 G'day mate 40 here. So I remember about 23 years ago Dennis Prager is talking on the radio about I think the second Mrs. Gingrich how after her divorce from Newt She lost a bunch of weight and got a new hairstyle and how fantastic she looked this is from some women's magazine talking about how you know wonderful she was looking and Dennis Prager said well, maybe she'd put this effort Into looking good. She would never have gotten divorced and I've noticed this too that often Women look great. They get married. They let themselves go They put on a ton of weight they get divorced and then they put some effort in and they look great again And I think Dennis Prager is onto something that if they put that effort into looking good while they were married They might not have gotten divorced and same goes with men like plenty of men let themselves go as well so Dennis Prager says we need divorce because when you offer people a job for which they cannot get fired They don't tend to perform well. And so if you don't permit divorce then you are removing the incentives for for men and women to To earn their marriage, right? So if if you've got tenure if you can't get fired people will tend to let themselves go they will stop putting an effort in and I'm thinking about Adele Adele that the singer she She got divorced and she lost a hundred pounds. All right. She lost 100 pounds. So Maybe if she'd put that effort in she She wouldn't have ended up divorced from Simon Konecki and She turned to exercise for relief from anxiety Okay, so I didn't know how long lasting this this weight loss will be But people when they're back on the the dating market they often put a ton of effort in and then once they catch someone they just relax and I think it's a winning strategy. It's like people to put a lot of effort into getting a job Or getting a promotion, but then once they've achieved what they want They just let go so these are I think unstable people and I think all of us have these tendencies It's just a matter of to what degree do you do let your natural tendencies towards sloth and indulgence overtake you I Finish reading the great new Jonathan Franzen novel Crossroads and one of the major characters in it is the The wife and mother Marion so all all the novels that I've read Almost the novels of his that I've read have been about family So I've read all this novel since what 2000 I've read the corrections came out around 2001. I Read freedom read that twice purity and Now Crossroads so Crossroads is supposed to be the first of a trilogy and it's about a family in Illinois Ross as the Husband and the father and associate minister Marion is his wife and then they've got four kids and the perspectives of three of the kids are also represented in the novel laponius Maximus good good to see you, sir, so in in this novel Crossroads Marion Like essentially ran away from home after high school and moved to Los Angeles Without really knowing what she was going to do and I think it says in the Talmud if you don't teach your son a profession you're teaching him to be a thief and so if you show up in a town without many resources and Without without a profession and you're a woman. You're essentially You know asking for a life of prostitution if you're attractive so young Marion moves to Los Angeles and she falls into a couple of very unfortunate sexual affairs and she almost loses her mind and Then that she's she Moves away from town and she finds she finds Ross and she marries him, but he doesn't she never tells him about the The trauma that she's been through now 30 years into a marriage. She's she's gotten fat she's about 40 pounds overweight and She's quite unhappy in a marriage and her husband's obviously unhappy in the marriage and the kids aren't particularly happy with their parents Who are obviously unhappy with each other, so this exemplifies one of my favorite sayings everything you do affects other people Like if on your own in your own quiet soft soft clean No individual private space you're eating ice cream or excessive amounts of pizza or smoking crack That's going to affect other people right if you're putting on the weight That's going to affect other people if you feel like a social pariah If you feel like a social outcast Then that's going to affect your family That's going to affect the people you're connected with because nobody wants to be connected with someone who's a pariah Like if you're an under-owner No, the same person is going to want to hang out with a fellow under-owner unless unless you're in recovery If you're an alcoholic the same person's going to want to hang out with an alcoholic if you're a drug addict or a sports addict Whatever dysfunction you've got going on Even if you're in the engage in that dysfunction in your own private space in your own safe space where you should be able to do What you want because it's not hurting anyone else it will affect other people it will hurt them You're smoking the crack. It's going to end up negatively affecting other people So Mary and this mother of four she packs on 40 pounds the marriage falls apart And of course that's going to negatively affect the kids negatively affect the community Because when one put one couple gets a divorce it divorce tends to ripple All right along with most things divorce is heavily social so I see this in synagogues one couple gets a divorce and then Six months later like half a dozen couples have gotten a divorce because it unstitches the social fabric suddenly say one One outgoing charismatic woman is now on the marriage market and now all these You know men are hitting on her and they're now unhappy in their marriage Oh, sorry about putting the the jonathan. I don't think I've put too many spoilers in there But crossroads terrific terrific jonathan friends and novel just so much wisdom I what I love about his books is he doesn't take sides and So you get to have empathy for each person's perspective and there are no good guys or bad guys in his novels and it's just I just think reflective of real life Like we we can have good intentions and do horrible things We can have bad intentions and the the rewards for that can be quite positive Gosh gosh, this is just a terrific terrific novel and I Like Harry he He portrays the power the power of sex like this young man He now saw that his supposed self-discipline The outstanding study habits his parents had always praised and not been disciplined at all It's simply been the absence of human connection and the absence of sex as soon as he starts having sex He discovers how hopelessly undeveloped the muscles of his will really were so he finds himself skipping organic chemistry lab Just to go for a long walk with his girlfriend He has his first experience of fallatio when he should have been in roman history class He fails to prepare for his cellular biology midterm because putting his penis and charon's vulva offered more pleasure in the moment that studying did so Mary impacts on 40 pounds the mother and then she's unhappy in a marriage and she remembers all the fantastic sex That she used to have with this married salesman And so she decides to take up smoking To lose the 40 pounds and go find out what happened to this married salesman So she had this passionate affair 40 years ago Oh 30 years ago and now she wants to know, you know, whatever happened to this guy who was married with kids And she disrupted his life when he tried to break up with her, but she can't forget all the passionate sex so I think this helps to explain why Perhaps the best predictor of a marriage's longevity is the number of sexual partners the woman has had Not the number of partners the man has had because that doesn't seem to play On the longevity of a marriage, but women who say who've had say 10 or more sexual partners They're a really bad bet to stay married to And the women who are the most likely to see a marriage through those who've had no sexual partners. So Here's Marion and she remembers the amazing sex that she used to have with with Bradley It's like far better sex than she had with her husband Russ the associate pastor and so she decides to lose 40 pounds and go looking, you know looking for Bradley And I love the way that friends and like turns into the very real things that the unseemly things that frequently motivate us and drive us and torment us Terrific terrific novel, but of course it's hard most men find it hard to You know make love to a woman passionately if she's 40 pounds overweight So if she'd put that effort into losing the weight and looking good and staying Staying in good shape for a husband Then the marriage may very well have not fallen on the rocks in the first place so Love this new Jonathan friends and novel I love the I love the empathy just understanding the different points of view and I love how we Portrays our delusions Like we we often need our delusions to go through the day I heard one philosopher might have been Peter Singer who said that if we knew what our friends were thinking None of us would be able to maintain friendships So we all have fairly distorted views of our our friends Because You know, we don't want to we don't want to know what they really think about us We we want to stay in a safe space. And so we distort reality so that That we can stay feeling emotionally safe and any behavior that our friends participate in that is Out of character that is different from our perception of them. We just ignore it and explain it away Right. So we we want to put our our friends in certain boxes So that we we don't want to deal with the the totality of them and so When when we say, oh, I'm shocked that my friend did this or I'm shocked that my spouse did that Not a likelihood is those those aspects of the friend or the spouse were there all along And we just did not want to confront them For our own emotional safety. We distort reality We we put people into boxes say, oh, this person's kind. This person's smart. This person's honest Because we don't want to deal with the the messy reality of their totality Yeah, half coalition. I remember until about 20 or so. I thought the idea of marrying a girl that wasn't a virgin was so off-putting yeah, and uh You're you're a different man then and maybe that's the kind of mindset that is That is Healthy, right? I mean marrying a woman who's had 10 or more lovers That's that's not a good bet now a man may have had 50 lovers That doesn't make you many more likely to get divorced after all almost The overwhelming majority of divorces are initiated by women so women file Or they drive their men to file. So women are the deciders women are the choosers and When women have had multiple lovers, they're much more likely to be dissatisfied And to remember how amazing it was with that married guy that they had that fling with And how their current husband just doesn't measure up Yeah, the the 40 community is back together again so, uh, there's a spanish female thriller writer kalman moeller Turns out to be three men So a million dollar euro literary prize has lured three spanish men out of anonymity To reveal that they are behind the ultra violent spanish crime thrillers marketed as the works of spain's elena forante They published under a pseudonym But these guys have published novels on their own. They were script writers And uh, they're professional storytellers and so they made up multiple levels of stories to entertain their audiences But most literary novels are written by one person But most dialogue heavy commercial fiction Such as screenplays plays and tv shows are written by more than one some kind of working relationship Uh, university of california academic senate informs regions once again that the sat is the most valid admissions test I better predicts college scores than any other factor And the university of california has gotten rid of sat scores because of They're supposedly racially discriminatory Uh, effects So there are these tropes about lesbian domestic violence Now there are these these cliches and stereotypes about why are lesbians so violent towards one another and now we've got these spectacular news stories about violent Asian-american lesbians So we've got nypd policewoman yvonne who who knows her ex-girlfriend in lesbian love triangle Then there's a japanese mount hollywood professor he tried to to murder Murder Uh, a woman Wow, pled guilty to nine charges stemming from december 29 incident which used a firepoker a rock and pruning shears to attack a colleague for our attack Then remember there was the chancellor at University of california school who Got into a levels lovers quarrel and jumped off a building So I have no idea if there's stereotype of lesbians being highly prone to domestic violence If there's any truth to it whatsoever. So not all stereotypes are true And uh, nike says nike ceo says we need to remove the stigma that holds murderers back Is a steve sailor So las vegas raiders coach john gruden was fired for writing politically incorrect emails a decade ago By contrast nike jordan chairman larry miller 72 reveals he murdered an innocent teen And he was a gang member in 1965 and served time in jail He's finally talking about it publicly because he's written a memoir and uh Nike ceo was gushing about you know, what a wonderful man this this murder is So we need to help remove the stigma that holds people and communities back So the stigma on murder It's got to go He was able to get out disclosing the murder because most employers only ask for details of criminal convictions from the last five years Nike ceo says i'm sad that larry carried this burden all these years without the support of his friends and colleagues and As for the completely innocent kid that he murdered well Who cares?