James Sexton: Divorce Lawyer on Marriage, Relationships, Sex, Lies & Love | Lex Fridman Podcast #396

We have been encouraged culturally to criticize people we're in long-term relationships with, not new relationships. New relationships, you put the person on a pedestal, you're allowed to just, oh, they're wonderful. But every trope out there in every form of popular media is like the wife rolling her eyes at the husband and the husband being like, oh, there's loathsome heartbeat that castrated me. As if like, people are just passive players in their lives. And I think that is an incredibly toxic message to send to people.

- [Lex] Yeah.

That this is how we should be relating to our partner. Like we should not, you don't take the piss outta your partner in front of people.

- [Lex] Yeah.

Like the successful relationships I've seen are where people are just cheering for their partner where they're thick as thieves, where there is just this feeling of like, man, they like each other. They got each other's back like you wouldn't believe. Man, you could take sides against anybody, but take sides against their partner. You're going down, and that when you see a couple that has that, that's so hard to break. But I think that comes from having like a steadfast.

Yeah, no, I don't do that.

- [Lex] Yeah.

I don't talk my partner.

- [Lex] Yeah.

And you don't shit talk my partner to me.

- [Lex] Yeah.

And that to me is when, because I think we're just so criticized by the world. The world is so full of criticism. We criticize ourselves so harshly, that having a partner who no matter what is like, you've got this, I'm with you. Okay, yeah, you screwed up, I see it. Look, I'm not gonna lie to you about your blind spots. You screwed up, but you know what? People screw up sometimes. You got a right to screw up. A lot of people screw up. Come on, get up. Let's go. I know you have it in you. If you have that person like that. I feel like that's a superpower.

The following is a conversation with James Sexton, divorce attorney and author of "How to Stay in Love A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together" As a trial lawyer, James, for over two decades has negotiated and litigated a huge number of high conflict divorces. This has given him a deep understanding of how relationships fail and how they can succeed. And bigger than that, the role of love and pain in this whole messy rollercoaster ride we call life. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's James Sexton.

What is the most common reason that marriages fail?

- That's a great question, but it's a question that everybody wants there to be a simple answer. Like they want me to say cheating or money or the internet. But the reality is, I think it's a lot of little things. It's disconnection. That would be my answer. The reason marriages fail is disconnection. What causes disconnection? That's the bigger, and I think more important question because like Tom Wolf said about bankruptcy, "It happens very slowly and then all at once." Disconnection happens very slowly and then all at once. So most of the time, what I think people want is an answer like cheating. But cheating is the big all at once thing. How did we get to the place where cheating was even something you were thinking about doing, or that you would think about and then cross the line from thought into action? And that's I think the big question. So disconnection would be my answer.

- Do you think it's possible to introspect like looking backwards for every individual case where the disconnection began and how it evolved?

- [James] Sure, yeah, this is such a multi-variate equation. It's a dance. It's a chemistry. It's what did you do and what did the other person do? And see, the interesting thing about being a divorce lawyer is I'm weaponizing intimacy in a courtroom. I'm telling it's full context storytelling what I do for a living. So what I do is I take my client's story and I have to present it to a judge and make my client the hero in every way and the other side, the villain in every way. Now I have to be careful not to do that in a manner that loses credibility. Because even a judge would know, even a judge is smart enough to know that no one's all good or all bad, but only if you were reverse engineering a relationship and saying, how did this break? You really have to look at both people, the good and the bad. What each of them did that moved the dial in these different directions. And I think that that's very hard for anyone going through a divorce to do about their own relationship. We don't know who discovered water, but it wasn't a fish. Like if you're in it, I don't think you see it clearly. I think as a divorce lawyer whose job is to really drill down on the facts and figure out what's going on in this story, I have to look at both sides. So I have to think a lot about my own arguments, but I also have to think about what's the other lawyer's argument going to be, especially in custody cases. So I really have been forced to look at both sides for so many years, so deeply in relationships. That once you do that, you realize that the good guy, bad guy thing just doesn't apply.

- I wonder if it's the little things or a few big things that cause this connection, whether it's, I mean, you've talked about granola and blowjobs, but those seem to be stories that you can tell to yourself like, maybe that story should be explained. Or maybe not.

- You don't think granola and blowjobs is self-explanatory.

- Almost. I think people can construct a good, like if you ask GPT what do they mean? I think the story that would come up is a pretty good one. But that's a story you tell about when you first knew it's the disconnection has begun, is when you stop buying my favorite granola, or when she stopped giving blowjobs.

- I would say when it's reached like a critical mass.

- Yeah, face shift of some sort.

- 'Cause I think it started before that. When she said, yeah, I used to give him blowjobs and when we were in our early relationship, and then one day like, I just was like, oh, well, we don't have as much time. Well, I'll wait until later and we'll have sex and then we both enjoy it.

- Blowjobs are inefficient.

- Yeah, exactly correct.

- So you batch it all together.

- Yeah, so she said, well, exactly. And they had kids at that point, so I think she really was like, hey, we've got a certain window.

- Yeah.

- So let's have something we both enjoy. So I don't think she had any negative intentions there. I think that she was working in good faith towards the betterment of the relationship, but it was having this second order effect. And so I really do think that, yeah, the blowjobs, the granola, I mean, there anyone who's been in a long-term relationship, I guess it's just worth asking the question, what does this person do that makes me feel loved? Because I think it's very interesting in my own experience in life. Remember, I had a difficult chapter with one of my sons, my younger son when he was in his early 20s, and we were having a heartfelt conversation. And I said to him, "Do you know I love you?" And he said, "Well, yeah, of course I do." I said, "But do you feel my love? Like, do you feel it?" You know, not just do you know it intellectually? Do you feel it? And I remember thinking to myself, when do we feel someone's love, right? Like what is it that they do? And sometimes it's the weirdest, silliest things that they would never know. They, the person who's showing us that they love us and that we're feeling their love. They would never show us, if you said, "Why does this person love you?" They wouldn't say, Oh, 'cause I always make sure that when the paper comes, I bring it from the bottom of the driveway to the door so they don't have to go out and get it. Or I always hold the door for them. Or I, you know, oh, I always like, again, I buy the granola that I know this person likes. Or I remembered that they don't like it when I put on this particular record, so I don't put it on. And those are these, yes, they're small things, but they're not small. They're kind of everything.

- Do you think it's good to communicate that stuff?

- Well, a 100%.

- It takes away some of the power of it, right?

- When you point it out, then the person realizes, oh, okay, he likes this or dislikes this. So yes, there becomes a deliberateness to it, a conscious. So I understand not pointing that out when it's a good thing. I think when it's a negative thing. Like I think in the granola situation, if she had said to him, "Hey, you used to do this and you've stopped. That feels like something to me." Like she said, she didn't say anything about that, just like he probably didn't say anything about the blowjobs. I think if there had been a moment of this is starting, let's talk about it while it's starting. But people wait from what I can see.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- People wait until the big thing happens. The financial impropriety, the substance use disorder, the cheating. They wait for that to happen and then they go, where did we go wrong? And the answer is quite a while ago, with the granola.

- Yeah. Yeah, so when you notice something like you notice that little something, talk about it, 'cause that little something is probably a colonel of a deeper truth. Of course, there is also moods, we're all like a rollercoaster of emotion. So you can not bring a granola one day just to, just because you're in this place where just nothing is-

- [James] Yeah, yeah.

- Just cynicism everywhere, just anger and so on. But it's a temporary feeling. But maybe that temporary feeling is grounded in some other deeper current that's actually building up.

- Yeah. And I think a good partner wants to understand the currents

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Of their partner, that they wanna understand. "Hey, are you going through something?" And look, if I'm the one you need to take it out on, that's okay. I'm a big boy, I can take it. If you're hormonal, if you're frustrated at work, if you're whatever. We should be able to have a little bit of that interaction in a relationship. But I do think it's so easy to just say to people, well, communication is the key. But it really is about fearless kinds of communication. It's about really, honestly saying to somebody, this feels like something to me. Am I wrong? This just feels like something to me. And also how that's presented. I mean, one of the things I'm very caught up on, or feel very strongly about is that we have been encouraged culturally to criticize people we're in long-term relationships with. Not new relationships. New relationships, you put the person on a pedestal, you're allowed to just, oh, they're wonderful. But every trope out there in every form of popular media is like the wife rolling her eyes at the husband and the husband being like, oh, there's loathsome heartbeat that castrated me. As if like, people are just passive players in their lives. And I think that is an incredibly toxic message to send to people. That this is how we should be relating to our partner. You don't take the outta your partner in front of people.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Like the successful relationships I've seen are where people are just cheering for their partner where they are thick as thieves, where there is just this feeling of like, man, they like each other. They got each other's back like you wouldn't believe. Man, you could take sides against anybody, but take sides against their partner. You're going down. And that when you see a couple that has that, that's so hard to break. But I think that comes from having like a steadfast.

Yeah, no, I don't do that.

- [Lex] Yeah.

I don't shit talk my partner.

- [Lex] Yeah.

And you don't talk my partner to me.

- [Lex] Yeah.

And that to me is when, because I think we're just so criticized by the world. The world is so full of criticism. We criticize ourselves so harshly that having a partner who no matter what is like you've got this, I'm with you. Okay, yeah, you screwed up. I see it. Look, I'm not gonna lie to you about your blind spots. You screwed up, but you know what? People screw up sometimes. You got a right to screw up. A lot of people screw up. Come on, get up. Let's go. I know you have it in you. If you have that person like that. I feel like that's a superpower to have that effect on another person.

- Yeah, one of the things I love seeing, you look at a couple and one is talking like in an interview.

- [James] Yeah.

- Answering a question, especially like intellectual questions. What do you think about the war in Ukraine or something? And then the partner is talking and the other person is looking at them as if they're hearing the wisest thing-

- [James] Yeah.

- Ever.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- They're still looking at them, not waiting for their turn to speak, not thinking about how's the audience going to take that?

- [James] Yeah.

- But they're looking at them like, God, I'm so lucky.

- [James] Yeah.

- To be with this smart motherfucker.

- Is it not? But there's this scene-

- And they could be seen the dumbest shit out there. (laughs)

- There's a scene in the movie "True Romance."

- [Lex] Yes, I love "True Romance."

- I love a great movie.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- I mean, Gary Oldman scene is like the greatest scene ever done in film with Christian Slater. But there's a scene in it where she holds up a sign to Christian Slater and it says, "You're so cool."

- [Lex] You're so cool.

- And like, man, that's it.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- That's it.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- I've always, I think I say it somewhere in the book that, you go to weddings and when the bride walks in, everybody's looking at the bride. It's her show. Everybody turns around as the first glimpse everybody gets at the bride. And I never look at the bride, I always look at the groom looking at the bride, because there's this like, to me, that's every, like he has this look like this 'cause this is the first time he's seeing her in the dress most of the time. And also he's seeing her like, "Holy shit, she's coming down the aisle. We're getting married." But this is it. And everyone's looking at her and I always look at him, 'cause I always think to myself like, the look on his face is like, that's like this feeling of like, holy, yeah, wow, okay. Everyone's looking at her and she's mine and she's coming up here and we're getting married. And I feel like yeah, like that kind of adoration, I think that's the look we're describing is adoration, like that the words coming outta their mouth that they're like, yeah, that's mine. That one's mine, you know. That's such a great thing. It's such a great feeling.

- I've seen the good stuff like with "True Romance." I mean, you could make fun of the guys totally cringe wearing Elvis.

- [James] Yeah.

- Essentially being a fake Elvis with shades and like what is he doing? It's watching these kung fu movies. But from her perspective and from any perspective you could take on him is this is the baddest motherfucker who's ever lived.

- [James] Yeah.

- Like, he's willing to do those things for me, but not like, it's almost like an epic heroic figure.

- [James] Yeah.

- And we're living in this epic hero story.

- What does that do to him though?

- [Lex] Yeah.

- See, that's the point. If there's a point to this, to this whole thing-

- [Lex] Yeah.

this whole couple thing.

- [Lex] Yeah. (laughs)

- Isn't that it?

- [Lex] Yeah.

- I don't understand this idea of, we had a successful marriage. We were married for 50 something years. We were miserable for 47 of them, but we hung in there. This is an endurance event.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Like the primary relationship of your life, you've decided you're gonna turn into the like a 50 mile trail race. Why? Why would you do that? Congratulations, you took the concept of monogamy and made it something that two people are absolutely not gonna enjoy. But you hung in there. Congratulations. And I understand. There's religious perspectives that say, well, it's a sacred covenant, but I have a real chicken or the egg problem with that.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Because I think it was like, well, how do we sell this incredibly stupid concept that isn't working to people? I know, we'll tell 'em, God says, you have to, and we'll sign on for that. I don't buy it. I don't buy it anymore. I really, 'cause when you see a successful marriage where you see two, even without a marriage, you see a pair bond. You see a couple that really love each other and cheer for each other in that way. And hang on each other's words that way and like are just in each other's corner that way. You see the fake shit instantly.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- You see the difference right away. It's like, if you, you know, the first time I've, this is the first time I've come to Austin. I've thought I'd eaten a lot of barbecue in my life. I've never had Texas barbecue.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- I landed, I went and had barbecue.

- [Lex] Yeah, yeah.

- I was like, okay, I've never had barbecue before. Apparently this is a whole different thing.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- I think it's the same thing. I think it's like once you see real love, real love and I mean romantic love, like real love like that, real bond, real, you go, oh yeah, this other thing's not gonna do it.

- Do you think that's a daily deliberate choice that a couple like that makes? Because it feels like a very easy to do deliberate step. Choose to see the brilliant in it, the beautiful in it, and almost immediately everything shifts and it becomes this momentum where all you see is the beautiful, and all you see is the brilliant.

- That is a conscious choice. I think approaching life that way is a conscious choice. Approaching any relationship that way is a conscious choice. I mean, looking at someone who hurts you or does something hurtful to you, and thinking about what's going on in their life, that they're doing that or what's happening with them. Yeah, that's a very conscious choice. And I think a a better one.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- A better one than seething in animosity and letting that eat you alive. But I don't know that it's, I don't think it should be so difficult, like with our children, with our pets, we don't have this problem. You never have someone look at their dog who they've had for eight years and go, I gotta get a new dog. I've had this one for eight years. I gotta get, like puppies are so cute. What am I doing with this old dog? It's the total opposite. They're like, oh my God, this is like my dog. This is my dog. The smell of the dog is like this is my dog smell. The bad habits of the dog. You're like, that's my stupid dog-

- [Lex] Yeah.

- That does stupid things. And it's not like that has to be a conscious, they wake up every day and go, I should be grateful for the dog. Like it's just visceral. It's in them.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And your children like people's children, it's why people are like not aware of how annoying their children are, because they're not annoying to them. I get it. To you, the sound of your kids shrieking is like, oh, my kid's having a good time. And you don't get, and see, when I try to, when I hear that, I try to hear it with those ears. Like, oh, that, I'm a parent, I get it. My kids are adults now. But like I get it. So when I hear a kid shrieking, I just am like, ah, to that parent, that's the sound of that kid having a great time and good. It's so nice that that's in the world. So for me, it has to be conscious. For that parent, I don't think it has to be conscious. So I think it would be great if it didn't have to be a conscious practice, but I wonder if like, anything in meditation or mindfulness, it's a matter of exercising that way of seeing.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And then once you've come to that-

- [Lex] It becomes easier.

- It does itself, right? It really does. I think initially has to be a conscious practice. And by the way, it's easier to make it a conscious practice before it started to fade, right? I mean, that's what's so amazing about marriage is there's like almost eight billion people in the world, and you're picking this one. So when you marry in theory, like the stock's at its highest, you're as crazy about each other as you could possibly be. So that's the time to get into this mindfulness, to get into this practice. Not once it's like the wheels are starting to come off. It's much harder. It's like gaining a bunch of weight and then saying, "Okay, how am I gonna lose the weight now?"

- Well, I think that even before marriage, like right away, you just see everything is beautiful. Let me quote BoJack Horseman on this. "When you look at someone through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags."

- [James] That's great.

- And there's a certain sense where if you from the very beginning, of course, you could end up in toxic relationships that way.

- [James] Sure.

- But life is short. You're gonna die eventually, might as well really go all in on relationships.

- There's a line in "Drugstore Cowboy," which is a great film. Where he says, "We played a game you couldn't win to the utmost."

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And I think everything, I think life is a game you can't win. And so you play it to the utmost. To love anything is insane because you are accepting that you're going to lose it. I'm a dog person. You get a dog and you've just resigned yourself to unbelievable pain because this thing's gonna die in like 10 years, maybe 15 if you're lucky. And why would you open your heart to that? Why would you let, because the joy is just so wonderful of it, of the ride up until it. Same thing with us. I mean, every marriage, every relationship, every love is gonna end. It's gonna end in death or divorce. So why not like, just go in, like go in, like go in, and just get weird. Don't define it the way that's, I mean, look at, you know, again, we keep going back to "True Romance," but just get weird. Like, yeah, I love this Elvis pretending to be weirdo. I love this former sex worker who's like whatever. Just go in. Love this person, have 'em love you. Don't worry about what everybody else is doing in their relationship. We're in such, I mean, it's not to me surprising that, that as the performative aspects of life on social media increases. People's satisfaction with their relationships and the divorce rate is following the same trend. Because I think everyone's going, well, what's everybody else doing? Well, how much sex is everyone else having? The only two people that should worry about how much sex you're having? The two people. If the two people are happy in the relationship. Great, then what does it matter? What does it matter what everybody else is doing?

- Yeah, there should be an element to great relationships and great friendships of like fuck the world.

- [James] Yeah.

- It's us versus the world.

- Us, it's us.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And that's what I mean when I say that thickest thieves. When they're like a unit like that, 'cause it's, look, it's just us. It's just what we want. It's what we like. And that's why I said like, even when it comes to sex or things like that, if you can't be candid with your partner about whatever weird shit you're into or what fantasy you had in any particular.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Well then who the hell can you be candid with? I mean, because you're gonna either go without or go elsewhere, and neither of those is a particularly healthy option or helpful option. It's the start of that decline. So why? Why open yourself to that decline, which invariably is just the path to the chair in front of me in my office?

- Yeah, you have a full section in your book on foot fetishes.

- I do. (Lex laughs) I do, yeah. Which is funny because I don't know anything about foot fetishes.

- Me neither. Me neither.

- Yeah. I'm not king shaming anybody, but there's nothing sexual about feet to me at all. I just don't get it, I don't, but I mean, listen, people like things, it's good. But yeah, I have had clients that have odd fetishes or sexual proclivities or things they wanna do, and they don't share it with their partner at all. And then they find an outlet for it because they try to go without it and that doesn't work. So they try to find some other outlet for it. And then that's interpreted as a betrayal and it creates distance and people split up. And of course, everybody likes to have like, you know, a bad guy to blame it on. So when you say, well, why'd you guys get divorced? Oh, 'cause he secretly had a foot fetish and he was on these message boards-

- [Lex] Right.

- Meet people but. Well, it gives you an easy answer as to why the two of you split up. But I don't think, you know, most divorces have such simple answers as it was a foot thing. But I also think too, like, listen, if you got a partner, I mean, we all do stuff that we're not super into because we're in a relationship. And that's what part of it is. Do you really wanna go see that chick flick? Do you really wanna eat at this restaurant? Do you really wanna go to her cousin's wedding? No, but you know, part of being in a relationship is, okay, if you're into this, I'm gonna pretend this song's a good song. Even though it's not my favorite song. And I think I just don't know, we've turned sex, I mean, sex has been so politicized in recent years, maybe it always was. But I think we've made it into something where we can't just, I don't know. I'm not in defeat, but if the woman I love was like, I'm really in defeat, I really wanna do stuff with your feet, I'd be like, all right, I can pretend that I'm into that. It's not gonna kill me.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- I'm not gonna be able to make it a centerpiece of our coupling. But like, yeah, I can pretend I'm in the feet, if you want.

- I don't personally have any fetishes that are outside of the normal discourse.

- As a divorce lawyer, I get to experience the whole spectrum.

- But if I, like if I was into furries, for example,

- [James] Yeah.

- I don't know how I would initiate the conversation with my partner about that.

- But frame the question the other direction.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- If you were into furries.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- How do you prevent your partner from knowing anything about that? That feels like a real, you'd have to make a conscious choice to not let your partner know.

- [Lex] Sure, sure.

- I don't think either of those is a particularly palatable or easy proposition.

- But a lot of people live life hiding some part of themselves.

- Yeah, quite unsuccessfully. The second order effects of that are very rarely positive.

- [Lex] Sure.

- I don't think I've ever met someone and went, yeah, I really hid this huge part of myself for an extended period of time.

- And it worked out great.

- And that's the best thing that happened. It's I'm really glad, I'm really glad I stayed in the closet as long as I did. It really worked out. Like it rarely does. It's a question of how long can you hold it off?

- [Lex] Yeah.

- I know gay men who stayed in the closet for 40 years, 50 years of their lives, and then they had a successful second chapter as a gay man. I've had clients like that. Do they regret that they were in the closet? No, because they were married. They had kids, like they had experiences they're glad they had. But would their advice to a young person in their 20s and 30s who's gay, stay in the closet, 'cause then you can have a wife and some kids, and then you can come out when you're 50 or 60 and have a second chapter, no.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- They would say, "Be who you are. Don't be afraid."

- As you were talking, I'm trying to think of, 'cause I'm publicly and privately I'm the exact same person or try to be the exact same person. So I usually try to make sure there's nothing to hide. But I was trying to come up with a counter example fee for if there's good things to, well, I mean, there could be like past relationships.

- [James] Oh yeah.

- If I slept with thousands of women or something like this, maybe you wanna put that to the side when you have the guts.

- Well, you don't wanna be in, there's a difference between being honest about something and being indelicate about it.

- [Lex] Right.

- I think we all do this with lovers. Like any of us who've been in more than one relationship, you would not at the end of sex be like, that was the third best sex I've ever had, you know. It's just indelicate, it's rude. So I don't think it's a matter of total candor at all times, but I think if you were using the furry example, and I'm not picking on furries. I just think if that is a proclivity that is anything other than a passing thought, like it's something that you just keep coming back to, then you're making a conscious decision to withhold it from your partner. And what is that out of? I mean, I would say it's probably out of fear. I'm not a psychologist, but probably out of fear. Fear that they would reject you. That they, okay, well now see, I genuinely believe that, I'm very conflicted in my religious faith, but I don't know that I believe in the devil, but if there was a devil, I think his principle function would be to convince us that we are so Beast Jill, that God couldn't love us. It would be to convince us that we're awful and that we should just lean into the awfulness. And I know the greatest low points of my life came whenever I just went, you know what? I'm just awful, I might as well just behave awfully. And I really believe that when you push down parts of yourself like your sexuality, like your insecurities, your true feelings from your romantic partner, the person who's supposed to be you're number one, you are making sure you will never feel their love because they don't love you. They love the you you've presented to them, which you know in your heart is not the authentic, honest, real you. And so if you know you're super into furries and you don't tell your partner about that, and your partner says, I love you so much, and you know what I love, one of the things I love about us is we have such great sexual chemistry. You'll never feel that love because you know, yeah, that's not true though. She doesn't know. She doesn't know that actually I'm not really satisfied and there is this thing that I want, that I know I can't even tell her 'cause I'm so ashamed of, like that doesn't feel like a good option to me.

- Yeah. Yeah. So that kind of vulnerability is essential to intimacy.

- I'm prone to jiu-jitsu metaphors, and this is one of the first conversations where I can actually use them because the person I'm talking to is a jiu-jitsu person.

- And people should know that you are a quote unquote "jiu-jitsu person." You have been afflicted with the disease.

- I am a brown belt under Marcelo Garcia, and I am like a seven year brown belt now so.

- Which is the right way to be a brown belt.

- Well, and also I am, you know, late middle aged, middleweight, and moderately talented. And training at that academy with so many incredibly talented people and training in New York City where there's so many unbelievably talented people. You're constantly humble and feeling like you should just be wearing a blue belt all the time. But a lot of, I think as you know, and as most people who practice jiu-jitsu know, you start to sort of see jiu-jitsu in everything. I genuinely believe that in love, you have to give something to get something. Everything you do creates a vulnerability. Every move you make in jiu-jitsu creates opportunity and creates vulnerability. And so you have to be willing to create vulnerabilities in order to get any leverage, in order to get any progress and any way to move the position. You don't want a marriage that's just two people both in 50-50, like you just sitting in that guard doing nothing. You want it to actually move along.

- Yeah, I mean, that's the way I see love in relationships is you should take that leap of vulnerability, give the other person the option to destroy you.

- Well, you have to expose, and that's the part that I think is hard for everyone is to expose yourself in that way. But that's what I mean, even when I said about getting a dog or having a child, like loving anything is tremendously courageous because it's terrifying. And it's only brave if you're scared. If you're not scared, it's not brave, it's just stupidity. It's bravery when you're afraid and you do the thing anyway. And so love is like, yeah, it's scary. I don't care who you are. In the jiu-jitsu community like I'm around as you are all like incredibly tough people, physically tough people, mentally tough people. But I've seen some of those people taken down.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- By 120 pound woman. (Lex laughs) Not from a grappling perspective, but they are taken apart.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- By a woman in their life. And vice versa, I've seen men, you know, who like, it really is shocking how much leverage we give to our romantic partners and how little discussion we really, genuine discussion we really have about it. How much we really are ever trained to think about it. There's nothing in school that teaches us about it. So much of literature and art is an idealized version of it. So little of it is real.

- And no matter how it evolves, when it ends in tragedy or drama, I feel like what people don't do enough is appreciate the good times. Appreciate how beautiful it is to having taken the risk and to having experienced that kind of love. I think when you look at people that are divorcing each other, there's a Edgar Allan Poe quote, "The years of love have been forgot, in the hatred of a minute." I always kinda am saddened, like deeply saddened how people seem to forget how many beautiful moments have been shared when some reason, some drama, some breakup leads them to part ways.

- Yeah, yeah. It's interesting that you came to that not being a divorce lawyer, because I've felt that way for a long time. And I really try to say to my clients, like in the courtroom at the negotiating table, I have a role to play where I have to be sort of like a pit bull or some kind of a like a courtroom sociopath, but behind closed doors, I'm very candid with people. I'm try to be much more emotionally attuned with them.

- So you're an empath in the sheets and sociopath in the streets.

- Exactly correct. That's well said. I've been, boy, I got a new tattoo idea. That's good. I like that. I do believe when I'm behind closed doors with people, I say to them, "How you end things is gonna be how you're gonna remember the whole thing." And that's unfortunate because you watch like a two hour movie and if the last 15 minutes of it sucked, you go, well that movie sucked. Well, the first hour in 45 was great, but you walk out with this bad taste in your mouth. I'm genuinely in awe of how easily people forget that they loved each other. And I'm amazed because by the time I meet them and by the time they hire me to be a weapon against the person they were in love with, there's nothing but animosity there. And so I have to try to imagine what these two people looked like when they were in love with each other, and how that even existed. But I have to tell you, I don't function that way. Every woman I ever had a relationship with, when I think of them, I don't think of the ending necessarily. I think of, I try to think about the greatest hits. I try to think about the moments that were wonderful, where I loved them and they loved me. And like there was joy and there was connection. And I don't know why you choose not to. There's that old axiom, I don't know who said it, that if you don't learn to find joy in the snow, you'll have less joy in your life and precisely the same amount of snow.

- Yeah.

- And I genuinely believe like, okay, the relationship ends. This is where it ends, we're done now. I am making a choice as to how I will remember you. And we do it in relationships. I always tell people, if you ever wanna see a couple light up, if they're ever like the couple at the table that's, you know, it seems like they got in a fight or something, ask 'em how they met. And most people when they talk about how they met, like their face softens, they both, and the other person looking at them telling the story gets that look you were talking about before. And 'cause they remember that thing and how they felt at that moment. And when this person was a choice, not a default, not their automatic plus one, but the person they asked to the wedding, not the, of course, you're bringing her, it's your wife, you bring your wife places. Like it was still, hey, there's like, 3 and a 1/2 billion women and I'm picking you, you know.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Like that feeling. And I don't know why when a relationship ends, you can't do that. A lesson I learned when my mother passed away, she had a two year terrible battle with cancer and was on hospice and was very, very sick. And it was a very slow and awful end. And I remember one of my worst fears was that this is how I would remember my mother for the rest of my life. That I would never be able to think of her. That I didn't think of what she had become in the last months where she was withered away to nothing in this bed. And I learned over time that memory is very kind that like, that faded somehow. And that now when I remember her, I remember her healthy and vibrant. I remember her laughter. I remember positive things. Some of that is, I like to look at photos of that or, but some of it is just how I think memory works. And I don't know why we don't apply that to relationships. And I think part of it is because we have this binary view of relationships that it's either success, which means you live happily ever after for the rest of your lives and die together. Or in short succession. Or it was wrong, it was awful. And I don't understand why that would have to be how we do it. I think we could look at relationships like what they are, which is chapters in a book. And that book is our life. And those chapters all have significance. And none of them would, the later chapters, none of them would happen without the prior ones. So there's this beauty to me of that. And I don't know if that it's a choice or if that is how it is and the rest is just narrative that we've put on top of it culturally for some reason.

- Well, I think to push back a little bit, I think memory can also, I think it is a deliberate choice, 'cause I think memory can, basically, that's how trauma works. It can surface the negative stuff and the negative stuff completely drowns out all the positives. I think it's a deliberate choice to make your memory probably work that way. In relationships, betrayal can do that, right? Sort of cheating, infidelity, like one event can almost erase the entirety of your understanding of the past. And all the memories are sort of shrouded in this darkness of, okay, what I believed was true, is totally untrue. And sort of to overcome that and still appreciate the beautiful moments.

- I'm continually astounded by how long the hurt and anger of betrayal can reverberate. I have clients who were four years, five years past when the divorce ended, the cheating was discovered and they're as angry as they were the day they found out. And I don't know what that's about.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Because I also have clients that they like look back on it and they go, we screwed up. We didn't do the best, but we did the best we could do at the time. There should be stars for wars like ours. (Lex laughs) There should be champagne for the survivors.

- [Lex] Yeah, that's beautiful.

- We made it through. We survived it and we were fools. And we were fools for love. And there are worse things in the world to be fools for. But I also do think that most relationships where there was infidelity and it's not a popular thing to say, and I'll get pilloried for it, but-

- [Lex] Great.

- I just don't know, and I don't wanna blame the victim of infidelity, but was the relationship really where it needed to be? Were you truly the most just dutiful spouse who was seeing this person's needs be met? Again, we've established in the granola story that people can sometimes with good intentions not be meeting their partner's needs or perceiving their partner's needs. Or their partner isn't communicating them the right way or all of the above. But I've rarely seen very happy content couples that cheat on each other. And so I understand there's a shame in saying, this person cheated on me, or I cheated on this person, 'cause I represent the cheater and I represent the cheated, I represent the victim of domestic violence and I represent the perpetrator of domestic violence. I represent the person with a substance use disorder, the person married to the person. So I don't get to choose the white or the black hat. Like I have my client and that's my client. And it's forces me to put myself into their story, from their point of view. And I think that kind of radical empathy that you need to engage in on a daily basis to represent people in those kinds of proceedings, it just I don't know, it just doesn't seem like there's good guys and bad guys. It just seems like it's complicated and people's intentions and where they actually end up are different.

- Yeah, I think there's some sense in still remembering the betrayal as it being symptom of taking life a little too seriously. Too seriously where you don't, life shouldn't be taken that seriously. You should be able to laugh at it all. I like the story you say of being able to appreciate the battle that should give stars for those kind of wars that we fought and just kind of be able to laugh at it all.

- Especially with love.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Like, that's just so absurd.

- [Lex] Yeah.

Like, it's so-

- It's so crazy.

- I mean, like, I don't, you know what? I think it's funny I think this is real candor, but as a man, there's nothing funnier than when you finish masturbating. There's no more humbling moment. And I like to think about the fact that like the richest, famous, most powerful person in the world, they jerkoff. The most powerful man in the world jerksoff, I'm sure. All of them do. I mean, you probably probably know them so you could ask, and that moment where you just, you come and you go, what am I doing? Like what the, now I gotta wipe the like, oh, good Lord. And there's this feeling of, but a second ago this seemed like a great idea and it was by the way, it was a great idea. There's this moment, this satori, where you just go, oh, like what? This is so silly. Well, that's love, that's sex. When you read other people's infidelity, the

text messages, the emails, 'cause I have to do that all the time. And I'll tell you how we make the sausage. In a divorce lawyer's office, some of the most entertaining moments is dramatic readings aloud of people's infidelity exchanges with their lovers.

- [Lex] The sexts.

- Yeah, the sext and like, you know, it's just so ridiculous, 'cause people have to go through like all kinds of gymnastics to be able to meet and have sex in weird places.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And you're reading this and you're reading these texts and you kind of go like, oh my God, these people. And by the way, I've represented some very powerful people and you read their texts with their lover or even their spouse, like even their spouse, and they're just pathetic. I mean, they're just like so not powerful. They're so like, "Hey babe."

- [Lex] Yeah.

- I have a name totally nameless-

- [Lex] Yeah.

- I have a very powerful, wealthy, famous former client where there's a whole series of texts about, is my dick weird? Which by the way, I think the answer is, is if you have to ask if you have a weird dick, the answer's probably yes, 'cause I've owned one and I've never thought is this weird? The fact that you're having this discussion. It's absurd. It's hilarious. Love is hilarious. It's bizarre. It's such a weird vulnerability. It's such a basic visceral human need. It really is something that we just, it's mysterious. It doesn't have to be that complicated. I don't think that even betrayal, like I said, it doesn't have to be that complicated. I think we can frame it differently.

- Yeah, you can laugh at the whole thing. I mean, I think what we don't often do with ourselves is look back at text or look back at emails or look back at Google search, I did that recently. Just looking at what I searched for like 10 years ago, 15, it's like, forget last week. Just look at your Google searches last week. And you're like, wait a minute, what?

- [James] Right?

- Why did you just search for this?

- [James] Right, right.

- 50 Times.

- Right. Why did the karate kid three pop into head?

- [Lex] Yeah, exactly.

- Why?

- [Lex] And like your like-

- Where's Ralph Macchio now? Where did the-

- Who is he dating?

- [James ] Yeah, yeah.

- Vice and then mother and then you were like.

- Oh, and then a restaurant nearby.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Like how did I go from this to that? But it made sense at the time.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- So when you ask someone how did our relationship fall apart? It's like looking at the Google search history-

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Of yourself from tenure. You don't even know why you were thinking about those things.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And now you wanna understand why you did what you did. Felt what you felt, she felt what she felt, she did what she did. And why the two of you, how you impacted each other and interacted with each other. Really? You think that's doable?

- In the courtroom, does that come up like text messages?

- [James] Oh, yeah.

- That resulted in with whoever you're cheating with. You have to-

- Yeah, I mean cheating doesn't come up as much 'cause most states are no fault states now. So why someone's getting divorced, whether it's infidelity or it doesn't matter. There's no good spouse bonus or bad spouse penalty.

- Well, there isn't. I mean, can you elaborate on that? Like that's-

- Well you can have, we've had times where we have to prove infidelity because we wanna prove what's called wasteful dissipation of marital assets. Which means that you were spending money that was marital money on a paramour. That's what the legal name for a ex, for a boyfriend or girlfriend in the marriage. And usually the person calls it, you know that whore.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Or that piece of shit.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- But we call them paramour. Yeah, the paramour.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Sometimes we have to prove inclination and opportunity. We have to prove that this person had the inclination to cheat and that they had the opportunity to cheat. And then we wanna show that, okay, so when they went away, that should be considered dissipation of marital assets. So if you go out to dinner with your brother, you didn't dissipate the marital estate, but if you bought your paramour a Tiffany bracelet, that would be a dissipation of marital assets and the person's entitled to a credit back for that from what was taken outta the marital estate. So we do sometimes have to authenticate text messages on the witness stand or in depositions. And what's interesting about that is the way people approach it. Like people sometimes try to pretend, oh no, this is just my good friend, and which is just like, you kill your credibility. Oh no, she's just my very good friend. She's not, she's not, that makes no sense whatsoever, or no, we were just friends at that point. And then several months later is when we, once this marriage was over, that's when we got together as partner.

- [Lex] Right.

- That's ridiculous. But sometimes people just own it. Just own it. I did a deposition of an executive once and opposing counsel like thought they were gonna really hit 'em. They were like, and looking at this credit card receipt, what was this charge for for this hotel? He was like, oh, that was for a hotel room that I got with my girlfriend. And you were married?

- Yes, yes. Where did you stay at the hotel? We didn't even stay. We actually just did like an afternoon delight rolled around in bed for the day.

- [Lex] (chuckles) Yeah.

- And it was like, well now, you know, took all the thunder out of that.

- What's the downside of doing that? It seems like a really-

- There wasn't, it actually I think helped his credibility. It was my client. So I thought it was the right move. We hadn't really discussed it in advance, but he was naturally intelligent enough to go, yeah. My credibility, I'm not gonna lie under oath, I'll admit what it was, but I'll do it in such an, we did it like at the end, like Eminem at the end of "Eight Mile." It was very like, yeah, I cheated on her with this person. Now tell these people something they don't know about me. And that's kind of how I try to, as a trial lawyer, we actually in my firm refer to it as the "Eight Mile" strategy, which is like, we will, if I know there was a text message sent, you piece of, I hope you die. My client sent that text message to his co-parent. On my examination of my client, I will say, I'd like to have this marked for identification shown to the witness. What is that? It's a text message. Who's it to? Plaintiff. You sent it? Yeah. Read it out loud for the court. Do I have to? I think you should. You're a piece of S, does it say S? No. (Lex laughs) What does it say?

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Well, it's a profanity. So you say it say, you piece of shit, I hope that she die.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- You sent that to her? Yes. Why? I was really mad. Do you think that was good? No, do you think it was helpful for your co-parenting relationship with her? No, why did you send it then? She sent me like 50 texts exactly like that. And I never responded. And I pushed it down every time, and then finally, I just blew up at her. If you had it to do over, again, would you do it differently? You know, I wish I could say I would, but the truth is I'm human and I was at my limits and I'm watching opposing counsel cross out entire sheets of their cross-examination 'cause it's gone now. They thought that they had their like Perry Mason moment, they had their like, did you order the code red moment? And it's gone now because if you just own and accept your fault or your issues in the relationship, you can take a lot of the power outta that.

- And I wish we wouldn't take texts seriously.

- I think we should have substantive discussions via text. I think text was designed for, are you here? Yes. 15 minutes away, or I got here safely, love you. Like that substantive discussions are people love having arguments via text.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And I have to say, when you read other people's text messages, as I am often forced to do.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- It is amazing because just like that Google history you were talking about, I don't know how the hell you got from one thing to another. Like I was just reading, actually on the way here, in the car, I was reading through a text exchange between two co-parents in the middle of a custody thing that I'm involved in. And it's like, you piece of shit, you never cared about anything and I'm gonna take, you have no right to take the kids from me, da, da, da. And then the next day, nothing in between. The next day, Maddie got a good grade on her science thing. Oh, that's great, she's doing so well. It makes me so happy. Yeah, her teacher said she's doing really well. Yeah, that's really great to see. I'll be there about 15 minutes late. No problem, see you then. Wait, like it was a day ago. I wanna know was there a phone conversation in between where one of you went, "Hey man, listen, I'm really sorry about that. Oh no, look, we were both, whatever. Or is it just like you did that," and then we're supposed to pretend that didn't happen and now we're just gonna talk about what Maddie got on her test.

- Yeah, well, sometimes a good nap or a good night's sleep can solve a lot of emotional issues stuff.

- I totally get it. But is there some, if you're looking just at the texts, it begs the question, wouldn't she take the nap and then go, "Hey, listen, I just woke up from the nap. It turns out I was really tired." Is that not happen by text?

- No that's 'cause sometimes it's hard to probably apologize for being asshole, right? So I think we use just text. We humans use all kinds of forms of communication to kinda vent. I think it's the wrong thing to do, but people do do that.

- Text has a permanence though. It's writing. I mean, it's writing.

- You think like a lawyer.

- [Lex] I like it.

- Do think like a lawyer. But lawyers think like detail. And why would you write that down? Writing it down, would you write it down and would you put it on a billboard in Times Square? 'Cause like that's, everything you say on Facebook or Instagram, can and will be used against you in a court of law. Like every photo you post. I mean, that's going on with a what's his name? Jake Paul or whatever Paul and Dillon Danis right now, that guy's girlfriend, every picture's ever been put on the internet of her by her is being weaponized right now.

- To reference an earlier part of our discussion. That's love. You take a big risks. Big risk putting it out there.

- [James] Yeah.

- Putting it out there on text, putting it out there on social media. You take risks.

- But is the reward of doing it via text worthwhile? Listen, the reward of love, I think is worth the risks of love. But the benefit of communicating by text, does it merit that risk of that being in writing, that the person can reflect on and review and scroll back and get heated up again about.

- I don't know, we just take risks, and we're vulnerable with each other.

- There may be something about text that for whatever reasons inspires a kind of candor because I think it is a new way to communicate, right?

- [Lex] Yeah.

- In the scheme of things. And so sometimes, we don't know the thing until it's really come into existence. So I don't know. I think it started as something that we just communicated in a very extemporaneous, unplanned way. Like texts were meant to be, I'm here, I'm outside, whatever it might be. And so what happens when you start to talk about more emotional, deeper, bigger things, or visceral things or more emphatic passionate things using a technology that was originally just being used for the other purpose? I don't know the answer to that. What I do know is, yeah, as a lawyer, A, from an evidentiary perspective, and B, I just know what it looks like on the outside. I know when I read it, what it looks like. And that's not always accurate. Like to just see the, it's like when you watch a video of someone at just their worst moment, and the person that tries to say, but wait, that's not me. Like, that was just me in that moment. That was me at this incredible low point. And I think as a lawyer, my job is to weaponize that and to try to say, okay, this low point is indicative of who they actually are.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And when I'm defending someone, I'm supposed to say, well, this is their low point and we've all been to a low point and this is just a moment in this person and to judge them by that moment, would you wanna be judged by your worst moment? So I have to be able to look at that both directions.

- Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone looks great on text.

- I mean, there's so much of our communication that is missing. Your expression. Like my sense of humor does not do well via text. 'Cause I have like sometimes a sarcastic sense of humor-

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Or I have a dry sense of humor and it does not always translate well to text. The nuance of things is lost sometimes.

- Yeah, but that's what makes the risk of it hilarious. I mean, the emojis, the memes, all that, taking a risk. There's a risk with a text if you do some like dark dry statement, right? That's a joke. And then the pause, and then there's no response for a couple hours. I mean, that's beautiful, I don't know. That's-

- It's the gap between the two trapezes, (Lex and James laughs) like once you've hit send and you're like, well, let's see where this goes? Like there's it coming back now, you know, and you're waiting and waiting. It's like that moment of just hang is, yeah, that's a rush. I mean, that's a rush. That's a beautiful thing.

- Well, I have my friend Michael Malice living close by. And if the courtroom were ever to see the text between us, we would be both in jail.

- [James] Okay.

- For many-

- [James] Who would have subpoena.

- Many years, subpoena. Yeah, when this finally comes out, when I have my-

- [James] Yeah.

- We're gonna have Johnny Depp, Amber Heard moment.

- [James] The subpoena's ready.

- We'll get my (laughs)

- Well, but that was one of, the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard thing was a great example of, in a gunfight between those two. Everyone was cheering for the bullets. I mean, no one was, I don't think anybody looked like a hero. They both looked like what they are, which is humans.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Really flawed humans who had, it really is like that that People magazine thing stars. They're just like us, you know. We watched that and went like, oh yeah, they're just like us. Like they cannot keep it together. They cannot have, like they just have these ridiculous toxic moments where both of them looked awful in that trial.

- Well, what do you take away from that trial? Just given all the work you've done. I mean, for me, I don't know if you can speak to that. It's probably the first time I've seen that kind of a complicated relationship. Even just to say a relationship laid out in this raw form. Yeah, like the fights of a relationship.

- Yeah. My feeling about that trial is there is no amount of money that would be worth laying that kind of stuff bare publicly.

- For you if you were dying down.

- For me, yeah. There's no amount of money.

- But for Amber Heard, I don't know which.

- Because they both look awful. They both look awful. And I don't think I'm qualified to say if one of or both of them are awful. But they both had moments in that courtroom where their behavior and words looked awful. And I just don't know that, that exposing that to the world, I just don't know. I mean, I understand the point of view that by bringing that suit, Johnny Depp was saying, look, yeah, I have to show these awful things to the world about myself, but it's not as bad as what she's claimed I've done, so I get it, I'm not saying that's incorrect. And for Amber Heard, I think her response is, well, for him to say I'm lying. I have to prove my, but my God, like what an awful thing to watch. All it really is is just another, it's just another couple. You know how banal that is? You know, how many of the-

- [Lex] So this kind of stuff happens a lot.

- A lot? It's the norm. It's not the exception. They just happen to have like a grand scale 'cause they have lots of people around them-

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And lots of money. But yeah, it's all this, that kind of dysfunction, that kind of chaos, that kind of, he said, she said, two people with completely differing histories of what happened in the marriage. False allegations of domestic violence or true allegations of domestic violence that are completely denied by the person. And you have witnesses that'll say, oh my God, they never engaged in any kind. 'Cause again, no one engages in domestic violence with company over, you don't like invite friends. People always say like, oh no, I saw them. They seem so happy. People always do this to me as a divorce lawyer. They come in and they go, well, here's photos of the kids smiling with me. So that's proof that like, I'm a good dad. And I'm like, there's photos of Jeffrey Dahmer smiling with people he ate later.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And you think these photos proof something like I don't-

- [Lex] Yeah.

- The lack of, I'm in the middle of a very complex domestic violence trial. And the entire defense on the other side is, well, we have photos of them on vacation where they look very happy and she never called the cops. That's no defense at all. Most victims of intimate partner abuse don't call the cops. They don't identify, self-identify as victims of domestic violence.

- And they probably have many stretches of time of intense happiness or happiness.

- Of course, of course. And by the way, perpetrators of domestic violence are charismatic. How else would they get victims? It's not like if they were ogre-ish, no one would sign on for that relationship.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- It's that when they're good, they're so good, that when they're bad, you go, but wait, no, that's not him the really good person is him or her. We saw that in the public testimony of that, you know, Depp, Heard thing is, there were moments where you look at her and go, oh my God. Like I want one, just like that. And there were moments where you listen to the testimony and go, oh my God, she's awful. Like what? That's just evil.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And the same for him. So I really, this should teach us something about how not only are there two sides to every story, that there's just so much complexity and nuance to these. But I think it, everyone was asking the question whether you were team Depp, team Heard or team, I could care less about either of these people. Everybody's looking at it going, why? Eight billion people in the world? Why did you stay together? Just break up. You're miserable. It's obvious. It's obvious you're not this, this can't be worth it.

- I've actually become friendly with Camille Vasquez, who's the lawyer on the Depp side. She's an incredible woman-

- Great lawyer.

- And just a great human being, just how passionate she's about her work. I mean, you radiate this kind of same passion. Like she's just truly happy doing what she does.

- [James] Yeah, yeah.

- And but also where the stress of a case is like takes, like it is becomes her. You can't sleep all this kind of stuff, which is fascinating.

- Yeah, I think that's a function of our professions. Even after 20 plus years of doing this, like the night before a trial, I can hardly sleep. And I-

- [Lex] The excitement, fear?

- Yes, yes.

- [Lex] Okay.

- All of that. All of that. And and I even have moments as I pull up to the courthouse and I listen, I wear certain cuff links that are like my lucky cuff links or something, and I pull up to the courthouse. I walk into the courtroom and I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach. And then it starts, and the moment it starts, something in me goes, oh yeah, I know how to do this.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And it's instantly, like I just, I own it, I love it. And it's, yeah, the people that love this job, being a trial lawyer, being a particularly a divorce trial lawyer, family law, trial lawyer, I love it. I love it. I love it more than I loved it when I started doing it. I still, you know, I can't imagine spending five days a week looking forward to two. I love what I do. I don't know that I'll ever love anyone or anything more than I love the work.

- So I saw you on talk with Steve Harvey a bunch of times, and I always loved it. One thing just sticks in my head from something he said as a device that if you and your partner, your spouse, if there's a fight, there's a difficult thing you have to deal with. Keep that to yourself. Don't talk to anyone else. Like that's a little, like a what does he say? Like a two arm circle or something, whatever the expression is.

- [James] Yeah.

- But basically resolve it all internally. Don't like when you face the world, you have a front of like rock solid.

- Don't take sides against the family.

- Yeah. (laughs)

- [James] Yeah, it is.

- Like it all boils down to "Godfather."

- Yeah, everything boils down to "Godfather" references. It really does.

- And "True Romance."

- Yeah, you don't take sides against the family. You don't show that weakness to the world. I mean, again, I don't know that, I don't know that Steve in candor would say you shouldn't discuss it with your own therapist, you know?

- [Lex] Sure.

- But I think what he's saying is don't project it out to the world. Don't share that, because I think, you know, it can change the way people view your relationship, which then will change the way you view your relationship,

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And so I think don't run reckless when it comes to that primary relationship. Don't run your mouth recklessly.

- Yeah. It's one of the things I mentioned to you offline that, my now close friend Joe Rogan, I've never heard him ever speak negatively of his wife. It's always like super positive, how awesome of a person she is. And that to me has always been an inspiration to do the same for everybody in my life, to always speak positively about them. That has a probably a virtuous spiral effect.

- I'm sure. That's probably because he has a great wife and he has a great wife in part because of that.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- I think it's clear that he's in her corner and cheering for her. It's clear she's cheering for him. It's not like Joe Rogan's not a man who has opportunity. I mean, he's surrounded by UFC ring girls for god's sakes. This is a guy who has all the opportunity in the world, and he seems to be quite a fan of his wife. And that is that's a superpower. Like that's a real thing. Now the question is, is, you know, he doesn't seem to talk about it. Like, oh, I gotta really work at that.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And that's not a man who's afraid to talk about what he works at. He's pretty honest about, man, yeah, I gotta work really hard to stay in show. I gotta work really hard to be able to do this. Like Yeah, I'm not good at memorizing that. It takes time.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- But I've never heard him say like, oh, marriage is a lot of work. And I think that's to his credit, because it seems like they're enjoying that.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And it's also not incredibly public. It's not something, most people couldn't pick her out of a lineup.

- He kept it private for many years. And just because it's a private joy, it's a private deep, meaningful, intimate partnership. That's interesting. That's also an inspiration. Not everything about your life has to be this. Look at me, I'm happy. I'm in a happy relationship. Everything is wonderful.

- Especially that, I think there is something about the womb like cocoon like joy, you know, of like love. When you're just tucked in, snuggled in, like just pressed against each other with that. Like that, that's such a, you know, it's just the two of you.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And that's lovely.

- [Lex] Yeah, that's peace. And that's such a good thing. We were just dying for connection. And that connection is so big. It's so everything. One of my earliest psychedelic experiences, probably when I was a teenager, but a theme that's been persistent in every psychedelic experience I've ever had, is this idea of like, everything is connection. Everything is being pressed to someone and with them, like the warmth of human connection. One of the reasons I enjoy listening to your work and your perspective has always been that I think at the core you see connection and love. And I think for me, from my earliest experiences with psychedelics at 16, 17, I was very attuned to that. I was very much, that was put on my radar by psychedelics and just stayed part of my consciousness forever. And I think I had a 30 something year break from psychedelics, but it was like, when I came back to it, I went, oh yeah, it's still there. That's still the core of everything, is connection.

- I mean, it's fascinating how deeply you value connection, how empathic you are that you would be doing what you're doing which is, or is it not?

- [James] I think it the opposite.

- Counterintuitive.

- No, I think it's actually why I'm well-suited for what I do. I think what I do is I have to learn the story of my client and know it and feel it very deeply. And I have to feel it in a very human way that's very compassionate to this person. And then I have to feel it and understand it in a way that's incredible antagonistic to it, so I can shore up defenses. So I have to feel this person's story and feelings from every possible angle, because every one of them is a vulnerability and every one of them is a potential strength and a potential defense. And so I actually think it's my number one, other than extemporaneous speaking ability, it is my number one job tool is the ability to radically empathize and to put myself in the emotional state of someone, in its best possible light and its worst possible light, so that I can see again the defense and I can see the vulnerability.

- But I mean, so that's beautifully put. But also just to bear witness to this connection broken in the-

- [James] Yeah.

- In those dramatic way over and over and over and over.

- That part is hard. But I was a hospice volunteer for many, many years when I first got out of college. And it really showed me a lot about what is sadness, what is tragic, and what is just inevitable decay? What is pain and decay? We all die. We play a game you can't win to the utmost. And so if we know the answer to all of this is you're going to die, then what do we do with the rest of that time? If all your stuff is just stuff, it's just gonna go to the, you know, the money's gonna go, everything is, your looks is gonna go, your everything's gonna go, love's gonna end one way another, then what are we doing? And again, I think it's love and connection, but what I'm doing for a living is helping. And I don't look at it as what I'm doing is helping people beat the crap out of each other. I look at it as I'm trying to help a client build their post-divorce life to sort of rise from the ashes of that which has fallen apart and move on to the next chapter and refocus and have the things they need financially, emotionally, whatever it might be interpersonally in terms of with their kids. And so for me, it's actually a job that is very consistent with my desire to build connection and to be empathetic.

- And witnessing the asterisks doesn't make you cynical about the whole thing of love.

- No, because again, 56% of marriages end in divorce, but 84% are remarried within five years. We keep doing it over and over again.

- [Lex] And that's a good thing. That's a-

- I think it is a good thing.

- The mess of it, the absurdity of it, the hypocrisy of it. That's something beautiful about that.

- Well, it's just the return is so great on the investment. Listen, man, I've had more than one dog.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- Like when my dog died, the first dog I had died, I remember when I'm never gonna love again. I'm done, I'm done with this. I will never expose myself to this kind of pain again. I'll never have to take the dog bed and put it in the closet and like, ugh. And then some friend called me and said, "We have an adoption event. Can you just watch this dog for 24 hours and then we'll take him." We just need you know, and I went, "Yeah, right. I'll watch a dog for the night," you know, da, da, da, and this dog come in. He said, oh, he has mane. He's not going. Fuck, I got another dog. He walked in and my heart went, yeah, I got a dog. And now that dog is 13 years old and his eyes are cloudy and he doesn't go up the stairs real well. And he is gonna break my heart. And I wouldn't change that for the world.

- I'm still there. I'm still struggling for the second one. I lost a dog and it broke my heart. And yeah, but-

- And you'll never lose that pain. But I promise you, your heart has an infinite capacity for the kind of love you felt with that dog. And you'll never feel a love that replaces the hole. There will never be another Buster for me. But there was Kaba (Lex laughs) and like-

- [Lex] Yeah.

- You know what? And when he's gone, there will never be another one of him. But you know what? Like when that stupid puppy that was five months old stumbled in, I went, I guess I'm gonna do this again. And you know what? I'm so glad, I'm so glad, and I know by the way, I know now because, and that's where I've said like, you know, it's that Joseph Brodsky poem, a song like, "I wish I knew No Astronomy when stars appear." I wish I didn't know the pain. But you know what? I don't care. I don't care. And I believe we don't care. Again, I think there's something to that. It's something hurts so badly and you go, I'm gonna do it again. I'm gonna do it, then it must be of value. It must be of real value.

- There's also a different perspective on it, that pain. So there's that from "Louie" the show of this interaction with an old man with Louie CK. And he says that, 'cause Louis is mourning the loss of, got split up, he got dumped or whatever. And he's mourning the loss of that partner of love. And the old man says that that is the best part. Like missing the love is still love. The real bad part is when you forget it, when the pain fades.

- [James] Yeah.

- And it's all gone. But the pain is actually a kind of celebration of the love you have.

- Of course. Well, the opposite of love isn't hate, the opposite of love is indifference.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- There's no question about that. I mean, hate is a passionate emotion. Love is a passionate emotion. And there is a school of thought that says that only unfulfilled love can be truly romantic. But I believe that, it's what I think I learned from hospice is that I think for me, knowing the impermanence is the thing, it's the key.

- Yeah, it's finite and eventually it's gonna be over. And so like that intensifies the feeling that, that's when you can have pure love without the drama.

- Dogs are, for me, a great example. And again, I don't know what it all means, right? Existentially, but I just feel like they have that, that kind of love has to be here to teach us something. And I feel like the fact that they're so amazing and just so loving and so wonderful, and the bond we feel is so amazing and deep and doesn't require a lot of maintenance. And yet it's so finite. Like it's just this short little lifespan. And I feel like there's just such a lesson there, there's so much there to unpack about the nature of connection and loss and that your heart has this infinite capacity. Like when you're, I'm telling you, when my dog died, when Buster died, I remember thinking with certainty, I will never do this again because I'll never love that way again. I'll never love a dog the way I love this dog. And it's just not true. That's just not true. You have this infinite capacity, and that makes it scary actually, because like right now, there's so many people you could love. There's so many dogs you could love. Like there's so much out there, and it's requires a certain bravery and tremendous amount of risk to do it.

- And a commitment, because I think to really experience love is you just dive in, 'cause there is a huge number of people. But to really like, I mean, you have to like really dive into the full complexity, the full range of another human being.

- Yeah, which is hard because we don't even, I don't know that we even feel comfortable diving into the full range of ourselves. There's pieces of ourselves we try to push away or not think about or.

- Okay. So speaking of the whole sociopath slash empath that is all embodied in one human being, that is you. Let's go back to some cases perhaps that you've worked on. Just something that stands out to you. What's maybe the craziest, most complicated thing you've worked on? Is there something that pops to mind?

- Craziest would be different than most complicated.

- [Lex] Let's go craziest.

- Yeah, so craziest, ah, gosh, that's a great question. So from a chaos standpoint, I mean, I see so many bizarre fact patterns and so many variations of people cheating with people, people sleeping with the nanny, people sleeping with the, someone, a relative of their spouse, people having same sex or polyamorous relationships, and the other person doesn't even know they're not monogamous. Like so much craziness that you could fill 15 books. In terms of complexity, I mean, emotionally complex is any custody case is emotionally complex because you're dealing with parenting issues. And what makes a good parent, I think is a very tricky question because, you know, I'm trying to convince a judge who's a better parent, and that is so loaded with subjective value judgements.

- Is there just to linger on the maternal presumption, is that a thing you come face-to-face with often in the court?

- Well, there was, I mean, it was real, it was the law. There was something in the law called the maternal presumption. It was also known as the tender years doctrine, which meant that a child under the age of seven was presumed to be in the custody of the mother unless you could show she was an unfit mother. So that's where the idea of like someone has to be proven an unfit mother came from now in the '80s, 1980s, that was changed. But under my skin is under my sovereignty. I mean, you can't suggest that there isn't in the world a suggestion that a mother who births a child and feeds a child with her body doesn't have a particular bond with a child that's different than a father's bond with a child. So where do we put that? How much importance do we put on it. Now that there's better and more research in the mental health field about attachment theory and infants. There's also a lot of, you know, a lot of research on how is attachment formed, how should parenting schedules be put together based on attachment theory. But, you know, there's conflicting perspectives on that.

- And so as judge to judge you see like, is there a lot of variation?

- Yeah, there is because there's lots of kinds of judges. Like there's judges that are thoughtful, enlightened, interested in the mental health research. And there's judges that just want, were unsuccessful lawyers that were good politically and got elected and they just wanna, you know, they just want a job where like they show up at nine o'clock, they have a lunch break from 12 until two o'clock and that they leave at 4:30 and they get a certain number of weeks vacation and a pension after 20 years.

- So what is in general the process of these custody battles? Like what's the landscape here?

- Well, most, the overwhelming majority of custody cases don't end up in my office. They are a negotiation between two people that love their children more than they dislike their soon to be ex. So the overwhelming majority of cases are just two people going, okay, how are we gonna make decisions together? 'Cause there are decisions that have to be made about kids. Will they go to public or private school, can they go on medication if they need it or not, should we change pediatricians, all those kinds of things. How do we make decisions and when will we each spend time with the kids? And so most custody cases are just that. Most custody cases are just a discussion, a negotiation between counsel about those issues. And they're not ugly and they're not anything. They're just people. Again, sometimes people have differing perspectives, you know, but sometimes people haven't thought through their perspective. So as a divorce lawyer, a lot of what I'm doing is counseling a person because they come in and say, well, I've been the person who handles, all of the homework and all of the everything. So he should only see the kids on weekends. And there's a logic to that. I've always done the homework with the kids. So I'm the parent who's in charge of the homework and he's obviously not done that before. But there's also a logic that you can then say, right? But then you're doing all the heavy lifting of parenting and he's doing none of that. And you were a married couple and living together. So he was trusting you to do that 'cause you're good at it and you seem to like it. So maybe now we want him to have to do some of the heavy lifting of parenting because we don't want the child when they're 13 to say, I love dad, we have nothing but a good time together. Whereas you make me do my homework and eat my broccoli. Dad's the grass on the other side of the fence that's greener. So sometimes it's about educating a client to like change their frame, you know, to look at this differently. Yeah, okay, we always go to my mother's for Thanksgiving, so I need every Thanksgiving. Okay, well you were married so you went to, now you're gonna have new traditions, things are changing for your children, things are changing for your family. You're both gonna have new traditions. So a lot of times it's just educating people on looking at things in a different way, looking at their parenting in a different way. We're not gonna live in the same house anymore, but we're still gonna parent these child, this child or these children together. What's much more interesting 'cause like, you know, I don't get invited to a lot of parties, but when I get invited to parties, if somebody says, what do you do for a living?

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And I say, I'm a divorce lawyer.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- And they go, oh my God, you must have stories. That's the way everybody said, oh my God, you must have so many stories. And if I said, yeah, there was this couple and they, you know, slowly grew apart and then they decided that it would be good for them to end their relationship as a married couple, but they wanted to continue to have an amicable co-parenting relationship. So they divided their assets, and they figured out a good parenting access schedule that made sure that they both had, both leisure time and responsibilities with the children. People would be like, that's the worst fucking story. Yeah, that's so boring.

- [Lex] Yeah.

- So what they really want is the like, and then he was sleeping with the nanny and then she caught him. So, you know, the truth is like, people want to hear about those flame outs. And by the way, those are super interesting as the lawyer. Like it's super interesting.

- It's usually gonna be what? Infidelity. You do have a chapter called Everybody fucks the Nanny.

- Everybody is fucking the nanny.

- Everybody is fucking.

- Yeah, there's a nanny fascination out there. I try to explain it in the book, but yeah, I mean I've had some great nanny stories. I mean, people run off with the nanny. People end up getting married to the nanny. I had one he convinced her that they should have a threesome with the nanny. They got the nanny drunk. They had a bunch of threesomes with the nanny and then the nanny and the wife paired up and left him.

- [Lex] Oh, nice.

- And they're still quite happy.

- [Lex] That seems like a happy ending the whole family.

- For everyone but him, but it was his idea,

- Well, he's really gonna have a nanny fascination now.

- Now he's, yeah, well, now he's gotta see the nanny who's now the like stepparent to the kids. And it was his bright idea of let's have a threesome with the nanny. Yeah, I mean the nanny thing I think is a function of, in many circumstances is the characteristics of the wife that he remembers fondly and that have been extinguished by the presence of children. So my words of wisdom is not don't get a nanny, or make sure you get an ugly nanny. My thought on it is that a woman should remember even when she's a mother, that she's also a woman who a man, you know, they fell in love with each other and she should take time to be in touch with the part of herself that is an independent woman, that's interesting and interested. And, you know, there's a lot to be learned from divorced couples because divorced couples, if you do it right, it's awesome. I had a wonderful experience parenting and being divorced, 'cause I divorced when my kids were quite young. My co-parent, you know, my ex-wife is awesome. She's a great mom, nice person. We're good friends. And it was great. I had half the time I had my kids and I could focus on them. And the other half of the time they were with the other person who loves them as much as I do. And I didn't have any of the responsibilities of kids. And I could just have all of the wonderful fun that you can have when you don't have, you know, the responsibilities that come with full-time caring for children so.

- What would you say now on the flip positive side, we've been talking about the collapse of things, what about success? What's the secret to a successful romantic relationship?

- My mom used to say that it's hard to define intelligence, but you could spot stupid a mile away. (Lex laughs)

- Yeah.

- So I'm much better at pointing out where people fall apart, 'cause I spend a lot of time with people who have fallen apart in their relationship. So it's easy to then say, well, just don't do what they do. But I don't know that that's not an oversimplification. So again, I think the answer is connection. I think the answer is affection, presence, you know, mindfulness and presence. I do think in my personal and professional experience, that most people want you fully more than they just want you in a disconnected way. So if you were to say to your romantic partner, you can have me for two hours where I'm giving you my undivided attention and I'm really joyful to be with you. Or you can have me for eight hours where I'm sort of half paying attention and I kind of want to be someplace else for part

of the time. There's just no choice there. It's so obvious. So I think presence is a big piece. And I think that, the you, the me, and the we, I think is important, because I think in relationships, there's you and there's me and we meet and something magical happens, you know. And we become, we. And now there's you and there's me and there's we, and then the we gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And isn't it great? 'Cause it's such a nice warm place. It gets so big, but it gets so big that you get small and me gets small, 'cause we, and if any of us dares to ask, well what about you, what about me? No, no, the we, what? You don't like the we? You don't wanna be with the we like, whoa, whoa. No, it's not that. But we only exists 'cause there was you and there was me, and I really liked you and you really liked me. And so we picked each other out of lots of choices. And now this we is so fucking big. Like it threatens to just consume all of it. And I really think that there's something there we have to look at more, honestly.

So we should not consume everything, but it at the same time, not be small.

Well, the we is the you and the me, and if you mix it so much that you and me loses, you know, it's components that all that's left is we. I don't think that that's the way to do it. I just think there's a, the world pulls us in that direction. Like we get told culturally that, well, why aren't you going with this person to that? Why would you do that by yourself? And why? Like anyone knows that there's joy in being away from each other and there's joy being reunited together. So why don't we, you know, speak very honestly about that. And I think some of that's our own insecurity, you know, well, why don't you wanna be with me 24 hours a day? Aren't I wonderful? Aren't I delightful? It's like, well wait, what?

Well, but also probably people are either afraid or lazy in developing their individual selves. I mean, it's still, it's lonely going out there in the world by yourself, and it's comforting in that little cocoon of we.

I mean it can also be incredibly adventurous.

Right. Going out into the world by yourself and then coming back to the we with a full report.

Yeah. Coming back and saying like-

Yeah. Oh my God, guess what I saw, guess what I did? I'm like, we have to go there together now. Because all I could think about was you.

Yeah. While I was there I was like, oh my god, she would love this.

Yeah. You know, like, that's magical. That's amazing. Look what I brought you back, I went in for this and then I got you this present from there.

Yeah. There's something, you know, and we know this, I always thought it was, you know, like when you watch the old westerns, or like the hero is leaving, and he's walking away from the cabin 'cause he's gonna go fight the gunfight and she runs up and she goes, please don't go, don't go, stay here with me.

Yeah. And he like kisses her and then he goes.

Yeah. You know, if he goes like, yeah, you're right, I'll just stay here, it's cool. You know, like, this is, I didn't wanna deal with that anyway. He's not the hero anymore then.

Yeah. (laughs) Yeah, deep truth to that. And then probably like you mentioned, sex.

Sex is. Probably a big part of it. Friendship. That seems to me like a really important one.

Depends on how you define friend. If being a friend means we have some connection to each other and we have each other's cell phone numbers, okay, then we're friends. But if it's a bigger definition than that, if it's like you've picked me up at the airport, or like you're someone I could call-

Right. That it's like, dude, I gotta hide a body. Like you get shovel in a lime, you know.

I like how you escalated from airport pickup-

Yeah. To murder.

Yeah. I try to go to two direction.

You're a true New Yorker.

I tell you, I define the Ben Affleck movie, "The Town," that scene, that's friendship to me. I mean, to me, the ideal male friendship is the scene where he says, "I need you to come with me. We're gonna hurt some people and you never have to ask me about it again."

Oh yeah. And he says, "Whose car are we taking?"

Yeah. And that's sort of like, to me, that's friendship. So it's a high bar, you know, to be like a friend. So when you say like, friendship, I think that's the kind of friendship you should ideally have with your romantic partner. If you're getting married. It should be the like whose car are we taking? Like it should be that, it's you and me.

To be fair, that bar is reached with me with a lot of people.

Yeah. Like if you call me tomorrow, there's a body.

But you're a big open, you're a big open heart.

But it's true. I wonder how many people out there are like that in terms of hiding the body.

I mean, my theory on this, 'cause I think I'm like you in that way. I think I'm very sensitive. I feel things really deeply, and I think that's a teriff, the world is terrifying when you feel things very deeply, because there's so much pain, there's so much betrayal, there's so many opportunities to be hurt. And I think when you are that kind of person, you go through like stages. And one of them is that I don't care. I don't feel anything. It doesn't matter, I don't feel anything. I don't feel anything, I don't feel anything. You try to convince yourself, I don't feel anything. It's fine, I don't feel anything. And then at some point like, you know, you do feel all of it. And then it's like, oh my God, the weight of this is crap. I mean I think it's the whole arc of Pink Floyd, "The wall."

(Lex laughs) It's literally-

Yeah. The entire arc of Pink Floyd "The Wall."

Yeah. And the song "Stop." I wanna go home, take off this uniform and leave the show. Like you just, when you feel all of it, the army of hammers coming at you, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. A thousand natural shocks, the flesh is heir to. When you feel all of that deeply. It's very hard. But, but it can also be a superpower. Because I think when you can bring that to a relationship, when you can bring that to a profession like you've done and I've done, then there's something very magical about that. The ability to bring it out in someone, to feel it in yourself, to understand it, is a gift. It's a wonderful, wonderful gift. I'm humbled by what it brought me professionally. And I'd like to think that you and I have both found professions that enable us to use that sensitivity, that empathy in a productive and good way. And in a fulfilling, a personally fulfilling way. And ideally in a way that does good for other people.

You yourself are incredibly successful and high performer. You've dealt with a lot of CEOs and just high performers in all walks of life. What can you say about successful relationships with those kinds of folks?

That's a good question. I think-

Is it all the same stuff or there's something special when they're busier?

Well, you know, I think when you represent high net worth individuals, but also high performing, I would make a distinction between high net worth and high performing. I've done high net worth divorces where the person's like a trust fund kid-

Ah. Even though they're an adult, you know, but they're like, what they did to achieve their high net worth status is their great-grandfather died.

Sure. So that is different than someone who is self-made, who through discipline, focus, entrepreneurship, whatever it might be. That they have found success. And there's also difference between financial success and fame 'cause I've represented famous people that actually did not have that much money in the scheme of things or much liquidity. And I've represented people that, that were not in any way famous and were very high performing in their field. Like in New York, we have a lot of finance people so. And what I find is their divorces are challenging. One, on a technical level because figuring out what they have and how to divide it is tricky.

Sure, yeah. Because when something's moving that quickly, like when your portfolio's movement affects a market, that's challenging. Jeff Bezos divorce for a time when it was in its early stages could affect Amazon stock. It did, you know, so that's a real thing. There are businesses that are affected by a divorce. But in terms of being in a relationship with someone who is a high performing person. You know, most of the high performing people I know are creatures of discipline and routine. From a Joe Rogan, we've talked about any of these people, like they have a routine, they have a discipline, they have a focus. They have a way they like to do things. They have a type of coffee they like to drink. They have a way that they like to do. And divorce is a tremendous disruption. I mean, divorce is fundamental things in your life are shifted out of your control. Like your spouse may be the one who has decided you are no longer going to live in that house. You will no longer see your children on these days. So to take that control away from someone is very, very hard. I mean, when someone is a high performing, high net worth person, they are used to being told, yes, they're used to being able to buy their way out of a problem. But just like illness.

Yeah. You can hire the best doctor, but you can't cure cancer because you have a lot of money. Like you can hire the best lawyer, but you can't cure a custody case. I mean, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's seemingly endless custody disputes that have been going on for years now with the best lawyers in California working on them is proof of the fact that you can't just buy a resolution to those things. That you have to go through it just like everyone else.

So that, lets me ask the question of how much does it divorce usually cost?

That's a great question. Average divorce, I mean it's sort of like a, what I always tell clients in the first consultation is I tell them the most reasonable question a person could ask me sitting in that chair across from me is two. How long is this gonna take and how much is it gonna cost? And those are the two questions I can't answer. And then the next thing they say is, give me a range.

(Lex chuckles) Which is a bit like calling your doctor and saying, "I have a headache. What is it?" Well, I can't tell you, I'd have to do tests. Give me a range. Okay. It's a reaction to the barometric pressure and it'll be gone in 15 minutes, or it's a brain aneurysm and you'll be dead in five minutes. There's your range. And so it didn't really help, right?

Yeah. I have the least expensive divorce I've ever seen is two people, one of whom comes into my office and says, we've written down on a yellow pad what we figured out at the kitchen table. She's gonna keep the house, I'm gonna keep the 401k, we have a bank account at this bank, we're gonna split that 50-50. I'm gonna pay her this much in child support each month. And we're gonna agree from time to time on what we're gonna do in terms of the schedule with the kids. But they're primarily gonna live with her. Can you write this up and make it legally binding? Yes, 3,500 bucks.

Just as a side note, I have a friend who went through a divorce and handled it just masterfully by giving more than he's supposed to and having nothing but love in his heart and happiness with the kids. And just like, I don't know, that to me is just an inspiration. His whole view was like, who cares about money?

Well, yeah. And also like, he refused with every ounce of his being to have anything but complete love for the other person.

Yeah, I've had clients who with a straight face will say to me like, well, I'm not gonna quibble over a few million dollars. And they mean it, because to them it's numbers on a page. So I'll personalize this a bit. So I have a friendly relationship with my ex-wife, who's the mother of my sons who are adults. And we have maintained a very good relationship. And so now it's many years divorced later, 17, 18 years later. And we were able to sort of post-game that relationship, even our co-parenting relationship. We kind of post-game it when we chat with each other. And I remember once saying to her, yeah, you never, you know, you never like screwed around with me when it came to the kids. You were always so like, cool, you know. Like if I called you, if I was having a really bad day at work or like see in just an ugly custody case, and like I just felt like I would call her and say like, "Hey, can I just pick the boys up and like take 'em out for ice cream or something tonight? I know it's not my night, but would you mind if I just like took 'em out for a couple hours?" She'd be like, "Yeah, sure, come on by." She was always flexible like that. And I said to her like, "What was that just goodwill? You're just a good person, or what was that about?" And she was like, "Yeah, it was partly that," but she was like, it was partly that like, you never screwed around with me when it came to money. If the kids needed something or if I needed something as the mother of the kids, like, you were always like, yeah, sure, of course. Her air conditioning kicked out and she needed it to replace it and she didn't have like liquidity at the time. And I didn't have a lot of money at the time 'cause it was a long time ago. And I was like, all right, no, no, no, 'cause I don't want you hot and upset and I don't want the boys, to be in like, of course. And so I think, yeah, when you approach a conflict with like, it's very hard to argue with someone who won't argue with you. If the person approaches the argument from the point of view of like, I'm not gonna argue with you. I'm gonna absorb your aggression. I'm gonna just not meet it with that. I'm gonna meet it with love. I'm gonna meet it with positivity. It doesn't always work, 'cause sometimes people are so angry that they just are, they're relentless.

Yeah. But I have to tell you, the louder you get, the quieter I get, the more you seem irrational. And that's what I always try to bring that to court proceedings. I always try to bring to court. Like if I know my adversary's coming in hard, I'll come in quiet and slow and deliberate because I want the volume to be turned up way too high over there. And then it looks like what it, what's the, your honor, what's their problem over there? And I think that, I say this to clients. They got a four year old, they're getting divorced, let's say. There's gonna be a wedding in like 20 something years. There's gonna be a wedding and it's either gonna be the wedding where they gotta put these people on opposite sides of the room, 'cause if they pass each other by the shrimp boat, they're gonna kill each other. Or it's the wedding where like you stand there, you take some pictures, you kind of go like, yeah, we fucked up this whole marriage thing, but maybe we did a good job with this kid, didn't we? And the decisions you make right now, there's a straight line to that wedding. And so even if you don't like this person, even if you're mad at them, even if you're mad at yourself for the choices you made in choosing them as a co-parent. Every single Mother's Day for 27 years, I have told my now longtime ex-wife "Happy Mother's Day." I'm so glad that we had kids together. I'm so glad you're the mother of my kids, 'cause they wouldn't be who they are if it wasn't that they were part me and part you. And I'm so grateful for you, and, you know, I'm always cheering for you. How hard is that? How hard is that?

Well, it's really hard for some people.

I don't understand why it's so hard for some people. I'll tell you, I do find that hard. There's not a lot of things that I kinda don't understand, but that's one that I kinda don't understand. Like I put in, one of the weird things I did did as a divorce lawyer that caused like a little stir among my colleagues for a few years. With some years ago, we all steal from each other's work, divorce lawyers. We're like the matrimonial mafia. We all know each other, we all deal with each other over and over again, but we all have the same job. And so we are the only people that really know the unique stresses of that job. So even though we try to kill each other all day, it's like boxer, like professional fighters like, yeah, your job's to take each other's head off, but like nobody knows what the two of you went through, like the two of you.

Yeah. That's why like, I always get like, I go like all kinds of rubbery when I see after the fight. Like the two people hug each other.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I'm always like-

Yeah. 'Cause you know what? They relate to each other better than anybody.

Yeah. They suffered, they bled. the competitors, they bled. So I really think divorce lawyers, we have that same kind of relationship. We went through this stress on opposite sides, trying to take each other apart. And I find that, we all steal from each other's material when it comes to separation agreements, provisions that we use for agreements. Like all the agreements are like these Frankenstein monsters of, oh, I like his estate planning provisions. So I like her provisions related to maintaining a life insurance policy to secure the alimony award. And I wrote this paragraph or this section, because what occurred to me is that when you have a child with someone, and let's say they're three or four or five, they're old enough to know what Christmas is, but they're not old enough to go buy a Christmas present, but they're old enough to know that you get presents on Christmas and you give presents on Christmas, but they're not old enough to buy one for the parent. So someone has to do that for them. So I thought, I'm gonna put in a provision that says that as long as the children are so young that they can't independently purchase a mother's day or a birthday present for the co-parent, that you'll take the children either to buy a small gift or to make a card, something like that. This struck me as a no-brainer, who could disagree with this? It's not for the person, it's for the kid. It's so the kid, "Happy Birthday, Mom." I don't have a present for you. I don't have a card for you, 'cause I'm fucking five.

(Lex laughs) Yeah. Like I'm five. You can't go do that. So wouldn't you want your child, not your co-parent, who cares? Maybe you want them to have the worst birthday ever, fine. But you don't want your child to be embarrassed. And I even put in the provision, the parties acknowledged that it is the intention of this provision to ensure that the child is not embarrassed and feels that they were able to say, I cannot tell you how many people refuse to sign that. How many lawyers said to me, we're taking that out. And I went, "Wait, why?" Well, why does my client have to buy a present for your client? I said, "They're not buying a present for my client. They're buying a present for the child to give to my client. It can be one of those little $3 boxes of chocolates they sell at the drugstore."

Yeah. Like it's a kid, they don't know. They don't know what anything is.

Oh. And people, Nope. And I have to tell you of the conundrums of the puzzles that I can't figure out in existence. That's when I can't figure, I do not understand why that's so hard.

That's basically just an illustration of their complete inability to do anything nice for the other person.

The level, right the level of hatred, the level of vitriol that they-

Yeah. Maybe this is me, if you apologize, there's not a lot I won't forgive. I'm not saying I'll forget it. I'm not saying, "Oh, we're totally good like it never happened." I understand that. But if someone says what I call a non bullshit apology, right? A bullshit apology is, oh, I'm sorry, you got so upset when I did that. That's a bullshit apology. I'm sorry that you were offended. That's a bullshit apology. Or I'm sorry for what I did because what are we talking about? We might not be talking about the same thing. Or you might be saying, I'm sorry that you found out about that, not that you did it. So a real apology is, I lied to you and I realized that that hurt you, and I'm really sorry, I shouldn't have done that. I regret that I did that and I know that it hurt you and I'm really sorry. That's a real apology, okay. So someone's willing to give you that and you still wanna walk around with like, the level of vitriol that you will harm your child rather than do something nice for them. I don't have a solution. And I say I see that all the time. Like parental alienation is a thing. It is a thing. Like children can be weaponized. I always tell people, you wanna get married. Get married, get a prenup ideally. But if you don't have a prenup, okay, you're just risking money, don't worry. You're just risking money. Money and hassle, of paperwork and of time and of going through an ugly financial divorce. But you have a kid with somebody, that is a missile. Like that person has a power over you for a long time, if not forever.

So the child could be used as part of a manipulation.

Oh, routinely.

That's heartbreaking. People weaponize children all the time, and they do it with the permission of their own conscience because they genuinely believe I'm gonna protect this person, this child from this person who by the way is a bad spouse. But that doesn't mean they were a bad father or bad mother. You can be bad at being a spouse, but the skillset of a spouse and of a parent, it's not necessarily the same. And I've seen people, people alienate children from a parent in such subtle ways, but they're so powerful. And as a lawyer, it doesn't matter what I know. It matters what I can prove. And it's very hard to prove alienation because it's usually a very subtle process. And the example I always give to people is it's a rare kind of crazy person that will say to a seven year old, "Your dad is a bad person," but this, "Hello. Here, it's your dad." You just said your dad is a bad person. You just did it with your eyes. You did it with your, the expression on your face when you handed the phone to the kid, you told that kid your dad is a bad person. You didn't have to say it out loud. And that is something people are guilty of all the time. When the kid comes home and says, these are a divorced couple. Kid comes home and says, "Oh, I met mom's new boyfriend." And you go, "Oh yeah, that's nice. Remember he is not your dad." You know, like what, whoa. Like you just told that kid a whole bunch of information about how he's supposed to feel about this person.

Yeah. Whereas if you go, that's nice. Is he nice, oh, that's great. I heard nice things. Yeah, I heard he is really, he likes bicycles. That's cool. That's really neat. Like you just told this kid, okay, it's okay, you could like this person. It's okay to like this person. It's okay that your mom is with this person. And again, whatever you feel about your ex, your co-parent, usually you love your kid more than you hate your ex ideally.

Also, I wish people would, even without an apology, forgive each other. 'Cause it goes back to the earlier discussion we had. I usually forgive people if there's something in them, especially if we shared something. But even just if there's something about them that's beautiful. It's great that they exist in the world. So I'm just grateful for that. And I use that as the fuel of forgiveness.

I dunno, to me, like forgiveness is very often, it's for me. When I let go of anger, I feel lighter. I think my heart enjoys peace. I mean partly, it's 'cause I fight for a living. I work in the world of conflict. I jokingly used to say to my sons when they were teenagers, I can only argue if you've paid,

(Lex chuckles) it's not fair to the paying customers. If I argue with you for free-

That's a good line. That's not fair.

Yeah. (laughs) But I think we're talking about the incredibly wide range that a divorce can cost.

Yeah. And you were saying the cheapest one was the yellow paper?

Yeah, yellow pad. Two people came to an agreement, write it up, make it legally binding five grand, maybe tops. But usually 3,500, five grand, that kind of vibe. Most expensive, millions, millions of in council fees.

And that's because of the duration, the complexity?

Yeah, the duration, the complexity of issues. Like I have clients who paid two, three million in counsel fees to me.

So it's like, has to do custody or like what's the complexity?

It can be complex custody that requires a hearing, that requires expert testimony, dueling mental health professionals opining on the parenting. It can be a situation where emergency circumstances occur, like where an individual tries to abscond to another country with the children and you have to bring them back under the Hague Convention.

Oh, wow. On international child abduction.

Oh, wow. Yeah, we've done some Hague cases. There are cases where people have very different facts. Like before I came here today, a client of mine's soon to be ex-husband who she's in the middle of a door. He tested positive for cocaine on a hair follicle test where it was said he was definitely not going to test positive and he tested positive. So it was like we were scurrying now with, okay, we gotta get a motion filed. We gotta suspend access. We gotta protect the kids. We gotta get in front of a judge. We gotta think about what are the implications of this, 'cause he was about to transition to an unsupervised parenting. Like this is the kind of stuff that can amp up the amount of work the lawyer has to do, which then translates to money. I mean, I get paid for my time, and the time of my team, I have attorneys and paralegals who work for me. When you have a team of lawyers working on a case, you can burn tens of thousands of dollars a day if it's a big enough case. There are also very complex financial cases. People move and hide money, high net, the high net worth space is a different world. If an average person owns a home, they own a home in their name or their name with their spouse. A high net worth person owns an LLC that owns that home. That LLC is owned by a trust. They are a beneficial, interested party in that trust. Like this is how some of my clients who make tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year, pay less in taxes than a cop or a firefighter, because they have structures and the structures that were designed for tax planning purposes then in a divorce become very tricky to unwind and to figure out, wait, no, what is mine and what is not?

Well, then that takes us to the question of prenups. What's your view on prenups, prenuptial agreements?

It's not popular to quote Kanye West but, "If you ain't no chump, holla we want prenup. We want prenup." I mean, that's what he had to say.

Meaning so that's, prenup is a good idea.

Prenup is an excellent idea. A prenup is a contract between two people that binds their respective rights and obligations in the event of a divorce when it comes to financial issues. That's all it is. There's a lot of reasons to have them and there really aren't any reasons not to have them, other than the fact it requires an uncomfortable conversation.

So I mean, there's a few questions here. First, do they work legally in general?

Yes, yes. If they are crafted correctly, which is not that hard to do for a lawyer to do. I'm saying for a lawyer to do 'cause with the internet, everybody thinks why would I spend a thousand dollars, I can just Google prenuptial agreement and I can get one, and then it'll be, that is a bad idea. It is like a will, like if you're gonna have a document that binds your rights at that level, it's worth, the most expensive prenup I've ever done was like three grand. That's ridiculous. That's not a lot of money. So there's no reason you wouldn't do it. But people still, people will still, I've had clients that have hundreds of thousands of dollars and they did their prenup downloading something from the internet and because of some imperfection. It doesn't have the right what's called acknowledgement, which is the section where the notary signs, and it has to say that it was duly sworn before this person on this date. And if it doesn't have that, it's invalid. It's not binding. So there are weird technicalities, but yeah, prenups are binding as long as there's been some minimal asset disclosure, which is easily done in a prenup. And as long as there's not a language deficiency, meaning that the person who is reading it understands English to the level that they understand what they're signing. And if they don't, that at least they've acknowledged in their native language that there is some opportunity for this to be translated for them. Yeah, they're binding. They're presumptively binding. We live thankfully in a culture where people are allowed to enter into contracts about money.

What are some prenups that you've seen that can be effective or what that people converge towards in terms of what does that agreement look like? Because the popular conception is when there's no prenup, both sides get half.

And that's generally true, that both sides get half, equitable distribution, which is what the law is called. It's the law of equitable distribution. It's not called the law of equal distribution for a reason, because it's equitable, not equal. Now equal, like equitable is presumed to be equal, but there are exceptions to that presumption. And that's where lawyers can get into fun and or trouble depending on how you view it. It's where we make our money. We make our money arguing that the fair result will not be just a 50/50 split. And so there's the very generic standard prenup, which is easy. I call that yours, mine, and ours. If it's in your name, it's yours, whether it's an asset or liability, my name, it's mine, joint names, we split at 50/50. Simple, clean. And you go in to the marriage now knowing what the rules are. So if you get a bonus at work and you put it in your sole name, then it's your separate property in the event you divorce. You go out and buy a boat and she doesn't support you buying the boat, but the boat, you got a big loan on this boat, you're responsible for that loan. So I like that because I like people having some control. And I also like people having to have discussions. Well, why are we putting that bonus just in your bank account? Why wouldn't we put it in the joint bank account? We should have that discussion while we're married, not when we're in a divorce lawyer's office 10 years later, because we should be able to talk about those kinds of things. So what's interesting about prenups is that, that somehow people think there's something like, it takes away from the romance of a marriage. But I've said it before and I'll say it again, all marriages end. They end in death or divorce. So having life insurance or having a will, it doesn't mean you can't wait to die. It doesn't mean you're looking forward to death. It doesn't mean that you're predicting, your demise sometime imminently. It just means that, you're being realistic and honest. So when you marry, and I don't mean spiritually marrying, having a marriage ceremony. I mean, legally marrying. You're making changes to your rights and obligations under law. That's what you're doing. Like marriage, from a legal standpoint, what we mean when we say I got married is a state agency. It's been created by the state. Like this is a legal status that most people who are in it know nothing about. They just did the most legally significant thing they're ever going to do other than dying. And they have no idea what rights and obligations it created in them. And the first time they're gonna get an education about it is in my office. That's crazy.

When they get divorced.

That's crazy. And so prenup is an opportunity to learn something about it at the start.

So first of all, whenever someone approaches me about prenups and that's like four or five times a week probably, depending on the season. Right before wedding season, we get a lot.

When is wedding season?

Well, it used to just be the summer, they say when you marry in June, you're a bride all your life. That's from some Rodgers and Hammerstein's music. Now the fall is very big too. People love fall content, fall weddings, pretty, you know, pictures and things.

Content.

Yeah, fall content.

It's good on gram.

Hashtag full content.

All right. It's all for the gram.

The hashtag. Weddings is for the gram. I have to tell you, weddings is performative, man. See, the problem is though, it's curated. So you'd say, here's us picking the cake. It's not, here's us doing the prenup. You know how many people I've done prenups for that I've watched on their social media or them being interviewed by Andy Cohen on Bravo and saying, "Well, no, we don't have a prenup." Yeah, you do, yeah, you do. You do, it's in my office. It's in a folder.

Yeah. They have prenup.

They don't even know, that's beautiful.

But prenups are not published any place. They're not filed with a court. They're maintained by the two people that signed it, and they're lawyers, that's it. So nobody has to admit that they have a prenup.

Beautiful. But there's a, yes, but there's a certain problem with that insofar as, a lot of people have prenups and we need to normalize prenups. Like there's no reason not to normalize prenups. There's no reason not for, until some famous people say, "Yeah, we have a prenup. We're crazy about each other. That's why we're getting married." But yeah, look, we're getting, you know, I don't wanna get a car accident, but I got a seatbelt. You know, like you have it just in case.

And I mean, what do you do if you're running a company? What does that have to do with a prenup? You're running a hundred billion dollar or trillion dollar company, Jeff Bezos, I suppose his marriage was before Amazon.

Yeah, his was before it was anything. But like, how does that work in a prenup?

Well, no, actually, it's the same. I mean, what you're doing with a prenup is you're identifying how things will be classified in advance. So you're creating a set of rules and then you both can function under those rules during the marriage. So for a brief time, I taught a family law drafting class at a law school. And when we would do separation agreements and we would do pleadings, it was lots of fun. When we would do prenups, I would say to the students, "What's the main thing you need when you're doing a prenup?" And they would say, "Well, you need asset disclosure." And I'd say, "Well, that's not the main thing." And they'd say, "Well, you need, technical language." They say, "Nope." Main thing you need is a crystal ball. The main thing you need is the ability to see what's gonna happen in the future. Who's gonna have money, who's not, who's gonna be successful who isn't, what people will inherit? Problem is we don't have that. We don't have that. So what can we do? We can create tranches, we can create structures, we can create systems, and then people can live with those in mind. You enter the game knowing the rules, right? So you know if this is gonna be a submission only event, you know if this is gonna be no time limit, you know if we're after a certain number of minutes, we're going into points now, okay? So I can work with that rule set and I'm gonna amend my game based on that rule set. Same thing. Same thing. You're just gonna say, look, what's the rule set? Let's agree on the rule set, and then let's conduct ourselves with the rule set in mind. Let's plan with the rule set in mind. And I think that, and by the way, and if you're gonna cheat, you cheat with the rule set in mind, you know you're cheating, right? You know you're trying to get around the rule set. So prenups are, when I do a consult for a prenup, the first thing I do is, here's what's gonna happen legally if you marry without a prenup. Here's what happens to your rights and obligations, then what we can change with that. There's almost no limit. You can amend anything you want to. The example I always give is, there was a case that went up to the appellate court where a high net worth guy married a very beautiful woman. And there was a provision in the prenuptial agreement that said, for every 10 pounds she gained during the marriage, she would lose $10,000 a month in alimony if they divorced. Here's her baseline weight as of the time of execution of this agreement. And I wondered if she was, like did like what a wrestler does? Like did she like, you know-

Yeah. Did she like bulk up up right before and then cut when she eventually got divorced? Like is she in there sauna, with the suit on. And the appellate essentially said, I don't know why you married this person, having had them make you sign this, but it's binding.

Yeah. But it's binding.

I wish somebody would do a contract like that, like the rent for this place would be more expensive if I was fatter, and cheaper if I was skinnier. And that way I would have to weigh in-

And be weigh in on it. Like a motivation.

Like some motivation on you. Yeah, exactly. That kind of prenup is motivating for me.

What his name? I think Tim Ferris says that about how he does like, he said, "You should make bets with people."

Yeah. Like it's like, if you gain this much, I gotta give you this amount of money. I think he says that in one of his early books.

And trying to make a binding somehow, which is tough.

Yeah, yeah. I think when we create incentives of that kind, that's why like there was like the no nut November or no shave November, sober, like all those-

Yeah. It was a competition. When people make a competition of something, they gamify something. It makes it something that people are more likely to stick with. I mean I guess a prenup would be interesting. The problem is there, there's also people put in prenups what's called fidelity clauses.

Uh-oh. Yeah, yeah.

Fidelity clauses, people still do these. I discourage people from doing them there. The two things that people put in prenups that I discourage people from putting in prenups, but very often people still put in prenups, even with my caveat is fidelity clauses and sunset clauses. So fidelity clauses is, I'm waiving alimony, I'm waiving this, I'm waiving that, but if you cheat, I get a million bucks or I get this much alimony, or I get this amount. And I know the intention is to disincentivize the person from cheating. It's a deterrent to have them cheat. But all it really does is just creates like an interesting legal battle for lawyers. Like how did you prove that they cheated or not?

Oh, right, 'cause what, yeah, what constitutes cheating also.

Right, right, is an emotional affair, and affair is oral sex, cheating is, you know, like what, what is, and by the way, how do you prove it?

Yeah. Well, I was in a hotel with her, but how do you prove that I had sex with her? And it's very, very, you're opening a can of worms with that kind of a thing. But people sometimes still put them in. And sunset clauses. Sunset clauses is if we're married X period of time, this goes away as if it never existed.

And why is that a bad idea?

The same reason the community property law in California is a bad idea. So the community property law is after a certain number of years, I think it's seven. Everything including your premarital property all becomes marital property. And the idea of that was supposed to be that if you've been married that number of years, like you're in enough of a serious relationship now that everything is one unit, you're one person. What it actually does is creates a very uncomfortable thought experiment that people have to have at the six year mark. Because now the honeymoon's kind of over, you might have a kid or two and you go, okay, wait a minute. Am I so happy in this relationship that I'm willing to take all of my premarital assets and throw them in the pot right now? 'Cause if not, I got six months to get divorced.

Yeah. And that's not, so like if you say to someone, if you got married tomorrow and then you found a company that's worth a $100 dollars and under your prenup, that's your separate property. But there's a sunset clause that says that your prenup goes out the window in 15 years. Man, at year 14 and six months. You gotta ask yourself some serious questions about where's this relationship gonna be in five, 10 years.

That's brilliant. And that's why kids, you pay for a lawyer.

That's it. We get paid to see around corners. I get paid to be paranoid. I tell people that all the time.

Okay, so you mentioned infidelity. You write in the book, which everybody should get. It's a great book. It's a great read. It's a window into your soul. You in this book, right? That there's five kinds of infidelity. Do you remember, can you explain?

Yeah, I mean, what I wanted to say is that all infidelity is not the same. That there's different kinds. And some of them are more obvious than others. There's the soulmate. That's the one I think I see most often, which is a person meets another person or rekindles on social media or elsewhere. A reconnection with another person in their life. And they go, oh my God, this is the person I'm supposed to be with. I'm in love. The heart wants what the heart wants. I'm leaving you for this person, 'cause I have found my true love. That's one type. And it's an incredibly common type. And there's a, you know, there are plenty of cautionary tales associated with that where people thought that they found their someone and then it turns out it was, you know, no, it was just unfair. A man who leaves his wife for his mistress just leaves a new job opportunity open.

And we should also mention that you, you know, talk about Facebook and Instagram.

Oh, yes. If we were going to invent a infidelity generating machine, it would be called Facebook. Which by the way is a function of the fact the book was written in 2019. I would now change it to Instagram.

Oh, 'cause you said just Facebook.

Yes. But now if I had to

Rewrite it. It would be, if we were gonna invent an infidelity generating machine, it would be called Meta. That would be what would happen there.

Yeah, there you go. Very tech forward. It's was a function of what Facebook and I think Instagram also are, which is, it is a communication tool that has people looking into windows that I think are antagonistic to marriage. You're looking into the lives of other people. You're looking into the social lives of people that you meet casually. So there was a time where you would be at your son's soccer practice and see the attractive mom across the way. And you wouldn't really talk to her, interact with her. If you did, it would just be at practice. But now we add on social media, those people, because for legitimate reasons, we need to maybe communicate about one practices or we wanna message the person. But now it's sort of an invitation to a connection. And then it, you know, there's a picture of her on vacation in a bikini, that's very intriguing. And then you have a benign, "Oh, I saw you guys on a vacation. Where did you stay?" You know, "Oh, was it good? Did you like that?" "Oh, that's nice." And now we're talking and now we're having an interaction. And now this is how the spark of affairs begins. It's usually people don't usually meet and go, "Would you like to potentially wreck your marriage?" "Yes, would you?" "Oh my God, let's do this."

Yeah. It's much more, you know, it's slowly happens. So when I talk about types of infidelity, the soulmate, the unexpected soulmate. This connection that you didn't expect. "I didn't expect to fall in love with this person, but I did. And the heart wants what the heart wants. And I'm sorry." That one's tough. That one's tough because it's an interesting distinction between men and women to some degree, that when a man finds out his wife was cheating, the question is, "Did you fuck him?" And when a woman finds out that a man cheated, the question is, "Do you love her?" And those are different things.

I feel like there could be many and have been many books written on that. Yeah, there have. Distinction. By much smarter people than me. Yeah. I think that the soulmate thing is very, very painful for a lot of my female clients when a man says, "Listen, I found the one, I found the one and it's not you." That is really, really hard to get past. Even when it turned out to be true. I mean, I've seen some people that, you know, it was an affair that turned into 20 plus year marriages. So an unhappy marriage and then a happy affair that turned into a very happy marriage. I've not seen, there's not a formula, you know, like I've been doing it long enough now that I've seen permutations I never would've expected. So that's one type of infidelity. The other is what I call the push outta the closet, which is, and that I think happened more often earlier in my career. There have been tremendous strides, I think in the lesbian and gay community where, including marriage equality, obviously, where there's a lot of change as to people accepting people as being gay or lesbian. And I think that there was a time where people were having, being in the closet was much more important. You were subject to professional scorn and all kinds of things if you were gay or lesbian. So people were sneaking around and having affairs with their same-sex partners, and then they get caught. And then it really was a function of the fact that they were closeted. And again, that's another kind of complicated dynamic because I haven't had that happen to me where a woman left me for a woman, but I'd like to think it would be easier for me.

Yeah. Because if you left me for a man, you're saying, "I want one like you, but better than you." Whereas if you leave me for a woman, well, that's a whole different set of equipment. I don't have that.

Yeah. So I can't, like, okay. It's not me, it's you. It's something you want that I can't offer. We don't serve that at this restaurant, so it's okay.

Yeah. I get it. I mean, there's a betrayal, there's a sadness, whatever.

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, it's a different thing. The saddest type of infidelity in my opinion, is the mistake, which is someone just makes a mistake. People do dumbest shit when it comes to sex.

Yeah. People just in a moment, you know, they follow temptation. Their impulse control is poor, and they do something that they, that doesn't reflect their morality or doesn't reflect the depth of their feelings. If you spent enough time in a room with people who've cheated in a relationship and are speaking candidly to you about it, 'cause you're their lawyer, they'll say to you very openly, like, "No, I really love my wife. Like, I really love my wife. I just, I don't know, I was just an idiot. Like, I just, you know, I saw this bright shiny object and I went for it. I really wanted to sleep with that woman. I wanted to fuck her. I love my wife. I make love to my wife, I love my wife, but I just wanna sleep with this one." And we created a culture where one of those eradicates, the other. That's a whole nother discussion is, or is there ethical non-monogamy? Like should we, is marriage about who I have sex with? Or is marriage a different kind of a partnership? Is it a pair bond that's about building a life together? And where does monogamy fit into that? And people like Esther Perel, those are people who are making very intelligent discussions about that.

Yeah, that's a complicated one. Just to actually just linger on that. How often have people with open marriages have been in your office?

Well, let's see. And this is one of those like from a research perspective, this would be flawed. Because I see the, they're in my office 'cause their marriage is falling apart.

Yeah. So there may be lots of people having open relationships that don't end up in a divorce lawyer's office. So I'd never meet them.

Yeah. But I meet a lot of people that, that was the Hail Mary pass.

Yeah. Like I meet a lot of people that they tried that, but in retrospect, it was a Hail Mary pass. It was like, look, we've just figured let's try this. Maybe this'll keep the glue together on this thing. And I've also seen open relationships go wrong, where we agree we're just gonna have sexual connections with other people, or we're gonna bring other people into the bedroom, but together, like we're gonna be together with other people or with another person. And then that connection of those two people like, you think it's a soulmate all of a sudden now. And it goes in this other because, and again, is that novelty, is that like it's the reason why I don't understand why people have the threesomes. It's kind of like when someone sings to you, "I don't know where to look." I don't know where to look. If someone's singing to me.

Yeah. I don't know where to look. Like it feels weird, right?

Yeah. This is a conundrum. (Lex laughs) No this, (laughs) I'll say this to you, this will never-

Yeah. But it's the reason I can't go to strip clubs.

Yeah. I dunno where to look. Like if I go to strip club, like you go to strip club and there's the part where the woman is on the stage and she walks past each person who does a little thing and the next person and then next little thing. So when she's right in front of you, I like a woman's face. And I like a woman's body. I like both of them. So I'm looking at the woman's face and she's very beautiful, but she's naked and I think, oh, she's naked. I should be looking at her naked body because obviously that's like, it's almost rude not to because she's naked in front of me. Well, of course. So then I'm looking at her naked body, which is lovely to look at. But then I find myself going, "Oh my God, you're just still like, you should look at her face for God's sakes."

Yeah. And then I look at her face and find myself having this whole thing in my head where I'm going like, "Oh my God, where am I supposed to look?" So I think a threesome with two women, you don't hardly know or you're not an, that's different. But a threesome with a long-term partner who you're in a relationship with and a new person seems to me a very dangerous ground because you're gonna wanna enjoy the novelty of this new person, but you're gonna have to spend time with this person after. So how much attention do you spend to the new novel, exciting thing without creating the impression that you don't, you're not interested in this 'cause you're my favorite person, but this is fun so I wanna just try this for a few. But then also I don't wanna forget about this. It just seems tricky.

That analogy by the way, is brilliant. And also I guess it's tricky because the consequences of mistakes are quite high, 'cause you're gonna have to talk about it.

Right, and there's an easy way to misinterpret the data, right? If I really like sleeping with my partner, but I get one chance to sleep with this other person, well, of course, I should indulge in that because I can do this anytime, what did, you know. But this person, my partner might interpret that as, "Oh, so you're more interested in her than me." Because that voice in my partner, that would be, you know, insecure might hear that. So just why would you even, why would you open yourself up to that level of chaos?

You seem to love chess in the courtrooms. It's the kind of intimate human chess of sorts.

Yeah, no, that's too high risk.

How do we get on threesomes? Oh, open open marriages.

Well, how do we get on threesomes? I don't know. I always wonder how people get in threesomes. I figure if they like if one is fun, two must be better. If two is better, three must be better. Yeah, I think the way that this becomes an issue is why would you have a non-monogamous relationship? What is it about your sex life with this person that's not satisfying? And I think that that is the question that's harder to ask yourself and to try to answer with your partner.

I mean, you've said that this idea of soulmates-

Great business.

Is great for your business, but so like a human being in a partnership can't be everything, is that true?

I think it's unrealistic.

"True Romance," right? The document of that we keep referencing here.

I think it's wonderful that we do, 'cause sometimes now people don't get that reference anymore. Like I talk to people in, when I try to teach negotiation to young lawyers who come work for me, I tell them to watch the Gary Oldman scene where he offers them the Chinese food.

Yeah, why is that scene the one that really?

Because it's the best negotiating lesson I've ever heard in my life. Where he comes in he's-

Just for the record.

Yeah. Gary Oldman plays a pimp.

Yes. And he owns, his girl is Patricia Arquette, right? And Christian Slater's character. The protagonist is coming in to tell Gary Oldman that he no longer owns this girl. Alabama is her name.

Alabama.

Alabama is gonna be with him now. And Gary Oldman is amazing performance. And he's sitting in a living room with a shotgun next to him, with armed guys around him, watching television and eating Chinese food. And he's got Chinese food laid out in front of him. And Christian Slater comes in and he says, "I need talk to you about Alabama." And Gary Oldman says, "Do you want some Chinese food?" And Christian Slater sort of taken aback by the question. He says, "No, I came to talk about Alabama, she's with me now." And he proceeds to tell him what his offer essentially is. And Gary Oman says, "You know, you fucked up, right?" And some and substance he says, you know, if you'd sat down and started eating my Chinese food, I would've thought, "Who's this guy? He didn't have a care in the world just sitting down eating my Egg Foo Young." But instead you tried to be hard. And now I know you're full of shit. And so I think that scene summarizes how in negotiation, the more you enter into it with that, anytime I deal with another lawyer and they're like, "Well, we'll see you in court." "Okay, we'll see you in court." Like empty barrels make the most noise. Like you and I as people who've been in the jiu-jitsu community or been, I know some dangerous people. I know FBI swat people, I know, you know, I know people that are, they know how to do things to people. And they're the calmest guys you ever meet in your life.

Yeah. You scuff their sneaker. "Oh yeah, don't worry about man, it's okay." They're quick to apology. They're just chill.

What were we talking about?

We were talking about-

Oh, wait, "True Romance." Oh, the soulmate.

Yeah, soulmate. Yeah, well, you're saying that this idea like with that film underlying, there's this current of like, they were made for each other.

Yeah. I think there's a distinction between the feeling that someone is your missing puzzle piece that you're made for this person. I think what that just means is there's a lot of overlapping, beautiful connections. I love them intellectually. I love them sexually. I love them interpersonally. We have some shared history. We have some shared commonalities. We were raised in the same culture, raised in the same religion. We have politically similar ideas. Like these are all, or we have totally opposite ones, but they're complimentary. I've always joked that like finding someone with complimentary pathologies, like I'm obsessively disciplined. So having a partner who's like flexible and like spontaneous is really good for me. And also me being like, "No, no, no, come on, come back. We're gonna do this now." "No, no, it's time to actually do this now." We're good for each other. It's barefoot in the park. It's this idea of like the yin and the yang. So what I have an issue with is that the definition of soulmate that I think is sold to so many people now is this idea that if your partner is disappointing to you in any way, meaning they're not the perfect travel companion, they're not the perfect vocabulary companion, they're not the perfect roommate, they're not the perfect lover, they're not the, like the odds of someone being all of those seems crazy to me. It's infinitesimally small and they don't have to be everything. If I go to a restaurant and eat 10 courses and one of them is kind of subpar and the other nine are the most amazing culinary experience I've ever had. How dare I say, "Well, that wasn't the right restaurant." What do you mean? Like, that's a great restaurant. What are you talking about? Of course, there was one little thing. So I think it's impossible to have someone never disappoint you. It's impossible to have someone who never lets you down or doesn't say and do the exact right thing at the exact right time. And to create the idea or expectation in anyone that your partner should never let you down, never disappoint. You never not know what to say.

Yeah. Is I think crazy. I mean, I find for myself, when someone, for example, loses someone, when someone loses a family member or a pet. I often say the same thing to the person. I'll either talk to them or send them a text or call 'em. And I'll say, "If I wish I knew the perfect thing to say because I would say it right now." But I know there isn't. I know that, you know, I don't say that part, but I know there isn't. There isn't a perfect thing to say. But if there was a perfect thing to say, I would say it right now. Love to me is not that you never let this person down. It's that you never wanna let this person down. It's love is a verb. It's this feeling of, I never want to disappoint you. I will disappoint you, but I never want to disappoint you. I will hurt you, but I never want to hurt you. When I hurt you, it will be my insecurity, my stupidity, my humanity that causes me to hurt you. But I will never intentionally hurt you. I will betray your trust. I'll never intentionally betray your trust. I will bite my stupidity say the wrong thing or loose slip say something to someone that you didn't want me to, but it won't be intentional. I'll always try to be on your team. That feels to me like a realistic thing.

Yeah, the intention leads the way, but there's some aspect of like, just the turn course meal, that over time, there's a kind of a convergence towards perfection. And along the way there's the rose-colored glasses where you see the beauty and everything. So it just, it feels, it's probably destructive just to really internalize the idea of soulmate. Because then any imperfections can make you doubt, can make you step away, can make you lose the connection. But it just feels like, I don't know.

It's too heavy. It just feels, I feel like when you see a couple that's 90 years old and they've been together for 60 years, 70 years, there is of course a temptation to think about all the beauty that they've seen on that journey together. The children, the grandchildren, maybe the great-grandchildren, all the joy that they've seen, all the pain they've endured and struggled together, but they've also disappointed each other a whole bunch of times. Probably let each other down. They probably lied to each other a bunch.

Yeah. And yeah, and to me that is a beautiful thing. Like that's what, that that is not, it's great in spite of that, it's great because of that.

Yeah. They still love each other, even though they've been so flawed and imperfect, and they're human and they still love each other. They still rode that thing together because the reasons to do so, were greater than the reasons to not.

We've mentioned some of this, but I'd love to get your opinion on having seen things gone wrong, and having mentioned Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, how much fighting do you think is okay in a relationship and how to resolve the fights such that they don't escalate to that disconnection? Is there some wisdom you have for that? I imagine you've seen some epic fights.

Yeah. (Lex laughs) I've seen some crazy fights. I have, even on my phone, I have some recordings, 'cause now there's cameras everywhere. It's like nest cams and ring cams. And so a lot of this gets recorded, and people, you know, have phones so readily available that they can record and the other person didn't know it. And I listen to the way people speak to their, first of all, I listen to the way people speak to each other, and I'm shocked. I listen to the way people speak to their romantic partner, to their spouse. And I'm blown away. I'm blown away.

Disrespect or what?

Just disrespect, insults, profanity, just degradation, just brutality, just, just, and then like to then kind of go on like the next day you kind of go on like nothing happened. I'm shocked by it. I mean, I listened to it and I think like if someone ever spoke to me that way, I don't know that I could ever really feel deep connection to them, like freely. I would feel so betrayed like that. They just so brutal.

Right. I can't imagine speaking to someone that way. Like saying just such vicious insults to someone. But I understand that's how some people communicate perhaps. I guess the question of how much fighting is too much fighting in the relationship? Is for me, a bit like the question, how much sex is enough sex in the relationship?

Yeah. It depends on the two people and their individual tastes. But what's problematic is when there is a disconnect between the two people.

Sure. There's a, I think it's Annie Hall, it's one of the Woody Allen films where Diane Keaton and Woody Allen are both talking to their respective therapists about the relationship, but it's like a split screen.

Yeah. And she says, "I mean, we have sex all the time. We have sex like once a week."

Yeah. And he goes, "We never have sex. We have sex like once a week."

Yeah. (laughs) Yeah. And you know, it's funny because it's true. It really is this, they both know the same data, but they're interpreting that data set completely differently. And I think it, you know, the question you have to start asking is like what is, Steve Harvey actually once said something funny to me. He said that success is not where you are. Success is where you are in relation to where you started.

Yeah. He says, 'cause if success is where you are, Oprah's got a all beat.

Yeah. Or maybe Elon's got us all beat.

Yeah. I don't know. But if it's where you are versus where you started, 'cause there's a lot of people that started on second and started on third act like they hit a double. Like well, I was given 10 million, but then I turned it into a 100 million. Well, the first million's the hardest.

Yeah. So, you know, come on. But I think the question of like, how much sex were we having at the beginning of the relationship, that might be the wrong gauge, 'cause that's like we couldn't keep our hands off each other and we just, it's novelty. But, you know, like how far, how much sex we're having post children versus before the children, that might be worth looking at. You know, like how do we compare it? Am I overweight compared to what? When I was 20 and running marathons or most 50 year old men? I don't know, I gotta, what do you compare it to? So I think fighting, there are some people that I think they enjoy fighting, like they enjoy argument. I know people that enjoy political debate. I don't particularly enjoy political debate. Not that I'm not very interested in political concepts, economic concepts. I just, I argue for a living. So in my free time, I don't find argument that enjoyable when it's intense. I find discussion more interesting.

That's so interesting that you just keep the battle to that particular, to your main profession-

Sure.

- and everywhere else you want peace.

Well, did you ever, you know, Bob Goldthwait Bobcat Goldthwait, the comedian, very, very funny. And he had a whole second chapter as like a director and a writer. But he has this, you know, I saw an interview with him once where he said, yeah, he says like, "I'm a comedian. I've been a comedian a long time. People always come up to me and they're like, 'Oh, you're a comedian, do you want to hear a joke?'"

Yeah. He's like, and all I can think is, "Oh yeah, that'd be a real fucking treat."

Yeah. (laughs) Like I haven't heard jokes all day, all night for years. That would be a real special occasion, yes. I get it, you know.

Yeah, and I mean a sadder story of, I've been reading quite a bit about Robin Williams and-

Yeah.

- His wife would talk about how quiet and introspective and thoughtful and intellectual he was and-

Right.

- Not really that humorous in his private life.

But that may be a function of, that it is enjoyable to be the other thing.

Yeah. One of the things I've always thought was very funny in relationships, my own relationships is, most women I know who have a husband who doesn't wear a suit every day for a living, when their husband gets dressed up, like they're going to a wedding or something, they get like, "Oh my God, look at him," you know, and I wear a suit every day, on the weekends I don't wanna wear like jeans and a black T-shirt, but the rest of the time I wear a suit. And I remember, I think this has been true in every relationship I've been in since I was a lawyer, including my ex-wife. It was always like, if I had on jeans and I wasn't shaven, it was like, "Look at you."

Yeah. It's like, are you kidding me? (Lex laughs)

I'm like really?

Yeah. Whereas the suit, they wouldn't even notice.

Yeah. Wouldn't even notice the suit.

Sometimes the other thing.

Well, that's what it is. It's the novelty of the other thing. So I think that if you're Robin Williams and you're like being shot out of a canon in terms of your performative style and your energy and explosive. Yeah, being quiet must be very refreshing. I imagine, you know, incredibly intelligent people must love just watching stupid humor or having a dumb, it's why some of the smartest people I know, like really dumb shit. (Lex laughs) It's why like Rick and Morty I think is brilliant.

Yeah. Because it's both smart-

Yeah. And dumb.

Yeah. It's the perfect combination.

It really is, yeah. I think it's possibly the perfect show.

Is there advice you can give to somebody like me on how to interview well, how to do conversations well? Do you think there's something transferable from the courtroom to this setting with complicated people?

Yeah, I think so. I think what can be learned about interviewing is the distillation. What is most important? When I hear a story that I have to present to a judge, the totality of someone's parenting, the good of their parenting, the bad of their parenting, the good of the other parent, the bad of the other parent. I have to sort of boil down what are the best examples, 'cause I can't lay it all out. And then what greater principle do they speak to? You know, the best jiu-jitsu teacher that I think I've had as Paul Shriner, and Paul doesn't just teach you techniques. He's teaching you ways of thinking about concepts in jiu-jitsu. And then here are some techniques that illustrate that. John Danaher, from what I can see, does a lot of that as well. I think they're like soulmates in the jiu-jitsu world.

Yeah. And then there's that element that you spoke to, which is maybe considering the other side, right?

Well, always, always.

Devil's advocate kind of thing.

Yeah, I mean, straw man, steelman stuff. You do a lot of that. And I think all the best interviewers do. But yeah, I think it's really, really important to think about, I have to know the other side's case much better than my own. I have to know what are their defenses, what are their strengths? I have to map out a strategy that keeps those in mind. And that's hard because early in my career, I would attribute to the other side an intelligence and strategy that sometimes wasn't applicable. I've learned, there's like the simplest explanation is the accurate one. The Occam's razor, I think like sextons would be never attribute to strategy that which could be attributed to stupidity for laziness.

Yeah. Because I have lots of adversaries that like, they'll not file a motion I thought they were gonna file. And I'll go, "Wait, why didn't they file that? Like tactically what are they thinking I'm gonna do?" And what is that about? And I would go, "Well, if I didn't file it, why wouldn't I file?" And the answer is like, they just didn't think to file it. Or like they were too lazy to draft it, or they went on vacation last week so that's why they didn't, and I'm driving myself crazy going, there's some tactical reason, there must be. So I think you have to look honestly and don't attribute to the other side your constitution, if I said that, I'd be saying it sarcastically. If you said it, maybe you weren't saying it sarcastically. Like you have to think about the fact that we're unique human beings who express themselves differently.

And for you, the audience is usually the judge.

It's a judge.

Do you do jury?

No, we don't do jury trials. That's the interesting thing about family law attorneys. Family law attorneys don't do jury trials. We do bench trials. We just persuade there's person in a black robe. That's the only person I have to convince.

Does the person in the black robe, do they have emotions? Are they human or are they very?

They are human. They are all too human.

Do they impose that humanity on you? Like do you feel it?

Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah. Oh no, do you feel it? Like they're human.

Yeah. They're working their shit out.

Okay. (chuckles) Their parents.

Yeah. They're husbands and wives.

Yeah. And you're talking about stuff they deal with.

Yeah. I had a woman on the stand, an expert witness on the stand who was talking about the emotional and physical abuse that was perpetrated on a seven year old. And this person had written a bunch of reports that were in evidence in this trial around like day six or seven in the trial. And there's all of this information in the record about this verbal abuse and mental abuse and gaslighting and like really intense stuff that this woman's doing to this seven year old. And the judge is like vaguely paying attention for most of the time. And at some point the person says, "Well, when a parent is abusing a child, da, da," and the judge just interrupts, she goes, "Well look, you know, do you think like if a person spanks a child that that's abuse?" She's like, "Well, I like a person in general." And by the way, if my adversary asks that question, I could object, but I can't object when the judge asks the question. They get to rule on that objection. So I'm like, "Where's this going?" She's like, "Well, no, I mean, spanking can be a form of abuse." She's like, "Right, but like, you know, are you saying like everybody who spanks?" And I'm sitting here going, "What is going on in your house?

Yeah. What went on with your parents? 'Cause you're bringing some stuff here that's not, this is not what you're supposed to be. This is not your role." But there are good judges and bad judges, and that's a big, big deal.

Well, I've noticed that now I don't have kids, so I have a certain perspective on the world. I really wanna have a family and have kids. But I've noticed when I talk to people that have kids and gender matters also, like fathers with daughters and so on. It changes the landscape of the conversation.

It sure does.

It's like you're no longer this intellectual that's like, "Well, there's this and there's this." It's more like, "Go fuck yourself. Anything that with kids."

Yeah, yeah. "Can like burn it to the ground. I don't care."

Yeah. "I don't care what the nuance is of the little intellectual thing."

Oh, you wanna learn about this, represent someone who's accused of child sexual abuse. I've had about a dozen of those cases where I've represented someone who's alleged to have perpetrated sexual abuse of a child. You are guilty until proven innocent. And let me tell you, as a lawyer, that is the toughest cases because you put sex and kids together and everyone loses their god damn mind, immediately. There is a rush to judgment. There is a disregard for procedure. There is a confirmation bias. There's a desire to be a protector. And again, all motivated and informed by really good things. The desire to protect the innocent. The desire to protect the vulnerable. But gang, no, like we have these, I like living in a world that has due process. I like these rules.

Right. I like the rules of evidence. I like innocent until proven guilty. I like that. I'm not saying it's perfect.

It's such a I'm so torn on it because I also like living in a world where people are so emotionally invested in connection to other like-

Those two things aren't mutually exclusive. They shouldn't be.

I know, but if you dedicate yourself fully to the law, you might lose some of the humanity.

I don't think you have to. I have to tell you, I once actually went off on a DA, on a district attorney who was very vehemently prosecuting a child sex abuse case that I was involved in. And I remember, I came in, thankfully I came in very early in the case. So the accusation was made and I came in right away, 'cause very often you get this case. There've been 15 interviews. This person's been interviewed by police, by child protective services. And it's like they've already, they're already so far down a hole they didn't even know they dug themselves into, you know. So I got in very early on and I just kept saying, she's like, "Well, we're gonna do this. We're gonna do this, we're gonna," I was like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait." We should both want this to be fair, done properly. There's an expert, like a well-respected expert who's a clinical psychologist who they're job is, they're a validation expert. So their job is to interviewed a child. They record the interviews with a hidden camera so that everyone can see. They didn't have suggestive questioning. There are very stringent standards that they follow, to prevent like suggestive questioning or any of those kinds of things. And I was saying, "Listen, no, no one should be interviewing this child other than this person who's a neutral, qualified person." And I kept saying to the other side, like, "Wait, no, no, see, this is the problem. You wanna win, you're a lawyer, you wanna win, I wanna win too, right? But we wanna win fair. Like, that's like saying, you know, I'm going into a boxing match, I wanna win. So if the referee's looking to the side, I'm gonna kick the guy in the nuts. Okay, then you might've won, but you didn't win boxing. You won some other thing. I wanna win a fair fight. I want to go in with the rules set, the law, the rules of evidence. I don't want a judge who doesn't understand evidence. I don't want an adversary who plays it fast and loose with the rules. I wanna go in and win a fair fight. And that's when it comes our passion to protect the innocent, to emotionally connect, to feel deeply about children and protecting them, I don't think that that's antagonistic to. We always treat dandruff with decapitation in this culture. And I don't understand it. And that's what I like about the law. The law, there's rules, and there's rules about procedure. And so that's our job is to bring out the truth using the rules and the procedure. I love that job.

But still there's a human being and the judge, right?

That's the problem.

It seems like a really hard job. It's a because you have to be pay attention to the whole thing.

You have to pay attention to the whole thing. And everyone is trying to persuade you and lie to you.

Yeah. And everyone can keep their shit together in a court appearance most of the time.

Yeah. It takes a rare, kind of crazy to blow up in a courtroom. So most of the time everybody looks really put together and like, yeah, you gotta have an amazing bullshit detector. I'm not saying they don't have a really hard job. They have a really hard job. They have a way harder job than I have.

What's their source of ground truth? Like how do they sharpen the radar for bullshit?

I think that they're assessing credibility, which is what you call it in the law is something that, I think you're supposed to develop it on the job.

Do you have the data of who was lying in the end or not?

No, not really. Not really, I mean, you can try to demonstrate a lack. What I always tell clients, and this is the art of advocacy, right? Is I want to use examples of misrepresentations to show that this person's a liar. I'm trying to extrapolate from the small, the large. I'm trying to say, here's three times he lied, therefore he's a liar. When in fact, we know human beings don't really work that way. But I've seen people submarine, just torpedo their entire case because they lied about some dumb shit, some dumb little thing. And I say to 'em, "Why would you lie?" "Why did you lie about that?" I had a case where a person was accused of child sexual abuse. And on cross-examination they were asked, "Did you have an affair with this babysitter?" And they were like, "No, no, no, no, no." And then it was shown through text messages and things. They clearly had an affair with the babysitter. And I said, "Why did you lie?" And they said, "Well, I didn't want that to come out." And I said, "Right, but now you're a liar." Did you molest your child? 'Cause if the answer to that is no, and now you destroyed your credibility 'cause you didn't wanna admit that you slept with an adult woman, by the way, it would've been good for your case. It would've been good for your case for you to say, "Yeah, I slept with her 'cause I like sleeping with adult women, that's how I am. I don't sleep with children much less my own." You know, so why would you lie? And so that concept is incredibly important. And judges, theoretically, they have to make very tough calls. I feel like it's the most impotent place to just sit there and dispassionately sort of listen and rule on objections. I just would be so frustrated, 'cause I'd wanna get up and I had to do jury duty once. And it was like a horrific experience for me because I'm sitting there and I'm-

You have no power, you're just-

Yeah, I'm just watching these two lawyers. I'm like, "Why did you ask that question that way?" I would never have asked it that way. Why would you object? Like when you object, you bring more attention to it, what are you doing? I'm watching both of them. It's like watching, like a jiu-jitsu probably wouldn't feel like for like John Donaher to watch two white belts spar. "Why are you doing, wow, my God, what are you doing? Why would you grab that? What are you thinking?" And, you know, it's frustrating. It's frustrating to watch. And as a judge it must just be unbelievable.

So divorce lawyers sometimes get a bad rep. Is there a reason for this?

I mean, no one's ever happy to be spending time with a divorce lawyer. Like if you have a criminal lawyer, they're defending you against the maelstrom of injustice and false allegations. They're protecting your freedom. And maybe you're acquitted and then you're like, "Oh, that person saved me," you know. You buy a house, you know that lawyer helps you get the house, you know you're happy about that, sign the paperwork. You do a will, like you help they make you feel secure. At best, I'm a representative of a chapter in someone's life that was very unpleasant. I have a friend who's a Julliard trained classical pianist, and he was having a humidification system installed in his home because his piano required a certain level of humidity and it was very expensive to install this humidification system. And we went out to dinner and then we came back to his place and he said, "Man, this is the most depressing $15,000 I've ever spent." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "'Cause there's nothing different. I spent $15,000 and I feel absolutely nothing different. My piano does, but I don't." I don't have anything to show for it. You finish getting divorced, you don't really have anything to show for it.

Yeah, at best.

Yeah. At at best, it's the same.

It's one of the things I think that's interesting about divorce is in our increasingly performative society. You can't pretend you meant to get divorced. You can't. Like everything everybody does, "Well, I wrote that album for me. It didn't matter that it was not gonna be popular." No, you wanted that album to be popular. Come on, you're lying, and that's fine, but you're lying. "Oh, I think my haircut came out great. I wanted it to look this fucked up." No, you didn't. You didn't, you're lying. And that's fine because we live in a society now where everybody's just, "Oh yes, I meant to do that." Okay, divorce. Nope, you got married. You break up in a relationship, not a marriage, okay. Well, we were only gonna be together for a little while. It was never serious. We were just like we were having fun. That's all it was, it wasn't. We were never gonna be a happily ever after. No, you got married, you got married guys, you got up there and you said forever. And it didn't go forever. So you can't bullshit anybody anymore. No, it didn't go the way you thought it was gonna go, didn't go the way you signed on for. So now that, that's undeniable. Like what can we make it? What can we make it into? Like it can be beautiful, the Barnes burned down, now I can see the moon. Let's make it something. And so for me, I think people look at a divorce lawyer and they just go, "Yeah. This is this horrible chapter and I associate you with it." Also too, listen, some of the things we do, it's difficult to simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

Yeah. The things you do to protect your clients sometimes look like acts of aggression, but really they're just trying to shore up a defense. And so I get paid to be paranoid and I have to say to clients sometimes like, "Well, are you sure that they're not doing this?" And then they go, "Well, I don't know." And I go, "Well, let me inquire." Did she accuse me of that? No, no, I'm not accusing you.

Yeah. I'm just trying, we get a reputation divorce lawyers as amping up conflict, 'cause we get paid for the conflict, right? It's like if you get paid by the bullet, you're gonna start a lot of gunfights, right? It doesn't really work that way with most good divorce lawyers. There are plenty of people that are bad lawyers and they stoke up conflict because it jacks up fees. They usually don't do well. They don't build a successful career, 'cause you live and die by your reputation.

Yes, reputation is everything.

But good lawyers, like good experienced divorce lawyers. We do the whole, you know, "Hey, listen, you're gonna say this, I'm gonna say this, you're gonna do this, I'm gonna do this. This is what, let's skip it. We're gonna end up here. We got judge, blah, blah, blah. And you know what he's gonna do? He's gonna go right here. So why don't we just agree right now to X, Y, Z. Sounds good, we're done, we're good."

So you wanna minimize the number of bullets.

It's like the two, it's like Miyamoto Musashi. It's like the two swordsmen who see each other and they just stand there at the edge and they see the whole fight in their minds and they know who won and who lost and they walk away. (Lex laughs) We do a lot of that. We do a lot of, okay. It's like when you watch high level chess.

Yeah. And someone resigns and you go, "Wait, what happened?" He didn't wait and you go, "No, no, the other guy won."

Yeah. It's 15 moves from now, but he won and the other guy sees it. So now we're done.

Can you speak to some recent high profile divorces? Like the most recent I saw is Kevin Costner.

Yeah, Kevin Costner is a great, I mean, I don't know him, I'm not involved in the case.

By the way, "Yellowstone" is just so great.

Oh, it's so good, right?

And I hope Matthew McConaughey, who I've gotten to know, I hope he's does one of these shows. "Yellowstone" or anything else. He's just born for the role, frankly, but anyway.

Yeah. He'd be amazing in that. Yeah, your conversation with him was a great one. The Kevin Costner divorce is interesting because Kevin Costner had one of the most expensive from a distributive award perspective. He gave a huge payout to his first wife, and then this time, he had a prenup. So it's actually, it's a very public showing of the fact that once bitten, twice shy, like he had a very public divorce that cost him a lot of assets in terms of the division of assets. And now

It appears, by all acknowledged reports, that he had a prenuptial agreement that was well-crafted and enforceable. The argument now is over what is child support? What is spousal support? What's covered in the prenup and what isn't? So, it seems like the prenup worked, actually. The prenup worked, and Kevin Costner's career, which has always been a steady career. I don't know that in the like, Hollywood stock market, that people would've bet on "Yellowstone." Like, I don't, I think you would've said, "Hey, the best years of that guy's career are behind him. How do you get better than 'Dances with Wolves,' and 'Robin Hood,' and like all these big, big, 'The Bodyguard'?"

[Lex] Yeah.

And then "Yellowstone," and it's like, holy cow, did he knock that outta the park? And he's central to it. I mean, he knocked the skin off the ball. So, I think that's why prenups are important. You don't know what your career is gonna do. You don't know where it's gonna go. And so he saved himself a lot of money. He also has a great lawyer. He has Laura Wasser. Laura Wasser is LA, just a top professional, brilliant lawyer, even-tempered, but intense in the courtroom, and just a smart, smart human being.

The thing I liked, just, you know, I haven't been following it, but I saw a few comments he's made, and he like refused to comment negatively about his spouse and just-

That's smart.

But like, the way he said it, it wasn't lawyer advice. It's good lawyer advice, probably, but he said it from the heart, which I always like. I like seeing that.

[James] Yeah.

Like where he refuses even the drama, even the public nature of it to-

[James] Yeah.

Throwing jabs or-

Well, Laura, his lawyer, is actually notorious for like, not speaking to the press about cases in an extended way. And that's a smart move. I don't speak about pending cases I'm involved in publicly, and I discourage my clients from doing so. I can't always stop them, but I discourage them from doing so. I don't think there's any good to come of it. There are lawyers who try things in the court of public opinion. I think there is a, to take it to the broader principle you just brought up, I think there is a lot of value in talking about your ex in a favorable way. I have to say, when I first got divorced many years ago, I went out on a date with a young woman. It was one of my first dates as a divorced man. And she was a divorced woman, and she's a beautiful woman. And we were having dinner, and it was going quite well. And it was one of those things where I was like, "Oh, I definitely wanna see this girl again." And I said something about, "Oh, there's gonna be this thing at this museum, we should go." And she's like, "Oh yeah, that'd be a lot of fun." And I'm like, "Yeah, we should definitely, maybe we'll be the next thing we do together." And she was like, "Yeah, we should go next weekend. The kids are with asshole, so we can go." And I just, it was like, you could hear that record scratch, like, I just went, "Oh yeah, no, this isn't good." I'm not, you're referring to the father of your kids as the asshole. We're already, I'm walking into something here that I don't know that I want to be involved in.

Yeah.

Matthew McConaughey, before he was married. If you look at his history, he dated some of the most beautiful women in Hollywood in their prime. And none of them ever talked bad about him in the press. They all were like, "Oh my God, he is such a great guy. He's such a great guy." And I always wondered like, how do you, he got outta all of those relationships without a scratch on him. And when you'd watch an interview with him, they would say like, "So, you know, you dated Penelope Cruz." And he'd go, "Penelope, that's just a special lady. That's just a, what a special lady. She's just a wonderful, what a wonderful woman. I was just so blessed to have the time with her. What a beautiful, wonderful woman." And I would think to myself, I'm like, "You're a genius." Like he's a genius because like he'd never came off as petty.

[Lex] Yeah.

Spiteful, bitter, any of that. He just came off as like, just dignified, strong, smart, self-assured. And like, it left, you know, it left like, it left the viewer with the impression that like, when he was looking off and basically, he's probably like just thinking about some wonderful time he had with her. And you think to yourself like, "God, that guy, like he just became cooler and cooler."

[Lex] Yeah.

Whereas if he got into like the whole, "Oh yeah, that was ugly and then this happened," and nobody wants to hear it. It's awful.

The funny thing about him, just having interacted with him a bunch, I don't think he's in the, he's in the Rogan School of thought, I think, that I don't see him ever having a fight. Now, his parents were, as he has spoken about a bunch, nonstop fighting.

[James] Right.

They got divorced and remarried and-

[James] Yeah.

Just insane.

[James] And they were volatile.

Yeah, very. And he seems maybe you kind of, it depends on swinging the other way. He just seems cool as a cucumber, like always.

Just lets it roll off. But, you know, even if it's internally.

[Lex] Yeah.

Not rolling off, there is value in just rising above it in your discourse.

That's true. Yes, yes.

Like, you lie to your children. People say this to me all the time, clients. They're like, "You know, why did you tell your child that dad had an affair?" Well, I'm not gonna lie to my kids. Fuck you, yes, you are. You lie to your kids all the time.

[Lex] Yeah.

"Mommy, are you gonna die someday?" "Yes, babe, I'm gonna die and daddy's gonna die. And then someday the Earth's gonna hurl into the sun and we're all gonna die." Sweet dreams. Like that's not, you lie to your kids all the time. "What's wrong with me?" "We don't know what's wrong with you. We're gonna take you to the doctor and hopefully, it's nothing serious and you won't die." You lie to your kids all the time. You tell 'em that Santa Claus exists when he does whatever. So to say, "I'm not gonna lie to my kids." You lie to your kids all the time. You don't like your husband, that's okay. You don't like your ex-husband, but it's their father. So just grin, you know. "Oh, daddy took me to meet his new girlfriend, Kiki." "Oh, that's nice. Did you guys have a good time?" "Good. Oh, that's, yeah, and she helped me do my hair and she did my makeup." Listen, I'm sure that's burning you inside.

[Lex] Yeah.

But you go, "Oh, that's great," because why? You love your kids.

I mean, again, McConaughey has a way with that. He's like, he basically says never lie, but a little bullshit is okay.

[James] Sure, sure.

(Lex laughs) Yeah.

I mean, I'm very like, Tom Waits has that song "Lied to Me." "You gotta lie to me, baby." Honesty is a funny thing.

But Tom Waits also believes that God's way on business.

I think his words, man.

"And who are the ones that we left in charge? Killers, thieves, and lawyers." That's a Tom Waits quote.

Well, it must be true then.

[James] Yeah.

(laughs)

I don't know how many limbs I have, but I will give all of them to talk to Tom. And he's a very private person.

I feel like he's the musical equivalent of Cormac McCarthy.

[Lex] Yeah.

Even if you get the interview, you're not, I don't think you're gonna get in there.

No, I don't think you want like, honestly, I don't think you want to. I think I've seen his public interviews over the years with Letterman, and I think he just, he is the poetry.

I would put Tom Waits, Cormac McCarthy, Maynard James Keenan. These are artists that like, I think they want the art to speak for itself. They would like to be lessened. They don't want you to, I remember early, early days of Tool, he could not have been less interested in the spotlight.

[Lex] Yeah.

To the point where I think it was almost to the detriment of the band early on. And there's no surprise that those are three artists that I think are unbelievable and in a category of their own. And that you hear their performance. Like, you can give me a page of a Cormac McCarthy novel, and I'll know it's a Cormac McCarthy novel. You can, a few notes of Maynard James Keenan or Tom Waits' voice, you know that that's them.

Yeah, as genius. Genius hides from the spotlight. But doesn't stop me from feeling sad about it. But anyway.

Yeah, that does. I would like to hear that interview.

She's the girl that got away.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I'm just standing outside of that girl's house with a blue box.

With a sign. Yeah, just playing in your eyes with Peter Gabriel, yeah.

Yeah, anyway, what does it lie to me? This whole idea of honesty in relationships is interesting. I mean, clerks with the blowjobs.

[James] Yeah.

I don't know how to phrase it eloquently, but like, there's stuff you should be honest about, and there's stuff maybe you don't need to be honest about.

So, in the law, it is illegal to commit fraud. Fraud is a material misrepresentation of fact. But the law specifically says you are permitted to engage in quote, "mere puffery."

[Lex] Nice.

Puffery.

[Lex] Puffery.

And that's the term that was used for it, puffery. And puffery is when you are inflating something, you're being like hyperbolic. But people wouldn't necessarily think you're telling the truth, like that it's not, you know, like if I say to you, "This bottle of water was held by Elvis, and that's why you should pay me $50 for it," that's fraud. But if I say, "This is the water that has been, this water has been drank by the finest people, presidents drink this water." Now, this is puffery. Advertising, marketing is based on puffery. It's not fraud. When it's fraud, it crosses the line. So there's a difference between honesty and candor, right? So in relationships, being honest is good. Being totally candid is probably not a great idea. It's indelicate to be totally candid about something. Things. The woman you're in a romantic relationship with says to you, "Do I look good in this dress?" And they don't. "Do I look fat in this?" That's a better. Any heterosexual man who's ever been in a relationship has had that question asked of him, "Do I look fat in this? Does this make my butt look big?" Or does whatever it is this, "Do I look fat in this?" If you go, "Yes," that's indelicate. It's honest, but it's indelicate and it's almost mean, right? And if you say, "No," but it's true, she doesn't look good in that. Like the concern she sees is a legitimate concern. Do you lie and go, "No, no, you look great in that. It's great, da, da, da." That's not a good thing either. So what do you say? You know, "That blue dress you have really compliments your body, like in a way that one doesn't." You know, "That, the cut of that dress is such that it doesn't flatter you." "I see what you're saying."

[Lex] Yeah.

"Now it's the dress, it's not you, babe, you know, but I'm telling you the truth. Like I'm addressing your concern." This is the distinction. Don't material misrepresent the facts. Like don't steer people down roads that they're, you know, you know that that's not how it's gonna go, right? So it's like if the woman says, "I love you," and you don't love her, don't say, "I love you back." You do the like, "Oh, you know, I have very strong feelings for you as well." Or you know, like there has to be some middle ground. You don't just pretend you didn't hear them.

Yeah, I mean, I guess all of it requires skill, just like you described. And I think just being honest in quotes is not enough.

Well, it's not a specific enough instruction.

(Lex laughs)

I mean, that's the problem. You see, when you write a relationship book, which I never intended to do, people come to you and say, "What are the things I should do to help my relationship?" Or, "What is the cause of divorce?" And you go, "Well, disconnection." But like, "What do you mean by that?" Or like, "How do I improve my relationship?" "Pay more attention." "Make small gestures." Okay, what does that even mean? Like, what do you mean? "Acts of love." "You should show your partner that you love them more often." What do you mean? Like, "What I say, what I do?" "We should have more sex?" Like, what are you at, what are you saying? People want measurable, specific things. So that's why I tried in my book to be like, very specific about like things you can do, things you shouldn't do. And they're practical suggestions. Like leaving a note. I talk a lot about leaving a note. If you're dating someone or you're living with them or you're in a serious relationship, send a text, leave a note, just little, every day, just some little thing that just tells them how much you like them. Like this is a low-cost, high-value move. Doesn't take much, and it's a practical thing. But when we speak in these sort of like broader axioms, these broader concepts that people just don't have any idea how to practically apply.

I can't wait to listen to the audiobook where you talk about managing marital finances as like anal sex, which your mastery of the metaphor (James laughs) touches one's heart and soul, your Shakespeare of the 21st century, really.

I don't know that Shakespeare would've brought anal up in that context, but I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah.

(Lex laughs)

My thesis there, or my point there, was, you know, proceed carefully and have discussion in advance.

[Lex] Yes.

And don't just spring it on someone.

[Lex] Sure.

And realize that if this goes wrong, it will go catastrophically wrong. So good communication is important and, you know, yeah. I don't think it's something you should just dive into unless you're prepared for that to have potentially very negative impact.

And finances is one of the sources of a huge amount of stress in relationships, which is-

Tremendous. Because it's about value, I think. I mean, aside from having painful conversations about what you tried to do and were able to do, or what your impulse control was in terms of what you spent money on, like there's the conversation, and then there's what's underneath the conversation. There's gender stuff about men feeling the need to be a provider. There's gender stuff of men or women thinking material goods will fill the void and buying things and then creating stress on their partner. There's the very human desire to make things seem effortless so your spouse doesn't feel any stress, when in fact it's causing tremendous financial stress. And then when the dam breaks, it breaks hard. So yeah, there's a lot. Finances is tricky stuff. And you could probably be wonderful romantic and sexual partners and have very different styles of how you handle your finances, and how you handle your finances is informed by, not only your individual psychology, but also how you were raised and how your family taught you about finance and how you should conduct your finances so.

And there's interesting power dynamics in play.

Tremendously, yeah. Those are very tricky because the standard of living of a couple becomes important in a divorce, but sometimes this toxic standard of living that created toxic levels of stress is one of the causes of the divorce.

[Lex] Yeah.

And they're asking the court to maintain a financial obligation on you. That is the reason why the marriage fell apart. And that feels like a particularly insulting form of indignity.

Well, you're a fascinating human being on many levels, but you're also exceptionally productive. And you've talked to me about waking up early. For you, we've met today at 11:00 AM. And for you, that's what, late afternoon, I suppose.

[James] Yeah.

We had to negotiate and come to an agreement because I went to bed at 4:00 AM.

And I was up at, I get up at four every day.

[Lex] You woke up at four.

So now I'm here. Well, I woke it's three o'clock local time.

[Lex] Yes.

So I woke up at three local time.

[Lex] Nice.

Yeah, I wake up at four naturally, then my body just wakes up.

[Lex] Oh wow.

And wakes up-

[Lex] That's fascinating.

Full on this speed.

[Lex] Wow.

Like my most productive writing and speaking is from 4:00 AM until noon or one.

So can you take me through a productive, like a perfectly productive day?

I wake up at 4:00 AM very naturally. I wish I didn't, but I do check my phone first thing 'cause I wanna see if any emergencies came in from a client overnight.

[Lex] So work emergencies.

Yeah, work-related emergencies. And it is a divorce lawyer. Our definition of emergency can be very serious. It's people absconding with a child. It's a police being involved in a domestic violence. And so they can be like time-sensitive things. And when someone is hiring a divorce lawyer, I think they're hiring, they want someone responsive. My clients have my cell phone number, and I go to bed early because I get up early. And so I go to sleep by 8:00 PM latest. I don't think I've seen 9:00 PM even on New Year's Eve. So I wake up at four, I check my phone, check my email. Usually, even if there's something that's, you know, time-sensitive, it's usually not so time-sensitive that it needs to be responded to at 4:00 AM 'cause most other normal people are asleep. I have espresso, black espresso, which I enjoy very much. And then I work out, and that's some days gonna be weights, a lot of days it's just gonna be cardio. I've changed my habits now that I'm in my early 50s. It used to be much more intensive weight training and deadlifts and stuff like that. And then I herniated my L5S1. So 485 was my max deadlift. And now I don't hardly do deadlifts.

Well, you can still relive the past glory?

I do. I still, I have some pictures of videos.

[Lex] You have pictures.

I have videos. I have videos of me putting 485 for three.

But you can, in stories, when you talk about it, you can exaggerate how much you've actually lifted.

That's true. But then you can't back it up. See, I'm very evidence-based. So if I don't have a photo or video of it, it's just puffing, mere puffery at that point. But I work out, and then I try to work out for like a good hour. And I do that partly because of stress. I think when I don't work out, it's difficult. I had a group of guys that I would do jiu-jitsu with at 5:00 AM. They were mostly law enforcement. They were cops who would either be starting a shift or coming off of a night shift. And we would train together, just do like an open mat. And it was at 5:00 AM till six, and that was heaven. I love training jiu-jitsu first thing in the morning if I can. And then I always do either a sauna or steam for 20 minutes, half an hour. And then I do a cold plunge. Or if I don't have access to a cold plunge, a cold shower. And then I have breakfast, and it's usually a very uncontroversial simple breakfast. I like to eat, you know, I eat like slow carb, Tim Ferriss type style. And then I get right to work. I try to do my drafting early in the day. Prenups, motions, things like that from let's say six or seven until nine, 9:30, which is when court begins.

So drafting is like writing up different documents.

Right, writing prenups, writing separation agreements, writing settlement proposals, writing motions for the court, pretrial memos, which is like research that I wanna present to a judge that supports my arguments. I do drafting. I review documents that the attorneys who work for me have drafted and refine them. And then court is usually from nine o'clock until noon. And if we're on trial, then it's a whole different pace, because trials, the lunch break isn't really a lunch break. You're preparing the afternoon's witnesses and you're trying to do damage control on what happened in the morning. But if it's just court conferences, like most cases, there's conferences. Conferences as you go in, you make oral argument, but you don't have witnesses on the stand, you're not taking testimony. It's like everybody's just shouting allegations back and forth and making temporary arguments pretrial. It's kinda the foreplay of the trial, right?

Is that exhausting by the way?

It's exhausting when you're done with it. Like while you're doing it, it's exhilarating. I always say that I never sleep as poorly as the night before a trial. And I never sleep as well as the night I finished a trial.

[Lex] Yeah.

Because when I am on trial, I am speaking, listening, watching the judge closely to see what they're reacting to and when they're paying attention or not paying attention, watching opposing counsel and the opposing party. When is the opposing party writing a little note to their lawyer to show it to them? What is the opposing counsel objecting to? My client is trying to pass me notes half the time while I'm speaking and making my arguments. I'm trying to like adjust what I'm doing strategically based on the objections that the judge is ruling on. So I'm so hyperstimulated on trial that when you finish, you can't even talk. You're gone. Your brain is jello.

[Lex] Yeah.

Conferences is harder because at least with a trial, there's a singularity of focus. Like with a trial, it's just one case and they have all my attention. The problem is, is then on the lunch break, all the other cases that I've been ignoring for the last several hours while I was on trial, they all have stuff going on. So it's like, "Hey, where's that settlement proposal on this?" "Hey, this, she just did this. We need to file a motion." So now it's like, okay, I have an hour to eat and to answer all of this in some preliminary way to delegate some responsibilities. And then I gotta go back in and put a 100% on my focus on this other case again. So you find yourself in a place. That's why I'm very disciplined, is you find yourself in a place where I live my whole life in six-minute increments, tenths of an hour, 'cause we bill in tenths of an hour. So everything I do, it's like 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, and I'm logging time throughout the day.

[Lex] That's fascinating.

And you find yourself at the end of the day. My son is a lawyer, my older son. He's a district attorney, and I'm very proud of him. He gets to put bad guys in jail, and he's very smart, and he's doing a great job. He just about a year ago. And when he graduated from law school, we were very close, and we were talking, and he said, we were just talking about like the career and the law that he was about to embark on. And I said to him, you know, the feeling at the end of the day when like all your homework or all your work is done, and you just go, "Okay, it's all done now, and I'm gonna go home." You'll never have that feeling ever again, ever. You're just gonna, every day, go, "Alright, it's enough. It's enough. I gotta, I got it, I gotta get outta here."

[Lex] Yeah.

Because you could, with every one of these cases, you could stay up 24 hours focusing just on it. So you have to have the discipline to go, "Yeah, no, that's it. I'm done for now. I've done what I could do today, and now I'm gonna sit and read for a half an hour. I'm gonna watch this show for a half an hour. I'm gonna have this meal," because you, it's never done, you know? So that's challenging. That's a hard part of this job. But I think my discipline helps with that. And then I like, I said, I finish my day around 5:30, six o'clock, and I have something to eat, and I try to wind down a little. And I'm usually in bed by 7:30 and asleep by eight.

You mentioned jiu-jitsu. You're a brown belt. What role has jiu-jitsu played in your life?

I love jiu-jitsu. I trained martial arts from the time I was a little kid. I think I was seven or eight. I took up Budokan and Goju Karate, and I did Judo, and it was always part of my life. And then I got to college and grad school, and I didn't have time for it, and I didn't do it so much. And then I got divorced. I was quite young still when I got divorced, and I had two young kids, and I thought, "Well, I can like, you know, grow a goatee and buy a convertible and do like the thing you're supposed to do when you're divorced with kids close to middle age," or "I can try to do something more productive." And so I said, "Well, maybe I'll go back to martial arts." So I took up Muay Thai, kickboxing, and they had a jiu-jitsu class at the same school after the Muay Thai class. And I had been around the orbit of jiu-jitsu, having been, my kids took karate, and there was jiu-jitsu there, it was a Gracie Academy. And I stayed for a jiu-jitsu class, and I had a 120-pound girl ragdoll me, 'cause I just knew nothing about grappling. And I remember just going, "Well, I gotta learn what this is." And that was it. I just dove into it. My first professor was Louis Vintaloro in New Jersey's, a Royler Gracie black belt. Great teacher, taught me amazing fundamentals. Took me all the way up to purple belt. And then right after I got my purple belt, I moved to the city, I moved to Manhattan. I actually chose my apartment based on its proximity to Marcelo Garcia.

(Lex laughs)

And I moved to West Chelsea because it was a short walk to Marcelo's Academy. My core jiu-jitsu was up to purple belt. It was Louis Vintaloro. And then it's been Marcelo, and Marcelo, Paul Shriner, who's really phenomenal at his academy. And all of people at his academy, I mean, are all phenomenal. I mean, Bernardo was there for a period of time that I was there, and before he went to Boston, Marcos Tinoco was like his lasso guard stuff. He was at Marcelo's for a long time. And what a teacher. I mean, my lack of skill at jiu-jitsu is not based on a lack of quality instruction.

(Lex laughs)

It's based on an inability to retain the information, you know, for very long.

I mean, like for me, that's one of the most reliable places I can go to humble myself.

I love jiu-jitsu. I love the progressive humility that it drives home constantly. I love the impossibility of perfecting it. Although Gordon Ryan's probably come close, and Marcello's probably come close to perfecting it.

Let me ask you actually, since you mentioned Gordon Ryan,

(James laughs)

so apparently some close with Gordon, and I'm sure you know, in Austin, just this jiu-jitsu scene, this incredible.

It's jiu-jitsu mecca, yeah.

He is the mecca.

I'm actually seeing John Danaher this evening.

So he's, I mean, yeah, this is like-

[James] Yeah, this is amazing.

A truly special place. But anyway, apparently long ago, you mentioned Jersey,

(James laughs)

there's a bit of a conflict between you and Gordon, and you mentioned to me offline that you love him and like just how much respect you have for him as an athlete and so on. But can you explain why is this be?

Yeah, I'm actually glad I have the, it's funny that you bring it up, and of all the, you know, we're talking about all these heavy topics, and this is probably the one that I find most, the most actually emotional. But Gordon's a very, I think a very young man still, he's like probably in his 20s or early 30s. And it's hard to imagine that 'cause he is accomplished so much as an athlete and as a business person. But there was a time, you know, not that long ago, I think it was eight or nine years ago, where he was just a young guy on his way up. He's only, I think a couple years older than my oldest son. And I, through a series of circumstances, jiu-jitsu wasn't, it's really exploded in the last 10 years, but there were not as many people sponsoring quote unquote super fights. There really weren't like jiu-jitsu super fights being sponsored Jersey and New York particular. And I got involved in sponsoring some jiu-jitsu super fights. And I also got involved in sponsoring some jiu-jitsu athletes. And Gordon was a young part of the Danaher Death Squad. I was friends with Eddie Cummings. I'm still friends with Eddie. I was friends with John, I'm still friends with John, but I didn't really know Gordon. I actually don't know that I've still ever met. I don't think I've ever met Gordon. I've been in the same room as him. But there was a fight that, I had sponsored some other fights with this particular promoter, and they asked me to sponsor one. And it didn't involve anyone from Marcelo's, but it involved Gordon. He was one of the people. And I liked John very much, and I liked everybody in the Danaher Death Squad. I like watching them compete. And I thought, you know, I think John's just brilliant. I mean, everyone at Marcelo's has such respect for John and for everyone. And the stuff they were doing, like when they were the early days of that Danaher Death Squad, like the Eddie Cummings, like his leg locks. He just blew the whole game up. It just was a whole nother thing, you know, it was like insane what they did, such innovation. And Gordon at the time was, he was online, and I'm much older than that. I'm in my early 50s, and that's not, I guess chronologically that much older, but generationally I think it's quite a bit different. And Gordon was smack-talking with a guy who I, about a guy who I was sponsor of, who I knew, and who I knew was a very good athlete and had been through difficult things in his life. And Gordon just said some like nasty things about him. It falls into the category of totally appropriate smack-talking, looking at it now and looking at what Gordon became, which is he's someone who talks trash. It's like part of his brand is to talk trash. And I see now that that's like a Muhammad Ali thing, but at the time I just didn't see it as what it was. And although it doesn't excuse it, my mother was dying. I was not at my best. I was having a hard time. And Gordon had spoken ill of this person, and I got upset, and I reached out to John and to Tom DeBlass, and I said to them, "Hey, like, could you tell this guy to knock it off? Don't talk about this person who I sponsor if I'm sponsoring his fight. I don't even know this Gordon Ryan kid, and I'm sponsoring his fight, and he should say thank you. Don't talk bad about a person I financially sponsor, like that's not cool." And I think on Facebook, he like wrote some comments, and then I wrote some comments back, and I was incredibly obnoxious. And very soon after, I felt really gross, 'cause I was an adult, and I was talking to a young person this way, who's on their way up, who's like a little older than one of my kids. And I just said these obnoxious things to him. And I felt really like, that's gross, you know. But I'd never really thought much about it again. I watched his star rise, and I was very, I mean, who's not impressed by Gordon Ryan? And everyone at our academy was always very like thrilled to see him rise. And I've stayed friends with John, and every time Gordon would have a big victory, I would always text John and be like, because Gordon's victories are John's victories too. They have such a great bond. All the people in his orbit like are all people that I respect and like, and I just would say, "Hey, listen, congratulations, and please pass all my congratulations to Gordon." We don't know each other. I don't have his number, I have no way to contact him to apologize to him. But, you know, if Gordon hears this, I am profoundly sorry. I don't say that 'cause I'm trying to get in your good graces. I don't know that we'll ever meet each other, but that was an unbelievably wrong, stupid thing to say to a young person.

Well, thank you for saying that. This warms my heart in general.

So you talk to a divorce lawyer, and it warms your heart. Look at that.

Well, speaking of which, you're a romantic, actually. You've seen love, you've seen love break down completely. What role does love play in the human condition?

I mean, it's kind of everything, right? Like it's love is, romantic love, wars are fought for romantic love. Empires fall because of romantic love. Like it takes down kings. It takes down, you know, we're all just struggling for it. We're all just chasing it. Like we're all chasing the dragon. It's like the rush we all are. So it's huge. It's huge. I mean, sex and love, which I like to believe are in some way connected, and love and romance, which again, I like to believe are in some way connected. I think it's huge. Look, I've always thought most of what men do, including me, we do to get laid. Like on some level. You wanna be successful. Why? So you can have money. Why? So you can have nice things so that you can attract attractive members of the opposite sex. Like a lot of things come down to that. And even for like men, like red-pilled men, who are like, "Yeah, I don't care about women." Well, you talk about 'em an awful lot. Like for someone that's not interested in women, you sure are like in the orbit of women who you're telling how much you don't care about women, which kind of feels like you're doing that to attract a certain kind of woman, which I get, you know, like more power to you. A person who worships an idol and a person who destroys an idol are both idolers.

[Lex] Yes.

If all you're talking about is how you don't need women, you're talking about women an awful lot. So it's just such a splinter in people's mind. Relationships, breakups, and like, it's such a great equalizer. I mean, you're spending some time in the rarefied air now of like big celebrity people. And I remember when I started out as a lawyer, just doing like the regular, like the cop and the teacher with a 401k, and they didn't have any assets. I remember thinking like, "Well, someday if I represent celebrities or wealthy CEOs, like they'll be different. They'll be like smarter. They'll be like different." It's just the same-

[Lex] It's the same.

Weird petty shit, the same infidelity, the same-

The same kind of insecurities, the same kind of jealousy, the same kind of fights.

[James] Yeah.

It all.

It's all the same.

(Lex laughs)

But it is, it's like it, and it's all this same insecurity, sadness. It's the same like desire to be validated, like mommy issues, daddy issues, like intimacy issues, you know, and it's all the same stuff. And just because you're really good at other things. Like I've represented professional athletes who are phenomenal, world-class doctors, business people, and they suck at relationships. No better than like anybody else. There's no connection between the skills that made you a good entrepreneur and the skills that made you a good spouse or partner. I'm sure there's some overlap, like patience is good, and thinking strategically is probably good. I'm just humbled by how we're called to it still, like it's so, and even when we lose, and even when like our greatest pains were caused by our desire to love and be loved in a romantic sense, we just keep putting the money on the table and playing. We won't just quit. We just keep going.

[Lex] And the whole mess of it is worth it.

I mean, I guess, I guess so. It's calling us. I don't know if it's worth it or not. That's a value judgment, right? We don't stop. I don't know a lot of people that, that they played the hand they lost and they went, "Well, no more of that game for me. I'm not a good poker player. I'm not playing poker anymore." I know people who've done that. I know people that are like, "Listen, I don't drink. Like, you know, I'm allergic. I break out in handcuffs and hospital bills. I'm not drinking anymore." But I don't know people that are like, "Man, that relationship, I screwed that up. Or I got screwed on that one, I'm not doing that anymore." You can say that. Everybody says that. "I'm through with love, you know, I'm done." They're not. They keep going. They'll go up again.

Never gonna fall in love again. And then a few weeks later.

Yeah, I got job security, man. I got job security. People are not gonna stop walking down that aisle. They are not gonna stop having kids with people that they probably should have thought through whether they would have kids with that person or not.

But I'm glad they are. I'm glad they're taking that leap. I'm glad they've taken that risk. It's this whole beautiful mess that we're all a part of. It's like taking that risk.

[James] Yeah.

Taking that leap of vulnerability is what this whole thing is about.

Yeah, and what a danger if we didn't, you know.

[Lex] Yeah.

You hear about people like Alexander Hamilton, or you hear about, you know, people who like, they were born of circumstances that like these two people should never have had a kid, and then they did. And that kid changes the world. And moves the dial forward. And what a like, what great mistake. What a great, you can't ever say it's a mistake. Like what an amazing thing that happened. And I think that that's one of the things I like about divorce as a practice and as almost looking at it like a spiritual practice. I think you just don't know what is a blessing, right, in the world. You just don't know. My father, I've spoken about this before publicly, and he does frequently. My father's an alcoholic. My father's been in recovery now for seven years, I think, yeah. But he was a bad alcoholic. Vietnam veteran, my whole life, and only got sober, you know, when I was in my 40s. And a lot of the personality characteristics I have are consistent with those of adult children of alcoholics, desire for control and control issues, a lot of those things. And I love my life. I'm having a great time. If I died tomorrow, man, I did more, learned more, earned more, loved more than I ever dreamed. And so I'm so glad my dad was an alcoholic. And if you said to me, "How do you raise kids?" I wouldn't say like, "Well, you definitely wanna be an alcoholic, 'cause like your kid's gonna get a lot of really good discipline lessons from that experience." No, like I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't want that for, but it's born, like all these wonderful things were born of this awful situation. So I think divorce is the same thing. We make these mistakes, right? But they're not really, like often have to say to my clients when they're like, "Oh, I wish I'd never married this person." I'm like, "You love your kids, right? Your kids are half that person. They would not be the organism they are without that person's DNA. So you can't regret being with that person if you love your kids. Like if you love your kids, those kids don't exist without that person." And I don't know how we refocus on that. I don't know, maybe we give, anyone going through a divorce, I've actually had a theory, which I've not said out loud, but I'll say it to you 'cause it's just us talking. I think if we could figure out a way to take a divorcing couple that is interested in potentially mediating and put them in a setting where we could give them both psilocybin, like a good dose, like two and a half, three grams, and have them do individual sessions with controlled setting with a guide, right? And have them sort of do that inner work, and then have them do some kind of a session together after they've had that experience, that psychedelic experience. I actually think you could do transformative divorce work because I have found myself, and certainly the many people that I've talked to who've had psilocybin experiences in particular, but any psychedelic experience, many of the empathogens, right? Or even like MDMA, you know, like MDMA, which is an empathogen. If we brought that space and the divorce and conflict resolution space together, that sort of psychopharmacological intervention on empathy, one's empathy receptors or one's connectivity, I think that could be radically transforming. It would be logistically an absolute nightmare. It would never get done from a legal standpoint. But man, like I think sometimes like that if, because I think the more that you can bring people to the awareness of connection that comes from many people's psychedelic experiences, I think they could then extrapolate that into their understanding of the conflict and disconnect they're having with their partner.

So really lean into the, like use this brink of divorce as a kind of catalyst.

[James] Yeah.

For doing a lot of soul searching, a lot of growth together.

Well, that was what appealed to me about it. I mean, before I started doing it. Is it was this idea that this is an opportunity for radical reinvention.

[Lex] Yeah.

It was an opportunity for people to say, "Okay, now what?" "I didn't expect that, now what?" And it was to be part of the architecture of that. I didn't look at it like I'm helping demolish the building. It was like, I'm tearing down the building so we can build the new one, which I hope is filled with joy and abundance and peace and love and real love, real satisfaction. My ex-wife is married for over a decade now to a phenomenal guy who is perfect for her. And he is nothing like me, by the way. If you met him and you've met both of us, you'd go, "Well, no one could love both of these guys." He's like, if you like this flavor, you wouldn't like this flavor.

[Lex] Yeah.

Like, I'm impatient, fast-talking, skip to the end, we gotta land this plane, come on. And he's like, he's a therapist, he's chill, he's certainly patient, and they're perfect together. And I can say that as someone who loves her and loved her, and knows her or knew her, and I think if we can, you know, if we can radically view honestly, like without jealousy, without the sense of like, look at it and just go, "Yeah, yeah, okay. Like, this is the love this person needed." That doesn't mean my love sucks. Just means it wasn't the right one for this person. You know, like there's someone in, there's a lid for every pot. Like she found her lid. I want her to find her lid. That's good.

And there's billions of pots out there, and we just need to match 'em with the proper lid.

Yeah, and not hit each other over the head with 'em all day long.

Yeah, man, this is such a romantic few hours we've got to spend together, and there's even a candle burning over there.

Is there? Oh, that's lovely.

All right, brother, thanks so much, James.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with James Sexton. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Rumi. "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.