Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, I'm just waiting for an email.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Maybe I'll get one after this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Hit me up, guys.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't think so either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then how to make sure that you're using that to help people to store contemporaneous evidence outside of their brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I just think there's so much potential that's being wasted right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
and to celebrate all the people who are doing amazing research and really cracking down on things like environmental crime and spending their lives to fight specific kinds of crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think it's important to speak with people whom we or who a lot of people dehumanize, including myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, I also speak with people who I think are or have I know have committed terrible crimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I have spoken to these people because as a criminal psychologist, that's often part of my job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So what's interesting, I think, when you're speaking to people who have committed really terrible crimes or certainly who've been convicted of terrible crimes, is that not only is it potentially insightful because they might give you a real answer and not just a controlled narrative about why they committed these crimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
If they are either maintaining their innocence or they're more reluctant to do that, I think even the narrative that they are controlling, that they're being very careful with, still tells us a lot about them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think certainly my research on environmental crime as well, what we see is that people use a lot of rationalization and they say things like, well, everybody's doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if I hadn't done this first, somebody else would have done this waste crime or this other kind of crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so there's this rationalization, there's this normalization, there's this diminishing of your own role and agency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that still tells us a lot about the psychology of people who commit crimes, because most of us
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
are very bad at saying sorry and saying i messed this up and i shouldn't have done that and instead what our brains do is they try to make us feel better and they go no you're still a good person despite this one thing and so we try to rationalize it we try to excuse it we try to explain it and there is some truth to it as well because we know the reasons why we engage in that behavior and other people don't have the whole context so we also do have more of the whole story
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But on the other hand, we need to also face the fact that sometimes we do terrible things and we need to stop doing those terrible things and prevent other people from doing the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, people used to not smile in photos as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think looking at historical photos of children or sometimes even kids in other cultures, it's like, oh, why are they all so serious?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But our creepiness raters are also way off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So this is something that I've been interested in for a long time as well, is that we have this intuitive perception of whether or not somebody is trustworthy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that intuitive perception, according to ample studies at this point, is not to be trusted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And one thing in particular is whether or not we think someone is creepy, including children.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But usually the research is done, of course, on adult faces and with adults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And only recently did we even really define what that vague feeling of creepiness is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it has a lot to do with just not following social norms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And this is something we see that transfers to other contexts, like why people are afraid of people with severe mental illness and psychosis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
If you're on the bus or the tube in London and someone's talking to themselves and they're acting in an erratic way, we know that people are more likely to keep a distance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There was one study where they literally had a waiting room where they also had people with chairs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the question was, how many chairs would you sit away from someone you know has a severe mental illness?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the answer is, you sit more chairs away.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And there's a physical and psychological distancing that's happening there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's not because people with severe mental illness are inherently more violent or more dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That is not actually what the research finds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's that we perceive them as such because we perceive them as...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
weird, basically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We go, this isn't how you're supposed to be behaving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I'm worried about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I'm going to keep my distance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so creepiness is much the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's where you can totally misfire whom you perceive as creepy just because they're not acting in the way that you expect people to act in society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It depends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
If they're too attractive, it can be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So there's effects that interact there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And we also don't trust people potentially who are too attractive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But again, deviation from the norm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so if you're deviating in any way, that can lead to, well, your assessment being more wrong, but also you assessing people as more negative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so with, yeah, with creepiness, the main thing that bothers me as a criminal psychologist is that tangential to creepiness is this general idea of trustworthiness and that you can tell whether somebody is lying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I've done research on this, as have lots of other people, like Aldert Fry is one of the leading researchers on deception detection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he has found in so many studies that it's really hard to detect whether someone is lying reliably.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that people, especially police officers, people who do investigative interviewing, they have this high confidence level.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
that they, because of their vast experience, can in fact tell whether the person across from them is lying to them, this witness, this suspect.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the answer to that, even that, if you take them into experimental settings, they are no better than chance at detecting lies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And yet they think they are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so again, you get into this path where you're going to miss people who are actually lying to you potentially, and you're going to potentially point at innocent people and say, I think you're guilty of this crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you go hard on that person in a way that might even lead to a wrongful conviction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Not just policing, in relationships and in lots of other contexts as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, a lot of jealousy is born out of uncertainty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Jealousy isn't, I know for sure that you have done something that is threatening our relationship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
A lot of jealousy is what's in my head because I am assuming that you might be thinking or doing X. And that is also basically an exercise in lie detection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And there as well, we are very bad at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's definitely some research to support the idea that people with psychopathy are better at lying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's also some research specifically on faking good in, for example, parole decisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So when it comes up to someone who is, there's a legal decision to be made as to whether this person is going to be released from prison or released from just detention in general.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then the person will act in a particular way, sort of mimic a good prisoner, mimic someone who's safe to be released into society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
then the committee goes, oh, well, you know, this person's doing great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so they're ready to be released.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then they make the wrong decision because that person has been faking it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think with psychopathy, it's a bit complicated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
there has been some sort of historically as well, some concern that certain treatment for psychopathy, especially empathy-focused treatment, makes people with psychopathy more likely to fake empathy and to weaponize it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But then there's other research which finds that if you use other kinds of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's like Jennifer Scheme in California who does research on people with psychopathy who have committed severe crimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And she specifically creates these treatment programs that aren't just around empathy, but they're more around almost learning the rules of society and convincing people that actually being pro-social is a better way to get what you want in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so there's a real need for tailored treatments to deal with, especially certain kinds of personality traits, dark personality traits, to try and convince people basically, actually, being pro-social is the better path, rather than just going hard on, you know, empathy and things that they don't maybe also see as faults with themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't think so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think that's what people fear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So a lot of the Nietzsche quotes I use as well are... Some of them I like because they speak to the chapters I write about and the issues I write about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But some of them I also like because they are how people think about evil and people who are labeled evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I do think with gazing into the abyss and the abyss gazing back, it's more of a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You're trying to find it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's why in some ways that doesn't work, actually, because it isn't a total blank.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It isn't the abyss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There are, in fact, things that you can see, even if it's just superficially, and patterns you can recognize to help you and key decision makers, especially in legal settings, make better decisions around people like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So when they see these patterns, they act a better way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So yeah, I get asked a lot as a criminal psychologist, do you carry the cases that you deal around with you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So some of the cases involve huge amounts of witnesses, huge amounts of potential victims.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so in these cases, there are very visceral descriptions sometimes of heinous crimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think that as someone who does this work, you can't be someone who sees it as anything other than a puzzle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So you have to look at it and go, here's the different pieces of information.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What I am doing is pattern recognition.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'm not here to emotionally invest in each of these victims or potential victims.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's not my role.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's therapists for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's other people who do that work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I am here working with the police.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'm here working with lawyers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'm here looking at it more sort of objectively to see how this all fits together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think that's how I engage with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I see it as this puzzle that I'm trying to figure out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's the classic scientist response as well to what other people in society go, ooh, they go, you know, this is horrible or this atrocious thing has happened or this shocking existential crisis-inducing thing I've just found is, you know, giving me existential crisis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And scientists instead go, oh, wow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you can sort of see the delight in discovery as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think sometimes scientists read as callous because we enjoy this discovery of knowledge and the discovery of insights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it just feels like this little light bulb has gone off and you go, oh, I understand a tiny bit more about the human experience or about the world around us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think it must be similar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't know that I feel or worry that I sort of become more quote unquote evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think it's more that you add this nuance, which I guess sometimes can be estranging to other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So there's that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So when you speak with others, sometimes like even when I say we shouldn't use the word evil, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
People go, no, but you have to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Does that mean you're trivializing things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the answer is, no, I'm not trivializing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'm just trying to understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Also, like sympathizing or being empathetic towards people whom others have written off is always going to get that response from some people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I mean, there are real questions around whom we're platforming and what that has and what role we have as content creators, both of us, of the people we talk about, how we cover them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I often come across this in true crime work that I do because I get asked to do TV shows.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I host TV shows and I host BBC podcasts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And there's always the question of sometimes people commit murder sometimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
to become famous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And should it be a blanket ban that we don't cover those cases?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or should we cover those cases, but in a different way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or should we anonymize it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So there's, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't never cover that case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It just means that you need to think about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
One of the most disturbing crimes that we covered on bad people, and just to be clear, bad people, much like the title evil, is sort of tongue in cheek, where the idea is it's people whom we refer to as bad people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then it's always a question of like, who are these quote unquote bad people and are we all capable of doing these terrible things?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But one of the most certainly problematic, dark cases that we covered was the Robert Pickton case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the episodes are called Piggy's Palace because that was the nickname for the farm where Robert Pickton brought Piggy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
victims whom he had kidnapped and then he killed them and he did terrible things to their bodies and rumors have it certainly that he fed some of these victims to pigs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Now one of the reasons I covered that case is actually because it was influential in my own career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So Robert Pickton is one of the most famous Canadian serial killers of all time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And as I was doing my undergrad at Simon Fraser University in Canada, I was being taught by someone called Stephen Hart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And Stephen Hart was an expert witness on the Robert Pickton trial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so he was keeping us abreast of some of the developments of what he was covering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I found it so interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I loved Stephen Hart as a person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he seemed to have a sense of humor, this gallows humor around it all, despite being faced with one of the arguably worst people in Canadian history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I thought that that was so interesting that someone could be so nice and so kind and so wonderful and be an expert witness for these kinds of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that's one of the reasons I went into the field is because of this case as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so we had him on the show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So he came on to the bad people and we interviewed him for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yes, he's done a lot of difficult cases, as have other researchers like Elizabeth Loftus, who's one of the main founders of the area of false memory research, which is what I also do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I do research on memory and false memory and witness statements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And Elizabeth Loftus has also been recently asked for the Ghislaine Maxwell case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
She was in the press.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so she has worked with lawyers to educate the court on memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
in lots of really, really controversial cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But the way she would explain it is that it's still her role to just train people and teach people on how memory works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
She's not there to decide whether people are guilty or innocent, but she is there to help people distinguish between fact and fiction when it comes to how our memories work or don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The psychology about Robert Pickton, I mean, he was a tricky person because I think he was profoundly lonely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And this is something we see with a lot of serial killers is that they have this loneliness, which I think also not only contributes to them committing the crimes in the first place, but also allows them to get away with things because they don't have as much of a social network or any social network that is helping them to do what's called reality monitoring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
to understand what's true and what's not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so when you see people get radicalized in their own thoughts, whether that's in the sense of things like schizophrenia, where you've got psychosis, you've got delusions, maybe command hallucinations, that's when you think you're hearing voices,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And someone is telling you that you have to do something, usually something harmful to other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if you don't follow those, you will hear those voices forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They're profoundly distressing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they are one of the aspects of schizophrenia that if you have it does make you more prone to violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so for these kinds of cases, if you don't have someone intervening, whether that's a family member or a therapist saying,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
How can you tell whether this thought is real?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Maybe that thought, maybe you're not hearing that voice, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Maybe that aspect of what you're thinking isn't true and bringing you back and closer to reality, you can just wander off to whatever alternate universe that you might live in in your head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's the same with radicalization in other contexts, is that you see that people who drift more and more into a certain group that has certain beliefs that are maybe divorced from the evidence, divorced from reality, you can see that people...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
will get more extreme over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And unless you have a tether that brings you back that allows you to do reality monitoring, it's going to be very difficult to find your way out of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So with serial killers, we find this reality monitoring problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think part of that's related to the lack of social networks that people have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The untethered goes to a dark place, and it then is often combined with some of these other dark tetrad traits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So you've got someone who maybe is high on psychopathy, low on empathy, someone who's high on sadism, someone who thinks that it's okay to pursue your own goals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And your own goal can be
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
like with Jeffrey Dahmer, you can be wanting to create the perfect partner, which in some ways seems to be what he was trying to do by killing people and piecing them together and sewing up a sort of new version.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's something in that where I can't help but go...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's so sad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't go, oh, my God, how terrible, how awful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And of course, it's atrocious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Of course, it's heinous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I have this real sympathy for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that's important for us to have, though, and not to say, I can't relate to this person at all, but to say that is an extreme manifestation of something I have felt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the difference between me engaging in that and this person engaging that are these other factors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But the core is in all of us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think all of us are capable of doing basically the worst things we can imagine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And one of the reasons I think that is because you can see neighbors turning on each other, especially if you look historically at the start of wars or big political moments where you have people who would have called each other friends, turning each other into the police, killing each other, doing terrible things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think all it takes is to become convinced that the people you think are your friends are actually your enemies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Whether that's just in your own world or in a larger political national landscape that I think I don't think it takes all that much for us to be capable of doing terrible things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But that's also why it's really important when things are good and when you're not at war and when you have the capacity to think deeply about important issues to train your mind on these thoughts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
of knowing that things like loneliness can manifest in these extreme ways, that things like jealousy and aggression, that they can turn into murder, that they can turn into these horrible versions, and to then also spot the red flags if you start going down that path.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think if we don't rehearse evil, if you will, we are much more likely to engage in it, especially in those moments where we don't have much time or energy to really think about what we're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's important to admit that to ourselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And research on murder fantasies finds that most men have fantasized about killing someone, about 70% in two studies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And most women as well, more than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So murder fantasies are incredibly common.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And certainly, according to some researchers...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's a good thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Being able to rehearse and think through doing the most terrible things is it's a great dress rehearsal for also how we don't want to live our lives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And only if you are able to fully think through what would I actually be like if I was engaging in this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What would I be thinking?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Who would I be with?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What would be my the group that I'm charging against this other person?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You know, who am I there with?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
As you said, like really putting yourself in the shoes of these.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
people who've done terrible things, that is how you also realize that you do not want those consequences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so, yeah, you maybe want to murder this person, but you don't really want to murder this person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's that intuitive sort of animalistic brain coming in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But then, luckily, we have higher reasoning that goes, actually, if you think this through, that's a pretty terrible consequence for yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the better thing to do is not to murder this person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think it's adaptive to be able to fantasize and think about these things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Obviously, if you start getting to a point where you're ruminating and you're going in these circles where you're constantly fantasizing about doing dark things, especially to a specific person, I'd always advise seeing somebody to talk to a psychologist, for example, because that then does become a risk factor for acting on those dark fantasies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But up to that point, if it's just a fleeting thought or something that sort of in one day you have these thoughts, that is totally healthy, I would say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yes, it's also been called the heroic imagination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So someone who has studied evil, quote-unquote, at length is called Philip Zimbardo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
He did the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that was an experiment which has now been torn apart in various ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It was absolutely influential for psychology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's where participants were randomly assigned whether they would be prisoners or guards in a mock prison experiment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then for a number of days, they were told to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
do various things and it got out of control and the guards went way over what they were supposed to be doing and they effectively started pseudo-torturing some of these inmates or these pretend inmates and the whole thing had to be stopped prematurely but it was really fundamental in showing how just by randomly being assigned into guard the person in charge or inmate you can within a matter of days have a completely different way of thinking about one another
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so Philip Zimbardo has also spoken at length about evil and that all of us are capable of it in the right circumstances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But he also is a big proponent of what he calls the heroic imagination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the heroic imagination is really what the purpose of everything I do is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The purpose of what I do isn't just to go, oh, this is curious, and to stop there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The point is to then prevent it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And to prevent it in ourselves, because that's, I think, ultimately what has to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You can't do a top-down sort of government-level approach to trying to be so tough on crime that no one will ever commit crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's impossible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But you can change...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So to say to attack you with the hearts and minds of individuals to recognize the pathways towards evil and to go, wait, I'm off track.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't want to go this way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I'm going to stop myself here and here so I can find my way back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so the heroic imagination is exercising that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I see someone on the street.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
How do I make sure that they're okay?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
How do I not become a bystander?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And actually the bystander stuff is interesting because there was a really famous case, the murder of Kitty Genovese.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And there were all of these both ear and eyewitnesses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So an eyewitness is someone who just hears things and an eyewitness is someone who sees the crime happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they didn't intervene in the murder of this woman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so this case was often taken as this
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Almost example of look how terrible human beings are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We just walk by.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We don't care about what's happening to strangers on the streets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And actually what's happened since is that there's been lots of other bystander experiments and they have not substantiated this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So we need to be very careful with looking at these extreme cases and going how horrible that this happened to this one person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But that doesn't mean that that's always how it happens.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so actually what we find in bystander research is that most of the time bystanders do intervene.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's just when there has already been a crowd that has accumulated, you read the room and you assume, well, nobody else has intervened yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it must not be a real problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That desire to not stand out in a negative way is often what hinders intervention.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, that's why we look at heroes, people who especially risk their own lives to save others, especially strangers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We see them with a sort of respect that nobody else gets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's because we recognize that we might not be capable of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
If I saw a stranger drowning in a river, would I really risk my life jumping in the river to maybe save them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think that's a big question mark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so when people do that, especially when people almost have this inherent reaction that they just jump in, they just go for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That is something that is a really admirable quality and that we as humans do celebrate and we should.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think often we should celebrate those incidents more and not the bystander moments where we didn't intervene.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We should be normalizing intervening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Murder is a really interesting crime because most of the time it's perpetrated for reasons that we don't like as a society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So as a person who talks a lot to the news and also to producers who are trying to make true crime shows who don't necessarily have a deep understanding of psychology, let's just say, and who come at you with myths where you go, oh, no, we're not going to talk about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We're not going to talk about whether or not the mom is to blame for this person killing somebody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I hate that excuse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's one of my least favorite sort of the trauma narrative of all people who do terrible things must have had a terrible childhood I think is really problematic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What really happens in murder most of the time, which is not what you see on TV because it's really boring, is it's a fight that gets out of control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if you look at the real reasons stated, it's things like this person owed me $4 and so I killed him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
This person stole my bike.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's these really stupid reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it is just this bad decision in the moment, an overreaction to a fight, to an argument.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it wasn't planned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's not some psychopath sharpening their knives, waiting for months to try and kill this person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And we don't like that because there's something called the victimization gap, which is that the impact of this extreme situation on the perpetrator, there's a huge gap between that and the impact on the victim and their family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the victim loses the life, whereas the perpetrator, sure, they get imprisoned, but at best, right, if you will, in terms of justice, but they don't have the same kinds of consequences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And we don't like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We like things that have extreme consequences and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
to have extreme reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that's why I think there's this real desire to show serial killers and to show people who are in fact planning murders for a really long time and then engage in them rather than this fight that goes out of control or someone drink driving or someone who is, I mean, unfortunately intimate partner homicide is also one of those situations that is common.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
One of the top four reasons for murder as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's not the almost glamorized version that we see of murder online or that we see in the news.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think it's always important to talk about murder as something that is rarely inherent to an individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Very few people want to murder.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They might fantasize about it, but they don't want to go through with it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And very few people who do engage in murder wanted to do it in that instance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Never mind again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think in general we have the way that we look at lots of crimes upside down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So we put murderers in prison for a really long time because we think that that's justice, which is, sure, that's one version where it's an eye for an eye kind of, you know, life for life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's obviously the more extreme version of that, which is the death penalty, which I don't adhere to, but I could see the rationalization of, well, you stole somebody else's life, so you don't deserve to have one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But there's also the other side, which is if we're looking at prevention, murder is really like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
people aren't going to go out and murder again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So that's a really low risk in terms of recidivism, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And high risk are things like fraud and elder abuse and sexual violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so in some ways, sometimes our sanctions are upside down in terms of how we can actually make society safer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they're in line more just with how we perceive justice to work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So there's big fundamental questions about how we organize our justice systems and what we want them to be for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think forgiveness is up to the victim's families.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And quite often when you speak with victim's families, there is this divide where you have some who are much more keen on something called restorative justice, which is where what they want is for the person to apologize, the perpetrator to apologize, to explain how it happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Also, quite often, I mean, you look at some of the other consequences in the other context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's sort of like teenage boys who are part of gangs, for example, is the other context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's a teenage boy killing another teenage boy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
These are kids.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the parents of a teenage boy understand that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They don't think of this other perpetrator as this grown man who has... I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think we think of it as...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
this fight between the parents of both teenage boys in that case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But really often what parents want is to just understand how this could happen and in some ways to allow the other teenage boy to still have a life and to not steal theirs as well or his as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So there's that restorative justice model where forgiveness, I think, belongs to the families.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Some families, of course, want the most extreme punishment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's also, I can understand how that would be a response that's triggered if you've suffered a severe loss.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But if we're looking to make society safer, putting people who have killed in prison is actually not the answer, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because if we want society to be safer, it should be based purely on what is most likely to deter crime and who is most likely to engage in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's where I think we've got it upside down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So that episode was all about what it means to espouse certain kinds of views, especially about women, and what it means to be in an environment that is fueling the fire of, well, hatred of gender.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so, and the idea of entitlement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think one thing that we see often in crimes, of all sorts actually, is the sense of entitlement that drives the perception that I'm allowed to engage in X,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
because of something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I deserve to have a life that looks like this, but I don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I'm going to go take it or I'm going to go do something to show my dissatisfaction in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so if you think that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
All men deserve to have a happy life, sort of a Disney version, with a woman at home who's taking care of the kids and this sort of white picket fence ideal that we've been sold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We have been told that that is what we should have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I understand where it comes from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The question though is, are we entitled to that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or is that the idea that that's something we should strive towards?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think the answer is no, nobody's entitled to a good life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I would like to see freedoms and rights manifest in such a way that everyone is able to achieve the kind of life that they themselves want, but you're not entitled to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that's where I think it can get a bit crossed and we can be sold these lies that are basically impossible for
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
everybody in society to achieve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And understandably, people get angry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if you're angry, and if you feel entitled, and if you're in this group where everyone else is thinking the same way as you, yeah, that can make you dangerous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it can reinforce that worst self.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You see other people saying, yeah, I feel the same way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Do you want me to help you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So Tinder swindler, that was a person who pretended on Tinder to be a rich guy who had this lavish lifestyle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he would match with women on Tinder and very quickly love bomb them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So he would send them all kinds of messages and immediately start...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
being very emotional, very sharing, pretend that he's messaging from his private jet or actually message from his private jet, but pretend that he's in love with this person very quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then he would invite women, in this case, Cecilia, to very expensive, luxurious dates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So he would whisk them away to Paris or he would show them his private jet or he would take them to a really expensive restaurant almost to prove that he, in fact, is this really wealthy guy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he would simultaneously be building up the story of a future together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you see this in people who...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
really problematic in relationships in a lot of ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, this is not just in scams or in criminal settings, but problematic relationship styles often involve someone who is creating this idea of a future together that you can just
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
See it now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You know, our kids in the garden running around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You're the only one for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That kind of language, like almost planning your wedding on the third date.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That kind of thing is what he would weaponize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And she, Cecilia, was looking for love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
She wanted all of those things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it worked really well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And what he ended up doing is defrauding her of lots of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And she ended up taking out loans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And her family were giving her money to help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What he was saying was this...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Critical situation, very classic fraud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's a critical situation where he was being followed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
He was under attack and he needed her to pay for some things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
He needed her to pay for some flights until she ran out of money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then she realized that this all was a big fraud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
This was a love scam.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the reason that we spoke with her is partly to show how it can happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think it's really important to remind people that this is something everybody is capable of believing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Fraud works because people know what we want to hear and they tell us the things we want to hear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think all of us, there's a tailored version of fraud that could appeal to basically everybody if they have enough information about you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah, because you're playing with people's emotions and you know that they're vulnerable in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And most people want to be loved and want to love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it's a really manipulative way in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think it's really horrible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But it's also something that we all love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Almost underestimate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So we think, I would identify fraud.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I would know if someone's trying to scam me of money until it happens to us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then we go, oh, wait, that did just happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then we get really embarrassed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think talking about it is really important and seeing it as not the thing that happens to dumb people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because that is sometimes how it's framed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's like, oh, such an idiot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
She was so gullible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Was she?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or was she just a nice person who wanted to believe that this person was capable of loving her?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Which I would hope we all are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, and coercive control is becoming more of an issue where that's when somebody, for example, in a relationship takes control of the finances.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's often a man in a relationship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's sort of traditionally because it falls often along these gender lines.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But the problem is that that person then starts to weaponize the fact that they're controlling the finances and starts using words like, I'm going to give you your allowance instead of going, you've paid as much into this as I have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so this is our shared money and starts using that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And controlling things and controlling how the other person lives in that relationship, that's when you get into things that are called course of control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And things like jealousy can also be used in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I have non-traditional views on jealousy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'm not a jealousy researcher, but I have done some research on sexuality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
personally think that jealousy is basically always a red flag.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because what it means is that the person who is jealous isn't secure in the relationship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the reason that they're not secure in the relationship is either because the relationship is wrong for them or because they are insecure in themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I don't think it is a sign of love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't think it is a sign of, you know, you want to protect your mate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think it is mostly control.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's the desire to control and to possess.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And jealousy, we know, is a precursor to intimate partner violence almost always, as in not all jealousy leads to violence, of course, but all violence is the jealousy is a precursor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And quite a lot of that is imagined things that the partner is doing, not even based on reality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Then we go back to our deception detection research where we're bad at telling whether someone's lying or not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so if you're basing how you're interacting with that person on a faulty lie detector, you're going to make bad decisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the research also bears out that most people are really bad at monogamy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So most people either have cheated on a significant other, maybe not their current significant other, but a significant other, or have cheated multiple times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's just consistently found in the research.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think it's the other way around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think monogamy is setting us up to fail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think monogamy is a social construct.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's a nice idea for some people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that at least based on the research on how people actually behave, they're not actually behaving in a monogamous way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
If you're cheating on your partner, that is not monogamy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That is polyamory potentially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the love of multiple people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's lying and it's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It doesn't have to be that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I'm polyamorous and I believe that you can love multiple people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't know that everyone is always going to meet lots of people at the same time that they're going to love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I think that there's been a move towards more people embracing open relationships and non-traditional relationship structures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that is healthy to at least have as an option.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think the idea that there's this one size fits all for relationships is really harmful to a lot of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it just doesn't really work for everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I guess with jealousy, what I'm thinking of is actually not an instance of jealousy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So where you have a feeling of, I feel left out or I feel it's more that sort of persistent feeling of I am a jealous person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's where I would say that is usually a red flag.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you're right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's a red flag partly because it means the person's probably bad at communicating or
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
you are as a couple like it's not necessarily just the person's fault um it's just that there's something happening in this dynamic that is that is bad psychologically and that should be addressed or maybe it's not the right relationship so the fact that a lot of people cheat does that mean every single person that cheated does that mean they're probably not going to be good at monogamy
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's exactly what psychologists do all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But why deny yourself the beautiful spectrum of human experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, it's like eating one meal for the rest of your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like, why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You don't have to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You can have lots of beautiful people around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
myself certain possibilities you know I think it's more that I want people to feel like they have a choice
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's the important thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think all we see is monogamy everywhere, all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's this one version of how we can live our lives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think it's not the only.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that having conversations with your partner as well, especially early, it's harder to bring this up later on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But to have it early and say, you know, how do you actually want to structure your life?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think how do you want to structure your relationship as part of that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And especially if you're going to commit yourself to one person, one primary person or one exclusive person, that's part of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think then you also don't have to lie to each other if you do cheat, or you can talk about it in a different way if you feel like there's a certain capacity to be honest about whom you're attracted to and how that might impact your life more generally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It can be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, all relationships can be difficult to navigate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think it's the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's and the same risk factors.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
If you're going in because you're trying to fix something about yourself, you're going to have a hard time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Much like if you're dating a single person, if you're trying to fix something and this is going to be the solution to the thing that you feel is broken about yourself, it's going to be hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But if you're going in coming from a good place and you're going, you know, I want to be open and I want to connect with people and I want to love people or person, then you're going to have a better time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You can love people in different ways, and also you can love lots of people deeply, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think, again, some research on bisexuality, so I'm bi, has also found that people who are bi are more likely to be in non-traditional relationships.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And one of the reasons for that is probably also because we constantly get asked to justify our sexuality as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so if constantly you're being asked if one person's enough for you, if one gender's enough for you, if you're in a relationship with one person, for example, you know, if I'm in a relationship with a man, do you miss women?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's like, I don't ask you that if you're in a relationship with a woman, do you miss women?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like, you probably do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But that's just other woman than your partner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It has nothing to do with being bi.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think there's this...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
constant barrage of questions of what does it mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Is it real?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
How do you choose?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What does a relationship look like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Do you constantly want threesomes?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's this constant hypersexualization also, especially of women that we find in the research that can also lead to really negative outcomes for mental health and for things like risk of sexual violence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But on the other hand, you've got bisexual people themselves saying, yeah, but I feel like I also have the superpower that I can love more widely and gender doesn't really matter in terms of whom I'm capable of loving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so relationship structures almost come with that conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's not that we need to be non-monogamous or that we need to be in these kinds of relationships.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's more that I think if you've engaged so deeply with your sexuality, partly because society has forced you to, then you're also going to be thinking about relationship structures more generally and going, actually, I'm going to choose this one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or thinking they're lying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So with men... So I wrote a book called Bi, The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I did that after I created a bisexual research group.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I wasn't a sexuality researcher, but as a bi person and a scientist, I was interested in the science of bisexuality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I couldn't really find it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It was really hard to figure out what people were actually learning about bisexual people in comparison to other kinds of queer people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
One of the things I've found is that the terms that are used are not necessarily bi.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it could be things like plurisexual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So if you type into Google Scholar the word bisexual, you're going to get a lot of confusing things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Also because bisexual is used for like two sexes where you have multiple sex or you can change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so they're bisexual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Which is different entirely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think partly out of that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Researchers started using words like plurisexual and omnisexual is another one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so if you're looking for research on this, plurisexual is probably the word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's just the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's just another word where it's all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Sometimes pansexual is also used.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And again, the idea being that it's all genders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think the right way to think about it is that I'm not attracted to most people, but I can be attracted to people regardless of gender.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Much like you're probably not attracted to most people, but you are attracted to people of a certain gender maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it's the same as being heterosexual in terms of potentially my pool of people who I might be interested in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's just that their gender is irrelevant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The biggest thing that researchers find people misunderstand about bisexuality is that it's a phase and that it's this idea that it's transient, that it's always changing and that it's a stepping stone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think a lot of people still see bisexuality as on the way to gay town, sort of like...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You're on your way, but you haven't quite committed and you're still stuck in expectations of society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You haven't quite let go yet, but really you're gay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's especially true for men.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so when you look at research on bisexual men, which is actually how the research started.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think now when we think of bisexuality, we think of women.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's true that today, twice as many women identify as bisexual as men.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But if you look at the history of this and the research on bisexuality over time, it was the other way around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So someone called Alfred Kinsey was one of the first sexuality researchers in recent history, certainly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he, after World War II, did this really big study of sexual behavior in the human male, it was called.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
He was a biologist himself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so he thought in taxonomies and he was doing research on gall wasps, so insects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And this idea of human sexuality was sort of thrown at him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
After the war, because there's also this whole move to get people to reproduce and to rebuild America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so sexuality was partly, and sex specifically, was becoming more of an area of interest, both in terms of research and in terms of policy and funding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so Alfred Kinsey was asked, do you want to do a class on human sexual behavior?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he was like, I know nothing about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so he spent about a year listening to students' questions about what they want to know about sex.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he realized that he...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
was looking for research to try and build up this course that he was probably going to teach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he realized that he couldn't answer most of their questions because the research hadn't been done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so a lot of the questions were around, what is normal?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You know, if I feel this during sex, is that normal?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
How often do people have sex?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Should I want these?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What about these fantasies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What does it mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What if I have homosexual fantasies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What if I engage in this kind of... And so he was looking at all of these questions and collating them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then he went out and did these huge studies
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he interviewed thousands of people himself, but also had all these research assistants who were out there interviewing people in America about their sexual behavior, which, I mean, just picture the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's the 1940s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
This is quite a conservative time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, certainly more than we might expect now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And here's this researcher asking incredibly personal questions about thousands and thousands and thousands of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he ended up finding, and this is one of the big findings in this book that he published called Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was a bestseller for an entire year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
He sold out auditoriums.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They had to sometimes add the room next to the room he was in because there was so much desire to go to his lectures about sex that they had to connect radios to other halls.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
To give people enough space to sit down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
He was basically a rock star.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And again, I think this challenges a misconception we have about sexuality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That we think of it as this sort of woke thing now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That the rainbow flag and all this stuff is sort of this modern invention almost.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But this is the 40s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
This was happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
People were going to these talks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
People were having these conversations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he created something called the Kinsey Scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so the Kinsey scale is from zero to six.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he found that it was not useful to apply a binary to people's sexual desires and sexual orientation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It was more useful to put them on a continuum because most people were not exclusively homosexual or exclusively heterosexual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Most people were somewhere in between.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so zero was exclusively heterosexual tendencies and six was exclusively homosexual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he would place people based on all the things they told him somewhere on the scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And about half of men were somewhere in the middle, not exclusively either, and about a quarter of women.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Now think about the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, and it's post-war, though, so I think that mattered as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So there's something called a homosocial environment, which has nothing to do with being gay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That has to do with being in a situation where you are with people of the same gender as you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So a homosocial environment are things like prisons, where you only have men or only have women, war...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
which at that point they just had.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so you have a lot of men who are exclusively in the company of men and maybe looking around going, well, now that my options are different, maybe I'm going to choose from this pool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Anyway, so he found that it was that way around, that a lot of people have these fantasies or actions that they've engaged in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then there were other researchers, other male researchers, who found similar things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then at some point in the 70s, it swapped.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it felt like maybe more people, more men were identifying as gay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And there were maybe less people who would have called themselves bi.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And suddenly this became a thing more for women.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think that there's some social things going on, there's some research things going on, but actually bi men have been studied for a long time as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Definitely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that research consistently shows that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
bisexual men are more likely to identify as, well, as gay or straight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And gay, well, it depends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So if they have what you might refer to as a homosexual lifestyle, so they engage in sort of going to queer parties, maybe go on Grindr or other gay apps, that would be much more a lifestyle thing where you've embraced and you see this as part of your identity, that you are part of this queer community.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's much easier to say you're gay than you are bi most often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Also because there's queer phobia within the queer community.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so you might get gay men saying to a bi man, come on, you're act.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I was bi once.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's a classic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I was bi once.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or come on, you're actually gay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's the same that you get the other way around with bi woman is that because it's seen as performative, the idea being that bisexual women are doing it for attention, they're
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
but the attention of men specifically, that, well, they're all going to go back to men anyway, and they're just doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's a phase.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's this thing that they're doing actually to be sexy to men, not because they're actually interested in women.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so there's this lesbian bi thing going on, which is often quite hostile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Not always, but often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And there's this gay male bi thing going on, which is different in nature, but is also potentially hostile.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So in both, saying you're bi can be problematic, but for men more so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The Kinsey scale is a good start.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the Klein grid, I think, is much more fun in some ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the Klein grid came out of research by Alfred Kinsey and others like Havelock Ellis, but we won't get into him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Fritz Klein was a male researcher doing research also on bisexuality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
He was specifically a therapist and he was looking at people who were struggling with their sexuality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so people would show up in the 70s and 80s in his practice and they would say, I'm struggling with my sexuality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he would say, how can I help you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they would say things like, I wish I wasn't interested in men and I'm a man.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he would then work through sort of what that means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Does that mean you don't want to have these feelings?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Does that mean that you don't want to have these attractions?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Does that mean that it's the implications of like how your friends and family will see you?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's the problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so he created this much more complex scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
which I think is really interesting for everybody to do, no matter what their sexuality is, because what it is is it gets you to think about things like, yeah, your sexual identity, easy, but not just that, but in past, present, and ideal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so if you say, well, I used to identify as straight, now I identify as bisexual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then I have in my head, this doesn't mean that other people think this, in my head, I have an ideal, which could be straight, because that's what maybe society's told us we should be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But it could also be something else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I've also had friends who've gone, you know, past, present, straight, straight, but ideal bi.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So you get into these interesting dynamics where sometimes people just wish they were a different sexuality than they were for other reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then there's other things in the scale that ask about your lifestyle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So, for example, if you are going to parties, queer parties, if you have queer friends, then you might have a homosexual lifestyle, even if you're straight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But then again, it's how much lifestyle would you like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so for me, that was a real moment where I was looking at that going, wow, my lifestyle is really straight.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And maybe I need to change this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so he was using these attractions and fantasies and identities and the past present ideal to help people to think through all these complicated feelings we have around our sexuality and to identify problem like sticking points.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so he would look at especially the ideal and the present.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if those were different, so if you said, I wish I was bi, but I'm straight, or I'm bi, but I wish I was straight, or I'm homosexual and I wish I was straight, he would say, let's talk about that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he'd try to work through it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the term he used for bisexual people who were uncomfortable in their own sexuality was being a troubled bisexual person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think any sexuality can be troubled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think you could be a troubled straight person, a troubled homosexual person, a troubled asexual person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And just thinking about why and which aspects are maybe missing, I think is really healthy for people to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't really like talking about honesty with yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think that's a high bar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think it's also often weaponized against people, especially by men, where it's this idea of you're not really being honest, you're actually gay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think this idea of we're not being honest with our own sexuality, that's a big word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think it's more that maybe you haven't had the right framework or the right words to think about aspects of your sexuality that are troubling to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think the sign is smaller than we think it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think that there's this tendency to assume that sexuality is something that we find and keep and consolidate from our teenage years, maybe early 20s.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You maybe get university thrown in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So if you get your experimental years in undergrad, but then you kind of have to choose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that is a difficult requirement, I think, for a lot of people because you can't possibly know all of the things and all the people you might be interested in at that point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And we change in every other way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Why wouldn't we change in this way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Giving ourselves also the ability to reappraise where we're at with our own sexuality, our own desires, our own relationship status, all these things is important to keep us happy and healthy and to not run into issues that we know are faced by a lot of homosexual but also bisexual people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Research has found that bisexual people are more likely to self-harm, they're more likely to be the victims of sexual violence, more likely to be isolated, more likely to be stalked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's lots of different aspects of being bi that are negative, and the reason for that is mostly because bi people are least likely to be plugged into the community.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So when you're going through stuff like this and you feel different and you're constantly being asked about your sexuality, if you're open about it or you're hiding it, that's also troubling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You're going to have these negative consequences, especially if you don't feel like the queer community is really a place for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So that's where also finding your people really matters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the reason I included kinks
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
kinks in evil and sexual conversations in general is because it is so often thrown into the same conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So if someone comes to me and says, Julia, I want you to help me explain why this person killed this other person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they'll often say,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
did you know that he or she was also into, insert kink here, or insert non-traditional relationship structure here, or insert whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I respond to that by going, okay, so?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think people use these words like, oh, he was really into BDSM and think that that's going to have this really important impact on me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or, oh, they were swingers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so, and again, I go,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah, that's, you know, almost like, and in other news, they were swingers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's like, that is not related to this crime at all, unless, you know, one of the partners was killed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But people see this as a defective character.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And kink is very much seen as a defective character in many circles, especially in broader society.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that is wild to me, because if you look at research on
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
sexual fantasies and kinks, a lot of people have at least one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So a lot of people, BDSM being the most common, are engaging in or interested in BDSM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So things like choking or things like restraints or being degraded or doing the degrading of other people in bed, consensually, of course, that is something that a lot of people fantasize about and a lot of people engage in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so these
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
kinks and these fetishes, they are much more commonplace than we sometimes think about them as.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Now, on the other hand, we obviously need to be careful not to assume that because in pornography, BDSM is almost ubiquitous, it feels, that that means everybody wants this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That is absolutely not the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But we also don't want to marginalize it and say it's almost nobody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's somewhere in between.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the main thing is always just to ask and to have open conversations about what it is that people actually want in bed and to make sure you have things like safe words.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
putting in the restraints to make sure that these interactions are safe and consensual, and then being able to explore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I mean, there's everything from pup play, where you dress up as a puppy and you engage in either just general frolicking or sexual behavior, to other things like blood play, which is when you pierce the skin to release some sort of blood that can be scratching, that can be cutting, that can be of yourself or your partner, that can be this...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
idea of, you know, I don't know, it's this taboo thing you're doing together and it's sexy in its own way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so everybody has their own versions of what they find attractive and rubbing up against people, you know, sort of unsuspecting, pretending that someone's sleeping.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's this wide range of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think people also feel often deeply ashamed about the things that they are interested in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that is also really sad because it makes it more likely that people are going to not be able to live that part of themselves and also that they think there's something wrong with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that can spiral into things like, am I evil?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Am I bad?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Am I a bad person because I have these fantasies?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that ties in, unfortunately, with homosexuality and bisexuality and the way that certainly historically and in most parts of the world still today, these queer lives and queer identities are still villainized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They're still seen as lesser, as bad, as a sign of a defect of character.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if people see that within themselves, they're going to think differently about themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And we, well, society is going to treat them differently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So it's all about destigmatizing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's what research has found on fetishes, especially on BDSM, is that the reason that people say they like it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, it's hard to explain why you have a fantasy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But if you go into the finer questions and really dig deep, you can find that people will explain a version of BDSM.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, I can really let go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I don't have to... If someone is telling me what to do, then I don't have to make any decisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I've spent all day making millions of decisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I don't have to in this context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I really like that because it's freeing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that's that disinhibition hypothesis is that the reason that we...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Often go to things in the bedroom that in other contexts we don't like or even find repulsive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like I don't in normal life potentially want to be told what to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But maybe when you move into the bedroom, you go, yeah, but this is a different context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I kind of want the reverse of what I want in my day to day life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I can also understand like furries and that sort of completely living as another species of it even is, it's a really interesting psychological phenomenon of release and of letting go of social pressure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's the being free and the juxtaposition there is that you are free because of the fiction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like you're play acting, but it's touching something deep inside you psychologically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that's where it sort of feels weird, but it also makes sense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, this is also why we like fiction, because it allows you to maybe be somebody else, have someone else's thoughts in your mind for a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you really get to live it as that for a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think, yeah, the truth and fiction sort of circle is always an interesting one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah, so each trait on the dark tetrad, as it's called, which is the four traits that are associated with dark personality traits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the research on human sexuality, I think, is interesting because we keep finding that people have these desires that they feel weird about, that they, unless they have a community or an app that you can go to to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
live those fantasies, they can feel quite troubling to the individual and they can make you unwell.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's true whether it's about your sexuality, so being gay and being unable to live as a gay person, or if that's wanting to engage in BDSM and not having an outlet for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So that can just make you unhappy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think that the stigma there is that that unhappiness is going to lead to some sort of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
horrible manifestations of crime i think that is mostly nonsense but it's more that i'm concerned about the mental health consequences for the individual who's unable to explore those sides of themselves and in research on kinks and sexuality it's just about also making sure that we have visible representation of certain kinds of communities and so that's one of the reasons i ended up writing by i came out in making evil making evil is the uk title evil in the u.s um
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So things that we often associate with the word evil, like sadism, which is a pleasure in hurting other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I came out because I was writing about all the things we associate with the word evil, and homosexuality certainly is one of those things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah, I came out as bisexual, and I came out as bisexual in the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I did it specifically, and I wrote it this way as well, because I was talking about the importance of visibility and how it's through visibility that you realize that the people around you, people you already know and love,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
are part of this community that otherwise feels other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It feels foreign.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It feels abstract.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And maybe it feels scary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But if you realize that actually you've got gay friends or you've got friends who are into certain kinds of fetishes or you've got friends who are whatever sexuality sort of aspect you're talking about, you suddenly go, oh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's going to be much harder to dehumanize these people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And this is where all of this kind of comes to me from a really sad place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You could talk about bias as this project of love and how I was finding the community.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Machiavellianism, which is doing whatever it takes to get ahead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I was trying to write something that would sort of bring us all together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But it's also because I'm constantly terrified that my rights are going to be stripped back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And we know that the laws around homosexual behavior and the rights around bisexual people as well, they're in flux.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's no straight line of acceptance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And just because right now I happen to live in a time and place where I'm allowed to be openly bisexual and I can engage in homosexual activity, that doesn't mean that that's going to stay, not even necessarily in my lifetime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Narcissism, which is taking too much pleasure in yourself and seeing yourself as superior to others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think much like writing evil at a time when you're not at war and you're able to think really deeply about these important issues, I think we also need to be thinking about things like sexuality and other issues that are important to us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if we want to preserve our rights, we need to normalize these issues and make sure that they're visible so that people find it harder to dehumanize those communities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I'm always terrified that bisexual people are going to be hypersexualized, dehumanized again, and that there's going to be laws against basically just who I am.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah, a lot of people felt seen by the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So it was really beautiful, the fan mail I got and the sort of responses to the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I got them from all over the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so in the book, I also spoke with some researchers who were stationed or doing research in countries where bisexual behavior specifically is illegal or homosexual behavior was illegal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
For a long time, bisexuality was, especially in women, well, actually homosexuality in women in general, was sort of seen as, it was a blind spot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then there's psychopathy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because what counted as sex is sex with a penis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so women can't have sex with one another.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so a lot of laws around homosexuality are specifically applying to men.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And certainly historically, that's the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So we're talking about sodomy, and that involves men and not women.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Psychopathic personality specifically often lacks in empathy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so if you look at the evolution of laws, for a while, women were kind of... It was socially not necessarily acceptable, but they were kind of getting away with it legally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But then...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
More recently, especially as bisexuality gets more visible as well, certain countries have started writing it specifically into their constitutions and specifically into their laws that bisexual identities and behaviors are also seen as problematic and illegal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So again, these laws change all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But in terms of fan mail, especially from people in countries where homosexuality and bisexuality are illegal or are seen as problematic or socially condemned, that was particularly important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's usually characterized by a number of different traits, including a parasitic lifestyle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Those people were particularly writing, saying, sometimes also saying, can I translate this into this other language on the DL, like on the down low and just like distribute this to my friends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I had people sending me messages saying I'm at X airport or an X country where this is this would be considered contraband.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like this book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
My book is a banned book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Fun fact.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It was banned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I sold the rights to a foreign publisher.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And right after it was sold, the laws changed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they sent me this really sad email saying, unfortunately, we can't publish your book because it's now considered part of the gay agenda, sort of promoting gay and homosexual lifestyles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so we can't publish it anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I take a little bit of pride in the fact that it's a banned book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I find it really sad, obviously, as to what it means.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But it also makes me feel like it's more important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's what people were writing to me about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So mooching off of others, deceptiveness, lying to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'd say try and read widely on issues around sexuality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Books like mine, but also other books might help you to navigate whether or not you're, you know, what labels there are and also whether or not those labels are good for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think things like the client grid are really helpful, especially for people who are more analytically minded like you and I.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think it gives you a construct to work with and numbers to work with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that can be really helpful to try and go almost seeing your sexuality as a mathematical equation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that can be quite useful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if that's how you think, then look at the client grid and see if that helps you to navigate things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And again, that empathy dimension where you are more comfortable hurting other people because you don't feel sad when other people feel sad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the benefits are that you can, well, live authentically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You can just be yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I do feel more free in who I am and who I'm able to sort of be online, for example, now that I'm out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And because I came out after in my 30s, I think also it was almost a foot in the door technique as well, which is a psychological technique of first coming in and then coming with your big ask.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I'd already published two books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I was already an established scientist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think if I tried bi first, I A, wouldn't have been able to publish the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It was the first mainstream book on bisexuality ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And B, I don't think I would have been taken seriously as a scientist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so having the other stuff first and then buy a sort of a side project, that was acceptable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I think the other way around wouldn't have been.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Now, all of those traits, psychopathy, sadism, Machiavellianism, and narcissism, all of them have a scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There still is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I actually find that it's done the opposite most of the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think as a woman, especially a young woman who's in the public eye, you're sexualized anyway, unfortunately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that is and was already a huge part of my online experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And actually, I think coming out as bi, A, you get sort of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
allies who suddenly are like, we're on your side, we're going to help you fight sort of the hypersexualization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And people get more, almost more weird about it in a good way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They get a bit quiet about it because they're like, oh, well, now it's an identity thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So maybe I shouldn't comment on what she's wearing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it sort of, it almost disarmed some of the more sexualized comments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So for me, I have to say it was mostly a positive experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, if you look at my trajectory into academia and then through it, basically what happened is I was ready to go study art.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so you can be low on each of those traits or you can be high on each of those traits.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's what happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I had my portfolio ready to go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I was going to go study art at undergrad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then my grandfather intervened and was like, being an artist is a really hard life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Maybe you should reconsider.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Painting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah, I am.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I also, I really like surrealism and I really like messing with sense of reality, which again is obviously something that then wove its way into my academic work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But he was also right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, I've always been very intellectual, let's just say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I skipped a couple of grades in school.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I was part of the chess club.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like it was very much, I was the clever kid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so but there's also part of me that's just like, but art is beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I love making art and it can speak to so many people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Anyway, my grandfather convinced me not to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And what the dark tetrad is, it's actually a way of classifying people into those who might be more likely to engage in risky behaviors or harmful behaviors and those who are not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then I applied instead for psychology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Although at that point, you just had to say social sciences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You didn't have to yet specify.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I knew it was probably going to be psychology.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the reason for that was because my dad has paranoid schizophrenia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think one of the reasons I'm so obsessed with this idea of what is real and that is in every way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean that in terms of what is real in terms of perceptions of right and wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What is real in terms of our own memories of the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What is real in terms of what happened in a crime?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What is real in terms of perceptual abilities and neuroscience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What is real?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, I mean that in every way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that's because I grew up with someone who had a unique view of what is real in real time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so seeing that, I think, just affected me profoundly because not only was it very destabilizing in terms of my upbringing, but also it's just in your face that people...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
quite literally are seeing and hearing different things than you and to not jump from that to what else are people perceiving differently than me I think would be almost like a missed opportunity and so I went to study psychology partly to understand that and what was going on there and then that took me down the sort of reality hole and honestly the reason I went to criminal psychology because I could have gone into any other the criminal psychologists were the most they were the most fun
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I feel like lots of psychologists, they took themselves so seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I just, I couldn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I was like, I don't, this isn't the vibe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so the criminal psychologists were, they had this gallows humor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They were doing these, like, arguably the most serious of the crimes in the cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if you score high on all of them, you're most likely to harm other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And yet were somehow having fun and having nice lives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I saw myself and I went, well, I want to do this version.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's often quite procedural.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I'm also much more interested in applied sciences, because I like the idea of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You know, what do we do with this information?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the thing that interests me most from a research perspective, I mean, I did my PhD in false memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So implanting false memories of committing crime, which was the study that ended up going viral because I was the first to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But each of us scores somewhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I built on a history of people implanting false memories of various kinds of other emotional events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I might score low on sadism, but higher on narcissism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But it was the first time that someone had combined false confessions research and false memory research.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that was the research of Elizabeth Loftus and Saul Kasson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So false confessions was Saul Kasson and false memories was Elizabeth Loftus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I was just doing them both at the same time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the question was, could you get people to believe that they committed a crime that never happened and confess to it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And not just that, but
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
believe that it actually happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So remember it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the answer to that in short is yes, you can, especially using specific leading and suggestive interview techniques.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so the procedural learning from that, which is what I'm most interested in, I don't like that's sort of a party trick to be able to actually do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's just so that you can then take that and go, okay, well, how do we prevent this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I've since trained police, lawyers, I've trained people at the ICC, the International Criminal Court, who deal with collective memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And in all of them, I'm probably subclinical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So they deal with hundreds of witnesses at a time in war crimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the question is, how do we try to preserve as original as possible memory without contaminating it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because, well, or at least without contaminating any more than it already is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's where social psychology, I think, excels, is that we have done lots of research on how social settings change what people say, and to some extent, what people believe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so this is the other thing we often talk about in psychology is that there's clinical traits and clinical diagnoses, like someone is diagnosed as having narcissism.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that's also where, actually, the leap to things like AI, I think, is not far, because ultimately, the way that we're engaging with large language models is that, and generative AI in general, is that it's structured as a social interaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's structured as a conversation most of the time now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
what we do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That is literally what I train the police on doing is how to make sure that you don't distort people's memories in the process and how to ask good questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so you get confabulations from both sides now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You get confabulations from AI and from the people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the problem is that there's a third thing, which is the in-between that I'm not sure is getting enough attention right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I wish that there was more integration of social scientists like me and people who do investigative interviewing and have done it for decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
to understand what is happening in the in-between, and so that we can both teach the people and the AI to respond better in that situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What we've created with GenAI is basically the ultimate false memory machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We have created a tailored experience of something that is most of the time telling you what it thinks you want to hear
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then it's uncritically giving that to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or I mean, sometimes, of course, there's, you know, other things where it's sort of appraising whether or not this is truthful or not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But it is giving that to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And there's no safeguard from you just going, this is truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And this is my past or this is how I remembered it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the problem is, is that not only is AI potentially distorting people and their memories, and never mind the factual basis on which they're relying, but it's also the other way around, is that potentially by asking leading or problematic questions, the people are changing how the AI is creating the content, which is in turn on some fundamental level potentially having an impact on how it's discerning truth from fiction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or there's subclinical, which is you don't quite meet the threshold, but you have traits that are related and that are so important for us to understand in the same context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that's where the false memory in human minds and confabulations in AI, I think are much more similar than we think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And when I first saw AI confabulate, hallucinate, I was like, this is what people do all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's just that we can't fact check them all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We're not in a conversation constantly being like, well, is that quite right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'm going to use that for my homework, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So it's both juicy and really troubling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But you don't even need that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So this is what we find in investigative interviewing, which is police interviewing of witnesses and suspects, is that all you need is a leading question or a suggestive piece of information in a short interaction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Most police officers don't spend a long time and they have no memory of this person's past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They know basically nothing about them except for things related to the crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And yet we know that within that very short, maybe half hour, one hour interaction, people's stories can change fundamentally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the problem is that if you create, if you have a memory of something that when you pull it up,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
In that social interaction, it's sort of live.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's like active.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And when you then finish that interaction, it sets back down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the thing is that if you put it back in a different way, what's going to happen is the next time you're going to remember the latest version and you might not realize that it's shifted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so over time it can shift and you don't realize it and that's your truth.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's where even just short interactions can have a profound impact on the human mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We do all the time in experiments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We know that false memories are common, that they're a feature of a normal, healthy brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They're not this glitch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They are a feature.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And we know that false memories are incredibly common in terms of if you think about basically any memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Now, I'm interested in autobiographical memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
This isn't memories of facts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
This is memories of experiences, things that you've lived in some way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And of those autobiographical memories, basically every single autobiographical memory you have is false.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The question isn't whether it's false.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The question is how false.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You're despairing over there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
No, that's not what I'm saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'm just saying that everything has a degree of falsehood to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, it's about whether you think that people are born evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And this is where sometimes I'll get accused of being like, oh, but does that mean we can never use witness statements?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'm not saying we can't use any witness statements.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'm just saying that we need to be careful because even if people say things with confidence, it doesn't necessarily mean they're true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or if they have multisensory details, they're describing in very specific detail what they smelled, what they heard, whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It doesn't mean it's necessarily true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Most of the time, our autobiographical memories are good enough to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so the question of would you kill B.B.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's where memory scientists talk about this as gist memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Our gist memory for events, much like for text, you get the gist of it, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You're good enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You generally remember accurately, approximately what happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But it's when you get to the so-called verbatim details, the specific details of memories, that you find people are often really bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Hitler is sort of meant to be something that gets people chatting about whether or not they think that people are born with the traits that make them capable of extreme harm towards others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Now, most of the time, that doesn't really matter because you remember you hung out with a friend.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You remember you were at this university.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You remember approximately what your favorite cafe was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You remember this important negative or positive event.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You don't actually need to know exactly what you were wearing and drinking and saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But in a criminal justice setting, you do need to remember exactly what you were drinking and saying and doing, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that's where we have this need to break down this human capacity for memory to this level of detail that is just not made for.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Right, and if that particular detail is someone's face, then that's a really big problem.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it can also be an entire false memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So this is where, in my research and in research like mine, we've implanted memories, what we call memories or false memories, of experiences that never happened at all.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So while most things are modifications of real memories, false memories, complete false memories, are when you think you experienced something that you didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And we all have them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We all have some memories that can't be true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And we usually realize them, for example, when we talk to our parents about our childhood or when we talk to friends and we say, remember that time we did this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or whether they think it's socialized, whether it's something that maybe in how people are raised is socialized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And your friend will go, that happened to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That didn't happen to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Mm-hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you become what is known in research as a memory thief, where you've stolen somebody else's memory and you've accepted it or your brain has accepted it as your own.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's possibly because the other person told it in such vivid detail that you could imagine it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And basically your brain was like, well, this feels real now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so the next time you thought about that, maybe, maybe not the next time, but maybe after a couple of times of thinking about it, you started going, this happened to me, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then you integrated into your autobiography.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Not hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's very easy to distort memories or to insert small false memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's harder to convince people of entire events, especially specific events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And this is widely debated, exactly how easy it is to implant a specific false memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's also one of the big debates around my own research is that when I was writing The Memory Illusion, which was my first book,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the research that was in line with that, there was a huge debate between me and a couple of other academics about what it means for something to be a false memory and how we should talk about the ease with which they're implanted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
sort of manifests over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that is still one of the biggest scientific debates in our field.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And to me, I think that's so the coding stuff is about the difference between what some people call a false belief and a false memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And with Hitler, we know from certainly psychologists who have pored over his traits over time and looked at who he was over the course of his life, there's always this question of sort of, was he mad or bad?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think this thing happened or I remember this thing happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that is a really difficult differentiation often because all we have as social psychologists is what you're telling me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I can ask you, do you think it really happened or not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Do you believe it really happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But ultimately,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's really hard to differentiate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I've always thought that you need to ask people about the specifics, like how confident are you in this memory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Do you feel things in this memory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Does it feel like other kinds of memory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Describe the nature of this experience rather than being like, do you think this is a real memory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because that's a hard thing to ask people to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or that it approximates a memory in their minds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Rather than just a thing they think kind of sort of happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But other people think that it's an easier to differentiate line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So for me, it's almost impossible to differentiate the two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Other people think it's more clear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then in terms of the frequency, so in my research, 70% of people became convinced that they committed a crime that never happened or experienced another important emotional event.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that number as well is challenged in that people go, well, does that mean that 70% of people can have false memories like this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the answer is no, obviously not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's just in my sample.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's just these specific six false memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it could be that I think 100% of people are prone to some version of this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Just maybe not in this specific study, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
If I had to come up with different false memory implants or if I was a different person myself and people trusted me differently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's, again, those social factors that make it more or less likely that I'm going to be able to convince you that something happened in your life that you can't remember.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And in one study, obviously, I can't capture that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And with the answer to was he mad, well, he certainly had some characteristics that people would associate with
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But it also doesn't mean that 70% of the time people are, you know, it might be 1% of the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or 0.1% of the time that people have these complex false memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, it's not just representativeness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's also that we shouldn't take individual studies in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like, I'm not saying that 70% of people always have false memories either.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like, it just means in this one study, more people than not develop these complex memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's mostly, I think, a good thing that we can shape it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think the fact that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
memory can be false in the way that I do it in my study is it's a result of the fact that our minds are made to creatively recombine information to solve problems in the present.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
For example, maybe sadism with this idea that he was less high on empathy is probably also showcased in his work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so even the fact that we have this gist memory, it's because we're optimizing data processing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We're basically saying these are the most important things from these events and the other details are irrelevant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Don't remember that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Gone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And now I'm going to work with that to try and solve what life comes up with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the ability to be creative and intelligent relies on our ability to take memories from the past and pieces of them and to creatively recombine them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that's what false memories are, except that that then can look bad if you're trying to remember something specific.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so in my research, I used leading and suggestive questions like close your eyes, picture the event that I'm trying to implant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I was implanting, for example, you're 14 years old.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You were in contact with the police.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The police called your parents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
and you assaulted someone with a weapon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then the question is, what do you remember?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you say to me as a participant, because you've been selected out to specifically never having had this experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And just to be clear, a weapon, I don't mean a semi-automatic weapon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And usually it was a rock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so people would say, because a weapon is just anything you use to hurt another person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I did the study in Canada.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We don't have guns in the same way as in some other parts of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it was unlikely that my participants would have been like, yeah, I totally have all these guns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so they would take something, an object, and hurt somebody else, or they stole something, or they hit somebody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So those are three of the conditions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I randomly assigned people to them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But in terms of whether he was born that way, I think the answer usually would be no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They knew that I'd contacted their loved ones ahead of time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So they were participating in a childhood memory study, an emotional childhood memory study.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they knew that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then I'd contacted their parents ahead of time to get information about what they were like as teenagers, where they lived, friends, basic things, and to make sure they hadn't ever experienced any of the Target events.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then with that information, I said to the participants, okay, so there's these two things your parents report happening, and one of them is a true one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I'd always include a true one to build rapport, which is... I'm doing the what not to do of interviewing, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'm laying it on thick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
To see what's possible, because you have to push it to also show that it's... that I can do this in this context so that we can warn police to not do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I said, we had these two instances that your parents reported, and one of them was...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
you had a skiing accident, blah, blah, blah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Let's start with that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The second one was an incident where you were in contact with the police.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But we'll get to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So we first have 20 minutes talking about the true memory, which people, you know, they're getting going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And actually, in his early life, he didn't showcase quite a lot of the traits that later he defined the horrors that he was capable of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It feels good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I've got a structured interview as well, which I'll then mirror in the false memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So it all feels very legit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then we get to the second memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I say this
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You know, there's this other important memory that your parents recalled.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then they'd say, I don't remember that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I'd say, oh, OK, but I have this really detailed account.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
All you have to do is remember it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then I would do the illusion of transparency, which is a really powerful psychological tool, which is to make people feel like they know what's going on when they don't really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the thing I would do is just say, well, you know, if you want to, we can do this memory retrieval technique called this imagination exercise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I don't like to call it repression, but sometimes we hide away memories that we don't like about ourselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I'm using words that people know and mechanisms that people have heard of that are, frankly, quite disputed in actual science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But people go, oh, well, maybe I did repress this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then everybody says yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Technically, they could say no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They could say, no, I don't want to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So would I go back in time and kill baby Hitler?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But they go, yeah, of course I want to know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I do this imagination exercise where people close their eyes, very simple, and just imagine what could have happened, basically.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And every time they say a detail, my very first detail ever, I remember this because I was so excited because they've got their eyes closed, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I'm right next to the head of department because they were worried because I was a PhD student that, you know, the ethics of it, the concept of it, it took like years to get the protocol through ethics and to make sure it was safe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The answer is no, because I don't think it's a straight line from baby to adult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Anyway, I'm grinning as the person with their eyes closed says the most trivial detail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I remember a blue sky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I remember going,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Oh, no, I had no idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so from the trivial details, and I'd always say, yeah, good job, good job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You know, social reinforcement, little treat, little treat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they would remember more and more details, and then they'd get more specific.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then they'd tell me who it was they allegedly attacked or stole from, where they were.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And those details had to come from them, because I don't know enough about their lives, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I don't think people are born evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So this is the other thing with false memories, is it's basing it on lots of real pieces of memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Real places, real people, real feelings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They're just woven together in a way that never happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so just three interviews and you've got 70% of people confessing to a crime that never happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What I wanted with the study is just to show it's possible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it could have been two people and I would have been happy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The fact that it was so possible was, frankly, quite surprising to everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And we did, in fact, cut the study short because we told Ethics that we're only going to have like a 13% hit rate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We're like, oh, this is working really well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We're going to stop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So and and that was just because of, you know, how power calculations or whatever science because science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And since then, there have been other studies on implanting false memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There have been ones also using AI tools.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So like whether or not we remember things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
or think we remember incidents differently or better if they were created with AI images of ourselves or videos.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So there was a study that came out, I think it was this year, by a team including Elizabeth Loftus, which showed that if you turn photos of yourself into videos using AI, that you are more likely to believe that those things happened in the way that AI is telling you that they did, even though AI has absolutely no idea.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that then you are more likely to remember it with high confidence that it happened in the way that this AI has created it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so we can see that there's lots of versions of this, whether it's interpersonal, social interactions or interactions with tech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And there's a big replication that's happening right now at the University of Maastricht of my study.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or it's about to happen, hopefully, actually, is where we're at.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, and I would be careful with using the word evil because I think we shouldn't use it to describe human beings because it most commonly others people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yes, that is definitely already happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the first thing that's important is for people to understand that they are capable of creating these false memories and that they're not this really unusual, hard to generate thing, that they're actually a normal memory process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that insight is why I wrote the memory illusion is because I think people need to just understand that their minds work like this and that they're really glitchy when it comes to the accuracy of their autobiographical memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But again, that that's probably ultimately a good thing as well in terms of our overall human experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But then what happens if you do have an important piece of information that's important to not being distorted, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You are a witness of a crime, for example, and you now know that this is going to be important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What do you do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the really simple answer is don't trust your brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Just make sure you write it down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Assume you are going to forget everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Assume you're going to forget no matter how important, how emotional, how intense, how much you say to yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It, in fact, I think makes us capable of perpetrating horrendous crimes against those we label evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
This is a failure of prospective memory, it's called.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I will remember.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You won't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Just assume that you're not going to remember.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the closer you get to the time at which an event happened, and we call this contemporaneous evidence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The closer you get in time, the more high quality that memory is going to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think there's this myth sometimes that like if you're drunk or if you're high or if you're really emotional, that that's somehow you should wait.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You should sort of like go home, sleep it off, and then recall your memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That is not what the current advice in memory research actually says.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's in the moment as soon as possible, write it down, record it outside your brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You can do it again when you wake up, but then at least you have an original version.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It does.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And collective and individual memory are these really interesting, they interact in really interesting ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So for me, that word is it's the end of a conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I would always say, when I train, for example, people who go to deal with warlords in the German military, I was working with agents who are going abroad and who are in these really difficult situations where they had to remember a lot of information that was important for national security.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They couldn't just sit there with a tape recorder being like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Hey, or like their phone being like, hey, Mr. Warlord, can you just talk into this a bit closer?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You can't do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so you have to remember it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's when we call somebody evil, we say this person is so different from me that I don't even need to bother trying to understand why they are capable of doing terrible things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so what they were doing is they were coming back from their deployments and they would meet up immediately and have like a team meeting to be like, what did you remember?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the problem is that they would do that before writing their notes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that is that is the wrong way around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so they don't do that anymore because I've told them not to do that anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But it feels good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It feels like collectively we are going to remember more details because you do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But it doesn't mean that those details are right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that's where I'd always say, have your own version before you talk to anybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Then, and my colleague, Dr. Annalise Freidevelt is one of the experts on the effect of things like eye closure on memory and collective memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And she has found repeatedly that if you remember things together,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
especially if you've already got an original version of your own, you do usually remember more details.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And especially if you are helping each other to remember, like in a relationship, you'll have someone who's better at remembering certain kinds of details, maybe names or what happened or what you were doing, and the other person's better at when it happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so you can have these complementary memories that come in in social situations, and you can then have more details that are remembered after.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because I would never do such things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or distorted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But you can also sometimes go back to your original account and go, actually, no, that was a bit wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so my, as again, an analytical person and someone who works as an expert witness on memory cases, I just want to see all the versions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I am good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I want your version history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I want the complete version history of your memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then I can tell you whether I think things have gone wrong here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that artificial differentiation between good and evil is something that certainly with the book I'm trying to dismantle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if so, why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, there's different people having very different memories of the same experience and there's the same person having different memories of the same experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I work in both in some ways as an expert witness, but mostly in the individual changing their story in a dramatic way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So a witness or an alleged victim saying that they, you know, having X story the first time they go to the police and then three years later having a very different, sometimes categorically different account.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the question is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Were they just too shy initially to say what really happened?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Were they under pressure from other people?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Were they not really remembering?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You know, why has it changed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or could it be that they have been undergone some really problematic, like, hypnotherapy or something?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
just shady therapy in general that has like convinced them that things are maybe much worse than they initially remembered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's not that therapy doesn't necessarily, like therapy can bring out more details for sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But the problem is that certain kinds of therapy mirror what we do in false memory research in terms of implanting false memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's why introducing continuums for different kinds of negative traits is really important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it just makes it really messy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you just, it makes the quality of the evidence really low because we can no longer tell what is because of the therapy and what's actually remembered.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Receipts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's all you got.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You have to look at your original versions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
If you only have your version now, the only thing you can look for is evidence that confirms or shows that it didn't happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
If you can't access that, then it ultimately is a matter of, especially if you've got two people saying completely different things, it ends up being a battle of confidence ultimately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And introducing this idea that there's nothing fundamental to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It depends on the kind of therapy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So there's a lot of therapy that is evidence-based and that is very much focused on tackling sort of feelings and reactions that you have right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Then there is an area or a bunch of areas of therapy, including psychoanalysis, which...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
are very focused on trying to find retroactively sources of mental illness in your personal past.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
that makes them capable of great harm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I am very critical of the kinds of, well, both from an explanatory perspective, but also from a false memory perspective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't think that we are the way we are because of individual incidents that happen to us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We all have the capacity to kill people and murder people and do other terrible things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think that is a wild thing to think about the brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
To be like, you are the way you are because of this one interaction you had that one time is like, I mean, maybe this explains a tiny bit of you, but what about all the other life experiences you have every single day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think that there's sometimes an oversimplified searching for answers or sources of problems that we have that I don't like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't think it's true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that there can be an uncautious approach to memory, as you were saying, where you have someone who is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Saying things and your role as a therapist is to help them manage their emotions now and to feel better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's the other thing is that they have a very different role than I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The therapist is trying to manage the person's well-being now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Whereas I am looking at the evidentiary quality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That is a complete, I'm almost like, not quite the other side, but I'm in a very different role.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, I'm criticizing slash analyzing their memories, whereas the others, the therapists, are more likely to be trying to help them manage the memories in their day-to-day life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The question is why we don't do those things rather than why we do do those things quite often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it doesn't matter if they're true or not to therapists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What matters is that they're troubling to the people themselves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But once you get into a courtroom setting, as you say, the facts and what actually happened matter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's not just what you remember.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's what actually happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I think humanizing and understanding that we all have these traits is the most important thing in my book, certainly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, the essence of that is right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There is something called state dependent memory, which is that you're more likely to remember things that were consolidated or created as memories if they match the state that you're in now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So if you are sad now...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
and your brain's sort of just going, you're more likely to remember other sad times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because your memory and the emotional state of your brain is basically already activating those networks of sadness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's like, here's some other sad things and shitty things that happened to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's the same with if you're embarrassed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's the sort of classic one that we usually use as memory researchers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
is that moment where you do something embarrassing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And for the next six hours, all you're thinking of is all the other embarrassing things you've ever done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's like your brain is like, would you like some other embarrassing stories?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And obviously you're going, no, thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Please stop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But you have this spreading activation, as it's called, of just this synapses, just like lighting up new networks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you're going, ah, and there's this other memory that's attached to the same feeling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it's the same with happiness, is that people who are happier tend to remember more happy memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so most of the time, unless you're depressed, most people look back at their lives with this sort of rosy reminiscence bias, and they're more likely to remember the positives than the negatives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But it's not quite the way you were describing it, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So it's not quite that you only remember the objectively good things that happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's more that your interpretation of the things that you've experienced is either neutral or positive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So for me, for example, growing up with my father with paranoid schizophrenia, that is something that I see as a net positive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So obviously at the time it was experienced in a complicated way, but in hindsight, it defined my life and it completely gave me a perspective of the human mind that I just wouldn't have had otherwise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I see that as a positive part of my autobiography.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that is what good therapy should be doing, is it should be taking negative experiences and not overriding them or changing them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, our brains do that naturally anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But trying to work with what you've got, the experiences, the true experiences, but then just shifting the emotional content so that how you're dealing with them now is good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And his experiments where he asked participants if they were offered this holiday that they could go on, but they wouldn't remember it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So they'd have the present day experience of enjoyment on this holiday.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think it was a tropical vacation or something that he'd offer people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And he then said, well, but you're not going to be able to remember this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Would you still go?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And a lot of people say, no, I wouldn't go on that holiday if I can't remember it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think that's interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
sort of pics or it didn't happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the social media generation obviously is perhaps even more in line with that also in terms of how you deal with that in a social context, sort of sharing those memories with others and those experiences and which experiences end up being the important ones in our lives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
ridiculous thing that happens now whenever something cool is happening people take out their phones and film it but the case for that is that yeah this gives you actual something to look back at that it's worthwhile to take a picture actually although it's even more worthwhile to pay attention so attention is the glue between reality and memory and so if you're using your phone to not have to pay attention and not have to put any work into remembering it then you're going to look at that picture later and go what was this because you've tried to outsource it in a way that our brains don't work
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, that's basically what we do as human beings already.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I don't see why tech couldn't do exactly the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And on top of dehumanization, there's also this other thing called deindividuation, which is where you see yourself as part of the group and you no longer see yourself as an individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Language, but also think about it yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's called auto-suggestion when you suggest things to yourself that didn't happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that often comes from reading something or seeing something or thinking about something or hearing somebody else's story and going, does something like that happen to me?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then you start picturing it and thinking about in what context it could have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then you start to basically implant a false memory in yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that can happen as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think with things like Neuralink, it would be the same, where you'd have the ability to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But again, I still think that this interaction between humans and AI or AI-like systems is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It is the same as a social interaction, which is why I was saying it's so important, I think, that we have social psychologists in the room.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because ultimately, whether it's an AI or another person, it's the same brain that you're modifying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I'm not necessarily worried about the fact that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
AI and generative AI can create false memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That is, again, something we've also been doing for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like modified photos is something pre-AI that we had that was already messing with people's minds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Even just what you have in the frame of a shot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So if you take a holiday snap and you're omitting
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
like a really important part of what actually happened on that holiday, because you're taking a picture of the nicest part and not the garbage behind you, that is going to have an impact on your memory as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it's this fight of us versus them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so versions of that have always existed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And historically, if you go even further back, I mean, in some ways, we've never been closer to facts than we are now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's this whole idea of like, oh, we're living in this post-truth or blah, blah, blah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But that is not true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, we didn't even know how to write for a long time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We had no way of reliably cataloging information, never mind the scientific method, never mind reliably sharing it with one another or fact-checking quickly with things like Google.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so you need both of those things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So, I mean, we're so close to facts, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That in some ways I think is the worry is that we've gotten comfortable feeling like we can just access things that aren't modified or that are less likely to be modified and now they're more likely to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You need that sort of collapse of empathy for other people, the people who are on the other side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that can interface with our memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There is, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's called cognitive restructuring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
When you actively, deliberately change an aspect of a memory, usually for some therapeutic outcome, so to be happier, to be better in some way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Hmm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah, it totally works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, I do it all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Again, it's about thinking about experiences you've had, positive or negative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Usually the negative are the ones we need to work on more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And thinking instead of, wow, how terrible was that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Thinking, what did I learn from that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What has this given me that other people haven't experienced?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What is it that it taught me about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Who are my friends?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What are these insights that I've won from this experience?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think that is an important part of resilience that we ideally need to celebrate and teach more than the opposite, which is hanging in the negatives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you need this idea that you can be swallowed by the group.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, with relationships, one of my favorite research on memories is that if you ask people in relationships who does most of the housework or who does most of certain things, the numbers that they give you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So like someone will say, I do 60 percent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The other person will say, I do 50 percent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that gives you a sense of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you add them up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's more than 100 percent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's basically always the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And on lots of different fronts, people will claim that they do more.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if you ask them how much their partner does, they will diminish it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so one of the tips I always say for relationships in terms of memories is actually just sharing what you're actually doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so if you've initially it feels a bit cumbersome because it's quite unnatural to be like, I've just taken out, you know, the rubbish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
also the cloak of justice, the cloak of morality, even when, you know, maybe you're on the wrong side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I've just taken out the bins or I've just booked us a hotel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But saying it out loud means the other person is able to perceive it and then can add it to sort of their internal experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
like star chart of how much you've done in the relationship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they're more like to actually perceive what you're contributing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Whereas we just assume that people have the same memories we do and that they, of course she remembers that I took out the bins, but not necessarily.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
She might not even have really perceived it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But if you're reminding each other of all the things that you're doing, it can feel more balanced over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yep.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It can be improved.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And there are now some really good brain training apps as well that can help to get people to work better with attention, to have NBAC tests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So remember information, a couple of pieces of information back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So what did I tell you three sentences ago?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's where, I mean, getting into sort of who's on the right side of each war is always a more complicated issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's all of these kinds of
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
well, games effectively that you can play that will in fact train how your brain is using its networks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There was one that was developed by researchers, including researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany, and it's called Neuronation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's one that I like because it's all these really short games.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the idea is that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
doing one thing like sudoku or whatever those sort of classics to train your brain that is only going to be useful up to a point because it's then the same thing over and over again and what you want to be doing is lots of different kinds of tasks that your brain has to remain flexible and so short and many is the answer rather than one thing hard it's almost the opposite of expertise so in doing this regularly like keeping your mind sharp that's interesting uh
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Me too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't know because I'm also terrible at remembering names.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Allegedly there are tricks and it's mostly to make the information more sticky by making it a bigger network in the brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But certainly calling other people evil and calling the other side evil and dehumanizing them is crucial to most of these kinds of fights.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so usually when you hear a name, especially like you and I, it's like gone immediately.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's partly because I'd like to think the positive of that is because we're focusing on other things about the person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like, what are they like?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What's this next interaction going to be?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Maybe you're a bit nervous about what they're going to say or what you're going to say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You're already thinking a step ahead in terms of interpreting the situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's quite an overwhelming situation when you first meet somebody because there's a lot to take in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so if, however, a name is important, then you need to A, interpret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Remember to focus when they actually say their name and tune out the other stuff, which can be really difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then to give yourself a mnemonic of how do I remember this name?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So you could have visualize something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You could have a weird name like word game or some sort of like rhyme that you create for the person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You can say, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Julia with the big ears, like whatever works for you as long as it sticks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Now, there's a caveat that I recently discovered about myself in terms of why I might not have particularly bad memory for names.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
All of these mnemonic devices that have been studied over the last hundreds of years mostly rely on creating elaborate pictures in your mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So like memory champions, people who do competitive remembering, will tell you that they create these really elaborate images in their heads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I recently discovered that I have aphantasia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Aphantasia is the inability to create mental imagery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so when I was trying these techniques, I was going, none of these are working for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it turns out it's because I don't see anything, whereas other people actually see pictures in their mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I think there's some individual differences stuff going on there that we haven't quite understood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
No.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the memory palace idea is absurd to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the test for aphantasia is really easy, which is close your eyes and picture a red apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I just see black.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And there's a scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So some people are hyperphantasic, where they can have a really elaborate version of the apple.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And other people have like a gray sort of outline, and I have nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or am I just... Oh, that's the question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or is it just a concept?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because I do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that's why I'm so interested in concepts and ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And we know that people with aphantasia are less likely to care about their childhood memories because they can't visualize them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But are you seeing anything?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Interesting, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And most people with aphantasia don't realize they have it until they have this kind of conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I didn't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I have a hypothesis that people who are analytical are more likely to... I think it intersects with other things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because a lot of my friends, turns out, have aphantasia, and I think it's... There's a version of intelligence, I think, that it might be related to, or an interest in certain kinds of concepts that it's related to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I don't know, because it's early days of research on this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the book Green Crime is really an experiment for me in whether we can apply criminological and criminal psychology ideas to the area of environmental protection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And crimes, because there are people who are convicted of crimes, who are convicted of crimes specifically in relation to destroying the earth and our natural resources, our shared resources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I sometimes think about the earth as like a house.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if someone was coming into your house and just setting things on fire and then walking out unpunished, you'd be really upset.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And correctly so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Or poisoning your water or just like leaving a bunch of garbage all over your house.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's what people are doing on a planetary scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the question is, are we responding effectively?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if so, who?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Who is responding effectively?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then what is the adequate punishment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
How should we deal with the people who we catch?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
In this book, the question was, are the people who are, for example, I use the Dieselgate Volkswagen case, which was all about lying about the emissions that were being produced by diesel cars, especially in the United States.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so Volkswagen, for 10 years, produced these cars that had what was called a defeat device, which is a specific device that makes it look like the cars don't emit very much nitrous oxides, but they actually were way over the legal limit for pollution.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
My case for empathy, or evil empathy as I sometimes call it, is empathy for people who we often call evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Now, why we should care about nitrous oxides is because there is no bottom limit of nitrous oxides that is healthy for the human lung.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So basically any amount is bad for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's related to things like asthma.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's related to things like premature death.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's related to all kinds of negative immediate health effects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
This is what was being pumped out of these cars at wildly high rates, 40 times the legal rates in some cases.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they just lied about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They just covered it up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They knew they didn't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, some some of the people there's a big debate within the Volkswagen people who've been convicted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
A lot of people say, I didn't really know I'm being scapegoated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
People knew the question how much and who that's up for debate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But certainly people knew they had to create the thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Also, the title of my book is evil, or in the UK market it's making evil, which is a reference to a Nietzsche quote, which is thinking evil is making evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They had to literally create this piece of software to put into the cars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then when they got caught, they lied about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And eventually the truth came out, but it was like 10 years later.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so the question is, what leads people, clever people, these aren't idiots.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
These are like clever engineers who are literally working on emissions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like they know exactly what these emissions do to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They know exactly how harmful they are.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
What leads people like that to lie about it, to create these things and to continue lying when they are caught?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that is one of the cases I cover in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I'm looking at it more as a case study for this kind of crime, which is the sort of corporate collective crime and the lying and just what leads people in these settings to lie and to cover up each other's crimes and to conform to these new norms, these harmful environmental norms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I look at it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
in that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then in other chapters, I look at like people go undercover and uncover poaching gangs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And there it's somewhat procedural where it's more, I didn't know that there were undercover agents infiltrating poaching gangs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I didn't know that Interpol was involved in all of these kinds of environmental crime and how.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it gets quite exciting in some of these cases where you really see the people who are trying to hold people accountable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The idea being that evil is a label we place onto others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So what I found most interesting in researching for green crime, so I was speaking to people from the United Nations who are doing these huge research reports on things like the international trafficking in wildlife crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I was talking to people who were infiltrating at the EIA, the Environmental Investigation Agency.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
sort of undercover police of the earth, and they're infiltrating these organized crime groups, these gangs that are involved in poaching and other activities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There's nothing inherent to anything that makes it evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I was talking to this Interpol agent, and I think all of these people were talking about very different ways of measuring environmental crime and of responding to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so depending on who you talk to, the answer will be very different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
How do we fight crime?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the answer is also very different potentially than in other kinds of crime that are more commonly discussed, like violent crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So initially, when I started trying to apply criminal psychology to these really big crimes that are often also multilevel, where you've got bosses, whether it's a corporate boss or an illegal gang boss,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I also think that we need to...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You've got the middlemen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You've got the people on the ground who actually have the guns who are killing people or animals or are logging or polluting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then you've got sort of all these levels of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that makes it very different from the kinds of crimes that we often talk about in other kinds of true crime, for example, where it's sort of one person, maybe a couple of people against one other person or a couple of other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so the scale is so tiny normally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, dismantle that and empathize with people we call evil, because if we're saying that this is the worst kind of act or worst kind of manifestation of what somebody can be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it's mostly violent crime, which is mostly it's arguments, it's bad decisions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's people who are frankly often quite vulnerable themselves, like substance using, people with mental health problems, people who are sleeping rough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
These are not healthy, normal people most of the time who are perpetrating bad crimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And yet in this context, in environmental crime, this is where I couldn't apply the research directly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You've got some of the smartest people in the world who are still engaging in fraud, who are engaging in the cover-up of financial information, who are creating shell companies in order to hide certain things for poaching, the proceeds of poaching.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You've got people who are out there illegally fishing, and someone's insuring the vessel that has been literally registered by Interpol as a criminal vessel for 10 years, and someone's going, I'll insure that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so you've got these really...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
complicated other factors going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I thought that's what was so interesting is ultimately stripping back each layer of each of these crimes and going, who is that person?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Who is the person who's ensuring this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Who is the person who is out there engaging in illegal fishing on the boat?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Who is the person who's financing the boat?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Who is the person who's investigating, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so looking at all the different levels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that's where you get some clarity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And actually at the end of the book, for me,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I felt so optimistic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I went into green crime because I, like most people in the world, at least according to a recent UN climate survey, something like 85 to 90% of people in the world think about the climate crisis on a regular basis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Most people think about it every single day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
This idea that there's this minority of people who care about climate change, that's an illusion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
That's not true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if you ask people...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
what the emotional consequences are of those feelings.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
People say things like eco-anxiety, anger, sadness, grief, that we're worried about the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But what you want is for people to feel motivated, energized, purposeful about tackling one of the biggest issues of our time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And certainly by meeting all of these UN researchers, I went to so many conferences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
You have no idea how many conferences I went to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So if someone can destroy others, torture others, hurt others, I work as a criminal psychologist, so I work a lot on...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I went to anti-corruption conferences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I went to wildlife crime conferences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I went to the specific meeting of multilateral agreements to see how people were negotiating in the room and the tensions between it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It was wild.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's so interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's such a huge space and it gave me so much hope for the future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah, where no one's debating, did someone just burn down this rainforest?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's like, we can see it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I was at a European Space Agency conference recently.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they're telling us all about the different satellites that are imaging, sort of pointing at the Earth rather than out into space, and that are imaging through all these different wavelengths exactly what's changing, and basically just chronicling how the Earth has changed over time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And a lot of these environmental crimes can be seen from space and can be measured.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
sexual abuse cases, on rape cases, on murder trials.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it's, like, as long as you trust those data, the question then is, okay, these crimes are happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
How do we stop them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And as you say, like, I was very much trying...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I mean, you can't write a book on environmental issues and be apolitical.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think that's impossible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I certainly was trying to look at it quite logically and go, here's a crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We all agree this is bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And these are people who've been convicted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
This isn't just like someone who didn't do the recycling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because also I think that individual level is often detrimental.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But these are...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
huge, huge crimes that cost us a huge amount of money to clean up and that cost a huge amount of human health and have these other knock-on effects and are changing, certainly, the structure of our planet in a way that we can feel already.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so in those contexts, that word evil is used all the time to go, this person is evil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that is the purpose of the book, is to try and show that we actually have lots of laws already.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We've got lots of enforcers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We've got lots of researchers on it from space and not space looking at these issues, tracking them, and trying to hunt down the criminals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So the psychology of environmental crime, I find often boils down to the same kinds of things that we have already been talking about in the context of quote unquote evil, where it's things like conformity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So doing what you think everyone else is doing or know what everyone else is doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So there's an industry where you know that lots of people are cheating or are fudging the facts in some way, then you both feel the need and also maybe rationalize
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
the ability to also deceive because it's market forces, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like ultimately in a free market or even a controlled one, you've got these people who are just lying to everybody else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And if we're doing that, then we need to go, okay, but what we actually want is we don't really just want to label people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they're saying, we're getting to these X outcome by following the rules that everyone else is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And they're not, they're just lying to consumers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They're lying to the regulators.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They're just lying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then other people who are trying to be honest and, you know, play the game clean are
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They see the success of this other company and go, well, we want to have what they have.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then they realize they can't, with the tech that exists, get there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so what do they then realize is, well, they must be cheating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so then they start cheating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so it has this trickle effect of making everyone else fall in line with these ideas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
well, unethical practices that are unethical on so many levels.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then later you get these huge lawsuits because if you get caught, then everyone's upset.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The investors are upset.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The consumers are upset.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
The environmentalists, the lawyers, everybody's upset with you because you have committed this huge crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We want to stop that behavior from happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the only way we're going to do that is if we understand what
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you can be an emissions engineer with a kid with asthma and an old grandma who's struggling with her health and still feel like, yeah, I know that I'm creating these dirty cars, and yet I'm going to do it anyway.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
led that person to come to that situation and to engage in that behavior.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because as you say, there's the conformity, the social pressure, the rationalization, and those are all very human experiences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that's why also in the book, I always focus on
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Whistleblower is a big word, but like people who at some point actually helped to uncover what was going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And that we're back to the topic of heroes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We're back to bystander effects.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We're back to all of the social psychology and criminal psychology we've been talking about this whole time, which is why I thought it was so important to apply that research to this context and to say, OK, so now we've got.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so that's why evil empathy, I think, is crucial, because ultimately what we want is to make society safer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
These people who are willing to engage in these crimes, they know it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But there's also this moment of how do you get out of it and who is going to stop them?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And back to the idea of heroes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And you do usually in these cases at some point have a hero, either an external one or an internal one, who goes, this needs to stop.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I have empathy for everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Ooh, there is one context.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So there is one context that I don't know if it's that I have trouble empathizing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think it is I have trouble empathizing, and I just think it is I don't want to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I don't know why this is the one thing, but I remember writing Evil, and I got to the section on sexual slavery, and...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And the only way we can do that is to understand the psychological and social levers that led them to engage in this behavior in the first place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
There was something about that very specific issue of having women in particular in a confined area where you have often trafficked them and then you're forcing them to engage in repeated sexual acts that the person who is running that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I can't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I know that I'm not saying that that's the worst kind of crime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't think it necessarily is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I just think from my mind, there was just a, you can't go there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I don't know how to empathize with that person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think the fact that there are people who study the darkness gives me hope, and that there are people who want to understand why we do bad things, myself included, but I mostly get to benefit from other people's research that I summarize into my books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think that the tech that we are now experiencing mostly also gives me hope in that there is this whole new frontier of capacity to implement scientific findings if we want to do so and choose to do so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Like, also even in memory interviewing, we were talking about the potential role of AI in distorting our memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
When I do talks, when I do corporate talks, I tell people the prompt that I use to use the cognitive interview, which is the best practices in memory interviewing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Because you can also tell, you know, AI tools to do the appropriate kind of interviewing if you're talking about memory things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I created a company called Spot in 2017, which uses...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, we're now building it out to be AI, but it's basically a tool to record important emotional memories and to share them as information with others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I've always been interested in how tech can help us to record important emotional events, like with Spot, Talk to Spot, and how technology can actually make us feel more human.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So there's these capacities like memory that we're bad at, and tech can help us to overcome some of those shortcomings as long as we use it in a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
science-backed way rather than just sort of freestyling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
I think the worry I have sometimes is that, as I've said before, we're sort of ignoring the social scientists entirely sometimes when building these systems, and it ends up becoming this engineering math problem when that's not actually, in terms of the consequences for humanity, what it's going to be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I'm always keen on connecting social sciences and big issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So Spot came out of my going around the world and giving everyone an existential crisis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So I'd go around and like with you, I'd say, look, our memory is really faulty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And here's all the ways it can lie to us.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And people would go, oh, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And then I'd go, bye.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Some point I was like, maybe I should do something about this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I went to a, well, I did a TED Talk and I was invited to this tech conference called Founders Forum, which is a sort of meeting of tech founders and others in London, but in also a couple other places.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I was invited to this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And while there, I met the founder of Evernote, Phil Libin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so I met Phil Libin at this event, and I was talking to him about my research on memory and how I've been wanting to implement or translate what I've been doing into something that could prevent false memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And specifically, I was interested in creating an AI or at least machine-administered version of the cognitive interview system.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So that's the neutral approach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's already a scripted approach, which was helpful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So it's been scripted for decades or a couple of decades.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
It's been scripted for decades as a cognitive interview.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And when we train police on how to do it in places like the UK, it's literally just asking people to basically read.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
a script that we have fine-tuned over the years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And what can do that really well?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Well, chatbots can do that really well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so together with Phil Libin and my two co-founders, Dylan and Daniel, I ended up co-founding Spot, which is talktospot.com if you want to check it out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it ended up
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
sort of pivoting into this general reporting tool for workplaces, where this was before Me Too, but it was the idea being that in lots of workplace environments, you have important emotional events that are really important to understand, but are really hard to preserve.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And often you have this really bad evidence that you're relying on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Someone at some point sort of goes to HR and says something and somebody else says something else, and you're sort of unsure as a company maybe who to
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
whom to trust, what's real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so we were trying to streamline that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so now Spot is a reporting tool for any kind of compliance issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And so you can talk to Spot, it's called.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And it is this chatbot interface that administers the cognitive interview and then creates a report that then gets sent, if you want, to your employer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So we work with insurance companies, medical companies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
We work with the bar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So all the lawyers in the UK use it themselves, which I always think is a real stamp of approval when the bar counsel is using your tool.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But again, not bars and drinks, bars and lawyers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Thank you for clarifying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Just picturing all these like people like with flair throwing vodka bottles in the air.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Not them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
They could also use it potentially.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But we've got people reporting like, you know, someone left bleach in a machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So it's like a more small memory.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So it's streamlining reporting processes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
Again, that's why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
So in the context of Spot, yes, it's just compliance and it's that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
But I think in sort of private life and in terms of where I think this could go, I'm interested in all memories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think that important life events can be recorded.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
And I think the idea of having grief bots and having things that have a representation of you or your loved ones, I think that's something that I like seeing in the future, I would say.