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

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“Yeah, a lot of people felt seen by the book. So it was really beautiful, the fan mail I got when the sort of responses to the book. And I got there from all over the world. And so in the book, I also spoke with some researchers who were in 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 sort of seen as it was a blind spot. Because what counted as sex as sex with a penis. 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”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 that's going to stay, not even necessarily in my lifetime. And so I think much like writing evil at a time when you're not at war and you're able to think really 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 sort of aspect you're talking about, you suddenly go, oh, it's going to be much harder to dehumanize these people. And, and this is where all of this kind of comes from me from a really sad place. You could talk about Bai as this project of love and how I was finding the community. I was trying to write something that would sort of bring us all together. But it's also because I'm constantly terrified that my rights”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 by. I came out in making evil, making evil's 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the research on human sexuality, I think, is interesting because we keep finding that people have these desires that they feel weird about, that they, 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. 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 themselves. In research on kinks and sexuality, it's”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the being free and the juxtaposition there is that you are free because of the fiction. You're play acting, but it's touching something deep inside you psychologically. And so 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and that's what researchers 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 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, but maybe when you move into the bedroom, you go, yeah, but this is a different context. And I kind of want the reverse of what I want in my day-to-day life. And so I can also understand like furries and that's sort of”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 they have these fantasies? And that ties in, unfortunately, with homosexuality and bisexuality and the way that certainly historically and in most parts 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. Well, society is going to treat them differently. So it's all about destigmatizing.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make sure that these interactions are safe and consensual, and then being able to explore. And I mean, there's everything from, you know, pop 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. 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 the world.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 restraint.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did you know that he or she was also into Insert Kink here or insert non-traditional 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 they were swingers. And so, and again, I go, yeah, that's, you know, almost like, and in other news, they were swingers. 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 sort of broader society. And that is wild to me, because if you look at research on sexual fantasies and”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the reason I included kinks in 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. There's lots of different aspects of being by 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 also finding your people really matters.”
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 sign is smaller than we think it is. I think that there are 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. So if you get your experimental years in undergrad, but then you kind of have to choose. 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. Like research has found that”
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 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. Whereas 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Identities and the past, present, ideal to help people to think through all these complicated feelings we have around our sexuality and to identify problems like sticking points.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, if you say, well, I used to identify S 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. And so I've also had friends who've gone past, present, straight, straight, but ideal by. So you get into these interesting dynamics where sometimes people just wish they were different sexuality than they were for other reasons. And then there's other things in the scale that ask about your lifestyle. So for example, if you are going to parties, queer parties, if you have queer friends, then you might have a homosexual lifestyle, even if you're straight. But then again, how much lifestyle would you like? And so for me, that was a real moment where I was looking at that going, wow, my lifestyle is really straight. And maybe I need to change this. And so he was using these attractions and fantasies.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“McKinsey 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 Havlock Ellis, but we won't get into him. Fritz Klein was a male researcher doing research also on bisexuality. He was specifically a therapist, and he was looking at people who were struggling with their sexuality. And so people would show up in the 70s and 80s in his practice.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Queer phobia within the queer community. And so you might get gay men saying to a by man, come on, you're act. I was bi once. That's a classic. I was bi once. Or come on, you're actually gay. It's the same that you get the other way around with buy woman is 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 buy thing going on, which is often quite hostile, not always, but often. And there's this gay male buy thing, which is different in nature, but is also potentially hostile. So in both, saying your buy can be problematic. But for men more so.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely. And I think that research consistently shows that bisexual men are more likely to identify as, well, as gay or straight. And it depends. So if they have what you might refer to as a homosexual lifestyle, so they engage in sort of going to queer parties, maybe go on Grindr or other gay apps, that would be much more a lifestyle thing where you've embraced 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”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And then there were 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 may be less people who would have called themselves by. And suddenly this became a thing more for women. So I think that there's some social things going on. There's some research things going on. But actually by men have been studied for a long time as well.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While in his post war, though, so I think that mattered as well. So there's something called a homo social 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 homosecial 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of woke thing now, that the rainbow flag and all this stuff is sort of this modern invention almost. But 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. And so zero was exclusively heterosexual tendencies. And six was exclusively homosexual. And he would place people based on all 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The 1940s. This is quite a conservative time. I mean, certainly more than we might expect now. 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 challenge is a misconception we have about sexuality, that we think of it as this.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like what they want 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. 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 are out there interviewing people in America about their sexual behavior, which, I mean, just picture the time.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Gaytown, 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 identifies bisexual as men. But if you look at the history of this and the research on bisexuality,”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 it's the same as being heterosexual in terms of potentially my pool of people who might be interested in. It's just that their gender is irrelevant.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, which is different entirely. 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking they're lying. So with men, so I wrote a book called Buy 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 biperson 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. One of the things I found is that the terms that are used are not necessarily by. And so it could be things like plurisexual. 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 sex or you can change. And so they're bisexual.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the superpower that I can love more widely. And gender doesn't really matter in terms of who I'm capable of loving. And so relationship structures almost come with that conversation. 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.”
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. You can love people in different ways, and also you can love lots of people deeply, I think. And I think, again, it's some research on bisexuality. So 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, 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. 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? There's this constant hypersexualization also, especially.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be. I mean, all relationships can be difficult to navigate I think it's the same risk factors 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 person, then you're going to have a better time.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 this 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, how do you actually want to structure your life? And I think how do you want to structure your relationship as 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. And I think then you're also 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 certain capacity to be honest about whom you're attracted to and how that might impact your life more generally.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 could just, you can have lots of beautiful people around.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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's 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 that is bad psychologically and that should be addressed or maybe it's not the right relationship.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's the other way around. I think monogamy is setting us up to fail. 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's, it doesn't have to be that way. 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. So I think the idea that there's this one size fits all for relationships is really harmful to a lot of people. And it just doesn't really work for everybody.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 asignificant other, or have cheated multiple times. And that's just consistently found in the research.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, as in not all jealousy leads to violence, of course, but all violence is the jealousy is a precursor. And quite a lot of that is imagined things that the partner is doing, not even based on reality. We go back to our deception detection research where we're bad at telling whether someone”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The spectrum. Well, and course of 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 sort of 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 course of control. And things like jealousy can also be used in that way.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because 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's 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. Because that is sometimes how it's framed as like, oh, such an idiot. She was so gullible. 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then she realized that this all was big fraud. This was a love scam. 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who are really problematic in relationships in a lot of ways. I mean, this is not just in. Often involves 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, that kind of thing is what he would weaponize. And she, 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, this 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So 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 approve that he, in fact, is this really wealthy guy. And he would simultaneously be building up the story of a future together. And you see this in...”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it can reinforce that worst self. You see other people saying, yeah, I feel the same way. Do you want me to help you?”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have been told that that is what we should have. Like, 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. And so that's where I think it can get a bit cross 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 thinking the same way as you, yeah, that can make you dangerous.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 so, and the idea of entitlement. So I think one thing that we see often in crimes of all sorts, actually, is the 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. 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 this is a sort of white picket fence ideal that we've been sold.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think forgiveness is up to the victim's families. And quite often when you speak with victim's families, there is this divide where you have some who are much more keen on something called restorative justice, which is where 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 and 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, they don't think of this other perpetrator as this grown man who has, I don't know, I think we think of it as this fight between the parents of both teenaged boys in that case, but really often what parents want is to just understand how this”
2025-10-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source