Criminal psychologist Julia Shaw showed that 70% of people can be made to confess to crimes they never committed — using nothing more than leading questions and a few guided imagination exercises.
Lex Fridman Podcast
Criminal psychologist Julia Shaw showed that 70% of people can be made to confess to crimes they never committed — using nothing more than leading questions and a few guided imagination exercises.
TL;DR
Criminal psychologist Julia Shaw joins Lex Fridman to dismantle the concept of "evil" as a binary label, arguing instead for a continuum of dark traits (psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism) that all humans share to varying degrees [1] — Julia Shaw "Evil is not a category you're in or out of. The dark tetrad traits — psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism — each exist on a sp…" 08:43 . They cover serial killer psychology, why most murders are mundane arguments gone wrong [2] — Julia Shaw "The true leading cause of murder is embarrassingly mundane: a fight over $4, a stolen bike, a bad moment. Premeditated psychopaths are the …" 44:53 , the mechanics of love-bombing and fraud, bisexuality and polyamory research, sexual kinks and disinhibition, and — most strikingly — Shaw's own research showing 70% of participants could be made to confess to crimes that never happened [3] — Julia Shaw "Generative AI systems are structured as social conversations — the same format that Shaw has spent decades studying for its power to distor…" 1:41:35 . The single most actionable takeaway: write memories down immediately after an event, because even a brief leading question can permanently alter what you believe happened.
Julia Shaw is a criminal psychologist and author who in her books explores human nature, including psychopathy, violent crime, the psychology of evil, police interrogation, false memory manipulation, deception detection, and human sexuality.
The episode opens with Lex Fridman reading a rich bio of Julia Shaw — a criminal psychologist who has written on psychopathy, violent crime, false memory, deception detection, and human sexuality. Her books include Evil, The Memory Illusion, Bi, and her newest, Green Crime. Lex describes her as 'brilliant and kind-hearted,' framing the episode as a wide-ranging exploration of human nature's darkest corners. The brief introduction sets an ambitious intellectual agenda before handing off to the sponsor reads.
Lex uses the Shopify read to geek out on the infrastructure behind the platform's legendary Black Friday performance in 2021: 30 terabytes of data per minute, 32 million requests per second, 11 million MySQL queries per second — all on Ruby on Rails. The BetterHelp read is woven around Shaw's approach to empathy for perpetrators of terrible crimes, framing therapy as a tool for understanding a complicated mind. The LMNT read touches on Lex's long-term one-meal-a-day lifestyle, and the AG1 read ends with him talking himself into a run in pouring rain. Taken together, these reads establish the personal, digressive tone that characterizes the Lex Fridman Podcast.
Shaw opens by defining the dark tetrad: psychopathy (low empathy, parasitic lifestyle, deceptiveness), sadism (pleasure in hurting others), narcissism (inflated self-view), and Machiavellianism (doing whatever it takes to get ahead). Crucially, every person scores somewhere on each trait — the goal is to understand where people fall on these continuums rather than sorting the world into monsters and non-monsters [1] — Julia Shaw "Evil is not a category you're in or out of. The dark tetrad traits — psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism — each exist on a sp…" 08:43 . The 'baby Hitler' question becomes a vehicle to argue that nobody is born evil and that the environment is the primary shaper of dark behavior. Shaw is emphatic that the word 'evil' is dangerous — it ends conversations rather than starting them, and enables dehumanization that has historically made mass atrocities possible [2] — Julia Shaw "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 c…" 12:41 . Lex and Shaw discuss dehumanization and deindividuation as the twin engines of war violence, and Shaw makes her case for 'evil empathy': understanding perpetrators not to excuse them but to prevent future harm. She addresses the Nietzsche concern (does gazing into the abyss corrupt you?) and describes how she maintains clinical detachment by treating each case as a puzzle. The chapter ends on the question of whether studying dark figures risks platforming them, and Shaw's nuanced take on how coverage of notorious criminals should be handled.
Shaw recounts how the Robert Pickton case — a Canadian serial killer who killed victims on his farm and allegedly fed them to pigs — first captured her attention as an undergraduate at Simon Fraser University. Her professor, Stephen Hart, was an expert witness on the trial and modeled the 'gallows humor' that made criminal psychology feel like a viable career. The pivot to the psychology of serial killers in general reveals a consistent pattern: profound loneliness undermines 'reality monitoring' — the social checks that keep extreme thinking tethered to shared reality [1] — Julia Shaw "Serial killers are not born with a kill-switch. What many share is profound loneliness and a lack of social networks that perform 'reality …" 32:32 . Without close relationships to challenge distorted thoughts, dark ideation can escalate unchecked. Shaw brings in the parallel to radicalization and psychosis: in all these cases, the absence of a social tether allows extreme worldviews to solidify. The discussion of Jeffrey Dahmer is particularly striking — Shaw expresses genuine sympathy for his desperate (and horrific) attempt to create a permanent companion, calling it a 'sad' manifestation of a desire for connection that, in its core, is universally human. Elizabeth Loftus is mentioned as another expert who has worked on high-profile criminal cases, including Ghislaine Maxwell.
Drawing on her work with prosecutors, true crime producers, and researchers, Shaw presents the uncomfortable truth: most murders happen over trivialities — a four-dollar debt, a stolen bike. They are not the product of psychopathy or long-term planning; they are bad decisions in high-emotion moments [1] — Julia Shaw "The true leading cause of murder is embarrassingly mundane: a fight over $4, a stolen bike, a bad moment. Premeditated psychopaths are the …" 44:53 . The 'victimization gap' concept explains why society resists this truth — we want extreme causes for extreme consequences. The discussion then pivots to the astonishing mismatch in the criminal justice system: murder has a recidivism rate of just 1–3%, yet murderers receive society's longest sentences [2] — Julia Shaw "Society locks up murderers for decades, but murderers almost never re-offend (1–3% recidivism). The real recidivism risks are fraud, elder …" 48:16 . By contrast, fraud, elder abuse, and sexual violence have high recidivism rates but lighter penalties. Shaw argues this is backwards from a harm-reduction standpoint. Restorative justice enters the conversation as a framework that many victims' families actually prefer — they want understanding and apology, not just imprisonment. The chapter ends with a brief but provocative discussion of incels: their psychology of entitlement and the role of internet echo chambers in radicalizing ordinary grievance into potential violence.
The Tinder Swindler case is dissected in detail: the con man matched with women on Tinder, rapidly love-bombed them with romantic gestures and flights to Paris, then extracted loans by manufacturing emergencies. Shaw's interviewee Cecilia lost significant sums of money and took out family loans before realizing the deception. Shaw uses this case to make the universal point that fraud is not about targeting gullible people — it works because the con is tailored to what each person most wants to hear. The most dangerous evolution of this, both agree, is AI-enabled love fraud: the ability to ingest a target's online presence and craft a perfectly optimized romantic narrative at scale. Shaw's concern is not just financial — she worries these scams leave victims unable to be vulnerable again, eroding their capacity for genuine intimacy. The episode briefly notes that coercive control within real relationships operates on the same psychological levers as scams: controlling finances, weaponizing love, manufacturing emergencies.
Shaw offers an uncompromising take on jealousy: it is not love, it is control. The person who is jealous is either in the wrong relationship or insecure in themselves, and research consistently links jealousy to intimate partner violence — not as a cause in all cases, but as an almost universal precursor [1] — Julia Shaw "Jealousy feels like love, but it's actually a desire to control and possess. Research consistently shows jealousy is a precursor to intimat…" 56:56 . Much jealousy, she notes, is not grounded in real evidence of wrongdoing but in faulty 'lie detection' — the same overconfident pattern-matching that leads police officers to wrongly identify suspects. The conversation then enters coercive control territory: the systematic use of financial control and psychological manipulation within relationships. Shaw connects this to the broader false security of relationships built on poor communication rather than explicit agreements, setting up the next chapter's discussion of monogamy.
Shaw's core provocation: if most people have cheated on a partner, then most people are already practicing a form of polyamory — they're just doing it dishonestly. She rejects monogamy not as a universal ideal but as a compulsory default that many people are poorly suited for. The research on bisexuality is connected here: people who have been forced to rigorously examine their sexuality often end up questioning relationship structures too, and bi people are statistically more likely to be in non-traditional relationships. Lex plays thoughtful counterpoint — he identifies as a monogamy person and argues that the focused depth of one relationship offers its own kind of infinite exploration. Shaw's response is elegant: she just wants people to feel they have a genuine choice rather than a socially mandated default. The chapter closes with a discussion of what polyamory actually requires — good communication, security in yourself, and honesty — emphasizing these as prerequisites rather than outcomes.
This is the episode's most extended single topic. Shaw begins by explaining why bisexual research is hard to find: the term 'bisexual' is confused in academic databases and researchers have shifted to terms like 'plurisexual' or 'pansexual.' The history of Kinsey is then explored at length: a biologist studying wasps who was handed a sexuality research project and spent a year just listening to students' questions about sex before conducting thousands of interviews across America. His Kinsey Scale (0 = exclusively heterosexual, 6 = exclusively homosexual) found roughly half of men sitting in the middle — not exclusively either — at a time when this was genuinely radical [1] — Julia Shaw "In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey — a biologist who studied wasps — sold out auditoriums talking about human sexuality. His Kinsey Scale showed t…" 1:46:00 . Shaw explains the historical reversal: bisexuality research started with men (partly due to the post-war homosocial environment of veterans), but today twice as many women identify as bisexual as men, partly because bisexual men still face hostility from both straight and gay communities. The Klein Grid is introduced as a richer multidimensional tool covering attraction, behavior, fantasies, social preference, lifestyle, and self-identification across past, present, and ideal. Shaw reveals she came out as bisexual in her book Evil and subsequently wrote Bi specifically to create the mainstream scientific literature on bisexuality that didn't exist. She discusses the mental health consequences for bisexual people — higher rates of self-harm, isolation, and sexual violence — largely attributable to feeling unwelcome in both straight and queer communities. The chapter ends with her fear, expressed with genuine emotion, that the rights of bisexual and queer people are not permanently secure.
This is the episode's most extended single topic. Shaw begins by explaining why bisexual research is hard to find: the term 'bisexual' is confused in academic databases and researchers have shifted to terms like 'plurisexual' or 'pansexual.' The history of Kinsey is then explored at length: a biologist studying wasps who was handed a sexuality research project and spent a year just listening to students' questions about sex before conducting thousands of interviews across America. His Kinsey Scale (0 = exclusively heterosexual, 6 = exclusively homosexual) found roughly half of men sitting in the middle — not exclusively either — at a time when this was genuinely radical [1] — Julia Shaw "In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey — a biologist who studied wasps — sold out auditoriums talking about human sexuality. His Kinsey Scale showed t…" 1:46:00 . Shaw explains the historical reversal: bisexuality research started with men (partly due to the post-war homosocial environment of veterans), but today twice as many women identify as bisexual as men, partly because bisexual men still face hostility from both straight and gay communities. The Klein Grid is introduced as a richer multidimensional tool covering attraction, behavior, fantasies, social preference, lifestyle, and self-identification across past, present, and ideal. Shaw reveals she came out as bisexual in her book Evil and subsequently wrote Bi specifically to create the mainstream scientific literature on bisexuality that didn't exist. She discusses the mental health consequences for bisexual people — higher rates of self-harm, isolation, and sexual violence — largely attributable to feeling unwelcome in both straight and queer communities. The chapter ends with her fear, expressed with genuine emotion, that the rights of bisexual and queer people are not permanently secure.
Shaw is frequently asked to include a person's kinks as evidence of criminal character, and she consistently refuses — kinks are not predictive of criminal behavior unless directly involved in the crime itself. Research shows BDSM (including choking, restraint, and role-play) is among the most commonly practiced or fantasized sexual activities, and Shaw's message is simple: destigmatize first, ask safe-word questions second. The disinhibition hypothesis is the episode's most intellectually satisfying insight here: the reason submissives enjoy submission is often that it eliminates decision-making after a day of relentless choices. The dominant role, Lex adds, offers clarity — the freedom of not having to walk on eggshells. Both experiences are forms of being genuinely free precisely because of the fictional or consensual frame. Shaw extends this to furries, blood play, and other 'extreme' kinks: the psychological mechanism is the same — using a consensual frame to release social pressure. Shame about these desires, she argues, causes the real harm.
This is the episode's intellectual climax. Shaw's PhD research combined two previously separate fields: Elizabeth Loftus's false memory work and Saul Kassin's false confession research. The question: can you make someone believe they committed a crime that never happened? The methodology was painstaking — years to get through ethics — and involved selecting participants who had never experienced the target events (assaulting someone with a weapon, stealing, hitting someone), obtaining parental confirmation, building rapport with a true memory first, then introducing the false memory through guided imagination ('close your eyes and picture being 14, the police called your parents...'). Social reinforcement ('good job') was applied every time a participant generated a detail [1] — Julia Shaw "In just three interview sessions, Julia Shaw convinced 70% of participants they had assaulted someone or committed a crime as a teenager — …" 2:06:59 . The first participant said 'I remember a blue sky' and Shaw was grinning next to her supervisor because she knew it was working. Within three sessions, 70% of participants had developed complex false memories complete with specific people, places, and feelings — drawn from real elements of their lives but woven into events that never occurred [2] — Julia Shaw "What we've created with GenAI is basically the ultimate false memory machine. We have created a tailored experience of something that is mo…" 1:41:54 . Shaw is careful about what the 70% means: it doesn't mean 70% of all people can have false memories implanted; it means the phenomenon is real, possible, and alarmingly easy. She connects this to current concerns about AI — GenAI's conversational structure mirrors the exact conditions of a leading interrogation, making it potentially the most powerful false memory machine ever built.
Shaw describes approaching environmental crime as an experiment in whether criminological frameworks developed for individual violence can scale to corporate and organized environmental destruction. The Volkswagen Dieselgate case is the keystone: engineers who knew exactly what nitrous oxides do to human lungs nonetheless built defeat devices to conceal emissions up to 40 times the legal limit [1] — Julia Shaw "Volkswagen engineers knew exactly what nitrous oxides do to human lungs. They created a device to hide emissions 40 times the legal limit a…" 2:31:00 . The psychology is not psychopathy — it is conformity, market pressure, rationalization, and the gradual normalization of deception within a competitive industry. The same dynamic plays out in poaching gangs, illegal fishing, and deforestation: multiple levels of actors (bosses, middlemen, ground-level perpetrators) each rationalize their piece of the chain. Shaw attended UN conferences, anti-corruption meetings, wildlife crime summits, and European Space Agency events where she learned environmental crimes can literally be seen from space via satellite imaging. But far from despairing, she left these conferences energized: there are heroes at every level — whistleblowers, undercover investigators at the Environmental Investigation Agency, Interpol agents tracking criminal vessels — and they gave her genuine hope. The political framing of 'climate change' is sidestep effectively: by framing it as crime with specific convicted criminals, the debate becomes less partisan and more actionable.
The closing chapter is genuinely optimistic. Shaw's hope comes from three sources: researchers who study darkness with the specific goal of preventing it, technology that can implement scientific findings at scale, and the growing number of people — from space agency scientists to Interpol agents — dedicated to fighting harm. She introduces Spot, co-founded with Evernote's Phil Libin and two others, as a practical implementation of her research: an AI chatbot that administers the cognitive interview protocol to help workplaces record important emotional events (compliance issues, harassment reports) with maximum memory fidelity and minimum contamination [1] — Julia Shaw "Generative AI systems are structured as social conversations — the same format that Shaw has spent decades studying for its power to distor…" 1:41:35 . The Bar Council of England and Wales is among its users. But Shaw's ambition is larger: she imagines Spot or analogous tools being used for general life memory preservation, grief bots, and representation of loved ones. Her most urgent professional call: AI companies need social scientists in the room. The conversational structure of LLMs is a social interaction, and the science of how social interactions distort memory is directly applicable — but mostly ignored. The episode closes with Lex's T.S. Eliot quote: 'Most of the evil in the world is done by people with good intentions.'
Chapter 3 · 08:16
Shaw opens by defining the dark tetrad: psychopathy (low empathy, parasitic lifestyle, deceptiveness), sadism (pleasure in hurting others), narcissism (inflated self-view), and Machiavellianism (doing whatever it takes to get ahead). Crucially, every person scores somewhere on each trait — the goal is to understand where people fall on these continuums rather than sorting the world into monsters and non-monsters [1] — Julia Shaw "Evil is not a category you're in or out of. The dark tetrad traits — psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism — each exist on a sp…" 08:43 . The 'baby Hitler' question becomes a vehicle to argue that nobody is born evil and that the environment is the primary shaper of dark behavior. Shaw is emphatic that the word 'evil' is dangerous — it ends conversations rather than starting them, and enables dehumanization that has historically made mass atrocities possible [2] — Julia Shaw "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 c…" 12:41 . Lex and Shaw discuss dehumanization and deindividuation as the twin engines of war violence, and Shaw makes her case for 'evil empathy': understanding perpetrators not to excuse them but to prevent future harm. She addresses the Nietzsche concern (does gazing into the abyss corrupt you?) and describes how she maintains clinical detachment by treating each case as a puzzle. The chapter ends on the question of whether studying dark figures risks platforming them, and Shaw's nuanced take on how coverage of notorious criminals should be handled.
Evil is not a category you're in or out of. The dark tetrad traits — psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism — each exist on a spectrum, and every person scores somewhere on all four. The monster-versus-good-person binary is a fiction that stops us from understanding how violence actually happens.
Would you kill baby Hitler? Julia Shaw says no — because people are not born evil. Even Hitler didn't display the worst of his traits in early life. Evil is not inherited; it manifests through environment, social context, and a cascade of choices and experiences.
Mass atrocity runs on two psychological fuels: dehumanization (the other side is not really human) and deindividuation (you lose yourself in the group). Remove either one and the machinery of mass violence stalls. Every war, every genocide, has required both.
Research by Albert Vrij and others shows that even experienced police officers are no better than chance at detecting lies, despite high confidence in their ability to do so.
Chapter 4 · 29:23
Shaw recounts how the Robert Pickton case — a Canadian serial killer who killed victims on his farm and allegedly fed them to pigs — first captured her attention as an undergraduate at Simon Fraser University. Her professor, Stephen Hart, was an expert witness on the trial and modeled the 'gallows humor' that made criminal psychology feel like a viable career. The pivot to the psychology of serial killers in general reveals a consistent pattern: profound loneliness undermines 'reality monitoring' — the social checks that keep extreme thinking tethered to shared reality [1] — Julia Shaw "Serial killers are not born with a kill-switch. What many share is profound loneliness and a lack of social networks that perform 'reality …" 32:32 . Without close relationships to challenge distorted thoughts, dark ideation can escalate unchecked. Shaw brings in the parallel to radicalization and psychosis: in all these cases, the absence of a social tether allows extreme worldviews to solidify. The discussion of Jeffrey Dahmer is particularly striking — Shaw expresses genuine sympathy for his desperate (and horrific) attempt to create a permanent companion, calling it a 'sad' manifestation of a desire for connection that, in its core, is universally human. Elizabeth Loftus is mentioned as another expert who has worked on high-profile criminal cases, including Ghislaine Maxwell.
Serial killers are not born with a kill-switch. What many share is profound loneliness and a lack of social networks that perform 'reality monitoring' — the everyday checks that keep thoughts tethered to reality. Without that tether, dark ideation spirals unchecked toward violence.
Shaw's false memory protocol required only three interview sessions to convince the majority of participants they had committed a crime — demonstrating how quickly memory can be manipulated.
In Julia Shaw's PhD research, 70% of participants were led to believe they had committed a crime that never happened and confessed to it using suggestive interview techniques.
Around 70% of men and more than half of women have fantasized about killing someone. Far from being a warning sign, Shaw argues this is adaptive: mentally rehearsing the worst-case scenario is how the brain stress-tests its own moral limits and ultimately reinforces them.
Research finds approximately 70% of men and more than 50% of women have at some point fantasized about killing someone, suggesting murder fantasies are a normal, adaptive phenomenon.
Chapter 5 · 43:59
Drawing on her work with prosecutors, true crime producers, and researchers, Shaw presents the uncomfortable truth: most murders happen over trivialities — a four-dollar debt, a stolen bike. They are not the product of psychopathy or long-term planning; they are bad decisions in high-emotion moments [1] — Julia Shaw "The true leading cause of murder is embarrassingly mundane: a fight over $4, a stolen bike, a bad moment. Premeditated psychopaths are the …" 44:53 . The 'victimization gap' concept explains why society resists this truth — we want extreme causes for extreme consequences. The discussion then pivots to the astonishing mismatch in the criminal justice system: murder has a recidivism rate of just 1–3%, yet murderers receive society's longest sentences [2] — Julia Shaw "Society locks up murderers for decades, but murderers almost never re-offend (1–3% recidivism). The real recidivism risks are fraud, elder …" 48:16 . By contrast, fraud, elder abuse, and sexual violence have high recidivism rates but lighter penalties. Shaw argues this is backwards from a harm-reduction standpoint. Restorative justice enters the conversation as a framework that many victims' families actually prefer — they want understanding and apology, not just imprisonment. The chapter ends with a brief but provocative discussion of incels: their psychology of entitlement and the role of internet echo chambers in radicalizing ordinary grievance into potential violence.
People who commit homicide have an extremely low recidivism rate of only 1–3%, making lengthy imprisonment a poor fit for societal risk reduction.
The true leading cause of murder is embarrassingly mundane: a fight over $4, a stolen bike, a bad moment. Premeditated psychopaths are the exception, not the rule. Society obsesses over the dramatic edge case while ignoring the boring, preventable majority.
Society locks up murderers for decades, but murderers almost never re-offend (1–3% recidivism). The real recidivism risks are fraud, elder abuse, and sexual violence — crimes that get lighter sentences. If the goal is genuinely reducing harm, we've got our punishments backwards.
Chapter 6 · 51:51
The Tinder Swindler case is dissected in detail: the con man matched with women on Tinder, rapidly love-bombed them with romantic gestures and flights to Paris, then extracted loans by manufacturing emergencies. Shaw's interviewee Cecilia lost significant sums of money and took out family loans before realizing the deception. Shaw uses this case to make the universal point that fraud is not about targeting gullible people — it works because the con is tailored to what each person most wants to hear. The most dangerous evolution of this, both agree, is AI-enabled love fraud: the ability to ingest a target's online presence and craft a perfectly optimized romantic narrative at scale. Shaw's concern is not just financial — she worries these scams leave victims unable to be vulnerable again, eroding their capacity for genuine intimacy. The episode briefly notes that coercive control within real relationships operates on the same psychological levers as scams: controlling finances, weaponizing love, manufacturing emergencies.
The Tinder Swindler succeeded not because his victims were dumb but because he weaponized the most human desire of all: to be loved. Fraud doesn't exploit stupidity — it exploits hope. And there is a perfectly tailored version of the con for every one of us.
Chapter 7 · 56:38
Shaw offers an uncompromising take on jealousy: it is not love, it is control. The person who is jealous is either in the wrong relationship or insecure in themselves, and research consistently links jealousy to intimate partner violence — not as a cause in all cases, but as an almost universal precursor [1] — Julia Shaw "Jealousy feels like love, but it's actually a desire to control and possess. Research consistently shows jealousy is a precursor to intimat…" 56:56 . Much jealousy, she notes, is not grounded in real evidence of wrongdoing but in faulty 'lie detection' — the same overconfident pattern-matching that leads police officers to wrongly identify suspects. The conversation then enters coercive control territory: the systematic use of financial control and psychological manipulation within relationships. Shaw connects this to the broader false security of relationships built on poor communication rather than explicit agreements, setting up the next chapter's discussion of monogamy.
Jealousy feels like love, but it's actually a desire to control and possess. Research consistently shows jealousy is a precursor to intimate partner violence — and much of it is based on imagined threats, not real evidence. Shaw's view: persistent jealousy is almost always a red flag.
Chapter 10 · 1:20:21
This is the episode's most extended single topic. Shaw begins by explaining why bisexual research is hard to find: the term 'bisexual' is confused in academic databases and researchers have shifted to terms like 'plurisexual' or 'pansexual.' The history of Kinsey is then explored at length: a biologist studying wasps who was handed a sexuality research project and spent a year just listening to students' questions about sex before conducting thousands of interviews across America. His Kinsey Scale (0 = exclusively heterosexual, 6 = exclusively homosexual) found roughly half of men sitting in the middle — not exclusively either — at a time when this was genuinely radical [1] — Julia Shaw "In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey — a biologist who studied wasps — sold out auditoriums talking about human sexuality. His Kinsey Scale showed t…" 1:46:00 . Shaw explains the historical reversal: bisexuality research started with men (partly due to the post-war homosocial environment of veterans), but today twice as many women identify as bisexual as men, partly because bisexual men still face hostility from both straight and gay communities. The Klein Grid is introduced as a richer multidimensional tool covering attraction, behavior, fantasies, social preference, lifestyle, and self-identification across past, present, and ideal. Shaw reveals she came out as bisexual in her book Evil and subsequently wrote Bi specifically to create the mainstream scientific literature on bisexuality that didn't exist. She discusses the mental health consequences for bisexual people — higher rates of self-harm, isolation, and sexual violence — largely attributable to feeling unwelcome in both straight and queer communities. The chapter ends with her fear, expressed with genuine emotion, that the rights of bisexual and queer people are not permanently secure.
Chapter 11 · 1:35:56
Shaw is frequently asked to include a person's kinks as evidence of criminal character, and she consistently refuses — kinks are not predictive of criminal behavior unless directly involved in the crime itself. Research shows BDSM (including choking, restraint, and role-play) is among the most commonly practiced or fantasized sexual activities, and Shaw's message is simple: destigmatize first, ask safe-word questions second. The disinhibition hypothesis is the episode's most intellectually satisfying insight here: the reason submissives enjoy submission is often that it eliminates decision-making after a day of relentless choices. The dominant role, Lex adds, offers clarity — the freedom of not having to walk on eggshells. Both experiences are forms of being genuinely free precisely because of the fictional or consensual frame. Shaw extends this to furries, blood play, and other 'extreme' kinks: the psychological mechanism is the same — using a consensual frame to release social pressure. Shame about these desires, she argues, causes the real harm.
Researchers find bisexual people are more likely to self-harm, be victims of sexual violence, be isolated, and be stalked — largely because they are least likely to be plugged into a supportive community.
Julia Shaw almost became a painter. What redirected her was growing up with a father who had paranoid schizophrenia — someone who literally saw and heard a different reality. That destabilizing experience became the engine of her entire career: an obsession with what is real, across crime, memory, and human perception.
Chapter 12 · 1:39:04
This is the episode's intellectual climax. Shaw's PhD research combined two previously separate fields: Elizabeth Loftus's false memory work and Saul Kassin's false confession research. The question: can you make someone believe they committed a crime that never happened? The methodology was painstaking — years to get through ethics — and involved selecting participants who had never experienced the target events (assaulting someone with a weapon, stealing, hitting someone), obtaining parental confirmation, building rapport with a true memory first, then introducing the false memory through guided imagination ('close your eyes and picture being 14, the police called your parents...'). Social reinforcement ('good job') was applied every time a participant generated a detail [1] — Julia Shaw "In just three interview sessions, Julia Shaw convinced 70% of participants they had assaulted someone or committed a crime as a teenager — …" 2:06:59 . The first participant said 'I remember a blue sky' and Shaw was grinning next to her supervisor because she knew it was working. Within three sessions, 70% of participants had developed complex false memories complete with specific people, places, and feelings — drawn from real elements of their lives but woven into events that never occurred [2] — Julia Shaw "What we've created with GenAI is basically the ultimate false memory machine. We have created a tailored experience of something that is mo…" 1:41:54 . Shaw is careful about what the 70% means: it doesn't mean 70% of all people can have false memories implanted; it means the phenomenon is real, possible, and alarmingly easy. She connects this to current concerns about AI — GenAI's conversational structure mirrors the exact conditions of a leading interrogation, making it potentially the most powerful false memory machine ever built.
Generative AI systems are structured as social conversations — the same format that Shaw has spent decades studying for its power to distort memory. When AI tells you what you want to hear, it's running the same psychological playbook as a leading police interrogation. The result is a machine that quietly rewrites your sense of reality.
In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey — a biologist who studied wasps — sold out auditoriums talking about human sexuality. His Kinsey Scale showed that roughly half of men are not exclusively heterosexual, demolishing the binary model of sexual orientation decades before the modern conversation began.
Today twice as many women identify as bisexual compared to men, a reversal of the pattern seen in mid-20th-century sexuality research.
Alfred Kinsey's landmark postwar study found roughly half of men fell somewhere between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual on his 0–6 scale.
In just three interview sessions, Julia Shaw convinced 70% of participants they had assaulted someone or committed a crime as a teenager — events that never happened. The method used nothing more than leading questions, social reinforcement, and guided imagination. This is how innocent people end up in prison.
A study co-authored by Elizabeth Loftus found that AI-generated videos of yourself doing something make you significantly more likely to falsely believe the event actually happened.
When partners independently estimate what percentage of housework they each do, their totals reliably exceed 100%, showing how self-serving memory distortion is universal in relationships.
Close your eyes and picture a red apple. Most people see something. Julia Shaw sees black. She has aphantasia — the inability to form mental images — and only recently discovered it. It explains why memory palace techniques never worked for her, and may be more common among analytically-minded people than anyone realizes.
Chapter 13 · 2:30:01
Shaw describes approaching environmental crime as an experiment in whether criminological frameworks developed for individual violence can scale to corporate and organized environmental destruction. The Volkswagen Dieselgate case is the keystone: engineers who knew exactly what nitrous oxides do to human lungs nonetheless built defeat devices to conceal emissions up to 40 times the legal limit [1] — Julia Shaw "Volkswagen engineers knew exactly what nitrous oxides do to human lungs. They created a device to hide emissions 40 times the legal limit a…" 2:31:00 . The psychology is not psychopathy — it is conformity, market pressure, rationalization, and the gradual normalization of deception within a competitive industry. The same dynamic plays out in poaching gangs, illegal fishing, and deforestation: multiple levels of actors (bosses, middlemen, ground-level perpetrators) each rationalize their piece of the chain. Shaw attended UN conferences, anti-corruption meetings, wildlife crime summits, and European Space Agency events where she learned environmental crimes can literally be seen from space via satellite imaging. But far from despairing, she left these conferences energized: there are heroes at every level — whistleblowers, undercover investigators at the Environmental Investigation Agency, Interpol agents tracking criminal vessels — and they gave her genuine hope. The political framing of 'climate change' is sidestep effectively: by framing it as crime with specific convicted criminals, the debate becomes less partisan and more actionable.
Volkswagen engineers knew exactly what nitrous oxides do to human lungs. They created a device to hide emissions 40 times the legal limit and lied about it for ten years. The psychology is not psychopathy — it's conformity, rationalization, and market pressure. This is how normal people commit massive crimes.
Volkswagen's defeat devices allowed diesel cars to emit nitrous oxides at up to 40 times the legal limit for a decade before the fraud was uncovered.
A recent UN climate survey found that 85–90% of people worldwide think about the climate crisis on a regular basis, contradicting the myth that climate concern is a minority view.
No indexed bits in this chapter.
In just three interview sessions, Julia Shaw convinced 70% of participants they had assaulted someone or committed a crime as a teenager — events that never happened. The method used nothing more than leading questions, social reinforcement, and guided imagination. This is how innocent people end up in prison.
Society locks up murderers for decades, but murderers almost never re-offend (1–3% recidivism). The real recidivism risks are fraud, elder abuse, and sexual violence — crimes that get lighter sentences. If the goal is genuinely reducing harm, we've got our punishments backwards.
This episode
Factual claims made this episode, and whether a source was named.
In two studies, approximately 70% of men have fantasized about killing someone, and more than 50% of women have done the same.
Recidivism for homicide is only 1 to 3%.
Police officers who do investigative interviewing are no better than chance at detecting lies in experimental settings, despite high confidence in their ability.
70% of participants in Julia Shaw's PhD study were convinced they had committed a crime that never happened, using suggestive interview techniques.
Today, twice as many women identify as bisexual as men.
Alfred Kinsey found that approximately half of men were not exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual, placing somewhere in the middle of the 0–6 Kinsey Scale.
Volkswagen's defeat devices allowed diesel cars to emit nitrous oxides at up to 40 times the legal limit for approximately 10 years before the fraud was discovered.
85–90% of people worldwide think about the climate crisis on a regular basis, according to a recent UN climate survey.
People with psychopathy are better at faking good behavior during parole decisions, potentially leading to incorrect early release.
Bisexual people are more likely to self-harm, be victims of sexual violence, be isolated, and be stalked, largely because they are least likely to be plugged into a supportive community.
In a study co-authored by Elizabeth Loftus, participants who saw AI-generated videos of themselves doing something were more likely to believe the fabricated event actually happened, with higher memory confidence.
A replication of Julia Shaw's false memory study is being conducted or planned at the University of Maastricht.
When couples independently estimate what percentage of housework each does, their combined estimates consistently exceed 100%, due to self-serving memory bias.
This episode
Biologist who conducted landmark postwar studies on human sexuality and created the Kinsey Scale, discussed as a foundational figure in bisexuality research.
Pioneer of false memory research cited multiple times; expert witness on the Ghislaine Maxwell case and co-author of a recent AI false memory study.
Canadian serial killer whose case influenced Julia Shaw's career; covered on her Bad People Podcast with his expert witness Stephen Hart.
Therapist and bisexuality researcher who created the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, a multidimensional expansion of the Kinsey Scale.
Psychologist who ran the Stanford Prison Experiment and coined the 'heroic imagination' concept, discussed in the context of ordinary people committing evil acts.
Used as a case study of how sadism and extreme loneliness combine in serial killers, with Shaw expressing unusual empathy for his desire for human connection.
Murder victim whose case became the canonical — and contested — example of bystander effect, with witnesses allegedly failing to intervene.
Zimbardo's controversial 1971 experiment in which randomly assigned 'guards' began pseudo-torturing 'prisoners', used to illustrate how situational factors drive evil behavior.
Leading false confession researcher whose work Julia Shaw combined with Elizabeth Loftus's false memory research in her PhD study.
Mentioned as one of the famous serial killers whose psychology is examined in the episode.
Central case study in Shaw's book Green Crime; used defeat devices to hide diesel emissions up to 40 times the legal limit for a decade.
Discussed as an investigative body combating environmental crime, including tracking illegally operating fishing vessels and wildlife trafficking.
Institution where Julia Shaw has trained personnel on preserving collective memory and avoiding contamination in war crimes witness interviews.
Phil Libin, founder of Evernote, is mentioned as a co-founder collaborator Julia Shaw met at Founders Forum, which led to the creation of Spot.
Company co-founded by Julia Shaw that uses AI-administered cognitive interview techniques to help workplaces record and report important emotional events and compliance issues.
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