Marriage Is the Biggest Financial Risk You’ll Take — ft. James Sexton

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26:06Scott Galloway:we're back with prof g markets so james i've i've read that 70 of divorce filings are now from women and some of that is that women no longer feel in economically indentured and uh that an increase in divorce rates in some ways represents progress in our society but also that potentially women bring quote unquote more divorce energy to a relationship. And the data I saw that, and I'm very open to pushback here, is that the lowest divorce rates are among gay men, second lowest heterosexual couples, highest divorce rates, gay women. Thoughts on divorce energy by gender and different types of marriages and what you observe in terms of the likelihood of them deciding to end it?

26:49Yeah, I mean, those statistics are accurate. I think they're often weaponized in the wrong ways. So, you know, in the what I'll roughly call the red pill manosphere space, although, you know, our mutual friend Chris Williamson describes you and I and he as the gentlemanosphere. So we're sort of, you know, we have a male audience or a percentage of our audience that's male, but we don't have that sort of, you know, hardline position that made for an interesting documentary for Louis Theroux. I think the way that gets weaponized is this idea that women are somehow playing at the casino of marriage.

27:27And then when the chips get high enough, they cash out. What I think it really is, is the tendency of men more than women to go out for milk and never come back. And then what happens is the woman comes to my office or one like it and says he left. He left for his secretary. He left. And I don't know where he is. and he's not paying the mortgage and I don't know what to do. And I go, okay, we have to file a divorce action. And she goes, wait, I don't want a divorce. I didn't ask for a divorce. He's the one who left. I want him to come back. I want us to figure it out or I want us to be civilized with each other.

28:02And I say, look, if you want that mortgage paid, if you want temporary child support, we have to go to a judge. And the only way to go to a judge, there's no such thing as an action for I'd like to work it out if possible. It's an action for divorce. So we have to file the divorce section. And I can't tell you the number of divorces I've done over the span of 25 years is a high number. But I would say very few of them have ever been a woman just cashing the chips out at the casino, whereas I've had a large number where the guy just leaves and the woman ends up having to be the plaintiff. And adding indignity to that is that very often that man will say later on, well, you're the one who filed for divorce.

28:39You know, you're the plaintiff. Your mom filed for divorce. So it's misleading. But I do think the idea of divorce energy, I think we're in a, you know, unfortunately, we're in a misandrist moment, I think. And it's become very acceptable for women to engage in behavior in relation to marriage, that if it occurred with men, would be viewed very differently. I've always said that in the context even of like, you know, song, Maybe Next Time He'll Think Before He Cheats, you know, where she breaks his car with baseball bat and all these things. If that was a song by a man about maybe next time she'll think before she cheats, it would be a hate crime.

29:19Like it's multiple felonies being described in that song. And, you know, if a man cheats on a woman, even if she hasn't had sex with him in years, it's while he couldn't keep it in his pants and he's a Lothario, if a woman cheats on her husband, And even if it's with like the hot personal trainer or tennis instructor, it's, you know, he wasn't keeping her happy, her husband. She needed to figure out who she was. So if he cheats, it's his fault. If she cheats, it's his fault. And there's a lot of that energy out there on the Internet and a lot of that content. And I think the algorithm continues to drive that.

29:52And, you know, I know that you understand better than most in the context of your writing and thinking that, you know, this boys versus girls world that we've created and that the algorithm pushes because it creates engagement. You know, whether you're shouting in opposition or shouting amen, it's just engagement. And so, you know, the social media gods love it. So I think that's only increasing. We're getting further from each other and we're not recognizing what you've rightly pointed out, which is that a world in which men are flailing is not a world where women are thriving and vice versa.

30:26Scott Galloway:Such an obvious insight that men, more men end marriages than is perceived because it's the woman that ends up filing. I never thought of that. What you're saying is that number is misleading. A lot of men effectively end their marriages. They're just not the ones legally filing for divorce. Correct. Yeah. I mean, the divorce statistics that are tracked. See, I get into this conversation a lot because I talk to people about how divorce how marriage is arguably from a legal standpoint, not just a negligent activity. It's potentially a reckless activity. So the law makes a distinction between negligence and recklessness.

31:03Negligence is a failure to perceive a substantial and unjustifiable risk of serious harm. And recklessness is a conscious disregard for a substantial and unjustifiable risk of serious harm. With the divorce rate hovering just over 50 percent, and then you add to it, and there's been quite a bit of interesting studies about marriage dissatisfaction. Because remember, those are just the marriages that catastrophically failed, meaning they divorced. There was the entry of a certificate of dissolution in marriage, which means the divorce was finalized. But there's another 15 to 20 percent that are physically separated under a binding written agreement, but not finalizing a divorce for whatever reason.

31:41So they can stay on each other's health insurance, religious reasons, whatever it might be. And then there are the percentages of people, and there's been a lot of interesting research on this, that stay unhappy in a relationship, either for the children or because they don't want to give away half their things or economic insecurity that you can't move out now of two cable bills because you're barely affording your single cable bill. So it really turns into something where statistically, this is a very unlikely to succeed enterprise and one that is likely to cause tremendous harm. But again, it's wildly popular.

32:14And it's not one that we would ever ask the question of someone. And like if Ed said, hey, guess what? My girl and I were getting married. If I said, really, why? That would be indelicate. That would be a rude question to ask. Whereas most things that catastrophically fail 50 % of the time and generally fail to achieve the objective, which was living happily ever after roughly 75 % of the time, it's not unreasonable to say to this person, hey, what are you what is the problem to which marriage is a solution? And, you know, my graduate work before I went to law school was at NYU, and I was Neil Postman's research assistant on a few of his books.

32:54And I was in his department, the Department of Culture and Communication. And when I was there, you know, Neil had this approach to technology of saying, anytime you encounter any technology, ask yourself, what is the problem to which this technology is a solution? Who has that problem? How does it practically solve the problem? And what new problems might it unintentionally cause? And if you apply that model to the technology of marriage, you're going to have people that are going to approach it very differently because marriage is, above all else, a contract with the state in regards to the rule set for your relationship.

33:31And that's not how most people look at it.

33:33Scott Galloway:So I just want to push back or ask for a follow-up on that 50 % number, because my understanding of the 50 % number is that each year at that moment, they look at the number of marriages, the number of divorces, and they divide one into another. But my understanding is that a lot of divorces coming to fruition right now are a function of the economic dependence women may have felt 20, 30, 40 years ago that they no longer feel. and that if you look at the data around young people, Gen Z and millennials getting married now who start out on more of an economic equal footing, that the divorce rates may in fact be much lower, that that 50 % number is actually misleading and young people getting married today will in fact have much lower divorce rates.

34:19So I've spent a lot of time discussing this and defending this. So I've really done the research on it. So, you know, and I'm going to rely a little bit on notes here, but because I want to get the numbers right. But, you know, there's what we call the crude divorce rate. And the CDC does the National Vital Statistics system that looks at a crude divorce rate of approximately 2.5 per 1 ,000 population in recent years, which, again, seems low in the scheme of things. But it translates to literally hundreds of thousands of divorces. Second and third marriages, it's much higher. Second marriages, you're looking at 60 to 67 percent.

34:55Third marriage is 73 to 74 percent. You know, what's really interesting is couples who marry before the age of 25 have a significantly higher divorce rate, roughly 60 percent. And couples where one or both partners did not complete college divorce at much higher rates than college educated couples. So what often happens is people do a great job of lying with statistics on this because they'll say, well, you know, a survey of college educated women over the age of 30 at divorce rates only five percent. You're like, right. You just cherry picked people who graduated college, which is not the majority of the world and or of the United States and people who marry after the age of 25.

35:40And so this is like you're again, you're picking a statistical model that's going to work best for you. And then on top of that, like I said, you have these statistics of a marital breakdown without a formal divorce. And the American Psychological Association did some good work on that. The U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey. Bowling Green State University has something called the National Center for Family and Marriage Research. And they've done a ton of research, not with that simplified model of saying, here's the marriage rate, here's the divorce rate, and let's match those up. Because people are very rarely in the same year getting married and divorced.

36:14And when you have things like the pandemic, where the court system essentially slowed or shut down for a period of time, then, of course, right after, you know, the world sort of came out of lockdown, there was a glut and backlog of divorces. that happened. So really, you have to look at the data in a long-term way, and you have to sort of try to control for all of those variables. But the marriage rate has gone down. The divorce rate has gone down as a function of the marriage rate going down. But what's frightening in terms of what you'd call like the refined divorce rate is it's really the majority of Americans, and people don't like to talk about that, but the majority of Americans don't have a college education.

37:01And the college education framing is a very important piece of this because there is such a disparity in the divorce rate when people are college educated versus not college educated. And again, I'm not sure of the reasons behind that. I'm sure there are people more qualified than me to answer that. But if one in four planes crashed, people just wouldn't fly. And so even if you just said 25 % of marriages catastrophically fail in divorce, I think that would be a very frightening number. But again, I still think legal separation and unhappily married, like there's what's called the Toshiro estimate, which was a psychologist named Tai Toshiro wrote a book called The Science of Happily Ever After.

37:44He talks about the percentages of people who express real satisfaction in their marriage. And I'll tell you, some of the stuff that comes out of that is absolutely terrifying. Because what you've got basically is 42 to 45 percent of people that formally divorce, three to four percent separate without divorcing, and 14 to 19 percent report their marriages is unhappy, loveless, feeling obligated to stay, and actually report that they dislike their spouse. Now, I don't think anybody who gets married is saying that would be success. That if I could maintain that level of connection, that would be success.

38:25So again, are we looking at marriage as an endurance race, that if you don't divorce, you won? Or are we looking at it as we maintain this high level of connection and goodwill with each other and that we say, hey, I don't regret this choice that I made. And I think that impacts the statistics in a real way. We try on this show, this is Prof G Markets, so we try to look at things through a general lens of economics and economic security. One of our views, and I'd be curious to get your perspective on this, is that marriage, if just strictly from an economic security perspective, is generally a good thing, that it means that we kind of get our shit together, we work harder.

39:06We notice this anecdotally among the people who work at our company. But generally speaking, if you're trying to get rich, if you're trying to build economic security, then you should probably be trying to get married too. And I have some follow-up questions, but first I want to hear your response to that question. I don't disagree. I mean, I think a successful marriage is a tremendous asset. I think Warren Buffett, you know, said that the best investment he ever made was his marriage and that, you know, choosing the right spouse is the most important economic decision you're ever going to make.

39:40I think many, many people would agree with that. I represent a tremendous number. You know, I'm in New York. So, you know, if you're talking to Laura Wasser, you know, she's going to tell you about her clients that are all celebrities. My clients, you'd pass them on the street. You wouldn't know who they are. Scott might know. You might, you guys might actually, you recognize a different, you guys are a different kind of geek, you might be like, hey, I know him. He's from BlackRock, you know. But they're the Patagonia vest-wearing guys that I do the prenups for when they marry a yoga teacher. And what I'll say is, yeah, I think they realize value.

40:09You know, they see that this is bringing something to my life. And I think what that is, is it's eliminating a certain noise, and that is the noise of mate selection. It's grounding someone, you know, in connection with another person. I mean, look, I'm still very much a romantic at heart, even after doing this for 25 years. I think that the value that a good, strong relationship brings to someone in their life is you can't measure it. I mean, I've seen some incredibly successful people have incredibly successful marriages. By the way, I don't think a marriage has to last forever for it to be successful.

40:48I think you know, you can have a happily ever after separately. You know, my ex-wife has been remarried for 15 years. She's a wonderful person. The man she married is a wonderful guy. I consider him part of our family, you know, and we raised our sons as a group. And I'm so blessed to have had that chapter. And I think that it would be much healthier if we viewed relationships as chapters in a long story. And I think, you know, marriage came about when most women died in childbirth, and most men died before they were 50. And now, happily ever after, marriage is running into the same problems that the pension system is running into, which is it made sense when you paid in for 20 years, and then you died when you were in payout for 10 years.

41:33But now, you pay in for 25 years, and then your defined benefit plan kicks in, and it's paying you for the next 40 years. This is why the postal system is going to go under, because the pension, it was not designed for these current climate conditions. I mean, marriage is, like so many other things, we are primates living in medieval institutions with godlike technology in our hands. Like, how does that story end? Does it end with a happily ever after? Does it end with a tremendous amount of confusion? I think it creates a lot of confusion. But I do think, again, if you get it write the stability and security that a pair bond brings, even without children.

42:15Like, with children, of course, I think it takes multiple people and it takes, you know, a tremendous amount of energy. I won't even call it masculine or feminine energy because I actually think it's human traits that tend to cluster in men or cluster in women for a variety of reasons, but it takes the unique skill set of multiple people to raise children successfully. And I think marriage is a great opportunity to bond very closely with another person in raising new humans, or even if you don't have children, in navigating the self and having someone there who genuinely sees your blind spots and calls them out with real love and helps you.

42:56Again, when I gave my example earlier about what I hope on your deathbed you get to say, it's not this person became who I wanted them to be. It's I helped this person become the most authentic version of who they are, who they were. And I think that is something we need other people to be able to do. Given how high these marriage rates have gotten, it seems as though that's something that everyone should at least recognize. Yes, you're getting into this relationship, this also contractual agreement, which might pay dividends later Hopefully it will. That's why you're doing it. But also, it comes with tremendous, tremendous risk, which makes me think, shouldn't everyone be signing prenups?

43:39What is your advice to most people getting married today? Every marriage has a prenup. It's either one that was written by the state legislature or the state in which you reside and can be changed by them without your consent. And then once they change it, you don't have the right to opt out anymore. I mean, find me another contract where you sign up for something and they can change the essential terms. And you're not allowed to say, well, wait a minute. If you change the amount of my car lease, I don't want it anymore. No, you change what apartment I get in my apartment lease. No, no, I signed up for this one.

44:11Like the state legislature in the state in which you reside for a period of six months or more has jurisdiction over your divorce. And they can change. Now, by the way, I don't care what side of the political aisle, left, right or a raging moderate. That was my little plug for you, Scott. The reality is you put yourself in this situation and you're, I guarantee over the last 16 years, every single person you know has looked at the government at some point and said, these people are idiots. So you're signing a prenup with the government or the person you like better than the other 8 billion other options.

44:47You tell me. You tell me which of those two things is more sensible. relying on a future government that will be elected by a popularity contest and you hope it'll work out and the rules that they came up with will make sense for your specific dynamic or this person and I, this person I've chosen out of the 8 billion options, we are going to make a rule set for our marriage. There is no contest there as far as I'm concerned. I think some people would say that the trouble is that it's a little overwhelming. And at least if you're going with what the government has decided, you're depending on some level of precedent for these very, very difficult questions that often do have to do exactly with money, the kinds of questions that people don't really want to confront.

45:28So I guess my follow-up question for you is, what kinds of things should be going into a prenup? How should couples be thinking about their finances? Are they together? Are they separate? What are the kinds of things you run into? Yeah, look, it may be a difficult conversation. And that's what I was saying earlier about don't marry someone if you can't have difficult conversations with them. The solution to it, though, is, look, I've been to the DMV. I've never walked into the DMV and thought, oh, yeah, these people should be in charge of everything. They've got this whole thing locked down. I'm going to put them in charge of my finances.

45:58This is great. This is the best and brightest the world has to offer. Like, that's who you're trusting if you don't do a prenup together. But look, I've represented victims of intimate partner abuse, coercive control, domestic violence for many years. And what I will say is I've learned conclusively from that that you cannot feel loved if you don't feel safe. Like the most important thing is to feel safe. And safety comes in a lot of forms. It comes in the form of physical safety, which is obviously the most important, but also emotional safety, economic safety. When you love someone enough to marry them, you should want them to feel safe.

46:35And, you know, there's a line from a song by Prince off the album Sign of the Times. It's a song called If I Was Your Girlfriend. And Prince, as a man, is singing it to a woman he's dating. And one of the lyrics is, if I was your girlfriend, would you run to me if somebody hurt you, even if that somebody was me? And I always thought that was a very romantic line. Because the truth is, like, that's what a prenup conversation is. What are you afraid of? Like, what are you afraid of in this relationship? I'm afraid that I'm going to sacrifice a bunch of things and trust you to take care of the finances, and I'm going to diminish my lifetime earning capacity, and then you're going to find a younger model and split.

47:13Hey, you know what? That's a very fair thing to be afraid of. There's lots of examples of that you can point to. So say it out loud. Sometimes when you're afraid of something, you know, Scott knows this as a father, you know, when my kids were little and they would say out loud, like, yeah, I'm afraid of this, or I think there might be something under the bed. Like, that's the way you go, okay, let's look. Let's look under there. Let's put the light over here and let's see what that is. You know, let's not, you don't do well by like pretending it's not something you're afraid of. So I think sharing with each other, look, I'm afraid that you're going to weaponize against me someday and try to take everything I built, including the things I had before we got married, and that you're going to, the threat of litigation is going to be so potentially expensive and the valuation of my business interests is going to be, and the things I'm going to do for wealth preservation and tax avoidance that are legitimate, fair things are going to get weaponized and spun in the full context storytelling that is divorce law.

48:08And the lawyers are going to walk out with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fee and we're going to walk out with a lot less and a lot of pain. And I don't want that. Okay, those are both really legitimate fears. If we can give them voice, I think if you love someone, you'll want to understand their fear and not go, oh, you don't trust me? You'll look at it and say, okay, I know you trust me, but you're afraid. It's okay to be afraid. Let's figure out how we can make each other feel safe. Is there some form of managing finances? Is there a way to go about the money problem in a relationship, in a marriage that is ultimately either going to maybe decrease the likelihood of getting a divorce, or if we're not trying to make a boogeyman out of divorce that makes the divorce less difficult, that is, generally speaking, a good thing for the marriage.

48:58Obviously, everything in a relationship, like how much sex should people be having? What should they do in terms of dinner rituals or date nights? I think the particular chemistry of two people is important to look at. So I'm not a fan of giant, like one-size-fits-all approaches. But what I will say is, for me, I think a very sensible system that I can understand is the yours, mine, and ours. Because I think really our relationships are based on a series of Venn diagrams. You know, like there's the you, the me, and the we. And like, you know, you met her, there was you, and there was she, and then there's we.

49:32And so whether it's economic or whether it's interests or how we spend our time, you want that Venn diagram to continue to be a Venn diagram. Like there's a temptation to make the we, because it's so warm and cozy, to make the we everything and reject all the you and the me. But that's not healthy because you fell in love with each other and that's the you and the me. So the we wouldn't exist if you didn't like each other. So you can't let it subsume your identity. And I think the same thing financially. I think that there should be some shared sense of the finances, but there should also be some separateness.

50:04If I'm buying you a Christmas present and you're going to always see exactly how much it costs, we have no privacy or autonomy in our spending. And so, again, I think for each couple, the conversation about what should be the you, the me, and the we economically, it's the same conversation that you should be having on every other thing, which is what do you want? What do I want? What's good for us? And how do we have that, you know, check-in? And again, it's kind of like estate planning. When somebody says to me, you know, when should I do my estate planning? I would say early and often, you know, and it's the same thing.

50:40Like you can, you should check in early in the relationship and often. And constantly say, is this still working for the two of us? Because you're going to see on a long timeline as a young buck, you're going to see that as time goes on, like what's incredibly important in your 30s and even in your 40s, it shifts. It starts to change. Like it moves in different directions. And again, that's not necessarily a bad thing. As long as you say to each other, hey, something changed. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it just a function of the natural flow and progression of time? That's, I think, the most important thing is to have the mechanisms for just constantly checking in.

51:22We'll be right back. And by the way, First Time Founders is officially moving to the Prof G Markets feed. The first episode on the feed is coming out tomorrow with the CEO and co-founder of Portiful. You can find it right here on Prof G Markets.

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53:49Scott Galloway:We're back with Prof G Markets. You said something that, some data that was really illuminating, that people who get married when they're over the age of 25 have lower divorce rates and people with college educations have lower divorce rates. So if you take away that as you get older, you're more mature, better perspective, and if you are fortunate enough to have a college degree, it doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter, but maybe have more historical context. Maybe even again, you're blessed with not only privilege, but maybe some perspective that comes from education. Isn't the takeaway that it's a smart thing to do to wait to get married and also a really smart thing to try and stay married?

54:32Yeah. I mean, I think you can make that argument from that data. The downside of making that argument is the biological reality of people wanting to marry for the purpose of having children. So if you say to somebody, and this is where this, you know, this becomes such a fraught conversation to have. And somehow, you know, thankfully I've managed to like have it without too much offending either side, partly because I've represented both sides of every single argument in the divorce space, you know? And so whenever somebody, like I posted something a few weeks ago on International Women's Day that got me a lot of negative and positive, you know, press, because I posted five of the wealthiest women in the world, and the majority of them, the ones that I posted, were all billionaires as a function of divorce.

55:27And, you know, of course, I was immediately getting attacked and people were saying, you know, well, didn't these women deserve this? And I wanted to say, what argument do you -

55:36Scott Galloway:The men were billionaires because of the women they married. What argument do you think I make in court? Like, I represent those women and I represent the men they're married to in roughly equal measure. So, like, I'm, I think it's hilarious when people are saying to me an argument that I've made in a court, you know, they're saying like, well, don't you know that those women contribute? Of course I know those women contribute. I've made those arguments. Some of those women are my clients. So of course I get that. But I also get the other side of that argument as well. I think the truth of marriage statistics is people who have a college education, it's usually a sign of other things like they're, you know, again, the substance use disorder rates related to a person who has a college education and doesn't.

56:21This is not a function of the fact that they had a good liberal arts education. This is a function of the fact that this is a person who probably had the economic stability that they could go to college in the present climate. You know, again, it's not, you know, it's not your story of a person who could get into a state school and could do that. They're not. I went back to I went to a state school in New Jersey. I went to Ramapo College of New Jersey. And they asked me about 10 years ago to come back and to speak at an open house. and, you know, I was very effusive about the fact that, hey, I didn't have good SAT scores.

56:54I was a really unambitious, bad student. I had long hair and a bad attitude. And I said, you know, this is a school that took a chance on me. And I'm so grateful of the fact that I moved on to become someone very successful. And afterwards, one of the admissions people came to me and said, you know, this was so great and you were so funny. But in the future, when you come, like, maybe don't talk about that because you wouldn't get in now. Like you then wouldn't get in now. And I said, do you know how horrified you should be to say that out loud? Like, because you just admitted you would have passed on me.

57:30And look at me. You have me speaking here today. So I think that there is a reality. And I mean, again, I don't want to sound like a me in college saying there's no war but the class war. But I do think that that, you know, if you really care, this is why I always think it's funny when like right wing conservatives, you know, I debated with Matt Walsh on The Daily Wire about this because he was very gung ho about how we got to get rid of no fault divorce. you know that no fault divorce is to blame for the demise of marriages which is kind of like saying like emergency rooms are to blame for the number of injuries people have like you're mistaking cause and effect and you're thinking barriers to exit i would actually say barriers to entry makes more sense like you gotta you know it's the most legally significant thing you're ever going to do other than die and you don't even have to take a test you know before you do it or fill out like there's no waiting period nothing like that but if the right really cared about about marriage and keeping marriages together, they would care about creating economic stability.

58:25They would care about creating opportunities for people to go to college and to be able to get educated. They would look at the raw data and say, hey, this improves marriage outcomes, so let's feed that. And that, by the way, would have a lot of other cascading effects because that would increase the number of people that don't deal with, you know, substance use disorder, which, again, when you take that demographic out, improves the marriage rate. So all of these things, they're all tied to each other. And the answer is not that difficult to suss out, but it's not going to be popular among the left or the right.

58:57The left, because it's got a lot of gender stuff in it, which becomes fraught terrain. And on the right, they don't want to have to look at the fact that the wealth disparity in the United States is a big piece of this. When we look at the way that divorce rates have changed over time, also we've been talking about how young people are not really dating as much as they used to, they're not having sex as much as they used to, and they're not really having children as much as they used to. I think the stuff that always kind of shocks me is the fact that around half of Gen Z, my generation, say they don't want to have children.

59:34A lot of people are trying to figure out why is that. We believe that it's mostly to do with financial anxiety. But I guess my question, as someone who is literally a practitioner of marriage and divorce, how would you say that the digital age has changed marriage? And are there any ways, I mean, I guess, how has it changed marriage as an institution for the worst? And perhaps, has it maybe changed marriage for the better? It has not changed marriage for the better. It has changed it for the worse, I think unequivocally. There's a chapter in my book called, if we were going to invent an infidelity generating machine, it would be called Facebook.

1:00:11I would probably change that now to meta because I think Instagram and TikTok are better. But look, I think, you know, Ed, you're too young to remember the song Part-Time Lover by Stevie Wonder. But it was a song about a man who's having an affair and he's singing to his mistress. And he says, you know, call up, ring once, hang up the phone to let me know you made it home. So then my wife won't suspect, you know. And the whole song is about like, if there's an emergency, have a male friend call and ask for me. Now it would just be, I'm going to text you. Don't worry. I'll DM you. We have created technologies that are wildly antagonistic to monogamous pair bonds.

1:00:48Because A, you're watching everyone else's relationship greatest hits while living your gag reel, which creates this endless comparison. And by the way, I cannot tell you how many people, celebrities, because I represent a lot of athletes, celebrities, that I see them on social media, hashtag blessed greatest husband ever. And they were just in my office. They were just in my office for a consultation. They've been living apart for the last two years. Like, this is this is an absolute. But but again, we don't show that to anybody. And then what happens is one day they just go. It's with great pain.

1:01:25We tell you that we're separating. We'd like some privacy during this difficult time as we navigated and move on in our relationship. We're grateful for the gifts that we gave each other in our conscious uncoupling. Like, and this is, but, but meanwhile, the rest of us, the civilians are looking at this and going like, I have my relationship doesn't look like that. They're so happy. Look at how happy they are. And by the way, at the same time, while we're again, when, when are you looking at your social media? Like when you're bored, when you're on the subway or on the toilet, it's not when you're having like great moments.

1:01:52So you're watching everyone's greatest hits. You're sitting in this bored, sad moment of your own. And what are you looking at? Everyone's curated, wonderful life. and you now have reasons to communicate with people you have absolutely no business communicating with. Like in the past, if you wanted to flirt with a woman who was one of the moms on your son's soccer team, you would have had to like slide up to her in person at practice, which is pretty obvious. Whereas following her on Facebook or Instagram, because there's a group where you guys share information about who's doing rides and who's doing snacks, well, that's perfectly harmless.

1:02:26And now you're seeing her vacation pictures with her in a bikini. And you have a message, oh, where'd you guys stay in Tulum? We were thinking about maybe going our cell. Oh, well, you look great, you know, da-da-da. Now we're talking. And we're talking privately, by the way. Like, if at the soccer practice I grabbed that mom and was like, let's go over here behind the bleachers and talk, everyone would look and go, what are you doing, man? Whereas if I'm doing that on the couch next to my wife, she doesn't even know I'm having that conversation. So there is so much coming at marriage right now that I am shocked that the divorce rate isn't higher than it is and that the marriage satisfaction rate is going to survive this at all because there is just such an endless progression of comparison and false performative things.

1:03:12I want to believe, the optimist in me wants to believe that part of the popularity of my work is how honest and blunt I am about the challenges we're facing, but how it has not taken my optimism and belief in love and how ultimately the most important thing in life is to find deep connection and to feel loved and to feel worthy of love. I think our greatest fear is that if people knew us, the real us, they couldn't possibly love us. And I think that real romantic love is about someone looking at you and seeing, I see you. I see the good, the bad, the fool in you, the hero in you, and I love you.

1:03:59I love the whole thing of you, and I'm cheering for you. And I believe in you. To me, that's the most worthwhile, beautiful sentiment in the world. It's a superpower if you find it and can keep it. But like everything that has value, it requires some effort. And I think we're not doing anybody any favors by pretending that it's effortless. You know, we make these rom-coms and it's like everything's fine. They live happily ever after. Right. Because you end the story. you know but if jack had survived the titanic eventually kate winslet's character would have been like dude what with painting the french girls are we gonna get a real job what are you doing you know and it it we're not doing people a service by showing them like only the greatest hits and not the day-to-day maintaining of connection part james sexton has been an attorney

1:04:47Scott Galloway:in new york since 2001 he holds a law degree from fordham law school and a master of arts degree from NYU, where he focuses graduate studies on persuasive speech and propaganda. After nearly two decades of refining his skills as a lawyer in the courtrooms of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Rockland, Westchester, and Orange Counties, James earned a place in the top 1 % of family law attorneys practicing in New York. James is the bestselling author of If You're In My Office, It's Already Too Late, How to Stay in Love, and How Not to Fuck Up Your Marriage. He's also the host of the podcast, Better Call Sexton.

1:05:20Scott Galloway:James, this was entertaining and meaningful. Very much appreciate your time and good work. Thank you. It was a pleasure, Scott. I'm a fan of your work for many years now. And if I had a dollar for every person that said to me, you and Scott Galloway should chat sometime. And I do have to say, I owe you a big one. I've heard the same thing. Yeah. I owe you a big one, too, because you got me through the pandemic. I jokingly say that you and Cody Rigsby were my two best friends in the pandemic because I listened to Pivot constantly during that time. And it was like a lifeline. And I remember, and I did Peloton rides like three times a day.

1:05:54And Cody Rigsby was like my savior. So no, I'm thrilled we finally intersected. We have a lot of people in common. And I'm glad, Ed, that we got to meet as well. And it's always fun. I like Scott. I really share Scott's passion and enthusiasm for men connecting with younger men and us trying to sort of collaboratively share our life experience and wisdom and share from you and get from you, you know, all the different perspective that you bring to the older guys like us. So I think we're all really lucky to have each other. I'm really glad we chatted and I hope we'll connect again. Really appreciate it, James.

1:06:27Thank you so much. It's a blast. Good to see you guys.

1:06:39Scott Galloway:go up reactions uh so i really enjoyed james content because just as we've normalized i think it's important we normalize talking about cancer before you didn't talk about even when my mom got cancer i remember you like you only told your closest friends because it was somehow embarrassing Then we normalized mental health struggles. You never said, oh, my kid's struggling with anxiety or I'm in a relationship with someone who's bipolar. And we've normalized that, which is really healthy or made it a topic of conversation, which is an acceptable topic of conversation. And I think divorce is finally an acceptable topic of conversation outside of kind of TMZing it.

1:07:19Scott Galloway:And it's something I consider one of my biggest failures. You know, I had a wonderful relationship with my ex and I'm still very fond of her. We still speak pretty regularly. really. And it's just, I find his, I find his content comforting because I think, I mean, I actually don't think he's a divorce attorney. I mean, he may be in practice during the day, but on TikTok, he's basically a marriage counselor. He's basically saying, these are the, it's like, if you want to understand how to be a good pilot, you should go to airdisaster.com and listen to every black box recording of every crash in history.

1:07:56Scott Galloway:So you know how to avoid air disasters. And I think he's very instructive and informative for people your age around how you, what are the red flags? How do you set yourself up for success? So I really like his content. I also appreciate, I think he's a fantastic communicator. He's sort of, again, I said this, he's kind of tailor-made for TikTok. Your thoughts, Ed? Also tailor-made for podcasts. I mean, I was just gripped the entire time. Yeah, I found it really interesting, the thing he said about prenups, the fact that you're signing a prenup either way, and it's either you sign it with your spouse or you sign it with the government.

1:08:34And it just kind of got me thinking. I mean, it reminds me of a conversation that we had with Ramit Sethi, where Ramit was talking about this cult of home ownership, this idea that everyone believes that you have to own a home. And so we'll kind of do whatever we can just to make sure that we can say, yes, I am a homeowner. And then we forget about all the fixed costs. And we just completely disregard doing the cost-benefit analysis of could I be renting versus owning. And it makes me think that marriage is kind of one of those things that there's almost a cult of marriage where we're so obsessed with the precedent, we're so obsessed with what you're supposed to do, that we refuse and get anxious at the concept of just thinking for ourselves.

1:09:22and the prenup is almost the perfect example of that. Like his point is exactly right. You're signing a prenup either way, but it's up to you on whether you want to negotiate the terms of your own relationship or if you want to outsource those terms to someone else. So I guess my big takeaway from him is I think he's really empowering people to think about the institution of marriage. One, he's promoting it because he believes that it's a good thing, which I appreciate. I think it's a good thing too. But he's kind of encouraging us to rethink the terms or at least view it from a more first principles perspective and think, okay, what are we actually trying to do here?

1:10:03What is the goal of this? And that's a far more powerful and wise decision versus just doing things because that's what everyone else does. So that's kind of what resonated for me.

1:10:15Scott Galloway:I always joke about it. I always say, when I meet women that I'm attracted to, I'm like, number three. And now the pod is ruined. Oh, my best line. You could be the future ex-Mrs. Galloway. Zero lessons learned.

1:10:50Drew Burrows is our technical director, and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday.

1:11:23Reunion as the world turns and the dark lights in love.

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