 Brad Coats, that's the word of the day, Brad Coats. Coats, Pry, Anomoto, and Gibson, I get that right? He got it. It's a law firm right here in Pioneer Plaza. And Brad likes to come around and say hi, say hi. Say hi. Say hi, Jay. And it's a family law firm, so he talks about family law and things that extend from that. And he's very wise because he has the ability to sort of integrate all his experiences in the courtroom, in the office, you know, in life. And that's why he can speak about sophisticated subjects around family law and about family. That's why we'd like to have him come down here. And I like being here. Yeah. So today, this is really an interesting one. We've touched on some of this before. How six somewhat shocking social megatrends are impeaching. Impacting. I mean, I'm peach too. I got impeachment on a modern romantic relationships. We're gonna put that to music later. Okay. Okay, but what do you mean by that? Well, it's exactly what I say. The change in American society is really, really dramatic. There's a lot of stuff going on that has changed the way relationships used to was. And then it's gonna change the generations going forward and it's gonna change the face of America. I got another one, if you'll let me on it later about what the ripple effect of this is gonna all be for America's families overall. We're gonna make a date for that right after the show. So these old good things, Brad, I mean, these old things we should be happy about that will make us feel good or are they all bad things or is it a mix? Well, I mean, people are doing it because they think it makes them feel good. Yes, the individuals think it's great. A lot of it, whether it's good long-term, that becomes a trickier question to answer because then, like I say, the ripple effect for society, we were talking earlier, it's not like smoking where you have a surgeon's general report that says, hey, smoking's gonna cause cancer. We don't know what all these different changes are gonna do as they percolate through society, but they're gonna be big. Yeah, and we have so many changes. It's like, I got out of law school and my firm had a little meeting and they said, there's a case came down. I said, wait a minute, that case changes everything I learned in law school. I'm really, I'm stressed by this. I mean, I get the feeling that everything around me is changing, nothing I know is for sure, and that's what you have here. All these changes, very stressful, huh? You know what's amazing? I've written the divorce with decency book. This is the fifth edition now. People keep asking me, you know, why did you write that thing five different times? It's not actually the law that has changed all that much. It's society and the effect of all this that's changing. I mean, there have been changes in the law. When I first started practicing, we didn't have homosexual marriages or homosexual divorces. I mean, that's new news. But a lot of this other stuff is really the way society is evolving. The six shocking megatrends. Let's stop and start on that. I'm ready to be shocked. Shock value. Shock and awe. Social media and its impact on traditional approaches to romance. Sex, an entirely different approach to sex is going on. A lot of it has to do with social media. A lot of viewers understand that. Or sex, pornography is a big aspect of that. That's changed totally. Living arrangements, cohabitation, now being almost preferable to actually is preferable, in many cases, to traditional marriage. I remember how shocking it was when that first came up when we were young. Yeah, yeah. And then that's resulted in less marriage overall. The decline in the institution of marriage is happening right before our eyes. And then people haven't stopped having sex. Well, they've slowed it down a lot, which is surprising. We'll talk about that in a second. But they still haven't enough sex to bring babies into the world. So the divorce calendar has shifted to a large extent from being a child custody and stuff as an outgrowth of divorce to now being what's called the paternity calendar, where it can be the outgrowth of a temporary relationship, anything from a one night stand to a cohabitation but short of marriage. Then you have DNA. Then you've still got kids, you've still got custody. All that's still got to be handled. So that's the paternity calendar. The other one is the one that is for years in my age group, grade divorces. Aging boomers are getting divorced at twice the rate of anybody else right now, which is surprising, especially when you used to think long term marriages bode well for stability in society. And now the boomers are getting divorced faster than anybody. You're going to have to explain that to me. What you said is exactly right. Is it something that people want? Yeah, it seems to be. I mean, people just want everything, and they always have with our generation. Yeah, yeah, we like it, but is it good? Who knows? Well, let's go through it and see if it's good or bad or in the middle. Well, let's do. Social media huge impact. When you think about it, and we've talked about this on the show before, it used to be you had to meet somebody live and in person to get to even form a relationship. Now you can meet unlimited number of people. And the timing used to have to be right. I could meet misright, but if she was married to somebody else, then it didn't work. Now the timing is almost immediate. You just pull something up on the net. And with Tinder and all these crazy sites, see everything from match.com to Tinder to the racier sites. And you can have as many relationships as you can squeeze out of your computer as fast as you can do it, yeah. I knew a woman who used social media to find husbands. And it was very efficient. You should have seven husbands that way. That's a joke. Probably wouldn't have to be a joke. I mean, you could have. I've known people that they've got a Tinder date set for a 6 o'clock dinner. By 8 o'clock, they've figured out that it hasn't worked. And they've got another Tinder date for cocktails at 10 o'clock. So what that does. What do you say at 8 o'clock? We're done here. I think we've exhausted it. But what that does is it works in favor of shorter term, more revolving relationships where people don't invest as much of themselves into it the way that you used to have to do. That's profound. Used to be dependency from till death do we part where your psyches were integrated completely where you understood and the other person understood. And you couldn't live without the other. You see that still today with some people. And you really invested a lot of yourself into the relationship. Now you don't have to invest anything, really. I mean, you have to hit somebody on the computer. That's when you don't invest in a relationship. Well, you've got a higher divorce rate. You've got shorter term relationships. Maybe fewer kids. Maybe kids that are then the result of a divorce or a blown relationship. And then the impact is, what's that going to be like? I mean, what's it like to be raising a bunch of fatherless families in America? You've got to talk about that. Just one question strikes me. Are you writing anti-live-together agreements? Used to be called anti-nuptials. You mean pre-nuptials or before living together? My firm doesn't want to do that. And I don't really like doing post-marital agreements. There's a specific statute that says that pre-marital agreements, if done right, if concluded by marriage, they're going to be enforceable. There's not really anything else. There's no statute that covers living together stuff. And the Marvin. And family, of course, is not going to hear anything that doesn't actually end in marriage. Oh, good. That's the law of the state. It's not the law in other states. The reality of it is that in Hawaii, family court limits it to just marriage or paternity if you have kids. But they won't come and imagine what the caseload would be if every time a couple that had just moved in together and moved back out wound up coming in and having a judge decide who got to keep the dog and who, oh, it can happen. I mean, the civil courts will do that, but not family court. So you've got social media totally changing the nature of relationships. And it's now estimated that it's not only meeting the people. It's not only meeting, making for dinner, it's all that. It's the way the relationship itself is conducted, the amount of contact you have with your other half during the day. It's different than a telephone call, it really is. It's different than having time together. It's that immediate fly, immediate, what do you want to call it, immediate engagement and bang, done. It's done by texting. And it can be done. It's a texting relationship. And on either end, it becomes more superficial. Because when we were guys and we had to get a corsage and a date for the prom and call her up and meet her parents, it took a little bit of macho alpha male behavior to go do that. Now, as we all know, men's testosterone levels are dropping anyway. Everybody's a metrosexual now instead of an alpha male. And the way you now do it, a hook up with a gal, not that I've hooked up with anybody this way lately, but the kids, hey, what's up? Me and the guys are gonna be at Joe's bar at seven o'clock. Why don't you and your girlfriends come on down? Okay, is that an invitation on a date or is that, what the hell is that? And then at the other end, it's ghosting. Ghosting is when you used to text everybody every day and tell them how much you loved them and then you suddenly stop communicating with them all or blocking them from your device. There's a message there. But I mean, what kind of way is that to behave? I mean, it certainly violates all rules of civility that we used to know. We've talked about this before, but you know, the Western civilization, in fact, global civilization is based on the family unit. And at least my perception, up till now, the stronger the family unit has been in a given society, the stronger the society. That's absolutely correct. The family unit is declining, so that's very, very troublesome. That's absolutely correct. You say that 35% of all new relationships start up via the internet nowadays. And at least 20% of divorces are now attributed to Facebook. So on the front end, you can meet them that way and then all of a sudden, you know, something comes out of your Facebook page that, you know, makes somebody jealous and the next thing you know, you're breaking up with them. So you're starting that way and you're ending them that way and that's all social media. You better be careful what you do on your Facebook page because what's on your Facebook page is real trouble. Real trouble, yeah. So let's move on to the significant changes in sexuality. Pornography being one of the biggies. This is totally amazing. 25% of all total internet search engines are porn related now. 8 to 10% of all emails porn related, 12% of all websites porn related. Porn, when you think about porn, what porn does, and I'm sure you're not familiar with this, but you'll have to take my word for it. Neither of us know anything about it, but he's still an expert anyway. It alters men's, what I call, sex expectations of their partners. Because you're bringing it from the outside to home. You've got a 45 year old wife and instead you're watching the 20 year old, you know, pumped up, siliconed up, you know, stiletto heels, young girl doing all kinds of unnatural acts that you haven't seen your wife crying quite some time, if ever. And all of a sudden you start saying, well, this is the way sex ought to be. You know, that's the guy's sex expectations, so to speak, they're lowered, or maybe they're raised in a lower sort of fashion, but now you have men treating women more as objects, which is, they're not happy about it. Think of what happens when a guy takes a Viagra. They haven't got, you know, they're trying to have Viagra for women nowadays, but they haven't quite got it there. So a guy takes a Viagra, it has an immediate erection, he wants to immediately use that erection. Meanwhile, women who have always much preferred foreplay to the actual sex act itself, and you know, it's a statistic show, women are looking for 15 to 20 minutes of foreplay before they think sex is much fun at all, the guy's going, hey, I'm ready, let's go, and you know, so now women are even more pissed off, as if they didn't have enough to be pissed off at us for to begin with. The ultimate insult. Yeah, so it's really kind of crazy, there's countries like Japan where sex is, that sexuality, men and women just are going totally separate directions in Japan. That's why you see so many of these young Japanese girls coming over here to our universities, you know, looking for a different life. What do you mean, separate direction? Well, men and women are having little or nothing to do with each other in Japan anymore. That could be a whole other show. Having children at night. More closer to home, there's also statistics that are showing that millennials, you would think that all these Tinder and Hookup things like that would be more sex. Actually, their sexuality peaked in the 1970s. Sexually, you know, when we were all young hippies and it was peace, love, and sex. The reality is now that millennials seem to be having far less sex and far fewer real relationships. Oh, for the good old days. Yeah. But you know, question, why? Why is, why did it happen in Japan and why is it happening with millennials? This is troublesome because it's not organic, it's not natural. Well, but it kind of, when you think about what the situation is for millennials right now, you know, a lot of them are broke after the recession. We boomers took all the money. They've watched the recession happen. You know, they've gotten real negative views of a lot of that. Some of them are living in their parents' basement. You ever tried to seduce a girl in your parents' basement? You know, it's just, there's functional. We didn't have a basement. There's functional things that are happening with, you know, that makes it very difficult for millennials. And even though they've got this constant exposure to more and more and more, the reality of it is they're having fewer relationships. They're getting married much later. They're almost relationship resistant. They're fine with this sort of group hang together kind of thing. It's only skin deep though. They're going back to social media. Skin deep. It's not, you know, it's not like, okay, I'm going to commit to you. We're going to raise a family. We're going to, you know, all those hallmarks. We're going to get jobs. We're going to have a, you know, we're going to have a real relationship. We're going to have 2.2 children. We're going to buy a house. I mean, the millennials don't even buy cars anymore. You know, they ride share. They rent rather than own. They, you know, I mean, everything's a transitory deal for the millennials. Skipping a stone on the surface of a lake it never actually goes under the water. Let's take a short break. I'm getting slightly troubled by this conversation. I need one minute break. Okay. That's Brad Coates. He's in family law, but he's also in family philosophy. It's really important to hear from him. We'll be right back. Hey, hello, everyone, and welcome to the Think Tech Hawaii studio. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii. We air here every Tuesday at 10 a.m. Hawaii time, trying to bring you issues about security that you may not know, issues that can protect your family, protect yourself, protect our community, protect our companies that folks we work with. Please join us and I hope you can maybe get a little different perspective on how to live a little safer. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Mellie James, host of Let's Mana Up. Tuesdays, every other Tuesday, from 11 to 1130. This show is meant to dive into stories of local product entrepreneurs and how they're growing their companies from right here in Hawaii. I'm so thrilled to have our show kicked off and so please join us on Tuesdays at 11 o'clock as we talk to local entrepreneurs and hear their stories. Okay, we're back with Brad Coates. You wanna talk some more about the sex thing? Sex is always good. Make, you know, for big viewership if you talk more about sex. Sex is always fun to talk about, but we probably gotta move on because I'm not sure how much time you're gonna give me. The third mega trend, living together, cohabitation instead of getting married and building a house or buying a house together now, everybody seems to want to live solo and I've got the statistics right here. Only about 5% to 10% of all marriages in the 1960s were preceded by cohabitation where you try to try a living together situation. Then it was still assumed that you were gonna get married. Now it's 55 to 60% by the 1990s and the marriage rates dropped by 40% since 1970. So married couples are now less than half, 48% of all. I mean, it used to be that, you know, I mean, this is exactly 1972, 75% of all US adults are married by the year 2000, only 56%, 2010 census. But cohabitation is up. Everybody wants to just live together instead of getting married. And for a longer period of time and we're right here from all of that. Let me ask you when I hear from all of that is that some people decide to cohabit like permanently for their lives, you know, into old age. That's correct. Never a marriage, why? Well, there's a lot of reasons. For one thing, it used to be that in order to get government benefits, corporate benefits, health insurance, you know, that kind of thing, you had to have an actual marital relationship in order to have your spouse qualified for your health plan. Now you can have your significant flight benefits. You know, if you were used to be that if a flight attendant could only bring her husband along now, she can bring her boyfriend or her girlfriend or whoever. I mean, all this expanded social leniency as it is, such as it is, is allowing everybody to have all the benefits they used to have with marriage without actually having to get married. Yeah, and trying to take those benefits away from this extended definition, you'll never be able to do it. So what we have is really non-reversible. It's gonna continue. That's correct. That's correct. I mean, basically, now that everything's available to significant others, unmarried couples living together is up 10 folds since 1960. Unbelievable. But cohabiting couples have twice the breakup rate of married couples. And 40% of people who cohabit have brought kids into the relationship. And they're gonna then have to deal with, like I say, the paternity calendar of deciding the paternity of these kids. Yeah, you may not have to decide property settlements, but you've still gotta decide that. Turns out, turning married encourages people to have kids. That's still a reality. Well, yeah, that whole approach is, it encourages stability. And you can do a whole nother show on the fact that society's almost segmenting down. The people that are staying married right now are college graduates, finding one another, the lawyers marrying other lawyers, doctors marrying other doctors. What's that right? How interesting. It used to be that a lawyer might marry a legal secretary, because again, the proximity, she was there, she was attractive. It didn't really matter whether she had the same advanced education or earning capacity that you do. But now, you want to share the profession. But now, you want to marry somebody that says equal learning is with you, so you can live in Cahala and know between the two of you. So it really ended, and now those people are built. They've got websites that you can go on, just for people whose net worth is over a million dollars. And the professionals are able to find each other. And a lot of these kids coming out of college are just dating other Ivy League college graduates instead of surfers and... It dawns on me actually, Brad, that this may be a factor in the disparity of wealth and income. I mean, it totally broadens the chasm between the haves and the have-nots society. The people that get divorced are oftentimes people that have high school education or less, they still get married. They then get divorced at a much higher rate than the college and graduate people do. And so then you've got kids, you're 18 years old, you're trying to support a kid that's now, that's the result of your... Well, it goes down the next generation because if you have two high earners living together, they're more likely to be able to send their kid to college. Totally. Than two low earners. So it really is segmenting society. So it goes one generation after another and it perpetuates and expands this whole notion of the diversity of income. Ooh, disparity of income. Disparity, yeah. Because like-minded people can find one another and again, all on the internet. So that's how you decide. It turns out that people like living separately. A lot of people like living separately. If you go back, I'm sure you spent a lot of time in the villas in France and the kings and the queens. You know, the queen's suite was over here, the king's suite was over here. I mean, you know, people didn't, wealthy people always kind of live sort of separately. So they were starting to design houses that way before the recession hit. Now they've had to come brought back on that but people like having their own space. And the boomers in particular, once they get divorced, a lot of times they're not inclined to get remarried again. Because, you know, I mean, you're 60 years old, why bother? So they live alone. So there's a certain risk to living alone or living apart together where each show, where each party has their own house and then they go back and forth. Yeah, yeah. But you know, I mean, the rule, the black letter rule is if you're elderly, living alone is dangerous because there's nobody there to watch you and take care of you, grab you to the hospital, whatever it is. And something bad happens to you health wise or anything, you don't have any safety net. So I guess part of this is you don't need a safety net so much as you did before. I think you may be onto something. That's the reason why it's your show. But that, you know, marriage in general used to be the big safety net. You know, you ate better, you know, you were now bouncing around in bars all the time. Your wife or husband was feeding you the right food. If you collapsed on the floor, somebody was there to take you to the emergency room. I mean, two earners could combine to buy a house. But you know, the whole idea behind, just like you were saying before, the whole idea behind society as the mainstay of society was that married couples were good for society. Had all kinds of benefits for a decent civilization. Now we've just totally decided what we don't care about. So how does that affect the larger community? I know it's speculative, but if I give you a country of everybody married, you know, the picket fence and all that, out of the fifties, leave it to be. Right, right, right. We're now where everybody's on his or her own. And even when they get senior, there's been more, some of them are his or her own, relying on technology, relying on, you know, I don't know, community systems rather than family systems. What happens when I give you a country of 350 million people that are moving in that direction? I think what happens, just a wild thought, is that instead of having the community of marriage or a tight family group, multi-generational, multi-generational family group, I would give you instead a nation of communities on the internet who have like interests, who have like causes. And those are being divided these days. I mean, the country is being, you know, cut up into all these communities that are sort of ticked off at each other's. Well, and people, kids that grow up on the internet have a much more global view. I mean, they've got, I've got friends, one of my old law partners, his son just married a gal that he met from the Philippines, and they met in a game, they were gamers, and they were in one of these game rooms, and they'd never, you know, they met by playing video games from you, and you meet somebody from Ethiopia from, so realistically, instead of having a culture where it's the focus is on your nation, it's more, you know, a much more natural to these people to think globally and internationally. Well, that may be good. That may be very good. But it's also, I mean, you know, look at our esteemed President Trump. You know, we want America to be the way America used to be where you're in America and God damn it. And otherwise we're sending you to Mars or to back to where you came from. He's going backward a mile a minute. Yeah. Just one thing I read yesterday was that he's trying to, your attorney general, not mine, is trying to, you know, return to the death penalty. So, I mean, we're moving back to the 12th century, rapid, rapid, rapid. Well, there's major, major changes. I mean, there's a question of whether or not, you know, sort of Western civilization, as we knew it, you know, is, you know, is in danger of changing radically, whether you think that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's not a real problem. You know, one of the places where the unmarried and raising kids is one of the highest is then the Nordic country, Sweden and Norway and stuff, Iceland. You know, they've got, getting married is almost an afterthought. They're raising families as a single parent. It's very natural up there. And if you've got a small cohesive society, a lot of those, you know, socialist kind of policies can sort of apply. It's going to be trickier to see what happens when you do it with a nation like you say of 350 million. But people's focus is definitely way, way different than it used to be when it was everybody came back from World War II and, you know, we were all Americans. Yeah. It's not only changing here, it's changing everywhere. So you've got a lot of these great divorces going on. Let me just be fine. I never know how much time I'm going to get with you. So let me just read down my list of, my key list of marriage killer factors again. The internet, more options for more partners. So there's no need to settle on anyone. And for boomers who have divorced once, no need to resell or have a remarriage. Sex in the old days, if you wanted to have sex, you had to get married to do it, you know. Now sex is readily available without marriage. Religion, we didn't talk about that, but I'm sure you could. Marriage is essentially a religious institution, but now religion's on the decline. Expanded benefits, government and corporate benefits previously available to only married folks are now available to significant others, or life partners as well. Marriage is being postponed, delaying the ages of first marriages to approximately 29 for men and 27 for women. As you may recall, when we got married when we were out of college, you got out of college at 23, you married a 21-year-old girl, and then, you know, recession, cash-scrap millennials can't afford courtship, marriage, homes, kids, maternity. Having kids out of wedlocks was once a pariah. I mean, one in 10 births was out of wedlock back in the 70s. Now it's 40% to 50% of all life births. There are many places that's commonplace. What I call the she-economy, rapid rise in education and career and monetary advancement for women. Now it makes them far less dependent upon marriage or upon men. I mean, like you were talking about the Donna Reed, where the husband went to work and the wife had to just wait till he came home with a paycheck. Now she's got a bigger paycheck than he does, and more women have got more advanced degrees than men do nowadays. And then nine is living arrangements, cohabitation and living solo were frowned upon in the past. Now it's totally acceptable. So whether that's a great thing to expand society's consciousness or whether it's gonna prove to be problematic, well, you know, who knows? But like I say, there's almost no way to predict because it has so many variables attached to it. Yeah, I wanna give you one more, if you know, for future reference. Yeah. It's the power to reject. You don't have to go through a divorce. You don't have to go see a lawyer. Yeah. If you're not married, you don't have to get unmarried. You can just walk away. It makes it much easier to just cut and run. And people change over their lifetimes. Your spouse may be, you know, your other, may turn into a person that you don't like anymore. You may decide that you really made a mistake there somewhere and you wanna, you know, find your own future. And she may wanna find her own future. Well, if you're not married and living in one of these, you know, arrangements, you know, you can just walk away one day. Right, right. And that makes it all different. In some ways, good is the pose because you can get away from a bad thing. In some ways, you can make a mistake on leaving too. Well, it's, again, you know, I tie it all into marriage and divorce. All kinds of evidence that shows that sex, for one thing, is better in second marriages than it is in first marriages. But it's also true that once you get accustomed to just cutting and running, you know, and, you know, okay, I get to leave whenever I want. You know, the divorce rate for a first marriage is about 45%. Divorce rate for second marriage is about 65%. Interesting. Divorce rate for third marriage is about 85%. Really? You know, by then they've got the divorce lawyers number programmed into their speed dial and they're just, you know, we're just ready to go. Get jaded. Yeah. Let's close. Let's talk about your book. How about a picture of the book? How about that book? Okay. What about that book? What a great book. What is it? What is it? It's the complete how to handbook and survivors guide to the legal, emotional, economic, and social issues of marriage. All divorce with decency written by that brilliant author, Brad Cote. Okay. Well, on the next show, we're actually going to put that to music also. And maybe some dancing. Thank you very much, Brad. Great to have you here. Great to have you. Always great to see you, Jay. Aloha.