Transcript for Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex | Lex Fridman Podcast #483

This is a transcript of Lex Fridman Podcast #483 with Julia Shaw. The timestamps in the transcript are clickable links that take you directly to that point in the main video. Please note that the transcript is human generated, and may have errors. Here are some useful links: 

Table of Contents

Here are the loose “chapters” in the conversation. Click link to jump approximately to that part in the transcript: 

Episode highlight

Julia Shaw (00:00:00) We all have the capacity to kill and murder people and do other terrible things. The question is, why we don’t do those things, rather than why we do do those things, quite often. Most men have fantasized about killing someone, about 70% in two studies, and most women as well. More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody. So, murder fantasies are incredibly common.

Introduction

Lex Fridman (00:00:23) 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, “Green Crime,” which is a study of the dark underworld of poachers, illegal gold miners, corporate frauds, hitmen, and all kinds of other environmental criminals. Julia is a brilliant and kindhearted person with whom I got the chance to have many great conversations on and off the mic.
Lex Fridman (00:01:20) This was an honor and a pleasure. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here’s Julia Shaw.

Dark Tetrad

Lex Fridman (00:01:38) 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?
Julia Shaw (00:02:05) So, each trait on the dark tetrad, as it’s called, are the four traits that are associated with dark personality traits, things that we often associate with the word evil, like sadism, which is a pleasure in hurting other people; Machiavellianism, which is doing whatever it takes to get ahead; narcissism, which is taking too much pleasure in yourself and seeing yourself as superior to others. And then there’s psychopathy. Psychopathic personalities specifically often lack empathy, and it’s usually characterized by a number of different traits, including a parasitic lifestyle, so mooching off of others, deceptiveness, lying to people, and again, that empathy dimension where you are more comfortable hurting other people because you don’t feel sad when other people feel sad.
Julia Shaw (00:02:52) Now, all of those traits — psychopathy, sadism, Machiavellianism, and narcissism — all of them have a scale. So, you can be low on each of those traits, or you can be high on each of those traits. 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. And if you score high on all of them, you’re most likely to harm other people. But each of us score somewhere, so I might score low on sadism but higher on narcissism. And in all of them, I’m probably subclinical. 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.
Julia Shaw (00:03:37) Or they’re subclinical, which means 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 (00:03:46) So early in the book, you raised the question that I think you highlight is 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?
Julia Shaw (00:03:58) Well, it’s about whether you think that people are born evil. And so the question of “Would you kill baby Hitler?” is 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. Or whether they think it’s socialized, whether it’s something that maybe in how people are raised sort of manifests over time. And with Hitler, we know from 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, “Was he mad or bad?”
Julia Shaw (00:04:32) And with the answer to, “Was he mad?” Well, he certainly had some characteristics that people would associate with, for example, maybe sadism. This idea that he was less high on empathy is probably also showcased in his work. But in terms of whether he was born that way, I think the answer usually would be no. And actually, in his early life, he didn’t showcase quite a lot of the traits that later defined the horrors that he was capable of. So, would I go back in time and kill baby Hitler? The answer is no, because I don’t think it’s a straight line from baby to adult, and I don’t think people are born evil.
Lex Fridman (00:05:08) 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?
Julia Shaw (00:05:19) Well, and I’d be careful with using the word “evil,” because I think we shouldn’t use it to describe human beings, as it most commonly “others” people. In fact, I think it makes us capable of perpetrating horrendous crimes against those we label evil. So for me, that word is the end of a conversation. 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, because I would never do such things. I am good.” And so that artificial differentiation between good and evil is something that, certainly with the book, I’m trying to dismantle.
Julia Shaw (00:05:56) And that’s why introducing continuums for different kinds of negative traits is really important, and introducing this idea that there’s nothing fundamental to people that makes them capable of great harm. We all have the capacity to kill and murder people and do other terrible things. The question is, why we don’t do those things, rather than why we do do those things quite often. So, I think humanizing and understanding that we all have these traits is the most important thing in my book, certainly.
Lex Fridman (00:06:24) 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 on 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.
Julia Shaw (00:06:49) That’s right, and on top of dehumanization, there is also this other thing called de-individuation, which is where you see yourself as part of the group, and you no longer see yourself as an individual. So, it’s this fight of us versus them. And so you need both of those things. You need that collapse of empathy for other people, the people who are on the other side. And you need this idea that you can be swallowed by the group, and that gives you a sense of the cloak of justice, the cloak of morality, even when, you know, maybe you’re on the wrong side. And that’s where I mean, getting into who’s on the right side of each war is always a more complicated issue.
Julia Shaw (00:07:29) 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 (00:07:37) Yeah, you promote empathy as an important thing to do when we’re trying to understand each other, and then a lot of people are, are uncomfortable with empathy when it comes to folks that we traditionally label as evil. Hitler’s an example. To have empathy means that you’re somehow dirtying yourself by the evil. What’s your case for empathy, even when we’re talking about some of the darker humans in human history?
Julia Shaw (00:08:04) My case for empathy, or “evil empathy” as I sometimes call it — so empathy for people who we often call evil… 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.” The idea being that evil is a label we place onto others. There’s nothing inherent to anything that makes it evil. And so I also think that we need to 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, so if someone can destroy others, torture others, hurt others…
Julia Shaw (00:08:45) I work as a criminal psychologist, so I work a lot on sexual abuse cases, on rape cases, on murder trials, and so in those contexts, that word “evil” is used all the time. So, “This person is evil.” 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. We want to stop that behavior from happening, and the only way we’re going to do that is if we understand what led that person to come to that situation and to engage in that behavior. And so that’s why evil empathy, I think, is crucial, because ultimately what we want is to make society safer. 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 (00:09:26) On a small tangent, I get to interview a bunch of folks that a large number of people consider evil. So, how would you give advice about how to conduct such interviews when you’re sitting in front of a world leader that some millions of people consider evil? Or if you’re sitting in front of people that are actual, like convicted criminals, what’s the way to conduct that interview? Because to me, I want to understand that human being. They also have their own narrative about why they’re good and why they’re misunderstood, and they have a story in which they’re not evil, and they’re going to try to tell that story. And some of them are exceptionally good at telling that story. So, if it’s for public consumption, how would you do that interview?
Julia Shaw (00:10:13) I think it’s important to speak with people whom we, or who a lot of people, dehumanize, including myself. I mean, I also speak with people who I think are, or have, committed terrible crimes, and I’ve spoken to these people because, as a criminal psychologist, that’s often part of my job. 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.
Julia Shaw (00:10:46) 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. So, I think, certainly in 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.” And, “If I hadn’t done this first, somebody else would have done this waste crime or this other kind of crime.” And so there’s this rationalization. There’s this normalization.
Julia Shaw (00:11:16) There’s this diminishing of your own role and agency, and that still tells us a lot about the psychology of people who commit crimes, because most of us 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 and 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.
Julia Shaw (00:11:54) 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 (00:12:03) I find these pictures of World War II leaders as children kind of fascinating, because it grounds you and makes you realize that there is a whole story there, of environment, of development through their childhood, through their teenage years… you just remember they’re all kids. Except Stalin. He was looking evil already when young.
Julia Shaw (00:12:25) Well, people used to not smile in photos as well. 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?”
Julia Shaw (00:12:33) But our creepiness radars are also way off. 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. And that intuitive perception, according to ample studies at this point, is not to be trusted. And one thing in particular is whether or not we think someone is creepy, including children, but usually the research is done, of course, on adult faces and with adults. And there’s only recently did we even really define what that vague feeling of creepiness is, and it has a lot to do with just not following social norms. And this is something we see that transfers to other contexts, like why people are afraid of people with severe mental illness and psychosis.
Julia Shaw (00:13:15) 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. There was one study where they literally had a waiting room where they also had people with chairs, and the question was, “How many chairs would you sit away from someone you know has a severe mental illness?” And the answer is you sit more chairs away, and there’s a physical and psychological distancing that’s happening there. And it’s not because people with severe mental illness are inherently more violent or more dangerous. That is not actually what the research finds. It’s that we perceive them as such because we perceive them as weird, basically.
Julia Shaw (00:13:54) We go, “This isn’t how you’re supposed to be behaving, and so I’m worried about this, and so I’m going to keep my distance.” And so creepiness is much the same, 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 (00:14:10) Well, what are the concrete features that contribute to our creepiness metric? Is that meme accurate that when the person’s attractive, you’re less likely to label them as creepy?
Julia Shaw (00:14:23) It depends. If they’re too attractive, it can be. So, there are effects that interact there.
Lex Fridman (00:14:29) That’s hilarious.
Julia Shaw (00:14:29) And we also don’t trust people potentially who are too attractive, but again, a deviation from the norm. And so if you’re deviating in any way, that can lead to your assessment being more wrong, but also you assessing people as more negative. And so 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. And I’ve done research on this, as have lots of other people, like Aldert Frey is one of the leading researchers on deception detection.
Julia Shaw (00:15:08) And he has found in so many studies that it’s really hard to detect whether someone is lying reliably, and that people, especially police officers, people who do investigative interviewing, they have this high confidence level that they, because of their vast experience, can in fact tell whether the person across from them is lying to them, this witness, the suspect. And even that, if you take them into experimental settings, they are no better than chance at detecting lies, and yet they think they are.
Julia Shaw (00:15:39) 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,” and you go hard on that person in a way that might even lead to a wrongful conviction.
Lex Fridman (00:15:55) So, the fact that it’s very difficult to detect lies and overconfidence in policing creates a huge problem.
Julia Shaw (00:16:04) Not just policing, in relationships and in lots of other contexts as well. I mean, a lot of jealousy is born out of uncertainty. Jealousy isn’t, “I know for sure that you have done something that is threatening our relationship.” 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. And there as well, we are very bad at it.
Lex Fridman (00:16:27) Is there a combination of the dark tetrad and how good you are at lying? Are people with certain traits, maybe psychopathy, better at lying than others?
Julia Shaw (00:16:39) There’s definitely some research to support the idea that people with psychopathy are better at lying. There’s also some research specifically on sort of faking good in, for example, parole decisions. So, when it comes up to someone who is… There’s a legal decision to be made as to whether this person can be released from prison or released from just detention in general. 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. And then the committee goes, “Oh, well, you know, this person’s doing great,” and so they’re ready to be released. And then they make the wrong decision because that person has been faking it. So, I think with psychopathy, it’s a bit complicated.
Julia Shaw (00:17:21) There has been some, 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. But then there’s other research which finds that if you use other kinds of interventions, like Jennifer Skeem in California, who does research on people with psychopathy who have committed severe crimes. 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.
Julia Shaw (00:17:58) 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, that being pro-social is the better path, rather than just going hard on empathy and things that they don’t maybe also see as faults with themselves.
Lex Fridman (00:18:17) Is there a psychological cost to empathizing with so-called monsters?
Julia Shaw (00:18:21) You referenced Nietzsche in the book, you know, “Gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.” If you study, quote unquote, “evil,” or study monsters, you may become that. Is there a danger of that? I don’t think so. I think that’s what people fear. So, a lot of the Nietzsche quotes I use are… some of them I like because they speak to the chapters I write about, and the issues I write about. But some of them I also like because they are how people think about evil and people who are labeled evil. And I do think with gazing into the abyss and the abyss gazing back, it’s more of a… You’re trying to find it. And that’s why in some ways that doesn’t work actually, because it isn’t a total blank. It isn’t the abyss.
Julia Shaw (00:19:09) 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. So, when they see these patterns, they act a better way. So, I get asked a lot as a criminal psychologist, “Do you carry the cases that you deal with around with you?” Some of the cases involve huge amounts of witnesses, huge amounts of potential victims, and so in these cases there are very visceral descriptions sometimes of heinous crimes. And I think that as someone who does this work, you can’t be someone who sees it as anything other than a puzzle.
Julia Shaw (00:19:55) So, you have to look at it and go, “Here’s the different pieces of information. What I am doing is pattern recognition. I’m not here to emotionally invest in each of these victims or potential victims. That’s not my role. There are therapists for that. There are other people who do that work. I am here working with the police. I’m here working with lawyers. I’m here looking at it more objectively to see how this all fits together.” And so I think that’s how I engage with it. I see it as this puzzle that I’m trying to figure out. I worry for my own brain that when I confront people and see them as a puzzle, which I do, I see the beauty in the puzzle. All the puzzles look beautiful to me.
Julia Shaw (00:20:33) I’m sometimes like a Prince Myshkin character from The Idiot by Dostoevsky, where you just see… It’s not the good in people, but the beauty in the puzzle. And I think you can lose your footing on the moral landscape if you see the beauty in everything a bit too much. Because everyone is interesting. Everyone is complicated. 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 an existential crisis.” And scientists instead go, “Oh, wow!” And you can sort of see the delight in discovery as well.
Julia Shaw (00:21:19) And I think sometimes scientists read as callous because we enjoy this discovery of knowledge and the discovery of insights. 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.” And I think it must be similar. I don’t know that I feel or worry that I sort of become more, quote unquote, “evil.” I think it’s more that you add this nuance, which I guess sometimes can be estranging to other people. So, there’s that. So, when you speak with others, sometimes… Like, even when I say, “We shouldn’t use the word evil,” people go, “No, but you have to. Does that mean you’re trivializing things?” And the answer is, no, I’m not trivializing. I’m just trying to understand.
Julia Shaw (00:22:01) Also, sympathizing or being empathetic towards people whom others have written off is always going to get that response from some people. 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. I often come across this in true crime work that I do, because I get asked to do TV shows. I host TV shows, and I host BBC podcasts. And there’s always the question of sometimes people commit murder to become famous. And should it be a blanket ban that we don’t cover those cases, or should we cover those cases but in a different way, or should we anonymize them? So, it doesn’t mean that you should never cover that case.

Serial killers

Julia Shaw (00:22:42) It just means that you need to think about it. Speaking of which, you’ve done a lot of really great stuff, podcast shows. One of them is Bad People Podcast. You co-host it. It has over 100 episodes, each covering a crime. What’s maybe the most disturbing crime you’ve covered? 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. 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? But one of the most, certainly, problematic, dark cases that we covered was the Robert Pickton case.
Julia Shaw (00:23:26) And the episodes are called Piggy’s Palace, because that was the nickname for the farm where Robert Pickton brought 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. Now, one of the reasons I covered that case is actually because it was influential in my own career. So, Robert Pickton is one of the most famous Canadian serial killers of all time. And as I was doing my undergrad at Simon Fraser University in Canada, I was being taught by someone called Stephen Hart. And Stephen Hart was an expert witness on the Robert Pickton trial, and so he was keeping us abreast of some of the developments of what he was covering.
Julia Shaw (00:24:10) And I found it so interesting, and I loved Stephen Hart as a person, and he seemed to have this sense of humor, this gallows humor, around it all, despite being faced with one of the arguably worst people in Canadian history. 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. And so that’s one of the reasons I went into the field is because of this case as well. And so we had him on the show. So, he came onto Bad People, and we interviewed him for it.
Lex Fridman (00:24:40) All right, and he has done, I imagine, a lot of really difficult cases.
Julia Shaw (00:24:46) 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. I do research on memory and false memory and witness statements. And Elizabeth Loftus has also been a recent expert for the Ghislaine Maxwell case. She was in the press. And so she has worked with lawyers to educate the court on memory in lots of really, really controversial cases. 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. 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 (00:25:32) So what kind of person feeds their victims to pigs? What’s interesting about that psychology?
Julia Shaw (00:25:38) The psychology about Robert Pickton? I mean, he was a tricky person because I think he was profoundly lonely, and this is something we see with a lot of serial killers is that they have this loneliness, which I think 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, to understand what’s true and what’s not. 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.
Julia Shaw (00:26:16) That’s when you think you’re hearing voices and someone is telling you that you have to do something, usually something harmful to other people. And if you don’t follow those, you will hear those voices forever. They’re profoundly distressing, and they are one of the aspects of schizophrenia that if you have, it does make you more prone to violence. And so for these kinds of cases, if you don’t have someone intervening, whether that’s a family member or a therapist saying, “How can you tell whether this thought is real?” Maybe that thought. Maybe you’re not hearing that voice, right? Maybe that aspect of what you’re thinking isn’t true and bringing you back closer to reality.
Julia Shaw (00:26:54) You can just wander off to whatever alternate universe that you might live in in your head, 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 will get more extreme over time, 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. So with serial killers, we find this reality monitoring problem, and I think part of that’s related to the lack of social networks that people have.
Lex Fridman (00:27:29) That’s fascinating. So that’s one important component of serial killers. What else can we say about the psychology? What motivates them? So if you look at some of the famous serial killers, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, are there other things we could say about their psychology that motivates them? So interesting, the tether to reality. Loneliness is a part of the human condition. It is, in fact, one of its side effects is you can get untethered. And then with some of these brains, I guess the untethered goes to some dark place.
Julia Shaw (00:28:03) The untethered goes to a dark place, and it then is often combined with some of these other dark tetrad traits. 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. And your own goal can be, 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. There’s something in that where I can’t help but go, “That’s so sad.” I don’t go, “Oh my God, how awful.” Of course, it’s atrocious. Of course, it’s heinous, but I have this real sympathy for that, and I think that’s important for us to have, though.
Julia Shaw (00:28:54) 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, and the difference between me engaging in that and this person engaging in that are these other factors.” But the core is in all of us.
Lex Fridman (00:29:09) Do you think all of us are capable of evil, of some of the things we label as evil?
Julia Shaw (00:29:16) I think all of us are capable of doing basically the worst things we can imagine. 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 in to the police, killing each other, doing terrible things. So I think all it takes is to become convinced that the people you think are your friends are actually your enemies, whether that’s just in your own world or in a larger political national landscape. I don’t think it takes all that much for us to be capable of doing terrible things.
Julia Shaw (00:29:51) 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 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. 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 (00:30:30) Yeah, I really appreciate the way you think and the way you talk about this. Listening to history, when I’m reading history books, I imagine myself doing the thing I’m reading about, and I almost always can imagine that, like when I’m being honest with myself.
Julia Shaw (00:30:49) And it’s important to admit that to ourselves. And research on murder fantasies finds that most men have fantasized about killing someone, about 70% in two studies. And most women as well. More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody. So murder fantasies are incredibly common, and certainly according to some researchers, that’s a good thing. Being able to rehearse and think through doing the most terrible things is a great dress rehearsal for also how we don’t want to live our lives. And only if you are able to fully think through, “What would I actually be like if I was engaging in this? What would I be thinking? Who would I be with? What would be my the group that I’m charging against this other person?
Julia Shaw (00:31:34) You know, who am I there with?” As you said, like really putting yourself in the shoes of these people who have done terrible things. That is how you also realize that you do not want those consequences. And so yeah, you maybe want to murder this person, but you don’t really want to murder this person. That’s that intuitive sort of animalistic brain coming in. But then luckily, we have higher reasoning that goes, “Actually, if you think this through, that’s a pretty terrible consequence for yourself. So the better thing to do is not to murder this person.” So I think it’s adaptive to be able to fantasize and think about these things.
Julia Shaw (00:32:09) 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. But up to that point, if it’s just a fleeting thought or something that sort of in one day you had these thoughts, that is totally healthy, I would say.
Lex Fridman (00:32:35) And also, I think it’s useful to simulate or think through what it would take to say no in that situation. Meaning, once you’re able to imagine yourself doing evil things, you have to imagine the difficult act of resisting. A lot of people think they would resist in Nazi Germany. Well, most people didn’t, and there’s a reason for that. It’s not easy. Same reason, I’ve seen this. If something bad is happening on a public street, most people, it’s the bystander effect. Most people just stand there and watch. I’ve seen it once in my life. This is humans, so it’s actually you want to simulate stepping up.
Julia Shaw (00:33:19) Yeah, so it’s also been called the heroic imagination. Someone who has studied evil, quote unquote, at length, is called Philip Zimbardo. He did the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that was an experiment which is, I mean, it’s now been torn apart in various ways. It was absolutely influential for psychology. It’s where participants were randomly assigned whether they would be prisoners or guards in a mock prison experiment, and then for a number of days, they were told to 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.
Julia Shaw (00:34:00) 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. And so Philip Zimbardo has also spoken at length about evil and that all of us are capable of it in the right circumstances, but he also is a big proponent of what he calls the heroic imagination. And the heroic imagination is really what the purpose of everything I do is. The purpose of what I do isn’t just to go, “Ooh, this is curious,” and to stop there. The point is to then prevent it, and to prevent it in ourselves because that’s I think ultimately what has to happen.
Julia Shaw (00:34:39) 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. That’s impossible. But you can change, sort of to say it in a tacky way, the hearts and minds of individuals to recognize the pathways towards evil and to go, “Wait, I’m off track. I don’t want to go this way, and I’m going to stop myself here, and here’s how I can find my way back.” And so the heroic imagination is exercising that. I see someone on the street. How do I make sure that they’re okay? How do I not become a bystander? And actually, the bystander stuff is interesting because there was a really famous case, the murder of Kitty Genovese, and there were all of these both ear and eyewitnesses.
Julia Shaw (00:35:21) So an ear witness is someone who just hears things, and an eyewitness is someone who sees the crime happening, and they didn’t intervene in the murder of this woman. And so this case was often taken as this almost example of, “Look how terrible human beings are. We just walk by. We don’t care about what’s happening to strangers on the streets.” And actually, what’s happened since is that there’s been lots of other bystander experiments, and they have not substantiated this. So we need to be very careful with looking at these extreme cases and going, “How horrible that this happened to this one person,” and it is, but that doesn’t mean that that’s always how it happens. And so actually, what we find in bystander research is that most of the time, bystanders do intervene.
Julia Shaw (00:36:01) 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, and so it must not be a real problem.” That desire to not stand out in a negative way is often what hinders heroism. I mean, that’s why we look at heroes, people who especially risk their own lives to save others, especially strangers. We see them with a sort of respect that nobody else gets, and that’s because we recognize that we might not be capable of that. If I saw a stranger drowning in a river, would I really risk my life jumping in the river to maybe save them? I think that’s a big question mark.
Julia Shaw (00:36:43) And so when people do that, especially when people almost have this inherent reaction that they just jump in, they just go for it, that is something that is a really admirable quality, and that we as humans do celebrate, and we should. And I think often we should celebrate those incidents more and not the, you know, the bystander moments where we didn’t intervene. We should be normalizing intervening.

Murder

Lex Fridman (00:37:07) And again, again, this idea of heroic imagination, actually simulating, imagining yourself standing up and saving the person when a crowd is watching, they’re drowning, to be the one that dives in, tries to help. You mentioned 70% of men and some large percentage of women fantasize about murder, and I also read that you wrote that recidivism for homicide is only 1 to 3%. So that raises the question, why do people commit murder?
Julia Shaw (00:37:43) Murder is a really interesting crime because most of the time it’s perpetrated for reasons that we don’t like as a society. 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, we’re not going to talk about that. We’re not going to talk about whether or not the mom is to blame for this person killing somebody.” I hate that. 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.
Julia Shaw (00:38:22) 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. And if you look at the real reasons stated, it’s things like, “This person owed me $4, and so I killed him. This person stole my bike. This person owed me…” It’s these really stupid reasons, and it is just this bad decision in the moment, an overreaction to a fight, to an argument, and it wasn’t planned. It’s not some psychopath sharpening their knives, waiting for months to try and kill this person. 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.
Julia Shaw (00:39:08) So the victim loses a life, whereas the perpetrator, sure, they get imprisoned, but that… At best, right? If you will, in terms of justice. But they don’t have the same kinds of consequences, and we don’t like that. We like things that have extreme consequences to have extreme reasons. 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, one of the top four reasons for murder as well.
Julia Shaw (00:39:49) But that’s not the almost glamorized version that we see of murder online or that we see in the news. So I think it’s always important to talk about murder as something that is rarely inherent to an individual. Very few people want to murder. They might fantasize about it, but they don’t want to go through with it. And very few people who do engage in murder wanted to do it in that instance, never mind again. I think in general, we have the way that we look at lots of crimes upside down. 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, you know, an eye for an eye kind of. You know, life for life.
Julia Shaw (00:40:30) 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. But there’s also the other side, which is if we’re looking at prevention, murder is really… Like, they’re not going to… People aren’t going to go out and murder again. So that is… That’s a really low risk in terms of recidivism, actually. And high risk are things like fraud and elder abuse and sexual violence. And so in some ways, sometimes our sanctions are upside down in terms of how we can actually make society safer, and they’re in line more just with how we perceive justice to work.
Julia Shaw (00:41:07) So there are big fundamental questions about how we organize our justice systems and what we want them to be for.
Lex Fridman (00:41:13) Can you just linger on that a bit? So how should we think about everything you just described for how our criminal justice system forgives? If they are very unlikely to murder again, how would you reform the criminal justice system?
Julia Shaw (00:41:28) I think forgiveness is up to the victims’ families, and quite often when you speak with victims’ families, there is this divide where you have some who are much more keen on something called restorative justice, which is where they… What they want is for the person to apologize, the perpetrator to apologize, to explain how it happened. Also, quite often, I mean, you look at some of the other consequences in the other context, it’s sort of like teenage boys who are part of gangs, for example, is the other context. And it’s a teenage boy killing another teenage boy. Like, these are kids, and the parents of a teenage boy understand that. This isn’t… You know, they don’t think of this other perpetrator as this grown man who has… I don’t know. It’s…
Julia Shaw (00:42:13) I think we think of it as this fight between the parents of both teenage boys in that case, 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. So there’s that restorative justice model where forgiveness, I think, belongs to the families. Some families, of course, want the most extreme punishment. That’s also… I can understand how that would be a response that’s triggered if you’ve suffered a severe loss. But if we’re looking to make society safer, putting people who’ve killed in prison is actually not the answer, right?
Julia Shaw (00:42:52) 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, and that’s where I think we’ve got it upside down.
Lex Fridman (00:43:05) If I could just stick to The Bad People Podcast, there’s an episode on incels called Black Pill: Are Incels Dangerous? So are they dangerous? What’s the psychology of incels?
Julia Shaw (00:43:15) 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, and the idea of entitlement. So I think one thing that we see often in crimes, of all sorts actually, is this sense of entitlement that drives the perception that I’m allowed to engage in X because of something else. And I deserve to have a life that looks like this, but I don’t, and so I’m going to go take it, or I’m going to go do something to show my dissatisfaction in life.
Julia Shaw (00:43:58) And so if you think that 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 it’s the sort of white picket fence ideal that we’ve been sold. We have been told that that is what we should have. I understand where it comes from, and the question though is, are we entitled to that, or is that the idea that that’s something we should strive towards? And I think the answer is no, nobody’s entitled to a good life. 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.
Julia Shaw (00:44:38) 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 everybody in society to achieve. And understandably, people get angry, 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 (00:44:57) And the internet gives you a mechanism to be your worst self.
Julia Shaw (00:45:03) And it can reinforce that worst self. You see other people saying, “Yeah, I feel the same way. Do you want… Do you want me to help you?”

Lies and scams

Lex Fridman (00:45:10) Oh, the internet. So one more episode, you interviewed the lady Cecilia, who got Tinder Swindled. Can you tell what happened with the Tinder Swindle situation?
Julia Shaw (00:45:21) So the Tinder Swindler, that was a person who pretended on Tinder to be a rich guy who had this lavish lifestyle, and he would match with women on Tinder, and very quickly love-bomb them. So he would send them all kinds of messages and immediately start 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. And then he would invite women, in this case Cecilia, to very expensive, luxurious dates. 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.
Julia Shaw (00:46:10) And he would simultaneously be building up the story of a future together, and you see this in people who are really problematic in relationships in a lot of ways. 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 see it now. You know, “Our kids in the garden running around. You’re the only one for me.” That kind of language, like, almost planning your wedding on the third date.
Julia Shaw (00:46:42) That kind of thing is what he would weaponize, and Cecilia was looking for love. She wanted all of those things, and so it worked really well. And what he ended up doing is defrauding her of lots of money, and she ended up taking out loans, and her family were giving her money to help what he was saying was this critical situation, very classic fraud. It’s a critical situation where he was being followed, he was under attack, and he needed her to pay for some things. He needed her to pay for some flights, until she ran out of money, and then she realized that this all was a big fraud. This was a love scam.
Julia Shaw (00:47:19) So the reason that we spoke with her is partly to show how it can happen, and I think it’s really important to remind people that this is something everybody is capable of believing. Fraud works because people know what we want to hear, and they tell us the things we want to hear. 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 (00:47:46) Yeah, and by the way now, in modern day, AI could probably better and better do that kind of thing. Do the tailored version of the story that you want to believe, and love is a topic on which that would be especially effective.
Julia Shaw (00:48:03) Yeah, ’cause you’re playing with people’s emotions, and you know that they’re vulnerable in that way. And most people want to be loved and want to love, and so it’s a really manipulative way in, and I think it’s really horrible, but it’s also something that we all almost underestimate. So we think, “I would identify fraud. I would know if someone was trying to scam me of money,” until it happens to us, and then we go, “Oh, wait. That did just happen.” And then we get really embarrassed. And so I think talking about it is really important, and seeing it as not this thing that happens to dumb people, ’cause that is sometimes how it’s framed. It’s like, “Oh, such an idiot.” “She was so gullible.”
Julia Shaw (00:48:42) Was she? Or was she just a nice person who wanted to believe that this person was capable of loving her, which I would hope we all are.
Lex Fridman (00:48:50) Yeah, and I hope she and others that fall victim to that kind of thing don’t become cynical and keep trying.
Julia Shaw (00:48:57) Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.
Lex Fridman (00:48:59) Those kinds of things can really destroy your ability to be vulnerable to the world. But, I mean, it sounds like this same kind of thing is just commonplace in all kinds of relationships. That’s the puzzle that it could be. If you find yourself inside of a toxic relationship with a, quote, “love bombing,” it could be a lot of manipulative, fraud-type of things, right, inside a relationship. …In this spectrum.
Julia Shaw (00:49:22) 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, and that’s often a man in a relationship. That’s traditionally because it falls often along these gender lines. But the problem is if 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, and so this is our shared money,” and starts using that and controlling things and controlling how the other person lives in that relationship, that’s when you get into things that are called coercive control. And things like jealousy can also be used in that way.

Jealousy

Lex Fridman (00:50:01) Is there any way out of that? Maybe the jealousy study, or is this a vicious downward spiral whenever there are any signs like this that means you’re screwed, get out? Or is this just the puzzle of the human condition and humans getting together and having to solve that puzzle?
Julia Shaw (00:50:22) I have non-traditional views on jealousy. I’m not a jealousy researcher, but I have done some research on sexuality, and I personally think that jealousy is basically always a red flag because what it means is that the person who is jealous isn’t secure in the relationship, 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. And I don’t think it is a sign of love. I don’t think it is a sign of, you know, you want to protect your mate. I think it is mostly control, and it’s the desire to control and to possess. And jealousy, we know, is a precursor to intimate partner violence almost always.
Julia Shaw (00:51:01) As in, not all jealousy leads to violence, of course, but all violence has jealousy as a precursor. And quite a lot of that is imagined things that the partner is doing, not even based on reality. Then we go back to our deception detection research, where we’re bad at telling whether someone’s lying or not. 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. So, the research also bears out that most people are really bad at monogamy. 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, and that’s just consistently found in the research.
Lex Fridman (00:51:40) So, maybe there’s justification to be jealous?
Julia Shaw (00:51:43) I think it’s the other way around. I think monogamy is setting us up to fail.
Julia Shaw (00:51:46) So, I think monogamy is a social construct. That’s a nice idea for some people, and I think that at least based on the research on how people actually behave, they’re not actually behaving in a monogamous way. If you’re cheating on your partner, that is not monogamy. That is polyamory, potentially. So, the love of multiple people. And it’s lying, and it doesn’t have to be that way. So, I’m polyamorous, and I believe that you can love multiple people. I don’t know that everyone is always going to meet lots of people at the same time that they’re going to love. But I think that there’s been a move towards more people embracing open relationships and non-traditional relationship structures, and I think that is healthy to at least have as an option.
Julia Shaw (00:52:28) I think the idea that there’s just one size fits all for relationships is really harmful to a lot of people, and it just doesn’t really work for everybody.
Lex Fridman (00:52:36) Well, if you could just focus in on one component, it seems to me one of the problems is honesty as a hard requirement, and good communication is another hard requirement, because that feels like the prerequisites for avoiding all these problems.
Julia Shaw (00:52:56) And I guess with jealousy, what I’m thinking of is actually not an instance of jealousy. …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.” And that’s where I would say that is usually a red flag. And you’re right. It’s a red flag partly because it means the person is probably bad at communicating, or you are as a couple. Like, it’s not necessarily just the jealous… Person’s fault. It’s just that there’s something happening in this dynamic that is bad psychologically, and that should be addressed, or maybe it’s not the right relationship.

Monogamy

Lex Fridman (00:53:30) So, the fact that a lot of people cheat, does that mean every single person that cheated is probably not going to be good at monogamy? I guess if you can just analyze all of human civilization as it stands and give advice, that’s definitively true for everyone. Not-
Julia Shaw (00:53:48) That’s exactly what psychologists do all the time. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (00:53:50) Okay. Generalize.
Julia Shaw (00:53:50) We make sweeping statements.
Lex Fridman (00:53:52) This is great. No, I just… I think it’s really interesting because I see all those things as romantic: choosing not to cheat, choosing to dedicate yourself fully to another person. I mean, it’s all just romantic, and then some people do cheat, and your heart is broken. You write a song about it, and then you move on. You try to repair yourself and be vulnerable to another human being and all that.
Julia Shaw (00:54:13) But why deny yourself the beautiful spectrum of human experience? I mean, it’s like eating one meal for the rest of your life. Like, why? You don’t have to do that. You can just… You can have lots of beautiful people around and…
Lex Fridman (00:54:26) Well, so for me, actually focusing on a single thing, you get to explore. You mentioned a puzzle. Over time, you get to see the nuance, like the beauty of the puzzle. You realize it’s an infinitely long project to really understand another human being. And so, if you focus, you don’t get distracted. So, that applies. I’m a person, when I find a meal I really like, I’ll stick to it for a long time. I’m definitely a monogamy person, I think. But that also could be a component of where I grew up. You know, there’s a certain cultural upbringing, and maybe my brain is not allowing…
Julia Shaw (00:55:01) …myself certain possibilities, you know? I think it’s more that I want people to feel like they have a choice, and that’s the important thing. And I think all we see is monogamy everywhere, all the time, and it’s just one version of how we can live our lives, and I think it’s not the only. And I think that having conversations with your partner as well, especially early—it’s harder to bring this up later on—but to have it early and say, you know, “How do you actually want to structure your life?” And I think, how do you want to structure your relationship is part of that. And especially if you’re going to commit yourself to one person, one primary person, or one exclusive person, that’s part of it.
Julia Shaw (00:55:37) And I think then you also, you know, 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 (00:55:52) So, how difficult is polyamory? I think a lot of people would be curious about that kind of stuff. Does jealousy come up? Is it difficult to navigate?
Julia Shaw (00:56:00) It can be. I mean, all relationships can be difficult to navigate.
Lex Fridman (00:56:02) Sure.
Julia Shaw (00:56:03) I think it’s the same. It’s… and the same respect. So if you’re going in because you’re trying to fix something about yourself, you’re going to have a hard time. 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. 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 a person,” then you’re going to have a better time.
Lex Fridman (00:56:28) What does the perfect polyamorous relationship look like? Can you really love multiple people deeply?
Julia Shaw (00:56:34) I think so. You can love people in different ways, and also, you can love lots of people deeply, I think. And I think, again, research on bisexuality — I’m bi — has also found that people who are bi are more likely to be in non-traditional relationships. And one of the reasons for that is probably also because we constantly get asked to justify our sexuality as well. 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? And it’s like, I don’t ask you that if you’re in a relationship with a woman. Do you miss women? Like, you probably do, but that’s just other women than your partner.
Julia Shaw (00:57:14) It has nothing to do with being bi. And so I think there’s this constant barrage of questions of what does it mean? Is it real? How do you choose? What does a relationship look like? Do you constantly want threesomes? Like, there’s this constant hyper-sexualization 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. But on the other hand, you’ve got bisexual people themselves saying, “Yeah, but I feel like I also have this superpower that I can love more widely, and gender doesn’t really matter in terms of whom I’m capable of loving.” And so relationship structures almost come with that conversation.
Julia Shaw (00:57:52) It’s not that we need to be non-monogamous or that we need to be in these kinds of relationships. It’s more that I think if you’ve engaged so deeply with your sexuality, partly because society’s 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 (00:58:06) Yeah, that’s interesting. I mean, your sexual preferences and relationship structure preferences, some of the choice has to do with how society’s going to respond to it. So if you have to explain it every time you go to a party, you might maybe not want to do that or talk about it or at least be open about it. Yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot of annoying conversations you have to do if you’re polyamorous, some of which you’ve mentioned. And yes, there are effects of like over-sexualizing the people involved. Yeah.

Sexuality

Julia Shaw (00:58:42) Or thinking they’re lying. So with men… So, I wrote a book called Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, and I did that after I created a bisexual research group. So, I wasn’t a sexuality researcher, but as a bi person and a scientist, I was interested in the science of bisexuality, and I couldn’t really find it. It was really hard to figure out what people were actually learning about bisexual people in comparison to other kinds of queer people. And one of the things I found is that the terms that are used are not necessarily bi. And so it could be things like plurisexual.
Julia Shaw (00:59:16) So, if you type into Google Scholar the word bisexual, you’re going to get a lot of confusing things also because bisexual is used for, like, two sexes where you have multiple sexes or you can change, and so they’re bisexual.
Lex Fridman (00:59:28) Right.
Julia Shaw (00:59:28) Yeah, which is entirely different. And so I think partly out of that, researchers started using words like plurisexual, and omnisexual is another one. And so if you’re looking for research on this, plurisexual is probably the word. But…
Lex Fridman (00:59:41) What does omnisexual mean?
Julia Shaw (00:59:42) It’s just the same. It’s just another-
Lex Fridman (00:59:44) Okay. Got it.
Julia Shaw (00:59:44) Another word where it’s all. Sometimes pansexual is also used. And again, the idea being that it’s all genders.
Lex Fridman (00:59:52) So, how should we think about bisexuality? Is it fluid, like day to day, month to month, year to year, fluid who you’re attracted to? Or is it at the same time, have the capacity to be attracted to anyone or attracted to everyone? What’s the right way to think about it?
Julia Shaw (01:00:12) 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. Much like you’re probably not attracted to most people, but you are attracted to people of a certain gender, maybe. And so that’s… It’s the same as being heterosexual in terms of potentially my pool of people whom I might be interested in. It’s just that the gender is irrelevant.
Lex Fridman (01:00:33) What’s the biggest thing that people misunderstand about bisexuality?
Julia Shaw (01:00:37) 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. So, I think a lot of people still see bisexuality as on the way to gay town. Sort of like you’re on your way, but you haven’t quite committed and you’re still stuck in expectations of society. You haven’t quite let go yet, but really you’re gay. And that’s especially true for men. And so when you look at research on bisexual men, which is actually how the research started. So, I think now when we think of bisexuality, we think of women. And it’s true that today, twice as many women identify as bisexual as men.
Julia Shaw (01:01:18) But if you look at the history of this and the research on bisexuality over time, it was the other way around. Someone called Alfred Kinsey was one of the first sexuality researchers in recent history, certainly, and he, after World War II, did this really big study of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, it was called. He was a biologist himself, and so he thought of taxonomies, and he was doing research on gall wasps, so insects. And this idea of human sexuality was sort of thrown at him after the war because there’s also this whole move to get people to, well, reproduce and to rebuild America. 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.
Julia Shaw (01:02:05) And so Alfred Kinsey was asked, “Do you want to do a class on human sexual behavior?” And he was like, “I know nothing about this.” And so he spent about a year just listening to students’ questions about what they wanted to know about sex, and he realized that he was looking for research to try and build up this course that he was probably going to teach, and he realized that he couldn’t answer most of their questions because the research hadn’t been done. And so a lot of the questions were around, “What is normal?”
Julia Shaw (01:02:36) You know, “If I feel this during sex, is that normal? How often do people have sex? Should I want these? What about these fantasies? What does it mean? What if I have homosexual fantasies? What if I engage in this kind of…” And so he was looking at all of these questions and collating them, and then he went out and did these huge studies, 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. This is the 1940s. This is quite a conservative time. I mean, certainly more than we might expect now.
Julia Shaw (01:03:12) And here’s this researcher asking incredibly personal questions about thousands and thousands and thousands of people, 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. He sold out auditoriums. 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 to give people enough space to sit down. He was basically a rock star, and again, I think this challenges the misconception we have about sexuality, that we think of it as this sort of woke thing now…
Julia Shaw (01:04:02) …that the rainbow flag and all this stuff is sort of this modern invention almost. But if you… this is the ’40s. This was happening. People were going to these talks. People were having these conversations, and he created something called the Kinsey Scale. And so the Kinsey Scale is from zero to six, and he found that it was not useful to apply a binary to people’s sexual desires and sexual orientation. It was more useful to put them on a continuum because most people were not exclusively homosexual or exclusively heterosexual. Most people were somewhere in between.
Julia Shaw (01:04:34) And so zero was exclusively heterosexual tendencies, and six was exclusively homosexual, and he would place people based on all of the things they told him somewhere on the scale, and about half of men were somewhere in the middle, not exclusively either, and about a quarter of women. Now think about the time.
Lex Fridman (01:04:54) It was a very conservative time.
Julia Shaw (01:04:56) Well, and it’s post-war though, so I think that mattered as well. So there’s something called a homosocial environment, which has nothing to do with being gay. That has to do with being in a situation where you are with people of the same gender as you. So a homosocial environment are things like prisons, where you only have men or only have women, war, which, at that point, they just had, 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.” 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.
Julia Shaw (01:05:36) And then there are other researchers, other male researchers, who found similar things, and then at some point in the ’70s, it swapped, and it felt like maybe more people, more men, were identifying as gay, and there were maybe fewer people who would have called themselves bi, and suddenly this became a thing more for women. So I think that there are some social things going on. There are some research things going on that actually bi men have been studied for a long time as well.
Lex Fridman (01:05:59) Okay, so you said a lot of interesting things. So there is a difference between the truth and the socially acknowledged thing, so there are social elements. I don’t know. This might be anecdotal, but I know a few women friends of mine who identify as bisexual. I don’t know a single guy friend who identifies as bisexual. They’re either gay or straight. So there’s still a social thing going on.
Julia Shaw (01:06:28) Definitely.
Lex Fridman (01:06:28) Right?
Julia Shaw (01:06:28) Definitely, and I think that research consistently shows that bisexual men are more likely to identify as gay or straight.
Lex Fridman (01:06:39) As gay.
Julia Shaw (01:06:39) And gay, well, it depends. If they have what we might refer to as a homosexual lifestyle, so they engage in going to queer parties, maybe go on Grindr or other gay apps, that would be much more a lifestyle thing where you’ve embraced it and you see this as part of your identity, that you are part of this queer community. It’s much easier to say you’re gay than you are bi, most often, also because there’s queerphobia within the queer community. So you might get gay men saying to a bi man, “Ah, come on. You’re actually gay. I was bi once.” That’s a classic. “I was bi once,” or “Come on.”
Julia Shaw (01:07:14) You’re actually gay.” It’s the same that you get the other way around with bi women, that because it’s seen as performative, the idea being that bisexual women are doing it for attention, but the attention of men specifically. That, “Well, they’re all going to go back to men anyway and they’re just doing it. It’s a phase. It’s this thing that they’re doing actually to be sexy to men, not because they’re actually interested in women.” And so there’s this lesbian-bi thing going on, which is often quite hostile. Not always, but often. And there’s this gay male-bi thing going on, which is different in nature but is also potentially hostile. So in both, saying you’re bi can be problematic, but for men, more so.
Lex Fridman (01:07:53) Do you like the Kinsey Scale as a very simple reduction, that there’s a spectrum? I also saw the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid that adds a few parameters like who you’re attracted to, how you’re actually behaving, the fantasies you have, social preference, lifestyle preferences, all that kind of stuff. Self-identification, what you actually say publicly. All those different dimensions. Or is the Kinsey Scale a pretty damn good approximation?
Julia Shaw (01:08:21) The Kinsey Scale is a good start, and the Klein Grid, I think, is much more fun in some ways. So the Klein Grid came out of research by Alfred Kinsey and others like Havelock Ellis, but we won’t get into him. Fritz Klein was a male researcher doing research also on sexuality. He was specifically a therapist, and he was looking at people who were struggling with their sexuality. So people would show up in the 70s and 80s in his practice, and they would say, “I’m struggling with my sexuality.” And he would say, “How can I help you?” And they would say things like, “I wish I wasn’t interested in men, and I’m a man.” And he would then work through what that means. Does that mean you don’t want to have these feelings? Does that mean that you don’t want to have these attractions?
Julia Shaw (01:09:07) Does that mean that it’s the implications of how your friends and family will see you that’s the problem? So he created this much more complex scale, 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. Not just that, but in past, present, and ideal. So if you say, “Well, I used to identify as straight. Now I identify as bisexual.” 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. But it could also be something else.
Julia Shaw (01:09:47) And so I’ve also had friends who’ve gone, you know, past, present, straight, straight, but ideal bi. So you get into these interesting dynamics where sometimes people just wish they were a different sexuality than they were for other reasons. And then there are other things in the scale that ask about your lifestyle. So, for example, if you are going to queer parties, if you have queer friends, then you might have a homosexual lifestyle, even if you’re straight. But then again, it’s how much lifestyle would you like?
Julia Shaw (01:10:17) And so for me, that was a real moment where I was looking at that going, “Wow, my lifestyle’s really straight.” Um, “And maybe I need to change this.” 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 sticking points.
Lex Fridman (01:10:37) Yeah, that’s fascinating. So maybe the presumption there is if everything’s aligned, the fantasies, the ideal partner, all those things, that’s probably the healthiest place to be?
Julia Shaw (01:10:49) Right. And so he would look at especially the ideal and the present. 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,” and he’d try to work through it. And the term he used for bisexual people who were uncomfortable in their own sexuality was “being a troubled bisexual.” And so I think… You can… I think any sexuality can be troubled. I think you could be a troubled straight person, a troubled homosexual person, a troubled asexual person. And just thinking about why and which aspects are maybe missing, I think, is really healthy for people to do.
Lex Fridman (01:11:27) Meaning there are some puzzles that you haven’t quite figured out, maybe you haven’t been honest with yourself about your preferences, all that kind of stuff.
Julia Shaw (01:11:33) I don’t really like talking about honesty with yourself. I think that’s a high bar, 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.” And so I think this idea of “we’re not being honest with our own sexuality,” that’s a big word. 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 (01:11:55) How obvious… When a person is bisexual, how obvious is it to identify like the sexual orientation grid? Like how big is the sign, whatever you are?
Julia Shaw (01:12:06) I think the sign is smaller than we think it is. 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. You maybe get university thrown in, sort of if you get your experimental year as an undergrad.
Julia Shaw (01:12:28) But then, you kind of have to choose. 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. And we change in every other way. Why wouldn’t we change in this way? So I think 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. 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.
Julia Shaw (01:13:16) There are 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. 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. You’re going to have these negative consequences, especially if you don’t feel like the queer community is really a place for you. So that’s where also finding your people really matters.

Sexual fetishes

Lex Fridman (01:13:44) Since we’re on the topic of sexuality, one of the things you touched on in your book on evil was kinks, sexual fantasies. I think the point of describing that was that we often label that as evil or bad. What can you say about what you’ve learned from kinks and sexual fantasies from writing that book?
Julia Shaw (01:14:06) The reason I included kinks and evil and sexual conversations in general is because it is so often thrown into the same conversation. So if someone comes to me and says, “Julia, I want you to help me explain why this person killed this other person.” And they’ll often say, “Did you know that he or she was also into,” insert kink here, or insert nontraditional relationship structure here, or insert whatever. And I respond to that by going, “Okay, so?” 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. Or, “Ooh, they were swingers.” And so… And again, I go, “Yeah?” That’s, you know, almost like, “And in other news, they were swingers.”
Julia Shaw (01:15:00) It’s like that is not related to this crime at all, unless, you know, one of the partners was killed. But people see this as a defect of character, and kink is very much seen as a defect of character in many circles, especially in broader society. And that is wild to me because if you look at research on sexual fantasies and kinks, a lot of people have at least one. So a lot of people, BDSM being the most common, are engaging in or interested in BDSM. 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.
Julia Shaw (01:15:45) And so these kinks and these fetishes, they are much more commonplace than we sometimes think about them as. 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. That is absolutely not the case, but we also don’t want to marginalize it and say it’s almost nobody. It’s somewhere in between, 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. So, you know, putting in the restraints to make sure that these interactions are safe and consensual and then being able to explore.
Julia Shaw (01:16:22) And, I mean, there’s everything from, you know, 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 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. 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. There’s this wide range of things, and I think people also feel often deeply ashamed about the things that they are interested in.
Julia Shaw (01:17:07) 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. And that can spiral into things like, “Am I evil? Am I bad? Am I a bad person because I have these fantasies?” 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. They’re still seen as lesser, as bad, as a sign of a defect of character. And if people see that within themselves, they’re going to think differently about themselves, and society is going to treat them differently. So it’s all about destigmatizing.
Lex Fridman (01:17:45) I really liked what you wrote about, I guess it was in the context of BDSM or maybe sadomasochism or maybe just the submissive-dominant dynamic, like why that might be appealing, the disinhibition hypothesis. I guess this applies generally to sexual fantasies is if you live them out, that you could just let go of all the bullshit that we, that we put up in normal society. That you could just be all in, fully present to the pleasure of it.
Julia Shaw (01:18:13) Right, and that’s what research has found on fetishes, especially on BDSM, is that the reason that people say they like it… I mean, it’s hard to explain why you have a fantasy. But if you go into the finer questions and really dig deep, you can find that people will explain a version of, “Well, I can really let go, and I don’t have to… If someone is telling me what to do, then I don’t have to make any decisions, and I’ve spent all day making millions of decisions, and I don’t have to in this context. And I really like that because it’s freeing.” And so that’s that disinhibition hypothesis is that the reason that we often go to things in the bedroom that in other contexts we don’t like or even find repulsive, like I don’t in normal life potentially want to be told what to do.
Julia Shaw (01:18:59) But maybe when you move into the bedroom, you go, “Yeah, but this is a different context, and I kind of want reverse of what I want in my day-to-day life.” 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 (01:19:20) But I think that also applies to… because you mentioned submissive, that’s more straightforward to understand. I think that also applies to dominant because you don’t have to walk on eggshells. It’s the clarity of it. That was really interesting. Having read that from you, that really made me think that there is a deep truth to that, to being true to whatever the sexual fantasy is. It’s not just the fantasy itself that’s appealing, it’s the being free in some sense.
Julia Shaw (01:19:53) It’s the being free and the juxtaposition there is that you are free because of the fiction. Like you’re play acting, but it’s touching at something deep inside you psychologically, and so it, that’s where it sort of feels weird, but it also makes sense. 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 and you really get to live it, as that for a bit. So I think, yeah, the truth and fiction sort of circle is always an interesting one.
Lex Fridman (01:20:25) So, for researching the Bi book, the bisexuality book, what have you learned about sexuality in general? Human nature, kind of sexuality, and how it’s practiced in terms of different communities, and I’m sure there are subcultures and stuff. Yeah. What have you learned?
Julia Shaw (01:20:40) The research on human sexuality, I think, is interesting because we keep finding that people have these desires that they feel weird about, that… Unless they have a community or an app that you can go to to live those fantasies, they can feel quite troubling to the individual and they can make you unwell. 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. So that can just make you unhappy. So I think that the stigma there is that that unhappiness is going to lead to some sort of horrible manifestations of crime.
Julia Shaw (01:21:22) 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 Bi. I came out in Making Evil. Making Evil is the UK title, Evil in the US. 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 (01:21:55) You came out as bisexual, by the way, yeah.
Julia Shaw (01:21:56) Yeah, I came out as bisexual. And I came out as bisexual in the book, 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, are part of this community that otherwise feels other. It feels foreign, it feels abstract, and maybe it feels scary. 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 aspect you’re talking about, you suddenly go, “Oh, it’s going to be much harder to dehumanize these people.” And this is where all of this kind of comes for me from a really sad place is the…
Julia Shaw (01:22:41) You could talk about Bi as this project of love and how I was finding the community. I was trying to write something that would bring us all together. But it’s also because I’m constantly terrified that my rights are going to be stripped back. And we know that the laws around homosexual behavior and the rights around bisexual people as well, they’re in flux. There’s no straight line of acceptance. 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’s going to stay, not even necessarily in my lifetime.
Julia Shaw (01:23:20) And so I think much like writing Evil at a time when you’re not at war and you’re able to think 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. 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. 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 (01:23:47) Did you hear from a bunch of people after Making Evil, after Evil, the book, and mentioning and coming out in that book, and then writing the Bi book, that are bisexual and maybe what are some stories? I’m sure, because I haven’t seen much material on it, as you spoke to, so I’m sure they felt lonely without a community, right?
Julia Shaw (01:24:08) Yeah, a lot of people felt seen by the book. So it was really beautiful, the fan mail I got and the responses to the book. And I got them from all over the world. 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. For a long time, bisexuality was, especially in women, well, actually, homosexuality in women in general was seen as… It was a blind spot, because what counted as sex is sex with a penis.
Julia Shaw (01:24:41) And so women can’t have sex with one another. And so a lot of laws around homosexuality are specifically applying to men. And certainly, historically, that’s the case. So we’re talking about like sodomy, and that involves men and not women. And so if you look at the evolution of laws, for a while, women were kind of… Like it was socially not necessarily acceptable, but they were kind of getting away with it legally. But then 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. So again, these laws change all the time.
Julia Shaw (01:25:24) But in terms of fan mail, especially from people in countries where homosexuality and bisexuality are illegal or are seen as problematic, are socially condemned… that was particularly important. So that those people were particularly writing, saying, some of them 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?” I had people sending me messages saying, “I’m at X airport or in X country where this is, this would be considered contraband.” Like this book, my book is a banned book, fun fact.
Lex Fridman (01:25:58) Nice.
Julia Shaw (01:25:59) It was banned. I sold the rights to a foreign publisher, and right after it was sold, the laws changed, 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. And so we can’t publish it anymore.” But I take a little bit of pride in the fact that it’s a banned book, but I find it really sad, obviously, as to what it means, but it also makes me feel like it’s more important. And that’s what people were writing to me about.
Lex Fridman (01:26:26) What advice would you give to young people, or just people in general, that are trying to figure out their sexuality or how to speak about their sexuality?
Julia Shaw (01:26:37) I’d say try and read widely on issues around sexuality. 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. I think things like the Klein grid are really helpful, especially for people who are more analytically minded like you and I. I think it gives you a construct to work with and numbers to work with, and that can be really helpful to try and go almost seeing your sexuality as a mathematical equation. And I think that can be quite useful. And if that’s how you think, then look at the Klein grid and see if that helps you to navigate things.
Lex Fridman (01:27:16) A bit of a tricky question, but what are the pros and cons of coming out publicly as a non-standard sexuality? From a recommendation perspective, what are some benefits and what are some challenges?
Julia Shaw (01:27:31) So the benefits are that you can, well, live authentically. You can just be yourself. So I do feel more free in who I am and who I’m able to be online, for example, now that I’m out. Because I came out in my 30s, I think also it was almost a foot-in-the-door technique, which is a psychological technique of first coming in and then coming with your big ask. And so I’d already published two books. I was already an established scientist. I think if I tried “bi” first, I, A, wouldn’t have been able to publish the book. It was the first mainstream book on bisexuality ever. And B, I don’t think I would’ve been taken seriously as a scientist. So having the other stuff first and then “bi” as a side project, that was acceptable. But I think the other way around wouldn’t have been.
Lex Fridman (01:28:16) I think it was still brave, I think. I think you mentioned somewhere, maybe in an interview, that there was some concern of being sexualized when you covered the topic of sexuality.
Julia Shaw (01:28:26) There still is, but I actually find that it’s done the opposite most of the time. I think as a woman, especially a young woman who’s in the public eye, you’re sexualized anyway, unfortunately. And so that is and was already a huge part of my online experience. And actually, I think coming out as bi, A, you get allies who suddenly are like, “We’re on your side. We’re going to help you fight the hypersexualization.” And people get almost more weird about it in a good way. They get a bit quiet about it because they’re like, “Oh, well, now it’s an identity thing, so maybe I shouldn’t comment on what she’s wearing.” And it almost disarmed some of the more sexualized comments. So for me, I have to say it was mostly a positive experience.
Lex Fridman (01:29:13) The incels didn’t know what to do with it.
Julia Shaw (01:29:15) Exactly. Like, “Ugh.”

Criminal psychology

Lex Fridman (01:29:18) Just to go back to the beginning, maybe what got you interested in criminal psychology?
Julia Shaw (01:29:23) 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 (01:29:33) Nice.
Julia Shaw (01:29:33) That’s what happened. I had my portfolio ready to go. I was going to study art at undergrad, and then my grandfather intervened and was like, “Being an artist is a really hard life. Maybe you should reconsider.”
Lex Fridman (01:29:45) What kind of art? Sorry to take that tangent.
Julia Shaw (01:29:47) Painting.
Lex Fridman (01:29:48) That is fast. I would not have expected that, because you’re so super analytical.
Julia Shaw (01:29:53) Yeah, I am, but I also 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 (01:30:02) That’s cool
Julia Shaw (01:30:03) …but he was also right. I mean, I’ve always been very intellectual, let’s just say. I skipped a couple grades in school. I was part of the chess club. It was very much I was the clever kid. But there’s also part of me that’s just like, “But art is beautiful. I love making art, and it can speak to so many people.” Anyway, my grandfather convinced me not to do it, and then I applied instead for psychology. Although at that point you just had to say social sciences. You didn’t have to specify, but I knew it was probably going to be psychology. And the reason for that was because my dad has paranoid schizophrenia. I think one of the reasons I’m so obsessed with this idea of what is real, and that is in every way, that…
Julia Shaw (01:30:45) I mean that in terms of what is real, in terms of perceptions of right and wrong, what is real in terms of our own memories of the world, what is real in terms of what happened in a crime, what is real in terms of perceptual abilities and neuroscience, what is real. I mean that in every way, and I think that’s because I grew up with someone who had a unique view of what is real in real-time. 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 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.
Julia Shaw (01:31:34) And so I went to study psychology partly to understand that and what was going on there, and then that took me down the reality hole. Honestly, the reason I went into criminal psychology, because I could have gone into any other. The criminal psychologists were the most fun. I feel like lots of psychologists take themselves so seriously, and I just couldn’t. I was like, “I don’t, this isn’t the vibe.” And so the criminal psychologists were, they had this gallows humor. They were doing arguably the most serious of the crimes and the cases, and yet, were somehow having fun and having nice lives. And I saw myself, and I went, “Well, I want to do this version.” And so I did.
Lex Fridman (01:32:15) Yeah, that’s great to hear, that a criminal psychologist because probably they have to, more than any other subfield, confront the reality of the mind.

False memories

Julia Shaw (01:32:24) And it’s often quite procedural. So I’m also much more interested in applied sciences because I like the idea of, you know, what do we do with this information? And the thing that interests me most from a research perspective, I mean, I did my PhD in false memories, so implanting false memories of committing crime, which was the study that ended up going viral because I was the first to do it. And I built on a history of people implanting false memories of various kinds of other emotional events. But it was the first time that someone had combined false confessions research and false memory research. And so that was the research of Elizabeth Loftus and Saul Kassin. So false confessions was Saul Kassin, and false memories was Elizabeth Loftus.
Julia Shaw (01:33:07) And I was just doing them both at the same time. And the question was, could you get people to believe that they committed a crime that never happened and confess to it? And not just that, but believe that it actually happened, so remember it? And the answer to that in short is yes, you can, especially using specific leading and suggestive interview techniques. 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. And that’s just so that you can then take that and go, “Okay, well, how do we prevent this?” And so I’ve since trained police lawyers.
Julia Shaw (01:33:39) I’ve trained people at the ICC, the International Criminal Court, who deal with collective memory. So they deal with hundreds of witnesses at a time in war crimes. And the question is, how do we try to preserve as original as possible memory without contaminating it? Or at least without contaminating it any more than it already is. 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. And I think that’s also where the leap to things like AI is not far because ultimately, the way that we’re engaging with large language models and generative AI in general, is that it’s structured as a social interaction.
Julia Shaw (01:34:22) It’s structured as a conversation most of the time now, and that is what we do. 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. And so you get confabulations from both sides now. You get confabulations from AI and from the people. 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. 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 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 (01:35:03) I mean, it’s really interesting. Are you saying that there’s a drift of some kind in terms of on both AI and human side when they’re interacting together that we need to be very clear about?
Julia Shaw (01:35:13) Yes. What we’ve created with Gen AI is basically the ultimate false memory machine. We have created a tailored experience of something that is most of the time telling you what it thinks you want to hear, and then it’s uncritically giving that to you. Or I mean, sometimes, of course, there’s other things where it’s sort of appraising whether or not this is truthful or not. But it is giving that to you.
Julia Shaw (01:35:43) And there’s no safeguard from you just going, “This is truth, and this is my past,” or, “This is how I remembered it.” And the problem 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. And so that’s where the false memory in human minds and confabulations in AI, I think, are much more similar than we think.
Julia Shaw (01:36:22) And when I first saw AI confabulate, hallucinate, I was like, “This is what people do all the time.” It’s just that we can’t fact-check them all the time. We’re not in a conversation constantly being like, “Well, is that quite right? I’m going to use that for my homework,” right? So it’s both juicy and really troubling.
Lex Fridman (01:36:40) Well, right now the interactions are pretty ephemeral. They’re short-lasting, and there’s not really a deep memory to the interactions. But this could get a lot worse if the AI is personalized to a degree where it remembers things about you so that you can then start to, over many interactions, feed the narrative about your past that you construct together with the AI over time.
Julia Shaw (01:37:05) But you don’t even need that. 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, most people, most police officers—
Lex Fridman (01:37:18) Oh, interesting
Julia Shaw (01:37:18) …don’t spend a long time, and they have no memory of this person’s past. They know basically nothing about them except for things related to the crime. And yet we know that within that very short, maybe half hour, one hour interaction, people’s stories can change fundamentally. And the problem is that if you create, if you have a memory of something that when you pull it up in that social interaction, it’s sort of live. It’s like active.
Julia Shaw (01:37:43) And when you then finish that interaction, it sets back down. 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 shifted. And so over time, it can shift and you don’t realize it, and that’s your truth. And that’s where even just short interactions can have a profound impact on the human mind.
Lex Fridman (01:38:06) Wow, so you can modify memories that quickly?
Julia Shaw (01:38:09) Yeah. We do all the time in experiments.
Lex Fridman (01:38:11) Okay, can you speak a little bit more to false memory? So, like th- it’s just fascinating. So things happen to us, we humans do things in the world, and then we remember them, and most of our lives, I guess, is lived in memory, in remembering the things that happened to us. And you’re saying that we can modify the story we tell about the things that happened to us? That’s fascinating. So what do we know about this ability to have false memories?
Julia Shaw (01:38:40) We know that false memories are common, that they’re a feature of a normal, healthy brain. They’re not this glitch, they are a feature. And we know that false memories are incredibly common in terms of, if you think about basically any memory… Now, I’m interested in autobiographical memories. This isn’t memories of facts, this is memories of experiences, things that you’ve lived in some way. And of those autobiographical memories, basically every single autobiographical memory you have is false. The question isn’t whether it’s false, the question is how false. You’re despairing over there.
Lex Fridman (01:39:14) Well, I mean, yeah, that’s… I mean, it’s both beautiful and terrifying-
Julia Shaw (01:39:18) Right
Lex Fridman (01:39:18) … that nu- nothing is real.
Julia Shaw (01:39:19) No, that’s not, that’s not what I’m saying.
Lex Fridman (01:39:21) Okay.
Julia Shaw (01:39:21) I’m just saying that everything has a degree of falsehood to it. And this is where sometimes I’ll get accused of being like, “Oh, but that… does that mean we can never use witness statements?” That… I’m not saying we can’t use any witness statements. 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. Or if they have multisensory details, they’re describing in very specific detail what they smelled, what they heard, what they… whatever, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true. Most of the time our autobiographical memories are good enough.
Julia Shaw (01:39:54) And that’s where memory scientists talk about this as gist memory. Our gist memory for events, much like for text, you get the gist of it, right? You’re good enough. You generally remember accurately approximately what happened. 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. Now, most of the time that doesn’t really matter because you remember you hung out with a friend, you remember you were at this university, you remember approximately what your favorite cafe was, you remember this important negative or positive event, fine. You don’t actually need to know exactly what you were wearing and drinking and saying.
Julia Shaw (01:40:33) But in a criminal justice setting, you do need to remember exactly what you were drinking and saying and doing, right? And so that’s where we have this need to break down this human capacity for memory to this level of detail that it’s just not made for.
Lex Fridman (01:40:50) So that’s where the verbatim stuff can get you into trouble, because with criminal cases, I suppose the tiniest details really matter, because then the lawyers can really zoom in on that particular detail, and then you could just make that up. And then the interrogation with a leading question, as you were saying, can just alter your memory of a particular detail, and then everything will hang on that detail.
Julia Shaw (01:41:13) Right, and if that particular detail is someone’s face, then that’s a really big problem.
Lex Fridman (01:41:17) You’re right.
Julia Shaw (01:41:17) And so, and it can also be an entire false memory. So this is where in my research and in research like mine, we’ve implanted, well, memories, what we call memories or false memories, of experiences that never happened at all. 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. And we all have them. We all have some memories that can’t be true, 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?” And your friend will go, “That happened to me, that didn’t happen to you.”
Julia Shaw (01:41:57) 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. And that’s possibly because the other person told it in such vivid detail that you could imagine it, and basically your brain was like, “Well, this feels real now.” 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?” And then you integrate it into your autobiography.
Lex Fridman (01:42:26) How hard is it to insert false memories?
Julia Shaw (01:42:29) Not hard. It’s very easy to distort memories or to insert small false memories. It’s harder to convince people of entire events, especially specific events. And this is widely debated exactly how easy it is to implant a specific false memory. 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, and the research that was in line with that, there was this 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, and that is still one of the biggest scientific debates in our field. And to me, I think that’s…
Julia Shaw (01:43:09) So the, the, the coding stuff is about the difference between what some people call a false belief and a false memory. So I think this thing happened or I remember this thing happened, and that is a really difficult differentiation often because all we have as social psychologists is what you’re telling me. And I can ask you, “Do you think it really happened or not? Do you believe it really happened?” But it’s really hard to differentiate, and so I’ve always thought that you need to ask people about the specifics, like, “All right, how confident are you in this memory? All right, do you feel things in this memory? Does it feel like other kinds of mem-” Right?
Julia Shaw (01:43:43) Sort of, like, describe the nature of this experience rather than being like, “Do you think this is a real memory?” Because that’s, that’s a hard thing to ask people to do.
Lex Fridman (01:43:52) So you, you want to get indirectly as many signals as possible to show that they actually believe the thing happened.
Julia Shaw (01:43:58) Or that it approximates a memory in their minds, that’s right, rather than just a thing they think kind of sort of happened.
Julia Shaw (01:44:04) But other people think that it’s an easier to differentiate line. So for me, that, it’s almost impossible to differentiate the two. Other people think it’s more clear. 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. And that number as well is, is challenged in that people go, “Well, does that mean that 70% of people can have false memories like this?” And the answer is no, obviously not. That’s just in my sample. That’s just these specific six false memories. And it could be that I, I think 100% of people are prone to some version of this, just maybe not in this specific study, right?
Julia Shaw (01:44:46) That if I had to come up with different false memories to implant or if I was a different person myself and people trusted me differently, there’s the, 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. And in one study, obviously, I can’t capture that. But it also doesn’t mean that 70% of the time people are… you know, it might be 1% of the time or 0.1% of the time that people have these complex false memories.
Lex Fridman (01:45:10) I guess you’re just speaking to the fact that, you know, you don’t know how representative the sample is. But even from one study, that’s a crazy… that’s incredible.
Julia Shaw (01:45:19) Well, it’s not- …just representativeness. It’s also that we shouldn’t take individual studies in that way.
Lex Fridman (01:45:23) Sure.
Julia Shaw (01:45:24) I’m not saying that 70% of people always have false memories either. It just means in this one study, more people than not developed these complex memories.
Lex Fridman (01:45:31) What was the methodology for implanting the false memories? This is so cool, by the way. Human memory is so fascinating, and the fact that we can engineer memory…
Julia Shaw (01:45:43) It’s good that it’s fast.
Lex Fridman (01:45:43) …it’s so interesting. It’s also really interesting that we live so much of our lives in memories. And that you can mess with that. You can shape it. It’s interesting.
Julia Shaw (01:45:54) It’s mostly, I think, a good thing that we can shape it.
Lex Fridman (01:45:56) I think so. Yeah.
Julia Shaw (01:45:57) I think the fact that memory can be false in the way that I do it in my study is a result of the fact that our minds are made to creatively recombine information to solve problems in the present. So even the fact that we have this gist memory, it’s because we’re optimizing data processing. We’re basically saying, “These are the most important things from these events, and the other details are irrelevant. Don’t remember that. Gone. And now I’m going to work with that to try and solve what life comes up with.” 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.
Julia Shaw (01:46:39) And so that’s what false memories are, except that that then can look bad if you’re trying to remember something specific. In my research, I used leading and suggestive questions like, “Close your eyes.” “Picture the event that I’m trying to implant.” So I was implanting, for example, you’re 14 years old. You were in contact with the police. The police called your parents, and you assaulted someone with a weapon. Then the question is, “What do you remember?” And you say to me as a participant, because you’ve been selected out to specifically never having had this experience… And just to be clear, a weapon, I don’t mean a semi-automatic weapon. I mean anything. And usually it was a rock.
Julia Shaw (01:47:18) So people would say, “I found…” because a weapon is just anything you use to hurt another person. I did this study in Canada. We don’t have guns in the same way as in some other parts of the world. So it was unlikely that my participants would have been like, “Yeah, I totally have all these guns.” They would take something, an object, and hurt somebody else, or they stole something, or they hit somebody. So those are three of the conditions.
Julia Shaw (01:47:40) I randomly assigned people to them, and they knew that I contacted their loved ones ahead of time, so they were participating in a childhood memory study, an emotional childhood memory study. They knew that, and then I 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. Then with that information, I said to the participants, “Okay, so there are these two things your parents reported happening, and one of them is a true one.” 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 (01:48:17) Right.
Julia Shaw (01:48:18) I’m laying it on thick.
Lex Fridman (01:48:20) To see what’s possible.
Julia Shaw (01:48:20) To see what’s possible, because you have to push it to also show that I can do this in this context so that we can warn police to not do this. So I said, “We have these two incidents that your parents reported, and one of them was you had a skiing accident,” blah, blah, blah. “Let’s start with that one. The second one was an incident where you were in contact with the police, but we’ll get to that.” So we’d first have 20 minutes talking about the true memory, which people, you know, they’re getting going. It feels good. I’ve got a structured interview as well, which I’ll then mirror in the false memory. So it all feels very legit. Then we get to the second memory, and I say this, you know, I…
Julia Shaw (01:48:56) “There’s this other important memory that your parents recalled.” They’d say, “I don’t remember that.” And I’d say, “Oh, okay. But I have this really detailed account. All you have to do is remember it.” 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. 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.” I don’t like to call it repression, but sometimes we hide away memories that we don’t like about ourselves. And I’m using words that people know and mechanisms that people have heard of that are frankly quite disputed in actual science.
Julia Shaw (01:49:34) But people go, “Oh, well, maybe I did repress this.” And then everybody says yes. Technically they could say no. They can say, “No, I don’t want to do that.” But they go, “Yeah, of course I want to know.” So I do this imagination exercise where people close their eyes, very simple, and just imagine how, what could have happened basically. 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? And I’m right next to the head of department because they were worried because I was a PhD student about the ethics of it, the consequences.
Lex Fridman (01:50:03) Yeah.
Julia Shaw (01:50:03) It took years to get the protocol through ethics and…
Lex Fridman (01:50:06) Yeah
Julia Shaw (01:50:06) …to make sure it was safe. Anyway, I’m grinning as the person with their eyes closed says the most trivial detail, “I remember a blue sky.” And I remember going, “It’s working.”
Lex Fridman (01:50:21) Did you know it was going to happen at all?
Julia Shaw (01:50:22) Oh, no, I had no idea. I had no idea.
Lex Fridman (01:50:24) That’s so fascinating.
Julia Shaw (01:50:25) And so from the trivial details, I’d always say, “Yeah, good job, good job.” You know, social reinforcement, little treat, little treat. And they would remember more and more details, and then they’d get more specific, and then they’d tell me who it was they allegedly attacked or stole from, where they were. And those details had to come from them because I don’t know enough about their lives, right? So this is the other thing with false memories, is it’s basing it on lots of real pieces of memories, real places, real people, real feelings. They’re just woven together in a way that never happened. And so just three interviews and you’ve got 70% of people confessing to a crime that never happened.
Lex Fridman (01:50:58) First of all, great study. Great, great job all around. To what degree has this been sort of elaborated on and proven further since? Because it’s a super powerful idea, whether it’s 70% or any kind of percent.
Julia Shaw (01:51:11) What I wanted with the study is just to show it’s possible.
Lex Fridman (01:51:14) That’s the, that’s really the powerful thing, that it’s possible.
Julia Shaw (01:51:17) Right. And so it could’ve been two people, and I would’ve been happy. The fact that it was so possible was frankly quite surprising to everybody. 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. We were like, “Uh, this is working really well. We’re going to stop.” So, and that was just because of, you know, how power calculations, whatever. Science.
Julia Shaw (01:51:38) Because science. And since then there have been other studies on implanting false memories. There have been ones also using AI tools, so like whether or not we remember or think we remember incidents differently or better if they were created with AI images of ourselves, or videos. 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. And that then you are more likely to remember it, yeah, with high confidence that it happened in the way that this AI has created it.
Julia Shaw (01:52:23) And so we can see that there’s lots of versions of this, whether it’s in, you know, interpersonal social interactions or interactions with tech. And there’s a big replication that’s happening right now at the University of Maastricht of my study, or is about to happen hopefully actually, is where we’re at.
Lex Fridman (01:52:40) There’s a lot of questions I want to ask you. Like one of them, doesn’t this mean that at scale you could have something like a government use propaganda to mass gaslight a population? So implant m- false memories u- using AI, using, using whatever tools they have?
Julia Shaw (01:53:01) Yes. That is definitely already happening.
Lex Fridman (01:53:06) That’s terrifying. Is there any- anything you’ve learned about defending against that? I guess knowing that first step is just knowing that it’s possible, that’s already a very powerful piece of knowledge.
Julia Shaw (01:53:19) That’s right. 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. They’re actually a normal memory process. And that insight is why I wrote The Memory Illusion 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. But again, that’s probably ultimately a good thing as well in terms of our overall human experience. But then what happens if you do have an important piece of information that’s important and not being distorted, right?
Julia Shaw (01:53:55) You are a witness to a crime, for example, and you now know that this is going to be important. What do you do? And the really simple answer is don’t trust your brain. Just make sure you write it down. Assume you are going to forget everything. Assume you’re going to forget no matter how important, how emotional, how intense, how much you say to yourself, “I will remember.” You won’t. Just assume that you’re not going to remember. And the closer you get to the time at which an event happened — and we call this contemporaneous evidence — the closer you get in time, the more high-quality that memory is going to be.
Julia Shaw (01:54:32) And I think there’s this myth sometimes that if you’re drunk or if you’re high or if you’re really emotional, that somehow you should wait. You should sort of go home, sleep it off, and then recall your memory. That is not what the current advice in memory research actually says. It’s in the moment as soon as possible, write it down, record it outside your brain. You can do it again when you wake up, but then at least you have an original version.
Lex Fridman (01:54:57) Yeah. You used the analogy of a Wikipedia page for memory. I think that’s a pretty useful way to think about it. It’s kind of crowdsourced by all the different influences you have, all the different experiences, all the other people, you telling other people about the memory. All of that edits the page, the Wikipedia page of your memory.
Julia Shaw (01:55:18) It does. And collective and individual memory are these really interesting… They interact in a really interesting way. 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 were going abroad and who were in these really difficult situations where they had to remember a lot of information that was important for national security. They couldn’t just sit there with a tape recorder being like, “Hey,” or their phone, being like, “Hey, Mister Warlord, can you just talk into this a bit closer?” You can’t do that. And so you have to remember it.
Julia Shaw (01:55:52) And so what they were doing is they were coming back from their deployments, and they would meet up immediately and have a team meeting, “What did you remember? What happened?” And the problem is that they would do that before writing their notes, and that is the wrong way around. And so they don’t do that anymore because I’ve told them not to do that anymore. But it feels good. It feels like collectively, we are going to remember more details.
Lex Fridman (01:56:16) Hmm.
Julia Shaw (01:56:17) Because you do, but it doesn’t mean that those details are right. And so that’s where I’d always say, “Have your own version before you talk to anybody.” Then, and my colleague, Dr. Annelise Fredevelt, is one of the experts on the effect of things like eye closure on memory and collective memory, and she has found repeatedly that if you remember things together, especially if you’ve already got an original version of your own, you do usually remember more details. 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.
Julia Shaw (01:56:57) 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 (01:57:05) Right, but there are conflicting forces here. So that’s true, but also as you said, it’s true that together, you can weave a narrative that never happened. So together, you can solidify the thing that actually happened, maybe if you take notes beforehand. But at the same time, if you don’t take notes, then you can just make stuff up very effectively together because you’re like, “Yes,” ending the whole time, like building together a castle that’s false.
Julia Shaw (01:57:32) Or distorted.
Lex Fridman (01:57:33) Distorted.
Julia Shaw (01:57:34) Yeah. But you can also sometimes go back to your original account and go, “Actually, no, that was a bit wrong.” 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. I want your version history. I want the complete version history of your memory, and then I can tell you whether I think things have gone wrong here. And if so, why?
Lex Fridman (01:57:55) Have you seen like different versions of memory and they’re really conflicting? Like what have you learned about memory from that, that they can be very conflicting? People explain the same experience as very different.
Julia Shaw (01:58:09) 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. 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 (01:58:24) Ah, yeah.
Julia Shaw (01:58:24) 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. And the question is, were they just too shy initially to say what really happened? Were they under pressure from other people? Were they not really remembering? You know, why has it changed? Or could it be that they have undergone some really problematic hypnotherapy or just shady therapy in general that has convinced them that things are maybe much worse than they initially remembered?
Julia Shaw (01:59:03) And it’s not that therapy doesn’t necessarily… Therapy can bring out more details, for sure, but the problem is that certain kinds of therapy mirror what we do in false memory research in terms of implanting false memories, and it just makes it really messy and 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 (01:59:22) This is so fascinating. What are the ways you can possibly figure out which is true, the thing you remembered initially or the thing you’re now remembering four years later?
Julia Shaw (01:59:31) Receipts. That’s all you’ve got. You have to look at your original versions. 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. If you can’t access that, then it ultimately is a matter of, especially if you’ve got like two people saying completely different things, it ends up being a battle of confidence ultimately.
Lex Fridman (01:59:51) This is a tricky question, but you mentioned therapy. It does seem like what therapists do is they want to find a problem, and they can then just project the problem and then convince you the problem existed. So how do you know… Is therapy even an effective… It takes a very special therapist not to implant, right? A trauma that never happened or details that never happened to a trauma that did.
Julia Shaw (02:00:22) It depends on the kind of therapy. 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. Then there is an area or a bunch of areas of therapy, including psychoanalysis, which are very focused on trying to find retroactively sources of mental illness in your personal past. And I am very critical of the kinds of… Well, both from an explanatory perspective, but also from a false memory perspective. I don’t think that we are the way we are because of individual incidents that happened to us. I think that is a wild thing to think about the brain. To be like you are the way you are because of this one interaction you had that one time is like…
Julia Shaw (02:01:10) I mean, maybe this explains a tiny bit of you, but what about all the other life experiences you have every single day? 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. I don’t think it’s true. And I think that there can be an uncautious approach to memory, as you were saying, where you have someone who is saying things and your role as a therapist is to help them manage their emotions now and to feel better, and that’s the other thing is that they have a very different role than I do. A therapist is trying to manage the person’s well-being now. Whereas I am looking at the evidentiary quality. That is a complete… I’m almost not quite the other side, but I’m in a very different role.
Lex Fridman (02:01:48) Well, you just want the truth.
Julia Shaw (02:01:50) Well, I’m criticizing and analyzing their memories, whereas therapists are more likely to be trying to help them manage the memories in their day-to-day life. And so it doesn’t matter if they’re true or not to therapists. What matters is that they’re troubling to the people themselves. But once you get into a courtroom setting, as you say… …The facts and what actually happened matter. And it’s not just what you remember, it’s what actually happened.
Lex Fridman (02:02:13) Maybe you can speak to the other, the non-courtroom setting, because this is all… The positive side of it is you can basically shape your memories to be happier. I mean, I find this in myself. Maybe you could speak to that. If I look into past relationships, if I just think about, or maybe speak to others about the positive things, really think. Just think, like I focus my mind on the memory, on the positive memories. And then everything just becomes more positive. And I think it makes me feel like I’m way happier about my past. So there must be something to that, because I almost start to forget that the negative stuff happened.
Lex Fridman (02:02:57) And then the same thing on the flip side is if you focus on the negative, then the negative stuff just overpowers everything else, and you have a very heavy, negative feeling about your past. So that seems like the way to live a healthy life, a happy life is just to focus on the positive. Not to sound cliché, but basically modifying your memories continuously that everything was just great. Is there something to that?
Julia Shaw (02:03:27) Well, the essence of that is right. 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. So if you are sad now and your brain’s just going, you’re more likely to remember other sad times because your memory and the emotional state of your brain is basically already activating those networks of sadness. And it’s like, “Here’s some other sad and shitty things that happened to you.” And it’s the same with if you are embarrassed.
Julia Shaw (02:04:03) That’s the classic one that we usually use as memory researchers, is that moment where you do something embarrassing, and for the next six hours, all you’re thinking of is all the other embarrassing things you’ve ever done. And it’s like your brain is like, “Would you like some other embarrassing stories?” And obviously you’re going, “No, thank you. Please stop.” But you have this spreading activation, as it’s called, of just these synapses, just lighting up new networks, and you’re going, “Ah!” And there’s this other memory that’s attached to the same feeling. And so it’s the same with happiness is that people who are happier tend to remember more happy memories.
Julia Shaw (02:04:37) And so most of the time, unless you’re depressed, most people look back at their lives with a rosy reminiscence bias, and they’re more likely to remember the positives than the negatives. But it’s not quite the way you were describing it, actually. So it’s not quite that you only remember the objectively good things that happened. It’s more that your interpretation of the things that you’ve experienced is either neutral or positive. So for me, for example, growing up with my father with apparent schizophrenia, that is something that I see as a net positive. 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.
Julia Shaw (02:05:22) And so I see that as a positive part of my autobiography, and that is what good therapy should be doing, is it should be taking negative experiences and not overwriting them or changing them. I mean, our brains do that naturally anyway. 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 (02:05:45) How much of Danny Kahneman’s idea is that we live a lot of our life in memory? Like it’s not, you know, there’s the direct, in-the-moment experience of a thing, and then there’s remembering that thing over and over and over. So there’s like, I don’t know, getting married or whatever, like some pleasant thing that if you, over a lifetime, the pleasure you derive from that thing is disproportionately, most of it is from remembering the thing versus experiencing it. Is there something to that?
Julia Shaw (02:06:22) I think so. And his experiments where he asked participants if they were offered this holiday that they could go on… …But they wouldn’t remember it. So they’d have the present day experience of enjoyment on this holiday. I think it was a tropical vacation or something that he’d offer people.
Lex Fridman (02:06:37) That’s right.
Julia Shaw (02:06:37) And he then said, “Well, but you’re not going to be able to remember this. Would you still go?” And a lot of people say, “No, I wouldn’t go on that holiday if I can’t remember it.” I think that’s interesting and I think that sort of “pics or it didn’t happen” so that the social media generation obviously is perhaps even more in line with that also in terms of how you deal with that in social context. Sharing those memories with others and those experiences, and which experiences end up being the important ones in our lives.
Lex Fridman (02:07:07) Yeah, there’s a real case to be made. You know, there’s this kind of 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.
Julia Shaw (02:07:22) 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 (02:07:39) How hard is it to modify memories from a neuroscience perspective? So if you look at brain computer interfaces like Neurolink for example, do you think there’s a future where we’re implanting or modifying memories directly?
Julia Shaw (02:07:55) Yeah, I mean, that’s basically what we do as human beings already, and I don’t see why tech couldn’t do exactly the same thing.
Lex Fridman (02:08:01) Just speed that up. So right now we could do that with language, right? We just talk to each other and modify them and we just speed that up.
Julia Shaw (02:08:07) Language, but also thinking about it yourself. So you can, it’s called auto-suggestion when you suggest things to yourself that didn’t happen. And that often comes from reading something, or seeing something, or thinking about something, or hearing somebody else’s story and going, “Did something like that happen to me?” And then you start picturing it and thinking about it in what context it could have. And then you start to basically implant a false memory in yourself. And so that can happen as well. And I think with things like Neurolink, it would be the same, where you’d have the ability to do that. But again, I still think that this interaction between humans and AI, or AI-like systems, is…
Julia Shaw (02:08:42) 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. Because ultimately, whether it’s an AI or another person, it’s the same brain that you’re modifying.
Lex Fridman (02:08:53) So what you’re worried about there is that you become untethered from reality, like you fabricate too many details about the memory. If a human is interacting with AI, and the AI is telling the human what they want to hear, are you worried about over time you start to just have a very overly modified version of your past narrative?
Julia Shaw (02:09:15) I’m not necessarily worried about the fact that AI and generative AI can create false memories. That is, again, something we’ve also been doing for a long time. Like modified photos is something pre-AI that we had that was already messing with people’s minds. Even just what you have in the frame of a shot. So if you take a holiday snap and you’re omitting a really important part of what actually happened on that holiday because you’re taking a picture of the nicest part and not the, you know, the garbage behind you.
Julia Shaw (02:09:44) That is going to have an impact on your memory as well. And so we’ve… Versions of that have always existed. And historically, if you go even further back, I mean, in some ways we’ve never been closer to facts than we are now. There’s this whole idea of like, “Oh, we’re living in this post-truth,” or blah, blah, blah, but that is not true. I mean, we didn’t even know how to write for a long time. 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. So I mean, we’re so close to facts, but that in some ways, I think, is the…
Julia Shaw (02:10:21) 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. And that can interface with our memories.
Lex Fridman (02:10:31) So just a practical… Is there like a protocol for self-modifying memories so you can live a happier life?
Julia Shaw (02:10:39) There is, yeah. It’s called cognitive restructuring. 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 (02:10:52) That’s really interesting, right? Like, not just for if you have some kind of issue, but just how to have a life well lived. Right? Does that work?
Julia Shaw (02:11:01) Yeah, it totally works. I mean, I do it all the time. It’s… Again, it’s about thinking about experiences you’ve had, positive or negative. Usually the negative are the ones we need to work on more. And thinking instead of, “Wow, how terrible was that?” thinking, “What did I learn from that? What has this given me that other people haven’t experienced? What is it that it taught me about who are my friends? What are these insights that I’ve won from this experience?” 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 (02:11:36) That’s probably really good for relationships too, right? Together you form the collective memory, and you work on that. You can just fabricate or modify towards the positive.
Julia Shaw (02:11:47) 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… So like someone will say, “I do 60%.” The other person will say, “I do 50%,” and you add them up, that’s more than 100%, and that’s basically always the case. And on lots of different fronts, people will claim that they do more, and if you ask them how much their partner does, they will diminish it. And so one of the tips I always say for relationships in terms of memories is actually just sharing what you’re actually doing. 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.
Julia Shaw (02:12:29) I’ve just taken out the bins.” Or, “I’ve just booked us a hotel.” But saying it out loud means the other person is able to perceive it and then can add it to their internal star chart of how much you’ve done in the relationship. And they’re more likely to actually perceive what you’re contributing. 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. She might not even have really perceived it. But if you’re reminding each other of all the things that you’re doing, it can feel more balanced over time.
Lex Fridman (02:13:00) This memory is just so fascinating. Is it possible… This is a little bit outside of the topic of false memories, but is it possible to train memory? What have you understood about memory? Can it be improved?
Julia Shaw (02:13:12) Yep, it can be improved, 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 n-back tests, so remember information, a couple of pieces of information back. So what did I tell you three sentences ago? There’s all of these kinds of, well, games effectively that you can play that will in fact train how your brain is using its networks. There was one that was developed by researchers, including researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany, and it’s called NeuroNation, and that’s one that I like because it’s all these really short games.
Julia Shaw (02:13:52) And the idea is that doing one thing, like Sudoku or whatever, the 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 so 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.
Lex Fridman (02:14:13) Yeah. So in doing this regularly, like keeping your mind sharp… That’s interesting. Uh… I’m terrible at remembering names.
Julia Shaw (02:14:26) Me too.
Lex Fridman (02:14:27) Is there a trick to doing that?
Julia Shaw (02:14:29) I don’t know, because I’m also terrible at remembering names. Allegedly, there are tricks, and it’s mostly to make the information more sticky by making it a bigger network in the brain. And so usually when you hear a name— Especially like you and I, it’s gone immediately. And that’s partly because… I like to think the positive of that is because we’re focusing on other things about the person.
Julia Shaw (02:14:48) Like, what are they like? What are they… You know, what’s this next interaction going to be? Maybe you’re a bit nervous about what they’re going to say or what you’re going to say. You’re already thinking a step ahead in terms of interpreting the situation. And it’s quite an overwhelming situation when you first meet somebody because there’s a lot to take in. And so if, however, a name is important, then you need to, A, remember to focus when they actually say their name and tune out the other stuff, which can be really difficult, and then to give yourself a mnemonic of, “How do I remember this name?” So you could visualize something. You could have a weird word game or some sort of rhyme that you create for the person.
Julia Shaw (02:15:29) You can say, “Julia with the big ears.” Like, whatever works for you, as long as it sticks. Now, there’s a caveat that I recently discovered about myself in terms of why I might not have… I have particularly bad memory for names. All of these mnemonic devices that have been studied over the last hundreds of years mostly rely on creating elaborate pictures in your mind. So, like memory champions, people who do competitive remembering, will tell you that they create these really elaborate images in their heads. I recently discovered that I have aphantasia.
Julia Shaw (02:16:05) Aphantasia is the inability to create mental imagery. And so when I was trying these techniques, I was going, “None of these are working for me.” And it turns out it’s because I don’t see anything, whereas other people actually see pictures in their mind. And so I think there are some individual differences going on there that we haven’t quite understood.
Lex Fridman (02:16:23) So you’re not able to visualize… Can you imagine, like, a castle in your head and look at it?
Julia Shaw (02:16:28) No. So the memory palace idea is absurd to me.
Lex Fridman (02:16:31) Wow.
Julia Shaw (02:16:32) But the… So the test for aphantasia is really easy, which is, “Close your eyes and picture a red apple.”
Lex Fridman (02:16:38) You can’t picture a red apple?
Julia Shaw (02:16:39) And I just see black.
Lex Fridman (02:16:42) Wow.
Julia Shaw (02:16:43) Yeah. And there’s a scale. So some people are hyperphantasic, where they can have a really elaborate version of the apple. And other people have, like, a gray sort of outline. And I have nothing.
Lex Fridman (02:16:56) Wait. How does your memory work? Like, if you think about a past event, are you… Wait. Am I visualizing a past event, or am I just—
Julia Shaw (02:17:04) Oh, that’s the question. Or is it just a concept?
Lex Fridman (02:17:06) I think it might be… I might be operating in the space of concepts.
Julia Shaw (02:17:09) Hmm. Because I do, and I think that’s why I’m so interested in concepts and ideas. And we know that people with aphantasia are less likely to care about their childhood memories because they can’t visualize them.
Lex Fridman (02:17:19) I’m trying to think if I can visualize people’s faces from the past. I have a feeling like I can.
Julia Shaw (02:17:25) Ooh, but are you seeing anything?
Lex Fridman (02:17:27) Am I actually seeing it? I don’t know. I think I’m… I actually reduced those people down to a few concepts about the characteristics of their face, and I might be visualizing the concepts. Boy.
Julia Shaw (02:17:41) Interesting, right? And most people with aphantasia don’t realize they have it until they have this kind of conversation. I didn’t know.
Lex Fridman (02:17:47) I don’t know if I can visualize the red apple now. Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah, because I… The memory palace thing has never really worked for me either. I tried. Interesting. Okay.
Julia Shaw (02:17:57) I have a hypothesis that people who are analytical are more likely to… I think it intersects with other things. Because a lot of my friends, it 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. But I don’t know-
Lex Fridman (02:18:16) I’m going to… Okay.
Julia Shaw (02:18:16) Because it’s early days of research on this.

Criminals destroying the planet

Lex Fridman (02:18:18) All right. This conversation totally is leading me to do some soul-searching on many fronts. You have done incredible work across a number of disciplines. I mean, from, from sexuality to evil to memory. And now in your upcoming book, Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet and How to Stop Them. Can you speak to the psychology of the people, the organizations that are killing Earth, as you describe, including illegal gold miners, animal traffickers, con men who falsify data and bribe regulators to keep polluting, and many other types of criminals? Is there a psychology similar to the psychology of some of the folks we’ve been talking about?
Julia Shaw (02:19:01) 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 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. I sometimes think about the Earth as like a house. And if someone was coming into your house and just setting things on fire and then walking out unpunished, you’d be really upset, and correctly so. Or poisoning your water, or just leaving a bunch of garbage all over your house. And that’s what people are doing on a planetary scale. And the question is, are we responding effectively? And if so, who?
Julia Shaw (02:19:46) Who is responding effectively? And then what is the adequate punishment? How should we deal with the people we, who we catch? And so 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. 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. Now, why we should care about nitrous oxides is because there is no limit of… no, like, bottom limit of nitrous oxides that is healthy for the human lung.
Julia Shaw (02:20:34) So basically any amount is bad for you. And it’s related to things like asthma. It’s related to things like premature death. It’s related to all kinds of negative immediate health effects. And this is what was being pumped out of these cars at wildly high rates, 40 times the legal rates in some cases, and they just lied about it. They just covered it up. They knew they didn’t… Well, some of the people, there’s a big debate within the Volkswagen people who’ve been convicted. A lot of people say, “I didn’t really know. I’m being scapegoated.” Fine, people knew. The question of how much and who, that’s up for debate, but certainly people knew because they had to create the thing. Like, they had to literally create this piece of software to put into the cars.
Julia Shaw (02:21:15) And then when they got caught, they lied about it, and eventually the truth came out, but it was like 10 years later. And so the question is, what leads people, clever people… These aren’t idiots. These are like clever engineers who are literally working on emissions. Like, they know exactly what these emissions do to people. They know exactly how harmful they are. What leads people like that to lie about it, to create these things and to continue lying when they are caught?
Julia Shaw (02:21:42) And so that is one of the cases I cover in it, 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. And so I look at it in that way, and then in other chapters, I look at, like, people go undercover and uncover poaching gangs. And there it’s somewhat procedural where it’s more, I didn’t know that there were undercover agents infiltrating poaching gangs. I didn’t know that Interpol was involved in all of these kinds of environmental crime and how…
Julia Shaw (02:22:27) 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 (02:22:34) What are the different ways to fight environmental crime that you describe?
Julia Shaw (02:22:39) 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. I was talking to people who were infiltrating at the EIA, the Environmental Investigation Agency. It’s like the 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. I was talking to this Interpol agent, and it’s… I think all of these people were talking about very different ways of measuring environmental crime and of responding to it. And so depending on who you talk to, the answer will be very different: how do we fight crime?
Julia Shaw (02:23:29) And the answer is also very different potentially than in other kinds of crime that are more commonly discussed, like violent crime. So initially, when I started trying to apply criminal psychology to these really big crimes that are often also multi-level, where you’ve got bosses, you’ve got this, whether it’s a corporate boss or an illegal gang boss. You’ve got the middlemen. You’ve got the people on the ground who actually have the guns who are killing people or animals or are logging or polluting.
Julia Shaw (02:23:56) And then you’ve got sort of all these levels of people, 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. And so the scale is so tiny normally, and it’s mostly violent crime, which is mostly… It’s arguments. It’s bad decisions. It’s people who are frankly often quite vulnerable themselves, like substance using, people with mental health problems, people who are sleeping rough. Like, th- these are not healthy, normal people most of the time who are perpetrating bad crimes.
Julia Shaw (02:24:31) And yet in this context, in environmental crime, this is where I couldn’t apply the research directly, 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.
Julia Shaw (02:24:49) 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.” So you’ve got these really complicated other factors going on, 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?” Who is the person who’s insuring this? Who is the person who is out there engaging in illegal fishing on the boat? Who is the person who’s financing the boat? Who is the person who’s investigating them, right? And so looking at all the different levels, and I think that’s where you get some clarity. And actually, at the end of the book, for me, I felt so optimistic.
Julia Shaw (02:25:35) 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. Most people think about it every single day. So this idea that there’s this minority of people who care about climate change, that’s an illusion. That’s not true. And if you ask people what the emotional consequences are of those feelings, people say things like eco-anxiety, anger, sadness, grief, that we’re, you know, we’re worried about the future. But what you want is for people to feel motivated, energized, purposeful about tackling one of the biggest issues of our time.
Julia Shaw (02:26:13) And certainly by meeting all of these UN researchers, but I went to so many conferences. You have no idea how many conferences I went to. I went to anti-corruption conferences. I went to wildlife crime conferences. I went to the specific meeting of multilateral agreements to see how people were negotiating in the room and the tensions between… It was wild. It’s so interesting. It’s such a huge space, and it gave me so much hope for the future.
Lex Fridman (02:26:40) And actually, the way you frame it very clearly is a crime against Earth. Somehow that’s more actionable and it’s less controversial and divisive because climate change, as a topic, has become a political issue. Where it’s like, is it really happening? What’s the right policies? It’s nice to look at actual obvious criminals.
Julia Shaw (02:27:08) Yeah, where no one’s debating, “Did someone just burn down this rainforest?” It’s like, well, we can see it. I was at a European Space Agency conference recently, 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 they’re basically just chronicling how the Earth has changed over time. And a lot of these environmental crimes can be seen from space and can be measured. So it’s, as long as you trust those data, the question then is, okay, so these crimes are happening. How do we stop them? And as you say, I was very much trying…
Julia Shaw (02:27:43) I mean, you can’t write a book on environmental issues and be apolitical. I think that’s impossible. But I certainly was trying to look at it quite logically and go, “Here’s a crime. We all agree this is bad.” And these are people who have been convicted. This isn’t just someone who didn’t do their recycling, because also I think that individual level is often detrimental. But these are huge, huge crimes that cost us a huge amount of money to clean up and that cost a huge amount of human health and, you know, have these other knock-on effects and are changing, certainly, the structure of our planet in a way that we can feel already. So that is the purpose of the book is to try and show that we actually have lots of laws already. We’ve got lots of enforcers.
Julia Shaw (02:28:25) 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 (02:28:32) So what can you say about how people end up doing bad stuff in a company when there’s a lot of them? Are they bad people? How do you get to that place where you, in a large collective, are doing something really bad?
Julia Shaw (02:28:48) 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. So, doing what you think everyone else is doing, or know what everyone else is doing. 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 the ability to also deceive because it’s market forces, right? Ultimately, in a free market or even a controlled one, you’ve got these people who are just lying to everybody else. And they’re saying, “We’re getting to these X outcome by following the rules that everyone else is.” And they’re not. They’re just lying to consumers.
Julia Shaw (02:29:32) They’re lying to the regulators. They’re just lying. And then other people who are trying to be honest and, you know, play the game clean, they see the success of this other company and go, “Well, we want to have what they have.” And then they realize they can’t, with the tech that exists, get there. And so what do they then realize is, “Well, they must be cheating.” And so then they start cheating, and so it has this trickle effect of making everyone else fall in line with these, well, unethical practices that are unethical on so many levels. And then later, you get these huge lawsuits because if you get caught, then everyone’s upset. The investors are upset. The consumers are upset. The environmentalists, the lawyer, everybody’s upset with you because you have committed this huge crime.
Lex Fridman (02:30:15) Yeah, I mean, you ex- you explain so many forces there, but even the simple force of social pressure- …like very slight social pressure. I was just watching this documentary. It’s based on a book, “Ordinary Men,” talking about the Germans in Nazi Germany that were taking part in the execution squads in Eastern Europe and that they were given the option not to do it, and ultimately, most people decided to keep being part of the execution squad, even though they had no hatred in their heart, seemingly whatsoever.
Lex Fridman (02:30:54) It’s just slight social pressure. You don’t want to be the guy that kind of chickens out. Just a little bit of social pressure, and you are able to very quickly dehumanize a large number of people and to murder them without any hate in your heart, without anything that could trivially, directly be identified as, quote, unquote, “evil.” Just normal people doing very bad things.
Julia Shaw (02:31:20) 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,” because as you say, there’s the conformity, the social pressure, the rationalization, and those are all very human experiences. And that’s why also in the book I always focus on… whistleblower is a big word, but like people who at some point actually helped to uncover what was going on. And that if we’re back to the topic of heroes, we’re back to bystander effects.
Julia Shaw (02:31:54) We’re back to all of the social psychology and criminal psychology that 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, “Okay, so now we’ve got these people who are willing to engage in these crimes. They know it.” But there’s also this moment of how do you get out of it, and who is going to stop them? And back to the idea of heroes, 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 (02:32:23) Do you have empathy for those criminals?
Julia Shaw (02:32:25) I have empathy for everybody.
Lex Fridman (02:32:29) Has that ever been in your life challenged, like where you had trouble empathizing?
Julia Shaw (02:32:35) Ooh. There is one context, so there is one context that I… I don’t know if it’s that I have trouble empathizing… I think it is I have trouble empathizing, and I just think it is… I don’t want to. 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. 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 (02:33:21) It’s tough for you.
Julia Shaw (02:33:22) I can’t. That’s like, I know that. I’m not saying that that’s the worst kind of crime. I don’t think it necessarily is. I just think from my mind, there was just a, “You can’t go there.” That’s… I don’t know how to empathize with that person.

Hope

Lex Fridman (02:33:36) Yeah, I probably have a bunch of categories of people. Stuff with kids is just like— … it’s tough. It’s tough. It’s tough. What gives you hope about this beautiful world of ours, about the future of human civilization, given all the darkness that you have studied?
Julia Shaw (02:33:57) 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. 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. Even in memory interviewing, we were talking about the potential role of AI in distorting our memories.
Julia Shaw (02:34:38) 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, because you can also tell AI tools to do the appropriate kind of interviewing if you’re talking about memory things. I created a company called Spot in 2017, which uses… 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. 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.
Julia Shaw (02:35:20) So there are 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 science-backed way rather than just sort of freestyling. I think the worry I have sometimes is that, as I’ve said before, we’re ignoring the social scientists entirely sometimes when building these systems. 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. So I’m always keen on connecting social sciences and big issues.
Lex Fridman (02:35:52) Can you speak more to Spot? This sounds fascinating. So what’s entailed in recording important memories?
Julia Shaw (02:36:02) So Spot came out of my going around the world and giving everyone an existential crisis. I’d go around, and like with you, I’d say, “Look, our memory is really faulty, and here’s all the ways it can lie to us.” And people would go, “Oh, no.” And then I’d go, “Bye.” And—
Lex Fridman (02:36:21) That’s funny.
Julia Shaw (02:36:22) At some point, I was like, “Maybe I should do something about this.” And so I did. I went to a… Well, I did a TED Talk, and I was invited to this tech conference called Founders Forum, which is this meeting of tech founders and others in London, but also a couple of other places. I was invited to this, and while there, I met the founder of Evernote— Phil Libin.
Julia Shaw (02:36:49) 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. Specifically, I was interested in creating an AI or at least a machine-administered version of the cognitive interview. So that’s the neutral approach. It’s already a scripted approach, which was helpful. So it’s been scripted for decades, or a couple of decades. It’s been scripted for decades as a cognitive interview. When we train police on how to do it in places like the UK, it’s literally just asking people to basically read a script that we have fine-tuned over the years. What can do that really well? Chatbots can do that really well.
Julia Shaw (02:37:34) Together with Phil Libin and my two co-founders, Dillon and Daniel, I ended up co-founding Spot, which is talktospot.com if you want to check it out. It ended up pivoting into this general reporting tool for workplaces. This was before Me Too, but 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. Often you have really bad evidence that you’re relying on. Someone at some point goes to HR and says something, and somebody else says something else, and you’re unsure as a company who to trust, what’s real. So we were trying to streamline that.
Julia Shaw (02:38:15) Spot is now a reporting tool for any kind of compliance issues. You can talk to Spot, it’s called, 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. So we work with, like, insurance companies, medical companies. We work with the bar. All the lawyers in the UK use it themselves, which I always think is a real stamp of approval when the Bar Council is using your tool. But again, not, not bars and drinks. Bars and lawyers. But…
Lex Fridman (02:38:44) Thank you for clarifying.
Julia Shaw (02:38:46) Just picturing all these like… …People with flair throwing vodka bottles in the air. Not them.
Lex Fridman (02:38:53) They’re great too, but yeah.
Julia Shaw (02:38:54) They could also use it, potentially. But we’ve got people reporting like, you know, someone left bleach in a machine. So it’s like a more small memory. So it’s streamlining reporting processes.
Lex Fridman (02:39:05) I mean, can you envision something like Spot being used for recording generally important emotional events, positive and negative throughout your life? That seems like something the LLMs of today would really benefit from.
Julia Shaw (02:39:18) Yeah, again, that’s why…
Lex Fridman (02:39:20) Just so you’re not just strictly looking at like compliance or in the context of companies?
Julia Shaw (02:39:26) So in the context of Spot, yes, it’s just compliance and it’s, it’s that. But I think in sort of private life and in terms of where I think this could go, I- I’m, I’m interested in all memories, and I think that important life events can be recorded. And I think the idea of having like grief bots and having things that have a representation of you or your loved ones, I think that’s something that I’d like seeing in the future. I would.
Lex Fridman (02:39:51) Have you gotten a chance to work with maybe the Gemini team or OpenAI folks, or any of them? Anthropic? Because it seems like they don’t have enough people that think about this.
Julia Shaw (02:40:02) Well, I’m, I’m just waiting for an email.
Lex Fridman (02:40:04) Okay. Wow.
Julia Shaw (02:40:06) Maybe I’ll get one after this.
Lex Fridman (02:40:07) I’m hanging.
Julia Shaw (02:40:08) Hit me up, guys.
Lex Fridman (02:40:09) Yeah, I’m hanging out with DeepMind folks. That would be really, that’d be really fascinating to, to see. First of all, the, the proper cognitive interview, that’s really interesting. That’s really interesting how to not lead, how to not to plant false memories. I don’t think any of them are thinking about that.
Julia Shaw (02:40:25) I don’t think so either. And then how to make sure that you’re using that to help people to store contemporaneous evidence outside of their brain. I just think there’s so much potential that’s being wasted right now.
Lex Fridman (02:40:35) Yeah. So the hope is that technology and that there’s people being willing to empathize with all different flavors of the human condition, that’s your source of hope for the future?
Julia Shaw (02:40:48) And to celebrate all the people who are doing amazing research and really cracking down on things like environmental crime and like spending their lives to fight specific kinds of crime.
Lex Fridman (02:40:58) Yeah, I like this Earth. I hope, I hope we fight for it. It’s the only one we got, and I’m pretty hesitant to say that maybe in this galaxy, we might be the only ones. So let’s, let’s protect it. Well what’s your name again? Just kidding. Julia, this is a huge honor. Um, I’ve been a fan of yours for a long time. I’m really glad we got a chance to talk. This was really fascinating. Your work is fascinating, and you’re just a fascinating human being, so thank you.
Julia Shaw (02:41:27) Thank you.
Lex Fridman (02:41:29) Thanks for listening to this conversation with Julia Shaw. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from T.S. Eliot, “Most of the evil in the world is done by people with good intentions.” Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.