The Divorce Lawyer's Guide to a Happy Marriage with James Sexton

A healthy relationship with money is going to lead to a divorce that's a little healthier. And a dysfunctional relationship with money is going to lead to one that's a lot of chaos.

The majority of marriages end in divorce.

The worst time to learn how to fight is when you're in a fight.

How you will get the government involved in that relationship is the least interesting part of this conversation.

That's a great question. I don't think I have. I don't think I have. I wonder what's going on. You know, we always avoid... I think I admire and avoid those who've gotten over the fence, you know, because it's like a person who's in jail and there's someone now on the other side of the fence going, 'It's lovely out here,' and I'm looking at them going, 'Huh, you know, like they might... they're probably right.' So it might be that I avoid former lawyers for that reason. Or it may be that often people won't admit that they're former lawyers. You know, they don't want to acknowledge that it's true. You know, they tell people that they were like, you know, something less shameful like a prostitute, you know, or, you know, a murderer, you know. But yeah, no, it's... yeah, this could be uncharted terrain for me.

Recovered. I would say recovering.

Because alcoholics always say you're never recovered. You're always recovering. Because I always tell people I'm a recovering Catholic, you know, because I went to Catholic school my whole life and I said I never really... I never think I'll be completely over it, but I'm recovering and I'll stay in recovery. So, you're a recovering attorney, but I... you know, we spoke very briefly earlier today, which I was trying to resist because I knew the minute we started talking, things would be coming out of our mouths that would be interesting to talk about. But one of the things I said is that how does it not inform? Like I'm sure that your training as an attorney informs the way you look at the world and the way that you process problem-solving and identify issues and whatever profession a person might choose from then on, I think you can't change that way of looking at things.

Yeah, I think it was fundamental to it. I mean, I wanted to become a mental health professional, a psychiatrist or a psychologist because I found, you know, sort of human interaction so fascinating and the way we struggle with ourself and getting to know ourself and becoming ourself, becoming an authentic version of ourself. And I always sort of felt if there was a purpose to life, it was to figure out who you are, you know, and to ideally find connection to another person and help them figure out who they authentically are. And I genuinely don't think I can learn everything I need to know about myself from myself. I think that I need someone else. I need someone who can see my blind spots. I need someone who can help me see myself clearly. And so I wanted to be part of that ecosystem. I wanted to be part of, you know, people figuring themselves out. And in the process of doing that, even helping me figure out who I am, you know, and then I realized that good therapists probably listen more than they talk.

And that wasn't my strong suit. So I thought, well, what's the next thing? And I ended up going to graduate school. I thought I'd be a professor. I thought I would teach. But then, you know, the extemporaneous speaking, debate, because even professors like you get up, you talk about things, but you're kind of repeating the same things because you're teaching the wisdom of others and your own analysis of that wisdom perhaps, but your own synergy of it with your own independent thought. That then you're just reiterating the same things to some degree over and over. And I thought I would lose interest in that pretty quickly. So then the law became very appealing. And I'm blessed to say, I mean, I joke about lawyers getting over the fence, but I've been a divorce lawyer for 25 years and I still get very excited to get to work. Like I love it. I still really love it. I know we're not necessarily known for our numbers ability, but I would love to get some numbers with you.

Yeah, I really should run that calculation. I mean, I have the records that I could run it. Because I'm asked it sometimes. I mean, it has to be in the thousands now because I always have at least... And now my career is more selective. Like when it started, I really represented anyone. I mean, whoever would hire me. I was not one of those attorneys who was born into a family of lawyers and, you know, like my colleague Laura Wasser in LA who represents, you know, a lot of celebrities and things like that. Her father was an incredibly successful divorce lawyer who represented celebrities and she became a lawyer by virtue of her connection to her father. She started having these clients and then became, you know, is a phenomenal attorney by any metric. One might argue even better than her father. No insult to her father. She's just a phenomenal attorney. So, she certainly wasn't handed anything that she did not deserve. But she had access to something, like she didn't start out representing cops and teachers, you know, she started out representing and working on these kinds of cases. And there are other examples of that in New York and other jurisdictions. A lot of my colleagues, you know, started out... I started out with nothing. I started out representing assigned people in the family court system where you're paid $25 an hour by the state. So that was how I started and I built that into, you know, the practice that I've built it into. So those early years I probably had 40 or 50 clients at a time because you had to make it up in volume somehow. Now I only have at any given time maybe 10 or 15 clients. I'm very selective about what cases I work on. The number of people that would like to work with me versus the number of people I am willing to work with is much smaller. So I probably have 20 or 30 inquiries per week of people who'd like to work with me. I maybe do three or four consultations per week. I maybe take two new cases a month.

So it's a very... like most people that are interested in working with me I refer out to someone else and I don't work with. I only work on cases now that I think I would be particularly good for, where I would be useful for the case. It's less about what is economically, because if my client is worth $10 billion or my client's worth $100 million or my client's worth $500,000, I'm $850 an hour. So every case I'm working on, I'm getting paid exactly the same amount of money, which is $850 an hour for the number of hours that are in a day that I could work. So I don't really worry anymore about, you know, like is it a case where I will be useful, you know, and if the answer is yes then I take the case. So I would say at this point the number of cases I'm handling at any given time is the lowest it's ever been. But there were times in my career where I had eight or nine associates and, you know, a whole army of lawyers and we would handle, you know, a much larger number of cases. And I didn't enjoy that model as much because I'm very hands-on at my best. I'm kind of a control freak in that way. I'm sure you've never met a lawyer who's a control freak before. I know it's very strange. It's a very odd thing. I'll explain it to you at some point. I'll explain it to you at some point. No, but yeah, I would say in the thousands now, probably.

Yeah. No, that's a great question. I really ideally like to speak to people when they're in the contemplative stage of something. So, I would prefer to speak to someone who's thinking about getting married. I'd prefer to speak to someone who is married and starting to see some issues in the marriage and thinking about the possibility of divorce. I think the worst time to learn how to fight is when you're in a fight. And the worst time to learn what your rights and obligations potentially are is when they're about to come into direct conflict, you know. So, I personally believe if you wanted to improve marriage outcomes and the way our divorce system works, creating like barriers to entry in marriage rather than barriers to exit. There are a lot of people that say like, 'Oh, we should make it harder to divorce because then people would work harder at saving their marriage.' I disagree. I actually think that we should make getting married like you have to have some basic understanding of legally what's happening in this relationship before you're allowed to marry because it's like you're signing a contract that you have no idea what the terms are. And so when you say to me, for example, like someone's, you know, had an ugly divorce, they're about to get married, they don't have a prenup or they're not planning on having a prenup, I always stop people right there and say, 'Well, no, they have a prenup. They have a prenup. It's written by the government.'

And it can be changed by the government without their permission. And it can be changed by the government without their permission. And then once it's changed, they can't say, 'Oh, well, no, I don't accept those terms.' It's too late. They already can change those terms without your permission and you're still in that contract. So to me, the most sensible conversation someone can have is not should we have a prenup. It's who should write our prenup: the government, present and future, or the two of us, two people who've decided that we like each other more than the 8 billion other options in the world. Like I personally believe that if we have a relationship, we should write the rules for that relationship. And even just having the conversation about what those rules should be will tell us a lot about each other, useful information in an intimate relationship. So...

Well, I mean, yes. I think if you were marrying someone who had a significantly higher net worth than you and you wanted to preserve and you feel that what they would be willing to give you at the beginning of a relationship in contemplation of the demise of the relationship is lower than what the law would provide for you in the event your marriage ends, then I think you would have a disincentive to have a prenup. So if you were... I don't like to use the term gold digger, but like if you were someone who was saying, 'Okay, the primary incentive in this marriage for me is economic security and my rights in the event of divorce would be better than what this person would agree to give me in a prenup,' then I think there's a tremendous disincentive. If you are the asset, if what we call the moneyed spouse, no, I can't think of any circumstance where it would be disadvantageous to have a prenuptial agreement unless the terms that your soon-to-be spouse would insist upon to feel secure are greater than what their entitlements would likely be in court, and you're willing to agree to those things. Like because I have had... I did a prenup for a guy who's a Goldman Sachs guy in his 30s, young man, very successful though, in his 30s already worth 20 or $30 million, really on his way up in the world and in the company. And he was marrying a, you know, very beautiful woman who I don't... I think she was like a yoga teacher or something. She made no money. But she was lovely and loving and they had a just a lovely... and he was actually quite handsome young man, like, and very successful, you know. So he had a lot of prospects and they seemed to have a really lovely relationship. There was a polarity between them. She was very spiritual and grounded and, you know, very beautiful and he was very driven and intense and I think she softened him a bit, which was nice. And we were in this negotiation of this prenuptial agreement, which is a very different negotiation than when I'm doing divorce negotiations because one of them is like a post-mortem on a dead body and the other one is, you know, these are two people that are about to like get in the same car and drive home, you know, together. And you find yourself going, you don't really want to make it adversarial, but there are some adverse interests at play. And he, to my surprise, just said, 'Well, yeah, okay, if we...' because we were getting kind of caught up in, 'Well, if we're married this many years, then this is how much percentage she would get of alimony.' And he finally just said, 'Yeah, just like give her a million bucks. Like, if we split up, she gets a million bucks.' And I said, 'Well, if you split up in like six months, she gets a million bucks.' He's like, 'Yeah.' I said, 'Do you realize she wouldn't have accrued a million dollars in rights if you split up in six months?' And he's like, 'Yeah, but if we split up, like I have bigger problems than that. Like, you know, she can just... it's fine. She can have it.' And I thought, 'Okay, like that makes sense to me.' You know, I think when you represent enough high-net-worth individuals in the divorce context, you come to realize that some of them, like the money is symbolic of something. It's not, you know, because there's really only two amounts of money: enough and not enough. That's the only two amounts of money.

And I have clients who are worth a few million dollars and it's enough. They're happy, they're content, they have what they need. So I think a healthy relationship with money is going to lead to a divorce that's a little healthier and a dysfunctional relationship with money is going to lead to one that's a lot of chaos. So, I think a prenuptial agreement conversation and contemplation, it's very tied in with what money means to you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

But I love that. I love the... I mean, look, you've heard me speak enough to know that like I love the simplicity of metaphors and, you know, I know we're a society that's prone to axioms, but I find that like... and that's a very... you know, I had a therapist once who said that most interactions you have with people, they're either on the get or in the have.

And that most of what we're trying to do is find a way to be in the have and not on the get. Because when you're in the have, you're mindful of what you have. You have some gratitude. You have some awareness, you know. And when you're on the get, you know, there's something outside of yourself that you feel you need in order to feel in the have. And I think it's exactly what you're saying, which is like make it stop or make it start, you know, like give me the thing or stop the thing, you know, and I really get that. Yeah.

Yes.

So I'll give you a very common example. A lot of men in particular will come into my office who are in a custody case and they're very frightened because they don't know like what is my time with my children going to be. And something I hear them say constantly is I want 50/50. I want 50/50. I want 50% of the time. I want my children 50% of the time. I know that's not what they actually want. Like no sane person analyzes their interactions with their children in numeric percentages. Like I was a father. I am a father. They're adults now. But like I never thought like I've only been with Billy 48% this week. I need another 2%. But get your baseball glove. We need to do 2%. Like that's an insane way of analyzing your time with your children. So what is that man saying? He's saying I don't want to be a second-class parent. I don't want to just be a guy who plays with the kids every other weekend and has dinner with them. I want to do the heavy lifting of parenting as well as the fun stuff. I want to play with them on the weekends and I also want to make them eat their broccoli and get to school on time and I want to help them with their homework. Maybe they had divorced parents and they had the kind of father who just showed up every other weekend and took them for like a play date and then dropped them off and they're saying, 'I don't want to be that. I want to be a real father. I want to be really involved.' So, a lot of my job is to hear, you know, when someone... another great example is people will say, um, I want to keep the house. I want to keep the house because I want to keep the kids in the house.

And usually what I can get to is that no, I want the kids to feel like things are still the same. And I find myself having to say to them like, 'Do you think it's going to feel the same? Like the chair where mom used to sit at night is going to be gone now and mom's not going to be sitting in it. Don't you think this house is going to be haunted a little bit? Don't you think like this is the house where your marriage died? Like, do you think that it's going to help your children to stay in that house? Or do you think this is the beginning of a new chapter and maybe in the beginning of a new chapter having a new space where you build that new home might be useful.' And so, and sometimes when you reframe it for people that way, that helps them get to what is it they're really looking for. And so I think both of our jobs, the thing that people say they want and what they really want is very different. So people say to me, I want money. I want alimony. I want child support. I want to stay in the marital home. I want full custody or sole custody. But what they're really saying is all the same things anyone says to any profession, mental health professional. Like they're saying, I want security. I don't want to feel so scared. I want to feel safe. I want to feel like my children have stability. And these are very normal human things to feel, you know. So I don't... I can solve some of the engineering problems, right? That's what lawyers are good at. I'm very good at taking a problem and breaking it into these smaller pieces and figuring out how to undo the Gordian knot, you know. And I'm very good strategically in terms of my work in court and my work in negotiation. But I think the most important piece of what I do is understanding what does my client really want? What does the other side really want? Because that becomes something that I can leverage and that becomes ways to create levers. And what I find strategically is that the most dangerous thing sometimes in divorce is letting anyone know what you actually want because the other side will weaponize it. Like I know I weaponize the other side's desire all the time. So I try to get to the bottom of what they want so that I can make them afraid that they're going to lose it and I can, you know, I try to use sort of fear and greed as the levers on the other side. So helping your client identify what they want but also keep their mouth shut about what it is that they want so that we can employ some strategy is a big piece.

I've had a few of those, but typically when people have gone through the kind of divorce where you require someone like me, they're going to have a prenup next time and it's going to be much simpler. But I did do... I've done a few where I represented them in their divorce and it was an economic divorce and then they remarried with a prenup, but then they had children with this person. So, a prenup can't really bind your rights or obligations related to custody or visitation. So, then we ended up in a custody battle. And so, I've had cases where we went through a financial litigation in one and now a custody litigation in the second one. And yeah, I mean, it happens. It doesn't happen as often. I will say that I know that the statistics for second marriages, the divorce rate is actually higher than first marriages. But my observation of my client base is that people who remarry and have a prenup I think are less prone to divorce. I actually think people who have prenups are less prone to divorce, but there would be no way to prove that because prenups aren't recorded anywhere. They're a contract. They're just in the... you know, I have celebrity clients who I've seen interviewed on TV saying, 'Oh, yes, we didn't have a prenup.' And yes, you did. Like, you did. It's in my safe. I have it. Like, but you know, like it's attorney-client privilege and no one can disclose it, but yes, you do have a prenup. People like to pretend they don't have prenups and then they have prenups. This is very big with actors. I don't know why it is. Actors all love to say, 'Oh, we didn't have a prenup. We didn't need that. We believe in the relationship.' And meanwhile, they have prenups.

You told me jurisdiction. Sounds like it.

Sounds right up my alley.

Those cases are international multi-jurisdiction cases. I've done a few of them and I've been co-counsel on a number of them because often you need to work with lawyers from all the different jurisdictions and yeah, they have... it's a particular brand of chaos. I mean, it really is. It is.

Sure, sure.

Yeah. And these can be... I'm sure because I have clients like this. These are C-suite executives, like these are partners in major law firms. So these are not risk-averse people. These are not people that are shy. These are people that can, 'Okay, we have to lay off 10,000 people next week because that's going to help our bottom line,' like, and so they can be ice cold when they have to be tactically. But there's something about the nature of that intimate relationship that having a difficult conversation like that and disappointing your romantic partner, it doesn't matter how good you are at these other aspects of life, you can have a very hard time with that. I mean, I've represented some people that are masters of their craft. They are world-class athletes. They are world-class actors. They are executives, founders, and they are absolutely childlike. And I don't say that pejoratively. Like they're childlike in the sense that like they're all emotion, right? And no logic when it comes to this connection with this romantic partner. And logic goes completely out the window because it's just about this depth of connection with this person and this sense that no, no, like this is different. Like I can feel that it's different. Like I feel this love, I feel this connection, I feel this... And you know, it's very hard to tell someone who has like a PhD and is the most, you know, a brilliant person, 'You're wrong.' Like, or if you're right, it's an unfalsifiable premise that you're saying. And why wouldn't you want to have this? Like I don't plan on getting in a car accident, but I like having airbags in my car. I like having seat belts in my car. Like every marriage ends, it ends in death or divorce. I hope yours ends in death. That sounds weird to say, but like I hope your marriage ends in death because it means it was successful, that you stayed together all the way through. But on the odd chance that it ends the way that the majority of marriages end, the majority of marriages end in divorce. So why wouldn't you hedge that bet a little with a prenuptial agreement? I understand why, because it's a difficult conversation to have with someone who you feel so deeply connected to.

Yeah.

You know, the best definition of addiction that I've ever heard was that addiction is any behavior that you engage in to stop yourself from feeling what you would have felt if you'd done nothing at all. And someone once said to me that the most useful question you can ask when entering into therapy is, 'What is it that I'm afraid to feel?' I can say without hesitation, work is my favorite narcotic. Like anytime I am in pain emotionally, work is the most comforting thing to me because I understand the rules of it. I'm excellent at it. I know exactly what's expected of me and exactly how to do it. So anytime things feel terrifying in my life or things feel out of control, because all those things you just listed, you know, divorce, you know, disease or diagnosis, death, they're all things that remind me I have no control, like that I can't fix this. My brains, my wit, I can't fix this. You know, like my oldest son has epilepsy and thank God it's been well controlled, but in his junior year of college, he just out of the blue had five grand mal seizures and was, you know, it was terrifying. And I remember thinking like, okay, my money can get him good care. It can get him, you know, with good doctors, but it can't fix this. Like nothing can fix this. There's no... my intellect can't fix this. My problem-solving can't fix this. My presence or absence can't fix this. Like...

There's, I don't have control over this. And so I think that having spent a lot of time with high-performing people, because that happens to be what my client base now ends up being, unless they were lucky enough to have generational wealth, which I do have a lot of, like trust fund people, you know, that like their greatest skill was that their grandparents died. Like that's why they're worth so much money is that someone, someone very successful died and then left it to them. They picked their grandparents carefully. [laughter] But most of my clients are high performers, and yeah, I think that a lot of them, they have lost that balance. They don't have a balance, like maybe they never had a balance, and so it's not even fair to say they lost the balance because many of them never had a balance. Many of them just, it was all gas, no brakes, and then they now they don't know how to stop that, like they don't know how to do, or they [snorts] have the kind of job, like the job I have, that you kind of can't do. You have to do it or not do it. You can't sort of do it, like it's, you're in or you're out. Those are your choices. It's not...

There's no way to be a part-time divorce litigator. Like no, you're either a divorce litigator, which is a harsh mistress, or you're not. And I happen to be the kind of person that like I can very easily imagine a life where I stop doing what I'm doing and I'm just writing and speaking and, you know, living my life. I find, you know, I find hobby, I have a lot of hobbies I find very rewarding, but I'm still very much enjoying what I do. So I keep doing it, and I'm going to keep doing it until I don't enjoy it anymore or until I find it stressful in a way that I think is harmful to me. But I think that burnout and the inability to find any balance, and perhaps even more, I think like most narcotics, you start to build the tolerance to it and you need more to feel the same effect.

Oh yes. And so I think that that's where burnout, I think in my unlearned opinion, is a function of I'm dosing myself higher and higher with the comfort of my work and my excellence at my craft. But there's only so much my body and my brain can take, and I have to start subtracting from the healthy habits like sleep and exercise and rest. I'm very blessed that early in my career I figured out that I have to devote a certain amount of time every day to the instrument of me.

Like that the instrument of me can't play the music it plays for my clients if I don't get up and tune it in the morning. So I make a point every day of getting up, exercising, moving my body in some way, whether it's going to the gym, whether it's doing cardio, whether it's doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, doing something. I start my day with a tremendous focus on myself and my body. And then I even make a point of giving myself a little sort of treat in that like I like to either do the sauna or steam room and stretch in there and stretch in a way that feels very indulgent, like it feels very relaxed and it sort of feels like a reward for having punished my body a little bit by lifting weights or doing cardio or doing jiu-jitsu. And then I take a shower and I always like have nice products, you know, that like smell good and invigorate me. And then we're talking about an hour, hour and a half of my morning. But by starting the day with that, I feel like it is tremendously helpful in keeping me reminded that like I have to be a priority and I'll never let a client take that from me. Like that's like sacred in the morning for, I don't let anybody take it. If I have to get up at 3:30 a.m. to make sure I have that time because I have to meet a client at 5:00 a.m. for some reason or I have a phone call because they're in Europe, you know, I make a point of okay, whatever I have to do to make sure I protect that little bit of time, I do it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I look at some of my colleagues and I'm, you know, I worry for them, right? I worry for them because they're great at what they do, but I can see that it's taking a tremendous toll on them physically and mentally. And, you know, I'm very blessed that I'm 53. I don't take any medications of any kind. I don't, you know, I watch my health. I live life like I enjoy good food. I enjoy good wine. And I enjoy, but I, you know, I believe all things in moderation, including moderation. I think sometimes it's great to just enjoy and like life's to be lived, but yeah, I think people have a very hard time keeping focus on, you know, I think you have to be a little self-interested. I think we're teaching people that being self-interested means you're being selfish. And I don't think selfish and self-interested are the same thing. I think you have to be a little self-interested because I want to bring my best self to my work, to my clients. They deserve it. I want to bring my best self to my romantic relationship, to my interactions with the people I love. I want to be my best self. I have to give a little bit of attention to myself. And I think that's a gendered thing a little bit. Like women, it's a lot more acceptable to say like self-care. Like, oh, I need some self-care. And men saying, well, I need some self-care. It's like, well, what are you, you know, like you need self-care? You want to go to the spa? [laughter] You know, but I do think like men, and I think there's been some changes in this in recent years. I think it's one of the good things that's come out of the whatever you want to call it, the manosphere or the red pill movement, is the idea that like no, like work on your body, exercise, take care of yourself physically, give some thought to what it is that you're putting into your body diet-wise and how well it works for you. And so I think that's a good thing that that's become something men are allowed to. But there's still a bit of stigma about men saying they need rest.

And it doesn't have to be, you know, bubble bath and chamomile tea for men. It can be hunting. It can be golfing. It can be driving a fast car. It can be high-T activities, right? I encourage my clients to do those things all the time. I'm not the kind of coach that's going to tell you like the only thing you can do is take a bubble bath, right? Well, and I have a client who's a bow hunter, and he, he's been a bow hunter for years, and I was talking to him a few weeks ago, and I said something about, oh, you know, like you have like venison, like it must be. And he's like, you know, I haven't really got a deer in like a number of years. And I'm like, you go hunting almost every weekend. And he said, I'll tell you a secret. He says, I go into the woods and I go into a tree stand and I sit and read a book and I just sort of hang out in the woods. And he's like, sometimes I see different animals and I just sort of watch them. He's like, I don't really take a shot unless I have the shot. He's like, and most of the time I don't really care if I have a shot. And I said to myself, you know, how many men golf because they like being outside for a bunch of hours and being with friends and having some drinks, you know, like I think it's kind of funny that we, you know, we like to put an activity around. Men in particular, we like put an activity around things, you know. I see it with my own sons. I used to, you know, I had a very sort of emotionless father, you know, who didn't ever talk about feelings. If I'd ever like sat down when I was a teenager and said like, how are you doing, dad? He would have looked at me like what? Like I don't know why, you know. So I tried to be the opposite, you know. I used when my sons were 12 and 13, I'd be like, so how are you doing? How's school? Is everything good? How are you feeling about, you know, they would fine, why, you know, they were very... And then I figured out sort of by accident that if I went outside and said, oh, do you want to play frisbee? You want to like throw the frisbee? You want to catch the ball? We'd start doing that, and then they would say like, yeah, I got in a fight with Chris at school today. And I'd be like, oh, yeah. What happened? You know, and he'd be like, well, I don't know. You know, he's been kind of a jerk lately. And they'd be like, oh, yeah. That's weird. Like, did something change? And now we're talking.

But if I'd sat him down and said, like, I think if I had daughters, if I'd sat down and said, what are you feeling right now? Are you doing okay? They would start talking because all the women in my life, all the women in my life, my nieces, women I've dated, like my whole life, if I sit down and go like, what's going on? What's on your mind now? Oh my god. They'll tell you [laughter] for days.

Yeah. Or if I say, you know, I'm working something through. Can I share it with you and maybe get your perspective? [gasps] Yes. Like that's the best date ever. Yeah. What's going on? Like, you know, men, it's like this is not encouraged in us. And yet I've been doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu for 15 years, and you know, this is as tough an activity as you can get. Like we're trying to break each other's limbs, and afterwards we're sitting next to each other, you know, just against the wall, exhausted, having tried to choke each other and break each other's arms, and people just start talking. Like, because now we went through battle here, you know, and now we like, all right, we've established our dominance. We've established that we're strong. And now it's like the, yeah, I'm having some stuff with my kid. Oh, yeah. What's going on? Like, yeah, you know, like I'm worried about... And we're, by the way, we're facing in the same direction. We're not looking at each other. We're facing the distance.

And there's something about, and I've had some of the most intimate discussions with male friends in that setting. And it usually is that like, okay, first we've proven we're tough, so we don't have to worry. Like people aren't going to be like, you know, we're talking about feelings. We must be gay. It's like, no, like we're just men. Like we're just, we're tough. We're doing our thing, but let's talk. Like it's okay. Like we don't have to look at each other. It doesn't have to be romantic. We're just looking off in the distance, but we're like, we're connecting. And I think that that is, that's something that, you know, men are not encouraged to do. And so high performers, look, we're just people at the end of the day. We're just men. We're just women. We're just, we have our biology. We have our structures. And they're not that different. Whether you're, you know, if you're a mortician, the body of a homeless person and the body of the president, it's the same meat. You know, it's the same cardiovascular system. It's the same. So it's the same emotional components. I think too...

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, very common. Yeah, it's very common. I think so. First of all, compulsivity leads to compulsivity, and you know, each profession has its own, like musicians, in my experience, professional musicians, touring professional musicians, like rock stars and things like that. The schedule of that lends itself to certain kinds of substance use disorder and certain kinds of potential sex addiction or love addiction, that kind of a thing. Why? Because you are away from your family or your romantic partner for extended periods of time. You are usually, you know, there are women around that would like to sleep with you, you know, because you're a musician on stage and, you know, you're sort of powerful and an artist and, you know, this person feels some connection to you. So it's quite easy because you're on the road. It's quite easy for you to be able to have sexual connections with people outside your marriage that are anonymous and that you're never going to get to know the person again. So that is an easy compulsivity for people to fall into. From a substance use disorder perspective, you are traveling most of the day. You arrive at a location. You're probably tired from the travel, but you have to perform, right? And you have to perform energetically. So cocaine, Adderall, you know, any kind of amphetamine. And again, I very often see it in non-illicit substances. So it's often Adderall or other stimulants that you can get quite easily, you know, by any physician. You just say, oh, yes, I have ADHD. And they're going to give you stimulants, and you can instead of taking 20 milligrams, you're taking 100 milligrams, like which is the equivalent of you're basically doing meth, basically. Like, but you're basically giving yourself massive amounts of stimulants, performing on stage, the adrenaline rush that comes from that, and then really you're supposed to go to sleep, but you don't.

Like you have a massive amount of amphetamine still running through your system. You have the adrenaline dump that happens after you get off of stage. So what do you do? Alcohol and benzodiazepines.

Yeah. You all these. But now we've got all of these stimulants in our body, naturally produced, like exogenous and endogenous, you know, they're all kind of in and out. And then we start taking, and this is a cycle. So now we have this cycle of, okay, one pill makes me up, one pill and one substance drinking, and that drinking and the benzo brings me down. And now you can't fall asleep without it. So now you have the... So that's what happens in these careers, like, and it happens with CEOs where they're bouncing from one time zone to another. And again, you know, that's where a lot of stimulants come in because if you're jet-lagged and you're on the wrong calendar, well, if you take some, you're going to feel like you're connected to whatever calendar you're on, you know. And I think that, and alcohol, of course, is a huge piece of entertaining when people are executives. They very often have to go out to dinners and things, and there's a sense of, okay, well, we all have to drink because if you don't drink, you're something of an outlier. I think that's changed a little bit. It's become a little more normalized for people to not drink. There was a time, I would say even 20 years ago, where if you didn't drink alcohol, people assumed you were an alcoholic.

Which is strange, like because sometimes people just don't drink because they're athletic, and sometimes they don't drink. Like I used to competitively run marathons. So for a period of time I didn't drink alcohol because it just, even a small amount of it would affect my performance the next day. There are people that, you know, like now just, oh, yeah, I'm a high performer. I don't drink, and people leave it. They're okay with it. They just don't even notice. But I think there is still some social pressure to feel connected to, you know, to your peers, and if they're drinkers, you drink. You know, we're again, we're not, I'd like to think we're more evolved than we are, but we're not as organisms. You know, I think we still want the tribe and the pack to accept us. We want to do the things we need to do. So I think addiction, I think the person who is prone to finding their rewards outside of themselves, which is what many high performers are, you know, they're, if I get a number one record, I'll be, I'll feel good. Like if I get a best-selling novel, I'll feel better. You know, I consider myself very blessed that I've worked with so many high-performing people because it helped me personally not fall into that trap because I learned very early on that it's a horizon that just forever recedes. It just keeps moving. And so if a hundred million dollars doesn't make you feel safe, 200 won't. You know, if a great review of your book in the New York Times doesn't make you feel successful, having a number one bestseller is not going to make you feel successful. Like, and I'm human. Like, I feel those same things. Like, when my book came out, I remember thinking, oh my god, if like I would walk into a bookstore and see my book on the shelf, I will feel successful. And for a second I did.

But then it was like, but wouldn't it be great to like have it get reviewed in the Times and have them love it? Like then I'd feel successful. And then the Times reviewed it and they loved it. And for like a minute I felt really good, but then I was like, yeah, but what if it makes the bestseller list? You know, and at some point my brain went, yeah, no. Like just stop. Like just stop. Like it's, you're either in the have or on the get, you know? And like I think clients who are prone to, and are high performers who are prone to, we just need this and then we'll have it. Then we're good. Then we have the recipe. All right. I just need this also, and then if I have that, I'll have, then I'm going to... If they really stop and say like, okay, this is a horizon that keeps receding. I think that they're less prone to those things. But for so long as you're in that mindset, I think you're opening yourself up to other kinds of addictions, to other kinds of compulsivities. And again, these are all, I think, very basic biological urges. I mean, you know, I have a lot of clients who would say they have sex addiction. I think sex addiction is something people refer to having when they get caught in affairs. I don't know that it actually is like a, I'm not qualified to say, but it just seems to be the thing that everybody, well, I have sex addiction. That's why I slept with this person. It's like, no, you slept with this person because they're attractive and it's fun to sleep with attractive people. Like that's like, I'm not suggesting you should have engaged in that behavior, but it's not complicated. Like it's not that complicated. Yes, there's more underneath. Why didn't you not let yourself get into a place in your relationship where you felt so disconnected from your partner that you weren't getting what you needed from them sexually to the point where now you were willing to sacrifice the short-term pleasure against the potential of joy of a long-term relationship where you've been successfully monogamous? I kind of get why people didn't do all that math in their head. Like they look, I like chocolate cake. You know, if you put a piece of chocolate cake in front of me right now, I would go, oh, yeah. No, if I eat that now, my blood sugar is going to spike. I'm going to be a mess for the rest of the day. Like that's okay. But if it was the end of a really long day, you know, and I'm tired and I feel like I deserve something, you know, and you put a piece of chocolate cake, I'll be like, well, you have like one bite. I'll have one bite, and then it tastes pretty good. Well, now I already, I'm eating junk. I might as well just go the whole way, and then I'm going to eat the piece of cake. And the next morning I'll go, oh man, like I don't, that isn't what I wanted to do. I was kind of, you know, I don't feel as good now. But in that moment, I'm not thinking about how I'm going to feel the next day. It has nothing to do with how I'm going to feel the next day. I just want something right now.

I would say all of those things are about sex. Money is about sex as far as I'm concerned. And sex is about sex, but sex is also about power. So I can't separate them as easily. I think money is the least relevant. I think money is only, money is value, and that value is always relative. You know, we learned when COVID happened that suddenly like how much money you had, there were certain things you still couldn't, like restaurants were still closed. It didn't matter how much money you had. Like you still couldn't get on an airplane. It didn't matter how much money you had. Like maybe if you had private jet money, you could fly your private jet someplace. Why? To go where? To go someplace that was in lockdown, right? Like so suddenly the limits of wealth became very clear, which is why like everybody got into like making sourdough bread and like, you know, doing these very rustic things.

Because it was like, okay, like this is something I can still do, you know, and test myself with and push myself in. And so, and I even think sex is, I mean, aside from it being a very enjoyable pursuit, like sex is about connection, you know? It's about connection and it's about, there's pleasure in there, of course, but like it's, there's some unique thing about the combination of pleasure and power that sex represents. And so I would say that is our most important drive. But it manifests in all of these other weird things. Like I think money becomes a way to feel like we're of value, you know, and I think it's always a function too of what you... I mean, this is going to sound very therapisty of me, but like it's what you didn't have when you were like a kid.

You know, like I grew up without money. So I remember thinking like money came to represent all the things I didn't have. And so I thought if I had money, I'd have all those things. I'd have security, stability, comfort. I'd feel successful. And then I got money. And it's great. Don't get me wrong. Like I've been poor and I've been rich. So much better to be rich. So much better. But it doesn't solve those core problems. Like it offers an imaginary solution to real problems and a real solution to imaginary problems, but it's not a real solution. So I think if your wound when you were a kid was, my mom didn't love me or show me affection, and love and affection was something I had to earn by doing things right, and if I did it right I would get love, and if I did it wrong I wasn't worthy of love, I was worthy of derision and scorn, then yeah, you're going to have a really hard time as an adult in your intimate relationship because if your girlfriend or soon-to-be wife is upset when you want to have a rational conversation about a prenup, you're feeling that as like the world is ending, you know, but really all it is is a woman isn't particularly pleased with you in this moment, but you've, the seven-year-old you that's still in there is going, Mom's mad. Mom's mad. Like you must be doing it wrong. You must not be, you must be bad, you know? And I think we're just, that's what it's about. Like that's what it's about. And I know like people don't, I think we all think we're impervious to that or that we've evolved past it or something. But I actually don't think it's something you ever evolve out of. I think it's just something you can learn to, oh, that's what's happening in me right now. And that's a superpower.

Yeah. 15 and 20 clients.

I would say all of them would fit into one of those categories. Okay? There's either some sexual disconnection that leads to malcontent that leads to divorce, or there is some sexual disconnection that leads to infidelity that leads to divorce, or there is some infidelity that is in no way connected, like where they still have an active sexual relationship with their spouse but they also end up having an affair and that leads to divorce. So I think sex is always part of the equation. It's just how much is about sex and how much is not about sex. Sex is also, I think I've learned in my line of work, it's symbolic of different things for people, you know, and I think, you know, it's different with men and women. Obviously, I'm not, you know, giving away anything, you know, groundbreaking by saying that men and women, again, not all men, not all women, but many men and many women process sex differently. Like I know a lot of men that see sex like they see eating, like it's like it's just a biological urge that like I need to get, like I need to, like I genuinely believe if their spouse just slept with them or gave them a blowjob in the morning before they left, like they would just, their relationship would be much easier. It would just be easier. They would just have an easier day because it's just something that they needed to sort of, okay, I got, like me in the exercise in the morning. Okay, I exercise. Great. Got that out of the way and now I can go do the other things.

And a lot of men I know, and I have to tell you, I am this way. Immediately after sex I want to go do stuff. Like I don't like want to nap and snuggle. Like I want to like go out and do things. Like I feel, yeah, I feel like I'm in my power, you know? Like I feel great. And I've actually had to train myself, like because very few women I interact with are like that. And so I've had to train myself in relationship to like, no, no, no, like she wants you to like kind of be here for a minute and sort of like, okay, like be present and like it's not a chore to do that. It's okay, you know, it's a learned behavior. Like, whoa, wasn't that great? That was so great. You know what I'm going to do? Let's go downstairs and we'll do that. Like, and because I want to do things, I feel like I'm in my power, you know.

And I think that, you know, many of my partners in life, it's the opposite. Like they're like, oh, no. Let's just be in the warmth of each other, you know, and just sort of soft and quiet. And it's the opposite emotional experience to what I'm having, like in terms of an energetic experience. But that's okay. I mean, I think that that's, in an ideal permutation, you're going to like understand each other and like she'll understand that's the way that I am and I'll understand that that's the way that she is and we can make some accommodation for each other. And I think that that's, if we could talk about those things more comfortably as a society, I think we'd be better off. You know.

And I've had a really unavoidably honest seat to it. Like I have to see things that people would not admit in public.

Right. Yeah.

Yeah. I always say stereotypes are a real time saver.

So let's... Yeah. So this is something I can very, very clearly comment on as someone in the trenches watching who's getting divorced, and the permutation of hard-charging active worker and supportive other keeping the home front burning, taking care of kids, being a supportive presence, that is the more successful pairing in terms of least likely to end in divorce, more likely to end, more likely to continue in the kind of marriage worth continuing in. Right? So I don't consider divorce the ultimate failure. I think staying in an incredibly unhappy marriage is a different kind of failure.

So I don't think like when someone says like we stayed married for 50 years, we were miserable for 40 of them. I think you lived your life terribly then. Like I don't think unless you're very religious and believe you're going to burn in eternal hellfire if you divorce, I can't imagine why that would be a compromise you would make because those were 40 years where you could have found connection in some other aspect of life. So that's a permutation because I again, I think when you put two hard-charging people or two unambitious people in a relationship, the lack of polarity leads to just an endless series of either competitions that are very unhealthy in a relationship. You know, I've seen this with like actors marrying actors or actors marrying musicians, like high-profile celebrities marrying high-profile celebrities, athletes marrying, you know, actors, you know, because this is what happens. People in the rarified air meet other people in the rarified air. C-suite executives marrying C-suite executives, like that doesn't, it works if you're two people who are both in high-performing fields that are in no way competitive with each other. So like I've seen very successful athlete marrying actress, like David Beckham, Victoria Beckham, you know, like that's very successful. Why? Because they're both elite at what they do, but what they do is completely different. They're in no way competing with each other, you know, but they can understand certain aspects of each other's lives in very real ways, and that is useful. That is useful, you know, but even that, one of you steps out of the limelight a little bit to raise the kids and focus on other things. So even then there's still some sense of, you know, like who's the plus one and who's the star, you know, and that's still tricky. Like it's still tricky to do. So I've seen it fail a lot of times, too. But like actor married to actor, I've done a bunch of those divorces because one is, I just got this new series, and this one, my series got cancelled, and then there's this constant feeling of like, oh well, I don't want to just be known as blah blah blah's spouse. Like I was a star also. I want to be, you know, so that's a very tricky thing. I think, you know, I represent a lot of musicians and actors, and the happiest ones are married to what we call civilians. Like they're married to civilians. Like they're married to someone you would pass on the street, you never know who they were. Like they're a teacher or a social worker.

Right. Right. If you marry a civilian, if they can handle the chaos that is your life, [snorts] right, which not everyone can.

Like I even see that a little bit in my own life because I now will, I'm recognized quite often and I'll be out with my son even to dinner. I took my son out for his birthday recently and we were having dinner and just two people came up to the table and they were like, I'm so sorry, I just want to tell you I'm a fan. And I said, oh, that's lovely. And it's always a lovely thing. It's a love. Like these are not people coming up to me to say, I don't like you. Like they're always coming up to say, I like your work. Can I take a picture with you? You know, like and it's a lovely, lovely feeling. But you know, and thankfully my son is like, oh, he's kind of proud of it's my dad. Like someone's that interested in my father. But there does come a point where when it's been interrupted enough times, like it starts to be like that person you're with starts to go like, okay, like I want your attention. I'd like your undivided attention, and the ways that you can give them your undivided attention become smaller and smaller because if you want my undivided attention, we have to go somewhere where no one's going to see me. And I have, and I am a D-list celebrity at best. Like some of my clients, they cannot go in the normal entrance of any place or they will be mobbed by people and photographers, and they either have to stop for an hour and sign everything for everyone and take pictures or they have to go, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, and go, and then people go, look at him. He thinks he's so much better than him. He can't even stop for his fans for five minutes. So it's a terrible choice. So I think there are pairings that make sense. And a pairing that makes sense is a...

high-profile person and a supportive other who's not in any way threatened by that and learns to sort of roll along with it. But having two very high-profile people is usually very difficult to navigate.