3335 What Nobody Tells You About Divorce | Joseph Sorge and Stefan Molyneux
More money flows through the family courts, and into the hands of courthouse insiders, than in all other court systems in America combined. The documentary "DivorceCorp" looks at the business of divorce and business is booming. Joseph Sorge is the writer/director of DivorceCorp who became interested in the subject of divorce after experiencing firsthand the complexities of the family law system. For more, please check out: http://www.divorcecorp.comFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
We're back with Joseph Sorch.
He is an entrepreneur and also the writer and director of, I guess, the most realistic horror movie I've ever seen called Divorce Corp.
It's a powerful documentary which exposes the complexities and corruptions within the American family law system.
Joseph, great to have you back.
Thank you, Stefan.
I appreciate it very much.
So just for a note, people can go to divorcecorp.com.
if they want to view the movie.
And it is essential viewing.
You know, I mean, just about everyone has been touched by divorce in some way, whether it's, you know, your parents divorced or you've been through a divorce or your sister or something like that.
And particularly in America, we hold the complexities and confusions and outright often it seems like predations of the family court system It's just kind of a law of physics, you know, it's just the way things have to be.
But one of the things that I really appreciated about the film was its comparison with other countries, particularly the Scandinavian countries.
So let's start off with what is going on in the American family court system at the moment and then we'll talk about how it contrasts and compares with others.
So what are the big things that you see going on at the moment that have not magically been fixed since the release of your movie, but at least people are talking about them?
Well, the American family court system is a throwback to old England, where the king decided things.
In family court, you have one individual who makes the decisions, and that's the judge.
There's no jury.
Some states have a jury, but most of them, the vast majority, do not.
So you have one individual who's the decision maker and executioner all at once, and he or she decides, based on their own personal prejudices, their biases, and their judgment, what should be done.
These courts are called courts of equity as opposed to courts of law.
And by giving them that label, courts of equity, they get to circumnavigate a number of protections that we have in courts of law.
As I said, you're not entitled to a jury in most states.
You're not entitled to an attorney.
If you cannot afford an attorney, you cannot ask the state or you cannot demand that the state produce an attorney for you.
You're on your own.
You're not really entitled to a transcript.
You can hire a transcriptionist and pay for that yourself, but you can't demand that the hearings be transcribed.
And therefore, if you can't afford it, you really have no appeal process because the appellate courts act on transcripts.
So there are many protections that we think that we're entitled to in court, but they're not present in the family courts.
Well, and if you decide not to go through mediation, you go through the family court system.
The average contested divorce in the United States of America costs about $50,000.
And, you know, it's funny because, you know, you want to divide the property, you end up dividing it between the remnants of the marital couple and the lawyers and psychologists and social workers and everybody else who floats around this wreckage.
You've got to sell your house, you've got to sell your cars.
And sometimes, as you point out in the movie, judges will just place liens on people's property to get the people paid that they feel need to be paid.
That's absolutely right.
You know, in most instances, in most transactions in life, you pay a small fee.
Credit cards might extract 1% or 2% when you go through a credit card transaction.
If you do a big transaction, like you sell your home, you're going to pay 4% or 5% to the real estate agents.
You're going to pay another percent to the bank.
In points and fees.
But you don't pay 50%, 80%, 100% of your wealth in order to complete something.
But family court is so inefficient, and it's so antiquated, and it's so greedy.
That it consumes 50 to 80 to 100% of people's wealth.
By the time they are leaving family court, many people are bankrupt.
It's the fourth most common cause of bankruptcy.
And so we ask, why is this government-imposed institution taking such huge pieces of people's income?
And if, you know, if the government wanted to impose a tax to disincentivize divorce, well then that money that people are paying would be going to the general coffers so that it could be distributed to the population.
But that's not what's going on here.
The money is going to private attorneys and it's being put into their pockets.
I think the saying is you are spending the money for your children's education on the education of your attorney's children.
And that's our system.
I mean, it's absurd how a system that really is supposed to be helping people going through a very difficult time is actually enriching the attorneys who are operating within the system.
And what's really horrible is those attorneys are allowed to make campaign contributions to the judges who are hearing the cases.
And so, you know, there have been studies, and one was published in the New York Times, about how do judicial decisions, how are they influenced by the amount of money that an attorney contributes to the judge?
And it was shown that attorneys who contribute to judges win about 70 percent of their cases, and those that do not contribute to judges, well, then they win about 30 percent of their cases.
So there's clear bias in the system.
And yet these attorneys are allowed to essentially bribe these judges to sway them in favor of the cases that they are presenting to the court.
Well, and that's for those outside of America.
That is based upon the reality that judges in these situations run for appointment or election.
And that costs money.
And of course, they would rather spend other people's than their own.
Is that the cycle?
Yes, that's essentially what's going on.
I mean, if we were to fund, as taxpayers, fund judicial campaigns, then these judges would not have to go out there and raise money.
And, you know, very few average people contribute to judicial campaigns.
We don't know the judges.
We don't care, other than to get a good judge.
But, you know, by donating money to someone that you don't even know doesn't guarantee you're going to get a good judge.
But there are special interests who are interested in getting certain judges elected.
And those special interests are the attorneys.
The social service workers who appear in family court, the accountants who appear in family court, and the group of people who are called guardians ad litem who are appointed by the judge to protect, so, you know, quote-unquote, protect the children in family court.
These people give all sorts of money to the judges.
Now, I'll say, in fairness, that in some states, the amount of money that can be contributed to a judge is limited per person.
But that doesn't stop the attorney, the attorney's spouse, the attorney's children from contributing to the judge, the partners in the law firm.
An attorney might be a family practitioner in a law firm with 100 other lawyers.
They all can contribute to the judge.
And in aggregate, that could add up to six-figure contributions to the judge.
So it makes a big difference.
And not only can they contribute cash, they can sponsor fundraisers.
They can speak on behalf of the judge and, you know, endorse a judge for election.
They can campaign against someone who doesn't play the games that they want played in court and try to disparage that person.
So there's all types of ways that the insiders in the system can influence the outcome of judicial elections.
There's this tragedy that goes on in the realm of divorce, and I think that people's magical thinking about how these things can be solved is one thing that contributes to this kind of problem.
For instance, when you get divorced, basic math, it costs a lot more for people to live in two houses than for the same people to live in the same house.
So what that means is that having a divorce is going to lower the standard of living for one or both of the spouses.
And that used to be, of course, a bit of an incentive to not get divorced, to work it out because you didn't want a big drop in the standard of living.
And number two, of course, is that people who can't cooperate to the point where they can stay married are going to have disagreements about how to raise the children.
And those disagreements are going to have to be resolved in some manner, which means that, you know, one of the one of the people who don't get along with the other people is going to have to surrender their preference over their children's raising.
And these two things, you can't magically just sort of wish them away.
But I think this idea that for women in particular, who initiate divorce more often and generally get custody and generally get child support and alimony, there's this kind of magical thing where, well, I'm going to get divorced, but somehow my standard of living is not going to drop, you know, to be Taking care of in the style to which you've become accustomed.
Well, that's given that there's less after the divorce to begin with, both because of the two families and also because of the cost of the legal procedures.
That means that whatever the woman gets that makes it either break even or slightly advantageous has to come out of the heart, blood, mind and spleen of the man.
Yeah, I think you bring up some very good points.
The first is the math.
You cannot just take something and divide it in half and expect both sides to be obtaining what they did obtain prior to the marriage.
In fact, when two people live together, there's a cost savings in terms of the economics of the rent or the mortgage payment.
You know, you have two people under one roof instead of each needing to have their own separate roofs.
Their sharing of food, their sharing of transportation.
There's all kinds of cost savings that are benefited by a couple benefits by.
When you have individuals who have split up, then there are no longer those same cost savings.
And so there's less money to go around to support the lifestyle.
If you have laws that say that one person must be kept in the lifestyle prior to the separation or the divorce, that must mean that the other person must take a more significant reduction in lifestyle.
And that's simply not fair.
Yet, the way our laws are set up, they're set up to create this unfair imbalance.
And that unfair imbalance oftentimes creates disharmony between the individuals.
And unfortunately, that disharmony spills over to the children in many cases.
And the children, in cases where there's a contested situation or where money becomes a significant issue, are harmed by the disharmony between their parents.
And the idea that in family courts, they have the right to choose one parent over the other parent, that is very destructive because that's going to be cause for manipulation.
A lot of the false, what turns out to be a lot of times false allegations are put forward about negative behavior, abuse, and so on.
So this idea that one parent gets pitted against the other and the court can choose one or the other versus this sort of 50-50 thing, that is really astonishing.
The idea that somebody can bungee into a decaying marriage or a disintegrating marriage and know which is the better parent when they're speaking through lawyers with all of the weird twisted incentives that that whole adversarial system brings is inconceivable to me.
And anybody who claims expertise in this area, I would view at least to some degree with significant skepticism.
Yeah, I agree 100%.
I could speak for hours on this topic.
But let me just start off with how they do it in Scandinavia.
Because people say, oh, well, we have to do it the way there's no other solution than what we do in the United States.
But that's not true.
Travel to Scandinavia, especially to Sweden, where I think they lead the Scandinavian countries in their progressive thinking, they essentially share the children 50-50 in many, many, I think 40 or 50% of the time.
And it's equal sharing, and it works out quite well.
In fact, there is a Swedish researcher named Malin Bergstrom, and she's done a number of studies on the outcomes of children after divorce, and she's looked at how children perform on a number of scales.
Not just academic scales, but overall happiness, health, sense of well-being, etc.
And she has shown that children who live with both parents in the nuclear family do the best, but children who live with separated or divorced parents 50-50 do almost as well.
And then it falls off sharply when we look at families where the sharing of children is more like 20-80, as it is in many cases in the United States, or 30-70, those children do not do as well as the children who are with their parents roughly equally.
And the children who do the worst are the ones who are with just one parent.
And, you know, unfortunately, in the United States, 30 percent of our children in the United States live with just one parent.
And this is a result of either...
The parents never having gotten together as a family, or it's the result of our system in the United States that actually financially encourages single parenthood.
And I have YouTube videos that you could see that will go into the details of this, but essentially our federal government provides incentives to the states to create single parent households.
Well, and those single parent households will generally vote for more and more government.
They will often vote for the left.
And this, of course, has been a big tension between the Republicans and the Democrats since Dan Quayle's famous statements years ago about Murphy Brown, that the right prefers intact families and the left at least has some significant incentive to create single parent households because if they're headed by women in particular, they will tend to reliably vote left because they need somebody to provide the resources that the absent father is providing either none of or less of.
I think you've identified a feedback loop that does get politicians elected who are in favor of single-parent households.
But it's more perverse than that.
The federal government provides incentive dollars to the states to collect child support.
The more that a state collects each year, the more dollars it receives from the federal government.
Now, child support is an amount of money that's paid by one parent to the other parent to help raise the child.
In most states, the states look at the incomes of both parents, and if the incomes are equal in many states, then there's no need for child support because both parents have equal capability of supporting the child, and if they share the child 50-50, then no money goes back and forth between the two parents.
If that were the case in the majority of divorced families, the amount of child support being paid each year would go down.
And thus the states, the amount of money that the states receive from the federal government would go down.
And so the states are disincentivized to encourage shared parenting.
We are in an age now where women earn, regardless of what you hear from President Obama or Hillary Clinton, women do not earn 77% of what men earn.
When you look at, first of all, younger women, you look at women that are in the same occupation as men, or you look at the women that are working the same number of hours as men.
The disparity in the amount that women earn It's primarily due to women electing to work fewer hours or electing to participate in jobs that have more schedule flexibility or jobs that are not as dangerous as some of the jobs that men participate in.
When you normalize for those factors and equate things Women between the ages of 24 and 35 today are earning, I think it's 94% of what men earn.
And in some occupations, like pharmacists, women earn 100% of what men earn.
Or social workers earn 103% of what men earn.
Or health technologists earn 104% of what men earn.
My point is that what was called the wage gap or the earnings gap is decreasing and has been decreasing for 20 years in the United States.
You would think that that would reduce the amount of child support that's being paid in the United States because the wages are getting more equal.
Well, in fact, the amount of child support that's paid in the United States adjusted for inflation has been going up and continues to go up.
And the only thing I can think of That is driving that is that the states are incentivized to collect more and more child support each year or enforce the collection of more and more child support each year.
And the courts that are employed by the states are incentivized to make larger and larger child support awards each year.
And so what we found, and I've worked with an economist named William Komenor, and he's done a study, he's a professor of economics at UCLA, and he's done a study of what it actually costs to raise a child, and he's found that the average amount of child support that's awarded each year is about twice what it actually costs to raise that child.
And so they've padded the child support amounts with a built-in amount of what I call pseudo-alimony, Which is an amount of money that's really intended for the other spouse instead of the child, but it's called child support.
And that other spouse has no accountability as to how any of the money is spent.
And so what we have here is an unhealthy partnership between the federal government, the states, and the single parent.
To create a system and perpetuate a system and enhance a system that increases every year the amount of money that's taken from the provider spouse and given to the dependent spouse.
And thus we've created a very profitable situation, a profitable essentially profession to be a professional baby maker.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, it's strange to think that children, which are a liability until they grow up and then become an asset to society as a whole, have somehow been turned through this, through the welfare states or other things, into a money-making asset.
It's just a remarkable reversal of economics.
Now, speaking of kids, of course, the idea behind Family Court is to shield the children, of course, as much as possible from the difficulties of the whole process.
Boy, the way it plays out, it doesn't really seem to work out that way.
And sort of the two things that crossed my mind on watching the movie is, well, number one, you are going to get more custody, more child support, more resources if you can convince the judge that you are a better parent.
And generally, it's easier to portray the other parent as worse than to magically become better yourself, which looks opportunistic.
So this creates this tear the other person down to win the pile of gold and the attention of the children.
And of course, as you point out, judges will hire sometimes attorneys for the children.
And the attorney then cross-examines the children about their home life and their parents and so on.
It's a pretty terrifying experience, I'm sure, for kids.
The judge forces the parents to pay for the lawyer, doesn't allow the parents to review the lawyer's bills or anything like that.
And that is just a brutal situation.
And not only is it not shielding the children from a bitter adult situation, But it's drawing them in and asking them to pick sides and squeal and tattletale.
Man, you couldn't design something more monstrous if you tried.
Yeah, I agree.
When a judge says that they're trying to keep the children out of the divorce process, to me it's like a parent that beats their child and tells them they're doing it for their own good.
I mean, it's really a horrendous process.
And the judges drag the children into it, even though they claim that they don't, because they use proxies.
They use these social workers to evaluate the children that come into your home and look at how many breadcrumbs you have on the counter.
They have these attorneys that they hire called guardians at litem who charge $200, $300, $400, $500 an hour in order to essentially Represent that they represent the children, but they really do almost nothing.
They rarely meet with the children.
They do appear in court and collect their $500 an hour in court, but they're not really taking care of the children.
They're not looking out for the children's best interest in most situations.
They're looking out for their pocketbook.
And what they do is they take the money that they collect, So the judge orders that the parents pay this guardian ad litem, $500 an hour, then that guardian ad litem can take that money or some of that money and contribute it to the judge's campaigns.
And so you have this horrible cycle of essentially corruption and graft that's going on and these people who think that they are so dignified and so respectful.
Blessing this corruption.
We have legalized corruption in the United States that allows this terrible feedback loop from the pocket of the parent into the pocket of the judge through this proxy called a guardian ad litem or this proxy called a social worker who's really working for the judge and then giving the judge the piece of the action.
And so what are they incentivized to do?
They're incentivized to spend more hours at this process because they get paid by the hour.
And what do they do?
Then they, you know, the social workers drag the children into the process by asking them, well, who's the better parent?
You know, who do you prefer to spend more time with?
Which parent gives you piano lessons?
Which parent takes you to soccer?
And which parent gets You know, drops you off at daycare, drops you off at the playground.
And then when the children ask, well, what's going on here?
The parents are not allowed to say anything about the process.
So the only feedback that the children get is from the experience of going through this cross-examination by these people.
And they don't understand what's going on.
There are horrendous situations where one parent is prohibited from seeing the children except under supervised visitation.
And this is when an accusation has been made of some sort of abuse.
And so the court says that that parent who's been accused, it hasn't been convicted, there's been no proof, it's just an accusation, they say that that parent can only see their children under supervised visits.
Well, guess what?
The one thing you cannot say under a supervised visit, you cannot tell the child that you would prefer to spend more time with them, but the judge has limited your amount of time to this environment under supervision.
You can't tell them that.
If you tell them that, you lose your child completely.
And so this child is bewildered.
Why has this parent abandoned me and then only wants to see me under the situation where there are other people around watching them?
And you can't tell them what's creating that abnormal situation.
So, I mean, the impact on the children is horrendous, and that's what the Swedes have shown, is that, you know, when you compare the outcome of children who have a balanced relationship with both parents, To the situation where one parent has been marginalized to the point of only being able to see the child under supervised conditions,
the children perform so much better in the balanced situation than they do in the imbalanced situation, and yet the United States is financially incentivized at every level to separate the family, to polarize the children, and to cause one parent to pay money to the other parent so that the state and the judges can skim a percentage off of that.
Well, and you know, this is the challenge when it comes to sort of individual conscience versus a terrible system.
Nobody expects a factory owner or – it's not really owner – a factory manager in the Soviet Union to be rabidly efficient because communism, no price mechanism, it's just ridiculously inefficient.
And so this is the great challenge is that every individual is following rational self-interest and I'm sure with a self-coated veneer of moral posturing and we're doing good and maybe even those real intentions.
But when the system is so badly designed and the system is so destructive to positive outcomes...
To me, I sort of swing back and forth.
I want to blame the individuals, but at the same time, they're acting rationally within the context of a system.
So I really do think that the change has to come from an awareness and from outside.
Because, of course, the family court system is, you know, if you're not going through a divorce, I mean, what does it really matter to you?
But then when you are going through a divorce, you can't criticize it.
it.
I think one guy went to jail for five years for writing a negative comments, a negative comments about a judge on his blog.
You can't criticize it when you're in it for fear of prejudicing against you.
And when you're done with it, if you ever are, the last thing you want to do is go back into it and start criticizing it.
So it's one of these things that's kind of immune from the general criticisms of society that otherwise might be leveled against it.
Stefan, I agree with you 100%, and it's people like you and I who are the odd, rare individuals who actually speak about this.
Most people do not want to talk about divorce or child-rearing under situations where both parents are apart.
It's a somewhat taboo still in our society, although many taboos have been lifting these days.
But also, it...
It represents a failure, you know, one way or another.
I'm not saying that anybody, one person failed, but the union failed.
And so, you know, it's like talking about dirty laundry or, you know, bathroom behavior.
I mean, people just don't want to talk about it.
And so this is not something that rises to social cocktail discussion.
It's also something that, you know, if you're foolish enough to make a movie about the subject, you don't get Married couples to go see that movie because one spouse is going to say, why do you want to see a movie about divorce?
It's not a date movie.
So these are not things that you get together and have some drinks with friends and start chatting about all these awful things with the divorce system.
There's many, many more things that people would rather talk about.
So unfortunately, it's difficult to motivate a political movement to change these laws because of the reasons that I just said.
And then on the other side, you have these entrenched interests.
You have $50 billion a year going to the attorneys and the social workers and the accountants and all the court workers and everybody that's involved in this hideous process.
And they don't want it changed.
And they're politically connected.
They're going in and out of government or they're in government and they're getting these payoffs from the lawyers.
So whenever you try to get some kind of legislation passed, you come up against all types of resistance from the entrenched interests.
We helped with a referendum in one of the Dakotas, and I don't remember which one, and we tried to point out That, you know, shared parenting, 50-50 shared parenting was better for the children.
We made some commercials.
And guess who opposed, who came out with opposing TV commercials?
Ooh, the lawyers, the judges, the social workers?
Yeah, the bar association.
The bar association took dues from their members and paid for advertisements to oppose the referendum.
And they won.
They won because they outspent us 10 to 1.
And so, you know, there's our political process in the United States, private interest money, swaying public opinion on subjects where the public is not, you know, highly aware of the intricacies of the issues.
And so, you know, money oftentimes will push social policy, and the private interests of the attorneys and the judges push the social policy in that case, and we didn't get shared parenting.
So, Joseph, now that it's been about two years since the movie came out, it's very popular, very well made, and very controversial.
What has the response been in your life from general public, from strangers, from friends, from family?
What has it been like for you to be at the center of talking about some significant wounds in society?
Well, on a personal level, first of all, the movie came out on Netflix about four or five months ago.
So you can get DivorceCorp if you have Netflix.
And that greatly increased the viewership of the movie.
And since then, I've come across many people who, you know, said, oh my God, I just saw that movie.
You know, you made that?
That's amazing.
You know, I never knew.
The most common comment is, I never knew the system was so crazy.
And because, as I said, most people don't like to talk about this.
So that's been the reaction, and generally people have said they liked the movie a lot, they found it depressing, but they liked it a lot, they thought it was well made, they thought the points were articulated well, and they generally were moved emotionally by the movie.
It's gotten four and a half out of five stars on Netflix and on iTunes, so I think overall it's a Entertaining movie.
There are critics, though, and every once in a while I'll come across a family lawyer who say, ah, you totally misrepresented what's going on.
We're not bad people, as the movie might imply.
We're really trying to do the best for people.
And I think it's driven me to my next, you know, movie, which is this make-believe movie, which is how people...
Convince themselves of certain things, even though the facts are squarely in their face that would dispute what they believe.
So this new make-belief effort is really looking at the psychology of how people believe things and how they justify what they believe, because it's shocking to me.
I can understand an undereducated Population living in a country where, you know, they practice strange religions or chants or whatever, you know, not understanding modern thinking, not being able to really digest the facts and come up with independent thought.
But in a country that prides itself in individualism, in, you know, it's somewhat rational thinking, it's You know, leads the world in science.
You would think that educated people, like attorneys, who've been through high school, they've been through college, they've been through law school, they have to read all the time.
How could these people have such warped, perverse ideas about what fairness is?
It's shocking.
And they're probably, if they're watching this right now, they're saying, how could that guy Sorge have such a perverse view of what we're doing?
Because we're really trying to help these people.
As you say, most people somehow rationalize what they're doing as good, even though they may be, you know, putting a knife into someone's heart.
So it surprised me how the attorneys that reacted to me could, you know, Justify their system, defend their system, and still claim and believe in their minds that they were doing good.
And so it motivated me to explore this new area, which is make belief.
And how do we make our beliefs?
Or how do other people make our beliefs for us?
And then inculcate those and indoctrinate those beliefs into us.
It is fascinating.
We've got a presentation on this channel called The Death of Reason, which goes into a wide variety of experiments where people have, you know, they say, this is my opinion, and here's why.
And then they're presented very clear and easily digestible counterfactuals to whatever it is they believe.
And not only do they not change their minds, but they're actually more likely to increase their fealty to their original misconception.
It is just an amazing capacity of the human mind.
I don't know that it's innate.
I mean, I think we don't get taught how to process reason and evidence.
We don't get taught how to debate, how to make good arguments, how to construct valid propositions in most schools.
So it's...
It's like expecting people to know how to play piano if they've never been exposed to a piano.
But yeah, watching most people debate is like watching a pianist trying to play Bohemian Rhapsody with his forehead.
It's not usually a very good thing.
But we all have to make decisions.
And so in the absence of reason and evidence, We have to sort of find a position, plant our flag wherever it is, make the most virtuous thing that we can, most virtuous fantasies we can about what we believe and then just stick to our guns no matter what.
And that is, I think, one of the reasons why in the divorce world things get bad and in politics things get bad.
All of these places which don't have the sort of self-correcting mechanism of volunteerism and the free market and so on, it's brutal.
I also wanted to point out to people who are listening or watching this that you can check out Joseph's, a little trailer for this Make Belief movie at mbelief, B-E-L-I-E-F, of course, mbelief.com.
And I really, really thank you for your time today.
Check it out on Netflix.
You can get a free month of Netflix in most places just by signing up.
It's worth it just for this documentary.
boy, imagine how much time, energy and money it can save you.
Also, you know, for people who are thinking of going through divorce, watch this movie, because it will scare you back into each other's arms, or, I think as you've pointed out, and I'll sort of give you the last word on this, it will give you an alternative to family court, which do exist, so So if people, you know, boy, you know, it frustrates me because most people who are considering divorce and end up staying married five years later, they say, wow, I'm really glad I decided to stay married.
That was a bad time, but it's all better now.
But if, let's say, for whatever reason you simply can't stay together, I wonder if you can give people the alternatives that exist to this rather parasitical system that they're forced to take if they don't take any of the alternatives.
Well, the alternative, and it's an excellent alternative, is mediation.
And there are mediators who are incentivized to help you work through the process in a productive way and help your children work through the process in a productive way.
And I think it's a much healthier path to take and less expensive, less time-consuming, less anxiety-provoking, And generally produces much, much better outcomes.
The problem is that you oftentimes have one spouse who feels that if they go through the horrendous, anxiety-producing family court system, they will end up with more money.
And if they go through mediation, they're afraid that they're gonna end up with less money.
Frankly, the mediators, the good ones, are attuned to this, and they try to make sure that they assure the person that that's not going to be the case.
They're gonna end up with more money in mediation because there's gonna be more money left over to split up.
But there's always that divorce attorney out there saying, you know, let's tear that other person apart.
Let's get every dollar from them.
There's the boyfriends or the girlfriends saying, yeah, go after them in court.
They didn't treat you well and show them, you know, get revenge.
And so, you know, there's a temptation there to listen to one's friends, family, or, you know, so-and-so professionals to go the angry route.
As opposed to going the more peaceful route.
But I would urge anybody who's on the fence in this area to go through the mediation route because there will be more money left over.
It's a much more healing process.
And I think overall people experience much, much more favorable outcomes for them and their children.
Yeah, it's not just the money for the kids.
Think of the amount of parental attention and energy that is drained away by the system, leaving them less emotionally and intellectually available for their children.
I think, without a doubt, if you really care about your kids, then you want to try and avoid the family court system as much as possible.
Mediation is not only going to help you financially, it's going to help your kids.
They won't be cross-examined by lawyers and dragged through court systems and so on.
And that is, of course, the hope.
And that's, I think, the very strong recommendation.
So yeah, just do a Google for those mediators or divorce mediators and so on.
You can get them to drop an entire agreement, right?
And then they can go to the judge, the judge can rubber stamp it, and you don't have to get sucked into the quagmire.
So thanks again for making the movie.
When is Make Belief?
I know it's always tough to say in the middle of the project, but when are you slating to get it out?
Well, we hope to release a podcast, an audio podcast in the fall to start building interest and building following.
So go to the mbelief.com website and you'll get updates as to when this will be available.
And then we're going to start releasing video teasers, two or three minute teasers per episode along with the podcasts.
And then we do have interest from some TV networks to produce a series on the subject, a video series on the subject.
And it's still too early to say what the date will be.
Well, fantastic.
Hopefully, you'll be able to come back on and help build some momentum on this channel.
So, mbelief.com.
Thanks so much, Joseph.
Always a great pleasure.
And thanks for all the work you've done to really help people make very, very important and better decisions about the futures of their family.
