Why 73% of Divorces Are Filed by Women +: Why Social Media is Causing Divorce with James Sexton (Divorce Attorney)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
No one has all the answers, but when we ask
the right questions, we get a little closer, closer to truths,
closer to each other, even closer to ourselves. I'm journalist
Danielle Robe and each week, my guests and I come
together to challenge the status quo and our own ways
of thinking by daring to ask what if, why not?

(00:28):
And who says?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
So?

Speaker 1 (00:30):
Come curious, dig deep, and join the conversation. It's time
to question everything. Hello. Hello, I hope you're having an
amazing week. I'm going to be quick at the top
because this week's episode is I think one of the
best of the year, best of all time. Our guest

(00:52):
James Sexton, is unbelievable. But I just wanted to say
hi because a lot has happened. I've been back back
and forth to New York, Chicago, LA, back to New York,
back to Chicago, and We've been doing live podcast episodes
for Reese's Book Club, and I got to interview Reese

(01:12):
live for the first time, which was amazing. I got
to talk to Alison Williams. And I also had a
little family thing happened. My grandmother passed away. My dad's mom,
her name was Barbara, and a lot of you know
that Robe is actually my middle name, and Barbara is

(01:32):
the BA in Robe. I was named after my two grandmothers.
And I went home to Chicago and I was on
the plane trying to see her, trying to get to her,
and she passed away while I was on the plane,
which was brutal. But I'm sharing this to tell you
that I got to Lincolnwood, which is where she lives

(01:58):
or lived, and I saw her body and I'd never
seen a dead body before. Sorry, I know this is
a lot, but I promised it. It has a point.
So I grabbed her hand and I was a little frightened,
and my mom grabbed it with me, and she was like,
you know, it's still, It's still you're Nana. And I

(02:19):
was looking at her and she would have been ninety
three in December, and I'd always say, Nana, how old
do you feel? And she would say she called me Dolly,
and she would say, Dolly, I think I think I'm
twenty eight. Forever I feel twenty eight. And the reason
I'm sharing this is I was looking at her body,

(02:41):
thinking it goes by so quickly, and so if there
is something that you really want to do, if you
want to accomplish it, if you want to make a
new friend, like however big or small it is, take
this as your sign to go and do it, because I,

(03:03):
honestly I was staring at her body, thinking, we have
to take a big bite out of life. We only
get one of these and it really does go by
so quickly. And a lot of you have heard this
story because I posted it on Instagram. But when I
was growing up, my mom would sit on a park

(03:25):
bench with me, and honestly, since I was four years old,
she would say, Danielle, do you see all these people
walking around living their lives. You can either go and
be part of the world and go live yours, or
you can sit on this park bench and watch people
live theirs. And I think about those things, and I'm like,

(03:46):
if you want something, go get it. It is so possible.
It is truly perseverance and hard work. And you know,
I zoom with one, if not two of you a week,
and each week I am blown away by how amazing
you are. You're such doers and dreamers and truly beautiful minds,

(04:11):
and so you know all of this. I'm not telling
you anything new. But I think sometimes life events and
platitudes just remind us of what's important. So that's really
my message to you today. And that was longer than
I expected, But it is time for today's episode. And

(04:33):
James Sexton is I don't curse a lot, but he
is fucking fabulous. He's amazing. I think you're gonna love him,
So let's get into this episode. We live in a
world obsessed with finding the one, from Romeo and Juliet
to The Notebook Bridgerton to The Bachelor. It's one of

(04:56):
the few stories every generation keeps rewriting. Nowadays, we swipe
instead of court people, and we text instead of write letters.
But here's what I was thinking about. We question gender monogamy,
what partnership even means, and yet marriage, this century old ritual,
still stands for all of our reinvention. Marriage remains one

(05:19):
of the last traditional institutions people still believe in and
chase and fight to keep. Maybe it's because beneath the
politics and paperwork, marriage represents the same thing. It always
has the hope that someone will choose us and keep
choosing us even as we change and vice versa. But

(05:40):
if marriage falls apart, who do we call a lawyer,
and James Sexton is that lawyer. As one of the
country's top divorce attorneys, he's seen the private lives of
people who once promised each other forever, and he's seen
the full spectrum of human longing, devotion, betrayal, rage and forgiveness.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
People out of their therapists, but they don't lie in
their lawyer.

Speaker 1 (06:03):
He's been called the sociopath you want on your side,
but the truth is James might be one of the
most emotionally intelligent men you'll ever meet. And you know
what's interesting His book. If you're in my office, it's
already too late, isn't really about divorce. It's about how
to stay out of one. We talked for nearly three hours.
Don't worry, I edited this episode down. I know you

(06:25):
don't have three hours to give the pod this week,
but I left James that evening with a reminder that
sometimes the clearest truths about something come from studying its opposite.
It's like how in art, the negative space makes you
finally see the shape that is. Have you ever seen
Matisa's blue nudes? If you haven't, or you can't picture
what I'm talking about, look it up when you have time.

(06:48):
Matisse made a series of collages from blue paper cutouts
depicting nude figures in various positions and the cutouts they're beautiful,
but it's the white space that makes them gorgeous. Sometimes
absence reveals more than presents. Divorce does that too, It
shows us what love really is when everything else is
stripped away. My point is James deals in divorce, but

(07:12):
what he's really an expert in is love. What sustains it,
what erodes it, and what it reveals about who we
are when the illusion fades. By helping people separate, he's
learned what it actually takes to stay together. So the
question we're circling today is what does marriage actually mean?
And why do we keep doing it when so many

(07:34):
of us fail at it? The question we're circling today
is what does marriage actually mean? And why do we
keep doing it when so many of us fail at it?
It's time to question everything with James Sexton. When people
sit down with you, James, they have such a clear

(07:56):
idea of what they want in mind, which is how
to prevent divorce. That's what every interviewer wants to know.
I'm sure which.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
Is the opposite of my day job. My day job
is people sitting down and saying, like, how do I
facilitate the demise of this unhappy marriage? So it's really
interesting that this aspect of my career. Yeah, it's the
total opposite period, like how do I stay married? And
all day long people like, how do I no longer
be married?

Speaker 1 (08:21):
But I think it's so much So you wrote a
book about how people can stay out of your office.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
It was really based on the premise. When I was
a kid, my mom used to say to me that
it's really hard to define intelligence, but you can spot
stupid a mile away. So for me, a definition of
intelligence was always an absence of stupid. So I sort
of realized after like twenty something years of doing the
job of sitting across from people whose marriages were ending

(08:45):
and having a very unfiltered view of it and really
getting to see it in like this authentic way, because
people lie to their therapists, but they don't lie to
their lawyer. Like the two people you should never lie to,
as your doctor or your lawyer. Our whole job is
to protect you, and privilege is attached, so we can't
tell anybody anything. You said, so I felt like, you know,
I've kind of learned what screws up relationships in this

(09:06):
really honest, authentic way, and maybe what a good relationship
is one that doesn't have all of this awful stuff
attached to it. And that's you know where it came from.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
Well, I read that you are described as the sociopath
you want on your side when people walk in your office.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
That is quite a tagline my line of work, being
a trial lawyer in divorce, people say things to you
than any other profession.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
It would be a terrible insult. Like I've had people sit.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
Across from me on the first time they meet me
and say, I've heard you're a ruthless son of a
bitch and that's why I'm here, you know, and you
kind of go in any other world that would be
an insult. But I guess I understand what you're saying,
which is like, you've heard that I'm very tenacious. I
think as a divorce lawyer, it's pretty common that you
have to argue different sides of issues, so people start
to think, oh, you mustn't have any moral compass, you know,

(09:54):
because you're willing to represent the victim of domestic violence,
and then in another case you're representing the p a
trainer of domestic violence, and in one case you're representing
the cheater and in the other case the person who's
been cheated on.

Speaker 3 (10:05):
And they sort of say, well, how could you possibly
do both of those things?

Speaker 2 (10:08):
But you know, you really do learn a lot about
human emotional complexity doing the job, and I actually don't
think it makes you associopath. I think it's the opposite.
You have to be very sensitive and empathetic and try
to put yourself in the head of the person that
you're representing and understand the most sort of intimate and
forgiving kind of way.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
You kind of just mentioned that therapy and law in
what you do are a little bit connected. You wrote
in your book that you're privy to more of a
person's true life than any therapist. What has that kind
of access to other people taught you. It's such a
rare thing that you get to experience.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
Yeah, I mean, it's taught me a lot. It's taught
me everything. I mean. I dedicated my book to my
clients because of the things they trust me with. Twenty
five years of doing this job, I'm still absolutely humbled
by the fact that people are trusting me with the
most important things in their life, like their children, their time,
that they're going to get to see their children, the

(11:06):
intimate details of their finances, their home. It's like shocking
to me. I've learned a ton from my clients. I mean,
I've learned a lot about myself from my clients. I've
learned what I'm capable of in terms of how understanding
and patient I can be with them in that context,
which is I hope made me better as a parent,
as a partner, as a person. You know, I think

(11:27):
more than anything I've learned, if only people had like
horns or halos, you know, if they were just like
good people and bad people and you just had to
figure out which one the person is and put them
in the category. But like, the line of good and
evil runs right through the human heart. And I've learned
that if you judge any of us by our worst moment,
that you're going to have a very awful pessimistic view

(11:49):
of us. That's unfair. And if you judge any of
us by our greatest, most noble moment, you're going to
have a really unfair optimistic view of how wonderful we are,
so I'd like to think that all of us are
like the average of all of those things.

Speaker 3 (12:02):
But it's probably taught me to be less judgmental. It's
taught me to.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Be more open to the things that people have been
through and what it's done to them.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
Do you ever get shocked anymore? Like, does anybody ever
come into your office and they're seemingly have a halo
over their head?

Speaker 2 (12:17):
It is so hard to shock me, Yeah, because I've
just seen so many unexpected things over the course of
my career. But every once in a while, it still happens.
It happened to me recently, actually, and it probably was
the first time in a few years that I've been shocked.
The case is resolved now, but I was representing a
woman who is married to a very successful guy, and
he had what appears to me to have been some

(12:37):
kind of nervous breakdown, and he ended up giving away
seven hundred thousand dollars on TikTok, like just to random people,
like over the course of thirty days, Like he had
just gone online and just been giving away massive amounts
of money for no reason, like other than just to
sort of see the other people's joy and I was

(13:00):
shocked that that was even possible, Like, I was shocked
that you could on TikTok give away that much money
to people you've never met and it wasn't even like
people in need. That was one that shocked me, like
because in court we didn't really know how much she'd
given away. And I said, you know, you're I'm very
concerned because it appears these giving away you know, significant
amounts of money on TikTok and we don't really haven't
accounting yet of how much it is. And Judge said, well, sir,

(13:23):
you know, is it true that you've been giving away money?
And he said, yeah, you know, I've given away some
money and over the last month, and he said, you know,
about how much is it? And I thought, you know,
fifty grand, one hundred grand and he was like, it's
at least three or four hundred thousand, but it could
be more.

Speaker 3 (13:37):
I really tried to not have this shock register on
my face.

Speaker 2 (13:40):
So, yeah, that was an example of me being shocked
and it doesn't happen as often, but I'm glad, you know,
I'm still capable of it me too.

Speaker 3 (13:48):
Actually, yeah, I'm.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Never shocked anymore by the ways that people cheat on
each other, bibles, sexual perversions and proclivities, and I don't
have a good game anymore. Of what's shocking because I'll
sometimes I have dinner with friends and they'll say like, oh,
you know, what did you do today? And I'll start
describing like a case that I'm working on, and they'll go, oh,

(14:10):
my god, you know what, You're sleeping with her sister.
You know. I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess that is weird. Yeah,
that's like for me, that's a Tuesday, but yeah, I
guess for normal people that would be a weird thing.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
It's sort of confirmation that there's a lot going on the.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Variety of human experiences really, and also the private lives
of public people, like because sometimes I'll get to know
someone on paper before i've met them. I'm representing the wife,
so I haven't met the husband, and all I know
of him is what she's told me. I'll look at
their bank statements or I'll look at their credit card statements,
and I'll have this like, Wow, this person's like into

(14:44):
some kinky stuff and they're really you know, and then
you meet them and you're like, you look.

Speaker 3 (14:47):
Like my accountant and you're really in defeat.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
That's so weird, Like I had no idea, but it
teaches you that the private lives of people are sometimes
extremely different than their presentation. You know who they are.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
With two decades of experience navigating high conflict divorce, it
seems like every divorce is high conflict. What is high
conflict actually mean?

Speaker 2 (15:08):
Well, so I got to push back on that and
say the following. It feels like every divorce is high
conflict because the divorces that you hear about are the
high conflict one. And the people that tend.

Speaker 3 (15:18):
To talk about their divorce are people who've had really
ugly ones because it scarred them and it becomes a
part of their identity to some degree. And so you
hear a lot about ugly divorces. Like doing what I
do for a living. When people say, you know, oh,
what do you.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
Do and I said a divorce or are, they go,
oh my god, you must have stories, And if I said, yeah,
like there was this couple and they met and they
were together, and then for a period of time they
grew apart, and so they divided their assets in a
fair way and now they're raising their kids separately while
living lot. You'd be like, that's the most boring story ever,
Whereas if I said, like, yeah, let me tip the
chainsaw on, he cut the car in half, Like you
want to hear that story. That's a true story about

(15:55):
the way I think that Because of that, there's this
perception that's what divorces look like. The overwhelming majority of
divorces are nothing like that, thankfully. They're really just identifying assets,
valuing assets, and coming up with creative ways to divide
those assets. And when you get into as I thankfully
have in recent years, the high net worth or ultra

(16:17):
high net worth space high networth being like anything over
ten million, ultra being over one hundred million of a
marital estate, then it's actually much more of like a
tricky accounting issue because a person's net worth at that level,
depending on what happens in the stock market, for example,
on a day to day basis, could fluctuate wildly. So
when you have to divide something, it's a very technical

(16:38):
thing to figure out how to divide certain assets and
when to value them for the purposes of divisions. So
you definitely find that doing what I do is always
something different, which is kind of what makes it exciting.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
I interviewed a conflict negotiator one time, and he said,
the presenting problem is never the real problem. He was like,
it's true for therapy for divorce, and in my experience.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Very much true in divorce. I think people what they
think they are worried about, what they think they want,
and what they actually want are very often different. Thankfully,
I have been doing it long enough that I have
a little bit of a Rosetta stone. So like when
someone comes in, usually a father or husband comes in

(17:21):
and says, I want fifty to fifty custody. I know
what they need. Well, first of all, like no sane
person would ever say, like I've only had forty seven
percent of my time with the kids, like I need
another three percent, Billy, grab your baseball glove, you know.
Like it's not normal. That's not a normal people would
analyze their time with their child. What that person really
means is I don't want to be a second class parent.

(17:42):
And sometimes it's fed by their own experience, Like maybe
they came from a divorced household and they saw their
dad every other weekend and once a week for dinner,
and he was like a playmate, not a real parent,
and they don't want that. Like they're saying, I want
to do the heavy lifting of parenting. I want to
do the hard part and I want to do the
fun part. And I don't want to just be like
a play to my kids. I want to be a parent.
I want to help make decisions. I don't want to

(18:03):
be cut out of important decisions. That is a very
worthy sentiment, But when you say I want fifty to fifty,
that's what you're expressing. Another example that happens a lot
in divorce is people will come in and say I
want to keep the house, I want to keep the
kids in the house, And a lot of times what
they're saying is I'm really worried about my kids, and

(18:24):
I would like them to not notice that we're getting divorced.
It's hard to have to say it, but it's part
of my job to say to them, your kids are
going to notice that you're getting divorced. And actually, there's
a school of thought that would say that the more
you try to minimize their experience of it, the more
you're going to probably make it more difficult and protracted

(18:44):
for them.

Speaker 1 (18:45):
How about when people come in and they're fighting over
find china or things that.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
Toaster of them by had a case where it was
about a ten million dollars marital estate and the settlement
negotiations broke down over a forty eight dollars toaster oven.

Speaker 1 (18:58):
Clearly, they're not fighting over a toaster of it, Like,
how do you determine what is worth fighting for your
client and what you have to level with them and say.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
Listen, great question. This is why my job is to
be very dispassionate and emotionally detached from what's going on.
Which is not to say that I'm not emotionally invested
in being successful for my clients and helping them achieve
their goals. But I'm not emotionally invested in the case
in the sense that I can see it clearly. You know,
thank god, neither of my kids when they were little.
They're adults now, but when they were little, neither of

(19:29):
them was ever like very ill. But if one of
them had been very ill and the doctor came in
and went, oh my god, your kid is so sick,
I don't want that doctor like I want the doctor
to come in and go, Okay, here's what this is.
I've seen it before. Here's the best case scenario. Here's
the worst case scenario. Here's how we're going to address it.
This is plan A, this is Plan B, this is
planned safe. Like, because I'm emotional, so I need you

(19:50):
to not be emotional. I need you to understand my emotionalism.
But I need you to be like clear with me
and confident with me and not afraid to tell me truth,
tell me what I need to hear, not what I
want to hear. And that's what I really try to
be with clients, and that's what they really need for me.
Sometimes they're so mad because I'm telling them stuff they
don't want to hear, because sometimes they're so mad at

(20:12):
their spouse and they're so mad at the situation that
I'll even say to them, like, you're gonna spend ten
thousand dollars in legal fees fighting over a five thousand
dollars motorcycle, Like that's stupid. And they'll say, I don't care,
it's the principle of it. And I'll say, right, but
you're gonna pay me ten thousand dollars arguing over a
five thousand dollar And they'll say, I don't care. I

(20:33):
like you more than her. I'd rather pay you ten
thousand dollars could screw her. And what I learned early
in my career because when I was a young lawyer,
I didn't have the confidence to push back, and I'd say, okay, like,
if you want me to do this, I'll do it,
you know.

Speaker 3 (20:46):
And then six months later they call me and go,
why did you let me do that?

Speaker 2 (20:50):
And I'll go, what did I let you do? I
told you not to do it and you said you
didn't care, and they're like, right, but I wasn't thinking
clearly you were. So I learned that sometimes what they
need from me again, keeping some of my clients or celebrities,
they're athletes, they're Wall Street geniuses who understand money in
a way that I never will and that most human
beings never will. And they're not used to someone telling them, yeah, no,

(21:14):
like that's ridiculous and right now what you're being is
impulsive and you're not thinking this through, and they're not
used to being spoken to that way. But most of
the time they appreciate it. If not in the moment
when it's done, they appreciate it because they're like, all right,
you kept your eye on the ball.

Speaker 1 (21:29):
I have an unsavory question.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
I love that which most questions are entirely too savories.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
It's true, especially, it really is.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
I pulled a bunch of people before our interview, some
I know well, some I don't know well, some who
have been divorced, some who are married, and I said,
what would you be most interested in knowing from a
divorce attorney? And most of them had questions that I've
heard you answer before, But there was one that stuck
out to me, which is this person is married and

(22:01):
is a year in I would say, and having some
issues in their marriage. And they said, should I ever
want to get divorced in five years, in ten years?
What should I be thinking about now? Is there any
information I should be collecting?

Speaker 2 (22:17):
So, you know, I think that's a question that's probably
crossed everyone's mind at some point. Who's married, Right, It's like,
is there why if things fell apart? You know? And
with the divorcory of being fifty six percent, it's probably
not a dumb question, right. Fifty six is the current
statistic that's a little misleading because it includes people who've
been married more than once, and the statistics show that
you get worse at it as you.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
Go on, even for first marriages. It's just over fifty percent.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
So I mean, just think about that failure, right, and
then add to it the fact that like, let's be
like generous ten percent stay together unhappy for the kids
or because they don't want to give up path their stuff.
I think you can make the argument it's probably like
twenty thirty percent. But then you've basically got a technology
fails like sixty seventy percent of the time. It's fully crazy.
Like if I said to you there's a fifty percent

(23:01):
chance when you walk out the front door getting a
hit in the head with a bowling ball, you'd be like, all,
I'll stay inside, or I'll wear a helmet when I
go outside, like you wouldn't just like do do do
you walk outside? And people yet just get married like
you know, it's nothing. So the answer I would give
to that person is the following. Most people when they
get married have absolutely no idea what they just did legally,

(23:21):
none whatsoever. I can tell you with a high degree
of certainty that most people the first time they learn
legally what happened to their rights and obligations when they
got married is when they walk into a divorce lawyer's office.
And that is the worst possible time to look. That's
like saying I'm going to learn how to fight the

(23:41):
next time I'm in a fight. That's actually the worst
possible time to try to learn how to fight, even
like a few minutes before would have been better. Yeah, right,
but ideally as far an advance as possible. Like I
genuinely believe if you wanted to damage my business smad
model and that of my colleagues, you would create barriers

(24:03):
to entry for marriage, like you would like what like
a driver's license, Right, you have to take a written test,
then you have to pass it. Then you get a
learner's permit where you're allowed to learn how to drive
under very restrictive conditions, and then you take a road
test and then they'll let you drive in most states
for a couple of months. You have like a restricted

(24:24):
radius of where you can drive and what times you
can drive.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
Yeah, married, fifty bucks. You pay a guy who's dresses
like Elvis in Vegas, and you're married.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
That's it. You don't get a pamphlet.

Speaker 1 (24:33):
That's a great nothing.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
So I think if you made people take a class,
I don't know, maye people sit down with a divorced
lawyer for half an hour, so we can just explain
to you basic like give them a pamphlet, give them
a fighting chance.

Speaker 3 (24:47):
I'm not kidding when I say you don't get a pamphlet.

Speaker 1 (24:50):
I have to be honest. I've never thought about it.
I'm not married, and I'm like, I've never really thought
about the legal ramifications, aside from prenups, which I know
you discuss a lot.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
Yeah, most people never think about it. They're just caught
up in the romance of it, the moment of it,
the bond of it, the sort of pheromones of the
whole thing. Which again I don't blame anybody. I've been
in love, Like, I get it. Man. Like the last
thing you're thinking about is, hey, we could potentially hurt
each other. And remember, like love and marriage are two

(25:21):
completely different things. You could make an argument that they
don't have a strong correlation with each other, like you.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
Could are hard though, because it's.

Speaker 2 (25:31):
Hard to be married. Yes, it's hard to.

Speaker 1 (25:32):
You, but it's hard to be married if you don't
have the love the other one you can do. You
can be in love and not be married.

Speaker 2 (25:38):
That's a fact, which is a pretty good argument for
not getting married. Right, because you're going to get all
the benefits of love without any of the risk that
comes with marriage. But eighty six percent of people who
get divorced are remarried within five years. That's the statistic
that blows my mind because the fail rate of marriages.
I kind of go, yeah, right, Like that's not you

(26:00):
know a lot of married people, but do you really
know a lot of really happily married people. That's a
question worth asking, Like I know a lot of married people,
but I only know a handful of like really happily
married people people that if you say to him right now, like,
would you choose again this person? Like if you could
hang out with anybody, is this the person you'd hang

(26:21):
out with. I know a couple of people that the
answer is like, oh yeah, it's my favorite person. And
some have been married twenty years and they're like, no,
it's still my favorite person, you know. And that to me,
like you won the liary, Like that's incredible, Like you
know how much better your life is because you found
that those people have a superpower because of that. So
to me, I'm like, dude, shoot the shot, like try

(26:42):
like give it a shot, because if that's the potential prize.
Go for it, go for it. But you know, remember
this is a legal status. It's the most legally significant
thing you're going to do in your life other than die.
It's the most legally significant thing. And by the way,
every marriage ends, it ends in death or divorce. It's
like one of the only things in the world that
you go, I really hope this ends in death. But

(27:04):
what I will say is most people don't realize that
you are submitting yourself to a set of rules made
by the government. And that's a really weird thing. Like,
I don't know who the first person was who went like,
I love you, like I love being with you, I
love how you make me feel. Let's get the government what, Like,

(27:25):
where the hell did that come from? Like I understand
the feeling.

Speaker 3 (27:29):
Of like I love you, I want this to be forever.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
I want to feel like this one I'm with you forever,
Like I want to be here for you, I want
you here for me. Like who doesn't get that? That's amazing?
Who wouldn't want that? But then to go, let's get
the government involved. That's the craziest. Like I've been to
the DMV. Have you ever like walked into the DMV
and went like, oh, yeah, these people should be in
charge of everything. They have got it together here, like

(27:53):
they really know how to just do things efficiently and
in a way that makes sense. It leaves everybody feeling good. Like, no,
you walk in there and you just go like, oh
my god, it's the height of government bureaucracy. Why would
you say, like, these people or this type of person
should be in charge of the most significant decisions in
my relationship. That's insane.

Speaker 1 (28:15):
It's insane. And also some would say that the US
government incentivizes marriage and kind of punishes divorce. Do you
think they punished divorce?

Speaker 2 (28:24):
Yeah, you could make that argument. I mean, I think
they definitely incentivize marriage without question, which is why there
was such a fight for marriage equality and lesbian couples
for many years are like, why don't we have these
estate protections, Why don't we have these tax benefits? Why
don't we have this access to medical care and medical
decision making for this person who I have a serious
relationship with. So, you know, marriage equality was an important fight.

(28:47):
It was always kind of funny to me because it
was like I live in a primarily gay neighborhood, you know,
I live in Chelsea, and I just remember, like, you know,
thinking like why would you guys want to sign on
for this, like this technology that most people hate and
fail at, like and we want it? Like if you
actually disliked gay and lesbian people, you'd be like, yeah,
we're gonna make you get married. We're gonna let you

(29:09):
have access to this awful technology. But people fought hard
to have it. And I think it's because there definitely
are some incentives legally for it. What some people perceive
as the punishments that come with getting divorced by the
government are really well intentioned, right, Like I mean, the
road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but they're

(29:30):
designed to protect you know, children, some of these things,
but again they're weaponized the wrong way. But part of
it is it's also a revenue raiser, feeding tickets. Like
police are expected to have a certain quota and they
have to get it, and it's a certain amount of
revenue that's anticipated to be generated from it. So it's
similar in the sense that there is a whole sort
of divorce in corporated out there. You know, there's a

(29:52):
whole industry. And my hands aren't clean, I mean, I've
made a very good living facilitating the demise of unhappy marriages,
and you provide of service. I don't make it rain,
I sell the umbrella. But the truth is, like, there
is an industry that's been built around the ending of marriages,
and you know, people when they're getting married, it's the
last thing they're thinking about, is that industry.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
You mentioned that you've seen cheating, You've seen.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
Money, financial impropriety, sit There's.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
A lot of reasons and a lot of obvious reasons
why people get divorced, but social media is at the
center of a lot of divorces. Now. It's even sort
of weird to say out loud because it's like a
fake world, yet it's totally infiltrating people's real lives.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
I think it's at the center of a lot of
the things that are going sideways in our world. You think, yeah,
I think it's at the center of our political discord
and the division that we all feel, whatever side you're on,
Like the feeling of how big that chasm between the
sides has become and how much lack of goodwill is
now there it used to be. You know, I don't
like this person's ideas and now it's I don't like

(30:58):
this person. Yeah, Like it used to be like this
person has bad ideas and I disagree with them, And
now it's this person's a bad person, and it's not
okay to just say, yeah, I don't agree with their ideas.
I think that they love this country, but I think
they have a different version of what would make this
country great than I have. Like that's gone, and I

(31:18):
think it's very much affected our view of our self
and of our partner, and of the partnerships around us,
and of the potential other people we could have had
relationships with and still potentially could have relationships with. Like
it has fundamentally changed so many aspects of the way
we perceive things, but starting with self, like how we

(31:39):
perceive ourself and our relative worth and our relative success
that it's now become untethered from objective reality. You know,
Comparison was always the thief of joy, But comparing your
relationship to other people's presentation of their relationship, you don't
stand a chance.

Speaker 1 (31:59):
Is that what you see in terms of when people
are breaking up via social media? It's the comparison game?
Or is it ye? Cheating media and.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
How dishonest people's presentation of their relationships are because I
have clients who are in my office actively negotiating a
separation agreement or in the middle of a private arbitration
of a heavily contested divorce, and they're still posting on
social media like.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
Happy anniversary of the best hubs ever hashtag.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
Blessed, and I'm like, you were in my office earlier
today because you're.

Speaker 3 (32:32):
Cheating on him, and there's like you know all the time.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
I've had celebrity clients who remain nameless, who I've seen
interviews with them when they're getting married and they're like, oh, yeah,
we don't have a prenup, Like I don't believe in that.
I mean, well, I'm like, yes, you do. It's in
my safe, like you guys signed it at my conference
room table. But you know, because it's not published anywhere,
it's a confidential document. It's not filed anywhere unless there's

(32:56):
a divorce down the road, people get away with saying
these falsehoods, you know, in a very public way, and
it shifts our perception of our relative relationship to other
people's relationship in a really significant way.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
That's really interesting. Do you think it's true? That the
more people post, the less happy they are.

Speaker 3 (33:12):
I mean, it's been my observation, like it really is
is a.

Speaker 2 (33:16):
Very quick progression from endlessly posting about the relationship to
all of a sudden the person is conspicuously absent. At
every trace of them has been eliminated, you know, and
you kind of look at it and go like, oh, well,
that'd escalated quickly, Like they're just erased from this person's timeline.
You know. I see that a lot. What I see
more than anything in terms of social media is how

(33:38):
I think it's changed people's perception of the relative success
of their own relationship. Because you're looking at someone else's
greatest hits while you're living your gag reel. You don't
look at We're having a really interesting conversation right now.
We're engaged with each other, so neither of us is
looking at our phone. So like anytime you're having like
a heightened experience, you're having a one wonderful meal, you're

(34:01):
having an interesting conversation, you're having good sex, whatever it
is you're doing. You're not on your phone, Like why
are you on your phone? You're on your phone when
you're like sitting on the subway and your board, you're
on the toilet. It's not your best moment. It's like
a moment where you're a little vulnerable, you're not feeling
great about yourself. Maybe you're in transition between activities and
what are you looking at? You're looking at the moments

(34:23):
that someone has decided are like, look at me, Look
at how good I look, Look at how cool. What
I'm doing is think about what that does to somebody
that when you're at your low, you're looking at people's
curated high. And by the way, it's not even a
real high. It's like a curated bullshit high. Like they're
not actually flying private they just went up to that

(34:43):
you know, set or whatever. Or they're not even in
first class. They just took a picture in first class
and went back to economy. It filters, you know, they
make them look the way that they look. You don't
see the parts of their vacation where the kid got
sunburned and everyone was unhappy. You just see like the
smiling picture where everyone's you know, blissful, like that kind
of discord, that kind of unhappiness with what you have.

(35:04):
Think of how it used to be, Like maybe at
church you'd see what someone else was wearing. You know,
what watch they had, or what car they drove, or
maybe you'd see your immediate neighbors like what they had.
But how much did you really have opportunity to compare
yourself to people now? Like you've the opportunity all day

(35:24):
to look at like just incredible versions of people.

Speaker 3 (35:28):
Again, three quarters of which is absolute bullshit.

Speaker 1 (35:30):
Does AI make it worse in your opinion?

Speaker 2 (35:32):
I think so, because again we're further untethered from objective reality.
We're just becoming untethered from anything real.

Speaker 1 (35:38):
Do you see a shift in the way people are
viewing marriage? And just for context, I live in Los Angeles,
so I'm aware that coastal areas, particularly Los Angeles, I
think socially things happen there first, sometimes before they spread
other places.

Speaker 2 (35:53):
And it's always been a place where I kind of
class tend to gather and.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
I see a lot of people and hear a lot
of people talking about ethical non monogamy. Yeah, and people
who are wanting I think the want for a life
partner is still there, Like someone wants someone they can
count on, especially if they want children, They want to
raise children with somebody, maybe even live under one roof sure,
but I don't know that they want to sleep with

(36:17):
that person all the time. And people are starting only
that person right, and they're starting to question what are
the alternatives? Do you hear that or see that? Or
is that just a lot of angelus?

Speaker 2 (36:27):
So I'll say a couple of things. One is, I
do think that some of the technological innovation that we've
been talking about is a function and has also created
a second order effect of people asking interesting questions why
do we do it that way? Like Uber came about
from someone being like the why are taxis the only

(36:48):
cars allowed to drive people around? Like I have a car,
I'm gonna drive people around. Why can't I just like
share my car with somebody else and they pay me?
And that's a really great question, Like, Yo, how do
you not think of that? I like that this generation
and seems to be asking a lot of like, yeah,
why do we do it that way? You know? Like
it's actually why I like having young lawyers around my
office and I hire interns every summer and I hire

(37:08):
from the intern pool when people graduate law school because
I like having young people around me because they kind
of go, yeah, why do you do it that? Way,
and if the answer is that's how the person who
taught me did it, it's like, okay, but why was
that the right way to do it?

Speaker 1 (37:22):
You know?

Speaker 2 (37:23):
Like tradition in some ways is you know, the wisdom
of people who were here before us, And tradition is
also peer pressure exerted by dead people. You might sometimes
want to say, like, oh, yeah, why did you do
it that way? Because grandma did it that way. Well,
grandma didn't have a smartphone. Like grandma didn't have every
single song that's ever been written accessible in her hand

(37:43):
at all times, so the way she listened to music
may not be instructive of how we should do it,
you know.

Speaker 3 (37:48):
So I think it's good to ask questions.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
What I will say is there are some things that
I really wonder if there is a different way that
it could be done. I'm the wrong guy to ask
about ethical non monogamy or polyamory because I'm a divorce lawyer.
So all I see are where that ended in a
car crash of a divorce. Right, so I only get

(38:13):
to meet people who that was the hail Mary pass
of maybe we can stay together, you know, And so
I see a lot of people where they tried that
and it didn't work out and it ended in divorce.
But that's like, you know, talking to someone who's an
oncologist and they're like, oh my god, everybody has cancer,
Like everyone I met today has cancer. It's like, right,
you're an oncologist, Like that's pretty normal. Like if you

(38:34):
were a cab driver, most of the people you met
wouldn't have had cancer. Like it's okay, Like it's not
like everyone has it. So I am sure there are
people who are, you know, exploring other permutations of relationship,
including ethically non monogamous versions of it, or even unethically
non monogamous ways of doing it, the latter being very

(38:55):
popular for a very long time, unethical non monogamy, And
maybe they're they're successful at it and they're just not
ending up in my office. I haven't met those people,
But do I think it could potentially be possible. Yeah,
of course. I mean I think there's lots of ways
to do relationships. I think Freud and civilization and it's

(39:16):
discontents and a lot of the people that talk about
like how do you have a civilized society? A lot
of it is we have to suppress our drives, like
to sleep with lots of people. We'd like to kill
people or beat people up who don't do what we
want them to or who make us angry, and as
a civilization, we have to come to some rules of no,
we're not going to do that, you know. This is
how we're going to organize ourselves in a way that
restores order or maintains order. I think monogamy is one

(39:40):
of those things that we were like, oh, no one
at a time, you know, But I think we can
all agree, like I'm not spoiling the plot. We're bad
at it. We've been bad at in a really long time.
Like I think infidelity was probably invented like twenty four
hours after monogamy, Like monogamy was invented, and then the

(40:01):
next day somebody was like, hey, wait a minute, you know,
and went in the other direction with it. Because I
think a lot about the history of male and female
interaction and what is the purpose of it, what's the
point of it? Where are we good at it, where
are we bad at it? What need in us is it?
Like I think it's funny that it's strange to ask

(40:22):
the question if somebody says I'm getting married, that it
would be rude of me to go, oh, really, why.

Speaker 1 (40:28):
Why are you right? That would be rude.

Speaker 2 (40:30):
It would be rude.

Speaker 1 (40:30):
That's a great point, is that rude?

Speaker 2 (40:33):
Like if you said to me, Jim, I was starting
a podcast and I went, really, why? Yeah, like that's fair, Like, well,
you know, I love talking to people and I think
I have an interesting point of.

Speaker 3 (40:43):
View, like and you have great answers like funny. But
if someone had asked you.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
That question, you wouldn't have been like, how dare you? Well?
You know, if I said I'm quitting my job, you
go why? And I don't like it anymore. I found
something else i'd rather do. If someone said.

Speaker 3 (40:55):
To you, I'm never getting married, you would say.

Speaker 2 (40:58):
Why, Well, divorce rates above fifty percent and I think
it's very hazardous, and you know, I don't think i'd
be good at it or whatever.

Speaker 3 (41:05):
But if somebody says I'm getting married and you go, oh, really, why,
they would look at.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
You like you're being very rude. And I don't understand
why that's a rude question, because there are to me,
very logical answers to that question, like oh, it's really
important to my parents, or I'm of a religion where
you know, you can't have sex with someone unless you
marry them, and so I want God's stand up approval
because I'd really like to have sex with this person.

(41:30):
Very fair. I'd like the tax benefits to come with marriage.
Very fair. That's very reasonable answer. But if you said,
like I don't want to be lonely, getting married is
not necessarily going to solve that problem, Like you might,
in fact actually be signing up for a very uniquely
awful kind of loneliness, because if you've ever been sitting
on a couch next to someone and felt really lonely,

(41:51):
that's like a uniquely awful kind of lonely. Yeah, So
I just think it's interesting we don't even get to
asked the question.

Speaker 1 (41:58):
Do you think that's the question people should be asking
before they approach marriage.

Speaker 2 (42:03):
I think the question you should ask is what is
the problem to which marriage is a solution, and then
maybe ask the question do I have that problem?

Speaker 1 (42:11):
I don't know that's why people get married, though, And
so it's like, oh, then just no one should get married.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
No, I don't know that's true.

Speaker 1 (42:17):
Like what would be a problem. Trying to think how
I would answer that, Like, well.

Speaker 2 (42:21):
I mean sometimes it's a very practical one, which is
that there's a religious under right. Sometimes it's a familial one,
like oh, it's really important to my parents that I
get married.

Speaker 3 (42:30):
And by the way, like I sometimes that's okay.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
It's okay to do things to placate your family. And
in a happy relationship, I don't think getting married is
going to buy action make it worse. Like I think
a happy relationship, you get married, you're probably still happy.
In unhappy relationship, you get married, you're probably still going
to be unhappy. I think there's a lot of people
that think that getting married is going to add some
magic or value or connection or security or closeness or

(42:56):
guarantees that.

Speaker 1 (42:57):
It thinks to guarantees I think maybe more for women.
But tell me if you think it's for men to
people think if I have this piece of paper because
it is so difficult to get divorced and so costly
to get divorced, that we will fight through whatever issue
that we wouldn't fight through otherwise.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
I think that's a very human and understandable way to feel.
And I think you're right, But I think it's part
of a very core and to me, beautiful but really flawed.
Part of being human is that we want to have
control over things we don't have control over. It's the
same thing as when I'm on a plane and turbulence

(43:35):
hits and I hold the seat like that's going to
hold the plane together somehow, or if the plane suddenly
falls out of the sky, the fact that I'm holding
the thing's going to help. It's not like I have
no control over what's happening in that situation, and it's
very scary. It's like when someone says, Oh, I have
this family member and they have terminal lung cancer and

(43:55):
part of you wants to go or were they a smoker?
And it's not that you're trying to say they deserve
to take at cancer, but you're like, oh, my god,
Like I hope that doesn't happen to me or to
someone I love, Like, please tell me they were doing
something that I'm not doing and my mom and dad
aren't doing, so then they're safe. And I think that's
so beautifully human, Like to want to feel safe in

(44:16):
a world that feels really unsafe, and to want to
feel alone in a world where we feel really alone
sometimes Yeah, And I think that's what it is. I
think it's like I love you and I feel so
connected to you, and I want this to last forever,
So like what can I strap on to it that's
going to make it feel like this forever? And I
think that's like a very beautiful and human sentiment. But

(44:39):
it's also ridiculous because we're not going to feel this
way forever. We're not going to be this forever. We're
not even going to be here forever, Like we're going
to lose each other for sure. Love is not permanently gifted.
It's loaned in every permutation. Like everything you love, you'll lose.
That's the nature of love. And I don't say that

(45:00):
to be a pessimist. To me, that is a wake
up call. That is a like, oh my god, Like
there is a finite number of sunsets I'm good to.

Speaker 1 (45:09):
See, right It's like the urgency of life.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
Right like, and the beauty of it is the impermanence
of it. Like I wouldn't want to live forever.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
I like the fact that the clock is ticking on
this and that there's only so many permutations of things
I'm going to get to do, and like that's what
makes it beautiful, is the impermanence to some degree. So
I think marriage is like a seat belt. It makes
people feel really safe, but there are a lot of
accidents that are still going to happen, and the seat

(45:37):
belt won't save you necessarily. I agree that, like barriers
to exit, sometimes might make a person think twice, but
does it really you know, I remember reading an interview
with Russell Brand where he was talking about when he
was a heroin addict when he was younger, and he said,
you know, he was rallying against at the time, like

(45:58):
the criminalization of addiction. And he was saying, you know,
in all the time that I was a junkie, not
once did I ever think like, oh I really want
some heroin. Oh wait, it's illegal. I shouldn't. The illegality
of it never crossed my mind. People aren't evil. They
don't do evil things because they're evil. They mistake it
for happiness. Like nobody ever gets up in the morning
and goes, today, I am going to screw up my

(46:18):
marriage and start an affair. They just make increasingly bad,
small choices that lead them down a path and then
they're like, okay, I've made this choice now and I've
screwed up things, and I might as well just keep going.
And so I think that marriage is something that gives
us a false sense of security in our relationships sometimes
and in that sense, it may actually be bad for
preserving the bond of our relationship.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
I read that seventy percent of divorce is initiated by web.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
That is true, seventy three percent.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
Actually, I think that statistic would shock a lot of people.

Speaker 2 (46:48):
It would, but it's also widely misinterpreted and also very
unfairly weaponized.

Speaker 3 (46:54):
Okay, so it's weaponized by some people I really like.

Speaker 2 (46:57):
Actually, you know, I think there is a crisis in
mass ulinity and a crisis happening for men right now
and particularly boys, certainly for men in their role in society.
And because of that, there's all of these you know,
what's called red pill space, and there's you know, like
a men's movement, and it can be a healthy version
of it, or it can be like a somewhat toxic
version of itut it. So I think that some men

(47:19):
on the furthest extremes of the men's movement use that
statistic unfairly to create the false impression that the majority
of women who marry treat it like they went to
the casino and they stocked up, and then once they
were winning, they cash their chips out. So they marry

(47:40):
a guy, they have kids with him, they create a
child support obligation, they watch him rise in success, and
then they cash out and they get rid of the guy.
But they get like the husband dolla carte because the
guy still has to pay for the kids, He still
has to pay alimony, he still has to pay her bills,
but she no longer has to be with.

Speaker 3 (47:57):
Him anymore and she can go off with a different
guy and be happy.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Right.

Speaker 1 (48:00):
That is so not how I interpreted.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
It's how it's been weaponized. Look to a person with
a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
So to a person who's trying to be convinced that
men suck, you can find evidence of men sucking. You
think women suck, you can find evidence of women's Like
I see this all the time.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
Yeah, and I even see it when I speak.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
Like people take one out of context thing I said
about men and they use it to show how much
men suck, or they take something I said about women
out of contact and say this is proof of how
much women suck. And the truth is I'm actually presenting
a very balanced view where yeah, we both suck sometimes
and we're both heroic sometimes. The reality is that, of course,
are there some women who weaponize the divorced system and

(48:39):
process to maximize the return that they get financially at
the end of a marriage. Of course, yeah, we've seen it.
It happens all the time. There are people who openly
admit like, oh, yeah, I got child support from three
different guys and it's a very lucrative career. I've had
kids with three different people, and people are very open
about that. Again, I think that's the menari and most

(49:00):
people you know, I think are just trying to survive.
But part of the reason why women are in the
position of commencing divorce actions. In my experience, I would
venture to say that men ghost more than women do.
Like men don't like the confrontation. Men very often are
conflicted verse and just bail. Like I've seen a lot

(49:22):
of men go out for milk and never come back.
When you say bail, you mean like just leave the marriage,
Like they just leave, like they just abruptly said.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
Move to another state.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
No, they might just move out. They just go yeah,
like this.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
Is over and then the woman has to actually legally
initiate the divorce, because.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
What she'll say is she'll say, to me, he left, Yeah,
I didn't want the marriage to end. He apparently does.
He got an apartment, but he's not paying the mortgage,
and he's not paying my car loan, and he's not
paying you know, the electric bill, and don't have the
funds to do that. I'm have access to these bank accounts,
or I don't have the earnings that he has, or
I earn one tenth of what he does.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
And he always paid the mortgage.

Speaker 2 (50:02):
So when I say to him, like, hey, you know,
you got to keep paying the mortgage, He's like, well,
I don't live there anymore, and I have to pay
my apartment now. So I'll say, okay, well we've got
to file a divorce action. They're like, wait, I don't
want to file a divorce action. He's the one who
wants the divorce. Let him file a divorce action. I'm like, right,
but you want a judge to issue in order that
he has to maintain the financial status quo and continue
to pay the bills. I can't get a judge to

(50:23):
issue and order until I commence an action I can't
commence an action with him as the plaintiff.

Speaker 3 (50:28):
I have to commence an action on your behalf.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
So that's where I have found in my experience, it's
much more common for women to have to take that step.

Speaker 1 (50:36):
I would have never thought of that.

Speaker 3 (50:38):
So how did you interpret that statistic?

Speaker 1 (50:40):
Then I interpret it. I sound silly saying this because
it's definitely not from a legal standpoint, but I think
a lot of times when women are in relationships that
are not working, we grieve the relationship long before we
actually exit it. And I've found that men have immense
guilt leaving their family and they'd rather sort of stay

(51:03):
in something bad than do something about it. And staying
in something bad means either cheating or trying to not
be around or whatever that is.

Speaker 2 (51:12):
Yeah, I call it going without or going elsewhere, and
men are more prone to that.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:16):
Yeah, what I will tell you that's insightful and it
does match up with my experience, So I think you're
onto something there. Again, there'd be no way to like
empirically prove it, but I think it makes sense to
me and it matches with my experience.

Speaker 1 (51:27):
No, it's good that, as dumb as I thought.

Speaker 2 (51:28):
No, definitely, not definitely, not No, I need you to
have some interesting perspective on it. I mean, even by
virtue of the fact that, like we have different experiences
as a function of our gender, you know, in relationship.
I think that that is useful, you know, it's useful
for us to have dialogues about these things. I have
actually found in terms of my observation of cheating is
men sometimes are actually shocked when they get caught cheating,

(51:52):
how upset their partner is or their wife is.

Speaker 3 (51:55):
Because they're like, it had nothing to do with her.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
I love her, Like.

Speaker 3 (51:58):
She's still beautiful, I still love with her. I still
love her.

Speaker 2 (52:02):
And you're like, right, but then why are you sleeping
to the other person. They're like, well, because they're like
really attractive and they were there. Like it's sort of
like why'd you eat the cake because the cake was there.
You're like, right, but you know you weren't supposed to
eat it. I know, but it was there, Like it
looks so good, I just ate it, you know. Whereas
women who also cheat. Breaking news women very often cheat
and it's like either a soft place to land. It's

(52:23):
like they're okay, this is going to be where I'm
going to go next, or it's like a way that
they show themselves, Oh yeah, this relationship's really over. Yes,
Like I've very rarely in a twenty five year career,
I've met so many men that leave the wife for
the mistress because they're convinced that they met their soulmate.

Speaker 3 (52:39):
And I've had a lot of guys who cheat and
are just like oh yeah, like.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
It didn't mean anything to me. Women, I very rarely
have it it's like, oh yeah, I didn't mean anything
to me. Like it usually is like, yeah, this is
what I had to do to figure out that this
is over, And the experience of having this affair is
what showed me. That's how severed I am from this
person that I was capable of cheating on them.

Speaker 1 (53:00):
So I think it reveals different.

Speaker 2 (53:02):
Things to the person. Yeah. Yeah, that's why it's sort
of you know, famous, and I think correct platitude is
that when a woman cheats and gets caught, the first
question the man asks is did you sleep with him?
And when a man cheats and gets caught, the first
question a woman asks is do you love her? Because
I think we know something which is guys, sometimes it

(53:25):
just didn't mean anything like, and sometimes it does.

Speaker 3 (53:28):
Sometimes it's like, oh, I think I met my person.

Speaker 2 (53:30):
With women, it's like a very like possessory thing of
like wait, no, like that your mind and somebody is
now sullied that. And men are in my experience, much
more unforgiving of infidelity. When a wife gets caught cheating,
the chances of the guy ever taken her back is
very limited.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
I have a friend who's a comedian who I talked
about this with, and he said that if the man
takes the woman back after cheating, he actually will never
forgive her. In his experience, he feels like, say it
happens in January, he was like, he'll be fine, and
then one day in November of the next year he'll

(54:06):
cheat and totally rationalize or start to be mean or
start to like take it out on her.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
Yeah. I've found that to be true because I do
have a lot of people that I represent where there
was infidelity and then the couple came back from the infidelity,
and then down the road something else is the thing
that ends at, whether it's more infidelity or whether it's
some other issue. So you get to kind of understand
the whole history of the marriage. And I see a
lot of people that had, you know, like infidelity, whether
it was just a dalliance or whether it was a

(54:32):
long term affair, and then they come back from it
and they have a period like a renaissance in their marriage,
and then sometimes it still ultimately breaks up for different
reasons or for the same kinds of reasons. Like the
forgiving is in the forgetting to some degree, if you
say you forgive someone, but you're like carrying it around
like you got that in the chamber now, and it's like, Okay,
that's gonna be my like get out a healthree card.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
Yeah, I think that's the better way of saying that.

Speaker 2 (54:56):
Yeah, Or even the feeling of like I'm going to
really punish you now now by just like making you
wallow in your own guilt for a bunch of years,
I'm going to forgive you, and that's going to make
you feel even worse you did. And doing this twenty
five years, I'm still sometimes astounded by the ways people
can hurt each other and punish each other and hurt
themselves and you know, punish themselves.

Speaker 3 (55:19):
It's really shocking to me still sometimes.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
So you represent the wealthy and ultra wealthy. I've heard
so many sort of platitudes about love and money. One
of the famous ones is if you marry for money,
you pay for it the rest of your life. In
your experience, how does money change marriage?

Speaker 2 (55:35):
I think it works on a couple of different levels.
So one, I think financial stress is very hard on
a marriage. So economic instability and struggling with money is
really hard on a marriage because it's hard on a person,
and you know not to gender it too much, but
it's really hard on men. When a man feels like
he can't provide for his family, there's a tremendous anger

(55:56):
that comes out of that person and a tremendous resentment.
And sometimes that doesn't find a target. It just sprays
in every direction, and it manifests in substance, us issues
and other kinds of things that really are toxic to
a coupling and to a family. So lack of money
financial instability can have a really profoundly negative effect on people. Similarly,
getting everything you want is sometimes the worst thing that

(56:20):
can ever happen to a person because there's really only
two amounts of money enough and not enough. Period.

Speaker 3 (56:29):
That's interesting and representing billionaires.

Speaker 2 (56:31):
I can tell you if one hundred million dollars isn't
enough money, no amount of money is going to be
enough money. You know, money offers you real solutions to
imaginary problems and imaginary solutions to real problems. Like if
you're lonely, money's not going to solve the problem of
your loneliness, Like that's a real problem. Money will offer
you an imaginary solution to that problem. You can go

(56:54):
to the club and everybody will hang out with you
for the night because you're paying for bottle service. That's
not an actual solution to the problem of lofe loneliness,
Like it's an imaginary solution to the problem of loneliness.
And the real problems that money solves are not real,
Like I can't afford this particular brand of handbag, You'll
get that handbag and it's just eventually another handbag. It's
never enough handbags, Like there's never an I've divided a

(57:16):
lot of burkins, like there's not. You really, I actually
keep a tally of who's the most burkins I've ever
had a client, And I have a client whose wife
accumulated thirty seven burkins. That's the winner right now? She
had them in like every color, every material. She had
like the alligator ones, she had the snake ones. I
think she had color lines that they only do in

(57:38):
certain parts of Europe, and they were miserable. He had
a wine collection that was worth like ten million dollars.
And these are distractions people create to sort of distract
their attention from the inevitability of their own demise and yeah,
unhappiness and disconnection they have, Like you could be miserable,
and I've learned very quickly doing what I do that
you can be miserable in the penthouse and you could

(57:59):
be really happy in a crappy studio apartment. You know, it's
really more about the person you're there with and how
connected you are to yourself into them.

Speaker 1 (58:06):
What do you think you understand about marriage that most
other people don't.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
I guess that it's fragile. I think I understand how
fragile it is in a way that other people don't
want to acknowledge that it really requires that you pay
attention in a way that people have a hard time
doing a because it's uncomfortable, and b because there's so
many things to distract you from it. And I think
one of the things people find false comfort in when

(58:32):
they get married is like, Okay, I'm married. That's done. Now,
I don't have to worry about that anymore. They're doing
themselves a tremendous disservice because part of what made you
fall in love is that you were interested and you
were interesting, you know, like you were interested in this
person and they were interested in you.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
And you on the back of the card game.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
Yeah, and you felt interesting because you don't just fall
in love with the person. You fall in love with
who you are when you are with them, and the
parts of you that they bring out and shine a
light on parts of you that maybe you don't love
that they make you see differently. I know. Sometimes like
the most lovely thing about love is when you're so

(59:10):
self conscious about something about yourself and the person's like that,
like I love that about you, like, and you're like really,
like I hate that about me, and they're like, oh
my god, I love that about you. There's something so
lovely about feeling seen and loved like that. But I
think one of the things that really makes marriage so
fragile is that people just stop seeing each other. That's
so strange to me that you stop seeing this thing

(59:32):
because it's right in front of you. Like if somebody said, like, yeah,
I don't see that thing anymore, why because it's right there.
It's there all the time. It's like, well, that's.

Speaker 3 (59:39):
Why you should see it all the time, because it's
right there, you know.

Speaker 2 (59:42):
But that's why people just stop seeing it, like they
don't see this person. And it's so sad because it's
so easy to make someone feel seen. I often tell
my male friends because I've learned a lot about this
by spending a lot of time with women and hearing
about what made them feel disconnected from their marriage. And
I always try to tell my like happily married male friends,

(01:00:03):
just remember to make her feel seen.

Speaker 3 (01:00:05):
It takes nothing. It takes this much, Like.

Speaker 2 (01:00:08):
Just leave a note in the morning I married the
prettiest girl. That's a what does that take ten seconds?
Like ten seconds to write that note?

Speaker 3 (01:00:16):
Would you ever not want to get that note? Would
that note ever not warm you?

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
Would that note ever not make you feel love? Like
that's so love? Like the text message that you send
that says, oh, you know, I'm in Starbucks and that
song came on made me think of you. At the
risk of being prone to superlatives like that is to
a woman what nudes are to a man, like, Hey,
I'm thinking of you, and you're with me even when
you're not with me, like I see you, even when

(01:00:42):
you're not in front of me, I see you, but
especially when you're in front of me, I see you. Like.
There's something so human and understandable about wanting to feel that,
And there's also something so human and understandable about forgetting
how important that is. If I'm an evangelist for anything,
it's kind of to remind me people that, like, you know,
love is not permanently gifted, it's loaned. I just think

(01:01:04):
you have to be mindful and present, and that's really
hard to remember to be. So that's the long answer
to the question that I think marriage is really fragile,
but I don't think it has to be so hard,
Like I think that the fundamental fragile nature of it
is tied to the simplicity of that connection.

Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
Do you think you can have second marriage energy in
your first marriage?

Speaker 2 (01:01:25):
You know? I think yeah, because I think second marriage
energy is you know what you don't want because you've
watched it go wrong, and maybe you're a little quicker
to tell the person something they might not want to
hear and disappoint them a little, so you don't disappoint
them a lot in the long term. Like I think

(01:01:46):
something divorced people learn is it's better to like live
an uncomfortable truth than a comfortable lie. And so they
learn that, Like, you know, I held my tongue in
and it doesn't go and right, it didn't say anything,
and then we got really lost, Whereas if I had said, like, hey,
I think we might be a little lost, we might
have stopped the car and been like, Okay, where did

(01:02:08):
we lose the plot? And let's go back to there
and figure it out. And I think once you've learned
that lesson, and again, it doesn't have to be marriage.
It can be through a breakup. I'd like to think
that with every relationship, I get better at relationship. I
think we break in relationship and we heal in relationship.
And I'd like to think that each one is a
lesson and a chapter and a long book, until eventually

(01:02:31):
you have the last one and hopefully that's the one
that you were best at.

Speaker 1 (01:02:34):
I have more divorce questions for you, but I've watched
so many of your interviews, and everyone asked about divorce
because it's fascinating. But I don't ever really see people
talk about you. You're covered in tattoos.

Speaker 2 (01:02:47):
I am really covered ted, like my whole back, my
whole I'm tattooed. My whole thing's tattooed. Basically. Really, I'm
like one big tattoo.

Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
Okay, so covered in tattoos. You listen to heavy metal
growing up.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
I also listened to show tunes growing up, so I
also know the entire of Oklahoma. So I'm the old
person that knows all the lyrics to the album by
Slayer Rain and Blood and also knows all the lyrics
to Surry with their friend John Top from Oklahoma.

Speaker 1 (01:03:12):
It's unique. But there's something I notice in your conversations,
which is there will be a moment where your eyes
well up a little bit and you hold back the tears.

Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
Yeah I do.

Speaker 1 (01:03:22):
Yeah, But it's when you talk about love or talk
about being seen. What is that for you? I don't
want to start to go there.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
It's a really interesting question. It's a question about me.
It happens to me a lot when I talk about love.
I am much more prone to crying about something beautiful
than I am about something sad. I am very capable
of being deeply sad about something and not crying about it.
I'm not afraid to cry. I'm very comfortable crying, but

(01:03:52):
often find myself moved to tears. Like frequently I'm moved
to tears when I read something it's beautiful. When I
listen to some piece of music that's moving, Like my
natural reaction to that is that feeling of like a heightened,
overwhelmed feeling is like, yeah, my eyes well up, and
I think when I talk about love and connection and

(01:04:14):
being seen, yeah, it's still so moving to me. Just
how beautiful that is. It's so funny to me because
you know, years ago, when my first book came out
and I was first doing press, people really expected me
because I'm this like successful divorce trial lawyer who's described
as like the sociopathy winer side, and who's very capable
of being very intense in a courtroom and being weaponized

(01:04:37):
and cross examining the hell out of people and stuff
like that. That people really assumed that I was just
not a not emotional and be certainly not like moved
by romance or love.

Speaker 3 (01:04:47):
A lot of times people say like well, do you
still believe in love?

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
And I was like, like, that's showing me is the
craziest question. That's like, thing, do you still believe in gravity?
Like I don't have to believe in gravity. Gravity exists.

Speaker 3 (01:04:57):
Like I can say I don't believe in gravity.

Speaker 2 (01:04:59):
I'm not going to all up, Like, of course I
believe in love, like I feel love.

Speaker 3 (01:05:04):
I see love everywhere around me, and I see.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
It's the only thing that really matters, Like it's the
thing we're all looking for. It's because there's so much
pain in the world, like life is incredibly short and
brutish in some ways, and we're all gonna die, and
everyone we love is gonna die. Like I mean, there's
so much about it that's like, oh wow, we're playing
a game you can't win, but the winning of it

(01:05:28):
seems to me to be like to feel these beautiful feelings,
you know. So when I feel those feelings, whether it's
a beautiful piece of music or experiencing some connection with
someone or like accessing some emotion, like yeah, I mean
that's to me, like that's everything, Like that's the whole thing,
and so I feel it really deeply. I think to

(01:05:50):
do what I do for a living. The secret as
won't be a secret when I say it out loud,
But the secret is like I'm the opposite of a sociopath,
Like I'm really sent you know, the tattoos and the
things like that. When I was a young man, I
hated the part of me that was that sensitive, Like
I wanted to beat it out of me. I'll hurt
myself as much as I can find a way to

(01:06:13):
not feel stuff so deeply. You know, I was afraid
of spiders, so I got a tarantula and I put
it in a glass cage next to my bed, so
I would have to wake up every day and look
at a giant spider until it wasn't afraid of spiders anymore.
And that worked. But I could never beat the sensitivity
out of me. And I figured out, like, oh okay,

(01:06:35):
like it doesn't have to be my enemy. Can be
a superpower. And it became a superpower to be that sensitive,
to be able to like figure out like what's gonna
move the judge, what's gonna make my client feel safe,
what's gonna make the other side feel vulnerable and scared?
And you know, it took me a long time to
figure that out as a superpower. But I'm really grateful

(01:06:57):
that I did. And I think once I let myself
really that it was a superpower, I let myself feel
it more and I think that's where some of that
emotion comes from. I've also been in therapy a really
long time, so that might be part of it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:10):
Can either of your kids have it?

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
Yeah, I think they both have it in different degrees.
I think my older son is a lawyer, but he's
very analytical and very academic. He's really smart, got that
from his mom. You can be a little cerebral, and
it's really easy for me to get along with him
because he's really easy to navigate. My younger son is
like me, he's like really sense it, and because of it,

(01:07:32):
we have a harder time getting along because we can
read each other and this situation like a book, and
our powers neutralize each other in some degree. So we've
gotten round and round, like we've had chapels where we
were not close. But what's really lovely is he's twenty
five now and then the last year or two we've
become really close, and that feels really lovely because I

(01:07:54):
had to sort of see that the parts of him
that were challenging for me were the parts of myself
that are challenging.

Speaker 1 (01:08:00):
Oh it's so confronting.

Speaker 2 (01:08:01):
Oh it's rough. It's rough. I mean one of the
unique things that divorced people with children get to experience.
And it's a really great life lesson. You have to
learn to navigate the personality traits of your ex spouse
that you didn't like. But in your kids, no one
ever talks about that you love more than anything. And

(01:08:22):
so then you're like, oh shit, I can't just divorce them.

Speaker 3 (01:08:26):
Like I can't leave, Like they're my kid. I'm stuck,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:08:30):
And I know my ex wife there must be times
where she just looks at them and goes, oh my god,
you have so much of your father and you.

Speaker 3 (01:08:38):
And there are times where they'll react to something and
I'll go.

Speaker 2 (01:08:41):
Like, oh my god, that is so your mom right now.
You know. But it's a really great lesson. You're like, no,
I can't quit on this, Like I have to learn
how to navigate this. I think that there's something really
valuable there. It's helped me grow as a person, I think,
and it even helped me have a good relationship with
my ex wife. I mean we never had a terrible one,
but it really helped us that, like, yeah, no, we

(01:09:01):
have to learn how to navigate each other, you know,
Like there's some parts of our relationship that are over,
but there's some parts of it that continue, Like we're
still a family. We're always going to be family. We're
going to be grandparents together someday. Like we're stuck with
each other.

Speaker 1 (01:09:13):
What's the dumbest hill anybody's died on in a divorce
proceeding aside from the toaster.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
It's a chapter in my book called the Case of
the Incredible Shrinking Penis. It tells the story of the
dumbest till I've ever seen somebody die on, and that
is that a guy married my client on false pretenses.
He wanted a green card and I got married, and
he literally read after the marriage ceremony, left and never
came back. And my client came to me very upset

(01:09:40):
and said, I want this marriage annulled. And an annulment
is different than a divorce and divorces. We were married
and now the marriage fell apart, and annulment is this
was a fraudulent marriage, and you can get it annulled,
and then you've never been married, like it was not
a legal marriage. It's a void marriage. And this was
really important to my client because she was religious and
because she really I wanted this to be like you know, yeah,

(01:10:02):
I'm marrying this person forever.

Speaker 3 (01:10:03):
And it was a fraud. This guy wanted nothing to
do with her, and.

Speaker 2 (01:10:05):
We had him served and we said we want an annulment,
and he said, I won't give you an omen I'll
give you a divorce because that way he could keep
the citizenship. He said, no, we want an annulment.

Speaker 3 (01:10:13):
And the reason he didn't want to give her an annulment is.

Speaker 2 (01:10:15):
They could affect his citizenship status. So we ended up
having an oment trial and he claimed that they had
consummated the marriage, meaning that they had sexual intercourse. Now
my client was like a thirty seven year old woman,
so like, how do you prove somebody didn't have sex
with somebody? So I was talking to her about, look,

(01:10:35):
maybe you want to just take the divorce because like
it's going to be really hard to prove you didn't
have sex. It's his word against yours. And I said,
you know, like you know, she was like, well, I'm
a virgin, and I was like, well, I mean congratulations,
Like that's an accomplishment at thirty seven. But you know,
the chances of your hymen still being intact are like
almost nothing, like because you know, as time passes, it

(01:10:57):
gets weaker. Any guynecologists can tell you that, like, just
because a woman's got a broken hymen doesn't mean that
they're not a virgin. And I said, but look, if
it was intact, that would be conclusive proof that you
never had sex with this person. I said, why don't
you go to your coologist and find out? So she
went to your getecologist. A couple of days later, I
walk into the office. My secretary says, Jane Doe is

(01:11:17):
in conference room B, and she's very upset. So I
was like, all right, I know what this is. So
I go in and I say, listen. You know, it
was a long shot. There was no way it was
going to be intact. And she was crying. She was like, no,
it's intact. She's like, I just came from the doctor.
Myhymen is intact. And I was like, oh, game on,
Like it's game on now, Like I was like, are
you serious. She's like yeah, I'm like she would testify

(01:11:39):
to that. She's like yeah, she even like took pictures.
I was like, oh, it's on now. So we took
the case to trial and we didn't let the guy know,
and I had him get on the witness stand and
on cross examination, I said, you testified earlier that you
had sexual intercourse with my clients. Yes, I did. I said,
when you say you had sexual intercourse, you mean you
put your penis into her vagina. And Judge's like, mister, sexon,

(01:12:00):
I think we all understand that's what sexual intercourse says.
I was like, you right, if I could just have
a little leeway, i'd appreciate. So I'll give you a little,
mister section. But this is going to stay PG. This
isn't going to get X rated. I walked through and
I said, and did you have any problems when you
had sex? No, we had no problems. I said, no, sir,
I apologize for asking this. How big is your penis? Objection?
I said, your honor, I asked for a little leeway here.

(01:12:21):
This will be relevant, I assure you. She said all right,
and he said it's average size. I said, respectfully, there
could be some debate about what it means to be
average size. I said, so, how many inches approximately is it?
He said, well, you know, five or six inches? I
said five or six inches? When erect? He said, yes,
five or six inches. I said, very good, thank you.
I said, I have nothing further. Then I called her

(01:12:42):
gynecologist to the stand and I basically said, would it
be physically possible for a five or six inch penis
to have penetrated my clients vagina? And said absolutely not.
The only way a person could have had sexual intercourse
with her is if they had a microfallis, meaning a
penis less than one inch long and anything more than

(01:13:03):
that and they would not have been able to do it.
So the guy went back on the stand and said,
I exaggerated the size of my penis. It's actually much
smaller of him that And I said, it isn't your
testimony that your penis is smaller than one inch when erect?
And the judge said, all right, that's it. I want
to see counsel in chambers and brought us both in
chambers and said to opposing counsel, like, your guy's going

(01:13:24):
to grant her the annulment or I'm going to hold
him in contempt a court. I'm going to charge him
with perjury. He's gonna end up in jail. That was
the worst hill to die on it ever, because he
just was like, but I've never seen a person put
in the position they were trying to vehemently argue that
they had exaggerated the size of their penis before. It
was a really unprecedent and ever since, I've never had
that come up again. No pun intended.

Speaker 1 (01:13:46):
So there is no segue from that story. So I'm
gonna go so much.

Speaker 2 (01:13:49):
Yeah, it's not possible.

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
But I met a women's dinner probably a year ago,
women's health dinner, and it's a signed seating. I'm sitting
across from Laura wasston.

Speaker 2 (01:13:59):
Yeah, Laura's great.

Speaker 1 (01:14:00):
Okay, what first time I ever met her?

Speaker 2 (01:14:02):
Brilliant?

Speaker 1 (01:14:03):
And I was like, Laura, can I ask you the
annoying question that everybody wants to know, Like, as a
divorce attorney, what is your advice on marriage?

Speaker 2 (01:14:12):
Yep?

Speaker 1 (01:14:13):
And I preface the question by saying that I have
a friend who's a divorce attorney in Chicago and she
married my other friend and as they were getting married,
in her vows, she said that because she's a divorce attorney,
everyone asked her this question and her advice is that
marry somebody who does the right thing, not just for you,
but for everybody around you. And I said, so, what

(01:14:33):
is your advice, Laura, And she.

Speaker 2 (01:14:34):
Goes, I'm dying to hear this. She took like a full.

Speaker 1 (01:14:37):
Sixty seconds to think, and she goes, you know, I
think you want to you have to want to stay
at the same hotels.

Speaker 2 (01:14:43):
I mean, it's an extremely Laura answer. That's great.

Speaker 1 (01:14:46):
So I tell my college friends and they're like, there's
like a lot to that answer. Actually, right, there's more than.

Speaker 2 (01:14:52):
Just yeah, that's a really interesting layered answer because it
has a lot to do with economics. It has to
do if like the style and feel that a person has,
what kind of experience you want to have, Like some
people want to stay at a hotel that's very emblematic
of the place where they're visiting. So if they're in Peru,
they want to stay someplace that's got that very like

(01:15:14):
inspired by the local And some people want to just
stay someplace that reminds them of exactly like it was
at home, like the accidental tourist concept, like I want
to approximate the sensation of being at home but being
in another country. So I think It's a brilliantly layered answer,
and the fact that she came up with it in
sixty seconds is impressive to me.

Speaker 1 (01:15:31):
I thought so too. Yeah, I think about it all
the time.

Speaker 2 (01:15:34):
Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of Laura's superpower is that. I
think she, as a lawyer, can say a lot with
less like and she can pack a lot into that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:44):
As somebody who has seen tons and tons of divorce.
What is your best advice for entering a marriage?

Speaker 2 (01:15:52):
Entering a marriage? Okay, I wanted to be specific in
the answer. In specific, I'm never going to have an
answer as good as Laura's. My advice would be pay attention.
It seems like a silly and simple answer, it's not
as artful or layered. But I think pay attention. I
think attention.

Speaker 1 (01:16:05):
I think it's really layered.

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):
I think paying attention to yourself, paying attention to the
other person. Don't stop seeing them, don't stop seeing the
small things, because the small things are really everything. I
think that no single rain drops responsible for the flood.
And I think that we think a lot about the
big disconnections, but the small disconnections lead to the big disconnections.

(01:16:28):
And I think that we fall in love so fast
and then we fall out of love very slowly. It's
like the way we go bankrupt very slowly and then
all at once. I think, if you're paying attention all
the way through, the chances of that happening go way down.

Speaker 1 (01:16:44):
I think it's really interesting that was your advice. Because
when there's someone and this is one of the shows
I do other shows, and anytime I feel comfortable asking
someone offline who's been divorced, I always say, did you
know when you were walking down the aisle? I've probably
asked thirty five people I've interviewed, all different industries. Only
one said no. Everybody said yes, they felt something and

(01:17:06):
they walked down the aisle for a number of different
other reasons. But I see how that happens.

Speaker 2 (01:17:11):
Yeah, I will share that. When we got divorced, my
now ex wife said to me, you know, when I
was standing in the sort of vestibule of we got
married in a restaurant, She's like, and I was about
to like walk down the aisle. She's like a part
of me thought like, don't do this, like run. I said, really,

(01:17:32):
and she said yeah. She didn't tell me in a
hurtful way. She was telling me in a way like that,
Oh maybe something in her new and I would never
have guessed that. I think it's hard, you know, it's
hard to listen to yourself in an honest way. I've
been in therapy a long time, and anytime somebody says,
like how much they like being in therapy, I'm like, well,
then you might need to get a different therapist. Therapy

(01:17:53):
is supposed to be uncomfortable, like it's supposed to be
a little uncomfortable. It's supposed to be like that which
you need to see the most is in the place
you least want to look, and you have to dig around,
you know, and you have to be uncomfortable. And I
think that you know that discomfort is an important part
of the process. And I think that discomfort is the

(01:18:14):
discomfort you feel when you're paying attention. Again, I am
a fan of an uncomfortable truth versus a comfortable lie.
And I think the long term ramifications of ignoring the
voices inside you, of not paying attention, that cost is
much higher than the temporary discomfort.

Speaker 1 (01:18:33):
True or false, don't marry anyone you wouldn't want to
be divorced from.

Speaker 2 (01:18:37):
True. I think engaging how someone is with their exes
is important. I think it tells you something about who
they are. I remember when I first got divorced. I
went on a date. It was one of the first
dates I went out with after my divorce. It was
a long time ago. It was going really good. It's
going really well, and I was like, oh, this is cool, like,
you know, like I can feel a connection with the person.
We're having fun. We were at dinner and I was
already thinking about maybe I would see her again. And

(01:19:00):
we were talking about some like art galleries, some exhibit
or something, and I said, oh, we should, you know,
maybe we'll go see it together. We could do it, like,
you know, sometime soon. And she was like, oh, I'd
love that. You know, we could do it next weekend.
Like the asshole has the kids so I could do it.
And I was like, oh, boy, okay. Like and the
fact that she was referring to her co parent and
next husband is the asshole. I was like, we are

(01:19:20):
not on a good level here, like this is not
something And it was so different than my experience. I
would never refer to my ex wife that way. You
divorced who you married, Like people don't want to believe
that people are like, oh, when the ring comes on,
the mask comes off. Like no, Like, if you're married
to a person who's like petty and spiteful, you're going
to divorce someone who's petty and spiteful, and they're going
to be petty and spiteful and divorce. Like if you

(01:19:42):
marry someone who's like reasonable and prone to acknowledging the
possibility of their own error and like kind of kind
hearted and empathetic, that's who they'll be probably in the divorce.
Like and so it's okay, Yeah, you should be prepared
to divorce the person that you're marrying.

Speaker 1 (01:19:56):
For someone who's not married yet, what's the number one
red flash that should make them run away before they
ever get there?

Speaker 2 (01:20:03):
I mean, I don't think you should ever marry someone
who think you're going to change or in anticipation of
them changing. I honestly have to say the number one
red flag in my experience would be people that have
substance use issues. I think a lot of marriages, particularly
at this moment, I would say in the last five
to ten years, substance use issues is a big thing.

(01:20:24):
Whether it's alcohol abuse, cannabis abuse, opiates, you know, stimulants adderall, like,
substance use is usually emblematic of other significant mental health
issues or interpersonal issues that a person might have, And
if a person has mild substance use issues, very often

(01:20:44):
that can metastasize into something much more extreme. It's not
going to get better, it'll get worse. So I would
say that's a huge red flag. My other answer would
be a person who is incapable of apologizing. I think
you can tell a lot about a person by the
way they apologize, Like I think you should listen when
someone apologizes, because if they're prone to what I like

(01:21:04):
to call a bullshit apology, which is, you know, I'm
sorry you were so upset by what happened. That's a
bullshit apology. I'm sorry. That's a better apology, but it's
not a very good one. The best apology is I
know what I did that upset you, and then saying
what it was like I wasn't listening and I invalidated

(01:21:25):
your perspective. I shouldn't have done that, and I'm really
sorry that I did. And if I had the chance
to do it again, I would do it differently. That's
an aplus apology. You identified what you're apologizing for. So
this person knows I'm not just offering a blanket apology.
I don't understand what I actually did. I'm acknowledging what
it is that I did to make sure that what
I'm apologizing for is the thing that hurt you. Then

(01:21:48):
I'm apologizing unequivocally for the behavior, not for how it
made you feel, not for the effects of it, for
the behavior itself. And I'm acknowledging it was wrong of
me to do and that I won't repeat that behaveavior
now that I've learned the lesson that was necessary. That's
a good apology. If you are dating someone and they
can't apologize, and even when they apologize, it has to

(01:22:09):
be you know, I'm sorry, but you know I have
to say, like you were definitely pushing it. Okay, like
run because they're not going to get better at that.

Speaker 1 (01:22:17):
That's a really good one. Okay. My last question is
what is the best gift to give somebody going through
a divorce.

Speaker 2 (01:22:24):
You know, there's this new phenomenon I just heard about
that I kind of love. Tell me divorce registries. I
love this.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):
I you too, I agree.

Speaker 2 (01:22:33):
Somebody pointed it out to me, thinking I was going
to piss all over it because I tend to like
laugh at some of these conventions like that people do,
like you know, there's all these new ones too, like
a baby moon or a push present. People have to
just like add holidays and ad opportunities to buy gifts.
So somebody brought us to my attention that a woman
was getting divorced and she put up on like TikTok

(01:22:56):
or whatever social media is. Like, listen, a lot of
my friends are asking me like how they can be
of support to me. And of course, like talking to
me and being there for me is a really lovely thing,
but like if you really want to do something like
I I gave half my stuff, like I let him
keep all the pots and pans. I got to get
pots and pans, like, and she made a registry. She

(01:23:16):
went on Amazon and made a registry. Somebody brought it
to my attention. I was like, that's not a thing,
and they were like, yeah, it is. And I looked
it up and I was like, oh my god, that's
the thing. I actually bought an item on her registry.
I bought her a forty dollars. It wasn't like expensive thing,
but she registered for stuff that like, oh yeah, like
it was useful. Yeah, Like she like gave them all
the sheets, Like I got the impression she left the

(01:23:37):
apartment or left the home, so there was like things
she needed that, Like you know, like you don't own
two pasta strainers. Yeah, so if you leave, you're like,
all right, you keep the pasta strings.

Speaker 3 (01:23:49):
If you said, like I'm keeping the pasta strain.

Speaker 2 (01:23:51):
You'd seem petty. So she was like, yeah, I let
him keep all that stuff. And it struck me as like, oh,
that's kind of a cool way to say to friends,
like I want to help me replace all the stuff
I lost in the divorce. You can, So I think
that's a really cool thing that you can do. I
think people when they go through a divorce, I think
they feel like who they are has foundationally been shifted.

(01:24:13):
Like we live in a world where everybody acts like
they meant to do everything that happens, even though half
the time I think they're lying.

Speaker 3 (01:24:20):
You know, like even you get fired from a job,
you're like I hated.

Speaker 2 (01:24:22):
That job anyway, people like really I meant to do that,
you know, and you can't do that with divorce, Like
nobody got married was like, yeah, whatever, if it doesn't
work out, we'll just get divorced, like people mean to
stay married.

Speaker 1 (01:24:33):
It's a good point.

Speaker 2 (01:24:34):
And so I think anything that can make a person
not feel like a failure and sort of see it
as an invitation to the next chapter of their life.
And I think as a friend, the best thing you
can do is just point out to the person, like
all the things about them that still make them incredible
and special and that make them appealing, not just in
the context of relationship, just in the context of life
and whatever this next chapter holds for them.

Speaker 1 (01:24:56):
It's cool that you said that. I was going through
a breakup years ago and I was so sad, and
I got an email from a college friend out of
the blue, and it was short, it was one or
two paragraphs, and she just said all the things that
she loved about me.

Speaker 2 (01:25:11):
Isn't that great?

Speaker 1 (01:25:12):
I will never forget it?

Speaker 2 (01:25:13):
Yeah, yeah, it isn't that lovely? It's so lovely, Like
it is such a wonderful feeling when we express to
another person. I mean, you can do this in a
relationship if you ask another person, like, what is it
you love about me? Like, sometimes you're really surprised by
the answers. Yeah, I work at an office, you know,
with a lot of women. I have a lot of
women in paralegal and administrative staff, and it fascinates me

(01:25:35):
sometimes because my office is such that I can hear
their conversations sometimes, and I've learned so much about how
little I know about women by that experience, because we're
all running around like trying to do as many shoulder
presses as possible and thinking we have to get like
Chris Hemsworth's abs.

Speaker 3 (01:25:54):
That it's so not it and the stuff you guys.

Speaker 2 (01:25:57):
Like when you're like, oh, you know, he was wearing
a T shirt and like you could just see like
the bump of where the like crossy wears. Was Oh,
I think that's so sexy.

Speaker 3 (01:26:04):
I'm like wait what, like what is that?

Speaker 2 (01:26:06):
Or he did that thing like that when I got
up to use the restroom, like he didn't know whether
he should get up or not, and he was so cute,
and I'm like, wait, what are you talking about? Like
the stuff that you guys are like blown away by anything,
some of the stuff that you're upset by.

Speaker 4 (01:26:21):
If we do, I'm like, we would never have known that,
Like we really should have to like embed an anthropologists
like a lean goodall in each other's spaces.

Speaker 2 (01:26:31):
Like I think like women should like embed themselves in
like some bar or some jiu jitsu academy and just
like hide and listen to what we're saying. And then
we should do the same thing with women, like we
should just like listen because we would be stunned by it.
And I think if you say to your partner, like,
you know, when do you feel the most loved by me?

Speaker 3 (01:26:51):
Like that's an interesting question, beautiful, like when do you
feel the.

Speaker 2 (01:26:54):
Most loved by me? I think you'd be shocked at
the answer. It would be such small things. It would
be such little tiny things that made you feel like
and you'd go that it wasn't the grand gesture and
I planned for your birthday and it's like, no, is
that one time where you did this, like or when
my mom was sick and you did this, And it's.

Speaker 3 (01:27:14):
Like wait, really, like it was that easy, Like it
was that easy.

Speaker 2 (01:27:19):
That little thing like that to me is like the
most beautiful thing that we just don't even know how
much power we have over the emotional state of this
other person, and we don't even see the ways we
make them feel loved. I'm always in my own relationships,
you know, even with my sons, like I've always said
to them because I know how you know, working as

(01:27:40):
a hospice volunteer and doing what I do for a
living and seeing the impermanence of things.

Speaker 3 (01:27:44):
I'm always thinking about the impermanence of things.

Speaker 2 (01:27:46):
And I always make a point of telling my sons,
like everyone in my life, where I love, I make
a point of the last thing I say to them
in every conversation is I love you, because I always
want to know that's the last words I said to
that person, because you never know when it's the last time,
you know. But I've always I said to my sons,
I'm like, you know I love you, but I want
you to know I know you love me, like I
want you to hear me say that I know you

(01:28:07):
love me, so you never have to worry if something.

Speaker 3 (01:28:10):
Happened to me.

Speaker 2 (01:28:11):
Did my dad know I loved him? Like, yeah, I
know you love me. And I think there's tremendous value
in relationship, whatever the relationship, mother, father, son, sibling, whatever,
in saying to the other person like I feel your love,
and maybe even say to them, do you know when
you did X, Y, and Z, I could feel that
you love me. Like, what a gift to say that

(01:28:32):
to someone.

Speaker 1 (01:28:33):
You know, I'm probably like eight thousand hours of conversation professionally,
and no one's ever said that I agree with you.

Speaker 2 (01:28:40):
That interesting?

Speaker 1 (01:28:41):
Yeah, yeah, and it's so beautiful.

Speaker 2 (01:28:43):
It's free, Like you don't need to buy the thirty
seven Birkin bags. Would warm you to the core. If
all of the people in your life right now could
just tell you all the times they feel loved by you,
I think you would be reduced to a puddle of tears.
How beautiful that is.

Speaker 3 (01:29:01):
And I think that one of the great problems of
our society is that, like the first time most people
get everyone who loves them in a room is.

Speaker 2 (01:29:10):
At their funeral. Yes, Like, that's crazy, man. We have
to cultivate spaces to talk more about our next company
other Maybe that's just what I need, is another job.

Speaker 1 (01:29:22):
I have some rapid fire questions. Yes, go, celebrity couple
you think is the real deal?

Speaker 2 (01:29:29):
I think is the real deal in terms of how
much they love each other, because I've got a couple
that I'm like impressed by in terms of how well
they divorced, like Bruce will listen to me, more like
had the coolest divorce ever. Really, Oh yeah, Like Leave
Schreiber and Naomi Watts had like the coolest divorce and
now they like just took their kid off to college
and they both posted on Instagram about it and they're
at lunch together, and like I was like, say, you

(01:29:50):
can do it. People do it all the time. People
are cool with each other. So that's couples that I
think are like a celebrity couple that I think is
the real deal. Gosh.

Speaker 3 (01:29:58):
I think actually Brock and Michelle Obama.

Speaker 2 (01:30:00):
I remember when they did their first dance the inauguration,
I think was to edit James at Last, which I
think is a very romantic song. And way they were
looking at each other, I was like, man, these two
like they got a couple of kids, and like, I
get the impression they still are into each other, like
they're still going at it. And maybe it's artifice, but
I didn't get the impression it was. It seemed to
me that, yeah, that's like real.

Speaker 1 (01:30:21):
And palpable your favorite romantic comedy.

Speaker 2 (01:30:24):
I think Love Actually. I've probably seen Love Actually like
fifteen times, and I still think it's a really beautiful
film because it's about a lot of different kinds of
love and a lot of different circumstances, and I think
it's a really lovely film. I know it's come under
some criticism in the past, but I think that's a
really good romantic comedy.

Speaker 1 (01:30:40):
It's your favorite holiday, Thanksgiving.

Speaker 2 (01:30:43):
Because there's no gifts. I don't have to buy anybody presents,
and it's just food, and it's a lot of people
getting together and we'll just gathering for a meal. I
really like that.

Speaker 1 (01:30:50):
I love how anti consumerism you are.

Speaker 2 (01:30:52):
I think we've convinced people that consumption will fill the void,
and it won't. Nothing drives that point home to you
more than representing ultra wealthy people like because they're just
miserable a lot of them.

Speaker 1 (01:31:00):
What haven't you gotten in life that you've been chasing?

Speaker 2 (01:31:03):
Peace? I think peace inside myself. I think that's what
I'll have always been chasing, and maybe we'll always be chasing.
I feel like I'm getting closer to it. I think
I spent a lot of my life uncomfortable in my
own skin. I would never go backwards. I'm fifty two.
My sons are in their twenties. A lot of the
guys who work for me are in their thirties and forties,
and I don't envy any of them. I like moving forward,

(01:31:23):
and I feel like I'm getting closer and closer every
year to peace.

Speaker 1 (01:31:27):
Thank you for saying that and sharing that. If you
weren't an attorney, what would you be doing?

Speaker 2 (01:31:31):
I think I'd be a writer. I love to write.
I wrote my book. I've written some fiction, none of
which has been published yet, but some of which is
in the works, and I like to write. It's a
very solitary activity. I also think I would probably work
in end of life medicine. I would probably be like
a full time hospice volunteer. I think that's what I'll
do when I retire, is I'll probably write books and
be a hospice volunteer.

Speaker 1 (01:31:51):
Something everyone should try once.

Speaker 2 (01:31:52):
Brazilian jiu jitsu. I've been trading Brazilian jiu jitsu for
about fifteen years. I think it's one of the most
rewarding and enjoyable activity. I jokingly call it struggle cuddles
because it's a very physically intimate activity to do with somebody,
but it requires a lot of trust and it's also
like chess with your body, and it's also really practical
from a self defense standpoint.

Speaker 1 (01:32:12):
What's a book that you've read that changed your life,
something you think everybody should read.

Speaker 2 (01:32:15):
I gotta go with two of them.

Speaker 1 (01:32:17):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:32:17):
One is All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Door.
It won the Pulitzer Prize. It's an unbelievably beautiful book.
It's theoretically about World War Two, but it's not really
It's about being human. And so I think that is
one of, if not the greatest book I've ever read.
The others book that came out about two months ago
in June. That's a book by an author named Jason Green.

(01:32:38):
It's his first novel and it's called Unworld. It's a novel,
and it's a very readable novel. I would say that
it's about artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness, but
it's really about life and grief and what does it
mean to be human? And like All The Light We
Cannot See, it was a book that moved me to
tears like two or three times as while I was

(01:33:00):
reading it, but with just how beautiful the sentiment in
it was. It's an incredible book. I mean it's a
new book, so I don't know how it will do
popularity wise. I kind of stumbled on it. It's not
even out in paperback, it's still in hardcover. But I
bought it when I was going away to Las Vegas
for the weekend, and I was like, Oh, I'm gonna
read like some light fiction, you know. And I'm sitting
like by the pool at the palazzo, like crying, like

(01:33:23):
it was such a good book. And in some of
the same ways that all the light we cannot see
is what it's about is not what it's about very
much about being human.

Speaker 1 (01:33:32):
You can grab the question everything card game and pull
out whichever card calls to you.

Speaker 2 (01:33:36):
Oh, this is the worst question for me? Why I'm
so antisocial? The single best party you've ever been to
set the scene. Everyone who knows me in real life
knows I do not go to parties. Like I refuse
to go to parties. I'm really good at working room,
but I find it exhausting.

Speaker 1 (01:33:54):
Will you go to a small gathering like a dinner.

Speaker 2 (01:33:57):
Yes, but I hate that too. I'm great at it,
I just I find it exhausting. And I also I
wake up at four am every day, so I'm usually
in bed by eight eight thirty. Yeah, so like all
the interesting things happen after eight pm, So I'm really
not that much fun.

Speaker 1 (01:34:13):
Can I ask you a question? Taking all humilody out
of this for a second, Most people I know who
feel that way have a really high IQ, and so
they are the most interesting person at the table.

Speaker 2 (01:34:26):
Usually I love talking to people. I find people fascinating.
I'm just way better with like one on one. Like
if you said to me, like, hey, let's like go
have coffee and talk to somebody for a couple of hours. Yeah,
if I had more free time, I would happily do.
Like as a hospice volunteer, I don't think I've ever
talked about death with anybody. Like they just want to

(01:34:48):
tell you about their life and what they did for
a living and their relationships, and like I'm riveted, Like
I'm fascinated by that. I feel compelled when I'm in
a group setting to like enter and be entertaining and
bring out the entertainment in the people around me. I
feel like this sense of control that I'm like, Okay,

(01:35:08):
I want to like make this as wonderful as possible,
and I'm good at it. But I just I find
it really tiring. So my answer to this would be
the single best party I've ever been to. Set the scene.
It would really be me and my dogs on the
couch and like, you know, something really interesting on Netflix
and probably popcorn with like some ghee on it and

(01:35:29):
some salt. And that's to me, like the best party ever.
Like I'm very much a homebody. My idea of a
good party is like a very small group of people,
if any, and maybe something lovely to eat, and definitely dogs,
like anything having dogs involved. Like I'm the person who
at the party. If I had the misfortune of being

(01:35:50):
invited to a party, I will definitely be in the
corner playing with their pets.

Speaker 3 (01:35:54):
Like I love animals, so I'll sit there with their cat.

Speaker 2 (01:35:57):
And I'm the guy too that people will go, you know, like,
oh god, that dog doesn't like anybody, you know, And
I'm like, oh yeah, well you just you only needed
to meet me, like.

Speaker 3 (01:36:05):
And my energy with animals works really well.

Speaker 1 (01:36:07):
Well, I heard that you love dogs so much that
you're launching pet nups.

Speaker 2 (01:36:11):
Yes, pet nups Trusted petnup dot com. That is our
new venture. So the team Trusted prenup dot Com, which
is a company I've been involved in for most of
this year. We really only started up. I've done hundreds,
if not thousands, of prenups, and I was approached by
a team of really innovative thinkers who came to me
and said, we want to leverage AI and technology and

(01:36:34):
take these prenups. You've done these hundreds, if not thousands
of prenups, feed them into a large language model, come
up with the best possible version of the prenup. And
we did. And I was really the legal technical advisor
who took the time to put together like the best
possible version. And we've now had hundreds of people in
the last five six months who've now come onto the

(01:36:55):
platform and built their own prenup.

Speaker 1 (01:36:57):
Co.

Speaker 2 (01:36:58):
We're doing it a quarter of what the retainer would be,
and this is like soup to nuts, and we have
a guarantee in terms of its enforceability, We have guarantees
in terms of satisfaction with the process. Like we're really
transparent in the way we're doing it, and we're doing
it in this really innovative way, and I'm thrilled to
see how well it's doing. But one of the things
that I've been seeing more and more of in my practice,

(01:37:18):
and as an animal.

Speaker 3 (01:37:19):
Lover, I'm very attuned to it is.

Speaker 2 (01:37:21):
I'm seeing a ton of people who in the divorce,
like what happens with companion animals is a huge peak,
like they're a member of our family. We care about
them in a very similar way to the way we
care about our children. Some couples are making choices of
saying we're not having children and our pets are going
to be you know, our fur babies or whatever it
might be. And so, you know, the pets, just like
the children. They didn't ask for there to be a

(01:37:42):
division or a conflict. They don't really understand what's going on.
And I've seen people weaponize a pet in a divorce.
I've seen people, you know, really be terrified to lose
a pet in a divorce. So we decided, you know what,
rather than creating barriers to entry to this, like, we're
going to make it something that's total lead tomocratize. There's
a lot of law firms and even some online services

(01:38:04):
that are charging people to do cohabitation agreements or companion
animal agreements. Like if people are dating and they decide
to get a dog or a cat together even though
they're not living together, like they're charging people to create that,
and we said, yeah, let's not do that, let's just
do it for free. Let's do it to public service.
So what we're doing is Trusted Pet nup. If you
adopt a rescue pet anywhere in the United States, you're

(01:38:26):
entitled to a free Trusted Pet nup. You're entitled to
a free companion Animal agreement. Whether it's a we're dating,
whether it's we're cohabitating, whether it's we're married, whether it's
we're marrying. This is basically a way to protect the
rights and obligations related to a pet. And if you
aren't adopting a dog or cat or horse or bird

(01:38:47):
or whatever companion animals you're adopting, if you've already done
it or you bought it from a breeder, we're still
making it accessible. And what we're doing there is a
pay as you wish kind of a thing. But what
we're doing is giving fifty percent of it to foster
and stray rescue charities, and the other fifty percent we're
using for the costs of the platform, maintaining the website,
all of the back end stuff that's done by our

(01:39:08):
technical team. So yeah, that's something we're pretty excited about
and that I think is going to be a really
nice public service and I hope is going to raise
some money for, you know, the charities that I already
was very supportive of, and really help people see the
value in fostering pets and hopefully minimize conflict between people
when they split up, you know, when it comes to
their pets, because I've really seen that cause a lot

(01:39:29):
of pain for people, and I think that it doesn't
need to It can be something that we can contract.
You know. The law is starting to treat companion animals differently.
When I first started practicing, I had a case where
the people couldn't agree on what to do with the dog,
and he said, ah, I'm word the dog be sold,
and the proceeds divided. They immediately went and figured out
the solution. But there was a long time where courts
treated animals like property, like if you accidentally killed someone's dog,

(01:39:52):
you owed them the replacement value of purchasing a new dog.
Like that's crazy. So now the law really understands that
they have a special emotional place in our hearts. So
we're just trying to help people's contractual relationships, you know,
stay a pace with how the law is changing.

Speaker 1 (01:40:09):
You are such a dynamic person.

Speaker 2 (01:40:11):
Thanks. I mean, I think that's a compliment.

Speaker 1 (01:40:13):
I don't know for sure. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:40:16):
Exhausting to spend that much time with, but thank you.
I appreciate that.

Speaker 1 (01:40:19):
No riveting. Thank you for sharing so much time with me.

Speaker 2 (01:40:22):
No, thank you for asking such interesting questions and creating
such a nice space. I'm really appreciative of the time.

Speaker 1 (01:40:28):
Nice. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:40:29):
It's great.

Speaker 1 (01:40:34):
Okay, you know what time it is. Today is a
good day. To have a good day. I'll see you
next week.

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