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The Oprah Podcast

Your Brain on Revenge with Oprah and James Kimmel, Jr.

20 Jan 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 5.116 Unknown

Did you have a waiting to exhale moment? You put all his clothes in a pile and burned them? I did. Oh, you did?

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Chapter 2: What personal experience led James Kimmel Jr. to study revenge?

5.217 - 5.84 Courtney

I did, yes.

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5.94 - 30.46 Unknown

I took all the clothes I bought. Listen to you grown-up people in here. This young woman, you're applauding her burning up his clothes. Perfect illustration of, you know, revenge-seeking and revenge addiction. You can control it. Now, let's hear what were the negative consequences for you. None. None?

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Chapter 3: How does revenge manifest as an addiction?

30.54 - 34.105 Oprah Winfrey

Okay. Being on the Oprah podcast.

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38.371 - 46.622 Unknown

Welcome to the Oprah Podcast. We're in New York City with an audience of our listeners.

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Chapter 4: What are the psychological effects of seeking revenge?

46.782 - 65.189 Unknown

And I so appreciate all of you and all of you who tell me that you're getting information, enlightenment from our podcast, that it's comforting to you. You get a lot of ahas. I'm so happy. You're going to have a lot of ahas today. because the truth is we are living in a complicated and complex time.

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66.031 - 88.728 Unknown

And it is my hope to continue using my life in such a way that we can create conversations that can help you kind of take the lens and zoom out to see the bigger picture of a lot of subjects and zoom in to understand what's really underneath so many of the challenges that we all are facing as humans together here on the planet.

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88.748 - 112.614 Unknown

And one of the things about the human condition that has always troubled me, and I know many of you here and who are listening and watching us too, is the senseless violence from domestic violence to school shootings. Remember when Columbine just shocked us and now nobody's shocked anymore? To riots and all the way up to war.

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Chapter 5: What is the Non-Justice System and how does it work?

113.034 - 133.953 Unknown

So my guest today says at the root of almost all violence is one universal human condition. I want to know, those of you who don't know what the show's about today, what do you think that condition is? Insecurities. Insecurities. Fear. Definitely. I would also say anger. Anger. Hatred.

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Chapter 6: How can forgiveness play a role in overcoming revenge?

134.414 - 139.6 Belinda

Hatred. OK. Yes? I would say vengefulness or revenge.

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140.38 - 143.083 Courtney

You win!

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144.285 - 148.309 Unknown

Actually, I thought all of the answers were appropriate.

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Chapter 7: What stories from the audience illustrate the impact of revenge?

148.99 - 168.133 Unknown

Did you see the book before? It's The Science of Revenge. Revenge. He says you say it's revenge. It is revenge, but every person here was right because revenge is always triggered by a grievance, a perception of being wronged or mistreated. And in all of those instances, we're talking about grievances.

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168.153 - 193.884 Unknown

The grievances flow one direction, and that is to create this motivation and desire to retaliate and hurt the people who hurt you. So this is James Kimmel Jr., is a revenge and violence researcher and lecturer at the psychiatry department at the Yale School of Medicine. Thank you for coming all the way from Yale today to be with us. And his book is called I didn't know until I read it.

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193.964 - 211.724 Unknown

Actually, I read an article that you wrote, and then that prompted me to get the book and ask the producers about Let's Doing This show on the science of revenge, because it never occurred to me that there was a science of revenge, understanding the world's deadliest addiction and how to overcome it.

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And I want to say quickly that when we posted about this particular topic on the Oprah podcast Instagram page, we received nearly 10 times the response we normally do.

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Chapter 8: How does James Kimmel Jr. define the relationship between revenge and violence?

222.297 - 238.36 Unknown

So there's a lot of people holding revenge out there. And I'd like to start with your personal story. Tell us how you came to be a scientist of this, to study this, the incident that you experienced as a teenager.

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238.34 - 256.925 Unknown

So when I was a young boy, about 12 years old, my folks moved my brother and I from a suburban home, small suburban home, onto my great-grandfather's farm in central Pennsylvania, which at the time was the most fantastic thing that could ever happen to me as a 12-year-old boy to be on a farm.

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257.306 - 284.549 Unknown

When I got there, one of the things that I first set out to do was to befriend and learn about and hang out with the other kids on the surrounding farms that were at great distances from our farm. And so I reached out to them and I found pretty quickly that I wasn't welcomed into their community. And When they sort of rejected me, my response was to try even harder.

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284.589 - 306.585 Unknown

The harder I tried, the more they pushed back, and the shunning moved on into bullying. And the bullying, as it often starts, it started verbally at first, and then that moved on into a much more aggressive form of bullying as we got older. So from age 12 till now, I'm moving into age 16 or 17 even, and this is still going on.

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And it moved into kind of physical attacks in hallways, getting on and off the bus. You feared them? I feared them. This was just kind of something you had to solve for yourself or just, you know, shut up and tolerate. Did you tell your parents? Did you tell your parents? You know, I think a little bit, but there was just sort of a... Yeah. That's too bad. That's what happens.

326.617 - 346.356 Unknown

And so then what happened? Well, so late one night, my family are asleep. And we were awakened to the sound of a gunshot. and jumped out of bed, raced outside to look and see what was happening outside our house. And I saw outside a pickup truck that had been owned by the one of the guys who was bullying me, speeding away. Okay.

347.358 - 373.219 Unknown

And we searched around the house, didn't see any damage, went back to bed. The next morning, one of my jobs was to wake up and go out and take care of all of our animals. the cows, the pigs, and also a sweet little beagle hunting dog that we owned named Paula. And when I went out to feed and water her, I found her lying dead in a pool of blood with a bullet hole in her head. They had shot her?

373.44 - 401.098 Unknown

They shot her. They shot her, yeah. So my folks called the police. They felt bad. They took a report. So about two or three weeks later, I found myself home alone at night, and I heard a vehicle come to a stop in front of our house again. So as I was getting up to look outside and see what was going on, I saw this pickup truck, the same one, And then there was a flash and an explosion.

401.118 - 424.204 Unknown

And the pickup truck took off down the road again, and our mailbox had blown up. And with that explosion went the rest of my self-control. After all of these years, I ran and I grabbed a loaded revolver from my dad's nightstand, and I tore off after these guys. I jumped in my mother's car, and I'm flying down the road in the middle of the night, just shouting in rage.

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