1226: James Kimmel, Jr. | No Even Scores in the Science of Revenge

1226: James Kimmel, Jr. | No Even Scores in the Science of Revenge

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show,

James Kimmel, Jr.: the addiction circuitry, that's the nucleus dorsal St. Stratum. Those are the pleasure, craving, and habit formation areas of the brain that are activated for drug and alcohol addiction. So it's the same neuro circuitry, and then as part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex that is there to stop you from doing things.

That lead to negative consequences. If that's inhibited or hijacked, then you may go out on a revenge seeking binge that leaves your fantasy behind and becomes a real life revenge attack.

Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show, I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, [00:01:00] authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional organized crime figure, journalist turned poker champion, cold case homicide investigator, or hostage negotiator.

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Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today on the show Revenge. It feels good until it doesn't. We've all fantasized about it, right? The ex who wronged us, the boss who humiliated us, the guy who cut us off in traffic and in that split second of imagined payback, we feel powerful.

Righteous, maybe even a little bit alive. But according to my guest today, revenge doesn't just scratch an itch. It feeds an addiction. One that can hijack your brain, destroy your relationships, and in extreme cases, fuel [00:02:00] wars, terrorism, and even genocide. Dr. James Kimmel Jr. Is a Yale research. Lawyer and expert on what he calls revenge addiction.

He argues that retaliatory behavior activates the same neural pathways as cocaine, gambling, and social media. The dopamine hits the craving, the withdraw, all of it. And he's seen it ruin lives firsthand from violent offenders to everyday people who can't stop replaying old grudges. We'll dig into why revenge feels so intoxicating, why it's hard to resist, and how our brains can literally become dependent on payback.

We'll explore how men and women experience vengeance differently. Why mass shooters and extremist groups often share the same psychological profile as addicts and how our movies, media, and politics, all feed the cycle. And yeah, we're gonna talk about forgiveness too, not in a kumbaya let it go kind of way.

But as a neurological detox, the only known treatment for revenge addiction, this conversation gets a little dark, it gets personal, and it might just make you question how often you've confused justice with revenge. So let's get into it. Here we go [00:03:00] with Dr. James Kimm. This is a bit of a juicy one man. The science of revenge.

It's almost like a taboo topic. It's kind of a vice I have to slash hate to admit. I suppose I could be vengeful sometimes. I fantasize about it. I don't actually do anything. Does that make me a better person or just a more wimpy person? I don't know. What do you think? Maybe we start there.

That's an interesting place to start.

I'm not gonna judge whether it makes you better or worse, but I will say this, probably about 95% of people, according to studies that have been undertaken, will reveal that 95% of people will report that they have revenge desires and revenge fantasies. You're in the vast majority.

What's weird about it though is I'm so angry at Soandso about something legitimate.

If they got hit by a garbage truck, I wouldn't care. That's actually not true. Like as soon as I tell that to myself, I know that that's not true. And it's not that I secretly like this [00:04:00] person. I still might hate them, but this is gonna make me sound like a psychopath. But here we are. I actually would rather save their life so they feel even worse.

Like, oh man, that guy just did that thing too. He actually pushed me outta the way of the garbage truck. I'm the bad guy. He is a good person. Like, oh, I almost wanna give them a kidney and be like, ha, now I'm inside you forever and you owe me one. That's right. You can never repay me. That's how good of a person.

I'm like, I have, it's like a weird inverse. What's the opposite of revenge? What is the opposite of it?

James Kimmel, Jr.: Yeah, the opposite might be forgiveness, right? It might be, uh, forgiving the person who wronged you rather than trying to make them suffer. Ah, that's

Jordan Harbinger: no fun.

James Kimmel, Jr.: Revenge means inflicting pain upon someone who.

You perceive has inflicted pain on you, giving them your kidney to save your life. Not an act of revenge, even though. You might be thinking about it in that way going, ha ha, now you'll owe me for the rest of your life. But not really revenge seeking there.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I don't know. It's [00:05:00] complicated, right? Because of course, that's not the only reason I would do it.

I would like to do something like that so I could reinforce that I'm a good person or whatever. I actually have a weird fantasy of giving somebody my kidney, not a bad person. Ideally it's somebody in my family or something like that. But what a cool thing you could do for someone is to do something like that.

And I have no idea why I have the desire to actually do this. 'cause it's like horrific surgery. The recovery I assume is brutal. You're on medication probably. It's horrible by all accounts, right? You would only do it for somebody you really love. But I'm also like, oh man, what an honor to be able to do something like that.

This has nothing to do with revenge, but it occurred to me just because when I was reading about this revenge usually involves you wanna humiliate somebody, you want somebody to die or be injured because of you. And I'll have a flash of that, but I would love to be able to do something so good for somebody like that, that they actually change their ways forever.

That's the fantasy. Maybe you do something so loving that they actually wake up and they become a good person. It's totally Disney and ridiculous [00:06:00] and probably not realistic at all.

James Kimmel, Jr.: I love that actually. And you don't hear a lot of people voice that. Let's put it this way, but I think maybe more than a minimal amount of people think about it from time to time in different ways.

We all wanna be a hero, or at least many of us wanna be a hero, and that's a heroic act, what you've just described there.

Jordan Harbinger: But it still seems selfish because yes, I'm doing it for them, but I'm also like, look at the halo around my head after having done this amazing thing. It's still totally self-serving.

Even if the side effect is like, okay, fine, you're not gonna die early from kidney disease, whatever. Like, look at me. Once again, that's, there's a bit

James Kimmel, Jr.: of narcissism in there. Maybe perhaps, you know, we could go into that, but on the revenge scale, that would be very low because you're actually helping someone instead of hurting them.

Jordan Harbinger: So this might be a dumb question, why do we want revenge? There's not really any value inherent to it. My life doesn't improve if somebody who I think is a bastard gets hit by a car. Yet [00:07:00] many of us crave things like that, right? We want our ex-boyfriend who cheated on us to get beat up or worse, right? We want that, but your life doesn't improve because in fact, it might even get worse if it's also the father of your child, but you still, you're like, I wouldn't hate it if he got hit by a taxi.

James Kimmel, Jr.: Yeah, well, you're talking about somewhat two different things there shot in Freuder, which is getting gratification from someone else's suffering that you didn't cause someone that you maybe you envy or you despise and they finally get theirs, but it had nothing to do with you giving it to them. You didn't hurt them, but you learn that some bad fate has befall them.

That's the idea of shot in Freuder, and they're related to revenge, but revenge seeking is about you being the instrument of their suffering. Why do we do that? Is your question. Why would we want to make someone else suffer? And we do that because it makes us feel. Better, [00:08:00] just the way drugs or alcohol make us feel better.

That's what the new neuroscience is showing us, is that when we are in pain, we feel victimized or we feel humiliated, betrayed, shamed, insulted, disrespected, any of those. We feel that as a physical pain inside our brain and our brain wants that pain to stop. And the most immediate way to achieve that is to get a dopamine rush.

And that's what we get. And we activate the pleasure and reward circuitry of addiction to get it. And so we really do feel better temporarily. It's short, but it's a short high. It's a powerful high, and for some people it's a high that they want again and again and again, and it can become addictive.

Jordan Harbinger: You touched on something interesting is that we're feeling hurt and we want a dopamine rush to intercept that hurt, and that actually makes a lot of sense where you see people who are.

I don't know. Let's say they were like really bullied a lot as a kid and now they're like older and they're making [00:09:00] OnlyFans porn and they're having all this weird sexual stuff and you're like, what? Where did that come from? Were you molested as a kid? They're like, no. Well, why are you doing all this stuff that hurts yourself?

They're doing it out of pain. It makes total sense. I just figured it had to be related to that. And now the dopamine thing that you're saying, they're probably thinking back to all the pain, the unresolved pain they had as a kid, and they're like, oh, I'm gonna do some other sort of adventurous sexual thing, and that's gonna give me this dopamine rush and it's gonna make me forget that I got beat up every day as a kid.

My parents didn't care. Is that related? I

James Kimmel, Jr.: don't know that that is because you know, unless they're feeling like they want revenge against themselves, in other words, they've disappointed themselves. They believe that they've committed wrongs or sins, and they feel like they would feel better if they punish themselves for their prior bad acts, then that might be a act of self revenge.

But otherwise, not really revenge seeking because they're not trying to hurt someone for the pain that's been inflicted on them. Right. So [00:10:00] it's a little bit different.

Jordan Harbinger: I didn't mean revenge seeking, I meant more the dopamine interrupting the pain response that the person is having.

James Kimmel, Jr.: Yeah, I don't know about, that's an interesting question, and I don't know if we have studies that show that you're gonna get at that dopamine rush in that way.

What we do know is when you have this. Pain of victimization and injustice. You've experienced an injustice and you want that pain to stop. Evolution has made it an adaptive strategy for us. Going back to like the lysine era or the ICE age that we experience enormous pleasure from inflicting pain upon the hurt, the person that has wronged us or their proxy.

It could even be a proxy for that person if you can't get at, or it's too dangerous to get at the person who really hurt you.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So this is a very specific key for a very specific lock. Right? This is not just. I need to generally feel dopamine because I've been hurt. This is, I [00:11:00] need to feel a specific dopamine rush resulting from an act that I do to a person who hurt me.

That's, again, a very specific key for a very specific lock like that you cannot fit the square peg through the round holds not going to work to give you the same kind of rush.

James Kimmel, Jr.: I think that's correct, but I would say that it's a lock that has many holes in it, and the reason is many places to insert that key because we, throughout our lives, we experience grievances, which is what we're talking about daily, hourly, almost in all sorts of ways, and sometimes we imagine them.

We can imagine grievances, we can experience real grievances. There is no panel of judges about whether something that's a grievance for you or a, a sense of injustice or humiliation or shame would be for another million people who witnessed or experienced the same thing. It's a big broad lock, and we experienced victimization all throughout our lives all the time.

And then the question is, [00:12:00] what happens when all of these infinite number of grievances are flowing into that same addiction, neurocircuitry of pleasure and craving, but the thing that unleashes that pleasure and craving is hurting other people, inflicting pain on other people. That's what revenge is about.

And for a lot of people, it becomes the source of almost all forms of human violence. Revenge is the root cause. If you're looking at what is the root cause of almost every form of human violence. It is revenge seeking. That includes bullying on playgrounds, intimate partner violence, street and gang violence, mass shootings, genocide, torture, terrorism, war, all of it at the root of almost every one of those incidents.

Who we see as the perpetrator now feeling victimized first and now they're seeking justice in the form of revenge in order to make themselves feel better.

Jordan Harbinger: It's interesting 'cause you see there's a lot to unpack here, but Right. Terrorism, it [00:13:00] makes complete sense. You have a group that's been oppressed or the Kurds, for example, in Eastern Turkey or whatever in the form a terror cell and they set up bombs in Istanbul or something like that.

Or there's other examples right now that I'm not even gonna bring up. 'cause I don't want 8,000 emails from people shooting me the nuance of whatever their pet thing is with this cause. But you see this a lot with terrorism. You also see fake victimization or like manufactured victimization. I mean, if you read the history of Germany, for example, they were actually bent over a barrel with the Treaty of Versailles, world War I.

Right. But then Hitler wasn't just like, Hey, we gotta come back from this. It was like, lean into it, right? I want everybody in this new generation who wasn't even alive then to really feel how humiliated our whole country was as a result of this. And it was like Hitler knew that you could just push that button.

It was a vending machine that had an infinite money glitch, right? He could just keep hitting that victimization button. You see that in a lot of modern conflicts [00:14:00] as well. Even the Chinese, to a certain extent have kind of a thing where they're like, the whole world is looked down on us. So now we have to show them how great we are.

And that involves some savory stuff like technological advancement and it involves some other unsavory stuff, like whatever the CCP happens to have on the docket for a lot of the places that it has plans for. So like you really do see the victimization revenge plot line play out on the world stage.

It's not just this guy stole my girlfriend and I'm upset about it. This has like a serious scaling ability,

James Kimmel, Jr.: right? And that's been going on throughout human history. Or at least recorded human history. And we know that just as you said, Jordan, that imagined grievances trigger real revenge desires with real world revenge effects like violence and war.

So if it's real enough in your head to be triggering some type of revenge, desire, or revenge craving. Then it's real enough that you have to take it seriously and we all have to take it [00:15:00] seriously. It doesn't matter whether it was just your imagination and your only person on the planet who imagines it, or as you have mentioned with Hitler, we had recently the stop the steal myth, but Hitler spread the stab in the back myth, which was that politicians in Germany and the Jews betrayed Germany into entering into the Treaty of Versailles, paying these immense reparations, losing part of their country and humiliating the German population, in particular, the German soldiers who had just fought World War I to what they believed was going to be a victory.

And it ended up being. An armistice and them being blamed for the start and the perpetration of that entire war.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, the history stuff we can really dive into, but I think let's stick with some of the addiction stuff. I think 'cause that's maybe more in line with the theme of the show. Although I will note that the book has historical examples of revenge being played out on the world stage from Mao to [00:16:00] Stalin to Hitler.

If people are really into that and you dedicate a significant amount of time, it's not just the head nod that we are doing here on the show. And we'll link to the book in the show notes. Please use our links if you buy books from the show 'cause it helps support the show. So tell me how you got interested in the topic of revenge.

'cause you have your own air quotes villain origin story that you told us in the book and I'd love for you to recount that for us.

James Kimmel, Jr.: Yeah, maybe it's a John Wick story and it's pretty close in a lot of ways. It's a John Wick story that's funny. When I was 12 years old and my parents moved my uh, family from a suburban.

Housed out into the country onto my great-grandfather's 200 acre farm. I wanted to befriend the kids around me who lived on other neighboring farms, and those guys weren't having it. You know, I was just descended into their lives and we didn't make our living from the land. I hadn't grown up there and they didn't wanna welcome me into their community.

And the harder I tried, the more they resented it. And that eventually turned into [00:17:00] bullying. And the bullying turned from words as I got older into my middle and upper teen years into small and then more significant physical acts of violence. Until one night at my house, my folks and my brother and I were all asleep, and we were awakened to the sound of a gunshot and ran to the windows, looked outside, checked to see what was going on, and I saw a pickup truck owned by one of these guys who had been tormenting me.

Taking off down the road from my house. We walked around, checked the place out, didn't see anything, and eventually went back to bed. One of my jobs in the morning before going to school was to feed and water the animals. We had a small herd of black Angus cattle, some pigs, and a beautiful beagle hunting dog named Paula.

And when I went to her pen, which was attached to the barn to feed and water her that morning, I found her lying dead with a bullet hole in her head and a pool of blood.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's disgusting. Look, [00:18:00] bullying is one thing, but looking back on this in 2025, does that not seem completely psycho to you to kill someone's dog?

Like I get spray painting, loser on the side of the barn might have been like, Hey, wow, that's pretty bad. But to shoot someone's dog animal abuse is like a hallmark trait of a psychopathic future serial killer.

James Kimmel, Jr.: But I wanna say this was in the early 1980s and it was in farm country. And that's what I was gonna ask.

And I'm not trying to excuse what they did. It was horrific and it was my dog and it was so not okay. It is psychopath and, but it feels like that more now than it did then, especially in farm country where animals are viewed differently. They're not personified the way that they are now as pets. So maybe in that sense, I don't want to be too quick to judge them as sociopaths.

I would absolutely judge them. However, as revenge addicts, I believe they felt aggrieved by my presence and my efforts and whatever else was going on in their [00:19:00] lives. They decided to try to make a point with me through my dog, which to me fits a little bit more than the sociopath narrative, but regardless of what it was, it was horrific.

Shouldn't have happened. We called the police. The police took a report, but they weren't gonna do anything at the time, which kind of also echoes towards a different period of time. I think more often than not today, police would absolutely be going and visiting those people and their parents and going, what the.

Did you just do? And why is this happening? And it better never happen again. But at that time it was, we'll take the report, you're on record. If it escalates, God forbid, we'll be more proactive at that point.

Jordan Harbinger: Like, call us when they shoot you instead of shooting your dog, is kind of what it sounds like.

Yeah, right. What is the escalation? See? Yeah. Call us if it escalates. They came onto my property armed with a lethal weapon and shot my dog. If you do that in San Jose, California in 2025, you're getting a visit and you're getting dragged out of your house by the cops. I would like to think anyway.

James Kimmel, Jr.: Yeah, I would think you're [00:20:00] arrested and you're spending a little bit of time in jail at least, but back then, not so much.

And so about two or three weeks pass and I find myself home alone at night. My folks were out somewhere and my brother was away as well, and I hear a vehicle come to a stop in front of our house. We lived on a one lane country road, so that wouldn't have been a common occurrence. So I get up to look outside, you know, it's pitch blackout to see what's going on, and I see this same pickup truck again.

And then immediately thereafter there's a flash and an explosion. And the escalation turns out to be they just blew up our mailbox, blew it off the post. But with that, that wasn't an animal or worse thankfully. But that was as much as I could take after all these years of abuse. And I'd been probably shooting guns since I was about eight years old on this farm.

And we had lots of guns for hunting. My dad had a loaded revolver that he kept in a nightstand for personal protection. I ran upstairs, I grabbed that [00:21:00] gun out of his nightstand, ran back downstairs out the house, and jumped in my mother's car. And I went off after these guys through the dark in the night, just shouting and rage and screaming at the top of my lungs to try and catch them.

Jordan Harbinger: So speaking of psycho, yeah. Side note, again, in 2025, if somebody blows up your mailbox, call the postal inspector. You think, oh, the postal inspector, big whoop. Those people do not. Around. They are damn serious about you getting your mail and nobody messing with it. If somebody blows up your mailbox, you think, oh, it's just the mailbox.

Oh, it's just some kids. No, the A TF is coming and the postal inspector is coming and they're busy, but this is their time to shine. They're like somebody blew up a mailbox with an explosive. They're not just stealing mail. They will track them down mercilessly. It's funny to think because you think postal inspector must be where like meter maids go to retire, right?

Like no, these people are dead serious and so yeah, no need to chase them with your own gun. Have the federal government do it because they love putting [00:22:00] people away for that. There's more than one guy who's in prison right now who is shocked that he got put away by a four foot 11 postal inspector who made it her life's mission to track his ass down and throw him in the federal penitentiary where he can't get out on early release, no parole.

James Kimmel, Jr.: That is definitely better advice than getting your own gun and going after someone. I 100% agree. And for kids listening to this right now, you really should pay attention.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. But since you're not doing this interview from jail, I'm guessing you didn't catch them or tell us what happened after this.

James Kimmel, Jr.: No, I did catch them. I eventually cornered them against their barn on one of their farm properties. And so the scene is their pickup truck is pointed at their barn wall and my car is behind theirs with my bright beams on, and I see three or four heads inside the truck. They start slowly getting out of the truck and they're, like I said, three or four of them, they're squinting back through my headlights trying to figure out who had just chased them down their one lane country road.[00:23:00]

And at that point, what was clear to me is that they were not armed in the sense that they had no weapon in their hands. They might have had. Guns, or at least whatever that explosive was they just used in their truck, but they had nothing in their hands and they couldn't have known at the time that I had a gun or necessarily who I was.

It's unclear if they could have recognized that car. You know, my mother's car. Maybe they were thinking it was her. Maybe they were thinking it was me, who knows. But what was clear to me is that I had the element of surprise, right? I had the gun. They didn't, and it was kind of go time. I had put up with so much abuse and I wanted them badly.

So I opened the door, I grabbed the gun, I start to step outside and as I, you know, put my leg through the opening, I just get this flash insight, inspiration kind of moment where I kind of project and can see my future and realize that the guy who just driven down [00:24:00] that road me would not be able to go back.

To who he was. I'd have a whole different identity after this. I'd have to know myself as a killer if I survived it, I might be hurt or killed myself. I might spend years, decades, or longer in a prison, and I knew that these were not things that I had ever identified myself with. I had been raised better than that.

I didn't want that identity for myself. No matter how badly I wanted the revenge and I wanted the revenge super badly, it just came down to I just didn't want to pay that high of a price to get it. And that quick, instantaneous realization was just enough for me to put the gun back down on the passenger seat, pull my leg back inside the car, shut the door, and drive home.

I'd come within seconds of almost committing a mass shooting.

Jordan Harbinger: That level of impulse control, or whatever you want to call it, is probably the difference between a lot of people we talk to in our daily lives, and a lot of people that are in prison forever. [00:25:00]

James Kimmel, Jr.: That's right, and we now know from the neuroscience of that, and it's just tracks addiction in the same way with addiction.

You know, like I said, if I was to overlay the new neuroscience on top of my actions, I felt humiliated, shamed, wronged, treated unjustly and victimized for years. I went after them to finally make myself feel better, and I would have felt better in that moment. That would've been an intense dopamine rush, but it would only lasted minutes or maybe an hour or something like that, probably not even.

But the last thing that stands between you and carrying out your revenge fantasies, of which I had many at that time, is this prefrontal cortex part of your brain, which is your self-control and executive function circuitry. And that's there. To stop you from doing things against your own self-interest in doing that cost benefit analysis that I did within a microsecond, it seemed to me at the time, unfortunately, that was working for me.

But for addicts, drug [00:26:00] addicts, alcoholics, gambling addicts, any other behavioral addiction, that part of your brain is often inhibited or hijacked. It's not there doing its job, which allows you to keep taking the substance, despite you knowing that it's ruining your life. And that's what stood between me and being the convicted version of myself in a prison today.

Jordan Harbinger: Afterwards, what were you thinking? Were you like, oh gosh, thank God I didn't kill anyone? Or were you like, ah, I should have at least made 'em like stripped down to their underwear and run down the road and then burned their clothes? I'm not making a great impression on this episode, but whatever My audience knows me, it just seems like there's a happy medium where you get to make them look like complete clowns, but you also don't go to prison.

And I kind of would've been like in my car driving home shit. I should have thought of that.

James Kimmel, Jr.: I wish I'd have done something a little less than the full max, but something also fun. I wasn't thinking that so much. I was thinking actually, honestly, I was thinking shame. And the shame I'm thinking about and that I felt at that time [00:27:00] was the shame of not being tough enough or cruel enough to go through with it.

This masculine kind of thing. It was like the guys that are on the movies, the cool guys, the heroes that go and take out the villain, that's what they do. They take out the villain, and I didn't have it in me. I chickened out. I cowered it out at the last second. So I was thinking about shame for a little while that I didn't have what it took to go and administer this final act of revenge against these guys, or final act of justice in the form of revenge that went away.

But that was part of my debriefing over probably weeks, was this idea. And in some cultures, and in some communities and neighborhoods, whether it's in the United States or elsewhere, that is a real taught shame. You're supposed to, if somebody comes at you like this and does something like what they did to me, you're supposed to go and you're supposed to dish it and maybe dish it times 10, right?

[00:28:00] Or a hundred.

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It's great if you're retired. It's great if you're new to the job market. It's great at any stage of life, and it takes about six minutes a day. It's not cheesy, it's not awkward. Very down to earth, very practical. Few minutes a day, and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course.

So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again, all free, no shenanigans whatsoever, I promise you, at six minute networking.com. Now back to Dr. James Kimmel. I used to work in Detroit and I worked with a security [00:31:00] team, and everybody was from like downtown Detroit.

I remember I was, in many ways it operated like a gang. I remember one guy, he got threatened by some dudes. They were like, we're gonna kill you, and I was. I just was like, whatever. I hear that every day at work. He lost his mind, and I remember he had to be brought back to the office and debriefed. I was like, explain to me why he's taking this so hard.

Who cares? Losers threaten his life. We hear this all the time. Why care and he goes where he comes from. If you get threatened like that and you back down or you don't react, your whole family's in danger, you look bad. The girl you're involved with is gonna think you're soft, your mother's gonna be ashamed of you.

Your kids are gonna be in danger at school. Where I come from, if somebody threatens you and you go whatever, I don't care. Nobody looks down on you for that. In fact, they're like, oh, thank God my son's not dumb enough to get into a fight over something like that. Right? But it's the complete opposite where this guy was from.

And so it, we had to calm this whole situation down and deescalate it. And even then I was like, I don't wanna work next to that guy for the [00:32:00] next couple weeks. 'cause if those guys show up, he's just gonna shoot him. Like he's just gonna pull his gun out and shoot him in the back of the head. He feels that he needs to do that and I don't wanna be around for that and I don't wanna see that.

And I don't wanna be next to him when he does that, or I don't wanna be shot with him 'cause those guys decide to do it first. I don't want any part of this. So my boss reassigned him actually to work alone in a place that was further away. From downtown. He ended up working at a yacht club, which is kind of hilarious.

But as you can imagine, a yacht club, there's nothing that goes on there that's similar to what goes on in these downtown venues where gangs frequent. So he had to be removed from the cultural context of the entire situation.

James Kimmel, Jr.: Yeah. And they may have saved his life and saved the lives of other people in the process.

And that's where it is in cities where there's a lot of retaliatory gang violence, which if there is gang violence, it's almost always retaliatory. The idea that's just evil people or animal people, it's completely false. And the neuroscience [00:33:00] really reveals this. Now, this is about revenge seeking, and then it's about one of the ways that society is invented for discharging this emotion, this intense desire for revenge is when you have police forces and justice systems that are available that will respond and will intervene.

But if in your community. You feel more often victimized by the police than you do supported by them, for instance. And therefore in your area, you're more likely needing to resort to street justice to manage these desires and to be part of the gang, you've gotta prove who you are and what your identity is.

You can end up with a lot of people committing a lot of violence and runaway revenge, uh, cycles like this. And some of my research is now being used in those types of communities to stop and control those revenge desires before they get ahold of you and end up leading you to killing other people.

Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned that revenge [00:34:00] has addiction properties.

Can you speak to that a little bit? Because I think that a lot of people are going, oh, he's being metaphorical here. He's using that as an analogy, but you're not actually doing that, right? This is a no, no, no. We have

James Kimmel, Jr.: now neuroscience over the last 20 years that shows. That revenge is very much an addictive type of behavior.

So let me explain how that works. What it looks, if you put somebody in a brain scanner and you give them a grievance, a reason to feel that they've been victimized, treated unjustly or unfairly, and then an opportunity to retaliate against the person who did this to them, and usually this is set up, or at least in the original studies as economic types of games, but now it's been done with games where there's been mild but significant amounts of physical pain involved as well.

And it shows the same thing. So the first thing that happens inside your brain when you feel a sense of injustice, humiliation, shame, betrayal. That's a real pain, and it registers inside your brain in an area [00:35:00] called the anterior insula, which is the brain's pain network. So you get physical pain from those types of psychological harms, and your brain doesn't like pain, and it wants that to stop and restore itself back into balance from this pain heavy balance.

It seeks pleasure. And through evolution, we've derived enormous pleasure from inflicting pain upon the people who wrong us. Turns out it gets carried out inside the brain in the addiction circuitry. That's the nucleus Dorsal St. Stratum. Those are the pleasure, craving, and habit formation areas of the brain that are activated for drug and alcohol addiction.

So it's the same neurocircuitry. And then, as I mentioned earlier as well, this part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex that is there to stop you from doing things that lead to negative consequences if that's inhibited or hijacked. It could be, for instance, in those communities that I'm talking about, where you're taught in your own family retaliate, don't ever back down [00:36:00] retaliate and your community is doing the same thing, so it's not there and functional for you, then you may go out on a revenge seeking binge that leaves your brain the fantasy behind and becomes a real life revenge attack.

And that's what we see in violence all over the place, including like intimate partner violence. Kids on playgrounds, bullies themselves always think of themselves as victims before they become bullies. The number one way to become a bully is victimize a kid. Kind of the way that happened for me. I was victimized enough times that I started to want to become a bully, eventually became a lawyer to gratify this craving for revenge.

Jordan Harbinger: It's funny, 'cause I was gonna mention you became a lawyer, which is essentially a professional revenge getter depending on which area of practice you're in. Yeah. So you're licensed revenge at that point, and that is interesting. Was that conscious? Were you thinking, I'm gonna be a lawyer so I can sue people and that'll feel good?

Or was it just like, you're an overachiever, so you went to law school?

James Kimmel, Jr.: Not immediately. So I wanted to be a farmer actually, when [00:37:00] I moved out to that farm, my career goal was to become a farmer. And at that night when that all blew up that way, I knew that was the end of my farm career and I'd have to become a student and do something.

Because up to that point, I was a horrific student up until like 10th grade. So I started looking around for career options and at some point I went, Hmm, lawyer. That looks pretty interesting. Yeah, you were out of

Jordan Harbinger: ideas, you became an attorney. I was backed into a corner and it was either drug dealer or lawyer, so I picked lawyer.

James Kimmel, Jr.: Yeah, yeah. Kind of like that illegal revenge seeker or, wow, these guys get paid as litigators, enormous amounts of money to get revenge on behalf of our clients or society if we're a prosecutor. And those ideas kind of everything merged. It's also fit my skillset as a more verbal, wasn't a STEM kid by any means, but I could write, I could argue a little bit, and I thought maybe this is my destiny and I went for it.

And for a while it [00:38:00] seemed like the perfect match for me. But the more I was able to gratify this desire to seek revenge on behalf of my clients, it became about me and it infected my day-to-day life. I was a professional revenge seeker at work, and then I was doing that at home too with my wife and kids when I finally wanted to separate myself from this.

'cause I thought it was becoming dangerous and toxic to me. I wasn't able to get away from it. It was kind of like all these addiction tropes I knew about from drug and alcohol addiction, but it was being visited on my life in the form of revenge seeking.

Jordan Harbinger: So how does the addiction take a toll on you over time?

How does it show up and what does it do to you psychologically?

James Kimmel, Jr.: Yeah. First of all, it messes up just about every relationship you have because nobody wants to spend time with a revenge seeker. If every encounter is met with some form of retaliatory punishment because you pissed me off, what you just said just now is upsetting [00:39:00] me.

It's illogical, it's incorrect. It's in any way offensive, disrespectful, or insulting, and you're giving these retaliatory responses back. Your relationships grow thin pretty fast, so that's one thing that it does that's highly toxic. Another thing that I think that it does is it becomes a preoccupation where you're always thinking about that, always plotting and scheming over the last rung and revenge.

It's important to think about revenge within the arrow of time. Revenge is always looking backwards in time. You're always seeking to punish someone for something that happened in the past. It's not a present or future thing. So you're always living in the past and obsessing over and ruminating over what happened to you at some point in time in the past, and this is what fuels your revenge desires.

And if you can't stop that type of rumination, then you're always dealing with these present revenge desires that are interfering with your present [00:40:00] life and your future and your ability to achieve the goals that you want to achieve in your life and to create and maintain the relationships that you would rather have.

We also know from studies that revenge seeking, when you do it actually makes you, despite the quick dopamine hit after that fades away, it makes you feel worse, but want more. You feel more anger, you feel more anxiety, you feel more depressed, and you feel fearful because you know, of course, that your act of vengeance upon person A is going to become person a.

Experience in their mind of victimization, and they're gonna want to come back at you. So you know that you're essentially putting yourself in harm's way and continuing conflict cycling in which you're always trapped inside of this conflict and can't get out because you and the other person are committed to trying to hurt each other for what they've just done, as opposed to actually [00:41:00] just leaving that in the past where it belongs and moving forward.

And I wanna make one point really clear about that arrow of time. Revenge seeking is not about self-defense. So for self-defense that's defending yourself because of a present or imminent near term future threat to your physical safety or the safety of someone else. Forgiving A wrong is never giving up self-defense.

It doesn't have to do that and it shouldn't. Self-defense actually activates a different part of your brain. The amygdala, which is not part of the reward and revenge circuitry that I've just been talking about. Self-defense protects you for the present in the future. Revenge seeking just lashes you and change you to the past.

Jordan Harbinger: I see you say something poetic in the book, which is a hammer can't drive a nail without feeling the impact of each blow. And I like that because I don't remember specific acts of revenge that I've ever had. I'm not really a vengeful person, not a real one. [00:42:00] And I think of things I've done to people out of anger and it's like it never feels good.

Right? You have to rationalize it later. They did this to me and it's, yeah, but so now you're both assholes. Like really? Is that what you wanted? Or you're both jerks? I have little kids and my son's sick, so he has trouble with impulse control, I guess you could call it. And so he'll get really angry with somebody.

This is a few years ago. He'll get angry with somebody, he'll just bite them on the shoulder and it's like, I know what you wanted to do. You wanted them to go away. And they were annoying. And I saw that kid and he is annoying, but like now he's not even the bad guy. You're the bad guy. 'cause you bit him on the shoulder, you didn't wanna play with him.

And I know in his head he's, I'm like, why did you do that? And he's like, well he was annoying me. But I can also tell he feels ashamed at the same time. 'cause he knows he shouldn't have done that. He's not just upset that he's in trouble. He knows he shouldn't have done that. So it chips away at the identity of the person you think you are, because unless you totally fully accept that you're this vengeful, petty person.

It's hard to maintain the concept, like I'm this upstanding, [00:43:00] nice, honest, good person, and then you're like, and also I'm poking nails in my ex-girlfriend's tires. How does that jive with me being a good, upstanding, honest person? Again, I have to compartmentalize it in a way that's uncomfortable and disingenuous, right?

So it doesn't really work. You can't really have both, especially if this is a habit that you engage in every few days, every week, every month, whatever it is.

James Kimmel, Jr.: Studies show that revenge seeking behaviors and thinking occurs as early as the toddler years. So absolutely consistent with what you just described about your son.

And I would say that your son biting this other kid for being annoying. That's a perfect example of revenge seeking, right? It's look. This kid is causing me pain. I'm self-medicating right now. I'm gonna cause him pain back. That's what addiction is always about. It's this idea of self-medication and making ourselves feel better, and we do a really bad job.

I have two kids as well, and we do a bad job as parents, [00:44:00] and we haven't had the tools really until very recently with his neuroscience to understand. That your own victimization is going to spin off these revenge desires. And there are really great ways to manage those and there are not great ways to manage them, and we just kind of let kids figure it out for themselves and follow their own instincts.

Instincts lead to things like biting or potentially worse in becoming a bully, but we can teach them other things. So there are some really good solutions that flow from this, and one is by seeing victimization and revenge desires and violence itself as part of an addictive process, and that opens up the entire addiction toolkit.

To us to be able to help ourselves manage those cravings before it's too late. And we should be starting to teach that in those toddler years and going forward actually.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's smart. And our, his school does a great job of managing all this stuff. Thank God. I guess that's why we pay the big bucks.

But it's also, as a parent, [00:45:00] it's also kind of embarrassing 'cause you know, it reflects on you and you're like, no, I did not teach him to bite other people when we're upset with them. Although your son is really annoying, you should know that.

James Kimmel, Jr.: And my kid's gonna bite him back the next time he sees him. You get this cycle going, right?

Jordan Harbinger: No, that's right. It's like a running joke now. He'll invite that kid over 'cause they're of course fine now. And, uh, like no biting and the, you know, the, everyone, including the kids thankfully, will laugh. But what I found interesting in your work here is it doesn't matter if the grievance is real or not.

Touching upon what we said earlier about the victimization stuff on the world stage, it's all in your head. So it doesn't matter if. This person actually did humiliate you in front of everybody else. Your example in the book is great, the mass shooters, right? They write these manifestos, which of course is like.

I willingly narcissistic. Who the hell writes a manifesto? Only a psychopath narcissist who's going on the shooting spree. But it's always, they've rejected me. They don't see how great I am. They don't understand. They've embarrassed me for the [00:46:00] last time, and it's, who's they? No one is thinking about you.

But in their head, this grandiose narcissist is, they are all conspiring to diminish my status as an amazing person. And you see this with, there was like an incel kid a while ago and he had gotten pushed off of a platform at a party and maybe someone laughed and guaranteed nobody ever thought about that kid again.

But he replayed this incident in his head along with being rejected by girls for years until he just decided to kill a bunch of people. And it was really scary 'cause he wrote all of this down, essentially, which is why we can piece it together. Point being, it can be all in your head, even if you're, I guess we would say mostly mentally healthy person.

These people are not. But you can still nurse a grievance in your head and realize. Maybe from talking to the other person that they have never thought about that. On a micro level, almost every argument can be like this, right? With your spouse, you're like, she always does this and always does [00:47:00] that, and then you talk to them and they're like, oh, did I forget to plug in the car?

I'm so sorry. I got a call. And you're like, oh, it wasn't a personal slight because I asked you to do it and you were doing this to show you that I'm the boss in the household and yada, like all these constructs, all the scaffolding you put up to make this a bigger deal than it had to be goes away in an instant.

I guess with people who are not emotionally, mentally healthy, they nurse this grievance until they explode,

James Kimmel, Jr.: they can't. You created a nice spectrum there between, let's say, intimate partner disputes that you might have with your husband or your wife or somebody that you love. You're feeling wronged and you start to wanna retaliate and you get these verbal battles between the two of you perhaps.

And this is slowly starting to eat apart your relationship. But what it's all about in those instances is both sides are feeling victimized, either real or imagined, and feeling insulted, humiliated, betrayed, and you're now wanting to retaliate again to [00:48:00] self-medicate and make yourself feel better. And that scales up to including even mass shooters, even if you were right, that mass shooters are typically sociopaths.

And the evidence doesn't really support that, that there are all sociopaths. There's some evidence that some of them are some percentage, not insignificant, but it's not the majority. But even the sociopath is going through the same experience of, I feel victimized now I'm retaliating. So even sociopaths can become revenge addicts if we wanna really reduce.

Mass shooters and improve our interpersonal relationships at home. It's the same process of seeing what's going on here is we're talking about revenge. Addiction or at least compulsive revenge seeking that's uncontrolled. Maybe if, if it's your, in your partner relationship, you're only using verbal battles and maybe little petty things like you don't like it that I leave the toilet seat up.

So I'm gonna leave that up for you tonight because screw you, right? And you're gonna [00:49:00] experience that. And that might be a small act of revenge, seeking a little bit of sabotage on the other person all the way up through a relationship that's gotten so dysfunctional that you get to a murder suicide situation in which, you know, this husband who obviously loved this woman and had kids with her and now feels in his mind, he's built up this perception of victimization as such an extent that he wants revenge against all of them in one last great final act, kills them all and then kills himself instead of just this cop out that we do in society of, oh, another act of senseless violence.

Oh, an evil person, always somebody that's not me, and there's no answer for it. That's not true anymore. We now have really solid evidence for what is causing this, and we have ways of tackling it that are much more worth thinking about as a public health measure to reduce violence than just throwing up our hands and going, oh, there's a bunch of evil people, and then there's a bunch of good people and we're different.

You're not different. Almost [00:50:00] anyone can be provoked to the point of committing an act of violence, and that should be enough warning for us to go, oh, in just the same way that if I drink alcohol or I take an opioid, I will experience euphoria. We all have evolved to experience pleasure from opioids and alcohol.

Similarly, we also all experience pleasure from grievance triggered revenge cravings and getting revenge. So then the question becomes is how do we control. This intense brain, biological pleasure, and we have ways to do that.

Jordan Harbinger: It seems like instead of going after the grievance or trying to prevent the grievance, we have to go after the response to the grievance because if everybody can be triggered by this, you can't prevent every grievance.

And it also, since the grievance doesn't even have to be real, it just has to be in their head or our head. You really can't go after the grievance. You have to go after the response to the grievance. Right?

James Kimmel, Jr.: That's one of the primary arguments in the book, and I think that's well supported. There are infinite number of grievances in the world because [00:51:00] as you say, we manufacture them and we see them.

There's no great judge for them, and they happen all the time. Some people are grievance collectors where they just experience almost every act that comes at them. That isn't a compliment as an insult, and for those people, they're having trouble managing those grievances. But what we can do. We should always try.

Society ought to be always about making things more fair and equitable and just, however, if we wanna really reduce violence, we need to focus on how grievances and real or imagined sense of victimization is converted inside your brain into an act of violence or intentional infliction of pain upon another human being.

And now we understand what that looks like.

Jordan Harbinger: Are men's brains and women's brains different, or are they, we kind of equally vengeful.

James Kimmel, Jr.: It seems like right now, without fully exhaustive studies having been undertaken that the desire for revenge is equal among the [00:52:00] sexes. But one of the things that has been uncovered in studies is that for males, males who are carrying out an act of revenge, their empathy center inside their brain.

Is dull. In other words, it's shut down. We do not empathize with the person that we're punishing or who is being punished if we're witnessing it. Whereas for females, the Empathy Center remains active. Females can empathize with the person being punished, and that might help explain some of the differences in what we experience, which is men being much more vengeful and carrying it out to a, a more excessive degree than most women under the same set of circumstances.

Interesting.

Jordan Harbinger: You mentioned revenge attacks as almost like a medical emergency, like a heart attack. What are warning signs? What should we be watching for before revenge turns violent? Is there any kind of where there's smoke, there's fire kind of signal we can spot?

James Kimmel, Jr.: There is. I have a website called [00:53:00] Saving Cane, CAI n.org that people can go to with the warning signs of revenge attack.

And they're also in my book, the Science of Revenge. But what you're looking for there, and we're starting to get a little bit better at this, but we're still missing too many people. The first thing to do is start thinking about revenge attack, like a heart attack. It's a medical emergency. It's should be the reason that we called 9 1 1.

You experience chest pain radiating down your left arm, and we've all kind of been taught by the American Heart Association or whatever medical group, call 9 1 1, do not try. And second guess it. Just call. And similarly things like somebody who is constantly dwelling on a grievance. Doesn't let it go, begins to express revenge fantasies and what they'd like to do to some person or group of people, often it's a group, they have grievances against an entire group and when they're not letting go and they [00:54:00] continue to express it, or as you had the example of the guy at work, there's a lot of workplace revenge seeking violence that can occur.

Mass shootings occur in schools, workplaces, shopping centers, churches all over the place. Among the many common things, there seems to be a pattern that led up to it of the person being unable to let go of grievances. Voicing their fantasies of what they'd like to do, and then moving towards the acquisition or availability of weapons and identifying a target, a time place and location, those types of things.

If that's starting to happen or being expressed, then somebody ought to be calling 9 1 1 immediately to have that person looked at. Unfortunately, I'm gonna say that's what we can do in the public side. On the professional side, there hasn't yet been a movement in the mental health profession to go, oh, we need to evaluate how is this person processing their grievances and revenge desires?[00:55:00]

Mental health professionals will argue after every mass shooting and people go, this must be a mental illness problem. Why are you doing nothing about it? And they'll go, we're doing nothing about it, because it's not a mental illness. There is no mental illness for violence, and that's true. And it's also true to say people who have serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia or borderline personality disorders and things like that are not more violent or statistically significantly more violent than anybody else, and that's also true.

But what they're leaving behind is this idea, which is a mental illness of revenge use disorder or revenge addiction, which we can treat and evaluate just like we do drug and alcohol addictions and begin to help. First evaluate is somebody. Having a moderate, low, or very severe addiction and then providing them with services to help them begin to process and control their revenge desires.

'cause they're just mental desires. They're thought formations inside of your head. We're all the [00:56:00] masters of our own brains. Sometimes we need a little help to get our brains under control and we can do that. So I would. Call 9 1 1 and treat anything like that as a, you know, revenge emergency. Huh? Revenge attack.

Jordan Harbinger: Revenge feels good. This sponsor feels even better, and it doesn't end in handcuffs. We'll be right back.

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It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with James Kimmel, you mentioned in the book, one indicator of revenge addiction is when somebody gets rejected. Safe romantically and then threatens suicide. And this one really hit because I've seen this come into our feedback Friday.

It's a segment we do where we give advice. I've seen that come in the inbox where someone's like, I really wanna break up with my boyfriend, but every time I try to do it, he's like, oh, I'm so down. Now I'm gonna end it. And I'm like, oh, this is so manipulative. If somebody breaks up with somebody and they hear a suicide threat, is it just them tripping?

Is it just manipulation? What do they do? I feel like this is way too common. People pull this card a lot.

James Kimmel, Jr.: They do. And there's no one answer fits all thing that I could provide. And I am not to be clear, I am not a psychiatrist or psychologist that could diagnose or treat that. What you can do [01:01:00] though, is begin to gauge and ask, are you serious about that?

Do you have a plan when. When time, date, location, and if the person's able to say, yes, I do, then you might be saving their life by calling them. You might even be saving your own because once in a while that will also manifest as a murder suicide. As we know all too well, romantic relationships that break down into murder.

Suicides are just way too common, so you ought to take it seriously. But you're right, Jordan, that a lot of times those are empty threats made to make someone else feel guilty because the person is in agony and they're just like, I would rather die than go through this. And that's not an uncommon feeling.

But if it has more substance to it with planning, then I think that you ought to call or try and get that person to call.

Jordan Harbinger: It. Found it interesting that there are studies with mice choosing revenge over food. Can you speak to that a little bit? 'cause if other mammals are doing this, instead of eating, it's like, ah, I can [01:02:00] relate.

Pretty

James Kimmel, Jr.: shocking study. So it turns out that the mouse brain has the same addiction circuitry that the human brain has. So they have a nucleus accumbens, they have a way of perceiving pain. And so there have been some mouse studies that have been conducted in, which are trained in enculturated to, for example, let a neighboring mouse into their cage.

And if that mouse stumbles into the cage, they'll attack that mouse and punish it. And then they'll give the mouse the option of eating its favorite food or attacking the intruding mouse. And the mouse will attack the intruding mouse rather than eat the food. And then having been trained up to this point, then they'll try it again.

But this time they'll go, okay, mouse can eat its favorite food attack the intruding mouse, but if it starts to attack the intruding mouse, it has to go over this electric grid that will essentially electrocute its feet. Which researchers have analogized to [01:03:00] being hit by a cannonball in the gut, and mice, even at that level, would rather go across that electrical grid to punish that invading mouse than not do that, which really shows an addictive type of response at the rodent level.

Now, one thing we can't know for sure is that the intruding mouse is viewed by the home mouse as committing a quote unquote grievance. We can't talk to mice and find out what their true motivations are. But I think that there's a strong argument that is what's occurring, that an intruding mouse is seen as committing a grievance and the home mouse is now punishing it.

But I wanna be clear, an intrusion is also a real time act of threat, self-defense type threat. And so it is also possible that mouse is just reacting on instinct. But what is weird is that, and I think it's more in favor of this being retaliatory, is that we don't. [01:04:00] Contrive for ourselves to be hurt or killed, and we don't put ourselves in harm's way, but we do put ourselves in a position to retaliate when we can for a past wrong.

So this is a subtlety, but it's kind of interesting.

Jordan Harbinger: But it is interesting. I think some people are going, is this really an addiction? Come on, we evolved this response. How can that be an addiction? If it's a natural response, if it's something we had when we were in tribes, this isn't some sort of addiction.

This is an evolved response. It's totally natural. Maybe it doesn't serve us, but it's not really an addiction like smoking.

James Kimmel, Jr.: Yeah, there's a good answer for that actually. We've also evolved so that almost a hundred percent of humans, as I said earlier, experience euphoria from opioids and alcohol or the pleasure of tobacco.

We've evolved to all like those addictive substances. That's about a hundred percent of people, but of the people who try. Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, only about [01:05:00] 20% become addicted to those, and that 20% roughly equals the number of people who in studies will say that they actually carry out revenge acts when they experience a grievance versus about 80% who go, I think about revenge.

I think it would be pleasurable, but I don't do it. We can evolve to all like a certain thing and we can also accept the truth that only about 20% of us actually could become addicted to it. So there's a good reason to believe that this is very much an addictive process.

Jordan Harbinger: Are people who have one addiction more likely to be addicted to something else?

Is a revenge addict more likely to get addicted to gambling too, or drugs? Or is a smoker more likely to also be a revenge addict? Do we have any data on that?

James Kimmel, Jr.: There are some theories about that and some studies that point in that direction. I don't think that it's been conclusively. Demonstrated. But one thing that I think is pretty close to conclusive is that, [01:06:00] as I said before, in addiction, you not only need to want the substance or want the revenge, but you need a prefrontal cortex that's been inhibited or hijacked in such a way that it won't stop you from going and getting it, even though it's ruining your life or ruining other people's lives.

And so it seems as though, at least at that level, people who have prefrontal cortex inhibitions. In general are going to be more likely to move toward an addictive state no matter what the substance or behavior is that we're talking about, because they don't have the same, I call it in the book this, they don't have the same stop circuitry, a circuitry that's there to stop you from doing things versus the addictive go circuitry.

Jordan Harbinger: This is a quote unquote addictive personality.

James Kimmel, Jr.: Yeah, that would be a term I probably wouldn't use, or I don't know if any mental health professionals would use that, but it's been addictive potential trait in this sense. There are [01:07:00] people who have genetic markers that show that their prefrontal cortex is inhibited, and those people tend to move towards addiction more quickly than people who do not have that genetic disposition.

Jordan Harbinger: How did revenge function as a benefit to humanity in the early days? Basically, why didn't this get bred outta the population? People used to ask me a lot about psychopaths, and I've done plenty of shows on psychopaths. They play a useful role in society today, so we'll have them forever, right? You might think, oh, psychopath a killer, but also that brain surgeon also possibly a psychopath.

I definitely went to school with somebody who went to med school to be a brain surgeon. I have no doubt she was a psychopath. She was just on another level. I think a lot of high powered CEOs are psychopaths. You just see that a lot. I know a lot of entrepreneurs where I'm like, yeah, I'm like arms length friends with this guy because I think he's a psychopath, but man, is he successful because he just is one track.

Mind doesn't care about anything else. But what about revenge addicts? Is that not maladaptive?

James Kimmel, Jr.: No. It was [01:08:00] adaptive back in the day, and it could still be adaptive today, and here's why. The leading theory is that as humans were coming out of their individual caves and deciding to live in groups and societies.

For a society to succeed, it's gotta have a way to essentially compel all of the people in the society to agree upon and follow and obey a similar set of social norms, right? The norms of that society. The other thing it needs to do to survive in community is be able to stop and deter people from doing things like stealing your mate or stealing the food you need for the winter, because otherwise you won't be able to procreate or survive.

So it's thought that revenge seeking was an adaptive strategy back then, but fast forward now to 2025. And the thing to know about now is that a lot of these grievances that we've been discussing. Are wounds not to your bodily ability to [01:09:00] survive or procreate. They are wounds to your ego, which is just itself a mental structure.

And so having revenge seeking to punish people for wounds to your ego, which is, as you really rightly explained, I think a lot of the mass shooters, a lot of intimate partner violence, bullying, social media platforms where there's just endless wounds to ego and retaliatory tweets and responses back. All of these things become maladaptive or at risk of maladaptive.

If they push forward to acts of violence or other intentionally inflicted human suffering that is going to harm you or someone else, it's gonna have negative consequences. Many of them do. Most revenge seeking does violence itself is maladaptive. So any act of violence is not a survival thing. You could say what if it's in self-defense?

The self-defense act is a survival move, [01:10:00] and so that would be okay, but that's usually because there was a violent act coming at you and you only had the choice of fight, freeze, or flee. So other than that one exception, all other violent acts are maladaptive,

Jordan Harbinger: man. Okay, so that's interesting. That's an interesting take.

If revenge is biologically wired, then it seems like that means cycles of violence are inevitable unless societies can rewire themselves away from revenge, which like how do we do that?

James Kimmel, Jr.: Think about it in terms of the other addictions again. So we also evolved. To experience euphoria from opioids and alcohol.

Right. I mean, a hundred percent of us

Jordan Harbinger: get that right. If you pointed to a society and said, look, there's no other addictions. We just have to get rid of this violence thing, then I would be like, okay, hopeful, optimistic. But it's like you're telling me, Hey, in a society that is riddled with gambling porn, fentanyl, and smoking, oh yeah, also this revenge thing has gotta go.

It's like, man, take a number.

James Kimmel, Jr.: It is take a number. But what's positive about it is that [01:11:00] they all can be solved in the same kind of way, and there are wins and successes. Helping people get off of all of those forms of addiction. And this is the best part of the whole thing. The neuroscience also shows that for revenge specifically, we are hardwired just as much as we are to seek revenge as to forgive.

And this idea of forgiveness, which is it's a more unique take on what forgiveness looks like inside the brain and what it really means. It's not merely only, or even at all necessarily a spiritual experience. It is a process inside your brain that shuts down pain. Instead of just covering it up with dopamine hits that shuts down the craving circuitry of revenge seeking, and that activates your prefrontal cortex.

Decision making. So we really have now neuroscience evidence that kind of proves out some of the forgiveness teachings of people like Jesus and the Buddha. It's phenomenal, and it works specifically for revenge seeking, and we can [01:12:00] teach it, we can coach it and we can use it. We just need to start doing that from youth up and get rid of this idea that forgiveness is softness or a weakness.

It is not. It is the ultimate way. It's like a wonder drug superpower that anyone can use. When they've been victimized in order to heal from the wrongs of the past. It's very impressive.

Jordan Harbinger: You see a lot of revenge and forgiveness. I suppose it's like Old Testament revenge, new Testament, maybe a little bit of forgiveness sprinkled in there.

Kinda like, oh, we saw the way that went. You have frigging Cain and Abel, right? It's like the original revenge story, and then it's not gone anywhere. I mean, I've seen the Lion King, they threw a scar off into the fire or whatever. That's the plot of every movie. We actually have a series, an incredibly popular one called The Avengers.

Come on man. Hollywood is feeding this. Is this dangerous? Is there a danger of feeding the society's appetite for revenge through entertainment? Or is it like, are we venting in a healthy way or are we reinforcing addictive loops? What do you think?

James Kimmel, Jr.: I think for 20% of the [01:13:00] people it's reinforcing addictive move.

And for 80% it's not as dangerous, but we don't distinguish between the two and there's no way to distinguish in there what we should know, that when we pay a ticket to see one of those movies, we are buying the drug. What we want is first, as it is in the beginning of all of these revenge plot movies, there's an experience of serious victimization to the protagonist, to the hero in the movie.

And we as human beings, we all have these empathy centers. We can instantly feel the protagonist's pain. And once we've experienced that, we start craving revenge just as much as the protagonist does. Then we expect over the course of the movie for there to be small moves that are gonna bring us to the point where we're finally going to get revenge against the villain.

And that payoff is what we want. That's why we're there. And that's what keeps our butts in the seats until the very end. And then we get this high, it's euphoric, we're cheering in this in our seats, and then we [01:14:00] walk out of the audience and go, wow, where do I get that high again? And we're definitely addicted to it.

And there's no surprise that revenge plots in superhero movies are among the biggest grossing forms of entertainment that there are. And there's no surprise that. Social networking is the same way. It's the ridiculous multi-billion dollar industry that allows us to feel other people's grievances express our own, and then give us instant gratification by firing retaliatory messaging back to other people that we think of raw dust and we can do it at group and population level.

It's the same type of addictive process, and we don't even begin to teach our kids how to manage these emotions that they're having and these powerful cravings and desires.

Jordan Harbinger: I know in the book you actually go as far as to say America has become maybe a revenge addicted nation In brief, what evidence do you see of that?

In our legal system, politics culture, we discuss films that [01:15:00] in our legal system, not to get too in the weeds as too nerdy lawyers here. We are a punitive justice system. You look at Norway where they're like, let's put these people on an island where they live humanely and learn how to become auto mechanics.

And then you look at our prison system and it's, we're gonna throw you in a dark hole with crappy food and a bunch of crazy people and you have to join a gang to survive. And when you get out, don't blow your other chance to be a functional human being. We're not gonna teach you how to do that or anything.

It's all you. But we'll see you back here in two years. That's our system, in my opinion.

James Kimmel, Jr.: It is. And there's lots of evidence for it. It's somewhat cyclical. In other words, it gets worse and then it gets better. And America is more, as many, probably all nations and all groups of people are more and less vengeful at different points in our individual and in our corporate lives.

Right now we've got, you know, a revenge seeking administration that represents a group of people and a group of individuals who believe they've been, you know, seriously victimized over the last maybe. [01:16:00] 20, 30 years and have been ignored and now put upon and the victims of other people's revenge seeking, and now they want revenge in return.

And it's important to think about. Revenge is not in that sense. It's not a political problem. It's not whether you're liberal or a conservative. It's a human problem. We all experience it. Liberals are both feeling victimized and perpetrating acts of revenge just as much as conservatives. What the X factor is, I think, is the social networking platforms that we as a nation we're not ready for, not at all prepared for.

That enable big groups of people to share and experience the same one or similar grievances at light speed and give them opportunities to retaliate and gratify their revenge cravings and move those for a certain percentage. Move these revenge desires out of. The ether and into the real world by planning [01:17:00] using the same platforms to plan real world revenge acts.

And we can think of the insurrection at the capitol as one where that very much happened. There was the grievance spreading about the stop, the steal on the social media platforms, and then there were desires to retaliate, but a certain group of people got together using the same platforms to gather at the capitol.

So we have that happening right now in a very intense way. While we have all of the media keeping up on this and going, this is how to make money. The way to make money in media is to. Provide people with grievances and opportunities to seek revenge. And they're doing that, whether it's a news show or a quote unquote news show or talk shows, it is everywhere.

So to me, the antidote to that is to begin to think about if we wanted to make America great again, we need to make it forgiving again. Mafa is my message. Make America forgiving again. And we [01:18:00] were, we have been, America has been an amazing forgiving nation. Japan and Germany are like two extreme examples.

But since the Civil War, which finally ended through forgiveness after the military hostilities, it took Northerners and Southerners to agree on not. Seeking revenge against each other anymore and forgiving each other for the wrongs of the past that we knit the country back together again. Then the civil rights era, more grievance, more revenge seeking, and we got over it.

So I'm hopeful this will pass, like all of the others, but it takes a commitment to thinking about forgiveness, not as only some pious way of getting into heaven. It might for you, and that's okay. It's more about at the neurological level, we can show that it shuts down the pain of the past. You can actually heal yourself from the wrongs of the past.

Even just imagining how it would feel to forgive a grievance that's plaguing you, like right now, this instant, you could close your eyes and go, how would I feel if I [01:19:00] decided to forgive person X for what they've done? And most people actually go, oh, I would feel like this. Burden just lifted from my shoulders.

I feel this moment of peace and joy. It's astonishing and we now can see neurobiologically how and why that occurs.

Jordan Harbinger: But how do we make our desire for forgiveness stronger than our desire for revenge? Or is that not really the goal?

James Kimmel, Jr.: I think that it is always stronger in this sense, Jordan, in both revenge seeking and forgiveness.

We want the pain of the past, the remembered pains of our lives to stop. We want that pain to end. There are two strategies you can choose. One is revenge seeking, which will give you a dopamine hit to cover up that pain for a short period of time, but then it roars back, or you can choose to experience forgiveness, which doesn't cover up the pain.

It actually stops the pain dead in its tracks and you can use it as many times as you want with no negative [01:20:00] consequences. It really is a super drug that works wonders. You don't need a doctor, you don't need to go to a pharmacy. You can give this to yourself as many times as the pain returns until it's finally silenced and forgiveness will silence the pain.

Jordan Harbinger: What do you think of the ability of maybe psychedelics or GLP one drugs because they say that also might STEM addictions GLP one stuff and psychedelics. There's a little bit of new recent research that shows that can rewire our brain. Little revenge detox maybe. What do you think of the potential for those kinds of drugs or interventions?

James Kimmel, Jr.: It looks very strong now. It's not been studied, so I can't point to any study where researchers have given someone a reason for a grievance, desire to retaliate and then administered a GLP one or psychedelics to see the effect. But I believe when they do that, we're going to see real benefits because it does seem to work on the same.

Pleasure and craving circuitry of addiction. That's [01:21:00] consistent no matter what the substance or the behavior is. So there's every reason to believe that it would help.

Jordan Harbinger: I know in the book you've got very detailed system of practical ways to put people on trial essentially in your head. I don't really wanna go through all of that here on the show 'cause it's quite in the weeds, but if people are like, wait, but you didn't tell us how to forgive people or how to get over this.

The book has a very detailed way of, you call it the non justice system. And I think that is probably very useful for people who are harboring a grudge or maybe are revenge addicts. I'm sure there's people in the audience right now who are like, oh, this is me. And I think it's good to know that you don't have to be Jesus or Gandhi in order to forgive people for serious offenses.

James Kimmel, Jr.: That's right. It's a lot easier than that. And what I've created, you know, we're both lawyers. You probably would appreciate the method here. It's just based on a trial, but it's a role play trial in which you get to put on trial. Anyone who's ever wronged or hurt you and your life. But during this role, play trial.

You play all of the roles, you're the victim, then you're [01:22:00] the defendant testifying, then you're the judge and jury deciding innocence and handing down a punishment. Then you're the warden administering the punishment, and finally, in the last step. You're the judge of your own life, deciding whether and how to set yourself free from the wrongs of the past.

And we've studied this at Yale and it's been shown to really reduce revenge desires rapidly and to increase benevolence toward the person who wronged you. And the reason it seems to work and the reason that people through thousands of years have been wanting trials, and what a lot of us want but never get to have is a trial.

It's very costly and limited the number of people that actually make it into a courtroom. But what we really want when we've experienced trauma is we want the opportunity to be heard and we want to hold someone to account. And the non justice system gives you that opportunity. You might go, well, it's only in your head, but it's way more than that because the pain itself and your memories of what happened to you are also [01:23:00] only in your head.

They're not out here in the real world. You don't need a stone and mortar and brick and wood courtroom filled with a judge who's not you, and lawyers who are not you in order to be heard and in order to hold somebody to account and decide Gelt or innocence, then when you play the war in administering the punishment.

You are given essentially what is like methadone for a revenge addict. There you get the experience actually punishing the person who wronged you safely in your memory, where it won't hurt you or other people. And then in the last step, you feel you know that you've gone through the trial and usually most people have gone through a trial, and you probably know this as well, Jordan.

There's this initial euphoria if you win, but then there's this big let down and more pain and going, wow, I thought I would feel so much better for so much longer after all of this work to get here. It's very disappointing. But here in the non justice system, you get the opportunity to ask yourself how you would feel if you decided to forgive instead.

That's where you get this kind of [01:24:00] euphoric release of, wow, I could really walk away from this moment and never think about this again. I want that. I wanna forgive because it benefits me. It doesn't benefit the perpetrator who hurt me. It benefits me as victim.

Jordan Harbinger: James Kimmel, thank you very much. Really insightful.

I never looked at revenge this way. Didn't even think there was a science to revenge, frankly. And here we are.

James Kimmel, Jr.: Yeah, thank you for the opportunity to be on your show. Really appreciate it.

Jordan Harbinger: Fame looks glamorous until you realize it costs the everyday freedoms that most of us take for granted.

JHS Clip: Even as a little kid watching Saturday Night Live and watching Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers and all these guys sneaking downstairs with my best friend Nick, and we would watch these things and then recite them for hours and reenact them well, I'm so grateful that I had.

Such a specific passion. I can't totally explain it, but it was something I had and was lucky enough to follow. I wanted so badly to [01:25:00] be on Saturday Night Live or the Daily Show, and I prepared relentlessly. It's why I moved to New York. It's why I started doing standup comedy and started doing improv comedy.

It's why I joined the community and I had this goal, and then I got on the Daily Show, and I had never thought beyond that. My career wasn't handed to me, but it's just important to look back with gratitude at some of the things that fell into place. It was the realization that the work never ends. That was a valuable lesson to learn on one of my first major gigs because, well, the Office happened and then the Hangover.

I still have to hustle. I gotta keep hustling. Movies are very intoxicating because it's so all consuming. It's very easy to detach from a lot of things in your life, whether they're. Difficult or good. Also, as an A DHD person, I thrive in hyper focus. So when I get into that mindset, it's like I'm in go mode and it's [01:26:00] thrilling, but there's a cost for

Jordan Harbinger: more with Ed Helms on the hidden costs of fame and the chaos of his career.

Check out episode 1146 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. We think revenge is about balance, but it's really about dopamine. And Dr. Kimmel reminds us that payback doesn't settle the score. It just rewires it. The cure is not vengeance, it's awareness, compassion, maybe even a little humility. All things Dr. James Kimmel will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com.

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It's a two minute read every Wednesday just about. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is a great companion to the show. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget [01:27:00] about six minute Networking as well over@sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and this show. It's created an association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

The greatest compliment you can give us is really to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's a revenge addict maybe needs to let something go or do a little dopamine detox, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.