Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - If You Do the Chores, He Gets the Promotion: The Hidden Economics of Domestic Labor with Eve Rodsky

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Women report doing 64% of the domestic labor in their household and the 73% of the mental labor. Eve Rodsky, author of the book and movement Fair Play, has championed not only this research, but also strategies to level the playing field. Today, Nicole and Eve talk about how to make your relationship more fair— and the financial consequences if you don't. Click here to learn more about Eve's work, click here to find Fair Play resources.

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One more time, public.com slash money rehab. This is a paid endorsement for public investing. Full disclosures and conditions can be found in the podcast description. I'm Nicole Lapin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. Women report doing six. 64% of the domestic labor in their houses and 73% of the mental labor. Yes, that is a thing. My friend Eve Rodsky is the author of the book Fairplay. She has championed not only research

on this, but also strategies to help level the playing field in relationships. Her book was not only a New York Times bestseller, but it was also a Reese Witherspoon book club pick, which is a big freaking deal. So today we talk about how you can make your relationship more equal on your terms and answer some of the most viral questions out there about relationship quality, like whether or not it is okay to have a 90-10 relationship. I found this conversation extremely helpful and honestly pretty cathartic. And I think you will too. Eve Rodsky, welcome to money rehab. Welcome back to money rehab. Yes, I got to be here before. I don't think I've ever said this on the show that you are legitimately one of my favorite humans. And I don't see you all the time. But when I do, I just

love you and I love everything you stand for and I feel like such a great connection to you and you came to my rescue during the fires like the ultimate woman's woman that you are so thank you I always rooting for you I think your messaging is crucial obviously not just for women for everybody but especially to women and and you also were one of the most wonderful people to me when I was launching my first book you have a busy life and so you sat down with me and gave me such important advice. I gave you all my spreadsheets. I was like, do you want my spreadsheets?

And you're like, that is my love language, Excel. And you know that I love a spreadsheet since my entire movement is based on the shit I do spreadsheets. So we bonded over our mutual love of spreadsheets. But I have to come clean about something. Like I love the messaging, obviously. And I saw like what a chord it struck with women. But I was single at the time.

And so let me tell you, since you came on the show in 2022, I've gotten married and have a baby. And holy shit, does everything you say now resonate on a whole other level? Like, I got it. But now, like, you got it. I got it. Like, in my core, in my soul, like, ancestially. Yes, ancestrally. I do.

Like, truly everything you've talked about, I think looking at the response that I would see at live events, of yours online, of women being like, yes, yes, Eve. Like, I saw it and it was so cool. But, like, now I'm one of those. Yes, well, I'm one of those ladies. I see, I see all of your invisible work. I see you raising an amazing daughter. I think about the blueberry story that you tell,

you've told in your book, you told it on the show. And this sounds so wrong. But there's a part of it that, like, is a little bit fuzzy to me because mum brain is so real. So you're in the car. There's something about stabbing your vagina that I don't remember, but I think about this all the time. Yes. So the story for those who maybe not haven't heard us before, Nicole, or me at least, is that I now, I did, I've launched a movement that is now reached millions of people we can say from our data and is in 27 countries.

Mazel to. And it started with a text that Seth sent me. Your husband was. Yes. My husband, Seth. And I'm still married to him. So that's apparently a very important question. A lot of people ask.

But the text he sent me was, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. And so the scene I want you to picture, because now that you have your beautiful daughter, it's probably easier for you to picture that I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries text that still triggers me 12 years later. It happened when I had a toddler that I was picking up from a toddler transition program and a new baby at home. And what I remember seeing in the car as this text was coming in was

a breast pump in a diaper bag on the passenger seat in my car. Very familiar. Gifts for a newborn baby to return because you don't want to lose out on those gift cards, but a lot of returns in the back seat.

And as you said, a client contract in my lap. Because you're a badass lawyer also. I also had been at that time forced out of my corporate job. And so I had started my own law firm. So I was very eager to get back and to get my own clients. And so I was marking up a contract in the car as I was racing to get Zach.

And that's what I remember. Oh, the pen. The pen was in between. I marked things up analog. And the pen was in between my legs as I was driving. And it was like inching into my vagina as I would hit stop. Every stop sign. And that chaos was what the text, you know,

That's how I received the text in the middle of all this chaos. And as we all know, right, and especially as mediators know, which is what I am. I'm a lawyer and a mediator for high net worth individuals, which could be a whole other podcast. We could talk about specifically succession problems. What I can tell you is that the presenting problem is never the real problem. And so obviously, maybe if my emotion was lower and my cognition was higher, as my therapist always has loved to say, it wouldn't have hit me so.

poorly, but that text set me into a breakdown. I call it now the blueberries breakdown. And I remember sobbing. First of all, we live in L.A. We don't take pulling over lightly, or at least I don't, because we know we're going to be back in traffic. So the fact that I pulled over to cry, I was sobbing in my car alone, thinking, how did I become the fulfiller of my husband's smoothie needs. I thought I was a high-powered lawyer. I had told Elizabeth Warren when I was in law school that I was going to be president of the United States, a senator from New York, and unironically, a Nick City dancer, because you could do, why not, right? I mean, we were the legally blonde era. Yes. What, like it's hard? And you went to Harvard Law School. I did go to Harvard Law School.

I did. And so I was very, I was embodying, I think, Elle Wood at the time when I said that. But I really did feel all that I would be able to smash glass ceiling after glass ceiling after glass ceiling, Nicole. And I think in that moment, what I realized 10 years later was the only thing I was smashing was like peas for my toddler. Yeah. While trying to negotiate my new law firm and a relationship where two-thirds or more, which is the statistic I didn't know at the time, but two-thirds are more of unpaid labor to run a home and raise a family, fall on women. And I think, even if I had just known that statistic at the time, I would have felt better that it wasn't my marriage. It wasn't my Seth that was doing this to me. It was just universal. Universal. Yeah.

And then from that where basically your husband texts you like, why didn't you get blueberries? Like as if you are in charge of, you know, stocking everything, which now I fully know, and being postpartum is a whole other bag. Correct. Three months postpartum at that time. Which is, I mean, really hard. Really hard. From that, it inspired you to create a spreadsheet. Yes.

So the spreadsheet started originally just for Seth. And what did you put in this spreadsheet? I'm laughing because it wasn't just, I created a spreadsheet for Seth. This is pre-Fair play movement. Now we have over a thousand plus therapists that are in our fair play movement, trained by our credentials, but a therapist actually told me to create a spreadsheet for Seth that if I was so overwhelmed that I should just make a list. And I don't know if anybody out there has heard that advice, but it's really fucked up advice. I don't know if you have to bleep

that out, but I really despise that advice because it puts all the onus on women and it sort of assumes that because of our gender, somehow we know better, somehow we have the better skills to raise a child, which is, you know, false in so many different ways. But yeah, therapists told me to do that. So I did. I did because I love Excel and I'm a researcher at heart. And so I figured, okay, if I'm so overwhelmed that I need to make a list, then I'm going to make the best list that's ever been made in the history of lists before AI, of course, that I couldn't get any help. And that's what I did. I opened up Excel. And I started to write on the bottom every single thing that I did that took me more than two minutes of my time. And then Nicole,

I found women like you. This is 2011. So we didn't have even social media then. I found them through baby groups and through early Facebook. And I would say, Nicole, like, what do you do? That's invisible to your partner that takes you more than two minutes. And two minutes became an arbitrary threshold, but I don't know why I picked that. And then I started to get national responses. People were receiving this Excel sheet in not even done form and coming back to me with things like Eve, thank you for this Excel sheet of all what I started to call the should I do spreadsheet for Seth. Women were coming back to me saying, I love that you have medical and healthy living as one of the tabs for kids. I see you have vaccine schedules.

I see that you have formula versus breast milk on here, but I don't see sunscreen. I don't see the application of sunscreen. And then I would put in, okay, you want me to add two minutes for the application of sunscreen? And then the woman would come back and say, no, well, what about the 30 minutes for the chase? And I was like, oh, toddlers need to be chased to put on their sunscreen. Okay, I'll add 30 minutes for the chase. And it was that granular. But to me, it was at that time, again, I know.

We have a lot more resources now. We have TikTok. We have Instagram. But at that time, we have you speaking to women. There were no podcasts. There was no Instagram. There was no TikTok. It was just me thinking I was failing.

So at that time, the responses from those women, Nicole, were my lifeline. Even if I had never created the book fair play or the movement, just getting the reception back from those women that I wasn't alone, that no matter whether they worked, whether they were stayed home, parents who work in unpaid labor, whether they were single mothers, everybody could relate to the fact that we are invisible and the work we do is invisible too. You touched on something that I wanted to double click on because one objection that women get when they try to shift responsibility to their partner is like, oh, well, you do a better job at that.

You're just better at that. So shouldn't you do that? the idea that it's weaponizing competence. So maybe we are better at a lot of things, clearly. Spreadsheets coming up with the list. But it is that cognitive load. It's like the mental load of handling it. We're better at it because it's a skill that we've been taught since birth.

And what do I mean by that? It didn't happen, you know, because our brains are wired differently for care. They're not. Nobody is good at multitasking. A task switching is actually bad for everybody. But what happens, Nicole, is that when we're born, we start to live in a world that has an assumption about how women and men are supposed to use our time. And so this gets into, I think, a lot of your other guests and themes. I was listening to you this morning in my ear.

Thank you. But, you know, time is a currency. And it can be invested, just like you talk about. And I think there's blue chip investments for it. There's risky investments. But for women, And we've been taught that the blue chip investment is care. And we get rewarded for that. Oh, she's such a good girl. She's so compliant. She's a great babysitter. And so since birth, we're taught that women, our time is to be given away as a currency for free.

Whereas men are taught that their time is to be banked and to be invested. So women's time is sand. It's infinite. It's not valuable. Whereas men's time is diamonds. And I have said that to you before. But when we live in a society like that, it's not your partner or Seth. It's that can you imagine being a gender that's been conditioned to protect their time?

They don't even realize that the other gender has been conditioned to give away their time for free. So what happens in a culture like that is not only do women get rewarded and punished for not doing things like sending gifts. We start to do things early. We learn to wrap gifts. We're by our mother's side when they're unloading the dishwasher or learning to cook. What happens is that men are taught that anything feminine is bad. You're a pussy. You know, I say to my sons, if you wore dressed to school, what would happen?

They say, well, you know, we would be beat up. I mean, it's a horrible world out there for men, too. And so that patriarchal assumptions mean that if you try to come into care, men are considered pedophiles. You don't see as many young men as babysitters. You have to call them coaches or else it's weird. So it's just a whole society not teaching men to care. And so for me, what happens in that situation is not only do men not learn the skills, but women start to make excuses for being complicit in their own oppression.

And so those are the things that make me most sad for women because I cried when I did it myself. I did a huge look in the mirror when I wrote fair play. Typically, the most common excuse, complicit in your expression, toxic times. message women use for why they do more care is because they say their husband makes more money than them. But in a culture, again, a patriarchy where women are always going to have a pay gap, then it would mean that men would never do care. So we can't use that excuse. The other toxic time message women say is that we're better multitaskers, as we just said, that we're wired differently for care. But that's completely false. Even if you look at, there's no evidence, but one brain

study shows actually men are a little bit better at multitasking. So I don't say that to women because I think it would explode, you know, their whole worldview. So I just try to say no one's better at multitasking. The other one that's really hard for me to handle is in the time it takes me to tell Seth what to do, I should do it myself. Yeah. And that should probably hate. You should probably hate that too because that's like a present value problem. So when you're talking about all of your economic themes, like that's like devaluing your future time, because of course it would make sense to time value of time, time, right? The time value of money, the time value of time. You want your money to compound. You talk about that beautifully all the time. I make my friends listen to you,

but you want your time to compound. And the only way for your time to compound is if you're not giving it away for free. So of course you want to teach someone, even if they aren't better at it, as we said, if they don't know how to wipe asses, do dishes. there's all the things that, you know, we've had to be penalized when we don't do. We teach those things. It's annoying, of course. We want people to be able to do things without asking. Unfortunately, men don't always have those skills for what we just said.

But when you get into a place where that person is doing those things with ownership, which is about fair play, then you get all that compounded time back. So what's happened to the spreadsheet? It's been shared with a gazillion women. So let's talk about that. So the spreadsheet starts to become a point of data for me. So I put my research hat on. And again, I'm still running a law firm at this point.

And this is just for fun because I like, I like to. I don't know. Idea of fun. Yeah, I don't know. It was my idea of fun. I would live, I should have like literally found a bed in a university and just beded myself in there. And I should have been a professor.

There's always a next step in a next chapter. So maybe I'll do that next. But I think the sociological side of things, my mother's a professor of social work and sociology. We have a lot of family colleagues who are in sociology. And I majored in anthropology economics with a minor in sociology. So I had a lot of this information already at my hand disposal about how to gain data. And so what I'd started to do with that spreadsheet was just ask couples how they divided up their labor. because so many women were coming to me saying that they were really overwhelmed and that they had a

helper in their house but not a partner and that they were losing their sex drive and that they weren't as interested in their partner anymore. So it was sort of interesting to hear all these themes. And so what I did was I asked a very important question, which was, hmm, where can I put my unique skills into this research? So I knew I wasn't a therapist. I knew that I wasn't a technical sociologist, but I am a lawyer. And what I love about the legal system is that we are designing behaviors, Nicole. So I'm not sure any other lawyer thinks of it this way, but this is how I've always thought of it. I wanted to go to law school because I didn't want to ask you every single time. Excuse me, Nicole, can you stop at the stop sign? Use eye statements. I would love for you to

stop at the stop sign. I wanted more global change. And I knew that we stop at stop signs because we passed laws to force people to stop a stop sign. So that behavior design element became very interesting to me. And I thought, hmm, can I use that design element of like governance and laws, which I use for my clients, my very high net worth clients, and they're very tricky financial situations, and they're very tricky succession situations, and they're very tricky governance situations. They're organizations, and this is what I do for a living. And so what I premise was, could I use my legal background and write on a whiteboard, what if the home was an organization? And I use the spreadsheet to help me posit whether that's true. Is the home an organization?

The spoiler alert is yes. It's a very important organization. It's probably our most important organization. So if you believe me that the home is an organization, then organizational management scholarship works. And so that's what I did with the spreadsheet. I took it and said, Okay, I'm not getting good data. So if I ask you and your partner, who's handling your daughter's first birthday, I would probably get back. We both are. Okay? That's not helpful data for me. So I changed the question and it opened up an entire world, which became fair play. Instead of asking who's handling X, who handles groceries, who handles the birthday party, I asked, I looked at the groceries tab of the 98 tabs on my should I do spread? sheet. And I said, hmm, how can I ask this differently? And so in 28 countries over the past 10 years now, I've been asking the same question, which is, how does mustard get in your refrigerator? Why that is such a powerful question, Nicole, is because it allowed me to map a racy framework for any of those out there who know sort of what a, or an organizational management

framework into this discussion. And what I found was that if I used a very simple organization management framework, which I called conception, planning, and execution. That's probably the simplest one you can use. I realize that women were conceiving. They're the ones who told me in 27 countries. Even Iceland does it this way. So that's why I feel better because it's not like Seth is a villain. This is happening literally everywhere in the entire globe, on the entire globe. Women are the ones who notice that they're... The mustard's low. Well, that's planning. So first, though, conception was women telling me they have yellow mustard in the refrigerator because the pediatrician told them their child was anemic and the child needs more protein. They conceived of this idea that there

would be a better way to ingest protein as opposed to like forcing iron down their child's throat in a supplement and that would be to drench it exactly in mustard, make a sandwich. But you need yellow mustard and the kid needs a lot of mustard on it to take their bites of their sandwich. that's conception. And then exactly what you just said. Women were also the ones getting stakeholder buy-in from their family for what they needed for the grocery list. They didn't say stakeholder or buy in, but that's what I was listening for. And like you said, they're watching the mustard and monitoring it when it runs low. That's planning. And then the reason why men were saying that they both handle groceries was because it was true in these heterosis gender marriages, men were

the ones going many times to the grocery store. But they bring home a spicy. But they bring home a Dijon. And the problem with that is not the blueberries or not the mustard. But when somebody brings some spicy Dijon, what that does is it erodes the two things that I always tell my clients are the most important thing in organization needs. It's really only two things. It's pretty simple. An organization just needs accountability and trust. So what happens if you don't have accountability and trust? The opposite of trust is control. And then we start sliding to I'm handling all the mental load, and you could maybe help me go get the balloons. But then your partner loses psychological safety because they're bringing home like Marvel balloons

and your child has a mermaid-themed party, and you're like, what am I going to do with these Iron Man balloons? So it's these small accountability and trust erosions that were leading to the biggest problems, and that's why Fairplay was able to provide a solution to solve those. You have. I want to go back to one thing you said, though, because Alex Cooper did an episode of Call Her Daddy. I don't know if you saw it where she said that the least attractive trait is a man who wants his wife to be. Absolutely. It's what I found. So do you agree? Does it impact? Oh, sex life is. Yes. Attraction. It does. And not only that, we just did our first big study, Nicole, to show that Fair Play, Yay. does work, and we did it with USC, and we got money from a big healthcare company because they're looking at how the mental load affects women's physical health, which, spoiler alert, it does.

But what we found was that the more cards, so fair play, just the spoiler alert was that the spreadsheet and the system became a metaphor of playing a deck of cards. So like there were that hundred tabs on this Excel sheet, there's now 100 cards. and you deal the cards for full CPE, doesn't mean you have to hold it forever, but if you're holding a card, I want you to own it. So I want you to own the grocery list. I want you to come home with everything you think the person needs by getting planning by asking their partner. And then when it comes home, if you're bringing home spicy Dijon, you carry through your mistake, right? That's how you own things in the workplace. I know I'm not working for Nicole Lappin if I say

to you, hey, Nicole, what should I be doing today? I'm just going to wait here to you, tell me what to do. I know I would be out of your organization tomorrow. I just know you. So why do we allow that in our home, right? I know that no employees on your staff would would do that. So why do we allow, why is my aunt Marion's Majan group? Why does she have more clearly defined expectations in the home? Apparently in her group, if you don't bring snack twice, you're out. But the home, I have systems engineers telling systems engineers telling me that they're waiting to decide who's taking the dog out, right, when it's about to take a pee on the rug. And when you get into this chaos spiral, we found in our study that not only does fair play

work, but that marital satisfaction decreases significantly. And sex drive was one of those ways that women in our study describe marital satisfaction. What's the best way to bring it up with your partner? Because maybe they'll be defensive. And they'll say, like, no, I am doing mustard shopping. and I'm doing things. What do you want for me? Yeah, totally.

I'm doing more than my dad did. That happens all the time. It's definitely the thing that makes me the most reflective about fair play because I think for anybody who's in maybe the health profession, they know that if they have their patients walk more, that they're going to be healthier, but they can't get their patients to walk. It's sort of like that, right? The hardest thing, the biggest barrier to entry. for fair play is actually having the conversation. So what I say in that situation, if you are

somebody who you have a wonderful open helper in your home right now, then you can absolutely launch into the system's part of the conversation. Hey, I found this really cool system. It's like an Asana or Trello and it's here to make our lives more efficient. So I say there's three ways you can enter. That's systems. There's a secret formula, though, for entry. And there's there's two other ways. One is boundaries and the other is communication. So I call it like you're, you can take a 20 second assessment. We can ask your listeners to do that. Do I struggle most with communication? Do I struggle most with systems? Do I struggle most with boundaries? And I would say start with the thing that's hardest. And what I mean by that is I struggled with all three when it was

my turn to come up and think about how I was going to bring this up to Seth. But when I was struggling with all three boundary systems and communication, I realized my boundaries for me were the hardest thing to rectify, meaning I kept breaching my boundaries. I would say I'm going to have Seth do bath tonight or I'm going to go out with my friends. And then I'd be like, oh, you did it. My child wants me and I should just do it. I'll come home. I'll go out after. And then I'm tired. than I'm resentful. And so I really had to think about why it was that I kept reaching my boundaries. And then that's when I started to think about those time things that, wow, you know,

I notice that it's not, I'm not really resentful about the mustard. I'm resentful about the fact that Seth has three hours after our kids go to bed to watch SportsCenter, work out, and finish a PowerPoint deck where I'm doing things in service of our home till my head hits the pillow. And that's still an hour after Seth goes to bed. And so I think when I finally realized that that was the issue and that I was, and what was the alternative, Nicole? What is it?

What is the alternative? What is the alternative to bringing this up? Well, divorce. Right. Right? That's what I kept thinking, right? Which is how I grew up. And I know you and I have talked about our backgrounds, right?

It's not, that's not an easy option. So I kept thinking what, and I would write this in my journal, for women who are, don't want to bring this up, who don't want to practice fair play. I kept saying, well, what's the alternative? For me, it was being a gray version of myself and dying inside and parenting my partner. I mean, that sounds terrible. Divorce. I don't know, emotional affairs.

I mean, a lot of women, Esther Perel, talks about that a lot. Or finally, just having the boundary to say, you know, it's Seth. I noticed this phenomenon that you get three hours after our kids go to bed to watch SportsCenter, work out, finish a PowerPoint deck. And I'm doing things in service of our home until my head's hits the pillow. And yes, you make more money than me, but I have a stressful job that's just as impactful to the world. And that's not going to mean everything's going to be 50-50, but I'm no longer willing to live with this time discrepancy. But Nicole, I took a lot of work

on myself. And that's why I think sometimes I think the conversation we're having deserves a trigger warning because I think I'm giving you another system, another system like your financial systems. This should just slot into your other types of conversations. But then I realize that because we've been conditioned this way, because we live in a patriarchy, because there's so much pain around relationships, this is actually a very painful conversation for a lot of women. But maybe if you put it on a spreadsheet or numbers, like it takes some of that out of it. So you say, sit down, like open the spreadsheet, potentially, play the game. That's how you open the dialogue. I mean, I'm sure you.

you've seen the viral Briné Brown clip where she talks about no marriage is 50-50. So what do you think? At times it's 10-90 or 90-10 or whatever. But over time, it nets out to 50-50. Is that the right framework? Yes. Well, I love equations and you have them again with your other guests. So I'm going to give you an equation where I think to me the equation is ownership, communication. So back to what I said earlier, If you have boundaries, if you have boundaries, if you can hold your boundaries, your partner says to you, Nicole, I may not be doing everything right, but I do see your time is equal to my time. We both just get 24 hours in a day and I want you to have time choice over how you use that. That's boundaries plus systems. So fair play is a system. Most people I would say who aren't even using fair play who say they have a system, it ends up looking like fair play because it's a system that most organizations use. Like Steve jobs came up with something called the DRI, the directly responsible individual, very similar to Fairplay. A lot of companies use these racy frameworks where someone is responsible for the task. Doesn't mean you can't include other people in the planning, but you hold the responsibility.

So it's not new or novel. Fairplay is not a new or novel system. It's just bringing these amazing concepts into the home. So that would be the systems. And then communication. So to me, that's the formula where I see, okay, this couple is going to make it. I don't care about 50-50. I want to know that you say my partner's open to me holding my boundaries, to implementing some sort of systems so we know what to do in advance and we're not waiting to take the dog out right when it's about to take pee on the rug. And there is some communication practice in the home. I'll just want to say something because you were asking earlier about coming into these conversations. Typically, if somebody says to me, I can't bring this up. I'll give you an

example. This is sort of funny. So I didn't think I'd bring this up, but I think it's worth bringing up. There is a Facebook group out of England during the pandemic called The Reasons I Hate My Husband and Kids during COVID. And I love these literal naming conventions, by the way, yes. So that was the name of the group. I think. it had 22,000 members in it. And I get a lot of these random things. People call me after funerals. They call me after, you know, see, I get a lot of data. So someone tagged me in, or a DM in this group saying, Eve, you should check it out. And they tagged me on a comment that a woman wrote in the group that said, if my husband dies during COVID, it's going to

because of me and not the disease. Okay? So I reach out to her on DM and say, I would love to talk to you. I'm a researcher. I would love to talk to you about how you discuss unpaid labor and domestic work with your partner. So the woman got back to me and said, thank you so much for your reaching out. I'm glad my comment resonated. I don't discuss.

We don't discuss domestic labor. and we tried, it doesn't work. I just went on Facebook. Right. So think about that, right? That, and I have a lot of empathy for this woman. For her, publicly threatening to murder her partner in a public realm of 22,000 people felt safer to her than bringing it up directly with her partner. So that's how hard, if anybody out there is saying this feels hard to bring up, I want you to

know that we see you. We know how hard this is. And it is easier sometimes to back off. But like I said, what is the alternative to continue to do that? So this is a long answer to your question about 50-50. What I'm looking for is boundary systems and communication because when I get people who say they have those things or they're practicing those things, typically I get that they perceive fairness in their home. I don't really actually care about what actual fairness means. But I like to see that both people are perceiving fairness. Well, even having a scorecard of whatever that tally is feels dangerous. Yes.

And that's why fair play is a dangerous game if you just use the cards. So the book and the cards are meant to be a system. And the cards, there is a card game that is a tool. But what I say is it's a do no harm in my mind where I say on every, I say on TikTok on Facebook in the book, warnings, don't use the. cards without having read the book first or even listening to this podcast first. The problem is it becomes a very quick scorekeeping tool to get very angry and resentful if you're just looking at them and saying, I hold all these cards and my partner doesn't hold any.

The visual is not for you to say, I hold everything and you do nothing. The visual is to say it's us against the cards. That unpaid labor sucks. It takes time. It requires. It requires skills that nobody wants. I don't want to learn to cook ever. If I didn't have kids, it would just be DoorDash forever. But look at these skills that we need to learn, especially after a child comes into the home. Unfortunately, we add 40 extra cards when a child comes into the home. So now we're playing with 100 in the deck as opposed to 60. And then you're looking at them and saying, this is the unpaid labor of our home. It's never going to be 50-50, but who wants to own what? And how can we do that in a way that feels that there's perceived fairness? And so a lot of, I would say, stay at home.

mothers who work for no pay say to me that they hold about 70 cards and their partners playing with about 15 but that those 15 cards their partners owning and they perceive fairness so I don't care how people live Nicole I just want them to use the tool in a way that's helpful to them I mean because there's it's so amorphous I'm sure you've seen this viral video where men ask women like where random things are like where the scissors where's the Where's the butter? That's one of my favorite one. Really?

I hope they know where the butter is. Well, no, there's a far side cartoon that might. So I have a stereotype of a man that I call Where's the Butter? And it came from a, I think it was a far side cartoon where there is an anniversary card. We're on the front of it. It's just a man opening the refrigerator and literally every single thing says butter, butter, butter, butter, butter, butter.

And then underneath the caption is, honey, where's the butter? I mean, but the point of that is that men are outsourcing. brain space for things like where is the kids winter jacket. Yes. You know, and so how when you start to think of all of that mental load or like the cognitive load that feel is so obviously invisible work, how do you quantify that? Well, the good news is you don't really have to quantify it because you will feel it. You will feel it. I will say that the thing that is you feel the most is the communication practice. So what do I mean by that? The thing that's to me quantified the most of fair play is not how many cards people hold is actually how many check-ins people

have. They'll report to me, oh my gosh, we did four check-ins this month. And what I'm asking people to do, Nicole, is to check in similar to a staff meeting. But we actually know this from organizational management. If companies have employees where they have regular check-ins, that employee is more likely to deliver the leader bad news, which is actually a very important thing for leaders to hear that they often don't hear. And so the same thing sort of applies to the home where people are more willing and open to hear bad news, meaning like, I need your help this week with a terrible task like, you know, crazy hat day for the kids or whatever, if you have a cadence of already coming to the table. So that's typically where I see people

quantifying it the practice of fair play the most where they'll say we got our you know weekly check-in done every week this month and it made us feel so good so that's where I love quantification but I will say where you don't really need it is you won't need it because you start feeling it and the conversations that really allow people if you're afraid to bring these things up which is very normal hence our Facebook woman the way I like to say it is is the best time to bring things up is on anniversary, on a birthday, where you just say, for my birthday this year, I really want to play with these cards. And what I mean by playing with the fair play cards, and you don't have to order them. We have a whole website and the show

notes we can link to for a nonprofit. We have an institute where we give out all of our resources for free. You know the podcast. Yes, yes. And what we love to say is, like, if you're playing with the cards, the actual deck, or you're using a spreadsheet version of them. And nothing I want for my birthday more. Right. Is sit down with me and let's start talking about what I call in the book, the minimum standard of care. So typically why conversations around fair play don't work is because they will start

with, I'm going to give you our daughter's first birthday party and you own it. So that is a ownership conversation, and you can talk through the conception of what that means, the planning, what the execution of that party could be. Is it just pizza and cake? Is it a blowout because it's a party for you? Because that's how I felt. My first birthday parties were blowouts, full open bar, you know, 100 people, because I was celebrating the hardest year of parenting, which to me is the first year.

So that's easier, but it often doesn't work that well because you haven't actually come to the core of Fairplay, which is sitting down to discuss how were birthday celebrating your home. So that's what I like to say. If you have a hard time, if you're not those systems, people who are just willing to go in and make things more efficient, start with a communication practice, maybe on your birthday, maybe when another time when emotion is low and your cognition is high, and just take three cards. I will assign them to you right now. Take groceries. Let me just pick some that are good, that I love stories. Take groceries, take birthday parties, and take gifts. Pick those three.

Those are three of the Fair Play 100 cards. And just ask your partner, who did gifts in your home growing up? Do you remember getting any gifts that you loved? And then how do you want to do it? Right. But the how do you want to do it is harder because we don't realize how much we've been affected by the way things were in our home. I wanted Seth, I'll give an example.

I wanted, Seth decided to own garbage, but I was his garbage shadow. I just couldn't stop following him around the house. And he's like, listen, I'm never, I'm not going to own this or play this game if you're stalking me over garbage. Well, this is, I mean, asking for a friend, taking the marker out of their hand. Right. I have that problem. Right. So especially in this case, he couldn't really understand what was happening, why I was having, being so triggered.

over when he took the garbage out. And then finally, when I realized that skipping the step of the minimum standard of care was actually not helpful. So when I finally sat, you know, I sat set down, this was years ago when I was developing the rules of the game, I realized, oh, just like the legal system, back to what I said earlier, this is designed similar to behavior design experiment. In our legal system, Nicole, we adjudicate about a trillion dollars a year in something called the tort system. So, I mean, you know that. But you're for your listeners, right? If McDonald's serves you coffee that's too hot and you spill it on your leg and you give yourself a third-degree burn, is McDonald's responsible. So how do we know if McDonald's is responsible? We use something called

the reasonable person test. That's similar to the minimum standard of care and fair play. So when Seth said to me, you're not being reasonable that you want the garbage to go out four times a day because I'm not even home. And so that's not going to, so don't leave like empty milk cartons near my bed and stop being passive progressive. Understand that in our house, you can restore accountability and trust in me because garbage will go out once a day. I won't tell you when it's going out. There will be a liner back in the bag in the bin, and it will go out once a day. And then it was like Moses parting in the Red Sea. I mean, it was the most, that was probably the most important conversation in our marriage. Aligning on what that means. What's the

expectation because for you you wanted like nobody lived in the house all the time and for him and then you had to say okay that's now the expectation once a day if you've done that it's been done but no unfortunately it wasn't that easy i had to actually go back to my childhood this is why i said if you've never done this before do the exercise i just said take three cards the ones i just gave you and to your listeners and just sit down when emotion is low cognition is high and ask how it was done in your home. What changed Seth finally? And this is why this, unfortunately, fair plays of practice.

It's like exercise, guys. Now we're hearing about strength training. We have to practice it. It is not a one-and-done conversation. It is just like exercise. And one of the big practices was having these minimum standard of care conversations for the cards the other person was going to own, which takes time. So I will say the onboarding, just like in a company,

onboarding in a company, the best companies take six months to onboard. They have a mentor. They really indoctrinate you in the company. The worst, like my law firm was like figure it out two days and then I was miserable. But in the onboarding a fair play, unfortunately it wasn't, okay, this will be our standard. It was Seth, and I may have said this to you off screen before, Nicole. I grew up in a home where I was taking care of my mother, starting at seven. There were eviction notices on our door. I wrote out her rent checks. I have a disabled autistic brother who gets a lot of our attention. What didn't get attention was our kitchen. There was garbage pouring out from a takeout bag that sat on a knob. We'd never had a garbage can. And it was the same thing every night.

If my brother wanted water, my mother was working late. I would help him and get him his water, close my eyes, go into our small kitchen, turn on the light, keep my eyes closed because I knew that was how the cockroaches and water bugs would scatter

when the lights turned on, didn't want to see them, then went to go get the water and bring it to my brother. So I think Seth had to understand my mother. He feels a lot of empathy for my mother.

He feels empathy for me and my brother. And so when he could start feeling empathy for the garbage and what it connoted, it was more than the garbage. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think when it's hysterical it's historical right like you had this I love that reaction to it like where was that coming from and you uncovered it and a lot of this stuff is not rational right it comes from childhood and there's you know this systemic idea that like the woman is responsible I even notice that our nanny and we're all in a group threat like she'll come to me and ask me the questions or you know in-laws will ask about like logistics but just to the woman And so it's generational, but also not, like women who are younger than me or my age. Like, well, instinctively come to me to ask questions about our daughter.

And schools. Can you imagine what they do to women? I mean, no matter how many men put their names on first, and I ask so many men to do that, they skip over their name and they call women. And what do you do about that? Like, do you put everybody on a group thread again? I don't pick up when the school calls. I just don't.

And eventually. do you think? Like, did something happen to my kid? I do. I do. But I think I channel men. And I think, okay, if they do this without a stress response, you know, most likely it's, you know, Anna bumped her head or Ben got a detention, which he did last week over not eating grapes in his pocket. Like he kept, you're not allowed to eat in the school. And he was like keeping grapes in his pocket. So typically you pray that that's what it is. Knock a wood. But yeah, I really have had to fight my instinct to do what comes naturally. And what about parents that leave their job to take care of the kids? Do you like the idea of putting a monetary value to a lot of these? Oh, absolutely. I do. Chores and

labor? I do. I do. I think I have a, again, back to our nonprofit Institute, we have a guide for post-ups. And I think it's really, really important. You've talked about this on your show. The expectation that's set for you in family law is already set for you by the state. Yeah, you have a pre-up regardless. You have a pre-nup, right? And so you might as well have one that reflects what you do. And so there's a wonderful woman named Niharuish, and she talks a lot about what happens when women take a parapause, she calls it, and stay home or men to.

But typically what ultimately happens is that the cards do shift. So you will see the person who's not working take on more labor. but then even in that situation gets very unbalanced and the power dynamic changes in that family. So what I like to say is if you do a post-nop, it helps because it acknowledges there's going to be a power dynamic shift in this relationship and I want you to value unpaid labor if I'm going to take this shift. And if your partner really is not valuing unpaid labor, then they wouldn't engage in a way that you'll know, you'll know. I have a lot of women say to me, like, I had that conversation

that didn't go well. And then I say, then you can't leave the workplace. Like, it's going to be bad later. We've seen too many stories of women who end up in the family law courts with very little alimony, something called a Gavron warning, Nicole, which is a humiliating document you get from the courts saying that you have a duty to become self-sufficient, even though you have 20 years of, you know, you left marketing 20 years ago and they're telling you to enter the workplace. I of women. I spoke to a woman who was a marketing executive who became a Mary Kay representative. Again, that's not bad work. Because she had to. Yeah, a lot of these MLM jobs become available because the skills that you had in your job or women who are nurse practitioners and have to regain their

license when their partners want to leave. And so I always say, and this gets back to the core, I think of why you do what you do. What I love about what you do is I think you're helping people avoid economic risk and also obviously make money and do some wonderful powerful things with their capital. But I love, you know, that you have a message that also helps people avoid economic risk. And the biggest economic risk a woman can take is having a child. And once we realize that that's 80% of our pay gap, it's the reason why Leanin is recently saying they have a study that came out yesterday that said women have no ambition anymore over 40. They have an ambition gap. I mean, it's just total bullshit. It's just that we have care responsibilities.

They don't even mention the word mother in their study, which I think is so bizarre. We don't have an ambition gap. We have an exhaustion gap. And we need to start talking about the truth of what it is to do unpaid labor. And until we invite men into their full power in the home, women are really not going to be able to step out into their full power in the world. And so that's why I love that we're having this conversation in these contexts, because the biggest economic risk women will take is becoming a mother. And it's because society assumes they're going to do the unpaid labor of the home. And then they stop paying us because they think we're not going to be as committed to the workplace. And that cycle becomes vicious. It happens in every generation. And look,

We're trying to close it, but right now, unfortunately, the pay gap is the worst it's been in in about five years. So even if you have a pre-up, having a post-nup, depending on the labor that you're doing in the home, is important? Well, especially of what you said. If a pre-up is, if you're in the same financial situation as your pre-up is not as important, to me, the only time a post-nup is absolutely necessary is if you're both contributing money to the household in work outside the home. And one of the parties says it's not worth it for me to work anymore because of greedy work. We have a Nobel Prize winning economist named Claudia Golden who says America thrives on greedy work. And so if, say, your husband is a law firm partner or about

to become a law firm partner, and he decides he wants to go for it. And he sits down with you and says, I care about your unpaid labor. I see you doing all this work. I need to lean into this partnership, it's going to be 100-hour weeks for the next two years, so you'll have to handle everything off-screen. The economic risk that a woman is taking to do that, to me, merits a post-nup. Because there's no economic risk to the man. He gets the family law system on his side, and he gets to leave the marriage with an amazing career. The economic risk is for the person who will give up the paid work because when you re-enter the workplace after a pause, we lose an exponential worth over time. So women who've taken an exit, 43% of women do take

a career detour after kids, and they see up to a million dollars or more of value lost in those decisions. But also statistically, married men make more than single men. So that's called the marital wage premium. Married women do you make more? than single women, but it's a much smaller gap. So what do you think came first? This is kind of a chicken or egg situation. Are married men making more money or are men who make more money more likely to be married? And do you make more money in the course of the relationship if you're married? It is chicken the egg. What I think is the men who are married are more likely to be able to do greedy work. So they're more likely to be the men who, and we see this because

the men who, I'll give an example, I have this wonderful, again, people contact me, like I said, in divorce and funerals and lawsuits. There's a man who just reached out to me because he wanted to let me know that he was a high-powered executive at his firm in the tech world. And he decided he sort of, his wife has been listening to me for a long time and they've sort of been in the fair play world. He decided to take his full paternity leave, which is six months on paper. he was the only person to do that in the group and they fired him. So now he's suing them. My point being that men who do what women do will start seeing that they're penalized too.

We need, like I said, right now, because it's not normalized, you're either going to be complicit or fight. So I say to those men, thank you for the fight. I know it's hard to also be penalized like women are because men are not used to that. but what we see is that the men who can do the greedy work often are the ones who rise up in their career so much so Nicole that this is my favorite statistic 80% of the 1% in this country are men with stay-at-home wives 80% of the 1% yeah I'd love a stay-at-home wife yeah right imagine I would get done oh my gosh well by the way my good friend who you should have on

too she's a professor at warden she just wrote a book called having a all. And I love because she has a very complimentary perspective because I have the behavior design legal perspective and she has the economic perspective. But her solution, so mine was to hold the boundary and say to Seth, I'm not living like this anymore. Other women's solution is court order custody, as we talked about. Her solution was to divorce a man and marry woman. What do you guys do now? Like, how do you guys divvy stuff up? Because you both also, since you were married have become so crazy wildly successful. Thank you for saying that.

Seth would say it's easier when I'm gone, which I think it is. I want to just be completely transparent. We have an amazing nanny. We have, we moved to L.A. for Cess parents. We would have, I think we would have been even more as successful if we could stay on the East Coast. I feel like everything happens on the East Coast. So we have Cess parents and our amazing nanny.

We have a college UCLA student who helps drive our middle son to all of his practices, which are over an hour and a half away three times a week for his club basketball. So as parenting has become more intensive, it's harder. And obviously, that's an incredibly privileged position. So we have a lot of amazing executors. But this is the interesting thing. What Seth used to think was, well, if Eve is so overwhelmed, she should get help. And he now says that was like the most sexist thing ever because now he realizes that as much as we love our village, Alexia is not deciding whether our child's adenoids are being taken out. And so what he realized, what I realized when we went through the cards for the hundredth time, because we've been practicing fair play for almost a decade now, is that about 50 of the cards, and this is what Seth realized, are not outsourceable.

so even if you have a partner who says oh if you're so overwhelmed get help i want women especially to know that then start with the non-outsourceable cards again as much as you love alexia she's typically not doing your elf on the shelf she's not doing santa she's not replacing the carrot and the cookie with the sparkle dust you know i'm jewish so i think that happens or she's not the one who again is deciding whether or not your child should go on flowning or whether you're going to do surgery, that person is not deciding to sign your kid up for club basketball or whether they're going to lean into golf or whatever it is. They're not deciding which, you know, charter school to put your name the lottery for. So there are about 50 cards

like that where even if you have this amazing village that I'm talking about, we still have to own. And that's, I think, been the most helpful realization for Seth is to say ownership means a lot of thinking. And so now I would say he probably thinks it's easier when I'm gone because he has a great team to help him execute on his mental load, but the mental load is smoother. Like dinner is on the table between six and seven. The kids aren't up watching Survivor until 11 because I decide it's like Survivor Night. There's a vegetable on the plate because my minimum standard of care has always been like a green on the plate would be like, I don't know, a lucky charms like shamrock, not like or something that was like what he meant by

green. So, yeah, I think, but again, this is 10 years in of doing a practice of something. So it's like looking at somebody who's been doing CrossFit for 10 years and being like, I want to do as many pull-ups as them. Like, I can't even hold onto a bar. I have like no grip strength, you know? So you're going from no grip strength where you fall off the bar to doing 10 pull-ups. As we know, it's a chip away situation. It's a practice. Every one of those quantified check-ins that we talked about is where I would start. is having some of these amazing conversations about what happened to you as a kid. Tonight, I want you just to talk about birthdays.

What did birthday parties look like for you and your partner when you were kids? Do you have, can you give me that? Can we practice? Like, what did they look like to you? I mean, I have so many traumatic memories. So it's like never a fun day to go down memory lane. Yeah, I didn't have a lot of birthdays growing up. And then when I was in my 20s, I had a lot of birthdays on like non-zero.

or five birthdays to make up for that. And I kind of discovered that through therapy, that I was like reliving that. And so, oof. So my point is that may be something that happens with your child's first birthday because that happened to me. Back to you and I bonded over sort of similar or similar seeming childhoods, when I was helping my mother pay her rent checks starting at seven. I also, there was a New York magazine. We would get a subscription in the back were personal ads. And there were things like

birthdays and gardener, whatever it was. And I would always pick like the clown and like literally pick up the phone and be like, hi clown. Can you come to my birthday party this Saturday? So I was always planning my own parties. And so birthdays mean a lot to me. And as I said to you, they're blowout parties. And I never got to tell Seth that with a Zach, because I just started to throw these, like, circus-themed giant parties. And he's like, what's happening here? Like, this child's one. Like, I thought we were getting, like, pizza and having, like, three of our family members over. And it became, like, a really big point of contention. So I wish I had had fair play with Zach because I would have sat, sat down and said,

do you remember what I tell you about my mom's eviction notices? Well, here's what happened to me when I had to plan my own birthdays and birthdays matter. And so those are the things I think humanize us. And if we can humanize this work so that's not seen as just like women's housework and chores, but it's actually like our humanity, Nicole, it's like all of our memories are these things. Yeah. Like I love learning that about you. I want to now know more about these non-zero and five birthdays. They were.

I'm sure they were epic. Yeah. They were just delayed gratification, I thought. And it was weird. Like I had an ex. I was like, you're so weird. Why are you doing this blowout? for like 28. Who cares? You'll be over it. And so I discover that in the process, but, you know,

having a child, even though she's won, like I'm seeing so much of my own childhood play out and the mother-daughter relationship. Well, the good news is you get a beautiful chance, right, to break all those cycles. But you also have a chance for some of that joy. How do you talk to your kids now about invisible work you have two sons one daughter it's really for my sons i would say appropriate obviously yeah my sons are the ones unfortunately who have to hear it day in and day out my older son zack he's taking gender studies which i'm very and that was as a gift to me i didn't even ask him to do it he just was noticing that his school has a new newly formed gender studies elective and a lot of his friends were taking media and then he was sort of

mad because the media kids got to maybe be announcers for the basketball team and he wanted to do that. But anyway, he ended up in gender studies. He's the only boy in the class. And I'd say he comes to it with this really an understanding of how to care for his younger sister. My middle son is my intellectual, more of my thought partner. And all day long, he just sends me TikToks of people who hate fair play. So that's his fair thing to do. He says, You need to understand criticism. A lot of it comes from the Christian right, and there are some really interesting critiques of fairness, saying that fairness is not a great value to aspire to.

But to those people, I always just, I have, I always with my son when I say, oh, that's the critique. Well, let's just, let's put, is fairness important to society into chat, GBT? And that's always a fun answer because it's like fairness is the basis for every single legal system in the world. So I would say that, you know, the critiques aren't. aren't so they're more vibesy than data driven. But I think it's funny that that's how Ben wants to, he's very aware of fair play. He's very aware of who talks about fair play. He

Googled, he tells me the most Google search about me is, is Evrotsky still married. So he's very involved, but in more of a thought partner way. And he loves to send me any videos of critiques. But it's interesting that you use fair, not equal or equality or equity. Fair. But it gets bastardized, it sounds like. Correct. Well, I think what's strange is that there's this new, as we know, a tradwife trend that is sort of emerged. And it's sort of same shit, different decade, Nicole. It's coming up.

And a lot of men are the ones who are actually engaging in the trad wife content. It's not just the women. And it's sort of interesting because to them, fairness is really not the value that they would look at first. They look at like servorship. There is a concept in Mormonism called the help meet. I didn't know this until I started since Seth started sending me the critiques. Women are supposed to be help meets to men in their home. And so the idea there's so fairness is really not what God has chosen for women. That's not the path. So I hear a lot of arguments like that where religious theory comes into the discussion. What's interesting about that,

is I'll just say that, oh, I can't combat religious theory and what your beliefs are, but all I can say is that considering I come from a very orthodox Jewish family where I understand that thinking, one thing I will know from a sociological perspective is that female seclusion is something that has been around since the beginning of time. The ultimate tool of the patriarchy is keeping women in the home. Well, what do you think about this new resurgence of trad wives and this sort of anti, I mean, I was part of the boss, which we literally wrote the book and now it's flipped. Well, I think if we argue, Nicole, that we're arguing for a hard life, we're not going to win. I think the beauty of the trad wife movement is that it shows a soft life.

But here's the beauty of the tradwife movement. If you compare it, I'm having a graduate student do this. I'm having him look at tradwife content and asking which cards it falls into. It's never middle of the night comfort. comfort. It's never medical and healthy living. It's never garbage. So it's never that those daily grinds that I was telling you about. It's never a woman saying, at the pediatricians, struggling with a kid who's screaming that they don't want to get their vaccine. It's never, like I said, garbage overflowing. It's all this work that is non-daily grind work. So it's focusing on non-essential

work that ultimately can become commodities that these women can sell. Like sourdough bread. Exactly, right? And garlands and home decor, those are fair play cards. We have a home decor card, but I wouldn't say that any couple is telling me the home decor is what's, you know, ruining their marriage, right? It's that the dishes have been left in the sink, the laundry is piling up, there's a wild card, someone's lost their job, all the other fair play cards that are really painful are the ones that we don't see the tradwife content engaging with. So what do I think?

I think it's a luxury to be able to talk about those non-essential fair play cards. And if you really actually look at what it takes to run a household, then the childwife content is not even relevant. Well, I also really love how you talk about all the help that you have because I think it's important to not just ask women how they do at all, but how much help they have. That's right. And men too, right? I think one last thing I can end on, I think is important for the men listening. I know a lot of men listen to you. Like I said, you're my husband's favorite podcast. Thank you so much. You and the Diary of the CEO. Those are her two favorite, yes. But your show's better for me because the Diary of the CO has like one woman on every hundred.

I guess and the morning routine is always like a plunge bath and like some cold ice thing. And I don't know. It's very triggering. But I want to just end this man who really, I think, had good intentions. But this is sort of what, how hard it is to break out, I think, of these, these roles. And we can really do better. But this wonderful man came to me saying, that him and his wife were playing fair play. And again, for them, it was one of those more

traditional marriages at the time that we were talking about earlier because he started to travel a lot. And he said, you know, I couldn't do my job without my wife. And I just want to acknowledge that. This is like that post-up conversation we talked about. She took a step back in her tech role. He's the head of a big tech company. He's on the road all the time. And he said, I fundamentally understand that without her, I couldn't do my job. And then right after that, he tells me, he wants to tell me about the two single moms on his team that he's sponsoring. And so what I said to him is, it's probably not that helpful for you to sponsor these two single mothers if you just told me they can't do your job. You just said that you could literally

not do your job without your wife handling everything for your children off screen. But you're sponsoring two single mothers who have to do all that work off screen. So then your implicit bias was that those women wouldn't be able to do your job. And I'm not saying that to throw him under the bus. I'm just showing that even somebody who was the best of intentions trying to say that they wanted to support other types of family life realizes that his job is something that he couldn't do without somebody doing all the other work off screen. And that's important because the more I say to him and all of those other one percenters who do have stay-at-home partners, I say, that's great, but it doesn't mean that they have to hold all the cards. The more that you can

bring in transporting your kids to school, right? Bill Gates did it. Melinda Gates talked about how he took the kids to school every day and how other fathers were like, wait, if Bill is doing this, then we should be doing it. I have brain surgeons who tell me that their wives is a stay-in-home wife, but they're holding 30, 40 cards because they know when they, they understand brain health. These are literally brain surgeons. One is a head of a huge hospital who says, I studied neuroscience. And I know that when I have oxytocin from my kids and I have endorphins and I have dopamine, these are all things I'm getting from my family. I do better in how I conduct my surgeries. So he does the work for the home. There are other values than just, oh, this is so hard,

I have to give it over to somebody. It's a village. But, it's also in that space in between when you're doing that mental labor, it's very gratifying. I don't hear any men that say to me, I regret it ever. In 10 years, there's never a man who's called me up and said, I regret that you told me to take my kids to school. I regret that I took them to all their vaccine appointments. I regret that I was the tooth fairy and had to get glitter on my hands. You don't see that in men. You see that they are enriched by this labor as well. And I think the more we talk about that, the more we will get more of those Dower of the CEO routines to say my morning routine is taking my kids to school and playing with them and feeding the baby and wiping a vagina from front to back. Yes.

So important, by the way. From front to back, front to back. Eve, as you know, we end all of our episodes by asking our guests for one final tip that listeners can take straight to the bank, saving, investing, anything. I'll go back to your time is diamonds. Time is a currency. Women have been unfortunately told how to use our time for so long. The more that we can reclaim our time choice, the more that women can understand that our time is diamonds as well, the more that we'll be able to use it to optimize our lives.

And that's my goal. My love letter to you, Nicole, is that you always stay in your full power and that you always get to use your time the way that you choose it. Amen, sister. Thank you. For the holidays, my family and I are headed to Florida to visit my in-laws. It is super important to me that my daughter knows her extended family and has the opportunity to spend time with them. While we're leaving one warm zip code for another, I know we'll still be getting that cozy holiday feeling of being with loved ones. The not-so-cozy part is the cost of flying three people across the country. I know a lot of us are feeling that this time of year. The costs add up fast. That's why I love hosting my home on Airbnb. It's an easy way to bring in some extra income while we're away, and that extra cash can help fund our next trip. Let's say you have a big trip planned or are escaping to a warmer part of the world to work from the beach. Why leave your home sitting empty and dark when it could be making money for you? This year, it's easier than ever to host your home

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