YouSaid · the spoken record

Julia Shaw

lines on the record: 191
first: 2025-10-14
most recent: 2025-10-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“To celebrate all the people who are doing amazing research and really cracking down on things like environmental crime and spending their lives to fight specific kinds of crime.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the brain. I just think there's so much potential that's being wasted right now.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in the context of Spot, yes, it's just compliance and it's that. But I think in sort of private life and in terms of where I think this could go, I'm interested in all memories. And I think that important life events can be recorded. And I think the idea of having a grief bots and having things that have a representation of you or the loved ones, I think that's something that I like seeing in the future. I would.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They could also use it potentially. But we've got people reporting someone left bleach in a machine. So it's like a more small memory. So it's streamlining reporting processes.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it ended up sort of pivoting into this general reporting tool for workplaces where this was before Me Too, but it was the idea being that in lots of workplace environments, you have important emotional events that are really important to understand, but are really hard to preserve. And often you have this really bad evidence that you're relying on. So someone at some point sort of goes to HR and says something and somebody else says something else and you're sort of unsure as a company maybe who to whom to trust what's real. And so we were trying to streamline that. And so now Spot is a reporting tool for any kind of compliance issues. And so you can talk to Spot. It's called this chat bot 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, so all the lawyers in the UK use it themselves, which I always think is a real stamp of approval when the bar council's using your tool.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I met Phil Levin 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. And specifically, I was interested in creating an AI or at least 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 the cognitive interview. And 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. And what can do that really well? Well, chatbots can do that really well. And so together with Phil Libbin and my two co-founders, Dylan and Daniel, I ended up co-founding Spot, which is talktoot.com if you want to check it out.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some point I was like maybe I should do something about this. And so And so I did. And so I went to a, well, I did a TED talk and I was invited to this tech conference called Founders Forum, which is a sort of meeting of tech founders and others in London, but in also a couple other places. And I was invited to this. And while there, I met the founder of Evernote, Phil Libbon.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Spot came out of my going around the world and giving everyone an existential crisis. So 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How technology can actually make us feel more human. So there's these capacities like memory that we're bad at, and tech can help us to overcome some of those shortcomings as long as we use it in a 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 sort of ignoring the social scientists entirely sometimes when building these systems and it ends up becoming this engineering math problem when that's not actually in terms of the consequences for humanity, what it's going to be. And so I'm always keen on connecting social sciences and big issues.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About memory things. And 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 that I've always been interested in how tech can help us to record important emotional events like with spot, talk the spot.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And 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, like also even in memory interviewing. We were talking about the potential role of AI in distorting our memories. When I do talks, when I do corporate talks, I tell people the prompt that I use to use the cognitive interview, which is the best practices in memory interviewing. Because you can also tell, you know, AI tools to do the appropriate kind of interviewing if you're talking.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 for my mind, there was just a, you can't go there. I don't know how to empathize with that person.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is one context. So there is one context that I don't know if it's that I have trouble empathize. I think it is I have trouble empathizing and I just think it is. 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. And 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These people who are willing to engage in these crimes 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. We're back to the topic of heroes. We're back to bystander effects. We're back to all of the social psychology and criminal psychology we've been talking about this whole time, which is why I thought it was so important to apply that research to this context and to say, okay, so now we've got”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? Like 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. They're lying to the regulators. They're just lying. And then other people who are trying to be honest and play the game clean, they see the success of this other company and go,”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge, huge crimes that cost us a huge amount of money to clean up and that cost a huge amount of human health and have these other knock-on effects and are changing certainly the structure of our planet in a way that we can feel already. And 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. 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where no one's debating. Did someone just burn down this rainforest? It's like 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. 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. And so it's like as long as you trust those data, The question then is, okay, these crimes are happening. How do we stop them? And as you say, like I was very much trying, 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 like someone who didn't do the recycling. Because also I think that individual level is often detrimental. But these are...”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not true. And if you ask people what the emotional consequences are of those feelings, it's people say things like eco-anxiety, anger, sadness, grief that 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. And certainly by meeting all of these UN researchers, 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going, I'll ensure that. And 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 ensuring 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 the 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. 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 every single day. This idea that there's this like minority of people who care about climate change, that's an illusion.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 its 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. These are not healthy, normal people most of the time who are perpetrating bad crimes. And yet in this context, in environmental crime, this is why 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. 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 ten years.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the, whether it's a corporate boss or an illegal gang boss, you've got the middlemen, you've got the people on the ground.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 and 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 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? And the answer is also very different potentially than in other kinds of crime that are more commonly discussed.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And it gets quite exciting in some of these cases where you really see the people who are trying to hold people accountable.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 how much and who that's up for debate. But certainly people knew because they had to create the thing. They had to literally create this piece of software to put into the cars. 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. 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. And so that is one of the cases I cover.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 bottom limit of nitrous oxides that is healthy for the human lung. 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”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the book Green Crime was really an experiment for me in whether we can apply chronological 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. 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 like 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? Who was responding effectively? And then what is the adequate punishment? How should we deal with the people who we catch? And so in this book, the question was, are the people who are...”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 turns out have a fantasia and I think 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 because it's early days of research on this.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting, right? And most people with affantasia don't realize they have it until they have this kind of conversation. I didn't know.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I do. And I think that's why I'm so interested in concepts and ideas. Then we know that people with aphantasia are less likely to care about their childhood memories because they can't visualize them.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's a scale. So, some people are hypersic where they can have a really elaborate version of the apple. and other people have a gray sort of outline, and I have nothing.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, so the memory palace idea is absurd to me. So the test for AFantasia is really easy, which is close your eyes and picture a red apple.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Elaborate images in their heads. I recently discovered that I have aphantasia 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's some individual differences stuff going on.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 have visualize something. You could have a weird game or some sort of like rhyme that you create for the person. You can say, you know, Julia with 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 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”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Especially like you and I, it's like 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. Like, what do they like? 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...”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And the idea is that doing one thing like Suduku 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. Almost the opposite of expertise”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 NBAC tests. So remember information, a couple of information pieces of information back. So what did I tell you three sentences ago? There's all of these kinds of...”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of how much you've done in the relationship, and they're more like to actually perceive what you're contributing. Whereas we just assume that people have the same memories we do and that they, of course, you remember is 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the rubbish. I've just taken out the bins. Or I've just booked us a hotel. But saying it out loud means the other person's able to perceive it and then can add it to sort of their internal star chart.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it totally works. I mean, I do it all the time. 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 Opposite, which is hanging in the negatives.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is going to have an impact on your memory as well. 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. We're so close to facts, but that in some ways I think is the worry is that we've gotten comfortable feeling like we can just access things that aren't modified or that are less likely to be modified and now they're more likely to be. And that can interface with our memories.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 garbage behind you.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Language, but also think about it yourself so you can, it's called auto suggestion when you suggest things to yourself that didn't have, and that often comes from reading something or seeing something or thinking about something or hearing somebody else's story and going, does something like that happen to me? And then you start picturing it and thinking about in what context it could have. And then you start to basically implant a false number in yourself. And so that can happen as well. And I think with things like Neuralink, it would be the same where you'd have the ability to do that in, but again, I still think that this interact between humans and AI or AI-like systems 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 offered people. And he 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 pick sort didn't happen 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, sort of sharing those memories with others and those experiences and which experiences end up being the important ones in our lives.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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. 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like 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. And so most of the time, unless you're depressed, most people look back at their lives with a sort of rosy reminiscence bias, and they're more like 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 parent schizophrenia, that is something that I see as a net positive.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source