← Travis Makes Money
Travis Makes Money
INTERVIEW | Make Money by Turning Expertise into Influence, feat. Dr. Maria Sophocles
00:27:48
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- [00:00]
A
You're listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by GoHighLevel.com for a free 30 day trial of the best all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet. Just go to gohighlevel.com travis. What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's our mission to help you make more money. Today on the show, I am talking to a new friend of mine, Dr. Maria Sophocles. She is a menopause expert, TED speaker, pioneering gynecologist and industry icon and helps high achieving women and their partners understand and fix the sexual health issues that directly impact energy, focus, confidence and relationship stability. For her new book, the Bedroom Gap explores the widening in desire and expectations between partners as they age. She coined the term the bedroom gap, which Oprah recently featured and her TED Talk has surpassed over a million views now sparking global conversations around midlife, sexual health and wellness. Maria, what's up? Welcome to the show.
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B
Hey, thanks Travis. Great to be here.
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A
So look, I know that your main focus is sort of like this clinician work and about menopause and middle age, you know, sex, sex life, relationships. But this is a Travis Makes Money podcast. So I was very curious to bring you on to talk a little bit more about maybe something you don't get to talk about very much, which is sort of the business side of things. And I'm very curious because you've actually done several, several things in the business world that a lot of people listen to the show, really want to do a TED Talk, write a published book, get featured by Oprah, things like that. So let's rewind the clock and talk to me about your, your clinician work. Like, is this something that you've been working on for a long time? Where did some of this exterior, you know, external, I guess opportunities start coming along in the, in the career.
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B
Yeah, so I, I've been a board certified OB GYN for 30 years, which is crazy that it's been that long. And my focus has always been and continues to be the health and well being of the women of any age that I take. But for sure, we are living through quite an awakening of women's health, if you will, especially menopausal health, reproductive rights. There's a lot of money funneling into the, we call it the femtech sector. A lot of startups looking at everything from how to have alternative new birth control types to how to fix pain, from endometriosis to menopause symptoms to sexual toys and Serums. I mean, things that, when I started practicing 30 years ago, were kind of just not even on the radar. You were a doctor. You prescribed antibiotics, you did surgeries, you delivered babies. That was really all you had in your wheelhouse. And now we have a burgeoning supplement market. We have snake oil, too. Don't get me wrong. There's opportunity, there's money. And when there's money, people with compromised ethics always step in. So that's honestly never been my gig. I've just always needed to pass the red face test. I always say I. I sleep well at night because I. I know that I just don't dabble in anything that is fake and. And leverage my medical expertise in a fake way. So I'm happy about that. But there's plenty of opportunity in a business way for people with a medical background. And that could be in you have your MD or you have your MD and you've done a residency in something, or you have your MD and you've done a residency and you've practiced, and then you've pivoted, which is what I've done. I've done a lot of pivoting throughout my career. Whether it was academic medicine or NIH research or being a chief medical officer for a device company, I've always been comfortable stepping outside the box of what was traditional and possible in medicine. So many years ago, I was actually taking my son. I have four kids. I was taking him around MIT to look at colleges. And in that lab were two very young men, and they were working on how to harness the power, how to help thermoregulate the body. They were saying our lab at MIT is so hot, there's no air conditioning. So they had built this little tiny computer on the wrist that would sense heat changes in the body and deploy cold to cool the body. Cause we all know if you cool the wrist, you feel cooler. But the problem is, if you just put an ice pack on the wrist, after a while, you don't feel any better. But some really smart person, way smarter than I am, figured out if the cold is pulsatile, it'll actually give messages to the brain to cool you off. So these two super smart guys figured that out, built this little device, and I said, hey, that's really cool. You know, I deal with menopausal women. Let me know if you ever want to try it out on them. Well, they called me, and they're like, yeah, we do want to try it on menopausal women. So my practice was the first we built a prototype. It worked. So then they got seed funding and then started a company called Ember Labs, Embr Labs, which is in existence today. And you can buy the Ember Wave now, Costco or Best Buy or Target or lots of places online. So that just kind of came from really. Not me inventing it. I don't want to misrepresent, but me giving these guys an opportunity and connecting the dots with what they were doing to the population that I was seeing.
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A
That. That feels like. That feels like where we're headed, I think, in a really positive way. Where. And you tell me if I'm wrong, because I'm absolutely not the expert here. That's why you're here. It feels like there has been. It feels like the sort of holistic medicine world and the traditional Western medicine world have been in conflict for a very long period of time, where they butt heads and, you know, sort of call each other names from a distance.
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B
Right.
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C
And it feels like companies like this and.
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B
And.
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A
And others.
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B
Yeah.
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And a lot of others are trying their best to sort of fuse those worlds together, which is what we should be like. We should be sharing information, and we should be not ignoring data, and we should be willing to change our mind, even if it'd be difficult. And again, I'm saying this from somebody who has not earned an M.D.
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B
yeah. But you have a good sense, you have a good business sense, and you have a good life sense. You do not need an MD to look around and realize that over, well over 50% of all Americans use supplements. Why? They feel driven there. They feel that Western medicine hasn't met their needs, or it takes six months to get in to see a doctor who's burnt out, tired, and only has 15 minutes for you. And if that doctor is only doing, you know, straightforward Western medicine, which, by the way, I did for many years. So guilty as charged. You may not. It may not be enough, or it may not be right. First of all, we need to upend medical education so doctors become better listeners, more open to things. But that's a whole different episode. I think where you're going with this is exactly where I saw, actually, a long time ago that these worlds need to be complimentary. Patients are becoming customers and consumers. And it doesn't mean you're a crappy doctor if you recognize that. It means if you just say, the only way is my way and you need an antibiotic, you are likely to have that patient go back and look at their Instagram reels and say, I think I Want to try this thing,
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A
you're pushing them to seek information elsewhere when you won't even have the common courtesy to hear out their opinion or their thought on this thing that directly affects the way that they live their life on a daily basis.
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B
That's right. Let me give you another example. I'm on the board of a company called the Honeypot. And the Honeypot is not a traditional medicine, antibiotic or cancer curing company. The Honeypot makes tampons, pads, sexual lube. It makes body wash. It makes all kinds of stuff for odor, for itch, for things that are really common, mostly for women. And women do not want to have to go to a doctor every time something's not quite right down there. They're just going to pay a copay, wait a long time, be given antibiotics. And that one woman figured out that just isn't the recipe. She started her own company in her garage, by the way, ended up selling half of it to private equity for like $385 million. So clearly other women in the country also feel we need something non prescription for some of these simple GYN and body odor fixes. Now, the cool thing is that company's done so well that they now have me on their board and I'm helping them to create. Although they're doing, they do a great job even without me. A whole scientific community where they bought a lab and they now are hiring microbiologists to actually really put science behind their products. So it's not just pretty labels and stuff. So you're right, the interface is there and a lot of scientific research is now coming from the private sector, which is awesome. Science labs at Harvard or whatever. Yeah, really cool.
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A
Yeah. That are being funded by one source of funding that's really difficult to get this grant that's going to allow you to maintain this research and going for a long period of time and then you know that from. I just am such a believer.
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C
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B
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A
Entrepreneurship is a better solution to problems than government interference.
- [11:47]
B
Me too.
- [11:48]
A
Something like that is, is really good to hear because I think that, you know, obviously, obviously this is not to say that there are not bad players in the entrepreneurship sector. Of course that there are. But as a. In. In general, it feels better for a profitable company to take money that they've earned and Invest it into R and D to continue delivering better products and services to the end user who already trusts them to solve these problems, rather than like a researcher begging for money from the government. And then when the government doesn't see an applied use for it in the first six months, they pull funding and then that person just all their research goes away. Like how much knowledge have we stuck the archives? You know what I mean?
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B
Because, yeah, so now the honeypub, which now has private equity money, has money to be able to hire some of these researchers who are frankly excited to have a beautiful new lab where they're really appreciated. And it's kind of government proof. So honestly, that's been super exciting for me to come full circle from someone who used to be in these research labs and thought as a youngster that that was just the way it was, you know. And now to see private equity inject money into a company to that wants to be better and better and have more scientific backing to their products. I think this is great. And we're seeing this across the women's health spectrum. Everything from devices, new contraceptive devices coming down the pike are super cool biomarkers for cancer detection. There's now at home Pap smear testing you just collected at home, which could for millions of women, take away the need to take a day off work and you know, to go get your annual checkup. I mean, there's a lot that's really going to, I mean, look at the data collection from OURA rings and things like that. We're going to use that data to be able, if clinicians can be progressive, they can use all that data to then see trends, patterns and be able to help you sleep better, eat better, exercise better. So I think the world of leveraging the massive amounts of data and then layering AI on top of that, it's going to be just mind blowing in the next decade.
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A
How much of this is sort of on a societal agency, like how much of it leans on societal agency, like people taking control of their health again? I feel like for a long period of time people just outsourced their health to the doctor. Meaning like if the doctor didn't tell them to do something, they just didn't do it. They didn't care about it because the doctor would have told me if there's some reason to do this other thing. And I feel like people are starting to get back onto the, like, you know, I am taking full control and ownership of my own personal health and therefore I need to think about preventative Measures. Before I go see a doctor for something that's already happened, I want to know, how can I prevent heart disease, how can I prevent cancer, how can I prevent some of these, you know, big issues that have come up in the last.
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B
I mean, that's the golden ticket is medicine, I'm sad to say, has been diagnosed a problem and treat it after there's a problem. And so we need a fundamental shift in, in medical education and in medicine to say, let's shift to sooner. Let's shift to preventative care so we don't have coronary artery disease and diabetes, which are two of the biggest killers of our population. So we don't have obesity, which then makes everything else worse. So you're seeing a huge shift in preventive care. And then the tip of this spear, of course, is the longevity industry. And make no mistake, there's some snake oil in that longevity industry. I mean, there are. I have patients that come in with 30 supplements. They come in with a suitcase and they say, my husband and I take these 30 supplements every day. And some of them have some good data, and some of them have no data. These were tried on eight rats and somebody made a pretty label and said, your legs will get longer and you'll live to be 90.
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Wrote some good website copy.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And that's pretty dangerous. But anybody listening, you can go on the CDC website and put in that supplement and see about its health benefits and see if it's dangerous. I, I don't even care if you take something that doesn't really have benefit, but I care if you take something that's dangerous that can affect your ability to blood clot, that can affect your liver. You know, one of the most common reasons now for people going into an ER is liver failure from too many supplements. So it's no joke. So it's not just that it's snake oil. You gotta take them seriously. But the flip side is, your point is so true. There's a huge trend in preventive care and huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to say, gee, what skillset do I have? Is it in nutrition? Is it in movement? Is it that? It's mental health. And I wanna start a chain of online mental health counselors who can reach people. Mental health is really an opportunity because we're, especially since COVID very under served. It's very hard to find a mental health professional that takes insurance. It's very hard to get in to see one quickly. And if you're depressed or anxious or have OCD or suicidal, I mean, you you may need care right away. So if you're a mental health professional and you're tired of being in your group or you want extra money, you may want to think about an online platform where you can, you can offer that. People are hungry for it. I'm happy for it.
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A
Where did you kind of start with the speaking side of your career? Now you're writing books and you're speaking on stages, and you did a TED Talk that has over a million views. Where did that, where did that enter?
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B
You can't tell? I mean. Well, it started. There is a good story in that. I have always loved one on one helping people, right, as a surgeon and a doctor. But I started to feel the same messages over and over that I was sharing with women in midlife about menopause and about sex and about, don't feel ashamed. It's not you. These are the changes happening. And so I pitched the idea to ted. And they almost never take doctors, by the way, because they said, oh, we get thousands of doctors, each one wants to tell us about kidney disease or blood pressure, whatever they said. But your message is universal. The fact that sex is, it changes in midlife and the fact that it's treatable and the fact that women feel a lot of shame about it, like they're broken, and they felt that was a universal message. And I did, too. So that's how the TED Talk started. And I really loved doing that. There were 1500 people in the audience and I could feel the energy. I mean, I could just feel it. And I started thinking, you know, instead of one on one, I've had 80 something thousand patient visits and I'm not going to live long enough to reach millions one on one. I'm getting tired. So let me see how this TED Talk goes. And then when it, it just went quickly, you know, to a million, and it was like, okay, maybe I need to change my audience from 1 to 1 to 1 to 201 to 500, something like that. And. But I still practice. So I have to say I'm, I'm, I'm not quite cutting that umbilical cord. I still do really love, you know, love that. But I'm enjoying the public speaking because I think it's just a bigger audience and it allows more people to really. It's not just about hearing me, it's about thinking for themselves. Wow, okay. I've just had a light bulb go on whether it's, I want to start this business to help, you know, help people with endometriosis or I want to that device I've been tinkering. I want to design a sex toy or I want to design. You know, sometimes my talks end up. People come to me and they say, I'm actually thinking of a startup, but I kind of want your advice on how to make it happen. So I'll connect them with VCs who do very early investing. Other times people say, thanks, you really helped me clinically. I want to get a counselor or a doctor or whatever. So my talks are all over the map. They're really not just clinical medicine. It's how to advocate for yourself in the workforce, how to take an idea and get it going.
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A
Tell me about the book publishing process, from pitching to agents and writing, promoting and all that stuff. How has that been for you?
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B
Yeah, it's been great. But I had a great. I've had a great person hold my hand and that was the best thing, was to get someone early. So I found an agent.
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A
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- [20:20]
B
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D
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- [20:27]
A
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D
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- [20:34]
B
That is fantastic.
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D
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A
What time has it been?
- [20:47]
D
It's clobber time.
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B
An agent, and I'm saying how I found the agent. But this particular group of agents is a collective called Grub street, based in Boston. And you can go on Grub street and see all their bios and pick someone who's the right age or gender or like or has experience writing sci fi, if that's your book or whatever. And so I interviewed about five people, narrowed it down to three, then two, then picked one. And she was great because she helped me understand that you don't have to finish the book before you publish a book. You have to have an idea for it and write a chapter or two. And I was shocked. I was like, don't you just hand someone the whole manuscript? No, you write a bit. Then you write a book proposal that can be anywhere from 10 to 100 pages. Mine was quite long. That proposal is Hard. And she held my hand through it. How to do it, what makes a good proposal and not so. I highly recommend having someone help you with the beginning part because that gave me such a good, well written proposal that I could pitch it to big name publishers instead of self published, which I thought, well, I can always self publish. Yeah, you can. Good luck with that and good luck making any money off that. Whereas if Penguin or Random House or Hachette picks you up, whether they give you an advance or not, and I'll talk about that in a minute, is a different thing. But if they're going to publish you, they're going to throw money behind the project because they want to make money from this. So they're going to hire an artistic team to design the COVID There's the COVID They're going to, they hired three different artistic teams. In fact, they're going to hire a PR team to say, gee, Maria, you talk about all these different lubes and sex toys in your book. Let's go to those companies, see if they want to get involved. Like, I wouldn't have had the knowledge or bandwidth to do that. So getting a big name publisher I think is helpful from a, you know, I don't expect to retire early off this book. I, you know, I know there are ways to do it. You can throw a lot of money at it and you're more likely to. Or you can know Oprah Winfrey or John Grisham, those are helpful. Or Michelle Obama, if you have those connections. These are helpful. And they can write a blurb on the back and you'll sell a lot more books. Me, I'm just a regular person, but I think. So this agent pitched and I was actually at TED and Hachette called and said, yeah, we want this book. Now 80 to 90% of books do not get advances. They say, we'll do it, we'll take a risk on you. We're not gonna give you any money ahead of time. We're just not that sure.
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A
We basically just do royalty split when
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B
the book comes out. John Grisham, Michelle Obama, they get huge amounts. And I was neither. They gave me a really nice advance, which I was shocked. But I think it's because they saw the TED Talk and they believed in the message and they kind of felt that women's health was, was kind of a hot field. So I think some of it's just timing, let's face it, you know, timing,
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A
but also highly credible. TED talks, very helpful, things like that. So, yeah, and let me just say
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B
about the TED Talk, Travis, one thing. There's TED and tedx. They are different, but they're not necessarily like, oh, just TEDx. You know, mine was a TED talk, yay. But TEDx, a lot of really incredible people got their start, like Brene Brown, who's a really highly published author with a TEDx talk. She gave a TEDx talk, which is just a community talk. So the founders of TED gifted away the TED brand. And so any community can create a TEDx stage. Series of talk Stage. Thank you. And so if you live in Dallas and want to do TEDx Dallas, and you want the theme to be longevity, you can find physicians and nutritionists and fitness experts and put it together. But doing a TED Talk is a very hard thing to get. It's a. They're very few. There've only been like 3,000 in the whole history, you know, whereas TEDx, I think there's somewhere between 60 and 100,000. It's a lot. But that shouldn't deter you if you're interested in using TED as a platform, because it is a beautiful platform to give credibility and to get your message honed. But remember what they say, if you don't have time to write a short story, just write a novel. Same with, with ted. So if you don't have time, you know, if. To do a TED Talk, it does have to be very honed and very tight. And there are people, by the way, who for money, will pay you to coach you on getting that message honed and tight. And, and that's something I recommend if you need it. I, you know, some people do that.
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A
Yeah. Let's talk marketing the book. Have you found that doing a bunch of podcasts, lots of speaking.
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B
Yeah. I decided just hit the podcast very hard. So I've done maybe a hundred of those. And you know, the problem is there are, it's crowded at the bottom and there's a few very, very top ones. Yours is a very well respected one, by the way. So yay, Travis, thank you for giving me some time. But you have a nice unique message and I think that's great. And I think you have a great presence. So I think, you know, it's kind of not, not a surprise now that I'm talking with you.
- [25:56]
A
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. No, for sure you're doing it the right way. You know what I mean? Like it just that that type of volume is sort of required. We, we did a lot of book tours when we were doing sort of PR services for podcasts specifically, we've got people booked on podcasts for book launches and things and we still do every once in a while. That was always my thing. It was like, let's get you on as many as you're willing to do because you don't necessarily know which ones are going to move the needle the most, but it's probably going to be like 10 of the hundred that you do. You know, 10% of them are probably going to sell 90% of your books. The problem is we don't know which one of those are going to do that. So we got to hit the circuit, you know what I mean?
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B
Yes. And it's probably the biggest 10. But it can be a one off. Like I've done a bunch that are based in Australia and oh my God, when this book came out, people were emailing from Australia. I can't wait to get this book. You know, it's like, oh, okay, I'm glad I did that.
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A
Didn't know that.
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B
Yeah, right. Didn't know that. And now I'm going to go out to Sydney and the Gold coast and, and do a little book women's event tour out there. So, you know, I mean that's, that's also for fun, but it's also to serve them, you know.
- [27:02]
A
Well, Maria, I have genuinely enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate you taking the time to come on the show. Where can people go to get more from you?
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B
I think website, really? Maria Sophocles, M.D. tED Talk. Maria Sophocles is a great way to see the TED Talk because I think it, it may lead to something they want to do. Instagram, of course. So same, same thing. And wish everybody good luck.
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A
Maria sophoclesmd.com yes, first name, last name,
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B
maryland.com little bit of a mouthful. I should shouldn't have thought of something. My husband's last name is Martin. Maybe I should have taken it, but Sophocles was a fun name. I didn't want to get it out.
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A
It should sound like a Greek philosopher, you know.
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B
It does. Well, relative, distant relative. Really? It's really distant. Travis, thank you so much.
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A
Yeah, of course, of course. Maria Sophocles md.com that's S-O-P-H O C L E S soft. Maria Sophocles md.Com Go check out some of the stuff that Maria's putting out. Follow her on Instagram. She's a good follow over there. And then the Bedroom Gap is her new book. Benefit from reading that.
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B
Travis, you want one? I should send you one.
- [28:03]
A
Send it over. Send it over. Send me a couple. I have. I have some other. I have some other people in my life I could give them to.
- [28:08]
B
So nice.
- [28:09]
A
I appreciate you taking the time. I do not take that for granted. Everybody else listening. Remember, money only solves your money problems, but it's easier to solve the rest of your problems with money in the bank. So let's solve that one first here on the Traction Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you next time.