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

- We all have the capacity to kill people and murder people and do other terrible

things. The question is why we don't do those things rather than why we

do those things quite often. Most men have fantasized about killing someone, about

70% in two studies, and most women as well.

More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody. So murder fantasies

are incredibly common.

- The following is a conversation with Julia Shaw, a criminal

psychologist who has written extensively on a wide

variety of topics that explore human nature, including

psychopathy, violent crime, psychology of evil, police

interrogation, false memory manipulation, deception detection,

and human sexuality. Her books include

Evil, about the psychology of murder and sadism, The

Memory Illusion, about false memories, Bi, about

bisexuality, and her new book that you should definitely go

order now called Green Crime, which is a study

of the dark underworld of poachers, illegal gold

miners, corporate frauds, hitmen, and all kinds of

other environmental criminals. Julia is a

brilliant and kindhearted person with whom I got the chance to

have many great conversations with on and off the mic. This was an honor and a

pleasure. This is Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please

check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find

links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so

on. And now, dear friends, here's Julia Shaw. You wrote the book Evil: The Science

Behind Humanity's Dark Side. So lots of interesting topics

to cover here. Let's start with the continuum. You

described that evil is a continuum. In other words, the dark

tetrad: psychopathy, sadism, narcissism,

Machiavellianism, are a continuum of traits, not a binary zero-one

label of monster or non-monster. So, can you explain this continuum?

- Yeah. So, each trait on the Dark Tetrad, as it's called, which is the

four traits that are associated with dark personality traits. So, things that we

often associate with the word "evil," like sadism, which is a pleasure in

hurting other people. Machiavellianism, which is doing whatever it takes to get

ahead. Narcissism, which is taking too much pleasure

in yourself and seeing yourself as superior to

others. And then there's psychopathy. Psychopathic

personalities specifically often lack in empathy, and

it's usually characterized by a number of different traits

including a parasitic lifestyle, so mooching off of others. Deceptiveness,

lying to people, and again, that empathy dimension where you

are more comfortable hurting other people because you don't feel sad when other people feel

sad. Now, all of those traits: psychopathy,

sadism, Machiavellianism, and narcissism, all of them have a

scale. And so you can be low on each of those traits or you can be high on

each of those traits. And what the Dark Tetrad is, it's actually a way of classifying

people into those who might be more likely to

engage in risky behaviors or harmful behaviors and those who are not. And if you score

high on all of them, you're most likely to harm other people. But

each of us score somewhere. So, I might score low on sadism

but higher on narcissism. And in all of them, I'm probably

subclinical. And so this is the other thing we often talk about in

psychology is that there's clinical traits and clinical diagnoses,

like someone is diagnosed as having

narcissism. Or they're subclinical, which is you don't quite

meet the threshold, but you have traits that are related, and that are so important for us to

understand in the same context.

- So, early in the book, you raised the question that I think you highlight is a very

important question: if you could go back in time, would you

kill baby Hitler? This is somehow a defining question. Can you explain?

- Well, it's about whether you think that people are born evil. So the

question of "Would you kill baby Hitler?" is meant to be something that gets

people chatting about whether or not they think that people are born with the traits

that make them capable of extreme harm towards others. Or whether they think

it's socialized, whether it's something that, maybe in how people are

raised, sort of manifests over

time. With Hitler, we know from certainly psychologists who have pored

over his traits over time and looked at who he was over the

course of his life, there's always this question of, "Was he mad or bad?"

And the answer to "Was he mad?" Well, he certainly

had some characteristics that people would associate with, for

example, maybe sadism, with this idea that

he was less high on empathy is probably also showcased

in his work. But in terms of whether he was born that

way, I think the answer usually would be no. And actually, in his early life, he

didn't showcase quite a lot of the traits that later defined the horrors that he

was capable of. So would I go back in time and kill baby Hitler? The answer is

no because I don't think it's a straight line from baby to adult,

and I don't think people are born evil.

- So you think a large part of it is nurture versus nature,

the environment shaping the person to become, to

manifest the evil that they bring out to the world?

- Well, and I'd be careful with using the word evil because I think we shouldn't use it to

describe human beings because it most commonly "others" people. In

fact, I think it makes us capable of perpetrating horrendous crimes

against those we label evil. So for me, that word

is the end of a conversation. It's when we call somebody evil,

we say, "This person is so different from me that I don't even need

to bother trying to understand why they are capable of doing terrible things

because I would never do such things. I am good." And so that

artificial differentiation between good and evil is something that,

certainly with the book, I'm trying to dismantle. And that's why

introducing continuums for different kinds of negative traits is really important,

and introducing this idea that there's nothing fundamental to people

that makes them capable of great harm. We all have the

capacity to kill people and murder people and do other terrible things. The

question is, why we don't do those things rather than why we do those things

quite often. So I think humanizing and

understanding that we all have these traits is the most important thing in my book,

certainly.

- Yeah, I think a prerequisite of doing

evil, I see this in war a lot, is to dehumanize

the other. In order to be able to murder them on scale, you have to

reformulate the war as a fight between good and evil. And

the interesting thing you see with war is both sides

think that it's a battle of good versus evil. It almost

always is like that, especially at large-scale wars.

- That's right, and on top of dehumanization, there is also this other thing

called de-individuation, which is where you see yourself as part of the

group, and you no longer see yourself as an individual. And so, it's this

fight of us versus them. And so you need both of those things. You need that

sort of collapse of empathy for other people, the people who are on the

other side. And you need this idea that you can be swallowed by the

group, and that gives you a sense of

also the cloak of justice, the cloak of morality, even

when, you know, maybe you're on the wrong side. And that's where, I mean,

getting into sort of who's on the right side of each war is always a more complicated issue.

But certainly calling other people evil and calling the other side evil

and dehumanizing them is crucial to most of these kinds of fights.

- Yeah, you promote empathy as an important thing to do when we're trying

to understand each other, and then a lot of people are uncomfortable

with empathy when it comes to folks that we

traditionally label as evil. Hitler's an example. To have

empathy means that you're somehow dirtying yourself by

the evil. What's your case for empathy, even when we're talking

about some of the darker humans in human history?

- My case for empathy, or evil empathy, as I sometimes call it, so empathy for people who we

often call evil... Also, the title of my book is Evil, or in

the UK market, it's Making Evil, which is a reference to a Nietzsche quote, which is, "Thinking evil

is making evil." The idea being that evil is a label we place onto

others. There's nothing inherent to anything that makes it

evil. And so, I also think that we need to dismantle that and

empathize with people we call evil because if we're saying that this is the

worst kind of act or worst kind of manifestation of what somebody can be, so if

someone can destroy others, torture others, hurt

others... I work as a criminal psychologist, so I work a lot on

sexual abuse cases, on rape cases, on murder trials. And so,

in those contexts, that word evil is used all the time. So,

this person is evil. And if we're doing that, then we need to go, okay,

but what we actually want is, we don't really just want to label people. We want to

stop that behavior from happening, and the only way we're going to do that is if

we understand what led that person to come to that

situation and to engage in that behavior. And so, that's why evil empathy, I think, is

crucial, because ultimately what we want is to make society safer. And the

only way we can do that is to understand the psychological and social levers that

led them to engage in this behavior in the first place.

- On a small tangent, I get to interview a bunch of folks

that a large number of people consider evil. So, how would you

give advice about how to conduct such interviews when you're sitting in front of a world

leader that some millions of people consider

evil? Or if you're sitting in front of people that are actual,

like convicted criminals, what's the way to conduct that interview? Because to

me, I want to understand that human being. They also have their

own narrative about why they're good and why they're

misunderstood, and they have a story in which they're not evil and they're going to try

to tell that story. And some of them are exceptionally good at telling that

story. So, if it's for public consumption, how would you do that interview?

- I think it's important to speak with people whom we or who a lot of

people dehumanize, including myself. I mean, I also speak with people who I think

are or have... I know have committed terrible crimes, and I've

spoken to these people because, as a criminal psychologist, that's often part of my job.

So, what's interesting, I think, when you're speaking to people who have

committed really terrible crimes, or certainly who've been convicted of

terrible crimes, is that not only is it potentially

insightful because they might give you a real answer and not just a controlled

narrative about why they committed these crimes. If they

are either maintaining their innocence or they're more reluctant to do that, I think

even the narrative that they are controlling, that they're

being very careful with, still tells us a lot about them. So, I

think, certainly in my research on environmental crime as well,

what we see is that people use a lot of rationalization. They say things like, "Well,

everybody's doing it," and, "If I hadn't done this first, somebody else would have done

this waste crime or this other kind of crime." So there's this

rationalization. There's this normalization. There's this

diminishing of your own role and agency, and

that still tells us a lot about the psychology of people who commit crimes,

because most of us are very bad at

saying sorry and saying, "I messed this up, and I shouldn't have done

that." And instead, what our brains do is they try to make us feel better, and they

go, "No, you're still a good person despite this one thing." And so,

we try to rationalize it, we try to excuse it, we try to explain it. And there is some truth to it

as well, because we know the reasons why we engage in that behavior and other people

don't have the whole context. So, we also do have more of the whole

story. But on the other hand, we need to also face the fact that sometimes we

do terrible things, and we need to stop doing those terrible things and prevent

other people from doing the same.

- I find these pictures of World War II leaders as children

kind of fascinating, because it grounds you. It makes you realize

that there is a whole story there of environment, of development through their

childhood, through their teenage years. You just remember they're all kids.

Except Stalin. He was looking evil already when young.

- Well, people used to not smile in photos as well. So looking at historical photos of children,

or sometimes even kids in other cultures, it's like, "Oh, why are they all so serious?"

But our creepiness radars are also way off. This is something that I've been interested in for a long time as

well, is that we have this intuitive perception of whether or

not somebody is trustworthy. And that intuitive perception, according to

ample studies at this point, is not to be trusted. And one thing in

particular is whether or not we think someone is creepy, including children, but

usually the research is done, of course, on adult faces and with adults.

And only recently did we even really define

what that vague feeling of creepiness is.

It has a lot to do with not following social norms. This is something

we see that transfers to other contexts, like why people are afraid of

people with severe mental illness and psychosis. If you're on

the bus or the Tube in London, and someone's talking to themselves and they're

acting in an erratic way, we know that people are more likely to keep a distance. There

There was one study where they literally had a waiting room where they also had

people with chairs, and the question was, "How many chairs would you sit away

from someone you know has a severe mental illness?" And the answer is you sit more chairs

away, and there's a physical and psychological distancing that's

happening there. And it's not because people with severe mental

illness are inherently more violent or more dangerous. That is not

actually what the research finds. It's that we perceive them as such

because we perceive them as

weird basically. We go, "This isn't how you're supposed to be behaving, and

so I'm worried about this and so I'm going to keep my distance." And so

creepiness is much the same, and that's where you can totally misfire

whom you perceive as creepy just because they're not acting in the way that you

expect people to act in society.

- Well, what are the sort of concrete features that contribute to our creepiness

metric? Is that meme accurate that when the person's attractive, you're

less likely to label them as creepy?

- It depends. If they're too attractive, it can be. So there's-

There's, there's effects that interact there.

- That's hilarious.

- And we also don't trust people potentially who are too attractive.

But again, deviation from the norm. And so if you're

deviating in any way, that can lead to

well, your assessment being more wrong, but also you assessing people as more

negative. And so with creepiness, the

main thing that bothers me as a criminal psychologist

is that tangential to creepiness is this general idea of trustworthiness

and that you can tell whether somebody is lying. And I've done research on this,

as have lots of other people, like Aldert Vrij is one of the leading researchers on

deception detection. And he has found in so

many studies that it's really hard to detect whether someone is

lying reliably, and that people, especially police

officers, people who do investigative interviewing, they have this high

confidence level that they, because of their vast experience,

can in fact tell whether the person across from them is lying to them, this witness, the

suspect. And the answer is that, even that, if you take them into

experimental settings, they are no better than chance at detecting

lies, and yet they think they are. And so again, you get into this path

where you're going to miss people who are actually lying to you potentially, and

you're going to potentially point at innocent people and say, "I think you're guilty of this

crime," and you go hard on that person in a way that might even lead to a wrongful

conviction.

- So it's the fact that it's very difficult to detect lies and

overconfidence in policing creates a huge problem.

- Not just policing, in relationships and in lots of other contexts as well.

I mean, a lot of jealousy is born out of uncertainty. Jealousy isn't, "I know for sure

that you have done something that is threatening our relationship." A lot of jealousy is, "What's in

my head because I am assuming that you might be thinking or doing

X." And that is also basically an exercise in lie

detection. And there as well, we are very bad at it.

- Is there a combination of the dark tetrad and how good you are at lying? Like,

are people with certain traits, maybe psychopathy, are better at lying than others?

- There's definitely some research to support the idea that people with psychopathy are better at lying.

There's also some research specifically on sort of faking good

in, for example, parole decisions. So when it comes up to

someone who is... There's a legal decision to be made as to whether this

person can be released from prison or released from just detention in general.

And then the person will act in a particular way, sort

of mimic a good prisoner, mimic someone who's safe to be released into

society. And then the committee goes, "Oh, well, you know, this,

this person's doing great," and so they're ready to be released. And then they make the wrong

decision because that person has been faking it. So I think with psychopathy, it's a bit

complicated. There has been

some sort of, historically as well, some concern that certain treatment for

psychopathy, especially empathy-focused treatment, makes people with

psychopathy more likely to fake empathy and to

weaponize it. But then there's other research which finds that if you use other

kinds of interventions, so like Jennifer Skeem in

California who does research on people with psychopathy who have

committed severe crimes. And she specifically creates these treatment programs that aren't

just around empathy, but they're more around almost learning the rules of society

and convincing people that actually being pro-social is a better way to get

what you want in life. And so there's a real need

for tailored treatments to deal with especially certain kinds of

personality traits, dark personality traits, to try and convince people

basically, actually being pro-social is the better path, rather

than just going hard on, you know, empathy and things that they don't maybe also see

as faults with themselves.

- Is there a psychological cost to empathizing with...

- so-called monsters? You referenced Nietzsche in the

book, you know, "Gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into

you." If you study, quote unquote,

"evil" or study monsters that you may become that.

Is there a danger of that? I don't think so. I think that's what

people fear. So, a lot of the Nietzsche quotes I use as well are... Some of them I

like because they speak to the chapters I write about, but... and the issues I write about.

But some of them I also like because they are how people think about evil

and people who are labeled evil. And

I do think with gazing into the abyss and the abyss gazing back,

it's more of a... You're trying to find it.

And that's why in some ways that doesn't work actually, because it isn't a total

blank. It isn't the abyss. There are in fact things that you can see,

even, even if it's just superficially, and patterns you can recognize to help

you and key decision-makers, especially in legal settings, make better

decisions around people like this. So, when they see these patterns, they act a better

way. So yeah, I get asked a lot

as a criminal psychologist, "Do you carry the cases that you deal around

with you?" So, some of the cases involve, you know, huge

amounts of witnesses, huge amounts of potential victims, and so in these cases there are very visceral

victims, and so in these cases there are very visceral

descriptions sometimes of heinous crimes. And

I think that as someone who does this work, you

can't be someone who sees it as anything other than a puzzle.

So, you have to look at it and go, "Here's the different pieces of information. What I am

doing is pattern recognition. I'm not here to emotionally

invest in each of these victims or potential victims. That's not my role. There's therapists for

that. There's other people who do that work. I am here working with the police. I'm here

working with lawyers. I'm here looking at it more objectively

to see how this all fits together." And so, I think that's how

I engage with it. I see it as this puzzle that I'm trying to figure out. I worry

for my own brain that when I confront people

and see them as a puzzle, which I do. I see the beauty in

the puzzle. All the puzzles look beautiful to me.

I'm sometimes like a Prince Myshkin character from The Idiot

by Dostoevsky, where you just see... It's not the good in

people, but the beauty in the puzzle. And I

think you can lose your footing on the moral landscape if you

see the beauty in everything a bit too much.

Because, everyone is interesting. Everyone

is complicated. It's the classic scientist response as

well to what other people in society go, "Ooh." They go, you know, "This

is horrible," or, "This atrocious thing has happened," or, "This shocking,

existential crisis inducing thing I've just found is, you

know, giving me existential crisis." And scientists instead go, "Oh,

wow!" And you can sort of see the delight in discovery as well.

And I think sometimes scientists read as callous because we

enjoy this discovery of knowledge and the discovery of insights.

And it just feels like this little light bulb has gone off and you go, "Oh, I

understand a tiny bit more about the human experience or about the world around us." And I think

it must be similar. I don't know that I feel or worry that I sort

of become more, quote unquote, "evil." I think it's more

that you add this nuance, which

I guess sometimes can be estranging to other people. So, there's that. When you speak with

others, sometimes, like even when I say, "We shouldn't use the word evil," people go,

"No, but you have to. Does that mean you're trivializing things?" The answer is no, I'm not

trivializing. I'm just trying to understand. Also, sympathizing

or being empathetic towards people whom others have written off is always going to

get that response from some people. I mean, there are real questions around whom we're

platforming and what that has and what role we have as content creators,

both of us, of the people we talk about, how we cover them. I

often come across this in true crime work that I do, because I get asked

to do TV shows. I host TV shows, and I host BBC podcasts.

And there's always the question of sometimes people commit

murder to become famous. And should it be a

blanket ban that we don't cover those cases, or should we cover those cases but in

a different way, or should we anonymize the… So, it doesn't mean that

you should never cover that case. It just means that you need to think about it.

Speaking of which, you've done a lot of really great podcast shows.

One of them is Bad People Podcast. You co-host it. It has

over 100 episodes, each covering a crime.

What's maybe the most disturbing crime you've covered?

One of the most disturbing crimes that we covered on Bad People, and just to be clear,

Bad People, much like the title Evil, is tongue in cheek, where the idea

is it's people whom we refer to as bad people. And then it's always a question of

who are these, quote unquote, "bad people," and are we all capable of doing these terrible

things? But one of the most, certainly, problematic, dark

cases that we covered was the Robert Pickton case. And

the episodes are called Piggy's Palace, because that was the

nickname for the farm where Robert Pickton brought

victims whom he had kidnapped, and then he killed them, and

he did terrible things to their bodies. And rumors have it,

certainly, that he fed some of these victims to pigs. Now, one of the reasons I

covered that case is actually because it was influential in my own career. So,

Robert Pickton is one of the most famous Canadian serial killers of all

time. And as I was doing my undergrad

at Simon Fraser University in Canada, I was being taught by someone

called Stephen Hart. And Stephen Hart was an expert witness on the Robert Pickton

trial, and so he was keeping us abreast of some of the developments of what

he was covering. And I found it so interesting,

and I loved Stephen Hart as a person, and he seemed to have this sense of humor,

this gallows humor, around it all, despite being faced

with one of the arguably worst people in Canadian history. And

I thought that that was so interesting, that someone could be

so nice, so kind, so wonderful, and be an expert

witness for these kinds of people. And so that's one of the reasons I went into the field is

because of this case as well. And so we had him on the show. So he came onto Bad People

and we interviewed him for it.

- All right. And he has done, I imagine, a lot of really difficult cases.

- Yes, he's done a lot of difficult cases, as have other researchers like

Elizabeth Loftus, who's one of the

main founders of the area of false memory research, which is what

I also do. I do research on memory and false memory

and witness statements. And Elizabeth Loftus has

also been a recent expert for the Ghislaine Maxwell case. She was in the press.

She was in the press, and so she has worked with

lawyers to educate the court on memory in lots of

really, really controversial cases. But the way she would explain it is that

it's still her role to just train people and teach people on how memory works.

She's not there to decide whether people are guilty or innocent, but she is there

to help people distinguish between fact and fiction when it comes to how our memories work or don't.

- So what kind of person feeds their victims to pigs? What's

interesting about that psychology?

- The psychology about Robert Pickton? I mean, he was a tricky person because I

think he was profoundly lonely, and this is something we see with a lot of serial killers is

that they have this loneliness, which I think

not only contributes to them committing the crimes in the first place, but

also allows them to get away with things because they don't have as much of a social

network or any social network that is helping them to do what's called reality

monitoring, to understand what's true and what's not.

And so when you see people get radicalized in their own thoughts, whether

that's in the sense of things like schizophrenia where you've got

psychosis, you've got delusions, maybe command hallucinations. That's

when you think you're hearing voices and someone is telling you that you

have to do something, usually something harmful to other people. And if you don't

follow those, you will hear those voices forever. They're profoundly distressing, and they

are one of the aspects of schizophrenia that if you have, it does

make you more prone to violence. And so

for these kinds of cases, if you don't have someone intervening, whether that's a

family member or a therapist saying, "How can

you tell whether this thought is real?" Maybe that thought, maybe you're not hearing that

voice, right? Maybe that aspect of what you're thinking isn't true

and bringing you back closer to reality. You can just wander off

to whatever alternate universe that you might live in

in your head, and it's the same with radicalization in other contexts is that you see

that people who drift more and more into a certain group that has

certain beliefs that are maybe divorced from the evidence, divorced from

reality. You can see that people will get more extreme over

time, and unless you have a tether that brings you back, that allows you to do

reality monitoring, it's going to be very difficult to find your way out of

that. So with serial killers, we find this reality monitoring

problem, and I think part of that's related to the lack of social networks that people have.

- That's fascinating. So that's one important component of serial killers. What else

can we say about the psychology? What motivates them? So if you look at some of the

famous serial killers, Ted Bundy, John Wayne

Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, is there other things we could say about their

psychology that motivates them? So interesting, the tether to

reality. I mean, loneliness is a part of the human condition.

It is, in fact, one of its side effects is you can get untethered. And then with

some of these brains, I guess the untethered goes to some dark place.

- The untethered goes to a dark place, and it then is

often combined with some of these other dark

tetrad traits. So you've got someone who maybe is high on psychopathy, low on

empathy, someone who's high on sadism, someone who thinks

that it's okay to pursue your own goals. And your own goal can

be, like with Jeffrey Dahmer,

you can be wanting to create the perfect partner, which in some ways seems to be what he

was trying to do by killing people and piecing them together and sewing up a

sort of new version. There's something in that where I can't

help but go, "That's so sad." I don't

go, "Oh my God, how awful." Of course it's atrocious. Of course it's

heinous, but I have this real sympathy for that,

and I think that's important for us to have, though.

And not to say, "I can't relate to this person at all," but to say,

"That is an extreme manifestation of something I have felt, and the

difference between me engaging in that and this person engaging in that are these other

factors." But the core is in all of us.

- Do you think all of us are capable of evil, of some of the things we label as evil?

- I think all of us are capable of doing basically the worst things we can imagine. And one of the reasons

I think that is because you can see neighbors turning on each other, especially if you look

historically at the start of wars or big

political moments where you have people who would have called each other

friends turning each other in to the police, killing each other,

doing terrible things. So I think all it takes is to become convinced that the

people you think are your friends are actually your enemies, whether that's just in your own

world or in a larger political national landscape that

I don't think it takes all that much for us to be capable of doing terrible

things. But that's also why it's really important when things are good and

when you're not at war and when you have the capacity to think deeply about important

issues, to train your mind on these

thoughts of knowing that things like loneliness can

manifest in these extreme ways, that things like

jealousy and aggression, that they can turn into murder, that they can turn into these

horrible versions. And to then also spot the red flags

if you start going down that path. I think if we don't rehearse

evil, if you will, we are much more likely to engage in it,

especially in those moments where we don't have much time or energy to really think about what

we're doing.

- Yeah, I really appreciate the way you think and the way you talk about this.

Listening to history, when I'm reading history books, I imagine myself

doing the thing I'm reading about, and I almost

always can imagine that, like when I'm being honest with myself.

- And it's important to admit that to ourselves. And research

on murder fantasies finds that most men have fantasized about killing

someone, about 70% in two studies. And

most women as well. More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing

somebody. So murder fantasies are incredibly common, and certainly

according to some researchers, that's a good thing. Being

able to rehearse and think through doing the most terrible

things is a great dress rehearsal for also how we

don't want to live our lives. And only if you are able to fully

think through, "What would I actually be like if I was

engaging in this? What would I be thinking? Who would I be with? What would be my...

the group that I'm charging against this other person? You know,

who am I there with?" As you said, like really putting yourself in the shoes of

these people who have done terrible things. That is

how you also realize that you do not want those consequences. And

so yeah, you maybe want to murder this person, but you don't really want to murder this

person. That's that

intuitive sort of animalistic brain coming in. But then luckily, we

have higher reasoning that goes, actually, if you think this through, that's a pretty

terrible consequence for yourself. So the better thing to do is not to murder this

person. So I think it's adaptive to be able to

fantasize and think about these things. Obviously, if you start getting to a point where you're

ruminating and you're going in these circles where you're constantly

fantasizing about doing dark things, especially to a specific person, I'd

always advise seeing somebody, to talk to a psychologist, for

example. Because that then does become a risk factor for acting on those dark

fantasies. But up to that point, if it's just a fleeting thought or something that

in one day you had these thoughts, that is totally healthy, I would say.

- And also, I think it's useful to simulate or think through what it would take

to say no in that situation.

Meaning, once you're able to imagine yourself doing evil

things, you have to imagine the difficult act of

resisting. A lot of people think they would resist in Nazi Germany.

Well, most people didn't, and there's a reason for that.

It's not easy. Same reason, I've seen this.

If something bad is happening on a public street, most

people, it's the bystander effect. Most people just stand there and

watch. I've seen it once in my life. Yeah, this is

humans, so it's actually you want to simulate stepping up.

- Yeah, so it's also been called the heroic imagination. Someone who has studied

evil, quote unquote, at length is Philip Zimbardo. He did the Stanford Prison

Experiment, and that was an experiment which is... I mean, it's now been

torn apart in various ways. It was absolutely influential for

psychology. It's where participants were randomly assigned whether they

would be prisoners or guards in a mock prison experiment, and then

for a number of days, they were told to do various

things. And it got out of control, and the guards

went way over what they were supposed to be doing, and they effectively started

pseudo-torturing some of these inmates or these

pretend inmates. And the whole thing had to be stopped prematurely, but it was

really fundamental in showing how just by randomly being assigned

into guard, the person in charge, or inmate, you can, within a

matter of days, have a completely different way of thinking about one another. And

so Philip Zimbardo has also spoken at length about evil

and that all of us are capable of it in the right circumstances, but he also

is a big proponent of what he calls the heroic imagination.

And the heroic imagination is really what the purpose of everything I do is.

The purpose of what I do isn't just to go, "Ooh, this is curious," and to stop there. The point

is to then prevent it, and to prevent it in ourselves because that's, I think,

ultimately what has to happen. You can't do a top-down sort of government-level

approach to trying to be so tough on crime that no one will ever commit crime.

That's impossible. But you can change, to

say it in a tacky way, the hearts and minds of individuals to recognize the

pathways towards evil and to go, "Wait, I'm off

track. I don't want to go this way, and I'm going to stop myself here, and here's how I can find my

way back." And so the heroic imagination is exercising

that. I see someone on the street. How do I make sure that they're

okay? How do I not become a bystander? And actually, the bystander stuff is

interesting because there was a really famous case, the murder

of Kitty Genovese, and there were all of these both ear and

eyewitnesses. So an ear witness is someone who just hears things, and an eyewitness is someone who

sees the crime happening, and they didn't intervene in the murder of this

woman. And so this case was often taken as this

almost example of, "Look how terrible human beings are. We just walk by. We

don't care about what's happening to strangers on the streets." And actually, what's happened

since is that there's been lots of other bystander experiments, and they

have not substantiated this. So we need to be very careful

with looking at these extreme cases and going, "How horrible that this happened to this one

person," and it is. But that doesn't mean that that's always how it happens. And

so actually, what we find in bystander research is that most of the time, bystanders do

intervene. It's just when there has already been a crowd that has

accumulated, you read the room, and you assume, "Well, nobody

else has intervened yet, and so it must not be a real problem."

That desire to not stand out in a negative way is often what hinders heroism.

I mean, that's why we look at heroes, people who especially risk their own

lives to save others, especially strangers.

We see them with a sort of respect that nobody else gets, and that's because we recognize that we might not be capable of that.

and that's because we recognize that we might not be capable of

that. If I saw a stranger drowning in a river, would I

really risk my life jumping in the river to maybe save

them? I think that's a big question mark. And so

when people do that, especially when people almost have this inherent

reaction that they just jump in, they just go for it, that is something that is a

really admirable quality that we as humans do celebrate, and we should. And I

think often we should celebrate those incidents more and not

the, you know, the bystander moments where we didn't intervene. We should be

normalizing intervening.

- And again, this idea of heroic imagination,

actually simulating, imagining yourself standing up and saving the

person when a crowd is watching, they're drowning, to be the one that dives in, tries

to help. You mentioned

70% of men and some large percentage of women fantasize about murder,

and I also read that you wrote that recidivism for homicide is only 1 to 3%.

So that raises the question, why do people commit murder?

- Murder is a really interesting crime

because most of the time it's perpetrated for reasons that we

don't like as a society. So as a person who talks a lot to the news and also to

producers who are trying to make true crime shows, who don't necessarily have a

deep understanding of psychology, let's just say, and who come at you with myths

where you go, "Oh, no, we're not, we're not going to talk about that. We're not going to talk about whether or not the

mom is to blame for this person killing somebody." I hate that. That's one of

my least favorite sort of... The trauma narrative of all people

who do terrible things must have had a terrible childhood, I think is really problematic.

What really happens in murder most of the time, which is not what you see on TV because it's

really boring, is it's a fight that gets out of control. And if you

look at the real reasons stated, it's things like, "This person

owed me $4 and so I killed him. This person

stole my bike. This person owed me..." It's these really

stupid reasons, and it is just this bad decision in the

moment, an overreaction to a fight, to an argument,

and it wasn't planned. It's not some psychopath sharpening

their knives, waiting for months to try and kill this person. And we don't like

that because there's something called the victimization gap, which is that

the impact of this extreme situation on the

perpetrator, there's a huge gap between that and the impact on the victim and

their family. So the victim loses a life, whereas the

perpetrator, sure, they get imprisoned, but that... At best, right? If you

will, in terms of justice. But they don't have the same kinds of

consequences, and we don't like that. We like things that have extreme

consequences to have extreme reasons. And so that's why I think there's

this real desire to show serial killers and to

show people who are, in fact, planning murders for a really long time and

then engage in them, rather than this fight that goes out of

control, or someone drink driving, or someone who

is... I mean, unfortunately, intimate partner homicide is also one of those

situations that is common, one of the top four reasons for murder as

well. But that's not the

almost glamorized version that we see of murder online or that we

see in the news. So I think it's always important to talk about murder

as something that is rarely inherent to an

individual. Very few people want to murder. They might

fantasize about it, but they don't want to go through with it. And very few people who do engage in

murder wanted to do it in that instance, never mind again.

I think in general, we have the way that we look at lots of crimes upside

down. So we put murderers in prison for a really long time

because we think that that's justice, which is, sure, that's one version where

it's, you know, an eye for an eye kind of. You know, life for life.

There's obviously the more extreme version of that, which is the death penalty, which I don't adhere to, but

I could see the rationalization of, well, you stole somebody else's life, so you don't

deserve to have one. But there's also the other side, which is, if we're looking at

prevention, murder is really... Like, they're not going to...

People aren't going to go out and murder again. So that is... That's a really low

risk in terms of recidivism, actually. And high risk are things like

fraud and elder abuse and sexual violence. And so

in some ways, sometimes our sanctions are upside down in terms

of how we can actually make society safer, and they're

in line more just with how we perceive justice to work. So there's, there's

big fundamental questions about how we organize our justice systems and what we want them to be

for.

- Can you just linger on that a bit? So how should we think

about everything you just described for

how our criminal justice system forgives? If they are very

unlikely to murder again, how would you reform the criminal justice system?

- I think forgiveness is up to the victims'

families, and quite often, when you speak with victims'

families, there is this divide where you have

some who are much more keen on something called restorative justice,

which is where they... what they want is for the person to apologize, the

perpetrator to apologize, to explain how it happened.

Also, quite often, I mean, you look at some of the other consequences in the other

context, it's sort of, like, teenage boys who are part of gangs, for example, is the

other context. And it's a teenage boy killing another teenage boy. 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 teenage boys in that

case, but really, often what parents want is to just understand

how this could happen and, in some ways, to allow the other teenage boy to still have a

life and to not steal theirs as well, or his as well. So

there's that restorative justice model where forgiveness, I think, belongs to the

families. Some families, of course, want the most extreme punishment. That's

also... I can understand how that would be a response that's triggered if

you've suffered a severe loss. But if we're looking to make society

safer, putting people who've killed in prison is not

actually the answer, right? Because if we want society to

be safer, it should be based purely on what is most likely to deter

crime and who is most likely to engage in it, and

that's where I think we've got it upside down.

- If I could just stick to The Bad People Podcast, there's an episode on

incels called Black Pill, Are Incels Dangerous? So are they

dangerous? What's the psychology of incels?

- 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 this sense of entitlement that drives the perception that I'm

allowed to engage in X because of something else. And I deserve to have a life that

looks like this, but I don't, and so I'm going to go take it, or I'm going to

go do something to show my dissatisfaction in life. And so if you think that

all men deserve to have a happy life, sort of a Disney version

with a woman at home who's taking care of the kids, and it's the sort of white

picket fence ideal that we've been sold. We have been told that that is what we should

have. 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 crossed and we can be

sold these lies that are basically impossible for

everybody in society to achieve. And understandably

people get angry, and if you're angry and if you feel entitled and if you're in

this group where everyone else is thinking the same way as you, yeah, that can make you

dangerous.

- And the internet gives you a mechanism to be your worst self.

- 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?"

- Oh, the internet.

So, one more episode, you interviewed the lady Cecilia, who got Tinder

swindled. Can you tell what happened with the Tinder swindle situation?

- So, the Tinder Swindler, that was a person who pretended

on Tinder to be a rich guy who had this lavish

lifestyle, and he would match with women on

Tinder, and very quickly love-bomb them. So he would send

them all kinds of messages and immediately start

being very emotional, very sharing, pretend that he's

messaging from his private jet, or actually message from his private jet, but pretend

that he's in love with this person very quickly. And then

he would invite women, in this case Cecilia, to very expensive, luxurious dates. So

he would whisk them away to Paris, or he would show them

his private jet, or he would take them to a really expensive restaurant, almost to prove that

he, in fact, is this really wealthy guy.

And he would simultaneously be building up the story of

a future together. You see this in people who

are really problematic in relationships in a lot of ways. I mean, this is not just in

scams or in criminal settings, but problematic relationship

styles often involve someone who is creating this

idea of a future together that you can just see it now. You know,

"Our kids in the garden running around. You're the only one for me."

That kind of language, like almost planning your wedding on the third date.

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. He ended up doing is

defrauding her of lots of money, and she ended up taking

out loans, and her family were giving her money to help what he

was saying was this critical situation. Very classic fraud.

It's a critical situation where he was being followed, he was under attack, and he

needed her to pay for some things. He needed her to pay for some flights,

until she ran out of money. And then she realized that

this all was a big fraud. This was a love scam. 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.

- Yeah, and by the way now, in modern day, AI could probably better and

better do that kind of thing. Do the tailored

version of the story that you want to believe,

and love is a topic on which that would be especially effective.

- 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 was trying to scam me of money," until it happens to us, and then we go, "Oh,

wait. That did just happen." And then we get really embarrassed.

And so I think talking about it is really important, and seeing it as not this thing that

happens to dumb people, because that is sometimes how it's framed. It's 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.

- Yeah, and I hope she and others that fall victim to that kind of thing

don't become cynical and keep trying.

- Yeah. Yeah, that's right, that's right.

- Those kinds of things can really destroy your

ability to be vulnerable to the world. But, I mean, it sounds like this same

kind of thing is just commonplace in all kinds of relationships. That's the puzzle

that it could be a... If you find yourself inside of a toxic

relationship with a, quote, "Love bombing," It could be a lot of

manipulative, fraud type of things, right, inside a relationship.

...in this spectrum.

- Well, and coercive control is becoming more of an issue, where that's when somebody,

for example, in a relationship takes control of the finances, and that's

often a man in a relationship. That's 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 coercive control. And things like jealousy

can also be used in that way.

- Is there any way out of that? Maybe the jealousy

study, or is this a vicious downward spiral whenever there's any

kind of signs like this that means you're

screwed, get out? Or is this just the puzzle of the human

condition and humans getting together and having to solve that puzzle?

- 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 as a precursor.

And quite a lot of that is imagined things that the partner is doing, not even

based on reality. Then we go back to our deception detection research,

where we're bad at telling whether someone's lying or not. And so if you're

basing how you're interacting with that person on a faulty lie detector, you're

going to make bad decisions. So, the research also bears out that

most people are really bad at monogamy.

So, most people either have cheated on a significant other, maybe not their current

significant other, but a significant other or have cheated multiple

times, and that's just consistently found in the research.

- So, maybe there's justification to be jealous?

- 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. So, I'm polyamorous, and I believe that you can love

multiple people. I don't know that everyone is always going to meet lots of people at the same time that they're going

to love. But I think that there's been a move towards more

people embracing open relationships and non-traditional relationship structures, and

I think that is healthy to at least have as an

option. I think the idea that there's just one size fits all for

relationships is really harmful to a lot of people, and it

just doesn't really work for everybody.

- Well, if you could just focus in on one component, it seems to me one of the

problems is honesty as a hard requirement and good communication

is another hard requirement, because that feels like

the prerequisites for avoiding all these problems.

- And I guess with jealousy, what I'm thinking of is actually not an instance

of jealousy,

- Oh, yeah

- ...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 might... It's a red flag partly because it means the person's probably bad at communicating, or you

are as a couple. It's not necessarily just the jealous-

- Together

- ...person's fault.

It's just that there's something happening in this dynamic that is bad

psychologically, and that should be addressed, or maybe it's not

the right relationship.

- So, the fact that a lot of people cheat, does that mean every

single person that cheated? Does that mean they're probably not

going to be good at monogamy? I guess if you can just analyze all

of human civilization as it stands and give advice that's

definitively true for everyone. Not-

- That's exactly what psychologists do all the time. Yeah.

- Okay. Generalize.

- We make sweeping statements.

- This is great. No, I think it's really interesting because I see all those things as

romantic, choosing not to cheat, choosing to dedicate yourself fully

to another person. I mean, it's all just romantic, and then some

people do cheat, and your heart is broken. You write a song about it, and

then you move on. You try to repair yourself and be vulnerable

to another human being and all that.

- But why deny yourself the beautiful spectrum of human experience? 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 and...

- Well, for me, actually, focusing on a single thing, you get to

explore. You mentioned puzzle.

Over time, you get to see the nuance, like the beauty of the puzzle. You

realize it's an infinitely long project to really understand another human

being. And so, if you focus, you don't get

distracted. So, that applies. I'm a person when I

find a meal I really like, I'll stick to it for a long time. I'm definitely a

monogamy person, I think. But that also could be a component of where I

grew up. You know, there's a certain cultural upbringing, and maybe

my brain is not allowing...

- ...myself certain possibilities, you know? I think it's more

that I want people to feel like they have a choice, and that's the

important thing. And I think all we see is monogamy everywhere, all the time, and it's just

one version of how we can live our lives, and I think it's not the only. And I think that

having conversations with your partner as well, especially early. It's harder to bring this up later

on, but to have it early and say, you know, "How do you actually want to structure

your life?" And I think, "How do you want to restructure your relationship?" is part of that.

And especially if you're going to commit yourself to one person, one primary person,

or one exclusive person, that's part of it. And I think

then you also, you know, don't have to lie to each other if you do

cheat. Or you can talk about it in a different way if you feel like there's, you know,

certain capacity to be honest about whom you're attracted to

and how that might impact your life more generally.

- So, how difficult is polyamory? I think a lot of people would be curious about that kind of

stuff. Does jealousy come up? Is it difficult to navigate?

- It can be. I mean, all relationships can be difficult to navigate.

- Sure.

- I think it's the same. And the same respect, so if you're going in because you're

trying to fix something about yourself, you're going to have a hard time.

- Hmm.

- Much like if you're dating a single person. If you're trying to fix something, and this is going to be

the solution to the thing that you feel is broken about yourself, it's going to be

hard. But if you're going in, coming from a good place, and you're

going, you know, "I want to be open, and I want to connect with people, and I want to love

people or a person," then you're going to have a better time.

- What's the perfect polyamorous relationship look like? Can you really

love multiple people deeply?

- I think so. You can love people in different ways. Also, you can love lots of people deeply, I think.

And I think, again, it's... So, 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, you know, if I'm in a relationship with a man, do you miss

women? And it's like, I don't ask you that if you're in a relationship with a woman.

Do you miss women? Like, you probably do. But that's just

other women than your partner. 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 of

women that we find in the research that can also lead to really negative outcomes

for mental health and for things like risk of sexual violence. But on the other

hand, you've got bisexual people themselves saying, "Yeah, but I feel like I

also have this superpower that I can love more widely, and gender doesn't

really matter in terms of whom I'm capable of loving." And so relationship

structures almost come with that conversation. 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

'cause 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."

- Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, your sexual preferences and

relationship structure preferences.

Some of the choice has to do with how society's going to respond to it. So if you have

to explain it every time you go to a party, you might maybe not want to do that

or talk about it or at least be open about it.

Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of annoying conversations you have to do if you're

polyamorous. Like, some of which you've mentioned. And yes, there are effects of

like over-sexualizing the people involved. Yeah.

- Or thinking they're lying. So with men... I wrote a book called Bi: The Hidden Culture,

History, and Science of Bisexuality, and I did that after I created a

bisexual research group. So, I wasn't a sexuality researcher, but as a bi

person and a scientist, I was interested in the science of bisexuality,

and I couldn't really find it. It was really hard to figure out what

people were actually learning about bisexual people in

comparison to other kinds of queer people.

And one of the things I found is that the terms that are used are not necessarily bi.

And so it could be things like plurisexual. 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.

- Right.

- 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. But

- What does omnisexual mean?

- It's just the same. It's just another-

- Okay. Got it.

- another word where it's all. Sometimes pansexual is also

used. And again, the idea being that it's all genders.

- So how should we think about bisexuality? Is it fluid, like

day to day, month to month, year to year fluid who you're attracted

to? Or is it at the same time have the capacity to be attracted to

anyone or attracted to everyone? What's the right way to think about it?

- I think the right way to think about it is that I'm not attracted to most people, but

I can be attracted to people regardless of gender, much like you're probably not

probably not attracted to most people, but you are attracted to people

of a certain gender, maybe. And so that's... It's the same as being heterosexual in terms

of potentially my pool of people whom I might be interested in. It's

just that the gender is irrelevant.

- What's the biggest thing that people misunderstand about bisexuality?

- The biggest thing that researchers find people misunderstand about

bisexuality is that it's a phase and that it's this

idea that it's transient, that it's always changing, and that it's a

stepping stone. So, I think a lot of people still see bisexuality

as on the way to Gay Town, sort of like you're,

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. So when you look at research

on bisexual men, which is actually how the research started. So, I

think now when we think of bisexuality, we think of women. And it's true that

today twice as many women identify as bisexual as

men. But if you look at the history of this and the research on

bisexuality over time, it was the other way around. So someone called Alfred

Kinsey was one of the first sexuality researchers in recent

history certainly, and he, after World War II, did this really big

study of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, it was called. He was a

biologist himself, so he thought of taxonomies, and he was doing research on

gall wasps, so insects. And this idea of human

sexuality was sort of thrown at him after the war because

there's also this whole move to get people

to, well, reproduce and to rebuild America. So sexuality was partly, and sex,

specifically, was becoming more of an area of interest, both in terms of

research and in terms of policy and funding. So Alfred Kinsey was

asked, "Do you want to do a class on human

sexual behavior?" And he was like, "I know nothing about this." So he spent about

a year just listening to students' questions about 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. 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 were out there interviewing people in

America about their sexual behavior,

which, I mean, just picture the time. This is the 1940s.

This is quite a conservative time. I mean, certainly more than we might

expect now. 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

best-seller for an entire year. He sold

out auditoriums. They had to sometimes add the room next to

the room he was in because there was so much desire

to go to his lectures about sex that they had to connect radios to

other halls to give people enough space to sit

down. He was basically a rock star. And

again, I think this challenges the misconception we have about

sexuality, that we think of it as this sort of woke thing now.

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 of the things they told him

somewhere on the scale, and about half of men were

somewhere in the middle, not exclusively either, and about a quarter of women.

Now, think about the time.

- It was a very conservative time.

- Well, and it's post-war though, so I think that mattered as well. So

there's something called a homosocial environment, which has nothing to do with being

gay. That has to do with being in a situation where you are with people

of the same gender as you. So a homosocial environment are things like

prisons, where you only have men or only have women,

war, which, at that point, they just had. And

so you have a lot of men who are exclusively in the company of men, and maybe looking

around going, "Well, now that my options are different, maybe I'm going to choose

from this pool." Anyway, so he found that

it was that way around, that a lot of people have these fantasies or

actions that they've engaged in. And then there are other researchers, other male researchers,

who found similar things, and then at some point in the '70s, it swapped, and

it felt like maybe more people, more men were identifying as gay,

and there were maybe fewer people who would have called themselves bi, and

suddenly this became a thing more for women. So I think that there's some social things

going on. There's some research things going on that actually bi men are

have been studied for a long time as well.

- Okay, so you said a lot of interesting things. So there is a difference between

the truth and the socially acknowledged thing. So

there's social elements. I don't know, this might be anecdotal, but

I know a few women,

friends of mine, who identify as bisexual. I don't know a single

guy friend who identifies as bisexual. They're either gay or

straight. So there's still a social thing going on.

- Definitely.

- Right?

- Definitely, and I think that research consistently shows that

bisexual men are more likely to identify as, well, as gay or straight.

And gay, well, it depends. So if they

have what we 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 bi,

most often, also because there's queerphobia within the queer community.

And so you might get gay men saying to a bi man, "Oh, come on, you're...

"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 bi

women, 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-bi thing going on, which is often quite

hostile. Not always, but often. And there's this gay male

bi thing going on, which is different in nature but is also potentially hostile.

So in both, saying you're bi can be problematic, but for men more so.

- Do you like the Kinsey Scale as a sort of very simple reduction

to... that there's a spectrum? I also saw the Klein

Sexual Orientation Grid that adds a few parameters like who

you're attracted to, how you're actually behaving, the fantasies you

have, social preference, lifestyle preferences, all that kind of stuff.

Self-identification, what you actually say publicly. All those different dimensions.

Or is the Kinsey Scale a pretty damn good approximation?

- The Kinsey Scale's a good start. And the Klein Grid, I think, is

much more fun in some ways. So the Klein Grid came out of research by Alfred Kinsey

and others like Havelock Ellis, but we won't get into him. And

Fritz Klein was a male researcher doing research also on sexuality. He was

specifically a therapist, and he was looking at people who were

struggling with their sexuality. And so people would show up in the

70s and 80s in his practice, and they would say, "I'm struggling with my

sexuality." And he would say, "How can I help you?" And they would say things like, "I

wish I wasn't interested in men, and I'm a man." And he would

then work through what that means. Does that mean you don't want to have

these feelings? Does that mean that you don't want to have these attractions?

Does that mean that the implications of how your friends and family will see you that's the

problem? And so he created this much more complex

scale, which I think is really interesting for everybody to do, no matter what

their sexuality is. Because what it is is it gets you to think

about things like, yeah, your sexual identity, easy.

Not just that, but in past, present, and

ideal. And so if you say, "Well, I used to identify as straight.

Now I identify as bisexual." And then I have in my head... This doesn't mean that other

people think this. In my head, I have an ideal, which could be straight,

because that's what maybe society's told us we should be. But it could also be something

be something else. So I've also had friends who've gone, you know, past,

present, straight, straight, but ideal bi. So you get into these interesting

dynamics where sometimes people just wish they were a different sexuality than

they were for other reasons. And then there's other things in

the, 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, it's 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's really straight."

"And maybe I need to change this." And so he was using these attractions and

fantasies and identities, and the past, present, ideal,

to help people to think through all these complicated feelings we have around

our sexuality, and to identify sticking points.

- Yeah, that's fascinating. So maybe the presumption there is if everything's

aligned, the fantasies, the ideal partner, the... all

those things, that's probably the healthiest place to be?

- Right. And so he would look at especially the ideal and

the present. And if those were different, so if you said,

"I wish I was bi but I'm straight," or "I'm bi but I wish I was straight," or "I'm

homosexual and I wish I was straight," he would say, "Let's talk about that,"

and he'd try to work through it. And the term he used for bisexual people who were

uncomfortable in their own sexuality was being a troubled

bisexual. And so I think you can... I think any

sexuality can be troubled. I think you could be a troubled straight person, a troubled

homosexual person, a troubled asexual person. And just thinking about

why and which aspects are maybe missing, I think is really healthy for people to do.

- Meaning there are some puzzles that you haven't quite figured out, maybe you haven't

been honest with yourself about your preferences, all that kind of stuff.

- I don't really like talking about honesty with yourself. I think that's a high

bar. And I think it's also often weaponized against people, especially by

men, where it's this idea of you're not really being honest, you're actually gay.

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.

- How obvious... When a person is bisexual, how obvious is it to

identify the sexual orientation grid? Like how big is the sign, whatever you are?

- 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, sort of if you get your experimental year as an undergrad.

But you kind of have to choose. And that

is a difficult requirement, I think, for a lot of people,

because you can't possibly know all of the things and all the

people you might be interested in at that point. And we change in every other

way. Why wouldn't we change in this way? So I think giving ourselves also

the ability to reappraise where we're at with our own

sexuality, our own desires, our own relationship status, all these things,

is important to keep us happy and healthy and to

not run into issues that we know are faced by a lot of

homosexual but also bisexual people. Research has found that bisexual people are

more likely to self-harm. They're more likely to be the victims of sexual violence,

more likely to be isolated, more likely to be

stalked. There's lots of different aspects of being bi

that are negative. The reason for that is mostly because bi people are least

likely to be plugged into the community. So when you're going

through stuff like this, and you feel different, and you're constantly being asked about your sexuality,

if you're open about it, or you're hiding it, that's also troubling.

You're going to have these negative consequences, especially if you don't feel like the queer community is

really a place for you. So that's where also finding your people really matters.

- Since we're on the topic of sexuality, one of the things you touched on

in your book on evil was kinks,

sexual fantasies. I think the point of describing that was that

we often label that as evil or

bad. What can you say about what you've learned from kinks and sexual

fantasies from writing that book?

- So the reason I included kinks and evil and

sexual conversations in general is because it is so

often thrown into the same conversation. So if someone comes to me

and says, "Julia, I want you to help me explain

why this person killed this other person." And they'll often

say, "Did you know that he or she was also into," insert kink here, or,

insert nontraditional relationship structure here, or insert whatever.

And I respond to that by going, "Okay, so?"

And I think people use these words like, "Oh, he was really

into BDSM," and think that that's going to have this really

important impact on me. Or, "Ooh, they were swingers."

And so, and again, I go, "Yeah?" That's

you know, almost like, "And in other news, they were swingers."

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 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

restraints 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, pup play where you dress up as a

puppy and you engage in either just general frolicking or sexual

behavior to other things like blood play, which is

when you pierce the skin to release some sort of blood. That can be scratching. That can be cutting.

That can be of yourself or your partner. That can be this

idea of, you know, I don't know, it's this taboo thing you're doing together, and

it's sexy in its own way. And so everybody has their own versions of

what they find attractive and rubbing up against people, you know, sort of

unsuspecting, pretending that someone's sleeping.

There's this wide range of things, and I think

people also feel often deeply ashamed about the things that they are interested

in. And I think that is also really sad because it makes it more likely that people

are going to not be able to live that part of themselves and also that they think there's

something wrong with them. And that can spiral into things like, "Am I evil?

Am I bad? Am I a bad person because I have these fantasies?" And that ties in,

unfortunately, with homosexuality and bisexuality and the way that

certainly historically and in most parts of the world still today, these queer

lives and queer identities are still villainized. They're still seen as

lesser, as bad, as a sign of a defect of character. And if

people see that within themselves, they're going to think differently about themselves, and we...

Well, society is going to treat them differently. So it's all about destigmatizing.

- I really liked what you wrote about, I guess it was in the context of BDSM or

maybe sadomasochism or maybe just the submissive-dominant

dynamic, like why that might be appealing,

the disinhibition hypothesis. I guess this applies

generally to sexual fantasies is if you live them out, that you

could just let go of all the bullshit that we, that we put up in normal

society. That you could just be all in, fully present to the pleasure of it.

- Right, and that's what research has found on fetishes, especially on BDSM, is

that the reason that people say they like it... I mean, it's hard to explain why you have a

fantasy. But if you go into the finer questions and

really dig deep, you can find that people

will explain a version of, "Well, I can really let go, and

I don't have to... If someone is telling me what to do, then I don't have to

make any decisions, and I've spent all day making millions of

decisions, and I don't have to in this context. And I really like that because it's

freeing." And so that's that disinhibition hypothesis is that the

reason that we often go to things in the

bedroom that in other contexts we don't like or even find

repulsive, like I don't in normal life potentially want to be told what to

do. 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 sort of

completely living as another species of it, even

is... It's a really interesting psychological phenomenon of release

and of letting go of social pressure.

- But I think that also applies to... Because you mentioned submissive,

that's more straightforward to understand. I think that also applies to dominant,

because like, yeah, you don't have to walk on eggshells. It's the clarity of it.

That was really interesting. Having read that from you, that

really made me think that there is a deep truth to that, to like

being true to whatever the sexual fantasy is.

It's not just the fantasy itself that's appealing, it's the being free in some

sense.

- It's the being free, and the juxtaposition there is that you are free because of the

fiction. Like you're playacting, but it's touching at

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 as that for a bit. So I

think, yeah, the truth and fiction sort of circle is always an interesting one.

- So you've, for researching the Bi book, the bisexuality

book, what have you learned about sexuality in general, human nature,

sexuality, and how it's practiced in terms of different communities?

And I'm sure there are subcultures and stuff. Yeah. What have you learned?

- 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 of themselves. And in research

on kinks and sexuality, it's just about

also making sure that we have visible representation of certain kinds of

communities. And so that's one of the reasons I ended up writing Bi. I came out in

Evil. Making Evil is the UK title, Evil in the US. I came out because

I was writing about all the things we associate with the word evil, and

homosexuality certainly is one of those things.

- You came out as bisexual, by the way. Yeah.

- Yeah, I came out as bisexual. And I came out as bisexual in the book,

and I did it specifically, and I wrote it this way, as well, because I was

talking about the importance of visibility, and how it's

through visibility that you realize that the people around you, people you already know and

love, are part of this community that otherwise feels other.

It feels foreign, it feels abstract, and maybe it feels scary. But if

you realize that actually you've got gay friends or you've got friends who are into certain kinds of fetishes.

certain kinds of fetishes, or you've got friends who are whatever sexuality aspect you're talking

about, you suddenly go, "Oh, it's gonna be much harder to

dehumanize these people." And this is where all of

this kind of comes for me from a really sad place is

the... You could talk about Bi as this project of love and how I was finding the

community. I was trying to write something that would sort of bring us all

together. But it's also because I'm constantly terrified that

my rights are going to be stripped back. And we know that

the laws around homosexual behavior and

the rights around bisexual people as well, they're in flux. There's no

straight line of acceptance. And just because right now I happen

to live in a time and place where I'm allowed to be openly bisexual and

I can engage in homosexual activity, that doesn't mean that that's gonna 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 gonna be hypersexualized, dehumanized again, and that

there's going to be laws against basically just who I am.

- Did you hear from a bunch of people after Making Evil After Evil, the book,

and mentioning and coming out in that book and then writing,

the Bi book that, that are bisexual and maybe what are some stories? I'm sure...

'Cause I haven't seen much material on it as you spoke to, so I'm sure they

felt lonely without a community, right?

- Yeah. A lot of people felt seen by the book. So it was really beautiful, the

fan mail I got and the sort of responses to the book. And I got

them from all over the world. And so in the book, I also spoke with some researchers who were

stationed or doing research in countries where

bisexual behavior specifically is illegal, or homosexual behavior was

illegal. For a long time, bisexuality was, especially in women,

well, actually, homosexuality in women in general was sort of seen

as... it was, it was a blind spot, 'cause what counted as sex is 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 look at the evolution of laws, for a

while, women were kind of... like it was socially not necessarily acceptable, but

they were kind of getting away with it legally. But then more recently, especially,

as bisexuality gets more visible as well, certain countries have started

writing it specifically into their constitutions and so specifically into their

laws that bisexual identities and behaviors are also seen as

problematic and illegal. So again, these laws change all the time.

But in terms of fan mail, especially from people in countries where

homosexuality and bisexuality are illegal or are

seen as problematic, are socially condemned — that was

particularly important, so that those people were particularly writing

saying, some of them also saying, "Can I translate this into this other language, on the

DL, like on the down low? And just, like, distribute this to my friends?"

I had people sending me messages saying, "I'm at X airport

or in X country where this is, this would be considered

contraband." Like this book, my book is a banned book, fun fact.

- Nice.

- It was banned. I, I sold the rights to a foreign publisher, and

right after it was sold, the laws changed and they sent me this really sad email saying, "Unfortunately, we

can't publish your book because it's now considered part of the, like, gay agenda, sort

of promoting gay and homosexual lifestyles. And so we can't publish

it anymore." But there's, I take like a little bit of pride in the fact that it's a banned book, but

I find it really sad, obviously, as to what it means, but it also makes me feel like it's more important.

And that's what people were writing to me about.

- What advice would you give to young people, or just people in general

that are trying to figure out their sexuality or how to speak about their sexuality?

- I'd say try and read widely on issues around sexuality. Books like mine, but

also other books might help you to navigate whether or not

you're, you know, what labels there are and also whether or not those labels

are good for you. I think things like the Klein grid are really helpful, especially for people who are

more analytically minded like you and I. I think it gives you a construct

to work with and numbers to work with, and that can be really helpful to try and go

almost seeing your sexuality as a mathematical equation. And I think that can be

quite useful. And if that's how you think, then look at the Klein

grid and see if that helps you to navigate things.

- A bit of a tricky question, but what are the pros and cons of coming out

publicly as a non-standard sexuality?

From a recommendation perspective, what are some benefits and

what are some challenges?

- So the benefits are that you can, well, live authentically. You can

just be yourself. So I do feel more free in who I am and who I'm able

to sort of be online, for example, now that I'm out.

And because I came out after, in my 30s, I think

also it was almost a foot-in-the-door technique as well, which is a

psychological technique of first coming in and then coming with your big

ask. And so I'd already published two books.

I was already an established scientist. I think if I tried bi first, I, A, wouldn't have

been able to publish the book. It was the first mainstream book on bisexuality ever.

And B, I don't think I would've been taken seriously as a

scientist. And so having the other stuff first and then

bi as sort of a side project, that was acceptable. But I think

the other way around wouldn't have been.

- I think it was still brave. I think you mentioned somewhere, maybe

in an interview, that there was some concern of being sexualized when

you covered the topic of sexuality.

- There still is, but I actually find that it's

done the opposite most of the time. So I think, as a

woman, especially a young woman in the public eye, you're sexualized anyway,

unfortunately. And so that is

and was already a huge part of my online experience. And

actually, I think coming out as bi, A, you get allies

who suddenly are like, "We're on your side. We're going to help you fight the

hypersexualization." And people get almost more

weird about it in a good way. They get a bit quiet about it because they're like, "Oh, now it's

an identity thing. So maybe I shouldn't comment on what she's

wearing." And it sort of, it almost disarmed some of

the more sexualized comments. So for me, I have to say it was mostly a positive

experience.

- The incels didn't know what to do with it.

- Exactly. Like, "Ugh."

- Just to go back to the beginning, what got you interested in criminal psychology?

- Well, if you look at my trajectory into

academia and then through it, basically what happened is

I was ready to go study art.

- Nice.

- That's what happened. I had my portfolio ready to go. I was going to study art

at undergrad, and then my grandfather intervened and was

like, "Being an artist is a really hard life. Maybe you should reconsider."

- What kind of art? Sorry to take that tangent.

- Uh, painting.

- That is wild. I would not have expected that, cause you're so super analytical.

- Yeah, I am, but I also really like surrealism, and I really like

messing with the sense of reality, which again, is obviously something that then wove its

way into my academic work. Um...

- That's cool.

- But he was also right. I've always been very

intellectual, let's just say. I skipped a couple grades in school. I was part of the chess club.

It was very much I was the clever kid. And so,

but there's also a part of me that's just like, "But art is beautiful. I love making art and it can speak to

so many people." Anyway, my grandfather convinced me not to do it, and then I applied

instead for psychology. Although at that point you just had to

say social sciences. You didn't have to specify, but I knew it was probably going to be

psychology. And the reason for that

was because my dad has paranoid schizophrenia. And so I think one of the

reasons I'm so obsessed with this idea of what is real,

and that is in every way that,

that... I mean that in terms of what is real in terms of perceptions of right and

wrong, what is real in terms of our own memories of the

world, what is real in terms of what happened in a crime, what is real in

terms of perceptual abilities and neuroscience, what is real. I mean,

I mean that in every way, and I think that's because I grew up

with someone who had a unique view of what is real in real time. And

so seeing that, I think just affected

me profoundly, because not only was it very destabilizing in terms of my upbringing, but

also it's just in your face that people

quite literally are seeing and hearing different things than you. And

to not jump from that to what else are people perceiving differently than me, I think

I think would be almost like a missed opportunity. And so I went to study psychology

partly to understand that and what was going on there, and then that took me down the sort

of reality hole. And honestly, the reason I went into criminal psychology,

is because I could have gone into any other, but the criminal psychologists were the most fun.

I feel like lots of psychologists take themselves so seriously.

And I just, I couldn't. I was like, "I don't, this isn't the

vibe." And so the criminal psychologists, they had this gallows

humor. They were doing arguably the most serious of the crimes and the

cases, and yet, were somehow having

fun and having nice lives. And I saw myself and I went,

"Well, I want to do this version." And so I did.

- Yeah, that's great to hear, that a criminal psychologist, because probably they have to

really, more than any other subfield, confront the reality of the mind.

- And it's often quite procedural. So I'm also much more

interested in applied sciences because I like the idea

of, you know, what do we do with this information?

And the thing that interests me most from a research perspective, I mean, I did my

PhD in false memories, so implanting false memories of committing

crime, which was the study that ended up going viral because

I was the first to do it. And I built on a history of people implanting false

memories of various kinds of other emotional events. But it was the first time someone had

combined false confessions research and false memory research.

And so that was the research of Elizabeth Loftus and Saul Kassin. So false

confessions was Saul Kassin and false memories was Elizabeth Loftus. And I was

just doing them both at the same time. And the question was, could you get people to believe that

they committed a crime that never happened and confess to it?

And not just that, but believe that it actually happened, so remember it?

And the answer to that in short is yes, you can, especially using specific

leading and suggestive interview techniques. And so the procedural learning

from that, which is what I'm most interested in, I don't, like that's sort of a party trick to be able to actually do

it. And that's just so that you can then take that and go, "Okay, well, how do we prevent

this?" And so I've since trained police lawyers.

I've trained people at the ICC, the International Criminal Court, who deal with

collective memory, so they deal with hundreds of witnesses at a time in war

crimes. And the question is, how do we try to

preserve as original as possible memory without contaminating it?

Because well, or at least without contaminating it any more than it already is.

And that's where social psychology, I think, excels, is that we have done

lots of research on how social settings change what people

say, and to some extent, what people believe. And I think that's also where

actually the leap to things like AI, I think, is

not far, because ultimately, the way that we're engaging with large language models

and generative AI in general, is that it's structured as a

social interaction. It's structured as a conversation most of the time now,

and that is what we do. I mean, that is literally what

I train the police on doing, is how to make sure that you don't distort people's

memories in the process and how to ask good questions. So you get confabulations from both sides

now. You get confabulations from AI and from the people. And the

problem is that there's a third thing, which is the in-between, that I'm not sure is

getting enough attention right now. And I wish that there was more

integration of social scientists like me and people who do

investigative interviewing and have done it for decades to

understand what is happening in the in-between. And so that we can both teach the

people and the AI to respond better in that situation.

- I mean, it's really interesting. Are you saying that there's a drift of some kind in terms of

on both the AI and human side when they're interacting together that we need to

be very clear about?

- Yes. What we've created with Gen AI is basically the ultimate false

memory machine. We have created a tailored

experience of something that is most of the time

telling you what it thinks you want to hear,

and then it's uncritically giving that to you. Or sometimes,

of course, there are other things where it's appraising whether or not this is truthful or

not. But it is giving that to you. And there's no

safeguard from you just going, "This is truth, and this is my past," or, "This

is how I remembered it." And the problem is that not

only is AI potentially distorting people and their memories,

never mind the factual basis on which they're relying, but it's also the other way

around: that potentially by asking leading or problematic

questions, people are changing how the AI is creating the

content, which is in turn on some fundamental level potentially having an impact

on how it's discerning truth from fiction. And so that's

where the false memory in human minds and confabulations in

AI, I think, are much more similar than we

think. And when I first saw AI confabulate, hallucinate, I

was like, "This is what people do all the time." It's just that we can't fact-check them all the time.

We're not in a conversation constantly being like, "Well, is that quite

right? I'm going to use that for my homework," right? So,

it's both juicy and really troubling.

- Well, right now the interactions are pretty ephemeral. They're short-lasting, and there's

not really a deep memory to the interactions. But this could get a lot worse

if the AI is personalized to a degree where it remembers things about you

so that you can then start to, over many interactions,

feed the narrative about your past that you

construct together with the AI over time.

- But you don't even need that. So this is what we find in investigative interviewing, which is police

interviewing of witnesses and suspects, is that all you

need is a leading question or a suggestive piece of information. In a

short interaction, most people, most police officers

don't spend a long time, and they have no memory of this person's

past. They know basically nothing about them except for things related to the

crime. And yet we know that within that very short,

maybe half hour, one-hour interaction, people's stories can change

fundamentally. And the problem is that if you have a memory of

something, that when you pull it up,

in that social interaction, it's sort of live. It's like active.

And when you then finish that interaction, it sets back down.

And the thing is that if you put it back in a different way, what's going to happen is the

next time you're going to remember the latest version. And you might not

realize that it shifted. So over time, it can shift and you don't realize it,

and that's your truth. And that's where

even just short interactions can have a profound impact on the human mind.

- Wow, so you can modify memories that quickly?

- Yeah. We do all the time in experiments.

- Okay, can you speak a little bit more to false memory? So, like, it's just

fascinating. So things happen to us. We humans

do things in the world, and then we remember them. And most of our lives, I guess,

is lived in memory, in remembering the things that happened to us. And you're saying

that we can modify the story we tell about the things that happened to us?

That's fascinating. So what do we know about this ability to have false memories?

- We know that false memories are common, that they're a feature of

a normal, healthy brain. They're not this glitch, they are a

feature. And we know that false memories are

incredibly common, in terms of if you think about basically

any memory... Now, I'm interested in autobiographical memories. This isn't memories of

facts. This is memories of experiences, things that you've lived in

some way. And of those autobiographical memories, basically every

single autobiographical memory you have is false. The question isn't whether it's false, the question

is how false. You're despairing over there.

- Well, I mean, yeah, that's... I mean, it's both beautiful and terrifying...

...that nothing is real.

- No, that's not, that's not what I'm saying.

- Okay.

- I'm just saying that everything has a degree of falsehood to it.

And this is where sometimes I'll get accused of being like, "Oh, but that... does that mean we can

never use witness statements?" That... I'm not saying we can't use any witness statements.

I'm just saying that we need to be careful because even if people say things with confidence, it

doesn't necessarily mean they're true, or if they have multisensory details,

they're describing in very specific detail what they smelled, what they heard, what

they... whatever. It doesn't mean it's necessarily true.

Most of the time, our autobiographical memories are good enough.

And that's where... memory scientists talk about this as gist

memory. Our gist memory for events, much like for text,

you get the gist of it, right? You're good enough. You generally remember

accurately approximately what happened. But it's when you get to the so-called

verbatim details, the specific details of memories that

you find people are often really bad.

Now, most of the time that doesn't really matter because you remember you hung out with a friend,

you remember you were at this university, you remember approximately what your favorite

cafe was, you remember this important negative or positive event. Fine.

You don't actually need to know exactly what you were wearing and drinking and saying.

But in a criminal justice setting, you do need to remember exactly what you were

drinking and saying and doing, right? And so that's where

we have this need to break down this

human capacity for memory to this level of detail that it's just not made for.

- So that's where the verbatim stuff can get you into trouble, 'cause with criminal

cases, I suppose the tiniest details

really matter 'cause then the lawyers can really zoom in on that.

particular detail, and then you could just make that up. And then the

interrogation with a leading question, as you were saying, can just

alter your memory of a particular detail, and then everything will hang

on that detail.

- Right, and if that particular detail is someone's face, then that's a really big problem.

- You're right.

- And so, and it can also be an entire false

memory. So this is where in my research and in research like mine, we've

implanted, well, memories, what we call memories or

false memories, of experiences that never happened at all. So while most things

are modifications of real memories, false memories, complete false

memories are when you think you experienced something that you didn't. And we all

have them. We all have some memories that can't be

true, and we usually realize them, for example, when we talk to our parents about our

childhood or when we talk to friends and we say, "Remember that time we

did this?" And your friend will go, "That happened to me, that didn't happen

to you." And you become what is known in research as a memory thief. Where

you've stolen somebody else's memory and you've accepted

it, or your brain has accepted it as your own. And that's possibly because the other person

told it in such vivid detail that you could imagine it, and basically your brain was

like, "Well, this feels real now." And so the next time you thought about that,

maybe, maybe not the next time, but maybe after a couple of times of thinking about it, you

started going, "This happened to me, right?" And then you integrate it into

your autobiography.

- How hard is it to insert false memories?

- Not hard.

It's very easy to distort memories or to insert small false memories. It's

harder to convince people of entire events, especially specific events.

And this is widely debated exactly how easy it is to implant a

specific false memory. It's also one of the big debates around my own research

is that when I was writing The Memory Illusion, which was my first

book, and the research that was in line with that, there was this huge

debate between me and a couple of other academics about

what it means for something to be a false memory and how we should talk

about the ease with which they're implanted, and that is still one of the

biggest scientific debates in our field. And to me, I think

that's... So the coding stuff is about the difference

between what some people call a false belief and a false

memory. So I think this thing happened or I remember this thing

happened, and that is a really difficult differentiation

often because all we have as social psychologists is what you're telling

me. And I can ask you, "Do you think it really happened or not? Do you

believe it really happened?" But it's really hard to differentiate,

and so I've always thought that you need to ask people about the specifics, like, "All right, how

confident are you in this memory? All right, do you feel things in this memory? Does it

feel like other kinds of mem?" Right? Sort of, like, describe the nature of this

experience rather than being like, "Do you think this is a real memory?" Because

that's a hard thing to ask people to do.

- So you want to get indirectly as many signals as possible to show that they

actually believe the thing happened.

- Or that it approximates a memory in their minds. That's right, rather than just a thing

they think kind of sort of happened.

But other people think that it's an easier to differentiate line. So for me, that

it's almost impossible to differentiate the two. Other people think it's more

clear. And then in terms of the frequency, so in my

research, 70% of people became convinced that

they committed a crime that never happened or experienced another important

emotional event. And that number as well

is challenged in that people go, "Well, does that mean that 70% of

people can have false memories like this?" And the answer is

no, obviously not. That's just in my sample. That's just these specific six

false memories. And it could be that I think 100% of

people are prone to some version of this, just maybe not in this

specific study, right? That if I had to come up with different false

memories to implant, or if I was a different person myself and people trusted me

differently. There are again, those social factors that make it more or

less likely that I'm going to be able to convince you that something happened in your life that you can't

remember. And in one study, obviously, I can't capture that. But it also

doesn't mean that 70% of the time people are, you know, it might be 1% of the time or

0.1% of the time that people have these complex false memories.

- I guess you're just speaking to the fact that you don't know how representative the sample

is. But even from one study, that's a crazy, that's incredible.

- Well, it's not

- That's a-

- ...just representativeness. It's also that we shouldn't take individual studies in that

way.

- Sure.

- Like I'm not saying that 70% of people always have false memories either. Like it's

it just means in this one study, more people than not developed these

complex memories.

- What was the methodology for implanting the false memories? This is so cool,

by the way. Human memory is so

fascinating, and the fact that we can engineer memory--

- It's good that it's fast.

- ...it's so interesting. It's also really interesting that we live so much of our lives in

memories. And that you can mess with that, you can shape it. It's interesting.

- It's mostly, I think, a good thing that we can shape it.

- I think so. Yeah.

- I think the fact that memory can be false in the way that I do it in my study is a

result of the fact that our minds are made to creatively recombine

information to solve problems in the

And so even the fact that we have this gist memory,

it's because we're optimizing data processing. We're

basically saying, "These are the most important things from these events,

and the other details are irrelevant. Don't remember that. Gone.

And now I'm going to work with that to try and solve what life comes up with."

And the ability to be creative and intelligent relies on our

ability to take memories from the past and pieces of them and to creatively

recombine them. And so that's what false memories are, except that that then

can look bad if you're trying to remember something specific.

And so in my research, I used leading and suggestive questions like, "Close

your eyes. Picture the event that I'm trying to implant." So I was

implanting, for example, "You're 14 years old. You

were in contact with the police. The police called your parents,

and you assaulted someone with a weapon." And then the question

is, "What do you remember?" And you say to me as a

participant, because you've been selected out to specifically never having had this experience...

And just to be clear, a weapon, I don't mean a semi-automatic weapon.

I mean anything. And usually it was a rock. And so people would say, "I found..."

'Cause a weapon is just anything you use to hurt another person.

And I did this study in Canada. We don't have guns in the same way

as in some other parts of the world. And so it was unlikely that my participants would have been like,

"Yeah, I totally have all these guns." And so they would take something,

an object, and hurt somebody else, or they stole something, or they hit somebody.

So those are three of the conditions. And I randomly assigned people to them,

and they knew that I contacted their loved ones ahead of time, so they

were participating in a childhood memory study, an emotional

childhood memory study, and they knew that. And then I contacted their parents

ahead of time to get information about what they were like as teenagers,

where they lived, friends, basic things, and to make sure they hadn't ever experienced any of the target events.

And then with that information, I said to the participants, "Okay, so there's these two things your parents

reported happening, and one of them is a true one." And so I'd

always include a true one to build rapport, which is, "I'm doing

the what not to do of interviewing, right?"

- Right.

- I'm laying it on thick.

- To see what's possible.

- To see what's possible. Because you have to push it to also show that it's

that I can do this in this context so that we can warn police to not do

this. So I said, "We have these two incidents that your parents reported,

and one of them was you had a skiing accident," blah, blah, blah.

one. The second one was an incident where you were in contact with the police, but we'll get to

that." So we'd first have 20 minutes talking about the true

memory, which people, you know, they're getting going. It feels good.

I've got a structured interview as well, which I'll then mirror in the false memory.

So it all feels very legit. And then we get to the second memory, and I

say this, you know, I... "There's this other important memory that your parents

recalled." And then they'd say, "I don't remember that." And I'd say, "Oh, okay.

But I have this really detailed account. All you have to do is remember it."

And then I would do the illusion of transparency, which is a really powerful

psychological tool, which is to make people feel like they know what's going on when they don't really.

And the thing I would do is just say, "Well, you know, if you want

to, we can do this memory retrieval technique called

this imagination exercise." And I don't like to call it repression, but

sometimes we hide away memories that we don't like about ourselves. And I'm using words that

people know and mechanisms that people have heard of that are frankly quite

disputed in actual science. But people go, "Oh, well, maybe I did

repress this." And then everybody says yes. Like technically they could say no.

They can say, "No, I don't want to do that." But they go, "Yeah, of course I want to know." And so I do this

imagination exercise where people close their eyes, very simple, and just imagine what could have

happened, basically. And every time they say a detail, my very first

detail ever, I remember this because I was so excited 'cause they've got their eyes

closed, right? And I'm right next to the head of department because they were worried 'cause I was a

PhD student... that, you know, the ethics of it, the consequences.

Like it took years to get the protocol through ethics and-

...to make sure it was safe. Anyway, I'm s- I'm

grinning as the person with their eyes closed says the most trivial detail,

"I remember a blue sky." And I remember going, "It's working."

- Did you know it was going to happen at all?

- Oh, no, I had no idea. I had no idea.

- That's so fascinating.

- And so from the trivial details, and I'd always say, "Yeah, good job, good job."

You know, social reinforcement, little treat. And they

would remember more and more details, and then they'd get more specific, and then they'd tell

me who it was they allegedly attacked or stole from, where they

were. And those details had to come from them because I don't know enough about their lives, right?

So this is the other thing with false memories; it's basing it on lots of real pieces of

memories, real places, real people, real feelings. They're just woven together in a way

that never happened. And so just three interviews and you've got 70%

of people confessing to a crime that never happened.

- First of all, great study. Great, great job all around. To what

degree has this been elaborated on and proven further

since? Because it's a super powerful idea, whether it's 70% or any kind of percent.

- What I wanted with the study is just to show it's possible.

- That's really the powerful thing, that it's possible.

- Right. And so it could've been two people and I would've been happy. The fact that it

was so possible was frankly quite surprising to everybody.

And we did in fact cut the study short 'cause we told ethics that we're only going to have like a

13% hit rate. We were like, "This is working really well. We're gonna stop."

So, and that was just because of, you know, how

power calculations, whatever. Science.

Because science. And since then there have been other studies on implanting false

memories. There have been ones also using AI tools, so like whether or

not we remember or think we remember

incidents differently or better if they were created with

AI images of ourselves or videos. So, there was a study that came out,

I think it was this year, by a team including Elizabeth

Loftus, which showed that if you turn photos of yourself into videos

using AI, that you are more likely to believe those things happened in the way that AI is

telling you that they did, even though AI has absolutely no idea. And then,

you are more likely to remember it with high confidence that it happened in the

way that this AI has created it. And so, we can see that there's

lots of versions of this, whether it's in interpersonal social interactions

or interactions with tech. And there's a big replication

that's happening right now at the University of Maastricht of my study, or is

about to happen, hopefully actually, is where we're at.

- There's a lot of questions I want to ask you. Like one of them, doesn't this mean that

at scale you could have something like a government

use propaganda to mass gaslight a population? So, implant false memories using AI,

using, using whatever tools they have?

- Yes. That is definitely already happening.

- That's terrifying. Is there any- anything you've learned about

defending against that?

I guess knowing that first step is just knowing that it's possible. That's

already a very powerful piece of knowledge.

- That's right. So, the first thing that's important is for people to understand that they

are capable of creating these false memories, and that they're not this really

unusual, hard-to-generate thing. They're actually a normal memory

process. And that insight is why I wrote The Memory Illusion, is

because I think people need to just understand that their minds work like this, and that they're

really glitchy when it comes to the accuracy of their autobiographical

memories. But again, that that's probably ultimately a good thing as well in

terms of our overall human experience. But then,

what happens if you do have an important piece of information that's important and not

being distorted, right? You are a witness of a crime, for example,

and you now know that this is going to be important. What do you do? And the really

simple answer is don't trust your brain. Just make sure you write it down.

Assume you are going to forget everything. Assume you're going to

forget no matter how important, how emotional, how intense, how

much you say to yourself. This is a failure of prospective memory, it's called.

"I will remember." You won't. Just assume that you're not going to remember.

And the closer you get to the time

at which an event happened, and we call this contemporaneous evidence,

the closer you get in time, the more high-quality that memory is going to be. And I think

there's this myth sometimes that if you're drunk or if you're high or if you're really

emotional, that somehow you should wait. You should sort of like

go home, sleep it off, and then recall your memory.

is not what the current advice in memory research actually says. It's

in the moment, as soon as possible, write it down, record it outside your brain.

You can do it again when you wake up, but then at least you have an original version.

- Yeah. You used the analogy of a Wikipedia page for memory. I think that's a pretty

useful way to think about it. It's kind of crowdsourced by all the

different influences you have, all the different experiences, all the

other people, you telling other people about the memory, that

all of that edits the page, the Wikipedia page of your memory.

- It does. And collective and individual memory are these

really interesting... They interact in a really interesting way. So I would always

say when I train, for example, people who go

to deal with warlords in the German military.

I was working with agents who were going abroad and who were

in these really difficult situations where they had to remember a lot of information that was

important for national security. They couldn't just sit there with a tape recorder being like,

"Hey," or like, their phone, being like, "Hey, Mister Warlord, can you just talk into this a bit

closer?" You can't do that. And so you have to remember it. And so what they were

doing is they were coming back from their deployments,

and they would meet up immediately and have a team meeting, could be like, "What did you

remember? What happened?" And the problem is that they would do that before writing their

notes, and that is, that is the wrong way around. And so

they don't do that anymore because I've told them not to do that anymore. But it

feels good. It feels like collectively, we are going to remember more details.

Because you do, but it doesn't mean that those details are right. And so

that's where I'd always say have your own version before you talk to

anybody. Then, and my colleague, Dr.

Annalise Fredevelt, is one of the experts on the effect of things like eye

closure on memory and collective memory, and she has

found, repeatedly, that if you remember things

together, especially if you've already got an original version of your own, you

do usually remember more details. And especially if you are helping each other

to remember, like in a relationship. You'll have someone who's better at remembering certain kinds of

details, maybe names or what happened or what you were

doing, and the other person's better at when it happened. And so you can have

these complementary memories that come in in social situations,

and you can then have more details that are remembered after.

- Right, but there are conflicting forces here. So that's true, but also as you

said, it's true that together, you can weave a

narrative that never happened. So together, you can

solidify the thing that actually happened, maybe if you take notes

beforehand. But at the same time, if you don't take notes, then you can

just make things up very effectively together because you're like, yes, ending the whole

time, like building together a castle that's false.

- Or distorted.

- Distorted.

- Yeah. But you can also sometimes go back to your original account and go, "Actually, no, that,

that was a bit wrong." And so my,

as again, an analytical person and someone who works as an expert witness on memory

cases, I just want to see all the versions. I want your version history. I

want the complete version history of your memory, and then I can tell you whether I think things have

gone wrong here. And if so, why?

- Have you seen like different versions of memory and they're really conflicting?

Like what have you learned about memory from that, that they

can be very conflicting? People explain the same experience as very different.

- Well, there's different people having very different memories of the same experience.

And there's the same person having different memories of the same experience. And so

I work in both, in some ways, as an expert witness, but

mostly in the individual changing their story in a dramatic way.

- Ah, yeah.

- So a witness or an alleged victim saying that

they, you know, having X story the first time they go to the

police, and then three years later, having a very different, sometimes

categorically different account. And the question is

are they just, were they just too shy initially to say what really

happened? Were they, were they under pressure from other

people? Were they not really remembering? You know, why has it

changed? Or could it be that they have been

undergone some really problematic like hypnotherapy or

just shady therapy in general that has like convinced them that things are maybe much

worse than they initially remembered? And it's not that therapy doesn't nec-

Like therapy can bring out more details, for sure, but the problem is

that certain kinds of therapy mirror what we do in false memory research in terms of

implanting false memories, and it just makes it really messy and you just

... It makes the quality of the evidence really low because we can no longer

tell what is because of the therapy and what's actually remembered.

- This is so fascinating. What are the ways you can possibly figure out which is true, the

thing you remembered initially or the thing you're now remembering four years later?

- Receipts. That's all you got. You have to look at your original versions. If you only

have your version now, the only thing you can look for is evidence that

confirms or shows that it didn't happen. If you can't

access that, then it ultimately is a matter of, especially if you've got like two people

saying completely different things, it ends up being a battle of confidence

ultimately.

- This is a tricky question, but you mentioned therapy.

It does seem like what therapists do

is they want to find a problem, and they can then just project the

problem and then convince you the problem existed. So how do you

know... Is like therapy even an effective... It takes

a very special therapist not to implant, right? A trauma that never happened or, or

details that never happened to a trauma that did.

- It depends on the kind of therapy. So there's a lot of therapy that is evidence-based and that

is very much focused on tackling sort of feelings and

reactions that you have right now.

Then there is an area or a bunch of areas of therapy, including

psychoanalysis, which are very focused on trying to find

retroactively sources of mental illness in your personal past. And I

am very critical of the kinds

of... Well, both from an explanatory perspective, but also

from a false memory perspective. I don't think that we are the way we are because of

individual incidents that happened to us. I think that is a wild thing to think about the

brain. Like to be like you, you are the way you are because of this one

interaction you had that one time is like... I mean, maybe this explains a

tiny bit of you, but what about all the other life experiences you have every single day?

And so I think that there's sometimes an oversimplified searching for answers or sources of problems that we have that

sources of problems that we have that

I don't like. I don't think it's true. And I think that there can be an uncautious approach to memory,

as you were saying, where you have someone who is

saying things and your role as a therapist is to help them manage their

emotions now and to feel better. That's the other thing is that they have a very different role than I

do. A therapist is trying to manage the person's well-being now.

whereas I am looking at the evidentiary quality. That is a complete... I'm almost like the

not quite the other side, but I'm in a very different role.

- Well, you just want the truth.

- Well, I'm criticizing and analyzing their memories,

whereas the others, the therapists, are more likely to be trying to help them manage the memories in their

day-to-day life. And so it doesn't matter if they're true or not to therapists. What matters

is that they're troubling to the people themselves. But once you get into a courtroom

setting, as you say...

the facts and what actually happened matter. And it's not just what you remember,

it's what actually happened.

- Maybe you can speak to the other, the non-courtroom setting, because this is

all... The positive side of it is you can basically shape your

memories to be happier.

I mean, I find this in myself. Maybe you could speak to that. If I, you know, look

into past relationships, if I just think about, or maybe speak to others about the

positive things... really think. Just think, like,

I focus my mind on the memory, on the positive memories. And then everything just

becomes more positive. And I think it makes me feel like I'm way happier

about my past. So there must be something to that,

'cause I almost start to forget that the negative stuff happened. And

then the same thing on the flip side is if you focus on the negative, then

the negative stuff

just overpowers everything else and you have a very heavy negative

feeling about your past. So that seems, like the way to live a healthy

life, a happy life is just to focus on the positive. Not to sound

cliché, but like basically modifying your memories

continuously that everything was just great. Is there something to that?

- Well, the essence of that is right. There is something called

state-dependent memory, which is that you're more likely to remember things that were

consolidated or created as memories

if they match the state that you're in now. So if you are sad now

and your brain's just sort of going, you're more likely to remember

other sad times because your memory and the emotional state of your brain is basically

already activating those networks of sadness. And it's like,

here are some other sad things and shitty things that happened to you. And it's the same

with if you are embarrassed. That's the classic one that we usually use as memory

researchers, is that moment where you do something embarrassing and for the next like

six hours, all you're thinking of is all the other embarrassing things you've ever done.

And it's like your brain is like, "Would you like some other embarrassing stories?"

And obviously you're going, "No, thank you. Please stop," but

you have this spreading activation, as it's called, of

just these synapses, just lighting up new networks, and you're going, "Ah!"

And there's this other memory that's attached to the same feeling. So it's the

same with happiness, is that people who are happier tend to remember more happy

memories. So most of the time, unless you're depressed, most people

look back at their lives with a rosy reminiscence bias.

They're more likely to remember the positives than the negatives. But it's not

quite the way you were describing it. It's not quite that you only remember the

good, the objectively good things that happened. It's more that your

interpretation of the things that you've experienced is either neutral or

positive. For me, for example, growing up with

my father with apparent schizophrenia, that is

something that I see as a net positive.

So obviously at the time, it was experienced in a complicated way,

but in hindsight, it defined my life and it completely gave me a perspective of the

human mind that I just wouldn't have had otherwise. So I see that

as a positive part of my autobiography, and that is what

good therapy should be doing. It should be taking negative experiences and not

overwriting them or changing them. Our brains do that naturally anyway.

But trying to work with what you've got, the experiences, the true

experiences, but then just shifting the emotional content so

that how you're dealing with them now is good.

- How much of what this Daniel Kahneman type of idea is, that we live

a lot of our life in memory? Like,

it's not, you know, there's the direct in the moment

experience of a thing, and then there's remembering that thing

over and over and over and over. So there's like, I don't know, getting married

or whatever, like some pleasant thing that if you, over a lifetime, the pleasure you

derive from that thing is disproportionately, most of it

is from remembering the thing we're experiencing it. Is there something to that?

- I think so. And his experiments where he asked participants if they

were offered this holiday that they could go on--

...but they wouldn't remember it. So they'd have the present-day experience of

enjoyment on this holiday, I think it was a tropical vacation or something that

he'd offer people. And he then said, "Well, but you're not going to be able to

remember this. Would you still go?" And a lot of people say, "No, I wouldn't go

on that holiday if I can't remember it." I think that's interesting, and I think that

sort of "pics or it didn't happen", so that the social media generation obviously

is perhaps even more in line with that, also in terms of how

you deal with that in a social context. Sharing those memories with others and

those experiences and which experiences end up being the important ones

in our lives.

- Yeah, there's a real case to be made. There's this kind of

ridiculous thing that happens now whenever something cool is happening.

People take out their phones and film it. But the case for that is that, yeah, this

gives you something to look back at. So it's worthwhile to take a picture, actually.

- Although it's even more worthwhile to pay attention. 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?"

'Cause you've tried to outsource it in a way that our brains don't work.

- How hard is it to modify memories from a neuroscience

perspective? So if you look at brain-computer interfaces like Neuralink,

for example, do you think there's a future where we're implanting

or modifying memories directly?

- 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.

- Just speed that up. So right now, we could do that with language, right?

We just talk to each other and modify them, and we just speed that up.

- Language, but also thinking about it yourself. So you can, it's called autosuggestion when

you suggest things to yourself that didn't happen. And that often comes

from reading something or seeing something or thinking about something or hearing somebody else's

story and going, "Did something like that happen to me?" And then you start picturing

it and thinking about it, in what context it could have. And then you start to basically implant

a false memory in yourself. And so that can happen as well. And I think with things like

Neuralink, it would be the same where you'd have the ability to do that.

And, but again, I still think that this interaction between humans

and AI or AI-like systems

is... it is the same as a social interaction, which is why I was saying it's so important,

I think, that we have social psychologists in the room, because

ultimately, whether it's an AI or another person, it's the same brain that you're

modifying.

- So what you're worried about there is that you become untethered from reality, like you

fabricate too many details about the memory? Like, if a human is

interacting with AI, and the AI is telling the human what they want to hear,

are you worried about over time you start to just have a

very overly modified version of your past narrative?

- 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, like, a really important part of

what actually happened on that holiday, 'cause you're taking a picture of the nicest part and not the, you know, the garbage

behind you...

That is going to have an impact on your memory as well. And so we've... that...

Versions of that have always existed. And historically, if you go even further

back, I mean, in some ways we've never been closer to facts than we are

now. There's this whole idea of like, "Oh, we're living in this post-truth," or blah, blah,

blah. But that is not true. I mean, we didn't

even know how to write for a long time. We had no way of reliably

cataloging information, never mind the scientific method, never

mind reliably sharing it with one another or fact-checking

quickly with things like Google. So I mean, we're so close to

facts, but that in some ways I think is the... 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.

- So just a practical... Is there like a protocol for

self-modifying memories so you can live a happier life?

- There is, yeah. It's called cognitive restructuring. When

you actively, deliberately change an aspect of a

memory usually for some therapeutic outcome, so to be happier,

to be better in some way.

- That's really interesting, right? Not just for if you have some kind of issue, but

just how to have a life well lived. Right? Does that work?

- Yeah, it totally works. 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

me about who are my friends? What are these insights that I've

won from this experience?" And so I think that is an

important part of resilience that we ideally need to celebrate and teach more than

... the opposite, which is hanging in the negatives.

- That's probably really good for relationships too, right? Together you form the collective

memory, and you work on that. You can just fabricate or

modify towards the positive.

- 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 o- 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. 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 is able to perceive

it and then can add it to sort of their internal,

like, star chart of how much you've done in the relationship. And they're more likely to

And they're more likely to actually perceive what you're contributing.

memories we do, and that they... "Of course she remembers that I took out the

bins, but not necessarily. She might not even have really perceived it. But if

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. This memory is just so fascinating.

Is it possible, this is a little bit outside of the topic of false memories, but is it possible

to train memory? Like, what have you understood about memory? Can it be improved?

- Yep, it can be improved, and there are now some really

good brain training apps as well that can help

to get people to work better with attention, to

have N-back tests, so remember information, a couple of

pieces of information back. So, what did I tell you three sentences

ago? There's all of these kinds

of, well, games effectively that you can play that will in

fact train how your brain is using its

networks. There was one that was developed by researchers, including researchers at the University

of Bonn in Germany, and it's called NeuroNation, and that's one that

I like because it's all these really short games. And the idea is that

doing one thing, like Sudoku or whatever, the sort of classics, to train your

brain, that is only going to be useful up to a point because it's then the same thing

over and over again. And what you want to be doing is lots of different kinds of tasks

so that your brain has to remain flexible. And so, short and many is the answer rather

than one thing hard. It's almost the opposite of expertise.

- Yeah, so in doing this regularly, like keeping your mind sharp...

That's interesting. I'm terrible at remembering names.

- Me too.

- Is there a trick to doing that?

- I don't know 'cause I'm also terrible at remembering names. Allegedly, there are tricks

and it's mostly to make the information more sticky by making it a bigger network in the

brain. And so, usually when you hear a name—

especially like you and I, it's like, gone immediately.

- Yeah.

- And that's partly because... I like to think the positive of that is because we're focusing on

other things about the person.

- Right. Yes.

- Like, what are they like? What are they... You know, what's this next interaction going to be?

Maybe you're a bit nervous about what they're gonna say or what you're gonna say.

You're already thinking a step ahead in terms of interpreting the situation. And it's quite an

overwhelming situation when you first meet somebody because there's a lot to take in.

And so if, however, a name is important, then you need to, A,

remember to focus when they actually say their name and tune out the other

stuff, which can be really difficult. And then to give yourself a

mnemonic of, "How do I remember this name?" So you could have a

visualize something. You could have a weird word game or some sort of,

like, rhyme that you create for the person. You can say, you know,

"Julia with the big ears." Like, whatever works for you, as long as it

sticks. Now, there's a caveat that I recently discovered about myself

in terms of why I might not have... I have particularly

bad memory for names. All of these mnemonic devices that have

mostly rely on creating elaborate pictures in your mind.

So, like memory champions, people who do competitive remembering, will tell you that they

create these really elaborate images in their

heads. I recently discovered that I have apantasia.

Aphantasia is the inability to create mental imagery. And

so when I was trying these techniques, I was going, "None of these are working for

me." And it turns out it's because I don't see anything, whereas other

people actually see pictures in their mind. And so I think there's some

individual differences stuff going on there that we haven't quite understood.

- So you're not able to visual... Can you imagine a castle in your head and

look at it?

- No. So the memory palace idea is absurd to me.

- Wow.

- But the... So the test for aphantasia is really easy, which is close your

eyes and picture a red apple.

- You can't picture a red apple?

- And I just see black.

- Wow.

- Yeah. And there's a scale. So some people are hyperphantasic,

where they can have a really elaborate version of the apple.

And other people have, like, a gray sort of outline. And I have nothing.

- Wait. How does your memory work? If you think about a past event, are

you... Wait. Am I visualizing a past event, or am I just thinking about it?

- Oh, that's the question. Or is it just a concept?

- I think it might be... I might be operating in the space of concepts.

- Hmm. 'Cause I do, and I think that's why I'm so interested in concepts and ideas.

And we know that people with aphantasia are less likely to care about their childhood memories

because they can't visualize them.

- I'm trying to think if I can visualize people's faces from the past.

I have a feeling like I can.

- Ooh, but are you seeing anything?

- Am I actually seeing it? I don't know. I think I'm...

I actually reduced those people down to a few concepts about the

characteristics of their face, and I might be visualizing the concepts. Boy.

- Interesting, right?

And most people with aphantasia don't realize they have it until they have this kind of

conversation. I didn't know.

- I don't know if I can visualize the red apple now. Oh, boy.

Yeah. Yeah, 'cause I... The memory palace thing has never really worked

for me either. I tried. Interesting. Okay.

- I have a hypothesis that people who are analytical are more likely

to... I think it intersects with other things. 'Cause a lot of my

friends, it turns out, have aphantasia, and I think it's... There's a version of intelligence,

I think, that it might be related to, or an interest in certain kinds of

concepts that it's related to. But I don't know-

- I'm going to... Okay.

- 'cause it's early days of research on this.

- All right. This conversation totally is leading me to do some soul-searching on many

fronts. You have done incredible work

across a number of disciplines. I mean, from sexuality to

evil to memory, and now in your upcoming

book, Green Crime: Inside the Minds of the People Destroying the Planet

and How to Stop Them. Can you speak to the psychology

of the people, the organizations, that are killing Earth, as you

describe, including illegal gold miners, animal traffickers, con men

who falsify data and bribe regulators to keep polluting, and many other types

of criminals? Is there a psychology similar to the

psychology of some of the folks we've been talking about?

- So, the book Green Crime is really an experiment for me in whether we can

apply criminological and criminal psychology ideas to the

area of environmental protection and crimes.

Because there are people who are convicted of crimes, who are

convicted of crimes specifically in relation to destroying the Earth

and our natural resources, our shared resources. I sometimes think about

the Earth as like a house, and if someone was coming into your house

and just setting things on fire and then walking out unpunished, you'd be

really upset, and correctly so. Or poisoning your water, or just

leaving a bunch of garbage all over your house. And that's what people

are doing on a planetary scale. And the question is, are we

responding effectively? And if so, who? Who is responding

effectively? And then what is the adequate punishment? How should we deal

with the people who we catch? So in this book, the question

was, are the people who are, for example,

I use the Dieselgate Volkswagen case, which was all about

lying about the emissions that were being produced by diesel cars,

especially in the United States. And so

Volkswagen, for 10 years, produced these cars that had what

was called a defeat device, which is a specific device that

makes it look like the cars don't emit very much nitrous

oxides, but they actually were way over the legal limit for

pollution. Now, why we should care about nitrous oxides is because

there is no 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 legal rates in some cases, and they just

lied about it. They just covered it up. 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 cause 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 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 in it, and I'm looking at it

more as a case study for this kind of crime, which is the 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 people going undercover and

uncovering 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 it

gets quite exciting in some of these cases where you really see the people who

are trying to hold people accountable.

- What are the different ways to fight environmental crime that you describe?

- So, what I found most interesting in researching for

Green Crime... So, I was speaking to people from the United Nations who

are doing these huge research reports on things like the international

trafficking in wildlife crime. I was talking to people who were infiltrating

at the EIA, the Environmental Investigation Agency. It's like the

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. 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, like violent crime. So, initially, when I started trying

to apply criminal psychology to these really big crimes that are

often also multi-level, where you've got bosses, you've got this, whether it's a

corporate boss or an illegal gang boss. You've got the middlemen. You've

got the people on the ground who actually have the guns who are killing people or

animals, or logging or polluting. And then you've got all these levels of

people, and that makes it very different from the kinds of crimes that we

often talk about in other kinds of true crime, for example, where it's

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 arguments. It's bad

decisions. It's people who are frankly often quite vulnerable themselves,

like substance users, 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 where I couldn't apply the research directly,

you've got some of the smartest people in the world who are still

engaging in fraud, who are engaging in the cover-up of financial information,

who are creating shell companies in order to hide certain things for poaching, the

proceeds of poaching. You've got people who are out there illegally fishing, and someone's

insuring the vessel that has been literally registered by Interpol as a criminal

vessel for 10 years, and someone's going, "I'll insure

that." 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

insuring this? Who is the person who is out there engaging in illegal

fishing on the boat? Who is the person who's financing the boat? Who is the person

who's investigating them, right? And so, looking at all the different levels, and I think that's where you get

some clarity. And actually, at the end of the book, for me, I

felt so optimistic. I went into Green Crime

because I, like most people in the world, at least according to a recent UN

climate survey... Something like 85 to 90% of people in the world think about the

climate crisis on a regular basis. Most people think about it every single

day. So, this idea that there's this minority of people who care about climate

change, that's an illusion. That's not true. And if you

ask people what the emotional consequences are of those feelings,

it's people say things like eco-anxiety, anger, sadness, grief,

that we're, you know, we're worried about the future. But what you want is for people

to feel motivated, energized, purposeful about

tackling one of the biggest issues of our time. And certainly by

meeting all of these UN researchers, but

I went to so many conferences. You have no idea how many conferences I went to.

I went to anti-corruption conferences. I went to wildlife crime conferences. I went

to the specific meeting of multilateral agreements to see how people were

negotiating in the room and the tensions between... It was wild. It's so

interesting. It's such a huge space, and it gave me so much hope for the future.

- And actually, the way you frame it,

very clearly is a crime against Earth. Somehow that's more actionable. And

it's less controversial and divisive because climate change, as a topic, has

become like a political issue.

Where it's like, is it really happening? Is it like...

What's the right policies? It's nice to look at actual obvious criminals.

- Yeah, where no one's debating, "Did someone just burn down this rainforest?" It's like, well, we can

see it. I was at a European Space Agency conference

recently, and they're telling us all about the different satellites that are imaging,

sort of pointing at the Earth rather than out into space, and that are imaging through all these different

wavelengths exactly what's changing. And they're basically just chronicling

how the Earth has changed over time. And a lot of these environmental crimes can be

seen from space and can be measured. And so, like, as long as you trust

those data, the question then is, okay, so these crimes are

happening. How do we stop them? And as you say, I was very much

trying... 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 they

have, these are people who have been convicted. This isn't just someone who didn't do their

recycling. Because also, I think that individual level is often

detrimental. But these are huge, huge

crimes that cost us a huge amount of money to clean up and that cost a

huge amount of human health and, you know, have these other knock-on

effects and are changing, certainly, the structure of

our planet in a way that we can feel already. 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.

- So what can you say about

how people end up doing bad stuff in a company when there's

a lot of them? Are they bad people? How do you get to that place

where you, in a large collective, are doing something really bad?

- 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 you know, play the game

clean, they see the success of this other company and go, "Well,

we want to have what they have." And then they realize they can't, with the

tech that exists, get there. And so what do they then realize is, "Well,

they must be cheating." And so then they start cheating, and so it has this trickle effect

of making everyone else fall in line with these,

well, unethical practices that are unethical on so many levels.

And then later, you get these huge lawsuits because if you

know, 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.

- Yeah, I mean, you explain so many forces there, but even the

simple force of social pressure.

like very slight social pressure. I was just watching this,

documentary based on a book, Ordinary Men, talking about the Germans in

Nazi Germany that were taking part in the execution squads

in Eastern Europe and that they were given the option not to do it,

and ultimately, most people decided to keep being part

of the execution squad even though they had no hatred in their heart

seemingly whatsoever.

It's just slight social pressure. You don't want to be the guy that kind of

chickens out. Just a little bit of social pressure, and you are able to very quickly

dehumanize a large number of people and to murder

them without any hate in your heart, without anything that

could trivially, directly be identified as, quote, unquote,

"evil." Just normal people doing very bad things.

- And you can be an emissions engineer with a kid with asthma and an old

grandma who's struggling with her health and still feel like, "Yeah, I know

that I'm creating these dirty cars, and yet I'm going to do it anyway." Because as you say,

there's the conformity, the social pressure, the rationalization, and those are

all very human experiences. And that's why also in the book

I always focus on... whistleblower is a big word, but like people who at

some point actually helped to uncover what was going

on. And if 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 that we've been talking about this whole time, which is why I thought it was so

important to apply that research to this context and to say, "Okay, so now we've got

these people who are willing to engage in these crimes. They know it." But there's also

this moment of how do you get out of it, and who is going to stop them? And back

to the idea of heroes, and you do usually in these cases at some point have a

hero, either an external one or an internal one who goes, "This needs to stop."

- Do you have empathy for those criminals?

- I have empathy for everybody.

- Has that ever been in your life challenged, like where you had trouble empathizing?

- Ooh. There is one context. So there is one context that

I... I don't know if it's that I have trouble empathizing... I think it is I

have trouble empathizing, and I just think it is... I don't want to. And I don't

know why this is the one thing, but I remember writing Evil and I got to the

section on sexual slavery, 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—

- It's tough for you.

- I can't. That's like the... I know that, I'm not saying that

that's the worst kind of crime. I don't think it necessarily is. I just think from my mind,

there was just a, "You can't go there." That's... I don't know how to

empathize with that person.

- Yeah, I have... I probably have a bunch of categories of people. Stuff with kids is

just like- ... it's tough. It's tough. It's tough. What gives you hope about

this beautiful world of ours, about the future of human civilization, given

all the darkness that you have studied?

- 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, 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.

I, 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 AI tools to

do the appropriate kind of interviewing if you're talking 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 to Spot.

and how technology can actually make us feel more human. So there are these

capacities like memory that we're bad at, and tech can help us

to overcome some of those shortcomings, as long as we use it in a

science-backed way rather than just sort of freestyling. I think the worry I

have sometimes is that, as I've said before, we're 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.

- Can you speak more to Spot? This sounds fascinating. So what,

what's entailed in recording important memories?

- 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 are all the ways it

can lie to us." And people would go, "Oh, no." And then I'd go, "Bye."

- That's funny.

- At some point, I was like, "Maybe I should do something about this."

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

this sort of meeting of tech founders and others in London, but also in a couple

other places. And I was invited to this, and while there, I met

the founder of Evernote- ... Phil Libin.

And so I met Phil Libin at this event, and I was talking to him

about my research on memory and how I've been wanting to implement or

translate what I've been doing into something that could prevent false

memories. 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 a

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 Libin and my two co-founders, Dillon and Daniel,

I ended up co-founding Spot, which is talktospot.com if you

want to check it out. And it ended up

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,

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. 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, and it

is this chatbot interface that administers the cognitive interview and then creates a report

that then gets sent, if you want, to your employer. So we work with, like, insurance companies, medical

companies. We work with the Bar. So all the lawyers in the UK use it themselves,

which I always think is a real stamp of approval when the Bar Council is using your tool.

- Nice.

- But again, not bars and drinks. Bars and lawyers.

- Yes.

- But...

- Thank you for clarifying.

- Just picturing all these, like...

...people, like, with flair throwing vodka bottles in the air. Not, not them. Um...

- They're great too, but yeah.

- They could also use it, potentially. But

we've got people reporting like, you know, someone left bleach in a machine. So it's like a more

small memory. So it's streamlining reporting processes.

- I mean, can you envision something like Spot being used for

recording generally important emotional events, positive and negative throughout your life?

That seems like something the LLMs of today would really benefit from.

- Yeah. Again, that's why...

- Just so you're not just strictly looking at like compliance or in the

context of companies?

- 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.

life events can be recorded. And I think the idea of having like

grief bots and having things that have a representation of you or

your loved ones, I think that's something that I'd like seeing in the future. I would.

I'd like seeing in the future. I would.

- Have you gotten a chance to work with maybe the Gemini team

or OpenAI folks, or any of them? Anthropic? Because it seems like they

don't have enough people that think about this.

- Well, I'm just waiting for an email.

- Okay. Wow.

- Maybe I'll get one after this.

- I'm hanging...

- Hit me up, guys.

- Yeah, I'm hanging out with DeepMind folks. That would be really, that'd be really fascinating

to see. First of all, the proper cognitive interview,

that's really interesting. That's really interesting how to not lead, how to

not to plant false memories. I don't think any of them are thinking about that.

- I don't think so either. And then how to make sure that you're using that

to help people to store contemporaneous evidence outside of their brain. I just think

there's so much potential that's being wasted right now.

- Yeah. So the hope is that technology and

that there's people being willing to empathize with all different flavors of

the human condition, that's your source of hope for the future?

- And to celebrate all the people who are doing amazing research and really cracking

down on things like environmental crime and like spending their lives

to fight specific kinds of crime.

- Yeah, I like this Earth. I hope, I hope we fight for it.

It's the only one we got, and I'm pretty hesitant to say that maybe in this

galaxy, we might be the only ones. So

let's, let's protect it. Well, what's your name again? Just kidding.

Julia, this is a huge honor. I've been a fan of yours for a

long time. I'm really glad we got a chance to talk. This was really fascinating.

Your work is fascinating, and you're just a fascinating human being, so thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thanks for listening to this conversation with Julia Shaw. To support this podcast, please

check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find

links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback,

and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from T.S.

Eliot, "Most of the evil in the world is done by people with good intentions." Thank

you for listening, and hope to see you next time.