James Kimmel Jr. (revenge and forgiveness expert)

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Speaker 1 Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts. On Expert, I'm Dak Shepard.
I'm joined by Lily Padman. Hi.
Confusing guests today.

Speaker 2 Very.

Speaker 1 Very confusing. James Kimmel Jr.

Speaker 2 Not

Speaker 2 the son or father of of Jimmy Kimmel.

Speaker 1 Correct. Yes.
But do you know Jimmy Kimmel's already a junior? Oh. So he would have to be the third.
Oh. Okay.
That's neither here nor there. James Kimmel Jr.

Speaker 1 is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, a lawyer and the founder and co-director of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies.

Speaker 1 His previous two books are Suing for Peace. and The Trial of Fallen Angels.

Speaker 1 And he has a new book out right now that I have not been able to stop thinking thinking about I think I talked about in a previous fact check it's really kind of ruining my enjoyment of revenge movies and my own fantasies his new book is the science of revenge understanding the world's deadliest addiction and how to overcome it this was a wild episode it was really interesting and

Speaker 2 important

Speaker 1 I think these this group of people studying this really has finally isolated the quintessential ingredient to violence.

Speaker 2 Yeah, revenge.

Speaker 1 Revenge.

Speaker 1 We're all revenge addicted.

Speaker 2 Some more than others.

Speaker 1 Some more than others.

Speaker 2 But he also gives some prescriptive ways of trying to mitigate that.

Speaker 1 Yes. Which is great.
Yes. Forgiveness.
It's not sexy, but it works.

Speaker 2 It's pretty sexy.

Speaker 1 There's not any like really heartpounding movies about the moment the hero forgives.

Speaker 2 It's not passionate.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So our media may take a hit, but it.
ultimately may be worth it. Please enjoy James Kimmel Jr.

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Speaker 1 Hello, how are you? Doing great, Dax. Welcome.

Speaker 3 James, nice to meet you, Dax.

Speaker 1 I like that watch.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Do you know this, Monica, about fancy watches? A, I don't care at all about this, but these crazy watches that are millions of dollars, it's all about how many complications they have.

Speaker 2 I've read that. What does that even mean?

Speaker 1 Really? Like, how many bullshit mechanisms do they have to create the time? So it'll literally be like 3,000 complications and the back is just this rat's nest of cogs.

Speaker 3 The moon phases and other added complication levels. That nobody really cares about.

Speaker 1 They make the actual chronography more complicated than it needs to be. It's a complicated machine to perform a simple task.
That's what we've got going with a lot of these watches.

Speaker 3 I was just reading an article in, I think it was the Wall Street Journal, about this effort in Europe to get more young people to become watchmakers because the people that have been around building watches are dying out right so they've been sponsoring this and some of them are doing their own watches and not really working for the brand names and creating their own names it might take them to build one 170 thousand dollar watch a couple of years one person it's just crazy so handsome watch pennsylvania michigan excellent i feel like these are similar cultures yes and atlanta not that far off Although below the Mason-Dixon line.

Speaker 3 So, you know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, slightly different. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Northerners have to be snobby on that.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You take whatever you can get to feel better than other people.

Speaker 1 None of us had anything to do with it. Right, right, right.
What part of Pennsylvania?

Speaker 3 I grew up in rural central Pennsylvania. Now I live outside Philadelphia.

Speaker 1 You grew up in kind of farmland.

Speaker 3 Farmland, right, near State College, where Penn State is located about a half hour west in Dairy Country.

Speaker 1 Okay, so first of all, I just want to say I immediately, when you were scheduled, text Jimmy Kimmel and said, I'm interviewing your son on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 I mean, he said, Kevin? And I said, no, no, no. James Kimmel Jr.
He does have a question for you. What is this? This is coming directly from Jimmy Kimmel.
Okay. Why not go by Jimmy? Right.

Speaker 3 Well, I didn't want to put shade on him.

Speaker 1 Sure. Step on him.

Speaker 3 I want to sort of. Give him a chance to grow an audience.

Speaker 1 That sort of thing.

Speaker 3 You know, I didn't want to step on him.

Speaker 1 Be his own person. Right.
Yeah. Be your own person.

Speaker 3 Don't live in my shadow.

Speaker 1 That's very big of you. Did you go by Jimmy as a kid or always James?

Speaker 3 Some of my family members called me Jimmy. And that was when I was younger.
The older I got, the more I adopted Jim. And professionally, you got to go Jimmy.
I moved to James.

Speaker 3 I would answer to any three of those.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Now, do you benefit, get annoying? Tell me about the experience of having such a popular name.

Speaker 3 The benefit I get is people want to talk about it.

Speaker 1 You go, oh, Jimmy Kimmel.

Speaker 3 Some people might go, I thought you might be.

Speaker 1 If you make a reservation, which would be in good faith. Yes.
Right.

Speaker 3 Because I'd say, this is just Jimmy Kimmel. But I don't do that because, again, I don't want to throw shit.

Speaker 2 A lot of integrity over there.

Speaker 3 I'm trying to be a good guy.

Speaker 1 You should 1,000% make reservations in New York at the hardest places and do it for Jimmy Kimmel. And then when you get there, if they're mad, you show them your license.

Speaker 1 And what are they going to say, like, well, we take away the reservation? They're not. That's exactly.
There's a famous physicist, Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 And there's also a very famous British actor, Brian Brian Cox, who is on succession. And he is many times shown up to a restaurant, and they're super disappointed that it's him.

Speaker 3 It kind of breaks their hearts.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Most of the people just enjoy talking about it. Your question is the question I always get asked.
Do you get asked a thousand times

Speaker 1 anything about Jimmy Kimmel?

Speaker 3 What he did, and he had me and Dr. Phil on, not on the show, but in this photo, because Phil had done an interview with Trump, and Phil had brought me up in the interview with McDonald.

Speaker 1 Did Trump get super confused? He wasn't. That's a good question.
Actually, I haven't heard that question before. That's interesting.

Speaker 3 But that then got to Jimmy. So he brings up to the audience, hey, listen to this name that Phil brings up during this interview with Trump.
And everybody, of course, explodes.

Speaker 3 And then he's like, I'm a researcher when I'm not on stage up here, which was kind of cool. And then he brought both of our pictures up.
And then in this really mad swipe, as nice as I've been, right?

Speaker 3 I've been a very moral

Speaker 1 good boy, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 And he puts a side by side of Dr. Phil and I up, and he goes, Look, everything that Dr.
Phil touches turns bald.

Speaker 1 Oh, never

Speaker 1 mind.

Speaker 1 That's a cheap shot. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Again, you got a feedback inferno of concept.

Speaker 3 So being a revenge researcher, I've been plotting how to get my revenge against Jimmy for months now, and I don't know how to do it.

Speaker 1 I'm going to add, and I'll put a bow on this Jimmy Kimmel thing, not the dude to pick a prank fight with. Oh.
That's kind of his bread and butter. Expert.

Speaker 1 Okay, so your book, The Science of Revenge, Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It.

Speaker 1 We're going to learn all about, but I think you do have an incredibly interesting story to your obsession with the topic of revenge as addiction. And I guess I'd love to start there.

Speaker 1 We know you're from Pennsylvania. We know it was farmtown.
And what was that experience like?

Speaker 3 My folks moved our family to this farm. It had been my great-grandfather's farm when I was age 12.
When I got there, I just thought this was the most amazing place to be raised ever.

Speaker 3 We had a small herd of Black Angus cattle. We had some pigs and chickens and things like that, and about 100 acres, but surrounded by dairy farms that were real working dairy farms.

Speaker 3 My dad was an insurance agent, not a farmer. So that's how we made our living.
And these animals were still my great-grandfathers, and I worked with him taking care of them.

Speaker 3 So I wasn't a real raised from the land kid.

Speaker 1 And you moved at 12? You're moving in seventh grade.

Speaker 3 That was it, seventh grade.

Speaker 1 That's a rough time to move.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I wanted to fit in.
I wanted these guys to like me. I wanted to hang out with them.
They had the really amazing tractors, and I'm kind of a tractor nut. And they had the big stuff.

Speaker 3 We had this old 1950, worked only half the time, little small Ford tractor. But I really wanted them to like me.
So I joined VOAG classes in middle school and high school.

Speaker 3 And I built a haywagon from scratch. I learned how to weld.
I learned how to cut wood. I learned how to take care of animals.
You couldn't have done more. I wanted to grow up and become a farmer.

Speaker 3 That was my career goal. So I kept reaching out to these guys to try to befriend them and they were not having any of that.
And at first they started shunning me and just, you're not one of us.

Speaker 3 Move along half city boy. But later on, that turned into bullying and that bullying went from words to small acts of violence, kicking and shoving and kind of smacking me around.

Speaker 3 And they were always in a group and I'm not a huge guy. And it was one of me against maybe 10 of them.
There was not much I could do about it.

Speaker 1 And it was early 80s.

Speaker 3 So the anti-bullying programs were not prevalent in schools. They weren't in mine.
Nobody talked about it.

Speaker 1 You do five years of this.

Speaker 3 Maybe it started the bullying side, more like 9, 10th grade. It didn't start right when I landed.
That was just shunning for a while.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Then it moved to the bullying. I think when they got older, their bigger team.

Speaker 1 And they're strong as fuck because they work on a farm.

Speaker 3 Correct. Living on a farm.
Most farmers are hunters. So you're hunting.
You're dealing with animals and stuff.

Speaker 3 And you're dealing with a lot of killing and death and a lot of brutality in general with the animals that is

Speaker 3 part of at least how it is or how it was. Child age.
And you're exposed to the killing of all kinds of animals and the domination of.

Speaker 3 person over another being. And as a kid, you don't know that that's not a good thing.
It's just the way life is. So one night, I'm about 17, so we all have driver's licenses.

Speaker 3 We all have access to vehicles and we're asleep at night, my parents and my brother and I. And we awake to the sound of a gunshot.

Speaker 3 So we jump to the windows to take a look outside to see what's going on.

Speaker 3 Again, in the country, you could get people actually shooting deer in the middle of the night with a spotlight, which is unfair and illegal most of the time because the deer are like, huh?

Speaker 3 And they're frozen. And then it's easy pick-ins.
And when I looked out, I saw the pickup truck of one of the guys that had been one of my main tormentors, and it took off.

Speaker 3 And we looked around the house and didn't see any damage and figured, oh, maybe they were just spotlighting, like I said. So we all went back to bed.

Speaker 3 The next day, one of my jobs in the morning was to take care of our animals before I went to school. So go out and feed the cows, the pigs, and feed and water our dog, a beautiful beagle named Paula.

Speaker 3 She was in her pen with a bullet hole in her head, laying in a pool of blood.

Speaker 3 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 Wasn't that just

Speaker 1 so cruel and terrible.

Speaker 3 And it never doesn't get that reaction.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You're having horrific Monica.

Speaker 3 It is horrific. I can't even imagine doing that,

Speaker 3 let alone having a reason to want to do that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. In this case,

Speaker 3 my folks called this state police or who patrols these vast farm rural areas in Pennsylvania. Again, early 80s, and they're like, this is bad.

Speaker 3 They weren't in any way insensitive to what happened, but they were also

Speaker 3 not going to do anything. We're sorry.
If it gets worse, let us know. But it's an animal.
So nothing happened. And my dad, who's this insurance agent, often was selling insurance to farmers.

Speaker 3 So he wasn't about to jump into the middle of this kids dispute, even though he was not at all happy with what happened to the dog. So nothing happened.

Speaker 3 We all kind of went back to our regularly scheduled lives. About two weeks later, my folks were out pretty late at night.

Speaker 3 I was home by myself and I heard a vehicle come to a slow stop in front of our house. We lived on a one-lane country road, so you would pick that up.

Speaker 3 Right as I was getting up to see what was going on, there was a flash and an explosion. What? I went to the window, and that's that same pickup truck

Speaker 3 roaring out of the smoke and our mailbox mangled and flying into the cornfield situation.

Speaker 1 So they blew up our mailbox.

Speaker 3 And that was it for me. They had reached critical mass.

Speaker 3 So like I said, we were hunters. I had been shooting guns since I was like eight years old.
Had plenty of guns in the house. My dad had a loaded revolver that he kept in a nightstand.

Speaker 3 I ran through the house. I grabbed it.
I jumped in my mother's car and I went out after them.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 3 As fast as I could. So I'm driving down this one-lane country road, hitting enormous speeds, just screaming and shouting at the top of my lungs in rage.

Speaker 1 Frontal lobes offline. It's just all instinct and on fight now.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I eventually caught up to them on one of their farms.
I kind of cornered them against a barn. They were still in the truck when I was pulled up with my brights on.

Speaker 3 Three or four heads in the back of the pickup truck window, and they start climbing out, squinting through my bright beams, trying to figure out who had just come roaring down their drive.

Speaker 3 They may or may not have recognized it was my mother's car. I was still in the car.
So they get out, they're staring, they're looking.

Speaker 3 And I'm like, it's go time. So I grabbed the gun.
And what was clear to me at that moment was that they were confused.

Speaker 1 They were unarmed.

Speaker 3 They couldn't have known I had a gun. So it would have been extremely easy at that point to just settle the score and zero off the balance.

Speaker 3 So I opened the driver's side door, started to step out, grab the gun. And just in that movement, I had just a really quick little insight or flash of inspiration.

Speaker 3 I don't know where it came from because I really wasn't in a thinking state of mind right there. But I had this clear idea that if I killed them, I'd be killing either all of myself or part of it.

Speaker 3 And that I would, at a minimum, never be the same guy after these next three seconds that I was before these three seconds.

Speaker 3 That was just enough of a jarring glimpse into the the future that it stopped me dead. And thankfully, I pulled my leg back inside the car door.
I put the gun back down on the seat.

Speaker 3 I shut the door and I drove home. And I came within like three seconds of committing a mass shooting.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Ironically or not, it stopped after that.

Speaker 3 It is maybe ironic. It is mysterious in a little way.
I don't have an explanation for it because I never confronted them. I never told them how close I came to taking their lives.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Although I've been the person on both sides of that, and there is some eerie, unexplained cognition that happens sometimes.

Speaker 1 Sometimes you know the score of things, even though you don't know the score of things.

Speaker 1 Sometimes you know you just got away with something that's quite big, even though you might not have the tangible proof of that.

Speaker 1 There's some feeling in you, I think, that you're like, oh, fuck, I just got away with something.

Speaker 3 I know what you mean. Well, I know that I

Speaker 3 just gotten away with something very big in my life that would have been transformative in a hyper-negative way.

Speaker 1 Yeah. When you've been fucked with like that, one event doesn't erase it.
Many events don't erase it. This kind of need to make sure you're never taken advantage of again, you're never harmed again.

Speaker 1 You make a decision in your life, not again on my watch. It kind of sets you on a trajectory.

Speaker 1 Now, we're all on this trajectory, as your book will point out, but I do think you weirdly found your way to law, which has to be somehow impacted or driven by your experience getting fucked with for so long.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the driving away for me, and I don't know what it's like for other people who get to that edge and then go back. But for me, I wasn't turning my back on the concept of revenge seeking.

Speaker 3 What I think occurred for me is I really wanted to do that. However, I didn't want to pay the price.
And so it was this idea of how can I get revenge? Because now I'm thinking the world is this.

Speaker 3 Take advantage of people that you can or get taken advantage of. And I didn't want to be taken advantage advantage of anymore.

Speaker 3 I just didn't want to either get killed or go to jail or think of myself as a murderer because I'm not a murderer. That's not my identity that I can accept.

Speaker 1 An element that's left out of your story, which I think is involved in your story, is you need to reclaim your masculinity in some sense.

Speaker 3 That's a great point. And I'm rarely asked about that.
You know, the masculine toxicity of all that we've been discussing, right?

Speaker 1 When it's robbed of you, and then it's robbed of you publicly, it is a very deep wound.

Speaker 3 It's hard to overcome that.

Speaker 3 And mainly for me at least was I don't want

Speaker 1 to

Speaker 3 have that happen again. So how can I do that without becoming like a criminal? I was able to put together lawyers are allowed to get revenge.

Speaker 3 That's what they're paid to do and they're paid a lot for it. And it's this prestigious job that you can get.

Speaker 3 And since I had to leave being a farmer, because that was the end of my farmer career on that day, I'm like, what am I going to do with me?

Speaker 1 Now we know that's revenge. But at the time, it would fly under the umbrella of justice.
Lawyers get justice.

Speaker 2 Two sides of the same coin, justice and revenge.

Speaker 1 It is, but I think you get into it for justice and you come to realize you're in it for revenge, potentially. Or maybe you didn't have any highfalutin goals.

Speaker 3 I don't think I had a highfalutin idea at the time, but I did know instinctively that that is the legal way. that you solve problems.

Speaker 3 The legal way involves you go to court and you get a judge to say who's right and who's wrong. And then the judge gets to order a sheriff who gets to have a gun to kind of do what's going to happen.

Speaker 3 So I turned my back on the farm life and turned full towards academics. And I found out there were a few things I could do well other than feeding cattle.
And one was I could write.

Speaker 3 That was my super talent. And I thought.
Lawyers do a lot of writing. Maybe that's something I can do.

Speaker 3 And maybe that's something I'd want to do because I can protect myself from future harms and push back on or punish those who come at me, the people I love, my clients who want to pay me.

Speaker 3 Some of that is happening in my late teen years. Some of it happened later.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and there's an evolution, right? So you go to Penn, you first intern at the district attorney's office. You're on the moral rights side of things, or at least you could buy into that.

Speaker 1 And then you go and you're clerking for a federal judge. So again, we're on this thing.
So when do you enter the civil litigation side? And what's that experience like?

Speaker 3 I do that right out of of law school, right past clerking, I should say. And I get into that for the money.

Speaker 2 Can we start to give a little, like, what is civil litigation compared to

Speaker 3 right? Because there are a lot of kinds. And a lot of lawyers do a lot of things that have nothing to do with litigation.
I wanted to be a litigator. I wanted to be in a court.

Speaker 3 There's two ways to get retribution in the legal system. One is through the criminal justice system.
If somebody commits a crime.

Speaker 3 And for everything else that's not a crime, it goes through the civil litigation process.

Speaker 1 McDonald's gave you too hot a coffee, you burnt your thighs. The largest, most powerful thing in the world an individual American can challenge in this domain.
That's its best version.

Speaker 3 That's right. But I wasn't a PI attorney.
I wasn't a personal injury lawyer, which is the maximal kind of version of civil litigation that looks pretty clearly like retribution, right?

Speaker 3 It's like you hit me with the car, you were drunk.

Speaker 3 I'm going to do everything I can to make you pay, not only because maybe I've been injured and I need that money to survive, which I get, but also I want you to suffer because I've been suffering.

Speaker 3 It's the punitive side of justice seeking. And so it's the two-headed coin.

Speaker 3 Justice that we think of, you know, with Martin Luther King and Jesus and the Buddha or Gandhi is the justice of equity and fairness and integrity and those types of concepts, social justice.

Speaker 3 And then there's justice that we say when we really mean revenge, as in after 9-11, George Bush went on TV and said, we're going to bring the terrorists to justice.

Speaker 3 What he meant was, we're going to go and we're going to kill them and we're going to get revenge.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 So justice is the polite, politically correct word we use. It's a euphemism and it enables by having that one word mean two opposites.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 When you tell your band of militants or terrorists to get in these planes and fly them into the World Trade Towers because we want justice against America, okay, that's the same thing we did right back.

Speaker 3 You can get people to do these things and you could get the American public, as we did, to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and kill hundreds of thousands of people in the process by saying it's justice.

Speaker 3 And people go, oh, I'm being good. I'm a good person.
I'm doing justice here. Not only is it gratifying because we're getting the terrorists who wronged us.
Yes.

Speaker 1 I remember feeling elation in New York City. I'm in a pizza place and all of a sudden I start hearing people cheering outside on the street.

Speaker 1 And then a guy in the pizza place puts his phone down and he goes, they killed Osama. And I remember going, fuck, like the elation I felt was so strong.

Speaker 3 Dopamine high. Yeah.
That now neuroscience has shown is exactly what you're getting. The whole city was high as a gas.
The country was high as a gas. Yes.
Many areas of the country. Not everyone.

Speaker 3 Some people felt that that was wrong in a lot of ways.

Speaker 2 But I know what you mean. You're saying by calling it justice, we have a moral high ground to it.
It then becomes a good positive thing when you replace it with revenge.

Speaker 2 That does have a negative connotation to it. And it is the same thing.

Speaker 3 Justice blesses terrorism. Justice blesses genocide.
It blesses war. It blesses torture.
It blesses murder and violence of all kinds.

Speaker 3 If you can put it under that rubric, you've taken away essentially essentially the last wall between you and becoming a murderer.

Speaker 3 And religions will cast it as justice seeking in order to endorse it and give it their stamp of approval as well. Humanity's been doing this for centuries to our great disaster because it is revenge.

Speaker 3 That's all it is. And it never stops.

Speaker 1 The notion of once and for all is one of the great fallacies people buy into. There's never a once and and for all.
It doesn't work that way, unfortunately.

Speaker 3 And so we can talk a little bit about how you can stop this, because there are some ways, powerful ways. And they have worked at the ends of all wars, actually.

Speaker 3 We always think war ends with a military conquest. And that's not really true.

Speaker 3 Shooting might end with a surrender or some sort of treaty or a complete military victory, but that's not the victory that maintains the peace at any moment after that victory.

Speaker 3 That victory comes through actual national forgiveness of the two warring parties after the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, World War I, World War II.

Speaker 3 All of our wars in America have ended that same way, or otherwise we'd be back fighting again and again and again, like between one and two.

Speaker 1 So your personal journey as a lawyer, which I guess span about 10 years, is that about right?

Speaker 3 I'm still a licensed attorney, but my career really took a pivot point after about 20 years of practice.

Speaker 1 20 years.

Speaker 3 And for 20 years, I really became as ferocious a lawyer as I was capable of making myself be.

Speaker 3 And I was getting as much justice in the form of revenge, as I say it, as opposed to justice in the form of equity as I could get for myself, for my clients.

Speaker 3 And that's kind of the job description for a litigator.

Speaker 1 And I think what's really hard, I have a lot of friends that are lawyers.

Speaker 1 I kind of graphed on something I watched in a chess chess documentary onto this, which is there's a long history of these chess masters becoming paranoid.

Speaker 1 Their mental health, you know, Bobby Fisher even is living in England as an anti-semite. A lot of really weird stories in the chess master world.

Speaker 1 And the braining theory is they spend so much time in their mind foreseeing doom. It's all they do for 12 hours a day.

Speaker 1 And you really form and embolden that neural pathway to the degree that it now infects everything you see in life because that's what you're using.

Speaker 1 And so, a couple of lawyer friends of mine have said, You spent a lot of your time figuring out how to not get fucked. And how on earth do you leave the office?

Speaker 1 And then the brain that does that all day long at a high level, how then when you're at the restaurant and then with your family? And so, at least from your book, that did happen to you, right?

Speaker 1 It kind of bled into everything.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I couldn't separate it with my family, my wife, my kids, my in-laws, my neighbors. There really wasn't any part of my life that was untouched.

Speaker 3 And that's a pretty good description of how I felt, which is you're taking this entire way of being, which is attack or be attacked and strategy. And there's an additional piece to it.

Speaker 3 So there's living in your mind, trying to avoid getting fucked, clearly. There's that extra piece of what I would say is

Speaker 3 feeling victimized. either directly as the lawyer or for your client.

Speaker 3 Anytime I would interview a client or when I was a prosecutor, a victim of a crime, I'm instantaneously right where they are, feeling what they had gone through, enraged.

Speaker 3 And I just want justice in the form of revenge really badly. And I'm, in that sense, a great lawyer because you want a lawyer to kind of do that.

Speaker 3 You want them to be fully invested, not just the money, but you want them emotionally there as a warrior for hire. I'm like a mercenary.

Speaker 1 Look at the commercials. They're all saying, I will fight for you.
Unanimous, they all have to tell you.

Speaker 1 And if you're sitting there and you were just in a car accident and you're looking at a string of these commercials, you're going to want the one with the guy that's just on the edge of crazy, right?

Speaker 3 I'm going to do anything to these people for you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's true. I'll kill their families when we're done.

Speaker 3 And that's why it really is revenge. You're hiring a soldier or a warrior to go and do this battle for you legally that you really can't do outside of the legal system without going to jail yourself.

Speaker 1 In some ways, it's an improvement upon old West justice. But it's the same thing.
It's just we figured out a way to do it a little less. That's right.
Lethal.

Speaker 3 And we have street justice. Every area has their sometimes street justice gunfights and worse.
And then we have it in the criminal justice system and we have it in war.

Speaker 3 So the real truth of that was that I did start to bring that into my own personal life with my family. And that caused a lot of problems, as you can imagine.

Speaker 3 And I felt a lot of guilt and remorse for it. And I wanted to stop.
And I found that I could not get out of it.

Speaker 2 Turn it off.

Speaker 3 I loved it, actually. You know, I was like, I feel bad afterward.

Speaker 1 It's the dopamine deficit issue. So in the shame, you need it even more.

Speaker 3 Right. I feel ashamed.
I'm sorry I did this. I really should probably stop.
And I'm really sorry. And then you're starting to be stressed out again.

Speaker 3 And maybe you have a few cases and you start to see that somebody has just said something that I interpret as offensive or an insult or unfair. Bam, I'm right back in it again.

Speaker 3 And I want that dose of revenge. That's just how it felt for me, but I didn't understand at all what was going on because there has been no research into this at all at that time.

Speaker 3 I was starting to suspect I was an addict and there are no 12-step programs for revenge addicts out there. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You hit a low point, I guess, 2004 or 2005-ish.

Speaker 3 Yeah, right around 04 is when that occurred. I'm just absolutely hating by this point my job, but I'm loving the doses I get in between.
So I'm hating my life.

Speaker 3 It's against a lot of my spiritual values. I'm a Christian.
So I had some fundamental thoughts about Jesus' teachings on forgiveness.

Speaker 3 And I thought, he's got to be talking about more than just a way to get into heaven. Cause he doesn't just say, forgive and you go to heaven.
He was like, you should forgive 70 times seven.

Speaker 3 That's a lot of times.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 3 What does it mean? And I didn't understand why. But my lifestyle was against that.
It was against what I should be doing with my family in terms of loving and respecting them.

Speaker 3 So at that point, I had hit a level at which I was alone in a spare room one night contemplating suicide.

Speaker 3 Had I gone to a doctor, which I should have, I would have probably been diagnosed as being clinically depressed.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more armchair experts,

Speaker 1 if you dare.

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Speaker 2 You know what's even better than getting compliments on your holiday outfit?

Speaker 1 Getting compliments on your holiday outfit that you got for way less than anyone would guess.

Speaker 2 Ding, ding, ding. Exactly.
I just hit up JCPenney for some holiday party looks. And let me tell you, the quality and style are great.

Speaker 2 I got this really gorgeous velvet blazer that everyone thinks was designer, but it's not, but it really looks luxe.

Speaker 1 Yeah. But you're sitting there like, oh, this JCPenney.

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Their home stuff is perfect for hosting.

Speaker 1 Plus, they've got gifts for everyone on your list that look so much more expensive than they actually are.

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Speaker 1 And you had kind of made a mess of your career as well at that point.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I had tried to to wean myself off of it by going from a big, high-powered litigation firm to smaller firms to part-time to my own firm.

Speaker 3 And I was an independent contractor working for other firms when I wanted to.

Speaker 1 By the way, can I just say, because I'm an addict, so that's like, I'm not going to drink whiskey, I'm going to drink red wine. I'm not drinking red wine, I'm drinking beer.

Speaker 1 Now I'm going to drink on the weekends. You're trying all the many things an addict tries.
Bargaining. Yeah.
Other than quitting.

Speaker 3 Right. And I wanted to quit.

Speaker 1 I got closer and closer to quitting.

Speaker 3 I had been a business major in college and I set up a business where we would hire lawyers in India to do legal research for lawyers in America.

Speaker 3 They can do it for less because of the economic exchange. So I had even tried to get that going, but it kind of flopped and my heart wasn't in it.

Speaker 1 Not enough dopamine on that.

Speaker 3 Not enough dopamine there.

Speaker 3 And I just kept coming back to the master, coming back to the drug. And so I happened to have a client who was a psychologist, a friend of mine from college, actually.

Speaker 3 And I said, I think I'm freaking addicted to revenge seeking or justice seeking. And he was like, you're not.
There's no such thing.

Speaker 3 I think you're tired. Why don't you take a vacation? And I'm like, you're probably right.

Speaker 3 But I said, first of all, tell me how you as a doctor, a psychologist, how do you diagnose somebody with addiction? And he said, well, first of all, there is no diagnosis for addiction.

Speaker 3 It's a substance use disorder or a gambling disorder, things like that. But he said, there's there's this book called the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and it has 11 criteria.

Speaker 3 And we use that while we're interviewing somebody. And I said, Can you send me a copy of this book? And he said, How about go on vacation?

Speaker 1 And I said, How about send me a copy of the book and I'll think about it?

Speaker 3 So he did, which was very nice of him. As soon as it came in the mail, I just opened it up, figured out what page this was on.

Speaker 3 And there are 11 criteria for substance use disorder: things like, do you use more of the substance despite the harm it's doing to your life, your social obligations?

Speaker 3 Do you want to try to cut down, but find that you can't? You know them.

Speaker 3 So I just crossed off the word substance and inserted the word justice. And I went and counted them up.

Speaker 3 And there's a scale and three or four is you have a minor substance use disorder and maybe the five, six, seven range is moderate and then beyond that is severe. I was seven, eight, nine in there.

Speaker 3 It goes up to 11. I went, I have a severe justice addiction is what I think I have, but nobody would believe that.

Speaker 1 It sounds silly on the surface. Right.
But it makes sense. I mean, I don't think so because, again, I'm an addict and I see addicts everywhere.

Speaker 1 There's many that have been yet to be studied or labeled.

Speaker 3 What is serious about it? Because it does sound a little bit silly to cross those off, because you could insert all kinds of words in there. I like ice cream and just put ice cream in there.

Speaker 3 But what you wouldn't get with ice cream unless you became obese and got sick from it, usually you you don't have a lot of negative consequences. It's not generally impacting your life.

Speaker 1 There's no wreckage.

Speaker 3 Right. So you probably don't have an addiction because the classic definition of addiction is the inability to resist an impulse despite the negative consequences.

Speaker 3 That's kind of the crystalline definition of addiction.

Speaker 1 I remember people being outraged when Tiger Woods claimed he had a sexual addiction. And so many people were like, everyone likes sex.
I'm like, let me tell you the difference.

Speaker 1 If it's ruining your life and you're trying your hardest to not do it and you continue to do it compulsively and you absolutely cannot stop. That's addiction.
I don't care what the thing is.

Speaker 1 That's right. He ruined his fucking life.
And he did.

Speaker 3 He had a ton of negative.

Speaker 1 And he wants to stop, you know, and he went to a treatment center. I know you think this is like a media curating or something, but that's not.
It's not.

Speaker 3 You know, addiction scientists, that's how they define it. They're broader than just the DSM, which is narrowly tailored to substance and gambling.
And that's about it right now. Right.

Speaker 3 With the possibility of things like gaming and food and shopping, a little bit, but none of them have been honored with the true layer of the world.

Speaker 1 They are

Speaker 1 covering

Speaker 1 it basically. So you go on this self-motivated path to start really studying this.
And how do you submerse yourself in it? What do you start reading? Do you take classes?

Speaker 1 How do you become a buff on this?

Speaker 3 At first, I wrote a book called Suing for Peace, and I took a spiritual approach.

Speaker 3 My thought was, and a lot of people with addiction, they kind of turn to spirituality, maybe first going, I need a higher power here to help me because whatever powers I have are insufficient.

Speaker 3 So I studied the world's justice teachings on forgiveness and revenge seeking or justice and forgiveness. And I found by going through that that anything you want to do is okay.

Speaker 3 Basically, and it's scary, but in almost all of the religions except perhaps Taoism and Buddhism, there are teachings that support overtly an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, revenge seeking.

Speaker 3 We know that. And there are forgiveness teachings.

Speaker 3 So in the Mosaic religions or the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, all three have both teachings simultaneously at the same time. But Christianity and Judaism are split.

Speaker 3 And you have Jesus saying, no, don't seek revenge. Turn the other cheek.
The answer was no really great answer, but it was an addiction. And I came up with a method of trying to...

Speaker 3 help myself because there was no help to be found. It's called the non-justice system, which I've ended up studying as a researcher at Yale.

Speaker 3 But the way that it works is there's something archetypal about the trial process. That's how humanity continues to gravitate in almost all societies.

Speaker 3 If somebody violates a social norm or harms somebody, there's usually a tribunal, there's usually a judge of some sort, there's usually an opportunity to present your case and defend yourself.

Speaker 3 There is a judgment, and then it may be followed by some form of punishment. So that process, that's hardwired, it seems, into all communities.
It's just there.

Speaker 3 And it turns out it really is there to the point that we all have a courtroom of the mind inside ourselves.

Speaker 1 Everyone will relate to this part. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 We are putting people on trial every day of our lives, sometimes hour by hour. The people who wrong us, insult us, are insensitive to us, ignore us, betray us, and worse, cut us off.

Speaker 3 The road ragers, all the insensitivities and slights of the world. We're putting those people on trial.
We're deciding whether they're guilty or not. We're playing all the roles in this trial, okay?

Speaker 3 Because we're doing it inside our minds and we get very good at it. We do it at light speed almost, right? We can do it very fast.

Speaker 3 And then we decide if we find the person guilty and we need to hand down a sentence and we may hand down a sentence, which could include, you ought to die.

Speaker 3 Sigmund Freud said that in his opinion, humans are literally doing away with other people daily and hourly, all during their lives in their subconscious.

Speaker 3 The question becomes, do you leave that sentence in your mind or do you carry it out in real life? And when you decide to carry it out, that is revenge seeking.

Speaker 1 The thing I always share about on here, and a lot of people seem to relate to it, is I will catch myself stuck in a rumination where I am making my case, right? Because I'm going to have this.

Speaker 1 theoretical argument that's impending and I make my case and I've got like 17 exhibits and by the time I get to the last exhibit I go, I got to remember not to forget.

Speaker 1 And then I go through all fucking 17 again. And I just over and over remind myself of all my points and my trial I'm going to have.
And either I don't ever have the trial. We have the trial.

Speaker 1 It doesn't go anything like I have prepared or rehearsed. It's not productive in any sense because they never had a shot.
I already had this.

Speaker 1 And to catch yourself on that loop of just remembering your evidence and your case is suffering to such a degree.

Speaker 2 Well, it becomes about not solving the problem, but just getting your information out.

Speaker 3 Trauma therapists like Bezel Vanderkolk have said the psychological harm that people feel after trauma of any kind, psychological or physical.

Speaker 3 The reason that psychological harm won't go away for most people is because people who are victimized have a powerful need to be heard. They have a powerful need to be validated.
They were injured.

Speaker 3 They need somebody to say and hear them. And they need to hold the person who wronged them accountable.

Speaker 3 So that rumination just goes on and on for everyone all the time that you've described to acts. And we need to have ways of shutting that down.

Speaker 3 And there haven't been actually other than alcohol or substances to just quiet the mind from this constant rumination.

Speaker 3 And that's part of what I tried to create was what if I could repurpose the trial system inside our minds so that you actually put on trial the person who wronged you.

Speaker 3 You play all the roles, including the defendant, in a structured way. So with a little script.

Speaker 3 And at the end, we're not just left with the punishment because you get to sentence them. You get to imagine punishing them.
And I could do this with either of you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, let's go through our actual examples.

Speaker 3 So if you have a solid grievance.

Speaker 1 Let's say I'm late. That's easy.
So I'm late. Monica's on time.

Speaker 3 Okay, so that's not a big grievance, but it could piss you off.

Speaker 1 Or her. I'm late.
I'm willing to be the startup.

Speaker 1 You're always the perpetrator. I'm starting off.

Speaker 2 Okay, let's say, yeah, he's late eight days in a row.

Speaker 3 But does this bother you? I don't love it.

Speaker 1 You don't love it. Do we have anything better, more grievous than that?

Speaker 3 To be a big grievance. From anywhere in your life that you're comfortable with sharing.

Speaker 1 What's a current grievance?

Speaker 2 I have one. Okay, so my apartment building.
Currently is so disgusting. This is so annoying.
Nothing of mine is turned on. I'm not running any water or anything.

Speaker 2 But randomly, there'll be like soapy water, weird stuff coming up out of the tub into my tub. Also, it happened in the laundry room and it flooded the laundry room.

Speaker 2 It's been an ongoing thing, and I've had to say over and over again, this is unacceptable. This needs to stop now.

Speaker 2 Fix it. They keep sending in a plumber.
The plumber's like, it's not clogged. I'm like, I know.
Clearly, that's not what's going on here. What are we going to do? So that's my grievance.

Speaker 3 Okay. They're not fixing this situation at all.

Speaker 1 Right. Let's just do it.
I'm going to add, they're placating you. That's a trigger for me.

Speaker 3 To keep it shortish, we'll say that you've just begun testifying as the victim. So imagine now that you're in a courtroom.

Speaker 3 You could close your eyes for a second and just sort of picture the judge's bench and the lawyers' tables and the jury box. And maybe the defendant is the landlord and they're over at their table.

Speaker 3 And you're over in your table and there's a judge up there and you're now on the witness stand and you're testifying to what they've done to you and what's happened to you.

Speaker 3 And this could be something really significant. So I've done this with people with serious sexual violence, murder, people whose family members have been killed.

Speaker 3 So it can be as big or as small as your life. But let's just stick with yours.
So you testify that that has happened and tell us how that has made you feel.

Speaker 2 Totally disrespected. I pay money to live here and I feel that this is the basic level of care and hygiene that should be handled by the landlord quickly.
So it's very annoying.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 All right. So let's stop with the victim testimony for a minute and let's switch.
So now you're going to play the role of the landlord.

Speaker 3 So the landlord was over at that table and now the landlord's walking up to the stand and sitting down. You're sitting and watching.
That's you as the victim, but now you are the landlord.

Speaker 3 So it's actually you in the witness stand. So you've got to switch that role.
Okay.

Speaker 1 And now you're a lawyer, very well paid, good lawyer. Jimmy Kimmel Jr.

Speaker 3 And his name's right, Jimmy Kimmel Jr.

Speaker 1 Thanks for that advertisement.

Speaker 3 And he's going to ask you, so what's your side of the story?

Speaker 2 Monica has complained about some water leaking into her building. She showed me pictures.
It looks bad. I've sent the plumber in multiple times.
The plumber doesn't know what's wrong.

Speaker 2 He's snaked the drain and it's still happening. She's still complaining about it, but there's not much more I can do.

Speaker 1 You would probably add that you're looking over like 18 units. There's one of you.
You don't have access to everyone else's.

Speaker 1 The plumber thinks maybe if he chased down this problem and all these other people's units, I can't get them to agree to let the plumber in because they don't have an issue. There might be a lot.

Speaker 1 She might feel like, you know, I'm doing really everything one person can do with these 18 units. And I keep sending the plumber and I'm as frustrated with the plumber as Monica is.

Speaker 1 And she somehow is holding me responsible as if I'm putting the subs in her tub. I don't have anything to do with it.
We're on the same team here. All right.

Speaker 3 So now, Monica, in your own role, you've just sat and listened to the defendant testify, both versions. Uh-huh.
How did it make you feel to hear the defendant's story? What was that like for you?

Speaker 2 I understand

Speaker 2 that there's a lot on her plate. She's just a person.

Speaker 2 She's not, you know, a machine. She can't just make sure something gets done because I want it done fast.
And unfortunately, I do think it is her job to make sure that the building is run up to code.

Speaker 2 So though I have compassion for her, I would still like the thing to be done properly.

Speaker 3 So how do you find, as the jury, is the landlord guilty or innocent?

Speaker 2 I think she's guilty. I do think that, objectively.

Speaker 3 That's fair. You're the jury and you get to say what you want.

Speaker 3 You don't have to apologize to me.

Speaker 2 Well, I feel bad for her, which is why I think I can really do this objectively to some extent. I don't think she's a bad person.

Speaker 3 So what should your sentence be? Since you found the landlord guilty, you're going to have to hand down a sentence

Speaker 3 in the non-justice system, which is what this is called, or the miracle court, because there's a free audio-driven app where it takes you through all the steps more methodically than I'm doing right now.

Speaker 3 But in that, you do need to have a sentence.

Speaker 2 This part's hard. I definitely don't want her to get fired.
So I'm not sentencing her with that.

Speaker 1 Can I suggest a sentence that I bet you would love? Sure.

Speaker 1 She has to have the same foam coming out of her tub and her laundry room. Whoa.
Because now she'll be heavily incentivized to deal with the core problem.

Speaker 3 Unless foam doesn't bother her.

Speaker 1 Well, we'll find out.

Speaker 2 That's funny. That doesn't even cross my mind.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 3 That's a very reciprocal type of view. And research shows that males are much more caught up in that

Speaker 3 than women who their empathy centers are more readily available. Males, it goes quiet.
When somebody does something wrong, males just go towards revenge seeking.

Speaker 1 That's interesting.

Speaker 1 I broaden that. Correct.
So I have to deal with this, and you should have to deal with it too. My hunch is once you have to deal with it, you'll be motivated to fix it.

Speaker 2 I don't have that. And I wouldn't want to sentence her with that.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 I think you want her to have the phone.

Speaker 3 Say, oh, well.

Speaker 1 Which is basically what you've already done. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Which is

Speaker 3 actually something that does happen from time to time in these trials. As in, some people will stop right after the defendant has testified.
They'll get some new insight by.

Speaker 3 adopting the other view that was completely unexpected to them. And it'll be shocking to the person.

Speaker 3 They may find that they themselves were at fault or that they understand at a very deep level why and they might have done the same thing in the same circumstances.

Speaker 1 It is a workaround to force you out of attribution error because no one's going to get on the stand and go, I did it because I'm a piece of shit. I did it because I'm a selfish monster.

Speaker 1 You have enough integrity even in your own court trial to know that no one would do that.

Speaker 1 So in the absence of that, you really have to fill in what they could possibly have been motivated by or what their explanation is. It'll kind of inoculate you from attribution error.

Speaker 3 Right. What we find from the research is it will also reactivate, if it wasn't, your empathy.
It's a different part of your brain that was silent, like I was saying for males in particular.

Speaker 3 So it reactivates that and you gain some new insight, but not for everyone. And most of the trials go the whole way to the end.

Speaker 3 But some people will stop at the defendant's testimony or where you're at. It's sort of almost like it wants to be stopped because you don't have a punishment.
Exactly. But you did want to be heard.

Speaker 1 I did. And you've got to be heard.

Speaker 3 And you're holding them to account in the sense that they had to come. and be put on trial.

Speaker 2 Right. And I guess the sentence part is interesting because even though I still at the end, I'm like, yes, I think she is guilty of negligence as a landlord.

Speaker 2 But when it comes to sentencing, do I think that's worth a sentence? It makes you start doing that. Like, is that really worth a punishment?

Speaker 3 No. And in your case, because the case wasn't a super serious case, I mean, part of it's driven by the type of case that you just did.
If this was a romantic betrayal.

Speaker 3 Like I'm going to be doing this next week on Dr. Phil with somebody who's lived through a romantic betrayal.

Speaker 1 And there won't be an easy go through that.

Speaker 3 That's going to be a seriously difficult thing because the pain of that betrayal. So we can talk a little bit about what's happening inside our brains.

Speaker 1 In the 20 years that you've been studying it, we've made a lot of progress in this realm and other people have gotten interested in it in the way you were.

Speaker 1 And we also have had technological breakthroughs where we can now do fMRIs and we can watch people's brains while they are engaged in revenge fantasy when they're engaged in this.

Speaker 1 And then we see undeniably, this is the exact same pattern we see in addiction. And please explain that reward system and how that's hijacking yourself.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so what neuroscientists have found is that your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. It is almost indistinguishable.

Speaker 3 This is like an amazingly big breakthrough that really hasn't been recognized at all by society. And the reason is, is because what follows from that is we now

Speaker 3 understand the biological cause of violence. It's revenge addiction.

Speaker 3 And we can also begin to imagine, because we know how to treat addiction and prevent it, a cure for violence, which has not existed until now.

Speaker 1 So the way it works is this.

Speaker 3 Grievances, this is the scary part. It can just be an imagined grievance, a real or imagined sense of victimization, injustice, shame, humiliation, betrayal, insult, disrespect.

Speaker 3 They all activate the pain network inside your brain, which is the anterior insula. So that's well established.
Your brain hates pain. It wants the pain to stop.
It wants to go back to homeostasis.

Speaker 3 It wants balance. And to do that, humans have evolved so that revenge seeking, punishing the person who wronged you or their proxy.

Speaker 3 So you don't even have to get at the actual person who did the insult or the betrayal. You can pick somebody else if it would be too dangerous, for instance, for you to go after the real person.

Speaker 3 Yes, the dog. And so what happens is the grievance and the activation of the pain network activates the reward and pleasure circuitry of addiction.

Speaker 3 Those are two areas called the nucleus that come as in the dorsal stratum. Those activate for alcohol, those activate for narcotics, those activate for gambling.
They also activate for sex.

Speaker 3 So pleasure on its own is pleasure. It becomes an addiction when the gratification of it comes with negative consequences.
Think about revenge for a second.

Speaker 3 All of the other addictions, you're generally ingesting or engaging in a behavior yourself with a small additional group of victims around you, primarily family who maybe depend on you or you're in a relationship with somebody.

Speaker 3 With revenge, the only way you can gratify it is to harm somebody. With addiction, you might put a needle in your own arm and inject something.

Speaker 3 With revenge seeking, you have to put a bullet in somebody else to get that same high, which is terrifying. But it's been that way for out recorded human history.

Speaker 3 We just haven't had the tools and the technology to see that that's what is driving these crazy things like mass shootings or insurrections or wars or all these things.

Speaker 3 They're all revenge-driven cravings.

Speaker 3 When you go through those two parts, the last part of your brain that is critical is the prefrontal cortex, which is the control center that's to give you self-control and your executive function.

Speaker 1 And modeling the future, predicting how you'll feel after this. Correct.

Speaker 3 That area of the brain, just like it does in other addictions with revenge, it goes silent. And when it does, you're on a farm and you're picking up a gun and you're going to shoot.

Speaker 3 And then, through the grace of God, somehow, it reactivated for me at the last second.

Speaker 1 I want to put an extra fine point on this. The area of your brain driving that in that moment actually cannot model the future.
That area of your brain is only now.

Speaker 1 The preformeral cortex is in charge of the future and modeling. So it literally can't consider the consequences.

Speaker 3 Oh, you mean the reward circuitry? It is all about gratification.

Speaker 1 Amygdala, all these areas, they are incapable of jumping.

Speaker 4 They just want pleasure at this second.

Speaker 3 Now. And that's the mandate, and it has no capability to resist that.
That other part of your brain needs to be functional.

Speaker 3 So if that's not available at that moment when you're craving making yourself feel better. So we seek revenge to make ourselves feel better.
It feels pleasurable. It gives us a hit of dopamine.

Speaker 3 And that takes away some of the pain of that betrayal or that insult or the drain backing up for the 15th time in your apartment.

Speaker 1 It does all that. The kind way to say it is like to exit discomfort.
You're very uncomfortable. And your brain wants you to not be uncomfortable.

Speaker 3 Or worse, you know, my dog was killed. There's a lot of discomfort in that.
Or somebody just invaded your country.

Speaker 1 And the brain does its fastest, most creative thinking in that moment. It'll figure out the thing that can alleviate your suffering.

Speaker 3 Which is go get revenge.

Speaker 3 That has evolved, it's believed, from as early as the ice age, when humans started to live in societies and needed to be able to stop people from stealing my wife or meat that I just killed two days ago, or how to cause people to comply with social norms of the group.

Speaker 3 So punishments that are adaptive, teaching a child, you know, if you eat too much ice cream, you're going to get sick and it's bad for you.

Speaker 3 And then you punish them and say, well, you're going to have to stop watching television for an hour. That's retaliatory, right? It isn't to gratify the parent.
It's to teach.

Speaker 3 The evolutionary psychologists have pinned it as early as the ice age.

Speaker 3 But in the fossil record, the first believed to be act of interpersonal violence that's been discovered so far, like two holes in the skull, you know, of a fossilized skull, goes back 430,000 years.

Speaker 3 Now, no way to tell what was going on then, of course.

Speaker 3 But if that's true, and it was an act of interpersonal violence, and if it's true, and I believe it is, and there's a lot of evidence for it in a lot of places, that almost every form of violence at the root is the result of revenge seeking.

Speaker 3 That is the motive. After every mass shooting, and they go, what was the motive? I always just instantly go, revenge.

Speaker 3 All you're really looking for is what was the grievance that started the revenge process. That's what people are looking for.

Speaker 1 You do a great job in the book to point out the number of sociopaths and psychopaths that might be pursuing violence for pleasure is so infinitesimal that that's not what we're discussing here.

Speaker 1 And when you look at history, you're not looking at psychopaths that have caused the mass. You're looking at normal people who are revenging.

Speaker 3 Normal people who one day, like I would consider myself a non-psychopath, normal person. Yes.

Speaker 3 And on one day, after years of bullying and the killing of the dog and the blowing up the mailbox, was willing to pick up a gun. That's happening all the time.

Speaker 3 Murder, suicides, normal people walking down the street and all of a sudden enough things happen in the right sequence that this can occur.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And nations, because it's at the national level and it's at every communal level.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about Olga. That's a fun, fun

Speaker 1 quotes. Interesting is a better word.
You have a lot of interesting cases throughout history that you look at. One of them is Olga.
What I would say is fascinating.

Speaker 1 We don't think of women as mass murderers.

Speaker 3 That's true. This woman, Olga Hepnarova, in the 1970s in Czechoslovakia.
We know this after the fact, but she had been bullied. She was bisexual.
That was very frowned upon in that area at the time.

Speaker 3 And as a young adult, she decided one day after a lot of what she felt was abuse

Speaker 3 to rent a truck and go out, find a crowd of people in Prague, get the truck up to like 40 miles an hour and drive right through them. And she did.

Speaker 3 She killed eight senior citizens, most of them were older.

Speaker 1 Oh, God.

Speaker 3 Wiped them out, injured another 13 or 12, right?

Speaker 1 Something like that.

Speaker 3 But before she did it, she wrote a letter that she sent to two prague newspapers explaining what she was about to do the manifesto elements like a manifesto

Speaker 3 but she was very careful about explaining her thought process in a really important courtroom of the mind sort of way like we were just doing with you monica and she decided that she was a victim she put the people on trial and she decided that they deserved the death penalty.

Speaker 3 That was her penalty. And she decided to carry it out in real life.

Speaker 1 And she has this very powerful sentence, which is that society can punish the individual, but the individual can punish society.

Speaker 3 And we can see there the example of proxy, right? So she was most aggrieved by her own parents, some of her friends in school.

Speaker 1 Her father was abusing her.

Speaker 3 Her father was abusive. Some of her friends were abusive.
None of them were victims of this. She ended up killing people she from all accounts had no connection with, hadn't harmed her.

Speaker 3 But as far as she was concerned, she was getting revenge on society writ large by doing this. And they were therefore her proxies.

Speaker 3 She stops the truck. She's arrested.
She confesses to everything. She says she's pre-planned it.
And she's very most concerned that people don't think she's crazy. She insists that she's guilty.

Speaker 3 She insists you knew exactly what she was doing. It's important for her and the public to understand that she did it.
because she was retaliating for the mistreatment that she had gone through.

Speaker 3 She gets to court. She has a lawyer.
The lawyer tells her, do not testify that way.

Speaker 3 She ignores the lawyer's instructions and testifies that way and goes on to say, I understand justice is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and I think you should execute me.

Speaker 1 Wants to be hung. Right.

Speaker 3 She's examined by a group of psychiatrists and psychologists because this obviously looks like the work of a mad woman. And they all find that she's completely of sound mind.

Speaker 3 And the court is therefore more than happy to give her her wish and grant her that. And so sentence her to execution by hanging.
She becomes the last woman executed in communist Czechoslovakia.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more armchair expert

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Speaker 2 So when people are, I don't know if we're equipped to even talk about this, but murder-suicide stuff a lot with these mass shootings, they kill themselves. Do we think that's meant to happen?

Speaker 2 Or do you think after they shoot everyone, the prefrontal cortex comes online and they're like, oh no, and then they kill themselves?

Speaker 2 Or do we think it is part of this whole like, I'm seeking revenge, but I know part of that means that I should die too? Do we know any of this?

Speaker 3 These murder-suicides are often without manifesto, not a ton of pre-planning. So we don't know, I think,

Speaker 3 sure.

Speaker 3 But one thing we do know is that you can want revenge against yourself for wrongs that you believe that you committed, self-disappointment.

Speaker 1 I think people that are already self-hating are prone to feel hated by others. It confirms the narrative overall.
So, it's like everyone is victimizing themselves.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so their true motive for the last act, you're asking, why did that person, after it's usually a male, gunning down his whole family, kill himself?

Speaker 3 You know, it could also be the fear of being incarcerated for life or executed.

Speaker 1 Or even facing the shame.

Speaker 3 What is hyper-clear is that all those murder-suicides are revenge-driven.

Speaker 3 The male spouse usually believes that he is a victim of all kinds of injustices in his life from his wife, from his kids, and he's going to destroy them all to balance the shame.

Speaker 1 He's going to teach them they should have taken him seriously and treated him better.

Speaker 3 That's exactly right.

Speaker 1 Let's touch base on a few of the deadliest revenge addicts from history.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are the biggest ones. 40 million for Hitler, 40 million for Mao, and like 20 million for Stalin.

Speaker 3 I go through in the book, I spend a whole chapter on all three of them.

Speaker 3 Going back into history, and there's enough record now and enough scholarship from historians to put together that all three of them were truly revenge addicts and from a young age.

Speaker 3 Stalin, for instance, way before he's anybody, is asked one night over drinks, vodkas, I guess, while in exile in Siberia, what's the most pleasurable experience you can have in your life?

Speaker 3 And his answer is, my most pleasurable experience is identify a target, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to sleep. Nothing is more joyful in the world for me than that, or more pleasurable.

Speaker 1 Oh, God.

Speaker 3 It's incredible. And really, you can see then, once he does get power, him carrying that out.
And Stalin had, by the way, he had been victimized as a kid.

Speaker 3 He had been abused over and over and over again. He was raised in a highly violent town, Tafleis, in Georgia, where blood feuds were part of the culture.

Speaker 3 And so there's this long history of revenge seeking both he as victim, he has perpetrator.

Speaker 3 And he then just goes on this revenge binger for 40 years and ends up killing 20 million people in the process and incorporating other people to do it. Hitler was the same way.

Speaker 3 We don't have a lot of his true childhood stuff. His history kind of starts as a young adult.
He wanted to be an artist, was rejected, rejected Austria when that happened to him or Vienna.

Speaker 3 And then when he got into World War I, became a soldier and loved the idea of fighting and killing other people.

Speaker 3 And when he started to believe that Germany was betrayed by its own people, at the end of World War I, and that's the only reason Germany had to surrender and have the armistice, he went on a complete tear of educating the Germans that they had been betrayed and convincing them that the only and correct response would be to destroy all the people inside of Germany who did that and then all of the countries around them who allowed it to happen.

Speaker 1 And we must add Putin because it's the exact same fucking story. This guy's dedicated his life to the KGB.
He's in East Berlin. He does not believe that the Soviet Union needed to tumble.

Speaker 1 And we are watching him currently try to exact revenge and reassemble the USSR. It's the same Hitler story.

Speaker 3 It just repeats throughout humanity. Mao, we have lots of early data from him.
He was also abused as a child, raised in rough circumstances, saw a lot of violence.

Speaker 3 But what happened for him that's kind of the most chilling, because he swerved back and forth from feeling very gratified by his revengeful acts, 40 million people killed, but also bad about it later.

Speaker 3 So he was really right on the middle and wanted to reform himself, but couldn't get it done. But his main experience was convincing the peasants of China to engage in struggle sessions.

Speaker 3 You've probably heard of those, where they would put on trial the landlords and others.

Speaker 3 Monica, you're very click. I hadn't thought about that until just now.

Speaker 1 Maybe I shouldn't bring this up.

Speaker 3 We want to keep you peaceful.

Speaker 1 Landowners.

Speaker 3 The landlords, landowners, and other people who had abused the peasants and convince those peasants to dwell on those grievances for months on end and then eventually have these great struggle sessions and pageants where they captured all the landowners, marched them through the streets, beat them, killed them en masse.

Speaker 3 And Mao was one of the original envisioners of this. The best way to manage and govern people is to cause them to essentially rat themselves out.
That's the idea is to constantly stir grievances up.

Speaker 3 stir these revenge desires, and then give them a way to gratify those revenge desires.

Speaker 1 And incentivize people people to tell on each other and throw other people under the bus so they themselves don't end up under the bus. That was the very thing.

Speaker 3 And that happened in China. It happened in the Soviet Union, but even more so in China.
But that's our human history because it's our victimization. Research is very clear.

Speaker 3 Bully victims are at the greatest risk of becoming bullies themselves.

Speaker 3 And I used myself in that. category, you know, as a bully victim.
And I didn't know this was happening at the time, but to become a legal bully, which is what I was was doing for 20 years.

Speaker 3 We should talk about the final best because we didn't get to it with you. What do you do when you have revenge cravings? There's two things.

Speaker 3 One is we could use an addiction approach, things like cognitive behavioral therapy and motivational interviewing or anti-craving drugs, potentially like GLP-1s at some point, which

Speaker 3 is really exciting that that could potentially happen.

Speaker 3 If that can reduce other cravings, which they think it can for drugs as well as food, it hasn't been studied for revenge craving, but it probably can.

Speaker 1 Seems to be working on a a lot of addiction.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's working on a lot of stuff. So that's really interesting.

Speaker 3 So we do have that and we can activate now the public health community, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and peer support, like 12-step programs for revenge addicts. I mean, we need that.

Speaker 1 We've seen like anger management programs that are semi-overlappy with this.

Speaker 3 Right, without a lot of adjustment, move into an addiction framework. The danger, I think, of anger management is it sort of targets, oh, it's just an anger that you manage.
And we can just do that.

Speaker 3 You can be angry, but it's kind of like what we know about drugs and alcohol. Even a small amount is too much.

Speaker 1 It's too many.

Speaker 1 A million is not enough.

Speaker 3 Well, that's the way for revenge addicts as well. Once you start, you're going to go on a revenge binger and you're going to hurt yourself and a lot of other people in the process.

Speaker 1 Because it doesn't feel good. Unfortunately, we're also burdened with this conscience.
And then that just skyrockets you right back into the cycle again.

Speaker 3 That is correct. But there's something more powerful than all of these things.

Speaker 3 Just as the neuroscience was explaining why we have revenge cravings and that they can become addictive, and now we know that.

Speaker 3 A different group of researchers were looking into what happens inside your brain when you forgive somebody.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 3 And this is amazingly powerful stuff. So it turns out that forgiving benefits the victim, not the perpetrator.
The give in forgiving is not a gift to. The person who wronged you.
It is a gift to you.

Speaker 3 And that's critical to remember. Neurologically, we now know what happens.

Speaker 3 So that pain network that I I was telling you about of a grievance, the anterior insula, when you just imagine forgiving, and if you had had a more serious grievance where I'm like, okay, let's move into this last step, the fifth step of the non-justice system, is to imagine what it might feel like.

Speaker 3 You don't have to forgive, but just imagine it for a second. Just imagine forgiving now your landlord.
Just close your eyes and just think about that for a second.

Speaker 3 What happens when you do that is that it shuts down the pain network, which is amazing. Instead of covering it up with dopamine, it shuts it down.

Speaker 3 On top of it, it shuts down the revenge-craving reward circuitry of addiction. So now you're no longer being burdened by this constant rumination that Dex had described, right?

Speaker 3 And then the last thing it does is it reactivates the prefrontal cortex, the decision-making and self-control circuitry. So forgiveness is kind of a human superpower or a miracle drug.

Speaker 3 We just didn't know it existed.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the forgiveness part is really great. And I'm just going to add a woo-woo-y spiritual aspect to it, which is in the process of forgiving people,

Speaker 1 you will find that you are more open to forgiving yourself. And it's a practice.
It's a muscle.

Speaker 1 And what we really suffer most from is not the grievances we have towards others, but it's our own disappointment in ourself and our own self-judgment.

Speaker 1 And so I think the more you forgive people, the more you're able to forgive yourself, which ends quite a bit of suffering as well.

Speaker 3 I couldn't agree more. And self-revenge is very prevalent and common.
Self-forgiveness needs to be more common as an anecdote. And you would get that same experience, which is shutting down the pain,

Speaker 3 shutting down the desire to harm yourself. I don't mean necessarily physically, but just constantly beating yourself up for who you are and what you've done.

Speaker 3 And then this better decision-making clarity comes along. And there is a spiritual component if you want it to be.

Speaker 3 But I think one of the troubles of forgiveness in American society, in addition to the masculine feeling that, oh, if I forgive, then I'm weak.

Speaker 3 I've been emasculated because I'm not hurting the person who hurt me. And it's not true.
You're being intelligent is what you're being.

Speaker 3 But by anchoring it in the spiritual realm as well, it kind of depowers what is really available to all of us for free. You don't need a doctor.
You don't need a prescription.

Speaker 3 You can heal yourself with this power of forgiveness that you don't have to have a belief in God or anything for.

Speaker 1 It exists empirically and biochemically, and we can observe it. You don't need a spiritual being in the mix.

Speaker 3 And you can forgive a million times and not harm yourself. So you can take the drug of forgiveness as often as you want.
Matter of fact, it's highly preferred. And you mentioned this, it's a practice.

Speaker 3 So practicing forgiveness is about giving yourself this kind of dose whenever the grievance re-emerges in your memory and it will.

Speaker 3 Like if the foam keeps coming up, you're going to have an opportunity every day to go, I could forgive this or I can just go into a complete rant and down spiral.

Speaker 1 I could damage myself.

Speaker 3 Who will suffer from that rant and down spiral?

Speaker 1 It would be my

Speaker 1 landlord's mom, right? Not the foam.

Speaker 1 I think it's worthwhile to acknowledge America's revenge culture. We're kind of unique in our rate of incarceration.
We're kind of unique in our sentencing. We have very punitive politics.

Speaker 1 As a country, a revenge addict.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think America is a revenge-addicted nation. I think these things happen in cycles throughout history for all countries and all humans.
Some days we're on a revenge rage.

Speaker 3 Other days we couldn't be more peaceful and lovable to be around. America is now feeling like it's getting towards maximal revenge seeking.

Speaker 3 We voted for a revenge-seeking government and at other times in the course of American history we voted for more of a forgiving or peace-seeking government.

Speaker 3 If you wanted to make America truly great again, you would make America forgiving by necessity because the great powers and great peoples have always been forgiving.

Speaker 1 We have an incredible relationship with Japan and Germany. We have benefited greatly from our forgiveness.
Thank God those places have been willing to forgive us. Right.

Speaker 3 So I was going to say, and them us. So, how did we end World War II that was different from one? When we ended one, we punished the shit out of Germany.

Speaker 3 And Hitler rose in retaliation and said, I will get retaliation against all of you bastards for doing this.

Speaker 3 At the end of World War II, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to do it again and to punish Germany severely at the end of World War II. But then Roosevelt died and Truman was elected president.

Speaker 3 When that happened, Truman then visited Germany right after the shooting stopped. And he came back and he said, we're not going to repeat the mistakes that we've made at the end of World War I.

Speaker 3 We're not going to do it again. So we're not going to go for severe reparations against Germany.

Speaker 3 We went beyond that to not only not punishing Germany, but flooding Germany with money in the Marshall Project and helping them rebuild. And that has net the world.

Speaker 3 70 plus years of peace with a true adversary. That's called forgiveness.

Speaker 1 And we just

Speaker 3 don't want to acknowledge the truth of that. But that's what happened.

Speaker 3 The only other thing that has killed as many people other than natural causes of revenge seeking would probably be like the bubonic plague that raged for about 2,000 years plus and only ended, it's hard to imagine this, but in the 1950s.

Speaker 3 That is crazy. It's really weird.

Speaker 3 And it only got stopped because a couple of scientists in Hong Kong, when there was an outbreak there, made the discovery that it was an unseen bacterium that was causing the deaths and not what everybody thought for 2,000 years, which is it's God's judgment, it's evil, witches, Jews, all everything.

Speaker 3 I mean, they just blamed it on every crazy thing.

Speaker 3 Outrageous. So they found out it was an invisible creature, a bacterium.
That's what's killing 200-plus million people.

Speaker 3 In my sense, this notion of revenge addiction is that moment in human history for violence.

Speaker 3 We've now discovered that it's an invisible addiction inside your own head to revenge seeking triggered by a grievance. That's the cause of human violence.

Speaker 3 We can do something about that now that we actually know, which is what happened with the plague.

Speaker 3 It may take another 50 or 100 years, but I'm hoping that with this information out there, we actually will start to prevent and treat violence instead of just punishing it, which is just creating

Speaker 1 more violence, right? Yeah, and breaking people out of the apathy of, well, this is planet Earth.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's just the way it is.

Speaker 1 It's hard to overcome that. It is.
I'm guilty of that. I'm right.
Yeah, it's a gnarly fucking world, guys. Gnarly shit happens and it's going to.

Speaker 3 We're up against it really bad. We really need to do this soon because of social networking platforms.

Speaker 3 They're infecting and addicting millions of people at once with the same grievance because you just press a button and you type in your grievance and now a million other people have your grievance.

Speaker 3 Now all those million people are all craving revenge for the same thing at the same time.

Speaker 3 And we're not prepared as humans for what that means. And we're starting to see what that means.

Speaker 1 Yeah, when I read that chapter, I was thinking you could have easily titled it, Social Media is the crackhouse for an addict. It's immediate.
It's right there. And you have to leave.

Speaker 3 No system has been invented until now that both allows the grievance to be communicated and gives you an instantaneous opportunity to seek revenge by firing back the retaliatory tweet.

Speaker 1 I mean, that is crack all the way. Oh,

Speaker 1 yeah. You can chart the addictive nature of drugs by how quickly they act.
A meth snorter has a certain rate of recovery. A meth smoker has a much lower rate.

Speaker 1 And then a meth shooter is almost not going to recover because of the instantaneous nature of it. And that's all those platforms are.
If you're using them that way. People use them in wonderful ways.

Speaker 1 Well, this has been incredible I really am yeah delighted you're shining a light on this yeah and it is bizarrely hopeful that we would have an explanation for the mass violence we've lived with forever oh my god if GLP ones can fix this

Speaker 1 oh my god I don't know that they can I don't want to say that I know we are we're not saying that we've done so many miraculous future coming fast so we don't know it's so true

Speaker 1 well dr. James Kimmel this has been a delight thanks so much for coming thanks for having me I super appreciate it.

Speaker 3 What a great conversation.

Speaker 1 We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

Speaker 1 I'm so excited. What?

Speaker 1 Because my 454SS is the perfect, perfect vehicle. Okay.
It's the best build I have of all the cars I've built.

Speaker 2 What is it?

Speaker 1 My pickup truck, my black pickup truck, 1990 454SS with an LT4 motor.

Speaker 1 out of a Corvette and an A speed transmission, huge tires and back, wheel wood brakes. It's perfect.
The stereo sucks.

Speaker 1 So I finally stepped up and now I'm having a suite system put in the truck and I can't wait to go cruising now.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to, I'm going to bump the bass.

Speaker 1 I'm going to bump the bass specifically. Wow.
If you hear bass bumping outside your apartment.

Speaker 2 Be like, who the

Speaker 1 cult?

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 this is your framing. Ooh, that's nostalgic.
It's booty bumping time. And then I encourage you to, in your apartment, just start booty bumping.
When's the last time you booty bumping? I am

Speaker 2 a long time. It's been a minute since I've booty bumped.

Speaker 1 15 years?

Speaker 2 20 years? No, no. No, probably

Speaker 2 Callie's wedding was the last time.

Speaker 1 And you specifically did booty bumping. Yeah, we did.

Speaker 2 Because it's like my college friends back together. We were really, we were showing up her LA friends.

Speaker 1 ah yeah and it was shaming them we were shaming them we are on the ass on the ground dropping it we were dropping like it's hot oh wow people were throwing up and rallying like we were people throwing dollar bills at you

Speaker 2 no okay that would have been how you know you were that's when you're an adult you know like it's that's degrading okay so it's not been terrible it's not been too long okay um it's very culty of you what you just did where it's like no

Speaker 2 that bad reaction you had, that that's that's gonna hurt you. Like, let's reframe and make it a positive thing.
Yeah. Even though

Speaker 2 it is a positive thing, no, even though what you're doing is loud.

Speaker 1 Oh, and loud is just negative. Even if it's a, you're, you hear your favorite song, that's negative.

Speaker 2 Yeah, if I, if I'm not choosing to put myself in a situation to have loud sound, I don't want it.

Speaker 1 Okay, Okay, now I'm going to come at you, accusatory, in response. Let's hear it.
I think as you're wearing your Mr. T gold chain, all of a sudden, you're like,

Speaker 1 I won't be in your cult. Okay.

Speaker 2 You think all of a sudden?

Speaker 1 Tell me about that gold chain.

Speaker 2 That's it. 12 years I've been telling you I will not be in your cult.

Speaker 1 Is that gold? It's not real gold. Oh, I was going to say that would be incredible.
And it would probably weigh like six.

Speaker 2 It is actually kind of heavy. Maybe.
But just, it's not.

Speaker 2 But it's a great necklace. I I got it from Sarah Henler.
Okay, great. I love.

Speaker 2 But no, it was quite reasonably priced, very reasonably priced, less than $200.

Speaker 1 Oh, wow. I'm surprised.
Because I could see you if something's too cheap, you might not get it even if you loved it.

Speaker 2 I recently, I bought some pants from the Gap.

Speaker 1 Okay, great.

Speaker 2 My mom and I both bought them. We bought matching pants.

Speaker 1 Mother-daughter.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah, when I was home.

Speaker 1 I love them. And you were in Georgia, though.

Speaker 2 I was.

Speaker 2 So there's an outdoor mall, obviously that's what i'm talking about at home yeah um pretty much my mom and i go from outdoor mall to outdoor mall yeah so we were outdoor i'm jealous of that i wish i liked that that sounds so fun

Speaker 1 because there's treats you go to the food court

Speaker 2 well there's no food court there's restaurants so yeah my mom and i went to one outdoor mall called the forum then we went to another outdoor mall called avalon

Speaker 2 and you know we stopped and we stopped at one of the places and we got some snacks and i had a wine and we kept shopping. Then my dad and my brother came to meet us and we had dinner.

Speaker 1 That's so fun. Do you feel judged by your mom when you have that glass of wine in the middle of the day and she doesn't? No, I don't.
You don't? That's great.

Speaker 1 I don't ever feel

Speaker 2 judged by them. Okay.

Speaker 1 That's nice.

Speaker 2 That's really nice.

Speaker 1 That's a luxury.

Speaker 1 A lot of parents are quite judgmental.

Speaker 2 With anything, unfortunately, there's judgment going the opposite way.

Speaker 2 And I try, I know, it's all all about me, of course. It's not about them.
My judgments are not about them.

Speaker 2 But,

Speaker 2 you know, I do worry.

Speaker 2 Sometimes I worry.

Speaker 1 About

Speaker 2 like my judgments come out of worry. And I guess.

Speaker 1 So do their.

Speaker 2 So does everyone. Yeah.
Everyone's judgments come out of worry.

Speaker 1 I was just, in fact, I showed one of my daughters the post because I found it very inspiring. What post? I follow a day, this account, Daily Stoic or Daily Stoicism

Speaker 1 and it was

Speaker 1 some rules to live by by the stoics. And do not complain.
Do not complain out loud, not even when you're by yourself. Okay.
I like it.

Speaker 2 Interesting. I really like it.
But you love to air grievances.

Speaker 1 Well, but like, I'll come off a motorcycle going real fast and you'll never hear me complain. You know, like I'm not a

Speaker 1 complainer. You think I'm a complainer?

Speaker 2 Well, I think we, well, I guess is how are we defining complaining? Because yeah, I think we talk about things we think are problems in a way that that's complaining.

Speaker 2 That's complaining about the world. And I think it's a good example.

Speaker 1 Complaining or objecting.

Speaker 2 Hmm. What's the difference? Give an example of complaining, like verbally, and then an example of if you can.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I hate work. I hate that I have to get up at 8 a.m.
every day. I can't stand it.
So it's like I'm somehow a victim of some situation.

Speaker 1 And it's almost unfair that I have to do do this thing i see yes okay yep it's like a little entitled a little bit

Speaker 2 okay yeah sure great um and objecting because i think it's okay to complain about

Speaker 1 things you think are wrong morally i wouldn't call that complaining i see yeah i would call that like objecting dissenting okay you know debating arguing standing up for something okay i see that yeah there's a difference for sure okay so no complaining, no complaining.

Speaker 1 Um, I want to pull it up, okay. These are good tips, all right.

Speaker 1 We love good tips, the stoics, but but you know what's so funny is there's just so much overlap with all this stuff because half of what they're

Speaker 1 saying in this clip is AA stuff. Obviously, this predates AA, so I'm like, oh, yeah, isn't that interesting? Like

Speaker 1 this stuff's all been around forever. It's very Buddhist, sure,

Speaker 1 um, very, very Buddhist.

Speaker 1 Okay, here we go. You ready? Let me get my volume all the way up.

Speaker 4 So, things you need to stop doing, according to the Stoics. Number one, stop complaining, Marcus Reelius writes in meditations.
He says, Don't be overheard complaining, even to yourself.

Speaker 4 If you can practice acceptance, if you can see things for what they are as they are, you can move on, you can deal with them.

Speaker 4 Which leads to the next one, which is stop focusing on things that are not in your control. As the Stoics say, we don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens.

Speaker 4 Number three, you got to stop judging and you got to stop having so many opinions things are not asking to be judged by you marcus aurelius says in meditations you don't have to have an opinion about this he says you always have the power to have no opinion seize that power you got to stop worrying about the future we suffer more in imagination than in reality seneca says and then he says he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary stop holding people to your standards it's called self-discipline for a reason tolerant with others strict with yourself.

Speaker 1 That was the motto of Marcus Aurelius.

Speaker 4 You gotta stop tying your ambition, your identity to things that are not up to you.

Speaker 4 That's what Marcus Aurelius said was the crazy thing about ambition, that it's tying your sanity, your hope, your peace, your happiness to an outcome that you don't necessarily control.

Speaker 4 And finally, you gotta stop acting like you're gonna live forever. You are not.
It's not that life is short, Seneca says. It's that we waste a lot of it.

Speaker 4 And we waste it because we think it is long, because we think we have tomorrow. We don't.
Don't do it later. Do it now.
Act as if you don't know how long you have, which is true, you don't. And

Speaker 1 well, and it shut itself off there.

Speaker 2 Um, that was probably, they probably did that on purpose. So it's like you want more, but you can't have more.

Speaker 1 Accept it. Yeah.
Don't complain about the video ending stuff. But judgment is what made me think of it.
And I didn't even remember it. But so I'm good at some of those tenets.

Speaker 1 And the one I'm terrible at, which I needed to hear, was you don't have to have an opinion on everything. Oof, that's a toughie.

Speaker 2 Well, I find find that complicated. I think.

Speaker 1 Let's hear your opinion on that.

Speaker 2 Well, we're not going to have a show if we don't have opinions.

Speaker 1 A thousand percent true.

Speaker 2 So we are to have opinions.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, yeah. I was just teasing.

Speaker 2 When I grew up,

Speaker 2 we were taught to have a critical opinion of things.

Speaker 2 Same. It was in class.
Like, read a thing and then figure out with real points what your opinion is on it.

Speaker 1 Critical thinking.

Speaker 2 Critical thinking. Yeah.
I think that's a good idea. That's a hard one for me because I find that to be a virtue.
Unless you're just shoving your opinion on people who don't need it, care about it.

Speaker 2 Didn't ask for it. Ask for it.
Yeah. It's irrelevant.
It's just you trying to have a voice for no reason. Yes, it's slippery, but I also think it's okay to

Speaker 2 take in all the information and

Speaker 2 form. And I thought about it.

Speaker 1 And I'd imagine you're free to have opinions on important things

Speaker 1 under this edict.

Speaker 1 But I definitely know, I've even said this on here in the last couple of years, like I have a mantra in my house, which is like, your opinion's not needed here. Right.

Speaker 1 Which is almost always true. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And life's better without me interjecting my opinion all the time. And I'm free to let everyone, you know.

Speaker 1 But that one's hard. That one's the hardest.

Speaker 2 It's hard for me. That's very hard for me, too.
I actually, you know what? I just had to apologize to someone recently because of this very thing. Actually, it's weird that you're bringing it up.

Speaker 2 I'm really

Speaker 2 embarrassed that I behaved this way. So I want to start by saying that.
And I did apologize.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Were you drunk?

Speaker 1 No. Okay.

Speaker 2 I was totally sober.

Speaker 1 Okay. That makes it harder, I think.

Speaker 2 I was with Jess.

Speaker 2 And we were on a big adventure one day. Yeah.

Speaker 2 We decided we were going to go go on what we call walkies, which is just like a long ass walk and we're stopping at stores and it's fun.

Speaker 1 You're treating LA like the outdoor mall.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 We're on vacation in LA. Yeah, yeah.
It's very fun. So we start and we go to some stores and he's buying some, you know, I kind of brought shopping into his life.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I was, I was going to say, I can't imagine he loves shopping.

Speaker 2 He's starting to like actually not just enjoy it with me, but he'll be like, oh, I do want to to go to that store and see what they have. I want to do this.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so we're, you know, we're bopping in places. We're both buying stuff.

Speaker 2 So we've already bought multiple things. Obviously, Jess and I know each other really, really well.

Speaker 2 So, and not only do I, not only am I reading between the lines, but there's explicit things stated between the two of us. Like, I'm worried about this or I'm worried about this.
X, Y, and Z. Okay.

Speaker 2 So we're walking, we're buying. It's exciting.
We're getting great items. Yeah.
And then we decide we're going to to walk to Echo Park. Now, for people who don't know, that's far.

Speaker 1 That's like far.

Speaker 2 It's not that far.

Speaker 1 Probably, what, three and a half, four miles?

Speaker 2 I didn't look at the mileage, but from where we were, which was already Sunset Junction.

Speaker 1 Oh, then, yeah, okay. It was an additional 45 minutes.

Speaker 2 Oh, 45-minute walk from there. Oh, okay.
Okay. So, but we decide we're going to do it.
And, but we'll stop in stores.

Speaker 2 So we're going, we go into a store, a men's store, and

Speaker 2 he is like looking at some tops. I think they're great.
He's going to try them on.

Speaker 2 And, you know, he puts one on and I was like, oh, it's, I love it. It's great.
And he was like, oh, I don't know. I don't know about this like collar thing.

Speaker 2 And I was like, well, if you don't, if it's going to like bother you every time you see it, then, you know, that's not a good idea. But I think it looks great.
Took it off. He put on the other shirt.

Speaker 2 Same shirt, but different color.

Speaker 1 Color or collar?

Speaker 2 Color. Okay.
Same exact shirt.

Speaker 2 And I was like, well, I like the other color better. Yeah.
And he was like, yeah, yeah, me too.

Speaker 2 Then we go to check out and he gives,

Speaker 2 he buys both.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 2 And I was like, you're buying both?

Speaker 2 And he was like, well, yeah. And I was like, but it's the same.

Speaker 2 I was like, it's the same. You don't need both.

Speaker 2 And I said it like that.

Speaker 1 And he was like, well,

Speaker 2 and he, but and he bought it. He didn't change his mind which i'm glad about but i was like i mean it's kind of like a

Speaker 2 specific shirt

Speaker 2 like it's not a white tea and a black tee it's specific so you you don't really need two of the same thing right

Speaker 2 okay so then that's over yeah yeah but then after i was like who am i to tell him he doesn't need

Speaker 2 two of the same shirt. Like, even if that is my opinion.

Speaker 1 Or your personal preference for you, how you would buy a shirt right if it's my opinion that no one needs two of the same shirt or whatever that is not my place to put on anyone this is not bad monica well i can't even but i was expecting something much more hurtful

Speaker 1 i'm not a mean girl well just you had to apologize i did because

Speaker 2 my thought was oh you hurt his feelings i didn't hurt his feelings but i did make him self-conscious

Speaker 2 exactly i made him self-conscious second guess himself yeah and that's mean like i i didn't i didn't mean it with

Speaker 2 ill intent i i meant it i meant it honestly as like an experienced shopper that's what you were thinking

Speaker 2 i know about shopping and and so like you do you're new to shopping and i see how you wanna and i thought

Speaker 2 you know you'll probably just have to return it and that's gonna be a pain like i know how this goes also like if you ever express any like money

Speaker 2 troubles and you're spending and I know you don't, like, that's a useless spend, but none of it's my business.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 None of it is my business. And that's why I had to apologize.
Cause, cause

Speaker 2 I guess that's for me. Like in apologies,

Speaker 2 I really, I have to be sorry. Like, I'm not just going to say, oh, I'm sorry.

Speaker 1 You have to feel bad that you did something.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I did something that I recognize I don't want to be doing in life. And I'm sorry I did it to you.
And I'm not going to do it again. Or I'm going to try not to do it again.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Anyway.

Speaker 1 So the Stoics,

Speaker 1 they were whispering to you.

Speaker 2 Well, I'm Buddhist.

Speaker 1 I was in a similar situation last night, but I did

Speaker 1 resist. I'm sitting in the nook, like at the booth.
Uh-huh. In your kitchen.
And I'm watching someone in my house cook pierogies on a pan. Okay.

Speaker 1 And I'm watching them flip the pierogies with their fingers in the pan.

Speaker 1 And I want to say so bad,

Speaker 1 I want to use tongs. You're going to burn your finger.

Speaker 1 And then I go, no.

Speaker 1 Don't burn the finger. I don't need to do that.

Speaker 1 That'll be its own issue. No, I won't.

Speaker 1 Exactly. And this person burnt their finger.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then they had a burnt finger. And I was washing dishes and then I shared another person.

Speaker 1 Oh, man, this is great. I wanted to say that and I just didn't.
Yeah. And like,

Speaker 1 everything's fine. This person has a burnt finger.
They're dealing with it. They learned the lesson way better than if I told them not to.

Speaker 1 They didn't even believe that I was going to, they would have not believed they were going to burn their finger. I would have forced them to get tongs.
They'd be resentful at me because, you know,

Speaker 2 you're controlling them.

Speaker 1 Like, let life teach everyone their lesson. I know.
No, I'm not saying that to you. I'm saying that to me.

Speaker 2 No, I agree.

Speaker 2 I agree. But also, now here, what about this?

Speaker 2 The fingers burnt, right?

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 2 And then for the next two hours, this did not happen with me either. But what if for the next two, three hours, there are complaints about the burnt fingers.

Speaker 1 You're not allowed to complain because

Speaker 2 the stoics.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 Then what? Because that's when I'm like,

Speaker 2 I don't want to hear it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because you juggled chainsaws and your fucking hand got caught.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so I don't want to hear it. I'm very much, I don't want to hear it, girl.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I relate to that a lot. I think my strategy lately has been

Speaker 1 I've been trying to find a middle road between those two things, which is

Speaker 1 I can acknowledge what you're going through

Speaker 1 and say I witness you. And I don't have to fake sympathy.
Right. I don't have to match your emotions.

Speaker 1 I have to let you know, like, oh, yeah, that looks bad. That must hurt.
Like, I can do that and resist saying,

Speaker 1 well, yeah, it's when you flip the things with your fingers, they're going to get, like, that's what, of course, I want to say. Right.
It's like, this is your fault. Right.

Speaker 1 And I don't want to deal with your emotions. But, but also,

Speaker 1 we zoom out. It's like, yeah, I make mistakes all the time.
Yes. Often they're probably my fault.

Speaker 1 And if I'm.

Speaker 2 But if you're complaining about it to other people for hours,

Speaker 2 you shouldn't.

Speaker 1 You've lost the right to do that.

Speaker 2 I kind of think so.

Speaker 1 But you can only complain about stuff that was truly you had nothing to do with.

Speaker 1 Or you can.

Speaker 2 I mean, I'm open to that being the truth, but I think you can complain or be like, my finger really hurts. I really should.

Speaker 2 At that point, I think it's on you to be like, I guess I shouldn't have touched that hot pan.

Speaker 1 I mean, that's what I'm hoping to hear, but I didn't get that. But that's fine because I just, I got out of a lot of

Speaker 1 so many bad things would have come out of it. And everything's fine.

Speaker 1 And the the finger was burnt whatever and then you go like oh grab neosporn and a bandaid and then we're we're on and that's all up to them yeah

Speaker 2 but do you think some okay now do you think in general some people are better decision makers than others of course look around you i know that's how i feel yeah so is it

Speaker 2 If you consider yourself a pretty good decision maker.

Speaker 1 Of course I do. Yes, and I do too.

Speaker 2 So when you're around

Speaker 2 people who you don't feel are very good decision makers and they're making decisions.

Speaker 1 It was in the video.

Speaker 1 So it's be tolerant of others and strict with yourself.

Speaker 1 So it's like, yes, I have a code and I'm going to think through everything and I'm going to really try to model out the future and always make the right decision. And

Speaker 1 that should have nothing to do with how anyone else is living their life, ideally. My best version of myself.

Speaker 2 It's so hard when you see it's causing them pain or distress.

Speaker 1 How often do you have friends? It's like they keep getting in their own way. Yes, I know.

Speaker 1 But I think you got to get mildly realistic. Unless they come and ask you, I'm going to pick between A and B, what do you think?

Speaker 1 And you go, B, for you to go like, you're always getting in your own way. You're blah, blah, blah, blah.
That has the illusion of you're going to change them. And that is also rubbish.

Speaker 1 You're not going to change anyone.

Speaker 1 If they ask your opinion on option A and B, I think you should give it.

Speaker 1 And then otherwise they think you should recognize like people are on their, their path and it's going to be however it is and they'll have the consequences of that.

Speaker 1 And you get to be on your path without anyone telling you maybe you should loosen up on your

Speaker 2 people get very

Speaker 2 stuck or fixated on something

Speaker 2 that is

Speaker 3 counterproductive to their goals.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And you want the best for them.

Speaker 2 You want the best for them. And it's, to me, feels like it's easy to just say, Hey, just so you know, like I'm seeing this.

Speaker 2 Like, I think there are nice ways of doing it, not like, well, you shouldn't have done that, you shouldn't have touched the pan. Like,

Speaker 2 I think there are some half-manipulative ways of doing it, like saying, like, oh, I know that happened to me, and I was six back when I was stupid. When I was

Speaker 2 20, actually, I'm way later, I did that, and I got this crazy burn, and then then I started using tongs.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You could relate. You could do that.
I sometimes think, like, and I do not want to suggest that I am the finish line, but I often think of you and I.

Speaker 1 And I think it's a great gift to the show that you're 37 and I'm 50. Okay.
It's a great gift because you're thinking in your age group and I'm thinking in mine and our audience is varied.

Speaker 1 So it's, it's good. But sometimes I think,

Speaker 1 what would this show be like if you were 50 as well?

Speaker 1 I think it'd be way less compelling

Speaker 1 because a lot of this stuff is just getting old. Like there's no effort on my part.
I'm not trying to be a certain person. But over time, I think people tend to change in kind of predictable ways.

Speaker 2 Interesting.

Speaker 1 You don't think so?

Speaker 2 Well, what do you mean? Like you think you're Zen and I'm not?

Speaker 1 Well, I think it's easy, like this little thing about like offering your opinion or not saying something to somebody.

Speaker 1 I think it's easier for me because I've had another 12 years of watching people do exactly as they're always going to do.

Speaker 1 And I've come to accept a little more that people are just, they're all on their own path. And I think you can only get that opinion by just watching time and patterns emerge.

Speaker 1 Or let's just say almost all people get a little more conservative as they get older. Uh-huh.
You know, that's just a, maybe you'll be excluded from that, but it's a very common,

Speaker 1 very common, yeah.

Speaker 1 So it's like, I'm also, it's curious if I was 37, if you were talking to 37-year-old Dax all the time, I probably would be much more revved up about a lot of the stuff you're revved up about. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I can almost guarantee it. Yeah.
And so I have this mixed emotion of like, I think it's great for the show

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I feel bad for us that we're not in the same

Speaker 1 year where maybe we would see eye to eye more.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 I mean, sure, age has parts, is part of it, but I think

Speaker 2 us not seeing eye to eye always is

Speaker 2 our, we have different personalities and different experiences in life.

Speaker 1 It's multifaceted. You're a woman, I'm a man.
Exactly. You're brown, I'm white.

Speaker 1 There's new innumerable things. One of them is 12 years.

Speaker 2 Yeah, one of them is 12 years. Yeah.
but I don't I guess I'm like it yeah

Speaker 1 I think you take you're taking offense to that well it's somehow like you're thinking I'm calling you immature or something that's why I started by saying I'm not saying I have evolved more than you or that you said I'm not the finish line exactly I'm not saying that like I'm the product of wisdom or anything I'm saying 50 year olds and 37 year olds are different definitely different and but I'm also not 20 so I I don't know if we're.

Speaker 1 Let me say this. I'm going to take you out of this.
I was a lot different at 37 than I am at 50. Yeah.
That's all. So I know I changed a lot in the last 13 years.

Speaker 1 And my hunch is you'll change a bit too.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 I'm sure. I hope.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, the goal is to be changing.

Speaker 1 I just wonder, like, I bet, here's what I'm saying. If we had time machines

Speaker 1 and I could

Speaker 1 be 37 and fast forward and listen listen to myself as a 15-year-old argue with you.

Speaker 2 As a 50-year-old, yeah.

Speaker 1 No, as a, as a 37-year-old.

Speaker 2 You're a 37-year-old listening to you now.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm 37. I get in a time machine.
I go, I go ahead and time 13 years and I hear me arguing with you.

Speaker 1 I guarantee 37-year-old me many times would be like, oh, my God, she's right.

Speaker 1 What are you talking about?

Speaker 1 And I think if you, it's, it's possible that when you're 50 and you you listen to some of this, you might also go, oh my God, that's so funny. I see what he was saying.
Sure, probably. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 That's all. Where did that come from?

Speaker 2 Where did this train of thought come from?

Speaker 1 Oh, I've had this for years. There's a lot of time.
There's tons of disagreements we have that I chalk up to our differences.

Speaker 1 And then some of them I chalk up to our age difference.

Speaker 2 But did something happen in this conversation that made you say that

Speaker 1 it came out of nowhere? No, it didn't come out of nowhere. We were talking about opinions.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And whether or not you need to give your opinion. Yeah.
And whether or not you think you should tell someone.

Speaker 2 Do you think that's with age? You've, you've come to that.

Speaker 1 As you get older, you're less interested in trying.

Speaker 1 You've just, you've been friends with people for 40 years and they never change and you give up.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but I don't.

Speaker 1 But I don't think any grandparents are telling other grandparents how they should live their life.

Speaker 1 There's a ton of 18-year-olds giving each other advice on how they should live.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, because they have a lot of time ahead. There's more reason to, honestly, if you're a 50-year-old or a six, you know, the older we get,

Speaker 2 the less time there is to make that, those changes. So I do think there is like, what's the, what is the point of telling someone my age how to behave or older than my parents, right?

Speaker 2 Like they're them. They are them at this point.

Speaker 1 But you will have a friend when you're 80 and your 80-year-old friend will be making mistakes. Like they'll, they'll be getting in their own way.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And my hunch is when you're 80 and your 80-year-old friend is getting in their own way, it's much easier for you to not say anything about it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think when you're young, it's hard not to say something about it because you foresee their whole life ahead of them.

Speaker 1 And if they keep doing this, they're never going to reach their goal.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, I just think there's differences as you age. I feel it even in a five-year gap between Kristen and I.

Speaker 1 Like she has a very much, her opinion about work is very much what my opinion about work was at 45.

Speaker 1 And even in the last three years, my opinion has evolved dramatically in that way. And

Speaker 1 I just recognize, oh, yeah, I got to remind myself

Speaker 1 what did I think when I was 45? Yeah.

Speaker 1 What did I think at 37?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, I think I do

Speaker 2 know that that was the point of my story is that I caught it.

Speaker 2 After, I mean, I didn't catch it, but I recognize that's not who I want to be.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 all I can do is try not to do it.

Speaker 1 I guess you're trying to straddle the line of not becoming boring.

Speaker 1 There's a bit of stoicism. I'm like, I don't know if you achieve all these goals.
Are you not just boring? You're like super self-disciplined. You never complain.
You accept everything.

Speaker 1 There's no friction. You're not judgmental.
You don't have opinions. Yeah.
Are you alive? I don't think anyone,

Speaker 1 again, achieves

Speaker 2 minus some

Speaker 2 real Buddhists

Speaker 2 who've devoted their whole life to it and live in a monastery and stuff. I don't think regular people can achieve all those things.
I think you can get close.

Speaker 2 I think when you're in distress or torment, you can try to like

Speaker 2 bring in those things so that you feel relief and better. But on a day-to-day,

Speaker 2 yeah, I doubt it.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 2 Well, let's get into some facts.

Speaker 1 Stay tuned for more armchair experts,

Speaker 1 if you dare.

Speaker 1 This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. So many of us are really impacted by the colder seasons when it gets dark so much earlier and the days feel shorter than ever.

Speaker 2 Yeah, me, me, I'm the one. I feel horrible when it...
seasonal affective disorder.

Speaker 1 Yes, you do take a

Speaker 1 hit. I do.
When it gets dark. You know how it goes.
Life gets busy, but that's exactly why shorter days don't have to be so dismal.

Speaker 1 It's time to reach out and check in with those you care about and to remind ourselves that we're not alone. And you know what? Every time I finally do, I think, why didn't I do this sooner?

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Speaker 2 James Kimmel Jr., facts. So watch complications.

Speaker 1 Oh, great.

Speaker 2 Tell me about them. Watch complications are features or functions added to a timepiece beyond its basic timekeeping function.

Speaker 2 They can range from simple displays like the date or day of the week to more complex mechanisms like chronographs or perpetual calendars.

Speaker 2 Essentially, anything on a watch that isn't directly related to telling time is considered a complication.

Speaker 2 Let's see.

Speaker 1 Do we have a world record for complications?

Speaker 2 I can find it. But hold on, I want to give some some more.
Chronograph, a stopwatch function,

Speaker 2 allowing the measurement of elapsed time. Moon phase, a display that indicates the current phase of the moon.

Speaker 2 Perpetual calendar, a mechanism that automatically adjusts for leap years, month lengths, and other date irregularities.

Speaker 1 Whoa.

Speaker 2 Turbulent, a rotating cage that houses the escapement and balance wheel designed to counteract the effects of gravity on a watch's accuracy.

Speaker 2 Then we have dual time zone. We have minute repeater, a complication that strikes the hour and a half hour on demand using a series of symbols or gongs.

Speaker 2 Power reserve indicator indicates the amount of time a mechanical watch will continue to run on a single winding.

Speaker 1 I'm totally listening to you and I'm getting the answer so you don't have to do that. I'm trying to help.
Thank you.

Speaker 2 Alarm, a function that allows the watch to sound an alarm at a specific time.

Speaker 2 Okay, now you are looking up the most complications. What did you find?

Speaker 1 Is that the same watch I have? What do you have, Rob?

Speaker 1 Or that's just one with different complications.

Speaker 1 Which has 41 complications. 41 complications.

Speaker 2 It's also called, it's horology.

Speaker 1 A Vacheron Constantin La Cabodoza, Berkeley Grand Complication. A pocket watch unveiled in 2024 has 63 complications.
But I said thousands. I'm reading another thing.
I got confused about.

Speaker 1 There's another thing that they also like like about watches that has a

Speaker 2 stupidly high number but well no yeah this says the watch with the most complications is the franc moulaire

Speaker 2 a ternitas megaphor boasting 36 complications but it features 1483 components and 23 indications via 18 hands and five discs okay maybe i was looking at components and also seeing complications and conflated components and complications Oh, and it says that one holds the record for the most complications.

Speaker 2 Other manufacturers like the one you just said, Vasharon.

Speaker 1 63 complications.

Speaker 2 Yes, 63, including a Chinese perpetual calendar.

Speaker 1 2,877 components and 245 jewels inside of that.

Speaker 2 Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 1 It'd take you a lifetime to build this watch. Yeah.

Speaker 2 What an interesting mind.

Speaker 1 I wish I was hornier for it. I just can't see that that doesn't equal value to me.

Speaker 2 It equals value to me because it is

Speaker 2 made with care.

Speaker 1 That's true.

Speaker 2 Things that are detailed like that, that are made with such care, I do appreciate.

Speaker 1 Mine just has one complication. It does? What is it? And I don't even know what it's doing.
Oh, seconds, seconds.

Speaker 2 Oh.

Speaker 2 Does it have the date?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 2 Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 But this is my new favorite watch. I love this watch.

Speaker 1 So simple.

Speaker 2 Yeah, obviously. It only has one complicated win.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's not complicated, and I like that.

Speaker 1 It only has three numbers on it, too, which I love.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's cool.

Speaker 1 It's a panora.

Speaker 2 Nice.

Speaker 1 It's the watch I've been coveting for 12 years that George had. Oh, cool.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, I looked up what's currently in the DSM for addiction.

Speaker 1 Okay. See if I still qualify.

Speaker 2 The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, classifies substance use disorders, SUDs, as follows.

Speaker 2 alcohol use disorder, caffeine use disorder, even though now they should remove that. They should.
Eric Topol told us we could drink it.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 2 Cannabis use disorder,

Speaker 2 hallucinogen use disorder, inhalant use disorder, opioid use disorder, sedative hypnotic use disorder, stimulant use disorder, tobacco use disorder.

Speaker 1 I've got a few of those.

Speaker 2 Includes a category for gambling.

Speaker 1 No rage. No rage.
No rage Yet.

Speaker 2 No shopping.

Speaker 1 Ah.

Speaker 2 Which is interesting.

Speaker 1 No kleptomania.

Speaker 2 That'll probably get added.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The 11 criteria that reflect impaired control, physical dependence, and social problems, they are

Speaker 2 taking more of the substance than intended or using it for longer than intended, persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance abuse.

Speaker 2 Spending a great deal of time obtaining, using, or recovering from substance use,

Speaker 2 neglecting major role obligations due to substance use, continuing to use despite substance-related problems, legal, social, occupational, tolerance, needing more of the substance to achieve the desired effect, withdrawal symptoms when not using the substance, craving for the substance, using in risky situations, example, driving while intoxicated, having substance-related legal problems.

Speaker 2 Does that up

Speaker 1 you don't, were you at it, were Were you doing a mental checklist?

Speaker 2 I knew you were going to say that.

Speaker 1 Of course, I would.

Speaker 2 I knew you were going to say that.

Speaker 1 Should I not?

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 1 It seemed plausible.

Speaker 2 I was so excited to.

Speaker 1 No, I was thinking about my own history.

Speaker 2 Well, we know yours.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I still think about it.

Speaker 1 I've never taken that questionnaire.

Speaker 2 How many did you have?

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 11?

Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe all of them. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, let's see. Um

Speaker 2 taking more of the substance than intended,

Speaker 2 no, but using it for longer than intended, probably yes.

Speaker 2 Persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance use.

Speaker 2 Probably yes. Um spending a great deal of time obtaining, using, or recovering from substance use.

Speaker 2 I wonder what a great deal means.

Speaker 1 That's a

Speaker 1 highly vague

Speaker 1 word. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't know what we would say for that.

Speaker 1 If you add it up in a week, how many hours you're drinking? Is that a great deal of time or not?

Speaker 1 I guess.

Speaker 2 I guess.

Speaker 2 I guess.

Speaker 2 But always it's

Speaker 2 in conjunction with other things. So it feels hard to do that.

Speaker 1 Right. It's not like you're sitting in your bathtub drinking.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Or even in my house.
Yeah. Yeah.
So that's harder.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Um, tolerance, needing more of the substance.

Speaker 1 Um, yes and no.

Speaker 2 I feel like if I take one day off, I'm already like back to your back to your.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But I mean, sure, probably.

Speaker 2 Withdrawal symptoms when not using the substance.

Speaker 2 I don't think so, but I guess I don't know what they would be.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't think you're any stretch physically addicted to alcohol.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Are you grumpier in the evening on the nights you can't drink?

Speaker 2 Again, depends on what I'm doing. Like if I'm playing a game somewhere, no.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 If I'm just like white, yeah, if I'm like just like white knuckling, it's and like I really're about to cook food and you're like, fuck, I can't.

Speaker 1 Tonight's a night I can't cook and drink wine. Are you agitated while you're cooking? Oh, um,

Speaker 2 maybe.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 craving for the substance, yes.

Speaker 2 I'm grumpy now.

Speaker 2 Had nothing to do with the alcohol.

Speaker 1 I'm not grumpy.

Speaker 2 I'm great. But I do want to warn you.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I do want to warn you, and I think it's only nice. Okay.
Sorry, real quick. Having substance-related legal problems? No.
No.

Speaker 2 Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Speaker 2 I do want to warn you that next week I will be PMSing.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

Speaker 2 And so will Kristen.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Great. And Carly.

Speaker 1 So I just want to wait.

Speaker 2 And probably Anna.

Speaker 2 Anna's always nice to you, though.

Speaker 2 She is. She's afraid of you a little bit.

Speaker 1 I don't know why I'm so nice to her.

Speaker 2 I know, but you're still the boss.

Speaker 1 I think I'm nicer to her than anyone, really.

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 But you're the boss.

Speaker 1 I'm not the boss. That's the thing.
In her mind, I am, but I'm not.

Speaker 2 Well, you're you can be

Speaker 1 I'm married to her boss.

Speaker 2 You can be scary

Speaker 1 Scary

Speaker 2 if you're upset. No one wants to upset you.

Speaker 1 I know we've covered this. This is like as if I like scream around the house.

Speaker 2 I need you to just accept that.

Speaker 1 Oh, I do. Okay.

Speaker 2 Cause it's not like.

Speaker 1 It's just frustrating because I don't really have I don't have tempered tantrums towards anyone or knock stuff over or slam doors or bars.

Speaker 2 When you get angry, it really doesn't feel good.

Speaker 2 And it in a way that when sometimes when other people get angry, it's kind of like, whatever. Like, I don't, I don't know, I don't know why that is.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But it is painful when you're angry at someone, I think, more than others.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. And that's just your power.
Okay. That's a testament to your power.

Speaker 2 And be grateful. Anyway, so I guess I have it.

Speaker 1 By the way.

Speaker 1 No, I don't I don't think that's the conclusion. But yeah, even that this happens, take everyone that's close to the circle out of it.
And it's like Ange

Speaker 1 tells me at some point when we're swimming at Barton Springs, like, I'm just so intimidated by you. Right.
And I go, even

Speaker 1 you're my baby. She's been my baby since I met her.
Right. Like, I'm so tender to her, have been since I met her.
Yeah. She elicits that in people.
That's what's so fun about Ange. Sure.

Speaker 1 And yeah, I go, oh, yeah, if she thought that there's nothing I can really do, because I know for sure towards her, at least I've always been like super gentle.

Speaker 2 It's not necessarily about like who you are towards the person.

Speaker 2 It can be just like

Speaker 1 you know someone has a side.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or like what they've seen. I mean, she's been around you in lots of working situations.

Speaker 1 She has seen me command a group of hundred people yeah as a director of

Speaker 1 things

Speaker 2 and also like

Speaker 2 if you're unhappy on a set or with something like

Speaker 2 that's often made clear uh-huh you know it's i i wouldn't say this isn't a negative thing but i don't think i would say like you're easy breezy oh

Speaker 2 Is that a surprise?

Speaker 1 I'm not surprised you're saying that. I'm going off of

Speaker 1 the three times I've been the director of things and have had crews. What I hear repeatedly is I'm like the funnest person.

Speaker 2 I'm not saying you're not fun. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So I'm just my

Speaker 1 assessment of me. I don't yell at people.
The only time I've yelled at people is when they have yelled at people and I make an announcement to everyone. And that doesn't happen on this movie.

Speaker 1 There's been these moments of like firm boundaries, but they're always like, we don't yell at people here. Everyone fucks up.
No one's burning someone for having messed up.

Speaker 1 I don't yell at anybody. Well, you

Speaker 2 do when you're mad. You do.

Speaker 1 On a set? Oh,

Speaker 2 maybe not on a set. Sorry.
It's fine.

Speaker 1 I can just like, I, yeah, I, I have, um,

Speaker 1 maybe a flawed assessment of how I

Speaker 1 yeah, I've treated some boss. I've had moments with bosses.

Speaker 2 We've had moments, but that's much different. Yeah.
That's a more personal, you know, of course, that's different. And I'm sure you and Kristen have had huge fights.
That's different too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 where everyone's yelling. I mean, it's not like just you.

Speaker 1 And I think my baseline is hotter to some degree in the way my family talks to each other. Sure.
Like, you and I have arguments, like my brother and I had arguments. Yeah.
Anyway, so I

Speaker 1 go. So anyways, I'm an alcoholic.
I mean, that is what I was about to say.

Speaker 2 It kind of seems like I should evaluate.

Speaker 1 Well, what's interesting is these questions are positioned as binary, yes or no.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 But that's very incomplete. There's a huge spectrum of, I think about it a lot.
Well, I think about it, what, every five minutes?

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Every night at five for seven minutes. I know.
There's a huge variety in how many, you know, how these could be answered.

Speaker 2 And what is interesting is, I mean, other than the legal problem thing,

Speaker 2 well, I guess it's continuing to despite substance-related problems, social, I guess, maybe that's the one, but it's not that focused on the consequences.

Speaker 2 Because to me, that's sort of how I evaluate it.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 but that's not ruined. Which I think is a big part of the DSM.

Speaker 1 Is

Speaker 1 correct. I mean, I don't think someone gets sober unless they're making a mess of their life

Speaker 1 enough

Speaker 1 that it really acquires some major adjustment. Or in A, we say you're going to end up in an institution in jail or debt.
Like, that's what the trajectory you're on.

Speaker 2 But I think maybe

Speaker 2 it's also worth considering

Speaker 2 sobriety if you're like, I'm too, I'm too attached to this thing or I'm, I'm too dependent on it, or it's become such a habit that it's, you know, there's that's a hard and curious evaluation of just like wanting to

Speaker 1 have freedom from it. Like in many ways, smoking wasn't an issue for me because it had no negative impact.
My girlfriend was a smoker. She didn't care.
None of my friends cared. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I could afford it. I'm not getting illegal trouble.
I'm just not dangerous. It's dangerous in 40 years.
Right.

Speaker 1 So I have to be motivated by simply hating the notion that I am dependent on it and I would like to be free of it. Yeah.
And that's just a harder thing to to rely on for motivation.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think that takes

Speaker 1 time.

Speaker 2 Which may, so maybe eventually. I'll let you know.
Okay. By stop.

Speaker 1 Just like wine bars and they're so cute and

Speaker 1 cozy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, I get it.

Speaker 2 And maybe I should work on like

Speaker 2 my dependence on cuteness.

Speaker 1 Okay, start there and see if the other stuff is fixed downriver. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, this was unfortunate.

Speaker 1 Oh, oh, oh.

Speaker 2 Yay. I wrote down update on the bath and I didn't know what I was talking.
I didn't, I was like, what does that mean? But I just remember. The bath has been fixed.

Speaker 1 It has been fixed.

Speaker 2 I believe so.

Speaker 1 Did you get an explanation of what the problem was?

Speaker 2 So the plumber came and he said, you know, it's draining. And I was like, I know, that's not the problem.

Speaker 2 I don't know what the problem is. It doesn't seem like it has to do with my apartment.
Yeah. And he said, okay, it's probably a pipe thing.

Speaker 2 And so

Speaker 2 they scheduled a time. I was out of town, actually.
They scheduled a time to replace the pipe or do something with the pipe. Okay.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I put a camera in it and see what's going on in the pipe.

Speaker 2 Maybe. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so far, so good.

Speaker 1 Oh, wonderful.

Speaker 2 So that's great.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And I want to just just be clear. My landlord's great.

Speaker 2 She's a nice. She's nice.
She's a nice person. Yeah.
And I have no problems with her. It just

Speaker 2 was bumming me out that that was a gross thing happening.

Speaker 1 I also think when you live in LA and you pay exorbitant rents, rightly so you expect a little more. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like I think if you were spending $800 a month on a one-bedroom in Oakland County where I'm from. Yeah.
And there was suds coming out, you'd kind of be like, yeah, you get what you pay for.

Speaker 1 Right, right. But when you're spending what is the mortgage on a $700,000 house to live in a one-bedroom apartment,

Speaker 1 I think the expectations go up.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's true. Okay, let's see.

Speaker 2 Oh, I looked up where blood feuds are prominent.

Speaker 1 Appalachia.

Speaker 2 Albania.

Speaker 1 Oh, sure. Casquafa, my old

Speaker 1 high school. friend.
Oh, right. He was Albanian.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he and his brother got down hard.

Speaker 1 In fact, I was just texting with Carrie, and somehow she heard some update on him. And I'm like, I'm so glad he's alive.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 If you recall, my story about him is that Aaron and I, Aaron and I delivered cars in Detroit generally five days a week.

Speaker 1 We'd go work for my mom after school and most of our deliveries were downtown Detroit. So when we were down there, I would go to my classmates, Coney Island.
He and his brother owned a restaurant.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 He was a high school student. Yeah.
And Albanian. Super fucking tough.
And we used to go in there and get free cone dogs whenever Aaron and I were in a certain section of Detroit. We'd hang with Kavs.

Speaker 1 We pulled up one day and there's police tape all over the parking lot and we have to park next door. And as we're walking up, we see the full front of the window is gone.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he's standing the side. He's like, he's been talking to cops.
We're like,

Speaker 1 what happened? He's like, oh, damn, we just had a fucking shootout. Homeboys across the street started shooting.
One came in the window. Brother pulled out the MAC 10.
Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

Speaker 1 And I'm like,

Speaker 1 we were just in class like three hours ago, and they were in a huge shootout. And he was fine.
Thank God.

Speaker 1 I mean, just like emotionally.

Speaker 1 He was totally fine with the fact that the brother pulled out a MAC 10. Yeah, man, there are just

Speaker 1 ways of living growing up. And the other crazy story about him was this.
So the Albanians in my school often didn't get along with the Chaldeans. There was some beef there.
Uh-huh. And maybe blue.

Speaker 1 There was a new Chaldean kid who came to the school. Somehow he had a beef with Kaz.

Speaker 1 Kaz on the way. We have these mobile classrooms, a couple of them.
So walking out of the gym, across the parking lot to the mobile classroom,

Speaker 1 new Chaldean kid comes up to Kaz, pulls out a gun, points it at him

Speaker 1 at school, points a gun at him, and Kaz goes,

Speaker 1 Bitch, you better pull that fucking trigger because if you don't, I'm going to kill you after school. That was like out of a movie.

Speaker 2 What? Yes. But did he? Of course not.

Speaker 1 He was terrified. Somehow, Kaz knew who was real and who wasn't.

Speaker 2 But then, did then, did he beat him up, kill him after school?

Speaker 1 Well, he didn't kill him because he no, he didn't. Obviously, that kid got in major trouble, got kicked out of our school.
Cops came, the whole thing is.

Speaker 1 But he just looked right at him and said, Bitch, you better fucking kill me.

Speaker 2 Oh my god.

Speaker 2 That's so scary.

Speaker 1 So next level for a high school student.

Speaker 2 Wow, yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, back to blood feuds. Okay.
Albania, South Caucasus,

Speaker 2 South Caucasus.

Speaker 1 You hear about that in the news, the Caucasus.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Chechenya. Caucasus.

Speaker 1 Caucasus.

Speaker 2 Okay. In the U.S.,

Speaker 2 Appalachian Mountains, in the Old West, Hartfield-McCoy.

Speaker 1 Oh, sorry.

Speaker 2 Hatfield-McCoy feud.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 And then in the Philippines, parts of Greece and Croatia.

Speaker 1 Also do blood feuds. Yep.

Speaker 1 It's really related to herding, if you believe Malcolm Gladwell. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 All these cultures of honor started as herders who have an undefined

Speaker 1 grazing area that butts up often against other people's undefined, and you have to stand your ground or your sheep are going to die and you're not going to get food.

Speaker 1 So this history of standing your ground

Speaker 1 and herding communities is quite prevalent.

Speaker 2 All right. Well, that's it for James Kimmel Jr.
Revenge.

Speaker 1 I loved this episode. Yeah, it was great.
It really got me thinking.

Speaker 2 Me too. And I hope it gets everyone thinking because we have such quick triggers.

Speaker 1 The challenges that legislation can't address are

Speaker 1 very

Speaker 1 troubling. Yeah.
Because we need systems. Systems are more powerful than individual humans.
So we need systems to help us be the best version of ourselves.

Speaker 1 And ultimately, you are going to get triggered all day, every day and you have to

Speaker 2 try this forgiveness exercise and and get some good results from it and really use it but it can't really be implemented i know on a societal level yeah there's nothing we there's no law we can write unless like it can be in schools yeah like a really core curriculum but we can't even i mean no like we can't even get state to state county to county to agree on what should be taught in schools so right I highly doubt this is an option.

Speaker 2 So, just listen to this episode and pass it along, share it.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And you're up against like family tradition.
Like, my family, you're a hero when you stick up for your family member in my family. You become legend status.

Speaker 1 Like, my, it happened to my brother, it happened to me. When once you do that, like, it's a very prized thing.

Speaker 1 I have that same pride with my girls when I see one of them defend the other or stick up for the other. Like, that's a, that's just a very historic

Speaker 1 familial pride thing. That's like, you're up against that.
Yeah, it's a lot.

Speaker 2 It can be practiced, though.

Speaker 1 Yeah. All right.
Love you.

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