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John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur Rx, where we help healthcare professionals own their future.

John Shufeldt:
Hey everybody, welcome back to Entrepreneur Rx. Today got the great pleasure of speaking with Dr. Gregory Charlop. He is a world-recognized expert in wellness, he is a speaker and author. He's been featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX, and he's focuses on improving the lives and the performances of women athletes by giving expert advice on nutrition and sleep, and mental health. He founded Retired Athlete Health and he co-founded the Women's Sports Forum with Olympian Myriam Glez. Greg, thanks for being on the show.

Gregory Charlop:
Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me!

John Shufeldt:
Thanks! Okay. I've got to ask you, you're peds anesthesiologist, your residency fellowship-trained and you did one of the biggest pivots I've seen.

Gregory Charlop:
Well, I hate to say it, but I think maybe part of it was a mid-career crisis. I, so for many years I worked for a large medical center, for Kaiser in Northern California. And I love Kaiser, so don't interpret anything I'm saying is being anti-Kaiser because I like them. But one of the big things is they don't let you use your medical license for anything other than Kaiser stuff.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it's like Mayo. Mayo ...?

Gregory Charlop:
Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. And so I think I've been always one of those restless people and I like to do multiple things so I'm kind of creative and I don't like to do things just within the box. And so I kept myself occupied doing real estate stuff on the side. I flip houses, I bought and sold, I started a real estate technology conference, and wrote a book about real estate technology, and I liked it, and I did it in part because I could, it didn't conflict with my Kaiser non-compete stuff, but eventually, I think I wanted to do more than what I was doing, and I wanted to do other kind of health related things. And I just couldn't do it with Kaiser, and honestly, I was ready for a change anyways. And so we left Northern California where I was, and we moved down to LA and when I was down there in LA, I was like, well, I'm going to try all these different things, I just did PREM Anesthesia, so I set my own schedule, I worked as much as I wanted and I did other stuff. And so I started working in plastic surgery offices in Beverly Hills. I've always been interested in nutrition, so I wrote a book called Why Doctors Skip Breakfast, and it's about anti-aging medicine. And then I reconnected with some former UCLA people and former athletes, and I was surprised to learn as a layperson, I didn't know this, that athletes really don't get the greatest health care. You know, like if they break a bone or something, they get great orthopedic care. But in terms of, say, nutrition, sleep, stuff like that, they really don't get what you would expect. And so I got into that and then we identified that women athletes, in particular, needed attention because they really weren't getting that. And so we switched to that, and I experimented with a bunch of different stuff, like telehealth conferences, I got involved in a bunch of different organizations, we started like this Q&A series, TV appearances, you know, one thing led to another, it wasn't really a big master plan, I guess.

John Shufeldt:
So let's go back up. So give us, give us your background. So when did you want to become a physician? College, medical school did you that route, so we have some context.

Gregory Charlop:
I guess, well, my original goal was to be a rock star and, like everybody, and then I think what I realized that wasn't going to pan out then medical school was kind of plan B, you know, I think I was one of those people that went into it because I liked science and I didn't really know what to do, that was sort of science-related other than being a doctor. I didn't have the patience for research, even though I think that stuff's important. And, you know, back when, when I was in school, I think if I were going into it now, I would go straight into some more entrepreneurial aspect. But at the time that just wasn't so much of a thing, you know? So I never even thinking when we went into medical school, I thought about doing a combined MBA, but I ended up not doing it. But yeah, I did, I did medical school because I like science and I like the idea of helping people and I wanted to do something that was kind of quick-paced. And so that's why I ended up going into anesthesia. I don't like things that have slow turnarounds. I think I get impatient with things quickly, I like to come up with ideas and see what happens, I don't like to spend a lot of time working through the details of them over a long period of time. So that's, that's kind of how the anesthesia thing came.

John Shufeldt:
So, okay, so you went to UCLA?

Gregory Charlop:
Yeah, I went to UCLA for college and medical school, then Stanford for residency, and then back to LA Children's for a pediatric fellowship.

John Shufeldt:
All right. So you kind of do the lower tier sort of medical schools and residencies, I'm joking.

Gregory Charlop:
You know, I see people would tell you that.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, that's actually an impressive, impressive background. Then how long did you do Peds Anesthesia before you made the switch? Because here's why, I think this is so important. There's a lot of people listening who are going to say, man, he invested a lot. I mean, anesthesia is what, four years, right? And then there's peds, two years or one year? One. So five years post-medical school, that's a lot. And how long did you do that before Kaiser? Before you flipped the switch?

Gregory Charlop:
A pretty long time. I was there for 14 years, so I feel like that's a respectable length of time. And even now, I still do PRN. I mean, one of the nice things about anesthesia, if you're someone listening to this show and you're trying to pick a field of medicine to go into that you want to do other things. You know, anesthesia can lend itself to that, you know, like emergency medicine. There are certain things you could do that if you choose to do this, you can still put food on the table with your medical work, but do other stuff on the side. And thankfully, anesthesia is one of those, so I still do it now a couple of days a week.

John Shufeldt:
And then, so that's actually a good point and that's what I've done my whole life as an EM physician, I've worked a couple of days a week, at least in an emergency department, and the rest of the time I was able to do some entrepreneurial stuff. So how did you start? So you move down to the LA area and you said, all right, I want to work with athletes because now I've had this aha moment that they're not getting the care they need, maybe nor the nutrition, sleep, or mental health issue. Was it just, was it a switch going off in your head like, I've got to fix this? And if so, why?

Gregory Charlop:
Well, so I'll be truthful with you. You know, I've had a lot of other little business ventures. Like I've had, I lived in Silicon Valley for years. So I, with my real estate stuff, I had different, I had a few tech, real estate tech startups. So I had some experience with startups and marketing and the different problems that plague startups. And so my thought was, if I'm going to do something, let's say with telemedicine or start some kind of consulting thing, what I didn't want to do was I didn't want to do something where I have to do mass marketing and send a billion emails or have a billion Facebook ads and hope that someone is interested and come to me. I didn't want to spend the effort at the time, I don't particularly like doing that, so I thought I should target kind of a niche population. And my thinking was that athletes, again, this is just my supposition or sort of to some degree, they interact with each other like celebrities do, like entertainers and things, so they tend to go to some of the same people. So my thinking was, if I can get in with some of them, the marketing to some degree would take care of itself because once you know some, you know many, and then you don't have to bother with things like Facebook ads or email campaigns. So that's partly how it started. On top of the fact, like I said, that I found out there was sort of a need for this in the athletic community.

John Shufeldt:
Now, did you, that I read that you have daughters that are athletes?

Gregory Charlop:
I have daughters that I hope to be athletes, but they haven't thus far been. So this is actually been the big project I'm doing now. We've kind of even sub-specialized to some degree from women athletes now to girls specifically. And so we started this program from soccer to C-suite and this is based on there was some research by Ernst and Young, they found that over 90% of senior women, executive C-suite women, they played sports when they were younger. And so my thinking is, based on this research, if we could intervene when girls are, I don't know, eight, nine, ten or even teenagers get them to play sports and do leadership activities, you can have a lifelong impact on them. And so we're starting this multi-state conference series and writing a book about it, and there's a lot of interest in this. And so that's where it is, so they're not athletes yet, but hopefully one day.

John Shufeldt:
It really makes total sense. All right. Tell us about your book. Why did you write the book Why Doctors Skip Breakfast? I love the title of that. And I'm, and I literally live for this whole anti lifespan, anti-aging stuff, so I want to hear your thoughts.

Gregory Charlop:
Yeah, well, so I'll tell you. So I remember a few years, I remember that started a few years ago, a friend of mine who's a radiation oncologist and he was telling me, hey, have you heard about this anti-aging medicine thing? And I was like, what are you talking about like he was lying. And now he's like, no, no, seriously, like, if you look it up, there's like thousands of articles and like in reputable places like New England Journal and all kinds of things. So I looked it up and sure enough, like, this is a field which I just didn't know until he told me about it. And so that led to my interest in this, I always liked nutrition and so I think I was a natural kind of convert to this way of thinking, just based on how I already view things I've always liked, sort of lifestyle modification stuff. And so, so I started researching it and it was interesting because I've noticed that a lot of physicians have sorted themselves into this without even realizing it. So the way, the name of the book, it's based on intermittent fasting, the book title. And that actually came from when I was at Kaiser, I noticed, you know, we were, I was at a very tertiary facility, you know, Kaiser breaks their hospitals up and everything. And so we were with high-powered surgeons, they went to MIT and all kinds of good places and good anesthesiologists. And what I noticed, you know, we'd all hang out you know the OR, you hang out, sitting around a table, you know, people come and go before surgery starts and I noticed that nobody there practically was eating, maybe drink coffee, you know, or maybe you drink water or something, but hardly anyone ate. And so I think maybe even unintentionally, people are kind of fasting in the morning whether they meant to do that or not. And so that's where the title of the book came. But, but it's interesting as I researched it more, there's all kinds of really cool anti-aging stuff and there's pretty good data for it, and I think there's a huge growing interest in this now, you know, people want lifestyle modification.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I've done metformin for years and tacrolimus now and I do intermittent fasting. I mean, I, you know, I do cold immersion. I like it all because I really actually ... there's a pretty significant benefit from it so I'm a ... convert for sure.

Gregory Charlop:
Yeah. Yeah, I like him. He's interesting.

John Shufeldt:
So back to the female athlete. What are you doing now to promote this? I mean, what's, what's kind of the business model? How do you generate revenue from it?

Gregory Charlop:
So originally, this is probably my, my problem. I kind of go from idea to idea because I don't like working too hard on any one thing. If I have to point a finger at my flaw, I guess it goes with the ... So the original business model was telemedicine. I did that for a while, but then what I found was telemedicine, and this is purely just a personal thing, it becomes almost like a slog eventually, it's just like anything else, like you're still having to get patients, patient, patient, you have to talk people into things, your, I don't know, like it wasn't like I liked it, I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. And then, you know, truthfully, like some of this stuff, if you really want to be like a Peter Attia kind of real cutting edge, you have to be willing to go out on a limb, you know, medically, because a lot of this stuff is controversial and isn't super evidence-based. Like you might do it for yourself, but you're not necessarily going to recommend it in a professional setting to someone else, so I struggled with that a little bit. And then, so then what we did is we transitioned to, I guess you could call it sort of more of like a higher-level view on things. So what we did is we started the Women's Sports Forum, which was a big online conference, and then it had these sub-conference series. And what I liked about that is it allowed me to network with, and I really focused on is building a network with sort of like-minded people in the athletic and media communities. And so what this did is it allowed me to network with either women athletes and/or people who care about this type of thing, which is a lot. And so I developed a pretty large network of athletes and kind of media people. And so now the business model, I hate to say it because it sounds sort of too up in the air, but the business model going forward is we're starting, I told you this other conference series, and it's primarily through sponsorships of the conference. We're planning on doing this in person, we have three coming up this summer and then we're also planning on doing a spinoff conference series, which is really the big target. And the goal there is to create an alternative to the Davos World Economic Forum.

John Shufeldt:
Wow.

Gregory Charlop:
This is my first time publicly announcing this.

John Shufeldt:
Wow.

Gregory Charlop:
Yeah, because what we identified is there's a similar problem with Davos, as there is with a lot of these health things, which is a lot of it is done by 80 plus year old sort of people that, you know, it's the same people over and over again, it's not including younger people, women, international people, things like that. And so there's a big need, we think, to bring smart and/or affluent people together in nice locations to sort of, both to network and also to solve intractable problems. And so I guess, to answer your question, the business model is developing a good network, then going from the network to creating these sort of high value conference series, which would probably be funded primarily by sponsors and ticket sales.

John Shufeldt:
But all directed towards athletes, primarily women athletes.

Gregory Charlop:
Well, originally, yes. And from soccer to C-suite, I guess is more girl athletes if you want to say it. This Davos-style thing that I just mentioned, that's really not so much athletics, that would just be probably more health in general. The goal there, the vision of that is you'd have a conference where you might have, say, Beyonce chatting with a middle Eastern sheik, chatting with a American female biotechnology executive.

John Shufeldt:
So it's kind of bring, and it's just kind of bringing high-powered people together to collaborate on cutting edge ideas. But.

Gregory Charlop:
Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
In a less octogenarian crowd.

John Shufeldt:
Correct, correct. Yeah, that's a .... And you know, I'll tell you and you know this well, because you fly in the right circles and this is something that if I could have given myself advice earlier, I would and I certainly would give this advice to people listening, networking is underappreciated as a skill, you know, like I am, I was working on stuff and, you know, I'm reasonably connected, but it took a lot of effort. And then I found someone who was more connected than I was, and she was able to do something in a day that would have taken me like five months to do.

John Shufeldt:
Wow.

Gregory Charlop:
And so just because she knew the right people to call that, I didn't quite know. And so what I learned from this is you could sit around and draw as many things on the whiteboard or whatever as you want, but the best thing you could do is to find the right people that can get stuff done for you or with you.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it's funny, I've never been a great networker and I've really had to force myself to do it, and I still suck at it, frankly. But, but you're right, you know, you can make one phone call and somebody could open a door for you that would take you, take me months and months to do. So where do you see yourself, as this progresses, do you see yourself basically as the, I don't know if you read the book Blinked, but the kind of Paul Revere who is a connector, so he's kind of a visionary connector of putting these pieces together.

Gregory Charlop:
Yes, I guess so. But, you know, the funny thing is, I'm actually like you. I don't, I can't say that I particularly enjoy networking. It's, I don't necessarily like that. I'm not, I'm probably in the middle of the introvert-extrovert spectrum. So I don't play the network from a hedonistic standpoint. I just, I like it sort of from a utilitarian standpoint that I think it's gets stuff done. But I think at the end of the day that that's probably my goal. If you're able to kind of connect the right people and to connect the right ideas, you kind of make things happen. I mean, how often do you do you hear stories about someone who has a good idea, but it was kind of outlandish and then it happened shortly afterwards. I'm pretty confident that most of that was they knew the right people to get it going. You know, you always hear these stories of people that are hanging out at a restaurant and they sketch some idea on a napkin and it happens, the only way that could happen is because those people were the right people.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, exactly. And with the right with the right connections or they were so darn persistent that eventually it just, it just worked for them. So let me, I always ask this question, what do you think your personal mission statement is? If you had to summarize it in a in a pithy quote.

Gregory Charlop:
This isn't a pithy quote. But I, I like sort of the philanthropic business model. I think the best goal is if you can create a business that is good for you financially, allows you to work the type of work and the environment, work environment you like, while at the same time helping society in some way, I think that's the Holy Grail.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, totally right. So speaking of something that probably may have been a little bit of impediment, but you know, when you hear male physicians dealing with women athletes, everybody's mind goes to that creepy molester physician Nassar in Michigan. Did you have to overcome that? Was that ever a discussion point or did you simply kind of rise above it because you did more or less hands on care?

Gregory Charlop:
Well, I'll tell you, so I didn't do hands on care at all for the women athletes. So for me, it wasn't a huge problem. I will tell you, though, when I've talked to my business partners and when we were pitching ideas, it did come up, you know, why are we having like this middle aged male is the face of this program to help essentially young women, whether it's the girl athletes or the young women athletes. So people were worried and I think it caused some angst among potential funders or potential business partners. And so we had to think, well, how are we going to sell this? And the people are like, you should take on more women partners and have them be the face of it. So I think it was a challenge, not so much in light you're a creepy guy. It was more of a challenge in the sense of like, why is a guy doing this? Shouldn't a woman be doing this.

John Shufeldt:
Right, yeah, I guess that's a fair question. So what advice? I mean, what have you learned through all this? If you had to sum it up and kind of advice you'd give to somebody else who says, you know what? What he's doing is maybe don't do this same thing. But I want to, I want to have the same amount of moxie it took Greg just to pivot out of anesthesia, full time at Kaiser, you had a great pension and all the perks to go out on your own, and it takes a lot of guts, period.

Gregory Charlop:
You know, the biggest advice I would give to someone who's already in practice is it's nice to have some kind of runway saved up. Either you've saved up money and you've got money in the bank, or you're able to kind of do what you and I do, which is to do medicine here and there. Because the thing is, like a lot of the stuff you do, this entrepreneurial stuff, these outside projects, you're not going to make money off of it. Or if you do, you're not going to make a lot and you're probably not going to make as much as you're accustomed to making medicine unless you really hit it big. You know, you do something like the stuff you're doing, maybe like investment banking or something, but the vast majority of physician entrepreneurs, I'm going to guess, are going to make more money per hour being physicians. And so my big advice would be, if this is something you want to do, which I totally support, is either save up some money or, or have a way of working part time, so you're not under financial stress that you could, you can fool around with this stuff without worrying about providing for your family and putting food on the table.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, I think one thing that I've learned and that I've heard other people say is it really is a hedge against burnout, that having these other creative outlets, whether it's a new business or becoming a rock star, is really helps prevent the just a drudgery of day-to-day-to-day practicing medicine, which I continue to love to do. But I think I love to do it because I get to do other stuff as well. Is that how you see it?

Gregory Charlop:
100%, 100%. I mean, I kept thinking about this exact topic and I completely agree with you. Like, I like thinking about these entrepreneurial things. And I kept asking myself, I never made any money off this, would I still do it? And the answer would be yes, because it keeps my brain active and it gives me something to think about. And it's a creative outlet, and I'm doing something different that other people aren't doing know. And I remember when I left Kaiser, like, people looked at me like I was crazy. But I like the fact that I'm kind of following the beat of my own drum. And I think that you're right, I think if I had stayed, even though I liked Kaiser, I would have just gotten burned out with the medical stuff. You need, you need some kind of either intellectual or creative outlet outside of medicine, you know, and I've also seen, the other side of the coin is I've seen a lot of physicians who retire. And then not long after they retire, they get sick or they die or something, you know? And, you know, obviously, I'm just speculating here, but I think sometimes people got so invested in their physician career, that became their identity. And then when they weren't doing that anymore, they didn't know what their purpose was.

John Shufeldt:
Totally true. The wheels come off the bus, like airline pilots who were all dead and four or five years after they quit, not all of them, but their lifespan is very short after they quit flying. And one of the theories is one radiation as their fly. And the other one is that they just, they don't, they never develop hobbies and other things to do, and I always feared that about myself. So I think you're right, if, even if you don't make a lot of money doing it, there's there's benefits of having that creative outlet. Well, Greg, where can people find out more about your connect with you?

Gregory Charlop:
Well, the best way is I have a website, Gregory CharlopMD, G R E G O R Y C H A R L O P MD.com. I'm active on LinkedIn, so that's actually probably the best way. If you just look for me on LinkedIn, I'm busy on that. And if you're interested in the book Why Doctors Skip Breakfast that's available on Amazon.

John Shufeldt:
I like it, okay, we'll post everything within our show notes, link to the book, link to your website, and it's been a really pleasure talking to you. And again, congratulations. I said from anesthesia and fellowship to what you're doing now, I mean, it takes a lot of courage, so it's very cool, so congratulations.

Gregory Charlop:
Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me on, and I love what you're doing as well.

John Shufeldt:
Thank you.

John Shufeldt:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur Rx. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. Thanks for listening.

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