Learn. Share. Evolve…

0:00:06 The person who forgives gets almost all of the benefits. It is a misconception, and we can see
0:00:11 this in these brain scan studies, that the beneficiary of forgiveness is always the victim.
0:00:18 It’s a hardwired way of self-healing from trauma and pain of the past. The word give in forgiveness
0:00:23 is not a gift to the perpetrator who caused your harm. You’re giving them nothing. You don’t even
0:00:29 have to communicate with them to experience these amazing neurological benefits of forgiving
0:00:36 a grievance inside your own head. So it is this kind of wonder drug or superpower that we have
0:00:39 that’s often been neglected in our society.
0:00:50 I’m Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast, and we go all over the world looking
0:00:57 for remarkable people to help you be remarkable. And we found another great person. His name is
0:01:06 James Kimmel Jr. He’s a lawyer, don’t hold that against him, and a behavioral science researcher.
0:01:15 And he proposes a really radical reinterpretation of the role of revenge in our society. He, in
0:01:22 this book, he views much of what we call justice-seeking as kind of a dopamine-driven revenge cycle that
0:01:29 probably causes more problems than it solves and perpetuates violence and suffering.
0:01:37 His latest book is called The Science of Revenge. It’s a very fascinating book. It utilizes his personal
0:01:44 survival experiences, which maybe he’ll get into as a youth, plus examples from leaders such as Hitler and
0:01:52 Stalin and Mao to shed light on the causes of violence in our society. So welcome to the show, James.
0:01:55 Guy, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
0:02:01 I just want to tell you that I went to law school for two weeks and then dropped out. So that’s my extent of
0:02:05 knowledge of the law. Well, then you were wiser than me, I think.
0:02:12 Well, your son is entering law school now, so let’s see, second-generation lawyer, right?
0:02:19 Yeah, but my wife is a transactional lawyer, not a litigator, and my son intends to do the same and
0:02:25 stay away from litigation, which I refer to as the professional revenge business. So I’m happy that
0:02:28 he’s going to steer clear of that aspect of the law.
0:02:33 Well, if litigation is professional revenge, what is criminal law?
0:02:39 That is also professional revenge seeking. If you’re a prosecutor, right, you’re seeking revenge
0:02:45 on behalf of society. And if you’re a civil litigator, you’re seeking revenge for money on
0:02:52 behalf of your clients. And so, yeah, we’re right there with it. And it’s legalized revenge
0:02:58 that we call justice. That’s the brand name that we call the revenge that we seek. With doctors and
0:03:04 opioids, if it’s bought on the street, it’s called heroin. But if we prescribe it, it might be called
0:03:11 Oxycontin. Same kind of drugs, same addictive properties in both instances, just like justice
0:03:14 and revenge seeking. So we have a problem on our hands.
0:03:24 So you are literally saying that the desire for revenge and the act of revenge is an addiction,
0:03:25 like a medical condition.
0:03:33 Yeah, it can be just like with drugs. So, you know, about 20% of the people in a population who
0:03:39 experiment with drugs or alcohol actually become addicted to them. And we haven’t actually studied
0:03:45 this question of just how broadly experiences revenge addiction. But if it follows that pattern,
0:03:51 it might be the same thing. And we should be clear when we talk about addiction, we’re talking about
0:03:59 compulsive behavior. We all experience pleasure from revenge fantasies and imagining revenge gratification,
0:04:05 the way we all experience pleasure from opioids. If anybody takes an opioid, they’re going to experience
0:04:11 some type of euphoric high. And we’re going to experience that with revenge seeking. When it
0:04:18 becomes addictive is when we can’t resist the desire to engage in revenge behavior or take a drug,
0:04:25 despite knowing the negative consequences. That’s when it moves from just a pleasurable experience into
0:04:27 something that’s more pathological.
0:04:37 And is one of your goals to get the diagnostic and statistical manual to recognize this as a medical
0:04:38 condition?
0:04:44 Yes, absolutely. And we have a lot of evidence now. We have neuroscience evidence, we have behavioral
0:04:53 evidence, and we have world history evidence backing up this idea that humanity throughout centuries now
0:05:01 in thousands of years has been experiencing revenge addictive moments, either in our individual lives or
0:05:08 in our corporate lives at population scale. We know that revenge seeking is the primary motivation for
0:05:15 almost all forms of human violence, beginning with bullying and youth violence, up through intimate partner
0:05:23 violence, street and gang violence, extremism, terrorism, genocide, war, all up and down the ladder
0:05:29 of severity. We know that revenge is the primary motivation for that. And then the question becomes
0:05:36 is, well, why do we seek revenge at all? And over the last 20 years, neuroscientists have been able to
0:05:38 solve that question.
0:05:46 And the fact that it is not yet recognized in the DSM, does that pose like real problems? Or is it just a
0:05:47 kind of a formality?
0:05:53 Oh, it poses real problems. It’s not a surprise that it isn’t recognized there yet.
0:06:02 Because the science that is able to show us why we want revenge has only emerged in, as I say,
0:06:10 the last 20 years. And so this is relatively new science. And the DSM isn’t about adding new scientific
0:06:16 discoveries as quickly as possible. The people who create that, the American Psychiatric Association,
0:06:23 take their time and want to make sure they’re right before they put a diagnosis into the DSM. But I think
0:06:30 the time has come now to seriously consider and make that move and that we need it. Because by seeing
0:06:37 revenge seeking as an addictive process, and we can get into how and why and the neuroscience in a moment,
0:06:43 But by seeing it that way, this opens up for the first time really in human history, the opportunity
0:06:49 to prevent and treat violence using public health methods of prevention and treatment,
0:06:56 rather than relying, as we’ve been for, I don’t know, the last 5,000 years, solely on the threat of
0:07:01 punishment and criminal justice systems, which have been around for a long time. But it seems like this is
0:07:08 about as good as they get. We still have maybe the same 20% of the people that become addicted to drugs
0:07:15 and alcohol, about 20% of people throughout their lifetimes seem to have contact with the criminal
0:07:24 justice system, basically being charged. And it’s time to see the revenge desire as an addictive process.
0:07:30 And when we do, we get to open up our entire addiction prevention and treatment toolkit that we’ve
0:07:38 developed over the last decades, and employ that to focus on violence and compulsive revenge seeking,
0:07:46 in order to add to not replace, but add to the criminal justice system, so that we can really take that next
0:07:54 level step in minimizing violence and reducing it. But obviously, revenge has been around for a long time,
0:07:58 interesting. Is there any benefit? Does it serve any purpose?
0:08:08 The leading theory from an evolutionary perspective on why humans derive pleasure from revenge is that this
0:08:16 probably started in the Pleistocene epic, maybe as early as the Ice Age, and maybe even earlier than that.
0:08:24 But the idea is, and like I said, this is the leading theory, is that as humans began to form societies and
0:08:31 live in groups, they needed a way, and this is an adaptive strategy at first, to cause people in
0:08:43 a way that they’re going to be in society. And if you’re going to be in a way to live in a way.
0:08:49 And you don’t get to come and take those from me. And if you do, there will be a negative consequence
0:08:57 consequence for that. And so in that way, revenge seeking has a deterrent effect, or at least we think
0:09:04 it does. And it does seem to have some deterrent effect. And it did when we’re trying to deter activities
0:09:14 that can frustrate or stop our ability to survive and or procreate. So revenge used purely for those
0:09:21 types of adaptive strategies makes sense. Revenge, on the other hand, the way it’s often used in modern
0:09:30 society is to avenge injuries to our egos, our sense of self-identity, self-respect. There are
0:09:36 psychological makeup and the way we want to project and see ourselves in the world. And when revenge is used
0:09:44 in that context, it becomes less adaptive. And more importantly, revenge, although it has this
0:09:53 deterrent effect to some degree, it also has the primary motivational effect, as I just mentioned
0:10:00 earlier, of motivating almost every form of human violence. It’s pretty hard to make a good case that
0:10:06 revenge is the best strategy for stopping violence when it is the number one reason why people commit it.
0:10:15 That is a real disconnect. And so there are probably are better ways of creating deterrence to violence
0:10:21 seeking that’s motivated by revenge desire. And that’s what I argue in the book. And that’s by targeting the
0:10:29 the desire itself inside the brain, where it forms. And if we focus there, we can achieve this next level
0:10:36 violence reduction by deterring violence at that level. And not only with the threat of punishment,
0:10:44 which that threat of punishment is why we almost in all cases are engaging in violent behavior in the
0:10:50 first place, because we experience grievances throughout our lives on an almost daily, hourly basis,
0:10:57 small and large. And what we can see neurologically now inside our brains is that when you experience a
0:11:04 grievance, which is a real or imagined sense of having been wronged or mistreated or shamed or humiliated,
0:11:10 that pain activates the pain network inside your brain, the anterior insula, the brain doesn’t like
0:11:16 pain and wants to compensate with a nice dose of pleasure. And the first thing it does is activate the
0:11:23 pleasure and reward circuitry that activates for addiction. And we start ruminating on fantasizing
0:11:30 about and potentially engaging in revenge acts. So you may consider this a little bit off the wall,
0:11:38 but we kind of have an off the wall podcast. So let’s say you go to a WNBA game and you see the star
0:11:46 get poked in her eye. Then you see a few plays later, someone else on our team takes down the person who
0:11:53 poked your star in the eye. That was an act of revenge. It was justice. It was grievance. Do you
0:12:00 look at that and you say, all right, in the context of the WNBA or athletics, that was justified. You
0:12:07 have to do that. Or would you pull Sophie Cunningham aside and say, let me help you deal with your
0:12:15 addiction, addiction to revenge. Revenge is really prevalent in sport and sports have a lot of rules
0:12:22 and controls to maintain and eliminate most forms of violence. But that form of violence that you just
0:12:29 described, let’s say a takedown, right? Which is in direct violation of the rules that we have. So is it
0:12:35 really necessary? If it’s retaliation because you’ve just poked my teammate in the eye, that’s something that
0:12:41 happened in the past. You poked my teammate in the eye sometime earlier in the game or maybe in a prior
0:12:48 game even. And now you’re going to retaliate and inflict pain upon that person who did that. That’s
0:12:52 punishing them for wrongs of the past. That’s to be distinguished. And I distinguish carefully in the
0:13:01 book between revenge seeking for past wrongs versus self-defense to prevent present and future threats of
0:13:12 harm. If, in your example, the player is now going to have a physical altercation because they have a
0:13:16 reason to believe that there’s going to be another eye poke that’s coming right around the corner and
0:13:22 it’s like, nope, not this time. I’m going to stop you physically. That’s self-defense. That’s not revenge
0:13:29 seeking. And that would be fight or flight type of behavior rather than revenge seeking. And so it makes
0:13:36 sense to do it there. But this idea of self punishment, the first player who poked the original
0:13:42 player in the eye, if they did that out of their own sense of grievance, they used their desire for
0:13:47 revenge to do the original eye poke. And now we’ve got another player who’s using their grievance and
0:13:56 desire for revenge to take that person down. These are not solid adaptive behaviors. Survival is not
0:14:03 at risk. And we have a set of rules and the officials are there to administer those rules.
0:14:08 And you have a coach there that can advocate for the administration of the rules and perhaps pulling
0:14:14 that player out of the game. So these are really bad idea behaviors because if the takedown happens,
0:14:20 that player who did the takedown, as we all know from being sports spectators is usually the one
0:14:26 that’s caught and usually the one that’s penalized by the ref and then has to go forward and living with
0:14:31 that either as, wow, I’m a beast and I take other players down and that may have negative consequences
0:14:37 on their career. Usually we see in studies, revenge seeking doesn’t actually make us feel good for
0:14:43 long. It’s a temporary high, just like drugs. We feel great in the moment and for a short time after,
0:14:49 and then we end up feeling worse, angrier. We worry about retaliation back against us. So we’re filled
0:14:54 with anxiety. So there are a lot of negative consequences to revenge seeking for everybody
0:14:54 involved.
0:15:04 So you are not saying that there is no such thing as healthy anger or justified grievance or justified
0:15:09 indignation. It’s about when things spiral out of control.
0:15:14 Yeah. For addictive behavior, it’s about that compulsion. It’s about the, I have this desire
0:15:20 to retaliate. And despite knowing that I’m going to suffer negative consequences or me and other
0:15:26 people are going to suffer many negative consequences. And with revenge seeking, negative consequences are
0:15:33 built in. Revenge means inflicting pain on another person because you feel wrong. If you can’t control
0:15:41 that, then you might be heading into or already involved with a compulsive revenge seeking disorder.
0:15:48 And you could and should receive some form of either self-help or professional treatment if it’s gotten that
0:15:56 far before it begins to take over your life. And we have just innumerable examples throughout human
0:16:03 history and modern society of people for whom this revenge seeking has taken over their lives.
0:16:09 You can just essentially conclude that every person who’s in jail for a violent crime
0:16:15 is almost in all instances, a revenge addict who could not control their desire to retaliate,
0:16:20 and they’re now in prison for that. And then we look at their victims, and we look at their victims’
0:16:27 families, and we look at the families of the people who are in jail. The harms are enormous. The costs
0:16:37 to society are just off the charts. And yet, we’ve never looked at, scientifically, until the last 20 years,
0:16:43 what happens inside the brain and why we do this at all. Because I’m going to suggest, if somebody pokes you
0:16:51 in the eye, you might want to have a bowl of ice cream. We could have been adaptively, right? We could have been
0:16:57 adaptively evolved so that when we get an eye pain, we want some ice cream or a nap or we want a hug.
0:17:03 But that’s not what we want. We want the pain of the person who hit us in the eye or their proxy,
0:17:08 and we want them to know that their new pain is because of what they did to us five minutes ago.
0:17:18 Is there a way to remove the sweetness from revenge to, you know, I’d rather have ice cream than this.
0:17:21 How do you make revenge less attractive?
0:17:28 Yeah, that’s a great question. And there’s probably no way to make revenge less sweet,
0:17:35 because this is a biologically derived, evolved, adaptive experience that we all have when we’ve
0:17:41 been wrong, that revenge will feel temporarily good, just as it is that opioids will always give us this
0:17:48 euphoria and it will always feel good. But there are ways to control the desire for it and to recover
0:17:56 from the addictive compulsive process of revenge seeking. And those include all of the addiction
0:18:02 strategies that we know that are effective for drugs and alcohol. Addiction, things like cognitive
0:18:09 behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, counseling, NA, maybe RA for revenge addicts,
0:18:18 anonymous. Ultimately, anti-craving drugs and medications like naltroxone and even GLP-1 anti-craving
0:18:24 drugs that have been shown to be effective for food are now being studied for other addictions and may be
0:18:32 effective in reducing the cravings for revenge seeking. But the great news in this entire story
0:18:39 is the neuroscience of forgiveness is really incredible. It’s almost seems like it’s miraculous.
0:18:46 Just as we’ve been hardwired to want revenge when someone harms us, we also have been hardwired to forgive
0:18:53 and reverse the process and actually end the pain and the cravings on the spot. And that’s what forgiveness
0:19:00 does. And we can see this in brain scans of people who have a grievance and are asked to simply imagine
0:19:07 forgiving it. And what that shows us inside the brain scan is that pain network part of the brain that activated for the
0:19:14 grievance, the anterior insula. When you simply imagine forgiveness, even without telling the person who
0:19:19 wronged you that you’re forgiving them, that stops that area of the brain. It shuts down the pain
0:19:26 rather than just giving you a quick dopamine hit. It also shuts down the pleasure and reward circuitry of
0:19:32 addiction so you’re no longer craving retaliation and revenge. And then the last thing it does is it reactivates
0:19:39 your prefrontal cortex. That’s your self-control and executive function circuitry so that you’re able to
0:19:45 make better cost benefit decisions. And you find when you’re in that state that in almost all cases, it’s
0:19:52 better in your own self-interest, just your self-interest to not seek revenge. It’s better to forgive if you want
0:19:58 the pain of the pain of the past to go away and you don’t want it to infect and harm your present and your future.
0:20:06 So just to be clear, the person who forgives gets as much value as the person who receives the
0:20:08 forgiveness. Is that what you’re saying?
0:20:13 It’s even bigger than that. It’s even bigger than that. The person who forgives gets almost all of the
0:20:20 benefits. It is a misconception, and we can see this now neurologically for sure in these brain scan
0:20:28 studies, that the beneficiary of forgiveness is always the victim. It’s a hardwired way of self-healing
0:20:36 from trauma and pain of the past. The word give in forgiveness is not a gift to the perpetrator who
0:20:40 caused your harm. You’re giving them nothing. You don’t even have to communicate with them to
0:20:47 experience these amazing neurological benefits of forgiving a grievance inside your own head.
0:20:55 So it is this kind of wonder drug or superpower that we have that’s often been neglected. Our society,
0:21:01 particularly our society and a paternalistic society, wants to think of forgiveness as some form of
0:21:08 weakness or something that you’re doing to reward the person who just slapped you in the face with an act of
0:21:16 kindness. And it’s not that at all. It’s a gift to yourself to heal yourself from the trauma and pain of the
0:21:16 past.
0:21:25 And would it be accurate to say that we don’t hear about these mass forgivers? We hear about mass murderers.
0:21:32 So, you know, is it because bad news sells and you hear about Mao and Stalin and Hitler,
0:21:36 but you don’t hear about the people who are mass forgivers?
0:21:44 That’s exactly the case. And there are mass forgivers everywhere. And I meet them more and more now as a
0:21:51 result of the book. I’ll find people who say most of their lives, they’ve had this insight or intuition
0:21:59 that forgiving and moving on as fast as possible is the way to become successful in your life. It’s the way to
0:22:06 heal and move forward and not allow the bad things that happened to you in the past to infect and destroy
0:22:12 your present and your future. So there are some people, and I haven’t had the chance to study them,
0:22:19 who say they don’t even think about revenge when they’ve been wrong. And I tend to view those types of
0:22:25 claims with a little bit of skepticism because I know from other studies that revenge seeking has been
0:22:33 found in all societies around the world and that it is an evolved strategy. And so it seems unlikely that
0:22:42 people derive no pleasure from revenge seeking, but they may have developed such a sense of control and
0:22:48 wisdom that they just don’t want any part of that great feeling, that temporary high that only leads
0:22:54 to disaster, that they just don’t allow themselves to think about it at all when they’ve been wrong.
0:23:00 And that’s a very powerful and good strategy. What we have, Guy, now are neuroscience evidence that
0:23:06 supports the ancient forgiveness teachings of people like Jesus and the Buddha, who we think of it as a
0:23:12 spiritual construct, but it’s really not. It can be, and it’s fine that it is a spiritual construct, but
0:23:19 it really has a neurological basis inside of our brains and inside of science. And it’s great now,
0:23:26 just really in the last 10 or so years, to be able to bring this out to the public and show people
0:23:38 that it has all of these benefits for the victim, not the perpetrator.
0:23:47 Now, just to be clear, this is a fine point here. It is one thing to say, let’s say somebody does
0:23:53 something to you. One reaction could be, I’m not going to let it bother me. I’m not going to think about it.
0:23:59 It’s not going to even enter into my consciousness anymore. That’s one attitude. The other attitude is,
0:24:08 I understand what they did, but I am actively forgiving, which is a decision which is different
0:24:12 than ignoring. So are you saying either or one is better than the other?
0:24:18 Researchers have identified kind of two types of forgiveness. There’s decisional forgiveness, as you
0:24:24 actually just described, which is, I’m going to make a kind of a tactical decision to forgive this
0:24:31 wrong, for my own benefit, for my own self benefit. And it’s a great decision. And that’s usually the
0:24:37 decision that’s the easiest to arrive at, because you’re still looking at your own self interest.
0:24:41 And you’re clear in your own mind, you’re not giving a gift to the person who wronged you. You’re not in
0:24:47 any way condoning what they’ve done. You’re not endorsing what they’ve done. You’re still holding
0:24:53 on to the idea that what they’ve done is potentially a very terrible wrong. And you’re not going to
0:24:59 budge on that. And nor do you have to, nor are you giving away your right to self-defense. If let’s say
0:25:04 you’re in a toxic relationship, where you’re repeatedly being harmed by someone, and you decide,
0:25:10 I’m going to leave that relationship now, in order to protect myself, even though I may forgive
0:25:15 everything that happened in the past, but I’m going to stop that behavior from continuing into the future.
0:25:21 So that’s kind of decisional forgiveness. And it activates a different set of structures in the brain.
0:25:26 That’s versus what some researchers have identified as emotional forgiveness,
0:25:33 where an additional thing occurs in that point. And what occurs is humans are very, very adept at
0:25:40 empathizing with other people. And we have this psychologist think of the ability to imagine what’s
0:25:46 going on in other people’s heads. We call that theory of mind. And humans are good at doing that,
0:25:52 imagining what another person might’ve been thinking about. And through a process of analyzing
0:25:58 what happened during the grievance, and also imagining what the other person, the perpetrator,
0:26:05 might have been thinking or going through themselves. Some people can come to an emotional forgiveness
0:26:13 in which they essentially reevaluate and recreate the entire incident, the entire grievance, the entire
0:26:20 trauma, in a new light in which we can see it as less of a trauma than we once believed it was.
0:26:25 So that’s emotional forgiveness. And it’s not required. Decisional forgiveness gets you,
0:26:32 you know, 90% of the way. Emotional forgiveness can put you in a really better place if you can
0:26:40 see what happened to you and your own role in it, perhaps. And the reasons why the person wronged you
0:26:48 in a new and more either a revised light in which it wasn’t as bad as you thought, or maybe it might have
0:26:55 been excusable because of X, whatever the X might be. So there are these two types of forgiveness that
0:27:04 researchers talk about. Now, do you have a James Kimmel, Jr.? Like, these are the steps to catalyze forgiveness.
0:27:13 I do. So I created about 20 years ago. This is drawing on my legal practice. As I said, I was a litigator.
0:27:22 And one of the things that I found that was useful in the litigation revenge seeking process is that a trial,
0:27:28 the trials that we all know from television or real life experience or movies, but this idea of there
0:27:36 being a tribunal of an impartial judge and jury, that there’s this experience in which we testify and
0:27:42 explain what happened to us as victims and the defendants given an opportunity to explain their
0:27:49 side of the story and testify to that. And then we have, you know, did it happen or not? We have this
0:27:55 opportunity to hold the defendant accountable if that’s what is being decided and to punish,
0:28:01 imagine at least punishing the defendant for what they’ve done wrong. So that’s what the judge does.
0:28:08 And then we move to the warden phase of these trials at the prison or, you know, up into and
0:28:14 including an executioner. But we move to a phase in which the defendant is punished, which is our
0:28:22 gratification socially and individually of the desire for revenge. In those steps, we have two actually
0:28:29 pretty therapeutic things happening. One is we get to be heard and trauma researchers and experts will say
0:28:36 that the psychological pain that we experience from grievances, whether they’re physical or only in the
0:28:45 brain, in order to relieve that, people need to be heard. There’s a need to have someone hear our pain
0:28:51 story and acknowledge, yes, this happened and I’m sorry. And that was terrible for you. And we get it.
0:28:58 And the other thing people need in addition to being heard is this ability to hold the person who did it
0:29:04 accountable. And accountability in this sense doesn’t mean we often think it means revenge itself, but it
0:29:11 doesn’t need to, nor should it. It should mean we’ve labeled who did the wrong. We’ve made an account,
0:29:16 like an accountant tracking books. An accountant only decides where the money went, how it went.
0:29:22 Accountants don’t make a judgments on the worth of that money spent expenditure or the money coming in.
0:29:28 They just account for what happened. And that accountability is really important in healing
0:29:36 from trauma as well. So I created this system called the non-justice system, which goes to that first part,
0:29:41 decisional forgiveness and says, if you can’t forgive, and most people find it difficult at first,
0:29:49 what you could practice is this idea of non-justice. And non-justice is not injustice, which is unfairness.
0:29:56 Non-justice means to abstain from seeking justice in the form of revenge, just as non-violence means to
0:30:02 abstain from seeking violence or perpetrating an act of violence. So the non-justice system uses those
0:30:09 four steps of the criminal trial, but allows a person using it to put the courtroom inside their head
0:30:14 where it needs to be, because we’re always talking about wrongs of the past. So you’ve got a courtroom of the mind,
0:30:20 and it’s a role play in which you play all of the roles. So you don’t need a lawyer, you don’t need a judge,
0:30:26 because you’re the lawyer, you’re the judge, and you don’t need witnesses because you play not only yourself as victim,
0:30:32 but you play the defendant and imagine what the defendant would testify to in their own defense.
0:30:38 You come up with your own verdict, purely on your own as judge, and then you hand down a sentence,
0:30:43 which can be anything you want inside your head. It doesn’t have to be something that a court of law would hand down.
0:30:49 And then if you’ve created a sentence of punishment, you’re now the warden, and you have to experience
0:30:54 and imagine what it would be like to administer that punishment, which allows you to safely release
0:31:01 in your imagination these really powerful revenge cravings, like methadone for a revenge addict.
0:31:06 I added one last step. And the fifth and final step, which is not part of normal criminal trials,
0:31:14 is you become the judge of your own life. And you look back on the trial, and you’re asked to clarify in
0:31:21 your mind, did the wrong that you’ve put somebody on trial for just now, is that even something that’s
0:31:27 happening in the real world? Is the defendant here? Did the wrong happen in a way that anybody on the
0:31:34 planet can experience with their own senses? And the answer is no. The wrongs of the past are only thought
0:31:40 formation memories that are in our heads. And we control what’s going on in our heads. And once you’ve
0:31:46 decided that, you’re then given the opportunity to imagine what it might feel like to forgive. Just imagine
0:31:53 it. You don’t have to forgive, but you can just imagine what would that feel like if I forgave. And when I ask
0:31:58 people this, and your listeners can experiment with this at any time when it’s safe to close your eyes,
0:32:04 just think of a grievance that you have in your life, and there’s probably many, many. And imagine
0:32:10 for a second what it would feel like to just forgive that. What people invariably say back is that they
0:32:18 would feel relief. They would feel this instant feeling of relief where the pain has gone away and the
0:32:25 desire to retaliate, which is this revenge rumination is suddenly gone. And usually folks at that stage
0:32:31 like that feeling because it’s even better than the revenge high, because it’s this sense of peace and
0:32:38 calm and their ability to move forward with their lives without dragging the wrongs of the past forward
0:32:45 is so enticing that they want that again and again. And what I say at that point is then start forgiving
0:32:51 again and again. Every time that memory reoccurs, it’s a practice. You do it until the pain of the
0:32:58 wrong of the past and the grievance is no longer affecting your present and your future. And at that point,
0:33:06 you move on. I just want to point out to our listeners that you have made this into a website.
0:33:11 So there’s actually a process that you can go through this non-justice system, right?
0:33:16 It’s a web app. So it’s not on the app stores. It’s a web app. And if you want to try it,
0:33:21 it’s an audio version of what I just said. The full version, the written version is in my book,
0:33:27 The Science of Revenge. But the audio version is free. There’s not even an in-app purchase for it.
0:33:31 You just go there and you can download from miraclecourt.com. All one word,
0:33:38 miraclecourt.com. And you can try it. It’s my voice leading you through the five steps of a
0:33:44 non-justice system or miracle court trial. I have to admit that after reading your book,
0:33:53 the word justice has taken on a very negative connotation in my mind. At least the way I understood
0:34:01 justice, it’s like a nice way of saying revenge, right? Justice is in the eye of the beholder, right?
0:34:07 As humans and particularly in American society, we have two opposite meanings for the word justice.
0:34:16 And this allows us to perpetrate all sorts of bad things and bad ideas. So justice in the social justice
0:34:23 sense is a very elevated term. We think of that as equity and fairness and treating all people equally.
0:34:31 And we think of people who are truly just as people like maybe Jesus or Martin Luther King or Gandhi,
0:34:39 some of our most elevated human beings that we can imagine. And this is a great and noble version of
0:34:45 justice. And if that’s all it meant, justice would be fine and would have no negative connotation.
0:34:51 But that’s not only what it means. As a matter of fact, more often or just as often at worst,
0:34:59 or at best, I should say, just as often, we use the word justice to mean revenge, retaliation and payback.
0:35:05 So, for instance, an example I talk about in the book at some length is after the 9/11 attacks,
0:35:11 when President Bush came out to the country and said, “We’re going to bring the terrorists to justice.”
0:35:18 Now, we all know just by hearing that sentence that he didn’t mean bringing terrorists to fairness
0:35:25 and equity and love. He meant we’re going to go and we’re going to kill them. We’re going to go
0:35:32 and get justice in the form of revenge. Why didn’t he use the word revenge? Why do we often all use the
0:35:38 word justice? Because by using the word justice, we do this bait and switch inside our own minds and
0:35:46 inside the minds of our listeners, in which we suddenly sanctify with this noble version of justice,
0:35:54 our worst behaviors. When Osama bin Laden convinced terrorists to fly planes into the world trade towers,
0:36:01 they were doing it for justice, their own version of justice. And that was not fairness or equity.
0:36:09 It was revenge seeking for their perceived grievances against America. And when we sent our troops to the
0:36:16 Middle East and ended up killing, I don’t know, some 800,000 people over the course of the Iraq and
0:36:24 Afghanistan wars and many multi-trillions of dollars spent. We weren’t doing fairness and equity. We were
0:36:31 doing revenge seeking against the people that we believed had wronged us and their proxies. And we did
0:36:39 it very bigly. And we would not likely have authorized that if we had thought it was just coarse revenge
0:36:45 seeking. But if we can call it justice, which kind of ennobles it for us. And it’s almost as if God is
0:36:51 sanctioning our behavior the way Osama bin Laden was saying, “Go get justice. God wants you to kill the
0:36:57 infidels.” Okay, so we’ll go do it as long as God says it’s okay. But that is a very slippery slope. And
0:37:04 that’s what the word justice does. And that’s why I say that in my legal career, I came to experience
0:37:14 justice as the brand name that we use to put on our retaliatory acts of litigation and retaliatory
0:37:21 behaviors to make it seem much more noble than it really is. Up next on Remarkable People.
0:37:26 One night, my family and I, we were asleep. It was very late at night. And we were awakened to the
0:37:31 sound of a gunshot. And we looked around the house and I saw this pickup truck driving away,
0:37:36 a truck owned by one of the guys who had been bullying me. We checked the house. We didn’t
0:37:40 see any damage and thought everything was good. Maybe they were just a spotlighting deer.
0:37:47 The next morning when I woke up, one of my jobs before school was to feed and water our animals,
0:37:54 including this sweet beagle, a hunting dog that we had, whose name was Paula. And when I went to her pen,
0:37:59 I found her lying dead with a bullet hole in her head.
0:38:08 Do you want to be more remarkable? One way to do it is to spend three days with the boldest
0:38:14 builders in business. I’m Jeff Berman, host of Masters of Scale, inviting you to join us at this
0:38:20 year’s Masters of Scale Summit, October 7th to 9th in San Francisco. You’ll hear from visionaries
0:38:26 like Chobani’s Hamdi Ulukaya, celebrity chef David Chang, Patagonia’s Ryan Gellert, promises Phaedra
0:38:34 Ellis Lampkins, and many, many more. Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com/remarkable. That’s
0:38:39 mastersofscale.com/remarkable. And Guy Kawasaki will be there too.
0:38:47 Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It’s found on Apple Podcasts
0:38:54 or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki.
0:39:04 Now, what if somebody pushes back and says, well, if there wasn’t this reaction, we would have no
0:39:11 prevention from it happening again. Today, 2025, we could point to a lot of places in the world where
0:39:16 people are saying we’re doing this because we need to teach them a lesson so they never do it again.
0:39:22 Sure. Well, two answers there. First, I’m very clear in the book, and I mentioned this before,
0:39:30 I’m very clear between self-defense and preventing real threats of future harm, which is a fight or
0:39:36 flight instinct, and we need to do it to survive. It’s an adaptive strategy. And that versus revenge
0:39:43 seeking, which is merely trying to punish people for wrongs of the past, largely to feel this gratifying
0:39:52 experience of having gotten revenge or gotten justice in the form of revenge or retaliation or payback.
0:39:58 Those types of feelings that we have. And the focus of this research in the book is on
0:40:04 revenge seeking and justice in the form of revenge, not self-defense. So that’s the first thing.
0:40:12 And the second thing that I explain in the book is that that form of retaliation as a deterrent for future
0:40:21 harm, as we talked about earlier, Guy, is very weak and ineffective in stopping future wrongs. We want it to be,
0:40:28 and believe often that it’s going to be this cure all. If I just come down on, or we use the example of the
0:40:34 basketball player. If I just take her out, she’ll never poke anybody in the eye again, especially not
0:40:41 on my team. It doesn’t often work. It mostly doesn’t. There’s going to be a new desire for revenge by the
0:40:47 original eye poker. And there’s probably going to be another instance of eye poking, revenge seeking
0:40:52 down the line. And this happens throughout our lives. It happens in our intimate partner relationships. It
0:40:58 happens between children and their parents. It happens between children on playgrounds and bullies.
0:41:06 It happens in workplaces with workplace grievances and sabotage. We always think, ah, I need to,
0:41:14 I have to, like the world is counting on me to punish this person in order to prevent them from doing the
0:41:19 wrong again. But as I said, it is the primary motivation for why the wrong occurred in the first
0:41:25 place. Almost in all cases, perpetrators see themselves as victims seeking justice in the
0:41:31 form of revenge. That’s why it’s the primary motivation for almost all forms of violence and
0:41:38 intentionally inflicted human suffering. So merely feeding more fuel, uh, revenge fuel into the system
0:41:43 is a weak at best deterrent. And there are better strategies for that.
0:41:52 Okay. Which is what? So George W. Bush calls you up on 9/12 2001 and says, James, what should I do?
0:41:55 I’m thinking of launching an attack. What should I do?
0:42:01 Here’s what I thought on 9/12 that ought to be done. And it’s what I would tell him to this day.
0:42:08 Bin Laden and his associates do present because they’ve committed to this.
0:42:12 They’ve proven that they’ll do it and they’ve said there will continue their attacks.
0:42:21 So they do present a serious imminent threat of harm to the country and the people of this nation.
0:42:28 And so therefore, as an act of self-defense, they need to be taken out, unfortunately.
0:42:36 That’s in contrast to hunting people down for 10 years after the wrong happened, when nothing
0:42:42 further has occurred and annihilating, destroying hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom
0:42:50 had nothing to do with it, just to gratify our desire for revenge. So a targeted strike upon the
0:42:57 people who present the threat makes sense as a survival strategy for America. Seeking revenge
0:43:01 endlessly for a decade, that should have been shut down long before that.
0:43:08 So what happens if it’s Hamas and they’re completely embedded in a civilian population?
0:43:09 Then what do you do?
0:43:15 Well, it’s kind of the same situation. It’s not just about, and I see your point. Your point is,
0:43:21 maybe you shouldn’t hurt innocent people in your revenge seeking. And so if Hamas is in a civilian
0:43:29 population, there’s nothing you can do. That’s not true. But if your goal is purely self-defense and not
0:43:35 retaliation, then the way you go about identifying the threat and eliminating it is much different.
0:43:40 And you’re going to be much more surgical about it. And you’re going to limit your behavior
0:43:47 to, like I said, eliminating the specific threat. And you’re not going to go beyond that and call it
0:43:54 a self-defense when you’re destroying tens of thousands of other people in the process,
0:44:00 or hundreds of thousands is in the case of America after 9/11. So it’s the revenge seeking,
0:44:06 and it’s a very slippery slope. We will be eager, our leaders and all of us individually will be
0:44:13 eager to say, “Oh, well, you know, I’m just acting in self-defense here, even though the threat is no
0:44:19 longer present.” And it’s a slippery slope that we all need to be aware of. We can focus on, if the threat’s
0:44:24 gone, that should be the end of our attack. Otherwise we’re merely retaliating.
0:44:31 So how can somebody self-diagnose and say, “You know what? I’m going off the deep end. Revenge
0:44:37 has become an addiction. What are the warning signs? And then what do I do when I see this happening to
0:44:45 myself? Yeah. The primary warning sign for compulsive revenge seeking would be feeling grievances in your
0:44:54 life and feeling that desire to retaliate and not being able to control it despite the negative consequences
0:45:01 that you’re aware of that will occur. If you’re not able to control that at that point, then you might be
0:45:09 dealing with something that looks very similar to an addiction. If on top of that, you try to cut down
0:45:16 on that type of behavior and you’re unable to do so, or you’re continually doing it despite the harm that
0:45:24 it causes to yourself, your family members, your community, other people, these are signs of an addictive
0:45:30 process. And I have a different website, not the miraclecourt.com website, but the savingcain.org website.
0:45:39 So that’s saving, C-A-I-N, like Cain and Able Cain. Savingcain.org is a website that has resources for
0:45:45 people who might be planning a mass killing. And it’s modeled on a suicide prevention website. So it gives
0:45:52 resources to people who find themselves caught up in these desires to retaliate, which is almost always the
0:45:57 case with mass shootings, is that there are a lot of grievances, there’s a lot of desire for revenge,
0:46:03 and there’s a conviction in the person’s mind. Just as you said, how can I let this go? I can’t let this
0:46:08 go on. I have to start killing people. They’ll just keep harming me. That is a pathological thought
0:46:14 process in your head if you’re thinking about killing a large number of people, or any people for that
0:46:20 matter, under those circumstances. And so on that website, I have, in addition to some of the things I just
0:46:25 described, the idea of how to be aware of and know the warning signs of a revenge attack,
0:46:31 which should be treated as a medical emergency, just like a heart attack. And when you see signs
0:46:36 like constant rumination and thinking about the grievance and not willing to let it go,
0:46:42 not being able to forgive, starting to think about actual physical violence to harm either the person
0:46:47 who wronged you or their proxies, because it can be anybody. It doesn’t have to be the person who
0:46:53 who wronged you. Starting to think about, and if people are expressing targeting, like who the target
0:47:01 might be, a day in time, acquiring weapons. These things all come from FBI and secret service studies
0:47:06 of mass shooters. And they’re all in on that webpage. When you start to see those things,
0:47:14 that should become an instantaneous 911 or 988 call, because you’re starting to see enough evidence
0:47:21 that there might be a compulsive act of violence on the near-term horizon. And that person needs help
0:47:26 before it occurs. If they get it before it occurs, they’re not a murderer. If it comes too late, they’re
0:47:31 a murderer and there are people dead. So it’d be a good idea for all of us to learn those warning signs.
0:47:39 In a sense, you opened the book up with where you almost became a murderer, right? But you pulled
0:47:45 yourself back from the edge. I did. And you’re referring there to this time in my life when I was
0:47:52 a teenager in which I was pretty severely bullied by a group of guys that I actually wanted to befriend.
0:47:57 They were guys who lived on neighboring farms. I was raised in the country. But they didn’t want
0:48:03 any part of me and what I was about, despite my efforts to join them and join Future Farmers of America
0:48:10 and enroll in VOAG classes. And we had a small herd of Black Angus cattle and pigs and chickens and things
0:48:18 like that. So they started bullying me eventually when I continued to try and be one of them. And that
0:48:23 moved up through and including physical violence until one night, my family and I, we were asleep.
0:48:28 It was very late at night and we were awakened to the sound of a gunshot. And we looked around the house
0:48:34 and I saw this pickup truck driving away, a truck owned by one of the guys who had been bullying me.
0:48:39 We checked the house. We didn’t see any damage and thought everything was good. Maybe they were just
0:48:44 a spotlighting deer. The next morning when I woke up, one of my jobs before school was to
0:48:50 feed and water our animals, including this sweet beagle, a hunting dog that we had,
0:48:56 whose name was Paula. And when I went to her pen, I found her lying dead with a bullet hole in her head,
0:49:04 which was a severe grievance. I mean, dog killing is a big deal, as you can imagine. We did report it to the
0:49:08 police. The police weren’t really willing to do anything. Everything was status quo there.
0:49:14 Two weeks later, I was home alone. My parents were gone. I heard a car come to a stop in front of our
0:49:19 house. I looked outside. It was the same pickup truck. And then there was a flash and an explosion
0:49:25 and they blew up our mailbox. And when they did that, that was kind of it for me. I had been putting
0:49:32 up with their abuse and tormenting me for years. They had now killed my dog, blown up a mailbox.
0:49:37 And I thought I’m going to have to escalate as well. I went and grabbed a gun for my dad’s
0:49:42 nightstand, a handgun that was loaded. I jumped in my mother’s car and I drove after them through
0:49:47 the middle of the night, pinned them down, caught them against a barn. There was their truck,
0:49:53 my car behind theirs with my bright beams on, about three or four heads in their rear window.
0:49:58 And they got out and they’re starting to squint through my high beams to see who had just
0:50:05 chased them down the road. And what was clear to me at that point was that they were unarmed. They
0:50:11 didn’t have anything in their hands and that they wouldn’t or couldn’t have known that I had a gun.
0:50:16 So I had the element of surprise. Everything was set up for me to do, you know, a lot of what you’ve
0:50:21 just been describing, Guy. I got poked in the eye and now I’m going to take you down. And I had the
0:50:27 opportunity to do just that. And I opened the door, grabbed the gun, started to get out. But at the
0:50:33 last second I had this insight. And then if I went through with it, I’d be killing the person that I
0:50:39 had been when I drove up that road. If I survived it at all, it could have been a gunfight, could have
0:50:44 been arrested, could be in jail the rest of my life. All sorts of bad things can happen and all sorts of bad
0:50:51 things do happen in those instances. But this little insight that I would be paying an enormous
0:50:57 price for getting the revenge I wanted was just enough to cause me to change my mind on it and go,
0:51:02 Yes, I want revenge and I want it real bad, but I don’t want to pay this kind of price for it. It
0:51:07 was just too high of a cost. And that was enough to cause me to pull my leg back inside the car,
0:51:13 put the gun back down on the passenger seat, close the door and drive home. I didn’t forgive them. I
0:51:20 wanted revenge, but I knew that that wasn’t a price level that I could afford. And like I said,
0:51:24 after that point, about two years later, I got the idea of going into the professional
0:51:29 revenge business and becoming a lawyer. And the rest is the history I’ve already described.
0:51:35 You said a very interesting thing. You did not forgive them. Have you forgiven them yet for killing
0:51:42 your dog? Yes, I have. And quite some time ago, and I’ve talked to a lot of people who are serious
0:51:46 dog lovers that go, there is no way. And I would have gone through with it. I would have gunned them
0:51:53 down. Don’t ever come and kill my, my dog or my cat. Nothing can be worse than that for some people.
0:51:59 But I hope when they say that they’re talking in euphemisms and they’re not really imagining that
0:52:06 they would have gone through with it any more than I did. But I will say this, we know from news reports
0:52:12 and our own lives, many, many people go through with it and they pick that gun up and they go out and
0:52:18 they fire those bullets and people are hurt or killed. And like I said, we see this in the news every
0:52:24 day and our prisons are full of it. And the reason that’s occurring is because those individuals have
0:52:30 a compulsive desire for revenge at that moment and their prefrontal cortex isn’t able to control it.
0:52:36 And they go through the threat of themselves being punished or even killed. Even killed is not enough
0:52:43 to stop people from committing acts of violence. Fathers, often it’s fathers, commit murder suicides
0:52:50 in this country on a weekly basis, sometimes even daily, where they kill the spouse that they love
0:52:56 and their own children because they feel aggrieved and they want to punish them and get that final last
0:53:02 word and then kill themselves. That’s how powerful revenge compulsion and revenge addiction really is.
0:53:09 And we need our public health and mental health professionals to engage with this and begin to,
0:53:15 one, public health education to warn people about the dangers of revenge desires and how quickly
0:53:21 they can take over your life and ruin your life and the lives of many other people. And also help treat
0:53:29 people who have this before they act or even after they’ve acted in order to be rendered safe and
0:53:36 productive members of society again one day. Wow. Okay. I think we covered it, James.
0:53:42 I must say this has been one of the darker episodes of Remarkable People, but I think it’s such an important
0:53:50 topic. And especially in June 2025, there’s a lot of revenge happening in this world.
0:53:57 And I hope we can shed some light that we do some of that revenge and increase forgiveness in the world.
0:54:03 I do too. Thank you for the opportunity to share this with your audience, Guy. And I know it sounds dark
0:54:09 and grave at some points, but most acts of revenge are not violent. And there are small things that can end up
0:54:16 making our lives less productive and actually become a frustration to our own success. So even controlling
0:54:21 those small moments can free you to become what you say in your book, a remarkable person.
0:54:30 I appreciate this very much. And just remember the name of the book is The Science of Revenge. And the
0:54:37 author is James Kimmel, Jr. So thank you very much for being on our podcast. Now, let me thank the rest of the
0:54:44 Remarkable People team who made this possible. And I have to start with Madison Neismar, who’s the co-producer.
0:54:52 The other producer is Jeff C. He’s the sound design maven. And we have a researcher named Tessa Neismar, who does all
0:54:59 the background research for me. And that’s the Remarkable People team. And we find people like James and their
0:55:07 brilliant books. So until next time, mahalo and aloha and go out and forgive a few people of the raw
0:55:13 songs of the grievances. And I would make the case that when you start thinking you’re seeking justice,
0:55:18 you should take a step back. Thank you very much. Thank you. Mahalo.
0:55:25 This is Remarkable People.