A Good Day to PREPARE: Caroline Paul on training to be brave

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Today, we hear from Caroline Paul about the importance of being brave. Caroline should know…She's climbed the Golden Gate Bridge, gotten into Guinness World Records for crawling and trained for the Olympic luge team. In 1989, Caroline was one of the first female firefighters in San Francisco—1 of 15 women out of a crew of 1,500. For thirteen years, every day on the job was an adventure. She published a memoir about her experience, and later wrote The Gutsy Girl and You Are Mighty, a practical guide for young activists.

This is episode 2 from a special segment for Women’s History Month about how we can build a more feminist future....and take care of ourselves and each other when the work is daunting. Find more trailblazers in our new book, It’s a Good Day to Change the World.

TRANSCRIPT

Lauren Schiller: What does it take to build a more equal, just, and joyful world? And how do we sustain ourselves when the work is daunting?

I’m Lauren Schiller, creator of Inflection Point and coauthor of the new book IT’S A GOOD DAY TO CHANGE THE WORLD. 

We’re bringing you a special segment every week of women’s history month, about how we can build a more feminist future....and take care of yourself and each other along the way.

Today, we hear from Caroline Paul about the importance of being brave. Caroline should know…

She's climbed the Golden Gate Bridge, gotten into Guinness World Records for crawling and trained for the Olympic luge team. In 1989, Caroline was one of the first female firefighters in San Francisco—1 of 15 women out of a crew of 1,500.

For over thirteen years, every day on the job was an adventure. She published a memoir about her experience, and later wrote The Gutsy Girl and You Are Mighty, a practical guide for young activists

Caroline Paul: I was a kid that was really shy, and I was scared of a lot of things, but I had a twin sister who was very outgoing and very social, so she was my buffer for a long time. I also read a lot of books about adventure. And adventure taught me a lot about how to manage fear. Though It wasn’t until recently that I realized I should be crediting my mother for my adventurous lifestyle because she told me very recently that in fact she had grown up with a very fearful mother. And then, at twenty-one, she went on a ski trip with friends, and it was a revelation. She had so much fun and she realized everything she’d been missing because her mom had kept her and her sister from doing things like that. She didn’t want that for us. So she encouraged us to do everything; even though she wasn't an outdoors person she wanted us to find what we wanted to do.

I never thought I would be a firefighter when I was growing up. I didn't have those dreams. There were no role models for girls.

But when I was in my twenties, I was a volunteer at KPFA. And I was doing the morning news. And all these stories were coming over my desk about the racism and sexism in the San Francisco fire department. So I thought, Oh, maybe I'll go get an undercover story.

And I'll pretend I'm interested in being a firefighter and take the test. And to my surprise, I got in. And by then I was really quite intrigued with the fire department, it seemed like it would fit my personality. It was an adventurous life.

So I became a firefighter and I loved it.

Lauren Schiller: Here are some of Caroline Paul's tools to change the world

Notice your own gender biases

Caroline Paul: If you have a daughter and a son, notice how you're raising them differently when it comes to challenges, especially physical challenges. And then once you notice, really ask yourself, Are you protecting her when you simply caution her and instill this idea of fear. The way to protect them is to give them guidance on how to deal with danger and deal with situations outside their comfort zone. 

Lauren Schiller: Next, Embrace exhilaration

Caroline Paul: the thing about fear is that it actually feels a lot like excitement physiologically. You might be getting jittery and flushed and your heart's racing and you think that's fear. In fact, it's exhilaration and you're deciding not to do something and missing out on a lot of fun. I really want girls and women to start training and bravery because it is something that's learned.

Lauren Schiller: Be gutsy

Caroline Paul:  you have to come from a place of bravery where you're actually looking at your skills, looking at the situation, and looking at your fear. Fear is good. It keeps you safe. I'm not against fear. I'm just pro gutsy. 

Lauren Schiller: And finally, how do we sustain ourselves when the work is daunting? Caroline’s advice:  Have an adventure

Caroline Paul: I used to go all around the world, having adventures I've been to Siberia and Borneo and Australia. I just I've been a lot of places. And then a friend of mine said, you know, Caroline, the best wilderness is in the United States. And he was right. You can have adventures really close to home. I think that an adventure is when you get outside your comfort zone and you're also having fun. 

Lauren Schiller: Find more of Caroline Paul's story, along with more trailblazers and their tools— in It’s a Good Day to Change the World....our new book based on INFLECTION POINT INTERVIEWS CALLED. You can find it wherever you get your books. Learn more at inflectionpointradio.org.

This series was produced in collaboration with K A L W. Our executive producer is David Boyer. Our impact producer and my co-author is Hadley Dynak. 

I'm Lauren Schiller.

CAROLINE PAUL

Illustration by Rosy Petri

“It’s a Good Day to Change the World”

Feminist Detective: The Case of Body Positivity

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Is the body positivity movement a good thing or a bad thing for feminism? Ruth Whippman joins Lauren to discuss.

Take a listen and let us know what you think about the body positivity movement.. and anything else you want me and Ruth to uncover. Email us at info@inflectionpointradio.org. You can write OR record your question in a voice memo on your phone and send it.

Library of Congress

What Covid-19 Means For Feminism At Home - Eve Rodsky

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Now that we are all tethered to our homes, you may be doing more laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning (did we say dishes?), nose wiping, bottom wiping and emotionally tending to your kids and teens.

So it seems super timely to talk to the woman who has emerged as a leader in the movement to end the gendered division of labor at home and how to divvy up that labor as equitably as possible.

Eve Rodsky has spent almost a decade surveying women and men about who does what at home to understand how and why we divide up labor along gender lines--and how to shift it--she’s talked with Economists, Psychologists, Historians, Neurologists and more.

And she wrote a book that details exactly how to divide and conquer with your partner, the unending duties at home. It’s called "Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution For When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live)". If you’ve been listening to Inflection Point, you may have also caught my conversation with Eve at INFORUM last year. I wanted to hear how her system is working in the Covid-19 world.

We spoke live (on Zoom, of course) for The Battery in San Francisco about how to make changes that are a win for everyone in your home and in society.

Be sure to check out Eve’s TOOLKIT FOR ACTION.

TRANSCRIPT:

Lauren Schiller:
Now that we're all tethered to our homes, you may be doing more laundry, dishes, and other housework and if you have kids, you may have become a home school teacher. And every day is like the weekend, except not because you may also be working on top of feeding, cleaning, nose wiping, bottom wiping, and emotionally tending to your kids or teens or partner. So it seems super timely for us to talk to the woman who has emerged as a leader in the movement to end the gendered division of labor at home, and how to divvy up that labor as equitably as possible.

Lauren Schiller:
Eve Rodsky has spent almost a decade serving women and men about who does what at home to understand how and why we divide up labor along gender lines and how to shift it. She's talked with economists, psychologists, historians, neurologists, and more and she wrote a book that details exactly how to divide and conquer with your partner the unending duties at home, it's called Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live).

Lauren Schiller:
If you've been listening to Inflection Point, you may have also caught my conversation with Eve at INFORUM last year. I wanted to hear how her system is working in the COVID-19 world. We spoke live on Zoom, of course, for the battery in San Francisco, about how to make changes that are a win for everyone in your home and in society. If you found any time to read the news, here's a fun fact that might've popped out at you.

Eve Rodsky:
There's been 70, 7-0 articles that have come out since March 8th that say things like women are doing a double, double shift or coronavirus is a disaster for feminism or that it's unsustainable for women to continue to do unpaid labor, and so while I'll say that, yes, it's great to have all these articles. This is not a new problem. We've been talking about this for a hundred years, so it's time for us to move from talking about the problem and keep reintroducing the problem to actually move toward a solution.

Lauren Schiller:
One of the headlines I read was “nearly half of men say they do most of the homeschooling, 3% of women agree”.

Eve Rodsky:
Yes, there's an over-reporting trend between men and women and the heterosis gender relationship and yes, we can definitely go into why that happened.

Lauren Schiller:
This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller with stories of how women rise up. Let's hear a little more about Eve's story and why she began this quest to end the gender division of labor, and then we'll get into how you can get a few hours of your life back. We'll be right back. We're back with Eve Rodsky.

Eve Rodsky:
This started with a text my husband sent me eight years ago, right? My husband sent me a text that said, "I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries." And it was actually a very COVID like moment Lauren, because you can sort of picture the scene, if you can indulge me. I just had my second son, Ben. My son, Zach was three at the time. I had a breast pump and a diaper bag in the passenger seat of my car. I had gifts for a newborn baby to return in the backseat of my car. I had opted out and I put that in quotes now because I learned from sociologist [Pam Stone 00:03:36] that I did not opt out, society pushed me out of the traditional workforce so I just started my new firm.

Eve Rodsky:
I had a client contract. I'm a lawyer and a mediator in my lap. I had a pen that was stabbing me in the vagina as I was racing to pick up Zach from his toddler transition program, which in America lasts like three minutes because we value working families. On top of this chaos where the space time continuum was sort of collapsing on me, Seth sends me this text out of nowhere, I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries.

Eve Rodsky:
I pull over to the side of the road that day, thinking to myself this is very cliche, right? That my marriage is going to fall apart over off season blueberries, but what I was really thinking was I used to be able to manage employee teams and now I'm so overwhelmed. I'm not even managing a grocery list and more importantly, how did I become the she-fault as I call them Fair Play, right? The default, the she-fault for most of the cognitive labor, the conception and planning for literally every single household and childcare task that was not supposed to happen to me. I'm a product of a single mom.

Eve Rodsky:
At seven years old I was her partner, her parental child. I paid her bills. I learned how to use her chemical bank checkbook to pay her bills as early as seven. I helped my disabled brother with his SSD. I managed her eviction notices. I had vowed Lauren, that this was not going to happen to me. On top of that, I'm a Harvard trained attorney and mediator so I'm actually literally trained and... overly trained with continuing legal education to facilitate to mediate and to use my voice and so I kept thinking to myself, if this was happening to me that two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family is falling on my lap. Someone who vowed it wasn't going to happen to them and is trained to communicate then I figured it's probably happening to other women.

Eve Rodsky:
And now as we know that there's 70 articles that have come out since March that say that coronavirus is a disaster for feminism. The UN has a sustainability goal, 5.4, which says value unpaid labor so that women don't do $10.9 trillion a year of unpaid labor, that that's unsustainable for economies. I realized that this was not a me issue, that my private issue was actually a public trouble and that was sort of the eight year journey to get where I was today. I will say that I'm not surprised by how everything breaks down because again women statistically do two thirds or more of what it takes to run a home and family, regardless of whether we work outside the home and it's worse, it gets worse. The higher, the more you make, which is very counterintuitive.

Lauren Schiller:
The more money you bring into the home, the more labor you're doing at home.

Eve Rodsky:
The more work you do. Correct.

Lauren Schiller:
Now what is happening there? Because no one could do it as good as we can. Is that what-

Eve Rodsky:
Correct. Yes, I think what's... so again, what I love, we'll definitely get to practical those solutions and I appreciate that couples are here together, but I think it's really important again, to go a little cultural consciousness and 70 articles have been about this issue and then we can get into practical solutions which do work. My husband is not that blueberries man. He's holding many cards right now and we'll talk about the metaphor of the Fair Play cards, but the real core issue was that the smallest details Lauren, are creating the biggest problems.

Eve Rodsky:
I have a woman telling me that she hates her husband because he leaves beard shavings in the sink. I had a man tell me he was locked out of his house over a glue stick. This is before COVID. He had to go into New York City. He lives in White Plains, New York because he forgot to bring a glue stick home from his wife's perspective. She'd been working two weeks on an Einstein biography project. She just needed that glue stick. I'm crying over off season blueberries, right? This issue is manifesting as a private life issue that we all sort of gripe about but as a mediator I'm trained that the presenting problem is never the real problem.

Eve Rodsky:
I went out and looked for what the real problem was. That took me 500 interviews with men and women that mirror the U.S. census and what I found was that the core underlying issue in the division of labor problem that needs to be fixed first, before we go onto solutions, is that as a society, men, women, and children, especially in those homes. Men, women in society and children, we view men's time as finite like diamonds and we view women's time is infinite like sand. That value of time discrepancy, we see that in the workplace because women and men in the same job make less money.

Eve Rodsky:
If you're a woman of color, it's even worse. We know that as women enter male professions, the salaries go down but what I wasn't prepared for was what I had to keep writing in every interview, which was CIYOO which was complicit in your own oppression. It was women. Women, we are the worst purveyors of what I call these toxic time messages where we guard men's time like diamonds and we treat our time as infinite like sand.

Eve Rodsky:
I'll just give you three examples and then we can go more Q&A. One was, women who said to me, of course I do. I pick up the call from the doctor and take my kids to the pediatrician. I pick up the blueberries because my husband makes more money than me, so that's a losing argument for women because that means that because I chose philanthropy and my husband chose private equity, I'm now going to be doing unpaid labor for the rest of my life. It doesn't work, especially in the same job even if we don't even make the same as men. The time is money doesn't work.

Eve Rodsky:
Women said to me, things like I'm a better caretaker. I'm wired differently. I'm a better multitasker. Lauren, I went to the top neuroscientists in this country that one of my clients funds and that was the only other day I cried besides the blueberries day was when this man said to me, when I said are women wired differently? Do we have better executive function than men? This old school, white neuroscientist said to me, no, but imagine if we can convince half the population, we being men, that they're better at wiping asses and doing dishes, how great for me and the other half of the population, he's like, it's totally pat... he didn't say patriarchal. He said, it's just totally conditioning.

Eve Rodsky:
That made me cry. I actually cried that day, and then one of the most popular was a lot of women in heterosis gender relationships were saying to me in the time it takes me to tell my partner what to do, I might as well do it myself. I went to [Dan Arielli 00:10:35] my close friend and very top behavioral economist in the Wall Street Journal. He said, that's a terrible argument because of course it makes sense to tell your partner how to wipe the asses and do the dishes. Otherwise you're doing it forever and your resentment is up here and your partner is invisibly living with you and it sucks. Finally, even women and men in the same job, I had two shipping supervisors at [UPS 00:10:57].

Eve Rodsky:
I had two colorectal surgeons say to me, "Well, yes, we have the same job, but I can find the time, and my husband is better at focusing on one task at a time." As I like to say, unless you're Albert Einstein and know how to fuck with the space time continuum, there's actually no way to find time and especially now when our space time continuum is collapsing. Unless we retire these old tropes of these toxic time messages and we start creating an understanding that all time is created equal, Lauren then nothing, nothing I can say after this, no practical solution is going to matter.

Lauren Schiller:
I mean, there's so much in there and I'm thinking... in fact, as I'm talking with you over to my right is a bed full of laundry. He was waiting for me to fold it. Now that everyone's at home... okay, so you are preaching this. We talked last summer, maybe or fall these actions can be observed on a daily basis by both partners.

Eve Rodsky:
Correct.

Lauren Schiller:
What are you hearing about... I mean, is there enlightenment afoot. I mean, are people now that they're home together and more privy to what's going on, I mean, in spite of the fact that the headline that I stated which is the over-reporting factor but the, what do you do all day question? Is that being answered?

Eve Rodsky:
Yes. Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
But with their own eyes.

Eve Rodsky:
That's the silver lining, I do and I will say that I love all you men out there because what I realized was that Fair Play was a love letter to men because this is not really a partner against partner issue. This is a systematic issue. This is, all of our cultural understanding that we guard men's time. Of course, if my time is guarded, I would want to keep it guarded. I wouldn't even see necessarily the problem, right? But what is happening now is the invisible work, the mental load, the second shift, whatever you want to call it but I like invisible work because it is work. It's just unpaid work is finally visible and that to me is the... it is the silver lining and so people are coming to me more now saying there is an understanding. It doesn't necessarily mean yet we are at the expectation of things changing, but at least there's an understanding that the invisible is now visible.

Eve Rodsky:
My favorite meme is now you'll never ask a stay at home mother what she does again all day ever again, and so that invisibility to visibility stage is really important, but we can't stop there. It does require still a system shift. Not only in all time is created equal, but an understanding that even if you bring in more money, right? That unpaid labor should not fall on one person, and what I mean by that is a completely different way of looking at unpaid labor.

Eve Rodsky:
What I want to challenge everybody, especially if you're listening as a couple, is that it's time to start treating our home as our most important organization. What I mean by that is some respect and rigor. Putting systems in place so that we're not setting the table when we're hangry and cranky or being resentful because we're the ones folding the laundry. Those systems are really, really important and it's actually... all Fair Play is borrowed from, is when I went out to figure out what was happening to me on that dreaded blueberries day.

Eve Rodsky:
I started to look at the gendered division of labor articles and women doing more in the home, and I said, well, in my day job, I'm a mediator. I work for highly complex family foundations and family businesses and I set up systems for them so that they have grace and humor and generosity when they're making the most complex financial organizational decisions. We're the organizational management books for the home. I went on Amazon, I started looking and then Lauren, all I could find was the life changing magic of organizing your junk drawer.

Eve Rodsky:
Like how did we get into a life changing magic of organizing your junk drawer conversation when the life changing magic is long-term thinking? It's setting up those systems so you're not the one wiping asses and doing dishes for the rest of your life and then feeling resentful about it and then leaving a real relationship, and we'll talk about communication just really fast. Communication, it all requires a rewire in how you communicate and understanding that when you give a man, especially a heterosis gender, man, what I call a RAT fucked, the random assignment of a task. I just need the glue stick. That is the opposite of how we do things in the workplace.

Eve Rodsky:
Netflix calls it context, not control. The rare responsible person. We know all a lot in the workplace about intrinsic motivation comes from autonomy. Asking you to pick me up a glue stick is not autonomy, and so the opposite of that is what Apple calls the DRI, the directly responsible individual. All Fair Play is, is taking those very simple concepts and bringing them to the home, to say women men, when you hold a card, a Fair Play card, bedtime routine, groceries, laundry, you are doing it with full start to finish. Conception, planning, and execution. Because what I found, Lauren, was that when I went out into the world, especially in heterosis gender relationships, I found that if you think about mustard, everybody out there think about how mustard got in your refrigerator.

Eve Rodsky:
Somebody had to know your second son, Johnny likes French's yellow mustard with his protein, otherwise he chokes. That in organizational management is what we call conception. Then somebody has to monitor that mustard when it's running low and put it on a grocery list with everything else you need for the week. That in project management organizational management is what we call planning, and then someone has to get their butts to the store to purchase the French's yellow mustard. That is the execution phase and that's where heterosis gender men are stepping in and you guys, you're bringing home spicy Dijon, the gross mustard with the seeds every freaking time. I asked you for French's yellow. Don't you know Johnny likes French's yellows. Don't you live in this house and then all of a sudden, we're not talking about mustard anymore, Lauren, we're talking about accountability and trust.

Eve Rodsky:
The only way to get out of that cycle is exactly the opposite of that article, where men think they're doing half, but really women think it's 3%. It's because of that disparity. In over-reporting the signs shows that men are focused on the execution, the purchasing of the yellow mustard whereas they are ignoring the conception and planning to get to that purchasing of the yellow mustard. Once men take over the full conception, planning, and execution, the context, not control, the autonomy of mind, the intrinsic motivation, everything changes and that's how my own house changed. That's how thousands of couples who are playing are changing.

Eve Rodsky:
It's basically divorced for married people because in a divorce, you have to let them take over. Just do divorce for married people and I promise you, it works.

Lauren Schiller:
Well. I like that declaration. You thinking about it, like, because you have to be thinking as an independent person, not as how does she want me to do it or how does he want me to do it? Right? You held up the cards. I think that it would be really helpful if you could talk about the way that you divided the categories and the way that couples can start talking about these tasks that are with us and now more than ever.

Eve Rodsky:
Yes. I'd like to give you results of my survey for the past couple of weeks. Well, since March 8th. I guess it's been like nine weeks now. I've been asking over social media, asking people to go on to fairplaylife where you can see sort of all the cards in the conception, planning, execution, and asking women and men to tell me which ones are causing the most consternation in the home right now. I call them the dirty dozen because it's really a baker's dozen if you have kids, but this is what my survey unearthed. Laundry, groceries, some similar to the survey. Laundry, groceries, meals, home supplies, tidying up, cleaning, dishes, and garbage.

Eve Rodsky:
Now, if you have kids, you add discipline and screen time, homework, which is now home school, watching of children whether they're infants or teenagers who are trying to escape quarantine and social interactions for kids, which I was surprised by, that that would be a big one, but it's a high stressor from couples telling me that keeping their friends connected to their friends, so house party and Zooms is actually highly labor intensive for them. I think that that dirty dozen is a good place to start because those are the places where people are getting stuck right now where the small details are the biggest problems.

Eve Rodsky:
Communication shifts that I talk about in Fair Play is really, I'd say, start with the dirty dozen, if you can iron out the dirty dozen then everything else is probably just gravy. It'll fall into place.

Lauren Schiller:
I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point. When we come back with Eve Rodsky, why ownership of the to do's is more important than divvying things up equally. I'm back with Eve Rodsky. One of the things that you talk about in the book is that it's not necessarily about 50/50. It's about being equitable.

Eve Rodsky:
Correct.

Lauren Schiller:
How would you advise people watching today, listening today how they start that conversation about who does what and how they do it the right way?

Eve Rodsky:
Well, I think 50/50 is a terrible idea. Thank you for bringing that up because how do you even measure that? Right? I mean, that's just a score keeping exercise in futility. I like to say let's like throw out 50/50 and instead focus on ownership, and what I mean by that is when Seth started to understand the idea of CPE, we sat down and we sort of talked about what the full breadth of say extracurricular sports for my two sons meant and so bless his heart, right? Again, this is back to the heterosis gender male.

Eve Rodsky:
He talked to people and told everybody he was in charge of extracurricular sports for my kids, for my two sons, because he showed up at the little league fields. When I explained to him that the conception was serving their friends to see what sports they want to play and what leagues they want to play in and then the planning was ordering their equipment online, returning it to Amazon when it didn't fit, signing up the five waivers that they needed, xeroxing their birth certificate, paying for coaches gift, being snack parents once a week, arranging all of the carpools, every single practice which for my son's basketball team was three days a week and my youngest son's was... for his baseball team was one day a week.

Eve Rodsky:
Once he understood that that was all the planning that went behind getting to the execution, getting them to the field. I got six hours, Lauren of my week back. For me, that could have been fair. Seth just handling the extracurricular sports card where I held the other 89 cards for my family. That could be fair in your family. I'm not here to tell you what your fair looks like, but I know that there is not always equal and equal is not always fair, especially if there is a breadwinner and somebody isn't. But I do know it means that one person should not be doing all the unpaid labor in your home if you're privileged enough to have a partner.

Eve Rodsky:
It could just be one card, but like I said, extracurricular sports, which was one card saved me six hours a week and that for me... in the beginning of Fair Play years ago felt there. Now at we're at a point where Seth is holding probably 38 to 50 cards of our 87 that are in play most of the time and now a lot of our cards, right? Having it all doesn't mean doing it all. A lot of our tasks have been retired because the good news is COVID is a slower lifestyle, but it does mean that those dirty dozen are way grindier. I'm not going to hold laundry forever because now two loads seems to be like 17 loads and I'm not sure why, but that's just the way it is.

Lauren Schiller:
Or like happened to me the other day when the water starts mysteriously leaking out from under the washing machine. Whose job is it to get someone to come in?

Eve Rodsky:
Correct. That's the home maintenance card and I hold that right now but how great is that if you pre negotiated in advance. Part of communication is not communicating. That's what my husband says. The beautiful thing he says about Fair Play is that the CPE allows us to communicate more about things that matter and that we're drowning less in decision fatigue. Because again, who wants to be making the decision of who sets the table when you're already hungry and cranky. That to me is the key.

Eve Rodsky:
The conception, planning, execution, the CPE of a card means that we do not have to communicate because he owns his shit. I own my shit and we redeal if it gets annoying or unfair, but we know the full context of what it takes to complete that task from start to finish and now our sons know that. That's the beauty. We have eight and 11-year-old sons who are playing with us and they're understanding the executive function that goes from curiosity to completion because that's hard. All those steps are not easy. The conception and planning are not easy.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, what's interesting having kids at home now and doing online schooling is that they actually have to become better at the conception, planning, and execution, right? Because their teachers-

Eve Rodsky:
Absolutely.

Lauren Schiller:
...aren't feeding it to them. They don't have a place they have to show up every single day at a certain time. In a way, this is kind of like good training for becoming an adult who's sharing responsibilities, even though the main responsibility is yourself as a kid.

Eve Rodsky:
Absolutely. Well, if you're not ready to bring these concepts of CPE to your partner, then at least bring them to your kids, right? Because the beauty of this is... I'm telling you all, any of you don't have kids yet, or you have them, right? Or if you're even in your own relationships or if you think you may have them. What we're seeing now in terms of successful adults, and you see this in all the books, how you raise an adult, you talk to deans from colleges, is that the kids who know how to do things from start to finish with executive function, with time management and it is also kids who know how to communicate.

Eve Rodsky:
That's really all Fair Play is. It's just a tool, cheaper than a couple of therapists, right? That gets you to think about what does it mean to take care of a dog for a day? I was talking to my father about this with my son, Zach and I talk about this in the book as he was way younger. My father said he was playing Fair Play because he was taking... he was giving [Marsha 00:26:09] the morning off to take the dog to doggy daycare. And I said, dad, that has nothing to do with Fair Play. That's literally the opposite. That's execution on someone else's mental load still.

Eve Rodsky:
You're breaking up a task. I said, what Fair Play would be is owning a full dog day on Wednesdays, when you take her to doggy daycare and that means being responsible for her special vitamins, for feeding her morning and night, for making sure she was walked, asking the daycare whether she pooped there, whether you have to take her out later. My son was able to tell my dad what it meant to take care of her pet from start to finish.

Eve Rodsky:
That is the beauty, right, of executive function. It's the curiosity to completion journey. Instead of those rainbow color coded schedules, you can actually go on to fairplaylife and ask your kids, "What do you think it means to take care of a pet for a day?" What does it actually mean to tidy up? Why is that important to you? That idea of the conception, planning, execution can be really, really helpful. I think in this time, even if your kids still need reminders, at least they will understand what it means to do something from start to finish.

Lauren Schiller:
I just want to say to everyone that I read the book from start to finish and I actually have a physical deck of cards like Eve is showing you. In preparation for interviewing her the last time she and I spoke, I sat down with my husband for about an hour... took about an hour and a half to go through each of the cards and deal them to one another. We had in our hand, a physical card that said I'm in charge of these however many cards it ended up being, and luckily in our family, it did actually ended up being pretty equal because I have a-

Eve Rodsky:
Wow. [crosstalk 00:27:47].

Lauren Schiller:
...heavy lifter of a husband, but it was very validating for both of us to see what the other was doing. It's a great extra... I'm just going to endorse your book.

Eve Rodsky:
Thank you.

Lauren Schiller:
It's a great exercise to formalize things that you may already be talking about with your significant other, but maybe not as explicitly. The other thing in your deck is... there were two things that I actually want to talk about that seems so relevant right now. One of them is a set of cards within the deck that are called wild cards and that's an unexpected thing that life throws at you. The other one is about unicorn space, which is the ability to have the time to pursue your passion.

Lauren Schiller:
In the era of COVID-19, at six weeks it's already an era, but in the era of COVID-19, it's like one big wild card.

Eve Rodsky:
Correct.

Lauren Schiller:
What are some ideas that you have just generally where we've all been thrown through this giant loop? And then secondly, how do we protect the space that we need for our creative passions?

Eve Rodsky:
What does it mean to be in a wildcard? Well, I talk about that in Fair Play for two reasons. One, because say there's a daily disruption, a wildcard where your child is sick from school. Overwhelmingly, regardless of whether the woman worked out of the home in heterosis gender relationships, women were the one in schools were reporting that they call women. That women are the ones picking up their kids from school and I'd asked schools why they do that. And often it was like, I don't want to bother the men. It was a version of the guarding men's time. It was very interesting.

Eve Rodsky:
Also I talk about wildcards because it's a very important to understand, again, as Lauren said, like, this is not rocket science. These cards are just a mediation tool to get you to clearly define expectations in your home, and you have to do that by communicating and so the wildcard of COVID or while there's wildcards in the deck like job loss and money problems or serious illness or a glitch in the matrix is because it's getting you to recognize that when emotion is high, cognition is low. In a wild card emotion is high cognition is low. Most of my day, I know now that my emotion is high and my cognition is low.

Eve Rodsky:
If I communicate when my emotion is high, my cognition is low that means I'm communicating during emotional cascade. I talk about that in Fair Play and that's toxic. I think it's really important to understand the idea of a wild card, because it all is linked to how you communicate and our communication vulnerabilities... I talk about this as a mediator. Our communication vulnerabilities are most likely to come out during a wildcard. Lauren, would you indulge me in a quiz? What is your partner's name?

Lauren Schiller:
Absolutely. Justin.

Eve Rodsky:
Justin. I'm sad I didn't know that. I should know that. Okay. I want to play like a newlywed game with you where... even though you're not newlyweds, most of us aren't. I want you to tell me what Justin would say about you. I'm going to read you the top seven vulnerabilities that I sort of started writing down and noticing over a decade long career mediating complex family issues.

Eve Rodsky:
I'm going to read you seven and I want to know what you think Justin would say about you when emotion is high and cognition is low. Okay. One, long-winded. Why you're talking and no one's listening. Two, sharp command sir. Your tone and drill sergeant delivery isn't popular with the troops. Three, bad timing. You drop your grievances and requests for help into the conversation at inopportune moments. Thanks so much for the flowers, honey, but you forgot dishwashing detergents. Four, toxic word choice. I wasn't going to say anything, but I really hate it when you [inaudible 00:31:31]. Five, all or nothing. You never replace the toilet paper roll. You always leave the seat up. Six, dredging up the past. This is just like the last time you forgot to [inaudible 00:31:41] or seven, boiling over. I wasn't going to say anything. I avoided the conversation. I didn't say anything, but now I'm really pissed.

Eve Rodsky:
If anybody on the chat wants to tell me too, we can customize the rest of our tips based on what they say, but I'd love Lauren to tell me. What do you think Justin would say about you?

Lauren Schiller:
Of the-

Eve Rodsky:
Of the seven.

Lauren Schiller:
Of the seven.

Eve Rodsky:
Shall I read them again?

Lauren Schiller:
Which one-

Eve Rodsky:
One, long-winded. Two, sharp command and tone. Three, bad timing. Four, toxic word choice. Five, all or nothing. Six, dredging up the past or seven, boiling over. What would he say is your vulnerability when emotion gets high and cognition as well?

Lauren Schiller:
Okay. This is actually very hard for me to answer because he and I have been together for so long that I would say I've hit every single one of those.

Eve Rodsky:
I love that. I love it. Well, thank you for being vulnerable and recognizing that you're already communicating.

Lauren Schiller:
Oh yeah.

Eve Rodsky:
Give me one now... Okay. In this wild card, which one do you think that you would have an example of maybe that you could share-

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah, I mean, of course. Over 20 however many years we've been together. Of course there are examples that I can dredge up from the past. That one time that I asked you to do this thing and you brought me this... Like, okay, here's a perfect example. I hate chicken apple sausage, okay. For the record, and we got into this knockdown drag out fight because we went to the baseball game, back when we had baseball games and we were tailgating with friends and the only protein he brought was chicken apple sausage. I sucked it up. I ate it, sat through the whole game and in the car ride home with the poor kids in the back, was just like... I blew my top. You know I hate chicken apple sauce. Now that's-

Eve Rodsky:
That's okay. I love that. I'm writing that down. I want to use that.

Lauren Schiller:
And now it's become the family joke. Like he does not buy me chicken apple sausage anymore.

Eve Rodsky:
Well, that's a bowling offer. It's great. Because... and bad timing. I'm going to say that's bad timing too.

Lauren Schiller:
Acknowledged.

Eve Rodsky:
I mean, your kids make fun of it now, but yes, and what's so beautiful about that is I think it gets to some... what [Sonya 00:33:45] just said actually and [Jacqueline 00:33:46] too, is that all of these are sort of related to this idea that feedback in the moment, whether it was in the moment with your kids or you couldn't hold it in anymore, right? This feedback in the moment or communicating when emotion is high and cognition is low, it can be toxic and so I think that's what I'd love for everybody on your listenership to take away is that it sounds scary and complicated and to enter a system and to talk about cards because we are all believing that we're not communicating.

Eve Rodsky:
It sounds complicated if you say to me, I don't communicate about domestic life, and so many men and women on my Fair Play journey said that Lauren. We don't communicate about domestic life. Okay. One woman says that to me and then I find out, no... then she talks 20 minutes later, not related to the communication question I asked her and she says, yeah, well, my husband, when he forgot the clothes and didn't put them in the dryer, I dumped them on his pillow. Another woman said to me, we don't talk about domestic life and then I find out she has an Instagram account called the shit my husband doesn't pick up, and she's publicly shaming him on Instagram.

Eve Rodsky:
Recently in COVID, I reached out to a woman who told me she doesn't communicate about domestic life, but I actually reached out to her, Lauren because she posted to 27,000 members in a, I hate my husband COVID group, that if her husband died during COVID it wasn't going to be from the disease. It was going to be from her. She publicly threatened to murder her spouse in a 27,000 member forum but she says she doesn't communicate about domestic life. I think the first step is to recognize we're already communicating. As a mediator I'll go on your Nest Cam and I... you've been with Justin for many years. I'll see five ways you've communicated about domestic life, whether it's about chicken apple sausage, or who's folding the laundry that's sitting on your bed.

Eve Rodsky:
What I want to say is that when you recognize, and you can say with some humor and levity, I'd like to do this communication quiz, or I know I use bad tone, and so I wanted to say to you, I'd love to find a time to communicate when emotion is low, cognition is high because it's a wild card that's not often. For [Steph 00:36:04] and me now it's 10 minutes a night after our kids go to bed with either wine or cookie dough. We set a timer because he says I'm long-winded. We set a timer, 10 minutes and we check in.

Eve Rodsky:
Sometimes it's things that have to have happened the next day and they're serious. Sometimes it's just connecting. But recently Steph said to me that he was upset, but he didn't boil over because he had a time. He had a time to communicate with me our practice of communicating. Every night, Fair Play is a practice just like meditation and exercise. You have to invest in your relationships like you're investing in toilet paper. We sit down 10 minutes a night, and he said to me, I'm feeling upset about your minimum standard of care, which is a word from Fair Play about how you're homeschooling our kids.

Eve Rodsky:
When I have the hours that are allocated to me, my phone is on the charger. When I see your hours with the kids, I see you like this. Pointing at them on Zoom.

Lauren Schiller:
With your phone to your-

Eve Rodsky:
With my phone to my ear.

Lauren Schiller:
...ear.

Eve Rodsky:
And so what he said to me was, I'm hoping that your minimum standard of care could be a little higher and that you can block out the times that you are responsible for our kids' learning because that's our minimum standard of care that we're going to be present for them and if you can't do that, then you need to let me know because then... I don't want to do it either. I want to be able to be on my phone. I said, "No, no, no, I'll do it. I'll do it." But that's how we talk about things now in a way that's way better than again, sobbing on the side of the road over off season blueberries.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, you've created a vocabulary and you have a framework and that takes so much of the emotion-

Eve Rodsky:
Out of the way.

Lauren Schiller:
...out of the conversation, right? It's like, you can be rational. Well, let's before... I have two more questions before we go to questions and one of them is just to circle back to this idea of unicorn status.

Eve Rodsky:
Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
Can you speak to that?

Eve Rodsky:
That's why I brought up communication first because we have to ask for what we need. People who are listening with their partners, what I will say to you is I found the midlife crisis even if you're not midlife yet, and that's not breast implants or green Ferrari's. What it is was that the things people told me that made them happiest were the things that their partners resented most about them.

Eve Rodsky:
I'll say that again, the things that people reported to me made them happiness were the things their partners resented most about them. That to me is the real midlife crisis, and that happens because of perceived unfairness. It would be a man saying to me, "My happiness is my triathlon training." And then his partner is saying, "I fucking hate him because he escapes six hours on the weekends and he leaves me to take care of the kids." What I want to say to everybody here is that the permission to be unavailable, to create those boundaries for yourself, by doing something, an active pursuit that makes you, you is actually indicative of how healthy your relationships are and how long you'll stay together.

Eve Rodsky:
If you feel you are resigned to going to Costco together for all day long and not picking up the diapers and all getting the buffalo wings or whatever, or sitting with each other in the park and just being angry and miserable that you're all there because you need family time, Fair Play is the opposite of that. It says own your tasks. Spend less time together as a family unit and actually spend more time on yourself. Especially now we need that, and often because we know the statistic that men take twice as much leisure time as women, and especially we guard men's time. That's back to that time message. It's really important to negotiate that.

Eve Rodsky:
I say, no scorekeeping, no 50/50 unless you're talking about unicorn space, the active pursuit of what makes you, you and that can be crocheting Harry Potter dolls which one woman sent to me and showed me her unicorn space. We're signing up for the volunteer firefighters as another woman did that I interviewed for Fair Play, or it could be training for that triathlon as long as your partner gets that time back for them. Seth and I had unicorn space hours where Saturdays I get nine to 12 and then he gets from 12 to three.

Eve Rodsky:
Sometimes there's self-care built in, but really we try to use it. Professor Laurie Santos who teaches the most popular happiness course at Yale talks about that... she calls it differently. She says, make your leisure time nutritious. That's all unicorn space is. It's not sitting there scrolling four hours on Instagram. It's the active pursuit of what makes you, you. For Lauren, I'm going to assume part of it is your podcast because you have a beautiful way of bringing out ideas in other people and so I would say like identifying you that part of your unicorn space has to be your podcast, because it's a really beautiful skill that only uniquely you can do, but for others, it can be... like I said, it could be crocheting Harry Potter dolls. It could be baking pies, but it's about getting that freedom to be in that permission to be unavailable from yourself without any guilt and shame.

Lauren Schiller:
I think that's so important for us to reinforce for ourselves right now.

Eve Rodsky:
Yes, and we don't give it to ourselves and especially because we think the space time continuum is collapsing on us and I get it because find your passion and purpose things sound like bullshit but in the context of rebalance and efficiency, I promise you, you can get that time back, even if it's five or 10 minutes a day, but sitting there journaling, writing a poem, it doesn't necessarily have to be creative. I'm not creative. I'm a left brain organizational management consultant. I'm a lawyer, but to me it was a curiosity about the gender division of labor. That's what I carved my time out for.

Eve Rodsky:
Whatever it is that makes you, you I'd say don't make it like the mythical equine that doesn't fucking exist. Create that time, reclaim your time by first communicating when emotion is low and cognition is high and I will say one thing that made me sad. One woman said to me, the only time she got unicorn space back was during her divorce because now her kids are half time with her husband and she said it was easier for her to ask for a divorce than it was to negotiate these issues on a daily basis. That makes me sad. Get it right the first time, try at least to invest in communication before you go to the step of divorce and you explode your whole relationship.

Lauren Schiller:
How do you see this translating societaly. I mean, there's the whole leading by example but then in these op-eds that are coming out, within these 70 articles or so, there's been a lot of demands. There needs to be more... there needs to be paid family leave, there needs to be onsite childcare. There needs to be flexible work hours, things of this nature that could potentially start to tip the system in a way that is not still putting the burden on women but on the other hand, it could still just be about reinforcing the norms that we already have. What do you see-

Eve Rodsky:
Correct.

Lauren Schiller:
...as being the right next step from a societal perspective?

Eve Rodsky:
Well, I get scared that we're going to reinforce the norms because as women do more of the homeschooling or the unpaid labor and the dirty dozen, and then the workplace can say, see, I told you, women are not committed to the workforce. Then we get into this terrible cycle of why women are paid less than men in the first place, which is called the motherhood penalty, which applies to women, even if you're not mothers. Yes, I say that societaly, it starts with empathy. It starts with heterosis gender men who are managers of other men saying and modeling.

Eve Rodsky:
What I say to men is if you're on this call, the most important thing you can do, especially after COVID... well actually during COVID is... fold laundry on your Zoom. Before COVID in Davos, I asked all these male world leaders to make sure that when they get home, they call their school and that they are the number one person that is called when a child is sick. The more we see men modeling and picking up the phone during work meetings to show that their work and life are integrated, the better we'll do.

Eve Rodsky:
One Google engineer said to me he's a Fair Player, that before Fair Play right, the life part of his work life equation was invisible. He was ignoring it and then he started to think about if he coded and he forgot an important variable, he said the system would crash and so he feels like the system has crashed if we ignore the life. I guess the good news is that the silver lining of this is we kidding no life anymore. We're all that BBC guy with a toddler coming in on us, and so the more we can model behaviors to show that we integrate our life, especially white men, the better.

Eve Rodsky:
On top of that, yes, of course. I talk about Fair Play, which is what we just said, the modeling that behavior, but also fair day and fair pay. If we really truly believe women's time is valued equally to male's time, if all time is diamonds and women's time is not sand, then we'll pay women the same for the same jobs and then fair day is continuing the flexibility that we are getting now and affording that flexibility and saying that employers, you have to make those changes. You have to allow for life. It doesn't mean anybody's less productive. It just means that they're happier.

Lauren Schiller:
All right, we do. Thank you. We have a question here from Jacqueline. She says I'm good at conceptualizing and planning, but execution, not so much. I'm guessing that makes me a bit of the boss in the relationship. I'm not in a relationship at the moment, but could it work if I just do the first two steps of the categories?

Eve Rodsky:
No, no.

Lauren Schiller:
Sorry, Jacqueline.

Eve Rodsky:
No, because then the person you're with is getting RAT fucked. The men that you're with or women that you're with are getting the random assignment of a task. I distill... it finally took me years to distill nagging. What were men especially saying, that they hate nagging? What does that mean? It's such a gendered word. What the hell are you talking about? I hate that word because I think it's gendered. Instead I say, the random assignment of a task, and that is really what matters and I think Sonya has a really important question. Why, especially white men, not all men, because actually I did find that men of color, again, this is 500 men in interviews, but why white men especially were the ones who were most resistant to these ideas and again, it's sort of who knows. I didn't go into the patriarchal reasons why or the political reasons why, but it took me the longest to get white men to agree with the statement. So this is where it comes from to get a little nitty gritty for Sonya.

Eve Rodsky:
I asked a question of men, again, across socioeconomic status and ethnicity. Do you believe an hour holding your child's hand at the pediatrician's office is as valuable as an hour in the boardroom or on the assembly line or in the workplace? White men had the hardest time answering that question? Yes.

Lauren Schiller:
We have a question here from [Tamar 00:46:59]. She says, I think you mentioned that there were changes that employers should make to support Fair Play concepts. Any examples of what can be done. It seems that new mothers are particularly vulnerable for feeling isolated and kicked out of the workforce.

Eve Rodsky:
Absolutely. What I would say to that Tamar, it's this understanding, and I went to Davos to talk about this, but this is... yes, this is a huge crisis because we know that in the professional world, 43% of women take a career detour after kids. It is a huge crisis. I've been screaming this crisis for eight years. I think now finally we're getting a little bit of traction. It's the only way to changes is... and I had a post it, right? We have to invite men in to this conversation because if we just talk about it as women for the next hundred years, nothing will change.

Eve Rodsky:
I know for men, the beauty about men, I'll give you a quick example about... I had a man who is a Fair Player. He's also a fellow philanthropic advisor. We work with a mutual client. He went to his client's funeral. That's a little confusing, but one of his other client's funerals and what he said to me, and this is an executive in Seattle, a mogul, somebody who's made hundreds of millions of dollars that he was at this funeral before COVID obviously, and they start and he said, "Nobody talked about the money he made in his life." What happened was each... he had three daughters.

Eve Rodsky:
They each got up to the podium and they just start reciting a poem that he said sounded like a shell service team poem. It was confusing. All three daughters recited the poem and didn't say what it was until at the end, when the last daughter said, those were three of the poems our father wrote to us as a tooth fairy, and it still makes me cry even though I... I was told the story a while ago, because at the end of the day what this man who was identifying to me, now that he's sort of in the system is that that's how I want to be remembered.

Eve Rodsky:
Part of the long answer is that it requires that empathy for us all to have a cultural shift, to know that an hour holding our child's hand is as valuable as an hour in the board room, and that requires us all being cultural warriors. Just by showing up on this call, by listening to this podcast, you are a cultural warrior in this movement to recognize that all time is created equal and the value of care, and when we start from there, I mean, we can't go back if it becomes a movement.

Lauren Schiller:
That was Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live). Eve also has a podcast you should check out called In All Fairness. Definitely listen to my conversation from last year with Eve at INFORUM, where she lays out the fair place system in more detail and how to put it to work for yourself. I'll put a link to that conversation and the Fair Play website on my website at inflectionpointradio.org. I'm Lauren Schiller and reporting to you from my new headquarters at home, this is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:
That's our inflection point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know a woman leading change we should talk to? Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one-time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to inflection point radio.org.

Lauren Schiller:
We're on Facebook and Instagram @inflectionpointradio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions, and follow me on Twitter @laschiller to find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go, inflectionpointradio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host Lauren Schiller. Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Speaker 3:
From PRX.

How to Get Through the Worst, Together -- Kelsey Crowe

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

I think we can all agree, it’s been a rough spring with COVID-19 taking over our lives. You may know someone who’s sick, or who’s lost a loved one or their livelihood, or any number of awful things. But as this all goes down, we don’t always know what to say, or do, for someone who’s hurting, let alone asking for the help we might need ourselves. My guest Kelsey Crowe wrote a book, “There is No Good Card For This. What to Say and Do When Life is Scary, Awful, and Unfair to the People You Love” and founded a whole community called Help Each Other Out, to help us help each other. We spoke in 2017 and I thought we could all use a bit of what she calls “whiskey for the wounded.”

Solo Swimmer Kim Chambers: "Surround yourself with people who believe in you."

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Kim Chambers is only the sixth person ever to complete the Ocean’s Seven challenge... solo. That's seven open water channel swims. Think summiting Mount Everest in a bathing suit x 7… hours upon hours upon hours of swimming in critter-filled, often quite cold water. Kim is also the first and only woman in the world to solo swim the thirty miles of shark inhabited waters from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate of San Francisco. We spoke about taking risks, jellyfish and body image--as well as how important having a team who believes in you is for "individual" success. Listen to our conversation and check out Kim’s documentary “Kim Swims”.

How Seane Corn Brings the Principles of Yoga into Activism

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Seane Corn helps people who are committed to social change understand that to dismantle the systems that create oppression, you've got to dismantle the systems that exist within yourself. This world-renowned yoga instructor, activist and author of "Revolution of the Soul" shares how to dismantle those systems and learn where we can each be most of service for a better world.

Transcript:

Seane Corn:

My name is Seane Corn and I am a yoga teacher and I'm the cofounder of Off the Mat, Into the World as well as the author of Revolution of the Soul. In my community, I've been a part of the yoga wellness for communities for many, many years. And over the last 12 years, I've been committed to training leaders to bridge the gap between yoga, transformational work, social justice, and conscious action.

Lauren Schiller:

We're all kind of freaking out right now in trying to figure out what kind of action we can each take to just make it all better. So when I read Seane's book, Revolution of the Soul, it made me feel a little more centered and, like I could go make some change. Rather than the alternative, running through the streets with my hair on fire.

Seane Corn:

And I've been committed myself to raising awareness, raising funds, and to doing whatever I can to, not bring the principles of yoga into activism, but to help people who are committed to social change understand that to dismantle the systems that create oppression, you've got to dismantle the systems that exist within yourself that actually perpetuate and are complicit to that very same separation that you suggest you want changed. And so I wrote this book, really has a toolkit, if you will, to help people approach social change in a way that is more accountable and responsible and to normalize the messy and uncomfortable conversations that are often required when we want to go out and make a better planet. There's a way to do that that doesn't create more harm.

Lauren Schiller:

So today, Seane Corn tells us how to bring the principles of yoga into activism. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point, with stories of how women rise up. We'll be right back.

Lauren Schiller:

I'm back with Seane Corn. Well, it's interesting to think of the connection back to yoga, because I think the general feeling around yoga is like, oh, well that's a practice for myself. That's going to make me feel better. That's why I'm going to start my day so that I feel more centered. But I wouldn't necessarily, until I read this book, connect that back to what does that mean for then to how I go and approach the world or the kind of difference I can make in the world, to be more specific.

Seane Corn:

I think that that's probably the issue with contemporary yoga today. When we think of yoga, we think of those poses, the asana, which is only one part of the pathway. Yoga itself is a philosophy. The very definition of yoga is to come together and make whole, and to recognize that everything is interdependent, is connected. And so if you believe in that philosophy, you have to turn towards where there is separation. Where there are power differentials. Who's getting access to freedom, peace, food, resources, and who's not? And, if in the practice of yoga, one of the main belief systems is that our liberation is bound, that I can't be free unless we're all free. So if I believe that, then my actions have to actually manifest that. And I have to be willing actually to look at the ways in which I'm participating in that separation. And so yoga, that's why it really needs to be within the mainstream. The understanding of yoga needs to be broadened out past the body. That's just the byproduct of the practice. You feel better. Because the truth is, when you do yoga asana, you release the tension. When you release the tension, you're less reactive. When you're less reactive, you are more empathetic, more caring, and more responsible in the choices that you make. When you're tense, you're shut down. And in that tension is when we can create conflict. And so we practice yoga asana, yes to feel better, but to also teach us how to self-regulate so that we can be more in present time when there's issues in the world without contributing to it any further. So the yoga practice itself is much more complex than those physical poses, but the physical poses are a tool that we can use in order to stay resourced and grounded.

Lauren Schiller:

How can we participate in making change in the world?

Seane Corn:

Well, it depends on who that “we” is. I can only speak to, I'm going to speak to the we that I understand. Which is white, privileged, able-bodied, with access to resources. That's who I am. That's more often than not, the community in which I'm communicating to. So I can't just give a formula to a blanket we, because there are some people within that “we” that are trying to feed their kids. They're trying to survive. Their lives are at stake. They live on the margins. They, perhaps it would be dangerous for them to do some of the things that I might suggest. It might be dangerous to them, to their family, to their own survival or sustainability. So I can't speak to that broader we.

But I can speak to people like myself within the communities of yoga and spirituality who talk about, let's go out and change the world. Let's be of service to really unpack what that means. And that's really complex and messy. For years I wanted to help, until I realized that my helping was just one more form of saviorism. That my helping without really understanding colonization, without understanding white supremacy, without understanding power dynamics, that I was just contributing to systems that have already created so many problems. And yet at the same time though, I'm like, "But I want to help. I want to do good." I had to dismantle, within myself, the image that I have of myself as a good person. To that as a whole person with faults and graces.

So, to anyone who's listening, do your work. Really like, do your work. Go inside. Let yourself get informed about what's happening in the world, your own particular cultures. Input into some of the challenges that exist and what needs to change within your own attitude and behaviors that might be contributing to it. So much that I talk about is understanding the mind-body connection. And this goes on throughout the whole of the book. And this is really important for anyone who's listening. We are informed by our trauma. We are informed by our history, by our traditions, by our ancestors, by our culture. So we hold in our bodies, belief systems that live deep within our tissues.

So like if I'm out in the world and there's conflict and chaos, and I get afraid, the rational part of my brain is going to shut down. The reactive part of my brain gets alerted. In that moment, I'm no longer in the present time. My nervous system will revert back to the fears of my high school, the fears of my family, the fears of my history. So, I have to recognize that that's just a reality. I can't not be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic. I can't not be ageist or ableist, or carry certain biases and discriminatory and stereotypical attitudes, because I'm not enlightened first of all. And because that information is so embodied, that if I'm afraid or tired, odds are that's going to get excavated and cause harm. It might be subtle, and yet impactful. I'm not alone in this. Anyone who looks like me. Anyone who has that same kind of background, we all embody this.

So my suggestion, we need to normalize these conversations. We need to own it. And instead of getting defensive when we make mistakes, recognize that we can't change what we won't see. And if we're really committed to social change, the best gift of allyship that we can give to the world is owning our contribution to its pain and its suffering. That's the first step in. And so, do your yoga practice. Go to therapy. Read books. Get white fragility. Get Skill in Action by Michelle Cassandra Johnson. There are so many resources to look at right now that would be so helpful. And don't be afraid to make mistakes. But recognize that intention doesn't always equal impact, and that we have to take responsibility for the impact that we cause that does continue to hurt others. And instead of freezing in shame or guilt because we messed up, just acknowledge it, own it, move into it and commit, like from your soul, to wanting to be a part of this change. But it means being a part of the transformational change from within.

Lauren Schiller:

My guest is Seane Corn, author of Revolution of the Soul. Coming up, Seane tells us how to figure out where we can be most effective in our activism.

Lauren Schiller:

And we're back with Seane Corn. One of the things that is in your book that's explicitly called out as the stop, look and listen approach. Is that how you would summarize what you were just talking about? Or is that a different, something else that we should be thinking about?

Seane Corn:

Stop, look and listen, I don't personally break it down in that way. But in theory, yes, I would say it's in the pause. Like when you're doing a yoga pose, you're taught to get into a pose. You breath. You pause and bear witness to what's coming up. Your mind's all over the place. Normally, "I'm too old, I'm too heavy, I'm too skinny, I'm too weak." There's all these voices that are trying to sabotage the experience or the other part of the spectrum like, "Look at me, I'm amazing." And so we witness the ego in action. We don't react to it, but we bear witness because what we experience in that pause, is what we experience everywhere. The mat is just a mirror to how we approach life. And so I would say, you go into the pause. Breathe. Pay attention. And make a new choice.

Lauren Schiller:

You reference your old therapist Mona a lot throughout the book. And one of the things that you write that she used to say is that, "Your pain is your purpose." Can you speak to that?

Seane Corn:

Sure. And again, this can't be a generalized statement. More often than not, this can be true, but depending on how someone carries their trauma and how far along they are in managing, dealing or understanding their trauma, this might be relevant for someone else could be actually re-traumatizing. My experience is, the very place that brought you to your knees, the very place that got you to the mat or to therapy or into the program where you sought help, support, understanding, is the very place in which you will be most skilled to be able to be of service.

Seane Corn:Alcoholics, drug addicts, people who have dealt with domestic violence, people who've lost a child. God forbid. There's a level of experience of wisdom that is only gained through walking that very individualized, very isolated path where you go up against your own deep shadows of fear, of grief, of rage, anger, disappointment, and have to fight within yourself to make meaning, even in the incomprehensible. When everything is so bleak, and yet you find the resource within yourself to find grace. Not in spite of the experience, but because of it.

Who better than a soul who has walked that path to stand in the presence of someone else who embodies a similar depth of pain or shame, and be able to hold space with empathy. Which is a shared experience, rather than sympathy or pity, which is hierarchal and it creates, again, more separation. It's an imbalance of power. Those are the people in my experience who have been the most effective in their activism. The most skilled at finding sustainability and care. And who are able to, in a way that's incredibly nonjudgmental, bring others into the fold, who often feel the most rejected or lost.

And so Mona, who I do reference in the book, says, "Your pain is your purpose." And it's something that I do believe and I try to support people in empowering the stories that they have within themselves, that at one time brought them the most shame, to reframe them and to find the grace, to find the God, the find the love, and then to be in service to that for others. That's what that means.

Lauren Schiller:

It feels like right now there's so much coming at us. And you know, again, I say the “us” now, the complete new thinking about what “us” means. But there is a lot going on in the world right now that feels like it's trying to push women backwards. Trying to push the progress that we've made for equality backwards. And it feels like the impulses to just ... time is of the essence. With all of your wisdom in mind, how do we try and make the change that we want to see right now without losing too much time?

Seane Corn:

What I can say is that, for the time is now for all of us to wake up and do what needs to be done in order to create a world that is fair and free and just an equal and safe and peace-filled and loving for all beings everywhere, we all have work to do. And we can no longer rely on our national, or even global leadership, to continue to make choices on our behalf. That we actually have to step into levels of leadership and to hold our administration accountable for the choices that they are making. And we can only do that if we are proactive. If we are engaged. If we are educated. If we're willing to see the bigger picture and not allow ourselves to get overwhelmed or fatigued by the rhetoric that is continually coming at us. I believe the fatigue that exists in the world today is strategic. And it's politically strategic. Through the media is strategic, to keep us disempowered, to keep us tired, to keep us feeling inadequate. To keep us feeling as if we somehow aren't able to make these shifts, because it's too far gone.

Right now our culture is in trauma. And that trauma is being excavated through the words that are being used in the world today, especially in our nation. And although that is scary and that is terrifying, it's also really positive. Because like I said earlier, you can't change it until you can see it. That trauma's always been there. But for many of us, especially again, white women of privilege, there's a lot of that trauma I haven't had to see because it doesn't affect me directly. Now that it is in my face, in our face, we cannot, should not turn away from it. Because again, like I said, otherwise we are the problem. And so we have to recognize that we have to build our stamina. We have to find community. We have to find tools of sustainability. And it really depends on where someone's at.

Obviously if someone's right now raising a bunch of small kids, it's probably not a really good idea to perhaps get on the frontline and risk getting arrested. That might not be sustainable for them. So you have to know, like right now in your life, what can you do in order to be of service? Do you have money? Can you support someone who can be on the front frontline? Can you pay for the lawyers that might be necessary to be able to change the policies that exist? Can you run for local office? There are so many ways in which we can be in service.

But I do still feel the most important thing that we can do is accountability. Is to really look inward and see what we are doing each and every day that's creating these divisions. Take a good hard look at that, and then get really practical about what our skills are, what our talents are and what we're being called up to at this time. But what we can't do is allow the fatigue to overwhelm us. Otherwise they've won. It's purposeful. And yet at the same time, self-care is critically important, especially for people who are on the frontline, who are listening to this, who do live on the margins. Their self-care is probably paramount to the work that they're going to do in the world, because they're already in such trauma. But that means someone like myself needs to double down, so that someone else doesn't have to.

So there are so many things that we can do, but apathy is not one of them. And not caring is only representative of the lack of care that we have for ourselves. So, the more we can love our journey, the more we can appreciate the gift that it is to be a part of this world, and to recognize that we get to do this work. We get to have access to tools for healing and transformation and change. So how dare we not go deep, get raw, get real, be authentic. Tear away all the veils of illusions that cover us and keep us separate from each other, and go in and create change from the inside out when we can. And we should. And we must, because lives depend upon it.

So, my advice is just breathe. Pause. Check in with your feelings. Do the inner work. And then act as if lives depend on it, because they do. Act as if your own liberation depends on it, because it does.

Lauren Schiller:

Is there anything else that you would want to say before I let you go?

Seane Corn:

There's something very important to recognize, that there's no separation between the mind and the body and that our bodies remember everything. It remembers the grief of our grandmothers. It remembers the loss of our mothers. It remembers the heartbreak of every woman who has come before us. And we carry that inside our own bodies and it's very much influencing our perspective and the way in which we experience the world and how the world sees us. And that it's time to honor what our bodies have been holding onto, but also to be willing to break the cycles for our daughters and for our sons going forward, that we need to learn from this trauma and transform our fear into faith. Shift our judgment into compassion and our resistance and to surrender. And open our hearts to the love that we as women are, have always been, and will continue to be. And that what we have that guides us as women is our intuition.

God is not something, our spirituality is not something you seek. It's something you awaken to. It's already within you. And I define spirituality as truth and love. That's it. It's who we are. But trauma, fear, socialization, all of that block that light. Our work is to reframe our narratives and develop our self-confidence. Because the thing that blocks our intuition is low self-esteem. Build the self-esteem, and you will trust your inner guidance. You might not always like where it takes you, but you will know that's exactly where you're supposed to be. And you will breathe and surrender to it, knowing that that is the gift of being, and the challenge of being, and that if you can tolerate the discomfort, what's on the other side of it is liberation.

Lauren Schiller:

That was Seane Corn, author of Revolution of the Soul. We'll put a link to Seane's book on our website at inflectionpointradio.org. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.

Eve Rodsky is Ending Gendered Division of Labor at Home

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

When Eve Rodsky found herself sobbing on the side of the road over a text about blueberries, she knew something had to change. Hence began her seven year quest to create a more equitable division of labor at home. Her book is called "Fair Play. A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live)" and her solutions are based on extensive research with experts from sociologists to neuroscientists to behavioral economists and conversations with couples all over the country.

TRANSCRIPT: We do our best, please forgive or let us know any errors.

Eve Rodsky:                           I find myself sobbing on the side of the road over a text my husband, Seth, sent me and it just said, "I'm surprised you didn't get blueberries." And you can picture the scene. I just had a new baby, my second son, Ben was just born. I am on the side of the road sobbing with a breast pump and a diaper bag in my passenger seat. I have returns for a new baby in the back seat of the car, because God forbid they have more than a 30-day return policy for clothes. I have a client contract on my lap with a pen, sort of a sticking me in the vagina as I'm trying to mark it up at every red light traffic stop. As I'm zooming to pick up my older son, Zach, who's about almost turning three at the time, in his toddler transition program.

Eve Rodsky:                           In America, since we really value working mothers, those programs are like 10 minutes long. So I was trying to zoom back and I was like, "Okay, I'm probably going to get into an accident if I'm crying, and my contract's going to get all runny." So I pulled over the side of the road, I just started crying. I knew I was going to be late to pick up Zach, but that was a day I always say, "Thank God Seth sent me that text." Still married. We're very happily married, thanks to Fair Play. But back then it felt like my breaking point, and I said to myself, you know, I'm done. This is not the career marriage combo I thought I was going to have.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and that is Eve Rodsky, the author of a new book, a revolution called Fair Play. We spoke on stage for Inforum at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco this October, to a very lively house. What is this Fair Play you might ask? Well, here's what it's the opposite of.

Eve Rodsky:                           Second shift, mental load, emotional labor. But my favorite came out of a 1987 article by a sociologist named Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and her article is called Invisible Work. And why I love that one so much was because you can't value what you don't see.

Lauren Schiller:                  Eve set out to find out why women are what she calls the she-fault, for all things domestic and more to the point what can be done about it. This is Inflection Point with stories of how women rise up.

Eve Rodsky:                           I had women saying to me, WTF, I'm doing it all. Another woman said to me, "At this rate, after looking at this spread sheet I'm not going to stay in my marriage." And so I realized I had unleashed this rant without a solution. And every other book up until Fair Play, every other book had said, make a list. But there is a problem when you make a list sometimes, right? Because you enter consciousness. But if you don't have a solution, when you're woke and you just are sitting in that resentment, it actually can be worse before it gets better.

Eve Rodsky:                           And so that's where I realized I needed to put my mediator hat on and say, I do this for a living. I develop systems. I'm a Harvard trained mediator. I am product of a single mother who vowed this one happened to me. I went to my first equal rights amendment march when I was 15 months old. I was there.

Lauren Schiller:                  You were? Oh my God.

Eve Rodsky:                           We were there together. It was still happening to me. So I went on a quest to find out if that was true. And the good news for Fair Play, the bad news for society is that it was happening to lots of other women too.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yup. Well since you mentioned your mom and you mentioned that march, and maybe if I go back through old photos I can find you as an infant.

Eve Rodsky:                           Yeah, I have that photo.

Lauren Schiller:                  I was only like seven. But anyway tell us about your mom a little bit and growing up with her, and like what you used to do for fun on your birthday.

Eve Rodsky:                           Oh yeah. So my mother, we didn't have a lot of money for fancy birthday gifts. Even if we did, I'm not sure she would have given me any, because she doesn't really believe in possessions. But instead what we would do on my birthday, she said she would give me the gift of being the change I want to see in the world. That's the Gandhi quote. And so what we did was she said, I could look at anything I wanted, any civic engagement that was happening in Washington DC. We lived in New York City.

Eve Rodsky:                           And so around my birthday, she said she'd buy me a Greyhound bus ticket, and we'd pack lunch and we'd go down, and usually it was a march. So every year my birthday starting around seven, we'd go to Washington D.C. and we'd march for whatever social justice civic engagement thing was happening at the time. And I think it really impacted me because a, obviously it's this idea of not materialism b, it's this idea of birthdays, being gratitude for other people, but c, it was the camaraderie to understand that if you go and there's other people there, there's more people than you, who are caring about an issue and that leads you to do more.

Eve Rodsky:                           And so that was also like the beauty, my love letter to you. Fair Play is a love letter to women, and it's also become a love letter to men. Because I get to share your stories and that's sort of the beauty of the march of this idea that we're all in this together. And it was the cathartic thing for me was that, it wasn't just a me problem. My favorite sociologist C. Wright Mills says, "Private lives, public issues." And I realized this was a serious public issue, yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  So in the start contrast to your moment on the side of the road, you tell a story in the book about being on an airplane and checking off this dude across the aisle. Can you share the story and kind of what epiphany that brought?

Eve Rodsky:                           Absolutely.

Lauren Schiller:                  We'll hear that story and more right after this short break.

Eve Rodsky:                           So the man on the plane, I call this case of the man on the plane. My cousin and I, right when I was discovering all these issues, getting to consciousness about what was happening, I was becoming the defaults. Or like I like to say in the book that she-falls, for every single thing for my household and family, regardless of whether we work outside the home, women do two thirds of what it takes to run a home and family regardless of whether we work outside the home. So before that was a statistic I was undeniably living, but I didn't know at the time.

Eve Rodsky:                           So around the time when I was undeniably living this, but didn't know it at the time, I was on a plane with my cousin, she was coming back to L.A., she was coming out for work. I was coming home from a work trip and we had our grab and go Chicken Caesar Wraps. We went to Hudson News to buy presents for the kids. The second we enter boarding area, DirecTV decides to call me. I'd forgotten I'd scheduled a satellite installation appointment from six months earlier. If anyone's ever dealt with ATT, you don't want to ever deal with not taking that satellite appointment.

Eve Rodsky:                           So I'm trying to install a satellite dish on FaceTime with these men at my house. My cousin at the same time, her phone blows up, her au pair didn't know where to go for soccer practice, and didn't have the cleats or the shin guard. So she's sending him back home. The au pair back home to get her stuff, and we're having this very interactive boarding session. As we get to our seats, my cousin, as I'm still on the phone with ATT, realizes she left her laptop bag back in the boarding area.

Eve Rodsky:                           So we're pushing through to try to get back off the plane. I'm screaming the whole, the plane, the first class flight attendants weren't that happy, that people all the way back in coach were trying to disrupt the first class passengers. She gets off the plane, we get back on the plane, and it was this collective staring at us like, "Ladies, get your shit together."

Eve Rodsky:                           Now on the other side of the plane where you're sitting, this man walks on and we became very interested in this man, because he's about our age. He just takes out a laptop. He literally has no luggage, and we see sort of his screensaver is a really cute brunette, and some kids on his screen saver and he just starts typing, just starts typing. And somehow he manages to finish a PowerPoint deck as we're in the air. And then my cousin keeps looking over and she's like, "What is he doing? He's like solving world peace. He's like solving like calculus."

Eve Rodsky:                           He was using this sort of weird grid, this geometric grid, and then he fell asleep. And then he was doing some candy crush on his phone and there was obviously no good movies on to be watched. We were just became sort of obsessed with him and about five hours into the flight from New York to L.A., my cousin just looks at me and says, "I just wish I was that man." And it was this idea, right, that what is the value of an unencumbered mind? It really is truly priceless. And Virginia Woolf talks about this, almost a hundred years ago that Shakespeare couldn't have been a woman because her mind is too encumbered.

Eve Rodsky:                           And so that really got me thinking about the cost of women, right? The cost of women, of being on our side of the plane, and the motherhood penalty for being seen as not having our shit together, and what the beauty is. And so that set off this idea of the pricelessness of an unencumbered mind. So then from there, my passion, what I call my unicorn space, became this idea of how do we get women, how do we get women to have less of an encumbered mind? We're never going to have a fully unencumbered mind, but even if it's a little less, even if there's one less satellite dish appointment, maybe we're just dealing with the au pair, it'll be a little bit better. Maybe I will have 20 minutes to play candy crush in the airport too.

Lauren Schiller:                  So in the book you talk about the difference between equal and equity.

Eve Rodsky:                           Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  Like that the goal is actually not... So all this stuff that we're responsible for, which, I mean that is a whole other conversation. It's like why are we the she-faults? Actually I'll just ask you that. Did you learn about that? Like why are we the she-fault?

Eve Rodsky:                           There's two phases... Well, I have three phases of research. So phase one was figuring out why we were the she-fault by going through every single article and book, because I'm a really good researcher. My college roommate can tell you that. That ever been written on the subject of what I call the she-fault. And it turns out that she-fault has a name actually many names, second shift, mental load, emotional labor. But my favorite came out of a 1987 article by a sociologist named Arlene Kaplan Daniels. And her article was called Invisible Work.

Eve Rodsky:                           And why I love that one so much was because you can't value what you don't see. So what if, and this was my first foray into this idea of the solution was, what if I made visible the invisible. And I finally showed Seth all that I do. And so that has led me on this mission to create what I call the Shit I Do spreadsheets. And it was a really fun exercise that took me months. But what it started with was me writing down every single thing I did that took more than two minutes, that have a quantifiable time component.

Eve Rodsky:                           So you can't quantify love, but you can quantify how long it takes you to buy the flowers for the recital. So that became gestures of love, in one of my Excel tabs, and slowly I started building and I don't know if any of you that use Excel, but it had 98 tabs, 20 items of sub tabs, over a thousand items of visible work. And then I sort of sent it to my friends to say what am I missing? And I had friends who say, "Well you forgot sunscreen." I say, well obviously you don't have to use Excel then, because it's tab 72, under medical and healthy living, you just didn't down to item 21, because it's there.

Eve Rodsky:                           Another woman who I didn't even know, literally a friend of a friend that found my list through the Jewish Federation in Arizona said that she noticed I didn't have allowance on there. And I said, "Well then you really don't know how to read Excel because it's under tab 55, it's under family values and traditions." It's item number seven because why else are you giving allowance unless it's to have some sort of family value. So I think they were like freaked out, but they were very happy that it was that thorough.

Eve Rodsky:                           And I finally get the courage after these months and months to send this 19 million megabytes spreadsheet off to my husband, with the very eloquent need or like perfect communicator in the subject line that said, "Can't wait to discuss," with no context other than that, and just send it off into the ether and waiting for his response. And I'm waiting and waiting, and I finally get Seth Rodsky, unread email in my inbox. I open up the email and it's just one monkey covering its eyes. That was that. I didn't even get the courtesy of the three monkey trio. So sad, just to see no evil.

Eve Rodsky:                           And so obviously in my household, right, this has triggered a see no evil reaction. That's where I realized I needed to put my mediator hat on and say, I do this for a living. I develop systems for very difficult families, and if that doesn't make sense to you, just picture the HBO shows succession. Those are my clients. You should feel bad for me. But the good news is that working with families like that, I've had a decade of experience in mediation and systems building around shared values.

Eve Rodsky:                           Where even the most difficult clients, who would literally storm out of the room, when their son would be speaking, can share and have communication with grace and humor and generosity around very difficult family issues. So if that can happen for those families, I thought, "Well why not bring the same systems learning into ordinary households?" And that's sort of how I started developing Fair Play. Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  Okay. So let's get to this equity question, versus equality question. Because I mean it seems like the very first place that you would go is like, okay, there are a hundred items on this list or a thousand items on this list or whatever it is for you or your family. So if I just give you, my partner, half of them, everything's good.

Eve Rodsky:                           Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  But you actually say that's not true. So talk about that a little bit.

Eve Rodsky:                           So the Shit I Do spreadsheet evolves over time into the 100 Fair Play cards. And what I found was, the science backs this up. 50/50 is the absolute wrong equation. And I actually think 50/50 has held us back for a 100 years, because it's never 50/50, and then when you think it's going to be, there's a lot of disappointment and resentment and on and on and on. So what I realized, and the science backs this up, is that perceived fairness is a better indicator than actual fairness, whatever that means in the home in terms of how you view your partnership.

Eve Rodsky:                           So my perceived fairness may look different Laura than your perceived fairness. But what it comes out of after doing all the research is ownership. And so what I mean by that is everything you sort of need to know about Fair Play, you sort of can learn from the life changing magic of mustard. And what I mean by that is somebody has to know your second son, Johnny, like spreads French's yellow mustard on his protein, otherwise he like gags on protein, right? So if he dips it in French's yellow mustard, he eats his protein. That's what I call conception.

Eve Rodsky:                           That's what organizational manager's called conception. Then somebody has to put it on a list, or notice that the French's yellow mustard is running low. That's what I called planning. Then someone actually has to get their butts to the store to purchase the French's yellow mustard. And that's what I call execution. And that's when men step in. And that's a big problem, because they always bring home spicy Dijon, the nasty scene, they just do. And then men all over the country are saying to me, "I'm never going back to the store for my wife, because I went to the damn store, I got the mustard and I can't ever do anything right."

Eve Rodsky:                           My love letter to men, women all over the country were saying things to me like, "Well what do you mean Eve? You want me to trust him with making our living will? He can't even bring home the right type of mustard." And so it led to this trust spiral, where women just kept on taking more and more and more back on their plates. So what happens when you own the full mustard situation? When the conception, planning, execution stays together, when you have context? Well, if I'm the one who notices that my son needs a mustard and plan for the mustard, and I execute mustard, then something beautiful happens. You actually bring home the yellow mustard.

Eve Rodsky:                           And so Fair Play is predicated on that notion of ownership. And so that's why I say it's not 50/50, because men are not taking 50/50 of the cards. Even stay at home dads often don't have 50 cards, but when you have ownership there's perceived fairness, and so back what I just said, perceived fairness is a better indicator of marital happiness, and that's what I kept seeing all over the country, when you own the mustard situation. And if you don't believe me and you say, "Well, yeah, right. That's definitely not how we do things in our family."

Eve Rodsky:                           I just say, "Let me stop you because the most successful organizations do it that way." Netflix calls it the RRP, the rare responsible person, where they're given context, not control, and you never wait to be told what to do. Apple coined the term DRI, which is a directly responsible individual, where you own a task from conception and planning to overseeing the execution. So I believe it's time to start treating our home with some respect and rigor. That our home is our most important organization, because who would ever walk into your boss's office and sit there and say, "So, hey, what should we be doing today? I'll just wait here to tell me what to do."

Eve Rodsky:                           You wouldn't have a job the next day. But that's how we're doing things in our home. So I'm asking people to just bring some respect, some rigor. Like I said, treat our home like an organization, because when you do, then things start to change.

Lauren Schiller:                  So what about the idea of who has more time? So you actually break down kind of three or so, maybe it's four categories of situations that women are in, why don't you say what the categories are. Because, you've got women who are working full time and you've got women who are staying at home, and somehow there seemed to be equally responsible for as long the same things. But this idea that especially the women who are staying home, by choice or otherwise, theoretically have more time.

Eve Rodsky:                           Well the first thing again is back to fairness, right? Fair Play is a very customizable situation. So my affair is not going to look the same as your affair. Again why I think 50/50 is the wrong equation, because what does 50/50 mean, in a stay at home marriage where maybe you are taking on more of the marriage, the responsibilities in the home. But back to your question Lauren, about time. So why is Fair Play not just a card game? I wish I could just like hand out decks. But what I realized was that, and you've said this a tone sort of switches.

Eve Rodsky:                           The first half of the book really it has to be some consciousness raising, and then you can go to the South Beach diet part where I give you like what to eat and when to eat it, and that's where men come in, because they do like the prescriptive stuff. But the beginning was so important because of my finding. I had this giant finding that I wasn't expecting, and it sort of predicates everything that comes after in Fair Play. And it was this idea that women and society view men's time as finite, like diamonds, and women's time is infinite like sand. So what do I mean by that?

Eve Rodsky:                           Well, men were saying things like, "My power hours, I make more money and she has more time." So we were hearing it from men that, we know that from equal pay, we go into the office for the same amount of hours. We're paid less for those hours. But what I didn't expect was that the worst purveyors of not valuing their time would actually be women. And so women all over the country were saying things to me like, "Of course I should pick up the extra slack in my home, because my husband makes more money than me," not true.

Eve Rodsky:                           Other women were saying to me, "I do more in the home because I'm just wired differently. I'm a better multi-tasker." So I went to the top neuroscientists in this country to find out that that's 100% not true. And one actually said to me, off the record, "Don't use this in the book, but you can use this on your tour. Imagine you can convince half the population that they're better at wiping asses and doing dishes. How great for the other half of the population." That's that multitasking message. Hence, there's a 100 CEO's in the Forbes list this month, and guess what they all have in common except for one, they all are men.

Eve Rodsky:                           Okay. Other women were saying to me, "In the time it takes me to tell him how to do it, I might as well do it myself." So I went to the top behavioral economists who think all only about longterm thinking, 1000% not true in terms of longterm planning and my favorite were the two people with the same job? Yeah, we're both colorectal surgeons. Yeah, we're both shipping supervisors, but my husband's really busy and overwhelmed and I just find the time. And so I like to say, unless we're somehow Albert Einstein and we know how to fuck with the space time continuum, we definitely can't find time.

Eve Rodsky:                           There's literally no way to find time. But there is time choice of how you use your time, and if I have less choice of over how or use my time, then my time is less valued. So having to break those down for women especially was really important. So a lot of the book is looking at our own views of how we view our own time. And so I like to say, imagine a world where we're all time is created equal, right? Where we actually really believe that an hour holding our child's hand in the pediatrician's office, is just as valuable as an hour in the board room.

Eve Rodsky:                           If that becomes true, then guess what? Men will be more likely to do it, and then we'll start having some real changes in those workplaces. So all time is created equal, that's where the fundamental premise came from.

Lauren Schiller:                  So I mean, that is a huge societal shift.

Eve Rodsky:                           Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  Right.? And you know, I guess change starts at home. Have you learned about how that might ultimately ripple out to being rewarded in our larger society? I mean what do you think needs to change kind of from other directions?

Eve Rodsky:                           That's a great question. I'll tell it to you. Can I tell a two minute story that actually illustrate some sort of change that's happening? So I'll tell you a story about my friend Julie and Ed, who wanted to try Fair Play around the holidays last year. It's a terrible time to try anything new. But this actually was after the manuscript was submitted. So you're hearing a story that's actually not in the book. So Ed is the type of guy who said things to me like, "I'm the CEO outside the home, and my wife's a CEO inside the home, so throw up."

Eve Rodsky:                           Okay. But that's Ed. I like him. That's sort of the way he came at this. And so Julie wanted to try Fair Play, because she was super overwhelmed, and she says to me, "My mom just entered the hospital. Ed says he wants to help. I'm taking the kids to school. I'm working part time. I'm still making their lunches. I'm trying to decorate the Christmas tree, try to do a holiday card, plan our Christmas travel, and I'm at my breaking point."

Eve Rodsky:                           So I said to her, "Well, what's breaking you?" And she said my second son, Brody, second grade secret Santa project, because it has to be made from scratch. I always say thank you to the schools. It's so nice to do that to us around the holidays. But they do. And so she said to me, "Well typically if I hadn't heard about your Fair Play concepts, I would just give Ed a list of all the things I need to get for me for the secret Santa project. And when I got home from sitting my mother in the hospital, I'd be building the project with Brody.

Eve Rodsky:                           But you're telling me not to do that. You're telling me to ask Ed, CEO outside the home to own the homework, this one homework projects for one day, one card for one day." I said, "Yes, I am asking you to do that." And so Julie said to me, "Well I wouldn't even know where to begin? Like that's completely not our habit." And she was sort of panicking, because she wouldn't have the tools to ask him to own the homework card for this project. So Fair Play at its core is really based on values. It's not a score keeping exercise where you throw cards at your partner.

Eve Rodsky:                           I asked you to back it up to what is your why. So I did that with Julie and I said "Why do you value this project? Let's just start with that. Why is this the project that's breaking you?" And so she said to me, "Well it's the signature second grade project, because we're supposed to be teaching our kids that Christmas is not about a $100 [inaudible 00:25:56]. It's about a lack of materialism and the fact that you can get a nice homemade gift that you actually are excited to open, means a lot to me in the school."

Eve Rodsky:                           Okay. I was feeling like that was a very articulate answer. And then she says, "On top of it, my son Brody drew the name of a new girl at school, and I watch her, I'm the one who drops off in the morning, because I have a part time job. And so I watch this little girl sort of walk around, and no one's really talking to her. And it would be really nice if my son who is popular and athletic and who has been at the school since kindergarten would make something really nice for this new girl. Like maybe would make her feel more welcome, and it would foster empathy for him."

Eve Rodsky:                           So I tear every time... You know, when she said that, I still tear up telling that story. So it felt very powerful to me. Her why. So I said, "Just say that to Ed. Just what you just said to me. When you're calm, not when you're feeling overwhelmed, but when you're calm, articulate that. Exactly what you just said to me. You say to him." So I was interviewing a lot of people at the time, so I almost forgot about checking back in with them. But I'm so happy I did because Ed gets on the phone and tells me that right after Julie told him that he began Googling secret Santa projects for little girls with his son Brody.

Eve Rodsky:                           Remember this is CEO outside the home guy, and that's what I call conception. Because they decided in a Popsicle stick jewelry box, and then he tells me that they start writing down on a list everything they need to build that project. So they wanted color, this is all Eds details. They wanted colored, Popsicle sticks, glue, glitter and Brody even wanted the little girl not to have to use two hands to open her jewelry box. So they were buying a knob for the box that was on their list.

Eve Rodsky:                           So that's what I call in Fair Play, the planning. And then Ed tells me that he found this really cool store named My Goals. And it wasn't even that difficult because you could just go to one store, and get everything you need. So wow, that sounds like a really cool store. And they go to My Goals, they pick up everything they need for this project and they come home. And they start building it. And so Julie chimes in and says, "Well, my life changed in that moment." And I said, "Well that's a pretty big statement. So what was changing for you in that moment?"

Eve Rodsky:                           And she said, when she saw Brody and Ed on the floor working on gluing these pieces together for this Popsicle stick jewelry box, that she noticed that Ed had glitter on his hands. And she said to me, I said, "Well, what was making that so meaningful to you? And she said, "Because it finally felt like he was in it with me. And because glitter is a fucking pain in the ass to get out and it's always in her hair and on her hands. And how cool if he actually gets it on his hand and here and realizes that."

Eve Rodsky:                           And so that sort of got me thinking right, about small micro changes. I didn't ask this man to take a 100 cards. I didn't even ask him to take homework for the year or the month. This was ownership of one card for one project, and his wife gave him trust to do it. And so imagine all men have glitter on their hands. Because back to what you said about societal change that starts in the home. So Ed's also a very high up position at a very important East Coast company. What if he recognizes that there's value in doing secret Santa projects?

Eve Rodsky:                           Maybe he'll let his employees leave earlier. Maybe he'll understand that women, their time matters, and so we should pay them the same. But I do think it all begins with glitter. Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  Okay. I actually have to ask you about the CEO of the home business, because I was just chatting with someone this weekend who said that that's what their tax advisor put down on her tax return as her title, and she was happy about it.

Eve Rodsky:                           Okay.

Lauren Schiller:                  But you're like, "Hmm, so what?" What is the downside of that?

Eve Rodsky:                           The downside of that is that it means that ownership of every single card is landing on the woman, and nobody can hold all the cards. I mean in single mother of households, yes, they do try to hold all the cards like my mother did, and stuff falls through the cracks. And there's societal issues, we're not valuing that. We could talk all day about single mothers, but if you have the solution, privilege, to have a partner at home, I say to you, "Nobody should be holding all the cards."

Eve Rodsky:                           And so again, what I found was that men like Ed... So let me just tell you another thing, one last thing about Ed that I don't often tell, but in this context I think it's important. He also told me that Brody, his son started crying in the car on the way back from My Goals, because he was sad his grandmother was in the hospital. And I think the reason Ed told me that, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I want to go back and ask him. I think he told me that because he felt privileged that his son was finally confiding in him.

Eve Rodsky:                           And there's a connection there when your son's willing to be vulnerable and cry to you. And what does that do for him? And so people know, I love these types of stories. So I got a call two days ago from a client in Seattle, who told me he was at a funeral, not to get all existential. And he said, "You're going to love this story about the funeral." I said, "Well, that's really cool. You think I love stories about funerals. But tell me why I'm going to love this story." He said, "This man, again, very powerful man in my clients realm. My HBO says, you know, succession realm passed away.

Eve Rodsky:                           He wasn't my client, he was a friend of my client. And his daughter... So even though he was super powerful, I guess he was always a tooth fairy. He held the magical beings card for his kids, and his daughter read all of the poems she ever received from him as the tooth fairy at his funeral." And so I think about what is that for men? What do we care about at the end of our lives, right? We care about those things, those connections we make. And so I saw men who were getting ownership, not given a list, not what I call rat fucked, the random assignment of a task, but actually given ownership, they were getting more meaningful connections out of their family life.

Eve Rodsky:                           And so it's not good for men either to live in the CEO of the home CEO outside the home siloed living. Even if it's not, like I said, 50/50, trust in the home matters. When you're doing it together, I saw huge shifts in how people were interacting with each other and their children.

Lauren Schiller:                  I think it's worth spending a few minutes talking just functionally about how this works. Because I've been having fun pitching it to various people.

Eve Rodsky:                           I got my ambassador.

Lauren Schiller:                  And I'm like, "This is going to change everyone's life. It's going to change my life." But I was able to go to my husband and say, "Well I have to prepare for this interview. Right. So I need you to play this game with me. That's going to create more efficiency in the home." And I like watched to see what his reaction was. And I was like, "Or," because you've got several pitches that you can make to your partners. Right?

Eve Rodsky:                           Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  And I was like waiting to see which one he'd most respond to. Meanwhile, my 14-year-old daughter is listening in because she hears everything and she keeps asking me, "Mom, what's this game? Like are we ever going to play the game?" So I'm like ready to take a pack of cards.

Eve Rodsky:                           Yes. You're going to take on cards.

Lauren Schiller:                  So let's talk about you. I mean, you've obviously referenced the 100 cards and, a few of the different categories and that you need to have the concept planning and execution.

Eve Rodsky:                           Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  There's also things like minimum standard of care and all that. So could you just give a little rundown of how this game works?

Eve Rodsky:                           Yes. Remind me to get right back to that. Because you just said something important about communication.

Lauren Schiller:                  Okay.

Eve Rodsky:                           And then we'll get right to the practicality of it. So just one quick thing about how women communicate, and men too. So a lot of women out there were saying to me very powerful women even, and ones that again have less economic privilege that they can never have a conversation about these issues in the home. It's hard that they didn't want to bring it up, that this was too tricky. So one woman said that to me, and then completely unironically about 20 minutes later. She's like, "So yeah, it's when my husband didn't put the clothes in the dryer, I just dumped the wet clothes on his pillow."

Eve Rodsky:                           Another woman said the same thing. "I can't have a conversation about this in my home." But then I find out she has an Instagram account called the shit my husband doesn't pick up, and she takes pictures of all of it and she posts it on Instagram. So what I'd like to say to all you women and men out there, is I promise you, you are already communicating. I will go on your nest camera, watch you for a day, circle every single time you are communicating about home life. Even if I don't see your words coming out of your mouth, you are already communicating.

Eve Rodsky:                           So when I could say to women, you were having a conversation shift, but not a start. Women felt a little bit less scared to have these conversations. And so that is one way to do it. To say we're going to have a shift and not a start because we are already communicating about home life. Now another thing is if you need lots of tools, Fair Play gives you those tools. They give you all the mediation tools that I have out of my practice, but it's also again back to the work we have to do in ourselves, why Fair Play is not just a car game.

Eve Rodsky:                           I have a lot of quizzes in the book, not just on who said it when, but on what type of personality profile are you, what toxic type messages have you given yourself, and also what type of communication vulnerability do you have? So a big communication vulnerability that I had and a lot of women have in my data set, was they love to give feedback in the moment.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah.

Eve Rodsky:                           And so when emotion is high, cognition is low. When you're giving that feedback in the moment, it's super unhelpful, but we love to do it. So my editor laughed at me because I had about 20 pages of explaining to women why not to give feedback at the moment from a neuroscientist perspective, from a psychologist, from me, from clergy. And so she said, "I get it that you really want to get this point across, that you have to hold your tongue to a time when emotion is low and cognition is high. But we can't spend 20 pages dissecting this. They're just going to have to believe you with three supporting experts."

Eve Rodsky:                           So it's about four pages in the book of that point. And so you have to start with using tools, sitting down, communicating at a time where you're calm, and that's where the cards help. So back to the practicalities. So if you're communicating, and not giving feedback in the moment, and you're sitting down, when you're calm, what happens is you have a full set of tools, right? Your brain is in a place that can have conversations that are more than just take the damn dishes card, because I never want to do dishes again. That's when Fair Play fails. And that's sort of the beauty of why this took me seven years. It was all to get to the last chapter of the book, which is called the top 13 mistakes couples make and the Fair Play fix.

Eve Rodsky:                           Because I needed to have testing subjects from all walks of life that mirrored the U.S. Census to get a sense of what was tripping people up. So you get to read about all the people's mistakes and how to correct them. But a big mistake was jumping right to the division, because it just became another list. So I did that. That was my first mistake, before I used my own mediation training to sort of develop the system. I just sort of had this game of fight idea, and I gave Seth the garbage card.

Eve Rodsky:                           And so what started happening was I started just following him around the house, sort of as his shadow. I even like opened the door under the sink to just remind him that that's where the garbage liners were. And so he could like trip over it as he was trying to get a snack. And he stopped me one day and said like, "This garbage thing is not working because you're literally stalking me over garbage, and I'm not going to own anything if this is what it feels like to own, something because you're literally stalking me over garbage."

Eve Rodsky:                           So this is my own mistake of just jumping straight to the division. So that's when I had a backup and say, My entire mediation practice for decade is based on values based mediation, where I ask people what is their why? So why am I not bringing that into the system? Well, it's because it's a really weird conversation to talk about your values over garbage, who does that? But what I found was that when you do that, it brings transformative change into the home, transformative change that lasts. And so that's what I started doing.

Eve Rodsky:                           I sat down and said, "So let me tell you why I value garbage. As you know, you went to my house, you saw my apartment on Avenue C in 14th street look like, you saw the Chinese takeout bag that sat on a knob. You saw that there was no garbage can in my house growing up." What happened was garbage would spill on the floor every single day. It would have this little bag, it would overflow. And so I was a very dehydrated child, because after sundown I was afraid to turn on the light in the kitchen, because we have cockroaches and water bugs that would just scatter everywhere.

Eve Rodsky:                           So I'm extremely triggered by garbage. But I'd never thought to tell Seth that. And so we sat down and I told him the story of my upbringing, and then he responds by saying, "Well, I slept on a Domino's pizza box as my pillow, my whole fraternity life. So I don't really care about garbage. I actually like garbage. It doesn't bother me." And so what happens, right when you have such different values over something as simple as garbage. Well then you borrow what I did from the law and from medicine, and you come up with what's reasonable, a minimum standard of care.

Eve Rodsky:                           And that's what we did. So I said to Seth, he said, "I will hold this card. And what feels reasonable to me is if garbage goes out once a day, and I will take it out once a day at 7:00 PM. I'll put it in my calendar like a work appointment, as long as you never fucking mention the word garbage ever again." And ever since that day, garbage goes out at 7:00 PM, and sometimes we re-deal when he's not home, and we take other cards. But that's what happens. 20 minute conversation. You invest in those conversations, and it's a lifetime of change.

Eve Rodsky:                           And so when women say, "Well, I don't want to spend 20 minutes talking about garbage." I love to just grab their phones, and I go to their screen time app, and I promise you they've been on Instagram or Facebook longer than 20 minutes. Invest in your partnerships, treat the homeless some respects because it pays off spades. I really believe change starts in the home. Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well one of the things that I was really excited about in reading this book was, aside from the very obvious benefits, is this notion of unicorn time, and that that gets to be a card. And when I saw your book, I'm like, "What's this little unicorn doing on that scale there?" So can you explain what you mean by that and let's talk about it.

Eve Rodsky:                           Yeah. It's this idea of unicorn time, unicorn space. I call it that because it's like the mythical equine, it's this beautiful creative space, that we used to have before kids and partnerships. But it doesn't freaking exist, unless we reclaim it. So it's really this idea and it changed the way I wrote the book. I really am an organization manager. I'm a mediator. I get to the presenting problem, the underlying problems. But what stopped me, which kept pulling me back into the fact that this was bigger than just a game, was not only the toxic time message we were giving ourselves, it was the identity loss that was being reported in so many women after children.

Eve Rodsky:                           I don't know who I am anymore. One woman who had three Ivy league degrees said to me when I said, what is your unicorn space? What is your creative space that makes you uniquely you, and how do you share that with the world? She said, "I don't even understand what that question means. It's physics." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, I'm an object at rest. Object in motion stay in motion, objects in rest stay at rest, and I'm object at rest. I won't even know how to answer that question."

Eve Rodsky:                           And why that was so important. It was because I asked a very provocative question of men. I asked men all over this country, are you proud of your wife, of your wife or your partner? Men always went to, "She's an amazing mother." Okay. I said, "That's great. That's a role." And then they said, "I couldn't do it without her." I said, "That's great. That's a personal assistant, so tell me more." If a woman had her self-worth, something that made her, her, right? Whether it's volunteering with the firefighters, like one woman I interviewed who does American Ninja warrior, or for me the gender division of labor, or baking pies or whatever it is, then the man immediately went to that.

Eve Rodsky:                           It was never like, "Oh, she's an amazing dental hygienist." One guy said to me, "The dental hygienist husband, my wife's perfecting rhubarb," and he went off for 15 minutes about how hard rhubarb is to work with. Because she wants to add rhubarb to her pie collection that she's going to enter in some contest. I don't bake myself like that, but I guess apparently rhubarb gets very runny, and so you have to like perfect it when you're baking. But this man knew so much about rhubarb, because it was his wife's passion. He was picking up on her passion.

Eve Rodsky:                           And so I said it's not about a shaming ourselves to say our spouses need to be proud of us, but it's about us being proud of ourselves. Feeling a little bit like we were here, before we had these roles of being parent, partner and worker. And it really, really affects women and men too. There were some men who said, "I really need to find my unicorn space," as well completely we both need it, and we can't resent our partners for taking it.

Eve Rodsky:                           So I'll just end on that. That's my Harper's Bazaar article, you can look out for it. It's called the Real Midlife Crisis. What happens when the person who loves you the most resents you the most? Because my finding was the three things that most people said made them happy, were adult friendships, self care, true self care, not CBD oil pedicures, but like working out, or walking to the beach with your dog and unicorn space. Those were the three things that we didn't want to give our spouse anytime for.

Eve Rodsky:                           So it's not about breast implants or a Ferrari, it's about bringing back in our happiness trio, which starts with unicorn space, in saying that we all value this. I deserve this as much as you do, even if it's unpaid. And that was the hardest for stay at home mothers, because they said to me, I'm already doing all this unpaid work. How can I add in baking pies on top of that? But they have to, because it's about your marriage. And then what I found out from the research is also about our longevity.

Eve Rodsky:                           It's about our longevity, being who we are and being able to share that with the world and a little, even if it means just like bringing a pie to your neighbor, that is about our longevity.

Lauren Schiller:                  And it's also just about being interesting. You talk about being interesting in the book, interesting to yourself and-

Eve Rodsky:                           You have a right to be interested in your life.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah.

Eve Rodsky:                           You have a right to be interested in your own life. And so many women said to me, "I don't feel I have that right to be interested in my own life anymore."

Lauren Schiller:                  All right.

Eve Rodsky:                           Sorry to end on such a downer. The good news is that the after, which is a sequel that I'm writing now, is all these women and men who rediscovered their unicorn space, and it's the most inspiring thing to watch.

Lauren Schiller:                  I just have to say, I feel like it is... how many people here would say they have unicorn space? You know, something that they really value and they get time to do. That's awesome. I mean, is that a good percentage?

Eve Rodsky:                           That's great. I love this room.

Lauren Schiller:                  That's right.

Eve Rodsky:                           40% of the room.

Lauren Schiller:                  Keep doing. Yeah. Yeah. So for those of you who don't, there's a little workbook.

Eve Rodsky:                           Workbook and how to get it back. But I will say that, when I was in blueberries time, right, when I was sobbing on the side of the road, anytime someone would forward me a find your passion and you know article, I would say that's just another fucking thing. I don't have time to do. So thank you for shaming me. You wanted me to have self care. Great. Then you take my kids to school and try to mark up a contract with a pen in your vagina. You try to get some self care time.

Eve Rodsky:                           So I found these very condescending messages to women along with lower your standards, all these other messages I could tell you about all night, because it's just putting more shit on us. So I only believe in unicorn space in the context of domestic rebalance, only in that context. Alone, it's just another thing on our list of shit we don't have time to do.

Lauren Schiller:                  That was Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play, a game changing solution for when you have too much to do and more life live. Speaking with me, live on stage at Inforum at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. I'll put a link to Eve's book on my website, inflectionpointradio.org, where you can find future events by clicking on the events tab. Come on out. I'm Lauren Schiller, this is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:                  Today's program was produced in part by the generous donation of Gabriel Howard and Martin Scoble. That's our inflection point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast.

Lauren Schiller:                  Know a woman leading change we should talk to? Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one-time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to inflectionpointradio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at Inflection Point Radio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. And follow me on Twitter at L-A-Schiller.

Lauren Schiller:                  To find out more about today's guest, and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go, inflection pointradio.org. Inflection point is produced in partnership with K-A-L-W 91.7 FM in San Francisco, and P-R-X. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host Lauren Schiller.

Announcer:                           Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

How Tiffany Shlain Turns Off Tech to Turn On Creativity and Activism

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Tiffany Shlain is the author of "24/6. The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week". She is also the founder of the Webbys, Character Day (where you can find her Tech Shabbat challenges) and the creator a number of films. In today's episode Tiffany brings it all together. You'll hear how taking time off from technology and taking time to reflect helps fuel your creativity and activism.

TRANSCRIPT. We do our best, please forgive or let us know about any errors.

Tiffany Shlain:                      My name is Tiffany Shlain and I'm a filmmaker. I founded the Webby Awards and I just finished my first book that came out called 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week. And it's about my family's decade-long practice of turning off all screens from Friday night to Saturday night for what my family calls our technology Shabbat and how much it's made our life better. And then Saturday is just literally everybody's favorite day of the week. We just, we hang out, we cook, we nap, we read, we journal, we space out. It's literally everybody's favorite day.

Lauren Schiller:                  Today, Tiffany Shlain tells us all how to step away from our screens just one day a week. But why would you do that?

Tiffany Shlain:                      It's good to have a day where you're, I can be reachable to the entire every news headline, every family member, every text alert. It's actually that's what have, I love being available to them the other days, but I need a day to just ground myself.

Lauren Schiller:                  What was the inspiration to take this break from technology?

Tiffany Shlain:                      I had this really intense year where my father was diagnosed with brain cancer and I found out I was pregnant in the same week. And those nine months, I thought a lot about life and death and what are we doing when we're here. And whenever I visit my dad who was quite sick, I would turn off my phone of course. And then he passed away and my husband's, and my daughter was born days later and we just knew we just wanted to change the way we're living.

Tiffany Shlain:                      And then shortly after that, we're part of this group called Reboot, and they had a national day of unplugging, which was one ceremonial day a year of turning off the screens, national day of unplugging. We did it and they asked us to write something for it, and it was this really wonderful night. And the next day, it just felt so good. No screens, it was this cleanest day, it was the longest day. It was the most present and happiest I'd been in a long time and we never stopped doing it.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So now it's been almost 10 years and the benefits just get. I see them more clearly and they just multiply and amplify. Just in terms of my sense of creativity, I feel very creative both on Tech Shabbat because I'm just, my mind is wandering and the next day is probably my most productive day of the week is Sunday and I laugh a lot more. I just feel I'm there for the funny, I'm just present for life more, feel more connected to myself, to my kids, my husband. It's this day every week that is so important to us and grounds us and even my teenage daughter, she is in her junior year of high school, which is super stressful. And in the last month because she knows she just started school.

Tiffany Shlain:                      She has commented I think each Saturday, I'm so glad I have this day. There's no homework, there's no being on, she gets to kind of reset and regroup, which we're not giving ourselves any time for it anymore. And especially with the news and we're waking up to the stressful news. We're going to bed with the stressful or FOMO or this or that or whatever mishmash of things you get on your phone. And so in the book I really talk about how much it's changed us and it has this ripple effect to the other six days because I've incorporated all these kind of smaller things into the week to not have the screen dictate my every move. And I was starting to feel like a marionette also, but the book also talks about kind of the history of time on time off the concept of a day of rest and all different cultures and why we need to bring this ritual back.

Lauren Schiller:                  So when does Saturday night end or are people sitting around waiting for midnight?

Tiffany Shlain:                      No It's funny we... If you are an observant Orthodox Jew, you wait till three stars are in the sky but for us it would be the three closing screens, no it's five o'clock so 5:00 PM Ken and I get ready to go out on a date and the girls get ready for what they call their double date with technology. And this is the great thing is that not only do I run towards Friday night, turning off the screen each week and everyone does, but on Saturday night you reappreciate the marvels of this miraculous tool called the web and technology all over again. So sometimes I extend it, but a lot of times I, there's something I wanted to look up the head to ponder all day. The pondering is actually quite delightful I think we've forgotten how to do that. Not be able to look something up immediately, but so it has this dual effect each week where I both can't wait to get off the screens and then I reappreciate what they can do when I come back on at five.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller this is Inflection Point, I love this idea of taking a day off of screens and I thought you might like it too. So next up Tiffany Shlain tells us how to start our own Tech Shabbat, stick around. I'm back with Tiffany Shlain let's just start with how do you pitch this to your family?

Tiffany Shlain:                      This is the question. Do not say to your kids, we're going to turn off screens one day a week, they might start crying no one's going to want that.

Lauren Schiller:                  No one wants that.

Tiffany Shlain:                      Here's what you say. Tip number one, ask every member of your family, including yourself. What do you wish you had more time to do? Everyone's got a list, I mean everybody has a list. Why do you wish you could do more of, is it skateboarding? Is it painting? Is it reading? Is it napping? Is it hanging out with your friends? What's the list? Everyone write their own list and you fill your day with that. It'll become everyone's favorite day of the week. So it's not what you aren't getting it's what you get back. And that's a whole framing because I think people are so attached to their phones for everything, which I think is problematic and kind of reminds people to even jog their mind of all the pleasures in life that don't require a screen.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So that's exercise number one. What are those things that you love doing? Think back when you were younger, what did you like doing, what do you want more of? And then make the day pretty much all of that and it's just, there's so many things that are pulled away from the screen, you're in a moment, whether it's reading and then you're reading and then it makes you think of something on your phone and then your phone and you're on Instagram and you're off the book. I could say that sentence with everything. So I think it's a framing thing. It's that we need to remind people how incredible it is to be human and to be really present for the people right around you instead of the people in the phone or the things happening in the phone.

Lauren Schiller:                  I feel I do have a bad habit of when my kids come home and I'm on my computer, my kids come home and on my phone and then I get mad at them for being on their phone when I'm trying to have a conversation with them some modeling.

Tiffany Shlain:                      That's why this is really good, it's modeling and we made this film called Dear Parent, which I don't know if you saw it, it's a two minute film. It is so much about modeling behavior and a lot of kids do say their parents are the one, just the culprits too. So if you make it like a family experiment and I mean I always wish when my kids see me on the computer and I'm working, you wish there was a light blinking above your head. Actually I'm working right now, I'm helping to pay for the bills I'm not just scrolling away.

Tiffany Shlain:                      But it is about it being an all in family thing. And I think that's a key part of the toolkit is that everyone has to be in and you're going to have your own rules. I think part number two about rules, so for us it is the screens or the conduit to every distraction and work and all the mishmash of things. So, and we really like kicking it off with a dinner and that's also fun. Who do you wish you spend more time with? Who do you wish you saw more? Everyone's got that list oh, I wish I hang out with that person more. What's a neighbor you want to know better? Who do you want to spend time with that you're not distracted by the phones. And it is such a different experience when phones aren't on your lap in your pocket.

Tiffany Shlain:                      It's a whole different dinner, it's people are really there they're not half there. And then we've done it with two kids in soccer, we've done that unfortunately they're not both in soccer right now. But you can do it with making plans you have to do a little prep in the Friday afternoon.

Lauren Schiller:                  So do you put the word out ahead of time, is there an auto reply or something?

Tiffany Shlain:                      I have some haxe on our website for the book and with all these resources is 24sixlife.com and there are some haxe to put auto responses on your text message. You know how when you get the do not disturb I'm driving, you can actually set that to go. I don't have it on my email because people know I usually do a tweet, I'm on Twitter, that's my preferred social media.

Tiffany Shlain:                      I usually will on Friday night say turning off screens for my weekly ritual see you on under the tide just kind of remind people they can do that too. And then we invited everyone to try it on mass and we have so many resources for people now on our site and with all these kind of research and short films and ways to get people on board and tips to prepare for your Tech Shabbat. And it is kind of an amazing thing that we need this much to unplug from the network for one day a week I mean the irony is not lost.

Lauren Schiller:                  It's begging for a camping trip, the inflatable bed.

Tiffany Shlain:                      And I think it's about just remembering our humanity that we're so often. I walked down the street and everyone's looking down and I listen, it's not I have digital perfection down the other six days I actually think it's harder. I do a lot of mini things the other six days I don't look at my phone when I wake up anymore and that's hard. But I'm don't look at that phone and I get my coffee and I journal, I do a five minute journal. We're talking it's a 10 minute experience that I'm not on my phone but it sets my day in such a different way. But I think it's harder during the week to do all those, don't have it at the dining room table at my film studio no phones on the desks anymore. It is too distracting, so it's in your bag until you go to the bathroom and check it on a break.

Tiffany Shlain:                      But on my Tech Shabbat, the phones away because it's the visual, even seeing someone else's phone on a table when you're having lunch, it could be off it's their phone. You're not as present because you're looking at their phone, which could ring and it reminds you of your phone, which maybe is in your bag, whatever.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So we just don't realize how much we are pulling ourselves away from just being where we are. So I think it's actually of course I know people have so much fear around it. I think if people just layered it back and reframed it, as I said from this more positive space, it is literally something I run towards now. I'm I can't wait for it. And I feel I just remember how to live in a different way. They say for creativity, I mean, you do so much creative work and it's good to put your mind in a different mode, even if it's just one day a week and every week it just feels this very deep relaxation and different mood that kind of carries me over to the next week.

Tiffany Shlain:                      And listen, there's a handful of times a year where I'm traveling, I can't do it. And I feel unmoored I just don't feel quite as solid. I feel oh, I didn't get it.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well you talk, there's a chapter in the book that talks about creating rules and breaking them?

Tiffany Shlain:                      You're going to find your own rules, for a while we only listened to Vinyl on a record play, which is really fun, but we really like to cook on our Tech Shabbat. I don't have time to cook during the week as much as I on the weekend. And we started using Alexa as our timer, we have an echo Alexa verbal speaker now, for us that counts.

Tiffany Shlain:                      That's okay because it's not a screen, I literally say Alexa set the cooking timer for 10 minutes, but I'm not on a screen. If I did it on my phone then I'd get a text and an Instagram and a notification and I'd be off. So for us, we still listen to Vinyl but we also use that as [inaudible 00:11:29]. So that's our rule, I mean you're all going to come up with your own rules. And I have a friend who has special needs child and she was saying I have to be available and a grown child, and I was, what if you got a flip phone that was like your bat phone for that day to kind of force you to just communicate in a different way. So you were always available even if you're out of your house but you weren't mindlessly scrolling being distracted from everything.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So I think you really need to look at what your family, in the book I have talked about, if you're single, if you're older, I don't know one person in my life or I've talked to so many people about the book that doesn't feel they're on the screens too much. So how do you build this? It's a very old from our people practice. Again I'm not religious but I love going deep on the cons it was such a radical idea. A day of rest it put a period time was ongoing there was no ending and it was a day of rest. It's the fourth commandment above, do not commit murder is after six days you shall rest for a whole day. That', a huge thing to say. So it's such deep wisdom and it's thousands of years old.

Tiffany Shlain:                      It's free, it's available to everyone. And I do meditation and yoga and I don't consider myself Hindu or Buddhist, but these are practices that bring great balance back into my life. And I would love for people to engage with a full day of Shabbat because then again, most Jews I know that did Shabbat, maybe they do a Friday night dinner. That's probably the most, but the only people I knew that did a full day were Orthodox Jews. And I was always marvel, you don't drive, you don't use money, you don't wow. That's, so I was marveled at it, but I think that it's not for me, but I think in this modern era, I don't know anyone that doesn't feel they're on their phones too much. So how do we bring a very old practice into the 21st century and make it work?

Tiffany Shlain:                      So getting back to your rules question, I think if you kind of, and we have a series of exercises in the book to kind of walk you through the questions, how many hours do you think you're on a day? When does it not feel good? When does it feel good? I mean, there's lots of times I love the work I do and these global conversations as the best of you get a text from an old friend or there's so many incredible moments. You look something up and you go down this whole beautiful rabbit hole of ideas. There's so many goods, but it just seems it's infiltrated every part of our lives and it doesn't feel good. And so all day long when you feel a marionette doll, which I feel there are thousands of behavioral scientists and engineers, their job is to keep your eyes glued on the screen.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So when you feel you can't take your eyes away from that screen, it's because that is an intention. So to kind of reclaim yourself one day a week it gives me perspective, every week I really get to detach and think about what's happening and how I can try to help change it. Because there's stuff on a personal level, there's in your family you can model behavior and your kids are living in your house until they're 18 you run the household, you can set some new frameworks and at your company you could say, hey let's put our phones away from our desks let's try this. And then there's some legislation that's coming out we're doing these short films, dear parents, they're all two minutes. To your student, to your CEO, to your legislator and to your fellow human, and they're all approaching this idea from these different perspectives.

Lauren Schiller:                  You got to talk about the things that you need. What are the tools that you need? [crosstalk 00:14:48].

Tiffany Shlain:                      And remember what it was like landline. First of all, landlines are very inexpensive, and how much is your sanity worth? They're good for real emergencies. I mean, we've got earthquakes they're really good if there's a real emergency, they're good if you want to find your lost cell phone and they're really good if somebody really needs to get in touch with you on your Tech Shabbat. So landline I just think is really good to have. If you don't have a printer that might be good but I've also just written things by hand, when we did have two kids in soccer, so Friday afternoon I look at what's happening Saturday, which fields are that? I would remind the team just to reminder, we're not on screens, we'll meet you there.

Tiffany Shlain:                      That's how it used to exist before cell phones, before everyone would be I'm 10 minutes late, I'm around the corner, I'm parking, who cares? We don't need the updates. So especially like the most profound fact I found during researching the book was that it takes 23 minutes to get back into flow after you've been distracted by a notification or a text. So just imagine how much we're taking people out of their moment every single day. So I text a lot less since I've written this book. So Friday afternoon I do a little prep and it's not much just write it and keep it on the counter with a sharpie. I love writing with a sharpie and that is also good for Friday night when there's inevitably things I'm, oh I forgot to do and just all the things that tumbled from your head just to have a place to put them. There'll be there on Sunday for you to deal with, so you just remind people and then you know remind people of your landline and you are liberated and set free. I think people forget how good it feels to not be so reachable.

Lauren Schiller:                  When we come back Tiffany Shlain tells us how to get into the habit of taking 24 hours away from our screens and how it will help us all be better at leading change support inflection point with a tax deductible donation toward our fundraising goal at inflectionpointradio.org just click the support button. We'll be right back with Tiffany Shlain.

Lauren Schiller:                  Lauren Schiller:                  Am back with Tiffany Shlain. I'm just going to make the leap of faith that most of the people that are listening to this cares deeply about, feels needs to change feels we need to make progress on and that there's not a moment to spare.

Tiffany Shlain:                      But here's the thing, by taking a day for yourself, you're going to be that much more able to do your activism. I remember after the election, I mean you were doing so many women's rights issues and so much stuff and I was exhausted a year in exhausted by Trump, exhausted by it all and I had to re master my strength and on my Tech Shabbats', I feel you have to be able to recharge. This is a long fight, this is a lot of not even, I don't want to use the word fight because issues around the environment that's long term behavioral change, women's rights that is longterm changes.

Tiffany Shlain:                      These are all marathons and if we're running a million miles an hour, 24 seven activism you're never going to recharge and you're not going to be as effective. And I come up with my best ideas, I do a lot of activist films on my Tech Shabbat because I've pulled away from all the noise and I can think we're not giving ourselves space to think. There's a quote it's something about, it was again with the women's movement, you have to find the joy that you can't it's exhausting and it can be, I mean you have to find the joy in life to keep going and I find most of my joy on these Saturdays and then I feel completely recharged to fight for the... I'm not usually out in nature, so I'm appreciating nature. I'm seeing that I get perspective on women's rights, on our government issues.

Tiffany Shlain:                      I just get the perspective, I don't feel I have the other six days. So, and then lastly I'll say that if everyone took a Tech Shabbat day off, from consuming maybe we'd, that would be one great step for the climate change crisis. We're all consuming and doing 24 seven and that's also not that healthy for crop or for ourselves. And I think it'd be better why is 24 seven our goal, why is growth always our goal doing more and more.

Lauren Schiller:                  You are sending out a series of emails leading up to character day many challenges. Could you just review what each of those three or four of them?

Tiffany Shlain:                      They're still available. And this is something that we're, we're having these resources up all year round. So if you wanted to step in and go, okay, I want to try this.

Tiffany Shlain:                      By yourself or with your family, whatever. It's an eight week program in total on the first week was don't look at your phone when you wake up, 15 to 30 minutes, replace it with something else you love and again it's not the year without, it's what you get back. So before you go to bed, before you go to sleep and at meals, put the phone away. So I was challenged number one, and then the second week was go and walk without your phone for 30 minutes. I know that sounds hard, but it's so great once you're ah, I am without my phone, I am no one's tracking me. No one can find me am just with myself. So that was week two, and then the third week was how do you cultivate your character online and off.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So really start to think about where your dad is going, how do you know if something's accurate? What is the effect on you when you're only reading negative news, which is the majority of news activating your amygdala, how can you do other things? So really how do you bring your best self when you are online? And then the fourth week because the Tech Shabbat challenge a whole day with yourself or family. It's good to have a buddy have somebody a squad do it with you for a day, but the key thing is not just about one day is put in your schedule four weekends in a row because building any habit you have to, it's the ritual of it. To me, the power is that we do this every week, go completely off and see how that feels and I promise you it's the best thing I've ever done in my life and I love the web, but we can't lose our humanity when we're using it.

Tiffany Shlain:                      I feel people don't make eye contact anymore. They're just grunting their way and scrolling it, they literally I remember it was gauche when you in pull out your phone, you're talking to someone now everyone does it. It's always at the table. It's what's important to us and let's think 10 years into the future, if we keep going in this direction, it's going to be the movie Wally. And is that what we want? I used to be a smoker, which I'm not proud of, but I came from a doctor's family, so I was rebelling and who would've thought, I mean everyone used to smoke in San Francisco and I would have never thought that no one hardly smokes anymore.

Tiffany Shlain:                      But it was a combination of laws and awareness and not coolness and everything. And then the behavior changed and I'm not completely equating smart funnies because of course smartphones brings so many good things but the habits around them are ridiculous right now. So the pendulum has swung so far, so just try this very simple practice to bring it a little back and I promise you it's going to make you feel better about the way you're living.

Lauren Schiller:                  That was Tiffany Shlain, author of 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week to find films, resources, and research about how technology is rewiring our brains and what it's doing to teens and youth plus to find the rest of the weeks of the Tech Shabbat challenge, we'll put a link to Tiffany's website, characterday.org on our website along with the link to her book. It's all at inflectionpointradio.org I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:                  That's our inflection point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know women leading change we should talk to let us know@inflectionpointradio.org while you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one-time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to inflectionpointradio.org we're on Facebook and Instagram at inflectionpointradio. Follow us and join the inflection point society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions and follow me on Twitter @laschiller. To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter you know where to go inflectionpointradio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver, our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host Lauren Schiller.

Speaker 3:                              Support for this podcast comes from the corporation for public broadcasting.

Feminist Detective - The Case of The Fleabag Crowdfunder

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Introducing a NEW Inflection Point segment “Feminist Detective” in which journalist and author Ruth Whippman joins me to seek out sexism in all its tiny guises so we can make big changes. This week we dig up the original crowdfunding page of the mega-hit show Fleabag from back in 2013, and discuss how the tone of it shows us the crazy lengths women have had to go to reassure and placate men that equality is not threatening.

This segment premiere is presented ad-free. Support Inflection Point with a tax deductible contribution and help fund production of more of them!

Lauren Schiller and Ruth Whippman

Candace Bushnell–Is There Still Sex in the City? Live On Stage

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Candace Bushnell gave us a reason to sit on our couch every week to soak in the stories of the women--and men--of the 90s television culture-changer "Sex and the City". Candace has written a number of books since then and her newest book is called "Is There Still Sex in the City?" This October I teamed up with Women Lit of the Bay Area Book Festival to have an on-stage conversation with Candace Bushnell, hosted by INFORUM at The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Bushnell kicked off the evening with an update about what she’s been up to lately and a reading, and then we got to sit down and talk--friendships, love, loss and dating over 50.

TRANSCRIPT: To err is human. If you find an error, let us know.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point with stories of how women rise up. On today's episode, Candace Bushnell.

C Bushnell:                            Like Sex and the City, once I started dating again, I discovered that there were certain types of guys out there just like there were in Sex and the City. And there were some surprises. One of the things that seemed immediately clear was guys your age no longer find you attractive and it does go both ways. Yes it does.

Lauren Schiller:                  Now that's a driveway moment. Stick around.

C Bushnell:                            At one point, I had this idea for a TV series where the women were going to run, it was a brothel, but it was for other women and they were going to employ these younger guys because there were so many young guys who, I don't know. And I thought the idea was really kind of interesting, but everyone's like, "No." But you know, I had a lot of wacky ideas about what I was going to do with all these stories and this material. And I really went back to the structure that I used in Sex and the City which is, it's really fiction written as journalism as opposed to journalism written as fiction.

Lauren Schiller:                  This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller with stories of how women rise up and that was Candace Bushnell. Yes, that Candace Bushnell who gave us a reason to sit on our couch every week and soak up the stories of the women and men of Sex and the City. She's written a number of books since then. She's a prolific writer and now she's out with a new book. This October I teamed up with Women Lit of the Bay Area Book Festival to have a conversation with Candace on stage hosted by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Candace kicked off the evening with an update about what she's been up to lately and a reading, and then we got to sit down and talk. Here she is on her new book called Is There Still Sex in the City?

C Bushnell:                            Is there still sex in the city? Yes. Yes, but less. And everybody's having less, including the millennials. They're having the least of all. Well, we'll talk about that later. This is not a sequel to Sex and the City, but it has different characters. But the inspiration for writing it was the same feeling that I had when I started writing Sex and the City. And when I started writing Sex and the City, the feeling was really like, this is uncharted territory. Writing about single women's lives in the city and the mating and dating rituals. And at the time we thought, oh gosh, this only happens in New York city. But it turned out that it actually happened everywhere. Now back in the mid nineties, I was a woman in my mid thirties and I felt like being single was really like a feminist kind of statement and it meant that you were kind of willing to break the rules and pursue your own dreams instead of maybe necessarily pursuing finding a man.

C Bushnell:                            And what's so interesting to me is that 20, 25 years ago, if you were a single woman in your mid thirties, people really felt that there was something wrong with you. Now, and I think partly thanks to Sex and the City, people just think you're normal. And so I think that's a bit of a triumph. But when I was writing Sex and the City, I felt very much like an outsider. And like a lot of my Sex and the City friends, I did end up getting married and I guess I found my Mr bigger and also maybe my mister was a little bit younger. And most of my friends also ended up finding their Mr big, their Aiden, their Harry or maybe even their Steve. Now all you guys, you know Sex and the City, right? Okay. Because I don't want to be like, people are looking at me like who is she talking about?

C Bushnell:                            And then something happened and I personally ended up getting divorced when I was 52. And so that was kind of the end of my, what I thought would be happily ever after because I really didn't think about it that much. And my first instinct was to run away. So I ran away to Connecticut, I started riding horses and then I had two other girlfriends who they didn't have children and I decided to do what women are always saying that they're going to do when you're younger. We're all going to live together and we're all going to live close by and we will be like the golden girls. And honestly, for six months it worked.

C Bushnell:                            We went to the vegetable markets, farm stands, we made dinner, we had one friend of mine Sassy, she came up with any excuse to have a party and wear hats. And I sort of thought, okay, this is going to go on forever. But then a whole bunch of my other friends ended up getting divorced. And what happens when women become single again? You go to where the other single women are. So all of a sudden, all of these newly single women, all in their 50s came to Sag Harbor, which I call the village in this book. Now when I got divorced, I really thought I did not want to date at all. I really felt like I've already done this. I've already done the reproductive cycle where I got married, I was in love, this and that, and then it didn't work. Why am I going to attempt to do it again? Isn't there's something better than we as women can do now that we're in our fifties besides looking for men?

C Bushnell:                            Okay. The answer was pretty much no. Because all of my friends and women who I know wanted to start dating again. And once again, and it's not just dating, but it's also reinventing your lives. And so once again, it felt like this is really uncharted territory because they are women who are dating again, they haven't dated for 20, 25 years. And things have really changed. And the other thing that happens when you get somewhere in your fifties is that there can be a feeling of invisibility and there's a question of are you still relevant? Children leaving the nest, careers may end, all of that kind of stuff. So there's also that struggle. But like Sex and the City, once I started dating again, I discovered that there were certain types of guys out there just like there were in Sex and the City and there were some surprises.

C Bushnell:                            One of the things that seemed immediately clear was guys your age no longer find you attractive. Okay. So 50 something guys, and I know there are men in the audience like, "I'm not like that." We're not really brought up to think of somebody in their 50s or 60s as being attractive and being like a potential sex partner. And it does go both ways. Yes it does. And one of the things that one discovers is there are younger guys who are interested. That's another story. And then one of the things that you do is okay, guys your age aren't interested. They're interested in younger women. So why not try to beat the odds by going for guy who's older? Maybe dating a man who's 15, 20 or even 25 years older? Which is fine except that given the fact that you're now middle-aged yourself, that means that man who could be 70, 75 or even 80.

C Bushnell:                            You wouldn't think that there would be a large contingent of men out there at that age who are dating. But when you think about demographics and how so many of the boomers are now in their later years, it makes sense that there's a crop of 60, 70 and even 80 something men out there acting like they're 35. I personally encountered one of these men at a party given by a married couple in their early sixties, and they decided to just get it over with and invite all the newly 50 something single women. I don't know how many of you guys have been in that situation. And then they would invite a couple of eligible guys who they could dig up.

C Bushnell:                            So there were lots of 50 something single women there and two or three of these senior age players or SAPs. These are older single men of means, meaning they have enough money to add it to their list of attributes and are often still employed in a lesser version of the high powered career they once had. At some point during the evening, I must've talked to one of these men because a few days later, Ron, the host of the party contacted me to let me know that out of all the 50 something women there, and I was in my fifties then, now I'm 60, he wanted to let me know that a fellow named Arnold had picked me out of the bunch to ask me out. Now, Ron was very excited about this and he was suddenly very impressed with me that I could attract a guy like Arnold because Arnold, he said was a big deal and everybody really admired him.

C Bushnell:                            Arnold played Ivy league football and he was once an oil man and a newspaper magnet and all the Park Avenue hostesses were always inviting him to their parties. He was sought after. I thought I remembered the guy. A tall, thick battleax type who was definitely older, too old for me I decided. "How old is he?" I asked. "He's a little bit older than I am," Ron said. So that would make him like 68. The thing is these guys often lie about their ages. They fudge somehow forgetting about that truth revealing device called the internet. Sure enough, when I Googled him, Arnold turned out to be 78 and that made him much closer to my father's age than mine. My father was 83, Arnold was just five years younger, but they couldn't have been more different. My father is very conservative and Arnold apparently is not. According to Ron, Arnold used to be somewhat of a notorious wild man at Studio 54. And even to this day, Arnold still has much younger girlfriends. The last one being 42.

C Bushnell:                            "I don't know how he does it," Ron said. I wanted to tell Ron that I didn't want to be the one to find out. And so I tried to say no to this fix-up. Peer pressure however, is one of the things that I hadn't counted on in middle age, and when it came to dating, it turns out there was a lot of it. My friends kept reminding me that it was good to go out and it was really good that someone had finally asked me out, when was the last time that had happened? Of course I should go. What's the harm in it? And besides, you never know. Of course the problem with you never know is that so often you actually do know. I knew or I was convinced I knew that I was not going to date a 78 year old man, no matter how wonderful he was. What if he fell down? I didn't spend my life working this hard to end up taking care of a strange older person.

C Bushnell:                            But every time I tried to explain this to people, I realized how ageist and judgy and anti-love hopeful I sounded because I didn't know. Did I? I didn't know what was going to happen. What if I fell in love with him, in which case his age wouldn't matter, right? Plus, I didn't want to be that creature. And you know that shallow woman who cares more about practicality than the blind illusions of love. Plus, as Ron reminded me, I must feel so honored than a man as powerful as Arnold wanting to spend time with little old me. In preparation for the date I went to my friend's Sassy's house and we looked at photographs of Arnold on the internet. His photos would have back about 35 years. He'd been a big man and rather handsome. "Oh honey," Sassy said, "he could turn out to be absolutely wonderful. You must keep an open mind."

C Bushnell:                            And so arrangements for a date were negotiated. We could have gone to a restaurant in my town, but Arnold really wanted me to see his house, which was in another town about 30 minutes away. However, he offered to pick me up and take me to his town and then I can always spend the night at his house if I needed to. And he would be really willing to drive me back to my house in the morning. A sleepover with a 78 year old man I didn't know? I don't think so. Thank you.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and that's Candace Bushnell reading from her new book, Is There Still Sex in the City? We'll take a quick break and when we come back, I get to ask her a few questions. Inflection Point is a listener powered independent production. I hope you'll consider supporting us with a tax deductible donation toward our fundraising goal at inflectionpointradio.org and clicking the support button.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point. I'm talking with Candace Bushnell, whose new book is called, Is There Still Sex in the City? We spoke live on stage at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival. Arnold. So-

C Bushnell:                            Yes. You know-

Lauren Schiller:                  You didn't spend the night I take it.

C Bushnell:                            I'm sorry?

Lauren Schiller:                  You didn't spend the night. He showed you his bed. He really tried hard.

C Bushnell:                            I mean, the thing about ... actually, I really made it funny and I worked hard to make it funny. He was really, really sexist, like shockingly so, and really quite oblivious and very entitled. Like one of the first things he showed me was his bed, which was 20 years old or older and he shipped it from California and he said, "I had a lot of really, I've had a really lot of good of sex on that bed and I expect to have a lot more." And I was like, this is just too much. He was, yeah. I mean it's-

Lauren Schiller:                  I want to know why your friends were so invested in you meeting with this guy.

C Bushnell:                            Well, I think it's something that we as women do, we want each other to be taken care of and it's still somewhere in the back of all of our minds, even though it really doesn't happen. That somehow the mail is going to be the protector and you'll be okay if you're partnered up. And I do, I think as human beings, we tend to feel that way. The problem is that they're looking for a relationship that's really just about fulfilling their needs.

Lauren Schiller:                  But it seems like from reading the book, what was so exciting to your friends about this guy is that he had a little bit of money and he had a little bit of power.

C Bushnell:                            Yes. Exactly.

Lauren Schiller:                  And so it seems like at this point in our cultural history in this moment that we're in right now, that maybe that would become less important, but yet it's still lingering on. What do you see happening with all that?

C Bushnell:                            I think it's still lingering on, but what's frustrating of course is that men like Arnold are not ... I don't know. I mean it's not what a lot of women are necessarily looking for and powerful men, they like to enjoy their power. And for powerful men, often part of that is a certain amount of sexual freedom. And that was Arnold.

Lauren Schiller:                  He was raring to go.

C Bushnell:                            He was raring to go. And I think, but that's the other thing that's very shocking, but it won't be shocking to any of the men here.

Lauren Schiller:                  Are there any men here?

C Bushnell:                            But when you start dating again ... there are men here, I saw them already and they're like, ah-

Lauren Schiller:                  Just checking. Okay.

C Bushnell:                            They're like, "We're going to kill her."

Lauren Schiller:                  Is Arnold here?

C Bushnell:                            They want sex immediately. It's like really? But I find though also when I talk to women who work in like old age homes and that kind of thing, they're like, "It's really a problem. These men, they want to kiss you, they want to do all of this and it's just not appropriate."

Lauren Schiller:                  Do you think it's just, you get into your seventies, I mean, neither of us are there yet, but like let's just cut through the crap. Let's just get to the sex. I mean is that maybe part of what's going on? Who knows?

C Bushnell:                            No, no, I don't think so. I think that this is somebody who that's how he operates. He has these certain things that he's going to tempt you with. Like he had this little pool and he was like, "You could come and swim in my pool any time." And I was like, "No." No. On the other hand, the thing that makes these situations so tricky is if the guy had been like incredibly attractive and all of that, that might've been something that I wanted to hear. So that's unfortunately human nature.

Lauren Schiller:                  Right. But what's interesting about, I mean we don't need to totally overanalyze Arnold for a guy but-

C Bushnell:                            No we don't. Because everyone's like, "We want to talk about this today." We don't even know who Arnold is and you probably won't even be in the TV series.

Lauren Schiller:                  But just that he expected that something would happen with sex and you, and like no matter what, like maybe, I mean I know he picked you out of the crowd at the party and everything, but that you maybe were more discerning.

C Bushnell:                            Well, one of the things that he said was that he asked how old I was, when I told him how old I was, and I think at the time I might've been 57 or 58. He was really shocked and he said that he had just upped his age group to maybe include 50, but he wasn't really thinking that that would be somebody who was like 58. And he made it very clear that ... because I think at a certain point I got so pissed off at him and I was like, "Why do you think women have sex with you?" And he said, "Because I buy them handbags."

Lauren Schiller:                  Oh my God.

C Bushnell:                            And this was a real thing. I mean this is another thing that I hear a lot from men is that they are hypersensitive, a lot of them and maybe rightfully so or they're incredibly aware of the power that money can have over women. And I do hear men complaining about things like women just want money from them and women just want them to buy things for them and this and that. And to a certain extent there are women like that. So that was Arnold's set up.

Lauren Schiller:                  Could you imagine a future where the power dynamic is totally reversed?

C Bushnell:                            Yes, I could. Although I don't know what makes me say that.

Lauren Schiller:                  And would that actually be better? I don't know.

C Bushnell:                            But you know power is it's about money really. But I know there's personal power, which is the power to get things done and make things happen on your own. But men, they exercise a lot of it's economic power over women. Economic and educational and access.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, it was really fun reading the book and I mean it just, I want to say it starts with a bang, but it actually it starts with a bang. I'm just going to put it there and I'm ... not like that kind of bang. Okay. It's an action packed to beginning. And anyway, I got about 10 pages in and then I was like, "Wait a second, is this a memoir? Is this fiction?" And then I looked and it says fiction. So, talk about how it's constructed.

C Bushnell:                            We're calling it auto fiction because it's a lot of autobiographical elements of my life in a fictionalized setting with fictional characters. But yes, I mean there are a lot of things that that did happen to me in the book and a lot of very poignant things because the other side of all of this is that your 50s is a very different time than your thirties. In your thirties, you are not generally, I mean you can be hit with all of these life altering events, but it's not the same as being in your 50s or 60s when you're hit with a certain amount of loss.

C Bushnell:                            And that's one of the things that's a big difference. In your thirties, you're looking up, up, up, and you know you're going to move forward. You're going to ... maybe you're already in a relationship and you're raising children and you're doing that into your forties and your career. Everything's going up. And then when you get into your 50s, things can kind of go ... And you know there, a parent will probably pass away. A friend will probably die unfortunately. And so while I was writing the book, my father actually did die while I was writing the book and one of my best friends took her life. So it's an interesting experience. And I talked a lot with my editors. Like originally I had one editor and he was like, "It's just supposed to be funny. We don't want death." But it's like that is such a part of people's lives at this time. And it's one of the things that shapes this period and it changes you psychically and psychologically. And because it does, it can be an opportunity for growth.

Lauren Schiller:                  We had a chance to talk before we sat in this room and one of the things that we were talking about is that, well, just like your editors were saying, "We want it to be funny. We don't want any death in the book." That there's not great role models out there for how to process the death of a parent or a friend or even prepare for it.

C Bushnell:                            That is true. And you know, I mean one of the things that's really different in the last 50 years, maybe the last 30 years, I think it was like in the mid 1960s or maybe even 1970 or 75, 76% of the population over 50 was married. So that was pretty much everybody was married unlike today where it's 50% of people are single, maybe even more people. So when these things happen to you, they happen to you in this in a sense, in the comfort of your own home. And it's happening and you tend to have like relatives and people who have dealt with this, people are there.

C Bushnell:                            You still have a partner, you've got a family, you're probably in the same house that you've lived in for a long time. Today when these things hit you, that is not necessarily true. You may be single again, chances are you may be living on your own, you may have moved, you may be getting divorced. There are a whole bunch of things that happen that don't really insulate you from these situations. And I think that's one of the things that that makes these things a little bit tricky.

Lauren Schiller:                  While you're writing the book, you lose your father, you lose your friend. How did you process those events and then, I mean, was writing the book a way of processing them or did you have to kind of go through it and then figure out how you were going to write about it?

C Bushnell:                            You know, I kind of had to figure out how I was going to write about it kind of while it was happening. Like I went to see my father, I knew he was going to go and I was like, "You know, the reality is if you're a writer, as Nora Ephron said, 'Everything's copy.'" I mean, I hate to say it, but I was just very, tried to be very aware of my feelings, et cetera, and tried to process them in an adult way, which means not having a breakdown and figuring out, I mean that's really what this time is about. You know what? At 50 you're an adult and you have to be. You kind of do.

Lauren Schiller:                  You kind of want to have the breakdown though.

C Bushnell:                            I just do. Being an adult is not necessarily being busy all the time. Being an adult is being able to stand back, assess the situation, take your ego out of it and figure out what is the best thing to do, how to move forward in a way that is the most humane and kind to everybody around. And it's a time when you have to kind of reach down and figure out how to move on. And it's hard. I mean there were a lot of times when I was writing this book when I was like, I was depressed writing the book. But as I was writing the book, I also felt something was lifting. And when I've looked at that U-shaped curve, the realities for most people, the bottom of that U-shaped curve, it is in your fifties and then things kind of start to go up again.

C Bushnell:                            So it was this personal journey for me through my fifties and it wasn't always easy. And I do, you know, I have friends who are ... I've seen people in a lot pain and I've ... this is also a time when you see that some people just, they can't get it together and they just can't make it. Men and women. So for me, this is something to explore and to write about.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, in that, and one of the things that you've written about consistently is friendship and female friendships specifically. What role does friendship or has friendship played for you in coming through those kinds of hard times?

C Bushnell:                            I think it's what it always is. It's like people being there for you. I mean, I had like one friend who she just decided, she's like, "I never turned down a funeral." She's like, "I'm going to them all. I'm going to figure out ... I'm figuring out how to do this." And it's like you got to show up for your friends in a different way. At one time maybe you were showing up with dating advice. Now you're showing up with soup. I don't know. But yes, it's again, another time of finding it's for a lot of people it's like reconnecting with people who you were friends with before you got married and had kids. Because when you have children, your friends tend to be the parents of your children's friends. And if you end up getting divorced, all of these things are changed.

Lauren Schiller:                  This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller talking with Candace Bushnell. When we come back, the Mona Lisa treatment. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point with a live on stage recording with Candace Bushnell for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival that we recorded the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Do you want to talk about the Mona Lisa?

C Bushnell:                            Oh gosh, yes. Well, first of all, it's a laser that ... and I know some of you have heard of this and they use it to restore elasticity and et cetera into your vagina. So it's a laser, but it's for inside and it's ... yes, they put it in your vagina and it works like lasers work. I mean it's just, it's skin. Okay. So it makes sense that it might work, but I want to preface it by saying that it's something that it's so easy for us to make fun of. The idea of women pursuing something, I don't even think it's sexual dysfunction, but something to enhance their sexuality or whatever. And there are basically three things for women and there are 77 products for men. So let's start with that.

C Bushnell:                            So it's actually could be a good thing. But what happens was I was thinking about doing it and it costs $3,000, but I thought if I'm going to do it, I only can do a before and after. So I have to find someone to have sex with before, and get the treatment done, because how am I going to know? I don't know.

Lauren Schiller:                  You don't think you'd be able to tell?

C Bushnell:                            I don't know. I'm making that up, but I don't know. Probably yes, because-

Lauren Schiller:                  I would hope for a $3,000-

C Bushnell:                            Well, I first heard about it, I heard about it from my gynecologist and then I brought it up at lunch with this guy, like have you ever heard of this? And he literally went pale, but he said, "My wife got it." And he said, "She's divorcing me and she's gone off with a younger guy." And this, I was like, "Wow." I heard the story about 20 times from other people of the same thing. So I thought that was very interesting of women actually leaving their husbands when, and really just being rejuvenated or whatever and saying, "Hey, I'm going to go out there and I don't feel like giving this up." So-

Lauren Schiller:                  Well let's, while we're on the topic, let's talk Tinder because you did a whole event experiment with [crosstalk 00:38:29].

C Bushnell:                            I did a Tinder experiment and-

Lauren Schiller:                  Everyone know what Tinder is?

C Bushnell:                            Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm just making sure.

C Bushnell:                            How many of you have gone on Tinder?

Lauren Schiller:                  Oh, show of hands.

C Bushnell:                            It's all the young women and it's a guy.

Lauren Schiller:                  Oh, you met on Tinder? No. Okay.

C Bushnell:                            You could meet on Tinder. I mean Tinder there are no filters or anything like that and people make their own choices. So, but I discovered an app like Tinder, it really is a game. It's designed like a card game and you know the app doesn't care if you meet somebody or not. It just wants you to be on it and stay on it. But what I found interestingly with Tinder, and this is something that I feel like I'm hearing it more and more out there from guys, and I think the thing that was most interesting about Tinder was how many men, first of all thought that the other men on it were absolutely horrible. And when men think like other men are bad, you really should pay attention because normally they cover up each other's bad behavior.

C Bushnell:                            And the other thing was how quite a few guys said how much they hated themselves when they were on Tinder and how it brought out like the worst sexist sides of their personality where they really just felt women were objects. And it was really interesting to talk to these guys and get their take on it and it's not heartening. And I ended up also talking to a lot of 25 year old women in their twenties who are on Tinder and they talked a lot about their frustrations and their biggest frustration seem to be with the quality of the men that they were meeting. So hello, maybe you shouldn't go on Tinder. And I thought, I mean I'd heard women complaining about dating before. Dating's never been easy, but it was really like the first piece I did for this book. And it was very eyeopening how much more negative women had become about dating and men.

C Bushnell:                            And I just heard like a lot more anger. I mean look, there are always women out there who are they're having a great time. It's all working out for them and they have it all together. But you know, a lot of women didn't and they insisted that the guys that I was going to meet on Tinder were going to be maybe not what they said, that they would have undiagnosed mental illnesses, and that a lot of them would use drugs, and that they were really unreliable and that this sort of thing. So I went on Tinder. The first thing that happened was Tinder set my age range for who I would be attracted to based on my age. I couldn't lie about my age because I didn't know I wasn't skilled enough on Tinder. And so it matched me up with, there were like two guys over the age of 58 and they were both like smokers.

C Bushnell:                            So I set the age, I was like, "What's going on?" I set the age range. I was like, "Okay, I will say 22 to 32 and see what happens." I got tons and tons of hits, so many hits and I really was like, "Wow." And people were writing really nice things. And I was like, "Those girls are so wrong." And then I matched with this guy who, he was 33 I think, and everyone kept saying, "Oh, he's a real man man." He had a beard and a lot of hair.

Lauren Schiller:                  Sure sign.

C Bushnell:                            And so we agreed to meet up, we met up and he told me a lot about like Tinder and how all the horrible guys were on it and this and that. And he was a vegetarian and the only place we could go, I could find to go was like a hamburger place. But he was like, "Don't worry, I'll deal. I'll just eat French fries." So I was like, "Okay." But it was interesting. It was fun. We kind of ... it was friendly and he seemed like a really nice guy. So then he asked me out again and we went to see this really cool downtown play and I was like, "Hey, this is like groovy. It's great. This guy's really cool." And then he asked me out again and I was like, "I really shouldn't do this, because I'm not going to date anybody for a story."

C Bushnell:                            And I wasn't really interested, but he asked me to go to this Shakespeare play in Brooklyn. So I thought, Well, why not? Am I doing anything else? I should go. So I was crossing the Brooklyn bridge and of course I couldn't help but think about that scene in Sex and the City when it's Miranda and Steve, they're going to meet on the bridge. And I was like, I'm crossing the bridge, maybe something's going to happen. Isn't this nice? Like I'm going to prove to everybody that you could meet a great guy on Tinder.

C Bushnell:                            And so I get there and everybody's pairing up and going into the theater, and then they're ringing the bell. And I didn't have the tickets, supposedly this guy had the tickets and he didn't show up. So it was an expensive taxi ride there and back. It was like $40 each way. And I was like, what's, you know. And so I texted him and I said, maybe we got the date wrong or something like that. And I didn't hear from him for two days. And then I got a really, really long text that said I am so, so sorry. I lost track of time. I took MDM PD do, some kind of new designer drug and I don't know what happened, but I tried to drive my car, I was arrested and then I was put in a 48 hour hold and it went on. And I was just like, he turned out to be exactly what the Tinderellas had said I would find. And I really thought Tinder, it's like Vegas, it's the house. It always wins.

C Bushnell:                            And then I was going to this black tie event and I saw this woman outside and she was really beautiful and she was smoking a cigarette. And I was like, "Wow, someone's still smoking a cigarette." I used to smoke. So I was like, I'm just going to go near the cigarette smell. And I just started talking to her and she was incredibly attractive. She was tall, blonde, she was maybe 32. She seemed like she had it all together. And so I decided to ask her about do you go on Tinder? Now I forgot to mention she was Russian.

C Bushnell:                            And she was like, "Yes, of course I go on Tinder." And I was like, "But why? You're so beautiful, you certainly don't need to be on Tinder." And she was like, "It's when you go on Tinder, you get more Instagram followers. It's all about Instagram." And I was like, "That's it." So there you go.

Lauren Schiller:                  And this is why millennials are not having as much sex obviously.

C Bushnell:                            Well, I don't know if anybody watched this. You know, there was that Lisa Ling thing about pornography and its effect on young men. And again, there were a lot of young men on there who were really very distressed about this constant use of porn and how they become addicted and how it affected them psychologically and how difficult it made them to find real women attractive and how it wasn't ... and how being around real women made them very nervous, very uncomfortable. They didn't know what to do. And again, like how they really, really did not like themselves.

C Bushnell:                            And I mean, I think that, and that's something that I hear. And I heard this when I was writing this Tinder pieces well from guys about how it's impossible for them to avoid pornography and how they get so much pornography, whether they want it or not, and how it's affects them in a negative way. And that's definitely, I don't know. I mean, I don't know, porn is such a big money making industry that we are never going to get a straight answer on it. I promise you. I'm not a fan of porn. I think I know too much about it.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm just thinking about how women in their fifties and up are depicted in the media and in movies and in our culture in general. And how we can start to see a shift toward that being, we're not just irrelevant. It's-

C Bushnell:                            Yes. Well I think that is-

Lauren Schiller:                  New world.

C Bushnell:                            It's really, I mean, it's changing so much because I feel like the Sex and the City woman who to me, I mean, to me the Sex and the City woman is a woman who's my age. I'm 60, but it's about really it was a change that happened in the late seventies and the early eighties. And it really happened because of feminism, the pill. Also women's magazines at that time were really very important and they were just seminating information to regular women out there about things that you could have that you could never have before. And one of them was an orgasm and the other was a career. And-

Lauren Schiller:                  And that ladies and gentlemen is having it all.

C Bushnell:                            Exactly.

Lauren Schiller:                  Forget everything else.

C Bushnell:                            And in the late seventies and eighties, there was a huge influx of women into the workforce. This has happened a couple of times in the 1920s, for instance, but then it always, women end up going back to the home. And it happened at that time. And that really made for a lot of changes and it was a group of women who they were going to go out there and do something that their mothers hadn't done. They were going to try to have it all. It was really like the first generation of women that were encouraged, told that you could have it all, that you could have a family, you could have a career.

C Bushnell:                            So this is not a group of women who are shy violence. This tends to be a group of women who they're used to challenging the status quo and they're used to going out there and changing things and changing perspectives. And this is really the same group of women, but they're older. And they're not going to go away. So I do think-

Lauren Schiller:                  So now's the time to show up. They're showing up.

C Bushnell:                            Yes. Yeah. I mean I do think it's a different time.

Lauren Schiller:                  That was Candace Bushnell speaking with me live on stage at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival. Candace's new book is called, Is There Still Sex in the City? I'll put a link to it on my website influctionpointradio.org, where by the way, you can find future events by clicking on the events tab there. I'd love to see you. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:                  That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know a woman leading change we should talk to? Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to inflectionpointradio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at inflectionpointradio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. And follow me on Twitter at laschiller. To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go. inflectionpointradio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host. Lauren Schiller.