#757 - James Sexton - A Divorce Lawyer’s Perspective On Love & Marriage

26:32You know, would you I mean and look you don't men make jokes about that It's you know Daniel Tosh has a great joke about how like you know his girlfriend said doing a one point like you know If I lost the leg would you still love me? And he's like, you break a nail out of here. Like a leg, your whole leg? Yeah, no, forget it. But the truth is, what a woman is saying when she says that to you, like if I lost my arm, would you love me? If I had breast cancer and my breast for God, would you still find me attractive? Is how deep is your love for me? And what would it endure? Well, I don't think it's an unreasonable or unromantic question to say if we heard each other, we heard each other, right?

27:11Are we gonna go nuclear on each other? Like, cause I never understood. I never understood. I mean, you wanna talk reality TV. That's a great litmus test for this. Like when people around the bachelor or love Island or any of those things, right? And they go from what I really think I like him and he might be the one. And then when he goes, yeah, I'm sorry, I chose somebody. Well, I never, he's a piece of garbage. And I know, wow. Cause like a minute ago you were saying, if he proposed to you, you'd say yes. Yes. So how did you go from there to there? If that was true, your reaction would have been, well, my heart is broken because I really think you're the one.

27:52And now you've heard me, but you know what? I love you and I want you to be happy and find joy and it makes me terribly sad that it's not with me. But I wish you well because when you love someone, you wish them well, even if it's to your detriment. You know, and so a prenup is saying listen, I don't want you to be here I want you to lay your head on the pillow next to me because you love me and you want to be here Not because you're afraid you won't be able to survive financially without me or because you're afraid I might weaponize against you in a court of law like it really there's something wonderful about saying like No, if we split up you'll get this you'll get that I'll get this I'll get that will both be okay But you know what I won't be okay because I won't have you What is the best way to construct a prenup?

28:38I think the simplest way is actually the best way and that is because you don't have a crystal ball You don't know what the future holds and if you want to make God laugh tell them your plans So I really think the way to to structure a prenup is to just have like tranches have buckets and I call it You know yours mine and ours which is if it's in my name It's mine whether it's an asset or a liability if it's in your name it's yours, whether it's an asset or liability, and if it's in our joint names, we're going to split it 50 -50. So if it's an asset, we'll divide it 50 -50, or if it's a liability, we'll each be responsible for half of it.

29:11And that gives you the ability, both of you, throughout the marriage, to have conversations. There's no prenup. There's no contract that you can sign and set it and forget it. You never have to have a conversation about money or about anything tough in the marriage. Again, if there was, believe me, I'd make a lot of money selling that document. But the truth is the best thing you can hope for is something that creates a structure that the two of you can then work together on and understand clearly. And then work from it. Does that not then create another ground for a reminder of the lack of unity potentially or the future impending potential separation that if every time the piece of money comes in such and such is going to draw down his dividend for this year, well, is that going in the personal?

30:00Is that going in the car? Yes. But I mean, he's working because she's to stay at home mom and then there's this sort of financial prisoner type scenario. But wait, again, like, Momentum worry doesn't have to just exist as to the individual. It should exist as to the couple. Like, remember that love is not permanently gifted, it's loaned. You know, remember that that that like I don't think there's anything bad about having to have ongoing conversations. Like, if she's a stay at home mom and he's the breadwinner, it is worth having conversations along the way about the value of those two roles.

30:40You're not doing yourselves any favors pretending that dynamic doesn't exist or forgetting. Like most couples do that those dynamics exist and just being resentful towards each other. Well, all she does is stays home and does nothing. I have to go out to work every day. Well, he's never here helping with anything with the house. He's always just down. He gets to be in the world interacting with people. Instead of looking at, hey, look, we each bring something to this relationship and we're each losing something for the bringing of that something, right? Like the tragedy of our current dating and marriage situation and the chaos that's come from comes from the fact that there is no longer clarity as to what anybody's supposed to be.

31:17If a man's a breadwinner, but why aren't you home with your kids and taking more care of them? And if a woman wants to stay home with kids, how dare you? Bella Abzug would be disgusted by Gloria Stein and would be disgusted by you. Which by the way isn't true. You know, feminism was not born of the idea that women should all be capitalist cogs in the workforce, and the couples should both devote all of their energies to the bottom line financially, rather than the devotion that they have to each other into their children. But yeah, a prenup is about having an original conversation, then having ongoing conversations about why we're doing what we're doing financially.

31:56You know, when you got that big bonus at work, why did you put it entirely in the account in your sole name? I'd like to have that conversation while we're still together rather than in a divorce lawyer's office in the proceedings of the divorce. Why not know where you stand with each other? Yeah. What are some of the ways that people go about divorces in terms of behavior or structure or announcements or whatever that cause everyone more financial or emotional or litigious pain than is needed? Yeah, I think you just tapped on it, which is going to litigation from minute one is really a bad idea.

32:35I mean, I jokingly tell people that, you know, if you divide your assets with the mediator or with two lawyers negotiating on your behalf, you're doing it with a scalpel. If you do it in court, you're doing it with a chainsaw. Hang on, hang on. Just explain to me what's a mediator. Sure. What's a lawyer? So there's a lot of paths up the mountain of divorce, right? And so the going from like the friendliest to the most extreme, known everything in between, the friendliest is two people sit down at their kitchen table and they map out on a piece a paper. Here's what I need. Here's what you need.

33:11Here's what you'll keep. Here's what I'll keep. And they go to one lawyer and say, can you write this up for us? They both sign off on it. It's an uncontested divorce. That's the simplest. Can you do that with kids as well? Of course. Yeah, of course. Of course. Court system is not going to get in the way of what two people agree upon. You know, if what they agree upon is not unconscionable, meaning it is so patently unfair that no rational person would accept it and no rational person and would offer it who was acting in good faith. So as long as it's unique to your situation, it's totally fine.

33:44Courts aren't going to second guess things. The next stage from that, more likely, because a lot of the people don't know what questions to ask. They don't know what issues. So they go to a mediator. A mediator is either an attorney, an accountant, therapist, someone who's training conflict resolution, who doesn't represent either person individually, but instead represents the transaction. and they sit with the couple, either together as a group, or they do shuttle diplomacy, where they can't just back and forth between the two. They try to reach resolution. They try to identify all the issues that have to be resolved, and then they try to resolve them, and then they can write that up and make it binding.

34:22That's a lovely thing when people can do it. I try to send people who come into my office who could potentially mediate. I try to send them out to a mediator, even though I that's sending money right out the door. But my attitude is if you can go to a mediator, go to a mediator. Problem is is mediation is somewhat self -selecting. Most people can't advocate for themselves. They don't feel comfortable having that discussion directly with their spouse, even with a mediator in the room. So more commonly, the majority of cases resolve the next step in the kind of continuum. And that is where you have two people who each hire their own individual attorneys, and the attorneys educate their individual clients as to their rights and obligations.

35:01They're upside reward, they're downside risk. Here's what you might get in court because it really comes down to what do you need, what do you want, what do you entitled to, what you need, you're going to get what you need, you need food shelter to see your children, what do you want, there could be no limit to what people might want. So what you want is informed by what you're entitled to. So a lot of what a lawyer does is explains to someone better than Google could what it is that they are entitled to. And then the two lawyers work with their respective clients and with each other to try to reach a mutually acceptable resolution or one that everybody's equally unsatisfied with.

35:34The next stage in the continuum is if there's something we can't agree on. Who's the tiebreaker, the judge, right? So one of us has to file one of the lawyers files, what's called an RJAI, Request for Judicial Intervention. A judge gets assigned to the case, and then that judge weighs in a little bit and says, well, here's what I would do with this issue. Or with these facts presented, here's what I might be inclined to order if we had a hearing. And nine times out of 10, you know, actually 98 % of the time is less statistic I heard on this Of divorce cases resolve before the entry of a final judgment now That's a little misleading because it gives people the mistaken impression that like people don't litigate divorces They do it's just what happens is you litigate for a little while and then everybody kind of gets the answers They wanted from the judge and now you know what the judge might do So sometimes you got to do three four days of testimony and trial and then you resolve the case because the judge kind of waves Everybody off and say, look, here's what I'm probably going to do.

36:31And then, of course, the furthest extreme is knockdown, drag out litigation, which, again, is kind of what I specialize in, and it's what I do for a living, is I'm something of a weapon. You point me at the spouse, and my job is to just go after them and sort of take no prisoners, cross -examine people. And that's not, you know, if you're in that position, it's unfortunate. It's unfortunate under all circumstances. Either if you're on the receiving end of it and you need me to be the person defending you, or if you're the person who needs to weaponize against another person, you've lost already to some degree, because you're spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars depending on the scope of the issues presented.

37:14I mean, I've had cases where the legal fees go into the two and three millions. Which do you prefer to do defend or prosecute? I like both the same. It's kind of the exact same skill set. That's like asking someone who does Jiu Jitsu, do you like top game, bottom game? It's like kind of, yeah, just two different paths up the same thing. And the goal ultimately is to get to roughly the same place to get to the submission. So it's really the same kind of thing. I personally, I kind of am like a legal version of Steve Prefontaine. Like I think you set the pace, you control the race. So I like to be a front runner.

37:49Like I like to be the one who's making everybody work real hard. But Prefontaine didn't win the Olympics for a reason, which is you actually, if you're smart and scientific, you let people drag and you let people create that. And from a physics standpoint, it's not the best way to do things. But I like litigating cases. I'm a trial lawyer at Harvard. I like cross -examining people. I enjoy this full -contact storytelling that is a trial. And it's a very exciting type of thing. It's a very exciting line. It's an intellectual. It's a chess match in the same way that chess or jujitsu is it's it's really about faints It's about you know taking risk.

38:30It's about every time you give something you give something up at the same time So it's it's a very very exciting career, but again, I I never want people to have to get to that place I do everything I can to prevent it and I think that's you know It's the it's the nature of violence for example, you know like it cops carry guns so they don't have to use them You know, if someone's a really good fighter, you're gonna be less likely to take a swing at them. So people hire trial lawyers because, you know, it's better to be have a trial lawyer and not need them, then need a trial lawyer and not have them.

39:05And instead you have somebody who's not a litigator at heart. You know, it's better to be a warrior in a garden and a gardener in a war. So being a trial lawyer, it's a lot of fun. You don't always get to use that skill set. But sometimes you get to a place in a career where I am where people hire you because they have a complicated case. Somebody calls me up and they have a very simple case. I'll say, listen, there's better choices than me for that type of case, because I'm more expensive because I'm more of a weapon. What are some of the more complex or outrageous cases that you've had to go through?

39:43You know, I've seen every variety of human chaos and misery, I think in 23 years of doing this. I mean, I've seen people just emulate themselves, you know, and it's everything from the humorously absurd, you know Fabrigette egg or something like that. Yeah, I mean, I once saw a multi -million dollar settlement break down over a toaster oven a toaster oven was it like a $32 toaster oven and I remember saying to my client like I will log on Amazon right now and and buy you three of that toaster oven. If you just settle the case, like what are you guys doing? You're arguing over a toaster oven. And they just, you know, it was just the hill they both wanted to die on.

40:32And it broke the whole settlement down and they ended up litigating all the way through. But I mean, I've seen all manner of chaos. I've seen, I talk about in the book, I tell a story about a trial that I once did where This person had clearly married my clients solely for their green card. And as soon as they got married, he vanished. And my client who had married in good faith was devastated by this. She wanted to annul the marriage and he refused to grant the annulment. And he was pretending that they had been married and that the marriage was a legitimate marriage. And she shared with me that they had not consummated the marriage, that they had not had sex.

41:12And I said, well, you can't prove that you guys didn't have sex. That's not, there's no way to prove that. And she said, well, I'm a virgin. So I said, well, you're also a 30 -something -year -old woman. The chances of your hymen being intact are minimal. If you ride a horse, if you fall, at least there's a million things after certain age that that can happen. And so she went to her gynecologist and came back about a week later. And my secretary said, oh, she's here. She's in the conference room and I went in and she was like weepy. And I said, look, you know, it was unlikely that what she said, no, no, it's, it's intact.

41:50You know, she was like, I'm just crying because it's like shocking to me that it's intact. And that so we went to trial and the guy got on the witness stand and, and I cross examined him and I said, and you, you know, you, you had sex with my client. Is that your testimony? And he said, yes. And I said, now, sir, how, how large is your penis? And of course, he had a side objective and I said, Your Honor, I'm going somewhere with this. I promise. And she said, I'll give you a little leeway, Mr. Sexton, but not much. This is not going to turn into penthouse for him. And he said, it's normal size.

42:17I said, you know, I'm fuzzy on what normal size means. Sir, do you mean it's five inches, six inches, seven inches? How big roughly? And he says, well, it's about six or seven inches when erect. I said, okay. And when you say you had sex with my client, you had, you had regular sex. You had, say, your vaginal intercourse. Yes. And you had no problems at all inserting your penis. again, posing Council of Jacks, the judge says, Mr. Jackson, where are you going with this? And I said, just give me a little leeway, Your Honor. And he insisted that yes, they had sex. So ended the cross examination, called her OBGYN to the stand.

42:47And they testified to the fact that he would have to have a microfalus, meaning a penis of less than one inch in order for him to have not penetrated her hymen. So then he got back on the stand. And suddenly, he misremembered and his penis is much smaller than he testified to. It's actually quite small. And before I could say, you're on or I want an independent medical examination of this man's penis, the judge waved his both off and said, all right, hang on, we're, we're, we're, and she took us all the two lawyers in the back and she said, you're settling this case, give her the ennullment, or else I'm gonna sanction this guy.

43:21I might even put him in jail for perjury and sure enough, we got her the ennullment. But that was one of the craziest cases. I mean, to have a man get on the stand and suddenly testified of the fact under oath that he had been lying about the size of his penis, and it was actually only about an inch. I never thought that, you know, I did not go to law school with that in mind. But yeah, I mean, I've had so many bizarre cases and you know, some are tragic, some are, you see things in this line of work that you can't unsee. You know, the way people treat children, the way people treat each other.

43:57I had a case recently where I had a represented a woman who her husband was a perpetrator of domestic violence for many years, but he was incredibly charming and incredibly handsome. And he just no one would have believed that this guy was violent or abusive. I kind of didn't believe her. I'll be candid. I mean, my job is to advocate for her and I advocated very well for her. But I remember meeting this guy and seeing this guy in court and sort of dealing with him and thinking like, I don't know, I just can't picture it, you know, like it he seems so lovely seems so nice, you know, and thank God they had a ring doorbell because it captured unbeknownst to him.

44:36Him beating the shit out of a six -month labored, a black lab puppy that they had and just like kicking it and throwing it back in it against the wall, which I'm a dog lover. So having to watch that and listen to it was nauseating to me. It was nauseous, it was horrifying to me. But it was the piece of evidence that we destroyed this guy with because he got up there and he presented so well and then you see this video of him just brutally beating an anaheopolis defenseless animal. And you realize, okay, this guy is like capable of atrocity. So, you know, my job is never boring, which is a wonderful thing.

45:17But it is sometimes I bump into the absolute worst parts of humanity and the absolute, just people that they're absolute. You know, when love goes south, it brings out something really, really vicious in people. And the way we treat each other is shocking to me sometimes. I'm very blessed. Like every ex I've ever had, every ex -girlfriend, my ex -wife, like I have tremendous love in my heart for them. They're all friends still to this day. Like I still stay in touch with them. You know, I wish them every happiness. I know they would wish me happiness as well. Even when we heard each other, even when we weren't right for each other, even when we failed by our own weakness and our own foolishness as humans.

46:02Like we still cared about each other. You know, and I don't understand the level of brutality that people unleash on each other in themselves when their hearts are broken. I mean, I get it. It's very human, but it's shocking to me how people can lose their minds when they get their heart broken. Have you struggled to protect your personal view of romance given the daily exposure that you deal with in your professional life? You know, there's a great line in a Joseph, one of my favorite poems, Joseph Brodsky, has a poem called The Song. He read it when his wife died and the poem is very pretty.

46:44It's worth looking up. But the refrain of the poem is, I wish you were here, dear. I wish you were here. I wish we sat in the car and you sat near. It's about missing someone and longing for someone. And one of the lines in the poem is, I wish you were here, dear. I wish you were here. I wish I knew no astronomy when the stars appear. And I always loved that line because I wish I knew no astronomy when the stars appear. Like when you don't know astronomy, the stars are so beautiful. They're these little pinpoint lights in the sky, you know, and you can understand how all these ancient cultures, like believed it to be that heaven was there and that this was holes in the blanket that covered heaven or that the stars were the gods in some way.

47:26All the myriad of things we came up with to explain it. And when you know astronomy, you know that this is a ball of gas, you know what this is. So to me, you know, I wish I knew no astronomy sometimes when stars appear. I think I wish I, I wish I'd known, I shouldn't say I wish I'd known, I wish I could look at, I love going to weddings. I love weddings. Like I still get teary -eyed at weddings. I'm still cheering for these people when I go to a wedding. But I kind of wish I didn't see what I see. It can't help but beat some of the romantic out of you doing this work. But it doesn't take away, you know, the beauty of it.

48:07I got a conversation with a gynecologist friend once. And I said to him, he's a very happily married guy. And I said to him, like, come on man, seriously, between you and me, do you like get home at night and like say to your wife like, babe, if I see one more, I'm just, I can't, you know? And he said, yeah, it's not the same thing. He said, it's not the same thing. He's like, it's like, it's a totally, you know, your brain just doesn't even process this those the same way, you know? And I think it's the same thing. I definitely learn a lot of lessons about what not to do. I think the divorce rate among divorce lawyers, I don't know if anyone's ever studied it, but I'd imagine it's lower, even though the profession is a demanding profession and therefore it's a harsh mistress, I think divorce lawyers are very acutely aware of, you know, just how hard it is and all the mistakes that people make unintentionally.

49:00So I don't like ignorance. I like it. I would prefer an uncomfortable truth to a comfortable lie. So I like going and knowing that, you know, yeah, we might crawl out of this thing. We might hurt each other. But you know what? It's worth trying. It's worth doing something like it's, you know, there's nothing great ever achieved without some enduring and without some risk. So, you know, I think love is one of those things. You just keep trying and you just keep going after it and, you know, maybe you never find it. And that's what's meant to be and that you just have a lot of really good scars to show for it.

49:39Like, there's a school of thought that would say that, you know, that only unfulfilled love can be truly romantic, you know, that I love, I mean, I've listened. I've been madly in love and I've had my heart broken. And I think both were beautiful, you know, both were some of the greatest poetry, Some of the greatest art came from heartbreak. Some of the greatest insight of life came from heartbreak. Like from loss from pain. And when I sat down with Lex Friedman a couple months ago, Lex and I were talking about dogs. We were talking about we both have had and lost dogs who we loved very much. And I said, but I don't know, it's a pain worth having.

50:21You know, like because the alternate is the pain of never having experienced the joy and the closeness of that like and I don't I don't know I don't want to die with it. He's without any scars like I don't want to tip toe through life and arrive safely at death like I want to I want to you know Give it give it my all and and and if I succeed or I fail like I felt big, you know So I think it's good to not be wildly reckless with your own heart or anybody else's heart But I don't think that, you know, that I think love is worth the risk, I believe that. What about, I've always wanted to ask someone that stands up and just cross examinations or spends time working for people because they are the clients, not because they have elected them as some paragon of virtue or whatever.

51:06How morally conflicted do you get when you need to defend or work on behalf of somebody that you have doubts about their character, about how virtuous they are, or maybe you don't even particularly like them or respect them as a person or a human being, or if you destroy or annihilate somebody in cross examination. Is there a difficulty doing that? Well, so those are two different questions. So the first one I would say is, what is it like to represent an asshole, or someone you don't believe in, right? Or to weaponize against a nice person, right? So when you represent someone you know as guilty or you know as a jerk or you know probably doesn't deserve the relief, like someone is just putting the kids right in the middle to gain tactical advantage or financial advantage.

51:56You know, I was once described and I think the person meant it as a compliment, but they wrote in a review of me and it stuck that I was the sociopath you want on your side. That's what someone described me as. And I don't think I'm a sociopath, but I will tell you I believe in our system. I believe in democracy. I believe in our legal system. It's not perfect. But just like democracy, our version of democracy, it's awful except for all the other ones. I think it's a good example of how to do things right. It's not perfect, but it does things right a lot of the time. And an absolute key to it is vigorous advocacy.

52:39You know, that everyone is entitled to vigorous advocacy, whether it's if it's criminal proceeding, the state has the burden of proof, and you have the right to vigorous representation to confront witnesses, to elicit testimony, you know, to a vigorous defense. So I believe in that, and I lean on that. When I'm representing someone who I, you know, I look at them and I go, yes, this is not a nice person or a good person. I will tell you, the truth has a way of coming out. Sometimes, despite my best efforts, the truth has a way of coming out. Like, I can throw up a lot of smoking mirrors. I can do a lot of real great show.

53:17I can put on a show. And you know, people buy the sizzle as much as they buy the steak, but at the end of the day, it's the steak, you know, and you can taste if it's garbage. You can taste if it's rotted. And so the truth has a way of coming out. The truth fears no trial in my experience. Now the other question that's an interesting question, I don't think I've been asked before, is what is it like to weaponize against a person who you know is probably a nice person and to eviscerate them on the stand? And that's, I will say it's not pleasant to do from an interpersonal standpoint, But you get very, in my line of work, you get very interested in the technique of arguments.

54:04So you're really thinking more about how you're doing what you're doing than the morality of what you're doing. And again, I feel sort of like there's in a gross point blank, the John Kuzak film about an assassin. He's, he's, he's breaks into the guys who tell him to assassinate him and he's like over him with his bed. and he's got the gun and the guy wakes up and he looks at me, says, please, whatever it is, like, I'm sorry, whatever it is, don't do this. And he says, I'm not the one who has a problem with you, pal. And then he shoots the guy. You know, and it's kind of the truth. Like, I'm not the one, you know, I didn't tell you getting the ring, you know?

54:40Like, I would have told you don't. You know, but you partly get very caught up in the technique of it, you know, I love trial work. It's just, like I said, it's an intellectual kind of combat. It's like debate with higher stakes in some ways and it's with you know, it's real time like it's a it's a really it's a really It's an art form. I mean it's a it's a blast to do you know So I I really get caught more in the technique of it than the morality of it But I have a chapter in the book where I talk about a case that I should have lost and I won And that I felt quite badly about because the reason I won was that the lawyer I was against was very inexperienced and not very talented and they couldn't get a piece of evidence in and I won as a result of that and really I shouldn't have.

55:30And my client who was a vicious human being who had brutally beaten this woman up, he walked out free, you know, and he actually padded me on the back as we were walking out of court and he said, you know, one good lawyer is better than 20 stick -up men. And I remember I kind of felt dirty at the end of that case. And curiously enough, I wrote about it in the book about, I don't know, 10 years later, maybe more. And when I read my audio, when you're recording an audio book, you sit in a booth and you have to read your book. And you never read your book out loud. Like, who the hell reads their book out loud?

56:06I wrote it, but I'd never read it out loud. And you read the whole book out loud to yourself. And I got about halfway through that chapter and I got choked up and I had to like take a break. And I remember thinking, that's weird, you know, like that's, I'd not see that coming. Like I wrote that chapter and I didn't feel that way. I've read that chapter, I didn't feel that way, but something about reading that chapter out loud made it feel real to me that like I had been part of some of justice not being done. And that felt ugly. Yeah. What's the reality of the American divorce law in your opinion, just how good or bad is it?

56:45Because again, if you were to take the internet or YouTube comment section or Reddit threads perspective, it would be completely biased, it would be totally ungender blind, it would be very swayed in one direction or another. That's not entirely inaccurate. I mean, it's terribly flawed in a number of ways. I mean, one, it's flawed in a general way, the same way that a lot of other things in our society are flawed. And that is that you get as much justice as you can afford a lot of the time. Like it's not a fair fight. If someone can afford me or one of my colleagues who's experienced and knowledgeable and the other person can only afford, you know, a person who's like a real estate lawyer and also does divorce from time to time and it'll charge you 1 ,500 bucks to do your divorce.

57:36Of course, it's not gonna be a fair fight, you know. And so that's not good. There needs to be some ways to control for that better. And yeah, it's definitely not gender blind, because our society's not gender blind. I mean, it's just not. You know, I have clients who call the police when their spouse has violated a court order. And if it's a male and the police come, they'll say, wow, it sounds like a family court matter. And if it's a woman in the police come nine times out of 10, they do something about it. They call the guy and they say, you have to return the child or, hey, if you don't, you know, go leave this room, we're going to have you arrested.

58:13Like it's, so it isn't genderblind. I think it's biased against men in fairly significant ways. I think anyone who's not being naive would admit that. But, but, you know, people don't want to say that. I mean, it's, you know, I hate to say that, you know, heterosexual males,

58:32particularly protected category anymore. And the system is very much designed against them to some degree, because the financial promises that a man makes during a marriage, if he's the breadwinner, which is still the majority of breadwinners in households are men in a family where there is a breadwinner and a care provider for the family, for the children. It's typically a man by a fairly significant majority. And those promises are enforceable at law. So if I marry a woman in what I bring to the table is, I'll provide for you, I'll give you food, shelter, and funds with which to care for the things that you need.

59:11And what you'll provide me is affection and love. Okay, the law can enforce my end of that bargain. They can't enforce your end of that bargain. They can't force you to be nice to me. They can't force you to love me or sleep with me. But they can't force me to pay you. And so that creates a bias. It creates a problem. When only one side of a contract is enforceable by force of law, that's a problem. So I don't think the system, I think it's a very easy thing for people to say, oh, I didn't get custody of my kid because the system's biased. Okay, I don't think that's true. That's like a person who says, well, the reason I'm overweight is because I have a slow metabolism.

59:51Okay, well, that's easier than saying, because I'm lazy and I don't actually like to work out or I don't want to work out more because I have to work out more because I have a slow metabolism or I have to watch what I eat more because I have a slow metabolism. These are all, it's just a way to go, yeah, well, it's not my fault. I don't believe that's true, but I do still think it's tilted in a different direction. And there's things that people have to do to control for that. I think that you have to, as a father, as a parent, you have to make sure that you participate, make sure that you go to the parent teacher conferences, you go to the doctor's appointments.

1:00:25I know that's not easy necessarily if you're working and all those things to take time for those things. But remember, if you end up in litigation, those are, it doesn't matter what you know. It matters what you can prove. And people don't live their lives that way. People don't conduct their marriages and their family life that way. They don't look at it and go, how am I going to prove I'm a good father? And that's a very scary thing to have to do. But look, we're, we talk about downstream effects all the time. All the people that are talking about institutional racism and reparations and concepts like that.

1:01:00Well, what they're saying is that I appreciate that now we're running the race fair. But you gave this group a head start. You gave white heterosexual men a gigantic head start. So the rest of us are trying to catch up and although maybe the rules are fairer now for everybody and maybe it's okay But they still got to catch up. Okay, so if you believe in that concept and this idea of institutional racism or institutional sexism patriarchy all those kinds of concepts up until the mid 1970s We had what was called the maternal presumption in divorce which is that children would go to the mother automatically unless you could prove the mother was an unfit mother.

1:01:45We had something called the tender years doctrine, which meant that a mother would automatically get custody if the child was under seven unless you could prove that the mother was like an insane, suffered from serious mental illness or had serious drug addiction issues. So that wasn't that long ago the 1970s. I was born in the 1970s. So to suggest that we're now 40 years, 50 years out from that and it's gone. There's no downstream effects. It hasn't affected the judiciary at all. It hasn't affected the body of law. That's naive. And for the same people who would argue that patriarchy and sexism and institutional sexism and the fact that Harvard didn't let women in until a certain time and Yale didn't let away, all of the, you can acknowledge that, but you can't acknowledge that a system that until almost 1980 said fathers were automatically second class citizens.

1:02:37You can acknowledge that it might take a little while to get that out of the system. That's dishonest. It's intellectually dishonest. I have a problem with that. But again, we always in this culture, we treat dandruff with decapitation. You know, we have the tendency to just say, well, it's either the system is screwed and manages screwed and don't bother, or there's nothing wrong with the system. It's totally genderblind. And both of those are just totally naive and totally false. Yeah, it's very interesting. I guess it's weird to think that the dramatized versions of some of the things that we see in some of the metamemes actually end up playing out in a courtroom that you are, you know, if you've got this unbelievably ludicrous toaster of an scenario or people using private investigators or people hiding money from their spouse by sending it to a grandmother in Switzerland or whatever it is.

1:03:30Telling their Ferrari to their brother for $20 or transferring money to, I mean, there's so many things you see. And what's interesting, too, Chris, is you, I started out my career representing, you know, typical people for lack of a better term, you know, a cop at a teacher. They got two kids, 401K and a little bit of equity in their house and some credit card debt. And now I represent ultra high net worth clients, some of them. So I have clients with literally billions of dollars online, hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, because New York is the home to finance and that's, you know, listen to finance and like LA, you know, my colleague Laura Wassers and LA phenomenal attorney and she represents a huge number of people in in Hollywood, you know, in celebrities.

1:04:17And so a lot of people know Laura's name, you know, because she's like representing Brad Pitt, representing, you know, she's represented some of the most made a Kevin Kawsner, most recently represented half a Hollywood her father as well as represent a huge amounts of Hollywood star to them. In New York we represent people that could buy those people 10 times over and you've never heard their name. And they're happy that you've never heard their name. They don't want you to have heard their name. Because they become that high -blade aggras that gets chopped. But when they divorce, it is a really real, when you have a client who's portfolio fluctuates in the tens of millions every day.

1:04:57Like what day things get divided becomes really important. You know, a difference of 3%, or 4 % is a giant difference when you're talking about a $7 billion marital estate. So, you know, it's a very, but what you come to learn is that people have like all the same problems. Like it's, what's amazing to me, you know, I didn't set out to do all this media stuff. I'm a divorce lawyer, I love being a divorce lawyer. I'd heard a podcast years ago, like 2017 with Stephen King, where they said, how does it that you write like two books a year, three books a year? And he said, well, if you wrote one page every day in a year, you have a book.

1:05:39And I thought, let me test that theory. I get up early, I get up at 4 AM. So every day I wrote a page, and within a year, I had a book. And then I sold the book. And then I started doing some of this media stuff as like a part -time thing, you know, just for fun, just to use a different muscle after 20 years of doing the same job. And I'm still sort of astounded how interesting people think it is. But I'm also astounded by the people I've come in contact with because I've interacted with some of the, you know, incredible celebrities, people who I've admired intellectually, people who's, where I mean, you're an exact, I enjoy your work.

1:06:13I've watched it for ages, you know. I mean, when I sat down with Lex, it was like a little surreal because I've listened to so I was actually On the subway listening to his conversation with Andrew Huberman on my way to a courthouse in Queens I got off the subway checked my email and had a message from him saying hi I'm Lex Reedman. I have a podcast and I'd be interested in having you on and I thought yeah I know you are I was just listening to you for an hour on my subway ride like this is surreal But but truth is like this is something that you know So nobody's particularly graded it just because they're graded other things.

1:06:49Like, you know, I don't know him personally, but like, look at Elon Musk. Like he's had a number of relationships. He has children with a number of people, but he's not necessarily settled into one person. And, you know, that's maybe a, maybe totally by choice. Or it may be that he's found challenging, you know, this thing. There's a person who can do such a misdeed depth of that man's mind, you know, the things he can understand that I couldn't even try to understand. And yet, this is something he struggles with. I represent quant people in finance who can turn $10 million into $500 million in a couple of years with their trading algorithm that they came up with themselves.

1:07:30And they just suck at marriage or relationship. And they're stepping on the exact same landmines as like the guy who digs ditches, you know, and to me there's something so amazing and kind of beautiful about that, that those are the things that we all struggle with and that we all want to know more about or get some edge on. And yet, and yet, we have to pretend we don't need help with it. Like, like my book, the audiobook, I sold the book book by like 50 to one. And I said to my publisher, you know, why do you think that is? And they said, nobody wants to see your book on their coffee table. Yeah.

1:08:16And I thought about it. And the truth is, if you came to my home and you saw seven habits of highly effective people or you saw the power of habit by During, you'd go, look at Jim, man. He's successful. He's at the top of his game. but he still wants to sharpen the point of the sword. This guy, look at him. You know, he never, never satisfied. If you walked in and you saw how to make love last, you'd be like, woof, it's going on with Jim. I'm like, that's some trouble in paradise with the better half there, what's going on. And I don't know why. Like, why is this a skill that there's any shame in talking about?

1:08:49Like, why, you know, even among like sort of the manosphere and the red pill, like they're very good problem -identifiers. Not good problem solvers. Great problem identifiers. Okay, so listen guys, you want to go fuck each other? Like because that's your option now like if you've decided women are irretrievably awful You know and that the system is rigged against us and okay, cool Then either start sleeper with each other or own sleep with anybody become the weird black pill people That's the whole that's the whole perspective of make -tow right the only way to win the game is to stop playing That's that that's that's that's that's the world view but really like what a defeatist way of viewing this?

1:09:29I don't know, man. Like for me, I've railed against cynicism on the internet and then drill down and railed specifically against cynicism in dating advice on the internet. Because I think you're right. I don't understand how men are supposed to be both heroic and able to overcome anything but bow out because a girl at age 19 broke their heart and how men are supposed to be disciplined and able to overcome difficult things and go and do the Brazilian Jiu -Jitsu and lift their hard weights, but that discipline completely stops when it begins at the base of their penis. Sure. It's like, Well, and what I'll tell you is, one of the things I like about Jiu -Jitsu is that you have to suck at it for a long period of time.

1:10:14And even when you're great at it, there's still gonna be somebody who's better at all times maybe unless you're Gordon Ryan. So like everybody is gonna be, find somebody better than them. And by the way, Gordon Ryan, jump ahead 30 years. There's going to be a 20 year old who's going to tap that guy out because he's going to age. It happens to all of us You know, so the truth is like I have to believe that the solution to this starts With us being able to talk about it like we do anything else like we talk about how we exercise We talk about what we eat we talk about you know, how do we get further in the workplace But we don't have honest conversations among men, among men in conversation with women, among women in conversation with each other about what's going on in our relationships.

1:11:02And we all know this. Any single man in the dating world knows how many women on their Instagram or hashtag girl boss hashtag, I don't need a man. And then when you get them alone, they want you to be a dominant man. They want you to be someone and they'll tell you, oh yeah, I would actually really love to like be home and have kids. And by the way, all the guys that on their Instagram, they're hard as nails, they're tough as nails. They're women in their lives. We'll tell you behind closed doors, they cry at things, they're sad, they're vulnerable. But we've created this game where like we all have to play these roles with each other and we're never gonna get better at it.

1:11:41We're never gonna get better at it if we don't. And I'm again, I'm not saying we have to walk around like an open wound sharing our feelings all the, like come on, it's okay to just say, Look, this is a skill. This is a skill you can take pointers. Like my book was designed to say, here are some practical things you can do to stay connected to your partner. Here are some little things you can do, actually do that have value. Because when all of these platitudes people give it, well you need to really like pay attention to your part. What do you mean pay attention? What does that mean? Pay attention.

1:12:13You need to show them that they're loved. What does that mean? Do you want me to take them to the beach? Do you want me to buy them flowers? like what am I supposed to do practically? Like if you tell me, I'm great, like, tell me what to lift and how often to lift it, and I'll do it. Tell me what to eat and what not to eat, and I'll do that, you know? But with love, none of the, no one is allowed to give any rules. All anyone does when someone tries to offer a practical suggestion is shit on it and tell them how, oh, it's never does matter anyway, because the game is rigged and forget it, the only way, and you're right.

1:12:45The McDowell people, absolutely. The best way to not get your heart broken is to never give it to anybody else, never expose it to anybody else. That's great, man. And you know what? Ships in the port? Nothing bad ever happens to them. They never get lost. They never get stuck. They never sink. But that's not what ships are for. You know, and this is not what we're forced. Not what our lives are for. Our lives are for vibrant enjoyment of life. And that requires connection with another person. It does. We know it does. James Saxon, ladies and gentlemen, James, I really appreciate your, I love your energy.

1:13:21I love the work that you've done. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the stuff that you're doing. NYC Divorce lawyer on Instagram, I don't put much up on there. You can go to my firm's website, NYC Divorce's, and if you're in New York, I tend to do a lot of speaking and media stuff in New York, but other than that, my book's out there. You can pick it up or listen to me on Audible for eight and a half hours if you feel like it. And I have some other things in the works coming up. So just stay tuned if you go to the website, you know, it'll tell you about that. But thanks for having me, Chris.

1:13:48It's I've been a fan a long time. I love your point of view. I really think you have a unique voice that that lands in this middle ground that the world needs right now. So I really appreciate you and I appreciate the chance to us it's out here. Thank you. I appreciate you too, mate. Take care, man.