Eve Rodsky, FAIR PLAY
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to the web-e-nominated podcast,
[0:12]Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:13]This episode has been sponsored by Lauren Gabriellesson,
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[0:49]I'm so excited to be here today with Eve Radsky, who's the author of Fair Play,
[0:53]a game-changing solution for when you have too much to do and more life to live.
[0:56]Eve received her BA in Economics, Nather Pology, from the University of Michigan,
[1:00]and her JD from Harvard Law School, a former JP Morgan philanthropy expert.
[1:04]She went on to found the philanthropy advisory group, which advises high-network families and
[1:08]foundations on best practices and more. Eve was raised by a single mom in New York City,
[1:12]and now lived in Los Angeles with her husband and three children. Also, in her work with hundreds
[1:17]of families over a decade, she realized that her expertise in family mediation, strategy,
[1:21]and organizational management could be applied to a problem closer to home, a system for
[1:26]couples seeking balance, efficiency, and peace in their home. And this book has already
[1:30]completely changed my life. So welcome, Eve. Thank you for coming.
[1:33]Oh, so great to be here with you. I said that before I'm getting a moment before I were
[1:38]even I were just chatting before I turned this on and already crying. So, you know,
[1:44]a good place to start. It's a good place to start. I was telling Eve that I've read a lot of
[1:50]books. There's been a lot of press and books and literature and everything on this whole
[1:54]very of the moment concept of invisible labor and mental load and all these things that women
[2:00]basically shoulder. And Eve's book, for me, just woke me up in a whole different way. And I don't
[2:06]know if it was a combination of your academic type research, your interviews with hundreds and
[2:13]hundreds of people, your personal stories. Thank you. And then your solution at the end of it,
[2:18]not just like venting about it. So this book, I mean, I don't know, like I have not stopped
[2:24]thinking about it honestly. So let's talk about it. Fair play. Tell everybody what it's about and
[2:29]what inspired you to write this book. Yeah. So thank you for having me. I like to say that
[2:34]this is a book my whole life in the making. I grew up in a single mom household where I think I
[2:41]got the first row seed of what it looked like for one person to have to do it all. And that helped
[2:47]that meant I helped my mom manage utility bills, eviction notices. And from that first eviction
[2:53]notice, when I was eight years old, I remember thinking this is not going to be me. I'm going to
[2:58]have a true partner in life. And I vowed to do that. And I did. I married that true partner. We
[3:04]were killing it in business and in life. He helped me secure my dream job in philanthropy. I helped
[3:10]him mark up his operating agreements as he grew a new business. We took turns doing the laundry,
[3:17]making each other dinner. It felt fair. Well, cut two, two kids later. And I find myself sobbing
[3:25]on the side of the road over a text my husband sent me. And that text said, I'm surprised you
[3:31]didn't get blueberries. And as I received that text, I pulled over to the side of the road and I
[3:36]was thinking what I was really thinking was if my marriage is going to end, it should be over
[3:41]something way more dramatic, right? Like, and if my fair with an NFL player. But then I thought,
[3:48]I used to be able to manage employee teams. And I can't even manage a grocery list
[3:53]because I'm so overwhelmed. And on top of it, when did I become the default for literally every
[3:58]single household and child care task or my family, including apparently being the
[4:02]familiar of my husband's smoothie needs? And that's when I knew that this was not how I envisioned
[4:07]my life and something had to change. So, I embarked on a quest. And when I talked about
[4:13]quests, I mean a quest like you said before, through five hundred and eight interviews with men and
[4:17]women, through ten disciplines of experts, a quest to find a solution for domestic rebalance
[4:25]that I knew so many of us needed. And I'll just tell you one finding on my quest because we'll talk
[4:28]more about it. But the most interesting thing I found was that the biggest problems in marriage
[4:34]and in partnerships were the smallest details. So, I had a CEO of a publicly traded company,
[4:40]a woman telling me that her greatest challenge was getting her husband to take out the kitty litter.
[4:46]Not, you know, running her publicly traded company. I had a man in upstate New York telling me that
[4:52]he was locked out from his house driving around aimlessly because he forgot to bring home
[4:57]a glue stick for his child's art project. I'm sobbing over off-season blueberries.
[5:03]Well, you enter fair play. Fair play is a life management system. Whereas core, it is crux
[5:08]as a card game you play with your spouse. It's easier to play in a monopoly where you divide up
[5:13]domestic tasks based on things that you value, having conversations that actually matter to you.
[5:19]Ultimately, the goal is for fairness, but also for women to be able to get some time back to pursue
[5:26]like what makes them uniquely them. Wow, amazing. By the way, I think you know they have those
[5:32]signs like rest stops on the side of the highway like this spot is sponsored by like
[5:36]yeah, they're on fabrics. I feel like they should have like mom crying stuff.
[5:40]Right, yeah. The amount of times I have had to pull over.
[5:44]Yeah. Right. Everybody for one reason or another. Side streets and whatever. I'm like,
[5:49]what is wrong with me? Like, or driving through like barely setting, right ugly crying through tears.
[5:55]I think that happens to a lot of women because we have our, you know, realizations at certain
[6:01]moments of the day when it just feels like too much to bury you down. And sometimes driving is like
[6:05]the only time you're alone from it. I mean, I write you just dropped somebody off and like suddenly
[6:09]you're like, that's right. There's quiet. There's like your left with yourself.
[6:13]You're left with yourself. When you stop running, you try to start thinking like is this,
[6:18]you know, this is the way is this how I envision my life. And it was the beauty of the book is I'm
[6:24]authentic. The stories are all authentic. Every story in the book is true. It's some of them had,
[6:29]you know, or concealed for privacy reasons. But the most important thing for me was to honor the
[6:35]stories. And you started with this whole shit. I do list. Yes. Yeah. Sorry for cursing at my
[6:41]daughter's photo listening. Sorry, baby. But no, you started this whole list, which actually I started
[6:45]a spreadsheet similar to yours. Like, yes. When my kids were like two, because I was like, how am I supposed
[6:50]to manage to look at all this stuff I do? That's right. How did this add up like this? Like,
[6:54]you know, because everyone says, I hope we'll find some movies that I can help you do this or that.
[6:58]No, I do this. Like, you have to do everything. Like, you have to do everything. Like, other or
[7:02]and what you said in the book too, like outsourcing a task can be more worth than doing the desk itself.
[7:07]That's correct. Like, oh, you need more help at home. Find another bit. No, it is so hard to do
[7:11]anything. It is hard to like all of it. It does not to complain. Like, it's a privilege to have kids
[7:16]and all of it, right? No, 100%. But there's so much that comes with it. That's correct. So tell
[7:21]me about how you started. And I always say women say to me it's a privilege to raise my kids. And I
[7:24]I say, well, great, because that's why I'm inviting men to share that privilege with you.
[7:28]Exactly. But yeah, so what happened was because I'm a lawyer and an organizational management
[7:35]specialist and then product of academic, my mother's a professor of social work and community
[7:40]organizing, I wanted to make sure I knew my subject really well before I dove in. So I read every
[7:47]single book and article that's ever been written on the subject of invisible work, emotional labor,
[7:53]second shift. And that started with 1880s, Virginia Woolf, a room of one's own all the way up to
[7:59]the more recent books that say, make a list. So I thought, let me do this. Let me try to make a list.
[8:06]So I started a spreadsheet called the shit I do. Now, the beauty of the spreadsheet was that
[8:12]it went viral in one's groups of women across the country. And I had people helping me fill out
[8:18]every single tab. And if I forgot something, someone would call me out and say, well, I don't
[8:23]see signs applying sunscreen on here. And I'd say, no, you just didn't look under medical and
[8:27]healthy living. It's under the medical and healthy living tab. Or someone would say, well, you
[8:32]forgot allowance. I said, no, no, allowance is in there. It's under family values and traditions,
[8:35]because otherwise why are you giving allowance? And it's not to set some sort of, you know,
[8:39]system for your children about their values and around money. So every, you know,
[8:44]Zag granular. I got a source by, I'd say, you know, dozens and dozens of women across the country.
[8:49]And I was so proud of it.
[8:51]So proud of this should I do spreadsheet,
[8:53]because it ended up with 198 tabs
[8:56]and about 15 sub-tabs.
[8:57]So over a thousand items of invisible work,
[9:00]we're on this beautiful spreadsheet.
[9:01]Not so invisible anymore.
[9:02]Not so invisible.
[9:03]And I kept saying if you make the invisible visible,
[9:07]that has to be the first step.
[9:08]And it was the first step to me and my friends.
[9:12]And it was beautiful because it was all there.
[9:14]And the way that I looked at it
[9:17]and the question I asked was,
[9:19]give me every single thing that takes quantifiable time.
[9:22]So obviously you can't put love on the spreadsheet.
[9:25]I love my children,
[9:26]but you can put that you went to purchase flowers
[9:29]for their recital because that took time.
[9:31]So that became a tab called gestures of love
[9:35]because anything that took time got on the spreadsheet.
[9:38]So this is what happens though.
[9:39]I'm so proud of it.
[9:41]All these women in my life have helped me source it.
[9:44]It was this wonderful exercise.
[9:45]I send it off to Seth one day that says,
[9:48]can't wait to start.
[9:49]Seth is my husband.
[9:50]And still my husband, amazing, amazing.
[9:53]And now both of those fair play were at a great place.
[9:58]I send it off to him.
[10:00]And can't wait to discuss.
[10:01]And I didn't even get the courtesy of a three monkey trio.
[10:06]I literally just got one monkey,
[10:09]that one monkey that has the eyes.
[10:10]The monkey emoji.
[10:11]The monkey emoji with the eyes cover.
[10:13]That is what he sent back to me.
[10:15]And really, I think what I realized is he didn't wanna see here
[10:19]or speak of these issues,
[10:22]because it felt too overwhelming.
[10:24]So I think in that moment,
[10:26]I realized, lists alone don't work.
[10:30]But systems do.
[10:32]And I do know that because I've been working
[10:35]for over a decade to create systems for family harmony,
[10:39]for my clients around their family foundations
[10:42]and family businesses.
[10:44]So from there, I took that beautiful,
[10:47]should I do spread sheet?
[10:48]And I started to turn into a system.
[10:51]And that's how you ended up with fair play.
[10:53]Which is a very easy, like I said,
[10:57]it's core and the crux is a card game
[10:59]based on 100 task cards that were derived
[11:02]from the should I do spreadsheet.
[11:03]But the beauty of that is that it comes with a set
[11:06]of rules now, not just a list.
[11:08]And those rules are really important
[11:10]because they've been beta tested
[11:11]with over 100 different couples at this point.
[11:15]And I know what works and what doesn't work.
[11:17]So-
[11:18]And it's so great in the book
[11:19]because you're like,
[11:20]don't show your husband this part now.
[11:22]Stop right here.
[11:23]Right, right, right.
[11:24]You're like, now wait a week and then come back.
[11:27]Do not try to push this through.
[11:29]That's correct.
[11:30]There's a lot of do-no harms in the book
[11:31]because again, after such a huge data set of interviews
[11:35]and this beautiful subset of couples
[11:37]who are willing to play with me to actually,
[11:40]so I got really good sociological data from them.
[11:44]I was able to troubleshoot.
[11:46]And so that's why my favorite chapter of the book
[11:48]is actually called.
[11:49]It's the last chapter.
[11:51]It's called the Top 13 Mistakes Couples Make
[11:53]and the Fair Play Fix.
[11:55]Because I got to work with each of these couples
[11:57]to help them course correct.
[11:58]That was super helpful, by the way.
[12:01]You had things like, okay, so let's go back and think.
[12:04]So you have all these cards, which are really tests.
[12:07]Those are all the things that have to get done.
[12:08]That's correct.
[12:09]You have people decide collectively
[12:11]which are the ones important to your family to keep.
[12:13]That's correct.
[12:14]And then you divide them up.
[12:15]That's correct.
[12:16]Between men and women.
[12:17]And it doesn't have to be 50-50.
[12:18]Nope.
[12:19]Magic number is 21 or something.
[12:20]Yes, well, the beauty of this, the game,
[12:24]is that you are imagining a life together
[12:29]about what you value.
[12:31]And so I think some women will say to me,
[12:34]what if my spouse doesn't want to play?
[12:36]Right.
[12:37]Right, yeah.
[12:38]And I think I've never seen someone want to play
[12:41]if it's communicated in the correct way.
[12:43]So everything to me, and this is what I've learned
[12:47]in my family, foundation and practice for again,
[12:50]working with over hundreds of families
[12:52]at this point in my career,
[12:54]that everything comes down to communication.
[12:56]And a lot of women will say to me
[12:58]that they are afraid to have these types of conversations.
[13:00]And yes.
[13:01]Well, there's like this whole,
[13:03]well, women do all this better.
[13:04]And this is just like women are,
[13:06]this is what they're supposed to do.
[13:07]That's correct.
[13:08]And we must be better.
[13:10]And in your book, you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
[13:13]no, okay.
[13:14]So let's go down to the core crux route
[13:17]of the most important finding of the entire book.
[13:20]The most important finding of the entire book was
[13:23]that men, women and society view men's time as finite
[13:28]and women's as infinite.
[13:30]And what I mean by that is men's time is guarded
[13:33]as a finite resource, like a diamond
[13:36]and our time is looked at as sand, infinite.
[13:39]And without an understanding,
[13:41]a cultural recognition that all time is created equal,
[13:46]nothing is going to change.
[13:48]I'll say that again.
[13:49]If all time is not created equal, nothing will change.
[13:54]And here's what I mean.
[13:55]This is my favorite interviews
[13:57]where men and women with the same job,
[13:59]where two pediatricians would be talking to me.
[14:03]And of course, because most women and all the data shows
[14:08]that women, children, two thirds or more
[14:11]of what it takes to run a home and family,
[14:13]regardless of where they work outside the home,
[14:15]as you'd expect in these interviews,
[14:18]most of the time, the women, the women pediatrician
[14:21]would tell me that as she looked at my cards
[14:24]that she was holding, two thirds or more
[14:26]of the household task cards.
[14:29]And her husband wasn't.
[14:31]So when I would ask her spouse,
[14:34]why he wasn't holding as many task cards as his wife,
[14:38]the number one answer for men was,
[14:40]because I don't have time.
[14:42]But why this doesn't work is because his wife
[14:45]is an exact same job.
[14:47]So how does she have any more time as you did?
[14:49]That's why those were my favorite interviews.
[14:53]You know, because it shows it proves
[14:56]that it has nothing to do with actual time.
[14:58]All the women in my interview said like that
[15:01]told me that they found time.
[15:03]And what I'd like to say, unless you're Albert Einstein
[15:05]and you can figure out the relativity of time,
[15:08]like I'd try to do with my son last year
[15:09]when he was Einstein for his biography,
[15:12]time doesn't expand and contract.
[15:14]We all have 24 hours in a day.
[15:17]And when you start looking at time like that
[15:19]and not as time is money,
[15:20]or it's on me to do all these tasks,
[15:23]then the culture starts to shift.
[15:25]Individual start to shift, relationship starts to shift.
[15:28]Because men ultimately don't want unfairness.
[15:32]And when you start saying to them,
[15:34]your wife is using her time in service of the household
[15:38]while you get to use your time for leisure,
[15:42]for napping, which is again,
[15:44]all the science shows, including one of my favorite consultants,
[15:48]Professor Darby Saxby,
[15:50]she shows that men take leisure time
[15:54]in much more abundance than women do.
[15:56]Again, because my thesis that men view their time
[16:00]is finite and women's is infinite.
[16:02]So again, when all time is created equal
[16:05]and we realize that it's not on us,
[16:08]that we're not better multitaskers.
[16:10]There is no science to support that.
[16:12]I will say that 100 times.
[16:14]There is no science supporting
[16:16]that women are better multitaskers.
[16:17]And I went to the top neuroscientists
[16:20]in the world to ask those questions.
[16:22]It is culturally what is expected of us.
[16:26]But once we can push back and say,
[16:27]my time is as valuable as your time.
[16:29]Regardless of whether you make more money than me
[16:31]or all these other messages,
[16:33]then things start to change.
[16:35]It's so funny because like this whole podcast,
[16:37]mom's don't have time to read books.
[16:39]I've spent so much time thinking about time
[16:41]and how to manage my own time
[16:42]and how to help people who don't have time.
[16:45]And until I finished your book,
[16:46]I was just sort of like,
[16:47]I'm gonna help people with limited time.
[16:50]But what if they could have more time?
[16:53]Yeah.
[16:53]What if there's a way?
[16:55]And what if your system works?
[16:58]I mean, not to say no.
[16:59]Yeah.
[17:00]That's the thing it does.
[17:01]Like if it works, if it scales,
[17:03]if everyone starts to do this,
[17:05]if things get rebalanced in the whole country,
[17:07]like think of the contributions.
[17:08]Cause I've seen like,
[17:09]I mean, anybody who takes on something massive,
[17:13]like managing their entire family,
[17:14]you're gonna have less time for your unicorn space
[17:17]or your work or whatever.
[17:19]Because you know, time is finite for everybody.
[17:21]That's correct.
[17:22]So if you rebalance a little,
[17:24]like think of the contributions people can add to society.
[17:27]Absolutely.
[17:28]That is why I do this.
[17:29]I wake up every day thinking about
[17:32]what would happen if there's a societal change.
[17:35]I see it happening for my beta testers
[17:37]where women do have time.
[17:38]And they're starting to talk about
[17:39]what they wanna do with their time.
[17:40]And it's really beautiful.
[17:41]Because there are severe costs for women doing it all.
[17:46]There are severe costs for women holding
[17:49]all the invisible work at home.
[17:50]In those costs, I talk about them in my book.
[17:53]They break down into costs on your identity.
[17:56]Who are you and do you see who you were
[17:58]before children in your life right now?
[18:01]There's costs on your career.
[18:03]Because the motherhood penalty is the largest penalty
[18:06]and the biggest discrimination on record
[18:08]in terms of wage discrimination.
[18:10]Because mothers and non-mothers, mothers are discriminated
[18:14]against more than any other population.
[18:17]So your identity, your career, your marriage,
[18:20]and what it does to your communication and your resentment.
[18:23]And also, as you said, society is a whole.
[18:26]And finally, wellness.
[18:28]Because the women who try to do it all
[18:31]are coming back and the sad thing is
[18:34]almost everyone who was in a full-time job,
[18:36]almost every woman in my dad has said
[18:38]who was in a full-time job and was holding
[18:41]over 60 cards of the hundred in the fair play deck
[18:45]were reporting two things.
[18:47]Either that they were ready to opt out of the workforce.
[18:50]They were teetering on the brink.
[18:52]Or two, they had some sort of ailment.
[18:55]Number one, being insomnia.
[18:57]Number two, being an autoimmune disease,
[18:59]which was really horrible to hear.
[19:03]But those were the things that kept coming up over
[19:05]and over in my dad's dad.
[19:06]So that's the sad part that there are costs
[19:09]to doing it all, to holding,
[19:11]shouldering the burden at home.
[19:13]And the beauty, though, as you were saying, Zippy,
[19:15]is when we can gain time back and when we can do things
[19:20]differently, not only does it make things
[19:22]more efficient, which is gets time back
[19:25]for men and women to pursue there.
[19:27]What I call unicorn space.
[19:29]The time to be who you want to be.
[19:31]The time to be uniquely you,
[19:33]to pursue your passions and your purpose.
[19:35]But you can't do that.
[19:36]And why I've always hated passion and purpose books
[19:40]is that nobody has time.
[19:42]No woman has time for passion and purpose
[19:44]without every balance.
[19:46]It only works.
[19:47]Unicorn space only works when you have a context
[19:52]of being able to have someone else take some
[19:54]of the mental relief off you.
[19:56]I feel like I couldn't even do what I'm doing.
[19:59]Had I not gone.
[20:00]of course.
[20:01]Yes.
[20:02]There's no way.
[20:03]I couldn't even work at, like, you know, people will say, like, oh yeah, fork is to
[20:07]you this wall.
[20:08]I have this major, like, cheat sheet and that I have every other weekend to myself.
[20:12]Not only the time to get things done, but the recharging.
[20:16]I don't know how you get that if you don't actually have that time, which if you're
[20:20]not divorced.
[20:21]Not that I'm telling everybody to go to the table.
[20:23]No, but that is right.
[20:24]That is right.
[20:25]That is right.
[20:27]That is right.
[20:28]This is a pro marriage book.
[20:29]What I'm trying to get people to is a system that looks like divorce.
[20:34]And what I mean by that is that one word, one word that divorce women tell me that has changed
[20:41]their life and that word is ownership.
[20:44]And this is what I mean.
[20:46]Ownership changes the game.
[20:48]When you're still married and if you want to, if this is a fair place of pro marriage
[20:50]book and you want to get to where you got with it more time in a marriage, you have to move
[20:56]to an ownership system.
[20:58]And what I mean by that is before fair play, my husband would say things to me, like,
[21:05]I got extra kick their sports.
[21:07]That's my, that's my thing.
[21:08]And I'm like, great.
[21:10]So what that meant for him was showing up on the field on Sunday mornings for literally
[21:16]showing up with my two sons for their games.
[21:19]Whereas I'm still behind the scenes, like a crazy person, figuring out who they're going
[21:22]to play with, finding out what leagues they should be part of, registering them for
[21:27]the leagues, getting the schedule, putting the practice schedule on my calendar, arranging
[21:34]card pool for practices, purchasing their equipment, finding their birth certificate, returning
[21:40]stuff on Amazon when the equipment is wrong.
[21:42]And I got a left-hand glove for a right-hand kid or whatever it was.
[21:46]Hours and hours and hours of my time behind the scenes just to allow my husband to claim
[21:52]that he was doing extra-curricular sports.
[21:55]The game is like the easy part.
[21:57]Well, that's a thing, right?
[21:58]Showing up.
[21:59]It's just big.
[22:00]That is correct.
[22:01]The game is the fun part.
[22:02]The execution is the fun part.
[22:04]So what happens after fair play is that when you were playing, when you were holding
[22:09]a card, like the extra-curricular sports card, you're not only responsible for the game,
[22:13]the fun part of showing up to watch your kid play.
[22:16]You're responsible for the conception, understanding what you want your children to play,
[22:21]to the planning, every single thing I just listed, the behind-the-scenes task, to the execution.
[22:26]I call that CPE.
[22:27]I loved that.
[22:28]That was like life-changing concept.
[22:29]And the cool thing about it is that we know it works, because it works in business.
[22:35]And it's been working in my practice for a decade.
[22:37]It's been working for over 50 years for businesses.
[22:41]Every single company is moving towards a directly responsible individual model.
[22:46]It's called DRI model.
[22:48]You don't walk into your boss's office and sit down and say, hey, which should I be doing
[22:52]today?
[22:53]I'll just wait here and have you tell me what to do.
[22:56]If you did that, you'd be fired on the spot.
[22:59]So we should fire people in our home who would do that, too.
[23:02]When you can move to ownership.
[23:04]So now, post-fair play.
[23:07]My husband has given me eight hours a week of my time back just from that one card.
[23:11]I literally don't think about extra-curricular sports.
[23:14]I show up sometimes if I want to.
[23:16]That's a different card.
[23:17]That's called the showing-up and participating card, which is a really fun one, because it doesn't
[23:20]come with a mental load of all the conception and planning.
[23:24]So sometimes I show up if I feel like it.
[23:27]Other times, I just use that time for myself and know that there's other times for me
[23:30]to see my kids in wonderful, you know, different types of activities.
[23:34]So that alone, one card, transformed my relationship.
[23:39]But because my husband loved it so much and he felt good at it, he started to understand
[23:43]the conception, planning, and execution model.
[23:46]And then he understood it from more and more cards and more and more cards and more
[23:50]and more cards.
[23:51]So today we're in a system that feels very fair.
[23:56]And I have gained so much of my time back, and I'm no longer that woman who's sitting
[24:01]on the side of the road sobbing over blueberries.
[24:04]So no rest stops after all.
[24:05]No rest stops.
[24:07]No, I've traded rest stops for what I call check-ins, which means that we prioritize
[24:12]our check-in like an episode of The Bachelor.
[24:17]These are weekly staff meetings, but they're really fun and they're short and they
[24:21]allow us to communicate in a non-emotional way.
[24:24]And it helps us redeal cards for the week.
[24:27]And that's how my beta testers do things.
[24:28]My most successful beta testers prioritize their check-in like an episode of The Bachelor.
[24:34]They never miss it.
[24:35]So will you sell an actual game to accompany the book?
[24:39]Or are you going to pull the cards out of the book?
[24:41]Yeah.
[24:42]So that's a good question.
[24:43]I wanted to make sure this was accessible to as many people as possible.
[24:46]So I didn't want it to be a price point above a normal book.
[24:49]So we are offering the cards as a free download just on my website, evrodsky.com, and
[24:56]also fairplaylife.com, to accompany the book.
[25:00]And there is a big, as you said, disclaimer, a big do-no harm on the cards, just like any
[25:05]card game.
[25:06]If you just bought a card game home, but you didn't have the rules to your card game.
[25:09]You didn't know if you're playing war or poker or rummy, you don't want to play without
[25:14]really understanding the rules of the game.
[25:15]It'll backfire.
[25:16]The only thing I worry about with this is that is my own ability to let go of some of
[25:22]the cards or to even, especially the C and the P.
[25:26]Yes.
[25:27]Yes.
[25:28]Okay.
[25:29]That's really so used to doing.
[25:30]That's correct.
[25:31]And there's a whole chapter in the book about that because I think the biggest hesitation
[25:36]women have is my husband is not going to remember.
[25:40]My husband is going to do it wrong.
[25:42]My husband has never been able to do anything right.
[25:44]So how is he going to do this right?
[25:46]I promise you when you move to a CPE model, that all changes.
[25:51]And the reason why is because of context, not control.
[25:55]Again, this is a business concept.
[25:57]When you give someone context to do their job, they are very, very competent.
[26:03]If you control them, they're terrible at it.
[26:06]That is what the organizational management research shows.
[26:11]So again, a CPE model, when you're holding ownership of the conception and planning
[26:15]to the execution, you care.
[26:18]The opposite I'll explain is what I call the rat fuck.
[26:22]So the rat fuck is what's happening in people's houses all over America.
[26:27]It's the number one thing I saw.
[26:29]And by rat fuck, I mean the random assignment of a task.
[26:33]So the way men are involved in daily life right now.
[26:38]They are responsible for pieces of execution.
[26:43]So back to the man with a glue stick.
[26:45]What was happening in his household?
[26:47]What was happening in his household I found out was that his wife had been working on some
[26:51]major project, a secret buddy project for her child for weeks, cutting out pictures.
[27:00]It required popsicle sticks.
[27:01]All these very intricate things to help her child do this one project.
[27:06]The night before it was due, they realized they had to glue the pictures onto the poster
[27:10]board.
[27:11]She did not have a glue stick that wasn't dried out.
[27:14]So she text her husband in the way home from work or in the middle of his day, just please
[27:19]bring home a glue stick.
[27:20]He walks into the door.
[27:22]She says, I need the glue stick.
[27:23]He says, I don't have it.
[27:24]She says, get the hell out of my house.
[27:27]I'm done with you.
[27:28]Why that's happening for her I get, right?
[27:31]She did everything.
[27:32]She held the conception.
[27:33]She knew about the homework assignment.
[27:35]She planned the entire assignment, but what she did was she gave him a rat, a random
[27:41]assignment of a task.
[27:43]She asked him for a glue stick.
[27:45]He reports to me he has no idea why he's bringing this glue stick home.
[27:49]He doesn't know about this project.
[27:52]And so he forgets.
[27:53]So in her mind, it looks like he's terrible.
[27:55]He can't even remember a glue stick.
[27:57]How am I going to put him in charge of our living will?
[28:00]What I will tell you is that rats and a rat infestation of your home, they ruin a marriage.
[28:07]And they don't work for women.
[28:08]They don't work for men.
[28:09]And they also make you think that your spouse is terrible at anything in the home.
[28:14]When you move to a CPE model, an ownership model where your spouse is responsible, your
[28:20]partner's responsible for the conception planning and execution of the entire task, then
[28:24]all of a sudden standards change.
[28:26]It really makes me see all the things I've been doing around.
[28:29]Yeah.
[28:30]I've been, even in the way I ask for help, I'm not even doing it in a good way.
[28:35]And so, and I think people get upset about the glue stick type situations because you're
[28:39]already doing so much.
[28:40]She just says one last little tiny thing.
[28:43]And then when you can't just do that one thing, like it's over.
[28:45]It's over.
[28:46]Because you have so much here like bottling up and taking on and then it's just like, that's
[28:50]the final straw.
[28:51]And they don't even know they're at the final straw because they're just like, whatever.
[28:54]Okay.
[28:55]No, that's exactly, we're actually, we're doing a fun little video skid called the final
[28:58]straw.
[28:59]Yes.
[29:00]Because we really, I believe that.
[29:01]I think that the final straw is happening to women all over and it's really interesting
[29:07]to see how the little things are what the final straw is, but it means so much more behind.
[29:14]It means so much more.
[29:16]The resentment that builds up over time that ends up being about glue sticks or blueberries
[29:21]is these patterns of inefficiency and lack of communication and not being aligned on expectations
[29:28]that don't work for any organization.
[29:30]They don't work for any organization.
[29:32]So why would they work in the home?
[29:33]They just don't, it's time to reimagine how we do things in the home.
[29:38]The same way that organizations do it all over the world.
[29:42]And like I keep saying, it works.
[29:44]I see it.
[29:45]I see it in my data.
[29:46]I see it in my beta testers.
[29:47]They should do.
[29:48]It works.
[29:49]When they're teaching organizational behavior in this like organizational like home management.
[29:53]I want to teach it at Harvard and Yale community colleges and not home.
[30:00]That's the way it used to be where you're just learning how to, you know, make bread.
[30:03]No, not home.
[30:04]But that's what I said, but real home management because it changes everything and it sets
[30:10]women up to succeed.
[30:11]My most successful thing is that I mean, men don't like feeling like failures either.
[30:16]I mean, they don't like getting yelled at and I mean, I feel like this benefits everybody.
[30:20]And I will say, I thank you for saying men because I don't, everyone will exclude them.
[30:24]And I will say the most important thing in this entire, entire project was a post that
[30:31]I kept on my computer.
[30:34]I have a lot of posts on my computer, but what are them said?
[30:37]Bring men to the table and invite men to the table.
[30:40]It was so important to me to change the narrative about how we're speaking to men and
[30:45]about men.
[30:46]So again, what's been happening, I think, in this new cultural conversation is we're starting
[30:50]to see interesting articles, but a recent article, for example, said it was a long-form
[30:57]piece of about 1,200 words and at the end, the solution was walk out of your home and
[31:03]strike.
[31:04]So straight to conflict, right, without trying collaboration.
[31:08]Another article, a legit article in The New York Times that always makes me laugh was
[31:12]an article about a woman who suggests that you move to a foreign country where your husband
[31:19]learns, knows the language and you don't, so that he can fill out school forms you
[31:24]won't have to.
[31:25]Now, I wish that I could be living on the beaches of Ibiza because that's the Spanish
[31:30]speaker, but that's not very practical for most families, I would say.
[31:36]So isn't it time that we have a solution that works for everybody?
[31:43]And by everybody, I mean that I mirror the U.S. Census in my interviews and my beta testers.
[31:48]So I know that this works for working class families, middle-income families all the way
[31:53]up to some of my former clients who classify themselves as billionaires.
[31:58]Amazing.
[31:59]Quickly, what is, so Hello Sunshine has picked this as a, like, what is this relationship
[32:03]of it?
[32:04]Well, what Hello Sunshine's done for me is I sort of call myself at the Rachel Ray or,
[32:08]you know, like, we're, I'm an unknown personality, but I do have a lot of science and
[32:14]expertise behind my name.
[32:17]And I think that's what Hello Sunshine looks for.
[32:19]They look for new ways to tell age-old problems for women, new ways to tell stories for
[32:25]women.
[32:26]So what happened was Reese is an old friend of mine, Reese Witherspoon's an old friend
[32:30]of mine, and she was actually one of the, should I do, sorcerers?
[32:35]I think she was my son's, one of the, she actually, I think she must, she may have been
[32:39]the one who reminded me that sunscreen wasn't there or that it was under the medical and
[32:43]healthy living tab, but she early on was really supportive of the journey of what I was trying
[32:51]to do in terms of making the invisible visible for women.
[32:55]And so from there, I got to meet her CEO Sarah Harten.
[32:59]And we really fell in love with each other.
[33:02]She is the living embodiment of this with three children, including a special needs child.
[33:08]She was one of my first and early beta testers with her husband, Dave.
[33:12]And from there, she really wanted to champion this as a company effort.
[33:16]So they're helping me amplify these messages, which is really exciting.
[33:19]It's fantastic.
[33:21]Do you have any parting advice for aspiring authors?
[33:24]We didn't really have time to talk that much about your writing process and everything
[33:27]which I wanted to hear quickly.
[33:29]Like how long did it take for you to write the book?
[33:30]Do you have a seven years?
[33:31]Seven years.
[33:32]Seven years.
[33:33]Seven years.
[33:34]It was a lot, well, because I decided that I wanted to make sure this wasn't just
[33:39]a me problem or a me and friends problem.
[33:42]So back to what it takes to mirror the US Census in terms of ethnicity and class.
[33:50]It takes time to find interviews to talk to people.
[33:54]So that took a long time.
[33:56]But I was worth it for me because I'm so confident in the system and the data.
[34:02]But what I'd say to aspiring authors is I'm 42.
[34:05]This is my first book.
[34:06]So it's never too late.
[34:09]It is never too late to take an idea that you have that came out of your life, that you
[34:13]want to share with the world.
[34:15]And that's the ultimate goal of fair play is for all of you women out there and men too
[34:21]to have the time to remember who you are outside of being a worker and a parent and a partner.
[34:28]You are somebody and you have important things to share with the world.
[34:31]And that's what I think I was emotional about before is it be about watching you, you
[34:35]live your unicorn space and how by having you out there champion so many authors,
[34:40]you're helping so many ideas get out into the world.
[34:44]So I thank you for that.
[34:45]Oh, thank you.
[34:46]I bet you there's some people crying now.
[34:49]After our conversation.
[34:50]I feel like I'm about to cry again.
[34:52]Anyway, thank you.
[34:53]Thank you for all your work for so many families and relationships and people and the country
[34:57]and honestly, I am so energized by what you're doing and so grateful.
[35:01]Well, thank you.
[35:02]Great being here.
[35:03]Thank you.
[35:04]To my sponsor, Lauren Gabrielson, the women's war brand that creates elevated essentials
[35:09]for the modern women's wardrobe, Lauren Gabrielson dot com.
[35:13]Thanks for listening to moms don't have time to read books.
[35:16]You can follow me on Instagram at moms don't have time to read books.
[35:19]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texturesound for the sound editing.
[35:24]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and out trim
[35:27]music.
[35:28]Thanks for listening.
[35:29]You can always email me at zibi at zibiowens.com.