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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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In life, there are times where you need to hit the gas and you have to stop thinking about, well, I m on a losing streak.
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Well, this just happened.
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Well, I had some bad luck the last few days, the last few weeks.
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It s easy to get into a rut or a slump.
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But the way to break out of that is that when you see a ray of light, man, hit the gas and go.
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Don t drown in it.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries and athletes.
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Now let s go out there and become passion struck.
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Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 376 of Passion Struck, the number one alternative health podcast.
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And thank you to all of you who come back to the show every week to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.
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I also wanted to wish you all a very healthy and safe Thanksgiving.
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My wishes go out to you and your families.
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I am also so excited to announce that my new book, Passion Struck,
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is now available for pre-order, and you can find it at Amazon or on the PassionStruck website.
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Starting in December, I will be using my solo episodes to discuss different aspects of the book, and in January, we re going to feature guests who I talk about in the book.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or, if you simply want to introduce this to a friend or family member, then introduce them to our Starter Packs, which are playlists of our favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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And in case you missed it, earlier in the week, I interviewed Amy Morin, who s a psychotherapist, international bestselling author of five books on mental strength and gave one of the most popular TED talks of all time, A Secret to Becoming Mentally Strong that has more than 22 million views.
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We discuss mental strength exercises and talk about how to pull up the unhealthy habits that can hold us back in life.
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Please check that episode out.
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And I also want to say thank you so much for your ratings and reviews.
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We now have over 25,000 of them globally on Apple podcast alone.
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And if you love today s episode or Amy s, we would appreciate you giving it a five-star review and sharing it with your friends and families.
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These go such a long way in bringing more people into the PassionStruck community, and I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners.
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Now let s talk about today s episode, which is one from the vault.
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Whether you are inked or not, I think we can all relate to using the concept of surface ink to go much deeper into who we are, what we ve experienced, but also where we see our future selves.
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Today s episode is about just that and reminding yourself that you are capable of being the type of human being that you want to be and creating a no plan B life with a relentless strive to win and succeed.
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But how do you unravel your greatest mystery and pieces of your biggest puzzle yourself?
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My guest today, Drew Plotkin, discusses his book, Under My Skin, where he goes through the roller coaster ride that has been his life and the painful secrets of his past
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along with his own techniques and tools for continuously navigating life s never-ending trail of valleys and peaks.
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Drew is Emmy-nominated and founder of The Launch, the RTV agency, where he has created and directed award-winning TV broadcast commercials for major celebrities, including Jennifer Lopez, Serena Williams, Cindy Crawford, Ellen Pompeo, Wayne Wade, Kristen Davis, Jane Seymour, Paris Hilton, Drew Brees, just to name a few.
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In addition, he is the founder and Chief Dude Officer of the skincare line Derm Dude, which produces products specifically for men s beards and tattoos.
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They are the primary 2022 sponsor for NASCAR driver Spencer Boyd.
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Drew has also co-founded Global Mobility USA, a non-profit that delivers wheelchairs to people in need.
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Our interview today is a story about learning to survive so you can thrive.
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It s about a real-life human post-it note morphing his body into his own roadmap to finding peace and healing with the past, awareness for the present, and safe passage and wisdom for all that lies ahead.
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Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am so excited today to welcome Drew Plotkin on the Passion Strike podcast.
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Welcome, Drew.
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Hey, how are you, man?
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Thanks for having me.
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I am excited to have you on.
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What a life that you have led.
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And congratulations on the launch of your new book, Under My Skin.
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I ll make sure on the YouTube we have a nice picture of it so the audience can take a look at it.
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But we re going to be referring to that book throughout today s interview.
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I know how big an accomplishment that is.
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So congratulations.
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Thank you very much.
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And yeah, your book, I m actually looking forward to reading it, especially after we speak today.
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So I might be able to talk you into a signed copy.
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I could send you the gallery.
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I m still waiting for it to come out.
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It s all about how do you create an intentional life, which is also what this podcast is all about.
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And I think it s a great segue into your whole book, because in many ways, that s what this book is really about, is this intentional life that you ve created through the many twists and turns that you call a roller coaster, which is the type of life most of us lead.
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I like to start out these interviews by giving the audience a chance to get to know the guest through different stories, but I ll say it just like this.
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We all have moments that define us.
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You had a very unique moment.
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First concert I ever got to go to was Led Zeppelin.
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Not that I can remember it because I was two years old.
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But I ve never had the opportunity to go to a Grateful Dead concert.
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I ve seen Phish and I ve seen a bunch of cover bands.
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But when you were at Arizona State, you got to see the dead.
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It turned out to be a very different type of experience for you.
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One that I think you will never forget.
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Can you talk about what happened and how it became an out-of-body experience and what you learned from it?
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Yeah, it s funny when you say that I saw the dead, technically I should have.
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I don t know that I saw too much of them that night.
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And it s always easier to laugh about it a little bit in hindsight, but I often say too that in life, sometimes you ll either laugh about something or if you don t, you might cry about it.
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And there s often a very fine line between those two things.
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So that specific event, and it really did change my life.
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was at a time where I was really beyond lost and drifting.
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And I think a lot of people can relate to that.
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I don t think that s uncommon at all.
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For me, I was so empty that I think another thing that people commonly fall into is alcohol and drugs and things of that nature and giving yourself a false
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fulfillment for that void, and clearly those things are not filling any type of void in more than what s right in front of you for a few minutes or a few hours, and then usually whatever the issue is worse afterwards.
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In this particular case, for me, I wasn t a particular fan of the band.
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I didn t even know that much about them, believe it or not.
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It wasn t really on my radar.
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A bunch of buddies were going to see the dead, and for me it was one more reason to party and be stupid and do any of the things that were part of my life at the time.
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It was just quite a bit of excess leading up to the concert.
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In the parking lot of the concert, the excess continued.
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During the beginning of the concert, the excess continued.
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I had a vague memory of some of the various things doing, none of them really smart, none of them that should be mixed together or taken alone.
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I vaguely remember all of a sudden just feeling like something was broken, something was wrong, and there s no feeling that I d ever had any
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sense of pride.
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Oh, I m going to throw up.
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It wasn t, oh, I drank too much or whatever.
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It was just an out of body.
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I felt like I broke something.
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Like I literally felt like I was not within me.
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And the next thing I remember is literally falling forward and faceplanting vaguely, literally faceplanting vaguely.
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I was probably still at least 10 pounds back then and like 240 today, but 210 pounds, six foot four, full faceplant with nothing to do in the middle of a concert of 50,000 people who were all waiting and whatever.
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I remember slightly having an awareness being on a hospital bernie, being wheeled towards an ambulance in the middle of this wide open field of craziness, and literally had that experience that other people have talked about.
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And some people believe it, some people don t.
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And certainly if you went through it, you re much more of a believer.
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But I drifted out of my body very clearly.
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I remember like it was yesterday.
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more than 25 years ago by 28 years ago and I was above my body and I looked down and I saw myself and I saw the medical people over me and oxygen and fluids and IVs and whatever they can do in the short term as you re taking you to an ambulance and I had
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some very impactful thoughts during that window, which may have lasted 30 seconds, maybe a minute, because I had to take me from the field to an actual waiting ambulance.
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So it took a little bit of time.
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The thoughts that went through my mind then really ended up having a very big impact on my life in a positive way.
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I m very happy to say, because obviously the way this event went down, many often times in those situations, the ending s horrible and sudden.
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somebody dies or somebody may recover from that event and continues down that same path.
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But I was very fortunate to not only recover physically from that day and everything, but I walked away from it with some key learnings, some key inspirational factors that I was able to take from a really bad situation.
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Today s discussion in many ways is going to be about, and they re very visible on you, the tattoos that you have, but it s an interesting read in your book because whether someone is inked or they re not inked, I think we all have ink on the surface of our lives that tells our story.
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And that s exactly what you do in this book.
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I wanted to start out by asking you, you have something called no plan B tattooed on your left index finger.
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What is the meaning of having a no plan B mindset?
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For me, that one is just that constant reminder that I can t get away from.
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I m often not wearing a ring and I see it no matter where I go.
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And it is that mindset of don t give up.
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If you don t have a plan B, then you have to make plan A work.
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There s a lot of takes on that.
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I ve often said that if you don t know what backwards is, you ll only go forwards.
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I look at life as walking the plank in the sense that there s only one direction, and I don t want to fall off into the ocean.
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I m going to go the way that s going to make the most sense for me.
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My father used to say, if you plan for a fire too much, you re going to end up with a fire.
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If you re certain that you re going to have a failure on your hands that you won t recover from, that s where you ll net out.
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It s not just all positive mindset and everything will fall into your lap.
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you have to be willing to put in the work.
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You can t just say, I won t give up, I won t quit, I won t go backwards.
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That s a big part of it.
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That s the starting part.
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The part that finishes it is because I m going to do this.
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I will do this.
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I won t have a plan B because here s what I m going to do to make sure that plan A works out.
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So that was the purpose of that tattoo.
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My life has been a serious, I think, as a lot of people, peaks and valleys.
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And the things that have always helped me get back to the peaks where we all want to be, but can t stay forever, is that when I m in those valleys, I really look at those windows as best I can.
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I try not to feel sorry for myself.
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not the easiest thing in the world, we re all human, but I m cognizant of that.
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And I look at myself and say, all right, what have I learned from the past?
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What has pulled me out of this valley before?
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What can I do proactively, productively, mentally, physically, constructively, that s going to get me out of here and then ultimately back to a peak?
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And a lot of that did stem from, I didn t really tie it together effectively, but
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After the Grateful Dead show and my whole hospital incident and all that, it was very shortly thereafter that I got my first tattoo.
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And that experience of the Grateful Dead show was the epitome of me feeling so empty, so lost, so void of a real purpose or direction.
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that I came up with the idea of a specific tattoo that by tattooing it on my body, I would not have the option of forgetting about it.
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I felt so strongly about needing to make a permanent
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mark of what I was feeling at that point in time, even though I didn t necessarily represent it with the best imagery.
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I didn t know much about tattoos or art or designs.
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In many ways, that first tattoo is something I joke about myself.
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But the purpose of it and the premise of it really stemmed from, so to say, going off a cliff, but surviving, which was that Grateful Dead show.
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And then all the other tattoos obviously have their own story and path.
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It s funny, when I go to concerts, depending on what time you type you go to, you typically see people dancing in one way or another.
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But when you go to a Phish concert, I ve never seen anything like it.
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It s like waves of people all in the same motion, coordinated over 40, 50,000 people.
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An interesting, sublime type of experience.
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You open your book by saying that you love tattoos,
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But you also hate them, and you re not a person who loves the pain that comes from them.
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But your collection of tattoos has now cost you north of $125,000.
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How have they become your pathway to intentional change and remembrance?
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Yeah, probably even since writing the book, I think I have about six more new tattoos.
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That s in a very short window of time.
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So my total sum cost has definitely gone up already even.
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The pain I joke about because the two things that just people always ask about on the surface are, did it hurt?
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Which one hurt?
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And it s often from people who don t have any tattoos or don t even plan on getting any.
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It s always an interesting question that people have, but it comes up all the time.
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And then what do they cost?
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That s always an interesting thing for people.
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They want to know about that.
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I m honest and say, there s an assumption that it doesn t hurt because you keep getting them.
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I ll go to the doctor and it might be time for a shot or something, or them to take blood.
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But, oh, I hate this.
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And it happens every time the nurse says, you don t like needles?
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Look at you.
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I m like,
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This doesn t mean I like that part of it.
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I like the reasons for the final effect.
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I want the tattoo on my skin process.
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The pain is like a necessary rite of passage, so to say.
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Maybe it makes you earn it a little bit more.
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Everyone has their own perspective on that.
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But it s a very funny thing that people do look at someone with a lot of tattoos and think, oh, it doesn t hurt him or he doesn t have the same nerve endings I do.
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I could talk about the pain part all day.
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It is not one of the reasons that I like tattoos.
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But I do struggle, like you mentioned, the opening of the book.
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I tend to say that this book wrote itself.
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It really did.
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It was supposed to take three months and it took 13.
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Rewrote itself and
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I kept forcing myself to be more and more honest with myself and putting things out there until there was like nothing left.
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I refer, when you put yourself pretty much naked on the cover of a book with just your junk and your ass covered only, you re pretty much vomiting everything out to the world as is.
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And a lot of the things I share in the book are things that I hadn t shared in some cases with anyone in the world.
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And in many cases, a lot of the more intimate personal things, maybe there were four or five people in the world who had been aware of some of the things in the books.
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When I started out saying I love tattoos and I also hate them, I didn t know if that was going to make sense to people and it still might not.
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To me, it does.
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What it really means is there are many parts of them that I like.
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For me, I m a big post-it note.
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I don t see myself as a work of art.
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Tattoos are a work of art.
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I see how the people s tattoos is very artistic.
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Mine, I like them.
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They ve been done by some great artists.
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I m very happy with them.
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I just don t see myself as a work of art, per se.
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I see myself as a big scratch pad.
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These are my reminders.
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These are my personal therapy.
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I m a post-it note, like you said before, no plan B, or having on my arm a necklace tattoo
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which was me that a little girl in Guatemala gave me off of her neck when we gave her a free wheelchair.
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We were doing some nonprofit work there.
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And this little 50 cent necklace that was hanging on by a thread meant so much to me that she gave it to me that I just never wanted to forget it.
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So I added that as a tattoo.
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So that s my life story is really told for me, my roadmap, my hieroglyphics, my past, my present, and where I hope to go in the future.
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That s my approach.
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The hate part, and I know hate s a strong word,
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is I am the first person to encourage people to love the skin you re in.
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You re wonderful the way you are.
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You don t need to change anything.
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And I believe that about other people.
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And I want people to believe that and feel that about themselves.
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So it s a bit of a dichotomy that as much as I would like to love the skin you re in, I think for some people, myself in particular, the desire to, I don t even say change my skin, but share my story using my skin
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wins out in the love-hate relationship.
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What s interesting you brought that up because as I have talked to people over the years who have tattoos, I have grouped them into three different groups.
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There s the person who has no forethought at all into it and just gets a random thing done.
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There s the other group where they spend a year and a half drawing a sleeve and then having this masterpiece of art drawn on them.
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And then there s the third camp, which I in many ways think are the most meaningful ones, which are things that
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have either come from a life event or a learning experience or something else, which is the camp that you fall into.
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And I ve got a really good friend who is well tatted.
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And I love looking at his tats because each one has a different story.
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His back has this huge tattoo.
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of a B-17 bomber because his grandfather was one of the few people who survived, I think, 30-plus missions on one and was able to come back home.
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And then he s got a dial from his first guitar that his dad gave him, and he s a guitar player, and others, some good, some bad, some good memories, some others.
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But you look at him, and you can see his life displayed all over his body.
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And to me, those are the most meaningful ones.
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I agree.
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That s the category I fall into, for sure.
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It s interesting, you write that when you find yourself drowning in a sea of dark clouds, you sometimes glance at your uncovered body.
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And how does that help not only to calm you, but to reinforce your core values?
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I think it goes right back to the categories that you were just talking about.
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I go out of my way to not judge other people s tattoos as long as they re happy and that s the most important thing.
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It is art and it s subjective.
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I m just not the person who walks into a tattoo shop because they
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have walk-ins available and pick a Yosemite Sam off the wall and say, let s tattoo that on today.
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Where there are some people, a very big category is, which is almost purely artistic.
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And there are some beautiful tattoos, spectacular.
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I often say I wish I had more than one body, because I see certain portraits of flowers and nature and animals and different things that I m like,
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Man, I would do that with my second body.
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My third body, I would do this.
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On my line of work, I know a lot of amazing artists that I have the opportunity to work with.
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And some of them, people wait two and a half, three years to work with.
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And I could get a tattoo with them, but their style isn t necessarily right for me.
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It doesn t mean I don t appreciate it.
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For me, it s what you said, which is that each and every piece is really first and foremost about what it means to me, how it makes me feel.
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And that s why some of my tattoos on my fingers or in different areas are small and simple.
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This one right here probably took 30 minutes at the most, but it s Sanskrit and it says, learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.
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So that goes back to your question,
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But those types of reminders, those types of post-it notes are very helpful to me.
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It s not like I might be having a bad day and stop and say, all right, which one is going to make me happier at this moment?
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And I look around.
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It s more of a constant.
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It s anywhere I look.
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It s a reminder in Greek from Pericles and something that he said that always resonated so strongly with me.
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So it s not something that I only think of
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in the moment of need or whatever it might be, it s something that is always with me and becomes part of me and it winds into my day-to-day 24-7 philosophy, be it no plan B or tribe or tattoos about my kids.
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Those are things that I always want to be with me and remind me and the one on my hand right here is a clock.
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and the glass is breaking and little birds fly away.
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And the clock is set to 7-11, which is for July 11.
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And when my oldest daughter was around seven or eight years old, I really took inventory of myself that I wasn t being present.
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Mentally, I was there, but I wasn t there the way I wanted to be.
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I was too worried about work and making money and planning for
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college future and all those things are wonderful and good and any parent in the world can get that and appreciate it.
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But there also needs to be a balance of what about today, what about reading a story to the seven or eight year old and what about making sure that you just stop and look them in the eyes and see what in those amazing little eyes that have so much future light in them.
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So this was really time flies is my own
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self-reminder.
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It s been helpful for me in many aspects of trying to be more present, not just the one that was intended for.
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Going back to your question of how did the tattoos help me in that way, it s collective.
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I say in the book also that if you get a Zen tattoo symbol on your hand and you re someone who has road rage your whole life and you re always about to snap, I don t think that tattoo is necessarily going to prevent you from flipping out the first time you re in traffic.
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That s probably a bit of a deeper process.
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I was going to come back to, I think the child you were referring to is Zoe.
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Yeah.
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And I was going to come back to that a little bit later in the episode, but I wanted to jump to, you have had a very interesting life.
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And at one point you were earning four to $6,000 a week for fewer than 20 hours of actual work, if I have it right, as a telemarketer.
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And while you were doing that, you followed five simple rules that served you as a role model at the time.
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You say that they not only apply to that job, but they apply to life in general.
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What were they?
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It s funny.
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I can speak to each of them in great detail.
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I don t remember what order I had them in the book.
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Quite frankly, I can flip through.
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You don t have to go in order.
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that specific just so I get it right, because it was one of my favorite parts of going through it.
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Thank you for reminding me of that.
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So the first one, there s a sequential benefit to it, is knowing when to go all in.
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And in life, there are times where you need to hit the gas and you have to stop thinking about, well, I m on a losing streak.
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Well, this just happened.
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Well,
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I had some bad luck the last few days, the last few weeks.
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It s easy to get into a rut or a slump.
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But the way to break out of that is that when you see a ray of light, man, hit the gas and go.
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Don t drown in it.
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The mind is such a powerful thing.
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And I ve read all these different articles and certain studies that people believe that maybe we tap into 5% of some of the brain s potential.
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Even if that s off, maybe we re tapping into 10 or 15%.
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There s so much that a positive mindset can do in the form of not just happiness in everyday life, but studies that have been done on people who are ill.
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cancer patients, HIV, what happens when someone has a positive mindset or is laughing and doing things that make them happy and how your body actually responds to that and has a metaphysical aspect and benefit within your body.
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So that part s great.
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If we could all be positive and have that positivity and laugh and be happy all the time.
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The challenge is life doesn t always point us in that direction.
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In many ways, we get dragged into the other direction by our own doing or environment or circumstances, whatever they are.
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And that s where it can become very difficult to pull out.
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And when you re in a telemarketing environment,
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The reality is, yes, I was the most successful sales representative, I think, for the full 18 months I was there.
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I was making a lot of money.
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This was 20-something years ago.
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I remember dating someone at the time who actually saw the money I was making, and they thought I must have been a drug dealer and made me fly to where the building actually was so they could see for themselves that it was a real business, a real job, and I wasn t doing anything illegal to make that kind of money back then, and in about 28 hours a week.
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even with my level of success, 90% of my day of those 20 hours, let s say,
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Probably 18 to 19 of those hours were being hung up on people being rude, people saying, oh yes, I d like to sign up with you and do the deal.
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I ll be right back with my credit card and never coming back, putting someone s credit card in and it being declined.
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The vast majority of your day as a very successful sales rep in a telemarketing environment is loaded, maxed out with rejection and what you can perceive as failure if you let it.
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And for me, it was all about having that right mindset and knowing when to go all in.
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And if 20 people hung up on me in a row, if 30 people hung up on me in a row, the people next to me fell into the normal patterns.
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They would get sad.
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They would get annoyed.
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Some would get depressed.
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Some would get angry.
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That s when you would start to hear, yeah, well, F you too, Mr. Joe Payne.
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And they d get fired or suspended.
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And I just would play mind games with myself, which was, I would say, you know what?
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23 people just hung up on me or said no, that s good because that gets me closer to the person who s going to say yes.
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And every person that said no, I mentally knew that only got me closer to the yes.
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And if you believe that, it will happen.
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It s a statistical fact.
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I always say that the successes I ve had in life, and I ve been fortunate to have quite a few of them in different businesses and fields,
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I was never the best at anything.
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I just was maybe too dumb to stop getting up.
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Every time I fall down, I just get back up quicker than anyone else.
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And I never stop.
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And the people I read about that inspire me are not people who hit it out of the park on their first venture.
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or partnering with someone with a ton of money and built a great empire.
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And their skill, that s wonderful too.
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But the people who ve always inspired me are the stories about people who failed 10, 11, 12, 13, 15 times.
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Then their 16th attempt was the one that blew everything up.
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And people say, wow, so that inspires you that on their 16th time, they had huge success and blew it up.
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I said, it s their first 15 times of them getting back up and inspired me.
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because it wouldn t matter, there wouldn t be a 16th time without that.
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And I come from New Jersey, anyone who reads the book knows that I refer to it as
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as the great nation of New Jersey and some other things, but Thomas Edison, the inventor, was a big figure in New Jersey history.
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And most people know him, the inventor of the light bulb and all of these wonderful things, and probably one of the most well-known prolific inventors in American history and the world.
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What a lot of people don t realize is to have been that successful, he also, by definition, failed more than anyone else in the world.
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And he is famously quoted as saying, I did not fail 10,000 times.
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I simply found that there were 10,000 better ways to do something.
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And to me, that is a winning mindset.
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That is about going all in.
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What would have happened if after he failed a thousand times, he said, screw it.
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Light bulb s not meant to be.
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We ll just do shit in the dark.
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They don t know what they re not missing.
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A lot of these different variations, they flow into it.
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Like one of the other steps that I talk about in the book,
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And related to telemarketing in life, I touched on that as well as gamification, which is really trying to take something as unpleasant as being hung up on and turning it into a game, turning it into making bets against yourself, making bets with your friends or whatever else in a fun, humorous, light way, trying to set goals for yourself.
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I used to sit there and would look at the sales that I had done for the week so far.
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So even if on a Thursday I was having a slow few hours,
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I would add up the money I made already.
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And maybe I was up $3,000 by a Thursday, maybe on a typical week.
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And I would look and say, Hey man, Monday through Wednesday, I made three grand again, 25 years ago.
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And what am I going to do with that?
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What s going to be fun with it or whatever, anything in the world to take your mind out of, Oh, I mentioned this next person hangs up on me.
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And I got to tell you, 99% of the people around me, and they were normal.
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This is the normal mindset of people in those types of situations.
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Their mindset was, okay, time to go back inside for lunch and get hung up on again.
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I would literally see that constantly.
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I really didn t take lunch breaks or snack breaks around people for the most part, because that negativity, which is normal, is so contagious in a bad way.
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So I would create my own island of positivity.
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And then you go from there and you develop this incredible agency in Los Angeles where you re working with top brands, A-list celebrities, professional athletes like Drew Brees and others.
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If there s someone who s listening to this, what were some of the keys along that way that allows you to create such a robust business and what can people learn from your experience?
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That s a great question.
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And I will say that prior to that, and we don t have to go into it because we d be here for three hours, but we re in the book, definitely had several more colossal failures along the way before the agency.
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And what I talk about in the book is that I learned a while ago that the word fail, F-A-I-L, is not only a bad word, it s a good word, and it really stands for first attempt in learning.
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And what I started to do when I really started to put it all together is look at things that I would refer to as failures or not a great window or something I didn t enjoy and say, what did I really take away from that is going to be in my arsenal for the next one and the next level?
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And I started to realize that no matter what the job was, what place I was in, man, I was learning such valuable, critical tools
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to take forward with me, if I just was willing to do that and not dwell on the negative of what didn t go as hoped for, but what did exceed my expectations, what made me stronger, better, smarter, more resilient.
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So when I got to California and there was a whole series of comedic, but like I said, if you don t laugh, sometimes you ll cry, but I had some very unusual experiences in LA.
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And it is that classic story when you just,
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head out to L.A.
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with no plans, no anything, no leads, no direction in your couch surfing.
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Some really interesting things can happen.
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One of the things that really made the biggest difference for me in building an agency and starting to build brands, I didn t know the mantra at the time, but there s a saying that people use now, which is how do you eat an elephant?
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And the proper answer is one bite at a time, meaning that it s so massive and so big.
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If you sit there and say, how am I going to get through this?
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You ll be so overwhelmed.
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You ll just shut down.
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And I really, in LA, adapted a mindset of one foot in front of the other that any one step forward.
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was huge it was a step that wasn t backwards it was a step that was forward it was in the right direction and i started small from my very first attempt at doing a commercial or semi-commercial i didn t even have a digital camera i talk about in the book that i m the way to the shoe pulling into a mall
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in California and maxing out three credit cards to buy a digital camera so I could fulfill the shoot that I had already signed up and accepted the job to go shoot and do.
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So that part of my world was, I would say, one,
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A lot of self teaching and resilience, but to the most important thing that I did is, I was very fortunate but aware to always surround myself with people who were smarter than me more skilled than me.
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better than me at anything and everything I can do.
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And it really became another mantra of mine, which, especially as the agency grew and businesses started to evolve and get bigger, and you had money and budgets to hire people and six-figure salaries and more, and you re spending more and you can attract more talent.
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And my take was always that I wanted to make sure I was always, at least by my own standard, the dumbest person in the room.
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I didn t want to hire someone in the digital world if I knew more about them in digital.
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I didn t want to hire someone to shoot video or edit or do graphics if I knew more or even close to what they know.
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That would be redundant.
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That would be silly.
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And the reality is it s something that a lot of people do that holds them back.
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It s an insecurity.
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It s the need to feel like you re always in control.
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And more than everybody else, then building a company and paying staff is a pretty stupid thing to do if you can do everything better than everyone else.
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You d be surprised how often people do just that, and they have a fear of hiring or bringing people on that might know something they don t.
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I m looking for people who know a lot of shit that I don t.
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That s where the value is.
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And as I built up the agency, little by little,
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I never went to film school, but I made sure that I worked with the best DPs.
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And when I work with someone, a director of photography, it wasn t that, okay, this person has the absolute best lighting in the world that nothing compares to.
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Yes, that mattered, but it was, how does this person work?
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Can I learn from them while I m on set?
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A gaffer, a camera person, the same thing, editors, post-production.
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I knew that I wasn t going to go back to school and learn all of these things.
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So instead of walking onto the sets and being the expert and running my mouth about everything, for the first several years, I soaked it up.
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I took it all in, and that really was my film school, my education on those things, already into storytelling at the time.
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I had no technical background or experience, really, in that world.
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And as one thing led to another, it does start to snowball.
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And once you work with one celebrity in Hollywood, it s a bit of a sheepherding thing.
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It s funny.
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They say, oh, you work with so-and-so.
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This person wants to work with you, and that person wants to work with you.
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And it started to go in that direction as well.
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Yeah.
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Surround yourself by people who are smarter than you.
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Try to be humble about it.
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If your people look good, if your team looks good, if the output is good, then you look good.
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Doesn t matter what anyone else thinks.
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That s how I always looked at it.
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I don t need someone to say you did a great job to me.
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If the project is successful, if the team is successful, it s my company.
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So that s all I need.
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Yeah, I love that story.
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And it reminds me of a mentor of mine, who was my physics teacher when I was in college, and she went on to become an astronaut.
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And one of her messages is you ve got to permit yourself to dream the dream.
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And
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She gets upset at a lot of the younger generations now because she feels often anytime they run into failure or they confront something that becomes too difficult, they give up.
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And she talks about through her life, she knew what it was going to take to be an astronaut and that the path was not an easy one.
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She was the first female at the Naval Academy to ever become one.
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But what she gave herself was the permission to take constant action.
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And she would fail constantly, but she learned from it and continued down the path.
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And as you said, it had a snowball effect to eventually propelling her to achieving that.
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So I think there s a ton of things that you can learn from that.
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And one of the common topics that comes up again and again on this podcast, and we ve had a lot of behavioral scientists and psychologists on it, is the power of the intentional choices.
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that we make every single day.
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And you brought up one of the most important ones.
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And Robin Sharma was recently on the show and he said, if you re in a neighborhood or in a town where you find yourself being the smartest person in that town, it s time to move.
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And I think you brought up a great illustration.
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When I was in Fortune 50 companies as a senior executive,
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It was shocking to me how many of my peers refused to hire people who were smarter or potentially more talented than them.
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And I just did the opposite.
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I figured if they propel their career, maybe they ll take me with them.
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But if not, I m going to learn a heck of a lot from them.
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But more importantly, the productivity of our unit is going to increase and they re going to be a great mentor to other people and it s going to enhance
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everything overall.
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But I don t think you can allow yourself to feel threatened by that.
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And so I m glad you brought that up as well.
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It shows that you have confidence and a lot of people don t, you re secure about yourself.
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But you brought up to remind me of two things that I got to share.
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One is now I know why you asked me to open with a story about Arizona State passing out waste in the hospital, because then you were going to drop in that while I was doing that in college, you were studying physics with a future astronaut.
4
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So good setup.
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That was crafty.
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He snuck that one in on me.
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As soon as he said that, I m like, Oh yeah, this is going to be, but you brought up about yourself and your mentor who ended up becoming an astronaut and how difficult and how hard it was.
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It brings me back to.
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Not to dwell on telemarketing, but lessons that I learned there in grain that are part of everyday life that have had the biggest impact on the biggest things I ve done in life decades after telemarketing, which was.
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objections.
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The woman who became the astronaut.
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Life is about encountering objections.
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I used to say they at one point asked me to start training the other sales reps.
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And the first thing I would do is I would have them
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Chant with me, which they thought I was on drugs, and I really wasn t.
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And I would say, I love objections.
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I love objections.
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I love objections.
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And they didn t know what the hell s wrong with this guy.
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And everyone else s mindset was they want to pick up the phone, dial the number, and have someone say, thank you for calling.
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I was waiting for you.
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Here s my credit card.
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You ll only make a good commission.
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How many people
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do real estate versus how many people do real estate and make a living at it.
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You will meet so many people who can get their license and will never sell a house or maybe one house.
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Then you ll see the same five percent that are just killing it time and time again.
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Why is that?
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It s the mindset that if you think that you re going to look for the laydowns, the easiest path.
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Well, guess what?
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Everybody would be doing it if it was that easy.
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And if you haven t figured that out by now your parents didn t teach you that I don t know you missed out, but I would literally say to everyone.
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you are going to have objections.
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If you don t get an objection, look for it, ask for it, because it s going to come up.
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And if it doesn t come up, you can t overcome it.
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The worst objection in the world to any business or anything in life, relationships, whatever it is, is an objection that I call the silent objection or the passive objection that you don t know about.
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Someone you re in a relationship with is upset with you.
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You can feel it.
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You can sense it.
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You re pretty sure, but something just doesn t feel right, but they re not saying it.
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What s wrong?
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Nothing.
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All right, well, either they re gone pretty soon, or when they let you know, it s built up and it s not fun.
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It could have been managed.
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It could have been discussed and talked out.
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Same thing, telemarketing, whatever someone was doing, whatever their objection was, as long as I can get them to talk about it, nine out of 10 times, I could then overcome it.
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I can t overcome an objection when I don t know what it is.
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That s when you just get ghosted and someone says, got to go click.
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And now you can relate that to anything else in life, running an agency, working with budgets and closing business deals in the seven figures, millions of dollars.
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Well, you don t think there s other agencies and then people out there who also were trying to get those same accounts.
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I remember when we landed our first T-Mobile account,
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It was the craziest thing in the world.
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I was speaking with some high up people there on the phone, and they said, oh, wow, I wish we spoke to you guys a few months ago, because you guys would have been great for this, but we just signed on a new agency.
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And I said, really?
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You signed them on like it s done?
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They said, well, we haven t officially signed the contract yet, but they ve gone through the vetting.
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It s been months, the whole senior, the big company, T-Mobile.
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And all I could fixate on was they hadn t signed it yet.
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There was a micro percent that I said, well, what if me and someone from my team fly down on our dime to Bellevue?
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where you guys are in Washington.
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And you already got your other people, but just in case we say something that sparks something, you never know, maybe for the future or whatever, who knows, maybe they forgot to sign the deal.
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Okay, but we just want to be fair with you.
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We ve already made a decision.
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We just have, no problem.
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All I wanted was that one little, and myself and a woman who still works with me today and is a very big part of all the operations and everything we do here.
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We flew down and I remember her saying to me, have you lost it?
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She was like, at this point, like they, and we knew who the agency was, big worldwide conglomerate, we were small little boutique.
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So even if it was a level playing field and they hadn t made a decision, we were the David versus the Goliath.
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And I just said, this is T-Mobile, man.
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This is the Super Bowl.
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Walk into that and make any type of impression, unless we trip and fall and spill coffee on them.
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You take that shot.
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You go in, and here s the upside.
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We can go in and throw anything and everything out.
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We don t have to sit there and say, oh, I hope we don t say this, because we could screw it up.
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Oh, better not say this, because maybe we have it locked up, but we don t want to stumble.
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We pretty much lost.
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Nobody there even thinks that we re even a consideration.
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We got there that morning.
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The campus to T-Mobile was so damn big.
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I think it was like 40, 50,000 employees at that time.
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So many buildings that as the Uber would pull around, or the taxi, whatever we were in, and roll down the window and say, hey, building such and such.
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And the employees didn t even know what building it was.
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It s a city.
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That s how big it was.
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We end up in a room with all of the executives and the person who told us to come in.
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And I think it was like 930 in the morning and we just started riffing and going because we had nothing to lose and finally came up for air after 45 minutes an hour we had some interactions and QA.
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And they went outside to huddle.
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And my associate who was with me said, what do you think they re doing?
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And I go, I don t know.
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Maybe they re calling security.
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Maybe they re firing the person who told us to come down at the last minute.
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And a person walks back in the room and says, can you guys stay?
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And we said, for what?
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For how long?
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Can you just stay today?
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We want you to meet some other people.
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You said some interesting things.
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We stayed the whole day.
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They brought in round and round executives, vice presidents, C-level executives of T-Mobile.
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And when we left that evening, they said,
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We re going to be giving you a call tomorrow morning.
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This was a really fascinating day.
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And they called the next morning and they said, I can t believe this, but we want to offer you guys the deal.
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And that became the first commercial.
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And it was a big thing for us to be doing a cell phone commercial at the time, but there was an opening and we took it and take your shot.
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Well, I m going to jump from that.
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And I think that was a great story.
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And I was hoping you could tell the audience another one.
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And that is when you and I were talking before this show, I told you I have a friend of mine right now who s in Bali on a four to six week trip where she s doing a number of things from, I think,
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transformational healing and yoga and other things but you took this trip to meet with a tattoo artist named Balaz initially and then it became a transformational retreat for you describe it as wounded spirit and soul.
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I don t know how I lead into this correctly but somehow or another you end up climbing a volcano in Bali.
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a day or so after getting this tattoo.
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And this experience leads you to find your personal passion to develop a product for better tattoo skin care, which emblem is right behind you now.
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Can you just tell that story?
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Because it s interesting how I think these events in life unearth our passions and that it s never too late in life for this to happen.
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Yeah, I d known of Balazs, I d met him a few times, but had never been tattooed by him.
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And look, any artist that only has one name, they better be pretty damn good at what they do.
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And I had recently experienced a really very hard, tragic situation in my personal life, loss, that I was certainly having hard times coming to terms with, probably the type of situation you never fully do.
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but was very open to some type of comfort or anything that would bring comfort or healing.
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So I wanted to do a specific piece.
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I was familiar with his style.
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We d been in communication before.
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Our schedules never hooked up.
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He s always in different parts of the world.
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It was never at the right time.
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He happened to be in Bali, schedules get a lot of work.
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I sent him a message about the piece that I wanted to do.
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And I shared with him the story behind it, which up until the book came out in this book, he was probably one of seven or eight people that I d ever shared the story behind the tattoo and the personal loss.
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It had to do with suicide of a very close person.
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And he was very into doing the piece.
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And I flew out to Bali to do the piece.
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And the first day I talk about in the book, I thought I was just gonna start designing and going through it.
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And it was more like tattoo philosophy and life philosophy and talking.
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And I refer to it as tattoo church, but with tequila, you know.
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And then he designed an outstanding piece that it was working from a concept that I had come up with and loosely sketched out, but he took it about 10 levels beyond what I ever could have hoped for or imagined.
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And then, yeah, he did over the course of two days, a very elaborate piece on my chest.
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Two days of tattooing back to back is a lot of trauma to the skin.
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That s what tattooing is.
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It s trauma.
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I say in the book that the average tattoo, the needle punctures your skin anywhere from 50 to 3000 times a minute.
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So think of hours and hours back to back two days.
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So when the tattoo was finished and over those two days, a lot of conversation, a lot of different practices, I would say, that were based in wellness and self-help and healing throughout those days and evenings, aside from just tattooing.
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And I had the new tattoo, and I was like, great, I ve got about 36 hours left in Bali before I got to get back to the US.
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And I Googled online, 36 hours in Bali, and one of these things came up.
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It said, go to Ubud, U-B-U-D.
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Here s the things to do.
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All right, cool.
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And I called the cab and got a two-hour drive from where I was staying and ended up in Ubud, which by the way, ironically means medicine and healing, translated in English, which I didn t realize at the time.
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And to make the absolute most of my time, I was hiking through rice fields and I was doing all these cool things.
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And I was like, man, I just don t want to sleep.
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I got 36 hours in this
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magical place.
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There s an active volcano that people hike called Mount Latour.
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And to do it, you pretty much leave your hotel at 2.33 in the morning, pitch black.
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And the idea is to get to the
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around like 4am when it s pitch black.
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And the whole goal is to get to the top of the volcano right when the sun rises.
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So it s supposed to be spectacular.
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So I started climbing I had a guy and my tattoo was maybe 18 hours old and I was wearing a white t shirt and
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I really was so mesmerized with Bali and the mood.
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I actually almost forgot that I even had just done two days of tattooing all across my chest.
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So it s also freezing cold in the morning because it s pitch black and it was windy.
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So you re wearing layers and you have a t-shirt and scarves and a long sleeve
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shirt and like a parka jacket and knitted caps and you re climbing and it s not like crazy climb but it s physical and you re using your hands at times and you re breathing heavier and you re going uphill and it s not like a walk in the park and all you can see in front of you is with a little headlamp so you re not even stepping on unsettled gravel
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And you re dripping sweat.
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And all of a sudden, as I m on the way up, I m realizing I m like peeling off layers.
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But I m like, oh, man, I m sweating terribly.
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And I went to target my T-shirt, and I realized my T-shirt that was white.
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I couldn t see clearly because it was totally black, but I black out.
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But I could start to see it didn t look very white anymore.
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Stuck.
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Like the blood and plasma that oozes from a new tattoo, it was stuck to my shirt.
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So instead of ripping it, I m like, this ain t good, but I ll deal with that later.
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you get to the top of the mountain, a couple other strange things happen.
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Crazy cloudy day and all of a sudden the sun just broke through for three seconds and my guide grabs me and brings me to a location.
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It s in the book, we have the photos, takes a picture of me and it just looks like I am renewed on top of the world where nobody has been before.
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And ironically,
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That picture of me mirrored almost identically a silhouette in the tattoo that the Pilates had just finished 18 hours earlier and it was a silhouette symbolic of me standing on top of a healing tree of life coming from broken hearts and sorrow and that s an elaborate
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piece.
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But what was incredible was that tattoo of the silhouette on my chest and me standing on top of the volcano.
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It was identical, almost down to the walking stick in the tattoo and the walking stick in my hand in reality.
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So we put those pictures side by side in the book because it s still too out of body to believe.
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And I quote Saint-Pilate s picture, and he was like crying.
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It s like, this is out of body.
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That was great.
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Well, then I had to get down the mountain and the volcano and get to the airport because my plane was leaving.
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And that s when I was like, yeah, this is bad.
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It s daylight and this white T-shirt is black.
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I was covered with volcanic ash, literally.
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And I m like, this is not good.
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Things that you don t want in a brand new healing wound opening.
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So on the way to the airport, I just asked the driver to stop in the town of Ubud, which I knew was known for lotions, creams, aloes, a lot of different cosmetic based products that people like and come from there.
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And I literally go into any store.
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I couldn t just grab like anything that was like soothing, calming, natural.
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And I had my carry on bag probably filled with 15 items, like surprised they let me on the plane.
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And on the flight home, I couldn t shower beforehand.
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I went into the restroom and cleaned up as best I could.
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I got one of the hot towels and started cleaning out the ash and everything.
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And I just started using myself as like a guinea pig.
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I m like, this is soft and this is...
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It doesn t smell like it has anything in it.
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This feels natural and this feels calming and hydrating.
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So I applied those different things.
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Now, I didn t find a magic ingredient that nobody had discovered.
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I generally don t believe those things exist after 25 years of skincare.
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And I ve seen all the marketing fluff and bullshit that companies like to say.
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But what it did, because when I got back home, my tattoo did not, in fact, heal perfectly.
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So I was able to do a little home chemistry on myself.
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I just was renewed.
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I felt in such a better place mentally, spiritually, I was ready to move forward with life.
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And for years, we had worked on other people s brands.
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And I mentioned in the book, we had sold a billion to 1.5 billion easily.
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of other products, brand services for other brands, big brands, and that was great.
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We were paid well.
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We made good money.
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That was the deal.
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But I had this emptiness of a craving to launch my own brand, to do my own thing.
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I did it for so many other people.
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But nothing naturally fit.
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I didn t want to do a toaster.
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I didn t want to do a blender.
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I sold hundreds of millions of dollars of blenders for other brands.
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That s great.
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And most of the beauty and skincare that we ve done is for women.
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Women s crepey skin, women s wrinkly skin, crow s feet, hair bond, color cosmetics, whatever it was.
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And that s when, even though this was a tattoo type of thing, I started to look around and I was like, man, there s no tattoo products really made by real tattoo collectors, tattoo people.
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that I could find that I felt that actually had really good ingredients, really thought out what someone with tattoos would want.
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And then I started to just explore the whole men s grooming area.
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And I said, it s interesting coming from women s
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skincare, women s beauty, women s personal care.
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I just looked at it and said, I think that the whole men s area has been so under focused.
5
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There have been brands that were starting to make some noise like Manscaped and others.
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And I just looked at it and said, really, this is it.
5
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Hit the gas.
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No one to go all in.
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And even though I started with one tattoo product,
5
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the plan already before we even sold our first tattoo, single bomb.
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I was already in development on seven different beard lines and beard products and deodorant and everything else and building out.
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I just, again, it was not a matter of, people would say, okay, well, if you re successful with this, are you going to do that?
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If you sell a lot of this, and I d say, we re moving forward.
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This isn t
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that pass or fail.
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We re moving forward.
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What if you don t sell a lot?
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We ll sell enough and then we ll find another thing that we ll sell more of that fits better, whatever it is, like it was the concept of Durham Duke.
5
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building out a men s grooming brand, authentically real, looking at it from what would I want as someone about to turn 50, covered in tattoos, always wanted to grow a big beard, but was patchy, itchy, flaky.
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So I looked at myself as a starting point and said, there s no real information.
5
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There s no product market that really speaks to guys other than
5
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marketing other than big corporations that take the existing products and slap for men on there and then throw it in Target because they think guys will just buy anything without looking.
5
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And that s when the kind of light bulb went off.
5
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And I just said for 20 years, everything I d been doing in the world of women s skin care and beauty and personal care, that has been my education, my buildup, my lead.
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And I d worked with top labs and formulators and some of the top dermatologists in the world over the years on all these brands.
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So I said, I m doing this, but for men.
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And honestly, I never did look back.
5
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That s funny.
5
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Now, sales keep going like this, and there are 35 SKUs, and we have a whole bunch more launching a new product today, and more in the coming months.
5
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But I was as confident the very first day we turned the website on before we sold a single thing as I am right now.
5
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And trust me, we didn t turn on the website and hear the bells go off.
5
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We were not selling a lot of product out of the gate.
5
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We had a lot of things to dial in.
5
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And I can honestly say it was never, I did not have a plan B, this was it.
5
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Yes, well, I also love I ve listened to a couple of other podcasts you ve been on and I love the story about how you ve made the marketing that you do about the product very much about transforming lives in many ways and being just very authentic about what the brand does.
6
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and what it doesn t do.
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So I thought that was a pretty interesting message as well.
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We talk to people in a real way.
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We have an interview coming out, I think, that we just did with Men s Health and they reached out and had been watching our TikTok and they were just, they re like, it s just different.
6
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What is it you re doing?
6
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I said, I m just telling people the way it is and being honest with people.
6
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I had no idea how to do TikTok.
6
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We didn t have any TikTok experts or marketing people on.
6
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I learned most of what I knew about TikTok from my six year old twins, watching them on their phones, how to do things.
6
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And I was sitting right here one day, not too long ago, and,
6
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I was explaining to a friend who dropped by about our ball care line and I was explaining to him this is our happy sack nut love cream it s a cooling cream it helps with chafing it helps keep you dry it helps all these different things the antibacterial it has deoclux natural deodorant and I literally was talking to a friend like a friend and
6
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It turns out that we were filming it and they put it up on TikTok.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I saw the other day that video has five and a half million views now.
6
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It was no purpose.
6
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It wasn t scripted.
6
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There was no, Hey, let s make a video about this today.
6
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It was just me talking to a friend and that s how we do everything.
6
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It really is.
6
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It s a very genuine brand.
6
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There s no bluff, no fluff, no bullshit.
6
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I just, I don t know any other way how to do it.
6
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I spent 20 years working in Hollywood, and this was my opportunity to get away from any of the Hollywood fluff and bullshit.
6
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Well, we don t have enough time to cover all the great elements of this book.
6
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For the audience, Drew goes into, in Chapter 7, his relationship with his father.
6
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And it colliding with Anthony Bourdain, he talks about his story of his daughter Zoe, which was very touching for me because my brother has adopted two kids from Haiti and before you get them,
6
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especially with the turmoil that was going on in that country, you never knew what was going to happen between political unrest and hurricanes and everything else that was going.
6
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So I found that a really great chapter about how you live in the moment and so many other things.
6
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But Drew, I wanted to ask if there was one takeaway that you hoped a reader or listener would get from the book, what would that be?
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As odd as it sounds, I would hope that
6
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And that doesn t mean that you can t dress it up.
6
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I became more comfortable in my skin.
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The name of the book is called Under My Skin.
6
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It was while writing the book that I literally came to the revelation that in reality, the only way I ever
6
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learned finally and started to understand what was under my skin was by looking at what I had drawn on top of it.
6
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And that was my way of being comfortable in my skin.
6
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Your way is whatever works for you and everybody has their own way.
6
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So I think if you can look back and just realize that
6
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Everybody faces the same challenges.
6
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Everybody has the same issues.
6
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If somebody says that they re never uncomfortable or they re never insecure or they re never sad or down about something, they re either delusional or full of shit or narcissistic.
6
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It s just not true.
6
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Everybody struggles with things.
6
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Nobody lives their life up at the peaks only.
6
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Most of us spend our fair share of time in the valleys.
6
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But I would like for people to take away
6
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tools to be more comfortable in your skin, to remember, as I say in the book that I learned recently, that the race in everything you do is really only against yourself.
6
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with yourself.
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That s it.
6
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It s not with a co-worker.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not with a boss.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not with employees.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not with money.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not with competitions.
6
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It s not with relationships.
6
SPEAKER_00
You re not competing with someone else.
6
SPEAKER_00
You re only competing with yourself.
6
SPEAKER_00
You set the deadlines.
6
SPEAKER_00
You set the goals.
6
SPEAKER_00
You set the boundaries.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if you want to blast through them, great.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if you want to sit tight where you are and
6
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be happy and cozy, that s great too, but you re in charge of that.
6
SPEAKER_00
And when you start to really let that sink in, what that means, you can be good with it.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s a nice thing.
6
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
6
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Well, Drew, if someone wanted to get to know about you more and some of these products, what are the best ways for them to do that?
6
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In a simplest way is our main website, DermDude.com.
6
SPEAKER_00
So Derm, D-E-R-M, Dude, D-U-D-E.com.
6
SPEAKER_00
And from there, you can hook up with all of our social media.
6
SPEAKER_00
You can buy our book on there under My Skin.
6
SPEAKER_00
The book s also available on Amazon.com, but you can buy it on our website as well, and we can get it out to you pretty quickly.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so it s, yeah, all things through dermdave.com.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then we have some cool stuff.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not just a business about buying this, buying this.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s a lot of information.
6
SPEAKER_00
We try to keep it funny.
6
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And my belief and our brand belief is that it s okay to laugh.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s a good thing to laugh.
6
SPEAKER_00
And we try to be a reference.
6
SPEAKER_00
We have a scent of body wash.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s very popular on our website.
6
SPEAKER_00
It says, life is full of assholes.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if it offends someone, I get that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Go to a different website that doesn t say that.
6
SPEAKER_00
Go to a different store.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s okay.
6
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It s America.
6
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But that s how I am.
6
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That s how we are.
6
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And it seems to be resonating with people and I m glad.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m really happy about that.
6
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
6
SPEAKER_02
Well, Drew, thank you for taking the time to come on the show today.
6
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and tell your story.
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And like I mentioned to the audience, we touched on just the tip of the iceberg and a lot of the different stories that you go through.
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And I think it s a valuable read to anyone and understanding how to better live in their skin, as you put it.
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So thank you again.
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Thank you, Derek.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Drew Plotkin.
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And I wanted to thank Drew and Jimmy Dwyer for the honor and privilege of having them appear on today s show links to all things.
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Drew will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com.
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Please use our website links.
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If you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show videos are on YouTube at both John or miles and our other YouTube channel passionstruck clips, advertiser deals and discount codes are in one community place at passionstruck.com slash
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deals.
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You can find me on all the social platforms at John R. Miles.
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You can sign up for my work-related newsletter, Work Intentionally on LinkedIn, or you can sign up for my personal development newsletter, Live Intentionally at PassionStruck.com.
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You re about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview that I did with my friend Matthew Weintraub, a healer, psychedelic activist, scholar, and entrepreneur.
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Matthew presents in our interview his groundbreaking book, The Psychedelic Origins of Religion.
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In this interview, we explore the profound ties that bind psychedelics and shamanism to the tapestry of all world religions.
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What s fascinating is the connection between psychedelics inducing a mystical state of consciousness, which has been researched by John Hopkins and measured, that most people are reporting this phenomenon.
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I m connecting to this higher being, this higher purpose, and this revelation that there is this other world beyond us.
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And then the other thing I would add to that is the law of thermodynamics, John, simply states energy is neither created nor destroyed.
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So the question we have to ask about death is really where does energy go?
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Because it can t be destroyed.
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That s a law of physics.
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So we need to ask a better question of, OK, so the energy is transmuted.
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Where does it transmute to?
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That s what I m interested in pursuing as Discovery.
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The fee for the show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful or interesting.
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If you know someone who really wants to explore what it means to live under your skin, then definitely share this episode with Drew today.
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The greatest compliment that you can give us is to share the show with those that you love and care about.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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Until next time, go out there and become a passion striker.