Lex Fridman Podcast
#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex
14 Oct 2025
Julia Shaw is a criminal psychologist and author who in her books explores human nature, including psychopathy, violent crime, the psychology of evil, police interrogation, false memory manipulation, deception detection, and human sexuality. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep483-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/julia-shaw-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Julia's Instagram: https://instagram.com/drjuliashaw Julia's Website: https://www.drjuliashaw.com/ Julia's Linktree: https://linktr.ee/drjuliashaw Julia's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drjuliashaw/ Julia's Books: https://amzn.to/4mQBnTV Green Crime (US Book): https://amzn.to/4nLfSVE Green Crime (Canadian Book): https://amzn.to/47lBAdc SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex BetterHelp: Online therapy and counseling. Go to https://betterhelp.com/lex LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drink. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (01:00) - Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (08:16) - Dark Tetrad - Psychopathy, Narcissism, Machiavellianism, Sadism (29:23) - Serial killers (43:59) - Murder (51:51) - Lies and scams (56:38) - Jealousy (1:00:07) - Monogamy (1:05:20) - Sexuality (1:20:21) - Sexual fetishes (1:35:56) - Criminal psychology (1:39:04) - False memories (2:25:01) - Criminals destroying the planet (2:40:24) - Hope PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
Full Episode
The following is a conversation with Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist who has written extensively on a wide variety of topics that explore human nature, including psychopathy, violent crime, psychology of evil, police interrogation, false memory manipulation, deception detection, and human sexuality. Her books include Evil, about the psychology of murder and sadism,
The Memory Illusion, about false memories, Bi, about bisexuality, and her new book, that you should definitely go order now, called Green Crime, which is a study of the dark underworld of poachers, illegal gold miners, corporate frauds, hip men, and all kinds of other environmental criminals.
Julia is a brilliant and kind-hearted person with whom I got the chance to have many great conversations with on and off the mic. This was an honor and a pleasure. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfriedman.com slash sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast.
We got Shopify for selling stuff online, BetterHelp for mental health, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for my daily multivitamin. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to letstreamin.com slash contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store.
Obviously, it's an incredible platform for selling stuff, but again, I will reiterate, as I do often, as we did in the DHH episode, what's also incredible is the implementation of the infrastructure, how the thing is built. The legendary, well-documented Black Friday, I believe in 2021, Shopify handled 30 terabytes of data every minute. 32 plus million requests per minute hit the servers.
11 million MySQL queries per second were processed. And all of that mostly Ruby on Rails. The very framework, the very programming language that's not supposed to scale, and it did, and it did so incredibly well, seamlessly, and still maintained the beauty underlying that implementation. There's this write-up I recently read about how they were actually able to make that happen.
There's so many interesting details, including the fact that, as DHH talked about, that it was a modular monolith, and it was scaled horizontally in these very interesting modular ways. Again, that's probably outside of the scope of what I'm supposed to be doing here. Just another chance to celebrate the incredible engineering behind Shopify. And all of that to help you sell stuff.
You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lex. That's all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match it with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
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