The Liz Moody Podcast - Invisible Labor Is Damaging Your Relationships–But This 6 Minute Exercise Can Change Everything with Eve Rodsky

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

Eve Rodsky discusses her book and card set Fair Play which aim to revolutionize the division of labor within households across the world. exactly what invisible labor is and how to know if you’re doing too much of it why equitable division of labor is a problem and how it shows up in relationships why Fair Play is a love letter to men, and exactly how to get male partners on board how female vs male labor looks different in different countries how to give up control of tasks and trust your partner more how to avoid identity loss after having children a quantifiable way to know exactly how much work having children adds to a relationship the 6 minute exercise that will change your relationship exactly how to divide up household labor when one person makes more money the number one thing partners get wrong when trying to communicate  why you DO want to go to bed angry and so much more! For more from Eve Rodsky, follow her @everodsky or go to fairplaylife.com to learn more about her books Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, download the Fair Play card set, and sign up for the newsletter. To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order my new book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  This episode is sponsored by: AG1: visit drinkag1.com/lizmoody and get your FREE year supply of Vitamin D and 5 free travel packs today.  Reliefband: go to reliefband.com and use code LIZMOODY for 20% off plus free shipping. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Liz Moody podcast, formerly known as the Healthier Together podcast. We are the same podcast, but with even more of everything you love. I'm your host, Liz Moody, and I'm a best-selling author and longtime journalist. This podcast is all about helping you live your healthiest, happiest life, whether we're discovering productivity secrets to increase happiness, learning what really causes bloat and how to best take care of our guts, or uncovering when anger can actually be an advantageous emotion. And yes, those are all real episodes, so if any of those topics sound good to you, scroll on back in the archives. Today, I am so excited to welcome Eve Rodsky to the podcast. Eve is a superstar.

She is the New York Times best-selling author of Find Your Unicorn Space and Fairplay. She started off as a lawyer. She went to Harvard Law, no big deal, before working in family mediation, strategy, and organizational management. That background led her to develop a system for couples seeking balance of efficiency and peace in their home, which has grown into the worldwide sensation fair play. If you were not familiar with the fair play cards, they are a set of 100 cards. They outline different tasks that are necessary to keep a household afloat and a system for defining ownership of the task. For example, there is an extended family card. Somebody has to remember to call Aunt Mary for

her 90th birthday. There is a garbage card. Who owns this task? What does ownership look like? What does a successfully completed garbage task look like in full. There are cards for money management, for social plans, for groceries, for home maintenance, and so much more. And we will talk about all of this way more in the episode. Fairplay is famous for rebalancing the division of labor within households, from marriages to intergenerational families to roommates, but it is so much more complex than just that. This episode is all about opening up the space to have difficult conversations.

knowing your values, acting with empathy, and building structures to best support every party in a relationship. We get into exactly what invisible labor is and how to know if you are doing too much of it, why equitable division of labor is a problem and how it shows up in relationships, why fair play is actually a love letter to men despite what many people think and exactly how to get male partners on board, how female versus male labor looks different in different countries, how to give up control of tasks and trust your partner more. How to avoid identity loss after having children. A quantifiable way to know exactly how much work having children adds to a relationship.

The six-minute exercise that will change your relationship forever. Exactly how to divide up household labor when one person makes more money. The number one thing partners get wrong when trying to communicate, plus a genius tip for communicating better, and so much more. As always, we would both love to hear your thoughts as you're listening. So definitely screenshot and tag us on Instagram. I am at Liz Moody and Eve is at Eve Rodski. I also love when you share a little picture of the episode and what you're doing as you're listening.

It makes me feel like I am right there along with you and I absolutely love it. Also, please, please share this episode. This is clearly a conversation that is so important to be having on an individual level, but also on a societal level so we can really affect that change from my. all angles. I am currently on my book tour for 100 ways to change your life. I'm so thrilled to be traveling across the country to meet all of you. So many cities are sold out, but check out Liz Moody.com slash tour to see if there are still tickets available for the city nearest you. I love seeing all of your story tags about 100 ways to change your life. And I am so, so, so glad. I cannot even

say how glad that you are all loving it. It just feels wild to have this thing that I worked on that was in my head and on the page and between me and my editors and my agent and all of that for so long to have that out in the world to have people reading it and digesting it and putting it into practice in their lives. It is, oh, it's a feeling unlike anything I've ever felt before. And it is so, so gratifying. If you are loving it, I would really appreciate a quick review on Amazon or on Goodreads. Reviews are so, so, so helpful. My publisher actually told me that one, Amazon review translates into seven new sales, which is insane. I don't quite get how that works, but it's interesting nonetheless.

So if you are loving the book, I would so appreciate a quick Amazon review, a quick Goodreads review, quick Barnes & Noble review, wherever you purchase the book. And thank you again for reading, for learning with me, for coming along on this journey. It has been an amazing, amazing ride, and it is all 100% because. of you. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Okay, let's get right into it with the great Eve Rodski. Welcome to the podcast. I'm such a huge fan. I feel like I was a fan before I dove into all the research about you and now I'm everything you say on other podcasts. I'm like, yes, like, yay, you're amazing. So thank you so much for being here. Well, I do think our work is really aligned, especially as I

started to move into identity and creativity for women. And I know your new book is coming out. And I feel there's a lot of aligned messaging because what I love about your work is that you're not an influencer from things of your opinion, but you do all of the research too. Everything is science-backed. And that's how I was. Everything that I wanted to do and bring to people were things that I didn't want to be anecdotal. I wanted to be science-backed or research-backed. And so I think that's where we intersect. Yeah, absolutely. And probably so many of our beliefs about the way that the world should work as well. Yes. I feel like your story is fairly well known by now, but just to make everybody be on the same page, can you give us a brief explanation about what the idea of fair play is and then also sketch out for us the problem that it's solving?

Yes. I'll just back up and say, I resolutely did not set out to be an expert on the gender division of labor. I mean, that wasn't on my third grade. What do you want to be when you grew up for? which probably said, you know, veterinarian. Well, that was later, but it definitely started off with, like, veterinarian, I'd say. But yeah, what I talk about is that Elizabeth Warren was our orientation professor, and she really did ask us, Gen X, women, what do we want to do with our law degree? This was 2009, 23 years ago, basically. There was a lot of hope that we were entering a new wave of feminism.

We were past having to argue for our reproductive rights. We were past having to ask a man, whether it's our father or our husband, to co-sign on a credit card for us. There seemed to be unlimited potential for this late millennial early Gen X woman. And so I felt that way, too. I really did tell Elizabeth Warren that I wanted to be president of the United States after I was a senator for New York. And ironically, she hadn't been a senator yet.

she was still a professor at Harvard. I had all these dreams, and I talked about this idea of, you know, feeling like I was going to smash, like, all these glass ceilings. And then if you cut to my life, really, in 2011, the decade later, the only thing I was smashing was peas for my toddler. I mean, that's what it came down to. I was completely shocked and surprised by the abandonment in three areas, abandoned by my workplace, because I try to negotiate going back to work at a corporation

and the hostility was palpable. I was losing my direct reports. I was going to have to pump in a converted broom closet, but they had no power outlets in there. So I needed to bring a battery pack. So I quit, or I now would say I was forced out. So there was hostility in the workplace. There was hostility for my partner,

where I talk a lot about in fair play, the fact that I had a blueberries breakdown from Seth saying, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries. That was the text that put me over the edge. And so my partner was abandoning, me by assuming because of my gender, I was going to be in charge of every single household and domestic tasks for my family. That was a statistic I didn't know, but I was living at the time that women hold two-thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family, and it just gets

worse if you make more money and worse if you have children. And then on top of that, I was being abandoned by America in my community because everyone was basically saying to me, you're on your own, right? If you want to have someone to help you breastfeed, you have to hire them. If you want somebody to help you teach you how to take care of a baby, you have to hire them. There was nothing that came the way other countries do it, whether it's paid leave, access to doulas, access to postpartum care. There was nothing like that. It was that shock that I was so far, Liz, from where I thought I was going to be to where I ended up, that deep pain was how fair plate organically started. That was a turning point in my life. I would say after my

second son was born in 2011, where I said to myself, I can no longer live like this. People will say all the time, you know, you can't have it all. And I'm like, yes, you can. You just have to be a man. Yes, you can. Of course you can have a family in a thriving career. Men do it all the time. I remember one of my friends, she was asked on stage, how can you be a law firm partner and be a good mom. Her answer to that conference that I love so much was, why are you assuming that I want to be a good mom? I just want to be a great dad. Wow. That's so interesting. And then you mentioned all of these other cultures and how they have more support systems. And I know that you tested fair play in 17 countries. 17 countries, yes. Yeah. So did you learn about how different couples are communicating

in different places where these support systems exist? I did, actually. And here's the good news or bad news, depending how you look at it, it's actually not so different for women, even in the countries that we look at as our shining stars, like the Nordic countries. For me, that was almost a comfort because we're all going through this together. That statistic I was telling you about earlier, that two-thirds are more of what it takes to run a home and family, there are definitely more supports, and it's easier, I would say, to find daycare, to get help, to raise your family. But I will say that the statistics around what women do versus what men do, they're pretty much the same in every single society. There's some that are worse than others. But women shoulder,

you know, the statistics are unbelievable. We do about $1.9 trillion of unpaid labor a year. Our entire social safety net, our entire systems would collapse, but for women's unpaid labor. So these are things obviously I learned over time. And, I have so many women laugh and say to me, well, now you made me not want to have kids. And I totally understand that. But I do think that the fair play movement is really the understanding that women can step into their full power outside the home. But it's time that we invite men into their full power in the home. I've heard you say before that society would collapse if women stopped doing this labor.

But one of your goals is to make women stop doing this labor. How is that going to work on a societal level? Well, my ultimate goal, right, is that men do the labor and women don't. That's sort of where I evolved to in my marriage. My second son, he's sort of like my social media manager. He'll be like, oh, there was a lot of, you know, internet searches around as Eve Rodsky still married? And I am.

And so I guess apparently that's a big search. How's Eve's husband? Yeah, how's he doing that? And Seth, who is pretty private, but allowed me to share my story. And I will say that as a woman out there, if you're interested in sharing your story, you do get a lot of societal pushback for sure. And it's very hard. A lot of women do not write their memoirs according to a study because they don't want to talk about people who are alive. And so Seth being able to be part of this was really important. But he always

jokes, you know, when people say, well, how did you get to such an equitable division of labor now in your life? He'll say, well, just, why don't you just have your wife write a book about you and portray you in a terrible light? That's what it took. Was there drama there when you were writing the book or dealing with things? Or by then, were you so good at having these conversations? I know that communication is one of your pillars of your life, your brand, all these things. How did that work out? I think the good news and the bad news was that Seth was there from the beginning. So by the time I decided to make my activism around unpaid labor, he had been so steeped in the conversations around Fairplay. He'd been hearing about this and practicing with me

since basically 2012, 2013. So in 2019, it was six years later, seven years later. By that time, he just, it was so used to hearing about it that he just sort of gave up. It wasn't contentious anymore. And actually, it really helped us a lot. It's hard to go backwards and tell a story of sadness. But there is obviously redemption in it because we are together. And I think he was willing to do that rainbow with me. You know, you start off sort of with all that rain. And then there is that pot of gold at the end, or at least a practice that's helpful. So I think he was with me in that way. Right after I fell apart in 2011 around all these abandonment issues with our society, my husband, and my workplace, the only thing I knew to do back then was to research similar

to you. And I think that's when good things started to happen for me. Because I wasn't at a solution when I started to do the research around fair play. But I did notice that it wasn't just my problem anymore. And I think that was the beauty. One of the pivotal moments for me I talk a lot about was this breast cancer march I went on because I was with nine other women who felt very powerful to me. This is before podcasts.

This is before we had a Liz, you know, someone like you. We didn't have anything. There was no social media during this time in 2011. I thought everyone else had to figure it out. And there was so much shame around saying that you weren't getting along with your partner. that no one was talking about that. So I didn't really know anybody else was suffering

from feeling like they were being overwhelmed by all the unpaid caregiving tasks of the family until I was on this march with these other women. One was a stroke and trauma doctor, award-winning producer, really strong women that use their voices in many different contexts. And being with them at this breast cancer march,

we were honoring a friend who was recently diagnosed and also a friend who had passed away in law school. we had this great communal morning of beauty and understanding around scientific research for breast cancer and being together and planning a lunch together and it was a Saturday morning. I had my second child at home and a toddler, so it did feel pretty controversial to leave two kids with my partner on a weekend just to be with myself. But then around noon, I talk about how I started to notice all of these texts coming in. that I may not have noticed if I wasn't already fed up in my own relationship. And the texts were so shocking to me because they were things like, where did you put Hudson's

soccer bag? Which is very similar to what Seth would say to me. What's the address of the birthday party? If you really want me to take Sophie, then you better have left a gift or, like, let me know where I'm going. My friend Kate's husband, always my favorite, do the kids need to eat lunch. So the beauty of that time in my life was as angry as I was with Seth, when I realized and asked these women who resolutely decided not to come with me to lunch, Liz, because they felt they left their partners with too much to do once they started to get these text messages that morning. When I realized that we had 30 phone calls and 46 texts for 10 women over 30 minutes, I realized I wasn't alone. I start to ask those women and other women what they do.

That's invisible to their partner, like finding Hudson's soccer bag. And that's how when I sent this spreadsheet to set that had 3,000 items of invisible work on it, and he reacted so terribly with a monkey emoji covering its eyes saying, I don't want to see this work. I don't think he wanted to remember that I had already gone through the shit I do spreadsheet, that I already tried to make the case that I was doing 3,000 things in these spreadsheet tabs that he wasn't aware of and I needed things to change and he didn't want to change. That's the part of our story that he didn't want to revisit.

But post should I do spreadsheet, when Fairplay turned from that into a system that we started to use, then he was okay with me telling our story. But I said to him, I can't tell our story without explaining the pain I was in trying to convince you to help me because I think so many women will be in that situation. It's interesting, though, because you are relying on. on your partner's empathy and interest in you living your best life? Yes. Because otherwise, everything is really set up better for them.

Like, they are going to do more work probably in a fair play system than they are without a fair play system. Correct. And I will say that what men say, because fair play ultimately became a love letter to men, is actually that's not the way it panned out. And that's why it was so beautiful. because when I was starting to bring this idea of a system to people, the idea that things could be easier in your home, what started to happen was coaches and people in the military, men in the military, were actually reporting the opposite. That systems, because they are used to systems in the military and as coaches, you don't put your point guard in for your center.

The good news is that my background is, I'm not a therapist. I am a lawyer. I have a very niche practice, which is I work for families that look like the HBO Show Succession. I bring an organizational framework to their families so that they could better and more easily make hard decisions. And so once I realized, oh my God, wait a second, if I could take what I do in my day job, which is build organizational systems for really highly complex families, could I start

treating my own home as an organization and build the same systems for myself. That was the insight that really changed my life because I knew once you're in a system that works, you get three things. You get explicitly defined expectations. You get fairness and transparency, and you actually know your role. That actually works better for people in the system and actually creates less work. So I think that was the insight and why fair play has become sort of a love letter to men when it started off with all my anger and rage. So if you were a woman trying to get a male partner on board in one line, just like a really simple thing to remember, what would you say? I would say, hey, you know how like every night we're waiting to take the dog out right when it's

about to take a piss on the rug? I feel like that decision fatigue is really dragging us down. I think we can probably find a better way to do this. So it's about the result of getting rid of who owns this task? Correct. The reason people adopt systems, the reason why we have any system you'd see at the workplace, the goal is really to make sure that you're making decisions in advance. Life becomes easier if you know what to expect. We do it for our kids, right? We tell them what to expect in the classroom. There's classroom visits for them to meet their teachers in advance. There's many times where we know how to do that. And in fact, what I would say is that, that when you know what you're supposed to do in advance and when you're in a good system,

the best way I could say is that imagine having somebody who you hired come in who works for you. And every single day that they come into the office, they come to you first in the morning and say, hey, I showed up to work today. So what should I be doing today? I'll just sit here in your spare chair and wait for you to tell me what to do. We know that. that that person would not exist probably at the workplace very long. Even my Aunt Marion's Majan group, I like to say it has more clearly defined expectations in the home because you don't bring snack twice to the group, right? That's the expectations. You're in charge of snack twice for the season. Then you're out. You don't get to come back. So I would say most places, even at Marion's Majan group,

definitely our workplaces, we give people the context for how to do their job. We invest in the onboarding, of those people to do our job. The only organization that we don't do that for is our homes. Yeah, absolutely. I love the workplace example, too, because if somebody came to every day and did that, you'd be like, of course they would be annoyed. And it really puts into perspective why, even though you've maybe offered to go to the grocery store and get the groceries, why the person you're asking would be annoyed. 100%. Hey, I've been there 17 times. Can you just remind me again of what I'm supposed to get, right? So, but this is why it was so interesting for me and why it was so exciting to watch the beta testing work because the truth is that type of reactive execution does

not really work for the person who's in that role. We know for psychological safety that people don't feel good when they are controlled. Actually, control is the opposite of trust, if you think about it. And so people, we like to feel trusted, we don't like to feel controlled. Hence, why masking was a big deal during the pandemic, right? I mean, things that you would say, okay, these are maybe common sense, but probably not because there was a lot of fighting back on these control issues. The goal of fair play is really to get people, and especially men, out of that feeling control, which is a gendered word for nagging, which I hate that word. I call it the rat. You don't want your home to be infested with rats.

which are random assignments of tasks, that's control, and move down the spectrum to trust. And then once you can do that, women will say to me, well, I can't trust them unless there's accountability. So that's really what Fairplay is designed to do. It's designed to bring back accountability and trust, which is actually the two things that 100 percent, Liz, are missing in home organizations in those 17 countries. People do not have accountability and trust in their partners, but leads to really strange incentives like women saying in the time it takes me to tell him what to do, I should do it myself. It leads to a lot of women becoming complicit in their own oppression. So we're going to talk about how to let go of that control and all of that a little

bit later. But first, let's just talk about the system. In a nutshell, what were you actually beta testing? What is the fair play system? The fair play system is a card game. It's a hundred card metaphor. You don't have to have the actual cards. We have that as a tool. But on the website, we have a free resource. We're here really to make this accessible to everybody. And what this 100 cards does is it lays out what all the invisible work is that it would take to run a home.

So the 100 cards represents for suits. There's home. There's caregiving. There's something called out, which are the things that happen out of the home. And there's something called magic. And then there's the wild cards of life. Like if you're getting a new job or if there's job loss or if you're you're bringing a new child into the home or if you're moving, then the cards can be harder or

need to be re-dealt. But the four suits are really beautiful because you can play about 60 cards if you are in a roommate relationship, if you're in a boyfriend's girlfriend relationship or LGBTQIA relationship, any relationship is about 60 cards. If you add a child or children into the relationship, you're adding 40 cards already. So people can already in advance without even knowing what the cards are, know that the labor of running your home organization is going to get so much bigger because you're adding an additional 40 cards if you bring children to the home. So what do you do with those cards? Which I just want to sit on that for a second. We have a lot of conversations on this podcast about the pros and cons of having kids and how we decide if we want to have kids.

And it is so interesting that you're saying you're almost doubling your labor by having kids, the 60-40 split. 100%. That's why people feel so overwhelmed because I really truly believe before fair play that a lot of our beta testers, like I would hear from these, again, from wonderful men. It doesn't have to just be heterocyst gender, but a lot of our misassumptions come from there, so I'm centering that conversation. But a lot of men would say to me, I genuinely thought there was nothing for me to do in the first six months of the life of this baby because my wife was breastfeeding.

I was like, I don't understand. I'm like you just forgot laundry existed. You forgot dishes existed. You forgot your wife and you needed to eat. It was just so confusing. You forgot that maybe you'd want to thank people for the gifts that they were sending you. Maybe you don't appreciate that, but at least a text message, someone would have to be in charge of that.

You forgot that this child would need daycare or child care. So it was such a shock to men. And we're seeing an increase in postpartum depression in men after kids. what I believe, now studying this for 10 years. Women, 100% is hormonal. We have no support. But I think for men, it's the shock and surprise of how much the labor has increased by not expecting that. I also think, and this is just a theory that I have and I'm not a parent, but I think that the loss of identity and the knowledge that your identity is forever shifted is a hard thing to come to terms with when you have a child as well.

100%. And so I think that leads really beautifully to the secret formula, right? So Fairplay is a card game. But what does that really mean? Well, the card game helps you do three things, which is a magic formula for successful home organizations or successful organizations of all types. What I would tell the families that I worked for as their lawyer was that if you want to transfer over this giant family business or family foundation, this organization needs three things. things. It needs boundaries, it needs systems, and it needs communication. They all have to be there to have a successful home organization. So when we talked about the hundred cards, that's the system part. But I think before that, what you just said is actually the key. The system happens when you're already at the table. But the boundaries and communication means people don't come to the table. The hardest thing about fair play was convincing people that, that they deserve to be at that table, that they deserve to, even if they're the one aggrieved, to approach their partner and say, I'm not going to live like this anymore, that they deserve

to communicate about domestic life. The problem is when you lose your identity, when society, especially for women, has told you, you're allowed to be just three things. We're happy with you being a professional. Sure, as long as you center your roles as serving your partner, aka taking their name, aka all the unpaid labor in the assumptions of being a woman, and also you being a parent. And so, yes, it's very hard because how could I even get you to the table with a system if you're already believing because of society that you're supposed to put a mom necklace on your neck?

That's why I wear an E. I wear my own initial around my neck because so many people try to give me mom necklaces when all my kids were born, everybody's going to remind me I'm a mother. I'm Zach's mom. I get it. But actually, I need to remind myself that I'm a person outside of my identity as Zach's mom.

That's the problem with the identity loss. The identity loss is designed for us to say, we're supposed to put our kids first. And then when you get there, that's why people don't come to the table to say, I deserve to look at my time as if it's diamonds like you do. In our society,

we have completely conditioned women to believe their time is infinite like sand, and to treat men's time as if it's finite like diamonds. And if you don't believe me, right, just look at health systems. They still say things like breastfeeding is free when it's an 1,800-hour-a-year job. You just have to look at when women enter male professions. Salaries automatically come down. We've been conditioned since birth to believe our time is less valuable than men's time. So yes, I can get you and give you the system, but I think this is the harder point.

this is why our conversation here is a 101 and sometimes requires a trigger warning, because we do everything, Liz, to comply with this breaching of our boundaries. We say to ourselves, it's easier to do it myself than tell my partner what to do. We convince ourselves we're better multitaskers that we're wired differently for care. We say to ourselves that we're both colorectal surgeons, but I can find the time and my partner is better at focusing on one task at a time. Those messages are our defense mechanism because we are supposed to lose our identity. And that's why people don't come to the table.

So sadly, it's not just the system. We need boundary systems and communication for fair play to work. And that's where the movement comes in. Because I can get you the system. I can get you to communicate even. But I can't get women to get out of their own way so that they can believe that their time is worthwhile when society has told us time and time again is not. Well, let's talk about some of those issues. So one, I think that a lot of people run into and society is

perpetuating because women are paid less. I think 83 cents to the dollar is where it's currently at. So my partner makes more money than me. They should have to take on less of the household labor because they're contributing financially. What would you say to them? I would say that you have to look at your home as a dual ambition home. And if you want to stay in a good relationship, we have to look at people with dual ambitions and say those ambitions matter because if we get into a tussle of you make more than me so I have to take on more unpaid labor, then guess what's going to happen? I'm going to take on more unpaid labor and you're going to keep getting paid more than me. It's self-perpetuating. The only way that men are going to be able to take the 83 cents on the

dollar that we have is because they're caregivers. So in fact, what was so shocking to me was it wasn't actually just so black and white. Why we're getting paid $0.83 in the dollar, and obviously if you're a black woman or a Latino woman, you're being paid less than that. But the reason why we are getting that pay gap in the first place is because society already assumes that we're going to be mothers and that we're going to be less productive.

And so we're already getting that penalty, regardless of whether we decide to have children or not. It's called the motherhood penalty. So we actually need a fatherhood penalty to come into place to, aka meaning that if men do it, it's normalized. And actually, there'll be no penalty. So the idea that I make less so I do more unpaid labor, unfortunately for women is a losing proposition. It's also losing proposition because the scariest and most traumatizing interviews that I did for a fair play were women in their 60s who had lost everything because they had given up. their careers and they were in such dire straits and then they go to the courts asking for alimony

or child support and the courts say well it was your choice to do nothing with your life and so what i've been doing recently for fun is i'll get dms and my team will sort them through and say okay a woman's asking you to testify at family court for her to combat the stereotype that she did nothing with her life. She raised three productive citizens that are now in the workplace. Can you explain to them the amount of labor it took for her to do that primarily? And so I'll read the amount of labor it took into the record. And I've done that now twice. And it's been a really interesting exposition into how little we value caregiving. Look, I'm never going to make everything that I wear organic. But your sheets, your pillows, your comforter are literally touching your

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That is Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash Liz Moody. So remember to get the offer slash Liz Moody for up to 25 free meals. Do you think there should be any discrepancy in the amount of cards that you get based on your salary? It's a great question. And people get really mad at me over this because fair play is not prescriptive. So I'll give people an example of what I mean by holding a card so then we can just talk about the magic number. When I started to develop this idea of a card game, I would ask couples, groceries, for example.

And this was a revolutionary question. I started off asking initially with all the cards, who does, you know, how does it work? Very sort of generic. And then what I would hear back is, oh, we both handle that. And I was like, okay, this is very unhelpful because everybody was telling me for every single thing in the family that they both handle it. There's just no way because these women are telling me they're resentful, men are telling me they don't know their role. Like, I'm missing something. So I'd go and ask these questions, who handles groceries? We both do. So I knew that I had to change the question

because I wasn't getting the data I needed. So then I asked the question that changed the entire trajectory of fair play, which was, how does mustard get in your refrigerator? I want you to walk me through every single little step of how that happens. This is where I saw the Nordic countries, again, not being as good as everybody thought. Because no matter where I asked, if women were married to men, it was the same thing. So much so that I would get goosebumps every single time, I couldn't believe that the data was so consistent, where it was always women, always women saying that they were the one noticing. They were the one who noticed that their second son Johnny doesn't eat protein without yellow mustard. And that's what he needs to get the protein down. That noticing,

that conception is something in organizational management we talk about. And so I was able to say, oh, shit, okay, conception is a bucket that I'm used to in project management and that's staying with women. And then I would hear women say that they were the ones monitoring the mustard for when it ran low. and they were getting stakeholder buy-in from their family for what they needed that week on the grocery list. I mean, they didn't exactly say stakeholder buy-in, but that's what I was listening for. And I was like, oh, my God, this is a planning phase. Like, again, I know this phase. And then the both trap, why men were also saying that they were involved in groceries,

because they were going to the store to get the groceries, right? They're picking up spicy Dijon every fucking time. And then women were saying to me, you want me to trust my partner with the estate planning card, Eve? the dude can't even bring home the right type of mustard. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Okay, that organization has lost accountability and trust. So all these amazing insights sort of started trickling out of the mustard question. And then what you realize is that when you design a system, you're designing it for ownership.

When you hold a card, you're holding it with full ownership. That insight changed my marriage. That's CPE insight, conception, planning execution. Seth was totally on board. He does ownership mindset in his workplace. He understood, oh shit, I really thought I was owning extra curricular sports for our little toddler sons. You mean you've been the one signing up at the AYSO 1980s portal. You've been the one getting the equipment. You've been the one returning the equipment to Amazon. You've been the one putting on sunscreen before I take the kids to the field. You've been the one on an 85 person text chain for practice. And I thought I

owned it? No, no, no. You now own it when you have all those tasks, and I never have to hear about it, and I get to show up smiling if I want to or not. The reason why that's a long answer is because that one card, when Seth took over extracurricular sports and did it with the full ownership mindset of conception planning execution, I would have told you I would have been fine with that. My marriage had already changed, and I was still holding probably around 85 cards, and he was holding one. So now that he got the hang of ownership, he started taking on more and more. And 10 years later, he's probably holding more cards than I am. But I will say, if somebody is not working in the home, if they're a stay-at-home spouse,

their other partner, there is perceived fairness and beauty, ironically, in the blackjack. About a fourth or fifth of the work. When the partner, who's the main breadwinner, holds 21 cards, again, about a fourth or fifth of the work, couples in all these countries were reporting perceived fairness. So that's the long answer to ownership matters more than cards. But if you do want a number, ironically, it ended up being the blackjack. Okay. Do other things impact division of cards, like things like chronic illness or I've gone through periods where I have really extreme anxiety?

And then it's interesting because my partner, Zach, not your child. Love Zach, love your Zach too. He takes on a lot more of the household labor during those times. There was a period where I literally couldn't get out of bed. So he was taking on a lot of our household labor. And then afterwards, I feel like I have to make it up to him. I have to do even more to make up for the deficiencies that I evidenced during that time. So I'm curious how other things like that, or even if we're talking about biological things like pregnancy, childbirth, women are taking on more of that, obviously.

So how do these other life situations impact division of cards? We've done boundaries. Now we did a beautiful thing around ownership and actually what the system is. And you sort of segwayed me. I don't know if he didn't intentionally be a great interviewer into this idea of what does communication look like. So what I would say is that that's a story you're telling yourself, right, that I have disappointed my partner. I've disappointed Zach because I've thrown all the stuff on him and now I have to do best to take it back. All I ask people in those situations is that when you have an anxiety episode or again a new job or something where your division you may want it to change again, I ask people, and this is what works now that we've seen this over 10 years, those couples need a consistent check-in. There's a wild card that the daily check-in for, it can be six minutes, literally, the six-minute check-in where you're literally sitting down, you can set a timer, but you get into the exercise of talking every single day when your emotion is low and your cognition is high. Actually, ironically, sometimes the divisional labor doesn't change at all, where Zach will say, you know, I want Liz her mental health to be okay, and I'm actually okay handling this amount of labor. I just want her to appreciate it or I want to talk about it. And this comes from the workplace that people, managers are much more likely to hear bad news that they need to hear from their employees if they have consistency of communication. It's sort of similar in the home where you can hear bad news.

that they need to hear from their employees if they have consistency of communication, it's sort of similar in the home, where you can hear bad news in a way that doesn't harm you, like I'm overwhelmed or I need more help, as opposed to when we typically give it, which is feedback in the moment, like, fuck this. One woman said she hasn't communicated about domestic life,

and then she's like a big COO, and I'm like, that cannot be the case because you're in charge of communicating everything for your company. And then, of course, she tells me that she doesn't, I'm sweat clothes in her partner's pillow when he doesn't put it in the dryer. So I'm like, okay, well, you're actually communicating. What I like to say to people is if you're afraid of what we're saying here, right, you're already communicating about domestic life, whether it's with your roommate, your parent,

your partner. It's just a communication shift, these moments of change in a relationship, whether it's a new baby or a mental health issue. That's when the most important thing is to invest not even in changing. the division of labor yet, but really into say, what does a practice feel like for us to come to the table every day? It takes a little exercise. Like when I went back after COVID, to trying to even walk again when I'd been getting like 200 steps a day for like a year and a half, I remember, I couldn't believe that I couldn't even like do a lap around my park. And so you just have to

remember that like exercise, you can't say I talked about my partner about the division of labor in 2005 once. It's like saying you exercise once in 2005 and now you're fit for life. Sadly, communication is a practice. People don't look at it that way, but it is. That's what I would say. If you're going to one of these high stress situations, even if it's good stress, that's the time to implement even before fair play, this, I'd say, a six minute, a day check-in. What's something that you think people get wrong in moments where they're trying to communicate and what's your best communication tip. Oh my gosh. This is so fun. Let's do it like an abbreviated version of an exercise. I want to know when emotion is high and cognition is low. So think back to a fight you and Zach had.

Okay. If you can start a picture something, I don't care. It could be leaving out the pizza overnight that you wanted to save or not putting a garbage liner back in the bag or something bigger about where you want to live. Think about a fight you've had with Zach. I want to know what he would say about you. Would he say that you are long-winded? You're just going on and on. What do you say that you always say things are like this and he never does this? Would he say that you sound like nails on the chalkboard because all of a sudden your tone gets really, really drill sergeanty? Would he say that you avoid the conversations and just don't come home for a while because you don't want to have them? Is there a type of communication,

vulnerability that you could tell me if you think about it that he would say about you? main ones. One is the always never. And then the other one for me especially is like the avoid shut down. Great. How much humor can you bring if you know that in advance? And then when you're communicating, you can say our typical pattern, as you know, Zach, right, is that I will tell you that you've always been a certain way and you've never helped me in any way possible. And I've asked, or I will avoid the conversation and not come to the table, right? And then he will say, well, yeah, and then because of that, I get big. You know, my tone gets big and then you walk away. So what's fun about knowing your communication styles is that when you're coming in for your check-in,

you can say this is my vulnerability. Most communication vulnerabilities stem from feedback in the moment. Because people don't believe that they're going to get their six-minute-a-night check-in, so they feel like they have to get it off their chest. It's that stupid advice, like never go to bed angry, right? which is the worst advice from a mediator, I think you could ever hear. Of course, you go to bed angry. The point is to have high cognition, low emotion conversations. So you go to bed, you get up, it's going to be a much better conversation. The goal is to have communication, understand it's a practice, know your vulnerabilities, and to remember that most of them come from feedback in the moment. And that's for me. The nails on the chalkboard is the feedback in the moment. I have to tell

Seth right then that he fucking sucks because he forgot to do X, Y, and Z, right? So now I've been able to practice writing down those thoughts in my iPhone notes. And so sometimes there will be things I need to bring up during our check-in that were not addressed. Other times, it'll literally be things like all-capped yellow rag. And Liz, I have no idea what the hell I was talking about. And so I'll say, well, that's good. I don't remember what this is. So it's not important. And I think that's the beauty of saying, okay, I'm not. cool, but let's just, you know, let's do this at our check-in. I actually love the idea of writing it down, too, because you get the satisfaction.

You're not holding onto it cognitively, like being like, oh, well, I remember this later. You like write it down, write it down in all caps. All caps. Add your angry emojis. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. And it like, it lets some of the air out of it whether or not you remember what you're talking about later.

What if you disagree about the value of something? So I'm messy and my partner is clean and he cleans the house and I say, you're not doing that for us, you're doing that for you because I don't care if the house is messy. And I think that can come up with a lot of parenting stuff. Like, I don't care what our kid is wearing. And you're like, well, I'm taking on the load of making sure that our kid has clean clothes and clothes that they like, etc, et cetera, et cetera. So how do you deal with that type of situation? Well, obviously, in any other situation, if it wasn't division of labor, you would care about something your partner cared about. I mean, that's part of a beautiful relationship, right?

They're telling you about their day. and instead of saying, well, I wasn't there, so I don't care. You would say, tell me about your day, right? But in the division of labor, so many people will say to me, well, I don't care about that. That's their problem. I don't care about thank you notes. How I like to reframe that is I talk about the minimum standard of care. So there are certain things that actually have to be done, like feeding your children or feeding

yourselves or dishes. But the beauty of these conversations, I care, you don't care, is that really what you're trying to say is that we have different values about something. thing. And so what's so fun about Fairplay is that my favorite part was watching couples in the beta testing days when I'd sit with, oh my God, just such a panoply of different couples and watch them have values conversations over garbage because it's very awkward for people to start talking about garbage as if it's not worthy of a conversation. But actually, I would argue garbage is probably one of the most worthy conversations you could ever have. I forced you to have a values conversation about

every card. And that's what takes a little long. It's a little bit of an onboarding process. Some people do it in like one or two sessions. I'd say it takes most people a couple months to get through all the cards that they're, you know, pretty nuanced. And again, this is an investment in your life, just like exercise. The way it sort of looks is you grab a card, right? And if Liz is owning the cleaning card, it's going to look too different than if Zach owns the cleaning card. So to get there, though, I need for you to have a conversation. So the way it started for Seth and me was, okay, we're here to talk about garbage. What does this even mean?

All right, we're going to talk about our values about garbage. How do you feel about garbage? And then I realized that that wasn't working because people were not used to having conversations about garbage. So saying things to them, like, tell me about how you feel about garbage. I would get a lot of blank stairs. So then I started similar to the mustard question. I started to ask people instead, I needed one garbage story from your childhood. Just tell me one thing you remember about, did you have garbage cans? And then I would hear the most

amazing stories, Liz. I would start learning about men. Well, I lived in a small apartment, so we actually just had a shoot. And then, you know, I was always responsible for throwing that garbage down the shoot. And the door would lock. One guy said, you know, every time I like took the garbage out, so I was always locked outside of my house. And my younger brother wouldn't let me back in. And so I was like, you didn't remember to, you know, turn your lock to keep your door open. So you start getting these beautiful stories. For me, that's what ended up happening. I ended up telling Seth a garbage story very vulnerably that I started to really remember garbage in my house because it was piling over. We had a cockroach and water bug infestation most years of my childhood. I was often alone at

night, so I didn't take out the garbage. I was too afraid to go out into our apartment lobby. So it would just sort of sit there. My brother was disabled. He would ask for water. I was putting him to bed as a latchkey kid, I'd go into the kitchen, Seth, and I'd have to close my eyes and turn on the light, wait for the cockroaches to scatter. When the light turned on, open my eyes, get the water, and leave. So every time I see it full garbage, I'm thinking of that neglect of my childhood. That's why I'm obsessed with taking it out. And then Seth was able to say to me, well, I had a housekeeper growing up. I don't give a shit about garbage. In fact, I think I slept on Domino's pizza boxes in my fraternity all four years, and I probably like garbage. So do we go back

into that situation like you said where he says, well, you care about garbage and I don't? No, it became, this is a daily grind that has to happen in our house. So what's our minimum standard of care for what garbage can look like that can meet both of our standards? For Seth, it was I care because you care, but it's not going to go out every hour. What's going to happen is, yes, I will own garbage, which means now I realize there are little garbages in the bathrooms that I never emptied. I will empty those little garbages. I will put liners back in all of the garbages. And I will take it out once a day.

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code Liz Moody for 15% off at branchbasics.com. That's code Liz Moody for 15% off the premium starter kit at branchbasics.com. And when they ask you where you heard about us, please make sure to mention the show. That is branch basics.com and use code Liz Moody. So understanding the values that we have behind all of these tasks essentially gives us the empathy to see from our partner's perspective

and to understand why it's important to them, even if it's not important to us? 100%. Okay. Well, I mean, even in your house, I would say to you, if you're talking to Zach, like you said he's somebody who values neatness, cleanliness, I'd be very curious to know what his house was like. Did he have a house where

everything was always in his proper place? Or did he grew up like I did in sort of a hoarder's house where nothing was ever in its proper place and we were dealing with the cockroaches? And so I need everything in his proper place now because of that. That's your homework assignment. I would just sit down tonight and just explore what each of you remembers about what your home looked like growing up. And would you recommend to anybody listening to do that with any that you're sort of disagree on what the minimal standard of cares. Yes. Yeah.

Okay. Typically, the beauty is most people actually get together because they align on a lot of great things. So it's not as scary as you would think. It's not like you're finding about everything. You probably think you're fighting about every minimum standard of care because for you it's probably the constant, you know, round robin of cleanliness. For me, it was this constant round robin of garbage.

But in fact, most of us have alignment and there's just a couple things where we need to tell each other our stories. But the beauty of onboarding is I want you to do it with all the cards, just because why not know more about your partner? One of my favorite cards is called magical beings. Why not know if they had Santa growing up or if they had lucky leprecha or if their family had an elf on the shelf or whatever? It's just fun to learn more about your partner. And this is a way to do it that obviously also helps with the division of labor later on. No, I love that. It's like a conversation starter. Also, I do love that you have these events. for free at fairplaylife.com. I think it speaks volumes to how much you're not just trying to

make money, but you're actually trying to have a paradigm shift. So props to you for that. I think another thing that keeps people from coming to the table with the fair play system is the idea that they can do something better and it'll take them longer to explain how to do it well than it would just take them to do it. Can you explain the present value problem? And can you explain why that will let us let our partners do tasks. So I love that you're asking me. No one asked me that question. And I think it's such an important question. So thank you for asking me because one of the most toxic messages that we give ourselves. And I talk about this in fair play is that message and the time it takes me to tell him, her, they, what to do, I should do it myself. It was the

most popular reason for not coming to the table besides I'm a better multitasker. Which can we just say quickly because we haven't addressed that? Like there's no the science behind that. It's simply not true. Every single person, whatever sex you are is a bad multitasker. Yes, exactly. That's simple to like debunk. There's actually no such thing as multitasking. It's called task switching. And our brains are actually not that great at it. No one's good at it. But I actually do think in the time it takes me to tell them what to do, I should do it myself, is a really powerful one. So for that one, I decided to go to an economist. Because as you said, it really is a present value problem. It's that we're overvaluing the present at expense of the future, which is what

sapiens, we do that really well, but it's actually really toxic. And so I went to Dan Ariely, who's a good friend, a behavioral economist. He really helped me unpack the fact that we are so present-oriented that we forget the future. So his point is, of course it makes sense to tell somebody what to do now. Of course it does. Because if you get somebody to take over dishes for you now, the onboarding of that may take, let's say, five hours of conversations, minimum standard of care conversations telling your story. Say you invest that five hours now. In the future, statistically, we're doing thousands of hours of dishes.

So, of course, it makes sense to invest five hours now to get thousands of hours back in the future. But often we, again, are devaluing our future. The beauty of what he says is if you're really worried, how do you debunk that, add some short-term reward substitution to it. So when people don't want to do future-oriented tasks, a good way to bring yourself out of valuing just the present is to add some short-term reward substitution to say, okay, when we're having the conversation about dishes, we're going to have it over a great bottle of wine at a French restaurant, or we're going to talk about dishes when we've taken an edible or whatever. I don't care. We're going to bring seven different

bowls of ice cream and taste them all. And then my partner is going to load the dishwasher in a way that's a minimum standard of care for both of us. And that's how we're going to introduce them taking over our dishes. Bring some fun short-term reward substitution into those hard future conversations. That's his advice. How do we let go of the control of they'll never do dishes as well as me? They'll never prepare dinner as well as me. They'll never, you know, dressed the child as well as me. I asked a neuroscientist that question because I was feeling so sad about this idea that women were especially holding onto, my kid will never be dressed as well, the dishes will never be done as well. And so what this one neuroscientist said to me was so powerful,

it actually was so painful, Liz, that I cried in his office, which was, I was like a great, I'm adding to the gender stereotypes of like a blonde woman, you know, crying in this scientist's office. But this neuroscientist said to me when I said to him, I just better at these things than my partner, at least right now. He said to me, look, imagine Eve that I could convince you that it mattered. Imagine I could convince you you took pride in wiping asses and doing dishes. If you take pride in that, then I don't have to do it. it. I get to spend my time at leisure, because men have five more hours of leisure time than women,

on average a week. I get to spend that time in leisure. I get to have a golf game. I get to write another paper to get tenure. So I have to convince you that you should take pride in wiping asses and doing dishes and making our children perfectly dressed because then you'll do it. And so that was a very painful thing for me to hear that a lot of the control was already divine for us to make us do this work, to take pride in this work, to tell women that it's our shame if our kids look a certain way, if our home looks a certain way. It's not to say you don't have standards. But like I said, it's that minimum standard of care. I can step back and say, what am I getting out of taking the garbage out every hour? and can I allow Seth the trust to take it out once a day? And by doing that, I got so much of

my hours back, he also got an increase in accountability and trust, which meant he was going to do it. That's the other thing. Once you get the context and the ownership, we see that standards automatically increase. That's the beauty. It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy, but we have to, again, understand that a lot of this shame on how our kids look, how our kids look, our homes look, how we look, imagine I can convince you to spend six hours on starving yourself, then I'm going to be able to control the country because all of your brain power is going into how little you eat, right? Oh, I talk about that all the time with women's beauty standards.

I'm like, think about how much time we spend trying to make ourselves look a certain way while men take more and more power. 100%. It's very similar to that. So a lot of this, like I said, deserves a trigger warning. but for people hearing this for the first time, I would say just, you know, there's nothing for you to do yet. You're not going to enter the fair play system yet. You're not going to change your life tomorrow. Just hear this conversation, maybe listen to it a second time and understand that we're here for you.

We're here for you because we believe that you deserve that permission to be interested in your own life. And to get there, unfortunately, we have to unravel all of these boundaries, breaches. that society has given us. Yeah, it is so powerful to be like maybe we need to question the things that we're saying matter and where do those messages that those things matter come from? Yeah, 100%. I have two more questions quickly. This one's a little bit of Lafiel, but I heard you say that the antidote to burnout is to be

consistently interested in our own lives. And I absolutely love that. I've never heard it put like that. Can you explain a little bit about why you think that's true? So women are burnt out especially. People living in a capitalist patriarch here burnt out. It's not working really for men either or for any gender. But the beauty is of understanding that the antidote to burnout is being consistently interested in your own life. Is that it allows so much more flexibility, Liz, than what we're telling women is the antidote to burnout, which is either mommy juice,

which is either edibles, which is either exercising 17 hours a day or even the scariest messages, which is that getting up at 3 a.m. to make the most of your day. I don't believe in any of that. I believe women need sleep. I believe you should get up as late as possible. Sadly, we've heard too often the antidote to burnout as a walk around the block. It's not going to cut it. Unfortunately, a girl's weekend or whatever you call it is also not going to cut it. What mental health is, is having the appropriate emotion at the appropriate time and the ability and shrink to weather it. Not happiness.

If I'm feeling burnt out, I'm not feeling mentally healthy. So I need to get back the appropriate emotion, which may be rage at that time, at the appropriate time, which may be, because I'm fucking burnt out and I can't do this anymore, but I need the ability to train to weather it. And that's the consistent interest in your own life. It provides an umbrella, that consistency,

of being curious, of being, of being able to be connected to others, to share with the world. That's what I wish for everybody out there. I wish for them to be consistently interested in their own life. And I'll give everybody a homework assignment. Over the next month, I want you to tell us, you know, in the comments or wherever you're listening, I want you to tell us that you did something where you say to us, you report back that after doing it, you say, I can't believe I just did that.

Do you have one for the last month? Well, I will say that one I just heard recently that was really beautiful that I didn't get to put in my second book, but I loved it so much, was a woman who decided to join a polar bear club and jump in the Atlantic Ocean because she wanted to feel what it would feel like. She knew it was good for her health, but she understood that also it is having connection and curiosity and doing something with others. And so she joined this polar bear group in Far Rockaway, jumped into the Atlantic Ocean, and was able to say afterwards, I can't fucking believe I just did that. And that's what I'm looking for. It doesn't have to be that hard.

It's not a passion you're going back to. I don't need you to go back to the classical piano or be even in like a ballet recital. I just need people to start taking steps to say, this is interesting to me. And so the other assignment I could give you out there is start with where you're lacking most. If you feel that you haven't been curious about anything, one woman said to me she's not

curious about anything except for why her child's poop is yellow. Just start there. Ask yourself, what are you wondering about lately? What's interesting to you? If it's the loneliness, the connection, start with the connection. That was this woman who wasn't necessarily curious about being a polar bear, but she needed the connection with people in her community. If it's that you have a million unfulfilled dreams, you haven't achieved one in a while, start with that completion. So curiosity, connection, completion is typically what you need to be interested in your own life. And so I would say start with one of those, but typically start with the one you're lacking in because then it'll take you in very unexpected places. So I normally ask for a homework assignment at

the end. Do you want to end on that or do you have a homework assignment for somebody who's perhaps interested in bringing more equity into their relationships who wants to make that visible, labor visible? Do you have a homework assignment for them? Yes, I do. Well, so those are the two homework assignments if you're not ready yet to bring fair play into your home, but you know that you're ready to look at your life and say, I want to do something where I'm excited to do it. So what I would say is that homework assignment was choose something that either makes you curious, connected, or you're completing something. But in terms of a fair play homework assignment, I want to tell you out there, pick either one of these three cards similar to what I asked Liz to do, and I want you to go home,

whether it's with a roommate, your partner, it can be your child, and I want you to ask them and you to tell your own story. Tell me a story about groceries growing up. Who bought the groceries in your house growing up? Did you remember who unloaded those groceries? What grocery store did you go to? I want you to get as granular as possible. Either do it with cleaning? How do you remember your home? Was it messy? Was it clean? Where did things go? were things in proper places, where were shoes, were they all over the floor, where they lined up at the front. So do it with either cleaning, do it with groceries, or do it with dinners. I want to know how you ate. Was it in front of the TV by yourself? As a latchkey kid, was it you were required to be

at family dinners? Did it feel good? Did it feel stressful? So one of those three cards, whether it's groceries, cleaning, or dinner, I want you to ask and tell your own stories. Okay, I love that. And I will remind everybody that all of the cards are at fairplaylife.com, which I just really love so much that you made that a free resource for everybody. Can you shout out anything else that you would like to make the audience aware of? Well, I'd love for them to sign up for the Fairplay newsletter. It's coming out of our nonprofit, Fairplay Policy Institute. Typically, it will address a certain typical fair play scenario that we have and being able to address here. So last newsletter was about bringing children into the fair play system. Can kids own cards? Other people want to know

my husband's a pilot or my wife's in the military. How does fair play work if a partner is gone for a long time? So we bring in scenarios that maybe don't apply to everybody, but there's research behind it that we now have garnered over the years. Can kids come in to? Oh, 100%. Okay. Holding cards for kids is the most beautiful and magical thing. And watching those kids tell you who they think is holding the cards in your family can be very, very interesting and start some really interesting conversation. I love that. I think, like, at the baseline, it feels good to own cards. It feels good to be trusted. It feels good to be able to contribute. And I think that's true for men. I think that's true for women. I think that's true for anybody in a relationship. And I think that kids highlight that really

beautifully. You don't want to say to a child or even to a partner, I want you to be happy. you want to give them that gift of saying, I want you to matter. And so fair play is a very concrete way to help people matter. You hold cards in that family system, that person matters because the family system falls apart if they're not doing their card. And that is why fair play benefits everyone. Thank you so much, Eve. I absolutely adored this conversation. Thank you, Liz. I love her. She is just so powerful and I love the way her mind works and I love the work that she's doing in the world. If something in this episode resonated with you or you have a friend you think it could help, please send them a link. Eve is really starting a revolution here and her work is so important.

I love that she's not only identified the problem, but she's sharing these real, actionable, grounded solutions for that problem. If someone shared a link with you and you were new to this podcast, welcome. I am so glad that you're here. Make sure that you're following on whatever platform you like to listen on. All you have to do is go to the main podcast page. That's the one that lists all of the Liz Moody podcast episodes. And you will see the word follow under the logo on Spotify. And then there's a little follow with a plus sign button on the top right of that same page on Apple Podcasts.

This way you will not miss out on any new episodes. They will appear right in your feed every single Wednesday. And you do not want to miss out because we have some very exciting ones coming up like a deep dive into why so many young people are getting cancer and exactly what we can do about. it and an introduction to keeping our focus, to training our brain to becoming literally smarter with the one and only gym quick. And do not forget to go to 100 Ways to Change Your Life.com. That is 100 ways to change your life.com to snack a copy of my brand new book, baby. Okay, I love you and I will see you actually next Monday for this month's advice episode of the Liz Moody podcast. It is a very fun one. So be on the lookout for that. I will see you then.

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