James Kimmel Jr. (revenge and forgiveness expert)

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts.

On Expert, I'm Dak Shepard.

I'm joined by Lily Padman.

Hi.

Confusing guests today.

Very.

Very confusing.

James Kimmel Jr.

Not

the son or father of of Jimmy Kimmel.

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.

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.

His previous two books are Suing for Peace.

and The Trial of Fallen Angels.

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

important

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

Yeah, revenge.

Revenge.

We're all revenge addicted.

Some more than others.

Some more than others.

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

Yes.

Which is great.

Yes.

Forgiveness.

It's not sexy, but it works.

It's pretty sexy.

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

It's not passionate.

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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He's an object,

he's an object.

Hello, how are you?

Doing great, Dax.

Well, James,

James, nice to meet you, Dax.

I like that watch.

Thank you.

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.

I've read that.

What does that even mean?

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.

The moon phases and other added complication levels that nobody really cares about.

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.

I was just reading an article and 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.

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 $170,000 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.

So, you know.

Yeah, slightly different.

Yeah.

Northerners have to be snobby on that.

Yeah.

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

None of us had anything to do with it.

Right, right, right.

What part of Pennsylvania?

I grew up in rural central Pennsylvania.

Now I live outside Philadelphia.

You grew up in kind of farmland.

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

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.

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.

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

Sure.

Step on him.

I want to sort of give him a chance to grow an audience.

That sort of thing.

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

Be his own person.

Right.

Yeah.

Be your own person.

Don't live in my shadow.

That's very big of you.

Did you go by Jimmy as a kid or was James?

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.

I moved to James.

I would answer to any three of those.

Okay.

Now, do you benefit, get annoyed?

Tell me about the experience of having such a popular name.

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

You go, oh, Jimmy Kimmel.

Some people might go, I thought you might be.

If you make a reservation, which would be in good faith.

Yes.

Right.

Because I'd say, this is just Jimmy Kimmel.

But I don't do that because, again, I don't want to throw shit a lot of integrity over there.

I'm trying to be a good guy.

You should a thousand percent 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.

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.

And there's also a very famous British actor, 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.

It kind of breaks their hearts to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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 anything about Jimmy Kimmel?

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.

Did Trump get super confused?

He wasn't.

That's a good question.

Actually, I haven't heard that question before.

That's interesting.

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.

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?

I've been a very moral

good boy, right?

Yeah.

And he puts a side by side of Dr.

Phil and I up and he goes, Look, everything that Dr.

Phil touches turns bald.

Oh, never

mind.

Again, you got to feed the inferno of content.

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.

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.

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

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.

We know you're from Pennsylvania.

We know it was farmtown.

And what was that experience like?

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.

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.

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.

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

And you moved at 12.

You're moving in seventh grade.

That was it, seventh grade.

That's a rough time to move.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And it was early 80s.

So the anti-bullying programs were not prevalent in schools, they weren't in mind, nobody talked about it.

You do five years of this.

Maybe it started the bullying side, more like nine, tenth grade.

It didn't start right when I landed.

That was just shunning for a while.

Yeah, yeah, then it moved to the bullying.

I think when they got older, their bigger team and they're strong as fuck because they work on a farm.

Correct.

Living on a farm.

Most farmers are hunters, so you're hunting, you're dealing with animals and stuff, and you're dealing with a lot of killing and death and a lot of brutality in general with the animals that is

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 a 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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Oh my God.

Wasn't that just.

What the fuck?

So cruel and terrible.

And it never doesn't get that reaction that you're having.

Monica, it is horrific.

I can't even imagine doing that,

let alone having a reason to want to do that.

Yeah.

In this case,

my folks called the state police or who patrols these vast farm rural areas in Pennsylvania.

Again, early 80s.

And they're like, this is bad.

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

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.

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.

We all kind of went back to our regularly scheduled lives.

About two weeks later, my folks were out pretty late at night.

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.

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

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

So they blew up our mailbox.

And that was it for me.

They had reached critical mass.

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.

I ran through the house.

I grabbed it.

I jumped in my mother's car and I went out after them

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.

Frontal lobes offline.

It's just all instinct.

I'm on fight now.

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.

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.

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,

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.

They were unarmed, 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.

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.

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.

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

That was just enough of a jarring glimpse into 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.

I shut the door and I drove drove home.

And I came within like three seconds of committing a mass shooting.

Yeah.

Ironically or not, it stopped after that.

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.

Right.

Although I've been the person on both sides of that.

And there is some eerie unexplained cognition that happens sometimes.

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

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

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

I know what you mean.

Well, I know that I

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

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.

You make a decision in your life, not again on my watch.

It kind of sets you on a trajectory.

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.

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.

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.

Take advantage of people that you can or get taken advantage of.

And I didn't want to be taken advantage of anymore.

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.

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.

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?

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

It's hard to overcome that.

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

to

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.

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.

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?

Now we know that's revenge.

But at the time, it would fly under the umbrella of justice.

Lawyers get justice.

Two sides of the same coin, justice and revenge.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That was my super talent.

And I thought, lawyers do a lot of writing.

Maybe that's something I can do.

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.

Some of that is happening in my late teen years.

Some of it happened later.

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.

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?

I do that right out of law school, right past clerking, I should say.

And I get into that for the money.

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

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.

There's two ways to get retribution in the legal system.

One is through the criminal justice system, if somebody commits a crime.

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

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.

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?

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

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.

It's the punitive side of justice seeking.

And so it's the two-headed coin.

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.

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.

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

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.

Yeah.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dopamine high that now neuroscience has shown is exactly what you're getting.

The whole city was high as a cap.

The country was high as a cat.

Yes.

Many areas of the country.

Not everyone.

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

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.

That does have a negative connotation to it.

And it is the same thing.

Justice blesses terrorism.

Justice blesses genocide.

It blesses war.

It blesses torture.

It blesses murder and violence of all kinds.

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

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.

That's all it is.

And it never stops.

The notion of once and for all is one of the great fallacies people buy into.

There's never a once and for all.

It doesn't work that way, unfortunately.

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.

We always think war ends with a military conquest, and that's not really true.

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.

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

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.

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

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

20 years.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

And so a couple of lawyer friends of mine, I've said, you spent a lot of your time figuring out how to not get fucked.

And how on earth do you leave the office?

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 you right it kind of bled into everything 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 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.

So there's living in your mind trying to avoid getting fucked clearly.

There's that extra piece of what I would say is

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

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, 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.

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.

Look at the commercials.

They're all saying, I will fight for you.

Unanimous, they all have to tell you.

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?

I want some guy that I'll do anything to these people for you.

Yeah, it's true.

I'll kill their families when we're done.

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.

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.

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.

So the real truth 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.

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.

Turn it off.

I loved it, actually.

You know, I was like, I feel bad afterward.

It's the dopamine deficit issue.

So in the shame, you need it even more.

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 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 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.

I was starting to suspect I was an addict and there are no 12-step programs for revenge addicts at all.

Yeah.

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

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.

It's against a lot of my spiritual values.

I'm a Christian.

So I had some fundamental thoughts about Jesus's teachings on forgiveness.

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.

That's a lot of times.

Why?

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.

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

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

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert,

if you dare.

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

Yeah, I had tried 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.

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

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.

Now I'm going to drink on the weekends.

You're trying all the many things an addict tries.

Bargaining.

Yeah.

Other than quitting.

Right.

And I wanted to quit.

I got closer and closer to quitting.

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.

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.

Not enough dopamine on there.

Not enough dopamine there.

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.

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.

I think you're tired.

Why don't you take a vacation?

And I'm like, you're probably right.

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.

It's a substance use disorder or a gambling disorder, things like that.

But he said, there's this book called the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and it has 11 criteria.

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?

And I said, how about send me a copy of the book and I'll think about it.

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.

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?

Do you want to try to cut down but find that you can't?

You know them.

So I just crossed off the word substance and inserted the word justice.

And I went.

and counted them up 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.

It goes up to 11.

And I went, I have a severe justice addiction is what I think I have, but nobody would believe that.

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.

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

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.

But what you wouldn't get with ice cream unless you became obese and got sick from it, usually you don't have a lot of negative consequences.

It's not generally impacting your life.

There's no wreckage.

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.

That's kind of the crystalline definition of addiction.

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.

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.

That's right.

He ruined his fucking life.

And he did.

He had a ton of negative addiction.

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.

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.

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

They all love

it.

Right, exactly.

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?

How do you become a buff on this?

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

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.

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.

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.

We know that.

And there are forgiveness teachings.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

There is a judgment, and then it may be followed by some form of punishment.

So that process, that's hardwired, it seems, into humans.

It's just there.

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

Everyone will relate to this part.

Yeah, yeah.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

The thing I always share about on here, 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 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.

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.

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.

And to catch yourself on that loop of just remembering your evidence in your case is suffering to such a degree well it becomes about not solving the problem but just getting your information out

trauma therapists like bezel van der Kolk have said the psychological harm that people feel after trauma of any kind psychological or physical 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.

They need somebody to say and hear them.

And they need to hold the person who wronged them accountable.

So that rumination just goes on and on for everyone all the time that you've described to Axe.

And we need to have ways of shutting that down.

And there haven't been actually

other than alcohol or substances to just quiet the mind from this constant rumination.

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.

You play all the roles, including the defendant, in a structured way.

So with a little script.

And at the end, we're not just left with the punishments because you get to sentence them.

You get to imagine punishing them.

And I could do this with either of you.

Yeah, let's go through actual examples.

So if you have a solid grievance.

Let's say I'm late.

That's easy.

So I'm late.

Monica's on time.

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

Or her.

I'm late.

I'm willing to be the villain in this.

Oh, you're always the perpetrator.

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

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

But does this bother you?

I don't love it.

You don't love it.

Do we have anything better, more grievous than that?

To be a big grievance.

From anywhere in your life that you're comfortable with sharing.

What's a current grievance?

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.

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.

It's been an ongoing thing and I've had to say over and over again, this is unacceptable.

This needs to stop now.

Fix it.

They keep sending in a plumber.

The 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.

Okay.

They're not fixing this situation at all.

Right.

Let's just do it.

I'm going to add, they're placating you.

That's a trigger for me.

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.

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.

And you're over on 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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah.

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.

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.

So it's actually you in the witness stand.

So you've got to switch that role.

Okay.

And now you're a lawyer, very well paid, good lawyer.

Jimmy Kimmel Jr.

And his name's right, Jimmy Kimmel Jr.

Thanks for that advertisement.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And she somehow is holding me responsible.

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.

Right.

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?

I understand

that there's a lot on her plate.

She's just a person.

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.

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

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

I think she's guilty.

I do think that, objectively.

That's fair.

You're the jury and you get to say what you want.

You don't have to apologize to me.

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.

So what should your sentence be?

Since you found the landlord guilty, you're going to have to hand down the sentence

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.

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

This part's hard.

I definitely don't want her to get fired.

So I'm not sentencing her with that.

Can I suggest a sentence that I bet you would love?

Sure.

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.

Unless foam doesn't bother her.

Well, we'll find out.

That's funny.

That doesn't even cross my mind.

Interesting.

That's a very reciprocal type of view.

And research shows that males are much more caught up in that

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.

That's interesting to me as a problem.

That's why.

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.

I don't have that.

And I wouldn't want to sentence her with that.

Okay.

I think you want her to have the phone.

Say, oh, well.

Which is basically what you've already done.

Yeah.

Which is 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Yeah.

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.

I did.

And you've got to be heard.

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

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.

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?

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, like I'm going to be doing this next week on Dr.

Phil with somebody who's lived through a romantic betrayal, and there won't be an easy go through that.

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.

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.

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.

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 your brain.

Yeah, so what neuroscientists have found is that your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs.

It is almost indistinguishable.

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 understand the biological cause of violence, its revenge addiction.

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.

So the way it works is this.

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.

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.

It wants balance.

And to do that, Humans have evolved so that revenge seeking, punishing the person who wronged you or their proxy.

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.

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.

Those are two areas called the nucleus that come is in the dorsal stratum.

Those activate for alcohol, those activate for narcotics, those activate for gambling.

They also activate for sex.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 that are all revenge-driven

cravings.

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 and modeling the future predicting how you'll feel after this correct 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 and then through the grace of god somehow it reactivated for me at the last second 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.

The prefernal cortex is in charge of the future and modeling.

So it literally can't consider the consequences.

Oh, you mean the reward circuitry?

It is all about gratification.

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

They just want pleasure at this second.

Now.

And that's the mandate, and it has no capability to resist that.

That other part of your brain needs to be functional.

So if that's not available at that moment 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.

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.

It does all the kind way to say it is like to exit discomfort.

You're very uncomfortable and your brain wants you to not be uncomfortable.

Or worse, you know, my dog was killed.

There's a lot of discomfort in that.

Or somebody just invaded your country.

And the brain does its fastest, most creative thinking in that moment it'll figure out the thing that can alleviate your suffering which is go get revenge 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 so punishments that are adaptive teaching a child you know if you eat too much ice cream you're going to get sick sick and it's bad for you.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

That is the motive.

After every mass shooting and they go, what was the motive?

I always just instantly go, revenge.

All you're really looking for is what was the grievance that started the revenge process.

That's what people are looking for.

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.

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 preventing.

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

Yes.

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.

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

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

Let's talk about Olga.

That's a fun

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.

We don't think of women as mass murderers, stereotypes.

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.

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

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.

She killed eight senior citizens.

Most of them were older.

Oh, God.

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

Something like that.

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.

It was like a manifesto.

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.

That was her penalty.

And she decided to carry it out in real life.

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

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.

Her father was abusive.

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.

But as far as she was concerned, she was getting revenge on society writ large by doing this.

And they were, therefore, her proxies.

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.

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.

She gets to court.

She has a lawyer.

The lawyer tells her, do not testify that way.

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.

Wants to be hung.

Right.

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.

And the court is therefore more than happy to give her her wish and grant for that and so sentence her to execution by hanging she becomes the last woman executed in communist czechoslovakia

stay tuned for more armchair expert

if you dare

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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?

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

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?

These murder suicides are often without manifesto, not a ton of pre-planning.

So we don't know, I think, for sure.

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

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.

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?

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

Or even facing the shame.

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

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 this.

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

That's exactly right.

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

Yeah, well, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are the biggest ones.

40 million for Hitler, 40 million for Mao, and like 20 million for Stalin.

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

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.

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?

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.

Oh, God.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

And we are watching him currently try to exact revenge and reassemble the USSR.

It's the same Hitler story.

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.

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.

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.

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

Monica, you're very close.

I hadn't thought about that until just now.

Maybe I shouldn't bring this up.

We want to keep you peaceful.

Landowners.

The landlords, landowners, and other people who'd 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.

And Mao was one of the original envisioners of this.

The best way to to manage and govern people is to cause them to essentially rat themselves out.

That's the idea, is to constantly stir grievances up, stir these revenge desires, and then give them a way to gratify those revenge desires.

And incentivize 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

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.

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

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 doing for 20 years.

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.

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 is

really exciting that that could potentially happen.

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.

Seems to be working on a lot of addiction.

Yeah, it's working on a lot of stuff.

So that's really interesting.

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.

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

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.

You can be angry, but it's kind of like what we know about drugs and alcohol.

Even a small amount is too much.

It's too many.

A million is not enough.

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.

Because it doesn't feel good.

Unfortunately, we're also burdened with this conscious, and then that just skyrockets you right back into the cycle again.

That is correct.

But there's something more powerful than all of these things.

Just as the neuroscience was explaining why we have revenge cravings and that they can become addictive, and now we know that, a different group of researchers were looking into what happens inside your brain when you forgive somebody.

Yes.

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.

And that's critical to remember.

Neurologically, we now know what happens.

So that pain network that 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.

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.

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.

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?

And then the last thing it does is it reactivates the prefrontal cortex, cortex, the decision-making and self-control circuitry.

So forgiveness is kind of a human superpower or a miracle drug.

We just didn't know it existed.

Yeah, the forgiveness part is really great.

And I'm just going to add a woo-wooey spiritual aspect to it, which is in the process of forgiving people,

you will find that you are more open to forgiving yourself.

And it's a practice.

It's a muscle.

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.

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.

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,

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.

And then this better decision-making clarity comes along.

And there is a spiritual component if you want it to be.

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.

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.

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.

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

It exists empirically and biochemically, and we can observe it.

You don't need a spiritual being in the mix.

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.

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

And it will.

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.

I could damage myself.

Who will suffer from that rant and down spiral?

It would be my

landlord's knock.

Not your foam.

Yeah.

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.

As a country, a revenge addict.

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 just on a revenge rage.

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.

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 a peace-seeking government.

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.

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.

Well, 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.

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

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.

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'd made at the end of World War I.

We're not going to do it again.

So we're not going to go for severe reparations against Germany.

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.

70 plus years of peace with a true adversary.

That's called forgiveness.

And we just

don't want to acknowledge the truth of that.

But that's what happened.

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.

That is crazy.

It's really weird.

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.

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

Outrageous.

So they found out it was an invisible creature, a bacterium.

That's what's killing.

200 plus million people.

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

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.

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

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 more

violence, right?

Yeah, and breaking people out of the apathy of, well, this is planet Earth.

Yeah, it's just the way it is.

It's hard to overcome that.

It is.

I'm guilty of that.

Yeah, it's a gnarly fucking world, guys.

Gnarly shit happens and it's going to.

We're up against it really bad.

We really need to do this soon because of social networking platforms.

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.

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

And we're not prepared as humans for what that means.

And we're starting to see what that means.

Yeah, when I 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.

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.

I mean, that is crack all the way.

Oh, okay.

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.

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.

Well, this has been incredible.

I really am

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 GLP1s can fix this,

oh my God.

I don't know that they can.

I don't want to say that.

I know.

We're not saying that.

We've done so many miraculous things that we're doing.

It's coming fast.

So we don't know.

It's so true.

Well, Dr.

James Kimmel, this has been a delight.

Thanks so much for coming.

Thanks for having me.

I super appreciate it.

What a great conversation.

We hope you enjoyed this episode.

Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

I'm so excited.

What?

Because my 454SS is the perfect, perfect vehicle.

Okay.

It's the best build I have of all the cars I've built.

What is it?

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

out of a Corvette and an A-speed transmission, huge tires and back, wheelwood brakes.

It's perfect.

The stereo sucks.

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.

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

You're going to blast.

I'm going to bump the bass specifically.

Wow.

If you hear bass bumping outside your apartment, be like, who the

cult?

No, 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 were booty bumping?

I am

a long time.

It's been a minute since I've booty bumped.

15 years?

20 years?

No, no.

No, probably

Callie's wedding was the last time.

And you specifically did booty bumping.

Yeah, we did.

Because it's like my college friends back together.

We were really...

We were showing up her LA friends.

Ah, yeah.

And it was shaming them.

We were shaming them.

We are.

on our ass on the ground dropping it we were dropping them like it's hot oh wow people were throwing up and rallying like we were people throwing dollar bills at you

No.

Okay, that would have been how you know you rally.

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.

It's very culty of you what you just did.

Where it's like, no,

that bad reaction you had,

that's, that's going to hurt you.

Like, let's reframe and make it a positive thing.

Yeah.

Even though

it is a positive thing.

No, even though what you're doing is loud.

Oh, loud and loud is just negative.

Even if it's a your you hear your favorite song, that's negative?

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

Okay, now I'm gonna 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,

I won't be in your cult.

Okay.

You think all of a sudden?

Tell me about that gold shimmy.

Oh, that's 12 years I've been telling you I will not be in your cult.

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.

It is actually kind of heavy.

Maybe it's not.

It's not.

It's, um, but it's a great necklace.

I got it from Sarah Henler.

Okay, great.

I love.

But no, it was quite reasonably price, very reasonably priced.

Less than $200.

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.

I recently, I bought some pants from the Gap.

Okay, great.

My mom and I both bought them.

We bought matching pants.

Mother, daughter?

Yeah.

Yeah, when I was home.

I love them.

And you were in Georgia, though.

I was.

So there's an outdoor mall.

Obviously, that's what I'm talking about at home.

Yeah.

Pretty much my mom and I go from outdoor mall to outdoor mall.

Yeah.

So we were outdoors.

God, I'm jealous of that.

I wish I liked that.

That sounds so fun.

Because there's treats.

You go to the food court.

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.

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, shopping.

Then my dad and my brother came to meet us and we had dinner.

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.

I don't ever feel

judged by them okay that's nice that's really nice that's a luxury

a lot of parents are quite judgmental if anything unfortunately there's judgment going the opposite way and i try i i know it's all about me of course it's not about them my judgments are not about them um but

you know i do worry

Sometimes I worry.

About.

Like my judgments come out of worry.

And I guess.

So do theirs.

So does everyone.

Yeah.

Everyone's judgments come out of worry.

I was just, in fact, I showed one of my daughters the post because I found it very inspiring.

What post?

I follow

this account, Daily Stoic or Daily Stoicism.

And it was

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 interesting I really like it.

But you love to air grievances.

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

complainer.

You think I'm a complainer?

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.

That's complaining about the world.

And I think it's a good thing.

Complaining or objecting.

Hmm.

What's the difference?

Give an example of complaining, like verbally, and then an example of if you can.

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, and it's almost unfair that I have to do this thing.

I see, yes.

Okay, yep.

It's like a little entitled

a little bit.

Okay.

Yeah.

Sure, great.

And objecting, because I think it's okay to complain about

things you think are wrong morally.

I wouldn't call that complaining.

I see.

Yeah, I would call that like objecting, dissenting,

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.

I want to pull it up.

Okay.

These are good tips.

All right.

We love good tips.

The Stoics, but you know what's so funny is there's just so much overlap with all this stuff because half of what they're

saying in this clip is AA stuff.

Obviously, this predates AA.

So I'm like, oh yeah, isn't that interesting?

Like

this stuff's all been around forever.

It's very Buddhist.

Sure.

Very, very Buddhist.

Okay, here we go.

You ready?

Let me get my volume all the way up.

So things you need to stop doing according to the Stoics.

Number one, stop complaining, Marx Rulius writes in meditations.

He says, don't be overheard complaining, even to yourself.

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.

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.

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, Marx really 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.

That was the motto of Marcus Aurelius.

You got to stop tying your ambition, your identity to things that are not up to you.

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 and finally you got to stop acting like you're going to live forever you are not it's not that life is short seneca says it's that we waste a lot of it 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

well and it shut itself off there um that was probably they probably did that on purpose so it's like you want more but you can't have more 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.

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.

Well, I find that complicated.

I think.

Let's hear your opinion on that.

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

A thousand percent true.

So we are to have opinions.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I was just teasing.

When I grew up,

we were taught to have a critical opinion of things.

Same.

It was in class.

Like, read a thing and then figure out with real points what your opinion is on it.

Critical thinking.

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.

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

take in all the information and

form.

And I thought about it.

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

under this edict, 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.

Which is almost always true yeah

and life's better without me interjecting my opinion all the time and i'm free to let everyone you know it's but that one it's hard that one's the hardest 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 i'm i'm really i'm embarrassed that i behaved this way so i want to start by saying that and i did apologize yeah um Were you drunk?

No.

Okay.

I was totally sober.

Okay.

That makes it harder, I think.

I was with Jess.

And we were on a big adventure one day.

Yeah.

We decided we were going to go on what we call walkies, which is just like a long ass walk.

And we're stopping at stores and it's fun.

You're treating LA like the outdoor mall.

Yes.

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.

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

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

I want to do this.

Anyway, so we're, you know, we're bopping in places.

We're both buying stuff.

So we've already bought multiple things.

Obviously, Jess and I know each other really, really well.

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 so we're walking we're buying it's exciting we're getting great items yeah and then we decide we're gonna walk to echo park now for people who don't know that's far that's like far it's not that far probably what three and a half four miles i didn't look at the mileage but from where we were which was already sunset junction oh then yeah okay it was an additional 45 minutes oh 45 minute walk from there oh okay okay so but we decide we're gonna do it and but we'll stop in stores so we're going we go into a store a men's store and

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

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

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.

He took it off.

He put on the other shirt.

Same shirt, but different color.

Color or collar?

Color.

Okay.

Same exact shirt.

And I was like, well, I like the other color better.

Yeah.

And he was like, yeah, yeah, me too.

Then, then we go to check out, and he gives, he's, he buys both.

Interesting.

And I was like, you're buying both?

And he was like, Well, yeah, and I was like, but it's the same.

I was like, it's the same, you don't need both.

And I said, I said it like that.

And he was like, well,

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

specific shirt.

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.

Okay.

So then that's over.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But then after, I was like, who am I to tell him he doesn't need two of the same shirt?

Like, even if that is my opinion.

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.

I can't even, but I was expecting something much more hurtful than you.

Oh, no.

I'm not a mean girl.

Well, just you had to apologize.

I did it because I was.

So my thought was, oh, you hurt his feelings.

I didn't hurt his feelings, but I did make him

half-conscious.

Exactly.

I made him self-conscious.

Second-guess himself.

Yeah, and that's mean.

Like,

I didn't mean it with

ill intent.

I meant it.

I meant it honestly as like.

An experienced shopper.

That's what you were thinking about.

I did.

I'm like, I know about shopping.

And so, like, you don't.

You're new to shopping, and I see how you want to.

And I thought,

you know, you'll probably just have to return it.

And that's going to be a pain.

Like, I know how this goes.

Also, like, if you ever express any like money troubles and you're spending, and I know you don't, like, that's a useless spend, but none of it's my business.

No,

none of it is my business.

And that's why I had to apologize.

Cause, cause

I guess that's for me.

Like in apologies,

I really, I have to be sorry.

Like, I'm not just going to say, oh, I'm sorry.

You have to feel bad that you did.

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.

I'm going to try not to do it again.

Yeah.

Anyway.

So the Stoics, they

were whispering to you.

Well, I'm Buddhist.

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

resist.

I'm sitting in the nook, like at the booth,

and I'm watching someone in my house cook pierogies on a pan.

Okay.

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

And I want to say so bad.

I want to use tongs.

You're going to burn your finger.

And then I go, no.

They'll burn their finger.

I don't need to do that.

That'll be its own issue.

No, I won't.

Exactly.

And this person burnt their finger.

Yeah.

And then they had a burnt finger.

And I was washing dishes and then I shared with another person.

Oh, man, this is great.

I wanted to say that and I just didn't.

Yeah.

And like,

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.

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 to be resentful at me because, you know,

you're controlling them.

Like, let life teach everyone their lesson.

I know.

No, I'm not saying that to you.

I'm saying that to me.

No, I agree.

I agree.

But also, now here, what about this?

The fingers burnt, right?

Yep.

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 finger.

You're not allowed to complain because

the stoics.

Right.

Then what?

Because that's when I'm like,

I don't want to hear it.

Yeah.

Because you.

You juggled chainsaws and your fucking hand got caught.

Yeah, so I don't want to hear it.

I'm very much, I don't want to hear it, girl.

Yeah, I relate to that a lot.

I think my strategy lately has been

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

I can acknowledge what you're going through

and say I witness you.

And I don't have to fake sympathy.

Right.

I don't have to match your emotions.

I have to let you know, like, oh yeah, that looks bad.

That must hurt.

Like, I can do that and resist saying,

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.

And I don't want to deal with your emotions but but also on a we zoom out it's like yeah i make mistakes all the time yes as often they're probably my fault and if i'm but if you're complaining about it to other people for hours

you shouldn't you've lost the right to do that i kind of think so you can only complain about stuff that was truly you had nothing to do with or or you can i mean i'm i'm open to that being the truth but i think you can complain or be like my finger really hurts i really should At that point, I think it's on you to be like, I guess I shouldn't have touched that hot pan.

I mean, that's what I'm hoping to hear, but I didn't get that.

But that's fine because I just got out of a lot of

so many bad things would have come out of it, and everything's fine, and the finger was burnt, whatever.

And then you go, like, oh, grab Neosporn and a band-aid, and then we're on.

And that's all up to them.

Yeah.

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

if you consider yourself a pretty good decision maker.

Of course I do.

Yes.

And I do too.

So when you're around

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

It was in the video.

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

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

that should have nothing to do with how anyone else is living their life, ideally.

My best version of myself.

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

How often do you have friends?

It's like they keep getting in their own way.

Yes, I know.

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?

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.

You're not going to change anyone.

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

And then otherwise, they think you should recognize like people are on their path.

And it's going to be however it is.

And they'll have the consequences of that.

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

people get very

stuck or fixated on something

that is

i mean counterproductive to their goals yeah and you want the best for them you want the best for them and it's to me feels like it's an it's easy to just say hey just so you know like i'm seeing this 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 i think there are some half manipulative ways of doing it like saying like oh i know that happened to me and then

back when i was stupid when i was when i was 20 actually i'm way later i did that and i got this crazy burn and then i started using tongs yeah

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 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 so it's it's good but sometimes i think

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

i think it'd be way less compelling

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.

Interesting.

You don't think so?

Well, what do you mean?

Like you think you're Zen and I'm not?

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

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.

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

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 it's common very common yeah 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 i can almost guarantee it yeah And so I have this mixed emotion of like, I think it's great for the show

and

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

year where maybe we would see eye to eye more.

I don't know.

I don't, I mean, sure, age has, has parts, is part of it, but I think

us not seeing eye to eye always is

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

It's multifaceted.

You're a woman, I'm a man.

Exactly.

You're brown, I'm white.

There's innumerable things.

One of them is 12 years.

Yeah, one of them is 12 years.

But I don't, I guess I'm like,

yeah,

I think you're taking offense to that.

Well, it's somehow.

You think 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.

But I'm also not 20.

So I don't know if we're.

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.

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

Right.

I hope.

Yeah.

I mean, the goal is to be changing.

I just wonder, like, I bet, here's what I'm saying.

If we had time machines

and I could

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

As a 50-year-old, yeah.

No, as a 37-year-old.

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

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.

I guarantee 37-year-old me many times would be like, oh my God,

she's right.

What are you talking about?

And I think if you, it's, it's possible that when you're 50 and 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.

That's all.

Where did that come from?

Where did this train of thought come from?

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.

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

But did something happen in this conversation that made you say that?

That felt like it came out of nowhere.

No, it didn't come out of nowhere.

We were talking about opinions.

Yeah.

And whether or not you need to give your opinion.

Yeah.

And whether or not you think you should tell someone.

Do you think that's with age?

You've come to that.

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

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

Yeah, but I don't.

Like, I don't think any grandparents are telling other grandparents how they should live their life.

I mean, there's a ton of 18-year-olds giving each other advice on how they should.

Well, yeah, they have a lot of time ahead.

Yeah.

There's more reason to, honestly.

If you're a 50-year-old or a six, you know, the older we get,

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 yeah or older than or my parents right like they're them they are them at this point 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 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 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

and if they keep doing this they're never going to reach reach their goal yeah

so yeah i just think there's differences as you age i feel it even in a five-year gap between kristen and i like she has a very much her opinion about work is very much what my opinion about work was at 45.

and even in the last three years my opinion has evolved dramatically in that way and

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

what did I think when I was 45?

Yeah.

What did I think at 37?

Yeah.

Well, I think I do

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

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

Yeah.

So

all I can do is try not to do it.

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

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.

There's no friction.

You're not judgmental.

You don't have opinions.

Yeah.

Are you alive?

I don't think anyone,

again,

minus some real Buddhists

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.

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

bring in those things so that you feel relief and better.

But on a day-to-day,

yeah, I doubt it.

All right.

Well, let's get into some facts.

Stay tuned for more armchair expert.

If you dare.

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James Kimmel Jr., facts.

So, watch complications.

Oh, great.

Tell me about them.

Watch complications are features or functions added to a timepiece beyond its basic timekeeping function.

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

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

Let's see.

Do we have a world record for complications?

I can find it.

But hold on, I want to give some more.

Chronograph, a stopwatch function, allowing the measurement of elapsed time.

Moon phase, a display that indicates the current phase of the moon.

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

Whoa.

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

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.

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

I'm totally listening to you, and I'm getting the answer.

Okay, so you don't have to do that.

I'm trying to help.

Thank you.

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

Okay, now you are looking up the most complications.

What did you find?

Is that the same watch I have?

What do you have, Rob?

Or that's just one with

that run, which has 41 complications.

41 complications.

It's also called

horology.

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.

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

stupidly high number.

Well, no, yeah.

This says the watch with the most complications is the Franc Moulaire

Aternitas Megaphore boasting 36 complications, but it features 1,483 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.

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

63 complications.

Yes, 63,

including a Chinese perpetual calendar.

2,877 components and 245 jewels inside of that.

Oh my goodness.

Wow.

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

Yeah.

What an interesting mind.

I wish I was hornier for it.

I just can't see that that doesn't equal value to me.

It equals value to me because it is

made with care.

That's true.

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

Mine just has one complication.

It does?

What is it?

And I don't even know what it's doing.

Oh, seconds, seconds.

Oh,

does it have the date?

No.

Oh, my God.

But this is my new favorite watch.

I love this watch.

It's so simple.

Yeah, obviously.

It doesn't.

It only has one complication.

Yeah, it's not complicated, and I like that.

It only has three numbers on it, too, which I love.

Oh, that's cool.

It's a panora.

Nice.

It's the watch I've been coveting for 12 years that George had.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

Okay, I looked up what's currently in the DSM for addiction.

Okay.

See if I still qualify.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, classifies substance use disorders, suds, as follows.

Alcohol use disorder, caffeine use disorder, even though now they should remove that.

They should.

Eric Topol told us we could drink it.

That's right.

Cannabis use disorder.

hallucinogen use disorder, inhalant use disorder, opioid use disorder, sedative hypnotic use disorder, stimulant use disorder, tobacco use disorder.

I've got a few of those.

Includes a category for gambling.

No rage.

No rage.

No rage yet.

No shopping.

Ah.

Which is interesting.

No kleptomania.

That'll probably get added.

Yeah.

The 11 criteria.

that reflect impaired control, physical dependence, and social problems.

They are

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, spending a great deal of time obtaining, using, or recovering from substance use, 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

you don't where are you at it were you doing a mental checklist i knew you were gonna say that of course i would i knew you were gonna say that should i not i don't know it seemed plausible you were so excited to no i was thinking about my own history well we know yours.

Yeah, but I still think about it.

I've never taken that question here.

How many did you have?

Oh,

11?

Yeah, maybe all of them.

I don't know.

Yeah, let's see.

Taking more of the substance than intended.

No, but using it for longer than intended.

Probably yes.

Persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance use.

probably, yes.

Spending a great deal of time obtaining, using, or recovering from substance use.

I wonder what a great deal means.

That's a

highly vague tested

word.

Yeah.

I don't know what we would say for that.

If you add it up in a week, how many hours you're drinking?

Is that a great deal of time or not?

I guess.

I guess.

I guess.

But always it's

it's in conjunction with other things, so it feels hard to do that.

Right.

It's not like you're sitting in your bathtub drinking.

Exactly.

Or even like in my house.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's harder.

Yeah.

Tolerance, needing more of the substance.

Um, yes.

And no.

I feel like if I take one day off, I'm already like back to your back to your.

but I mean, sure, probably.

Withdrawal symptoms when not using the substance.

I don't think so, but I guess I don't know what they would be.

Yeah, I don't think you're in any stretch physically addicted to alcohol.

Yeah.

But

are you grumpier in the evening on the nights you can't drink?

Again, depends on what I'm doing.

Like if I'm playing a game somewhere, no.

Right.

If I'm just like white, yeah, if I'm like just like white knuckling, it's and like I really

food and you're like, fuck, I can't

tonight's a night I can't cook and drink wine.

Are you agitated while you're cooking?

Oh,

maybe.

Craving for the substance, yes.

I'm grumpy now.

Had nothing to do with the alcohol.

I'm not grumpy.

I'm great but i do want to warn you yeah i do want to warn you and i think it's only nice okay sorry real quick having substance related legal problems no no um absolutely not absolutely not um

i do want to warn you that next week i will be pmsing oh okay

and so will kristen okay

great and carly

so i just want probably anna

anna is always nice to you though she's she is she's afraid of you a little little bit.

I don't know why I'm so nice to her.

I know, but you're still the boss.

I think I'm nicer to her than anyone, really.

I know.

But you're the boss.

I'm not the boss.

That's the thing.

In her mind, I am, but I'm not.

Well, you can be.

I'm married to her boss.

You can be scary.

Scary.

If you're upset, no one wants to upset you.

I know we've covered this.

This is like as if I like scream around the house.

I need you to just accept that.

Oh, I do.

Okay.

Cause it's not like.

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.

When you get angry, it really doesn't feel good.

And it in a way that when sometimes when other people get angry, it's kind of like, whatever.

Like, I don't know.

I don't know why that is.

Yeah.

But it is painful when you're angry at someone, I think, more than others.

And that's just your power.

Okay.

That's a testament to your power.

And be grateful.

Anyway, so I guess I have it.

By the way.

No, I don't know.

I don't think that's the conclusion.

But yeah, even this happens, take everyone that's close to the circle out of it.

And it's like, Ange

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 how, like, you're my, 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.

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 super gentle and soft.

It's not necessarily about like who you are towards the person.

it can be just like

you know someone has a siren, yeah, or like what they've seen.

I mean, she's been around you in lots of working situations, she has seen me command a group of 100 people

as a director of things,

and also like

if you're unhappy on a set or with something, like

that's often made clear.

Uh-huh.

You know, it's I wouldn't say this isn't a negative thing, but I don't think I would say like, you're easy breezy.

Oh.

Is that a surprise?

I'm not surprised you're saying that.

I'm going off of

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.

I'm not saying you're not fun.

Oh, yeah.

So I'm just my

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.

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.

I don't yell at anybody.

Well, you

do when you're mad.

You do.

On a set?

Oh,

maybe not on a set.

Sorry.

It's fine.

I can just like, yeah, I have

maybe a flawed assessment of how I,

yeah, I've treated some bosses.

I've had moments with bosses.

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.

But

where everyone's yelling.

I mean, it's not like just you.

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

so, anyways, I'm an alcoholic.

I mean, that is what I was about to say.

It kind of seems like I should evaluate.

Well, what's interesting is these questions are positioned as binary yes or no.

Yeah, 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, exactly, every night at five for seven minutes.

I know.

There's a huge variety in how many,

you know, how these could be answered.

And what is interesting is, I mean, other than the legal problem thing,

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.

Because to me, that's sort of how I evaluate it.

Yeah.

And,

but that's not ruined.

Which I think is a part of the DSM.

Is

correct.

I mean, I don't think someone gets sober unless they're making a mess of their life

enough

that it really acquires some major adjustment.

Or in AA, we say you're going to end up in an institution in jail or dead.

Like, is that

the trajectory you're on?

But I think maybe

it's also worth considering

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

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.

I could afford it.

I'm not getting illegal trouble.

It's dangerous in 40 years.

Right.

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 rely on for motivation.

Yeah.

I think that takes

time.

Which may, so maybe eventually.

I'll let you know.

Okay.

By stop drinking.

Just like wine bars, and they're so cute and

cozy.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, I get it.

Maybe I should work on like

my dependence on cuteness.

Okay, start there and see if the other stuff is fixed downriver.

Yeah.

Okay.

This is what's unfortunate.

Oh, oh, oh.

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.

It has been fixed.

I believe so did you get an explanation of what the problem was so the plumber came and he said you know it's draining and I was like I know that's not the problem

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

um and so

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.

I don't

put a camera in it and see what's going on in the pipe.

Maybe.

Yeah.

And so far, so good.

Oh, wonderful.

So that's great.

Yeah.

And I want to just be clear.

My landlord's great.

She's a nice person.

She's nice.

She's a nice person.

Yeah.

And I have no problems with her.

It just

was bumming me out that that was a gross thing happening.

I also think when you live in LA and you pay exorbitant rents, rightly so, you expect a little more.

Yeah.

Like, I think if you were spending $800 a month on a one-bedroom in Oakland County, where I'm from,

and there was suds coming out, you'd kind of be like, Yeah, you get what you pay for.

Right, right.

But when you're spending what is the mortgage on a $700,000 house to live in a one-bedroom apartment,

I think the expectations go up.

Yeah, that's true.

Okay, let's see.

Oh, I looked up where blood feuds are prominent.

Appalachia.

Albania.

Oh, sure.

Casquafa, my old

high school friend.

Oh, right.

He was Albanian.

Yeah.

And he and his brother got down hard.

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.

If you recall, my story about him is that Aaron and I, Aaron and I delivered cars in Detroit generally five days a week.

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.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was a high school student.

Yeah.

An Albanian.

Super fucking tough.

And we used to go in there and get free Coney dogs whenever Aaron and I were in a certain section of Detroit.

And we'd hang with Kavs.

We pulled up one day, and there's police tape all over the...

parking lot and we park we have to park next door and as we're walking up we see the full front of the window is gone Yeah.

And he's standing the side.

He's like, he's been talking to cops.

We're like, what, what happened?

He's like, oh, damn, we just had a fucking shootout.

The homeboys across the street started shooting.

One came in the window.

Brother pulled out the MAC 10.

Pop, up, pop, pop, pop.

And I'm like,

we were just in class like three hours ago.

And he, they were in a huge shootout.

And he was fine.

Thank God.

I mean, just like emotionally, he is totally fine with the fact that the brother pulled out a MAC 10.

Yeah, man, there are just

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 blood.

There was a new Chaldean kid came to the school.

Somehow he had a beef with Kaz.

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,

new Chaldean kid comes up to Kaz, pulls out a gun points it at him

at school points a gun at him and kaz goes

bitch you better pull that fucking trigger because if you don't i'm gonna kill you after school that was his like out of a movie what yes but did he of course not like he was terrified somehow kaz knew who was real and who wasn't but then did Then did he beat him up, kill him after school?

He didn't kill him because he no, he didn't.

And obviously that kid got in major trouble, got kicked out of our school.

cops came the whole thing but he just looked right at him and said bitch you better kill me oh my god

that's so scary

next level for a high school student wow yeah yeah okay back to blood fuse okay albania south caucus

south caucasus you hear about that in the news the caucasus yeah

chechenya caucus caucus okay in the u.s U.S.,

Appalachian Mountains, in the Old West, Hartfield-McCoy.

Hatfield-McCoy.

Oh, sorry.

Hatfield-McCoy feud.

Okay.

And then in the Philippines, parts of Greece and Croatia.

Also do blood feuds.

Yep.

It's really related to herding, if you believe Malcolm Gladwell.

Oh, yeah.

All these cultures of honor.

started as herders who have an undefined 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 they're not going to have food.

So, this history of standing your ground

and herding communities is quite prevalent.

All right.

Well, that's it for James Kimmel Jr.: Revenge.

I loved this episode.

Yeah, it was great.

It really got me thinking.

Me too.

And I hope it gets everyone thinking because we have such quick triggers.

The challenges that legislation can't address are

very

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.

And ultimately, you are going to get triggered all day, every day.

And you have to

try this forgiveness exercise 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 can.

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

I highly doubt this is an option.

So just listen to this episode and pass it along, share it.

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.

Like it happened to my brother, it happened to me.

When, once you do that, like it's a very prized thing.

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,

familial pride thing.

That's like, you're up against that.

Yeah, it's a lot.

It can be practiced, though.

Yeah.

All right.

Love you.

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