How To Access Better Maternal Mental Health Care

Quinn: [00:00:00] How can we provide better mental health support for pregnancy, postpartum, and loss around pregnancy? That's today's big question, and obviously in America in 2023, it's a loaded one. So I'm so thankful that my guest today is Simmone Taitt. She's the Founder and CEO of Poppy Seed Health. Simmone experienced the vast caps in emotional and mental support in American maternal healthcare while navigating her own path to parenthood after suffering multiple miscarriages, which she talks about today, with and without health insurance, like so many Americans.

Simmone identified a better way forward for all birthing people. She became a birth and full spectrum doula and then launched Poppy Seed Health in 2019. Poppy Seed Health, boy am I so excited about this organization. It is a growing [00:01:00] network of diverse, very qualified doulas, midwives, and nurses.

They provide care within seconds, private care right in the app just when you need it the most. And look if you've ever been a part of this journey as a pregnant person intentionally or not, as a partner, or in postpartum, whatever your path, you are probably intimately aware of how much and how often, often in the middle of the night. You just desperately need someone informed who can help answer questions around birth and postpartum planning, lactation support, general comfort, miscarriages, relationships, sleep, and so much more. And we do it very, very poor job as a country of intentionally providing these essential services, often intentionally not providing it.

And so that's why I am so glad that Poppy Seed exists. Welcome to Important, Not [00:02:00] Important. My name is Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit. In our weekly conversations, I take a deep dive, and boy is this a deep dive today, with an incredible human, like Simmone, who's working on the front lines of the future to build a radically better today and tomorrow for everyone.

And often so often that means doing the basics like this. So along the way, in every conversation, and especially this one, we will discover stories, but also tips and strategies you can use to, as we say, understand, and then help unfuck the world around us. Let's go meet Simmone.

Simmone, double M Simmone, welcome to the show. I appreciate you joining me today.

Simmone Taitt: I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me, Quinn.

Quinn: I hope to not abuse your trust and your time that you have kindly offered us here today. Simmone, where are you calling from? Where are you these days?

Simmone Taitt: I live in Jersey City, but the company is based [00:03:00] primarily in New York.

So that's where I am most of the time, downtown. But right now as we speak, I am in Sag Harbor in East New York. So we have a home here, but we really love Sag Harbor because there's a deep history here. It's a whaling town. I'm really into the ocean, but it also has one of the very last Black beach towns that's still standing in the US.

There are only 10 of them, so there's a lot of history here. I'm like a history buff.

Quinn: That's incredible. For better or worse, I have done a lot of that ancestry.com stuff before I had kids. Of course I haven't like opened the browser window in 10 years at this point. But for a long time I did a lot of that.

And one of the things I stumbled on, and obviously the further you go there's more question marks, but fairly sure that great-grandfather times 10 was one of the first Dutch colonists to come to and do New Amsterdam becoming [00:04:00] New York later. So that's interesting. Yeah that's all I got.

Everyone else is a bunch of Irish drunks.

Simmone Taitt: The Dutch, very important in coming to New York for a lot of different reasons. And you're one of those ancestry people. I get it. And did you do any of the other ones or did you just do one? Did you do like 23 and me? Did you go on the whole genetic DNA path?

Quinn: I haven't yet. In between doing all that work when I didn't have kids and what else was I going to do with my time to having them, that's when all the sort of DNA came stuff came about. I did, I think I did a 23andme test, but I haven't checked the like, Hey, find out which coworkers of yours are your cousins.

I haven't done that yet. I'm terrified of it. My wife definitely has a few friends who like found out their dad's not their dad.

Simmone Taitt: It happens, but Quinn, it happens..

Quinn: It's crazy. It's crazy. I got enough going on. I feel like I can't have those conversations at this point in my life.

Yeah. But I don't know, I, it's one of those things where I'm like, I wish I had asked more [00:05:00] questions to my grandparents. Forget even just names and dates and pictures. And who is this and how are they part of the family, but just stories and things like that. And so now I'm going, look, every one of these things I can semi concretely match is just something my kids will have and understand.

Yeah. Yeah. Even if they eventually cross me out of the picture entirely.

Simmone Taitt: Yeah, you're hitting on a passion point for me. And we haven't even gotten into all the meaty parts of Poppy Seed Health yet. But part of Poppy's product roadmap, and I won't give away too many trade secrets here, but it does get people very excited, is one of the things that I discovered on my own reproductive healthcare path in my own journey. And that is we in general don't know much about our fertility family tree for two reasons. The first is because culturally speaking, in general women, birthing people in general and families are [00:06:00] not asking the kind of questions, right? We'll ask like, who's our great grandfather?

Where are we from or where is our last name from? We're not asking things like, I've now had two pregnancy losses. I wonder if anyone else in my family has outside of my immediate family. And so when I started doing that research for myself, I realized that there have been at least four generations of women in my family who had suffered not just pregnancy losses but infertility. And they weren't using this language before. But I started putting together my what I call my own fertility family tree. And I'm like, oh my goodness. There's so many parallels here.

There's so much to learn about my own health and my own journey based on my own family. There is a passion point there, but there's also a product obsession about this because I think there's a there, there, as we talk about our own healthcare and participating [00:07:00] in our own health.

Quinn: I think you're totally right.

I totally think it's a there, there. Just the funnel of people who try to make babies who have a hard time, maybe eventually do, one way or another you will find on that journey the number of questions you end up asking or need to ask or had never even considered as a question before, just grows and grows.

The more that funnel gets dialed down as you're trying to understand why do I feel alone? Should I feel alone among friends and family? But further, like, has this happened before? And then if it has happened before in my family, okay can someone reputable help me understand like, what if this might be genetic?

What if it might not be. Or just best practices I can learn or things like that. Like you said, even two generations before us, the word fertility was just like nothing. At least practically. I love that a hundred percent. We certainly went down that journey and there's got to be a there, there, just help people pull together the pieces of the puzzle. Let's talk about Poppy Seed briefly. Let's lay the land. Oh wait, no wait. You're not getting away with this. The first question I ask everyone, I almost blew [00:08:00] this. Simmone with Double M. Ask everybody. I want to hear your whole life story, of course, but most importantly, why are you vital to the survival of the species?

And I would love for you to be bold and honest. Most people just laugh and then say something amazing.

Simmone Taitt: There is, I don't know that you've ever gotten a more literal answer, but we focus on the choices that it takes to either put life, give life, create life into the world, and as a species, we need that to happen.

And I say choices because it is incredibly important for people to have the choice of whether or not they want to procreate. Whether they want to make other little humans. But once that decision is made there is no more literal way for me to describe the [00:09:00] vitality of both humanity and the human race than to put and add other humans into our lives for whatever very small blip in the lifetime that we are on this earth.

So that is the most literal, like, answer to the question that you ask everyone. But to get a little bit more meta. I'll also say that you, we are all connected in humanity, right? In ways and we are all dealing with feelings, right? And so that's what we do at Poppy Seed Health. That is why we exist so that we can be the frontline nurse on feelings so that we can address the things that are happening with our nervous system in our brains.

How it all is related in our own healthcare. And emotional and mental health support is as vital as your heart health, as your gut health [00:10:00], as your brain health, as your muscle health, as your aging. It is a part of everything that we need to truly exist in the world.

Quinn: I think that wraps it up. Way to go. No, that was perfect. You're right. It is for that specific question, which is completely ridiculous. But also, again, we end up getting things that are fairly meaningful like that. For instance, yours is probably the most specific answer to that question that we could either set ourselves up for or have answered.

I appreciate it. That's fantastic. Okay, Simmone, let's do this. So tell me about Poppy Seed. Gimme the quick breakdown, whatever you're willing to share about what it is and where we are.

Simmone Taitt: Sure. I can't tell you about Poppy Seed Health without telling you why it exists in the world and sharing a bit of my own personal story.

Which is starts in 2016. So go all the way back to 2016 with me. I had my first pregnancy loss. It was my first miscarriage. I was [00:11:00] shocked. I didn't expect it. I went into a routine doctor's appointment for my second sonogram. We couldn't find a heartbeat. It does happen actually, the majority of pregnancies, about 80% of pregnancies that are not viable will happen during that first trimester.

And I was at the nine week mark and actually heading into the ten week mark, and I was devastated and I was not expecting that outcome. What I didn't also expect was to leave that doctor's appointment after about 15 minutes with no medical follow-up, no emotional or mental health resources. The second shock of my life came just within a 30 minute period that I walked out of this doctor's office, of course, deeply emotional, ugly crying, streets of New York first thing in the morning, trying to figure out as my brain was going crazy of, well, I feel pregnant.

Is the [00:12:00] doctor wrong? No one at work knows that I'm pregnant because it's first thing in the morning. And first thing in the morning, of course is when I have my doctor's appointment because no one knew at work. But in addition to that, we usually don't tell our employers that we're pregnant until we're showing, if that makes sense.

So there's that, and then my body wasn't doing any of the things that I'd seen on television because that was my own my only reference was let's just say dramatization of what a miscarriage actually looks like. I'm standing outside of my doctor's appointment and I pick up my phone and I go to no other than Dr. Google. I think it's important to pause here because for so many people that's the only accessibility point, and we know that about 85% of all of the searches in the US are people looking for healthcare answers. Thankfully, I have the gift of discernment, but just within a couple of minutes I found a few things that weren't offered to me by my own provider.

[00:13:00] So I picked up the phone. I called my own care plan back into my doctor's office asking for a specific kind of sonogram because I quickly learned on the internet that I needed to know that I had actually had a miscarriage that took everything out of my body that wouldn't be toxic to my body. So just for my own health and some other things, a blood draw, right?

To show that my HCG levels, which is the pregnancy hormone, was actually dropping because I was truly in a state of denial. Simple things like that weren't offered to me. I did not feel relieved after I got off the call with my doctor's office advocating for myself. I was enraged. I was infuriated.

I was also so upset. I was also grieving, yet I still went into the office. I still went through that entire day, and it wasn't until that evening when I was sitting on the couch at home, while I was still Googling everything right on the internet, just looking to [00:14:00] feel better, which is a very universal feeling that I stumbled on to a doula thread.

It happened to be on Reddit. It was some random person who also had a pregnancy loss, but it was only doulas that were responding to this person. And as I was reading through their responses, I started to feel that I really started to melt into that experience. And I, sat back on my couch and I thought to myself, I shouldn't have spent the last 12 hours looking for what I now know is emotional solvency, right?

It's what was actually making me feel better, and it was really powerful for me. And so two things happened almost simultaneously. The first thing is that, I decided to become a doula myself because that experience was so powerful. So I am a doula and I became a doula to be boots on the ground before, before building Poppy Seed Health, so I could really understand the gaps in our [00:15:00] maternal healthcare system.

But then the second thing that I decided was the idea for Poppy Seed Health. At that point, I don't know, I was 13, maybe 14 years into my tech career, I was on the growth side of most of these businesses, on the sales and business development side. But they were all leveraging the power of technology to create solutions into the world for in general, on demand, instantaneous reward.

And I knew that there was a place, I didn't know it as closely as I do now, but I knew that if I, as a singular person had no emotional and mental health support, that there were probably millions of people that needed this. And so the idea for Poppy Seed Health was also born that evening to very simply deliver on demand emotional and mental health support, one-on-one from doulas, midwives, and nurses, who we call our advocates.

And the vision was very simple. Press a button on your phone, [00:16:00] be in a conversation. Trusted, safe, secure conversation where you can talk about your feelings and hopefully feel better in the most acute moments that you need it. And so we focus on pregnancy, postpartum, and loss support. You can go to Poppy Seed Health.

We have an app. We also have an API and a backend that holds it all up. It's really the brains of Poppy, but we have very sophisticated algorithms in the front end that you don't have to worry too much about. We can talk about that all you want, but what those algorithms are doing, is connecting you with someone who can support you for wherever you are in your journey.

And that's really very important to Poppy and why we exist in the world.

Quinn: Thank you for sharing your story. I imagine you have bravely done that quite a few times because it is the genesis of this whole thing, but it's not easy still to do that culturally or [00:17:00] emotionally or spiritually or all those things, so I really do appreciate that.

It does, one of the things, again, like I mentioned to you, I've been so lucky to talk to so many just incredibly smart people. And sometimes they're working on something because they're just incredibly smart and it piques their interest and they happen to be good at it. But I really try to dial it down to the context is there's so often people listening who are trying to find their way into helping in some way.

That's the question we get all the time. What can I do about whatever it is? Usually it's this intersection of what are you into, what are your skills? And then I can point you towards 5,000 very reputable things that are already happening where you can help. But often it includes some sort of personal story.

This is obviously among the most personal. And that matters because it really helps people who are listening to not only feel like they can share their stories much less pursue something further on top of them or so it doesn't happen to other people or help people who it's inevitably going to happen to.

Like you're obviously it's going to keep happening with pregnancy. But also because it [00:18:00] just matters like why do you have to do this work and that can be pretty painful at first to acknowledge that not only can you not escape something difficult that has happened to you or someone you love, but that you have to dive deeper into it to help other folks. But it does really help other people to hear that. So I appreciate you sharing that and from all indications, Poppy Seed seems like something very cool and certainly of the moment, and certainly in this country, something that we need. Most importantly, where's the name Poppy Seed from?

Simmone Taitt: I love that you asked me that question, only because I don't get asked that question enough, which is interesting to me. I am always curious about the name of companies, and then like I make up my own narratives and things when I don't know it. So thank you for asking me. So Poppy Seed Health, it's a bit of a double entendre.

There are so many people that go out and they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to an ad agency and very smart creative people to come up with names. So Poppy Seed Health, the name came to [00:19:00] me in the shower. If you know me I'm a big hydrotherapy gal. I love everything about water.

I get my best thinking done near water, but mainly in the shower. I am also a podcast junkie and I listened to a really interesting podcast with the founder of Chuck E. Cheese, and there was a segment in which he talked about, also not having the money to be able to pay these ad agencies and things.

But he was taking all of these, like calls with people. And one of the things that stuck with him was when they were renaming the company that for something like Chuck E. Cheese and their brand, you want people to have to smile when they're saying the name. And so I dare you to try and say, Chuck E. Cheese without smiling, it's a natural smile. You can't do it. It's the alliterations, it's the pronunciation. It's [00:20:00] everything. So that stuck with me as I was going through this grueling process of what do we want to name the company? Like what is the name of this company? And so there are a couple of principles that we stand by even today at Poppy Seed Health.

The first one is the system in general is rigged for the baby, but not the person who is carrying the baby. We want to put the focus very squarely on the needs of that person. I was playing around with words like belly, and I said No. Actually the second real principle, which is true, is that you will not at Poppy Seed Health in any of our branding, and you can hold me to this, you will never just see a baby bump ever.

We include the whole person. The whole people, whomever it is. And we actually use real people, not models and that sort of thing for our photography.

Quinn: The photography on your website's incredible. Like I've never seen a more inclusive or diverse or however you want to phrase it, collection of people. I just kept clicking because [00:21:00] I was like, what's next? This is amazing.

Simmone Taitt: Thank you very much. We take a lot of pride in that, and our creative director, who has been with me since my, the very beginning, she was actually the second hire very early on for us, we take that very seriously because it reflects who we are supporting every day, but you'll never just see a belly, because, it's very important for us to focus on the whole person. And so I was taking this Chuck E. Cheese advice and also thinking about the real mission of Poppy, who we are supporting, how we do that at scale, the vision of the company.

And then I thought about what it actually means to support someone. And so the double entendre here is that the size of a poppy seed is the very first size of an embryo, and that's poppy seed, although we are poppy and then the word seed and then the word health. So it's not poppy seed together.[00:22:00]

But of course people can't help but think about poppy seed bagels. But that's okay. They have the poppy seed there. But actually poppy, the flower, looks fragile, but is one of the most resilient flowers. It is also a wild flower. And what happens with poppies is that the wind takes the seeds to wherever they're going to go and fall.

Wherever the wind takes them, they plant, and then they grow, which is why we have these beautiful wild flower patches of poppies around the world where they can actually grow. And there was just something very visceral about that for me. I shared my first pregnancy loss. I've had many since 2016, and they've all been very different.

Yet, somehow I'm still resilient. And so are the one in four people that will experience a pregnancy loss during their reproductive healthcare years or whatever that actual, whatever the loss looks like on the spectrum. But the point is, there's just this beauty in [00:23:00] thinking about a wild flower patch or field of poppies out there.

So the flower poppy, which you will also see a lot in our branding and then seed together and that's where the name came from. Poppy Seed Health. And I think you have to smile when you say it, when you say poppy. It's very hard not to smile.

Quinn: The fact that this goes all the way back to Chuck E. Cheese is incredible. I love it.

Simmone Taitt: Childhood memories.

Quinn: I have so many questions and thoughts. One, do you know what Aqua Notes are? My wife is going to throw this out the window. There are these waterproof pieces, waterproof pads of paper you can get. I just get them from Amazon with a waterproof pencil.

And I go through stacks of these fucking things in the shower, and then my kids use my shower and they put 20 notes up all over the place. And I'm like where'd my paper go? But it's an adorable note. Aqua notes. I'm going to send them to you. Order them, it's going to change lot. It's amazing.

Simmone Taitt: Amazing.

Also, great branding for them. Aqua Notes. It is exactly what it is.

Quinn: It's exactly what it is, [00:24:00] exactly what it is, fantastic. The number of times I have learned the lesson of just write it down on your Aqua Note. Because no, you aren't actually going to remember it even though you think you do.

Never. The second I get out the shower, I'm like 40 other things and it's gone. It never comes back. That is probably the most well considered and intentional name for a company that I've come across. That's amazing. I couldn't hate ours anymore than I do.

Simmone Taitt: Listen, it took a long time.

I'm telling you. It took a really long time and I did not think that it would be me that would come up with the name of the company, if I'm being honest. So the fact that I did and the fact that it was for free out of my own brain. It's like, oh my God. Really? It's like a startup win.

Like one of my proudest moments, and I'll tell you something else, Quinn, last thing on our name, I guess any branding expert, and I hold creatives at high esteem because I don't consider myself one, although I think it's really important to have them. But from the [00:25:00] time we came up with Poppy Seed Health and we came up with the name, whenever I would say the name of the company to anyone, they would say, oh yeah, I've heard of that.

I've heard of, I've heard of Poppy Seed Health. I'm like, we don't even have a website. But like, I just knew any branding expert is like, if someone is like oh yeah, that sounds so familiar. Oh yeah, I know that name. Anyway, so founders don't get to toot our horns like too often. But that is one of the things that I'm like, patting myself on the back about.

Quinn: What it shows besides clear, like creative acumen and a sense of like the mysticism of how our world is all connected and nature and all of these things. Is how intentional you are about this process from the beginning.

Not just, I got to come up with this name, but I got to become a doula first so I can walk the walk and really start to understand, and as you described, the gaps in our health system, which I almost wonder at this point if it's not like gaps between things, but just like, there's islands of health and the rest of it is just, a dark ocean where everybody goes to die.

It's [00:26:00] not great. I appreciate that because it seems like every choice along the way, you have really tried to build something very intentional and very focused to help people. Tell me a little bit about, as much as you're willing to share how many advocates you've got on board, how they break down and then we'll get into the more of the whys and the more organic part of this.

Simmone Taitt: So our advocates are a secret sauce. There is no other way of putting that, but I could've never envisioned really building the kind of advocate network that we have in the country without becoming a doula myself. It's almost like getting street cred, right? That's part of it. It was a big part of it for me. One, doulas really saved my life that evening. I was in a very dark place and I was in a dark place for a while and very lucky that I was able to stumble into this chat thread, right? But [00:27:00] actually, when I went through my first doula training, which was first doula training, that was in January of 2019, so a few years after my first pregnancy loss, right?

When I went through that training, what I did was I decided to support clients across a full spectrum of need. So that included people who were on Medicaid. It included people who had no health insurance. It included people who had marketplace health insurance. It included people who had commercial health insurance.

It included people who didn't need health insurance because they were so well off, they just didn't need it. I was able to support clients across the full spectrum of need and realized that the through line was everyone was asking the same question. It didn't matter if you lived in a mansion in Beverly Hills, or if you were unhoused, what mattered was that you just wanted to know how to stop your nausea, or what mattered was [00:28:00] you just needed to know how to get rid of those pregnancy symptoms you still had after your third or fourth pregnancy loss.

What nutrition is best, right? Where to go to complain about your partner. Everyone was doing the same thing no matter what it was. I got to experience that as a doula myself. But the other thing that I got to experience, and the other thing I really needed to understand were the nuances, not just as a doula, but as a birth worker.

And we call, we say birth workers and advocates because your nurse is your advocate in the hospital, right? Doulas are your best friend you never thought you needed to have. And midwives are a critical part of maternal healthcare in our country, historically and even now. But so many midwives and doulas have become, the narrative has so much become that they're out of reach.

They're way too expensive, right? It's only for people who can afford [00:29:00] them. Health insurance does not cover a lot of this care. And so I learned those nuances. Just the lifestyle of what it looks like to be a birth worker in this country. For me to be boots on the ground meant that I was getting a double lesson.

I was able to support my clients, but also really understand what it means to be a full-time doula. And I'll tell you a couple of things that I discovered and what went into the product of Poppy Seed Health, and then why we decided to focus on the human side of our business. Really building a business within a business because of our advocate network.

The first thing that is really critical is that 85% of doulas. In the country are not making a livable wage. So you have these highly trained people. Who have gone through their trainings, who are actually supporting people in community, out of community, but who are only like reg relegated to their zip code, within a certain mile radius that are not working. They're just not able to [00:30:00] work because they can't support themselves or their families. And so that first big learning. And that is something that we've built into our product experience and community experience at Poppy Seed Health, right? The second thing that we learned is that it's really critical for the network of our advocates to actually be in and out of our healthcare system, right?

So nurses are really important for us, right? When they're in labor and delivery, in birth, like whatever it is, they are very important because they're one of the most important people on your care team. Even if you met them just that day, when you go in to have the baby or whatever that looks like, but they're interfacing with your provider all the time.

They're the ones that are actually, making you comfortable in some cases, unfortunately, uncomfortable. But the point is that they are interfacing, they are your advocate on the ground. And so for those nuances, we had to build them in[00:31:00] to the product experience. And so when we launched Poppy in April of 2021, we had 40 advocates from across the country.

We didn't cover all the time zones. We were very much bi-coastal, but it didn't matter because what our tech does, is it allows someone in Kansas to request a chat. They don't know who they're getting that, that advocate could be in Arkansas. But the point is that our algorithms are working very quickly in about 300 milliseconds to be able to connect you with that person in about 10 seconds.

You're telling us things and we're able to connect you with the right people at the right time and for whatever need that you have. What happened pretty quickly, which is the most beautiful part about community building, is that these 40 advocates started to tell their friends and their friends started to tell their friends, and the friends of their friends started to tell their friends because we really focused our efforts.

I'm first creating a [00:32:00] space for an overlooked population within our healthcare system. Those doulas, nurses and midwives that are often ignored, often underpaid, but that want to come to Poppy as an extension to do the work that they love, earn supplemental income and do it whenever they want. So we, we know this model out in the world.

Think about DoorDash, think about Uber, right? We know that this model works. No one had ever applied it to growing a network the way that we have. Within a year, we were at just over 400, and right now we have a couple of thousand advocates in the country. We cover every single time zone, every single state.

It's really critical to our growth, but we focused so much and we still do on the community of those birth workers and we are connecting them with each other as well. So it really is a business within the business. [00:33:00] About 60% of our advocate network identify as BIPOC, 30% identify as queer. They are supporting people and mirroring exactly who we support every single day on the member side, and that's really important for us.

Quinn: I appreciate you providing so much context to what on the surface is a simple question because there has obviously been over the past few years, so obviously we're all trapped at home for a period of time. Many of us already knew again that there were these gaps in healthcare coverage of a huge variety and mental health was more or less ignored.

And then Covid comes along and as Ed Young and the Atlantic described it, which is a better metaphor than I ever had is it was a flood that exposed all the cracks that already existed. Or it was a, the pop quiz, it was like, Hey, here's all the choices you've made the past a hundred years.

Let's see how you did. Totally not great, but we're trapped at home and there's all this VC funding plowing into telehealth companies and ads on Instagram and all these different things. And now we're a few years in and interest rates are going up and they [00:34:00] pay their bills and the receipts are in.

And you find out that a lot of these companies are understandably having a hard time one, matching VC expectations, which are often a nightmare. Two, just scaling their technological infrastructure or their support infrastructure. The people actually inside the company, much less their, like you said, Uber for X, right?

You start to see the quality of their delivery people or the quality of whatever it might be, start to suffer as they scale, right? To meet all of the demand. But it seems like you're taking a much more intentional route about going with, like you said, doulas and nurses and midwives who are so well credentialed and so could be so much of a bigger part of the care economy, but aren't even able to support themselves to do it.

And yet they have this very unique set of skills and empathy that they want to contribute and then they can contribute. So it seems like, I guess the short answer is [00:35:00] that your provider, your advocates are going to be a little more qualitatively I don't want to say regulated, but qualitatively impactful.

Then trying to scale up again, folks who are just doing deliveries and have a bike, for example. Does that make sense? It's probably a small pool to draw from of course, but there's a bit of a cheat code there in the sense that they're already so well qualified for what they do, and they want to do this very specific thing.

Simmone Taitt: That's exactly right. Look, you hit on a couple of points that I think are very important here, and we can't have this conversation Quinn, without talking about AI because I'm getting asked the question every single day. Isn't AI just going to replace this? Isn't AI going to replace the robots in AI specifically are going to replace all of the things that are terribly wrong about maternal healthcare, reproductive healthcare, women's healthcare, and that's okay. We're going to solve it because, we have AI now. I will tell you that there is nothing better than getting a nurse who has[00:36:00] years of experience inserting your IV line with no pain. Trust me, I do not think AI will be able to solve for that. Or a doula who is literally with you in the delivery room when you've worked on things like hypnotherapy and mantras to get you through that ring of fire. And every birthing person will know exactly what I'm talking about on this podcast.

To get you to that other side. Or after you've had an unexpected cesarian and you cannot even barely stand up straight. Like AI can solve for a lot of things. And it will in healthcare actually. And I believe that it will, for example, at Poppy, it will help us better funnel people.

But we know the number one reason people come to Poppy Seed Health, and we're not two and a half years, three years with our MVP in the market now, is that human to human connection. The very first thing that someone says is, Oh [00:37:00] my goodness. I didn't think I'd get someone real. And we know within 17 seconds whether you're going to leave that chat with that advocate.

Which is why it's critically important for us to make sure that the quality of the advocate, the quality of the person that we even invite to become an advocate at Poppy Seed Health, that we're rigorous with our onboarding. They're coming with their licenses, certifications, trainings, but they don't even touch the app until six to eight weeks after they've onboarded with Poppy Seed Health.

We are creating empathy at scale. When we talk about being the front liners on feelings. Sure. You're going to start with whatever the question is that you come to chat with us about at Poppy, but most people don't believe this when I tell them, and like we have all of this significant data to back it up.

The majority, the average chat length is 37 minutes and we only provide texting on Poppy. We've tried video, we've tried phone. No one wants [00:38:00] to tell you about their hemorrhoids in their third trimester. When they're looking at you on the video, right? But they'll do it in a text conversation and they may start there with that question, but they tumbleweed into other things that they have nowhere else to go to talk about or that they are talking about, but it's their own space. It's something that I call expert anonymity. You really hit on two things. The first thing is that quality of the advocate, right? Going back to how important it is to actually get a human on the other line at 3:00 AM in the morning when the baby has stopped latching all of a sudden, and you're totally melting down.

There's no chatbot, there is no AI product that can see, that can hear you, and that can help you feel seen in those moments. Then a Poppy Seed Health nurse, doula, or midwife, and I stand really boldly by that.

Quinn: Who has done it in person so many times that anything you say to them, [00:39:00] like they have been there.

They have been there before. They have not, there's no version of this that they have not encountered.

Simmone Taitt: But the second thing that you hit on that I think is extraordinarily important as we think about solving the biggest crisis in our country in maternal healthcare, and that is the mortality and the morbidity, specifically preventable mortality and morbidity rates in our country, right?

Who it affects women who look like me, black and brown women, three to five x more than any other birthing person, right? When we think about our white counterparts, not only do we know that systematically, there are very deep fissures in our healthcare system that just apply to inequitable care, right?

But we also know that one of the things that helps tremendously is culturally competent care. Now, I think it's important to say this as the second point that you were that you hit on for [00:40:00] me. And that is we provide support that emotional and mental health support for everyone, and I know there are a lot of arguments, you can't do everything for everybody.

No. This is such a critical crisis in our country that it is so important for us to be able to improve our technology, our experience over time, so that we can meet people at the intersectionality of whoever they are or wherever they are. Without the kind of huge boundaries and mountains you have to climb to get the kind of care that we all deserve.

Right? There is no other way for us to do that unless we are actually thinking about everyone. And actually designing for everyone, which is why we went to market, pregnancy, postpartum, and loss support. We didn't say like, oh, we're doing also menopause and we're also doing like, there is a vast, far and wide healthcare landscape for us to grow into. But the most critical need still [00:41:00] in the United States is that the number one cause of death postpartum is mental health issues. Mental health. And so we want to get ahead of that for folks and we know if we can do that everything else comes out.

So effectively we're very good patient extenders, which is why our business model is what it is now. Because we want to unburden all of those places where the patient is getting stuck. Whether or not they know it and we’re in all of those places now. So anyway, those are critically important points for us to solve.

Quinn: No, that's so important. And there's about, unsurprisingly 128 different things. I kept pinning in my brain as you spoke, but one of the things I really tried to do is to, constantly part of having three children who just continually ask why, the age old thing of it eventually dials you down to whatever you want to call it, the fundamentals, the first principles, whatever it might be.

And you're like, because I said so, but that's not super [00:42:00] helpful to anyone because then they just come back. They're relentless. But is to really try to break these problems we have down to the things that are immutable. Which is that 200,000 years into Homo sapiens -ish, fertility and then should you be able to get pregnant or pregnant, whether you want to or not is still really complicated.

If ignore for any for the moment, any healthcare of any sort, any access, anything like that, the actual nature of it is still pretty, can be pretty complicated. It can be pretty dangerous. And that's ignoring again, the mental health part. Now when you start to add all those pieces on, you understand that, like you were saying, the quote unquote total addressable market of these folks that are going to go through this is some large percentage of half of the population.

The variations within that group, among that group are infinite. And what I liked about what you were saying is [00:43:00] how you increasingly framed this as really an essential service. If we're going to continue to have people get pregnant again, can't ignore whether they want to or not in this country, when we know as a fact that our choices mean that among wealthy countries we’re last for maternal mortality and then black women are two to three times worse. I had a representative, Lauren Underwood on a year ago in her home state of Illinois it's like six times as worse. It's a nightmare. So she's got Momnibus, she's incredible. She lost her best friend to it.

You add all those things on and again, like you said, it becomes so evident that this is such an essential service. And so one of the things when I was talking to my wife last week about this conversation and we've been talking about these things on and off, for so long, is we have some distance from it, but we start to see friends go through it and not talk about it and talk about it and all those things.

And I said to her, I said, if there's one thing you want me to get [00:44:00] into or a question you want me to ask, whatever it is, talked about it. And within an instant, she said she firmly feels like, and again, we were so privileged, we're at Cedar-Sinai in Los Angeles, who, and the care there was wonderful.

And we were so lucky once we were able to have kids, and then with our first one, and again, we'll see what, she has me cut out of this, but, after all these tries and miscarriages and failings, she has to have an emergency cesarian, which you don't realize that's the sliding doors of your body going in two very different directions, right?

Because you're like, yes, let's get this baby out for the birthing person and the baby, but oh my God, what it does to your body, right? Her big point to me was, this needs to be, this type of thing, Poppy Seed needs to be an opt-out service, not an opt-in service. Something where the pregnant person is onboarded along the way, whether you feel like you need it or not, or you even know that there's questions to be asked.

Almost like breastfeeding consultation, right? The person who comes in that first time and is like, yeah, you've never latched before. Let's do this thing. Let me help you. [00:45:00] It's unbelievable that in this country, it's not something that is just par for the course, right? I can't remember I think it's in the UK, whose own health services going down the tubes.

You get this little box when you leave and there's all these things in the journal, and how is this not something we talked about, onboarding your advocates. How is this not something that is onboarding for the birthing people that you know should be part of the puzzle? Because to her point, having gone through this, once you need help, it is so hard to ask for help.

Because of the social stigma, because of how you feel, because of the hormones, because of your just health in general or what you might've gone through, whether you have a healthy baby or not, or any baby or not, it is so hard to ask for help once you are already behind the pain. That was her point.

And I wonder if you think about that at all. You seem incredibly ambitious with this whole thing, so I'm sure you have, but I thought that was so telling.

Simmone Taitt: So Quinn, when are we all doing a double date? I would love to meet your wife.

Quinn: Oh my God. She would take it in a [00:46:00] heartbeat.

We’ll come up to New York. We'll give, we'll meet up. She would be so excited.

Simmone Taitt: Oh, okay. So she hit on something that keeps me up at night before ever even starting Poppy Seed Health. And it was so hard for me to show up for myself. So the number one thing that we know, and I often say this is that everyone, and I really do mean this, everyone, our healthcare system investors, venture capitalists, everyone from the outside booking in is expecting you to not show up for yourself. And what I mean by that is that behavioral change does not happen overnight. There was not a world in which, a decade ago we thought that we could pick up our phones and order a car to our front door, get into that car with a perfect stranger of whom we do not have to have [00:47:00] any conversation with.

And also do not have to exchange any money with in the car, get from point A to B, get out of that car, and then repeat that behavior many times over. There was not a world in which you thought that you could pick up your phone and find the love of your life. Your husband, your wife, whomever, a date for the night.

There was not a time that we thought that these things were safe, that they were safe to use, that they would deliver on the product that they were promising. But what I'm describing here, they've monumentally shifted the way that we interact in the world and the options that we have and the choices that we're making.

Order a car, get take out, find the love of my life. Because in the United States, emotional and mental health support is not a part of our maternal [00:48:00] care healthcare system. It's not a part of our reproductive healthcare system. It's not a part of our healthcare system. It is actually siloed. And it is even really hard to get to. And we know that because we're finally talking about mental health support and wellness, so much more. Covid of course, heightened this for us. But we are talking about many centuries of need here. Our therapists are completely burnt out, our psychiatrists are completely burnt out.

We can barely get to the support that we need. Forget about acutely, but in maternal healthcare, very specifically to your wife's point, and I promise I'm getting to my point here. Is that behavioral change does not happen overnight. And the number one barrier to entry for Poppy Seed Health that we are consistently trying to solve for is you feeling worth enough to show up for yourself?

It is a worthiness question [00:49:00] and we have a worthiness answer. However, we have created every kind of UX simplicity for you to hit that button, to have a conversation on Poppy. Yet 78% of everyone that downloads our app, the first place they go is sleuthing in our evidence-based library, which is free to everyone, right?

And we did that on purpose and we're constantly saying, Hey, come chat with an advocate. Promise we're real. You could chat with us now. But sometimes that's really hard to do, and I would say 90% of the time it's hard to do. And yes, it was critical for Poppy and our growth and where we are right now.

Right now in our path with the company, which many exciting things to come, but after realizing and knowing going into this, that's what we were up against. When I'm, the behavioral change that doesn't happen overnight. So any [00:50:00] investor, thank goodness for the investors who are on our journey with us at Poppy Seed Health, who have believed since Day Zero, they know this change is going to happen.

It doesn't happen overnight, but when it does and Poppy being at the forefront of it, it is an opportunity for us to just be available from the very moment someone says, I'm trying to conceive or I've just had an abortion and I need some sort of care support to go to, or I'm the partner in this relationship and we've been trying for seven years and I have my own emotional needs, right?

These are the truly the biggest things that we're tackling at Poppy, but the worthiness factor is the number one thing that we're up against. And so if we're just there, if you know we're available, if we are doing our jobs really well [00:51:00] and we are innovating and building in this space, that every single time you turn to that worthiness and you want to show up for yourself, you're showing up at Poppy Seed Health.

We're doing something really right.

Quinn: It's, yeah. And again I don't know how much publicly be allowed to share this, but I feel like we've seen every version of, again, having all the privilege and access in the world like 12 years ago, it just take a normal person who you're like, Hey, listen, maybe talk therapy would help.

Again, normal person doesn't exist. But the point is like to get to yourself or anyone to talk to a therapist just about life, hard enough, forget when you've got all these hormones in the stakes and all these things. I remember on our fertility journey. We never figured out what our problem was, quote unquote problem.

All we know is that once we made the embryos, it became dwindled very quickly and they, the quality was garbage basically. They were like, good luck. It's never going to happen. It did. We're very lucky. But I remember, so many specific points when they [00:52:00] were finally like and we ended up, we, I think we had five different fertility doctors and the last one is incredible and we owe him everything.

But at one point, him being like, now might be the time where we start to consider using an egg donor and what that means practically is one thing. What that means psychologically for everything you've ever thought from when you were 15, your parents are like, don't be an idiot. You're going to get pregnant immediately.

To now to, oh, quote unquote, and again, this is just the traditional use of it, like not going to have my own child and flipping through that book at night. And when you, as my wife was, none of her friends really had kids yet. So like, who's she going to talk to, me?

What could I offer in that respect. Like, forget my own issues in the moment. But there are so many, even if you have a quote unquote healthy, regular pregnancy, whatever it might be, there are just so many opportunities, not just for your service, but where it seems to make sense [00:53:00] systemically. And this comes back to our whole healthcare issues is wellness versus triage essentially.

Which is where something like this, like Poppy Seed needs to be inserted into the process over and over so that it isn't quite so rough on the other side, whatever the other side looks like, because there are so many, again, however you want to phrase them fail points or along the way of fertility and pregnancy. And then like you said, when so much of the issue is the year after when it is so difficult, just again, looking at systemically just seems like we it is such a flagrant self-defeating failure to not look at this and go like, Wait, what are the things that are needed along the way here so that it's not so bad on the other side?

I just, I don’t know, it's got to frustrate you even more, but at the same time, you're building something that hopefully we can use there.

Simmone Taitt: It is mind blowing. And the frustration is fuel for me because we hear it all the time at Poppy. And just to just to put this in context for you, with like [00:54:00] very little marketing.

We went to market direct to consumer that only lasted six months. We now probably work with health plans and employers and large clinical partners, because truly about 96% of all of our reproductive healthcare is happening within some kind of healthcare network or a clinic, right?

So we want to be where everyone is. And as closely to them as possible. But in two years we've had nearly 60,000 hours. That's about, that's just over 4 million minutes of chat time. We are talking to a lot of people who are finding Poppy and coming to Poppy and coming to us over and over again because they’re either looking for support, they're looking for education, and they're also looking for ways to advocate for themselves. It's mind blowing in our country and you were getting here a little bit when you were talking about the UK. We're the only developed [00:55:00] country in what something like this does not happen.

So let me paint this picture for you. First of all, midwifery led care is how most European nations, not just European nations, in and throughout continental Africa, everywhere outside of the US, is really focused on midwifery care. Which is whole body care. You actually don't see an OBGYN in most of these countries unless there's a complication or unless surgery is needed, which so many of our OBGYNs, whom we love, by the way, we love our providers.

Like, thank goodness for them. We do not want to marginalize them in their own industry. We want to help them. We want to be able to make sure that they can actually deliver on precision care and medicine. That doesn't happen in maternal healthcare, but outside of the country it does, midwifery led care you get a doula from almost the very beginning and then get this. After you have the baby in most countries, they don't send you home within 24 hours or 48 hours. n Japan they keep you there for a week and they're actually [00:56:00] teaching you how to take care of a baby, right? They're nourishing your body.

They're helping you with lactation. They're helping you learn. They're workshopping you as a new parent or parent on how to take care of this little human cannon that just came into your life before they kick you out the front door. And then in European countries, like the UK, it doesn't matter where you are socioeconomically, as soon as you get home with that baby, within 72 hours, a nurse is on your front doorstep.

You've never met that nurse. You have no idea who that nurse is. They are showing up for four to six weeks on your doorstep to take care of you. And to help you here in the States, we have postpartum doulas, but this is free. It's a part of just your healthcare, your maternal healthcare journey.

When you're out of the US and we know that there are better outcomes, we know that there are better long-term health outcomes. We know that there are better reproductive healthcare outcomes, and more importantly, emotionally and mentally [00:57:00] that person in that family is so much better. They score higher on almost every single score when it comes to emotional and mental health support and their physical healing.

In the United States, we ask one time how you're feeling. It is after you have the baby and it is within the first few hours, typically with the social worker, how are you feeling, which is one survey that is universal in this country. If you happen to flag on that survey, typically they'll say, you just had a baby.

You're just hormonal. Go home. You'll be okay. We're not flagging for PMADS. At Poppy, we are asking how you're feeling constantly. We're surveying you constantly. We're not asking one time within the first six weeks typically of you having a baby at Poppy. We're actually asking you every seven to 10 to 12 days depending on your answers.

And we're able to get you the kind of support that you need without you feeling like [00:58:00] you're going to end up in things like, child protective services or whatever. We're that protective bomb and actually that's what we're seeing the most excitement and growth at Poppy around, right?

Is that you finally have a partner and it just so happens that we are centering on your emotional and mental health support. Everything else grows out of that. And you probably, you hear the passion in my voice about this, but trust me, I know that behavioral change doesn't happen overnight. We're keeping at it.

This is the very bold stance that we've taken in the world, and we'll keep building, we'll keep building to deliver on it.

Quinn: The worthiness thing just sticks with me so much because again, so we had almost the exact same experience after all these fertility failures and going in and going into a doctor's appointment and I think it was a nurse practitioner does the heartbeat test. And then walks out of the room and we're like, [00:59:00] that feels a little bit off. Leaves us alone for, I don’t know, 10 minutes. And then doctor comes in and gives us the news. And then again, you go down this path of like, why isn't it working? Why does it keep feeling, is it me? What happens to me?

Why is this me? It's supposed to be easy. Am I not supposed to, like all these different things? But again, like, am I worthy of this kind of care? Like why do I have to extra care? It's crazy that anyone should have to ask these questions at all. And especially when it's so crystal clear, and again, that's among the general population, but much less among black women, black birthing people.

It's just like, again I'm trying to frame this as opportunities, which is the point of having you on and finding folks like yourself who were just like I'm going to start fixing this because I've been through this and I can walk the walk. And I understand that the market for this is just enormous and everyone needs it. It is the most personal care you could ever need.

Simmone Taitt: Yeah, that's exactly right. And Quinn, I, oh [01:00:00] gosh, my heart for you and your wife, it's the shittiest club to be a part of by the way, when you are either trying to conceive and you're also going through losses, and you're also asking yourself, what's wrong with me? What's wrong with my body?

What's wrong with us? The whole thing. I have been there, I am still there in so many ways on patient zero for, for Poppy Seed Health. Our product roadmap reflects that. In many ways. I think very much on the other side of what it looks like when you do get, and I'm going to use language here that it, there's no other way to really say it, but, when we think about fertility and infertility and what that journey looks like, if you are, if you've intentionally started to try and conceive that's one thing.

But if you've unintentionally conceived and you do not have the choices whether you are going to [01:01:00] keep or terminate that pregnancy, there are ripples of generational health problems, emotional and mental health issues and concerns that come up that ripples for generations.

Economic, socioeconomic, across the entire spectrum. And that's one end of the spectrum. But it is not separate than what the majority, as my partner likes to say, it's a very big problem for a small amount of people in that once you start layering on, okay, we're trying to conceive, it's not working, the windfall of financial obligation that then goes from IVF to egg donors to maybe a sperm donor, to IUIs. These thousands of dollars add up very quickly.

And if your employer isn't helping, if that's not even an option, which is the majority of [01:02:00] America, which is the majority of our country, it adds a very quickly, and there are still so many similar psychological, like socioeconomic, we're talking about first, second, third, fourth mortgages, if you can even have a mortgage to take loans against.

All of those things.

Quinn: Before you have the baby.

Simmone Taitt: Before you have the baby. Forget about, what happens after you actually bring children into the world and in our own, what I think could be much, much better social net for folks in the US but all of those things together, and I'm rambling a little bit here.

of those things together on both spectrums of what I just described intentionally and not intentionally having children in this world. We hear about all of them at Poppy, right? Like those are intersections that you wouldn't think are so similar, but they are so similar.

The stress level [01:03:00] for financial obligation, trust me, is the same when you did not intend to have a child and the same when you are intending to have a child, right? And so that's just an example. But those are the kinds of things where we know that people need safe spaces to talk about and it leads to other things that we can support them in.

And it leads to us being that great intermediary in those patient extenders to get them behavioral health or, whatever it is, care that they actually need. Because it started with a trusted conversation in so many ways, it starts because we want something so badly that is just not happening for us.

Quinn: I know you probably have to run and go finish saving the world here pretty shortly, but can we talk a little bit briefly about how maybe the mission and the work was accelerated or broadened in the past year, post the Dobbs ruling and things like that? Did you see your network of advocates who can't work in certain States anymore go up, or the number of people who are [01:04:00] unintentionally now having children or have to have children?

How has that changed the scope or anything like that? Or is it just we're already doing it now, it's, we're just here for more people,

Simmone Taitt: Like so many people, and I'm really using that broad term. Like so many people who have been following for the last several years, what's happening or what was going to happen inevitably with our Supreme Court.

We saw the shift, which was a long-term strategy, by the way, to a extraordinarily conservative court over the last 10, 15, 20 years. And that is a long-term strategy of this. If you've been paying any attention, we knew that was coming down. We also, in so many ways, when it comes down to politics, we know that with the court becoming more conservative, things like access to [01:05:00] safe legal abortions would be one of the first things for them to take up in the court.

And so it was still shocking even from the leak to actually Dobbs being overturned that it happened. However, in the background for Poppy specifically, when Dobbs was overturned and some of the very first States, the very first State actually to pass the SB8 law, which includes aiding and abetting.

So that is for any, provider, any person who's aiding and abetting in getting an abortion in the State of Texas. The Heartbeat law, right? We saw that happen in Texas and as soon as Dobbs was overturned, in some ways we were already prepared at Poppy Seed Health. Because we sit at a very unique inflection point.

So here we are in this historic decision which is affecting and will affect many generations to come across our country. But we do [01:06:00] not provide medical care. We are not providing medical advice. We are not doing anything that a provider would do. We are your best friends. We are your safe place to go to.

When Dobbs was overturned, my team sat back and we took a very critical eye at the very messy laws, which are still messy and gray across the country that were happening. We're like, actually, if we were to get subpoenaed, there is nothing that they would get, right? No medical records, no identification.

So we said, how can we actually look at where we are today, where we're going, and where we sit right now with the functionality of our product? We have a fiduciary responsibility to protect our advocates, for example, in Texas, who are part of our advocate network, and also a responsibility to protect those members who are requesting chats from Texas.

What does that look [01:07:00] like? Not only did we take this critical eye, but it actually helped us accelerate certain things on our product roadmap. For example, if you are an advocate in Texas, you will never be matched with a member from Texas. It rarely happens anyway. But our algorithms allow that not to happen.

And so as we look at the proliferation of things like SB8 across the country, we know if you're in Arkansas, we will never match Arkansas to Arkansas. We can protect both parties. But in addition to that, we said, as a really effective channel partner with our solution, who are the kinds of clinical partners we need to be working with right now to provide the enormous spike in emotional and mental health support and also work out those as those advocates and patient extenders.

So of course, partners across the country, one [01:08:00] of the biggest that we cannot ignore is Planned Parenthood, for example. Yellow Hammer is another example. We looked at where we can sit to provide this kind of support for people who are either and I should say this, the case study at Poppy primarily was people who were having abortions were always coming to Poppy Seed Health.

They were coming through our loss funnel, but what they were considering and why they were coming to us and why they still are coming to us is not aftercare for abortion. But whether or not, for the emotional support they need to make for their own choice about their own bodies, their own bodily autonomy.

So coming and talking to us about all of the things that they're considering while they're considering getting an abortion, not necessarily where to get one. Where can they go? Though those things are very important. We knew that being the partner to the Planned Parenthoods of the world, for [01:09:00] example, was way more critical. But the number one place that people were starting with us is, I just need to come to talk about this. I'm 19, I'm in college. I am 23. I'm not ready. I am 42. This is my fourth. We can't afford it. Whatever it is. That's why people come to Poppy.

We provide the care across reproductive healthcare for anyone on their journey. It is the number one thing that we realized after Dobbs is overturned. It is also really critical as a founder to prioritize where we can go with our product development, with the resources that we have. We're still an early stage tech company doing very big things, but there is only but so much venture capital.

There's only but so much, of the business side, of the revenue that, that [01:10:00] inflection point of scale and revenue. We're riding this growth edge right now. But I can tell you after Dobbs being overturned, delivering on that very critical abortion, emotional and mental health support for folks who are deciding on their own bodily autonomy as it relates to abortion. Is it important to us at Poppy?

Quinn: I appreciate the skill with which you navigated around whatever you've got going on there. It's impressive, but it's also an important and a last point, and I've tried to get into this a lot because again, we talk about these make or break verticals in society and science, but also how they intersect.

And data is such a big part of what's going on now. We saw literally just last week, the mother and daughter whose private Facebook messages are now part of court because of this and how the phone cellular providers have been selling your location data for 20 fucking years now. And it turns out, guess what?

The whole thing is just coming apart at the seams. But it means not only I don't, and again, I try to make this really clear to readers and [01:11:00] listeners, like, it's not just your or my cell phone data. It's that it's often lumped together, but also it's the people who have been collecting and harvesting and storing and selling that data who are also now accountable.

So the whole thing is come, coming apart seems, yeah. For someone like yourself, literally, not just philosophically and mechanically how you're positioning yourself, but technically as well, I imagine has to be quite the line to walk right now. Especially again, as like 50 different States are going in 50 different directions.

That is admirable for sure. I don't want to keep you all day. I feel like we could do this all the time. We're going to come up and see you in New York for sure. A couple last questions I ask everybody, and then I'm going to get you out of here. Does that work? Okay. When was the first time in your life when you realized you had the power of change or the power to do something meaningful?

When was the first time, and again, I say this all the time, for some people it's like fifth grade SEA, sometimes it was grandma died of this or whatever it might've been, my house was flooded. When was the first time when you're like, oh shit, look what [01:12:00] I can do.

Simmone Taitt: Oh man. I don't typically talk about my childhood because it was just all rose colored and amazing.

But the very first time I have to go back to fourth grade, I won our school's spelling bee competition. But I beat a fifth grader and that was my towns for me, like the biggest claim to fame. I was in fourth grade, I beat a fifth grader. But actually the thing that I was trying to win was a dictionary that had glossy pictures and I'd never seen a dictionary that had those glossy full color like picture sections.

And I was like, this is amazing. I'm going hard after this. If you've ever had to participate in the spelling bee, which in Massachusetts, which is where I was born and raised, it goes in the elementary school from first grade to fifth grade. So like you're beating the first graders. Of course I was in fourth grade but to beat the fifth grader was a really big deal.

And then I actually went on to regionals. [01:13:00] But it was the moment in which I spelled the name, the word correctly, and knowing that I had won something from something that I just loved doing, which was I loved reading. Like I was just a very curious child. That's when I knew it was in fourth grade.

That's when I knew.

Quinn: That's all really important. What was the word Simmone? You can't just leave it out here.

Simmone Taitt: I'm so sorry. The word was varsity.

Quinn: That’s pretty good for fourth grade. That's impressive.

Simmone Taitt: That c and the s can get really tricky.

Quinn: So it's so funny, I was telling my seven year old daughter this weekend we're talking about spelling and this and that.

They're all super nerd readers and I told them my fifth grade story spelling bee and I got knocked out on the first word, which was conscious because I forgot the C in the middle. And I just blew through it and I was like, eh, nailed it. And my teacher was like, no you didn't. You're out. And I was in shock.

And that s and c man, it's messed up. So good for you. That's fantastic. That's amazing. Alright, who is [01:14:00] someone in your life that has positively impacted your work in the past six months?

Simmone Taitt: So annoying, but it's so obvious and I'm so sorry. I, it just. Does everyone say their mom?

Quinn: No, but they should clearly. By the way, that's the correct answer.

Simmone Taitt: I don't know if it's the correct answer. I'm very close with my mother, very close with her. And in the last six months, I myself have gone through some health issues and the kind of health issues that are directly, that has directly affected my own fertility. I'm actually at a very much crossroads at this point.

And my mother was with me for nearly three weeks by my bedside, helping care for me. She was my caretaker, which I think is very hard for [01:15:00] mothers to do. And during that time, although I'm very close with her, we bonded in a different way. I'm 41 years old now, but it wasn't until I started Poppy Seed Health and I just started very publicly sharing my stories and really not holding back on that because I know it's helping just even one person that I think I created a very safe space for my mother who was in her late sixties.

And that generation didn't talk about a lot of these things. And so anyway, in the last six months, not only did she nurse me, I would say very similarly to the same way that she was when, I'm sure when I was baby, just to health and to thrive. But we also had some very significant bonding time. I learned a lot about my own family.

I learned a lot about my own fertility history in my family. I learned an incredible amount about her. It's almost like, getting your family's recipe box and the recipes living on with you. That's how I feel [01:16:00] about that time in the last six months of the time that I spent with my mother during that time that she was taking care of me.

So she's nursed me back to health yet again. Actually to be able to continue building Poppy.

Quinn: That is wonderful. And I'm so thankful she was there. I'm thankful for her. I'm thankful that she has gotten you back to where you would hopefully like to be. That's wonderful.

Again, mom isn't necessarily always the correct answer, but if you're looking for one, come on. There's certainly, moms. They're the greatest. I am very lucky to have a wonderful one myself. Okay. Last one. In all of your free time, what is a book you have read in the past year or so that's either changed your mind in some way or helped you consider some sort of topic or perspective that you maybe otherwise wouldn't have?

Simmone Taitt: I try. I'm not an audio book person. I'm not a hardcover, I’m a paperback person. And also, I'm a multi reader, which means I'm usually reading two to three different books at once.

Quinn: y Which drives [01:17:00] people insane. But yeah. It could be worse. I know people that are doing more than multiples of that, and that seems just like, no, thank you.

Simmone Taitt: Yeah. No, I am, I'm a really big believer in that kind of simulation. Anyway, the book that, the specific book I want to talk about is a newer book.

It's by Brianna Weiss. And this is a little self-revealing here since we've been self-revealing this whole time anyway. But you couldn't have convinced me prior that there wasn't a way, or that I, in some ways was self-sabotaging. Does that make sense? Let me explain more.

I know that I have some natural confidence. Part of this came from winning the spelling bee in fourth grade. But also I came from a very confident line of women and men, right? Like I can tell you that I was public speaking at an early age. [01:18:00] I really, you can put me in front of one person or a million people.

I don't really get nervous and that sort of thing. But there is something about becoming a founder that's so very tied to a personal experience, that is also tied to, on average, about 20 to 25 million people around the world at any given moment. That challenges confidence, right? That challenges not conviction and that's a very big difference. I am tirelessly convicted. But there's something about getting beyond huge challenges, getting beyond putting yourself in a box and in boundaries. As a founder, as a venture backed, healthcare and health tech company of which we are, and getting over that hump, I was using all sorts of other words for it.

And then I was listening to a podcast [01:19:00] and the podcast was about self-sabotage and I had never actually identified with self-sabotage. I could say other things like I need to get more sleep. I need to work at my, I need to, all these other things. But self-sabotage in a box was something I had never really explored.

So I picked up this book, the Mountain is You and it is about self-sabotage, right? And about getting so beyond what you think you are capable of. And I really believe I'm capable of so much, but I was hitting my own limits that I had created for myself and I didn't even realize it. To go from not really believing in self-sabotage to actually identifying and this is like a really vulnerable statement for me to say, but really identifying with parts of self-sabotage within myself and what that actually means and doing the hard work to get through it. That book has totally [01:20:00] changed my perspective and it's an easy short read and I would highly recommend it.

Quinn: Fascinating. Thank you for sharing all that. That is super helpful. And I love the way you delineated between confidence and conviction, which are, can be married together, but are really two different things, especially on this sort of founder's journey and someone obviously who is, feels so justly empowered and has empowered themself to do something that is very clearly, like effectively a human right that we're just ignoring because we choose to. So the conviction is obviously there. I don't think anyone would measure that any other way, but that's fantastic. I really appreciate you sharing that this whole journey. Thank you so much. This is wonderful. Where can everybody find Poppy Seed for themselves, for loved ones, for strangers, if they want to be an advocate?

Simmone Taitt: So you can download the app it's available on iOS or Google Play. It's free to download and you can go into the evidence-based library. You can request a chat. [01:21:00] If your health plan doesn't cover Poppy Seed Health, we would love to hear from you. And you can go onto our website, which is poppy seed health.com.

Hit us up at the info box. If you are a health plan and you would like to work with us, same thing, or clinical provider or an employer, our socials are the same. So we're at Poppy Seed Health on Instagram, Facebook, on LinkedIn. I'm Simmone Taitt on all of those handles as well. And we have recently joined the Threads trend, so we are also now on Threads at Poppyseed that you can find us in all of those places.

Quinn: Magical, thank you for what you're doing. It is one of, like you said, it is a shitty club to be a part of, but boy does it give you the conviction that we have to do this much, much better. So I really appreciate the work you're doing.

Thank you for your time today.

Simmone Taitt: Thank you. Yeah, this is, this was great. Thanks for having me, Quinn.

Quinn: Oh my [01:22:00] gosh. You're the greatest. I hope you don't regret all this. That's it. Important, not important is hosted by me. It is produced by Willow Beck, and edited by Anthony Luciani.

And the music is by Tim Blaine. You can read our critically acclaimed newsletter and get notified about new podcast convos at important not important dot com slash subscribe. We've got t-shirts and hoodies and coffee stuff at our store. I'm on Twitter at Quinn Emmett. I'm also there at what is the new one?

Blue Sky, whatever it is. I'm also on LinkedIn. Search me or important, not important. Wherever you are you can send us feedback or questions or guest suggestions, whatever you want on Twitter or to questions@importantnotimportant.com. That's it. Thanks for giving a shit and have a great day.