James Sexton: What 25 Years as a Divorce Lawyer Taught Jim Sexton About Life and Love | E191

23:57Can I, sometimes you just sit and talk with people. They rarely wanted to talk about death. They usually wanted to talk about their life, what they did for a living, their kids, their grandkids, whatever was going on, you know, what their hobbies were. I would watch baseball games with somebody. I would play checkers or chess. But most often I'd just be of service. Like, how can I help? You know, you just walk in and say, how can I help? And that's really, hospice is a very pure expression of that. You know, that you don't need any particular skillset. You don't need, you're just going into a critically difficult situation that people are navigating and you're saying to this person and their family, how can I be of service?

24:30Like, how can I help you? And it's a beautiful role to get to play. But when you walk out of a hospice visit, you have a reward in the sense that the volume on everything in your life is turned dead on. Like, I just felt like a Zen monk. I would walk out, just the world just felt beautiful because like, yeah, I didn't have a lot of money in the bank. And yeah, I had finals coming up and it was stressful or I had law school admissions exams to study for, but I didn't have bowel cancer. Like I didn't have someone I love in a bed about to die. I ended up becoming what's called a vigil volunteer after a certain period of time.

25:06And a vigil volunteer is when someone is imminently dying, like they're going to die within the next 24 to 48 hours and they don't have family. So they're in a nursing home or they were, this is kind of at the tail end of the AIDS crisis before the antibiotic cocktails came out. So there were a lot of displaced gay men whose families had disowned them. and they were dying of, you know, some of the complications that people would get from HIV, like progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy or some of the other, you know, viruses that you and I, our immune system would kill it instantly. But if you have no immune system because of AIDS, you would die from.

25:41And these are usually unconscious people because what most people don't know, because we work very hard as a culture to prevent people from having any exposure to actual death. All we really know is like TV representations of death, which are insane. like people don't go i loved you all and they just die like that's not how death really looks like death looks different like people are unconscious usually for a few days the machine doesn't want to stop pumping blood and breathing but it starts to fall apart vigil volunteering was just about being in the room so that someone when they die there's someone else in the room i got in the practice of reading Winnie the Pooh out loud because I just, it was a book my mom used to read to me when I was a little kid.

26:25It's a very, I think a very soothing story about very human things, the House of Pooh Corner. And so I would just sit and read Winnie the Pooh out loud and hope that this person was, if they were still present, that they were hearing that and would take some comfort in the softness of that story and sort of the simplicity of the themes of the story. And yeah, I was in the room with, you know, dozens of people when they died. And again, it was one of those things that's really life affirming. One of the things that we always think about, or some people think about when someone dies is, geez, you know, life is so fragile, it could happen.

27:05We could leave today and God forbid, got hit, get hit by a car, heart attack, whatever, whatever this is. And this reminds me, when I first started thinking about this 20 years ago, I have a friend named Jay whose dad was stabbed and murdered by someone on drugs. And he said to me, you know what, my dad always told me that he loved me and I never had to worry about that. Those were his last words that he said. You had the same and had the same conversation with your two sons. Tell us about that. Yeah, well, I think working in hospice and also dealing with my mother's, you know, illness created in me the desire to make sure that everyone in my life that I loved knew that I loved them.

27:51And ideally that the last words I said to them would be, I love you. And that the last words they would say to me is that they love me. I think that there are two distinct concepts. And so I always made a practice of telling, my sons are a good example, but really anyone I love, I always made a point of having the last thing I said to them be, I love you. Because that way I know that the last words I said were, I love you. You know, I've lost probably about four or five close friends in the last 20 years. And every one of them, the last words I said to them was, I love you. Because I just make it a practice, you know, of just saying, all right, man, love you.

28:29Like even my male friends, like my jiu-jitsu buddies, like tough dudes, like I'll be like, all right, bro, I love you, man. Like, it's because I want, I want that last thing to be. And by the way, like, especially among men, even like really super tough dudes. One of my best friends is an FBI SWAT agent in LA. And, uh, you know, he's like a manly man. And I'm always like, love you, man. And he's like, love you too, bro. Like, he's like, he's not the kind of guy that says, I love you a lot to people, but like, I've created a space for that to be like a, still a masculine thing. It's like the bro hug, you know?

29:00But I, I think that's one thing is telling people that you love them. But also, I think there's tremendous value in telling people that you know they love you. So I always say to my sons, like, you know, when I die, like, know not only that I love you, but that I know how much you love me. Like, just know that. Like, know that there was never a doubt. Like, anytime we fought, we've disagreed. Like, don't ever think back on a conversation we had and think like, oh, I didn't get to tell my dad how much I love him. Or, oh, we had that disagreement. And And like, I wonder, you know, I wish he knew that I didn't mean that hurtful thing I said during our argument.

29:37Like, you don't have to worry about that. Like, I know you love me. Like, I never doubt that I knew and felt your love. And I think that's a really important thing to do with people in your life is to not only tell them that you love them, but also to tell them that you know that you can feel their love, that you know that they love you. because I think that's a wonderful gift to give to people to know that they knew, you know, that you knew that they loved you because I think we all want not only to feel loved, but we want the people we love to feel our love. And so I see those as two distinct pursuits, but yeah, I've gotten in the habit of it.

30:14It's funny because my sons, you know, will jokingly say like even growing up, like when they were teenagers and I'd be like, well, that's unacceptable, you know, and I want you home in 15 minutes, love you. Like it was always like every conversation. But I mean, humorously, like I can look at my phone right now. My sons are 29 and 26. And my last text to my son is, okay, 730 or so, love you, you know? And then my last text with my other son, Billy, which was from yesterday, he said, all right, love you. Like last thing is always love you. Like it's just a habit that I forced them into. I hope they mirror it in their own lives.

30:50I haven't. My oldest son just got married in September. So I hope it's something he mirrors in his own life. Yeah, my kids, it's the same thing. I mean, even I have five kids. We always do that. The 24-year-old twins, my 22-year-old son, even my six-year-old and my nine-year-old. Oh, you got a full cat. Holy cow. You know, they start out saying, James, you know, I know. I don't want to say that anymore. Now kind of they're in the habit and they feel it. But I'm unfortunately, or fortunately, it depends which way of the way you want to cut this. But a divorce expert, I know more than I should know about this.

31:28I'm going through my second one. And when you go through this, you have a really hard time. I went away for some mental healing at a place called the Hoffman Institute. and one of the things that I had to do is write letters to our parents. And it's very, very hard to do. You write the letter. You don't have to give it to them, which I did not, which most people don't. It's about all the things that they did, which is the wrong word, but all the habits that you inherited from your parents. They call it negative love syndrome. You wrote a letter to your mom after she passed away. You never talked about the specifics.

32:16Why did you write the letter? It was you to her. She was dead. And what are the specifics of what you wrote in that letter? Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it was a very similar thing to what you experienced when you recall that, which is it's just such an emotionally charged thing, your parents, you know? Like there's something so primal about that. Like mom is the name of God on the lips of children. Like there's just such a power there. And your father is like the world, you know, there's so much there. And that's a primal mark. It doesn't go away. You know, I was laughing with my therapist the other day because I was navigating some challenge in my life.

32:55And she was like, well, it sounds like that might be reminding you of your dad. And I said, God, Kate, like I'm 53. I'm probably the best known divorce lawyer in the world. I represent billionaires and celebrities. And I've still got six-year-old Jim in the back of my head running the show. And she's like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like 100%. You and everyone else. Like you and everyone else. Like this is a great equalizer for us. But yeah, for my mom, I was working with a therapist at the time. And same therapist. And I had said there were so many things I wanted to say to my mom that I never got to say.

33:33And she said, well, why don't you write her a letter? And I said, well, she's dead. You know, she said, well, there's value in writing it, you know, writing it and then reading it out loud, even sharing it. So I did. And I wrote about, I wrote about the fact that she was, she, she always made me feel ashamed when I needed anything from her. Like when I would, when I would ask for something or, or, or complain about something I was going through, it was always met with some belittling of why, why do you need that? you know or if I would say oh like the kids at school were mean to me today well at least you get to go to school you know how many kids don't get to go to school and it was just a way to sort of belittle my pain and then as I got older and I was less of a child and more of a something resembling a young man my mom got meaner to me and I didn't understand why she was colder to me and meaner to me and in the letter I wrote that I understood like I wanted her to know that I understood what happened that I was the first man she ever had power over.

34:34Like her father was a bad alcoholic. And then she married my father who was a bad alcoholic. And both of them had tremendous power over her, her father, because he was her father and my father, because he was her husband and the breadwinner for the family. You know, I said to her, like, I thought it was something wrong with me for so long that I just couldn't get it right. But I realized now that like, you weren't mad at me. You were mad at all of these men. And I was the first man that you ever had any power over, you know, and I understand that. Like I understand how powerless you felt and I understand how you had power over me and that maybe that was a way for you to like get some of that anger you had and you out was with someone you have power over.

35:16Like, so I just want you to know that like I loved you anyway and I love you anyway and that I'm okay, you know. And so I wrote a long letter really trying to say all of those things, but also being honest about like how that left scars on me. It left me really unsuccessful in romantic relationships about allowing a woman to take care of me. You know, like I've always been very bad at that. I like to do everything for myself because I grew up in an environment where expressing need was a sign of weakness and would be met with humiliation or rejection rather than kindness. So a lot of my own therapy and in my adult life has been about learning to frame allowing someone to comfort me or love me differently not as an expression of need but instead like one of the biggest breakthroughs I ever had in therapy was only in the last few years where my therapist was talking to me about you know when I show up for because I love showing up for people like I love doing a favor I'm always the guy who does a favor and she said like how do you feel when you show up for someone I'm like oh Oh my God, amazing.

36:20Like I feel alive. I feel like so of service. I feel so good. And she was like, oh, so like when a friend is going through something and they reach out to you and they say, hey, can you help me? You like that. I'm like, oh, I love it. Like I'm at my best when there's a problem to be solved and I can solve it. Like I love that feeling. Like when my friend Nate passed away unexpectedly, like I got on a plane, flew to Atlanta and I was like, how can I help? You know, and I like took the dogs to the groom or the kennel, you know, so that when family came over and then I helped make sandwiches and I was like, okay, great.

36:47I'm doing stuff. I'm helping, I'm helping, you know? And she was like, well, then why wouldn't you let the people who love you do that? Like, maybe they feel the same way. Like, maybe they want to help you. It makes them feel good to help you. It's not a burden. You're not bothering them. Like, that's a voice in your head from your mom. Like, that's, like, this is a woman you were married to who you wouldn't let do anything for you, you know? Like, and so I learned a lot about that from that expression, from writing that letter. the harder thing that I've talked about before was the therapist after I wrote that letter and then read it out loud through a lot of tears said okay now I want you to go and I write a letter back from your mom to you and I was like what what do you mean she was like I want you to say what you need to hear from her like what is it you needed her to say to you in response to your letter and that was much harder it was much harder to write it was much harder to read I don't think I got through the first sentence of it without bawling.

37:48I'm talking about it now and I get choked up, like just the thought of it, because what it taught me was I knew the answers. Like, I know she loved me. Like the letter was like, yeah, I did all those things because I was scared. I did them because I was mad at your father and I was mad at my father. Like, but I loved you. I loved you as best I could. It wasn't, it wasn't great, but that wasn't anything to do with you. You were a little kid, like, and I loved you, you know, and writing it forced me to realize and confront that, no, you know, like, you know, like the wisdom you find on mountaintops is the wisdom you brought up there, you know, like you, you don't, you're finding things that you know are inside of you already.

38:33And so there was something really beautiful about that experience. And since then, I've really tried when I have a challenge with someone interpersonally to use that exercise to write what it is I need to say to them and then write what it is I need to hear from them. And very often I learn that there's nothing I actually need from them, that I actually know what it is I need to heal in my own heart, in my own head. I know it. So one of the things that a lot of people don't do because they're afraid and they don't want to go there is they want to confront their fear, right? I have had a fear of sharks.

39:04I saw Jaws at a young age. And even to this day. I go wake surfing a lot in the summer. Lake Coeur d 'Alene, I'm still worried about the fin coming up, even though that's irrational. And I won't get in the ocean because I have a beaches website called Sandy, and we've cataloged every shark attack in the world over the last 80 years. Where it happened, the type of shark, what happened to the person. And so I'm just terrified of sharks. Then I see online all the time because Instagram knows that I'm interested in it. So I see every shark attack online there was even a video last week on the news of a guy getting eaten by a shark you can see the blood in the water you you had a fear when you were younger of tarantulas and you had spiders in general spiders in general but i i i can't look at a tarantula i've hated tarantulas uh my kids will sometimes torture me look at this i i will not look at it i i have the same fear i would never in a million years put a tarantula next to my bed but that's exactly what you did.

40:02So how, why did you do it? And is there a tarantula in your life today that you're fighting in a fear that you want to get over? Yeah, those are two great questions. Yeah, I was just afraid of spiders and I just sort of said, okay, I've got to confront this. And I really believed in the idea of like confrontation therapy. And so yeah, I got a baby tarantula and I put him in a little round tank and put him right next to my bed. So the first thing I would see every morning was this big spider. and nobody explained to me that tarantulas live over 20 years by the way so my tarantula Nietzsche was his name.

40:37Nietzsche lived like 22 years and he got banged. He was a big spider but yeah it got me over my fear of spiders. What's a spider I'm afraid of now? What's the thing I'm afraid of now that I would need? I don't know if the things I'm afraid of now are things I could be as easily exposed to. I think if I had to say what my spider is right now, I think it's probably silence. I think I have a hard time doing nothing. I don't have a meditative practice of any kind. I don't, despite everyone I know who's very high performing, having some form of a contemplative or meditative practice. And so many of my friends who I admire, their sort of equanimity and their efficacy and sort of the combination of the two, how they can go from like a real calmed state to a really active focus state and then revert back to that calm state, which I really admire.

41:33I just have a very hard time doing nothing. And I think there is value. You know, Josh Waitzkin writes a lot about this. Josh and I trained together at Marcelo Garcia Academy. He's a black belt under Marcelo. And Josh wrote in The Art of Learning about the idea of like creating space, cultivating space, leaving open pockets in your schedule to just see what you want to fill it with. And yeah, that's the spider for me right now. It's something I have a hard time giving myself permission to create. I still feel like it's wasteful. When you described kiteboarding, you know, like cultivating the space for one's passions.

42:15When you come from a scarcity mindset, that as I did growing up, you know, the idea of, well, I could do this or I could make$10 ,000 doing this. You start to go, well, okay, if I've sort of won the money game, like I have the things I need and I have abundance and I'm blessed, you start to then start saying, okay, I got to trade this for how much time I'm going to lose. But I still haven't, I haven't mastered that. It's still the spider. There's still, there's still this, you know, poverty beast chasing me that I can feel its breath on my neck a lot of the time. And I think if I actually stopped and turned around, I would see it so far in the distance that, you know, it's like, like I'm running, like it's coming right behind me.

42:56And then if I stopped, I'd be like, oh, it's like a speck in the distance now. But my amygdala hasn't figured that out yet. We talk about things that make us successful. We're going to talk a lot more about that later in the show. But is fear a critical element of our success, no matter what we do and our personal lives, and especially our business lives, that so many people have ideas to start businesses, start new careers. They're afraid of failing. They're afraid of what's out there. They're afraid of not making money. Is fear critical to our success? Fear isn't a genesis for the conditions that create our success.

43:30But I think that then it becomes like diminishing returns and almost antagonistic to success because I think you have to find ways to control your fear or overcome your fear. I mean, I think fear is a vitally important thing because bravery is vitally important. And if you're not scared, it isn't brave. Like something is only brave because you're scared and you do it anyway. If you aren't scared and you do a thing, there's nothing brave about it. You're just doing your thing. But bravery, which I think is a virtue and is a feeling of overcoming resistance and power and creates in us like this positive force and positive momentum and self-esteem, overcoming resistance, being brave and accomplishing a thing that was scary is one of the greatest feelings in the world, I think, as a man, but also as a woman.

44:20And I really think fear is vital because of that. Fear, like pain, you know, pain is a way of telling you that you're doing something that might be wrong for you, or you're doing something wrong, or you're doing something in an inefficient manner. So I think it's a message and messages can be positive or negative or both. And so I think fear sometimes is a way of saying, hey, pay attention. You know, this is important. There are important things happening here. And so I think that that's useful. Just similarly, you know, I'm wearing a tie and a vest and a shirt. And this is a symbol. This is a message.

44:59The message is I take seriously what I'm doing today. Well, you also take what you're doing seriously and you're wearing a t-shirt. So, you know, when you're a young man and you're starting out in the world of business, it's good to be a little overdressed. You know, you have to earn the right to wear a t-shirt and be taken seriously. So, because the boss can wear whatever he wants to because he's the boss. If you sign the front of the check or you sign the back of the check, it's two different rule sets apply to some degree, but you have to earn the right to wear that t-shirt and be taken seriously.

45:29You have to earn the right to not have to wear, like I, the first 15 years of my career, no one knew I had tattoos because I intentionally kept my sleeves put down. And then when I rolled them up, it was with the understanding that I had earned the ability to do that. I think that's how I feel about fear. I think that fear early in your life is a very powerful motivator. The fear of failure, the fear of poverty, the fear of not being able to overcome the obstacles that you've created or have been placed in your path. But I think it gets to a point where now you have to put that down and not let it govern you.

46:06I think you have to start to, and that's my challenge now in this chapter of life is realizing that fear is still important and a motivator, but it's, if I let it, you know, feelings are like little kids. You can't let them drive the car, but you can't shove them in the trunk either. You know, you have to find that balance. I do a lot of professional coaching, appearance is one of the most underrated elements of success. It's an intangible that a lot of people don't really get. I mean, I have clients dress up in a suit and tie. That tie has to have a perfect knot in the middle. There can't be any space.

46:42Sure, it has to be pressed cleanly. And when I was 27 years old, I got a job at a company called Sun America. Eli Broad was my boss, Ford's 400 person, one of only three people who started two Fortune 500 companies from scratch. And I'm in there. And back then I bought my suit at Marshall's, TJ Maxx, half off. I could get these suits. I remember being at Bloomingdale's and thinking, God, there's a Canale suit there and it's on sale 40 % off. I'm like, God, that's so nice. And it was still like 650 bucks. And it had a vest. And I said, you know what? There isn't a soul at Sun America who wears a vest.

47:20And I said, you know what, I'm going to buy that vest. And I looked so good, I thought. And then you get to work and, you know, people are like, you're an asshole for wearing that three-piece suit. I mean, who do you fuck do you think you are getting all dressed up looking like that? It was like kind of like people didn't do that here. It was something in Britain that people did. And guess what, Jim? Within like three months, the three-piece suit, the vest caught on. But, you know. That's what happened to me. That's what happened to me. I got called Elliot Ness because I couldn't afford suits.

47:56So my father had been a salesman and he had some old suits and we were roughly the same size at that point. And I said, you know, Dad, can I take some of your old suits? And he said, yeah, you can take them. And they were all three-piece suits because they were from the like 60s and 70s and i didn't understand fashion at all so i and i couldn't afford suits and so i went into the courthouse and everyone was like oh it's elliot ness and i didn't really get it i was like oh are they saying i look like kevin cosner because the movie the untouchables had just come out and uh i just remember within like i think within six months or a year in gq all of a sudden there were people wearing vests and it just became part of my part of my look like i was very defiant i sort of was like all right like i'm just gonna there's a thing that makes me a little weird, then fine.

48:37It'll be my thing. It'll be my brand. It'll be part of my signature look. And yeah, you have to like be able to flip those kinds of things. I think it's great. But I see for guys like you and I that, you know, start out with like aspiring to being able to buy a Canale suit at Bloomingdale. Like I remember going to Macy's and they had like a one day sale once a year. And I remember they're like, I could get like a Hart Schaefer and Mark suit, you know, because all my suits were just the ones my dad gave me or they were really cheap ones they got at like today's man or whatever and uh i just remember like i bought one or two really nice suits that were like three or four hundred dollars and that was all the money in the world you know and i wore those suits with like real pride and real you know but it's very funny because now i represent you know billionaires and and hedge fund managers and a few of them ever wear suits like they're all wearing t-shirts they're all wearing like very few of them are slovenly looking, but they, you know, they, they wear, but there's always other trappings that they take things seriously.

49:36Like there's their hair is freshly cut like yours is, you know, they, you know, they, they wear jeans and a black t-shirt, but they have a nice watch, you know, like you can sort of look at them and you go, Oh, you're, you're, you know, you're still take things seriously. It's obvious you still take things seriously, you know? You know, when we're young, we look at people and we say, okay, I want to model myself after that person. I want to look at that person. You can do it by reading magazines. And one of the things we do is we watch TV shows at a young age. And I think, you know, there are some people who you think when I was 15 years old, Chips was the number one show on TV.

50:11And it was about CHP guys on motorcycles. I'm like, man, I want to be so cool. I want to ride a motorcycle and I want to be a police officer. That didn't happen. Around 16, I realized my passion for business. I want to have a business. I started reading profiles about CEOs of companies like GM, Ford, and T. Boone Pickens, and Greenmail, and Corporate Radio. I'm like, that's what I want to do. When you were 15, you watched LA Law. Tell us about Victor Suentes and one of my favorite actors of all time, Jimmy Smits. Jimmy Smits, man. I wanted to be Victor Suentes so bad. That show, LA Law, which by the way, you can now watch, it's all streaming online.

50:46It is, I loved that show. I mean, I love Chips also, but I loved LA law. It was like, that theme song in my head, I still hear it. You know, I really, Victor Sifuentes, the character played by Jimmy Smith, was this young criminal defense lawyer and he had an earring. And it was like unheard of that like a lawyer in a suit and he has an earring. And he was just so cool. And I just remember being like, that's what I want to be. I want to be a lawyer. I don't want to be like a criminal defense lawyer. I don't want to have like an earring and be cool. I want to be Victor Sifuentes. And he was a trial lawyer.

51:22Like he wasn't afraid to be in a courtroom and a cross-examine a witness. And he was just intense. I ended up being Arnie Becker, which was the character who was played, I forget the actor's name, but he was the divorce lawyer. And he was sort of like, I'm gonna say a villain on this show. He wasn't a villain, but he was like, you know, Jimmy Smith's character, Victor Sifuentes, was like morally correct and was always like fighting for underdogs and justice. And Arnie Becker was the divorce lawyer who was in it for the money and he was always sleeping with his female clients and he had like a fancy house and he was wealthy and he was much more like morally flexible.

51:59And I just remember never wanting to be that, but I actually ended up becoming kind of an amalgam of the two. You know, I ended up having the courtroom panache of the Victor Sepuentes character, but put to use in the context of the divorce lawyer. Let's talk about our studies. We'll talk about college first. You went to Ramapo College, which is a college in New Jersey that most people have never heard of. And while you were there, you were the student body president for two years, which says a lot about your personality, your leadership skills. I want to talk about being a waiter at Steak and Al.

52:34I was a waiter at Chi-Chi's. And I can tell you, I learned so much about customer service and what it was like for people to shit on you and people screaming about things like$6.99 prime rib or the tacos were cold. And today you have a strict policy of only hiring people who have worked in the service industry. One of the things also that comes up in my coaching, especially with young people, is nobody wants to do the shit work. Nobody wants to put in the time, the energy of doing things that are unsexy. Everyone today coming out of school wants sexy jobs, internet, AI. No one, no one, you know, people don't clean the bathrooms like I did or be a paper boy or a stock boy, a Kroger in high school.

53:14How important is doing the shit work and the work nobody wants to do to our success later in life? I think it's everything for me. I mean, it was huge and is huge. I think, A, it teaches the humility and a work ethic. B, you learn a lot about people when you are very low on the totem pole and can't really do much for them. Because the measure of someone's morality, in my view, has always been how they treat someone who can't do anything for them. You know, everyone, of course, now, like I'm around success and I'm successful and I'm, you know, I'm surrounded by celebrity and I'm a quasi celebrity in my own right.

53:51So there's a lot of reasons why it's nice to be nice to Jim Sexton. But, you know, most of my life, there was really no reason to be particularly, there was no profit in being nice to me. So the question of like, how do you treat someone who can't do anything for you tells you a lot about your morality. As a waiter, the most humbling lesson was if this person has decided to come to a restaurant to abuse the waitstaff and they are there just to be abusive to you and nasty to you and short with you, you can meet that force with force and then you won't get a tip. And the only thing worse than being verbally berated and belittled by a person is doing it for free.

54:30So you learned like you got to hold your tongue. You got to absorb their negativity. And you have to figure out a way to get into and out of this situation that preserves your basic dignity, of course, but also accomplishes the goal, which is I'm there to make a few dollars. Like that's the goal. And that's what I'm here to do. And so it was very, very useful training for me. I think that I also like being able to say to my employees that every single job anyone in my office is doing, I have done. I was a good soldier, so I can be a good officer. And I think you have to have been a good soldier to be a good officer.

55:08Look, I take nothing away from my colleagues, but there are a number of my colleagues who are very successful divorce lawyers, whose parents, usually fathers, were very successful divorce lawyers. And so you were kind of handed the keys to the kingdom. Now, look, there's plenty of people that are handed the keys to the kingdom and proceed to squander the inheritance completely and do nothing with it and never really. And I have kind of like John Teitler, for example, is I think possibly the best divorce lawyer in the world, certainly in New York. He's the one I look up to and he's my adversary in many cases, but he knows how highly I think of him.

55:45John's father is an incredibly successful lawyer. So John, you know, could have just skated on the laurels of his father. Instead, He took every opportunity and every door that was opened by virtue of A, his own abilities, but B, the connections of his father. And he took it further and further and further. And he has built it into, you know, something even more impressive than the already impressive thing his father did. Laura Wasser, same thing. Her father was an incredibly successful divorce attorney. And she is now, she took that ball and took it even further. Yeah, and just, you know, for those people who don't know, she's here, and when you're in divorce, You do not want to be on the other side of Laura Wasser.

56:24That is for sure. She is a weapon and she is very good at her job. And I joke that she's sort of the West Coast equivalent of me. So she represents all the celebrities and I represent all the producers who buy and sell those celebrities. So I think that, you know, for me, my success was born out of a hunger. And I'm very proud of the fact that I went to a very, at the time subpar college. It was just a state school that I could get into and afford. I was very proud of being a waiter at Bennigan's Pizza Hut and then Steak and Ale. I mean, you really picked the more impressive place that I worked, but before that, it was Pizza Hut and Bennigan's.

57:08But I... The Olive Garden, I did too. I did the Olive Garden. I should have mentioned that. Kind of embarrassed about it, but I was a waiter at the Olive Garden too. Very unlimited breadsticks. You can't go... Unlimited. They'd fall on the floor sometimes, Jim, and we're back in the kitchen. They have those rubber mats with the holes. Oh, yeah. Man, I saw some bad shit there, like stuff falling on the floor. You put it on the plate. You're making it better. Oh, man. We all have those stories. But I will tell you, I really believe that you learn more about politics working in a restaurant because the tension between the host staff and the bus boys and the cook, line cooks, and the dishwashers and the servers and the sort of like game of thrones that has to be played of like this ecosystem where every single one of those elements can't do their job without the other.

58:01And yet, if you align too much with any of them, the others start to reject you. And there was just, it really was the greatest training ground. It's why the people who I hire, I insist that they have some service background, ideally food service, because I really believe you learn And that same ecosystem is the same as a courthouse. Like a courthouse, you've got the judges, you've got their court attorneys who are like their consigliere or their right hand, like the hand of the king. Then you've got the scheduling clerks. Then you've got the court reporters, the court officers. And again, you might look at a court officer and be like, oh, they're just the person that protects the judge and walks them in and out of chambers.

58:38Right, but they're the first person the judge talks to every day and the last person they talk to when they walk out of the courthouse. Like, don't you think they say like, oh, Sexton did a good job today? or, oh yeah, I think that case was garbage or whatever. Like they have an influence. So you, not everybody can help you, but everybody can hurt you. So you really want to make a point of like getting, figuring out what each of these components of the ecosystem has to do with the larger purpose and figuring out a way to like, you know, to have them help serve your ends. And also how can you be of service to theirs?

59:13One of the things that I see as an investor, venture capitalists and my coaching practices. People come in, Jim, they'll pitch me and I'll say, what does that mean? I have no idea what you're saying. They'll give you a PowerPoint. It's 20 pages. I know a lot about technology. I know a lot about startups. I've been on 50 boards. I've helped companies raise over half a billion dollars. I started a company that stays worth 22 billion dollars. I know what I'm doing. And I am a former lawyer, so I get a lot of concepts. And one of the things people miss so many times is they can't explain what they're doing.

59:48And I get pitched all the time, so I have a short attention span. And sometimes I just have to cut people off and say, what's the one-liner here? You went to New York University, got a master's degree centered on persuasive speech and mechanics of persuasion. How important is being able to communicate what you're doing in a clear, concise fashion to your success and the people's success in general? I think it's the most important thing. I think the thing that sets me apart from my peers is my ability to communicate in a way that people can understand and digest. And mostly I do that with metaphors.

1:00:22I'm constantly using metaphors. I'm constantly comparing a thing that they don't understand to the thing they want to understand. And I want to compare it to something they get that they understand completely. So I'm constantly, just like I said, feelings are like little kids. You can't stuff them in the trunk, but you can't let them drive. Like I'm constantly trying to find the metaphor that will connect it to this person's cognition and ideally a metaphor that resonates for them. So if I have a client who's a sailor, I will talk about, hey, listen, we can't control the wind, but we can adjust the sails.

1:00:53And that's what we need to do in the courtroom is we can't control what arguments the other side is going to make, but we can adjust and be proactive. We can look for what are the conditions. So I'll just find like personally, professionally, what resonates with this person. So a physician, I'll use medical metaphors when I'm explaining things to them. Someone who does jujitsu, I use jujitsu metaphors. Like I find the communication style that connects with that person. That's what good persuasive speech is all about. It's about clarity and it's about connectivity. Brevity is good, but clarity is more important than brevity.

1:01:27And sometimes you can't explain a complex topic in an extremely brief fashion. It's why I think presidential debates have gone completely off the rails. Because it used to be the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which was over three full days. You'd have a two-hour thing and then a one-hour rebuttal. Okay, that's a little much for most people's attention span. But how would you solve the education crisis in the United States? You have 30 seconds. Okay, the only answer you could give in 30 seconds is that is a multivariate problem that has existed for an extended period of time and has layers of complexity having to do with socioeconomic status, race, geopolitical divides, taxation, I couldn't possibly answer that in 30 seconds.

1:02:13That's the only honest answer to give in 30 seconds. So I think brevity is important, but I think the clarity and the ability to connect to the person's way of hearing. There are some clients of mine, they want to explain to me, I find guys in finance tend to do this a lot. They'll straw man things. Like they'll say to me, explain to me why we're not going to do this. So instead of saying, what are we going to do? They'll say, explain to me why we're not going to do this because this is what my mind thinks we should do. Explain to me why that's wrong. And then I would explain to them, okay, what's the flaws in the theory?

1:02:48What's the holes in the thing? Why aren't we doing that thing? So I think you just have to find how this person communicates and what resonates with them. It's the same thing I have to do with a judge. I have to figure out what resonates with their communication style. When I got to Sun America, I got this job. And one of the things at 27 years old, and by the way, people hate you. I'm 27 years old. We have a legal department of eight people. And how's this loser lawyer? I had three jobs in eight months, coming out of Northwestern Law School after graduating at the top of my class, got fired twice in six months.

1:03:17And here I'm working for one of the most successful business people on the planet. And I'm looking around. And one of the things that we do to learn is model our behavior in certain character traits with certain people who have what we want. And there was a guy named Gary Krat, who's a very senior person at the company, who ran our broker-dealer network. So it's a network of about 10 ,000 people who sell financial products. And he could explain things to him so clearly. And I would look at him and say, gosh, you know, I want to speak like him. I want to be able to present ideas from him. And in three years there, I really did improve my ability to explain things in the clear, concise manner has been one of the most important criterias of my own success.

1:03:59I have another friend named Joe Hart, one of my best friends, today's CEO of Dale Carnegie and someone I've been mentoring since we got out of law school together. And what he did is he signed up for comedy at the Improv. So he got up the Novi Hilton and he just started being funnier, trying to do things. I mean, Joe and I will joke, hey, man, you're not that funny. I'm like, I'm funnier than you are. No, no, no. But I really respected him for what he did. He'd become a better public speaker, not only individually, one-on-one, and ability to communicate, but in front of a group of people, which is very critical if you're going to be running, whether it's a law firm, a company, a startup, doing public speeches.

1:04:41What's your advice to people who don't have that skill today? What should they be doing? Yeah, I mean, you don't learn how to swim by reading books about swimming. You learn how to swim in a pool. So I think it's just start conversations. Just the way you get comfortable talking is by talking. Like just start conversations. People actually are, especially in the digital moment that we're in right now, people are eager to have conversations. But you have to just find an entry point and you have to make it clear that you're not selling them something. Like that you really are just genuinely looking to connect with them.

1:05:09People love questions. You know, I'll frequently be like, I love that, Ty, where did you get that? Or like, I love that color, you know? And then they'll just start, you know, People will engage. And I think you just get more and more comfortable by doing it. I think talking is one of those things that I try to take every opportunity I have to speak before. I've spoken before audiences of, I mean, some of my things have gone to the hundreds of millions, but in terms of their viral viewing, but I've spoken to groups of tens of thousands of people. I've spoken to groups of 10 people. I really approach all those conversations exactly the same.

1:05:47I really try to approach them from a place of like, energy, authenticity, you know, really trying to be the most real and authentic version of myself that I can be and not really putting on a persona. If you watch my early media work, when my first book came out, I made the critical error of thinking, okay, what should I sound like on TV? And if you watch like my first interviews on Steve Harvey's show, they're very stiff, because I'm trying to sound like what I think a lawyer on TV should sound like. And then at some point when I did Soft White Underbelly, I think was the first time, I really just kind of didn't worry about it.

1:06:28I forgot that, you know, just like I am in this conversation, I forget that this is a conversation that's going to be viewed by more people. It's just you and I talking. And I'm just talking to you the manner in which I would talk to you in any context. If we were alone and there was no camera, this would be a conversation we'd be having. And so people can smell that inauthenticity and they can also smell that authenticity. So I would just say, authentically go out and be interested. Like, whether it's in romantic relationships, business relationships, being interested and being interesting are two really vital skills.

1:07:03And I think that on a first date, be interested and be interesting. And very often, one of the best ways to be interesting is to be interested. I really think like asking questions about, you know, Chris Voss, who's a friend and a colleague. Jim was on my show. I remember that. Great. Love him. Brilliant. Brilliant. And Chris is one of those people that's always asking questions because he's using those questions to learn more about you, what motivates you, what are your levers, what are your goals, what are your desires. And in negotiation, he really, you know, anybody in the audience who hasn't read Never Split the Difference, like go get it and read it 10 times because you'll just, every time I reread it, I learn more and more about it.

1:07:46Those, you know, Never Split the Difference and Getting the Yes are like, those are just the two books that it's like you can't read them too many times. Tell people who he is first who don't know who Chris Voss is. Chris Voss was an FBI hostage negotiator for many, many years. who ultimately was the lead hostage negotiator for the FBI. But he's just someone who now does strategic consulting, but he's just a master negotiator. He's just someone who understands negotiation. But Chris, and I won't try to summarize the brilliance that is Chris. I mean, your episode with him is a great one. He's had some great conversations with Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom, but his writing speaks for itself.

1:08:27His social media stuff, he does a lot of speaking. It's really worth watching. He's a great follow on Instagram. But Chris really talks a lot about the power of questions. you know instead of saying well here's what i can do it's well how how can i do that how am i supposed to take that number off how am i supposed to justify that number instead like by positing questions and i say when i learned that style of negotiating or approaching a negotiated interaction it changed the game of my efficacy as a negotiator as a lawyer because i i learned that the power of a question of, you know, well, how am I supposed to sell that to my client?

1:09:04Or I'm sorry, what am I offsetting that against? Why would we agree to that? I just want to understand your point of view. And it's not an insincere question. Like it's a genuine question. Like help me understand the thinking behind your position rather than just getting up in this positional game where we both take false positions and then find a fake middle. Like this is a real way of interacting with the principles behind what this person is trying to accomplish. Because in all of these interactions, whether it's in the business realm, the legal realm, the interpersonal realm, we're either on the take or in the give, right?

1:09:40It's really about we're giving something or we're taking something or some combination of the two. So it really is a seduction of the sense, where a negotiation is a seduction. I have to convince you that the thing I want you to do serves your interests as well. And we have to sort of get each other on board with each other's agenda. And Chris does a great job of showing that. But I think for me, studying persuasive speech, learning how to communicate that way, using those basic communication and attention-keeping skills. You know, a lot of the shows I've been on, Diary of a CEO, I've done three or four times.

1:10:17You know, Huberman Lab, you know, some of the bigger shows I've done, they track metrics very, very carefully. Steve Bartlett and his team are like data wonks. They look at every like and every metric. And one of the metrics that's very important in the social media world and in the world that they navigate is retention, which is like when someone starts watching, how long do they stay? And I remember after I did my first diary of the CEO, Stephen texting me and saying, your retention numbers are off the charts. And I had no idea what that meant. And he said, it means that when people start listening, they stay.

1:10:56Like people don't get halfway through an interview with you and just turn it off. Like they stay. And every time I've appeared since, he says, your retention numbers are still like higher than I've ever seen. And I once asked him, why do you think that is? And he said, because you're a storyteller. You're a good storyteller. You keep the energy where it needs to be. And I think that whatever job task you're doing, that's really that's a key key thing to master the ability to do i think it's important to be different than people that's one of the things about my own success when i started my podcast jim i had a producer says no one wants to hear about the family of your guests no one wants to hear about the parents i said fuck all that i'm gonna do my show the way i want to do my show because i know how i grew up i want to know what makes people um and my retention rates depend on the guests right Tony Robbins everyone listen to Tony Robbins he's my goat he changed my life and as I'm listening to you and I've seen every clip you've posted hundreds of clips I've watched your podcast on YouTube I'm thinking to myself are people going to tune away hearing Jim Sexton's background because we've gotten in your background more than you have with any other podcast ever but I want want people to know who you are and I'm wondering like are we going to start like at some point, all right, well, I launched part two of this, which is going to be talking about the cheating and reasons why people get, I mean, everyone loves talking about the cheating and the sex and relationships and the prenups.

1:12:27So I'm sitting here thinking like, I may actually, because everyone knows you in a certain way, but people don't know you this way. I want people to get to know you first before we get to how successful you've become. Yeah. Yeah. I have tell you, it's one of the things that made this conversation interesting to me and also scary because people really, most of the interviews I do, and I've done a lot of interviews, I'm a more prolific guest than host. And they really start with, okay, I was just hatched into this suit, you know? And sometimes I'll go back and talk about my dad or talk about my mom or talk about growing up or talk about my divorce or talk, you know, and just sort of as a footnote to explaining something.

1:13:10But I've seen how your interviews, like there's sort of a linear path. And I respect that. I think it's something that, it is a commitment to a certain way of understanding a person, you know, and understanding the trajectory, the hero's journey of a person and how they came to where they are, the good, the bad. But it's also, you know, it's a, for someone like me who spent a lot of time in therapy, it's more comfortable. But there are people that like, they've never really considered their origin story. Like, in fact, they don't want you to think about it. Like, they just want you to think, no, I was a fully formed CEO.

1:13:46You know, I just, I came out this brilliant person out of Harvard. And it's like, do you know how much has to go into someone getting into Harvard? Like in the habits of thought that had to go there? Like, so I want that story. I agree with you is a fascinating story. And it's the one that I want to know more about with someone else. But, you know, again, for a lot of people, the unexamined life is just fine. Like they don't, they got out of poverty. They got out of that. I don't want to talk about it ever again. You know, I was a fat kid. I don't want to talk about that ever again because that's not what I am now.

1:14:21And maybe if I talk to you about that, you'll see some piece of that that's still in me that I'm ashamed of and I don't want to embrace. Whereas I have found by being very open about those kinds of things that I think people can really connect with you because we all have things inside of us, no matter how successful we are. I mean, I represent a lot of very high achieving people who are just like me. They're frightened. They're flawed. They have parts of themselves they understand and have learned to master and parts of themselves they still don't know quite how to navigate. And I think there's something really beautiful about that.

1:14:56My next book is coming out in 2027. Henry Holt Macmillan, my same publisher. And the next one is called You Suck at Love. And when I first posited that as a title, they were like, oh, it's kind of negative. And like, people are going to be insulted by it. And I said, well, no, the you is all of us. Like, you suck at love. Everybody sucks at love. Like, it's the most natural thing in the world. And yet, and it's, by the way, also a somewhat teachable skill, how to be better at loving someone and how to be better at receiving love from another person. But we spend a lot of time in school teaching people how to divide fractions.

1:15:34And we don't spend a lot of time teaching them how to have a conversation with an intimate partner or how to give your intimate partner your attention and time and quality attention. So the position of the next book is really about, hey, this is a great equalizer. We should really all embrace it. And a big piece of it is our origin story and what we learned from our parents and from our siblings and our peer group about what does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? What is success? How do you define it? Why are we here? What is our purpose? And I think there's tremendous value in getting into that backstory.