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James Sexton: prediction

18 Sept 2023 Lex Fridman Podcast #396 – James Sexton: Divorce Lawyer on Marriage, Relationships, Sex, Lies & Love

“I think if we could figure out a way to take a divorcing couple that is interested in potentially mediating, and put them in a setting where we could give them both psilocybin, a good dose, like two and a half, three grams, and have them do individual sessions with controlled setting with a guide, and have them do that inner work, and then have them do some kind of a session together after they’ve had that experience, that psychedelic experience, I actually think you could do transformative divorce work, because I have found myself and certainly the many people that I’ve talked to who’ve had psilocybin experiences in particular, but any psychedelic experience, many of the empathogens or even MDMA… MDMA is an empathogen.”

— James Sexton

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
James Sexton
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
prediction
Recorded
18 Sept 2023
Publisher
Lex Fridman Podcast

Transcript context

…I’m glad they are. I’m glad they’re taking that leap. I’m glad they’ve taken that risk. It’s this whole beautiful mess that we’re all a part of. It’s like taking that risk, taking that leap of vulnerabilities of what this whole thing is about. And what a danger if we didn’t. You hear about people like Alexander Hamilton, or you hear about people who they were born of circumstances that these two people should never have had a kid, and then they did. That kid changes the world and moves the dial forward. What a great mistake. What a great… You can’t ever say it’s a mistake. What an amazing thing that happened. I think that that’s… One of the things I like about divorce as a practice and as almost looking at it like a spiritual practice, I think you just don’t know what is a blessing in the world. You just don’t know. I’ve spoken about this before publicly, and he does frequently. My father’s an alcoholic. My father’s been in recovery now for seven years, I think, but he was a bad alcoholic Vietnam veteran my whole life, and only got sober when I was in my 40s. A lot of the personality characteristics I have are consistent with those of adult children of alcoholics, desire for control and control issues, a lot of those things. I love my life. I’m having a great time. If I died tomorrow, man, I did more, learned more, earned more, loved more than I ever dreamed. So, I’m so glad my dad was an alcoholic. If you said to me, “How do you raise kids?” I wouldn’t say, “Well, you definitely want to be an alcoholic, because your kid’s going to get a lot of really good discipline lessons from that experience.” No, I wouldn’t want that for… But it’s born. All these wonderful things were born of this awful situation. So, I think divorce is the same thing. We make these mistakes, but they’re not really… I often have to say to my clients when they’re like, “Oh, I wish I’d never married this person,” I’m like, “You love your kids, right? Your kids are half that person. They would not be the organism they are without that person’s DNA. So, you can’t regret being with that person if you love your kids, because those kids don’t exist without that person.” I don’t know how we refocus on that. I don’t know. Maybe we give anyone going through a… I’ve actually had a theory, which I’ve not said out loud, but I’ll say it to you, because it’s just us talking. I think if we could figure out a way to take a divorcing couple that is interested in potentially mediating, and put them in a setting where we could give them both psilocybin, a good dose, like two and a half, three grams, and have them do individual sessions with controlled setting with a guide, and have them do that inner work, and then have them do some kind of a session together after they’ve had that experience, that psychedelic experience, I actually think you could do transformative divorce work, because I have found myself and certainly the many people that I’ve talked to who’ve had psilocybin experiences in particular, but any psychedelic experience, many of the empathogens or even MDMA… MDMA is an empathogen. d myself and certainly the many people that I’ve talked to who’ve had psilocybin experiences in particular, but any psychedelic experience, many of the empathogens or even MDMA… MDMA is an empathogen. If we brought that space and the divorce and conflict resolution space together, that psychopharmacological intervention on empathy, one’s empathy receptors or one’s connectivity, I think that could be radically transforming. It would be logistically an absolute nightmare. It would never get done from a legal standpoint, but man, I think sometimes that if… Because I think the more that you can bring people to the awareness of connection that comes from many people’s psychedelic experiences, I think they could then extrapolate that into their understanding of the conflict and disconnect they’re having with their partner.…

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