James Kimmel Jr. (revenge and forgiveness expert)

Summary

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard: Episode Summary Featuring James Kimmel Jr.

Episode Information:

• Title: James Kimmel Jr. (Revenge and Forgiveness Expert)
• Release Date: June 4, 2025
• Host: Armchair Umbrella (Dax Shepard)

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, host Dax Shepard is joined by guest James Kimmel Jr., a renowned lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, lawyer, and author of "The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It." The episode delves deep into the intricate psychology of revenge, its addictiveness, and the transformative power of forgiveness.

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James Kimmel Jr.'s Background and Book

James Kimmel Jr. is not to be confused with Jimmy Kimmel of late-night fame. As Shepard clarifies early in the conversation, James is a separate individual whose expertise lies in the study of revenge as a psychological phenomenon. He introduces his latest work, "The Science of Revenge," a book that has significantly impacted Shepard's perception of revenge, even affecting his enjoyment of revenge-themed media.

James Kimmel Jr. ([08:29]): "What's frightening is how revenge, which we typically perceive as a negative emotion, can become an addictive drive that compels individuals to seek retribution despite severe consequences."

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Personal Story of Revenge

Kimmel shares a harrowing personal anecdote from his youth that ignited his obsession with understanding revenge. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, he endured prolonged bullying from peers, which culminated in a night when his family's dog was brutally murdered. Driven by rage and possessing firearms from his environment, Kimmel confronted his tormentors with lethal intent but experienced a brief yet profound moment of introspection that deterred him from committing violence.

James Kimmel Jr. ([14:10]): "There was this clear moment—a jarring glimpse into the future—that stopped me dead. I realized that killing them would mean killing a part of myself, and I couldn't accept that."

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The Science of Revenge Addiction

Transitioning from his personal story, Kimmel elucidates his research at Yale, positing that revenge operates similarly to addiction. He explains how grievances activate the brain's pain network, prompting a paralleled activation of the reward circuitry typically associated with substances like drugs and behaviors such as gambling.

James Kimmel Jr. ([52:19]): "Your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. This revelation underscores the biological roots of violence as an addiction to revenge."

Neuroscience Insights

The conversation delves into the neurological underpinnings of revenge. Grievances trigger the anterior insula, the brain's pain center, while simultaneously activating the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum—regions linked to reward and pleasure in addiction. This dual activation creates a potent but destructive drive to seek retribution, often at the expense of rational decision-making governed by the prefrontal cortex.

Dax Shepard ([56:10]): "The prefrontal cortex, which models the future and gives us self-control, goes silent during revenge cravings, leaving us driven solely by the immediate desire for retaliation."

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Historical Examples

Kimmel references historical figures known for their vengeful actions, attributing their atrocities to revenge addiction. He discusses dictators like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, highlighting how their personal experiences with victimization fueled their relentless quests for vengeance, resulting in mass atrocities.

James Kimmel Jr. ([68:55]): "Hitler, Stalin, Mao—all epitomes of revenge addicts—used their personal grievances as catalysts for unprecedented violence, reshaping entire nations in their pursuit of retribution."

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The Role of Forgiveness

Contrasting revenge, Kimmel emphasizes the transformative power of forgiveness. Neuroscientific research reveals that forgiveness deactivates the pain and reward networks associated with grievances, reactivating the prefrontal cortex and restoring rational decision-making. This not only alleviates the internal burden of anger but also diminishes the addictive allure of revenge.

James Kimmel Jr. ([73:10]): "Forgiving benefits the victim, not the perpetrator. It's a gift to yourself, shutting down the pain network and the revenge craving circuitry simultaneously."

Strategies for Overcoming Revenge Addiction

Kimmel introduces the concept of the "Non-Justice System," a method designed to help individuals navigate their internal trials of grievances without resorting to destructive retaliation. He explains how structured self-reflection and forgiveness exercises can break the cycle of revenge addiction, fostering personal growth and societal harmony.

James Kimmel Jr. ([74:03]): "Forgiveness is a human superpower. It exists empirically and biochemically; you don't need a spiritual belief to harness its healing effects."

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Societal Implications

The episode concludes with a reflection on the pervasive revenge culture in American society, linking it to high incarceration rates and punitive politics. Kimmel advocates for a societal shift towards forgiveness and restorative justice, drawing parallels to post-World War II reconciliation with Germany as a model for enduring peace.

James Kimmel Jr. ([76:31]): "Making America truly great again requires embracing forgiveness by necessity, as evidenced by our lasting peace with former adversaries like Germany."

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Conclusion

This episode of Armchair Expert offers a profound exploration into the dark recesses of human emotion and behavior, shedding light on revenge as a potentially deadly addiction and highlighting forgiveness as a path to healing. James Kimmel Jr.'s insights challenge listeners to reconsider their responses to grievances and embrace forgiveness as a means to personal and societal betterment.

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Notable Quotes:

• James Kimmel Jr. ([14:10]): "It was just enough of a jarring glimpse into the future that it stopped me dead."
• James Kimmel Jr. ([52:19]): "Your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs."
• Dax Shepard ([56:10]): "The prefrontal cortex... goes silent during revenge cravings."
• James Kimmel Jr. ([68:55]): "Hitler, Stalin, Mao—all epitomes of revenge addicts."
• James Kimmel Jr. ([73:10]): "Forgiving benefits the victim, not the perpetrator."
• James Kimmel Jr. ([76:31]): "Making America truly great again requires embracing forgiveness."

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Key Takeaways:

• Revenge as Addiction: Revenge operates on a similar neurological level as substance addictions, compelling individuals to seek retaliation despite negative consequences.

• Neuroscientific Basis: Grievances trigger pain networks and reward centers in the brain, creating a powerful urge for revenge that overrides rational decision-making.

• Historical Parallels: Dictatorial figures often exemplify revenge addiction, using personal grievances to justify mass violence and societal control.

• Power of Forgiveness: Forgiveness can biologically and psychologically dismantle the revenge craving, offering a pathway to healing and societal peace.

• Societal Shift Needed: Embracing forgiveness over revenge could mitigate prevalent issues like high incarceration rates and punitive societal norms.

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This episode serves as a thought-provoking examination of the human psyche's vulnerability to revenge and the liberating strength of forgiveness, offering listeners actionable insights to navigate their own emotional landscapes.

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

Wondry plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now. Join Wondry plus in the Wondry 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 Dax Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.

[Monica Padman]

Hi.

[Dax Shepard]

Confusing guest today. Very, very confusing. James Kimmel Jr. Not.

[Monica Padman]

Not the son or father of Jimmy Kimmel, correct?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. But do you know Jimmy Kimmel's already a junior, so he would have to be the third.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

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 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.

[Monica Padman]

It was really interesting and important.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Revenge.

[Dax Shepard]

Revenge. We're all revenge addicted.

[Monica Padman]

Some more than others.

[Dax Shepard]

Some more than others.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

Which is great.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. Forgiveness. It's not sexy, but it works.

[Monica Padman]

It's pretty sexy.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Not passionate.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So our media may take a hit, but ultimately may be worth it. Please enjoy. James Kimmel Jr get into your body's.

[Monica Padman]

Vitals with the Vitals app on Apple Watch. I wanna get into my body and then my skin. Don't talk and I wanna feel about myself again. The Vitals app tracks key overnight metrics so you can spot changes in your health before you feel them. The Vitals app on Apple Watch iPhone Xs are later required. The Vitals app is for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. I wanna get.

[Dax Shepard]

This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Apply for Apple Card today and start earning up to 3% daily cash back on everyday purchases. And that daily cash can even grow automatically when you open a high yield savings account through Apple Card. What are you waiting for? Visit Apple Co CardCalculator today to see how much daily cash you can earn subject to Credit approval Savings available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Member FDIC terms and [e-mail] hey.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Hello. How are you doing? Great. Dax.

[Dax Shepard]

Welcome. James. Nice to meet you. Dax. I like that watch.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

I've read that.

[Monica Padman]

What does that even mean, really?

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

The moon phases added complication level that nobody really cares about.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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. Right. So they've been sponsoring this, and some of them are doing their own watches and not really working for the brand names and creating their own name. It might take them to build one $170,000 watch a couple of years, one person. It's just crazy.

[Dax Shepard]

So handsome watch. Pennsylvania, Michigan.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Excellent.

[Dax Shepard]

I feel like these are similar cultures.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yes. And Atlanta, not that far off, although below the Mason Dixon line. So, you know.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Slightly different.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yeah. Northerners have to be snobby on that. Sure, sure.

[Dax Shepard]

You take whatever you can get to feel better than other people. None of us had anything to do with it.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Right, right, right.

[Dax Shepard]

What part of Pennsylvania?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Dax Shepard]

You grew up in kind of farmland.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Farmland right near State College where Penn State is located about a half hour west in dairy country.

[Dax Shepard]

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. And he said, kevin. And I said, no, no. James Kimmel Jr. He does have a question for you. This is coming directly from Jimmy.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Why not go by Jimmy?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Monica Padman]

Sure. Step on his.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 anything.

[Monica Padman]

Be his own person.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Right, yeah. Be your own person. Don't live in my shadow.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 gotta go James. I moved to James. I would answer to any three of those.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, now, do you benefit get annoyed? Tell me about the experience of having such a popular name.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And go, oh, Jimmy Kimmel. Some people might go. I thought you might be.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Monica Padman]

A lot of integrity over there.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

I'm trying to be a good guy.

[Dax Shepard]

You should 1000% 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 gonna say? Like, we take away the reservation? They're not.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

That's right.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

It kind of breaks their hearts, doesn't it?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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. Cause Phil had done an interview with Trump, and Phil had brought me up in the interview with the Donald.

[Dax Shepard]

Did Trump get super confused?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

He wasn't.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a good question. Actually.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Which was kind of cool.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no. That's a cheap shot.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, it's a Cheap shot again.

[Dax Shepard]

You gotta feed the inferno of content.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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 farm town. And what was that experience like?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

That was it. Seventh grade.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a rough time to move.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 the WAAG classes in middle school and high school. And I built a hay wagon from scratch. I learned how to weld, I learned how to cut wood. I learned how to take care of animals.

[Dax Shepard]

You couldn't have done more.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 mine. Nobody talked about it.

[Dax Shepard]

You do five years of this?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

It started the bullying side. More like nine, 10th grade. It didn't start right when I landed. That was just shunning for a while.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Then it moved to the bullying. I think when they got older, they're bigger teens and they're strong as fuck.

[Dax Shepard]

Because they work on a farm.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 jump 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 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 they 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.

[Monica Padman]

Oh my God.

[Dax Shepard]

God, wasn't that just what the. So cruel and terrible.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And it never doesn't get that reaction.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

That you're having, Monica. It is horrific. I can't even imagine doing that right. Let alone having a reason to want to do that, yeah, in this case, my folks called this state police are 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 gonna launch investigation. We're not gonna 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

So like I said, we were hunters. I had been shooting guns since I was like 8 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.

[Monica Padman]

Whoa.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 the lungs.

[Dax Shepard]

Rage, frontal lobes offline.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

It's just all instinct. And I'm fight now.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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. And 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 0 off the balance. So I opened the driver's side door, started to step out, grabbed 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 home. And I came within like three seconds of committing a mass shooting.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Ironically or not, it stopped after that.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

I know what you mean. Well, I know that I've just gotten away with something very big in my life that would have been transformative in a hyper negative way.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 now, when.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

It's hard to overcome that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Do with me now we know that's revenge, but at the time, it would fly under the umbrella of justice. Lawyers get justice.

[Monica Padman]

Two sides of the same coin. Justice and revenge it is.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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 right side of things. You're. 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?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Monica Padman]

Can we, sorry, give a little. Like, what is civil litigation compared to kinds?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

That's a great question. Right. Cause 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 gonna bring the terrorists to justice. What he meant was, we're gonna go and we're gonna kill them and we're gonna get revenge for that. 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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

When you tell your band of militants or terrorists, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

That now neuroscience has shown is exactly what you're getting. The whole city was high?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

The country was high as a.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Many areas of the country, not everyone, some people felt that that was wrong in a lot of ways.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And it is the 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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, as 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, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Dax Shepard]

20 years.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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, chess masters becoming paranoid. Their mental health, you know, Bobby Fischer 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 have said you spent a lot of your time figuring out how to not get, 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 to you, right? It kind of bled into everything.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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, and 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 lawyer for hire, I'm like a mercenary.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 gonna want the one with the guy that's just on the edge of crazy. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

I will raise their head up and.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Do anything to these people for you.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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 lethally.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And we have street justice. Every area has their sometime 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 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.

[Monica Padman]

Turn it off.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 out there.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you hit a low point, I guess 2004 or 2005. Ish.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 gotta be talking about more than just a way to get into heaven because he doesn't just say forgive and you go to heaven. He was like, you should forgive 70 times 7. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

This podcast is sponsored by Apple tv presenting the hit series Slow Horses, a darkly comedic drama that follows a team of British intelligence agents who serve in a dumping ground department of MI5 due to their career ending mistakes. The brilliant, Emmy winning espionage drama has been nominated for 13 awards this year and has received two BAFTAs. The fantastic ensemble includes Academy Award winner Gary Oldman, Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jonathan Price and more. Catch up on the show critics are calling so much damn fun. It's five stars and one of the most sensational shows on television. Slow Horses is Streaming on Apple TV + [e-mail]+.com we are supported by Shipstation. We love to talk about tech and AI advancements on the show and if you're still operating your shipping and fulfillment processes with last year's technology, have we got an ad for you. It's Shipstation, baby. Lead your business into the future with smart features and automations that boost efficiency and save you time. Seamlessly automate repetitive tasks so you can work smarter, not harder, and you can seamlessly integrate with services and selling channels you already use and manage orders on one easy dashboard. We just shipped all of our last round of merch with Shipstation and it made Carly's life a breeze. Over 130,000 companies have grown their e commerce business with Shipstation and 98% of companies that stick with Shipstation for a year become customers for life. Calm the chaos of order Fulfillment with the shipping software that delivers. Switch to ShipStation today. Go to ShipStation.com and use code DAX to sign up for your free trial. That's ShipStation.com code DAX. We are supported by Allstate. Some people just know they could save hundreds on car insurance by checking Allstate first. Like you know to check your flights on time first before heading to the airport. Like you know to check your presentation is saved first before closing your laptop. That's one mistake I'll never make again. Checking first is smart, so check all state first for a quote that could save you hundreds. You're in good hands with Allstate. Savings vary subject to terms, conditions and availability. Allstate fire and casualty insurance company and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois. We are supported by better help. You know, there's still a bit of surrounding stigma for men's health. I think it, I think so too still be challenging for men to admit they're struggling and seek help.

[Monica Padman]

I have a friend who just started therapy, a male friend, and he loves it so much and. But yes, I think it's taken a little long, extra long, because you're right, there is a stigma, but there really shouldn't be.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Men today face immense pressure to perform, to provide and keep it all together. So it's no wonder that 6 million men in the U. S suffer from depression every year. And it's often undiagnosed. If you're a man and you're feeling the weight of the world, talk to someone. A friend, a loved one, a therapist. I'm a man. I've benefited greatly from therapy and BetterHelp is a great option if you're looking to start therapy. As the largest online therapy provider in the world. BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Armchairs get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.comdax that's BetterHelp h lp.comdax and you had kind of made a mess of your career as well at that point?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

By the way, can I just say, because I'm an addict, so that's like, I'm not gonna drink whiskey, I'm gonna drink red wine. I'm not drinking red wine. I'm drinking beer now. I'm gonna drink on the weekend. You're trying all the many things an addict tries. Yeah, other than quitting.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Not enough dopamine on that, not enough dopamine there.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And I just kept coming back to the master, coming back to. 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, a vacation. 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 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. 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. A minor substance use disorder. And maybe the 5, 6, 7 range is moderate. And then beyond that is severe. I was 7, 8, 9 in theirs, goes up to 11. And I went, I have a severe justice. Addiction is what I think I have, but nobody would believe that.

[Dax Shepard]

It sounds silly on the surface, right?

[Monica Padman]

But it makes sense.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

What is serious about it? Cause 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 body.

[Dax Shepard]

There's no wreckage.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

I remember people being outraged when Tiger woods claimed he had a sexual addiction. And so many people are 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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

That's right.

[Dax Shepard]

He ruined his fucking life.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And he did. He had a ton of negative and.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Insurance might not cover it. Right, Exactly, Basically. So you go on this self motivated path to start really studying this and how do you submerse yourself in it? What do you start reading? Do you take classes? How do you become a buff on this?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 turned 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 perh 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. Yeah, that architecture, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Everyone will relate to this part. Yeah, yeah, right.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

We are putting people onto 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 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?

[Dax Shepard]

Life.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And when you decide to carry it out, that is revenge seeking.

[Dax Shepard]

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. It'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 in my trial I'm going to have. And either I don't ever have the trial we have. The trial 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.

[Monica Padman]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Justice trauma therapists like Bezel van der Kol 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.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

So that rumination just goes on and on for everyone all the time that you've described, Dax. 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. A structured way. So with a little script. And at the end, we are not just left with the punishment because you get to sentence them, you get to imagine punishing them. And I could do this with either of you.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Let's go through our actual examples.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

So if you have a solid grievance.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Dax Shepard]

I'm late. I'm willing to be the villain in this.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Oh, you're always the perpetrator.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

But does this bother you?

[Monica Padman]

I don't love it.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

You don't love it. Do we have anything better, more grievous.

[Monica Padman]

Than that, to be a big.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Monica Padman]

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, 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 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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Okay. They're not fixing this situation at all. Right. Let's just do it.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm going to add. They're placating. That's a trigger for me to keep it shortish.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 lawyer's tables and the jury box, and maybe the defendant is the landlord, and they're over at their table, and you're over in your table, and there's a judge up there, and you're now on the witness stand, and you're testifying to what they've done to you and what's happened to you. 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.

[Monica Padman]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yeah. All right, so let's stop with the victim testimony for a minute, and let's switch. So now you're gonna 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. So it's actually you in the witness stand. So you've got to switch that role.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And now your lawyer, very well paid, good lawyer, Jimmy Kimmel Jr. And his name's. Right? Jimmy Kimmel Jr. Thanks for that advertisement. And he's gonna ask You. So what's your side of the story?

[Monica Padman]

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, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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 as if I'm putting the subs in her tub. I don't have anything to do with it. We're on the same team here.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Right? So now, Monica, in your own role, you've just sat and listened to the defendant testify, both versions.

[Monica Padman]

Uh huh.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

How did it make you feel to hear the defendant's story? What was that like for you?

[Monica Padman]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Monica Padman]

I think she's guilty. I do think that objectively that's fair.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

You're the jury and you get to say what you want. You don't have to apologize to me.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

So what should your sentence be? Since you found the landlord guilty, you're gonna have to hand down a sentence. And in the non justice system, which is what this is called, 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.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Whoa.

[Dax Shepard]

Because now she'll be heavily incentivized to deal with the core problem.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Unless foam doesn't bother her.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, we'll find out.

[Monica Padman]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

That's interesting.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Correct.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

I don't have that, and I wouldn't want to sentence her with that.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I think you don't want her to have the phone say, oh, well.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is basically what you've already done.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 of 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Right. What we find from the research is it will also reactivate. If it was 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. 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.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

But you did want to be heard.

[Monica Padman]

I did.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And you 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.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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 technical 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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 because what follows from that is we now understand the biological cause of violence. It's 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. 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 accumbens and 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 throughout recorded human history. We just have 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Predicting how you'll feel after this.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Dax Shepard]

I wanna put an extra fine point on this. The area of your brain driving that in that moment actually cannot model the future. Future. That area of your brain is only now. The prefrontal cortex is in charge of the future and modeling. So it literally can't consider the consequences.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Dax Shepard]

The amygdala, all these areas, they are incapable of jumping out.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 when you're craving making yourself feel better. So we seek revenge to make ourselves feel better. It feels pleasur. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 and it's bad for you. And then you punish them and say, well, you're gonna 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, goes back 430,000 years now. No way to tell what 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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 infinite, 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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Who are looking at normal people who one day, like I would consider myself a non psychopath normal person.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's talk about Olga. That's a fun. Fun in quotes. Interesting's 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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Stereotypically the woman Olga Hepnerova 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.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, God.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Wiped them out. Injured, injured 12. 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.

[Monica Padman]

The manifesto element.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yes, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And we can see that the example of proxy. Right. So she was most aggrieved by her own parents, some of her friends in.

[Dax Shepard]

School, her father was abusing her, abusive.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Some of her friends were abusive. None of them were victims of this. She ended up killing people. Cheat, 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 preplanned it, and she's very most concerned that people don't think she's crazy. She insists that she's guilty. She insists she 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 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Wants to be hung right?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 her that and so sentence her to execution by hanging. She becomes the last one executed in Communist Czechoslovakia. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

We are supported by ZipRecruiter. Oh, get recruited. It's summertime, baby, and one of the best times of year. The weather, vacation, jobs. Okay, maybe not everyone is excited about jobs, but summer jobs are a rite of passage. I detassled corn.

[Monica Padman]

You sure did. I worked at a law firm.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Oh wow.

[Dax Shepard]

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[Monica Padman]

There'S some incredible TV coming out of the UK right now. Now Brits just do it differently. The accents, the wit, the scenery, the devastating one liners disguised as compliments. It's all streaming on Britbox. They have the best Mysteries, dramas, comedies, and seriously addicting originals like Outrageous. Based on the true story of the Mitford sisters. They were kind of like the Kardashians of the 1930s. Wealthy, audacious, chaotic, wildly opinionated, and always making headlines. And chances are you've never heard their story. It's stunning. It's jaw dropping. It's very British. So check out Outrageous.

[Dax Shepard]

It could be your next favorite.

[Monica Padman]

Don't miss Outrageous. Streaming now only on BritBox.

[Dax Shepard]

This is Nick and this is Jack. We're best friends, ex finance guys and resident 90s expert.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And every week on our podcast, the Best idea yet, we're we're bringing you the untold stories behind your favorite products.

[Dax Shepard]

For instance, can you guess which billion.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Dollar fashion company went viral thanks to a rhinestone covered tracksuit?

[Dax Shepard]

Or which cartoon turned four turtles into.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

A global toy empire by accident? It started as a joke.

[Dax Shepard]

Last one.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Which cold beverage was so hated by.

[Dax Shepard]

Starbucks they actually ended up acquiring it.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Spoiler. The Frappuccino. Howard Schultz apparently thought cold coffee was super lame and then he bought it.

[Dax Shepard]

From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Juicy.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Couture to the orange mocha Frappuccino, Join us every week to learn how your favorite things got made.

[Dax Shepard]

Follow the best idea yet on the.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus.

[Dax Shepard]

And if this podcast lasts longer than.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

45 minutes, call your doctor.

[Monica Padman]

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 killed 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?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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, you know?

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yeah. So their true motive for the last act. You're right. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Executed or even facing the shame.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 to destroy them all.

[Dax Shepard]

To balance the science he's gonna teach them. They should have taken him seriously and treated him better.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

That's exactly right.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 trul 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 pleasant. 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, had been victimized as a kid, he had been abused over and over and over again. He was raised in a highly violent town to fleece in Georgia, where blood feuds were part of the culture. And so there's this long history of revenge seeking. Both he as victim, he has perpetrator, and he then just goes on this revenge Binger for, 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, 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, happen.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 others. Monica, you're very. Cliff, 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 had abused the peasants and convinced 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, them en masse. And Mal was one of the original envisioners of this. The best way to manage and govern people is to cause them to essentially rat themselves out. That's the idea, is to constantly stir grievances up, stir these revenge desires, and then give them a way to gratify.

[Dax Shepard]

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 powerful thing.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

And that happened in China. It happened in the Soviet Union, but even more so in China. But that's our human history, because it's our victimization. Research is very clear. Bully victims are at the greatest risk of becoming bullies themselves. And I used myself in that category, you know, as a bully victim. 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 therap therapy and motivational interviewing or anti craving Drugs potentially like GLP1s 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't.

[Dax Shepard]

Seems to be working on a lot of addictions.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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, we've seen like.

[Dax Shepard]

Anger management programs that are semi overlappy with this.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

It's too many. A million's not enough.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Well, that's the way for revenge addicts as well. Once you start start, you're gonna go on a revenge binger and you're gonna hurt yourself and a lot of other people in the process because it doesn't feel good.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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. Y 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 Dexa described. Right. And then the last thing it does is it reactivates the prefrontal cortex, the decision making and self control circuitry. So forgiveness is kind of a human superpower or a miracle drug. We just didn't know it existed.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, the forgiveness part is really great. And I'm just gonna add a woo woo 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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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. But by anchoring it in the spiritual realm as well, it kind of depowers what is really available to all of us for free. You don't need a doctor, you don't need a prescription. You can heal yourself with this power of forgiveness that you don't have to have a belief in God or anything.

[Dax Shepard]

For it exists empirically and biochemically and we can observe it. You don't need a spiritual being in.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

The mix and you can forgive, 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 reemerges 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.

[Dax Shepard]

I could damage myself.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Who will suffer from that rant and down spiral? It would be my partner.

[Dax Shepard]

The landlord's not, not the foam.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 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 that raged for about 2000 years plus and only ended. It's hard to imagine this, but in the 1950s.

[Monica Padman]

That is crazy.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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 2000 years, which is. It's God's judgment, it's evil. Witches, Jews, I mean, they just blamed it on everybody. 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. More violence. Right?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yeah. It's just the way it is.

[Dax Shepard]

It's hard to overcome that.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

It is.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm guilty of that. Yeah. It's a gnarly fucking world, guys. Gnarly shit happens. And it's gonna.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

We're up against it really bad. We really need to do this. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. When I read that chapter, I was thinking you could have easily titled it Social media is the crack house for an addict. It's a mis. Immediate. It's right there. And you have to leave the only way.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

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, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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. Recover because 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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And it is bizarrely hopeful that we would have an explanation for the mass violence we've lived with forever.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God. If GLP1s can fix this. Oh, my God.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

I don't know that they can. I don't want to say they can't.

[Monica Padman]

We're not saying that.

[Dax Shepard]

They've done so many miraculous things that were coming fast. So we don't know it's true. Well, Dr. James Kimmel, this has been a delight. Thanks so much for coming.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Thanks for having me. I super appreciate it. What a great conversation.

[Dax Shepard]

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. I'm so excited because my 454ss is the perfect, perfect vehicle.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

What is it, people?

[Dax Shepard]

My pickup truck. My black pickup truck. 199454 SS with an LT4 motor.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Out of a Corvette and an eight 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 sweet system put in the truck. And I can't wait to go cruising now. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna bump the base.

[Monica Padman]

You're gonna blast it.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm gonna bump the base. Specifically.

[Monica Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

If you hear bass bumping outside your.

[Monica Padman]

Apartment, be like, who the.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a 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 bump?

[Monica Padman]

A long time. It's been a minute since I booty.

[Dax Shepard]

Bumped, but 15 years, 20 years.

[Monica Padman]

No, no, no. Probably Cali's wedding was the last time.

[Dax Shepard]

And you specifically did booty bump.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Ah, yeah. Shaming them.

[Monica Padman]

We were shaming them. We are on the ass, on the ground, dropping it. We were dropping it like it's hot.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Monica Padman]

People were throwing up. And ral me where people throwing dollar bills at you. No.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. That would have been how, you know, you.

[Monica Padman]

That's when you're an adult, you know, like, it's. That's degrading.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So it's not been terrible too long. Okay.

[Monica Padman]

It's very culty of you, what you just did, where it's like. No, that bad reaction you had. That. That's. That's gonna hurt you. Like, let's reframe and make it a positive thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Even though.

[Dax Shepard]

Though it is a positive thing.

[Monica Padman]

No. Even though what you're doing is loud.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh. And loud is just negative. Even if it's a. You're. You hear your favorite song, that's negative.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Now I'm going to come at you accusatory in response.

[Monica Padman]

Let's hear it.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. You think all of a sudden.

[Dax Shepard]

Tell me about that gold sheet.

[Monica Padman]

In the last 12 years I've been telling you, I will not be in your cult.

[Dax Shepard]

Is that gold?

[Monica Padman]

It's not real gold.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I was gonna say that would be incredible. And it would probably weigh like six pounds.

[Monica Padman]

It is actually kind of heavy. It's not, it's. But it's a great necklace. I got it from Sarah Henler.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Gray, who I love. But no, it's quite reasonably price. Very reasonably price. Less than $200.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

I recently I bought some pants from the Gap.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Mother daughter pants.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. When I was home. I love them.

[Dax Shepard]

And you were in Georgia, though.

[Monica Padman]

I was. So there's an outdoor mall. Obviously. That's what I'm talking about at home. Yeah, pretty much. My male and I go from outdoor mall to outdoor mall.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So we were out.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

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 keep shopping. Shopping. Then my dad and my brother Came to meet us. We had din.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

No, I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't? That's great.

[Monica Padman]

I don't ever feel judged by them.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. That's nice.

[Monica Padman]

That's really nice.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a luxury. It's a lot of parents are quite judgmental, if anything.

[Monica Padman]

Unfortunately, there's judgment going the opposite way. And I try. I know it's all about me, of course, not about them. My judgments are not about them. Them. But, you know, I do worry sometimes. I worry about, like, my judgments come out of worry, and I guess so do their. So does everyone. Yeah, everyone's judgments come out of worry.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

What post?

[Dax Shepard]

I follow a daily. This account. Daily stoic or Daily stoicism too. 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.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

I like it.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

I really like it.

[Monica Padman]

But you love to air grievances.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, but like, I'll come off a motorcycle going real fast and you'll never hear me compl. You know, like, I. I'm not a. I'm not a complainer. You think I'm a complainer?

[Monica Padman]

Well, I think. Think we. Well, I guess is. How are you 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 wor. World. And I think it's a. Good.

[Dax Shepard]

Complaining or objecting.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I hate work. I hate that I have to get up at 8am every day. I can't stand it. So it's like I'm somehow a victim of some situation and there's. It's almost unfair. I have to do this thing.

[Monica Padman]

I see. Yes. Okay. Yep. It's like a little entitled. Okay, sure. Great. And objecting. Because I think it's okay to complain about things you think are wrong morally.

[Dax Shepard]

I wouldn't call that complaining.

[Monica Padman]

I see.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I would call that like objecting. Dissenting, you know, debating, arguing, standing up for something. Something.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, I see that. Yeah. There's a difference, for sure. Okay, so no complaining.

[Dax Shepard]

No complaining. I want to pull it up.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

These are good tips.

[Monica Padman]

All right. We love good tips.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Very, very Buddhist. Okay, here we go. You ready? Let me get my volume all the way up.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Some things you need to stop doing according to the Stoics. Number one, stop complaining. Marx 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, 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 a manner, 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 really 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.

[Dax Shepard]

And, well, and it shut itself off there.

[Monica Padman]

That was probably. They probably did that on purpose. So it's like you want more, but you can't have more.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Well, I find that complicated, I think.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's hear your opinion on that.

[Monica Padman]

Well, we're not going to have a show if we don't have opinions 1000%. So we are to have opinions.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I was just teasing.

[Monica Padman]

When I grew up, we were taught to have a critical opinion of. Of things. Same it was in class, like, read a thing and then figure out with real points what your opinion is on it.

[Dax Shepard]

Critical thinking.

[Monica Padman]

Critical thinking. I think that's a good. That, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

It, didn't ask for it.

[Monica Padman]

Ask for it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

It's irrelevant. It's just you trying to have a voice for no reason. Yes, it. It's slippery. But I also think it's okay to take in all the information and form. And I, I thought about it and.

[Dax Shepard]

I'd imagine you're free to have opinions on important things right under this edict. But I definitely know I've even said this on here in the last couple years. Like, I have a mantra in my house, which is like, your opinion's not needed here.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is almost always true.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

But that one's hard.

[Dax Shepard]

That one's the hardest.

[Monica Padman]

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 really. I'm embarrassed that I behaved this way. So I want to start by saying that. And I did apologize.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Were you drunk?

[Monica Padman]

No.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

I was totally sober.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. That makes it harder. I think.

[Monica Padman]

I was with Jess and we were on a big adventure one day.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

You're treating LA like the outdoor mall.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, we're on vacation in la.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's very fun. So we start and we go to some stores and. And he's buying some. You know, I kind of brought shopping into his life.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. I was. I was gonna say, I can't imagine.

[Monica Padman]

He loves shopping, but 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And then we decide we're going to walk to Echo Park. Now, for people who don't know, that's far. That's like, far. It's not that far.

[Dax Shepard]

Probably what, three and a half, four miles?

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, then, yeah, okay.

[Monica Padman]

It was an additional 45 minutes. Oh, 45 minute walk from there.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. So. But we decide we're going to do it and. But we'll stop and store this. So we're going. We go into a store, a men's store, and. 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. I love it. It's great. And he was like, ah, 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 gonna, 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. Different color.

[Dax Shepard]

Color or collar color? Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Same exact shirt. And I was like, well, I like the other color better.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And he was like, yeah, yeah, me too. Then. Then we go to check out and he gives. He's. He buys both.

[Dax Shepard]

Interesting.

[Monica Padman]

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, 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 tea. It's specific. So you, you don't really need two of the same thing.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, so then that's over.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But then after, I was like, who am I to tell him he doesn't need. Need to the same shirt? Like, even if that is my opinion.

[Dax Shepard]

Or your personal preference for you, how you would buy a shirt.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

This is not bad, Monica. Well, I can't even. But I was expecting something much more hurtful.

[Monica Padman]

Maybe I'm not a mean girl.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Well, just.

[Dax Shepard]

You had to apologize.

[Monica Padman]

I did. Because.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

I didn't hurt his feelings, but I did make him self conscious. Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

I made him self conscious second guess himself.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. And that's mean. Like, I. I didn't. I didn't mean it with ill intent. I. I meant it. I meant it honestly as like an experienced shopper.

[Dax Shepard]

That's what you were thinking.

[Monica Padman]

I did. I know about shopping, and so, like, you don't.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

That, 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 because. Because I guess that's for me, like, an apology. I really. I have to be sorry. Like, I'm not just gonna say, oh, I'm sorry.

[Dax Shepard]

You have to feel bad that you did.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I did something that I recognize I don't want to be doing.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

In life. And I'm sorry I did it to you, and I'm not gonna do it again. Or I'm gonna try not to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Anyway, so the stoics, they. They were whispering to you.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I'm Buddhist.

[Dax Shepard]

I was in a similar situation last night, but I. I did resist. I'm. I'm sitting in the nook, like in. At the booth.

[Monica Padman]

Uhhuh. In your kitchen.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

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 gonna burn your finger. And then I go, no, they'll burn their. I don't need to do that.

[Monica Padman]

Huh.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

And this person burnt their finger. Yeah. And then they had a burn finger, and I was washing dishes, and then I shared with another person. Oh, man, this is great. I. I wanted to say that, and I just didn't.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And, like, everything's fine. This person has a burnt finger. They're dealing with it. They learn the lesson way better than if I told them not to. They didn't believe that I was gonna. They would have not believed they were gonna 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 lessons. I know. Now I'm not saying that to you. I'm saying that to me.

[Monica Padman]

No, I agree. I. I agree. But also now he. What about this? This. The fingers burnt. Right?

[Dax Shepard]

Y.

[Monica Padman]

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?

[Dax Shepard]

You're not allowed to complain because.

[Monica Padman]

Well, I know, but they do.

[Dax Shepard]

The stoics.

[Monica Padman]

Right. Then what? Cuz that's when I'm like, I don't want to hear it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Because you.

[Dax Shepard]

You juggle chainsaws and your hand got cut off.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So I don't want to hear. Hear it. I'm a very much. I don't want to hear it, girl.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

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. And resist saying, well, yeah, it's when you flip the things with your fingers, they're gonna get like. That's what. Of course I want to say.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Is like, this is your fault.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And I don't want to deal with your emotions. But. But also, we zoom out. It's like, yeah, I make mistakes all the time.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Often they're probably my.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

My fault.

[Dax Shepard]

And if I'm.

[Monica Padman]

But if you're complaining about it to other people for hours. You shouldn't.

[Dax Shepard]

You've lost the right to do that.

[Monica Padman]

I kind of think so.

[Dax Shepard]

You can only complain about stuff that was truly. You had nothing to do with.

[Monica Padman]

Or, or you can.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, I'm open to that being.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, you did the right thing.

[Dax Shepard]

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 Neosporin and a band Aid. And then we're. We're on. And that's all up to them.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. But do you think some. Okay, now do you think in general some people are better decision makers than others?

[Dax Shepard]

Of course. Look around you.

[Monica Padman]

I know. That's how I feel.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So is it. If you consider yourself a pretty good decision maker.

[Dax Shepard]

Of course I do.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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, right decision. And that should have nothing to do with how anyone else is living their life. Ideally. My best version of myself.

[Monica Padman]

So hard. When you see it's causing them pain or distress.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, how often do you have friends that's like, they keep getting in their own way.

[Monica Padman]

Yes, I know.

[Dax Shepard]

And, 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. But if you. 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, their path and it's going to be however it is and they'll have the consequences of that. And. And you get to be on your path without anyone telling you. Maybe you should loosen up on your.

[Monica Padman]

Of course. You know, it's just hard when you see people get very stuck or fixated on something that is, I mean, counterproductive to their goals. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And you want the best for them.

[Monica Padman]

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, ugh. I know that happened to me.

[Dax Shepard]

And when I was six, back when.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you could relate.

[Monica Padman]

You could do that.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

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 this. 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.

[Monica Padman]

Interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't think so?

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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. You know, that's just a. Maybe you'll be excluded from that. But it's a very common.

[Monica Padman]

Very common. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Time.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

I don't know. I don't. I'm sure age has, has parts. It's part of it. But I think us not seeing eye to eye always is our. We have different personalities, different experiences on. In life.

[Dax Shepard]

It's multifaceted. You're a woman, I'm a man.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

You're brown, I'm white. There's new, innumerable things. One of them is 12 years.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. One of them is 12 years.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But I don't, I guess I'm like it. Yeah. Me.

[Dax Shepard]

I think you take, you're taking offense to that. Well, it's somehow like you're think I'm calling you immature or something. That's why I started by saying, I'm not saying I have evolved more than.

[Monica Padman]

You or that I'm not at the finish line.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Definitely different.

[Dax Shepard]

And.

[Monica Padman]

But I'm also not 20, so I don't know if we're.

[Dax Shepard]

Let me say this, I'm taking you out of this. I was a lot different at 37 than I am at 50.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Right. I'm. I hope.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

I mean the goal is to be changing.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

As a 50 year old. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

No, as a, as a 37 year old.

[Monica Padman]

You're a 37 year old. Listening to you now.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, I'm 37. I get in a time machine, I go, I go ahead in 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, he'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.

[Monica Padman]

Sure. Probably.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That's all.

[Monica Padman]

Where did that come from? Where did this train of thought come from?

[Dax Shepard]

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 might chalk up to our age difference.

[Monica Padman]

But did something happen in this conversation that made you say that that felt like it came out of nowhere?

[Dax Shepard]

No, it didn't come out of nowhere. We were talking about opinions.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And whether or not you need to give your opinion.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And whether or not you think you should tell someone to do you think.

[Monica Padman]

That'S with age you've come to that concept.

[Dax Shepard]

As you get older you're less interested in trying. You've just, you've been friends with people for 40 years and they never change and you give up.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, but I don't, like, I don't.

[Dax Shepard]

Think any grandparents are telling other grandparents how they should live their life. I think there's a ton of 18 year olds giving each other advice on how they should.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

There's more reason to honestly, if you're a 50 year old or a sick, 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 telling someone my age. Age how to behave.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Or older than my parents. Right. Like they're them, they are them at this point.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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 their goal.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So yeah, I just think there's differences as you age. I feel it even in a five year gap between Kristin 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.

[Monica Padman]

Mm.

[Dax Shepard]

What did I think when I was 45?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

What did I think at 37?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Well, I think I do know that that was the point of my story, is that I caught it after I didn't catch it, but I recognize that's not who I want to be.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

So all I can do is try not to do it.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Are you alive?

[Monica Padman]

I don't think anyone again achieved full stoicism 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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Stay tuned for more armchair experiments, if you dare.

[Monica Padman]

James Kimmel, Jr. Facts. So, watch complications.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, great. Tell me about them.

[Monica Padman]

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 mechanics 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Do we have a world record for complications?

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Whoa.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Mm.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm totally listening to you, and I'm getting. I'm getting the answers. So you don't have to do that. I'm trying to help.

[Monica Padman]

Thank you. Alarm. A function that allows the watch to sound an alarm at a specific time. Okay. Now you're looking up the most complications. What'd you find?

[Dax Shepard]

Is that the same watch I have? What do you have, Rob? Oh, that's just one with different complications. Batch Ron, which has 41 complications. 41 complications.

[Monica Padman]

It's also also called. It's horology.

[Dax Shepard]

A Vacheron Constantin, La Cabo 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 stupidly high number, but.

[Monica Padman]

Well, no. Yeah. This says the watch with the most complications is the Franc mould Ternitas Megafor boasting 36 complications, but it features 1,483 components and 23 indications via 18 hands and five discs.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, maybe I was looking at components and also seeing complications and conflated components and complications.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, and it says. And it says that one holds the record for the most complications. Other manufacturing manufacturers, like the one you just said, vast complications. Yes. 63, including a Chinese perpetual calendar.

[Dax Shepard]

2877 components and 245 jewels inside of that.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my goodness. Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. What an interesting mind.

[Dax Shepard]

I wish I was hornier for it. I just can't see the. That doesn't equal value to me.

[Monica Padman]

It equals value to me because it is made with care.

[Dax Shepard]

That's true.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Mine just has one complication.

[Monica Padman]

It does. What is it?

[Dax Shepard]

And I don't even know what it's doing. Oh, seconds. Seconds.

[Monica Padman]

Oh. Does it have the date?

[Dax Shepard]

No.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

But this is my new favorite watch. I love this watch. So simple.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Obviously it does. It only has one.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. It's not complicated. And I like that it doesn't even. It only has three numbers on it too, which I love.

[Monica Padman]

That's cool.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a panerai.

[Monica Padman]

Nice.

[Dax Shepard]

This is the watch I've been coveting for 12 years that George had.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, cool.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. See if I still qualify.

[Monica Padman]

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th Edition classifies Substance use disorders suds as follows. Alcohol use disorder. Caffeine use disorder. Even though now they should remove that.

[Dax Shepard]

They should.

[Monica Padman]

Eric Topol told us we could drink it.

[Dax Shepard]

Have. That's right.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

I've got a few of those.

[Monica Padman]

Includes a category for gambling.

[Dax Shepard]

No rage, no revenge yet.

[Monica Padman]

No shopping.

[Dax Shepard]

Ah.

[Monica Padman]

Which is interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

No kleptomania.

[Monica Padman]

That'll probably get added.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

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 abuse 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. Those add up.

[Dax Shepard]

You know. Where are you at? Were you doing a mental checklist?

[Monica Padman]

I knew you, you were gonna say that.

[Dax Shepard]

Of course I would.

[Monica Padman]

I knew you were gonna say that.

[Dax Shepard]

Should I not?

[Monica Padman]

I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

It seemed plausible that you were so excited to. No, I was thinking about my own history.

[Monica Padman]

Well, we know yours.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, but I still think about it. I've never taken that questionnaire.

[Monica Padman]

How many did you have?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, 11. Yeah. Maybe all of them.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

I don't know.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, let's see. Um. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a highly vague.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Word.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

I guess. I guess. But always it's. It's in conjunction with other things. So it feels hard. Hard to do that.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Exactly. Or in. Even like in my house.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. So that's harder.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Tolerance, needing more of the substance. Yes and no. I feel like if I take one day off, I'm already like, back.

[Dax Shepard]

You're back to your.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Again? Depends on what I'm doing. Like if I'm playing a game somewhere. No.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Monica Padman]

If I'm just like, white. Yeah. If I'm like, just like white knuckling, it's. And like, I really.

[Dax Shepard]

You're about to cook food and you're like, I can't. Yeah, tonight's a night I can't cook and drink wine. Are you agitated while you're cooking?

[Monica Padman]

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, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I do want to warn you that next week I will be PMSing.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, okay.

[Monica Padman]

And so will Kristin.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, great. And Carly.

[Monica Padman]

So I just want to probably.

[Dax Shepard]

Anna.

[Monica Padman]

Anna's always nice to you, though.

[Dax Shepard]

She is.

[Monica Padman]

She's afraid of you. You a little bit.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

I know, but you're still the boss.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

I know, but you're the boss.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm not the boss. That's the thing. In her mind, I am, but I'm not.

[Monica Padman]

Well, you're. You can be.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm married to her boss.

[Monica Padman]

You can be scary.

[Dax Shepard]

Scary?

[Monica Padman]

If you're upset. No one wants to upset you.

[Dax Shepard]

I know. We've covered this. Is it like a. As if I, like, scream around the house?

[Monica Padman]

I need you. I need you to just accept that.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I do.

[Monica Padman]

Okay. Because it's not like.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

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. I don't know. I don't know why that is.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

But it is painful when you are angry at someone. I think more than others. And that's just your power.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

It's a testament to your power and be grateful anyway. So I guess I have it, by the way.

[Dax Shepard]

No, I don't. 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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Tells me at some point when we're swimming at Barton Springs, like, I'm just so intimidated by you.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

And I go, even you're my. You're my baby. She's been my baby since I met her.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I'm so tender to her. Have been since I met her.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

She elicits that in people. That's what they. What's so fun about Ange?

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

It's not necessarily about, like, who you are towards the person. It can be just like, you know.

[Dax Shepard]

Someone has a side.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Or like what they've seen. I mean, she's been around you in lots of working situations.

[Dax Shepard]

She has seen me come out a group of a hundred people.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

As a director of Things.

[Monica Padman]

And also, like, if you're unhappy on a set or with something like. That's often made clear.

[Dax Shepard]

Huh.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Monica Padman]

Is that a surprise?

[Dax Shepard]

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 Cruz, what I hear repeatedly is I'm, like, the funnest person that.

[Monica Padman]

They'Ve ever worked for saying, you're not fun.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah. So I'm just. My. 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. That doesn't happen on this movie. There's been these moments, moments of, like, firm boundaries, but they're always like, we don't yell at people here. Everyone up. No one's burning someone for having messed up. I don't yell at anybody.

[Monica Padman]

Well, you. You do when you're mad.

[Dax Shepard]

You do on a set.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, maybe not on a set. Sorry. It's fine.

[Dax Shepard]

I can just. Like, I. Yeah, I. I have maybe a flawed assessment of how I. Yeah. I've treated some boss. Boss. I've had moments with bosses.

[Monica Padman]

We've had moments, but that's much different.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

And I think my baseline is hotter to some degree in the way my family talks to each other.

[Monica Padman]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

Like you and I have arguments. Like my brother and I had arguments. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Anyway. So I guess.

[Dax Shepard]

Anyways, I'm an alcoholic.

[Monica Padman]

I mean, that is what I was about to say. It kind of seems like I should evaluate.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, what's interesting is these questions are positioned as, 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 years? Minutes.

[Monica Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Every night at five, for seven minutes. I know there's a huge variety in how many. You know, how these could be answered.

[Monica Padman]

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.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And. But that's not really. Which I think is a part of.

[Dax Shepard]

The DSM is, 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, that, that's the trajectory you're on.

[Monica Padman]

But I think maybe it's also worth considering sobriety if you're like, I'm, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Know, there's, that's a hard and curious evaluation of just like wanting to have freedom from it. Like in, 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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I could afford it. I'm not getting in legal trouble. It's not danger. It's dangerous in 40 years.

[Monica Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's just a hard, harder thing to rely on for motivation.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. I think that takes time, which may. So maybe eventually I'll let you know.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

If I stop. Just like wine bars. And they're so cute and, and, and cozy bikinis are cute.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Oh, I Get it?

[Monica Padman]

Maybe I should work on, like, my dependence on cuteness.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. Start there and see if the other stuff is fixed. Down river.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Okay. This was unfortunate. Oh, oh, oh, yay. I wrote down update on the bath. And I didn't know what I was talk. I didn't. I was like, what does that mean? But I just remembered the bath has been fixed.

[Dax Shepard]

It's been fixed.

[Monica Padman]

I believe so.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you get an explanation of what the problem was?

[Monica Padman]

So the plumber came and. 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. And he said, okay, it's probably a pipe thing. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. I don't know, maybe put a camera in it and see what's going on in the pipe maybe. Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And so far, so good.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wonderful.

[Monica Padman]

So that's great.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I want to just be clear. My landlord's great.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, she's a nice.

[Monica Padman]

She's nice. She's a nice person.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

And I have no problems with her. It just. It was bumming me out. That.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, that.

[Monica Padman]

That was a gross thing happening.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, I think if you're spending 800amonth on a one bedroom in Oakland county, where I'm from.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Right, Right.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I think the expectations go up.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, that's true. Okay, let's see. Oh, I looked up where blood feuds are prominent.

[Dax Shepard]

Appalachia, Albania. Oh, sure. Kaz Kwafa, my old high school friend.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, right.

[Dax Shepard]

He was Albanian.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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 meant 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.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

He was a high school student.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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 cas. We pulled up one day, and there's police tape all over the parking lot. And we part. We have to park next door. And as we're walking up, we see the full front of the window is gone.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And he's standing the side. He's like. He's been talking to cops. We're like, what? What? What happened? He's like, oh, damn. We just had a fucking shootout. Homeboys across the street started shooting. One came in the window. Brother pulled out the Mac 10. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. And I'm like, we were just in class, like, three hours ago, and they were in a huge shootout. And he was fine.

[Monica Padman]

Thank God.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, just, like, emotionally, he was totally fine with the fact that the brother pulled out of Mac 10.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah, man. There are ways of living growing up.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Monica Padman]

Uhhuh.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, maybe there was a new Chaldean kid came to the school. Somehow he had a beef with Kez. 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. School at school points a gun at him, and Kaz goes, you better pull that trigger, cuz. If you don't, I'm gonna kill you after school. That was like, out of a movie.

[Monica Padman]

What?

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Monica Padman]

But did he?

[Dax Shepard]

Of course not. He was terrified. Somehow Kaz knew who was real and who wasn't.

[Monica Padman]

But then did. Then did he beat him up, kill him after? What?

[Dax Shepard]

He didn't kill him because, no, he didn't. Obviously, that kid got in major trouble. Got kicked out of our school. Cops came the whole nine years, but he just left. Looked right at him and said, you better kill me.

[Monica Padman]

Oh, my God, that's so scary.

[Dax Shepard]

So next level for a high school student.

[Monica Padman]

Wow. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Monica Padman]

Okay, back to Blood Fuse.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Monica Padman]

Albania, South Caucuses, South Caucasus.

[Dax Shepard]

You hear about that in the news? The Caucuses?

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. Chechenya. Okay. In the U.S. appalachian Mountains and the Old West, Hartfield McCoy. Sorry. Hatfield, McCoy feud. Okay. And then in the Philippines, parts of Greece and Croatia also do blood feuds. Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Monica Padman]

Oh.

[Dax Shepard]

All these. All these cultures of honor started as herders who have an undefined grazing area.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

That butts up often against other people's undefied. And you have to stand your ground or your sheep are going to die and you're not. They're not going to have food. So this history of standing your ground and hurting communities is quite prevalent.

[Monica Padman]

All right, well, that's it for James Kimmel Jr. Revenge.

[Dax Shepard]

I loved this episode.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It was great.

[Dax Shepard]

Really good. Got me thinking. Me, too.

[Monica Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

The challenges that legislation can't address are very troubling.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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. And get some good results from it and really use it. But it can't really be implemented.

[Monica Padman]

I know. On a societal level.

[James Kimmel Jr.]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

There's nothing we. There's no law we can write unless.

[Monica Padman]

Like, it can be in schools. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Like a really core curriculum.

[Monica Padman]

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 the school. So I highly doubt this is an option. So just listen to this episode and pass it along. Share it.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And you're up against, like, family tradition. Like my family. You're a hero. When you stick up for your family member or my family, you become legend status. Like, might happen to my brother. It happened to me when once you do that, 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 around 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.

[Monica Padman]

Yeah. It's a lot. It can be practiced, though.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. All right. Love you. Follow Armchair Expert on the Wondry app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Armchair Expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short [e-mail] survey.