#483 – Julia Shaw: Criminal Psychology of Murder, Serial Killers, Memory & Sex

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist who has written extensively on a wide variety of topics that explore human nature, including psychopathy, violent crime, psychology of evil, police interrogation, memory manipulation, deception detection, and human sexuality. Her books include Evil, About the Psychology of Murder and Sadism, The Memory Illusion, About False Memories, Bi, About Bisexuality, and her new book, the should definitely go order now called Green Crime, which is a study of the dark underworld of poachers, illegal gold miners, corporate frauds, hit men, and all kinds of other environmental criminals. Julia is a brilliant and kindhearted person with whom I got the chance to have many great conversations with on and off the mic. This was an honor and a pleasure. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Shopify for selling stuff online, BetterHelp for mental health, Element for electrolytes, and AG1 for my daily multivitamin. Choose wisely, my friends. And now on to the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. Obviously it's an incredible platform for selling stuff, but again, I will reiterate as I do often as we did in the DHH episode, what's also incredible is the implementation of the infrastructure, how the thing is built. The legendary, well-documented Black Friday, I believe in 2021, Shopify handled 30 terabytes of data every minute. 32 plus million requests per minute hit the servers. 11 million MySQL queries per second were processed. And all of that mostly Ruby on Rails. The very framework, the very programming language that's not supposed to scale, and it did, and it did so incredibly well, seamlessly, and still maintained the beauty underlying that implementation. There's this write-up I recently read about how they were actually able to make that happen. And there's so many interesting details, including the fact that as DHH talked about, that it was a modular monolith, and it was scaled horizontally in these very interesting modular ways. Again, that's probably outside of the scope of what I'm supposed to be doing here. Just another chance to celebrate the incredible engineering behind Shopify. And all of that to help you sell stuff. You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/lex. That's all lower case. Go to shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P help. They figure out what you need to match with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. And boy, in this episode, do we delve into the dark aspects of human nature and the human mind. It is so fascinating. And what's also, I think, inspiring to me about Julia's work is that she approaches every situation, every human being with a deep empathy, realizing that each of us have the capacity for good and evil, and so much of who we are is shaped by our environment. That's a real honest way to deal with cases where humans do horrible stuff to each other, realizing that they're not somehow different than us, that we too, all of us are capable of doing these kinds of things. And when you think of it that way, you can more honestly and rigorously analyze why people do what they do. And yes, it is a reminder how complicated the human mind is. You can explore that human mind with the help of a licensed therapist and better help. It's easy, discreet, affordable, available world wide. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. I'm currently drinking it, even though I'm traveling. It is always watermelon salt. I love it. Also, it's not just the OG drink mix. They got the sparkling water version that is another form factor. It's super delicious, much harder to travel with. But if you're at home and you can order a bunch, it's a delicious, different way of consuming element. Again, it's a source of happiness. It makes me feel at home even when I'm traveling. I'm still, and for the past many, many years, probably over a decade, maybe over 15 years, most days I'm doing one meal a day. I'm doing extremely low carb, not for any reasons, except it makes me happy. But when you do that kind of stuff, you want to make sure that the electrolytes are on point. And I used element for that. You should consider doing the same. Get a free eight count sample pack with any purchase. Try it at drinklmnt.com/lex.