Divorce Lawyer: “Give her a prenup on the 3rd date” - James Sexton

James Sexton is a New York-based divorce attorney and author, known for his expertise in family law and insights on marriage and divorce. What does it actually take to avoid divorce? In a world where most marriages don’t last, it’s easy to assume you’ll be the exception, until reality hits. So how do you prepare for a great marriage… and, if things don’t work out, make sure you’re equipped to handle a clean separation? Expect to learn what kind of marriages athletes and actors mostly have, the most difficult profession to navigate divorce with, the worst marriage advice to give someone, how prenups actually work, how to set your relationships up for success at the start, how to argue well as a couple, how to know when it's time to quit and much more… -- 0:00 Why Pro Athletes Make the Worst Divorce Clients 8:45 The Most Misunderstood Truths of Prenups 16:46 Do You Actually Need a Prenup? 25:43 Why Avoiding Hard Conversations Ruins Relationships 38:39 What Healthy Disagreement Looks Like 47:51 How to Set a Relationship Up for Success 53:55 Will Men Do Anything For Sex? 01:00:00 How to Help Your Partner Level Up 01:17:46 The Biggest Sign It’s Time to Leave a Relationship 01:31:08 How Children Shape Your Relationship Decisions 01:40:13 The Right (and Wrong) Way to Get Over Someone 01:51:56 Why Real Love Goes Deeper Than Appearances 01:56:31 Where to Find James - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  It's Valentine's Day.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  I mean, listen, this is a big day. People get all hopped up, make bad choices. It's technically, it's like the best holiday for my profession because-

• 0:08Chris Williamson?

  The biggest influx of future clients.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's just a level of confidence out there today. You know what I mean? Like, everybody out there is just like, hyper confident. There's a lot of proposals happen on Valentine's Day. And the romantic in me kind of is like, oh, this is lovely. And then the, you know, the professional in me is like, statistically, the likelihood you're gonna cross paths with me. It's pretty good.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  For the people that are listening, if you haven't got your beloved a Valentine's gift yet, and you're shitting yourself and you think, oh crap, I haven't done anything. Or if you just want to connect more deeply with your partner or work out if you should leave them, I've put together a list of 50 of the internet's most viral questions to connect more deeply with your partner. Some of them are evidence-based, some of them are stuff that I've come up with. And then 25 to work out whether or not it's time to leave. You can get that at chriswillx.com/valentines. That's chriswillx.com/valentines. We were just talking about famous people.

• 0:59Chris Williamson?

  What do you see in the marriages and divorces of professional athletes?

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Well, professional athletes are a very particular breed because professional athletes have had a monastic discipline, most of them, to a very specific task. And, and so they have, going for them, in the context of relationship, A, that they are used to putting all of their focus into one thing, right? How to catch and throw a football, how to shoot a three, whatever it might be. And so that, that becomes a useful skill in marriage because in marriage, like, that one-pointedness can also be very useful and it keeps you from being distracted by all the little, you know, shiny objects that happen. So that's helpful. It, it depends on the type of athlete. Because I will tell you, like, NFL players, they get their contracts early.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  They usually have a girlfriend who they were with when they were kind of on the come up. And then they get giant contracts very early on because they have such short careers. So you're talking about getting a couple, you know, a couple hundred million dollars when you're in your early twenties. You usually have just married the girl you were dating in high school, you know? And all of that money is now being acquired during the marriage. So it's all subject to, you know, division because you're one person in the eyes of the law on the day you get married. And most of these guys don't know that. Most of them aren't sophisticated enough that they would say, hey, you know, we should make sure I have a prenup. They don't always have the best people around them giving them advice when it comes to things like that. So- You know, I think professional athletes, depending on the longevity, like MLB players,

• 2:30Speaker 01

  NHL players, they have a longer career. So when I, you know,

• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  Dolphin.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, any of the sports that don't have that massive physical injury likelihood, like even MMA fighters are more like NFL players. I mean, except without the amount of money behind it. You really do see that this person is just, when that person leaves their sport, there's a, they're really kind of unmoored. They're lost, a lot of them. Because they, especially NFL players, it's such a short career and there's only so many slots for people to become a commentator and it's a very specific kind of field. So like if somebody was like a, you know, defensive lineman, like he may not be the most articulate fellow in the world because it wasn't required for his profession.

• 3:14Chris Williamson?

  Maybe a bit of CT.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to have been so like focused on one thing, your whole career, your whole life. I mean, these are people who started playing when they're five, six, seven years old and they made it a monastic discipline. And now, you know, they made a lot of money on it. When they're playing, very easy to be married because it's very structured. You know, preseason, you're here, postseason, you're here, during the season, you're traveling. They make lots of accommodations. All the leagues make lots of accommodations for family members so that people can travel with them. And they're busy. They're busy all the time. It's being an athlete is a very, it's like representing professional musicians, like a rock musician is a touring musician. They got a lot of free time. They got a lot of

• 3:56Speaker 01

  partying around them. But athletes, to perform at the level that most professional athletes have to perform, you kind of have to keep your shit together. So it's not as bad. What I will say is their divorce rate when they retire or get injured and have to leave and retire as a function of it, they have no idea to do it themselves.

• 4:14Chris Williamson?

  I saw national divorce statistics around about 50% for professional athletes. It's close to 70%. So you're nearly 50% higher than the general public and 50% of those divorces will come within one year of your retirement.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because, look, you said for better or for worse. You didn't say for lunch. You know, and this person went from being as busy as busy can be, meaning they are, from the minute they wake up until the minute they go to sleep, their day is accounted for, what they eat, the workouts they do, everything is tracked, every metric, like, everything is to nothing. Like, the silence is deafening when these people retire. And there's really no, you know, it's like when guys come back from war, the VA is like, okay, we gotta watch this guy, we gotta make sure we have support services for him, we gotta help with transitions back to employment, we gotta help make sure that the person's not dealing with post-traumatic stress in any way that could be dangerous to them or people around them. Athletes retire, there's very little support system put in place for them, and you assume, hey, guy's

• 5:13Speaker 01

  got, you know, $20 million, $50 million, he's gonna be just fine. It's actually like giving them a loaded gun, you know, like, they have too much money, too many people around them, and now they feel like the thing they devoted their entire young, thriving life to is gone. And if you think that, you know, coaching a high school basketball team after you've played in the NBA is gonna be satisfying, you're kidding yourself. What's that got to do with divorce? Well, I think the dissatisfaction that you feel in your own, look, I think most discord in relationships, romantic relationships, is a function of your relationship with yourself. And the fact that you are feeling restless, you are feeling unsatisfied, and it's incredibly

• 5:56Speaker 01

  easy to take that out on the people around you. I think we all know, you don't have to be a professional athlete to know that when you have a difficult day, your partner's right there, they're definitely doing something that could annoy you. It's probably something that when you were first dating, you thought was adorable. Like, they snort when they laugh, or they, you know, chew with their mouth open. And when you were first dating, you were like, oh my god, that's so cute, she does that. And now you're like, seriously? Are you gonna breathe through your nose like that all day? Like, because you're angry, you hate yourself at that moment, you hate your choices at that moment. So, I think that's what it's a function of, it's the proximity. On the other side of the fence, what is the most difficult profession to negotiate with? On the other side, who do you not want to see on the other side of the docket?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  I mean, it's it's who I see almost every day, which is I'm in New York City. So I'm finance, like everybody in finance. So hedge fund guys are a nightmare to have on the other side. They're also a nightmare to have as a client because they have no risk adversity. Like for these guys to be at the level that they're at, they like, give me a quant guy any day. Like quant guys, they'll do the math. They'll look at the risk versus reward. They'll figure out exactly how many hours you've taken to do something and how much it would be. And they'll tell you like with the exact numbers, like, okay, if the offer ends up here, then offer this. And they give you like a whole roadmap that you go, this is incredible. Like, yeah, but, you know, like hedge fund guys, you know, guys who were traders back in the day. Now that's sort of shifted a bit with technology.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Those guys have no risk adversity whatsoever. And they also, you know, they're risk tolerant, they're aggressive. I mean, I think if we did these guys' blood work, I think they'd have a lot of testosterone running through their blood because they have that intensity. And like, they're just not risk adverse and they're ready to like go to war. Why is not being risk averse bad to face? Well, it's not bad to face from a, you know, getting paid by the hour. Like they're going to go to trial, like they want to roll the dice and go to trial. So usually what is the thing that disabuses people of the desire to go all the way through litigation? Because every, every divorce gets resolved, it gets resolved by, you know, mediation, negotiation or litigation. And litigation is really what my specialty is, which is courtroom law.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Like you don't, most people thankfully don't need someone like me. Like, you know, most divorces are done with a scalpel. I'm a chainsaw. Like my job is to go in and to go at your spouse, you know? So I'm there to cross examine this person. I'm there to like really do the courtroom piece of things. So thankfully, the majority of divorces, you don't need someone like me. But when you do, it's because you have a adversary who is really coming at you. And the courtroom is an amazing place to sort of equalize that force. And it's sort of an embodiment of, you know, the world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door. Interesting. What do people not understand about how prenups work?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  I think the biggest thing people don't understand is that everyone has a prenup. Everyone, every person who's married has a prenup. It's either one that was written by the government and can be changed by the government at any time without your notice, and that once the government changes it, you can't opt out of this anymore. So it's a contract that one person can change and you can't do anything about. Or it's a contract written by the two people that claim to love each other more than the other eight billion options in the world. Because what is a prenup? A prenup's a contract. What is it a contract of? It's a contract of if this marriage ends, because every marriage ends, it either ends in death or divorce. So technically, like when someone gets married, really what you want to say is, I hope this ends in death. It's weird like that.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  But I really hope your marriage ends in death. Because every marriage ends, it ends in death or divorce. So if your marriage ends in something other than death, if you don't want to talk about divorce, great. If our marriage ends in something other than death, then what will be the rule set that governs how we divide our assets, what we owe each other? What will that be? So every marriage has that. It's either done by the government, or it's done by the two people. What do you mean when you say done by the government? Well, the government creates laws, like the Domestic Relations Law, the Family Court Act, like every state, every country has its own laws that govern the dissolution of a marriage. Just like they have laws that govern intestacy if someone dies without a will, just like

• 10:19Speaker 01

  they have laws that govern criminal, like what is criminal conduct and what isn't. So, you know, we don't realize or think about the fact that when you marry someone, you are doing the most legally significant thing you will ever do other than dying. It is the most legally significant, it has wide range effects on your property ownership, your participation in the title system, your rights and obligations when it comes to spousal support or child support, your inheritance rights. I mean, it has massive repercussions. By the way, you don't even get a pamphlet when you get married. Nothing, not even a brochure that says, by the way, here's all of the things that just happened legally when you entered into this contract with us, meaning you and this person and the state. Because it's really the state.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Like you're getting, you're meeting someone and saying fundamentally, You're my favorite person. Out of eight billion people, you're my favorite person. You're the one I like the most. You're the one I want to be with and spend time with and hold hands with. And when the bad things are happening, we'll support each other. And when good things are there, we'll share it together. And you're my favorite person.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  And this is going so well. Let's get the government involved. Which to me- The threesome with the government. Which, if you've ever been to the DMV, like, I've never gone into the DMV and gone like, oh, yeah. Yeah, these people should be in charge of everything. This is fucking great. This should be the third party in the most- This is the best and brightest the world has to offer in this building. Like, so let's let them make the rules set. You mentioned states there.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  What's the weirdest state for divorce law?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  I mean, every state has its own wacky proclivities. And each of them have their own. And see, the things that would be weird to me are evidentiary rules. Like, there's rules in New York State that if a person is a Department of Social Services or Child Protective Services worker, that the concept of hearsay doesn't apply to them. So hearsay, meaning hearsay is defined as a statement made by someone other than the declarant while testifying at trial, and it's offered into evidence to prove the truth of the matter asserted. That's the Blacks Law Dictionary definition. But basically, what it means is you get on the stand and say what someone else said to you for the truth of it. So like, if we're trying to prove that this can is white,

• 12:35Speaker 01

  you get on the stand and say, well, I was talking to Brian, and he said that the can Jim was holding is white. Okay? So I can't now confront Brian. And so you're testifying to what someone else told you for the truth of the matter asserted. There's a reason why, we call it the right for confrontation. In every jurisdiction, you're allowed to confront. Because otherwise, trials would be like, I talked to this guy who talked to this girl who once said Brian cheated on his wife. And that's suddenly evidence to prove that Brian cheated on his wife. So that is a really sacred rule in the legal system. But in New York, we have this rule that says that if a Child Protective Services worker's done an investigation, anything they say, quoting people, is not-

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Not hearsay. So they can come in and say, well, I talked to the teacher who said that she heard from someone that, you know, the children were being beaten. And that's evidence as if that person got in and you can never cross examine it because it's third party. So every jurisdiction has some weird ass rule like that. There's plenty of states that have weird rules, like weird laws on the books. Like there's, there's, there's a plenty of jurisdictions in the United States where consensual sodomy remains a crime. So sodomy, meaning like oral sex, like sex, other than penetrative, penile vaginal sex is a crime. So.

• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  Including gay sex.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Including gay sex, but also heterosexual blowjobs are illegal in some jurisdictions.

• 13:59Chris Williamson?

  Hand jobs?

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Hand jobs would be consensual sodomy. Yes. Cause it would be.

• 14:04Chris Williamson?

  Hand jobs.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  A handjob. Well, first of all, hand jobs, I mean, hand jobs are outdated technology. It's like a Betamax. Like who even does?

• 14:10Chris Williamson?

  I disagree. I think, I think that bringing back hand jobs and fingering is a.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  Fingering, I think you could go, you could make a solid argument, but hand jobs? Really? Why do you need a third party for that? It feels like you could do that yourself. What am I? Being a grown up, just use your mouth.

• 14:25Chris Williamson?

  Calorie conservation. I didn't look, I think.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Wow. This is a hot debate. I did not expect we were going to have this one, but okay.

• 14:31Chris Williamson?

  I, I think, I think a great question that everybody should ask is when was the last time you just got a handjob or just got fingered? Like that is.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:38Chris Williamson?

  That I think tells you a lot about what's going on in your life. There is a cornucopia.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  I gotta make plans this weekend.

• 14:43Chris Williamson?

  There is a cornucopia of different things that you could do.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  There is, yeah.

• 14:46Chris Williamson?

  And look at how much you're missing.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  You know what? There's a lot of things that like, I loved them when I was younger and I haven't had them in a while.

• 14:53Chris Williamson?

  Papa John's. How long's it been since you went to a Papa John's?

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Probably, probably same night I had a handjob.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the Papa John's handjob combo. When you got 20 bucks in your pocket, that's about as good as it gets. That's wow. You know what? I'm going to get, I'm going to get a Papa John's and a handjob. That is well done.

• 15:10Chris Williamson?

  It is Valentine's Day. Think about how many people this evening are thinking, darling, we did, yeah, we did have this lovely steakhouse booked and you had the lingerie. I'm really thinking about a reluctant luck away handjob and a slice of pizza.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  I mean, you know what? But that's a throwback jam. You know what I mean? Like you put on Nelly Hotten here. I'm into it. So you like go back to the nineties, go back earlier than that. Consensual sodomy. All right. There it is. Yeah.

• 15:34Chris Williamson?

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• 16:19Chris Williamson?

  of all, Momentous offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Going back to prenups, is there a correlation between prenups and divorce likelihood?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  So, there's no way to track that because...

• 16:54Chris Williamson?

  Selective effect.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, well, and also because prenups aren't filed anywhere. So, prenup is a contract. It's usually you have a copy of it in your safe, your spouse has it in their safe, and the two lawyers have it in their safe. And people lie all the time about having prenups, particularly celebrities. Because I have seen celebrities being interviewed about their forthcoming wedding and asked explicitly, "Did you guys decide to do a prenup?" And they go, "No, absolutely not." And I'm like, "It's in my safe. They signed it at my conference room table. That's absolute bullshit." But attorney-client privilege protects it. It's only going to be filed somewhere if you divorce, and matrimonial files are sealed files, so the public can't just view them. So if you've ever seen any people's divorce papers, it's

• 17:38Speaker 01

  because somebody leaked them. So, prenups, they're a lot... What I will tell you is, I have a theory, and it's kind of unfalsifiable, but the theory is, because I've been a divorce lawyer for 25 years, I've probably done, I've done hundreds, if not thousands, now of prenups.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  And usually a prenup is a very friendly transaction because it's a negotiation, but it's not the kind of hardcore negotiation you have at the end of a marriage. It's much more these are two people who like each other. They have an abundance of optimism. Theoretically, you're catching them in a moment where they like each other a whole lot because they're about to get married. So at the end of the transaction, they still feel really good about you. And it's not an expensive thing. You don't burn a lot of money doing a prenup. Like, the most expensive prenup I think I've ever done was probably $10,000, $15,000, which the retainer to start a divorce is $25,000 to $50,000. So, you know, it's not a big profit thing for lawyers. And what I will say is, very few of the hundreds, if not thousands, of prenups I've done,

• 18:36Speaker 01

  I think I've only done three divorces for someone who I did a prenup for. So that would beg the question, are they going to a different lawyer for the prenup divorce, right? They did their prenup with me, but they're going to go to someone else for the divorce. If that was something people did, I would have people coming to me getting divorces who had prenups done by someone else.

• 19:00Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  That doesn't happen. So this leads me to believe my theory, which is that people who get prenups usually don't get divorced. I think, and I actually think that makes sense to me because the level of like, open, vulnerable, brave conversation you have to have to negotiate and discuss the terms of a prenup, if you have that and you have that ability to like, say to your partner something that might upset them in the short term, but is important in the long term for both of you to feel safe, I think that that's a very useful skill and probably bodes well for the relationship. I see a lot of people that get, that break up in the prenup process.

• 19:42Chris Williamson?

  That was what I wanted to ask. So let's say that someone wants a prenup with their partner.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:47Chris Williamson?

  When do they broach it? Pre-engagement, straight after the bachelorette party? How do you go about it?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Personally, I think third date. Like, I think, I'm not kidding. I think that there's plenty of ways to safely enter that discussion. Talk about celebrity that's getting married or wonder if they have a prenup. Oh, Travis and Taylor, I wonder if they're having a prenup. Start getting the temperature of this person as to, well, I would never have a prenup. Or saying, oh, I'm sure they do. It's a smart, I mean, they're both smart business people. Why wouldn't they have a prenup? Like, start to get the feeling of what this person's, you know? Or are they just dead silent on it? Which tells you something, that silence. So that's phase one. Phase two is, as soon as you start talking, listen, what should you be talking about? Do you want to have kids? Do you not want to have kids? How do you feel? Are you a dog person, a cat person, or I don't like pets person? Where do you want to live geographically? How important is your family to you?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  When your family, your parents became elderly, would you want them to move in with us? These are the big life questions people should be asking when they're considering whether or not they want to marry somebody. So I think a question like, hey, you know, how do you feel about things like a prenup? How do you feel about, you know, how the state handles when people end their marriages? I think that's a useful dialogue to have. To me, you can't feel loved if you don't feel safe. I mean, genuinely loved if you don't feel safe. And I say that because I've represented countless victims of intimate partner abuse and domestic violence. And I say it because I've represented people who, in their relationship, felt like intimacy was going to get weaponized against them, and in fact, did get weaponized against them.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  And, and to really love someone well, I think you have to be incredibly vulnerable. I think you have to give yourself, you have to show this person your soft spots. Like, there's no other way. I mean, it's part of what I think makes love so brave, because it's, it's only brave if you're scared and you do it anyway, you know? And I think that to love anything is insane, because to love anything is to basically open yourself to the inevitability of losing it, whether it's a pet or whether it's another human being. Like, you're, you're basically saying, I'm going to let you hurt me. I'm going to lose you someday. But it's going to be worth it because I'm going to have this time with you. I'm going to have this connection with you. But I think that part of feeling love is feeling safe. And I think a prenup is about how do we both feel safe?

• 22:04Speaker 01

  If I'm wealthy and you're not, if I'm the Goldman Sachs partner and you're the beautiful yoga teacher who I've fallen for, there's a tremendous polarity there that's probably really beautiful. She's probably going to help him calm down and breathe and live life a little bit. And he's going to help her be a little more focused and help her be a little more serious. And maybe he has the resources to help her. Like this is the tale as old as time. Like this is, you know, the nature of male and female couplings. So in that dynamic, I don't think there's anything wrong with him saying, hey, I want to feel like if we split up, you're not going to just literally come at me for every single thing you possibly can get.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  And she should be able to say, hey, if we split up, I, I want to feel like I'm not going to be so far behind in the race. Like, cause you know, you can't be running a marathon and at mile 10, take a half an hour break and then jump back in and ever catch up with the people ahead of you. Like you've lost and we call that in the law diminished lifetime earning capacity. So there's, you know, I'm making choices where I can keep being a yoga teacher and not worry about the fact that, okay, I've got to like make money so I can buy a place someday or whatever it might be. So I'm going to trust you. So again, does that mean you're entitled to half of every single thing I have? Most people, if they're being honest, would say, yeah, I don't know that I'm entitled to that, but I think I'm entitled to something.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Or even if I'm not entitled to it, wouldn't you want me to feel like safe and loved? You know, and that's the time to have that conversation. Like the worst time to learn how to fight is in a fight. Like the worst time to learn what happened legally when you got married and what your rights and obligations are in the event of a divorce is in a consultation in my office when you're getting divorced. But that's when most people learn it.

• 23:50Chris Williamson?

  What's the game plan for delivering a prenup proposal well?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  I think what I'm pushing, and if there's something that I can say at the end of my life I did, I hope it's that I normalized prenups. And I hope that the phrase that really entered the lexicon is every marriage has a prenup. I think that is the best entry point is to essentially say, all a prenup is, is a rule set. And the rule set should be clear to anyone before they enter anything, right? Like, I want to understand the rules. Before I get on the road, I want to know what's the speed limit? What side of the road do we drive on? You know, before there's anything I do, I like to have a little bit of information about what it is I'm about to do. I think the prenup conversation is a conversation about saying, hey, I trust you, you trust me.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  We have an abundance of goodwill towards each other. Let's, right now, while we're this crazy about each other, say, how can we make each other feel safe? Because here's the thing, I have been in love. And I think I have the self-awareness to say to a woman, you know, I want to protect you from people that hurt you, even if that someone's me. Like, there's a chance I'm gonna hurt you. There's a chance I'm gonna make you sad. There's a chance I'm gonna disappoint you. There's a chance this isn't gonna work out. Like, I wish I knew no astronomy when stars appear, but like, I've seen, I've lived too much life and seen too many people have their hearts broken, and I've had my heart

• 25:23Speaker 01

  broken, and I've broken someone's heart. So I know that's a possibility. But I love you enough to know that if I'm in a relationship with you, there's an assumption of risk. And that is, we might hurt each other. So if, if anyone would hurt you, I want to protect you, including me. So what do you need to feel safe in this relationship? That, to me, feels like the entry point.

• 25:43Chris Williamson?

  Are agreements for behaviors during the marriage becoming more common now?

• 25:50Speaker 01

  They are, but the question of enforceability is very challenging. I mean, look, I love it. I love when people, I think people should have more open conversations about the nature of the economy of marriage. Like, I get looked at funny when I refer to marriage as an economy, but-

• 26:05Chris Williamson?

  Sounds a bit sort of sterile and dis-

• 26:06Speaker 01

  But it doesn't have to. Like, an economy is really any exchange of value. You know, it's a system that has an exchange of value within it. And so I think part of the reason why we've lost the plot a little bit in modern relationships is that we've stopped looking at them as an economy. Because to dare say, well, you bring warmth and comfort and I bring resources is like, well, I could bring warmth and comfort, well, I could bring resources. Okay, you're right. We can all be the exact same generic cog in the capitalist machine. We can all decide we want to be girl bosses or boss bosses or whatever we want to call it, or we can all stay home and change diapers. This is something we can all do. Great. Is that what we want? Do we want a world where everyone's doing the same thing, even if they don't like? I love to cook.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  And if she loves to cook, great, maybe we'll take turns cooking. But if I love to cook and she doesn't love to cook, why should it be, well, why should I do 100% of it? Because you like to fucking cook, so just cook. Like, what is that about? It shouldn't have to be that we both have to do the exact same thing or else there's an inequality between us. I'm interested in equity in a relationship. Does either person feel they're being taken advantage of? Giving way too much consistently? Taking too little consistently? Because again, there's going to be times in any relationship where you're giving more or getting more, you know? You have family tragedies, you have things that happen, you have stress going on at work, you're going to be taking more in that moment.

• 27:30Chris Williamson?

  Is there a potential that if you litigate this in advance or put it down in black and white, that it reduces your ability to negotiate in the moment?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  I think so. Well, no, here's what I'll say. I think that it establishes-

• 27:44Chris Williamson?

  You understand what I mean.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  I do understand the question. I think that establishing a baseline is really important. And so establishing a baseline of, look, here's what we're feeling and thinking right now.

• 27:53Chris Williamson?

  Throw a dart at the double. That's kind of in the region of what we're aiming for.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Because here's, I think there are two fundamental and somewhat contradictory errors that people make when they're getting married or cohabitating for the first time. And they're going to sound like a contradiction, but I don't think they are. They think that this is gonna change the person. You know, he drinks too much now, but like, once we get married, he'll settle.

• 28:14Chris Williamson?

  You're in love with that potential.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Or, right. And, and, and that somehow marriage will change, or cohabitation will change things. You know, he's got a wandering eye now, but once we move in together, you know, the, you know, she runs around, she's a bit of a party girl, but you know what? Once we get married, she'll settle down. So thinking that marriage will change this person is a mistake. Similarly, thinking marriage will prevent this person from changing is also a mistake. That marriage is gonna build walls around this thing, and it's gonna stay this wonderful. Because like, think about it, there's you, there's me, and then there's we. Right? And you were you, and I was me, and then we met each other, and all of a sudden, we're like, man, we got this thing together. And then the we is like this warm, wonderful, lovely place, we've all been there. And it actually gets so big, it threatens to eat the you and the me completely, which is kind of a shame.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Because now, like, the thing we fell in love with, the you and the me, like, it's been subsumed entirely by this, this creature of we. So I think that's an unfortunate thing, we should probably be on the lookout to prevent happening. But, but if you think about, like, what brings people together is, once they're together, now they go, okay, well, this is so good. I have to, like, build something around it, and maybe if I wear this ring, you know, that'll be, and it's like, okay, look, maybe if you, like, wear, you know, like, this crystal, it'll keep you protected. Like, it's not real. Like, when my kids were little, I would take, rather than explain to them at 10 o'clock at night that monsters don't exist, I would go, okay, hold on, and I'd go get some powder from the thing. All right, okay, this is anti-monster powder, and now no monsters can enter your room.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  And they'd be like, oh, thank God, and they'd go to sleep. And so, but again, like, that's a very human thing. Like, okay, this is all, what do you think a wedding ring is but anti-monster powder? That's all it is.

• 29:57Chris Williamson?

  Story, myth.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a...

• 30:00Speaker 01

  So I think that we, we think that things, if we can bolster it the right way, that this thing will stay safe. And it won't, it'll change. But all I, all I'm suggesting is, if you talk about baselines, now you know, hey, we were having sex twice a day, six days a week.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Early days, that's what you do. I get it. Okay. You probably wouldn't get much done in life if that stayed the same 10 years in. And it might be exhausting. It sounds like a lot of cardio. So what you might say, handjob could be the answer. God, Papa John's and handjob. All right, I'm on it. Happy Valentine's Day. So I think when you think about it that way and what you start to see is, okay, we moved off the baseline. Now, the question is, that's not necessarily bad. It's just, we've noticed it. Did we notice this? Okay, good. We've noticed it. Great. Do we have to talk about it? Is there anything to talk about? No? Okay, great. Like, is it? Because maybe it's our hormones have shifted, or maybe, you know, we're just at a different place, or maybe we got a baby now. And but if one of us feels like, yeah, I kind of miss that,

• 31:05Speaker 01

  or I feel things are a little different, great. Now we're having a conversation because we've measured our baseline. Again, like, measure what matters. I think that that's a smart thing to do.

• 31:13Chris Williamson?

  We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first, if you have been feeling a bit sluggish, your testosterone levels might be the problem. They play a huge role in your energy, your focus and your performance. But most people have no idea where there's are or what to do if something's off, which is why I partnered with Function, because I wanted a smarter and more comprehensive way to actually understand what's happening inside of my body. Twice a year, they run lab tests that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that analyze the data and give you actionable advice to improve your health and lifespan. And seeing your testosterone levels and tons of other biomarkers charted over the course of a year with actionable insights to actually improve them gives you a clear path to making your life better. Getting a blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with Function, it's just $499.

• 31:58Chris Williamson?

  And right now, you can get $100 off, bringing it down to $399. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that $100 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. More and more, I'm seeing people have open and transparent conversations at the beginning of a relationship about stuff like this. How do you feel about dogs? What, how would you raise the children? Homespend them? Would you put them in K through 12?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 32:26Chris Williamson?

  How do you feel about prenups? How, what's your timeline for children? How many?

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Love that.

• 32:30Chris Williamson?

  And so forth. And I think-

• 32:32Speaker 01

  It's bad for my business model.

• 32:33Chris Williamson?

  It sounds unromantic in some regards. It sounds slightly transactional, slightly sterile, a little bit like in a-

• 32:43Speaker 01

  It's romantic about that. I have to say, when you say that- I I think there is something incredibly romantic.

• 32:50Chris Williamson?

  Me too, but that's because you're showing up and you're saying, hey, look, this is what my vision of the future looks like.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:58Chris Williamson?

  I'm wondering whether or not you're going to be the dance partner to bring this to life. And if you're not, that that's going to be a shame, but this is the thing that I really want. And maybe you're going to teach me some things about myself that I don't know, that I didn't know that I wanted.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:12Chris Williamson?

  But first off, and I really love what you said, which is, if you're the sort of people who can talk about these things in a transparent way, the fact that you can have the conversation is maybe as valuable as the outcome of the conversation itself.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 33:27Chris Williamson?

  You being able to have this sort of transparent, open, egoless, uh, kind of shameful, vulnerable conversation, hey, this is what my inner world looks like. I I I really like quiet mornings and and and if I've noticed that sometimes you kind of, you're like real up and about on a morning, you like to play music and sing and dance and stuff. I find that kind of difficult to deal with and, you know, it happened on the first night that we stayed over together. And I'm just, is that, is that on every night that or like we're just so excited for me? And I don't want to say, but maybe I'll be moving in that direction. But look, this is my set point. This is where we're starting off at. And there's this wonderful passage, I want to read you this idea from Visakhkanth Verasamy.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:05Chris Williamson?

  It's called The Divorce Mystery.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:08Chris Williamson?

  Why do so many people divorce someone they thought was their favorite person? It's not really a mystery. It's mostly because good times are a poor predictor of how you'll handle bad times. And handling bad times is a much more important contributor to the success of a marriage. But as a species, as a culture, we have not truly internalized this. It's the lows, not the highs, that make or break a relationship. A painful lesson over the last 20 years of relationships is that in the medium run, it's exciting to feel hyped about people who seem to relate strongly in specific ways. But in the long run, it's really how you handle misunderstandings, conflict, confusion, disagreements that go the distance.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:46Chris Williamson?

  What do you think of that?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  I think it's absolutely true. I mean, I think Wittgenstein said that to know a thing, know its limits. When you push it to its, beyond its tolerances, its nature emerges. I think that, I think we have to see, it's the same reason why I always thought those shows like The Bachelor were hilarious or Love Island or any of them. I think they're funny because, you know, yeah, we get along really well in paradise. We get along really well when someone has put together a beautiful date for us with incredible food and lovely time. Like, of course, yeah. How are we going to feel when we're home and one of us has a head cold and is in a bad mood? Like, how are we, how is that going to look? Because, look, you're going to see your partner without makeup and without Spanx most of the

• 35:27Speaker 01

  time. And when we're dating, we have Spanx on our personality. Like, everything is sort of a compressed, very, you know, stylized version of things. And so I think there's tremendous value in seeing how does the organism handle stress? What do, when we're both stressed, what does that look like? But I also think that can be very romantic. Because, again, for me, and I talked about this on Andrew's show, you know, I, I think, I don't think our greatest fear is that we won't find someone to love. I think our greatest fear is that we are not worthy of love. That we, we believe that we're not worthy of love. I think that,

• 36:12Speaker 01

  I know for me, I have in my life felt, if you, you say you love me, like, you say you're my friend. But if you saw the ugliness in me, if you could hear the thoughts in my head, the weakness in me, all the parts of myself, the shit I need to work on. Because I'm, I'm presenting to the world the best version of myself as often as I can. And I really believe, like, I'm not religious, but if there was a devil, I, I believe that the devil's principal function would be to convince us that we are so bestial that God couldn't possibly love us. Because I think our, our realist fear is that we're not worthy of love, because

• 36:56Speaker 01

  we're awful. Because we're in here, and we hear all the things we think and feel and all the weakness in us. And there is something about the thought of someone seeing all of that and saying, oh, no, I love you. Like, I love all of that.

• 37:15Chris Williamson?

  Or maybe I even love you more because of it.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Right. I love you all the more because you're so human. You're so real. And by the way, I have all of this in me too. Like, and so maybe we'll see it, we'll see each other's blind spots. Because I can't learn everything I need to know about myself from myself. So like, I, I need people to see my blind spots. So there's some things to me about in this increasingly performative social media culture that we're living in. We're encouraged all the time to present the best version of ourselves and sort of put our greatest hits out there while everyone else, you know, is living their gag reel. And then when we're loved, like, do you feel that love really? Do you feel it? Or do you just go, oh, yeah, they bought it. They bought the character that I'm selling to them.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  So there's something about conversations where you have to say, look, this is what I'm scared of. Like, this is what scares the shit out of me. Like, this is the part of me I don't understand. This is, I react this way when this happens. I don't know why. This turns me on. Am I gross for that? Like, why does that turn me on? Like, I don't, you know, like, all the, and to be able to say that and have the other person go, oh, I get that. Like, I got my stuff like that, too. Maybe not the exact same stuff, but I got my stuff like that, too. And to have that person see all of that and love you anyway, to me, that's love worth having. That's love worth signing on for.

• 38:39Chris Williamson?

  How should people argue well? If the lows, not the highs, determine the success of a relationship? What, what does good disagreement and argument look like?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  I think good disagreement, I argue for a living. So I would say that good disagreement is substantive. It gets to the merit of the position. It gets to the substance of what we're talking about. You know, it's not about the pasta. It's not about the dirty dish in the sink. It's about what the dirty dish in the sink represents, which is, you're not really paying attention to my feelings. You know that I like things to be orderly and you weren't willing to take a few minutes to do this thing. So I would like to get to the substance of the argument. I think the most important thing in romantic relationships and marriages is, do not ever weaponize intimacy. Like intimacy, not meaning sexual intimacy. Intimacy, by definition, is the ability to be completely yourself

• 39:33Speaker 01

  with another person. So it's what we were just talking about, the sense of like, showing this person all your soft targets, you know? And if you then use those to hurt the other person when they've upset you, or as leverage when you want them to do something, that's a villainous thing to do. Because A, you can't take that back. And B, that person has shown you that part of themselves. Like, every single couple, any person who's listening to this, who's in a couple, there is a sentence that you know you could say to your partner that would have them shriveled up in a ball crying.

• 40:13Chris Williamson?

  Give me some examples of this weaponizing intimacy.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  That you know that a person's terrified of the fact that they're becoming like their mother or their father, or that they're, I mean, the film A Marriage Story, there's actually a great scene, it was Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson. It should have been called A Divorce Story. But there's an amazing Academy Award level scene where they're having this awful fight. And they just do that. They just unload in like weaponized intimacy. He's like, you're exactly like your mother. You claim you hate her, but you bring everyone down in all the same ways. And they just run and they're saying things that you can never unsay, you know? But they're the things that like you only would know if this person opened themselves to you

• 41:01Speaker 01

  the way that you have to, to have a deep connection to someone. Or if you just had a ringside seat to their most vulnerable sad moments. And so that kind of, that kind of thing, I don't think you can ever really recover.

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  So don't do that.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Don't engage in weaponized intimacy. The other thing I would say is also, again, the worst time to learn how to fight is when you're in a fight. So just, I think when you're in a relationship or starting a relationship or getting serious enough in a relationship that now you're saying your boyfriend, girlfriend, or wherever it might be, I don't think there's anything wrong with saying, look, we're, we're definitely going to get in an argument someday. Like, we're going to get in a fight someday. It's probably going to be my fault. I'm going to say something dumb. I say dumb shit all the time, so I apologize in advance. But I'm going to say something, it's going to upset you. We're getting in an argument. How do you like to argue? Like, do you need a minute?

• 41:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Like, should I give you a minute so you can calm down?

• 41:50Chris Williamson?

  Want to hug?

• 41:50Speaker 01

  And then, right, can I, should I never say calm down? Should I change the subject and be silly and pick you up and hug you and spin you around? Should I say some, should we have a code word? That it's like, hey, let's take a break because this is going wrong. And then we'll meet back in 10 minutes. Or are you the like, we've got to get this worked out tonight because I can't go to bed angry and we have to figure this out because it's going to ruminate and get really bad. Like, whatever it is, let's just talk about what that should look like and let's have some way to step back from it.

• 42:19Chris Williamson?

  Can I give you a perspective from attachment theory and some evolutionary science that might be useful here? So there's a book called Your Brain Unloved by Stan Tatkin. It's in my second reading list. And he explains how in couples that are having arguments, you want to deal with the argument as quickly as possible and ideally within three minutes. So you're sat at a dinner table and your partner says something that's a bit dismissive or mocking and you feel like, oh, that made me feel a bit put out. I mean, they're my friends. These are my friends. And you just said something, you want as quickly as possible from that to say, honey, can we just have a quick, um, and you need to agree this in advance. You don't need to fix the argument.

• 43:04Chris Williamson?

  You don't need to sort it, but you need to deal with it to bring the temperature down. And the reason that he gives for this is that the way that the human attachment system creates memories, if you don't deal with it sufficiently quickly, you risk moving it from short-term memory into long-term memory. When it moves into long-term memory, he describes it as you begin to see your partner as a predator. And it's the same brain structures that are activated. And that is very perilous. It's, that's where that sort of stomach twisting, like you've got a wet rag that's being pulsed inside of your, inside of your chest. Oh, that's that, that's that.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  So very powerful, but the danger, I would say in response to that, though, there's a chapter in my book called Hit Send Now. And it describes a way of approaching this kind of a thing, but it would not do it that quickly because here's, the evolutionary biology basis of that, I think, is a strong one, but I would also push back and say that. Even if you in advance agree, when that happens, we're going to have a code word or something we can say that means we got to go out and talk about this for a minute. So it doesn't turn into long term memory.

• 44:11Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  The act of of verbal engagement on that is going to, because I argue for a living. I like to think a lot about how will people react to what is being said. And I think you're setting it up for a defensive reaction in your partner. Now, look, if in advance, you sufficiently have enough goodwill between the two of you that you agree, anything I say, we're going to really try not to hear it defensively.

• 44:32Chris Williamson?

  That's the gold standard.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Because we have this, right, but that's an aspirational goal. And it's hard when someone.

• 44:37Chris Williamson?

  In the moment, someone's just said, I didn't even mean it. What do you mean? I was just making a joke.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  And we've got friends in the other room, like, we can't spend a minute, you know, too long doing this. Hit send now. What I talk about is send an email. I know that sounds impersonal, but the thing about sending an email is I can be thoughtful in the way that I put it together. And and there will be an understanding between us that if the subject heading is hitting send now, that this is one of those emails that I just want to say this, you don't have to respond immediately. I want you to just. So again, in your partner reading it, they don't have to immediately engage like they would in a verbal discussion. So this is a feeling of, OK, I want you to digest this. I'm going to have written it, which means I'm going to have been careful about how I wrote it and rewrote it and paid attention to what I was saying. And now you're going to hear it and read it and digest it.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  And because I think the value of it is it prevents these little things from turning into much, much larger things.

• 45:29Chris Williamson?

  The principle is the same.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, the principle is the same. The the the speed is the problem because I I find that what happens is people get so wildly defensive that, you know, and I see this all the time with, well, you know, we're not having sex as much as we used to. OK, what is that going to go? Well, you're not home as much. Well, I'm not home because I'm working. Well, I'm working because you spend so damn much money. Well, I spend so much money because you're never around. And now it's like the truth's at the bottom of a bottomless pit and we're all just getting no closer.

• 45:57Chris Williamson?

  It's very hard to pick that needle off the record as well, once it begins spinning.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Well, and and there are ways to, look, I think a lot as a trial lawyer about how do I tell it's full contact storytelling when I do for a living. So when I think about what's the way to say this? Think of the difference if your partner says, why aren't we having sex as much as we used to? Or, man, it sucks. We're not having sex as much as we used to. And your partner saying, God, you know what I was thinking about yesterday? I drove past that restaurant. Remember, we went out to that restaurant when we were first dating? And then we went back to my apartment and we literally stayed in bed for a day and a half. That was so much. But what a God. I think about that sometimes even now, you know? I love when we're that physically close. Okay, now I have primed the pump. Like now I have reminded you of when we were deeply physically connected.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  I have brought you back to that place. I've praised you for, God, remember how good that was? Remember how, boy, I still love that about you. I love that feeling of when we're physically connected. Now, if I say, you know, I know I've been running around a lot lately and busy at work, but we gotta really make some time to like, just spend some time rolling around in bed together. Cause I still think you're just the hottest thing in the world. Okay, that is gonna be perceived completely differently than why aren't we having sex like we used to? You know, you haven't given me a blowjob in it. You haven't given me a handjob in ages.

• 47:16Chris Williamson?

  When was the last time we went to Papa John's?

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, for Papa John's for a handjob. This is, I'm gonna get sued by Papa John's for this one.

• 47:22Chris Williamson?

  What? I mean, that's so great. And to think as well, one of the best questions that you can ask any couple. How did you meet?

• 47:30Speaker 01

  How'd you meet?

• 47:30Chris Williamson?

  How'd you meet? Tell me how you met. Tell me what you, tell me what the first date was like.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  And you can even have a couple that like, they're at the dinner table with you guys. And you could tell they had a fight on the way over, like they got that weird tension. And if you do the, so how'd you guys meet? Within five minutes, there's a softness that hits both of them because it just puts them back to who they were, who they were to each other, when they were interested and interesting.

• 47:51Chris Williamson?

  What are the important things that you think people should do at the start of a relationship to set it up for success?

• 47:58Speaker 01

  I mean, my answer to almost everything is just talking. I just think, I think the more that you can talk about.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  I think when you can talk about how you're talking about things, I think that when you can like almost have a meta-commentary happening of like, this is so weird, isn't it? It's scary. Oh, isn't this interesting what we're doing right now? Like really being able to talk about it almost in a detached fashion and narrative fashion. I think there's a lot of value in that. I think there's a lot of value in in talking about like formative experiences that this person has had. And I think there are a lot of fun games that can be played around that. You know, there was an article some years ago, I forget who authored it, but it was about like 30 questions that can make two people fall in love.

• 48:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and it gets progressively more intense over time. Many of them are in the questions at chriswillems.com/valentine.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  There you go. So I would say that those kinds of entry points, there's a lot, there's a card game now called Tales, which is very interesting. Steve from Diary of a CEO has a great, you know, the Diary of a CEO questions. Like, there's a lot of really great like supplemental tools. That is a fun game. Like, that game of like, you're a mystery to me, I'm a mystery to you in some ways. We've just started this relationship. We know we like the look of each other. We know we like some things about each other. There's an energy and electricity between us. So let's start playing in the world of ideas a little bit. Let's start playing in progressively showing, because, look, what is, what is dating, but progressively showing more of yourself to

• 49:36Speaker 01

  another person? And what is, what have we lost in sort of hookup culture? We've lost that progressive revelation, that teasing, that sort of playing of like, I'm gonna show you a little, and then I'll show you a little more, and I'm gonna give you a little, and then I'll give you a little more. And there's this feeling, okay, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna earn a little, and then I'm gonna earn a little more, and I'll be rewarded for my efforts by a little bit of sweetness from you. And they'll, that's a fun dance that people have been doing for a really long time. And we gave it up in exchange for, I'm not sure what we got out of that.

• 50:08Chris Williamson?

  Roy Baumeister says, "Courtship is the period during which a woman works out if she can do better."

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:14Chris Williamson?

  Which I think is.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it also sparks something in men that I think we like, something.

• 50:22Chris Williamson?

  That drive, dude.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  The challenge and drive of.

• 50:25Chris Williamson?

  That drive to win, man.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I feel, and I feel like, you know, we've couched that now as like a toxic masculinity, but I don't know. I feel like.

• 50:33Chris Williamson?

  Go fuck yourself, dude, and I can tell you to go fuck yourself neurologically as well. The way that men bond is using something called vasopressin. You've heard about this. Vasopressin, okay, so here is a thing that I'm trying to achieve. This is why good boy points in the bedroom, when cleaning the kitchen, when picking the kids up, when dressing nicely, when telling him that he needs to shave on a weekend so he doesn't scratch your face. Good boy points will drive a man to do obscene things, especially from a beautiful, charming, beguiling woman that he's attached to.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Even, listen, I've trained Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for 20 years. You think I like having sweaty balls in my face? No, but it's, I get tapped 15 times, but I tap a guy once and it's enough for me to go, all right, I'm getting somewhere with this.

• 51:19Chris Williamson?

  But when, think about how much more it is when coach comes past, who's got three stripes on his belt and goes, Jim.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:25Chris Williamson?

  Good.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Nice, right? Oh, my God.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  I've, I've built a law firm and represented some of the wealthiest people in the world. When I got my brown belt, it was the most exciting. I was the proudest accomplishment of my life. The amount of hours and injuries that it took to get there, 15 years worth of training to get there. So to me, there was something about that, that fight, that prize, that hunt. So, you know, that, that old school idea, and by the way, women loved, loved when there was this courtship piece and there was all of that. And again, men loved being held a little bit to a standard and having a sense of, and by the way, it solves this body count issue that everyone's so caught up in because it turns into something that, no, no, there has to be some gatekeeping and there has to be some sense of earning something. So I, I think there's tremendous value in that.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  And I think that if we were early in relationships to start really like progressively showing the other more, both physically and emotionally, right? And having maybe even that path coming up at the same time. Like as I'm seeing more of you, like if I've seen you with your panties off and I don't know how many siblings you have, we're doing things out of order as far as I'm concerned.

• 52:40Chris Williamson?

  In other news, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I am frankly dependent on it. And it's how I've started my day every single morning. This is the best tasting hydration drink on the market. You might think, why do I need to be more hydrated? Because proper hydration is not just about drinking enough water. It's having sufficient electrolytes to allow your body to use those fluids. Each grabbing your stick pack is a science backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium. It's got no sugar, coloring, artificial ingredients or any other junk. This plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue while optimizing brain health, regulating your appetite and curbing cravings. This orange flavour in a cold glass of water is a sweet, salty, orangey nectar,

• 53:23Chris Williamson?

  and you will genuinely feel a difference when you take it versus when you don't, which is why I keep going on about it. Best of all, there's a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. Buy it, use it all, and if you don't like it for any reason, they give you your money back and you don't even have to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavours with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com/modernd wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernd wisdom. There's a fascinating series. So Roy Baumeister is now on Substack and is just so fascinating. He's writing a series on sexual novelty at the moment. And he's basically advocating that specifically for men, women need a different treatment.

• 54:08Chris Williamson?

  Maybe he'll give that at some point in future. Specifically for men, you need to titrate the dose of sexual novelty over as long of a duration as possible. And this is good for the men too. It's the same as not letting the kids have ice cream every night. This is from his last book, which came out about five years ago. "Men will do what women demand of them in order to get laid. Women set the standards for sex and men meet them. Although this may be considered an unflattering characterisation, we have found no evidence to contradict the basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex." And perhaps not a great deal more. One of us characterized this in previous work as if women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:46Chris Williamson?

  If, in order to obtain sex, men must become pillars of the community, or lie, or amass riches by fair means or foul, or be romantic or funny, then men will do precisely that. Similarly, if men need to be broken, flaky, non-committal and inconsistent, then they will meet these standards appropriately. Women's mate choices, modern romance culture and girl magazines are not at fault for emotionally unavailable behaviour in men, but they are not totally unrelated to it either.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  You know, I could not possibly agree with anything more. That approach would probably be very bad for my business model. And the truth is, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a therapist, I'm not a researcher. I have facilitated the demise of thousands of unhappy marriages. People lie to their therapists, people lie on surveys, people lie in studies, they don't lie to their divorce lawyer. They don't, because there's no reason to. You have attorney-client privilege attached and I have to really know everything to do a good job.

• 55:40Chris Williamson?

  On that, surely people want to put themselves across in the best light.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Well, they lie to themselves, and then they lie to me because they're lying to themselves. But because I see so much data on this person, I see their credit card receipts, their text messages, like I, I really go in there on people. Like, you have to. If someone's going through custody litigation or an ugly contested divorce, you get to see everything, really. And so, having now listened to thousands of people, men and women, the abuser and the abused, the substance use disorder and the person married to the person with substance disorder, I've seen, I've argued every side of every issue in a divorce. I've spent time with perpetrators of domestic violence and victims of domestic violence. I've spent time with every possible permutation. And I will tell you.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  If only there were good and bad people in the world, like, you know, if only we could just find the evil people and segregate. Through the heart of every man. Right, through the solsennitsen, through the heart of every man is the line of good and evil. And so I genuinely believe that if we were to say, look, there have to now be standards, there has to be a code. Like, I was raised with the idea that men have to have a code, like, that a man is supposed to have a code. And all of the men I aspired to be like, which were mostly from literature, they were always samurai, they were always la long Caribbean in Last of the Mohicans, you know, it was all this idea of like, the man who was the protector, the provider, he had a code, he had the things he would

• 57:10Speaker 01

  do and the things he would not do, and nothing was going to pull him from that. And so, I genuinely believe that there is a hunger right now in men for that, this sense of what am I supposed to do? Tell me the mission. Like, tell me what is expected of me and what is not. And that women were the gatekeepers when it came to sex. They were gatekeepers, you had to earn this. You had to earn it, not by, you know, give me the money and then I'll give it to you. It was really more about the characteristics that made you someone that had resources. That is, that you were disciplined, focused, that you were someone who was, who was serious about things. Listen, I'm a 53-year-old man, and if you read the

• 57:51Speaker 01

  comments on my videos, like, it's shocking to me how many women are like Gaga over me. And trust me, it's not looks, it's the fact that I look like a serious person. Like, I wear a suit. Like, you know how many 53-year-old men are running around in hoodies? Yep. Like, I, but you know, listen, I, it's fine, but the truth is, there is something about old-school masculinity that is very appealing to women, because this, this suit is a statement. I'm put together. I take this seriously. That's what this says. I take this seriously. It's why you would wear this to a job interview or a funeral and you wouldn't wear it to the beach, right? You wear it because you're saying, I'm here, I'm wearing this because I want you to know I take what I'm doing seriously.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  And if you put this on when you're getting together with a woman, you're saying, I take this seriously. I take the world seriously. I take my place in it seriously. So I think the combination of, again, because I don't think it's a mystery or controversial to say that every man wants a good girl who's only bad for him and every woman wants a bad boy who's only good for her, right? So the combination of a suit and sleeves of tattoos, it's not shocking that women would find that attractive. It's Clark Kent Superman rolled into the one thing. So I don't know why we're not saying to young men, again, like, this is what we should be focusing on, is the mission, becoming the best version of yourself, cleaning yourself up, putting yourself together, and saying to women, women,

• 59:20Speaker 01

  listen, you've always been the gatekeepers of sex. You always have been. So you have to start taking that role seriously and you have to start holding men to some kind of a standard. And I'm sure that I'll get pilloried by people in the red pill space in the manosphere are going to say, oh, men have to accommodate themselves to women. Okay, yes, yes, that's how it works when it comes to sexual gatekeeping. That's how it works. Unless you want to be the kind of person that, you know, sneaks in the back door and steals things and puts on a false face of what it is that you really want and you want to be disingenuous. You're right. You can make a lot of money stealing. You can make a lot of money in a grift. Should you be proud of that? I don't think so.

• 1:00:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I've had two conversations this week talking about the show and how it relates to men. I tended to not do press, but both of these, the conversations were really interesting. There is a-

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  You got Steve in so much trouble.

• 1:00:15Chris Williamson?

  Fucking hell, dude.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  I have to tell you, as someone who is friends with both of you and who has spent time with both of you.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Talk about two people that should not be the targets and being called misogynist. Like, what fucking planet are we on when the two of you are? Steve, who just got engaged, by the way.

• 1:00:37Chris Williamson?

  I'm beyond the pale. We've got a.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  It's insane.

• 1:00:40Chris Williamson?

  We've got a Mexican Hitler saluting Nazi as the current leader of the men's movement. But me and Stephen are beyond the third rail.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  You guys are the best.

• 1:00:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  You dared have like, you know, difficult conversations.

• 1:00:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm popular. So it just goes to show how much of a third rail this stuff is. It's weird because a lot of these topics to me are almost not what we're talking about today, but a lot of the other stuff, birthright decline and things. It's like me being a comedian doing a trans joke. It feels so hacky and I've been talking about this for six years. Is it not accepted that these are some of the contributing factors? And it's a big problem and nobody is laying it at the feet and blaming anyone. But here are some of the, you say that in a certain group and people almost roll their eyes at how trite it is. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Get onto the net. Like, what's the most interesting thing that's coming out? Whereas if you say, you realize how big the internet is, oh, I'm so far outside of the territory. I'm, I've fucking leapfrogged the Overton window. I'm in a whole new universe here, motherfuckers. It is crazy.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  But it's the same reason why you'll never sell a diet book that just says, you know, eat less processed food, have more lean protein and move your body. Because it's not that long of a book. It's like a pamphlet.

• 1:01:47Chris Williamson?

  Scott Galloway rang me a couple of weeks ago. He rings me on the Saturday morning and.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Scott's like, Scott's like got such a crush on you. He loves you.

• 1:01:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  He's always talking about.

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  I heard you say on Cody Sanchez that I've got sexy man stubbles. So everyone's got a.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  It's oops, I didn't know I was sexy. Yeah, you've grown it in a little bit more now.

• 1:02:03Chris Williamson?

  I just woke up.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Scott's rocking the oops, I didn't know I was sexy stubble.

• 1:02:06Chris Williamson?

  He's also just had some.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Scott and I both are like, you know, the like dudes in their 50s who wear Panerai watches and are trying to.

• 1:02:12Chris Williamson?

  I did cosmetic surgery recently. So he, he rings me and he goes, the voice is the exact same as that of someone who's grieving, who someone's just died and he's like, hey buddy, how's it going? And I was like, well, I was fine until you, have I, should that be? And he's like, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Something?

• 1:02:31Chris Williamson?

  Anyway, um.

• 1:02:34Chris Williamson?

  Conversations that I had this week and this fledgling term, this nascent little meotinous blob that's coming up, the gentle manosphere. The gentle manosphere is Richard Reeves, it's Arthur Brooks, it's yourself, it's me, it's Scott Galloway, it's Alex Hormozi, it's Chris Bumstead, it's Rob Henderson, Mac and Murphy, it's that.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  But you know, I want it to be that we're gentlemen and not gentle men.

• 1:02:57Chris Williamson?

  Yes, correct.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Because I tend to be of the like, you know, civilize the mind and make savage the body.

• 1:03:01Chris Williamson?

  Gentle manosphere.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, Scott, like, I loved, I loved Notes on Being a Man, like, I think it's a great book, but I, I, I said that if you removed the throat clearing and land acknowledgements from every chapter, it would have been like half the length.

• 1:03:15Chris Williamson?

  You've heard me talk about this, right? You've heard me talk about the land acknowledgement.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, when he talked about being in a fraternity, it was, I was in a fraternity, it was great, I lived with a bunch of men, we held each other accountable, da, da, da. But it was, fraternities have traditionally been a very misogynist thing and they've had racist undertones and they did this and this was da, da, da. And then he says the point.

• 1:03:35Chris Williamson?

  Richard Reeves sat in that seat and I said, the first, one of the first things I said to him, I'm like, I'm sick of having to do this social land acknowledgement throat clearing thing every single time that I want to try and make a point. And then the one fucking time that I don't do it, hundreds of times I've spoken about this topic online, hundreds of times, I just chose the wrong time to not go, well, we must remember that women are going through challenges and historically, they've been the ones that systemically have been struggling and we're not saying that we need to get them out of the boardroom and back into the bedroom and it's very important to remember the other side.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  How many times, right? Do you have to say the same thing?

• 1:04:06Chris Williamson?

  I want to have, I want to have a single fucking disclaimer on my website or to say it once on the show and be like, look, presuming that I understand all of these things, I'll do a full episode, I'll do a full episode on it, which is just all of the different disclaimers. And then once I've done that, it means that each, but because of clipping culture, you need to chronologically do it with, even sometimes you throw little ad breaks in the middle of it. Well, don't forget what I said before about that and now we're back to the show.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Did you ever watch the show Silicone Valley?

• 1:04:34Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a brilliant show, but there was a scene where there's a character named Ryan and there, there are two guys who really love Ryan, but they have to talk about something that he's getting wrong. He's like, look, Ryan is great, but da, da, da. And the other guy goes, no, no, listen, Ryan is great, but da, da, da. And he goes, okay, but you know, and look, Ryan is great, but he goes, look, he goes, can we just say Rigby? He goes, Ryan is great, but, great, okay, he goes, Rigby. We gotta work other than that. He goes, rugby. So we just have to agree on a common land acknowledgement.

• 1:05:03Chris Williamson?

  The acronym. We need a safe word.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Women, you know, women, I'm not suggesting women should be back in the.

• 1:05:08Chris Williamson?

  Women are wonderful. War.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  War.

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  But.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  But, right. And that's it. That's all you have to do.

• 1:05:13Chris Williamson?

  I've got a safe word. I've got an anti misogynist safe word to do it. But no, I look.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  So I've been, I've been, I can say this because it's, it's not secret knowledge. I, when I was on Danielle's show, I was talking to her about a concept and one of the concepts I was talking about is that the characteristics of the power, powerful are often attributed to be better than the characteristics of the powerless. And she said, oh, that's an interesting point. I said, well, actually, it's not me. That's Gloria Steinem from her essay, If Men Could Menstruate, which is a phenomenal essay. If you've never read it, it's worth reading. It's a really, really good essay, even particularly for men to read. Because it really talks about how when you, you know, when you attribute something, and it talks about how like, if men could menstruate, it would be, well, the men can be the only ones in the military because we're used to the sight of blood.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  And then men can only be, and it's all of how the characteristics of the power, and again, it was written in the 1960s when there were a lot of systemic, you know, things against women. And so I didn't realize Danielle is close friends with Gloria Steinem. And I ended up getting an invitation to Gloria Steinem's home. This is a woman, she's in her 90s. This was my mother's idol growing up. And I, I get to spend an afternoon talking about modern masculinity with Gloria Steinem.

• 1:06:24Chris Williamson?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  I am beyond excited about this. It's this week coming up. And I, I really do think that we have to start having more conversations. And again, my work is based on my observations of people who signed up for a job. And the job was, I'm gonna love you, you're gonna love me, and we're gonna try to make each other's lives better. Right? Like, I mean, the greatest goal of marriage, if there is a goal to marriage, should be, I think, that at the end of your spouse's life, that they would look at you and say, You helped me become the most authentic version of myself. And you're still my favorite person.

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Like, if there's a wedding toast that has value, that would be it. I hope that someday, when one of you passes, you will look at the other one and say, "You helped me become the most authentic version of who I am, and you're still my favorite person." How is this a conversation that is in any way controversial to want to have? How do we get better at this job? Like, they spent a lot of time in my life trying to teach me how to divide fractions. It's been fucking useless. I've never needed it once. But nobody really had these conversations when I was a young man. About, you know, how, how does it work? How do relationships work? How do you not paint yourself into corners you can't get out of? How do you have conversations?

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  Like, you can't win a fight with your spouse or your girlfriend.

• 1:07:57Chris Williamson?

  Everybody lose.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  You, you can't. If you won, you lost. You made the person feel small. And vice versa, by the way, women and men. And if you lost, you lost. So, so how do we interact with it? Because this is important to all of us.

• 1:08:10Chris Williamson?

  So this is the difference, I think. I was asked yesterday, what is the, what are the defining characteristics of the general manosphere? And I said, the first one is emotions. It's an understanding that they're important. It's not seeing suppression as strength, and it's integrating them into the relationship. The second one is striving, because there's no way that you can look around some of the canonical examples. Someone like Chris Bumstead, most dominant bodybuilder of his era, six-time world champion, cried on camera six weeks before he went on in his girlfriend's arms because he's worried about. The third one was a prioritization of relational patterns. So, as opposed to, and this is what you're touching on here, number one and number three, right? That it's the integration of emotions. It's this open transparentness.

• 1:08:55Chris Williamson?

  It's not seeing suppression as strength. And it's pushing on the relational part. But there would be a much more kind of dictatorial, top-down, you know, like, classically patriarchal approach to this, which is, well, head of household, I say, you do. There is no negotiation. This isn't a back and forth. And in some ways, the leader-follower dynamic is good and important and preferred by many women in that sort of a world, not necessarily all. But.

• 1:09:25Chris Williamson?

  But. That is a degree of integration, what you're talking about here, learning how to relate well.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Chris Williamson?

  How do we relate well? And how do I make my, help my partner become? And I've got this, uh, this line again from another fucking wonderful Substack. The type of person I'm assuming we're looking for here is number one. Someone you will find fascinating to talk to after you've talked for 20,000 hours. Number two, someone you feel comfortable talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life. Number three, the conversation is wildly generative for both of you in that it brings you out. It helps you become. I love that line. It helps you become.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Chris Williamson?

  That's what you were saying. You were more of me, more me. I want to be more me.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Well, that's it. You know, it's not, I don't want you to become what I want you to be. I want you to become the most authentic version of yourself.

• 1:10:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  And I mean, to me.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  As I age. I find that what, you know, what was said, you know, by John Lennon a million years ago, which is that. You know, there's nowhere you can be that isn't where you were meant to be. And that, you know, that becoming yourself is the hardest thing, like to become yourself. To really identify what that means and to find a way to become an authentic version of yourself fearlessly. And to embrace all of the parts of yourself.

• 1:10:44Chris Williamson?

  Messiness.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Like embrace the parts of yourself. Like I have some extraordinarily traditionally masculine traits. You know, I, I'm constantly challenging myself. I love to push myself. I love to push my physical tolerances. I competitively ran marathons. I trained Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I've tattooed my entire body. Like I'm embracing pain and challenges and I, I feel cleansed and excited when I'm in the presence of that. And when I've endured something, the, these are largely masculine traits. Again, throat clearing. Yes, of course, there are many women who also enjoy that. But again, we have to get to a place where we can just say, like, it's okay. That there are some things that are traditionally this and traditionally that.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  And what of that, by the way, precludes our ability to just embrace those other pieces of self and authen- Present it. And I have to say, anything that has too much consistency to it worries me. Anytime someone is just so consistent that you just look at it and go, oh, okay. So they're they're like, I can tell you what car they drive. I can tell you, you know, what hobbies they engage in, who they voted for, just by looking at even what they're wearing. Because again, my job is largely pattern recognition, like many peoples. Like, my job is to, in a courtroom, identify all of the important, everyone in that courtroom is important. But I have to figure out a way to manipulate the emotional state of every single person in that room. Like, that's my job, is to manipulate people's emotional state. That's what you do as a trial lawyer.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  I want the judge to feel good about my client and dislike the other side. I want the other side to feel scared and vulnerable. I want my client to feel safe. I want the court reporter and the court officer to like me and dislike my adversary. So that when we have a break in testimony and they go back in the back room with the judge, they go, I like Jim. He's a really good lawyer. Oh, wow, you know, yeah, that witness didn't seem trustworthy. So I'm want to fuck with everybody in that room. Again, with a noble goal, I want to accomplish the objective for my client. And by the way, like they're

• 1:12:38Chris Williamson?

  The other side's doing it too.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Well, that's why I always tell people, I'm like, look, my job is full contact storytelling. And by that, I mean, there's lots of good storytellers. But you try to tell a story while someone's trying to stop you from telling the story and tell a different story at the same time. And then tell, it's like being a stand up comic while someone over there is trying to be funnier than you and stop you and heckle you. Like, and you're trying to do your set while that's going on. That's my job, you know? And it's with audience of one that's only vaguely paying attention. And it was not the most ambitious or brilliant lawyer in the history of lawyering, or else they wouldn't have taken that kick.

• 1:13:12Chris Williamson?

  You've got to be careful which judges are listening. They might not be happy.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  You know, listen, I'd love to think that judges are out there listening to this, but.

• 1:13:19Chris Williamson?

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• 1:14:00Chris Williamson?

  Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use with Nutonic on Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com/ModernWisdom or lowercase. That's Shopify.com/ModernWisdom to upgrade your selling today. Total Departure. What does good storytelling consist of?

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  I think it starts with being able to have a really dynamic imagination and putting yourself in the head of the person whose story you're telling. If you're telling your own story, I think it's about telling a story that has the full range of human experience and emotion to it. So when I'm structuring testimony for a client, particularly for a custody case, when you kind of have to tell your life story and who you are as a person and a parent, I try to make sure that both the strengths and weaknesses of that person comes out. I do something that I jokingly call the eight mile approach, which is the end of the movie Eight Mile when Eminem wins the final rap.

• 1:15:09Chris Williamson?

  Tell me something you don't already know about.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Tell me something you don't know about me. Right. So it's really the equivalent of tell, you know, I look at opposing counsel and I'm like, tell this judge someone that something that they don't already now know about my client. Because if my client sends, you know, a text message saying, you know, go fuck yourself. I hate you. It's coming out and he can't wait to bring it out and he's going to bring it out in the worst spot. So I'm going to bring it out. I'm going to put my client on and say, read what's been marked for identification as plaintiff's exhibit 26. Do I have to? I'd like it if you did. Go, go F yourself. Does it say go F yourself? What does it say? Can I curse? Please. It says go fuck yourself. Who did you send that to? I sent it to my wife. Why would you send that to her?

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  I was just frustrated and angry. Do you think that helped your co-parenting relationship? No, probably not. Do you think that that improved the communication between the two of you? No, it definitely didn't. If you had an opportunity to do it again, would you do it differently? You know, I'd like to say I would, but the truth is, like, she had sent me 50 text messages where she cursed at me and said all these things. And I lost it. I lost my temper and I said it. I shouldn't have said it the way I did, but I did. I'm human. I wish I could say to you, I would never do it again. But you know what? I got pushed so much that I lashed out. I'm watching opposing counsel cross out pages of his cross-examination now. Because now my client is a sympathetic character because he's human.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  And so I think that anytime you tell a story and in that story, you're the hero, but also weak, but also making mistakes. And there's things you get wrong. Like, you really want to bring the whole hero's journey into the story. I think that, you know, there has to be the challenge. There has to be the failure. There has to be the prospect of you might not make it. And then that's where the redemption arc comes through. So I think the best storytelling is engaged in that way. I also think that how we connect with people and talk to people is huge. I mean, I think when, you know, when COVID happened and everything went remote and we were doing remote trials via video conference, it was just an absolute nightmare.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Because cross-examining someone via a virtual format is very, very difficult. There's something very like, almost predatory about, because you have to earn the right to beat up a witness. Like, if you just go in and are immediately hard from minute one and like, isn't it a fact that? Like, that's not effective cross-exam. Effective cross-examination is I get you to commit to a set of principles that you think help your case, and then I use those principles to snap your neck.

• 1:17:43Chris Williamson?

  I can see why you like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. How do people know when it's time to quit? How do people know when it's time to leave a relationship?

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  I mean, it's hard to say. It's like, how do you know when to leave a job?

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  You know, look, the humorous answer is, you know, winners never quit and quitters never win. But if you never win and you never quit, you're a fucking idiot. So I think when you have done what you could do and you are still in a place where I think the majority of the time you feel empty and unsatisfied and alone. I think there is a type of loneliness when you're with someone and you feel very lonely. That that is a very unique kind of hell.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  I had a friend who used to jokingly say that the way he knew he was in a relationship is when he was having sex and he found himself thinking, you know, one of these days I've got to get laid. So I think that sometimes when you are with someone and feeling alone, when you are having a sexual relationship with your partner and you feel yourself wanting to sleep with other people in a consistent way. But I also think that, and a lot of what I talk about in my book is the idea that sometimes that is a spiral that we didn't mean to create. And that sometimes we've been created with excellent intentions and that there is a way to reverse that spiral.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  So like my penchant for manipulating people's emotional state in a courtroom, I think that power can be used for good. And one of the examples that I give is what I refer to as sexual monotony, which is that I think a lot of people with excellent intentions screw up their own sex lives in a monogamous relationship. Because we meet.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  We start dating. Maybe we're not virgins. We've had other relationships and varying degrees. Okay, so what do we do? We throw all the different techniques we've learned along the way from other partners, from porn, from the internet, whatever. We just throw that at each other. And what do we figure out pretty quickly? Oh, she likes this. This she really likes. This not so good. It landed flat. Okay. And she figures out, oh, he likes this. This he loves. This didn't do anything for him. This he doesn't like at all. Okay. Now, what do you do then? Play the hits, man, right? You play the hit. Like, I didn't go see Bruce Springsteen to hear the acoustic ghost of Tom Joad. I want Born to Run. I want Thunder Road. Like, play the hits, right? We're on a tight schedule. Like, let's, let's play the hits. And with great intentions, you play the hits. She loves this.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  You love this. We do it. We do it in a certain order. What have we just done? We created a routine. And what starts to happen now? If we're not checking in and, and, and having this open communication, now if one of us does something different, it's like, oh, that was weird. What did we deviate from the routine? Is something going on? What's happening there? And it's unspoken very often. So now, we're in this routine. We're in this rut. We don't know how to get out of it. And then when we start to have conversation, well, why don't we do this anymore? And how come we haven't done that anymore? Now, everyone's defensive about it. So what I always talk about is like behavior modification or like behavior manipulation with good intentions. And, and one of the examples that I give is if, look, if you're tired, like in the bedroom, we're just doing the same things in the same order all the time.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  I, I don't think having a confrontational discussion with your partner is helpful in that. I have suggested to people, I think the best way to do it, and, and I find me a woman who wouldn't want to have this conversation. If you went to a girlfriend and said, "The dream I had about you last..." I can't even look you in the eye. "The dream I had about you last night." I, I don't even know where it came. Wait, what? What, what was it? Like, she's gonna wanna know. What, what was it? I can't even. I don't know what. I, I, it was like the dirtiest. What were we doing? And then you describe what it is you've been thinking about doing. And either she goes... Oh, well, that is that something you'd want to do? And then you go, I don't know, maybe like, I guess something in my subconscious. Like it was hot in the dream, maybe, you know, give it a shot, kind of a thing.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  Or if she goes, oh, I would never want to do that. You go, yeah, I know. I don't know if I eat dairy before I go to bed or something. I don't know where that came from with subconscious.

• 1:22:02Chris Williamson?

  But it's a bit of Steven Bartlett.

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. At least now you've got that. You've got that dialogue happening. And again, this is in with a tremendous desire to deepen this connection. I think we screw up our relationships, not because we don't care, not because we don't want to be good at the job. I think it's just a matter of, you know, well, why should I do this? Well, I could do the, well, you didn't do this for me. Why should I do this for you? You can reverse that flow just as easily by just starting to treat your partner with grace and giving them things that leaving each other. What woman would not want to receive a text message in the middle of the day? You know, a song just came up on my Spotify. I had it on shuffle and it was making me think of you. Or, you know what I just thought of?

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  I just, a woman just walked by and she was wearing that perfume you were wearing when we first did it. Who would? That's the theme. That's the equivalent of sending nudes.

• 1:22:54Chris Williamson?

  And then, and then PS, you're way hotter.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Perfect, perfect. Like, and what, and by the way, what a gift that is. And, and what man has ever received a nude or a suggestive photo from a girl?

• 1:23:07Chris Williamson?

  Out of the blue, dude, and out of the blue nude.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  Who you're dating?

• 1:23:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's, that's like triple nudes. That's, that's worth three times a normal nude. That's a gold star.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  That's three dozen roses you bought for her.

• 1:23:18Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:23:19Speaker 01

  That's what that is. And it's so, what does it cost? Nothing.

• 1:23:22Chris Williamson?

  We did a series on the show, 20, 30 episodes when I first started and it was life hacks. It was how to make a great toasted sandwich. This is my favorite meditation app, but a lot of them were behavioral and many of them have stuck with me. Sleep with your phone outside of your bedroom and try and go for a walk first thing in the morning. The best one is basically this, but for friendships. And it's text your friends when you think about them.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:41Chris Williamson?

  Because they pop into my head all my, all the time. My, my old business partner that I used to run nightclubs with for 15 years. Sometimes I think about when we both got food poisoning at his son's first birthday party and it'll just come. And then it'll go. But if I don't have the rule or the impetus, just text Darren. Text Darren and say, dude, just thinking about when we shit ourselves. I was in Manchester, you were in Newcastle. We were both locked in nightclub toilets. Do you remember we were trying to run our events, our respective events in different? It was on New Year's Eve and that thing happened and da, da, da.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:11Chris Williamson?

  Or you just send one, hey, man, thinking of you. Hope you're really well.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  You know what I'm actually loving? And I never, I never say this about tech. Apple Photos sends these memories reminders every once in a while to you. Like it just goes into your camera roll and it says like, here's a memory. And it just pops up. Now, sometimes it's upsetting because all of a sudden you're like sitting there and you got a photo of your dead friend. But a lot of times it's just some random photo. And I have to tell you, like, I get them. And half the time I text them to the person who's in the photo with me. And I go, this just popped up on my thing. Look at these fucking kids.

• 1:24:43Chris Williamson?

  So fuck.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  Who were we back then? And it starts the like, how you doing, man? I'm good. You? Yeah. How's the kids are good? Yeah. All right, man. Just want to tell you I love you. Love you too. What a like beautiful moment of connection, costs nothing in the middle of the day.

• 1:24:55Chris Williamson?

  It rules.

• 1:24:56Speaker 01

  But nobody, but here's the thing, man, you're never gonna. And this is, this is my like soapbox lately.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  You're never gonna hear a lot about this in mainstream media. And the reason why is because it's fucking free and you don't have to buy anything.

• 1:25:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so here's, here's a guess on that. There's no commercial incentive for it. Saying just text your friends, it'll improve your social network. Doesn't have you signing up to some new app or joining a run club or signing up for Equinox or whatever the fuck.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:25Chris Williamson?

  I think another part of it is the same reason, one of the fundamental same reasons that the pick apart this movement was so pushed back against by women beyond the fact that it was manipulating them to get them into bed. But that a reliable signal of your authenticity means that there are some things that are close to your sense of self. And there are other things that aren't close to your sense of self. Your capacity for jujitsu. When you first started 15 years ago, I didn't see as some window into who you truly are as a person. Therefore, if you started learning to become better at jujitsu, I didn't feel that you were contriving yourself or coercing me into believing that you're a certain way. The same thing goes with learning to play the piano or speak French or something like that.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:26:08Chris Williamson?

  The same thing is not so true with our abilities in the bedroom. Or with the primary language that we speak, or perhaps our accent. We got rid of our accent. What are you trying to hide there? Immediately, you can feel like, oh, he worked on, he read, he watched some instructional about the bedroom. And I think the reason is there is a degree of ick among the people that are not tapped in. The world's split into two groups, people who are tapped in and people aren't tapped in. The world of people who aren't tapped in, look at, we could call it conscious relating. I can't think of a better word. It will, it'll be a placeholder for now. Conscious relating. So I'm genuinely thinking deliberately about how I show up and how it affects you and how that recursive spiral is going to continue to go.

• 1:26:50Chris Williamson?

  And my goal is to spin this spiral up as much as possible and stop it from coming down as much as possible. That's what I want to do.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:57Chris Williamson?

  And I'm gonna learn about attachment theory and I'm gonna realize that, oh, wow. I maybe do get a little bit anxious if somebody doesn't text for a while. And I'm gonna tell you that thing. I'm gonna use the emotions and you're gonna learn it about me. And if you get it wrong, I'm gonna be gentle with you, but firm. I'm gonna hold my boundaries. I'm gonna say, hey, babe, you remember when I said about that thing? When you do that, it makes me feel this. And I'm sure that you didn't mean to, but I would love it if you. And you just continue to build on that and you're gonna cycle through partners, I think. And this has been my big thing for the last sort of two years or so, trying to get below the neck. I was emotionally decapitated and I'm trying to, trying to work out how to stop praying at the altar of fucking cerebral horsepower.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:37Chris Williamson?

  And you are going to cycle through partners and friends very quickly. Because it's a particularly, it's an acquired taste. This is not, unfortunately Papa John's. This is something slightly more niche. But I think that the alchemy that's available, the friendships that I've got now, the way that I relate to my friends is so much deeper. Even the friends that I had before who've grown with me and have been prepared to sort of come along for this ride or have been on parallel journeys on their own.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the depth of connection that comes with.

• 1:28:10Chris Williamson?

  Fucking rules, dude. Fucking rules.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  But see, this is something I think we, we have to as a society.

• 1:28:16Chris Williamson?

  Unspeakable misogynist.

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  But we have to, absolutely. We have to start normalizing that because I.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  You know, it astounded me like when, when my book, you know, how to stay in love. Right. Like, there's a title for a book, how to stay in love. Noble goal. You're in love. You want to stay in love. That's lovely. If you saw, you know, let's, let's, let's use Galloway as an example. He's a married guy. If you walk into Galloway's home and you see Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you see Power of Habit by Derring, you see, you would go, look at this guy. Look at Galloway, man. He's crushing it out there. He's a monster. And, you know, he's still trying to sharpen the sword. Love it. Love it. You see on his thing, how to stay in love, you'd be like, oh shit. Things alright at home with Scott? Not you, but most people are gonna look at that and say, because we're supposed to just be naturally good at this.

• 1:29:07Chris Williamson?

  I had this line about drinking. I went sober about 10 years ago and took a break from partying and then came back to it and took a break and came back to it. Alcohol is the only drug where if you don't do it, people assume you have a problem.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. See, I, I don't drink. And when I say, and it's not, I've never had a problem drinking. It's never been an issue. But anytime I tell someone, oh, I don't drink alcohol, they assume I'm an alcoholic. And, and I think it's absolutely fucking hilarious.

• 1:29:31Chris Williamson?

  Same thing's true for relationship advice.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:29:33Chris Williamson?

  Relationship advice, one of very few that if you take it, people assume that it's because of an issue.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  That it's because of an issue. And, and, and what's funny to me is, so this is something that's fundamentally important to us. It has broad reaching implications. Like, talk to a Warren Buffett, talk to these people. They'll tell you one of the single most important business decisions they ever made is who they married. You know, and having a, a good romantic partner that doesn't cause you massive amounts of stress and doesn't make terrible financial decisions is an incredible asset. You know, and having someone who helps you see your blind spots and helps you become the best version of yourself. Like, they facilitate, like, I think there is tremendous value in being good at relationships, even if relationships aren't the most important thing for you. If money's the most important thing for you, if your kids are the most important thing for you, if your physical state is the most important thing for you, having a good relationship.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Right. And, and by the way, if the relationship, if we learned nothing from The Smashing Machine, whether the film or the documentary, the original one, it was, this was an amazing person derailed by toxic relationships and addiction. So if you think about the fact that this is important to all of us. How is it that saying this is a teachable skill? This is something we could get better at. We could take a systematic approach to it. Like, there is a, there is a value in doing that. You know, my next book, which I'm, I'm working on currently, is really just about a systematic approach to being good at love. That's it. Be good at love. Like, we want to be good at it. We don't want to be bad at it.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  How can I be good at it?

• 1:31:05Chris Williamson?

  Pick a part of three for relating, which I quite like. The question of how do you know whether it's time to end it or not? I'm going to give you some samples from this list that I put out. Number one, if you woke up tomorrow and the relationship had ended with no conversation, fallout or drama, would you be disappointed or relieved?

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a big one. It's a big one.

• 1:31:26Chris Williamson?

  Do you spend more time in the relationship or questioning the relationship?

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  Another good one.

• 1:31:32Chris Williamson?

  What are the emotions you mostly feel in relation to your partner? What are the thoughts you have most frequently? And is this how you would be prepared to feel for the rest of your life? So not hoping that there's going to be change in future. Would you want your future imagined child to date someone like your partner?

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good one. See, and the reason that's a particularly good one, I will tell you, because having represented people for several decades in custody cases,

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  there's a lot we won't do for ourselves, but we'll do a lot for our children. And, and one of the most powerful tools I have, it works a lot in women, but it works in men too, is, is I've had women who have been victims of domestic violence and a partner abuse, coercive control and, and men. And I'll say to them, you know, look, you, you deserve to be in a different, that's, doesn't really blow up on their radar. When I say to them, you do know that your children are watching this dynamic and they will choose their partners potentially in accordance. So your daughter is watching how your husband is treating you. And this is how she will believe, because whoever discovered water, it wasn't a fish. And believe me, your daughter is going to believe that this is how men should treat her.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  You have never seen someone say, okay, yeah, I have to make this change. Or this is how your son is watching and thinking this is how men are supposed to treat women. There are things we will do for our children and the people we, and look, we know this. It doesn't even have to be a parent thing. Like, look, we're friends, you know? If there was someone talking to you out loud in my presence, the way that I talk to myself in the morning, I would step in between the two of you. And I would, I would be like, who the, who are you to talk to him that way? Like, you don't know what he's going through, what his life is. Who are you to judge him? Are you fucking perfect? But we talk to ourselves terribly, constantly, right?

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  So I genuinely believe that like the, the sense of, that is a fantastic metric, which is if your, if your best friend, if your daughter, if your son, if your brother, your sister, if they were in this relationship, what would you tell them?

• 1:33:42Chris Williamson?

  There's two other elements there. The first one I learned from Adam Lane Smith, which I thought was so interesting. He explained why women, uh, uh, breakups often occur shortly after a child is born. Uh, and I'm presuming this includes divorces as well.

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:00Chris Williamson?

  Pressure of having kids, less time having sex, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like this, all of that stuff's in there. One of the elements, because he's attachment theorist, one of the elements that people don't see quite so much, but I think might contribute a lot is women have been able to put up with mistreatment of themselves. But they can't bear to see the potential mistreatment of their child.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:26Chris Williamson?

  This guy who does not have his shit together.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, like I was, you know, in and out and I loved him. I love him. I love him still, but he's, he's not that competent. He doesn't really have it together. And I, you know, we thought that the engagement was going to fix it and that kind of didn't. And we thought that moving in together was going to fix it and that kind of didn't. And then we thought the wedding was going to fix it and that kind of didn't. And now we've had the kid and, and now it's not about me.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:34:49Chris Williamson?

  Now, now it's about this little thing.

• 1:34:53Chris Williamson?

  And I, in the same way as in every movie ever, the hero is able to withstand as much torture as the bad guy can give him. But as soon as someone else gets brought in, his friend, or his girlfriend, or his kid, you fold at the first sight of it. Because watching somebody else suffer when you can interject is an infinity harder than enduring the suffering yourself.

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And you feel you have the right to choose to have suffering inflicted upon you. But the choice to have another person suffer due to your choices is the thing that's just so painful.

• 1:35:31Chris Williamson?

  There's a kind of nobility, I think, that we all see, because on the other side of hard things are often something valuable. And again, you know, winners don't quit. I can go through this. I have this, I'm the David Goggins of suffering. I'll just keep on going.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  But one of the hardest things, and I can say this as a parent to adult, to adult men now, when they were growing up, one of the hardest things is to sit with the necessary pain of your children. Like, there is necessary pain. And to let them, like, I remember the, sort of the moment where I realized, oh, they're now at an age where I can't solve all their problems with a pack of M and M's.

• 1:36:11Chris Williamson?

  Or special sprinkled on the floor.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, like, they came home and said, like, Chris, Chris doesn't want to be my friend anymore. He's hanging out with the guys on the lacrosse team and I'm not on the lacrosse team. And now, like, I lost my best friend. And you just have to look at that and go like, there isn't a solution to that problem. Like, the solution to that problem is like, yeah, you know, like, that's, that's gonna happen. You're gonna have people in your life who, you know, you have a real close connection with them, and then your interests maybe diverge and you start spending time. And like, having to sort of, maybe help them process it is the best you can do. But like, I can't fix, I can't call Chris's mom and say, hey, can you have him play with my son? Because it's really upsetting. And it's hard to do it, but it's also a really beautiful part of your journey as a parent and your journey as a human being.

• 1:36:59Chris Williamson?

  The deeper that I've gone into this emotions work, the more that I've seen situations like that. The compulsion to fix is noble, but completely backward. And what you're saying by when your son or daughter comes to you, or your best friend, or whatever, of how to fix this thing that's happened. Your friend's just gone through a breakup, or your son's just lost his best friend, or whatever. You say, oh, what we can do. No, no, no, no, no, no. You do not need to, because what that says is you without them are not enough. And in order for you to be enough, you need to change yourself. And your discomfort is making me upset.

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:37Chris Williamson?

  So you must make yourself okay so that I'm no longer not okay.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's a power dynamic too. I mean, you know, the, the, the, the old axiom that, you know, the, the urge to save the world is often a false face for the urge to rule.

• 1:37:50Chris Williamson?

  Oh, allow me to be the savior.

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:52Chris Williamson?

  Allow me to step in and look at this, how you're relying on me, on me.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:55Chris Williamson?

  A much better way to do it is to say, and this fucking sentence wins every single time. I'm sorry that happened.

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03Chris Williamson?

  How did that make you feel?

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  That must be hard.

• 1:38:05Chris Williamson?

  That must be hard. How did that make you feel?

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:08Chris Williamson?

  Tell me about that. How did that make you feel?

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and attending, doing what I do for a living, which is partly solving complex problems arising from an interpersonal conflict. But also just helping people sort of navigate. Cause you know, any rational person going through an ugly divorce would say, I can't make any big decisions right now. I'm going through a really ugly divorce.

• 1:38:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  But you have to make really big decisions about your divorce while you're going through a divorce. That's how it works. So I have to ask people at an incredibly difficult, emotionally intense moment in their life when they are everything that matters to them, their children, where they live, their work, their finance. Everything feels on the line and is in fact on the line. I have to now say to that person, while that's going on, we have to make really gigantic, long-term decisions. And the only way you can do it is by getting good at, A, telling people things that they might not want to hear. Being able to give people difficult news in a very straight and honest and clear way.

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  Being able to sit with someone's pain, you know, and being able to sort of not minimize it, but also not amplify it, you know? And I, I think that skill set has been, A, very, you know, I've developed it over, over a long time of practicing. But it's also, it's a, it's a, it's a, you can extrapolate it to any number of other things. Parenting, your own relationships, your friendships. And I think there's real value in knowing how to. How to, and it really goes back to what we were talking about earlier about, you know, a really useful relationship skill is the ability to have conversations that make yourself uncomfortable, your partner uncomfortable, but are in service of the relationship.

• 1:39:57Chris Williamson?

  That's alchemy. That's taking something that could be useless and ugly and turning it into a vehicle for transformation. How amazing. Oh, and then you come out on the other side and you're even closer together and you went through something that was difficult, but related. So beautiful. Give me the worst and best ways that people get over breakups.

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  I mean, the worst way is to just immediately dive into another relationship without any pause.

• 1:40:25Chris Williamson?

  You're an advocate of a breathing period?

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or if you're going to, you know, if you're gonna do the, the best way to get over someone's to get under someone. If you're gonna do that, like, see it for what it is and say it. Like, really be candid that that's what you're doing. Like, like, don't lead people on, don't mislead, and certainly don't lie to yourself. The most dangerous lies are the ones we tell ourselves. So I think, you know, just jumping into another relationship very quickly and a very serious relationship, I think is a terrible way to get over a breakup.

• 1:40:55Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Because I think you, A, you're still processing a tremendous amount of grief and trauma and loss. I think that you have to move through the stages of grief. I actually think like you could look at like Elizabeth Kübler Ross's stages of death and dying and grief, and you could apply those to, because all that's happened is a marriage has ended, a relationship has died. So you have to treat it like a death. We have to have the bargaining, the sadness. We have to have the anger. We have to have each of those stages before we can reach acceptance. You don't just get to skip. So I think you have to process those emotions, and I think that takes a little bit of time. I also don't think your divorce, you don't start to recover from your divorce until your divorce is done. So a lot of people are like, oh, we moved out months ago, or, oh, we've been going through this for ages. So now, no, when it's actually done and you get the piece of paper that says you're officially divorced, that's when it's done.

• 1:41:42Chris Williamson?

  The start line begins.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  That's when you buried the dead body. Like, saying that, oh, no, this person died last week and the funeral's next week, but I'm over. Like, they're dead. No, okay. When you see them lowered into the ground, now we've started the grieving process. So I think that's a piece of it. I think the best way, I mean, I, I believe that the people that, that A, Have some body practice is really important. I know that's going to sound really bro-ish, but I really do think that there is tremendous value in.

• 1:42:11Chris Williamson?

  Body practice can be.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  I think it can be yoga. Listen, I, I, I trained martial arts from the time I was seven until I was in my twenties. I trained Okinawan Goju Ryu Karate and Muay Thai Kickboxing and I gave it up. I stopped. I started running marathons. I focused on that. It was more friendly to the, you know, raising kids and things like that. When I got divorced, I went back to martial arts. That's when I took up Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Because I actually, I actually took up, well, you know, Craig Jones actually said in an interview recently, like he, he was sort of slagging on somebody. It might've been Gordon and he said like, uh, guys, like, come on, like this is, this is like, you know, cardio for divorced dads. Like, and I, I thought, you know what? Thank you for saying that out loud.

• 1:42:51Chris Williamson?

  It's true.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  That's exactly what it was.

• 1:42:52Chris Williamson?

  You're listening to Creed, you're drinking White Monster and you're going to go and try and do.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  And you're going to do struggle cuddles with a bunch of men.

• 1:42:59Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  That is essentially the minute you've sent a six minute round with somebody, you're now sitting next to them with your arm around them and you guys are best friends for life.

• 1:43:06Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  Because there's this feeling of physical, what physical intimacy do men have who aren't homosexual with other men? That you've, you break that physical boundary, you spent, there's tremendous trust in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I am trusting that when I tap, you will stop and not snap my arm or you will let go of my carotid arteries so I don't die. Like there is something really lovely about a stranger that I believe that promise and you can believe my promise to that.

• 1:43:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a, a micro culture. It's very interesting.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  So I think there's tremendous value in a physical practice or returning to some spiritual practice, whether it was meditation or some religious thing I've seen people go back to. I, I think that, that again, they're really the same thing, which is to say reconnect, connecting to another person while you are navigating a breakup. I think is ill advised, whereas connecting to aspects of self that you may have let go of in the pain of your difficult relationship that you're exiting, or becoming a beginner at something, or like if there was a sport you enjoyed reconnecting to that sport. I think, A, there's tremendous value in having a physical practice. I think that there's tremendous value in sweating and going through all of that,

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  and overcoming physical adversity, maintaining a strong instrument and being physically healthy. A lot of my clients, you know, they drink more than they should because they're going through something stressful. So finding healthy outlets for that, I think, is really important. And also too, just improving that, that it creates a sense of community. I think you start to feel really alone when you're in a bad relationship. And then when you're ending that relationship, it's like, okay, well, now I'm ending this relationship and I feel really alone because I'm actually alone. And so there were times when, I mean, my kids were five and seven when I got divorced. And I remember when they were there, it was the most joyous, lovely feeling because now I had them there. But I didn't have the uncomfortable feeling of, oh, I'm with this person who I'm not really in love with.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  And like, I have to sort of pretend I'm happy, but I'm not really happy. Suddenly I could just be happy. I was with my kids and I was having, and then they would leave. And the silence was deafening. I mean, it was a three year old and a five year old, like little kids, like little kid, they're so loud, they're boys, they were, and then they were just gone. And it was just this feeling of like, oh, like it's so quiet, you know? And they'll be back, but God, it's so quiet. And the greatest thing I did for myself, and I don't know what pushed me to do it, is I just started to create like routines. Like we live in a world of symbols. And what I would do is they would leave

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  and I would make a point of doing all of the laundry of their clothes and washing their sheets. And then I would make their rooms. Like I would put their beds back just right. And I'd put their clothes in the drawers and it was ready. It was ready for when they were back. And something about reconnecting, like caregiving in that way, and then reconnecting to, no, no, the stage is set and they'll be back. And then I gave myself permission to go, okay, now they're not here. You go be you now. You go figure out what that is, who that man is, because that's someone they're going to be watching and going, hey, who is that man? What does he do? You know? And so that gave me a tremendous strength and it really helped me navigate that challenge.

• 1:46:34Speaker 01

  And I think that that is the kind of thing that that people can do. And again, this is not exclusively male. I think women can do the exact same thing. I think that, you know, when your children go back to the co-parent or when, again, even if you don't have children, if you, you know, if you return or get a pet, like having a pet, having some, I think my mother used to say to me, you need someplace to go, something to do and something to love. And if you're missing any of those three things, you're going to have unhappiness. Right? So I think that having something to love is really, really important. If it's children, great, you have your children. If you don't have children, have a pet. If you don't have, have friends, like, but, but connection. I think, I think we're social creatures and I think we just have to find that connection. Cause what is divorce but a deep disconnection? You know?

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  And it's a disconnection that may have happened over a long timeline. Like we've fallen in love so fast, so fast that it's so powerful and amazing. And then we fall out of love like the way we go bankrupt, very slowly and then all at once. And, and, and, and it, when it goes like it, it, there is this part of us that sees it happening and just goes, oh no, is this really happening?

• 1:47:45Chris Williamson?

  There's one time that comes to mind for me where I actually remember this deceleration. It felt like falling off the edge of a roller coaster and it was very slowly and then, oh, fuck.

• 1:47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. And falling feels like flying for a little while.

• 1:48:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Then you hit the fucking ground.

• 1:48:02Chris Williamson?

  Till you hit the ground.

• 1:48:03Speaker 01

  And then it's a real wake up call and, and, but again, like I, see I, and again, I think it's a function of age.

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  I look back on the loves of my life. And I look back on even like the great pains of my life. You know, losing my mom to cancer, you know, all of, all of the hard things. And I, I realized like just how much was in there, like emotionally, like how much material was in there. And, and I, I have to tell you, like, the, the journey of that is I've learned so much from all of those things. And I feel like they were all so formative of me. And I also just, I, I, I don't know, I, I love stories that, that have that full range of human emotion.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  And there's something about, you know, the, the, there is a saying that, you know, only unfulfilled love can be truly romantic. Like that there's something about the, the riding the whole spectrum of connection and then disconnection and then. But you know, it's very funny, I, I, I've been in therapy for many years. And sometimes, you know, you're in therapy, it's because your life's on fire. You know, like marriage is ending, your mom is dying, whatever it might be. And then there's times where you're in therapy where you're like, hey, this is about just like trying to see my blind spots, trying to get better at being me. Seeing connections I might not have seen.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  And I have to say like that, that there is, um, in, in my view, like tremendous value in. I had to switch therapists. I'd been with a therapist for like 15 years and he, and he retired. So I had to find a new therapist. And the funniest moment was in that early, because having the same therapist for 15 years, like they've seen you through a lot of things. They, you don't have to fill in the blanks, they know your whole history. And all of a sudden, there's a stranger across from me and I'm about to talk to them about me. And I'm like, they have no context. So you find yourself sort of giving like the Wikipedia page of your life. And as I was doing it, I remember thinking like, oh, there were things that felt like epic tales

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  that are now three sentences. Yeah, I married my college sweetheart and we were married for about 10 years and we had two kids and then we got divorced and it was relatively friendly. That's it. That's all that was. But when it was going on, the world was ending. Were my kids gonna be okay? Was I gonna be okay? Was she gonna be okay? Like, what, what was this gonna do? Like, who were gonna be our friends and who weren't? Who was gonna be team her and team me, even though there weren't teams? And how would we explain that to people? And now you look at it and you go like, oh, it was just a thing, you know?

• 1:50:48Chris Williamson?

  You know what I think people are looking for? I think people are looking to feel alive. And my housemate, George, has this idea of alive mode and dead mode. And what you feel even going through a heartbreak, tumult, aliveness. Like, what? This is some fucking life. There's some life happening right here. And it's the same thing that you feel when you close the deal. It's the same thing you feel when you sell the business. It's the same thing you feel when you fall in love and you fall out of love. And yeah, sure, there is a flavor to one that is enjoyable and a flavor to another that is painful. But in some ways, it's better than that Wednesday afternoon where you can't remember anything that you did.

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  I don't wanna die without any scars. Like, I, I wanna earn all those scars and I wanna look at every one of them and go like, oh, yeah, that was this.

• 1:51:40Chris Williamson?

  Fucking lived.

• 1:51:40Speaker 01

  Insanity. That was this. That was, and I love that.

• 1:51:44Chris Williamson?

  And, and to your point about, I, I sort of got on with things and I gave myself a routine and I rediscovered the stuff that I'd lost. Anxiety really hates a moving target. The action is the antidote to anxiety.

• 1:51:55Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:51:56Chris Williamson?

  With that, I wanted to get you to react to an image that had been going very viral for a while. I'm not sure if you've seen this. You may have done already.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:52:05Chris Williamson?

  So it's a famous image, Pierce Brosnan and his wife. And I think it's maybe 20 years apart, something like that. And it's it's him and her at the what looks like the height of his 007 fame. And she's looking very young and then it's him and her. And she's gained a lot in the chest and got a little bit older, but so is he. And the best response that I saw to that, dear man, this is your daily reminder to avoid marriage. The best response that I saw to that was that man hasn't aged a day in three decades. Where do you think that regulation came from? That is the single best advert that you can see for marriage. Because look at what, look at how he is flourishing. And is that really the thing that you're?

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  But see, I I'm shocked that anyone looks at that. Like, first of all, this is a successful marriage in an industry where there is no such thing. Like, I have done a lot of actor divorces and believe me, they suck at being married. And so this is a successful, happy marriage that produced children that has, it is a long marriage. Now, I will tell you, like, I I don't know these two people. That is still a very beautiful woman.

• 1:53:21Chris Williamson?

  Damn right it is.

• 1:53:21Speaker 01

  She gained weight. Okay, she's gained weight, like.

• 1:53:24Chris Williamson?

  Pierce Brosnan has gained great weight.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  Okay, but but but this is a stunningly beautiful woman.

• 1:53:29Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:53:30Speaker 01

  And this is a woman who is aging appropriately, right? So she's not trying to do 50 million things wrong with herself. A hundred, but I'm saying like, she's not trying to to undo the inevitable.

• 1:53:41Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  And the truth is, like, I I if you're with a partner long term, you don't always see those changes as much, just like you don't notice in yourself that you've gained or lost weight until stuff feels tight.

• 1:53:56Chris Williamson?

  How old do you think your mum sees you when she looks at you? You're still 12.

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  Right. And so isn't that a beautiful expression of love? Like, I always tell people when they they talk about this sort of like, oh, well, you're going to age. And when someone ages, they do, okay, I have a dog that is 16 years old. I got that dog when the dog was four months old.

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  What do you, the dog is now deaf. Okay. Gets up every morning, tail wagging, can't wait to eat breakfast. He's living, got a great quality of life. When he no longer has a great quality of life, I will do the thing you need to do, which is to, to, to the brave and difficult choice. But he wakes up every day, tail wagging, has to get carried up and down the stairs. But once he's there, can't wait to eat his meal, can't wait to do his thing. So he's a happy dog. Do you think I look at that dog, deaf, has to be carried up and down the stairs and go, dude, I gotta get a puppy. This is fuck this fucking dog. Look at this old ass dog, can't even hear anything. Like puppies can chase ball, these kid dogs can chase balls. He was so fun. He used to run like a wind. I got videos of it on my phone. Now look at him, he's like a broken little thing.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  The opposite, the opposite. I love that dog more and more. I know I'm in the bonus rounds. I know I don't have all that much time and I have to tell you, I fucking love that dog. If you, how do you know that those people don't look at each other and just go, look at us and look at that photo of us when we were fucking kids. And we didn't know what it was gonna be and we were so scared.

• 1:55:30Chris Williamson?

  We're here now.

• 1:55:31Speaker 01

  And here we are.

• 1:55:32Chris Williamson?

  We're not there.

• 1:55:33Speaker 01

  Right. And by the way, you won. You won.

• 1:55:37Chris Williamson?

  That's escape velocity.

• 1:55:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:39Chris Williamson?

  That is, that is escape velocity.

• 1:55:40Speaker 01

  How do you look at that and not admire it? And but, so, but again, I get it. If you're that unbelievably shallow, that you go, oh, could Pierce, Pierce Brosnan is a handsome, successful man. He could pull 20 something year olds easily.

• 1:55:58Chris Williamson?

  And have his.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  Easily.

• 1:55:59Chris Williamson?

  And have his mind turned inside out by the inability.

• 1:56:02Speaker 01

  A hundred, but I'm saying this is not a man who doesn't have options. And this is a person who he chooses and, and I'm sure, and she, I'm sure has choices as well. So you, you look at these two people and I would look at that and say, wow, that's a success story. That's something to aspire to. Again, if they're happy, if they find joy in each other. But to just look at that, that's more about what you are seeing in your life and your emotional state than anything that's actually going on between those two people.

• 1:56:31Chris Williamson?

  James Sexton, ladies and gentlemen. Dude, you absolutely rule. I think you're fantastic. I love your work.

• 1:56:37Speaker 01

  I love admiration.

• 1:56:38Chris Williamson?

  I love the framing that you're placing around this, the relatedness. It's so good.

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  That means a lot. I think these are important conversations. I think, I didn't have a title for it until today. But yeah, I think that, I think we need to have the gentle manosphere. Like, I think we have to have, you know, we have to have a dialogue again. One of the things I think is most important about stuff like Scott is talking about is, look, what is non-toxic masculinity? Because if the answer is femininity, then that's not an answer. Like, I'd like to understand. And I think we have, there is a conversation out there. There is a large number of people, men and women, that are looking at the current state of things and going, yeah, this isn't working. And the fact that I'm so goddamn busy professionally and all my colleagues are too, is a testament to the fact,

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  is a testament to the fact that we're doing-

• 1:57:33Chris Williamson?

  Tapping the well of it going wrong. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:57:35Speaker 01

  Because nobody meant to get divorced. And yet, the divorce rate is up. And my prediction is it's only going to keep going up. So I think we have to figure out how to fix the individual components and then how to bring them back into some kind of serious, meaningful dialogue. So, but thanks for having me, man. This was a blast.

• 1:57:55Chris Williamson?

  You're amazing, man. We've talked loads and it's so great to meet you. Book, where should people go?

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  You can get How to Stay in Love anywhere where fine books are sold. You can listen to it on Audible or download that. You can listen to me talk for eight and a half hours if that's your thing. You can find me on Instagram at @NYCDivorceLawyer. I post a lot there. And you can go to SextonShow.com. That's got a lot of my appearances and it's got a lot of my, my point of view on stuff.

• 1:58:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Until next time, man. Appreciate you.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  You got it.