Women's Health Maverick. Leslie Schrock-Fertility Rules: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Women's Health Maverick. Leslie Schrock-Fertility Rules: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Intro:
Hi, I'm Abby Mercado, co-founder and CEO of Rescripted, former VC investor and ever entrepreneur, fierce advocate for women, and mom of IVF twins. Welcome to Women's Health Mavericks, a podcast dedicated to shining a light on the people who are moving the needle when it comes to women's health and wellness. From inspiring entrepreneurs and innovators, to leaders of big brands defining culture, to movers and shakers of biosciences companies dedicated to treating women, we'll introduce you to the people, the ideas, and the businesses that are changing the face of women's health in America and across the globe. With these changemakers on our side, the future of women's health is bright. Now let's get into it.

Abby Mercado:
Hey, I'm so excited to welcome Leslie Schrock to the podcast today. I have been a long-time fan of Leslie. She is fantastic. She is a female investor. She is an author. She is a thought leader in the women's health space. And I could not be more overjoyed to welcome her today. So welcome to the podcast, Leslie.

Leslie Schrock:
Thank you, for I feel like this is the mutual admiration society. I just love the work that you guys have done with Rescripted. You're elevating such an important conversation, so it is a pleasure to be here.

Abby Mercado:
Yay! Well, you are too, and I'm super excited to dive into who you are and what you're doing and all the things. So maybe let's start with that. So, Leslie, who are you? Where did you come from, and how did you get to where you are now?

Leslie Schrock:
Well, I think, number one is a lot of people listening may be on the path to thinking about I'm a mom of two boys, four and two, and I had a very difficult journey to welcome both of them here. So, you know, I started my career actually not in reproductive health. I was a creative person. I worked in advertising. I worked at a few startups. I was on the founding team of an organization called Rock Health, which sought to really bring people from the outside of healthcare in, so talented designers and developers and other folks that maybe didn't pursue that path, but really understood how to make things. And the organization has grown quite a lot, but while I was there, we launched over 100 companies, and it was really through that experience that I started to see just how much work there was to do in women's health. I was connected to doctors. We worked with the Mayo Clinic and UCSF and all of these top organizations really globally, and it was so clear that there was just still such a gaping hole for women's health. And so I met Kate Ryder, who was at the time an investor who's now the founder and CEO of Maven, was their first advisor. So I've been working in this space alongside doctors and business people as an investor, as an entrepreneur, myself, and now a writer, which happened, I don't tell this story that much, but it's a funny one. I was pregnant for the third time, finally with my son, so I had two failed pregnancies before he showed up, and I was out to lunch with a friend who I've known for a long time and was kind of picking at my food. And for anyone who's had loss, I don't know if you relate to this, but I just got really tired.

Abby Mercado:
I relate to loss for sure.

Leslie Schrock:
Yeah, I got so tired of talking about my pregnancies. I just was like, I cannot even I don't want to tell anybody for a little while. I just need this to be my thing. I was like, listen, I'm sorry. I'm like 11 weeks pregnant right now. All of this food smells disgusting. I know I look like I'm just not eating, but I just can't handle it. And we just started talking about, you know, she worked in health for a long time. She had some big jobs at PepsiCo and Weight Watchers. And I just was talking to her about the narrative around pregnancy, that pregnancy is this time of weakness and pregnancy is like this disease that you have. And, you know, it felt so wrong to me both as someone who had gone through it and also someone who definitely felt nauseous but didn't feel like I was weak. I felt like my body was doing amazing things. I also felt like, as a working parent, future parent, that there were things that no one was really talking about, like how to make decisions as it came to get back to work. And so anyway, I just said, you know, maybe I should write a book about pregnancy. And so, that is how I met my publisher at Simon and Schuster, was an introduction, and she was also the mom of two boys, and we chatted for a long time. And so I say that sometimes I'm an accidental author, but really, writing has become this beautiful gift in my life, and I feel really privileged to have been able to do it twice, first with Bumpin' and now with Fertility Rules.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing. Thanks for walking through that. So obviously, we're going to go, so into Fertility Rules and into Bumpin' and how you created those just beautiful, wonderful works and resources for women and men. But I want to rewind back and kind of look at it seems like you've kind of come full circle in your career. So you started out as a creative, you started out in design. Would love to hear how design thinking, and creativity, and all of those things that your career is kind of been rooted in has really kind of connected to what you do today as an author and investor.

Leslie Schrock:
Yeah, I mean, I went to school at the University of Texas at Austin, and I had, I hook them, I know, right? I did a degree in communications in advertising because I realized that communications is kind of one of these things that's useful no matter what field you go into. I also did a business minor, I did a lot of business classes, so I was pretty well rounded, but I just kept finding myself attracted to storytelling in business specifically and just really trying to come at it in different ways, communicate with people differently, figure out different ways to tell a story of a business, to really connect with people. And I think that that has influenced my work just for a very long time, both in terms of marketing a book. The cover of Fertility Rules, I actually designed that myself.

Abby Mercado:
Fun fact, and so compelling. It makes me want to buy it.

Leslie Schrock:
Thank you. And that was the point. That's actually a funny story too. If you want some behind the scenes of book publishing, here you go. So this is always one of the most painful things during the book publishing process is your editor presents you with covers once you've submitted your manuscript and you're pretty far into the process, and inevitably you go five rounds with these covers, because as an author you have these strong opinions, and for me, I was a designer and so I definitely had very strong opinions about what I wanted. I wanted it to family really well with Bumpin', which they knocked it out of the park with that cover. I loved that they did that. And I said, Well, I want something very similar, and then they gave me some options. And finally, I was actually at my brother's wedding in Maui. We were moving to New York, and I got this like third round of covers, and I was like, oh my God, not again. Like, no, we can't do this again. Like, no, no, no. I'm like, Nick, hold my beer. You know, like, not actually, but I was like, hold the kids. Like, go bathe them. We just got back ...

Abby Mercado:
Hold my Mai Tais.

Leslie Schrock:
Yeah, hold my Mai Tai. Like, there was no alcohol involved here, but I was so ready for something to look the way I wanted it to look. And so, in like five minutes, I churned out the first version of that cover, and then they changed the colors and sent it back. And so when you flip over Fertility Rules, my name is on the cover, credit on the back. A little fun fact.

Abby Mercado:
That's so cool. It's like once a creative has a vision, you can't really.

Leslie Schrock:
Absolutely.

Abby Mercado:
I feel like I'm like pseudo-creative. Like, I like to say I'm really creative in business and business development and sales and marketing, but like from a content perspective, it's absolutely my team that's creative and not me. But once they're on something, it's like they're on it, they know it's good, and they do not want to veer from it. So that definitely resonates.

Leslie Schrock:
Yeah, it was fun. I'm super proud of it. I like the way it looks, it feels very timeless, but I also wanted it, I think, to the point you brought up earlier, I also wanted it to really be a book that men could carry and pick up and not feel like it was weird and pink. Men read Bumpin' too, and Bumpin' it's very pink and yellow and bright and cheerful. And that was on purpose, too, because I think that as hard as pregnancy can be sometimes and as hard as the fertility journey can be, sometimes it's important to sometimes step back and say like, Yeah, this sucks, but also, my body is doing really cool stuff right now, and I need to start to become comfortable with the fact that I'm not in control of everything, and there's beauty to be found even in the really hard moments sometimes.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. So I would love to hear, you know, we talked a little bit about early career as a designer, creator, creative, all the things. Let's talk about what happened next. So Rock Health, like obviously just the ultimate leader in the digital health space and really was one of the very first groups to invest in this space in digital health. Would love to hear a little bit about the early days and what that was like. Saw on your LinkedIn profile, like, there were just three at the beginning. How is it conceptualized,and how is it brought to market, and what are you most proud of?

Leslie Schrock:
Oh man, that was a real crazy ride because we did a lot with very little. We were a startup helping to launch startups. So it started as a business plan at Harvard, and it became real in Chinatown in San Francisco, in this funny little office that was sandwiched between a few floors of one of those weird like, have you been to Chinatown in San Francisco? You know, the weird furniture stores with the giant brass lions and, like, the weird Murano glass and all of that. So we were, like, sandwiched between that, so it was a vibe. People would walk in, and they'd be like, what is this place? So I think from the beginning it was very, we were very disarming because we were very different. There was very little investment. I think investment in the space was like 800 million a year into digital health. It wasn't even called digital health at that point. Actually, we coined the phrase digital health. So it was kind of working from nothing, trying to make people care. And I think that that is one of the things that we did really successfully was bring in a lot of really incredible entrepreneurs, other organizations to partner with. And also one of the challenges with healthcare, and it's true of education and finance as well, is that there is a lot of regulation and there is a lot of bureaucracy that you have to contend with as a startup founder that you don't necessarily have to deal with if you're doing something on the consumer side of things. And so you kind of have to strap in and be ready for some weird stuff like dealing with HIPAA, dealing with sales cycles being really, really long. And so what we sought to do really was make it feel less challenging, because if you've been in this space as long as I have, you learn that with startups, like 80% of all problems are the same. It's like someone on the team is like not working out, co-founders aren't getting along. Investment stuff is complicated. Maybe like your round is taking forever to raise, it doesn't matter. But so many of the problems are the same, and for healthcare startups, it's really the same because you're dealing with the same bureaucracy and infrastructure and all of that. But really, I'm so proud of what we did during my tenure there. And, you know, I left and really dug in with more companies. Like they kept graduating, and I was like, wait a minute, where are you going? No. And my best friend was in that first class. That's how we met. And so I just really feel fortunate to have been on that journey. But it also gives you, you know, it's translated into investing and advising for me because I now, because I saw so many business plans during that time, and in the ensuing years, I have a lot of pattern recognition about what makes a market, what makes a good founder, what makes a great team, what are the problems they're going to encounter at each phase, and then how can I be helpful during that process?

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, I think that's okay. How can I be helpful? It's like a lot of investors will say that to you, but it feels like you actually mean it. Yes, so I would love to hear a little bit about you share the investments that you've made, a lot of them are in women's health, which is amazing. And there's a handful that are outside of women's health, which is also amazing. I would love to learn kind of what you look for in a startup. What do you mean success? What are some signs maybe for some aspiring angel investors out there, including myself? I'm okay, but I'm like a little cherub. I'm working on building my portfolio.

Leslie Schrock:
Well, let's share. Let's share deals. I would love to do that.

Abby Mercado:
Love that, too.

Leslie Schrock:
Yeah, I would say for me, my number one piece of advice to people, if you're just getting started with angel investing, is to invest in what you know. So choose areas where you have deep domain expertise, deep experience, or that, you know people that are starting these companies, because it's really about your lens on a problem, your understanding of a problem. Is it a good problem? Is it the right problem? Is it a big enough problem? Is it a problem worth solving? And is this going to be enough of a solution that people are going to get excited about it? And I think that the market sizing part of it is relatively easy. Understanding like where it works, like with healthcare anyway, you have to think about, where does it fit into a clinical workflow, where does it fit into the system, who buys it, who pays for it, how much is someone going to pay for it? So there's kind of the business aspect of it, which is super interesting and I love digging into, but assuming like those boxes are checked, for me, it's all about team. It's all that matters because it's really hard. I mean, I helped start two companies. I have been there on the op side deeply. I have been through all kinds of weird stuff, you know, I had to wind down. My second startup, like it was really hard, it was in the food space. But I think when you have that expertise, a lot of investors have never really been operators. And I think that that's something, you know, certainly like for you, you've got this great experience as a founder and an operator that you can walk into a meeting with someone and really have empathy for what they're going through and also understand if they have what it takes to stick it out when things get rough, because it doesn't matter how well you're doing, inevitably things will get rough. They will get rough more than once. So I think it's just, invest in what you know, really make sure you check all the boxes on the business side of the house and make sure that that makes sense as a sound investment, and then the team. I would also say one thing, which is angel investors have the luxury of not investing other people's money. It's your money. So you can decide if you want to invest in something you just want to see happen in the world or if you want to make a huge financial return, because those are two very different kinds of investments.

Abby Mercado:
1,000%, yeah.

Leslie Schrock:
Yeah, so it's a really, I think it's an important decision to make. Like, would you be happy if you just invested this company and you got double your money in five years? Because, like for a lot of companies, that's a great outcome. For other people. They're like, no, no, no, I'm looking for this 100x, you know, I want to invest in unicorns and billion-dollar companies, and that's much harder. And it's not impossible, and certainly not, there are $2 billion companies in women's health now, Maven and Mindbody. So we're certainly seeing the kind of growth that's necessary, but I think it's important to be very realistic and also be prepared that all the money that you invest as an angel, you should be prepared to lose it because if you can't, you shouldn't be writing those checks.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, for sure. And you know, I would say it's like also whenever you're making an investment, I have a ton of founders on our cap table, Rescripted, and I feel like they're always doing like very tangible things to help me out and to help me grow this business. And they feel like if you're a founder investor, you have that like, tangible, palpable experience, like pay it forward. That's what I want.

Leslie Schrock:
Absolutely.

Abby Mercado:
That's very desperately I want to do, and I think that that's what the founders on my cap table want to do too.

Leslie Schrock:
Yeah, super helpful is bat phones too. Like that's been my like, Oh God, what's going on? I need to just call someone and talk about this thing. Angel investors can be really wonderful people to call when there's an emergency situation because, unlike institutionals, where they might have a board seat or something else, angels can just be really helpful and help solve problems. So I think that that's another way to look at it too. I love that stuff. That's like what I live for, doing all the investing stuff. I like to get involved, so yeah.

Abby Mercado:
I love it. Well, thank you for all that fantastic advice. It'll be helpful to a lot of people, including myself. Also, while we're on the topic of investing, and specifically in women's health, which is what we're here to talk about today, this is a podcast about women's health changemakers, and you are definitely one in my mind, in our minds, in many people's minds, you mentioned two wins that we can consider in the women's health market. So Maven, Mindbody, both just excellent businesses that were started only a few years ago. I want to, I just want to talk about like, what is wrong with women's health investing? Why is it so frustrating? Why does it feel like there are so many failures? Why can't we grow these businesses? Like women are 51% of the population. We have really unique issues that desperately need solving. What are some of our blockers today on making smaller businesses the size that they deserve to be, which is humongous?

Leslie Schrock:
And we can record an entire podcast just on this topic. I feel like there should be a whole podcast on this topic, actually, because it is an incredibly complex and complicated question to answer. The first thing, I would say, is that research is a problem. We don't have sufficient research into women's health. If you look at the amount of research that goes into women's health, even from the NIH, which is the biggest supporter of medical research in the world, it is paltry compared to other areas. So there's just not an appetite from grantmaking organizations, or from researchers, frankly, to go on and do that research. It's very complex, and my network is both as an author and as a person in the space. I rely on many, many experts to do my work. I interview lots of people. I'm always talking to doctors, complementary practitioners, researchers, all kinds of stuff. But it's very clear that there's just a whole lot we don't know about reproductive health, and that goes for men too, which I think is an area that is going to, and hear me out because I can already see people's noses curling up like, how can you possibly talk about men's health right now? But it affects women, too. Men's health has a direct impact on women. We have to take care of sick men into our old age. Who wants to do that? Men die like five years sooner than women do. They're unhealthy, they have more chronic conditions, and also unhealthy men create unhealthy pregnancies. It does not matter if you're the healthiest person on the planet, if there's unhealthy sperm, you're putting your future kids at risk, you're also putting your pregnancy at risk. So I think it's something that people just don't know that much about, but that's certainly a big part of my work. Another challenge that women's health has in the investment world is that in order to achieve a venture-style return, the business has to be sufficiently big. And what we see a lot are companies popping up that deal with one thing. So PCOS is a huge problem, and I'm just going to pick on PCOS because it's an easy one. PCOS affects 1 in 10 women now. It's hard to diagnose, it's hard to treat, it causes lots of issues, it causes fertility problems, it is complex. You would think that there should just be companies dealing with PCOS, but because the diagnostic criteria is so loosey-goosey, there's not like a test you can take for it, there's just not a lot of interest in it because it's one thing, you know? If it was a diagnostic, if it was a super drug, if that's like a whole different kind of investing; that's biotech investing, pharma investing very different than what Silicon Valley traditional firms really do. Some do do it, but you need a special practice. You need people who deeply understand it.

Abby Mercado:
And it's going to take a long time.

Leslie Schrock:
And it's going to take a long time, and so much money, and a tremendous amount of money. I'm actually on the bioethics board at Gamito, which is working on women's health. I think that's a great example of one that is going to completely blow people's minds when everything they're doing comes to light, but they're a biotech company. They're not a digital health company. You've got to decide, how big is this company going to be? If it's just focused on one thing, then you've got to show as a founder how it's going to expand into adjacent areas. So now PCOS, then you start to nail endo, but they're very different. They're very different conditions. They require different treatments, different protocols. So it just becomes very complicated, and I think that women's health also, listen, like I'm in conversations talking about this all the time and feel very frustrated, there's an assumption that many women's health problems are quality of life problems, they're not actually clinical. Pelvic floor health, I think, falls into this very squarely. Incontinence is not just a quality of life problem, you guys. It is a big problem that people need to deal with because there's a lot of things that can go wrong during menopause if you don't deal with it. That's one of the reasons I'm really proud to be an investor and advisor to Origin who is building out a network of women's health PT clinics, because clearly there needs to be something more done there, and they need to be physical clinics. So this is another interesting thing, right? Like you think about healthcare, and you think about the times that you need to go see someone and the times that you do not actually need to go see someone, and they're actually quite different. So Origin offers both now, but absolutely like, I hope that they're in every single state and every single city at some point because there are times when you just need someone to physically examine you. You can do some of it on the phone, but, and I think the last thing I'll say about women's health investing and the people that do it is that for better or for worse, if you start investing in women's health, you often get pigeonholed as, Oh well, you do women's health. I mean, this has happened to me for sure. I've broken out of it because I do a lot. You know, I've invested in other companies outside of health, but people will just start sending you those deals because they think it's all you want to do. And if you're at a generalist fund that does not just invest in women's health, it invests in all of healthcare or it invests in consumer, it can kind of tie you up. So women, a lot of female investors, because it's mostly women who write these checks, don't just want to be shoved into the women's health bucket. So I realize all of this is very depressing, but this is the world, I mean, this is like it sucks, like this is the world we live in right now. There are a lot of really fantastic women's health investors, but men, unfortunately, in general, are not usually the ones to write the checks, and they don't always understand the problems. And they'll say things like, I have to go home and ask my wife, or like, oh, maybe my girlfriend or my wife didn't have incontinence after pregnancy. I'm like, are you kidding me? Of course, she did. She just didn't tell you.

Abby Mercado:
How many more times does she need to get up to pee at a restaurant?

Leslie Schrock:
Yeah, like, run in the house after jumping on a trampoline or something, You know, it's ridiculous.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, yeah, it's like we laugh, but, like, it really sucks, and it's super bleak. What are you, just, like, super random follow-up? What are your thoughts on reimbursement and how payers are looking at women's health, and how can that improve if it's bad? Which is a total layup, of course, it's bad, but would love to just hear a build on that.

Leslie Schrock:
Yeah, I think that this is another area that's really difficult, which is that most companies cannot just go direct-to-payers and get reimbursed. There's all kinds of crazy codes. There are all kinds of internal pilots that have to happen. And I would say 99 times out of 100, a payer is going to say, well, go to a self-insured employer and prove it there first. And the reality for these self-insured employers is they don't want to have 5,000 solutions for their employees, they just want to have a few. So if you can't show that you're a platform, meaning that you can start in one area and really like progress into others, like I think Maven is a perfect example of this. Maven started out as a way to build a coordinated care team via telemedicine for pregnancy. That was it, that's what they were doing. And then, eventually, what did the employers want? You know, you start getting in there and they say, oh, we're thinking about milk shipping. Can you just do that too? And Maven's like, yeah, let us just have a couple of weeks to figure that out. Boom. Hey, can you have a wallet product so we can just reimburse through you? Yep, we can figure that out. Boom. Like that is how this works generally. So you get to a bunch of employers, you prove it out, you build scale, you prove that you can help companies save money, because ultimately that's what all of them want, and then you end up in these payer conversations and you end up getting their covered lives and you end up getting a whole different set of challenges with that. But I think one of the huge challenges is, like women of reproductive age, sometimes there's a problem you know about and sometimes it's kind of couched as prevention. Well, employers and insurance is not really incentivized to invest in prevention, even though rising tides would raise all boats because people leave jobs and switch insurance every 2 to 3 years. So an insurer says, well, why would I invest in this person? They're just going to leave anyway. Whereas if they just all agreed to do it, we would have many fewer problems.

Abby Mercado:
....com, thanks for building on that. So I feel like, to take the Maven lesson, like be first to market and listen to your customer intently.

Leslie Schrock:
Absolutely.

Abby Mercado:
Make sure you're doing well by them. Like every conversation with a customer is an opportunity.

Leslie Schrock:
Absolutely.

Abby Mercado:
Like that's just like the ultimate startup lesson.

Leslie Schrock:
Yes, and they are patient-centric, they are employer-centric, they listen. They are really trying to be ahead of the curve and really work on these problems, and I think that is why they are where they are. And Kate's phenomenal. She's a phenomenal founder. She's amazing, yes.

Abby Mercado:
Let's dive into Bumpin' and Fertility Rules. So I believe that both of these just masterpieces came from your personal experience. So I would love it if you're open to it, if you wouldn't mind sharing your personal experiences and how they inspired these two books.

Leslie Schrock:
I alluded to it earlier, but Bumpin' really came out of a very challenging fertility journey. So I had two losses before my first son, who's now four, was born. The first was an early miscarriage, and the second was a pregnancy that was not viable. We had a chromosomal abnormality. We could tell from the scans that it was almost certainly going to end within weeks. I mean, it was very, very close to ending on its own, and I was completely shocked. Even though I've been close to reproductive health for a long time, I have a million doctors on speed dial because of my work, I had no idea that having an abortion for a wanted pregnancy was a thing. It just blew my mind, and I didn't really have anyone to talk to who had gone through it. I knew that I couldn't have been the only one who had gone through it, but I didn't have anybody, and I felt like that was really unfair. And I started thinking about my experiences, I started thinking about all the decisions and all of the various challenges that we encountered and realizing that miscarriage is kind of positioned as this like thing that randomly happens sometimes, it's just a part of pregnancy, to be perfectly honest. And I know that that might sound a little scary, but miscarriages have been happening forever, they will always happen forever because the human body is complicated, and this process, sometimes it's incredible to think about how it all works in the first place because.

Abby Mercado:
It's so inefficient, right? Like, like, I love Doctor ... Like she's always talking about this on Instagram, being like, I mean, just normal human reproduction without IVF is like so inefficient. Like, how does it all happen? Like as an IVF, I'm like, You just conceived naturally? Like.

Leslie Schrock:
Yeah, I mean, and listen, like, my problem wasn't getting pregnant, my problem was staying pregnant, you know? And then I had a very so, you know, I had that conversation with my friend, and I decided to go down the road of writing Bumpin', and I wrote it in real-time during my pregnancy. And I deeply rely on experts. So I think of myself at this point as more of a journalist slash educator when it comes to writing. So I am now a subject matter expert in all of these things because I've now written two books, but all of this information comes from experts. It all comes from research studies that have high-quality evidence that are conducted in the right ways. And if you ever want to go down PubMed holes with me, like happy to do it. There are many pages of citations in the back of both books, but I felt like there needed to be a different voice out there when it pertained to pregnancy, both because I don't think it's especially helpful to think about every single thing that could possibly go wrong. Some books really focus on that, they present every single clinical condition. I present the ones that are most frequently experienced, like miscarriage. Not everybody likes that, by the way. It's interesting to get that feedback from people. I think it's really important that we just normalize miscarriage because it is just such a normal part of this process. Like it's very unfair, it is awful. I've had three. It never really gets easier, but I felt like we just needed to acknowledge that not everyone loves being pregnant. Some people do. Some people have really easy pregnancies. Some people don't. Some people have a wonderful time breastfeeding and love it, and some people have a really hard time. And even if you do have an easy time, probably at some point, it will be hard. So I wanted to just acknowledge kind of the reality on the ground. I wanted to give people frameworks for making decisions but not overwhelm them with like 5,000 different studies with questionable evidence that result in people feeling more confused. So I really have a wonderful OB editor who went through everything. I had many other people read it too, both books, and Bumpin', I'm actually very excited to share that we're doing a second edition. It's coming out next year. I am just starting to work on it now, so if anyone listening has questions or things you want to see in there or things that didn't vibe for you, I am so about getting messages on Instagram or emails or whatever you want, messenger pigeon, whatever, it's all good, but I'm going to start gathering some input for that. But what I realized after Bumpin' came out was that there's just a lot we're not talking about with fertility either, and all of these problems that people have during pregnancy, some of it we can kind of fix, but we can't fix it while they're pregnant. We can't help people avoid some of these problems unless we start sooner. And so, Fertility Rules is meant to be a preconception guide for anyone who wants to know more about their bodies, really. Like, I hope that 18-year-old girls who have questions about birth control or about, you know, who are just becoming sexually active, like pick it up and understand like biology. That is my focus. It is biology. It is this is what your fertile window is. This is what birth control does and does not do. This is how you manage your expectations on your own fertility, on your egg quality, and what you can and cannot do and provide the same information to men, because imagine a world in which men understood fertile windows.

Abby Mercado:
I can't imagine.

Leslie Schrock:
Wouldn't it be amazing?

Abby Mercado:
It can, and it seems awesome.

Leslie Schrock:
It would be an amazing world.

Abby Mercado:
Leslie, please.

Leslie Schrock:
I mean, I'm trying. What do you think? I'm trying. You write books for a lot of reasons, but I'm purely writing it because I just see a lot of need. I don't think it's that people don't want to know. I think it's just nobody tells them. And men are especially underserved with sexual health information. They don't learn anything about their bodies as kids. We really don't teach boys how to be respectful advocates for women's health from a young age either, and we don't teach them anything about their own bodies. What guy knows anything about their own sperm? Like zero?

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, I will say love your personal brand because you have two sons, and it's like you're rewriting a world for them. And as somebody who's followed your work is so obvious to me. I'm like, Oh, this is so sweet and so cute, but like, she really freakin means it.

Leslie Schrock:
Oh yeah.

Abby Mercado:
She is creating a better world for her sons.

Leslie Schrock:
I mean, listen. I am trying to raise two. My uterus is done, closed for business. We're all done with that chapter. Would have been amazing to have a girl, but I see it as such a privilege as a parent to parent two boys, and to teach them from a young age, that's a penis, this is a vagina. We're actually just really going deep on some of that stuff with my four-year-old right now because he has questions. He's like, What's that and what's this? We've always used those terms, and you better believe they're going to be the most body-literate, respectful young men on the planet, because that is the world that we should live in. Like us women, that is the world that we deserve, and that is the world that I am trying to build.

Abby Mercado:
Oh, yeah. Love it. I'm so fired up. Um, so I read Fertility Rules, obviously, and I love the humorous tone, and I am curious, what was writing a chapter in that book like? You were reading studies, you were working with a physician kind of helping inform some of the super detailed biological topics. Like, I guess maybe just walk us through like, what does drafting a chapter look like?

Leslie Schrock:
Well, I'll step back and say that directing a book is a very different experience for every book and every author. So for any writers out there, there is no one right way to do it. But I sold the proposal and had some conversations with my editor about what I wanted to accomplish and what I wanted to do. And a lot of the time, you start a book, and it goes in directions you never expect. Because I conducted over 100 interviews for that book. I talked to reproductive endocrinologists all over the world reproductive urologists, urologists, OBs, acupuncturists, physical therapists, pelvic floor experts, the list goes on. I've really listened to a lot of different people because I wanted to build a more holistic kind of view into that world, and I wanted to do it in a way that was fun to read because I don't know about you, but after having read a lot of really dry medical literature, I just wanted to explain it to people in a way that felt easy, like you could share it at a cocktail party or over dinner or with your children, really communicate to people like human beings as opposed to like scientific experiment subjects. And I put in the historical bits, those were some of my favorites to write. So every chapter starts with a little bit of how we got where we are today, which I think is really important. I think context matters. I think understanding why we believe what we believe is incredibly valuable for a lot of reasons, but it's also really great because that is the stuff that men get really into with Bumpin'. All of these friends were like, Oh my God, you finally got my husband to read a pregnancy book because you added in all of these little snippets about, you know, the history of this procedure or whatever. And so I thought, you know, this would be a really inviting thing for everybody, but, and especially men. I'll tell you the chapter that was in some ways the hardest to write and that I rewrote from scratch, actually, even after I submitted it the first time, was the egg chapter, because while I think egg freezing is incredible and I think that it's an innovation that's improving a lot of women's lives, I think it's very difficult to tell women the truth about eggs, which is that at some point there's very little you can do. You can't fix chromosomally abnormal eggs. Like there's no pill you can take, there's no potion you can take, there's no lifestyle change you can make, and it's really unfair. I know this because I think that is the source of my problems. I think I had chromosomally abnormal eggs. I had meiotic errors in my eggs. My husband's sperm was fine. Like, I actually made him get tested even though we weren't having any more kids, just so I could have this conversation. But I had to think really carefully about how I was going to position that information because I don't want to discourage anyone, but I also think a lot of women who are freezing eggs believe it's a guarantee, and it's not. It's not an insurance policy, it's a hedge. I mean, it's a pretty decent hedge, but it's a hedge. And I think that everyone deserves to have, really, like a full spectrum informed consent as it relates to influencers that are trying to sell them, you know, egg miracle substances like it's something I appreciate so much about what you guys do, really publishing great fact, clinically evidence-backed stuff because there's so much on the Internet right now, and TikTok and Instagram and everywhere, that's like, we can magically fix your eggs if you follow our seven-week protocol, and it's BS, and it's.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, I think that the misinformation, disinformation problem that is just everywhere. Like it's amazing that we can find so much information about whatever we want information about literally anywhere on the Internet, but that doesn't mean it's right. Probably over 50% of the time, it's probably wrong, which is really sad. And it's really sad when it has an outsized impact on women, and think that's totally true. So with that, I always ask this question as we're wrapping up the podcast. Time is flying. I feel like I could talk to you for hours and hours, but if you had to rescript one thing about women's health, just making conversations bigger and better, you know, we've talked about miscarriage, we've talked about male fertility, which actually is female fertility when you really think hard about it, what would that one thing be that you would rescript, Leslie?

Leslie Schrock:
I think it's something I felt so deeply in my own journey. I would remove shame from these very normal biological processes that none of us can control, and I think that the only way to do that is empowering people with information and telling them, You had a miscarriage, it's not your fault. There's nothing to be ashamed of. You didn't fail. You didn't fail a test. You didn't fail life. It's just a meiotic error in your eggs, probably, and it's common. And I think that it's the same for male fertility. There's so much shame associated with that, and nothing's really going to change with fertility overall until we start to get men tested and treated sooner. So, and that we're not alone. I felt so deeply lonely before I really went into this world and wrote Bumpin', and now I hear from people all the time that are going through the same thing and feel grateful that my voice is out there. And that is the whole reason for doing it, you know, because I don't think anyone should feel that that alone, and grief counseling is great, by the way, ten out of ten, would recommend. Yeah, but yeah, rescript the shame. It's not your fault.

Abby Mercado:
I love that. And thank you so much for being such a loud voice on behalf of women everywhere. So, Leslie, this has been fantastic. Like, truly, you're so easy to talk to. This has been such a fantastic conversation. Where can our listeners find you?

Leslie Schrock:
I'm all over the Internet, but I'm on Instagram, I'm on Twitter. LeslieSchrock.com, I think you can get just about anything you want from me. You can also write me an email. I always respond.

Abby Mercado:
Your newsletter is amazing.

Leslie Schrock:
Oh, thanks, and I have a substack. It's FertilityRules.com. Thanks for that reminder. Yeah, no, and I love hearing from readers. And seriously, if you have thoughts or feedback or anything on Bumpin', I am all ears. I am deep in it right now. And you know, thank you for listening and thank you for reading.

Abby Mercado:
Well, thanks again, Leslie. And I'm sure we'll talk soon.

Outro:
If this podcast means something to you, be sure to hit Follow or Subscribe. This helps you because you'll never miss an episode, and it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. It's wild enough to be a woman without taking on the Wild West of women's health information. The good news is that Rescripted did the legwork on your body, so you don't have to. And we're here when you're ready to be an expert in you. Head to Rescripted.com and follow us at @HelloRescripted on Instagram and TikTok.

Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.

Automatically convert your mp3 files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.

Sonix has many features that you'd love including upload many different filetypes, automated subtitles, collaboration tools, powerful integrations and APIs, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.