Disconnection Happens Slowly, Then All at Once

Everyone who finds out James Sexton is a divorce attorney wants a simple villain: cheating, money, or the internet. Talking with Lex Fridman, he refuses the shortcut. Marriages fail, he says, because of disconnection, and what causes that disconnection is the question that actually matters. He borrows a line he attributes to Tom Wolfe on bankruptcy: it happens very slowly, then all at once.

Cheating, in that frame, is the all-at-once. The work is asking how two people arrived at a place where cheating was even thinkable, then crossed from thought into action. Reverse-engineering a broken relationship, Sexton argues, means looking at both people, the good and the bad. His job in court is to make a client the hero and the other side the villain, but he has spent enough years doing it to know the good-guy, bad-guy story almost never holds.

Fridman brings up the granola-and-blowjobs stories Sexton is known for. A wife who used to give her husband oral sex decided, once they had children, that they should wait and have intercourse later so both could enjoy it; she meant well and was trying to save time. He, for his part, stopped buying her favorite granola. Neither mentioned the change. Years later, after a financial disaster or an affair, they sit in a lawyer's office and ask where it went wrong. Sexton says the answer is the granola, quite a while ago.

He asks clients a specific question: what does this person do that makes you feel loved? After a hard stretch with his younger son in his early twenties, Sexton asked the boy whether he knew he was loved, then whether he *felt* it. The gestures that register are almost embarrassingly small: bringing the paper up from the driveway, skipping the record they hate, buying the right cereal. When those gestures stop, he argues, you say so while it is still a small thing. People wait for the catastrophe, then try to reverse-engineer a failure that started at breakfast.

Sexton thinks popular culture has trained people to mock the person they live with. New relationships still get the pedestal; long ones get the eye-roll, the castrated-husband joke, the wife as a punchline. He calls that an incredibly toxic message. The successful relationships he has seen are the opposite: two people cheering for each other, thick as thieves, so clearly in one another's corner that taking sides against their partner is a losing move.

The rule is simple and hard. He does not talk down his partner, and he does not let anyone else do it to him. The world, he says, is already full of criticism, and people are harsher on themselves than anyone else is. A partner who can say you screwed up, refuse to lie about the blind spots, and still tell you to get up and go is, in his word, a superpower. Steve Harvey's version of the same idea, which Fridman raises, is not to take sides against the family. Sexton agrees you should not project the fight onto the world, because other people's view of the relationship will change how you view it yourselves.

Fridman loves watching one partner talk in an interview while the other looks on as if the wisest thing on earth is being said. Sexton maps that look onto a scene in *True Romance*, where Alabama holds up a sign that reads, "You're so cool." At weddings he never watches the bride. He watches the groom watching her, often seeing the dress for the first time, with a face that says everyone is looking at her and she is mine. That expression, he says, is adoration, and it is the feeling worth protecting.

Sexton does not understand the boast of a "successful" marriage that lasted fifty years, forty-seven of them miserable. That, he says, is turning the primary relationship of a life into a fifty-mile trail race. Congratulations: you took monogamy and made it something two people would not enjoy, then hung in there. He has a chicken-or-egg problem with the sacred-covenant argument. He suspects the concept was hard to sell, so someone said God requires it.

Once you have seen a real pair bond, he argues, the fake version is obvious. This was his first trip to Austin; he thought he had eaten a lot of barbecue, then he had Texas barbecue and realized he had never had it. Romantic love, he says, works the same way. After that, approaching someone who hurts you by asking what is going on in their life is a conscious choice, and a better one than seething. With dogs and children the loyalty is visceral; with a spouse it may have to start as a practice, and the time to start is when the stock is at its highest, not after the wheels come off.

Fridman quotes *BoJack Horseman* on rose-colored glasses turning red flags into flags, then argues that life is short enough to go all in anyway. Sexton answers with a line from *Drugstore Cowboy*: they played a game you could not win, to the utmost. To love anything is insane, because you have accepted that you will lose it. Get a dog and you have signed up for extraordinary pain in ten or fifteen years; people still do it because the ride until then is so good. Every marriage ends in death or divorce. His advice is to go in, get weird, and stop measuring the sex life against everyone else's. The only two people who should care how much sex you are having are the two people having it.

Sexton's book has a whole section on foot fetishes, which he finds funny because feet do nothing for him. The point is not the fetish. It is the hiding. He has represented people with odd sexual proclivities who told their partners nothing, tried to go without, found an outlet elsewhere, and then watched the discovery get labeled betrayal. Everyone wants a clean bad guy. "He had a secret foot thing" is an easy story. Most divorces, he says, are not that simple.

Fridman asks how you would even begin the conversation if you were into something far outside the usual script. Sexton flips the question: if you were, how would you keep your partner from knowing? That is a continuous choice to withhold, and he has never met anyone who hid a huge part of themselves for years and called it the best thing that happened. Gay clients who spent decades in the closet do not regret the families they had, he says, but they would not advise a twenty-year-old to wait until fifty for a second chapter. The motive is usually fear of rejection.

He is conflicted about religious faith and unsure he believes in the devil. If there were one, he thinks its main job would be to convince people they are so bestial that God could not love them, so they might as well lean into the awfulness. The lowest points of his own life, he says, came when he told himself he was awful and might as well act that way. Push sexuality, insecurity, or true feeling down and away from the person who is supposed to be number one, and you guarantee you will never feel their love. They love the version you presented. You know that version is not you.

Sexton is a seven-year brown belt under Marcelo Garcia, a late-middle-aged middleweight who still feels he should be wearing blue. Jiu-jitsu, he says, shows up in everything: you have to give something to get something. Every move creates opportunity and vulnerability; two people sitting in closed guard doing nothing is not a marriage. Fridman puts it bluntly: love is giving the other person the option to destroy you. Sexton agrees. Loving anything is courageous because it is terrifying, and it is only brave if you are scared. He has watched physically and mentally tough people get taken apart by a 120-pound woman, not on the mat but in life. The leverage we hand romantic partners is enormous, and almost nothing in school or art prepares anyone for it.

Fridman is saddened by how easily people forget the beautiful years once a breakup turns bitter, and he quotes Edgar Allan Poe on years of love forgotten in the hatred of a minute. Sexton has felt that for a long time. In the courtroom he can play the pit bull; behind closed doors he tells clients that how they end things is how they will remember the whole thing. A two-hour movie with a bad last fifteen minutes becomes a bad movie. By the time people hire him as a weapon against someone they loved, the animosity has usually erased the rest.

He tries not to function that way. When he thinks of women he dated, he reaches for the greatest hits, the moments of joy and connection. He cites an old line: if you do not learn to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy in your life and precisely the same amount of snow. After his mother died following a long, awful decline, he feared he would only remember her withered in the hospice bed. Memory, he found, was kinder. He now remembers her laughter and health. He does not know why people refuse that kindness to former partners, except that culture treats relationships as binary: happily ever after, or it was all wrong. He would rather see them as chapters. None of the later ones happen without the earlier ones.

Fridman pushes back: trauma and betrayal can drown the good on purpose, and one infidelity can rewrite the past. Sexton is continually astounded by how long the anger of betrayal can last; some clients are as furious four or five years after the divorce as the day they found out. Others look back and say they were fools for love, and there are worse things to be fools for. He does not want to blame the betrayed, but he has rarely seen truly content couples cheat on each other. He represents cheaters and the cheated, victims of domestic violence and perpetrators, and the work has forced a radical empathy in which good guys and bad guys mostly dissolve. Love, he adds, is also hilarious. He has done dramatic readings of powerful people's sexts. One famous former client had a whole thread asking whether his penis was weird. If you have to ask, Sexton says, the answer is probably yes.

Most states are now no-fault, so infidelity usually does not walk into court. There is no good-spouse bonus or bad-spouse penalty. Lawyers prove cheating mainly when they need to show wasteful dissipation of marital assets: money spent on a paramour, the legal word for the person the client is more likely to call something unprintable. Inclination and opportunity have to be shown. Dinner with your brother is not dissipation. A Tiffany bracelet for the girlfriend is, and the other spouse is entitled to a credit. The people who pretend "she's just a friend" destroy their credibility. The people who own it often do not.

Sexton deposed an executive who, shown a hotel charge, said it was a room with his girlfriend, an afternoon delight, they had not even stayed the night. It took the thunder out of the other lawyer. His firm calls the move the Eight Mile strategy, after the Eminem film: say the worst thing about yourself first. If his client texted a co-parent "you piece of shit, I hope you die," Sexton puts the message on the record on direct exam, has the client read it, and asks whether it was helpful. The client says he was furious, she had sent fifty like it, he finally blew up, and he wishes he could promise he would do it differently, but he is human. Across the room, Sexton watches opposing counsel cross out entire pages. The Perry Mason moment is gone. Own the fault, he says, and you take a lot of the power out of it.

He does not want people having substantive fights by text. Texts were built for "are you here" and "I got home safely." On the drive to the studio he had been reading a custody thread that went from "you never cared about anything" to, the next day, Maddie getting a good grade in science, with nothing in between. He wanted to know whether anyone had called to apologize, or whether they were pretending the explosion had not happened. Text has permanence; it is writing. Would you put it on a billboard in Times Square? Everything on Facebook or Instagram, he warns, can and will be used in court, including every photo. His job, depending on the client, is either to say the low moment is who they really are, or to say we have all had a low moment and you would not want to be judged by yours.

The Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial, for Sexton, proved there is no amount of money worth laying that kind of private wreckage out in public. Both looked awful in stretches; he does not claim to know whether one or both of them *are* awful. What shocked viewers, he says, was how banal it was. That level of chaos, he-said-she-said, and disputed violence is not the exception in his practice. It is the norm. They just had a bigger stage and more money. Clients bring smiling vacation photos as proof they are good parents; he thinks of photographs of Jeffrey Dahmer smiling with people he later ate. He was in the middle of a complex domestic-violence trial whose defense was happy vacation pictures and the fact that she never called the police. That is no defense. Most victims of intimate-partner abuse do not call the cops, and they do not self-identify as victims. Perpetrators, he adds, are charismatic. If they were ogres from the start, no one would sign on. When they are good they are so good that the bad version feels like someone else.

Asked for the craziest case, Sexton says chaos and complexity are different things. The chaos is nannies, relatives, secret non-monogamy, enough material for fifteen books. The complexity is custody, because "better parent" is loaded with value judgments. The old maternal presumption, or tender-years doctrine, used to give mothers of children under seven custody unless they were proven unfit; that law changed in the 1980s, but the cultural gravity did not vanish. Most custody cases never become wars. They are two people who love the children more than they dislike each other, negotiating schools, medication, and the calendar. Sexton often has to reframe a client who wants every Thanksgiving because "we always went to my mother's," or who wants the other parent on weekends only because "I do the homework." New traditions will exist. If one parent does all the broccoli and the other does all the fun, the thirteen-year-old will notice.

The story people at parties actually want, he admits, is the nanny. His book has a chapter titled along the lines of everybody sleeping with the nanny, and he has had the full range: people who ran off with her, people who married her, one man who talked his wife into drunken threesomes with the nanny only for the nanny and the wife to pair up and leave him. They are still happy; he is not. Sexton does not advise hiring an unattractive nanny. He thinks a woman who has become a mother should stay in touch with the independent person her partner fell in love with. On the success side, he is better at spotting collapse than defining intelligence, but he comes back to connection, affection, and presence. Offered two hours of undivided, joyful attention or eight hours of half-presence, almost no one would take the eight. There is a you, a me, and a we; when the we gets so big that you and me disappear, the original reason for picking each other is gone. Friendship with a spouse, for him, should clear the bar in *The Town*: "Whose car are we taking?"

High performers, he says, are creatures of routine, and divorce yanks control of house, children, and schedule out of their hands. Money buys a great lawyer; it does not buy an ending, as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's years of custody litigation showed. The two questions every client asks—how long and how much—are the two he cannot answer. The cheapest divorce he has seen was $3,500: a couple who had written the deal on a yellow pad at the kitchen table, house to her, 401(k) to him, bank account split, child support set, and needed it made binding. The most expensive run to millions; some of his clients have paid two or three million in fees. Complexity does that: dueling mental-health experts, Hague Convention cases when a parent absconds abroad, a hair-follicle test that comes back positive for cocaine the morning unsupervised parenting was about to start. High-net-worth finances add another layer. Ordinary people own a house. His clients own an LLC that owns the house, held by a trust in which they have a beneficial interest, which is also how some people earning tens or hundreds of millions a year pay less tax than a cop.

Years after his own divorce, Sexton asked his ex-wife why she had always been flexible about extra ice-cream nights. Partly goodwill, she said, and partly because he had never screwed around with her on money; when her air conditioner died and neither of them had much, he replaced it so the boys would not live in a hot house. It is hard to argue with someone who will not argue back. In court, the louder the other table gets, the quieter he gets, until the volume over there looks like the problem. He tells clients with a four-year-old that there will be a wedding in twenty years. It will either require seating them on opposite sides of the room, or it will be the day they take pictures and admit they botched the marriage and maybe did all right with the kid. Every decision now is a straight line to that wedding. So for 27 Mother's Days he has written his ex-wife that he is glad they had children, glad she is their mother, because they are who they are only as part him and part her. He does not understand why that is so hard for some people.

Sexton once drafted what he thought was a no-brainer clause. While the children are too young to buy a Mother's Day or birthday gift on their own, each parent takes them to get a small present or make a card, so a five-year-old is not empty-handed on the other parent's birthday. He even wrote that the point was to spare the child embarrassment, not to be kind to the ex. Lawyers told him to take it out. Why, they asked, should their client buy a gift for his client? It can be a three-dollar box of drugstore chocolates, he said. People still refused. Among the puzzles he cannot solve, that one sits near the top.

A real apology, in his definition, names the act: I lied, I know it hurt you, I should not have done it, I regret it. "I'm sorry you got so upset" is not an apology. Neither is "I'm sorry you found out." He can forgive a lot if he gets the first kind. What he cannot fathom is keeping enough vitriol, after that, to harm your own child rather than do something small and decent. Parental alienation is real, and children get weaponized under the banner of protection. A bad spouse is not automatically a bad parent, and the skill sets are not the same. As a lawyer, what he knows does not matter; what he can prove does, and alienation is usually too subtle to prove. Almost nobody tells a seven-year-old "your dad is a bad person." They say it with their face when they hand over the phone. "Remember, he is not your dad," said of a new boyfriend, loads the child with a script. "Is he nice? I heard he likes bicycles" gives permission to like the person. Having a child with someone, Sexton warns, is a missile. Money you can lose. A co-parent has power over you for a long time, maybe forever.

On prenups his view is blunt, and he is willing to quote Kanye West: if you are not a chump, you want a prenup. It is a contract about money if you divorce, nothing more. Crafted correctly, they work. Downloading one is a bad idea; he has seen six-figure people void an agreement over a missing notary acknowledgment. The most expensive prenup he has done was about three thousand dollars. The generic version he likes is yours, mine, and ours: sole-name assets and debts stay separate, joint names split fifty-fifty. That forces the conversation during the marriage, when a bonus hits one account instead of the joint one, rather than ten years later in his office. Legal marriage, he reminds people, is the most legally significant thing most of them will ever do besides dying, and the first education they get about it is the day they hire him. A prenup is a chance to learn the rules at the start, the way you would want to know whether a match is submission-only before you step on the mat.

What you actually need to draft one, he used to tell law students, is a crystal ball. You cannot know who will make money, who will inherit, who will found the hundred-million-dollar company. So you build structures and live inside them. Almost anything can be written in. One appellate case involved a high-net-worth husband whose prenup cut the wife's alimony by ten thousand dollars a month for every ten pounds she gained over a baseline weight; the court essentially said it did not understand why she had married him, and then held it binding. Two clauses Sexton discourages anyway: fidelity clauses, which sound like a deterrent and become a fight over what counts as cheating and how you prove sex happened, and sunset clauses, which make the prenup vanish after a set number of years. California-style community property, in his telling, creates the same ugly thought experiment at the six-year mark: am I happy enough to throw my premarital assets into the pot, or do I have six months to get out? He gets paid, he says, to see around corners.

In his book Sexton argues that not all infidelity is the same. The type he sees most is the soulmate: someone rekindles a connection, often on social media, and announces that the heart wants what it wants. If we were going to invent an infidelity-generating machine, he wrote in 2019, we would call it Facebook; rewriting now, he would call it Meta. The platform puts people in windows they used to walk past. The attractive parent at soccer practice used to stay at soccer practice. Now there is a legitimate reason to connect, then a bikini photo from vacation, then a harmless message about the hotel, and the spark is already going. Nobody opens with "would you like to wreck your marriage?" It happens slowly. When a man finds out his wife cheated, Sexton says, the first question is usually whether she slept with the other person. When a woman finds out, the first question is whether he loves her. Those are different wounds. "I found the one, and it is not you" is especially brutal for his female clients, even in the cases where the affair later became a twenty-year marriage.

Another type he calls being pushed out of the closet, more common earlier in his career, when professional scorn kept people hiding same-sex relationships until they were caught. He has not lived that betrayal, but he imagines it would be easier than being left for someone of his own sex: that says they want a better version of you; this says they want something this restaurant does not serve. The saddest type, for him, is the mistake. People do deeply stupid things around sex, with poor impulse control, that do not match their morals or the depth of their feeling. Clients speaking candidly will say they love their wives, make love to their wives, and still wanted to sleep with this one bright shiny object. Culture treats one of those facts as erasing the other. Whether marriage is mainly about whom you have sex with, or a pair bond about building a life, is a conversation he points toward writers like Esther Perel rather than claiming to settle.

Open marriages show up in his office, with an obvious sample bias: he meets the ones that are falling apart. Often the arrangement was a Hail Mary, a last attempt to keep the glue on. Threesomes with a long-term partner plus a new person strike him as especially dangerous ground. He cannot even go to strip clubs, because he does not know where to look: the face feels rude to ignore, the body feels rude to ignore, and his brain locks. With two strangers the logistics are different. With someone you still have to live with, you will want the novelty and also need not to signal that you are more interested in the guest. The data is easy to misread. Of course you indulge the person you may never sleep with again; your partner's insecure voice hears that you preferred her. The harder question, he thinks, is what is unsatisfying in the sex you already have, and whether you can stand to ask it.

He does not deny the feeling that someone is a missing puzzle piece. He thinks it usually means a lot of overlapping connections: mind, sex, history, culture, even complementary pathologies. He is obsessively disciplined; a flexible partner is good for him, and he is good at pulling them back to the task. What he rejects is the product being sold as soulmate: if they disappoint you in any role—travel companion, talker, roommate, lover—they were never the one. The odds of one person being all of that are absurd, and they do not have to be. If nine courses at a restaurant are the best meal of your life and one is ordinary, you do not get to say it was the wrong restaurant. Love, as he defines it, is not that you never let the person down. It is that you never want to. "I will disappoint you, but I never want to disappoint you." Hurt will come from insecurity, stupidity, and humanity, not from intent. A couple together for sixty years has lied, let each other down, and stayed because the reasons to ride were larger than the reasons to get off. That, he says, is beautiful because of the imperfections, not in spite of them.

How much fighting is too much? Sexton compares it to how much sex is enough: it depends on the two people, and the problem is a mismatch. He cites the *Annie Hall* split screen in which one partner says they have sex all the time, once a week, and the other says they never have sex, once a week. Same data, opposite stories. Some people enjoy argument; he argues for a living, so in his free time he wants discussion. What shocks him on Nest cameras and secret phone recordings is the brutality of the language spouses use, the insults and degradation, and then the next day proceeding as if nothing happened. He does not know that he could feel free connection with someone who had spoken to him that way.

Family law in his world is a bench trial. He has to persuade one person in a black robe, and those people are all too human. They are parents and spouses, working out their own material while you talk about theirs. In one trial an expert described emotional and physical abuse of a seven-year-old; around day six the judge, who had been half paying attention, interrupted to ask whether spanking counted as abuse. Sexton sat there thinking about what had gone on in that judge's house. You cannot object when the judge asks the question. The difference between a good judge and a bad one, he says, is enormous. Put sex and children in the same case and, in his experience, everyone loses their mind: rush to judgment, confirmation bias, procedure treated as optional. He once went off on a prosecutor in a child-sexual-abuse case, insisting that only a neutral validation expert, on camera, with strict rules against suggestive questions, should interview the child. Wanting to win is fine. Kicking the other boxer in the groin while the referee looks away might win something, he said, but it is not boxing. "We always treat dandruff with decapitation in this culture." The law, at its best, is a way to bring out the truth with rules.

He has watched people torpedo an entire case by lying about something small. A client accused of abusing a child denied an affair with the babysitter; texts proved it. Why lie, Sexton asked. The man did not want it to come out. Now he was a liar. If he had not molested the child, admitting he slept with an adult woman would have helped: it is adult women he likes. Instead he burned his credibility. Divorce lawyers get a bad reputation partly because nobody is happy to spend time with one. A criminal lawyer can feel like a savior; a real-estate lawyer hands you keys. At best Sexton is the representative of a miserable chapter. A Juilliard-trained pianist friend spent fifteen thousand dollars on a humidification system for a piano and called it the most depressing money he had ever spent, because nothing in his own body felt different. Divorce is like that: you finish and have little to show. In a performative culture you can pretend you meant the flop album or the bad haircut. You cannot pretend you meant to get divorced. You stood up and said forever, and it did not go forever. The question then is what to make it into. "The barn burned down, now I can see the moon."

Some lawyers stoke conflict because they get paid by the bullet; Sexton says they usually do not last, because the business runs on reputation. Experienced lawyers skip the theater: you will say this, I will say that, the judge will land here, so let us land here now. He likens it to Miyamoto Musashi's swordsmen who see the whole fight in their heads and walk away, or to a chess player resigning fifteen moves before the mate. Kevin Costner's recent case, from the outside, looked to him like a public demonstration that prenups work. Costner's first divorce cost him a huge distributive award; this time he had a well-crafted, enforceable agreement, with the fight narrowed to support and what the prenup covers. *Yellowstone* also showed why you cannot predict a career. Laura Wasser, Costner's lawyer, is known for not trying cases in the press, which Sexton considers wise. After his own divorce he went on a promising date with a beautiful fellow divorced parent; when she said they could go to a museum next weekend because "the kids are with the asshole," he heard a record scratch. Matthew McConaughey, by contrast, talks about Penelope Cruz as a special, wonderful woman he was blessed to know. He never sounds petty. He just sounds cooler.

Clients tell Sexton they will not lie to their children about a father's affair. He does not buy it. You lie to children all the time, he says: about death, about Santa, about whether the doctor visit will hurt. You do not have to pretend you like your ex. You do have to grin when the child says daddy's new girlfriend did her hair. In the law, fraud is a material misrepresentation of fact; mere puffery is allowed. Relationships, he thinks, need a similar distinction between honesty and total candor. "Do I look fat in this?" answered with a yes is honest and almost mean. Answered with a fake no is not useful either. Point to the blue dress that actually flatters, make it about the cut, and you have told the truth without a material lie. If someone says "I love you" and you do not, do not say it back; find the middle of strong feeling rather than pretending you did not hear. People who ask him for the cause of divorce or the secret of staying together want measurable moves, which is why his book talks about leaving a note or sending a text that says what you like. Low cost, high value. Broad advice like "communicate more" does not tell anyone what to do on a Tuesday.

Sexton wakes at 4 a.m. without an alarm, at full speed. His best writing and speaking run from then until noon. The first move is the phone, because a divorce-lawyer emergency can mean a parent absconding with a child or the police at a domestic-violence call; clients have his cell number. He is asleep by eight, and he does not think he has seen 9 p.m. even on New Year's Eve. Then a black espresso, then an hour of training, more cardio than the heavy deadlifts he used to do. He herniated L5-S1; his max was 485 pounds, and he still has video of a triple at that weight, because he is evidence-based and otherwise it is puffery. He used to roll at 5 a.m. with law-enforcement guys coming on or off shift, then sauna and a cold plunge, then a simple slow-carb breakfast in the Tim Ferriss style. Drafting happens early: prenups, motions, settlement proposals, pretrial memos. Court is nine to noon. Trial days are a different sport. He never sleeps worse than the night before a trial, or better than the night it ends. He lives in six-minute increments, tenths of an hour, because that is how the billing works. His older son is a district attorney. When the young man graduated, Sexton told him he would never again have the feeling that the homework was done. You will just decide it is enough, and leave, because any one case could eat twenty-four hours.

Jiu-jitsu came back into his life after an early divorce, as an alternative to the goatee-and-convertible cliché. A 120-pound woman ragdolled him in his first class; he stayed. He took a purple belt under Louis Vintaloro, then chose a Manhattan apartment for its walk to Marcelo Garcia's academy. The most emotional story he tells Fridman is not a custody case. Eight or nine years ago he was sponsoring jiu-jitsu super fights and athletes. Gordon Ryan, then a young member of the Danaher Death Squad, trash-talked a competitor Sexton sponsored. Looking back, Sexton sees ordinary Muhammad Ali-style brand work. At the time his mother was dying, he was not at his best, and he asked John Danaher and Tom DeBlass to make the kid knock it off. Comments flew on Facebook. Sexton was, in his own account, incredibly obnoxious to a young person only a little older than his son. He felt gross almost immediately. He still texts Danaher congratulations after Ryan's big wins, because he has no number and no channel to apologize. If Ryan hears the conversation, Sexton says, he is profoundly sorry. It was a wrong, stupid way to talk to a young person on the way up.

Fridman asks what role love plays in the human condition. Sexton says it is kind of everything: wars are fought for it, empires fall because of it, it takes down kings. Everyone is chasing the dragon. He thinks a lot of what men do, including him, is in some sense aimed at getting laid: success for money, money for nice things, nice things to attract the people they want. Even the red-pill man who claims not to care about women talks about women constantly. A person who worships an idol and a person who smashes one are both in the idol business. When he started out representing cops and teachers with a 401(k) and no real assets, he assumed celebrities and wealthy CEOs would be different, smarter, other. They were not. Same pettiness, same infidelity, same jealousy, same mommy and daddy and intimacy issues. World-class athletes, doctors, and businesspeople, in his experience, are no better at relationships than anyone else. The skills that make a good entrepreneur do not automatically make a good spouse.

What humbles him is that people keep playing. They lose, they swear they are through with love, and they walk down the aisle again. He knows people who quit drinking because they "break out in handcuffs and hospital bills." He does not know people who actually quit pairing off. That, he jokes, is job security. Fridman is glad they keep taking the leap; the beautiful mess is the point. Sexton agrees, and adds the danger of not leaping. Some children are born of couples who "should never have had a kid," and then that child moves the world; he mentions Alexander Hamilton. You cannot finally call it a mistake. He has come to treat divorce almost as a spiritual practice, because you do not know what a blessing is. His father, a Vietnam veteran, was a serious alcoholic until Sexton was in his forties and has now been in recovery for years. Many of Sexton's own control issues match the profile of adult children of alcoholics. He loves his life. If he died tomorrow he would have done, learned, earned, and loved more than he once dreamed. So he is glad his father was an alcoholic, even though he would never recommend alcoholism as a parenting strategy. The good things were born of the awful situation. When clients say they wish they had never married this person, he asks whether they love their kids. Those kids are half that person. They do not exist without that DNA. You cannot fully regret the relationship if you love the children it made.

He has a theory he had not said out loud. If a divorcing couple willing to mediate could take a solid dose of psilocybin, two and a half or three grams, in a guided setting, do the inner work separately, then sit together, he thinks you could do transformative divorce work. Connection is the theme he keeps meeting in psychedelic experience, and he would like that awareness imported into conflict. Logistically, from a legal standpoint, it would be a nightmare and would never get done. What drew him to the work in the first place was not demolishing a building but tearing it down so a new one could go up. His ex-wife has been remarried more than a decade to a therapist who is, Sexton says, perfect for her and nothing like him: patient where he is impatient, chill where he wants to land the plane. If you can look at that without jealousy, you can say this is the love she needed. That does not make his love bad. It was not the right one for this person. There is a lid for every pot. He wanted her to find hers.