Pod Insights Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard James Kimmel Jr. (revenge and forgiveness expert) About this episode James Kimmel Jr. (The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction) is a lecturer at Yale University on forgiveness and revenge. James joins the Armchair Expert to discuss plotting his revenge against the other Jimmy Kimmel for months, wanting to grow up to become a farmer until he was bullied because of it, and how eerily close he came to an irreparable act of violence to even a score. James and Dax talk about becoming an attorney to get revenge legally and professionally, how justice-seeking blesses all manner of disastrous human impulses, and finding himself addicted to revenge. James explains by studying forgiveness he learned that any method of finding peace works, why people who are victimized have a powerful rumination on being heard, and roleplaying a functional process of litigation resolution.
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Transcript 24,463 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dax Shepard? Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dact Shepard. I'm joined by Lily Padman.
0:05 Speaker 01 Hi.
0:06 Dax Shepard? Confusing guest today.
0:08 Speaker 01 Very.
0:09 Dax Shepard? Very confusing. James Kimmel Jr.
0:12 Speaker 01 Not.
0:13 Dax Shepard? Not.
0:13 Speaker 01 The son or father.
0:16 Dax Shepard? Of Jimmy Kimmel.
0:17 Speaker 01 Correct.
0:18 Dax Shepard? Yes. But you know Jimmy Kimmel's already a junior.
0:21 Speaker 01 Oh.
0:22 Dax Shepard? So he would have to be the third.
0:24 Speaker 01 Oh.
0:24 Dax Shepard? Okay, that's neither here nor there. Uh, 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. Uh, 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.
1:01 Speaker 01 It was really interesting and, uh, important.
1:05 Dax Shepard? I think these, this group of people studying this really has finally isolated the quintessential ingredient to violence.
1:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, revenge.
1:15 Dax Shepard? Revenge. We're all revenge addicted.
1:19 Speaker 01 Some more than others, yeah.
1:20 Dax Shepard? Some more than others.
1:21 Speaker 01 But he also gives some prescriptive ways of trying to mitigate that.
1:25 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:26 Speaker 01 Which is great.
1:27 Dax Shepard? Yes, forgiveness. It's not sexy, but it works.
1:30 Speaker 01 It's pretty sexy.
1:32 Dax Shepard? There's not any like really heart pounding movies about the moment the hero forgives.
1:36 Speaker 01 It's not passionate.
1:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So our, our media may take a hit, but ultimately may be worth it. Please enjoy James Kimmel Jr. We get support from Gusto. So here's the thing about running a small business that nobody romanticizes. It's not the big idea that wears you down. It's the payroll, the tax filings, the wait, do I need workers comp for this stuff? That's the part that quietly eats away your whole afternoon, which is where Gusto comes in. Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all in one. Remote friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay onboard and support your team from anywhere. They handle automatic tax filing, direct deposits, health benefits, 401k,
2:20 Dax Shepard? all of it. And you get unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price. No hidden fees, no surprises. If something tricky comes up, you've got direct access to certified HR experts who actually know what they're talking about. And they're ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026, entrusted by over 500,000 small businesses. That's not nothing. Try Gusto today at gusto.com/dax and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/dax. Again, that's gusto.com/dax. This episode is brought to you by McDonald's. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Medium Fries
3:05 Dax Shepard? and a Drink is now $8. Okay, I need to talk about something that doesn't get enough respect. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese. This is not a casual burger. This is a crafted burger. We're talking 100% fresh beef cooked right when you order it. No artificial flavors, no fillers, no preservatives, just beef doing what beef is supposed to do. And here's a detail I love. There's a cowbell sound in the kitchen. When somebody orders a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, a cowbell goes off and the grill master throws a fresh patty down. That's like having your own entrance music at McDonald's. I want a cowbell for everything in life. The onions are hand topped by someone who just knows the right amount. Two slices of cheese laid out in a star pattern,
3:45 Dax Shepard? so every single bite gets cheese. And two pickles side by side, so you're never in a pickle desert. Every bite is accounted for. Someone engineered this thing with love. I love a Quarter Pounder.
3:58 Speaker 01 Me too. That's my order. It's a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. I love it. I didn't know they put so much effort that they did a star formation. I should have known because you can taste it.
4:10 Dax Shepard? You can taste it. Yeah. The love. Don't tell anyone this, but I'll put two of them back.
4:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm not surprised.
4:16 Dax Shepard? The Quarter Pounder with Cheese with Fries and a Drink, now $8 for a limited time only, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California, and for delivery. Fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery.
4:50 Speaker 02 Hey.
4:50 Dax Shepard? Hello, how are you?
4:51 Speaker 02 Doing great, Dax.
4:52 Dax Shepard? Welcome.
4:53 Speaker 02 James, nice to meet you.
4:53 Dax Shepard? James, nice to meet you, Dax. I like that watch.
4:57 Speaker 02 Thank you.
4:57 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.
5:07 Speaker 02 I've read that.
5:07 Speaker 01 What does that even mean?
5:08 Dax Shepard? Really, like, how many bullshit mechanisms do they have to create the time? So it'll literally be like 3,000 complications, and the back is just this rat's nest of cogs.
5:20 Speaker 02 The moon phases and other added complication levels that nobody really cares about.
5:26 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.
5:34 Speaker 02 I was just reading an article in, 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 names. It might take them to build one $170,000 watch a couple of years, one person. It's just crazy.
6:01 Dax Shepard? So handsome watch, Pennsylvania, Michigan.
6:04 Speaker 02 Excellent.
6:05 Dax Shepard? I feel like these are similar cultures.
6:07 Speaker 02 Yes, and Atlanta, not that far off, although below the Mason-Dixon line, so, you know.
6:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, slightly different.
6:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, northerners have to be snobby on that.
6:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:16 Dax Shepard? Sure, sure. You take whatever you can get to feel better than other people.
6:20 Speaker 01 I get that.
6:21 Dax Shepard? And none of us had anything to do with it.
6:23 Speaker 02 Right, right, right.
6:24 Dax Shepard? What part of Pennsylvania?
6:25 Speaker 02 I grew up in rural central Pennsylvania. Now I live outside Philadelphia.
6:30 Dax Shepard? You grew up in kind of farmland.
6:31 Speaker 02 Farmland, right, near State College, where Penn State is located about a half hour west in dairy country.
6:38 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."
6:49 Dax Shepard? And he said Kevin? And I said, no, no, James Kimmel Jr. He does have a question for you.
6:54 Speaker 02 What is it?
6:54 Dax Shepard? This is coming directly from Jimmy Kimmel. Why not go by Jimmy?
6:58 Speaker 02 Right, well, I didn't want to put shade on him.
7:01 Speaker 01 Sure, step on his toes.
7:02 Speaker 02 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.
7:08 Speaker 01 Be his own person.
7:10 Speaker 02 Right, yeah, be your own person, don't live in my shadow.
7:12 Dax Shepard? That's very big of you. Did you go by Jimmy as a kid or always James?
7:15 Speaker 02 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.
7:23 Dax Shepard? You gotta go James.
7:24 Speaker 02 I moved to James. I would answer to any three of those.
7:27 Dax Shepard? Okay. Now, do you benefit? Get annoyed? Tell me about the experience of having such a popular name.
7:34 Speaker 02 The benefit I get is people want to talk about it. And go, oh, Jimmy Kimmel. Some people might go, I thought you might be.
7:41 Dax Shepard? If you make a reservation, which would be in good faith.
7:44 Speaker 02 Yes, right, because I'd say, this is just Jimmy Kimmel. But I don't do that, because again, I don't want to throw shade.
7:49 Speaker 01 A lot of integrity over there.
7:50 Speaker 02 I'm trying to be a good guy.
7:52 Dax Shepard? You should 1,000% 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 when they can say like, we take away the reservation, they're not.
8:02 Speaker 02 That's right.
8:03 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.
8:15 Speaker 02 It kind of breaks their hearts, doesn't it?
8:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
8:17 Speaker 02 Most of the people just enjoy talking about it. Your question is the question I always get asked. Do you get asked a thousand times? Anything about Jimmy Kimmel? What he did, and he had me and Dr. Phil on, not on the show, but in this photo. Because Phil had done an interview with Trump. And Phil had brought me up in the interview with the Donald.
8:37 Dax Shepard? And did Trump get super confused?
8:39 Speaker 02 He wasn't. That's a good question. Actually, I haven't heard that question before. That's interesting. But that then got to Jimmy, so he brings up to the audience, hey, listen to this name that Phil brings up during this interview with Trump. And everybody, of course, explodes. And then he's like, I'm a researcher, when I'm not on stage up here. Which was kind of cool. And then he brought both of our pictures up. And then in this really mad swipe, as nice as I've been, right? I've been a very moral, good boy, right?
9:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
9:07 Speaker 02 And he puts a side by side of Dr. Phil and I up. And he goes, look, everything that Dr. Phil touches turns bald.
9:14 Dax Shepard? Oh. Oh, no.
9:16 Speaker 02 That's really not necessary.
9:18 Dax Shepard? It's a cheap shot, yeah. It's a cheap shot. Again, you gotta feed the inferno of content. Yeah, I do.
9:25 Speaker 02 So, being a revenge researcher, I've been plotting how to get my revenge against Jimmy for months now, and I don't know how to do it.
9:31 Dax Shepard? I'm gonna add, and I'll put a bow on this Jimmy Kimmel thing, not the dude to pick a prank fight with.
9:36 Speaker 02 Oh.
9:37 Dax Shepard? That's kind of his bread and butter.
9:39 Speaker 02 Expert.
9:39 Dax Shepard? Okay, so your book, The Science of Revenge: Understanding the World's Deadliest Addiction and How to Overcome It, we're gonna 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?
10:00 Speaker 02 My folks moved our family to this farm, it had been my great-grandfather's farm when I was aged 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.
10:38 Dax Shepard? And you moved at 12? You're moving in 7th grade.
10:41 Speaker 02 That was it, 7th grade.
10:42 Dax Shepard? That's a rough time to move.
10:43 Speaker 02 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 wag 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.
11:11 Dax Shepard? You couldn't have done more.
11:12 Speaker 02 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 kinda 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 ten of them. There was not much I could do about it and it was early eighties. So the anti-bullying programs were not prevalent in schools. They weren't in mind. Nobody talked about it. You do five years of this. Maybe it started the bullying side more like nine, 10th grade.
11:57 Speaker 02 It didn't start right when I landed. That was just shunning for a while. Yeah, yeah. Then it moved to the bullying. I think when they got older, they're bigger teens. And they're strong as fuck because they work on a farm. Correct. Living on a farm. Most farmers are hunters, so you're hunting, you're dealing with animals and stuff and you're dealing with a lot of killing and death. And a lot of brutality in general with the animals that is part of at least how it is or how it was. Child age and you're exposed to the killing of all kinds of animals. And the domination of person over another being. And as a kid, you don't know that that's not a good thing. It's just the way life is. So one night, I'm about seventeen, so we all have driver's licenses.
12:42 Speaker 02 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 shot frozen and then it's easy pickings. And when I looked out, I saw the pickup truck of one of the guys that had been one of my main tormentors. And it took off. And we looked around the house and didn't see any damage and figured, oh, maybe they were just spotlighting, like I said. So we all went back to bed.
13:22 Speaker 02 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.
13:40 Speaker 02 God. Wasn't that just? What the fuck? So cruel and terrible. And it never doesn't get that reaction. Yeah, that's horrific. Monica, it is horrific. I can't even imagine doing that. Yeah. Let alone having a reason to want to do that. Yeah. In this case. My folks called this state police or who patrols these vast farm rural areas in Pennsylvania. Again, early 80s and they're like, this is bad. They weren't in any way insensitive to what happened, but they were also like, Not gonna launch an investigation. We're just not gonna do anything. We're sorry. If it gets worse, let us know. But it's an animal. So, nothing happened.
14:21 Speaker 02 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. Oh my God. Roaring out of the smoke and our mailbox mangled and flying into the cornfield situation.
15:06 Speaker 02 So they blew up our mailbox. And that was it for me. They had reached critical mass. Yeah. So like I said, we were hunters. I had been shooting guns since I was like eight years old. Had plenty of guns in the house. My dad had a loaded revolver that he kept in a nightstand. I ran through the house. I grabbed it. I jumped in my mother's car and I went out after them. Whoa. As fast as I could. So, I'm driving down this one-lane country road, hitting enormous speeds, just screaming and shouting at the top of my lungs in rage. Frontal lobes offline. It's just all instinct and I'm fight now. Yeah. I eventually caught up to them on one of their farms. I kind of quartered them against a barn. They were still in the truck when I was pulled up with my brights on.
15:51 Speaker 02 Three or four heads in the back of the pickup truck window and they start climbing out, squinting through my bright beams, trying to figure out who had just come roaring down their drive. They may or may not have recognized it was my mother's car. I was still in the car. So they get out, they're staring, they're looking. And I'm like, it's go time. So I grabbed the gun. And what was clear to me at that moment was that they were confused. They were unarmed. They couldn't have known I had a gun. So it would have been extremely easy at that point to just settle the score and zero off the balance. So I opened the driver's side door, started to step out, grabbed the gun.
16:37 Speaker 02 And just in that movement, I had just a really quick little insight, or a 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.
17:19 Speaker 02 And I came within like three seconds of committing a mass shooting.
17:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah, ironically or not, it stopped after that.
17:26 Speaker 02 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.
17:36 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.
18:02 Speaker 02 I know what you mean. Well, I know that I
18:04 Dax Shepard? On your side.
18:04 Speaker 02 Just got in a way with something very big in my life that would have been transformative in a hyper negative way.
18:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah. When you've been fucked with like that, one event doesn't erase it. Many events don't erase it. This kind of need to make sure you're never taken advantage of again, you're never harmed again. You make a decision in your life, not again on my watch. It kind of sets you on a trajectory. Now, we're all on this trajectory, as your book will point out, but I do think you weirdly found your way to law, which has to be somehow impacted or driven by your experience getting fucked with for so long.
18:37 Speaker 02 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.
19:18 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.
19:25 Speaker 02 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.
19:33 Dax Shepard? When it's robbed of you, and then it's robbed of you publicly, it is a very deep wound.
19:38 Speaker 02 It's hard to overcome that.
19:39 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
19:40 Speaker 02 And mainly, for me at least, was I don't want to have that happen again. So how can I do that without becoming like a criminal? I was able to put together lawyers are allowed to get revenge. That's what they're paid to do and they're paid a lot for it. And it's this prestigious job that you can get. And since I had to leave being a farmer, because that was the end of my farmer career on that day. I'm like, what am I going to do with me?
20:05 Dax Shepard? Now we know that's revenge, but at the time, it would fly under the umbrella of justice. Lawyers get justice.
20:13 Speaker 01 Two sides of the same coin, justice and revenge.
20:15 Dax Shepard? It is, but I think you get into it for justice and you come to realize you're in it for revenge, potentially, or maybe you didn't have any highfalutin goals.
20:24 Speaker 02 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 gonna 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
21:05 Speaker 02 that's something I'd wanna 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 wanna pay me. Some of that is happening in my late teen years, some of it happened later.
21:21 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, or at least you could buy into that. And then you go and you're clerking for a federal judge, so again, we're on this thing. So when do you enter the civil litigation side and what's that experience like?
21:38 Speaker 02 I do that right out of law school, right past clerking, I should say. And I get into that for the money.
21:44 Speaker 01 Can we sorry, give a little, like, what is civil litigation compared to?
21:48 Speaker 02 That's a great question. Right, cuz 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.
22:09 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.
22:19 Speaker 02 That's right. But I wasn't a PI attorney, I wasn't a personal injury lawyer. Which is the maximal kind of version of civil litigation that looks pretty clearly like retribution, right? It's like you hit me with a car, you were drunk, I'm gonna 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 Buddha or Gandhi is the justice of equity and fairness and integrity and those types of concepts, social
23:04 Speaker 02 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." Yeah. So, justice is the polite, politically correct word we use. It's a euphemism, and it enables, by having that one word mean two opposites. Yeah. When you tell your band of militants or terrorists to get in these planes and fly them into the World Trade Towers because we want justice against America, okay, that's the same thing we did right back.
23:47 Speaker 02 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.
24:09 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.
24:30 Speaker 02 That's that dopamine high.
24:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
24:31 Speaker 02 That now neuroscience has shown is exactly what you're getting. The whole city was high as a kite. The country was high as a kite. Many areas of the country. Not everyone. Some people felt that that was wrong in a lot of ways.
24:43 Speaker 01 But I know what you mean. You're saying by calling it justice, we have a moral high ground to it. It then becomes a good, positive thing when you replace it with revenge. That does have a negative connotation to it, and it is the same thing.
24:56 Speaker 02 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.
25:33 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.
25:42 Speaker 02 And so, we can talk a little bit about how you can stop this, because there are some ways.
25:46 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
25:47 Speaker 02 Powerful ways. And they've worked at the ends of all wars, actually. Because 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.
26:26 Dax Shepard? Mm-hmm.
26:26 Speaker 02 Like between one and two.
26:28 Dax Shepard? Your personal journey as a lawyer, which I guess span about 10 years, is that about right?
26:34 Speaker 02 I'm still a licensed attorney, but my career really took a pivot point after about 20 years of practice.
26:40 Dax Shepard? 20 years.
26:41 Speaker 02 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.
27:04 Dax Shepard? And I think what's really hard, I have a lot of friends that are lawyers. I kind of graft on something I watched in a chess documentary onto this, which is there's a long history of these chess masters becoming paranoid. Their mental health, you know, Bobby Fischer even is living in England as an anti-Semi. A lot of really weird stories in the chess master world. And the reigning 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 spend a lot of your time figuring out how to not get fucked. And how on earth do you leave the office and then the brain that does that all day long at a high level?
27:49 Dax Shepard? 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.
27:56 Speaker 02 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
28:27 Speaker 02 Feeling victimized either directly as the lawyer or for your client. Anytime I would interview a client or when I was a prosecutor, a victim of a crime, I'm instantaneously, right where they are, feeling what they had gone through, enraged and I just want justice in the form of revenge, really badly. And I'm, in that sense, a great lawyer. Cause you want a lawyer to kind of do that. You want them to be fully invested, not just the money, but you want them emotionally there as a warrior for hire. I'm like a mercenary.
29:01 Dax Shepard? Look at the commercials, they're all saying, "I will fight for you." Unanimous, they all have to tell you.
29:05 Speaker 02 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? Because he's like, "I'll do anything to these people for you." Yeah, it's true.
29:17 Dax Shepard? I'll kill their families when we're done.
29:19 Speaker 02 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.
29:29 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.
29:37 Speaker 02 And we have street justice, every area has their sometimes street justice gunfights and worse. And then we have it in the criminal justice system and we have it in war. So the real truth of that was that I did start to bring that into my own personal life with my family and that caused a lot of problems, as you can imagine. And I felt a lot of guilt and remorse for it and I wanted to stop. And I found that I could not get out of it. Turn it off. I loved it, actually. You know, I was like, I feel bad afterward.
30:10 Dax Shepard? It's the dopamine deficit issue. So in the shame, you need it even more.
30:15 Speaker 02 Right, I feel ashamed, I'm sorry I did this, I really should probably stop. And I'm really sorry. And then you're starting to be stressed out again and maybe you have a few cases and you start to see that somebody has just said something that I interpret as offensive or an insult or unfair. Bam, I'm right back in it again and I want that dose of revenge. That is 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. Yeah.
30:51 Dax Shepard? You hit a low point, I guess 2004 or 2005-ish?
30:55 Speaker 02 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. Cause he doesn't just say, forgive and you go to heaven. He was like, you should forgive 70 times seven. That's a lot of times. Why? What does it mean? And I didn't understand why. But my lifestyle was against that. It was against what I should be doing with my family in terms of loving and respecting
31:36 Speaker 02 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. Yeah.
31:53 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.
32:00 Dax Shepard? We are supported by Squarespace. So here's something I think about a lot. Most people I talk to on this show, the ones doing really interesting things, they all had a version of their work that existed before anyone else saw it. It was just theirs, notes, ideas, projects they were tinkering with, and then at some point, they made the decision to share it. That's the part that's scary, right? Going from, I'm working on something, to here's what I made. Rob went through the exact same thing, building our site on Squarespace, and what made it doable was that he didn't have to become a web developer overnight. He just had to show up with the idea. Squarespace handles the rest. Beautiful templates that actually look like you hired someone, built an SEO so people can find you, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, all under one roof. No code, no patchwork of random tools. And
32:45 Dax Shepard? honestly, the thing I keep coming back to is how low the barrier is. If you've got something you've been building quietly and you're ready for people to see it, Squarespace makes that leap feel a lot less traumatic. Head to Squarespace.com/dax for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. We get support from Skims. Okay, I have a confession. I genuinely love matching pajamas. It's the best part of Christmas morning, really. Everyone in the same matching set, looking ridiculously cute in front of the tree.
33:21 Speaker 01 I love matching pajamas. I'm literally going to be in coordinating sets with all my friends this holiday season. Because I got them, spoiler to my friends who are listening, the same Skims pajama set I've been living in. They are so soft and cozy and they look cute. So you can leave the house and go get a late night hot chocolate and be cozy.
33:42 Dax Shepard? It's so great how Skims has sets for everyone, too. Women's, men's, kids, even your pets. So nobody in your life has to be left out this year.
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33:58 Dax Shepard? Okay, tell me more.
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34:11 Dax Shepard? Hot chocolate runs. It's like the pajamas we grew up in, except without the scratchy polyester that made opening presents feel more like a hot yoga class that nobody signed up for.
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34:40 Dax Shepard? This episode is supported by Helix.
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34:54 Dax Shepard? It really is the foundation. And I think people underestimate how much a bad mattress is quietly ruining their day. You wake up stiff, your back's angry, you're already behind before your feet hit the floor.
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35:22 Dax Shepard? Okay.
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35:29 Speaker 01 It was a mess. I need a new one.
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36:44 Dax Shepard? And you had kind of made a mess of your career as well at that point?
36:47 Speaker 02 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.
37:03 Dax Shepard? By the way, can I just say, because I'm an addict. So that's like, I'm not going to drink whiskey. I'm going to drink red wine. I'm not drinking red wine. I'm drinking beer. Now I'm going to drink on the weekends. You're trying all the many things an addict tries.
37:13 Speaker 01 Bargaining.
37:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah. Other than quitting.
37:15 Speaker 02 Right. And I wanted to quit. I got closer and closer to quitting. I'd 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. My heart wasn't in it.
37:35 Dax Shepard? Not enough dopamine on that.
37:37 Speaker 02 Not enough dopamine there. And I just kept coming back to the master, coming back to the drug. And so I happened to have a client who was a psychologist, a friend of mine from college, actually. And I said, I think I'm freaking addicted to revenge-seeking or justice-seeking. And he was like, you're not. There's no such thing. I think you're tired. Why don't you take a vacation? And I'm like, you're probably right. But I said, first of all, tell me how you, as a doctor, a psychologist, how do you diagnose somebody with addiction? And he said, well, first of all, there is no diagnosis for addiction. It's a substance use disorder, a gambling disorder, things like that. But he said, there's this book called The DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,
38:22 Speaker 02 and it has 11 criteria. And we use that while we're interviewing somebody. And I said, can you send me a copy of this book? And he said, how about go on vacation? And I said, how about send me a copy of the book and I'll think about it? So he did, which was very nice of him. As soon as it came in the mail, I just opened it up, figured out what page this was on. And there are 11 criteria for substance use disorder. Things like, do you use more of the substance despite the harm it's doing to your life, your social obligations? Do you want to try to cut down but find that you can't? You know them. So I just crossed off the word substance and inserted the word justice. And I went and counted them up. And there's a scale.
39:06 Speaker 02 And three or four is you have a minor substance use disorder. And maybe the five, six, seven range is moderate. And then beyond that is severe. I was seven, eight, nine in there. It goes up to 11. And I went, I have a severe justice addiction. Is what I think I have. But nobody would believe that.
39:25 Dax Shepard? It sounds silly on the surface.
39:27 Speaker 02 Right.
39:28 Dax Shepard? But it makes total sense. I mean, I don't think so because, again, I'm an addict and I see addicts everywhere. There's many that have been yet to be studied or labeled.
39:34 Speaker 02 What is serious? About it because it does sound a little bit silly to cross those off. Because you could insert all kinds of words in there. I like ice cream and just put ice cream in there. But what you wouldn't get with ice cream unless you became obese and got sick from it. Usually you don't have a lot of negative consequences. It's not generally impacting your life.
39:53 Dax Shepard? There's no wreckage.
39:54 Speaker 02 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.
40:06 Dax Shepard? I remember people being outraged when Tiger Woods claimed he had a sexual addiction and so many people were like, everyone likes sex. I'm like, let me tell you the difference. If it's ruining your life and you're trying your hardest to not do it and you continue to do it compulsively and you absolutely cannot stop. That's addiction. I don't care what the thing is.
40:23 Speaker 02 That's right.
40:24 Dax Shepard? He ruined his fucking life.
40:25 Speaker 02 And he did. He had a ton of negative consequences.
40:26 Dax Shepard? And he wants to stop, you know, and he went to a treatment center. I know you think this is like a media curating or something, but that's not.
40:33 Speaker 02 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.
40:42 Dax Shepard? Right.
40:42 Speaker 02 With the possibility of things like gaming and food and shopping. A little bit, but none of them have been honored with the true label of a diagnosis.
40:52 Dax Shepard? Right, exactly. Basically. So you go on this self motivated path to start really studying this. And how do you submerge yourself in it? What do you start reading? Do you take classes? How do you become a buff on this?
41:03 Speaker 02 At first, I wrote a book called Suing for Peace and I took a spiritual approach. My thought was, and a lot of people with addiction, they kind of turn to spirituality maybe first going, I need a higher power here to help me because whatever powers I have are insufficient. So I studied the world's justice teachings on forgiveness and revenge seeking or justice and forgiveness. And I found by going through that, that anything you want to do is okay. Basically, and it's scary, but in almost all of the religions, except perhaps Taoism and Buddhism, there are teachings that support overtly, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth revenge seeking. We know that. And there are forgiveness teachings.
41:46 Speaker 02 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.
42:29 Speaker 02 If somebody violates a social norm or harms somebody, there's usually a tribunal. There's usually a judge of some sort. There's usually an opportunity to present your case and defend yourself. There is a judgment, and then it may be followed by some form of punishment. So that process, that's hardwired, it seems, into humans. It's just there. And it turns out it really is there to the point that we all have a courtroom of the mind inside ourselves. Everyone will relate to this part. Yeah, yeah. Right. We are putting people on trial every day of our lives, sometimes hour by hour. The people who wrong us, insult us, are insensitive to us, ignore us, betray us, and worse. Cut us off.
43:12 Speaker 02 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?
43:56 Speaker 02 Or do you carry it out in real life? And when you decide to carry it out, that is revenge-seeking.
44:01 Dax Shepard? The thing I always share about on here, and a lot of people seem to relate to it, is I will catch myself stuck in a rumination or I'm making my case, right? Because I'm gonna have this theoretical argument that's impending. And I make my case and I've got like seventeen exhibits. And by the time I get to the last exhibit, I go, "I gotta remember not to forget." And then I go through all fucking seventeen again. And I just, over and over, remind myself of all my points in my trial I'm gonna 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
44:45 Dax Shepard? is suffering to such a degree.
44:48 Speaker 01 Well, it becomes about not solving the problem, but just getting your information out.
44:53 Speaker 02 Justice. Trauma therapists like Bezel Vanderkolk 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, right? So that rumination just goes on and on for everyone, all the time that you've described, 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.
45:38 Speaker 02 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?
45:51 Speaker 02 You play all the roles, including the defendant, in a structured way. So with a little script. And at the end, we're not just left with the punishment. Because you get to sentence them, you get to imagine punishing them. And I could do this with either of you.
46:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah, let's go through our actual examples.
46:08 Speaker 02 So if you have a solid grievance.
46:10 Dax Shepard? Let's say I'm late, that's easy. So I'm late, Monica's on time.
46:14 Speaker 02 Okay, so that's not a big grievance, but it could piss you off.
46:18 Dax Shepard? Or her. I'm late, I'm willing to be the villain in this.
46:20 Speaker 02 You're always the perpetrator, I'm sorry.
46:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
46:24 Speaker 01 Okay, let's say, yeah, he's late eight days in a row.
46:27 Speaker 02 But does this bother you?
46:29 Speaker 01 I don't love it.
46:30 Speaker 02 You don't love it? Do we have anything better, more grievous than that?
46:33 Speaker 01 This used to be a big grievance.
46:35 Speaker 02 From anywhere in your life that you're comfortable with sharing?
46:37 Speaker 01 What's a current grievance? I have one. Okay, so my apartment building currently is so disgusting. This is so annoying. Nothing of mine is turned on. I'm not running any water or anything. But randomly, there'll be like soapy, water, weird stuff coming up out of the tub, into my tub. Also, it happened in the laundry room, and it flooded the laundry room. It's been an ongoing thing, and I've had to say it 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 gonna do? So that's my grievance.
47:20 Speaker 02 Okay, they're not fixing this situation at all, right? Let's just do it.
47:23 Dax Shepard? I'm gonna add, they're placating you. That's a trigger for me.
47:26 Speaker 02 To keep it shortish, we'll say that you've just begun testifying as the victim. So imagine now that you're in a courtroom. You could close your eyes for a second and just sort of picture the judge's bench, and the 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 you feel.
48:11 Speaker 01 Totally disrespected. I pay money to live here and I feel that this is the basic level of care and hygiene that should be handled by the landlord quickly. So it's very annoying.
48:27 Speaker 02 Yeah. All right. So let's stop with the victim testimony for a minute and let's switch. So now you're going to play the role of the landlord. So the landlord was over at that table and now the landlord's walking up to the stand and sitting down. You're sitting and watching. That's you as the victim, but now you are the landlord. So it's actually you in the witness stand. So you've got to switch that role.
48:49 Speaker 01 Okay.
48:50 Speaker 02 And now your lawyer, very well-paid, good lawyer.
48:53 Dax Shepard? Jimmy Kimmel Jr.
48:54 Speaker 02 And his name's, right, Jimmy Kimmel Jr. Thanks for that advertisement. And he's going to ask you, so what's your side of the story?
49:03 Speaker 01 Monica has complained about some water leaking into her building. She showed me pictures. It looks bad. I've sent the plumber in multiple times. The plumber doesn't know what's wrong. He's snaked the drain and it's still happening. She's still complaining about it, but there's not much more I can do.
49:26 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.
49:59 Speaker 02 All right, so now Monica, in your own role, you've just sat and listened to the defendant testify, both versions.
50:06 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
50:07 Speaker 02 How did it make you feel to hear the defendant's story? What was that like for you?
50:13 Speaker 01 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.
50:38 Speaker 02 So how do you find, as the jury, is the landlord guilty or innocent?
50:42 Speaker 01 I think she's guilty. I do think that objectively.
50:47 Speaker 02 That's fair. You're the jury and you get to say what you want. You don't have to apologize to me.
50:52 Speaker 01 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.
51:00 Speaker 02 So what should your sentence be? Since you found the landlord guilty, you're gonna have to hand down a sentence.
51:05 Speaker 01 That's the problem.
51:06 Speaker 02 And in the non-justice system, which is what this is called, or the miracle court, because there's a free audio-driven app where it takes you through all the steps, more methodically than I'm doing right now. But in that, you do need to have a sentence.
51:20 Speaker 01 This part's hard. I definitely don't want her to get fired, so I'm not sentencing her with that.
51:26 Dax Shepard? Can I suggest a sentence that I bet you would love?
51:29 Speaker 01 Sure.
51:29 Dax Shepard? She has to have the same foam coming out of her tub and her laundry room.
51:33 Speaker 01 Whoa.
51:34 Dax Shepard? Because now she'll be heavily incentivized to deal with the core problem.
51:38 Speaker 02 Unless foam doesn't bother her.
51:40 Dax Shepard? Well, we'll find out.
51:41 Speaker 01 That's funny. That doesn't even cross my mind.
51:43 Speaker 02 Interesting. That's a very reciprocal type of view. And research shows that males are much more caught up in that
51:51 Speaker 01 Oh.
51:52 Speaker 02 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.
52:02 Speaker 01 That's interesting.
52:03 Dax Shepard? Eye for eye.
52:04 Speaker 02 Correct.
52:04 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 to fix it.
52:10 Speaker 01 I don't have that. And I wouldn't want to sentence her with that.
52:12 Speaker 02 Okay.
52:13 Speaker 01 I think I just say, oh, well.
52:17 Dax Shepard? Which is basically what you've already done.
52:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
52:20 Speaker 02 Which is actually something that does happen from time to time in these trials. As in, some people will stop right after the defendant has testified. They'll get some new insight by adopting the other view that was completely unexpected to them. 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.
52:46 Dax Shepard? It is a workaround to force you out of attribution error. Because no one's gonna 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.
53:08 Speaker 02 Right. What we find from the research is it will also reactivate, if it wasn't, your empathy. It's a different part of your brain that was silent, like I was saying, for males in particular. So, it reactivates that, and you gain some new insight. But not for everyone, and most of the trials go the whole way to the end.
53:25 Speaker 01 Yeah.
53:25 Speaker 02 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.
53:35 Speaker 01 Exactly.
53:35 Speaker 02 But you did want to be heard.
53:37 Speaker 01 I did.
53:37 Speaker 02 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?
53:44 Speaker 01 Right. And I guess the sentence part is interesting because even though I still, at the end, I'm like, "Yes, I think she is guilty of negligence as a landlord, but when it comes to sentencing, do I think that's worth a sentence?"
53:57 Speaker 02 Mm-hmm.
53:58 Speaker 01 It makes you start doing that, like, is that really worth a punishment? No.
54:03 Speaker 02 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 gonna 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 gonna 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.
54:28 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 technological breakthroughs where we can now do FMRI's 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.
54:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, so what neuroscientists have found is that your brain on revenge looks like your brain on drugs. It is almost indistinguishable. This is like an amazingly big breakthrough that really hasn't been recognized at all by society. And the reason is, is because what follows from that is we now understand the biological cause of violence. 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 now. So the way it works is this grievances, this is the scary part.
55:35 Speaker 02 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.
56:16 Dax Shepard? I, Paula.
56:17 Speaker 02 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 striatum. 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
57:00 Speaker 02 on you, or you're in a relationship with somebody. With revenge, the only way you can gratify it is to harm somebody. With addiction, you might put a needle in your own arm and inject something. With revenge-seeking, you have to put a bullet in somebody else to get that same high, which is terrifying. But it's been that way for out-recorded human history. We just haven't had the tools and the technology to see that that's what is driving these crazy things, like mass shootings, or insurrections, or wars, or all these things that are all revenge-driven cravings. When you go through those two parts, the last part of your brain that is critical is the
57:43 Speaker 02 prefrontal cortex, which is the control center that's to give you self-control and your executive function.
57:51 Dax Shepard? And modeling the future, predicting how you'll feel after this.
57:54 Speaker 02 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.
58:10 Dax Shepard? I want to put an extra fine point on this. The area of your brain driving that in that moment actually cannot model the future. That area of your brain is only now. The prefrontal cortex is in charge of the future and modeling. So it literally can't consider the consequences.
58:24 Speaker 02 Oh, you mean the reward circuitry? It is all about gratification now.
58:28 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the amygdala, all these areas, they are incapable of jumping ahead.
58:31 Speaker 02 They just want pleasure at this second.
58:33 Dax Shepard? Now.
58:34 Speaker 02 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 pleasurable, it gives us a hit of dopamine, and that takes away some of the pain of that betrayal, or that insult, or the drain backing up for the 15th time in your apartment. It does all.
58:58 Dax Shepard? The kind way to say it is like to exit discomfort. You're very uncomfortable and your brain wants you to not be uncomfortable.
59:05 Speaker 02 Or worse, you know, my dog was killed. There's a lot of discomfort in that.
59:08 Dax Shepard? Yes.
59:09 Speaker 02 Somebody just invaded your country.
59:10 Dax Shepard? And the brain does its fastest, most creative thinking in that moment. It'll figure out the thing that can alleviate your suffering.
59:16 Speaker 02 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 going to have to stop watching television for an hour. That's retaliatory, right? It isn't to gratify the parent, it's to teach. The evolutionary psychologists have pinned it as early as the Ice Age.
59:58 Speaker 02 But in the fossil record, the first believed to be act of interpersonal violence that's been discovered so far, like two holes in the skull, you know, of a fossilized skull, goes back 430,000 years.
1:00:10 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:00:11 Speaker 02 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.
1:00:38 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 infinitesimal that that's not what we're discussing here. And when you look at history, you're not looking at psychopaths that have caused the mass. You're looking at normal people who are revenge seeking.
1:00:55 Speaker 02 We're looking at normal people who one day, like I would consider myself a non-psychopath, normal person.
1:01:00 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:01:01 Speaker 02 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.
1:01:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:01:21 Speaker 02 And nations, because it's at the national level and it's at every communal level.
1:01:26 Dax Shepard? Let's talk about Olga. That's a fun, fun, in quotes. Interesting is a better word. You have a lot of interesting cases throughout history that you look at. One of them is Olga. What I would say is fascinating. We don't think of women as mass murderers, stereotypically.
1:01:39 Speaker 02 This 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.
1:02:10 Speaker 01 Oh, God.
1:02:11 Speaker 02 Wiped them out, injured another 13 or 12, right? Something like that. But before she did it, she wrote a letter that she sent to two Prague newspapers explaining what she was about to do.
1:02:22 Speaker 01 The manifesto element of this?
1:02:24 Speaker 02 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.
1:02:49 Dax Shepard? And she has this very powerful sentence, which is that society can punish the individual, but the individual can punish society.
1:02:57 Speaker 02 And we can see there the example of proxy, right? So she was most aggrieved by her own parents, some of her friends in school.
1:03:04 Dax Shepard? Her father was abusing her allegedly.
1:03:06 Speaker 02 Abusive. Some of her friends were abusive. None of them were victims of this. She ended up killing people she from all accounts had no connection with, hadn't harmed her. But as far as she was concerned, she was getting revenge on society writ large by doing this, and they were therefore her proxies. She stops the truck, she's arrested, she confesses to everything, she says she's pre-planned it, and she's very most concerned that people don't think she's crazy. She insists that she's guilty, she insists you knew exactly what she was doing, it's important for her and the public to understand that she did it because she was retaliating for the mistreatment that she had gone through. She gets to court, she has a lawyer, the lawyer tells her, "Do not testify that way."
1:03:51 Speaker 02 She ignores the lawyer's instructions and testifies that way, and goes on to say, "I understand justice is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and I think you should execute me."
1:04:01 Dax Shepard? Wants to be hung.
1:04:02 Speaker 02 Right. She's examined by a group of psychiatrists and psychologists because this obviously looks like the work of a mad woman, and they all find that she's completely of sound mind. And the court is therefore more than happy to give her her wish and grant her that, and so sentence her to execution by hanging. She becomes the last woman executed in communist Czechoslovakia.
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1:07:20 Speaker 01 So when people are, I don't know if we're equipped to even talk about this, but murder-suicide stuff a lot with these mass shootings, they kill themselves. Do we think that's meant to happen? Or do you think after they shoot everyone, the prefrontal cortex comes online and they're like, oh no, and then they kill themselves? Or do we think it is part of this whole like, I'm seeking revenge, but I know part of that means that I should die too? Do we know any of this?
1:07:47 Speaker 02 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.
1:08:04 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?
1:08:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, so their true motive for the last act, you're asking, why did that person, after, it's usually a male, gunning down his whole family, kill himself? You know, it could also be the fear of being incarcerated for life or executed.
1:08:27 Dax Shepard? Or even facing the shame.
1:08:29 Speaker 02 What is hyper-clear is that all those murder-suicides are revenge-driven. The male spouse usually believes that he is a victim of all kinds of injustices in his life, from his wife, from his kids, and he's going to destroy them all to balance the guilt.
1:08:46 Dax Shepard? He's gonna teach them they should have taken him seriously and treated him better.
1:08:50 Speaker 02 That's exactly right.
1:08:51 Dax Shepard? Let's touch base on a few of the deadliest revenge addicts from history.
1:08:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are the biggest ones. Forty million for Hitler, forty million for Mao, and like 20 million for Stalin. I go through in the book, I spend a whole chapter on all three of them, going back into history, and there's enough record now and enough scholarship from historians to put together that all three of them were truly revenge addicts and from a young age. Stalin, for instance, way before he's anybody, is asked one night over drinks, vodkas, I guess, while in exile in Siberia, what's the most pleasurable experience you can have in your life? And his answer is, my most pleasurable experience is identify a target, slake an implacable
1:09:39 Speaker 02 vengeance, and then go to sleep. Nothing is more joyful in the world for me than that, or more pleasurable. Oh God. It's incredible. And really, you can see then, once he does get power, him carrying that out. And Stalin, by the way, he had been victimized as a kid. He had been abused over and over and over again. He was raised in a highly violent town, Teflis, in Georgia, where blood feuds were part of the culture. And so, there's this long history of revenge seeking. Both he is victim, he has perpetrator, and he then just goes on this revenge binger for 40 years and ends up killing 20 million people in the process and incorporating other people to do it. Hitler was the same way. We don't have a lot of his true childhood
1:10:24 Speaker 02 stuff. His history kind of starts as a young adult. He wanted to be an artist, was rejected. Rejected Austria when that happened to him, or Vienna. And then, when he got into World War I, became a soldier and loved the idea of fighting and killing other people. And when he started to believe that Germany was betrayed by its own people at the end of World War I, and that's the only reason Germany had to surrender and have the armistice, he went on a complete tear of educating the Germans that they had been betrayed and convincing them that the only and correct response would be to destroy all the people inside of Germany
1:11:05 Speaker 02 who did that, and then all of the countries around them who allowed it to happen.
1:11:10 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.
1:11:28 Speaker 02 It just repeats throughout humanity. Now, 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 clever. I hadn't thought about that until just now.
1:12:13 Speaker 02 Maybe I shouldn't bring this up. We want to keep you peaceful.
1:12:16 Dax Shepard? Landowners.
1:12:17 Speaker 02 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 en masse. And Mao 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 away to gratify those revenge desires.
1:12:53 Dax Shepard? 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 very powerful.
1:13:01 Speaker 02 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 use 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 therapy and motivational interviewing or anti-craving drugs, potentially like GLP-1s at some point, which is really exciting that that could potentially happen.
1:13:46 Speaker 02 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.
1:13:53 Dax Shepard? Seems to be working on a lot of addictions.
1:13:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's working on a lot of stuff. So that's really interesting. So we do have that and we can activate now the public health, community, therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and peer support, like 12-step programs for revenge addicts. I mean, we need that.
1:14:08 Dax Shepard? We've seen like anger management programs that are semi-overlappy with this.
1:14:12 Speaker 02 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.
1:14:29 Dax Shepard? Too many, a million's not enough.
1:14:31 Speaker 02 Well, that's the way for revenge addicts as well. Once you start, you're going to go on a revenge binge. And you're gonna hurt yourself and a lot of other people in the process.
1:14:40 Dax Shepard? Because it doesn't feel good. Unfortunately, we're also burdened with this conscience. And then that just skyrockets you right back into the cycle again.
1:14:49 Speaker 02 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.
1:15:06 Dax Shepard? Yes.
1:15:06 Speaker 02 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.
1:15:51 Speaker 02 Instead of covering it up with dopamine, it shuts it down. On top of it, it shuts down the revenge craving reward circuitry of addiction. So now you're no longer being burdened by this constant rumination that Dex had described, right? And then the last thing it does is it reactivates the prefrontal cortex, 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.
1:16:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah, the forgiveness part is really great. And I'm just gonna add a woo-woo-y spiritual aspect to it, which is in the process of forgiving people.
1:16:28 Dax Shepard? 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.
1:16:51 Speaker 02 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.
1:17:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:17:00 Speaker 02 Which is shutting down the pain.
1:17:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:17:03 Speaker 02 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.
1:17:10 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:17:11 Speaker 02 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. 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 for.
1:17:51 Dax Shepard? It exists empirically and biochemically, and we can observe it. You don't need a spiritual being in the mix.
1:17:58 Speaker 02 And you can forgive a million times and not harm yourself. So you can take the drug of forgiveness as often as you want. Matter of fact, it's highly preferred. And you mentioned this, it's a practice. So practicing forgiveness is about giving yourself this kind of dose whenever the grievance 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.
1:18:24 Dax Shepard? I could damage myself.
1:18:25 Speaker 02 Who will suffer from that rant and down spiral? It would be not the landlord, not the plumber, not the foam.
1:18:31 Dax Shepard? Yeah. I think it's worthwhile to acknowledge America's revenge culture. We're kind of unique in our rate of incarceration. We're kind of unique in our sentencing. We have very punitive politics as a country or revenge addict.
1:18:45 Speaker 02 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, a peace-seeking government. If you wanted to make America truly great again, you would make America forgiving by necessity. Because the great powers and great peoples have always been forgiving.
1:19:22 Dax Shepard? We have an incredible relationship with Japan and Germany. We have benefited greatly from our forgiveness. Thank God those places have been willing to forgive us as well.
1:19:32 Speaker 02 Right, well, I was gonna say, and them us. So, how did we end World War II that was different from I? When we ended I, we punished the shit out of Germany. And Hitler rose in retaliation and said, "I will get retaliation against all of you bastards for doing this." At the end of World War II, Roosevelt and Stalin agreed to do it again and to punish Germany severely at the end of World War II. But then Roosevelt died and Truman was elected president. When that happened, Truman then visited Germany right after the shooting stopped. And he came back and he said, "We're not going to repeat the mistakes that we'd made at the end of World War I. We're not gonna do it again.
1:20:15 Speaker 02 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. That has killed as many people other than natural causes of revenge seeking would probably be like the bubonic plague. That raged for about 2,000 years plus and only ended, it's hard to imagine this, but in the 1950s. That is crazy.
1:20:56 Speaker 02 It's really weird and it only got stopped because a couple of scientists in Hong Kong, when there was an outbreak there, made the discovery that it was an unseen bacterium that was causing the deaths and not what everybody thought for 2,000 years, which is it's God's judgment, it's evil, witches, Jews. Right. I mean, they just blamed it on every crazy thing. Outrageous. So they found out it was an invisible creature, a bacterium. That's what's killing 200-plus million people. In my sense, this notion of revenge addiction is that moment in human history for violence. We've now discovered that it's an invisible addiction inside your own head to revenge seeking triggered by a grievance.
1:21:41 Speaker 02 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. Creating more, yeah.
1:22:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, and breaking people out of the apathy of, well, this is planet Earth.
1:22:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's just the way it is.
1:22:05 Dax Shepard? It's hard to overcome that.
1:22:07 Speaker 02 It is.
1:22:07 Dax Shepard? I'm guilty of that. I'm like, yeah, it's a gnarly fucking world, guys. Gnarly shit happens and it's gonna.
1:22:12 Speaker 02 We're up against it really bad. We really need to do this soon because of social networking platforms. They're infecting and addicting millions of people at once with the same grievance, because you just press a button and you type in your grievance and now a million other people have your grievance. Now all those million people are all craving revenge for the same thing at the same time. And we're not prepared as humans for what that means and we're starting to see what that means.
1:22:39 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 media. It's right there. And you have to leave.
1:22:48 Speaker 02 No system has been invented until now that both.
1:22:53 Speaker 02 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 cracked all the way.
1:23:04 Speaker 01 Oh.
1:23:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you can chart the addictive nature of drugs by how quickly they act. A meth snorter has a certain rate of recovery. A meth smoker has a much lower rate. And then a meth shooter is almost not going to recover because of the instantaneous nature of it. And that's all those platforms are. If you're using them that way, people use them in wonderful ways. Well, this has been incredible. I really am
1:23:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:23:26 Dax Shepard? delighted you're shining a light on this.
1:23:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:23:30 Dax Shepard? And it is bizarrely hopeful that we would have an explanation for the mass violence we've lived with forever.
1:23:37 Speaker 01 Oh, my God, if GLP-1s can fix this.
1:23:41 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
1:23:42 Speaker 02 I don't know that they can. I don't want to say they can't, man.
1:23:44 Speaker 01 I know, we're not saying that.
1:23:45 Dax Shepard? They've done so many miraculous things.
1:23:46 Speaker 02 The future's coming fast, so we don't know.
1:23:49 Speaker 01 It's so true.
1:23:50 Dax Shepard? Well, Dr. James Kimmel, this has been a delight. Thanks so much for coming.
1:23:53 Speaker 02 Thanks for having me. I super appreciate it. What a great conversation.
1:23:58 Dax Shepard? We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.
1:24:07 Dax Shepard? I'm so excited. Because my 454 SS is the perfect, perfect vehicle.
1:24:14 Speaker 01 OK.
1:24:15 Dax Shepard? It's the best build I have of all the cars I've built.
1:24:18 Speaker 01 What is it?
1:24:18 Dax Shepard? My pickup truck, my black pickup truck, 1994 54 SS with an LT4 motor.
1:24:24 Speaker 01 OK.
1:24:25 Dax Shepard? Out of a Corvette and an 800 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 bass.
1:24:43 Speaker 01 You're gonna blast it.
1:24:44 Dax Shepard? I'm gonna bump the bass specifically.
1:24:45 Speaker 01 Wow.
1:24:46 Dax Shepard? If you hear bass bumping outside your apartment.
1:24:49 Speaker 01 Be like, who the fuck?
1:24:52 Dax Shepard? No, this is your framing. Ooh, that's nostalgic. It's booty bumping time. And then I encourage you to, in your apartment, just start booty bumping. When's the last time you booty bumped?
1:25:04 Speaker 01 I am, uh, a long time. It's been a minute since I've booty bumped, but uh.
1:25:09 Dax Shepard? Fifteen years, twenty years?
1:25:11 Speaker 01 No, no, no, probably Callie's wedding was the last time.
1:25:16 Dax Shepard? And you specifically did booty bumping?
1:25:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, we did, cuz it's like my college friends back together. We were really, we were showing up her LA friends.
1:25:24 Dax Shepard? Ah, yeah.
1:25:26 Speaker 01 And it was cool.
1:25:26 Dax Shepard? Shaming them.
1:25:27 Speaker 01 We were shaming them. We are on our ass on the ground, dropping it. We were dropping it like it's hot.
1:25:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow.
1:25:33 Speaker 01 People were throwing up and rallying, like we were.
1:25:37 Dax Shepard? People throwing dollar bills at you?
1:25:39 Speaker 01 No.
1:25:40 Dax Shepard? Okay, that would have been how you know you really.
1:25:42 Speaker 01 That's when you're an adult, you know, like it's, that's degrading.
1:25:45 Dax Shepard? Okay, so it's not been terribly long?
1:25:46 Speaker 01 It's not been too long.
1:25:47 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:25:48 Speaker 01 Um, 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.
1:26:02 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:26:02 Speaker 01 Even though what you're doing.
1:26:05 Dax Shepard? It is a positive thing.
1:26:05 Speaker 01 No, even though what you're doing is loud.
1:26:09 Dax Shepard? Oh, and loud is just negative? Even if it's, you hear your favorite song, that's negative?
1:26:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, if I, if I'm not choosing to put myself in a situation to have loud sound, I don't want it.
1:26:24 Dax Shepard? Okay, now I'm gonna come at you accusatory in response.
1:26:27 Speaker 01 Okay, let's hear it.
1:26:27 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.
1:26:35 Speaker 01 Okay, you think all of a sudden?
1:26:39 Dax Shepard? Tell me about that gold chain.
1:26:40 Speaker 01 For the last twelve years, I've been telling you I will not be in your cult.
1:26:43 Dax Shepard? Is that gold?
1:26:44 Speaker 01 It's not real gold.
1:26:45 Dax Shepard? Oh, I was gonna say, that would be incredible. And it would probably weigh like six pounds.
1:26:50 Speaker 01 It is actually kinda heavy, but just, it's not. It's, um, but it's a great necklace. I got it from Sarah Henler.
1:26:56 Dax Shepard? Okay, great.
1:26:56 Speaker 01 Who I love, um, but no, it was quite reasonably priced, very reasonably priced, less than $200.
1:27:02 Dax Shepard? Oh, wow. I'm surprised, cuz I could see you, if something's too cheap, you might not get it even if you loved it.
1:27:08 Speaker 01 I recently, I bought some pants from The Gap.
1:27:13 Dax Shepard? Okay, great.
1:27:14 Speaker 01 Um, my mom and I both bought them. We bought matching pants.
1:27:18 Dax Shepard? Mother, daughter, pants?
1:27:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, when I was home. I love them.
1:27:21 Dax Shepard? And you were in Georgia, though.
1:27:22 Speaker 01 I was. There's an outdoor mall. Obviously, that's what I'm talking about at home.
1:27:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:27:27 Speaker 01 Um, pretty much my mom and I go from outdoor mall to outdoor mall.
1:27:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:27:31 Speaker 01 So we were at one-
1:27:32 Dax Shepard? God, I'm jealous of that. I wish I liked that. That sounds so fun. Cause there's treats, you go to the food court.
1:27:38 Speaker 01 Well, there's no food court, there's restaurants. So, yeah, my mom and I went to one outdoor mall called Forum. Then we went to another outdoor mall called Avalon.
1:27:47 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
1:27:47 Speaker 01 And, you know, we stopped in, we stopped at one of the places and we got some snacks and I had a wine.
1:27:53 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah.
1:27:54 Speaker 01 And we keep shopping, shopping. Then my dad and my brother came to meet us and we had dinner.
1:28:00 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?
1:28:05 Speaker 01 No, I don't.
1:28:05 Dax Shepard? You don't? That's great.
1:28:07 Speaker 01 I don't ever feel judged by them.
1:28:11 Dax Shepard? Okay, that's nice.
1:28:13 Speaker 01 That's really nice.
1:28:14 Dax Shepard? That's a luxury.
1:28:15 Speaker 01 It's a real-
1:28:16 Dax Shepard? A lot of parents are quite judgmental.
1:28:17 Speaker 01 If anything, unfortunately, there's judgment going the opposite way.
1:28:21 Dax Shepard? That's right, yeah.
1:28:22 Speaker 01 And I try, I, I know it's all about me, of course, not about them.
1:28:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:28:27 Speaker 01 My judgments are not about them. Um, but, you know, I do worry. Sometimes I worry.
1:28:35 Dax Shepard? About?
1:28:36 Speaker 01 Like, my judgments come out of worry. And I guess-
1:28:39 Dax Shepard? So do theirs.
1:28:40 Speaker 01 So does everyone.
1:28:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:28:41 Speaker 01 Everyone's judgments come out of worry.
1:28:44 Dax Shepard? I was just, in fact, I showed one of my daughters the post, cause I found it very inspiring.
1:28:50 Speaker 01 What post?
1:28:50 Dax Shepard? I follow a day, this account, Daily Stoic, or Daily Stoicism, only two. And it was, um, some rules to live by by the Stoics. And, um, do not complain. Do not complain out loud, not even when you're by yourself.
1:29:07 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:29:08 Dax Shepard? I like it.
1:29:08 Speaker 01 Interesting.
1:29:09 Dax Shepard? I really like it.
1:29:10 Speaker 01 But you love to air grievances.
1:29:12 Dax Shepard? Well, but like, I'll come off a motorcycle going real fast and you'll never hear me complain. You know, like, I, I'm not a, I'm not a complainer. You think I'm a complainer?
1:29:21 Speaker 01 Well, I think we, well, I guess is how are we defining complaining? Because yeah, I think we talk about things we think are problems. In a way that that's complaining, that's complaining about the world, and I think it's a good thing.
1:29:34 Dax Shepard? Complaining or objecting?
1:29:36 Speaker 01 Hmm, what's the difference? Give an example of complaining, like verbally, and then an example of, if you can.
1:29:43 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I hate work. I hate that I have to get up at 8 a.m. every day. I can't stand it. So it's like I'm somehow a victim of some situation. And there's, it's almost unfair that I have to do this thing.
1:29:55 Speaker 01 I see, yes. Okay, yep.
1:29:56 Dax Shepard? It's like a little indulgent.
1:29:58 Speaker 01 Entitled a little bit. Okay, sure, great.
1:30:02 Dax Shepard? Um.
1:30:03 Speaker 01 And objecting, because I think it's okay to complain about things you think are wrong morally.
1:30:10 Dax Shepard? I wouldn't call that complaining.
1:30:12 Speaker 01 I see.
1:30:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I would call that like objecting, dissenting.
1:30:16 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:30:17 Dax Shepard? You know, debating, arguing, standing up for something.
1:30:21 Speaker 01 Okay, I see that. Yeah, there's a difference, for sure. Okay, so no complaining?
1:30:25 Dax Shepard? No complaining.
1:30:27 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
1:30:27 Dax Shepard? Um, I want to pull it up.
1:30:29 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:30:29 Dax Shepard? These are good tips.
1:30:31 Speaker 01 All right, we love good tips.
1:30:32 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.
1:30:49 Speaker 01 Sure.
1:30:51 Dax Shepard? Um, very, very Buddhist. Okay, here we go. You ready?
1:30:56 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:30:56 Dax Shepard? Let me get my volume all the way up.
1:30:58 Speaker 05 Things you need to stop doing, according to the Stoics. Number one, stop complaining, Marx really writes in Meditations. He says, "Don't be overheard complaining even to yourself." "If you can practice acceptance, if you can see things for what they are as they are, you can move on, you can deal with them." Which leads to the next one, which is, "Stop focusing on things that are not in your control." As the Stoics say, "We don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens." Number three, you gotta stop judging, and you gotta 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 gotta stop worrying about the future." "We suffer more in imagination than in reality," Seneca says.
1:31:43 Speaker 05 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.
1:31:57 Dax Shepard? Tolerant with others.
1:31:59 Speaker 05 Your ambition, your identity to things that are not up to you. That's what Marcus Aurelius said was the crazy thing about ambition. That it's tying your sanity, your hope, your peace, your happiness to an outcome that you don't necessarily control. And finally, you gotta stop acting like you're gonna live forever. You are not. It's not that life is short, Seneca says, it's that we waste a lot of it. And we waste it because we think it is long, because we think we have tomorrow. We don't. Don't do it later. Do it now. Act as if you don't know how long you have, which is true. You don't. And.
1:32:29 Dax Shepard? Well, and it shut itself off there.
1:32:32 Speaker 01 That was probably, they probably did it on purpose. So it's like, you want more, but you can't have more.
1:32:36 Dax Shepard? Accept it.
1:32:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:32:37 Dax Shepard? 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 needed to hear, was you don't have to have an opinion on everything.
1:32:51 Speaker 01 Ooh, that's a toughie. Well, I find that complicated. I think.
1:32:57 Dax Shepard? Let's hear your opinion on that.
1:32:59 Speaker 01 Well, we're not gonna have a show if we don't have opinions.
1:33:01 Dax Shepard? A thousand percent true.
1:33:02 Speaker 01 So we are to have opinions.
1:33:04 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah. I was just teasing.
1:33:05 Speaker 01 When I grew up,
1:33:08 Speaker 01 we were taught to have a critical opinion of, of things.
1:33:13 Dax Shepard? Same.
1:33:14 Speaker 01 It was in class, like read a thing and then figure out with real points, what your opinion is on it.
1:33:22 Dax Shepard? Critical thinking.
1:33:23 Speaker 01 Critical thinking.
1:33:24 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:33:24 Speaker 01 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 it.
1:33:35 Dax Shepard? Didn't ask for it.
1:33:36 Speaker 01 Ask for it.
1:33:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:33:38 Speaker 01 It's irrelevant. It's just you trying to have a voice for no reason. Yes, it's slippery. But I also think it's okay to take in all the information and form, and I thought about it.
1:33:52 Dax Shepard? And I'd imagine you're free to have opinions on important things.
1:33:55 Speaker 01 Right.
1:33:56 Dax Shepard? Under this edict, but I definitely know, I've even said this on here in the last couple of years. Like I have a mantra in my house, which is like, your opinion's not needed here. Which is al- almost always true.
1:34:11 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:34:12 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 but that one's
1:34:19 Speaker 01 It's hard.
1:34:20 Dax Shepard? That one's the hardest.
1:34:21 Speaker 01 It's hard for me. That's very hard for me, too. I actually, you know what? I just had to apologize to someone recently because of this very thing. Actually, it's weird that you're bringing it up. I'm, I'm really, I'm embarrassed that I behaved this way. So I want to start by saying that. And I did apologize.
1:34:38 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:34:39 Speaker 01 Um.
1:34:39 Dax Shepard? Were you drunk?
1:34:40 Speaker 01 No.
1:34:41 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:34:41 Speaker 01 I was totally sober.
1:34:42 Dax Shepard? Okay, that makes it harder, I think.
1:34:46 Speaker 01 I was with Jess.
1:34:48 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
1:34:49 Speaker 01 And we were on a big adventure one day.
1:34:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:34:52 Speaker 01 Um, we decided we were gonna 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.
1:35:01 Dax Shepard? You're treating LA like the outdoor mall.
1:35:03 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:35:04 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:35:04 Speaker 01 We're on vacation in LA.
1:35:06 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:35:06 Speaker 01 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.
1:35:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I was, I was gonna say, I can't imagine he loves shopping, but.
1:35:20 Speaker 01 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.
1:35:52 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:35:53 Speaker 01 And then we decide we're gonna walk to Echo Park. Now, for people who don't know, that's far, that's like, far. It's not that far.
1:36:01 Dax Shepard? Probably what, three and a half, four miles?
1:36:03 Speaker 01 I didn't look at the mileage, but from where we were, which was already Sunset Junction.
1:36:08 Dax Shepard? Oh, then, yeah, okay.
1:36:09 Speaker 01 It was an additional forty-five minutes.
1:36:12 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:36:12 Speaker 01 Forty-five minute walk from there.
1:36:13 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
1:36:14 Speaker 01 Okay, so but we decide we're gonna do it. And but we'll stop in stores. So we're going, we go into a store, a men's store, and.
1:36:24 Speaker 01 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, the same shirt, but different color.
1:36:51 Dax Shepard? Color or collar?
1:36:53 Speaker 01 Color.
1:36:53 Dax Shepard? Okay.
1:36:54 Speaker 01 Same exact shirt.
1:36:55 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
1:36:55 Speaker 01 And I was like, well, I like the other color better.
1:36:58 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:36:59 Speaker 01 And he was like, yeah, yeah, me too. Then then we go to check out and he gives, he's, he buys both.
1:37:07 Dax Shepard? Interesting.
1:37:08 Speaker 01 And I was like, you're buying both? And he was like, well, yeah. And I was like, but it's the same. I was like, it's the same. You don't need both. And I said, I said it like that. And he was like, well. And he but and he bought it. He didn't change his mind, which I'm glad about. And I was like, I mean, it's kind of like a specific shirt. Like it's not a white tee and a black tee. It's specific. So you you don't really need two of the same thing.
1:37:39 Dax Shepard? Right.
1:37:40 Speaker 01 Okay. So then that's over.
1:37:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
1:37:43 Speaker 01 But then after I was like, who am I to tell him he doesn't need two of the same shirt? Like even if that is my opinion.
1:37:52 Dax Shepard? Or your personal preference for you, how you would buy a shirt?
1:37:55 Speaker 01 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.
1:38:02 Dax Shepard? This is not bad, Monica.
1:38:04 Speaker 01 Well, I feel.
1:38:05 Dax Shepard? I can't even, but I was expecting something much more hurtful, maybe.
1:38:11 Speaker 01 I'm not a mean girl.
1:38:12 Dax Shepard? Well, just you had to apologize.
1:38:14 Speaker 01 I did because I.
1:38:15 Dax Shepard? So my thought was, oh, you hurt his feelings.
1:38:17 Speaker 01 I didn't hurt his feelings, but I did make him.
1:38:20 Dax Shepard? Self conscious.
1:38:21 Speaker 01 Exactly. I made him self conscious.
1:38:24 Dax Shepard? So like second guess himself.
1:38:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, 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.
1:38:35 Dax Shepard? An experienced shopper. That's what you were thinking.
1:38:37 Speaker 01 I did. I'm like, I know about shopping and so like you don't.
1:38:40 Dax Shepard? And you're new to shopping and I see how you wanna.
1:38:43 Speaker 01 And I thought. You know, you'll probably just have to return it and that's gonna be a pain. Like, I know how this goes. Also, like. If you ever express any like money. Troubles and you're scared of spending and I know you don't, like, that's a useless spend, but none of it's my business.
1:39:02 Dax Shepard? No.
1:39:03 Speaker 01 None of it is my business. And that's why I had to apologize cuz cuz. I guess that's for me, like in apologies.
1:39:14 Speaker 01 I really, I have to be sorry. Like, I'm not just gonna say, oh, I'm sorry.
1:39:20 Dax Shepard? You have to feel bad that you did something. Yeah, yeah.
1:39:22 Speaker 01 I did something that I recognize. I don't wanna be doing in life and I'm sorry I did it to you and I'm not gonna do it again. I'm gonna try not to do it.
1:39:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:39:33 Speaker 01 Anyway.
1:39:34 Dax Shepard? So the Stoics, they. They were whispering to you.
1:39:37 Speaker 01 Well, I'm Buddhist.
1:39:39 Dax Shepard? I was in a similar situation last night, but I I did um resist. I'm I'm sitting. In the nook, like in at the booth.
1:39:49 Speaker 01 Uh huh, in your kitchen.
1:39:49 Dax Shepard? And I'm watching someone in my house cook pierogies on a pan.
1:39:53 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:39:54 Dax Shepard? And I'm watching them flip the pierogies with their fingers in the pan. And I wanna say so bad. If I wanna use tongs, you're gonna burn your finger.
1:40:04 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:40:05 Dax Shepard? And then I go. No.
1:40:07 Speaker 01 They'll burn their finger.
1:40:08 Dax Shepard? I don't need to do that.
1:40:09 Speaker 01 Huh?
1:40:10 Dax Shepard? Um, that'll be its own issue. No, I won't.
1:40:14 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:40:16 Dax Shepard? And this person burnt their finger.
1:40:17 Speaker 01 Oh, they did?
1:40:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah. And then they had to burn finger. And I was washing dishes and then I shared with another person. Um, oh, man, this is great. I I wanted to say that and I just didn't.
1:40:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:40:30 Dax Shepard? And like. Everything's fine. This person has a burnt finger. They're dealing with it. They learned the lesson way better than if I told them not to.
1:40:38 Speaker 01 You're right.
1:40:38 Dax Shepard? They didn't even 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.
1:40:45 Speaker 01 You're controlling them.
1:40:47 Dax Shepard? Like, let, let life teach everyone their lessons.
1:40:50 Speaker 01 I know.
1:40:50 Dax Shepard? No, I'm not saying that to you. I'm saying that to me.
1:40:52 Speaker 01 No, I agree. I, I, I agree. But also, now here, what about this? The finger's burnt, right?
1:40:59 Dax Shepard? Yep.
1:41:00 Speaker 01 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.
1:41:09 Dax Shepard? We're not allowed to complain because of the stoics.
1:41:12 Speaker 01 Right. Then what? Cause that's when I'm like, I don't wanna hear it.
1:41:18 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:41:19 Speaker 01 Because you did this.
1:41:21 Dax Shepard? You juggled chainsaws and your fucking hand got cut off.
1:41:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I don't wanna hear it. I'm a very much, I don't wanna hear it, girl.
1:41:27 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,
1:41:39 Dax Shepard? I can acknowledge what you're going through, and say, I witness you, and I don't have to fake sympathy.
1:41:47 Speaker 01 Right.
1:41:47 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 wanna say.
1:42:04 Speaker 01 Right.
1:42:05 Dax Shepard? Is like, this is your fault.
1:42:07 Speaker 01 Right.
1:42:08 Dax Shepard? And, um, I don't wanna deal with your emotions. But, but also, I don't know, we zoom out, it's like, yeah, I make mistakes all the time.
1:42:15 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:42:16 Dax Shepard? So often, they're probably my fault. And if I'm...
1:42:20 Speaker 01 But if you're complaining about it to other people for hours... You shouldn't.
1:42:26 Dax Shepard? You've lost the right to do that.
1:42:27 Speaker 01 I kinda think so.
1:42:28 Dax Shepard? Like you can only complain about stuff that was truly you had nothing to do with.
1:42:31 Speaker 01 Or, or you can complain.
1:42:33 Dax Shepard? I'm open to that, being the truth, but.
1:42:35 Speaker 01 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.
1:42:45 Dax Shepard? I mean, that's what I'm hoping to hear, but I didn't get that. But that's fine, because I just, I got out of a lot of.
1:42:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, you did the right thing.
1:42:52 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, I'll grab Neosporin and a Band-Aid, and then we're, we're on, and that's all up to them.
1:43:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. But do you think some, okay, now, do you think in general, some people are better decision makers than others?
1:43:10 Dax Shepard? Of course. Look around you.
1:43:11 Speaker 01 I know. That's how I feel.
1:43:13 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:43:13 Speaker 01 So, is it?
1:43:17 Speaker 01 If you consider yourself a pretty good decision maker.
1:43:21 Dax Shepard? Of course I do.
1:43:22 Speaker 01 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.
1:43:32 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 gonna think through everything, and I'm gonna really try to model out the future and always make the right decision. And that should have nothing to do with how anyone else is living their life, ideally. My best version of myself.
1:43:53 Speaker 01 It's so hard when you see it's causing them pain or distress.
1:43:56 Dax Shepard? Well, how often do you have friends that's like, they keep getting in their own way?
1:43:59 Speaker 01 Yes, I know.
1:44:00 Dax Shepard? And, but, I think you gotta get mildly realistic. Unless they come and ask you, I'm gonna 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 gonna change them, and that is also rubbish. You're not gonna change anyone.
1:44:18 Speaker 01 But.
1:44:19 Dax Shepard? 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 gonna be however it is and all of the consequences of that. And, and you get to be on your path without anyone telling you, maybe you should loosen up on your.
1:44:35 Speaker 01 Of course.
1:44:35 Dax Shepard? You know?
1:44:36 Speaker 01 It's just hard when you see people get very, um.
1:44:41 Speaker 01 Stuck or fixated on something that is, I mean.
1:44:46 Dax Shepard? Counterproductive to their goals.
1:44:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:44:49 Dax Shepard? And you want the best for them.
1:44:50 Speaker 01 You want the best for them and it's to me feels like it's an it's easy to just say, hey, just so you know, like I'm seeing this. Like I think there are nice ways of doing it, not like, well, you shouldn't have done that. You shouldn't have touched the pan. Like I think there are some half manipulative ways of doing it, like saying, like, oh, I know that happened to me.
1:45:13 Dax Shepard? When I was six, back when I was stupid.
1:45:16 Speaker 01 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.
1:45:26 Dax Shepard? Yeah, you could relate.
1:45:28 Speaker 01 You could do that.
1:45:29 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.
1:45:41 Speaker 01 Okay.
1:45:42 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?
1:45:58 Speaker 01 Hmm.
1:45:59 Dax Shepard? I think it'd be way less compelling because a lot of this stuff is just getting old. Like there's no effort on my part. I'm not trying to be a certain person. But over time, I think people tend to change in kind of predictable ways.
1:46:13 Speaker 01 Interesting.
1:46:14 Dax Shepard? You don't think so?
1:46:15 Speaker 01 Well, what do you mean? Like you think you're zen and I'm not?
1:46:19 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.
1:46:45 Dax Shepard? Or let's just say, almost all people get a little more conservative as they get older.
1:46:51 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:46:51 Dax Shepard? You know, that's just a, maybe you'll be excluded from that, but it's a very common pattern.
1:46:56 Speaker 01 Very common, yeah.
1:46:57 Dax Shepard? So it's like, I'm also, it's curious if I was thirty seven, if you were talking to thirty seven year old Dax all the time, I probably would be much more revved up about a lot of the stuff you're revved up about.
1:47:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:07 Dax Shepard? I can almost guarantee it.
1:47:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:09 Dax Shepard? And so, I have this mixed emotion of like, I think it's great for the show,
1:47:16 Dax Shepard? and I feel bad for us that we're not in the same year where maybe we would see eye to eye more.
1:47:24 Speaker 01 I don't know. I don't, I, I mean, sure, age has, has parts, is part of it, but I think us not seeing eye to eye always is
1:47:37 Speaker 01 are, we have different personalities and different experiences on, in life.
1:47:42 Dax Shepard? It's multifaceted. You're a woman, I'm a man.
1:47:45 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:47:46 Dax Shepard? You're brown, I'm white.
1:47:47 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:47:48 Dax Shepard? There's nu- innumerable things. One of them is twelve years.
1:47:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, one of them is twelve years.
1:47:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:47:55 Speaker 01 But I don't, I guess I'm like, it, yeah, I mean.
1:48:00 Dax Shepard? I think you take, you're taking offense to that.
1:48:02 Speaker 01 Well, it's
1:48:02 Dax Shepard? 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 you, or that I have progressed.
1:48:11 Speaker 01 Finish line.
1:48:12 Dax Shepard? Exactly. I'm not saying that like, I'm the product of wisdom or anything. I'm saying fifty year olds and thirty seven year olds are different.
1:48:20 Speaker 01 Definitely, definitely.
1:48:22 Dax Shepard? And
1:48:22 Speaker 01 But I'm also not twenty, so I don't know if we're
1:48:25 Dax Shepard? Let me say this, I'm taking you out of this. I was a lot different at thirty seven than I am at fifty.
1:48:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:48:30 Dax Shepard? That's all. So I know I changed a lot in the last thirteen years. And my hunch is you'll change a bit too.
1:48:39 Speaker 01 Right. I'm, I hope.
1:48:42 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:48:42 Speaker 01 I mean, the goal is to be changing.
1:48:45 Dax Shepard? I just wonder like, I bet, he- here's what I'm saying. If we had time machines.
1:48:49 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:48:50 Dax Shepard? And I could Be thirty seven and fast forward and listen to myself as a fifteen year old argue with you?
1:48:57 Speaker 01 As a fifty year old, yeah.
1:48:58 Dax Shepard? No, as a, as a thirty seven year old.
1:49:00 Speaker 01 You're a thirty seven year old listening to you now.
1:49:03 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I'm thirty seven, I get in a time machine, I go, I go ahead in time thirteen years and I hear me arguing with you.
1:49:08 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:49:09 Dax Shepard? I guarantee thirty seven year old me, many times would be like, oh my god, she's right. What are you talking about?
1:49:20 Dax Shepard? And I think if you, it's, it's possible that when you're fifty and you listen to some of this, you might also go, oh my god, that's so funny, I see what he was saying.
1:49:29 Speaker 01 Sure, probably.
1:49:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. That's all.
1:49:31 Speaker 01 Where did that come from? Where did this train of thought come from?
1:49:34 Dax Shepard? Oh, I've had this, uh, for years, there's a lot of time, there's tons of disagreements we have that I chalk up to our differences.
1:49:41 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:49:42 Dax Shepard? But then some of them I chalk up to our age difference.
1:49:45 Speaker 01 But did something happen in this conversation that made you say that, that it felt like it came out of nowhere?
1:49:50 Dax Shepard? No, it didn't come out of nowhere, we were talking about opinions.
1:49:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:49:54 Dax Shepard? And whether or not you need to give your opinion.
1:49:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:49:57 Dax Shepard? And whether or not you think you should tell someone to...
1:50:00 Speaker 01 Do you think that's with age, you've, you've come to that conclusion?
1:50:02 Dax Shepard? I think as you get older, you're less interested in trying, you've just, you've been friends with people for forty years and they never change and you give up.
1:50:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, but I don't...
1:50:13 Dax Shepard? Like, I don't think any grandparents are telling other grandparents how they should live their life. I think there's a ton of eighteen year olds giving each other advice on how they should live their life.
1:50:20 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, they have a lot of time ahead.
1:50:23 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:50:23 Speaker 01 There's more reason to, honestly, if you're a fifty year old or a six, you know, the older we get,
1:50:31 Speaker 01 the less time there is to make that, those changes, so I do think there is like, what's the, what is the point?
1:50:37 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:50:37 Speaker 01 Telling someone my age how to behave.
1:50:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:50:41 Speaker 01 Or older than, oh, my parents, right, like, they're them, they are them at this point.
1:50:46 Dax Shepard? But you will have a friend when you're eighty, and your eighty year old friend will be making mistakes, like, they'll, they'll be getting in their own way.
1:50:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:50:55 Dax Shepard? And my hunch is when you're eighty and your eighty year old friend is getting in their own way, it's much easier for you to not say anything about it.
1:51:02 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:02 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.
1:51:06 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
1:51:07 Dax Shepard? And if they keep doing this, they're never gonna reach their goal.
1:51:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:11 Dax Shepard? So yeah, I just think there's differences as you age. I feel it even in a five-year gap between Kristen and I. Like she has a very much, her opinion about work is very much what my opinion about work was at 45.
1:51:25 Dax Shepard? And even in the last three years, my opinion has evolved dramatically in that way. And I just recognize, oh yeah, I gotta remind myself. What did I think when I was 45?
1:51:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:51:37 Dax Shepard? And what did I think at 37?
1:51:39 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, I think I do know that that was the point of my story is that I caught it after. I mean, I catch it, but I recognize that's not who I want to be.
1:51:53 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:51:54 Speaker 01 So all I can do is try not to do it.
1:51:59 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 or you're 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.
1:52:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:52:15 Dax Shepard? Are you alive?
1:52:16 Speaker 01 I don't think anyone, again, you know, minus some like, 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.
1:53:06 Speaker 01 James Kimmel Jr. facts. So, watch complications.
1:53:11 Dax Shepard? Oh, great. Tell me about them.
1:53:13 Speaker 01 Watch complications are features or functions added to a timepiece beyond its basic timekeeping function. They can range from simple displays like the date or day of the week to more complex mechanisms like chronographs or perpetual calendars. Essentially, anything on a watch that isn't directly related to telling time is considered a complication.
1:53:36 Speaker 01 Let's see.
1:53:37 Dax Shepard? Do we have a world record for complications?
1:53:40 Speaker 01 Um, 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.
1:53:59 Dax Shepard? Whoa.
1:54:00 Speaker 01 Turbulon, 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.
1:54:29 Dax Shepard? I'm totally listening to you, and I'm getting, I'm getting the answer.
1:54:31 Speaker 01 Okay, great.
1:54:32 Dax Shepard? So you don't have to do that. I'm trying to help.
1:54:33 Speaker 01 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?
1:54:43 Dax Shepard? Is that the same watch I have? What do you have, Rob? Um, the Or that's just one with different complications? Vacheron, which has 41 complications. Forty-one complications.
1:54:53 Speaker 01 It's also called, it's horology.
1:54:56 Dax Shepard? A Vacheron Constantin La Cabadoza 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.
1:55:17 Speaker 01 Well, no, yeah, this says, "The watch with the most complications is the Franc Moulin." Aternitas megaphor boasting thirty six complications, but it features one thousand four hundred and eighty three components and twenty three indications via eighteen hands and five discs.
1:55:36 Dax Shepard? Okay, maybe I was looking at components and also seeing complications and conflated components and complications.
1:55:43 Speaker 01 Oh, and it says, and it says that one holds the record for the most complications. Other manufacturers like the one you just said.
1:55:50 Dax Shepard? Sixty three complications.
1:55:52 Speaker 01 Yes, sixty three, including a Chinese perpetual calendar.
1:55:58 Dax Shepard? Twenty eight hundred seventy seven components and two hundred and forty five jewels inside of that.
1:56:04 Speaker 01 Oh, my goodness. Wow.
1:56:08 Dax Shepard? It's taking a lifetime to build this watch.
1:56:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. What an interesting mind.
1:56:13 Dax Shepard? I wish I was hornier for it. I just can't see the, that doesn't equal value to me.
1:56:18 Speaker 01 It equals value to me because it is made with care.
1:56:23 Dax Shepard? That's true.
1:56:23 Speaker 01 Things that are detailed like that, that are made with such care, I do appreciate.
1:56:28 Dax Shepard? Mine just has one complication.
1:56:31 Speaker 01 It does? What does it have?
1:56:32 Dax Shepard? And I don't even know what it's doing. Oh, seconds, seconds.
1:56:35 Speaker 01 Oh, does it have the date?
1:56:37 Dax Shepard? No.
1:56:38 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
1:56:39 Dax Shepard? But this is my new favorite watch. I love this watch. So simple.
1:56:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, obviously. It doesn't, it only has one complication.
1:56:46 Dax Shepard? It's not complicated and I like that. It doesn't even, it only has three numbers on it too, which I love.
1:56:50 Speaker 01 Oh, that's cool.
1:56:52 Dax Shepard? It's a Panerai.
1:56:53 Speaker 01 Nice.
1:56:54 Dax Shepard? This is the watch I've been coveting for twelve years that George had.
1:56:57 Speaker 01 Oh, cool.
1:56:59 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:56:59 Speaker 01 Okay, I looked up what's currently in the DSM for addiction.
1:57:03 Dax Shepard? Okay, see if I still qualify.
1:57:05 Speaker 01 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, classifies substance use disorders, SUDs, as follows. Alcohol use disorder, caffeine use disorder, even though now they should remove that.
1:57:19 Dax Shepard? They should.
1:57:19 Speaker 01 Eric Topol told us we could drink it.
1:57:21 Dax Shepard? That's right.
1:57:22 Speaker 01 Cannabis use disorder, hallucinogen use disorder, inhalant use disorder, opioid use disorder, sedative hypnotic use disorder, stimulant use disorder, tobacco use disorder.
1:57:36 Dax Shepard? I've got a few of those.
1:57:38 Speaker 01 Includes a category for gambling.
1:57:40 Dax Shepard? No rage, no revenge.
1:57:43 Speaker 01 Yet, no shopping.
1:57:45 Dax Shepard? Ah.
1:57:46 Speaker 01 Which is interesting.
1:57:47 Dax Shepard? No kleptomania.
1:57:48 Speaker 01 That'll probably get added.
1:57:50 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
1:57:51 Speaker 01 The 11 criteria that reflect impaired control, physical dependence and social problems. They are taking more of the substance than intended or using it for longer than intended. Persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance abuse. Spending a great deal of time obtaining, using or recovering from substance use. Neglecting major role obligations due to substance use. Continuing to use despite substance related problems, legal, social, occupational. Tolerance, needing more of the substance to achieve the desired effect. Withdrawal symptoms when not using the substance. Craving for the substance. Using in risky situations, example, driving while intoxicated.
1:58:34 Speaker 01 Having substance related illegal problems.
1:58:37 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
1:58:39 Speaker 01 Those add up.
1:58:41 Dax Shepard? You know, were you at a, were you doing a mental checklist?
1:58:44 Speaker 01 I knew you were gonna say that.
1:58:46 Dax Shepard? Of course I would.
1:58:48 Speaker 01 I knew you were gonna say that.
1:58:50 Dax Shepard? Should I not?
1:58:51 Speaker 01 I don't know.
1:58:52 Dax Shepard? It seemed plausible that you were.
1:58:55 Speaker 01 So excited to.
1:58:57 Dax Shepard? No, I was thinking about my own history.
1:58:59 Speaker 01 But we know yours.
1:59:00 Dax Shepard? Yeah, but I still think about it.
1:59:02 Speaker 01 How many did you have?
1:59:03 Dax Shepard? I've never taken that questionnaire.
1:59:04 Speaker 01 How many did you have?
1:59:06 Dax Shepard? Oh.
1:59:08 Speaker 01 11?
1:59:09 Dax Shepard? Yeah, maybe all of them. I don't know.
1:59:11 Speaker 01 Um, yeah, let's see. Um, taking more of the substance than intended. No, but using it for longer than intended, probably yes.
1:59:23 Speaker 01 Persistent desire or unsuccessful efforts to cut down or control substance use. You probably yes. Um, spending a great deal of time obtaining, using or recovering from substance use. I wonder what a great deal means.
1:59:40 Dax Shepard? That's a highly vague.
1:59:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:59:44 Dax Shepard? Word.
1:59:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't know what we would say for that.
1:59:50 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.
1:59:57 Speaker 01 I guess, I guess.
2:00:00 Speaker 01 But always, it's it's in conjunction with other things, so it feels hard to do that.
2:00:08 Dax Shepard? Right. It's not like you're sitting in your bathtub drinking.
2:00:11 Speaker 01 Exactly, or even like in my house.
2:00:14 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:00:15 Speaker 01 Yeah, so that's harder.
2:00:17 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:00:17 Speaker 01 Um, tolerance, needing more of the substance. Um, yes and no. I feel like if I take one day off, I'm already like back.
2:00:29 Dax Shepard? You're back to your.
2:00:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:00:30 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah.
2:00:31 Speaker 01 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.
2:00:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah, I don't think you're in any stretch physically addicted to alcohol.
2:00:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:00:49 Dax Shepard? But are you grumpier in the evening on the nights you can't drink?
2:00:56 Speaker 01 Again, depends on what I'm doing. Like if I'm playing a game somewhere, no.
2:01:00 Dax Shepard? Right.
2:01:01 Speaker 01 If I'm just like white, yeah, if I'm like just like white knuckling, it's like I really can't drink.
2:01:07 Dax Shepard? Food and you're like, fuck, I can't.
2:01:08 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:01:09 Dax Shepard? Tonight's the night I can't cook and drink wine. Are you agitated while you're cooking?
2:01:14 Speaker 01 Oh, um, maybe.
2:01:19 Speaker 01 Um, craving for the substance, yes. Oh, 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.
2:01:32 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:01:32 Speaker 01 I do want to warn you, and I think it's only nice, okay, sorry, real quick, having substance-related legal problems, no.
2:01:38 Dax Shepard? No.
2:01:38 Speaker 01 Um.
2:01:39 Dax Shepard? Absolutely not.
2:01:39 Speaker 01 Absolutely not. Um, I do want to warn you that next week I will be PMSing.
2:01:46 Dax Shepard? Oh, okay.
2:01:47 Speaker 01 And so will Kristen.
2:01:49 Dax Shepard? Okay. Great. And Carly.
2:01:53 Speaker 01 I just.
2:01:54 Dax Shepard? And probably Anna.
2:01:56 Speaker 01 Anna is always nice to you, though.
2:01:58 Dax Shepard? She is.
2:01:59 Speaker 01 She's afraid of you a little bit.
2:02:01 Dax Shepard? I don't know why I'm so nice to her.
2:02:02 Speaker 01 I know, but you're still the boss.
2:02:04 Dax Shepard? I'm nicer to her than anyone, really.
2:02:06 Speaker 01 I know. But you're the boss.
2:02:10 Dax Shepard? I'm not the boss, that's the thing. In her mind, I am, but I'm not.
2:02:13 Speaker 01 Well, you're, you can be.
2:02:15 Dax Shepard? I'm married to her boss.
2:02:16 Speaker 01 You can be scary.
2:02:19 Dax Shepard? Scary.
2:02:21 Speaker 01 If you're upset, no one wants to upset you.
2:02:23 Dax Shepard? I know, we've covered this. This is like as if I like scream around the house or something.
2:02:28 Speaker 01 I need you to just accept that.
2:02:29 Dax Shepard? Oh, I do.
2:02:30 Speaker 01 Okay, because it's not like.
2:02:31 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 barge.
2:02:38 Speaker 01 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.
2:02:51 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:02:52 Speaker 01 But it is painful when you're angry at someone. I think more than others. And that's just your power.
2:03:02 Dax Shepard? Okay, that's a testament to your power.
2:03:04 Speaker 01 Take that and be grateful. Anyway, so I guess I have it.
2:03:10 Dax Shepard? By the way.
2:03:12 Dax Shepard? No, I don't know. I don't think that's the conclusion. But yeah, even, this happens, take everyone that's close to the circle out of it, and it's like Ange.
2:03:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:03:23 Dax Shepard? Tells me at some point when we're swimming at Barton Springs, like, I'm just so intimidated by you.
2:03:31 Speaker 01 Right.
2:03:31 Dax Shepard? And I go, how like, you're my, you're my baby. She's been my baby since I met her. Like, I'm so tender to her, have been since I met her.
2:03:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:03:40 Dax Shepard? She elicits that in people. That's what's so fun about Ange.
2:03:44 Speaker 01 Sure.
2:03:45 Dax Shepard? Um, 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 like, super gentle and soft.
2:03:55 Speaker 01 It's not necessarily about like who you are towards the person. It can be just like
2:04:02 Dax Shepard? You know someone has a side.
2:04:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, or like what they've seen. I mean, she's been around you in lots of working situations.
2:04:10 Dax Shepard? She has seen me command a group of a hundred people.
2:04:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:04:14 Dax Shepard? As a director of things.
2:04:17 Speaker 01 And also like if you're unhappy on a set or with something like.
2:04:24 Speaker 01 That's often made clear.
2:04:26 Dax Shepard? Uh huh.
2:04:27 Speaker 01 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.
2:04:34 Dax Shepard? Oh.
2:04:37 Speaker 01 Is that a surprise?
2:04:38 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 crews. What I hear repeatedly is I'm like the funnest person that they've ever worked for.
2:04:50 Speaker 01 Oh, I'm not saying you're not fun.
2:04:52 Dax Shepard? Oh, yeah. So I'm just my.
2:04:55 Dax Shepard? 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 of like firm boundaries, but they're always like, we don't yell at people here. Everyone fucks up. No one's burning someone for having messed up. I don't yell at anybody.
2:05:15 Speaker 01 Well, you you do when you're mad, you do.
2:05:19 Dax Shepard? On a set?
2:05:20 Speaker 01 Oh, maybe not on a set. Sorry. It's fine.
2:05:23 Dax Shepard? I can just like I, yeah, I I have um. Maybe a flawed assessment of how I yeah, I've treated some bosses. I've had moments with bosses.
2:05:34 Speaker 01 We've had moments, but that's much different.
2:05:36 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:05:37 Speaker 01 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.
2:05:45 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:05:47 Speaker 01 But. Where everyone's yelling. I mean, it's not like just you.
2:05:52 Dax Shepard? And I think my baseline is hotter to some degree in the way my family talks to each other.
2:05:58 Speaker 01 Sure.
2:05:58 Dax Shepard? Like you and I have arguments, like my brother and I had arguments.
2:06:02 Speaker 01 Yeah. Anyway, so I.
2:06:04 Dax Shepard? So anyways, I'm an alcoholic.
2:06:05 Speaker 01 I mean, that is what I was about to say. It kind of seems like I should evaluate.
2:06:11 Dax Shepard? Well, what's interesting is these questions are positioned as as binary, yes or no.
2:06:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:06:17 Dax Shepard? But that's very incomplete. There's a huge spectrum of, I think about it a lot. Well, I think about it, what, every five minutes?
2:06:26 Speaker 01 Exactly.
2:06:27 Dax Shepard? Every night at five for seven minutes?
2:06:29 Speaker 01 I know.
2:06:30 Dax Shepard? This is really huge. Variety and how many, you know, how these could be answered.
2:06:37 Speaker 01 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. Cause to me, that's sort of how I evaluate it.
2:06:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:06:54 Speaker 01 And, but that's not really
2:06:57 Dax Shepard? Which I think is
2:06:58 Speaker 01 Big of a part of the DSM.
2:06:59 Dax Shepard? 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
2:07:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:07:13 Dax Shepard? Some major adjustment or in a, we say you're going to end up in an institution in jail or death. Like, is that, that's what the projector you're on.
2:07:21 Speaker 01 But I think maybe it's also worth considering
2:07:30 Speaker 01 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 know, there's
2:07:41 Dax Shepard? That's a hard and curious evaluation of just like wanting to have freedom from it. Like in many ways, smoking wasn't an issue for me because it had no negative impact. My girlfriend was a smoker. She didn't care. None of my friends cared.
2:07:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:07:56 Dax Shepard? I could afford it. Not getting in legal trouble. It's not, it's dangerous in 40 years.
2:08:01 Speaker 01 Right.
2:08:02 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.
2:08:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:08:10 Dax Shepard? And that's just a harder thing to rely on for motivation.
2:08:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that takes to time.
2:08:18 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm.
2:08:19 Speaker 01 Which may, so maybe eventually I'll let you know.
2:08:22 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:08:23 Speaker 01 If I stop drinking. Um, just like wine bars and they're so cute and, and, and
2:08:30 Dax Shepard? Cozy.
2:08:31 Speaker 01 Martinis are cute.
2:08:33 Dax Shepard? Yeah, yeah. Oh, I get it.
2:08:36 Speaker 01 Maybe I should work on like.
2:08:39 Speaker 01 My dependence on cuteness.
2:08:41 Dax Shepard? Okay, start there and see if the other stuff is fixed downriver.
2:08:45 Speaker 01 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, um, has been fixed.
2:08:59 Dax Shepard? It's been fixed?
2:09:00 Speaker 01 I believe so.
2:09:01 Dax Shepard? Did you get an explanation of what the problem was?
2:09:04 Speaker 01 So the plumber came and he said, you know, it's draining. And I was like, I know, that's not the problem. I don't know what the problem is. It doesn't seem like it has to do with my apartment.
2:09:16 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:09:17 Speaker 01 And he said, okay, it's probably a pipe thing. Um, and so they scheduled a time. I was out of town, actually. They scheduled a time to replace the pipe or do something with the pipe.
2:09:31 Dax Shepard? Okay, maybe put a camera in it, see what's going on in the pipe.
2:09:34 Speaker 01 Maybe.
2:09:35 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:09:35 Speaker 01 Um, and so far, so good.
2:09:39 Dax Shepard? Wonderful.
2:09:40 Speaker 01 But that's great.
2:09:41 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:09:42 Speaker 01 And I want to just be clear, my landlord's great.
2:09:46 Dax Shepard? Like, she's a nice.
2:09:47 Speaker 01 She's nice, she's a nice person.
2:09:49 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:09:49 Speaker 01 And I have no problems with her. It just. It was bumming me out that that was a gross thing happening.
2:09:57 Dax Shepard? I also think when you live in LA and you pay exorbitant rents, rightly so, you expect a little more.
2:10:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:10:04 Dax Shepard? Like, I think if you were spending eight hundred dollars a month on a one bedroom in Oakland County, where I'm from.
2:10:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:10:10 Dax Shepard? And there was suds coming out, you'd kind of be like, yeah, you get what you pay for.
2:10:13 Speaker 01 Right, right.
2:10:14 Dax Shepard? But when you're spending what is the mortgage on a seven hundred thousand dollar house to live in a one bedroom apartment.
2:10:20 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:10:21 Dax Shepard? I think the expectations go up.
2:10:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's true. Okay, let's see. Oh, I looked up where blood feuds are prominent.
2:10:30 Dax Shepard? Mm hmm, Appalachia.
2:10:32 Speaker 01 Albania.
2:10:33 Dax Shepard? Oh, sure. Kaz Kowfer, my old high school friend.
2:10:38 Speaker 01 Oh, right.
2:10:39 Dax Shepard? He was Albanian.
2:10:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:10:41 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.
2:10:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:10:52 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 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.
2:11:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:11:09 Dax Shepard? And he was a high school student.
2:11:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:11:11 Dax Shepard? And 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 Kaz. We pulled up one day and there's police tape all over the parking lot and we have to park next door. And as we're walking up, we see the full front of the window is gone.
2:11:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:11:31 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. The homeboys crossed the street, started shooting. One came in the window, brother pulled out the Mac 10, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. And I'm like, we were just in class like three hours ago and they were in a huge shootout and he was fine.
2:11:53 Speaker 01 Thank God.
2:11:54 Dax Shepard? I mean, just like emotionally, he was totally fine with the fact that the brother pulled out a Mac 10.
2:12:00 Speaker 01 Yeah. Man, there are different ways of living, growing up.
2:12:05 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.
2:12:13 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
2:12:13 Dax Shepard? And there was a new Chaldean kid came to the school, somehow he had a beef with Kaz. Kaz, on the way, we had 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.
2:12:32 Speaker 01 At school?
2:12:32 Dax Shepard? At school, points a gun at him and Kaz goes. Bitch, you better pull that fucking trigger, cuz if you don't, I'm gonna kill you after school. That was like out of a movie.
2:12:44 Speaker 01 What?
2:12:45 Dax Shepard? Yes.
2:12:46 Speaker 01 But did he?
2:12:47 Dax Shepard? Of course not. He was terrified. Somehow Kaz knew who was real and who wasn't.
2:12:52 Speaker 01 But then did, then did he beat him up, kill him after?
2:12:54 Dax Shepard? He didn't kill him cuz he, 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 looked right at him and said, bitch, you better fucking kill me.
2:13:05 Speaker 01 Oh, my god. That's so scary.
2:13:09 Dax Shepard? It's so next level for a high school student.
2:13:11 Speaker 01 Wow, yeah.
2:13:12 Dax Shepard? Yeah.
2:13:13 Speaker 01 Okay, back to blood feuds.
2:13:14 Dax Shepard? Okay.
2:13:15 Speaker 01 Albania, South Caucuses? South Caucasus?
2:13:22 Dax Shepard? You hear about that in the news, the Caucasus.
2:13:25 Speaker 01 Yeah. Chichenya.
2:13:28 Dax Shepard? The Caucasus.
2:13:29 Speaker 01 Okay, in the US, Appalachian Mountains, in the Old West, Harfield McCoy.
2:13:36 Dax Shepard? Hatfield McCoy.
2:13:37 Speaker 01 Oh, sorry, Hatfield McCoy feud. Um, okay. And then in the Philippines, parts of Greece and Croatia.
2:13:45 Dax Shepard? Also do blood feuds?
2:13:47 Speaker 01 Yep.
2:13:47 Dax Shepard? Hmm.
2:13:48 Speaker 01 Um.
2:13:49 Dax Shepard? It's really related to herding, if you believe Malcolm Gladwell.
2:13:52 Speaker 01 Oh.
2:13:52 Dax Shepard? All these, all these cultures of honor started as herders who have an undefined grazing area.
2:14:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:14:01 Dax Shepard? That butts up often against other people's undefined, and you have to stand your ground, or your sheep are gonna die, and you're not gonna get them food. So this history of standing your ground and herding communities is quite prevalent.
2:14:13 Speaker 01 All right. Well, that's it for James Kimmel Jr. Revenge.
2:14:17 Dax Shepard? I loved this episode.
2:14:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was great.
2:14:19 Dax Shepard? Really got me thinking.
2:14:20 Speaker 01 Me too, and I, I hope it gets everyone thinking, cuz we have such quick triggers.
2:14:25 Dax Shepard? The challenges that legislation can't address are very.
2:14:31 Dax Shepard? Troubling.
2:14:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:14:33 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 get some good results from it and really use it. But it can't really be implemented.
2:14:52 Speaker 01 I know, on a societal level.
2:14:54 Dax Shepard? Yeah, there's nothing we, there's no law we can write.
2:14:57 Speaker 01 Unless like, it can be in schools.
2:15:01 Dax Shepard? Yeah, like a really core.
2:15:03 Speaker 01 Curriculum. But we can't even, I mean, no. Like, we can't even get state to state, county to county, to agree on what should be taught in schools. So I highly doubt this is an option. So just listen to this episode and pass it along, share it.
2:15:19 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, my family. You become legend status. Like it happened 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, stick up for the other. Like, that's a, that's just a very historic familial pride thing. That's like, you're up against that.
2:15:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a lot. It can be practiced, though.
2:15:48 Dax Shepard? Yeah. All right. Love you.
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