James Kimmel Jr. (The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction) is a lecturer at Yale University on forgiveness and revenge. James joins the Armchair Expert to discuss plotting his revenge against the other Jimmy Kimmel for months, wanting to grow up to become a farmer until he was bullied because of it, and how eerily close he came to an irreparable act of violence to even a score. James and Dax talk about becoming an attorney to get revenge legally and professionally, how justice-seeking blesses all manner of disastrous human impulses, and finding himself addicted to revenge. James explains by studying forgiveness he learned that any method of finding peace works, why people who are victimized have a powerful rumination on being heard, and roleplaying a functional process of litigation resolution.Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Watch new content on YouTube or listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free by joining Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/armchair-expert-with-dax-shepard/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: Who is James Kimmel Jr.?
Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts, or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dak Shepherd. I'm joined by Lily Padman.
Hi.
Confusing guest today.
Very.
Very confusing. James Kimmel Jr.
Not.
Not.
The son or father.
Of Jimmy Kimmel.
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Chapter 2: What is the Science of Revenge?
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.
You take whatever you can get to feel better than other people. I get that. 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.
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Chapter 3: How does revenge addiction manifest?
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 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 jumped to the windows, 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 pickings. 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 in 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. Wasn't that just so cruel and terrible? And it never doesn't get that reaction that you're having. Yeah, that's horrific. Monica, it is horrific. I can't even imagine doing that. Yeah. Let alone having a reason to want to do that in this case.
My folks called the state police or who patrols these vast farm rural areas in Pennsylvania. early 80s and they're like, this is bad. They weren't in any way insensitive to what happened, but they were also like, we're just 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 kid's 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.
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Chapter 4: What role does forgiveness play in healing?
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 a 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 gonna 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. Yeah. 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.
OK, 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. Yes. That now neuroscience has shown is exactly what you're getting. The whole city was high. Yes. The country was high. 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.
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Chapter 5: How can we mitigate revenge-driven behavior?
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, 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 total 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.
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Chapter 6: What historical examples illustrate revenge addiction?
What is it?
My pickup truck, my black pickup truck, 1990 454 SS with an LT4 motor.
Okay.
Out of a Corvette and an 8-speed transmission, huge tires and back, wheel wood 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 bump the bass. You're going to blast it? I'm going to bump the bass specifically. Wow. If you hear bass bumping outside your apartment.
Be like, who the fuck?
That's a call. 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 booty bumped?
A long time. It's been a minute since I booty bumped.
15 years? 20 years?
No, no. No, probably Callie's wedding was the last time.
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Chapter 7: What can we do to prevent violence driven by revenge?
I see.
Yeah, I would call that like objecting, dissenting. Okay, interesting. 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. Yeah. Okay, here we go. You ready?
Yes.
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