journalism. And then as you know, in Tickled, I kind of disavowed numbers. But we can get into that in a sec. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the first part of Tickled, for those who will end up reading the book, or just to give you a little summary, the first couple of chapters are Duff talking about the book that he was going to write and the book that has evolved into Tickled and kind of almost went against your, your, your narrative and thesis of what you wanted to tell people.

4:24 You know, we spend a lot of time with clients in the halo sector and health clubs, you know, looking at their data, talking about like artificial intelligence. And I joke around with them that you can't have artificial intelligence until you have intelligence, you know, so that's something that like you might want to actually understand the numbers. But what, what, you know, as you kind of hit that tipping point of starting to write the book and then almost like kept writing as you were thinking about what the, you know, redirection was, what kind of, you know, annoyed you about where you were heading to give people a little bit of like a taster. Appetizer. Sure. So, you know, as a business, you know, major and then banker and then business writer, I spent most of my life and certainly all of my career under the impression or sort of the assumption and ultimately proved to be an unexamined assumption that if you have the numbers, you have the story. And I went so far as to say that to people, if you've got the numbers, you got the story. Now that's true in the sense of if you are trying to tell a story about numbers and then you have the numbers, then you've got the story. But I suddenly realized, and this was out of the blue in Quarantine, it's like if, if you're writing about a

5:55 business like, of course we want to talk dollars and cents. How big is it? How many are there? How does it compare to others that do the same thing that it does? How does it compare to itself, you know, in the past or the future? And, you know, of course, we use, we use an arithmetic framework to sort of put something in a place where we can and understand it. But it all of a sudden hit me out of the blue that numbers cannot grasp the essence of a thing. And it's a subtle point, but, you know, an easy way to think about it is like, if we think about you or me. There's been this big push for the quantified self in recent years, right? We count everything about ourselves.

6:48 And in health, obviously, people like to do that too. But so it's like, yes, it's interesting how fast you can run a mile. Yes, it's interesting how old you are. Yes, it's interesting how much money is in your bank account. But all of those things, if you said, tell me, give me the essence of Duff, you wouldn't have a number, because a number cannot grasp it. And that suddenly hit me. I was like, oh, my God, maybe this applies to everything. Maybe we're counting, trying to count our way to meaning. When we can't do that. You can count your way to counting. But, like, when we say, how many? Sure, but why?

7:35 No, the answer to why is not a number. So I suddenly, yeah, sorry, go ahead. No, you kind of get into the crux of capitalism and quarterly earnings and reports, and I feel like that's all that's reported, is the numbers, and people don't ever think about what's the mission statement. How many lives have you affected, how many jobs, people you've employed? What's the feeling that people get? Are you delivering happiness? Are you solving problems? I think that's the crux of what you're getting at for. For an entrepreneur. And unfortunately, we're locked into this game of I got to talk to my investors about my numbers, and they don't really give a shit about anything else. And why is that? Why do we get here or how do we get out of here? You know, I make a point in the book where I. And it's my distinction, but I think it works just for thinking about it. I think at some point along the way, we split into two groups. There are experts and there are specialists.

8:42 If you open up the New York Times on any given day, they probably use the word expert in it maybe 50 times in one day. And what experts tend to mean in the context of the times and sort of a modern parlance is people who count things and predict things. Right. So during COVID they were always talking to epidemiologists who studied the statistics of COVID and tried to predict where it was going. So there are the experts on the one hand. On the other hand, there are specialists. So a specialist is someone who has mastery of a thing. Right. So a great chef, a doctor, or a, you know, musician or a athlete, someone who has. Who has put all their focus and energy towards mastering some specific aspect of life.

9:45 And it suddenly hit me, I was like, okay, if you had Covid in the thick of it when everyone was terrified, would you want to go to the expert who is the epidemiologist who counts things, or would you want to go to the infectious disease specialist who will actually treat you? I think one of the things that's happened to us as a culture and capitalism is certainly behind this, is that we have ceded too much of the discussion to the experts, to the people who count things, whereas the specialists are just off doing what they're doing. Right.

10:27 So we let the conversation be driven by an analytical view of it rather than a synthetic view of it. Like you were saying before, when we want to talk about a company, especially small companies that are on a growth curve. Yes, you're tracking the data, but you. But you really want to be tracking, like, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? As opposed to have you doubled X? Right. And the experts are the ones who are like, oh, this is half the size of that, and it could be twice the size it is in the future. You want to talk to the people who can talk about the essence of a thing. Yeah. The irony of what you're saying is you should really have to be a specialist as a prerequisite to be an Expert.

11:16 Yeah, exactly. 100%. Because it's funny, I read these Wall street analyst reports, which I've been reading for coming on now 25 years, and I'm thinking you have never been in a health club. You have no idea what that business and. And revenue engine, like what, what it takes to do that. And also when you put projections on an Excel model and you want, like, Planet Fitness to open up 300 locations, that's 300 leases, that's 300 real estate brokers, that's, you know, $2 million of equipment per location, that's hiring 15 people, that's getting permits from the city. You know, that's actually somebody waking up at 4 o' clock in the morning. You know, it's all like these things of like the specialists are like. You're saying maybe the reason why the specialists aren't in the Wall Street Journal is because they're busy, right? Oh, no, exactly. And you know what? This is not a new issue. I trace in. I've talked about this more in the Golden Passport, the Harvard book than I did in Tickled. Right. Like I trace a lot of our current sort of societal woes to.

12:23 We're the most over educated people, right? So instead of going and apprenticing with someone who actually can teach you how to do a thing, we spend more time in school talking about a thing, right? So another, another way to think of my division is an expert is someone who talks about stuff. A specialist is someone who does stuff. And you know what? Where we are as a culture now, you need both. And you're right. The best of the best is the specialist who will talk to you about their specialty. The worst of the worst is the inexperienced expert.

13:13 This is Pete Moore. I want to let you in on a little secret. There's this company called Promotion Vault. And what they do is they give out rewards from retailers that allow you to incentivize your members without having to do zero down and one month free or giving away shakes or giving away t shirts. What you want to do is build a rewards program that lasts, that people value and that doesn't discount your own products and services. So here's the deal. There's something called Rewards Vault. The Rewards Vault is going to allow a member to set up their own profile. They are going to answer questions, you are going to get those answers, you're. Going to be able to target those. Members and you're going to reward them inside your club, inside your spa and outside of the club and outside of the spa to get them to become loyal, to get them to pay their monthly dues and to be rewarded properly for the actions. A lot of companies are cutting back on rewards. You shouldn't be.

14:10 Promotion Vault, your answer, Trust me, this is real. You know, I'll take this down to like a granular level of something that we did at Woodstock like four weeks ago. But I took Siege, Noah and Adam and we went down and we sold, we set up a lemonade stand on the corner and we basically taught these 12 year old kids like, this is how you sell a product. This is how you talk to people. You don't yell at people, you bring them in. You might offer them something for free. If they make a Donation as part of it. So you're actually freed in the transaction. And I think what's happened in our society is people get into sales roles, but they actually haven't been taught the relationship side of sales or the social side of sales, and they're given quotas and numbers.

14:59 So to take it back. And I don't have an answer for this. You probably do. How do we change the narrative and how do we change the storyline to get across and live in a society that you and I want to live in? So a big part of Tickled and my conclusion that counting it leads us astray came down to. In early quarantine, I suddenly found myself saying to my girlfriend, now my wife, and in all sorts of junctures, I'd be like, oh, my God, this is the best burger ever. Or, oh, my God, this is the best book I ever read. Or, oh, this is the best band I've ever listened to.

15:41 And I kept saying it and I kept saying it. And at one point I said to myself, have I lost all sense of all my standards ever? It's just the latest. Like, don't I? Doesn't something have to have quality? And then I realized it's like that wasn't what was happening. I realized that I was present. And I was like, oh, my God, this is what they're talking about. When you're present, you get as close as you can to the sort of miracle of it all that we exist. And a couple things came out of that instantaneously for me. One, you cannot count the present, you cannot count now. And there's a reason for that. One, it contains everything, everything is contained in now. So you can't actually count it. And.

16:38 Or if you tried, as soon as you start trying, it's not now anymore. You're off of now. So that's a sort of a philosophical insight that to hold on to there. So once you realize that there is only now and you can't count it, right? So then what are your options here? Because what we do when we try to count things is we say, how are we doing today versus yesterday? So we're comparing now to not now, or how are we doing today versus how we want to do in the future? You're comparing now to not now. And when we do that, when we count things, essentially, and we start comparing, it takes you out of your present moment, right? Because you're thinking, if you're thinking past, you're not present anymore. You're thinking of the future. If you are present, right? So A couple final insights. Like, first of all, everything that has ever happened has led us to this moment, right? So therefore, everything in the past is already contained in now.

17:44 Anything that might happen in the future could be a bunch of things, but no matter what it is, it's going to start now. So therefore, the future is also contained in now. This is like Eckhart Tolle talks about this a lot in the Power of Now. So given that the whole past is already in now and the future all starts now, you could do yourself a, like, more of a disservice if, like, if you decide, okay, you know what, I'm going to focus on something that isn't happening right now. You've basically given up all things, right? So if you focus on what's happening right now and you're not distracted, your awareness of what's happening will increase and you will see more opportunities than you otherwise would have seen if you were distracted. And you will make better decisions, which will bring the future to you.

18:43 So to circle us back to your thing about entrepreneurs, right? Like, of course there's going to be tracking. If you're a business, you got a payroll, there are certain numbers we have to pay attention to. But when you're not doing the sort of admin, the more of your focus you can bring to what you're doing right now. Not like now, this week, now now. If you focus everything you have on that, what's that going to do? You will, you will. You will notice more. Right. I think to kind of frame this for. And that's awesome, dude. I love it. And I'm trying to practice it much more than I used to from an awareness standpoint. I had somewhat of an awakening, you know, during COVID as well, when all of our businesses were closed. And I told people as a joke, they're like, how's business going? I'm like, bro, I'm an unpaid, pro bono, certified entrepreneurial therapist. So how do you think it's going financially? It's not going well, lifestyle wise.

19:44 I actually, like, wrote a book, actually planted some plants in the backyard. I put out, like, some seeds for the, for the squirrels. I didn't know that it was a day that they sprayed the pesticide. And I would argue, but I'm saying. Like, that was awesome. You weren't distracted by the future. Exactly. Or stressed about the past. Yeah. At the same time. Right. But. But to bring it back to, like, the people that are listening to the, to this, you know, if you're inside of a health club and, and this, this bothers me. And Duff, you'll, you'll stick with me on this part here. You know, when I check into a club, okay, and I'm paying you $40 to go into a soul cycle or a spinning class or a high intensity workout, look me in the eye, okay? Be present with me. I'm here and I'm trying to get value out of this.

20:30 Ask me why I'm here, ask me what I'm trying to achieve, and note down that we are now building a relationship. Okay? Everyone looks at the data and says, hey, what's your attrition rate? How many first time visitors came back and now turned into a membership? Well, let me tell you, all that is like contained in the now of what relationship we built or did not build. You know, so it's almost like the human interaction of you staying present actually create something that's a bond. Then now I might actually help your business financially. Yeah. You want to count it? It goes back, it goes back to my earlier point about, you know, you can count, we can count ourselves in, you know, six ways from Sunday. But when you're standing in front of a person engaging with them, there's no like, again, in the trying to be on the button of now. Not like, can I convert these guys to a paying customer? When you're looking at them right in the eye, you, it's not, it's a non countable situation.

21:27 It's. You want to be connect and realize that you're both alive and that you both exist and that you are, you know, in, in you are, you are in a sort of a unified state. At any point when you're dealing with someone and you want to just make the best of it, counting something isn't going to get that done for you. You know, when you watch like college sports and they talk about some of these kids and they talk about their grit and they talking about their resilience and their backgrounds and how coaches get the best out of them. How if you, if I put you as like, I don't like to use the term hr, but let's say you, you, you became the head of player personnel and you were recruiting. How do you decipher who lives in the now? Like, what questions would you ask? Or how do you, how could you figure out, like, I want to build my team with, with the presence of those types of people? That's a good point. It's a great point.

22:21 You know, the book was called Tickled for a specific Reason. I realized at some point, sort of trying to think about what I was trying to get across, Right? Yeah. All the ways that we engage with the world around us. Right. All the senses. We actually. Whenever something works for you or connects, there's a tickle. And I'm like, I can explain. It's like good food. We say tickles the top, right? When someone tells you something that you think is really interesting. So it's like your mind is like, oh, that's cool. It sort of tickles a little bit, right?

23:03 Physical stuff, like, great. When we are engaging with the physical part of our own existence, you know, up to sex, like, orgasm is the ultimate tickle. But you know, doing something when your body feels good, it tickles. And then the final one is when we create something out of nothing, right? The moment you have when. When you're like, oh my God, I just brought something out of nowhere, Whether it's an idea, a piece of art, or even just like a dinner, like, it's, it's. It feels good to basically be engaged in the creation of your own reality. Right. So. And when. When you're doing any of those things, basically reminds you, you know, why it's awesome to exist.

23:56 Yeah. And, you know, why do we not. Why do, like, we've all been sad and depressed. Why do you not kill yourself when you're depressed? Because ultimately it's fundamentally awesome to exist. And deep down we know that even if we're sad. So back to your point about recruiting, right? Like, the people who will do the best at any particular thing are going to be those who are most engaged with it. And that basically you can tell like, like when someone is locked in to. To their thing, their tickle, you can just tell, right. They're not trying to sell you something, you know, a piece of their own data point. They're not trying to persuade you.

24:39 You can just see it. And like, again, I'm not a recruiter, so maybe some people who have to deal with hiring are like this. You can't see it, but like, no. You feel the energy of people in a room in their presence. I got, I got. Yeah, like, like, for me, like, ever since tickled, it's like my whole thing is like, is, does this tickle? Does it feel good? And if so, like, why? And like, to zero in on that, you could do that with people too. People can be. Can tickle you. And some people don't tickle you. Right. And it's like, you know, let's not. Maybe we're not meant to work together, but those that do, right? That's the goal that, like, you've got the brass ring there? Yeah. So. So, so one. One technical question. If I'm in an interview and I interview someone, can I ask them what tickles you?

25:32 You know, I don't even know these days. Right. You know, I am not the woke police. I'm just wondering because I think it's a great question. Right. I mean, you know what? That came up. That came up in a couple ways. I first wanted to call the book Tickled. I wanted to call it how to Tickle Yourself. And the publisher said, we're not going to do that. That's funny. But I did take the time to articulate in the beginning of it. I'm not talking about tickling in a perverted. Yeah, I know that comes. Right. It's like. It's like I said, if you look it up in the dictionary, there's. There's Tickle, which is sort of to. It's like to. To, like, stir your soul. Yeah. Right. And when people say, oh, that tickles me, not under your armpit, but like, the sense of being tickled to be alive, I think if we prefaced it. Properly, you could say, so it was interesting. I'm on LinkedIn a lot. That's kind of like my primary content consumption.

26:44 And obviously that's a highlight reel and a lot of numbers and a lot of fluff and a lot of bullshit. But I did read something the other day that I thought would resonate with you. When you are meeting somebody at a trade show or a dinner or networking event or what have you, instead of saying, what do you do? I read and they said, ask somebody, like, what are you working on that you're passionate about? And, like, give them the opening to basically say. To basically do exactly what you're saying, like, what's tickling you? And obviously you want to share that. And maybe I would share that passion with you. I would. You know, people love to talk about what their ideas are and what they're currently trying to pursue in their dreams. I think that was something for me, where you go around the room and you're like, what do you do? What do you do? What do you do? And it's like, you know, truncated resume, which is kind of boring, versus what are you passionate about?

27:34 Sure. Or. Or you could just, you know, what's your. Who's. What's the best song you've heard recently? Right. Like, I remember when I was in. When I was first interviewing as an undergrad for jobs on Wall Street. Yeah. One of the interviewers was asking me the same old stuff and I obviously had a look on my face and they said, there's something wrong. And I said, you all ask us the same questions and we all give you the same answers. How can you, like, claim to find the creme de la creme if it's all the same? So I think as like, I did have a phase like 20 years ago when I was in New York, bureau chief for a magazine. I was hired a lot of people hired like 30 or 40 people. I would just.

28:20 My interviews were not like the interviews I had. You know, I went to myself. It was just trying to get to know the person. And, you know, the more you can ask them about what their personal interests are, then they'll get fired up, then you'll know what tickles them and then, you know, off to the races. This is Pete Moore. Here's the last tip for you of the podcast. We are partnered up with a company called higher dose higherdose.com they are the leader in workout recovery products, infrared technology, LED light masks, neck enhancers, and other products such as PEMF mats and sauna blankets. If you have not gotten on the workout recovery train yet, your time and your stop is now. You got to get these products in there before these workout recovery and spas end up saturating your market.

29:17 Having your members walk out of the club and going into one of their locations for 200 bucks per month where they're paying 39 to you. Let's become an expert in workout recovery. If we are already an authority in workouts, Higher dose, check it out. There's a wholesale code and we look forward to helping you augment your products and services to meet the demands of your members. And hey, let's get people happy, healthy and sweating. And the recovery should be just as. Good as the workout. So. So last question on the we could talk for hours, obviously, and I really appreciate your time here. I think people are going to get some takeaways on living in the present and tickling themselves and tickling their employees and making something awesome in that, in that chain. What brands tickle you or what brands do you think are doing the right thing to emote in a personal connection that is not just like, hey, I'm an authority. I'm selling you products that I'm getting as much money out of you as I can, or I'm selling you a premium experience. What things resonate with you is like authentic tickling.

30:26 You know, branding. You know, we're talking about a relationship With a corporate, like in a commercial relationship. So most of the things, if you ask me about branding, it's quality. Right. So I live up, up here outside the city. Husa and steel chainsaws. Either one, I use both. And it's because they're awesome. Right. They don't break and they do exactly what they're supposed to do. On a related note, there's a. So up here I can go with.

31:07 If I need to go to the hardware store, I can go to Lowe's, Home Depot or Herzog's, which is a local hardware store. Like it's an Ace Hardware, but it's like it's, it's real local. It's more personal in there. Herzogs hands down. Because I go in there, you could talk to people and know where the stuff is. And so it's like people who actually take it seriously to, you know, do right by their customers love that place. Let me think here.

31:48 You know, I hate to say it, Apple, because I think there is no brand on earth that is more adored, that doesn't give a about its customers ultimately. Like I had an Apple II plus from, from like 1980 to the year 2000. I had that computer for like 20 years. And now a laptop, you're lucky if it lasts you two years. Yeah, but they do it well design wise. What other brands? Nothing's coming to me off the top of my head. Yeah, no, I think that's a good. I love the local hardware store because you would have argued that if you were in Harvard Business School and you were doing a case study on Ace Hardware, that would have been out of business already. Right. That would have been like the expert conclusion that this is like a cash, cash runoff business and these things aren't going to compete. And I go to Ace Hardware because I. Exactly what you talk about. I want to talk to somebody and I want to tell them what project I'm working on and what is the solution and they'll give you their specialists and they care.

32:52 I think caring is like just a big part of retail that everybody forgot was like part of like the business model. Caring. Yeah. And again, I would argue that we are so distracted by the past and the future, which leads us to be distracted by numerical comparisons, which leads us to sort of lose our grasp on the present moment. Because if you're comparing anything, you're not present. Right. And it leads us to sort of lose sight of. And I said this at the beginning, the miracle at hand. One of the things that occurred to me during COVID I was not particularly religious or even spiritual for most of my life. And then it just hit me like. Like an anvil on the head. I was like, oh, my God. It's a miracle that any of us is here. Yep. Right.

33:51 You've heard the thing where they talk about, you know, the. The odds of you being conceived. Right. You know, everything had to fall into place for you to be conceived. You could go back in your family tree. And so it's like infinite upon infinite upon infinite odds. The fact that you're here is like an infinite m. And when we do what we do, we all have to do something. You got to do something in any given moment, Right. You don't want to squander this infinite prize, like, counting some shit. You want to spend it engaging with the reality that's right in front of your face. And most of the time, like you say, if you're in service businesses like this, it's people, right? It's the people should. We've got it all backwards.

34:42 We're counting the people. Right? Right. Doing the people thing and then counting it after the fact. Right. We just got to, like, you know, there's only one go around on this ride. And the interesting part of it is not a number. The interesting part of it is something that's happening to you, and more than. More likely than not with some other people around, and you're engaging in, like, a, you know, doing a joint miracle together. Yeah. I tell people, you know, most people know how fast the car they're going is driving, know how fast they run a mile, and nobody knows that the Earth's going around the sun at 66,000 miles an hour and rotating at 1400 miles an hour. And then the sun, 96 million miles away, like, enjoy the ride, however it's been constructed and do good things and give back. And I think the interesting takeaway here is that for the operators here that are so immersed in their numbers. Look, I'm a guy trying to help people bring in capital to solve loneliness, diabetes, and obesity. But at the end of the day, it comes down to what's the multiple, what's the valuation. I'm fighting over $10,000 right now. We're fucking H vac unit in Texas.

35:59 That may or may not break within the next 30 days. Does. @ the end of the day, does that matter? The answer, obviously, is no. Okay? But I'm, like, spending time on that, you know, minutia point on an asset purchase agreement right now. So I think let's let everybody level up and say, instead of counting your numbers every day, count, like, the good things that happen and then that. That the income statement will, like, kind of build itself because you do. Or I wouldn't even go so far as count the good things. Like, the point I was making before now, like, I. I can't overstate it, right? And like, the takeaway is this. Pay attention.

36:40 And so that means in every single moment that you can remember to do so, pay attention. And what will come out of that? Right? You will do the right thing. If you are paying attention. You won't do the distracted thing. You won't do the sort of easy but morally flawed thing. If you are really, really paying attention, you will almost always and invariably do the right thing. And if you do the right thing in every given moment, starting now, if you do the right thing, everything else will take care of itself. It's true. It's. There's another way to think about that. It is never not now, right? So if you are like, when have you ever been able to say it's not now? You never have. So if it's never not now, right? We can really only do one thing your whole life, and that is the following.

37:48 What it is that you're doing right now. You can never do something in the past. You can never do something in the future. You can never do something somewhere else compared to where you are. You can only ever, for your entire existence, do the thing that you're doing. So what does that lead to? Pay attention to what you're doing. Love it. Only thing that is. And if you pay attention to that, the rest you got nothing to worry about. Awesome. I'll tell you this. This all occurred to me out of nowhere during quarantine. And my life since, it hasn't been perfect, right? Because we all get distracted. We all get distracted. But when I'm not distracted and when I'm following my own advice of paying paid attention to what you're doing, there's like, you're. You're at the top of your game because doing the only thing that you can do, and you're doing it well.

38:51 And then all everything else is just noise compared to that. I love it. All right, you got enough takeaways here to my Halo audience to do the right thing, pay attention, make other people awesome, and you will become awesome on your own by living in the present. Hey, Duff, it's great to have you on, man. I really appreciate the words of wisdom here. I'm sad about the pandemic, but I'm happy about what you gleaned from it. So we'll take that as a positive takeaway from COVID And you know what, Pete? Let me leave you with one thing. Covid was terrifying, and it was tragic, and there was a lot that was horrible about that.

39:32 Right? But if you think about it, those are the parts of COVID right? We talk about people who died. Right. I would not discount death and anyone who lost loved ones. It's horrible. But that's the countable part of COVID The part of COVID that isn't countable is, did you start doing something cool like you said earlier? Did you plant a garden? Did you take up a new hobby? Did you suddenly realize that you wanted a new job? Did you suddenly decide that you wanted to commit to your girlfriend or boyfriend? All these things do not yield to counting, and that's why we don't talk about them as much.

40:13 But Covid, at the same time as it's horrible. Great things happen during COVID I'm in a violent agreement. Well, thanks for coming on. Look forward to seeing you get in person. And our audience is going to take these words of wisdom and live a better lifestyle and create better businesses with better people and actually living and understanding that social relationships are how the world goes around. So thanks for coming on, buddy. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thanks, man. Awesome. Cheers. Sa Sam.