Lex Fridman

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And now, dear friends, here's Julia Shaw.

You wrote the book, Evil, The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side.

So lots of interesting topics to cover here.

Let's start with the continuum.

You described that evil is a continuum.

In other words, the dark tetrad, psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism are a continuum of traits, not a binary zero one label of monster or non-monster.

So can you explain this continuum?

So early in the book, you raised the question that I think you highlight as a very important question.

If you could go back in time, would you kill baby Hitler?

This is somehow a defining question.

Can you explain?

So you think a large part of it is nurture versus nature, the environment shaping the person to become, to manifest the evil that they bring out to the world.

Yeah, I think a prerequisite of doing evil, I see this in war a lot, is to dehumanize the other.

In order to be able to murder them at scale, you have to reformulate the war as a fight between good and evil.

And the interesting thing you see with war is both sides think that it's a battle of good versus evil.

It almost always is like that, especially at large-scale wars.

Yeah, you promote empathy as an important thing to do when we're trying to understand each other.