1388: Family Court | Skeptical Sunday

Do divorced dads always lose the kids and half their stuff in court? On Skeptical Sunday, Nick Pell shares how he got 50-50 custody and child support! Welcome to Skeptical Sunday, a special edition of The Jordan Harbinger Show where Jordan and a guest break down a topic that you may have never thought about, open things up, and debunk common misconceptions. This time around, we’re joined by writer and researcher Nick Pell https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/author/nicholas-pell! Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1388 https://jordanharbinger.com/1388 On This Week's Skeptical Sunday: Family court's rep as a kangaroo court run by man-hating judges is a relic of the '80s. Every state now has gender-neutral custody and child support laws, "best interests of the child" is the North Star, and effective 50-50 parenting is increasingly the norm — not the exception. Accusations aren't evidence — and judges have heard them all before, probably that very morning. Without receipts like police reports or documented incidents, divorce-day abuse claims rarely stick, and calling your ex an "abusive narcissist" may sink your credibility, not theirs. The real villain isn't anti-father bias — it's billable hours. A roughly $50 billion divorce industry rewards lawyers who stoke emotions and feed the sunk-cost fallacy, turning a few-grand, few-month settlement into a six-figure, two-year slog that bleeds everyone dry. Many dads lose before the opening bell — they swallow the horror stories, panic at a bluffed custody evaluation, and fold. Meanwhile, "family court reform" activists want allegations treated as true until proven false, flipping innocent-until-proven-guilty on its head. How do you stand a chance at winning? Lawyer up fast, and pick one who favors a cooperative settlement over a bloodbath. Document everything, stay involved in your kid's life, and keep communication BIFF: brief, informative, factual, firm. Courts reward the calm adult in the room, so be that adult. Connect with Jordan on Twitter https://twitter.com/JordanHarbinger, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jordanharbinger, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/THEJORDANHARBINGERSHOW. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on Skeptical Sunday, drop Jordan a line at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] and let him know! And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/id1344999619?mt=2&ls=1 — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking https://jordanharbinger.com/course — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course https://jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser https://www.jordanharbinger.com/news/ newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanHarbinger/! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors https://www.jordanharbinger.com/deals/: CookUnity: 50% off first week: cookunity.com/jordan or code JORDAN https://www.cookunity.com/jordanMint Mobile: Shop plans at mintmobile.com/jhs https://www.mintmobile.com/jhsZenni: 15% off your first order: zenni.com/podcast, code PODCAST15 https://zenni.com/podcastZipRecruiter: Learn more at ziprecruiter.com/jordan https://www.ziprecruiter.com/jordanSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 1:29Speaker 00

  Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher, Nick Pell. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers. On Sundays, though, it's Skeptical Sunday. A rotating guest co-host and I will break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic, such as targeted advertising, internet porn, hypnosis, homeopathy, the death industry, weddings. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, disinformation, junk science, crime and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit JordanHarbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, if you ask the average guy what family court is like for men, he's going to tell you it's a grim, shadowy kangaroo court run by man-hating judges seeking the destruction of the nuclear family and his home especially. It's a persistent idea that the mom always wins and walks away with half of what the man owns in custody of the kids. If he's lucky, he's going to get every other weekend and a couple of weeks during the summer for a trip to Disneyland. But how true is this in 2026?

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Is this a caricature based on the truth or an outdated stereotype that bears no resemblance to reality today? And if gender bias is gone from our nation's family courts, why are some activists seemingly intent on bringing it back? Here today to help us take custody of the truth is writer, researcher and family court veteran, Nick Pell. Nick, you spent, well, a lot of time in family court. I'll just leave it there.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's about two years just on my divorce and then my ex-wife came back three months later. I'm only legally allowed to talk so much about my specific case. Obviously, my sole experience isn't what we're here to talk about today, but I think my experience is fairly typical.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Okay, how so?

• 3:34Speaker 02

  I know everyone probably expects me to be like, oh, man, family court sucks. They just soak these poor guys dry and then take their kids away. That was not my experience at all. Part of this is a function of living in Arizona, but my experience, as we'll learn, is going to be much more typical than the horror stories you might have heard.

• 3:57Speaker 00

  So just to highlight this, Nick, you got divorced in Arizona, so this is the state that you have direct experience with. But you've also researched other states and, you know, the usual disclaimer applies here. None of this is legal advice. You got to talk to a lawyer for your state, for your situation, et cetera.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, anytime some guy has a horror story, I'm just like, dude, who is your lawyer? I mean, one of the lawyers I spoke to but didn't hire, she got 50/50 custody for a coke dealer.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  You've told me this before and that's kind of crazy to me because of course I'm thinking about the stereotypes as well, like, oh, the mom usually gets custody. And it's like, nope, this was a dad, he was a coke dealer and he got 50/50 custody. How does that happen?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  The courts decided that for whatever reason, him being a coke dealer wasn't compelling evidence that he was an unfit father. I'm guessing like he was selling eight balls at the bar or something, you know, like.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  I don't think, I don't think this guy was Scarface.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's not a cartel sicario that happens to sell coke on the side, right? Okay.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  No, but you generally have to prove in family court that somebody is an unfit parent. That's the standard if you want to deprive them of their parental rights. Now, what constitutes unfit, that varies from state to state. And there are still some pockets where, yeah, it's possible maybe men are getting a raw deal, but for the most part, no, this is just not the case.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  So we'll get down into the nitty-gritty here because I know that this is a persistent claim, especially online. I see it all the time. Men simply have no rights in family court. The judges always side with the moms, they rubber stamp maternal custody, they make you pay for the privilege. Yeah, I do see conflicting accounts, but usually when someone's ranting about it, it's that.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Well, when someone's ranting, it's usually something negative, but this is a completely false caricature of family court in virtually every jurisdiction in the United States today.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  There's a sense among men that any allegation against them in family court is just going to be taken at face value.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Here's the thing, and I figured this out very early on. Every single man I have ever spoken to who's been through family court has had allegations of some unseemly quality or another thrown at them.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  That's such a, what a coincidence.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think there's definitely an impulse with some women to just start throwing accusations of abuse at men once they're in family court. Anecdotally, this is particularly true in cases where men initiate the divorce, which is not, I think it's about 30% of divorces are initiated by men. But here's the thing, this is not the first time, not the first time this year, not the first time this week, probably not even the first time today, that a judge has heard these accusations. And if it's just an accusation without any corroborating evidence, he probably doesn't care.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  I think there's a tendency among people to think that their divorce or their custody battle is very special. It's very unique. It's totally different than any other one. And in reality, they're all just, they're pretty similar.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's not a lot of variation, you know? Women go into court and say, my ex-husband is an asshole and well, that's probably why you guys are getting divorced.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, not a lot of people like the person they're divorcing at the moment they're divorcing them. On the men's side, what I've seen is that sadly, a lot of them give up because they just accept these myths about family court at face value. The alleged bias against men, the ease with which accusations are entered in as evidence, the notion that you only get joint custody when the mother agrees.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  So what do the actual laws look like?

• 7:36Speaker 02

  Every state in the Union has gender-neutral custody laws. That does not mean that they default to 50/50 custody. 50/50 is not the default.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  So what is the default?

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Best interests of the child, which, all things being equal, includes both parents and probably with 50/50 shared custody.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  That's super vague, like a lot of legalese, to give judges wide discretion, I would imagine. So what does best interests of the child mean?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  This is more or less what you're going to see in every state, by the way, best interests of the child. There are some rare exceptions. Florida gives some leeway to single mothers until the fathers pursue parental rights. And that starts with a confirmation of paternity. But for the most part, this is it, coast to coast. Best interests of the child is the North Star in all 50 states. What that means, however, that is what varies from place to place. In many jurisdictions, best interests of the child does not automatically mean a presumption of joint legal or physical custody.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  So joint legal custody, that pertains to decision-making and joint physical custody is about where the child is physically present. For people who don't know, so the legal, legal is like, can we send him to school here? Can I get him this doctor? Physical custody is where is he spending the weekends, where is he spending the week?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Arizona, which again, where my divorce took place, is generally considered the hardest 50/50 parenting state in the country. They don't really deviate from this unless somebody doesn't want to parent or one parent is very, very clearly unfit. Joint custody is a starting point, but judges do have leeway to change that based on circumstances. In Arizona, it is extremely difficult to deprive someone of their parental rights. Anything short of abuse or neglect probably isn't going to fly.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  So why did your divorce take so long? I felt like it just lasted forever.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Boy, you thought it lasted forever. I was the one going through it.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  It was really hard on me, Nick, your divorce.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  It was hard on your wallet, but I paid you back.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Lawyers is the main reason, like lawyers. We'll get into the specifics of that kind of later on, but yeah, I mean, lawyers. What's wrong with this country, Jordan? Lawyers.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  No, I'm kidding. I love my lawyer.

• 9:55Speaker 00

  What are other states like? What's the story about how we get from the eighties where, I don't know, every divorced kid ended up with mom? And now where parents share parenting duties even after they split up? I mean, how did that happen?

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Kentucky was the first state to assume 50/50 was in the best interest of the child. Utah likewise has very father-friendly states, which is why it's being targeted by activists. Again, we'll get a little deeper into that later. Minnesota is another state that has very strong presumptions of equal and shared parenting time and rights as best for the child.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  And what's on the other end of the spectrum?

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Alabama, Tennessee and New York are the places, yeah, not the collection of states you were expecting here.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  No.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Don't usually hear those three states mentioned together.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  No.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  These are the places where you're most likely to find judges who want to give custody to moms. But again, their laws are gender neutral. So this is a judge discretion thing like you talked about earlier. This all comes from the Jackman Law Firm and it seems kinda semi anecdotal, but it squares with what I've heard in my experience. There's a deference in some states to more traditional parenting arrangements, which could mean that judges are going to tend to put younger kids with the moms.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Which is where the whole best interests of the child part can mean just about anything. Are there any factors which are used to determine what that actually means though? Or is it just like, hey, this judge is in a good mood today. Everybody's getting custody.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  It needs to be kinda repeated constantly that different jurisdictions, even maybe within the same state, are gonna have different criteria and that they weigh differently. So of the stuff I'm gonna talk about, some of these mattered in Arizona. Most of them didn't though. Arizona is like, if your child is fed, clothed, bathed and not abused in some way, you're getting your kid if you want them. But in any event, factors such as emotional ties and relationships, that's gonna refer to the nature and strength of the child's emotional ties with each parent, siblings, or any other significant individuals who may affect the child's best interests.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  So like stepparents or I don't know, a live-in girlfriend or something like that?

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Sure, maybe grandparents, aunts and uncles if they're close, you know, stuff like that. Then there's your actual ability and willingness to feed, clothe and care for the child and provide them with a stable, loving home. Stability is very important to family court judges. And they want the kid living in the same place, going to the same school, engaged in the same community. The more established the child is, the less likely the courts are going to be to disrupt that routine.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  That makes sense. You've told me that courts generally hate changing anything about a parenting agreement, at least as it pertains to the kids?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in Arizona, where I, again, got divorced, courts just don't make changes.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  And that's, you know, a common theme in many states. If something's working, the courts don't wanna change it. Because what they change it to might not work.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  That makes sense. So what about what the child wants? What age are they kinda like, hey, the kid can say something or, you know? Cause I know if a kid's little, it's like, we don't ask which parent they like most because they don't know what they're talking about. It's whoever was nice to them that morning or whatever. And they can't really make a mature decision and they were getting pressured. But at some age, right, they're like, hey, where do you feel most comfortable? You're almost an adult.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  It's unfair to a child to ask them to pick between their parents, you know?

• 13:45Speaker 00

  I agree with you.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  I mean, my lawyer was like, your worst case scenario is that the judge takes your kid into chambers and says, hey, what do you think of your parents? And he says, I like my dad.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  You know, not, I dislike my mom, but like, yeah, I like my dad. You know, like what, what are they gonna do? It depends on the age and the child's maturity. Again, it varies from state to state. I think in Arizona, it's like 12 is when they start having some kinda say. But anecdotally, because I'm on a lot of forums where people gripe and moan about their family court judge, that's in theory. In practice, at least my judge and the judges in my county, they do not give a shit what your kid wants. They don't care at all. It's too easy to manipulate one of them. My kid was five, so they certainly weren't gonna ask them. Kids that young can be very easily manipulated.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  A 14-year-old's like, oh yeah, dad gives me no bedtime and lets me drink beer and, you know, with my friends on the weekend, I wanna go live with him. And judges aren't stupid.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  They know that asking a 16-year-old who they wanna live with could very well result in like, dad lets me do donuts on the front lawn, so I wanna go live with him. You know, so if you go to your state's website and you're thinking like, oh man, when my kid's 14, they get to say where they wanna live. No, in theory, they have some kind of input. But in practice, I think you're gonna be hard pressed to find a judge who's gonna care much what your teenager thinks about where they're living.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Unless it's like, dad doesn't get me to school.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Right, or yeah, mom's new boyfriend's always trying to get into my room at night. Some stuff like that.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, or mom's new boyfriend's an asshole.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  Right, yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  You know, who's smoking pot all the time, which is legal here, but like, you know, I'm trying to study and he's blasting his REO Speedwagon records at 2:00 in the morning. Like, you know what I mean? Stuff like that, but just like, oh yeah, I wanna go live with mom. They don't care. They don't give this a lot of weight because kids are too easy to manipulate. And like, kinda the whole thing with children is that they don't know what's best for them.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  So you'll probably be familiar with this turn of judges. I'll give that due consideration.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, right, right. It's kind of like noted, be quiet now.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll put this in the pay no mind file.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the big thing is courts wanna see if the parents are cooperating. If one parent isn't, that's a big deal. That's a way bigger deal than what the kids want. If one parent is just constantly stonewalling or being a problem or communicating with foul language or being sarcastic all the time, they're not gonna like that. This is all relative and the courts understand that the parents in the middle of a custody battle may not be on their best behavior.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Surprise, surprise.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Right, no, this is not like, again, your divorce is not special.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  You know, you're maybe on your third, you're probably just on your first. They see 50 a week. So it's just, they're, they're not, it takes a lot to impress them positively or negatively. Mental and physical health matters.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  When you say mental and physical health, so is that, that's like of the parents, right? So if somebody is, I don't know.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Could also be the kid if the kid has mental health.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, the reason I wanted to stop you is because I meant what? So it's like, if you, obviously, look, if you suffer from a little bit of depression or something or you have bipolar, they're not gonna take your kid away, I suppose. But if it's like, yeah, dad goes in his room and doesn't come out for weeks at a time and I have to clean the house, feed myself, get to school on time and basically parent myself until he goes back on his medication, like that's gonna be a problem. And not that this was you, but I know that your mental health was a thing in your case or they, your ex tried to make it like a really big deal. Is that accurate?

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, she did, she did. It was a whole, it was a whole thing. Arizona courts, anyway, and I suspect a lot of other states, they do not care about, you know, mom spent half a day in bed because she's depressed. They don't care. Unless you're at the level of like, I have ninjas living in my attic and they steal my thoughts and you can't see them because they hide every time you come by. You know, there was a guy that I found via a forum who was like, do not be afraid of your custody evaluation because my ex-wife is schizophrenic and she passed one of them. And then I had to have one of my older children smuggle an iPhone into her house

• 18:13Speaker 02

  and be like, look, this is a pile of garbage so high in the house that if it falls over, it's gonna injure one of the children. That was when the court said, oh, well, we're gonna take a closer look here. You know, I mean, there's literal human feces on the wall at this guy's ex-wife's house.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  That's really sad. That's horrible.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  It is horrible, but that's what it took to get them to take a look. And I think people aren't really gonna like this when I first say it, but they'll maybe understand when I explain a little. This is kinda as it should be because you should have to document actual dangers to a child's safety or welfare to remove someone's parental rights. It should not be, oh, mom gets kinda bummed out sometimes or, you know, sometimes mom gets a little agitated or something, or dad or whatever.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Divorce court is messy, emotional and wildly expensive. But at least when this next thing drains your bank account, you actually get something useful out of it. We'll be right back.

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• 20:57Speaker 00

  What we don't want is, mom's got a prescription for Prozac, so that must mean she's an unfit mother, so don't let her see your kids anymore. Yeah, that's what we don't want. We don't want, this person's been in therapy for five years, so where there's smoke, there's fire, take his kids away. That's what we don't want.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Yes, in the case of the schizophrenic woman with poop on the walls, like, no.

• 21:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, supervised visitation and the kids shouldn't live there, yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's all I'm saying is like, it should not be easy to take people's kids away.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  What about things like drug abuse or just abuse in general? I mean, certainly we don't want kids in a house where people are doing meth or beating the kids up, right?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Well, physical abuse is always gonna be, you're getting supervised visitation. There was a, you know, I talked to a lawyer who had, who had seen some fairly extreme child abuse and with one of her clients, and she got the guy supervised visitation. I don't know, is that good or bad? I don't know, I don't think it, that's gonna be a deal breaker.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Drug abuse, maybe. The court needs evidence that you're an active addiction and that it's, and this is kind of the more important part of the sentence, and that it's interfering with your ability to parent. Is the judge gonna let you have your kids if you're like, oh, we do heroin when the kids aren't here?

• 22:08Speaker 00

  Okay, maybe not, I don't know.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  They might, is all I'm saying. I'm not saying they will, I'm saying they might. My judge gave a woman her kids back after she completed a treatment program, and she was on heroin. So, judges, at least, again, at least in Arizona where I live, they want to see kids with their parents, which gets to this whole idea of like, family court judges just hate families, all they wanna do is this and that. And it's like, my experience in family court is that judges really, really, really wanna keep kids and parents together.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they need receipts, they need receipts for all this stuff.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  Right, I mean, I talked about how every man I ever spoken to has been through family court. They've experienced some accusation or another, some kind of accusations of abuse, you know, but they do, they need the receipts.

• 22:56Speaker 00

  Judges generally don't care if it's the first time it's ever come up is during a custody battle. I mean, abuse allegations, right? If it's, yeah, we got divorced, and oh, he was abusive, it's like, okay, well, you were married for 15 years and there's nothing, there's no police calls, there's no statements, there's nothing. I mean, this is understandable that judges will discard stuff like that because the timing is just very suspect, which is unfortunate for people who have just been enabling their partner, because if they are abusive and they never said anything, now it's gonna bite you in the butt. But is there anything else on the list of what makes for the best interest of the child?

• 23:29Speaker 02

  The last thing is your prior caregiving roles. If one parent is basically not a parent, that can be an issue. That's super hard to document, though.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, you'd have to prove that they were gone 25 days a month or something, working on an oil rig.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  That's exactly, you have to prove they're gone. I mean, like, I've seen examples, or have been told of examples where it's like, you know, guys are getting divorced and mom wants to get into like, what percentage of diaper changing they were doing.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Oh, jeez.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  And it's like, no, no, no, we're talking about, did dad take off for three months?

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  You know, that's what they're talking about.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  That makes sense. These all sound like reasonable criteria, at least in theory, and I'm curious about how they get enforced in practice from one jurisdiction to another.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  In the Western United States, courts, and I'm speaking in very broad terms here. In the Western United States, courts tend to be more inclined towards 50/50 without serious compelling evidence to the contrary. And further east, they tend to assume this less. But every court is different, every judge is different, every case is different. There are, I can say definitively, with the exception of the thing we talked about in Florida with single moms, there are no states where women have a legal upper hand in court. I know we're gonna get a zillion comments about how I got screwed, and it's like, okay, well, did you fight your case? Did you have a good lawyer?

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Did you just roll over because you bought into these horror stories about how you, you weren't gonna get anything in court? Did you just roll over because you wanted to run off to Vegas and chase tail? And this made for a very convenient, ready-made excuse for you to do that? And I am sure that that happens, by the way.

• 25:12Speaker 00

  I'm sure it happens too. Here's what I predict. We're, we're gonna get a few of those comments, but we're gonna get even more comments from divorced women who are like, oh yeah, no, my ex-husband says he got raked over the coals in court, but here's what really happened. I offered him custody of the kids, and he didn't respond to any of this, and he didn't respond to any of that, and he did all of these other things that were horrible, and then when we finally got divorced, he turned around after not fighting any of this and not doing any of the parenting stuff that the judge wanted us to do, and then turns around and says, oh, she took my kids away and half my income. I've seen a lot of that online too, where a guy will rant like on a Reddit forum, and someone's like,

• 25:52Speaker 00

  you sound like my dad who did all of these other horrible things and now says these exact same things. And it's like, no reply from the original poster, and it's like, yeah, yeah, we nailed it, didn't we? Because I think it would be, it's convenient for guys to go, oh yeah, I kinda wanna have my freedom. This isn't really a house that I paid for, she had it before we got married, so I'm gonna go on record as saying, oh, she screwed me and she took the house and she took the kids, I just have to go move to Florida and, you know, go date girls that are 20 years younger than me. It's like, there's gonna be a lot of those comments too, I think, we're gonna hear a lot of that.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and ladies, I'm aware that this guy exists, okay? I don't wanna make it sound like I'm just like, oh, guys, guys just get accused of everything and they're just these innocent saints. Like, no, there's, there's definitely like guys who are like, whoo, cool, I get to see my kids three times a year and, and date 19-year-old girls in Florida.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  A hundred percent, yes, there's a lot of guys like that. So, so I'm expecting to actually see more of that than guys saying they actually got screwed. Well, I don't know, maybe it'll be 50/50, we'll see.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  Well, 50/50, we'll see. There's some statistics about how many dads get custody versus how many dads fight for them, but it's junk. And I'm not even gonna get into it.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Why?

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Because what we just talked about, tons of dads give up because they think it's pointless, or they can't handle the heat. I think that that motivates a lot of it. They believe these myths, or the second that they start getting accused of stuff, they're just like, whoa, now I'm toast, I'm out. Or I don't wanna deal with being cross-examined in court, or whatever it is. And it's like, dude, you're, you're almost certainly not gonna go to court anyway, but this is gonna get settled. They, almost all of them get settled. Judges do not wanna hold a trial. There was a quote from Frederick Nietzsche that helped me through my trial, not trials like in the sense of difficulties, I didn't actually have.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Trials and tribulations more like, yeah, okay.

• 27:51Speaker 02

  And the quote is, "He who has a why to live for can bear almost anyhow."

• 27:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  And there was like, nothing I wasn't gonna do to be a parent to my son.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, you said that a lot of why men think the cards are stacked against them is based on, like you said, bad or outdated information. Back in the 80s when parents got divorced, I know from my friends who got divorced in the 80s, it was just, everyone was like, oh, okay, so when are you gonna see your dad? It wasn't, oh, who's gonna live with their dad? It was, I don't even remember any dads in my neighborhood, I knew a lot of divorced kids, right? It was the 80s and 90s, they all lived with their mom and they all saw their dad on weekends, and it was just a thing. It was every Friday, it was like, what are you gonna do? Oh, I'm going to my dad's, oh, cool, yeah, cuz their dad lived near the other person's dad. So it was like, we can hang out, you're going to your dad's, cuz it was like, yeah, he lives across town where your dad lives. It was just, there was that whole Friday, like, who's going to their dad's? And a bunch of my friends did that, and it would be like, oh, okay, who's gonna still be in the neighborhood on Friday night?

• 28:46Speaker 00

  This half of the neighborhood's gone, so I gotta hang out with Andy today, that's just how it was. And it seems like that's my whole childhood.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  You know, it's interesting that we were talking about earlier about dads just not wanting to parent their kids post-divorce, because all the divorced house kids in my neighborhood growing up, there was never, I'm going to dad's.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Oh, really? At all?

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Never.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  Yikes.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there was like, there was like a crew of like five of us, and two of them had divorced parents, and the two with divorced parents, one of them, I don't think ever saw their dad.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, well, there were some of that.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  And the other one, I think, saw him like a couple times a year. And it was not because they, you know, and I know enough about the situation, it was 100% the like, cool, I'm a divorced dad now.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  I don't gotta parent anymore, so very real phenomenon.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  There were kids that had stepdads, and it was like, I never see your dad at any of these games and stuff. And it was like, oh, he lives in Florida, and it was like, oh, okay. Like, there was a few of those too, I remember those in the 80s.

• 29:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it was the standard in the 80s that mom got the kids. You know who it was that changed that? Wasn't men.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  It was women, because I think partly because they were like, my kid needs his dad in his life somehow. Even if it's just a couple weekends a month, my kid needs to see his dad. And I think that, yeah, they were tired of their ex-husbands buying their way out of parenting their children.

• 30:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  And they have to take. On all this additional responsibility and you get to write a check and party with girls half your age. I can see how they didn't like that.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, there was a whole doctrine, right? It was like the tender years doctrine.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and dual income households, it's obsolete.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  There's no stay at home moms anymore. I mean, there are, but like, how many are there now as compared to when we were kids?

• 30:37Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah, it's fewer for sure.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  When we were kids, that's when that started to change. Family courts also got way more professional. So in the eighties and nineties, you start seeing guardians ad lightem, evaluators, standardized custody guidelines. It's not like this vibes based thing where mom usually wins anymore. And then from 2008 to 2020, most family court systems get totally overhauled. To the point where, as we're talking about 50 50, it's effectively the law of the land nationwide. Even if we don't call it that, even if there's some pockets where the old ways may still prevail.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  I'd imagine technology also plays a role in this. We're kind of past the days of he said, she said, there's all kinds of ways to document everything. And those methods just didn't exist prior to the mass adoption of the smartphone. Like now you can get videos of this. You can get a recorded conversation of that. There's parenting apps where people can do things more easily with one another where before it was like, yeah, okay. We're going to make you meet up with the guy who terrorized your whole family and just hope that everything goes well. It's like, no, no, no. It's all scheduled in the app. It's filmed in the app. You and I were talking about this offline a couple of days ago. There were some custody cases, this ended tragically, this was recent, but when they had the drop off, they had to park five parking spaces away or something and they weren't allowed to talk to each other during the drop off.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  I mean, there's, this was all arranged by the court, I think. So that couldn't have worked before. Because how are you going to document that somebody said something to you in the parking lot? It would, it would have been impossible.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Bring a micro cause that recorder.

• 32:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, maybe.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Something like that. I mean, there was tons of text messages thrown both ways in my divorce and here's a, a bit of a free legal advice. If you're going to go to court and talk about what a bad parent your ex husband is, don't send him text messages saying that he's your kid's hero.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's, he, he loves you. You're, you're his hero. Oh yeah. During the, and then during the trial, he's terrible. He's an absentee. Now the judge knows you're lying, which can't be good. I also think that anytime a man loses or a woman for that matter, they're just going to see it as court's bias. I mean, and it might be a mistake, but I assume that anytime you get handed something in court that you don't like, it's you're going to default to, I got screwed or this is biased.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  My wife, as in the woman that I'm currently married to, is in a Facebook group where women just gripe about divorce court.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  And she's in it, you know, for the shit show of it all. But yeah, women are no less guilty than the men of thinking that any ruling they don't like is evidence of bias. But divorce court, family court is a really super emotionally raw area, to say the least.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  I'm sure.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Everyone feels justified. So when the court says something you don't like, you know, it's not that you didn't understand the law or the law wasn't on your side. You've been cheated in some way. And that's why a lot of these myths still persist because there's these horror stories about guys usually getting royally screwed in family court. And they have way more staying power than stories like mine. My divorce was very tough. It was very contentious. It dragged on forever. It was so emotionally draining, but at the end of the day, I got 50 50 joint custody, 50 50. It's called effective 50 50 parenting because it's like, okay, well, maybe, maybe the calendar works out that somebody gets a day or two more.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  On holidays and stuff, but like, yeah, it's called effective 50 50 and I get child support.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  I know you get child support, but I also know that a lot of listeners are going to be shocked by this, right? Like a man's getting child support. I never heard of that. Honestly, that sounds antiquated, but when you told me that, I was also kind of surprised.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  She makes way more money than I do.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  It's a simple mathematical formula. The courts are not there to lecture me on how I need to man up and earn more money. They run a formula. Everyone gets what's coming to them.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  So let me get this straight. Me not paying you more resulted in you getting a check every month from your ex wife? You're welcome, Nick. You're welcome.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Maybe the craziest thing is, is if me and my current wife have kids, my child support goes up.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Wait, how does that work?

• 34:52Speaker 02

  The child tax credit because my taxable income goes down.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Is that an Arizona thing? I don't pay any attention to this kind of stuff. I don't do my own finances. I probably shouldn't admit that, but here we are.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  Every state in the union has a gender neutral formula for calculating child support.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  Okay. Wow.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Gender neutral laws. It's coast to coast. So this is another like, oh, I had to pay her child support.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  And it's like, yeah, man, your ex wife was a stay at home mom for 12 years. And it sucks that you got to pay her money because she wants a divorce, but if she hasn't worked in 12 years and she has no outside income and you've been busy plugging it away at your career, you just have more earning potential.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that's fair. I mean, come on.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's fair. That's not man hating courts. That's a totally reasonable way of doing child support. Parents who have had to put their career on hold should not be expected to have the same earning potential as a mid-career spouse who spent the same period of time focusing on their career.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. That sounds reasonable, especially given that a stay at home dad is going to have the same expectations. I mean, there's so many more stay at home dads now. I know a few of them myself and it's like, they were doing some sort of, I don't know, a job that either they had a small company that they stopped working or a job that didn't quite, their trajectories changed and their wife is like a partner at a law firm. Yeah, okay. Nobody would say that's unfair, right? The guy has to go back to work. Okay. Well, you've been shelved for 12 years. But yeah, guys will never stop complaining about this.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  No, but it's totally fair. I mean, everybody's working and everybody's focusing on their career, which that happens a lot in marriages too. Like, you know, then it's like, you're just going on people's income. When the stay at home mom or dad goes back to work, the judge doesn't just go, well, you made $0 for the last 12 years. Uh, I guess that's your income.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  You owe blah, blah, blah. No, they're going to impute your income. They're going to say, what are you going to do? I'm going to go be a teacher. Okay. Teachers make in this county, I don't know what a teacher makes, but.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  50 grand a, I really don't know.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. I was going to say 50 grand a year, but like in today's dollars, isn't that like what you make for working at McDonald's?

• 37:01Speaker 00

  That's a skeptical Sunday right there too.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  I think there's plenty of people that are teachers that probably make a slightly more than somebody working minimum wage, uh, disgustingly.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they get like, uh, you know, they're going to impute your income to something and then it's like, okay, well, you better start making that at least. They imputed my income. It was like, it was totally reasonable. But yeah, I mean, men should just stop rolling over and letting courts take their kids away because they read some story on the internet.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  Now for something that won't ruin your life. We'll be right back.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Come join us on our subreddit, the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. You can interact with show fans. Me and Gabriel are in there. You can talk about the show, get some dank memes, joke around a little bit, get to know other show fans. It's kind of a fun time in there. Most of the time anyway. That's the Jordan Harbinger subreddit. Now back to Skeptical Sunday.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Social media also has a tendency to amplify the most horrifying anecdotes or, or concepts in any story. I mean, you see people complain a lot on social media. And I personally kind of go, well, what's the rest of this? Where's the rest of the, where's the real details of this story?

• 38:09Speaker 02

  The other thing is, you know, if you're convinced that the system hates men, you're going to constantly find information that confirms this. I was convinced of this. And then I talked to a lawyer who was like, why are you rolling over for your wife? You have PTSD and you use steroids. Like this is not a reason for you to let your wife take your kid from you.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm glad someone was able to talk sense to you because yeah, I remember the early days when you were just convinced you were never going to see your kid. It was really sad and you were super stressed out about it and I didn't have any way to sort of assuage your concerns because what do I know? I mean, I'm like a former real estate lawyer from New York, like finance guy, like I don't know anything about this and it just seems like if you're going to buy into that, a lot of people, maybe they never get that wake up call. Okay. So you mentioned that there are some pockets where there might still be a bias against men. Where are those places and what's the evidence for that?

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Some people say the Bay area in California, parts of Massachusetts and Cook County in Illinois, which is where Chicago is, parts of downstate New York, but this is all totally anecdotal.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  I see.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Find any like evidence for it, but it would be, it would be hard to gather data about that, but that's kind of like people who concede that there are places where men may be getting a raw deal still, who aren't lunatics are like, oh yeah, these are the, the places.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  Surprise the Bay area. This place is pretty woke.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  I'm pretty surprised that it's anti-father in, as far as the courtroom is concerned, I guess. But again, data citations needed.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, citations are definitely needed on that. Massachusetts has some like dad unfriendly laws, but I like, couldn't find out what specifically they were supposed to be. It could be court rules or I don't know. I, it was, I couldn't find anything, but that's.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  I see.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  That's what I read on, on lawyers websites, basically.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Or it's scare propaganda to get people to hire an attorney.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  That wrote the copy on that website. Cause yeah, if the stats don't bear that out, that's different. So you had to get a custody evaluation, but I remember you were, you were also surprisingly Worried about that. What would you say to somebody who has to deal with a custody evaluation? First of all, what is a custody evaluation?

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Custody evaluation is when a custody evaluator evaluates whether or not you can have custody.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  I see. So this is like a social worker that comes over and says, your house is dangerous. There's holes in the floor and dirty needles everywhere. You can't have your kids.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, no. This is a forensic psychiatrist who's gonna conduct

• 40:38Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  All kinds of interviews.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  They're talking to you. They're maybe talking to witnesses. And some of them, I think, probably will say whatever the person cutting the check wants them to say. They're not cheap. 20 grand to get started.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Wow, 20 grand. That's gotta be an insanely involved process. Either that, or those people make a truckload of money doing this. I don't really believe that that's possible. I don't think so.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  The forensic psychs, which in, at least in Arizona, that's the only type of psychiatrist who can testify in court.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  As an expert witness. So it's like kind of a red flag when my ex wanted my kid to see a forensic psychiatrist for alleged mental health problems that was two hours away.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  I see. So what exactly is a forensic psychiatrist? What are they doing?

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Forensics. They do tons of interviews, psychological evaluations. Their home visits are part of it, and they just kind of see how all the pieces fit together. So if there are inconsistencies, that's generally gonna be a much bigger deal than just being honest about, yeah, you know, I did and said some things at the end of my marriage that I wasn't very proud of, you know?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. I thought this was just a social worker who showed up to the house to make sure, yeah, again, it's not full of cockroaches with loaded guns on the table or something.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  The first person my ex-wife wanted to evaluate did have the reputation of being a hatchet man for hire.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  Whoa. So how did you get out of having a hostile evaluator?

• 42:06Speaker 02

  We told them to pick somebody else.

• 42:08Speaker 00

  Oh, really? So it's that simple?

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have to agree on the evaluator. And, and, you know, if it's not obvious, you can't just say no to everybody that they suggest.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  On the other hand, your opposing counsel doesn't just get to pull whoever they want out of their behind and force you to be evaluated by them. I do think her attorneys thought that the evaluator we ended up using was gonna be on her side. But you know what? She wasn't. She was super fair. At absolutely no point did I feel like she was out to get me. I didn't feel like there was any gotcha stuff, anything like that. The sense I got was that she had seen kids in actually dangerous situations and recognized pretty quickly that my kid was not in a dangerous situation. And then went through the process of verifying that for the courts, which is her job.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. So how did your evaluation turn out?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  It was kind of one of several examples of my ex-wife backing out when she realized that I wasn't scared. But I think that's also a tactic that gets used a lot in family court. Oh, you're gonna have an evaluator. And then the people, probably more often the guy, panics and just goes, whoa, I'll agree to whatever. I can't deal with that. And it's like, I had nothing to worry about. It was a bluff anyway, but I went along with it. And because I kind of didn't have a choice. My lawyer was just like, you have nothing to worry about.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  You were stressed, though. I remember you texting me and being like, this is happening. It's coming over. And I was like, oh, okay. So, and I was worried for you because I don't know, I don't know anything about this. Like, oh, he lives in a trailer. She's gonna say that the kids can't live here.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  The trailer, she says, I did. I lived in an RV like on a five acres of desert.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, not on the side of a road near a park or like a houseless person. Yeah, no, I know. But still, like, I'd be nervous about something like that.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  My lawyer wasn't.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  Well, she knows what's going on, right? We don't.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Well, no, definitely at first I was a little spooked by it, but the more like, the more I got into reading about it and people's experiences with it. And again, like, I didn't live in a mobile meth lab. I lived in a tiny house, basically. I had so much solar. I had air conditioning, running water and septic.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, didn't you have an illegal septic? I guess that doesn't preclude you from having kids.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  I did have an illegal septic, and it does not. Like, it's like, this is Arizona. Do you know how many people in the, in the county I live in have unpermitted septic tanks? And all kinds of like bizarre jerry-rigged electrical systems going on in their house? Like, like this was not gonna be

• 44:45Speaker 00

  Oh, my god.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  An issue. Or maybe, but I would be like, I would have been shocked. Tons of people in Arizona live in, in RVs and off-grid houses. And, you know, there's definitely like sticks and bricks homes, traditional homes, that are worse environments for children than my RV was.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  But the home visit was gonna be in my house that I live in now, which is

• 45:08Speaker 00

  I see.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  A normal house.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  So your ex-wife, she just dropped the evaluation. Why? Because she, did she run out of money? I know this was super expensive. The whole thing was expensive.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  She kind of routinely would make these big and expensive moves and just expect me to fold. And, and then she would back down when I didn't because she didn't want to actually spend the money on it. By the time the home visit came, she was actually pretty eager to settle. And me and my attorney initially insisted that the evaluation continue because we felt it was going fine. And we wanted the evaluator's report to use later on. And also, we just kind of wanted to bleed her.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Your attorney sounds clever and maybe a little nasty, which is a compliment, I suppose.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, I had a soulless ginger homework kid as a lawyer. She was definitely the girl in like fifth grade with multicolored highlighters, you know?

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  She had an insane evaluator come back in a case she was working on where they asked for the evaluation. And she was like, she kind of told the lady, like, this is stupid. This evaluator is not gonna do anything. And then the evaluator came back and it was like, this guy can only have supervised visitation. We're gonna throw cameras in his house.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  Oh, my god.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  And she was just like, just settle this and get on with your life.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. Don't risk having somebody kooky who's having a bad day install cameras in your RV. So I'm shocked that that's even a thing, by the way. Is that real?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:38Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  That's what they did to that guy. So I thought there was about a 0% chance of a negative evaluation coming back.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  But about zero and zero are not the same.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  Not the same thing. No, that's true.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  And I love the idea of her having to continue having to pay for this far. So this is like, the woman's gonna get paid to drive like four hours one way to come through the evaluation. And all kinds of other stuff. But anyway, yeah, like, to me, it was, it was like, okay, I kind of just want to get on with my life. And I hate having strangers in my home. So my attorney was, her biggest concern was that I was gonna get small-towned.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  What's that?

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Like, my wife was gonna hire a lawyer who plays golf with the judge and

• 47:21Speaker 00

  I see.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  I don't even think that would have mattered, but she practices down in Phoenix and

• 47:26Speaker 00

  If she's seen it before, then it happens. So

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Sure, but with this guy, I doubt it.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  I'm sure there's places where there's a good old boys' network or a legal culture of old school judges who stick to the old ways. But there's, there's no, it sounds like there's no systematic nationwide effort to screw dads out of their kids.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  There's no evidence for it anyway. I mean, the people out there making life hell for other people in family court. It's not the system, it's lawyers. There's tons of people out there who get a straight-talking lawyer who gives them the lay of the land, and it's not what they want to hear. So they go attorney shopping. And the new attorney's like, oh, yeah, you got this. We just gotta fight it really hard. It's gonna be a lot of money, but you're definitely gonna get it at the end.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  Right. There's always a lawyer, I mean, I speak from experience, unfortunately, here, and from the inside and the outside. There's always a lawyer willing to bill you for work that does not necessarily need to be done at all. I know, in fact, I'm going through this right now. I can't say the matter. It's not important. It's nothing juicy or interesting. But there is a lawyer who's like, look, I'll flat fee this for you for 12 grand and I'll give you a payment plan. In fact, I'm feeling generous. Let me cut it down to this and give you a better payment plan. And then I called another lawyer who I know. And I was like, hey, let me sanity check this. And he goes, oh, you don't even need to hire a lawyer for this. Here's what's gonna happen. Here's your worst-case scenario. It's gonna be less than my retainer. And I was like, oh, no wonder that guy was so keen on giving me a nice sweetheart deal and a payment plan.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:53Speaker 00

  He doesn't have to do anything, right? And it's, so I, look, I know a guy who spent two years in court over custody. He was the petitioner. The respondent fired their lawyer early on because they didn't like what the lawyer was telling them. And the respondent then hired a lawyer who basically said, look, you need two lawyers. Also, you need a $10,000 deposition. Also, you need the most invasive financial disclosure his accountant's ever seen in 20 years of practice. And this case ended up being settled for an almost identical settlement that was proposed by the original attorney. All of this sound and fury, it was basically just an excuse to bill an insane amount of money. And the case could have been settled in a couple of months for a few grand.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Instead, it was a six-figure divorce dragged out over two years, which is actually not only unethical, but like psychopathic. Because you're putting someone through hell and you're draining their money for an extended period of time. Just find more clients, bro. Like, that's how I think as an attorney. Anyway, do we know how much money is wrapped up in the divorce industry as a whole?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  About $50 billion a year.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  That's way more than I thought. Holy smokes.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, some people are making a lot of money off of divorces dragging on for as long as they possibly can, and it ate the judges.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  No. Oh, my god. Well, I would, look, I would imagine any motivated lawyer who's a little bit crooked, and those are so hard to find.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  They could turn They could turn a 10-hour case into 150-hour case pretty easily, right? Emotions are running high. It's really easy to stoke and inflame that. You find some irrelevant irritation. You turn it into a cause for being unreasonable. You fight for some maximal case, lost cause. You know, we should be able to do this. And then they're really going to hurt. And it's only going to be 10 grand. Oh, sorry, I meant 60 grand. Oh, sorry, but that doesn't include my fees, right? It's just one thing after another, sunk cost fallacy. And soon your client is broke. It's icky.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, tons of cases get dragged way past their sell-by date because some shady lawyer gets the ear of one of the litigants and milks them for everything they're worth.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  And they don't deliver anything of value. And there's no way around that. You know, it sucks, but people are allowed to pursue legal remedies in court to their own satisfaction. And I'm sure lawyers know how to stay just on the right side of that line legally.

• 51:11Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Um, where they're not, you know, like, between you and me, I can't offer you a big cash settlement, but I'm offering you a big cash settlement.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Courts have a responsibility to hear those people out. It's your right to pursue this in court. That's the flip side of it. Even if you're arguing past the law. And it's not always selfishness that drives that. It could be fear. You think, you know, if I don't fight for something huge, you're going to lose everything. Or you walk in with an inflated sense of expectations. And the lawyer tells the person, you're just not going to get that. But the client doesn't care.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Client management is a bit, that's an art unto itself, right? You got to figure out, am I dealing with a reasonable person? Or am I dealing with somebody who's never heard the word no and is willing to just pay for the privilege until the judge tells them? A good lawyer will be like, how do we settle this super quickly so that both parties are just slightly unhappy? Because you're not going to get both parties being happy. That's a, that's, that happens once in your career or something. But you're going to, you're going to have it where both parties are only slightly unhappy and one side doesn't get actively roasted, or both sides are totally screwed. The best-case scenario for a divorce like this is both sides are only slightly unhappy.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  I was super happy with my final settlement. Like, the process itself was a nightmare.

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  But the settlement, I was like, hell, yeah. My lawyer told me one of the reasons things turned out so well for me is because I always listened to her. There was one time where I overruled her. And it was, it was the right move. And she told me, well, this, this is a gamble, but it could work. But if she'd said, absolutely not, this is the stupidest idea you've ever had, I wouldn't have told her to do it.

• 52:47Speaker 00

  She gave you an honest evaluation of whether or not this dice roll was likely to end up neutral or positive, right? As opposed to saying, yeah, so that's fair. Look, if there's a, if there's a villain in family court, it's not anti-father bias, it's billable hours. So, okay, who wants to actively roll things back to the days before equal parenting rights? You kind of touched on this on the top of the show. I mean, the equal parenting rights thing, it just seems like a no-brainer to me, especially in an era where men and women both have jobs outside the home a lot of the time. Both share, at least in theory, something resembling equal parenting responsibility. I know a lot of women are like, ha.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  A lot of men are probably like that, too.

• 53:24Speaker 00

  I think a lot of guys are too. Yeah, I think, but back, compared to back in the day where guys would be like, ah, I never changed a single diaper. Ha, ha, ha, puffs on cigar. It's not really like that anymore. And I don't know any guys like that anymore, that are under the age of 60.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  So, the main driver behind this movement is a woman named Tina Swithin. She runs a website called One Mom's Battle. The short version is that this movement wants to begin treating all allegations as true and valid until proven otherwise. They want to limit custody for men, and I suppose women too, but it mostly seems, it seems very, very focused on men who are accused of abuse, you know, of course, for the safety of the children.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's not how any of this works. There's a million problems with that. I, by the way, does anyone, do you find it weird that there are divorce influencers? Because that's essentially what this person is, right? She's like an influencer of the divorce category. That's bizarre to me, but I guess it makes sense.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  I find it weird because she's trying to change the law to something I find retrograde. But the idea of there being somebody on TikTok that you can turn to who's just going to be like, it's okay, your life's not over. This is what divorce court actually looks like. The woman, the advocate, like, she does some kind of stuff from the other side.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  Is she an attorney?

• 54:46Speaker 02

  No, she's not.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  But yeah, if they're an attorney, that makes a lot more sense. Kinda yes, kinda no. Influencers in general are just weird to me.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  I know, it's bizarre, but I get it if a guy loves Legos and he's a Lego influencer, but a divorce influencer? This is not something I would want to make my entire personality. You know, like, once mine is over, I'd be like, okay, I've got 18 months where I'm willing to talk about this, and then I want to freaking move on. Maybe not even 18, maybe six. Anyway.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  The problem with Tina Swithin and this kind of like family court reform stuff is this is turning 1,000 years of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence on its head. You are innocent until proven guilty. Accusations are not evidence. And you know what? The evidentiary bar in family court is already on the ground. It is not a criminal court.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, yeah.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  You can invoke those rules of evidence, but most people don't. You know, it's just a, you don't have to prove things necessarily beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt in family court. You don't need chain of evidence, any of this stuff. But our system is built on the principle that it's genuinely better for 100 guilty men to go free than it is for one innocent man to serve a day in prison. And I think that that's correct.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Even a part-time coke dealer can afford to support our sponsors. We'll be right back.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. Your support of the advertisers keeps the lights on around here. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the podcast are searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. Here, we're not talking about putting people in prison. We're talking about protecting kids from potentially dangerous adults. But then again, we're also talking about depriving those adults of their parenting rights and the rights to see their kids.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  So, there's this one case in Utah, which is an absolute tragedy, but it was the engine for kind of the one big victory. This euphemistically named movement, Family Court Reform. A 16-year-old was murdered by her abusive father.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's terrible.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Yes, it is. But the thing is, I'm not really sure what the law they passed is trying to accomplish or does accomplish. A couple of months ago, you brought this up earlier because we talked about it in private conversation. There was a, maybe a month ago, a mom murdered her child, which, after the law was enacted, this was the one where they had to park five spots apart.

• 57:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  You know, so I don't know what it's doing or is supposed to do that isn't already in place.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's insane to me that people do this. I just cannot put myself into the headspace where killing yourself or your kid is the reasonable choice to deprive the other parent of custody. I mean, holy cow.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like, the new law, you know, I don't want to use this one tragic incident as like, well, see, it did nothing, so don't do anything. But the new law, when you look at it, it doesn't do much. It says that the child's safety has to be the first priority, and it already is.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  It raised evidentiary standards, which does not help the where there's smoke, there's fire crowd, which is what a lot of this is based on. It limited court-ordered reunification, which they're opposed to that. I don't know what limited means. I'm not a lawyer, but that could mean anything.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Could mean anything, everything, and nothing all at the same time. And it defunded reunification camps.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, why does that sound terrible? I mean, anything with camps in the names is, it sounds really sus. That is bizarre.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, they make kids go to these camps where people force them to reunify with their parents. And I can see situations where like, court-mandated family therapy is maybe appropriate to heal breaches between parents and kids. I don't think taxpayers should be paying for it. And I really don't think that we should be sending kids to camps for it.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is weird. Okay, but in some cases, the kids are hostile toward the parents with good reason, not because mom or dad poisoned them against the other one.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  No, absolutely. Sometimes kids hate their parents for good reasons. I hate my parents. I'm sympathetic to kids with shitty parents. Very, very sympathetic to kids who have shitty parents and don't want to be around them. And I think that, yeah, around 12, 13, 14, they should have some kind of influence over where they're going to spend most of their time. But the law, you know, it also includes like obligatory training and education, which the judges probably take about as seriously as I would take diversity training at work.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  Fire up those angry emails, folks. Okay, so all of this sounds totally reasonable to me. Do you have any issue with it? I mean, aside from the camps.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  No, yeah, the camps seem a little yucky, but no. And I'm like, opposed to this movement, and I read the law. I didn't get like, deep into the weeds on it because I'm not a lawyer, but it sounds so benign. Sounds like it throws a bone to really loud activists, does precisely nothing of substance other than defunding these camps. And I'm absolutely for doing that. And there's a federal version called Caden's Law.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  Okay, so what is the issue then with these activists, Tina Swithin and others, and family court reform? Because it can't be, oh, they passed one law and it doesn't matter.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  Well, there's a lot to get into here. First of all, Swithin completely denies the concept of parental alienation. This is, you talked earlier about one parent poisoning the kid against the other parent. And they use this to usurp parental rights.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Such as involving, enrolling your kid in therapy without informing the other parent. That is a usurpation of parental rights. If you're using the therapy as a cudgel against the other parent, that's another layer to that. But if you're communicating with teachers or other caregivers in a way that's hostile and disparaging to the other parent.

• 1:00:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  That is parental alienation. All of this is totally real, totally happens, and totally is not good for the kids.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, of course.

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  Which is who we're supposed to care about. Are there abusive men who weaponize accusations of parental alienation to deflect from their behavior? Yes, I'm absolutely sure that's a thing. Absolutely sure that happens. But that does not mean that parental alienation does not exist. It absolutely does.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  What else?

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  There's a kind of persistent narrative with the Swithen crowd where my ex-husband is an abusive narcissist, which here's another bit of free legal advice. Absolutely do not accuse your ex of this in court because this, your judge hears this 50 times a day. This is like the go-to, you know, attempt to slander somebody in, in family court.

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  They do not want to hear you use these words at all. Even if you have a serious case, they're going to take you much less seriously if that's how you frame it. So you need to document specifics if that's the reality. The Swithen thing kind of creates this frame where women, and it's almost always women, at least in this milieu, they're the hapless victims and men are evil monsters.

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  It couldn't possibly be that people who are in failing marriages that are disintegrating behave badly.

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Well, that's pretty much it. I mean, I think almost everyone whose marriage is falling apart says and does things they regret. People who are about to get divorced treat each other like shit for the most part. And you know what? That's not okay.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  It's the reality of it. And the judge is generally, as I said, you know, he's not going to be shocked by your divorce. There's a movement that wants to expand the meaning of abuse to something called coercive control, which we don't have the time to fully explain. This is a highly controversial concept. It's not some kind of settled science thing, but the family court reform does want to enshrine it into law.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  I think maybe something that needs to be said is that the purpose of family court is to find a solution that is good for the kids. It's not supposed to be a place where two people who hate each other get to drag each other through the mud for kicks or because they're high on righteous indignation.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, Swithen has also inserted herself into custody paddles, defending parents who defy court orders in ways that are really problematic. She's being sued for defamation by a father. There's a really good deep dive into her from a woman named Christina Short, who goes by Weaponized Stepmom. It's in the show notes. It's a good read if you really want to get deep into the weeds on the Swithen thing. We just don't have the time.

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, also, there's a lot going on with this whole topic. There's, that link will be in the show notes. Anyway, with all this said, why do you think more people don't enter into mediation? Because if you really just want out of the marriage and you want to bypass this crazy adversarial nature, family court system, it just seems like that's a good way to do this.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  Ah, I tried this.

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  I tried this at first with the Orett Center for Divorce Mediation. It was a nightmare. This particular place has some kind of cachet as like the place you go to mediate your divorce, which it absolutely is not. Do not go there. It was a nightmare. Two different attorneys advised me that the mediator, Michael Orett, was clearly biased against me and they both used that exact phrase. And that's when I pulled out. The second one I told me was the lawyer that I hired. I went out of my way to not poison the well with my lawyers. The lawyers I spoke to about this, they were just like, get out of there. We did end up using a mediator at the end to settle our divorce and she was great. She did not have good things to say about this place.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  And I mentioned it specifically because if you Google, you know, mediated divorce, a lot of times they're going to be the first thing that, that comes up.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  But is mediation itself bad? Because it seems like, you know, you had a bad experience, but not everyone's going to have that.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  Well, again, I would caution people against this particular mediator, but my divorce ultimately ended in mediation.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. After all that, oh my God.

• 1:04:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, I know, I know. If you want to mediate a divorce, you call a lawyer, you tell them you want a mediated divorce. If they seem hesitant to do it, you go find another lawyer who isn't. There's no special process for mediated divorce. A mediated divorce is when two lawyers hash out the details so everyone can get over this quickly and get on with their lives with minimal damage. The lawyers look at things amicably. They try to get a resolution everyone can live with quickly. And then final details get hammered out by a mediator. Orett was kind of like overpriced therapy with paperwork. When we saw the real mediator at the end, we were never even in the same room together.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  I see. Wow.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  Cause you don't, you don't need to be.

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  So do you have any advice for people who are going through a divorce or might do so later?

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  You need a lawyer up fast. Do not assume that your, your spouse is going to be reasonable. My biggest mistake was I was very naive about how easy the process would be. If you want to have a cooperative divorce, which is kind of the better term for mediated divorce, that's fine. Get a lawyer and tell your lawyer that if they don't want to do it, go find one who does. You need to document everything you can. You never know what might be helpful later. Be involved in your kid's life. Do not get emotional when communicating. I know that that can be super hard, but you need to be BIF, which means brief, informative, factual, and firm.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Fathers regularly get 50/50 custody of their kids, even when it's not what mom wants. You have to show up and oftentimes jump through a lot of flaming hoops to make it happen, but that's just the nature of getting divorced. Every court in America is, at least in theory, gender neutral. With that said, there can be variations from state to state and county to county. The best thing to do is consult with an attorney who can give you the lay of the land. There are some people who want to turn back the clock and these efforts should be scrutinized heavily. Remember, nearly everyone thinks their ex is a total jerk at the time of divorce. That's not evidence of anything. And all things being equal, it's better for kids to have involved and invested parents. Some people are bad spouses, but excellent parents, mediocre parents, and even the occasional coke dealer deserve to see their kids too.

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  The problem today isn't that dads have no rights. It's that it's all too easy for stubborn clients or greedy lawyers to drag out what should be a relatively simple divorce. The main thing for everyone is just to stay calm and pretend to be the adults that the courts want you to be. Thanks again to Nick Pell for helping us achieve full legal custody of the nuances here and thank you all for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me, [email protected]. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tada Sidlowskis, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  Our advice and opinions are our own and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, and I was a real estate lawyer, don't listen to me about anything. Also, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it's fact-checked. Consult a qualified professional before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.

• 1:08:24Speaker 00

  You may think you don't have an accent, which is exactly what your accent wants you to think. Every voice carries clues about class, identity, and belonging, and why what sounds intelligent, trustworthy, or normal often has more to do with power and familiarity than language itself.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Every person has an accent, but what really is driving our attitudes towards what's a beautiful language and what's not is our familiarity with that language. So the more familiar a language is or an accent is, the more we tend to like it, but also our beliefs about the speakers of those languages. And that is like 50% of what drives our attitudes towards language. When we're talking about someone speaking a different dialect, what we're talking about is that they're using differences at many levels of linguistics, not just sound. So they're saying syntactic or sentence structure differences. They might be adding different endings or deleting endings. That's morphology. They might be using different vocabularies, but an accent refers to only differences

• 1:09:22Speaker 04

  at the level of sound. So when we're attending to accents, we're attending to sound differences. And what that general description of the difference, it shows you there are so many different things you have to learn when you're learning a new language. There is more cognitive processing power when you hear a foreign accent. You have to recruit more neurons to unpack what you're hearing because it's less familiar. So you are exerting more processing effort. A lot of people actually experience that as something more difficult and unpleasant, but in other contexts where paying attention is important, it probably actually does help you, but you are actually using more processing power. Here's a great piece of evidence as how much our speech says about us without us being aware of it.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  Listen to linguist Valerie Friedland on episode 1349 and you may never hear anyone, including yourself, the same way ever again.

• 1:10:22Speaker 05

  Abercrombie Baby has every outfit they'll need to make this season of Firsts even more memorable. Think little looks with lots of cheer, like the Emerson dress or festive sweater. For cozy moments in, A&F essential sets are the go-to for comfort. And get ready to match your mini in cute pajama sets for the annual family card. Have a very Abercrombie Baby holiday. Shop in the app, online, and in stores.

• 1:10:52Speaker 05

  Abercrombie Baby has every outfit they'll need to make this season of Firsts even more memorable. Think little looks with lots of cheer, like the Emerson dress or festive sweater. For cozy moments in, A&F essential sets are the go-to for comfort. And get ready to match your mini in cute pajama sets for the annual family card. Have a very Abercrombie Baby holiday. Shop in the app, online, and in stores.