Evidence receipt / preference
Published · transcript-backedJames Sexton: preference
18 Sept 2023 Lex Fridman Podcast #396 – James Sexton: Divorce Lawyer on Marriage, Relationships, Sex, Lies & Love
“It’s full context storytelling, what I do for a living. So what I do is I take my client’s story, and I have to present it to a judge and make my client the hero in every way and the other side the villain in every way.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- James Sexton
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 18 Sept 2023
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…Do you think it’s possible to introspect looking backwards for every individual case where the disconnection began and how it evolved? Sure. Yeah. This is such a multi-variate equation. It’s a dance, it’s a chemistry, it’s what did you do and what did the other person do? And see, the interesting thing about being a divorce lawyer is I’m weaponizing intimacy in a courtroom. It’s full context storytelling, what I do for a living. So what I do is I take my client’s story, and I have to present it to a judge and make my client the hero in every way and the other side the villain in every way. Now I have to be careful not to do that in a manner that loses credibility because even a judge is smart enough to know that no one is all good or all bad. But only if you were reverse engineering a relationship and saying how did this break, you really have to look at both people, the good and the bad, what each of them did that moved the dial in these different directions. And I think that’s very hard for anyone going through a divorce to do about their own relationship. We don’t know who discovered water, but it wasn’t a fish. If you’re in it, I don’t think you see it clearly. I think as a divorce lawyer whose job is to really drill down on the facts and figure out what’s going on in this story, I have to look at both sides. So I have to think a lot about my own arguments, but I also have to think about what’s the other lawyer’s argument going to be, especially in custody cases. So I really have been forced to look at both sides for so many years, so deeply in relationships. Once you do that, you realize that the good guy, bad guy thing just doesn’t apply. I wonder if it’s the little things or a few big things that cause this connection. You’ve talked about granola and blowjobs, but those seem to be stories that you can tell to yourself like… Maybe that story should be explained or maybe not.…
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