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

0:00 We all have the capacity to kill people

0:02 and murder people and do other terrible things.

0:04 The question is why we don't do those things

0:06 rather than why we do those things quite often.

0:09 Most men have fantasized about killing someone,

0:11 about 70% in two studies, and most women as well.

0:16 More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody.

0:19 So murder fantasies are incredibly common.

0:24 The following is a conversation with Julia Shaw,

0:26 a criminal psychologist who has written extensively

0:29 on a wide variety of topics that explore human nature,

0:33 including psychopathy, violent crime, psychology of evil, police interrogation,

0:38 false memory manipulation, deception detection, and human sexuality.

0:43 Her books include Evil, about the psychology of murder and sadism,

0:49 The Memory Illusion, about false memories, Bi, about bisexuality,

0:53 and her new book that you should definitely go order now called Green Crime,

0:59 which is a study of the dark underworld of poachers,

1:03 illegal gold miners, corporate frauds, hitmen,

1:06 and all kinds of other environmental criminals.

1:10 Julia is a brilliant and kindhearted person with whom I got

1:14 the chance to have many great conversations with on and off the mic.

1:19 This was an honor and a pleasure.

1:22 This is Lex Fridman Podcast.

1:24 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description

1:28 where you can also find links to contact me,

1:31 ask questions, give feedback, and so on.

1:33 And now, dear friends, here's Julia Shaw.

1:37 You wrote the book Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side.

1:42 So lots of interesting topics to cover here.

1:46 Let's start with the continuum.

1:48 You described that evil is a continuum.

1:50 In other words, the dark tetrad:

1:53 psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, are a continuum of traits,

1:58 not a binary zero-one label of monster or non-monster.

2:02 So, can you explain this continuum?

2:05 Yeah.

2:06 So, each trait on the Dark Tetrad, as it's called,

2:08 which is the four traits that are associated with dark personality traits.

2:12 So, things that we often associate with the word "evil," like sadism,

2:15 which is a pleasure in hurting other people.

2:18 Machiavellianism, which is doing whatever it takes to get ahead.

2:21 Narcissism, which is taking too much pleasure

2:24 in yourself and seeing yourself as superior to others.

2:29 And then there's psychopathy.

2:31 Psychopathic personalities specifically often lack in empathy,

2:35 and it's usually characterized by a number

2:38 of different traits including a parasitic lifestyle, so mooching off of others.

2:43 Deceptiveness, lying to people, and again,

2:45 that empathy dimension where you are more comfortable hurting other

2:49 people because you don't feel sad when other people feel sad.

2:52 Now, all of those traits: psychopathy, sadism, Machiavellianism,

2:56 and narcissism, all of them have a scale.

2:59 And so you can be low on each of those traits

3:01 or you can be high on each of those traits.

3:03 And what the Dark Tetrad is,

3:05 it's actually a way of classifying people into those who might be more

3:09 likely to engage in risky behaviors or harmful behaviors and those who are not.

3:13 And if you score high on all of them, you're most likely to harm other people.

3:18 But each of us score somewhere.

3:20 So, I might score low on sadism but higher on narcissism.

3:23 And in all of them, I'm probably subclinical.

3:25 And so this is the other thing we often talk

3:28 about in psychology is that there's clinical traits and clinical diagnoses,

3:33 like someone is diagnosed as having narcissism.

3:36 Or they're subclinical, which is you don't quite meet the threshold,

3:40 but you have traits that are related,

3:42 and that are so important for us to understand in the same context.

3:46 So, early in the book,

3:47 you raised the question that I think you highlight is a very important question:

3:50 if you could go back in time, would you kill baby Hitler?

3:54 This is somehow a defining question.

3:57 Can you explain?

3:58 Well, it's about whether you think that people are born evil.

4:01 So the question of "Would you kill baby Hitler?" is

4:04 meant to be something that gets people chatting about whether

4:07 or not they think that people are born with the traits

4:09 that make them capable of extreme harm towards others.

4:12 Or whether they think it's socialized,

4:14 whether it's something that, maybe in how people are raised,

4:17 sort of manifests over time.

4:20 With Hitler, we know from certainly psychologists who have pored over his traits

4:25 over time and looked at who he was over the course of his life,

4:29 there's always this question of, "Was he mad

4:31 or bad?" And the answer to "Was he mad?" Well,

4:35 he certainly had some characteristics that people

4:38 would associate with, for example, maybe sadism,

4:41 with this idea that he was less high

4:45 on empathy is probably also showcased in his work.

4:48 But in terms of whether he was born that way,

4:51 I think the answer usually would be no.

4:53 And actually, in his early life, he didn't showcase quite a lot of the traits

4:57 that later defined the horrors that he was capable of.

4:59 So would I go back in time and kill baby Hitler?

5:02 The answer is no because I don't think it's a straight line from baby to adult,

5:06 and I don't think people are born evil.

5:09 So you think a large part of it is nurture versus nature,

5:12 the environment shaping the person to become,

5:16 to manifest the evil that they bring out to the world?

5:20 Well, and I'd be careful with using the word evil because I think

5:22 we shouldn't use it to describe human

5:24 beings because it most commonly "others" people.

5:27 In fact, I think it makes us capable

5:30 of perpetrating horrendous crimes against those we label evil.

5:33 So for me, that word is the end of a conversation.

5:37 It's when we call somebody evil, we say,

5:39 "This person is so different from me that I don't even need to bother trying

5:43 to understand why they are capable of doing

5:46 terrible things because I would never do such things.

5:48 I am good." And so that artificial differentiation between

5:51 good and evil is something that, certainly with the book,

5:55 I'm trying to dismantle.

5:56 And that's why introducing continuums for different

5:59 kinds of negative traits is really important,

6:02 and introducing this idea that there's nothing fundamental

6:05 to people that makes them capable of great harm.

6:08 We all have the capacity to kill people

6:10 and murder people and do other terrible things.

6:12 The question is, why we don't do those things

6:15 rather than why we do those things quite often.

6:18 So I think humanizing and understanding that we all have

6:21 these traits is the most important thing in my book, certainly.

6:25 Yeah, I think a prerequisite of doing evil,

6:28 I see this in war a lot, is to dehumanize the other.

6:32 In order to be able to murder them on scale,

6:34 you have to reformulate the war as a fight between good and evil.

6:38 And the interesting thing you see with war is both

6:42 sides think that it's a battle of good versus evil.

6:46 It almost always is like that, especially at large-scale wars.

6:50 That's right, and on top of dehumanization,

6:52 there is also this other thing called de-individuation,

6:54 which is where you see yourself as part of the group,

6:57 and you no longer see yourself as an individual.

7:00 And so, it's this fight of us versus them.

7:02 And so you need both of those things.

7:04 You need that sort of collapse of empathy for other people,

7:08 the people who are on the other side.

7:10 And you need this idea that you can be swallowed by the group,

7:13 and that gives you a sense of also the cloak of justice,

7:18 the cloak of morality, even when, you know, maybe you're on the wrong side.

7:23 And that's where, I mean, getting into sort of who's on the right side

7:27 of each war is always a more complicated issue.

7:29 But certainly calling other people evil and calling the other side evil

7:33 and dehumanizing them is crucial to most of these kinds of fights.

7:37 Yeah, you promote empathy as an important thing

7:39 to do when we're trying to understand each other,

7:42 and then a lot of people are uncomfortable with empathy

7:45 when it comes to folks that we traditionally label as evil.

7:50 Hitler's an example.

7:51 To have empathy means that you're somehow dirtying yourself by the evil.

7:57 What's your case for empathy,

7:59 even when we're talking about some of the darker humans in human history?

8:04 My case for empathy, or evil empathy, as I sometimes call it,

8:07 so empathy for people who we often call evil...

8:09 Also, the title of my book is Evil, or in the UK market,

8:13 it's Making Evil, which is a reference to a Nietzsche quote,

8:15 which is, "Thinking evil is making evil." The idea

8:17 being that evil is a label we place onto others.

8:20 There's nothing inherent to anything that makes it evil.

8:24 And so, I also think that we need to dismantle

8:28 that and empathize with people we call evil because if

8:32 we're saying that this is the worst kind of act

8:35 or worst kind of manifestation of what somebody can be,

8:39 so if someone can destroy others, torture others, hurt others...

8:44 I work as a criminal psychologist,

8:46 so I work a lot on sexual abuse cases, on rape cases, on murder trials.

8:51 And so, in those contexts, that word evil is used all the time.

8:55 So, this person is evil.

8:57 And if we're doing that, then we need to go, okay,

9:00 but what we actually want is, we don't really just want to label people.

9:03 We want to stop that behavior from happening,

9:05 and the only way we're going to do that is if we understand what

9:09 led that person to come to that situation and to engage in that behavior.

9:13 And so, that's why evil empathy, I think, is crucial,

9:16 because ultimately what we want is to make society safer.

9:19 And the only way we can do that is to understand the psychological

9:22 and social levers that led them to engage in this behavior in the first place.

9:27 On a small tangent, I get to interview a bunch

9:29 of folks that a large number of people consider evil.

9:33 So, how would you give advice about how to conduct such interviews when you're

9:37 sitting in front of a world leader that some millions of people consider evil?

9:42 Or if you're sitting in front of people that are actual,

9:45 like convicted criminals, what's the way to conduct that interview?

9:51 Because to me, I want to understand that human being.

9:55 They also have their own narrative about

9:57 why they're good and why they're misunderstood,

10:00 and they have a story in which they're not

10:02 evil and they're going to try to tell that story.

10:04 And some of them are exceptionally good at telling that story.

10:08 So, if it's for public consumption, how would you do that interview?

10:13 I think it's important to speak with people whom

10:16 we or who a lot of people dehumanize, including myself.

10:18 I mean, I also speak with people who I think are or have...

10:22 I know have committed terrible crimes, and I've spoken to these people because,

10:26 as a criminal psychologist, that's often part of my job.

10:29 So, what's interesting, I think,

10:30 when you're speaking to people who have committed really terrible crimes,

10:33 or certainly who've been convicted of terrible crimes,

10:36 is that not only is it potentially insightful because they might give you

10:41 a real answer and not just a controlled

10:43 narrative about why they committed these crimes.

10:46 If they are either maintaining their innocence or they're more reluctant

10:50 to do that, I think even the narrative that they are controlling,

10:55 that they're being very careful with, still tells us a lot about them.

10:59 So, I think, certainly in my research on environmental crime as well,

11:03 what we see is that people use a lot of rationalization.

11:06 They say things like, "Well,

11:07 everybody's doing it," and, "If I hadn't done this first,

11:09 somebody else would have done this waste crime

11:12 or this other kind of crime." So there's this rationalization.

11:15 There's this normalization.

11:16 There's this diminishing of your own role and agency,

11:21 and that still tells us a lot about the psychology of people who commit crimes,

11:25 because most of us are very bad at saying sorry and saying,

11:31 "I messed this up, and I shouldn't have done that." And instead,

11:34 what our brains do is they try to make us feel better, and they go, "No,

11:38 you're still a good person despite this one thing." And so,

11:42 we try to rationalize it, we try to excuse it, we try to explain it.

11:44 And there is some truth to it as well, because we know the reasons why we engage

11:48 in that behavior and other people don't have the whole context.

11:51 So, we also do have more of the whole story.

11:53 But on the other hand,

11:55 we need to also face the fact that sometimes we do terrible things,

11:58 and we need to stop doing those terrible

12:00 things and prevent other people from doing the same.

12:04 I find these pictures of World War II leaders as children kind of fascinating,

12:08 because it grounds you.

12:10 It makes you realize that there is a whole story there of environment,

12:15 of development through their childhood, through their teenage years.

12:20 You just remember they're all kids.

12:22 Except Stalin.

12:23 He was looking evil already when young.

12:26 Well, people used to not smile in photos as well.

12:28 So looking at historical photos of children,

12:29 or sometimes even kids in other cultures, it's like,

12:32 "Oh, why are they all so serious?" But our creepiness radars are also way off.

12:35 This is something that I've been interested in for a long time as well,

12:38 is that we have this intuitive perception

12:40 of whether or not somebody is trustworthy.

12:43 And that intuitive perception, according to ample studies at this point,

12:46 is not to be trusted.

12:48 And one thing in particular is whether or not we think someone is creepy,

12:52 including children, but usually the research is done,

12:54 of course, on adult faces and with adults.

12:56 And only recently did we even really

13:00 define what that vague feeling of creepiness is.

13:04 It has a lot to do with not following social norms.

13:07 This is something we see that transfers to other contexts,

13:10 like why people are afraid of people with severe mental illness and psychosis.

13:14 If you're on the bus or the Tube in London,

13:18 and someone's talking to themselves and they're acting in an erratic way,

13:21 we know that people are more likely to keep a distance.

13:23 There There was one study where they literally had

13:25 a waiting room where they also had people with chairs, and the question was,

13:29 "How many chairs would you sit away from someone you know has

13:32 a severe mental illness?" And the answer is you sit more chairs away,

13:35 and there's a physical and psychological distancing that's happening there.

13:39 And it's not because people with severe mental

13:43 illness are inherently more violent or more dangerous.

13:45 That is not actually what the research finds.

13:48 It's that we perceive them as such because we perceive them as weird basically.

13:53 We go, "This isn't how you're supposed to be behaving,

13:56 and so I'm worried about this and so I'm going

13:59 to keep my distance." And so creepiness is much the same,

14:02 and that's where you can totally misfire

14:05 whom you perceive as creepy just because

14:06 they're not acting in the way that you expect people to act in society.

14:11 Well, what are the sort of concrete

14:13 features that contribute to our creepiness metric?

14:17 Is that meme accurate that when the person's attractive,

14:20 you're less likely to label them as creepy?

14:23 It depends.

14:24 If they're too attractive, it can be.

14:25 So there's- There's, there's effects that interact there.

14:29 That's hilarious.

14:30 And we also don't trust people potentially who are too attractive.

14:34 But again, deviation from the norm.

14:36 And so if you're deviating in any way, that can lead to well,

14:41 your assessment being more wrong,

14:43 but also you assessing people as more negative.

14:47 And so with creepiness, the main thing that bothers me

14:53 as a criminal psychologist is that tangential to creepiness

14:57 is this general idea of trustworthiness

14:59 and that you can tell whether somebody is lying.

15:01 And I've done research on this, as have lots of other people,

15:04 like Aldert Vrij is one of the leading researchers on deception detection.

15:08 And he has found in so many studies that it's

15:12 really hard to detect whether someone is lying reliably,

15:16 and that people, especially police officers,

15:19 people who do investigative interviewing,

15:21 they have this high confidence level that they,

15:24 because of their vast experience,

15:27 can in fact tell whether the person across from them is lying to them,

15:29 this witness, the suspect.

15:30 And the answer is that, even that, if you take them into experimental settings,

15:35 they are no better than chance at detecting lies, and yet they think they are.

15:39 And so again, you get into this path where you're

15:42 going to miss people who are actually lying to you potentially,

15:45 and you're going to potentially point at innocent people and say,

15:48 "I think you're guilty of this crime," and you go hard

15:50 on that person in a way that might even lead to a wrongful conviction.

15:55 So it's the fact that it's very difficult to detect

15:58 lies and overconfidence in policing creates a huge problem.

16:04 Not just policing, in relationships and in lots of other contexts as well.

16:08 I mean, a lot of jealousy is born out of uncertainty.

16:11 Jealousy isn't, "I know for sure that you have done

16:13 something that is threatening our relationship." A lot of jealousy is,

16:15 "What's in my head because I am assuming that you might be thinking

16:19 or doing X." And that is also basically an exercise in lie detection.

16:24 And there as well, we are very bad at it.

16:27 Is there a combination of the dark tetrad and how good you are at lying?

16:33 Like, are people with certain traits,

16:36 maybe psychopathy, are better at lying than others?

16:40 There's definitely some research to support the idea

16:42 that people with psychopathy are better at lying.

16:43 There's also some research specifically on sort

16:46 of faking good in, for example, parole decisions.

16:49 So when it comes up to someone who is...

16:52 There's a legal decision to be made as to whether this person

16:55 can be released from prison or released from just detention in general.

16:58 And then the person will act in a particular way, sort of mimic a good prisoner,

17:04 mimic someone who's safe to be released into society.

17:07 And then the committee goes, "Oh, well, you know,

17:10 this, this person's doing great," and so they're ready to be released.

17:13 And then they make the wrong decision because that person has been faking it.

17:16 So I think with psychopathy, it's a bit complicated.

17:19 There has been some sort of, historically as well,

17:23 some concern that certain treatment for psychopathy,

17:26 especially empathy-focused treatment,

17:28 makes people with psychopathy more likely to fake empathy and to weaponize it.

17:34 But then there's other research which finds

17:35 that if you use other kinds of interventions,

17:38 so like Jennifer Skeem in California who does research

17:42 on people with psychopathy who have committed severe crimes.

17:46 And she specifically creates these treatment

17:48 programs that aren't just around empathy,

17:50 but they're more around almost learning

17:51 the rules of society and convincing people

17:54 that actually being pro-social is a better way to get what you want in life.

17:59 And so there's a real need for tailored treatments

18:02 to deal with especially certain kinds of personality traits,

18:05 dark personality traits, to try and convince people basically,

18:08 actually being pro-social is the better path,

18:11 rather than just going hard on, you know,

18:13 empathy and things that they don't maybe also see as faults with themselves.

18:18 Is there a psychological cost to empathizing with...

18:22 so-called monsters?

18:23 You referenced Nietzsche in the book, you know, "Gaze into the abyss,

18:27 the abyss gazes into you." If you study, quote unquote,

18:33 "evil" or study monsters that you may become that.

18:36 Is there a danger of that?

18:38 I don't think so.

18:39 I think that's what people fear.

18:40 So, a lot of the Nietzsche quotes I use as well are...

18:43 Some of them I like because they speak to the chapters I write about, but...

18:46 and the issues I write about.

18:48 But some of them I also like because they are

18:50 how people think about evil and people who are labeled evil.

18:54 And I do think with gazing into the abyss

18:58 and the abyss gazing back, it's more of a...

19:01 You're trying to find it.

19:03 And that's why in some ways that doesn't work actually,

19:05 because it isn't a total blank.

19:07 It isn't the abyss.

19:08 There are in fact things that you can see,

19:11 even, even if it's just superficially,

19:13 and patterns you can recognize to help you and key decision-makers,

19:16 especially in legal settings, make better decisions around people like this.

19:20 So, when they see these patterns, they act a better way.

19:23 So yeah, I get asked a lot as a criminal psychologist,

19:28 "Do you carry the cases that you deal around with you?" So,

19:32 some of the cases involve, you know,

19:34 huge amounts of witnesses, huge amounts of potential victims,

19:36 and so in these cases there are very visceral victims,

19:39 and so in these cases there are

19:42 very visceral descriptions sometimes of heinous crimes.

19:45 And I think that as someone who does this work,

19:50 you can't be someone who sees it as anything other than a puzzle.

19:55 So, you have to look at it and go, "Here's the different pieces of information.

19:58 What I am doing is pattern recognition.

20:01 I'm not here to emotionally invest

20:03 in each of these victims or potential victims.

20:05 That's not my role.

20:06 There's therapists for that.

20:07 There's other people who do that work.

20:08 I am here working with the police.

20:10 I'm here working with lawyers.

20:11 I'm here looking at it more objectively

20:14 to see how this all fits together." And so, I think that's how I engage with it.

20:19 I see it as this puzzle that I'm trying to figure out.

20:21 I worry for my own brain that when I confront

20:25 people and see them as a puzzle, which I do.

20:28 I see the beauty in the puzzle.

20:30 All the puzzles look beautiful to me.

20:33 I'm sometimes like a Prince Myshkin character from The Idiot by Dostoevsky,

20:38 where you just see...

20:39 It's not the good in people, but the beauty in the puzzle.

20:44 And I think you can lose your footing on the moral

20:47 landscape if you see the beauty in everything a bit too much.

20:52 Because, everyone is interesting.

20:56 Everyone is complicated.

20:57 It's the classic scientist response as well to what other people in society go,

21:02 "Ooh." They go, you know,

21:04 "This is horrible," or, "This atrocious thing has happened," or, "This shocking,

21:08 existential crisis inducing thing I've just found is,

21:11 you know, giving me existential crisis." And scientists instead go,

21:15 "Oh, wow!" And you can sort of see the delight in discovery as well.

21:19 And I think sometimes scientists read as callous because we

21:23 enjoy this discovery of knowledge and the discovery of insights.

21:27 And it just feels like this little light bulb has gone off and you go, "Oh,

21:30 I understand a tiny bit more about the human experience or about

21:33 the world around us." And I think it must be similar.

21:36 I don't know that I feel or worry that I sort of become more, quote unquote,

21:40 "evil." I think it's more that you add this nuance,

21:46 which I guess sometimes can be estranging to other people.

21:49 So, there's that.

21:49 When you speak with others, sometimes, like even when I say,

21:52 "We shouldn't use the word evil," people go, "No, but you have to.

21:55 Does that mean you're trivializing things?" The answer is no,

21:57 I'm not trivializing.

21:58 I'm just trying to understand.

22:01 Also, sympathizing or being empathetic towards people whom others have written

22:04 off is always going to get that response from some people.

22:07 I mean, there are real questions around whom we're platforming

22:10 and what that has and what role we have as content creators,

22:13 both of us, of the people we talk about, how we cover them.

22:17 I often come across this in true crime work that I do,

22:20 because I get asked to do TV shows.

22:22 I host TV shows, and I host BBC podcasts.

22:25 And there's always the question of sometimes

22:28 people commit murder to become famous.

22:31 And should it be a blanket ban that we don't cover those cases,

22:35 or should we cover those cases but in a different way,

22:38 or should we anonymize the… So,

22:39 it doesn't mean that you should never cover that case.

22:42 It just means that you need to think about it.

22:45 Speaking of which, you've done a lot of really great podcast shows.

22:48 One of them is Bad People Podcast.

22:51 You co-host it.

22:52 It has over 100 episodes, each covering a crime.

22:56 What's maybe the most disturbing crime you've covered?

23:00 One of the most disturbing crimes that we covered on Bad People,

23:03 and just to be clear, Bad People, much like the title Evil, is tongue in cheek,

23:07 where the idea is it's people whom we refer to as bad people.

23:10 And then it's always a question of who are these, quote unquote,

23:13 "bad people," and are we all capable of doing these terrible things?

23:16 But one of the most, certainly, problematic,

23:22 dark cases that we covered was the Robert Pickton case.

23:26 And the episodes are called Piggy's Palace,

23:29 because that was the nickname for the farm

23:32 where Robert Pickton brought victims whom he had kidnapped,

23:37 and then he killed them, and he did terrible things to their bodies.

23:41 And rumors have it, certainly, that he fed some of these victims to pigs.

23:45 Now, one of the reasons I covered that case

23:47 is actually because it was influential in my own career.

23:50 So, Robert Pickton is one of the most

23:52 famous Canadian serial killers of all time.

23:54 And as I was doing my undergrad at Simon Fraser University in Canada,

24:00 I was being taught by someone called Stephen Hart.

24:02 And Stephen Hart was an expert witness on the Robert Pickton trial,

24:05 and so he was keeping us abreast of some

24:08 of the developments of what he was covering.

24:10 And I found it so interesting, and I loved Stephen Hart as a person,

24:15 and he seemed to have this sense of humor, this gallows humor, around it all,

24:19 despite being faced with one of the arguably worst people in Canadian history.

24:24 And I thought that that was so interesting, that someone could be so nice,

24:28 so kind, so wonderful, and be an expert witness for these kinds of people.

24:32 And so that's one of the reasons I went

24:34 into the field is because of this case as well.

24:36 And so we had him on the show.

24:38 So he came onto Bad People and we interviewed him for it.

24:41 All right.

24:41 And he has done, I imagine, a lot of really difficult cases.

24:46 Yes, he's done a lot of difficult cases,

24:48 as have other researchers like Elizabeth Loftus,

24:50 who's one of the main founders of the area of false memory research,

24:55 which is what I also do.

24:57 I do research on memory and false memory and witness statements.

25:01 And Elizabeth Loftus has also been

25:04 a recent expert for the Ghislaine Maxwell case.

25:06 She was in the press.

25:07 She was in the press, and so she has worked with lawyers to educate

25:12 the court on memory in lots of really, really controversial cases.

25:16 But the way she would explain it is that it's still

25:20 her role to just train people and teach people on how memory works.

25:24 She's not there to decide whether people are guilty or innocent,

25:27 but she is there to help people distinguish between fact

25:29 and fiction when it comes to how our memories work or don't.

25:32 So what kind of person feeds their victims to pigs?

25:35 What's interesting about that psychology?

25:39 The psychology about Robert Pickton?

25:40 I mean, he was a tricky person because I think he was profoundly lonely,

25:43 and this is something we see with a lot

25:45 of serial killers is that they have this loneliness,

25:48 which I think not only contributes to them

25:51 committing the crimes in the first place,

25:53 but also allows them to get away with things because they don't have as much

25:56 of a social network or any social network

25:58 that is helping them to do what's called reality monitoring,

26:02 to understand what's true and what's not.

26:05 And so when you see people get radicalized in their own thoughts,

26:08 whether that's in the sense of things

26:10 like schizophrenia where you've got psychosis,

26:13 you've got delusions, maybe command hallucinations.

26:16 That's when you think you're hearing voices and someone

26:19 is telling you that you have to do something,

26:21 usually something harmful to other people.

26:23 And if you don't follow those, you will hear those voices forever.

26:26 They're profoundly distressing,

26:27 and they are one of the aspects of schizophrenia that if you have,

26:31 it does make you more prone to violence.

26:34 And so for these kinds of cases, if you don't have someone intervening,

26:38 whether that's a family member or a therapist saying,

26:42 "How can you tell whether this thought is real?" Maybe that thought,

26:45 maybe you're not hearing that voice, right?

26:47 Maybe that aspect of what you're thinking isn't

26:50 true and bringing you back closer to reality.

26:53 You can just wander off to whatever alternate

26:56 universe that you might live in in your head,

26:59 and it's the same with radicalization in other

27:01 contexts is that you see that people who drift

27:04 more and more into a certain group that has

27:06 certain beliefs that are maybe divorced from the evidence,

27:09 divorced from reality.

27:10 You can see that people will get more extreme over time,

27:14 and unless you have a tether that brings you back,

27:16 that allows you to do reality monitoring,

27:18 it's going to be very difficult to find your way out of that.

27:22 So with serial killers, we find this reality monitoring problem,

27:26 and I think part of that's related

27:27 to the lack of social networks that people have.

27:29 That's fascinating.

27:30 So that's one important component of serial killers.

27:32 What else can we say about the psychology?

27:34 What motivates them?

27:35 So if you look at some of the famous serial killers, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy,

27:40 Jeffrey Dahmer, is there other things we

27:42 could say about their psychology that motivates them?

27:45 So interesting, the tether to reality.

27:47 I mean, loneliness is a part of the human condition.

27:51 It is, in fact, one of its side effects is you can get untethered.

27:57 And then with some of these brains,

28:00 I guess the untethered goes to some dark place.

28:04 The untethered goes to a dark place,

28:06 and it then is often combined with some of these other dark tetrad traits.

28:11 So you've got someone who maybe is high on psychopathy, low on empathy,

28:15 someone who's high on sadism,

28:17 someone who thinks that it's okay to pursue your own goals.

28:20 And your own goal can be, like with Jeffrey Dahmer,

28:26 you can be wanting to create the perfect partner,

28:28 which in some ways seems to be what he was trying to do

28:31 by killing people and piecing them together and sewing up a sort of new version.

28:35 There's something in that where I can't help but go,

28:39 "That's so sad." I don't go, "Oh my God, how awful." Of course it's atrocious.

28:45 Of course it's heinous, but I have this real sympathy for that, and I

28:50 think that's important for us to have, though.

28:53 And not to say, "I can't relate to this person at all," but to say,

28:57 "That is an extreme manifestation of something I have felt,

29:00 and the difference between me engaging in that and this person engaging

29:03 in that are these other factors." But the core is in all of us.

29:09 Do you think all of us are capable of evil,

29:13 of some of the things we label as evil?

29:16 I think all of us are capable

29:18 of doing basically the worst things we can imagine.

29:19 And one of the reasons I think that is

29:21 because you can see neighbors turning on each other,

29:23 especially if you look historically at the start

29:26 of wars or big political moments where you

29:29 have people who would have called each other

29:31 friends turning each other in to the police,

29:34 killing each other, doing terrible things.

29:36 So I think all it takes is to become convinced

29:38 that the people you think are your friends are actually your enemies,

29:41 whether that's just in your own world

29:43 or in a larger political national landscape that I

29:47 don't think it takes all that much

29:49 for us to be capable of doing terrible things.

29:51 But that's also why it's really important when things are good and when you're

29:55 not at war and when you have

29:57 the capacity to think deeply about important issues,

29:59 to train your mind on these thoughts of knowing

30:03 that things like loneliness can manifest in these extreme ways,

30:08 that things like jealousy and aggression, that they can turn into murder,

30:12 that they can turn into these horrible versions.

30:14 And to then also spot the red flags if you start going down that path.

30:19 I think if we don't rehearse evil, if you will,

30:23 we are much more likely to engage in it,

30:25 especially in those moments where we don't have much

30:27 time or energy to really think about what we're doing.

30:31 Yeah, I really appreciate the way you think and the way you talk about this.

30:35 Listening to history, when I'm reading history books,

30:38 I imagine myself doing the thing I'm reading about,

30:43 and I almost always can imagine that, like when I'm being honest with myself.

30:49 And it's important to admit that to ourselves.

30:52 And research on murder fantasies finds

30:54 that most men have fantasized about killing someone, about 70% in two studies.

30:59 And most women as well.

31:01 More than 50% of women have fantasized about killing somebody.

31:04 So murder fantasies are incredibly common,

31:07 and certainly according to some researchers, that's a good thing.

31:11 Being able to rehearse and think through doing the most terrible things is

31:16 a great dress rehearsal for also how we don't want to live our lives.

31:21 And only if you are able to fully think through,

31:23 "What would I actually be like if I was engaging in this?

31:27 What would I be thinking?

31:29 Who would I be with?

31:30 What would be my...

31:31 the group that I'm charging against this other person?

31:34 You know, who am I there with?" As you said,

31:36 like really putting yourself in the shoes

31:38 of these people who have done terrible things.

31:41 That is how you also realize that you do not want those consequences.

31:46 And so yeah, you maybe want to murder this person,

31:48 but you don't really want to murder this person.

31:50 That's that intuitive sort of animalistic brain coming in.

31:54 But then luckily, we have higher reasoning that goes, actually,

31:57 if you think this through, that's a pretty terrible consequence for yourself.

32:01 So the better thing to do is not to murder this person.

32:04 So I think it's adaptive to be able to fantasize and think about these things.

32:09 Obviously, if you start getting to a point where you're ruminating and you're

32:12 going in these circles where you're

32:14 constantly fantasizing about doing dark things,

32:17 especially to a specific person, I'd always advise seeing somebody,

32:20 to talk to a psychologist, for example.

32:22 Because that then does become a risk factor for acting on those dark fantasies.

32:26 But up to that point, if it's just a fleeting thought or something

32:30 that in one day you had these thoughts, that is totally healthy, I would say.

32:35 And also, I think it's useful to simulate or think

32:38 through what it would take to say no in that situation.

32:43 Meaning, once you're able to imagine yourself doing evil things,

32:47 you have to imagine the difficult act of resisting.

32:51 A lot of people think they would resist in Nazi Germany.

32:56 Well, most people didn't, and there's a reason for that.

33:00 It's not easy.

33:01 Same reason, I've seen this.

33:04 If something bad is happening on a public street,

33:07 most people, it's the bystander effect.

33:09 Most people just stand there and watch.

33:11 I've seen it once in my life.

33:13 Yeah, this is humans, so it's actually you want to simulate stepping up.

33:20 Yeah, so it's also been called the heroic imagination.

33:22 Someone who has studied evil, quote unquote, at length is Philip Zimbardo.

33:26 He did the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that was an experiment which is...

33:30 I mean, it's now been torn apart in various ways.

33:33 It was absolutely influential for psychology.

33:35 It's where participants were randomly assigned whether they would

33:39 be prisoners or guards in a mock prison experiment,

33:42 and then for a number of days, they were told to do various things.

33:47 And it got out of control,

33:49 and the guards went way over what they were supposed to be doing,

33:53 and they effectively started pseudo-torturing some

33:56 of these inmates or these pretend inmates.

33:59 And the whole thing had to be stopped prematurely,

34:02 but it was really fundamental in showing

34:04 how just by randomly being assigned into guard,

34:07 the person in charge, or inmate, you can, within a matter of days,

34:11 have a completely different way of thinking about one another.

34:14 And so Philip Zimbardo has also spoken at length about evil

34:18 and that all of us are capable of it in the right circumstances,

34:21 but he also is a big proponent of what he calls the heroic imagination.

34:26 And the heroic imagination is really what the purpose of everything I do is.

34:30 The purpose of what I do isn't just to go,

34:32 "Ooh, this is curious," and to stop there.

34:33 The point is to then prevent it, and to prevent it in ourselves because that's,

34:37 I think, ultimately what has to happen.

34:39 You can't do a top-down sort of government-level approach to trying

34:42 to be so tough on crime that no one will ever commit crime.

34:46 That's impossible.

34:47 But you can change, to say it in a tacky way,

34:51 the hearts and minds of individuals to recognize

34:53 the pathways towards evil and to go, "Wait, I'm off track.

34:57 I don't want to go this way, and I'm going to stop myself here,

35:00 and here's how I can find my way

35:02 back." And so the heroic imagination is exercising that.

35:05 I see someone on the street.

35:07 How do I make sure that they're okay?

35:09 How do I not become a bystander?

35:11 And actually, the bystander stuff is interesting

35:13 because there was a really famous case, the murder of Kitty Genovese,

35:17 and there were all of these both ear and eyewitnesses.

35:20 So an ear witness is someone who just hears things,

35:23 and an eyewitness is someone who sees the crime happening,

35:25 and they didn't intervene in the murder of this woman.

35:28 And so this case was often taken as this almost

35:32 example of, "Look how terrible human beings are.

35:35 We just walk by.

35:36 We don't care about what's happening to strangers on the streets." And actually,

35:40 what's happened since is that there's been lots of other bystander experiments,

35:43 and they have not substantiated this.

35:45 So we need to be very careful with looking at these extreme cases and going,

35:50 "How horrible that this happened to this one person," and it is.

35:53 But that doesn't mean that that's always how it happens.

35:55 And so actually, what we find in bystander research is that most of the time,

35:59 bystanders do intervene.

36:00 It's just when there has already been a crowd that has accumulated,

36:04 you read the room, and you assume, "Well, nobody else has intervened yet,

36:08 and so it must not be a real problem." That desire

36:11 to not stand out in a negative way is often what hinders heroism.

36:18 I mean, that's why we look at heroes,

36:20 people who especially risk their own lives to save others, especially strangers.

36:25 We see them with a sort of respect that nobody else gets,

36:27 and that's because we recognize that we might not be capable of that.

36:29 and that's because we recognize that we might not be capable of that.

36:33 If I saw a stranger drowning in a river,

36:36 would I really risk my life jumping in the river to maybe save them?

36:40 I think that's a big question mark.

36:43 And so when people do that, especially when people almost have

36:48 this inherent reaction that they just jump in, they just go for it,

36:51 that is something that is a really admirable quality

36:53 that we as humans do celebrate, and we should.

36:56 And I think often we should celebrate

36:59 those incidents more and not the, you know,

37:03 the bystander moments where we didn't intervene.

37:05 We should be normalizing intervening.

37:08 And again, this idea of heroic imagination, actually simulating,

37:12 imagining yourself standing up and saving the person when a crowd is watching,

37:17 they're drowning, to be the one that dives in, tries to help.

37:21 You mentioned 70% of men and some

37:26 large percentage of women fantasize about murder,

37:29 and I also read that you wrote that recidivism for homicide is only 1 to 3%.

37:38 So that raises the question, why do people commit murder?

37:43 Murder is a really interesting crime because most of the time

37:48 it's perpetrated for reasons that we don't like as a society.

37:52 So as a person who talks a lot to the news

37:56 and also to producers who are trying to make true crime shows,

38:00 who don't necessarily have a deep understanding of psychology,

38:03 let's just say, and who come at you with myths where you go,

38:06 "Oh, no, we're not, we're not going to talk about that.

38:08 We're not going to talk about whether or not the mom

38:10 is to blame for this person killing somebody." I hate that.

38:13 That's one of my least favorite sort of...

38:16 The trauma narrative of all people who do

38:18 terrible things must have had a terrible childhood,

38:20 I think is really problematic.

38:22 What really happens in murder most of the time,

38:24 which is not what you see on TV because it's really boring,

38:26 is it's a fight that gets out of control.

38:29 And if you look at the real reasons stated, it's things like,

38:33 "This person owed me $4 and so I killed him.

38:37 This person stole my bike.

38:39 This person owed me..." It's these really stupid reasons,

38:42 and it is just this bad decision in the moment,

38:45 an overreaction to a fight, to an argument, and it wasn't planned.

38:50 It's not some psychopath sharpening their knives,

38:53 waiting for months to try and kill this person.

38:55 And we don't like that because there's something called the victimization gap,

38:59 which is that the impact of this extreme situation on the perpetrator,

39:03 there's a huge gap between that and the impact on the victim and their family.

39:08 So the victim loses a life,

39:10 whereas the perpetrator, sure, they get imprisoned, but that...

39:12 At best, right?

39:13 If you will, in terms of justice.

39:15 But they don't have the same kinds of consequences, and we don't like that.

39:19 We like things that have extreme consequences to have extreme reasons.

39:23 And so that's why I think there's this real desire

39:26 to show serial killers and to show people who are, in fact,

39:31 planning murders for a really long time and then engage in them,

39:34 rather than this fight that goes out of control,

39:37 or someone drink driving, or someone who is...

39:41 I mean, unfortunately,

39:42 intimate partner homicide is also one of those situations that is common,

39:45 one of the top four reasons for murder as well.

39:49 But that's not the almost glamorized version that we see

39:54 of murder online or that we see in the news.

39:57 So I think it's always important to talk about

39:59 murder as something that is rarely inherent to an individual.

40:03 Very few people want to murder.

40:06 They might fantasize about it, but they don't want to go through with it.

40:09 And very few people who do engage in murder

40:10 wanted to do it in that instance, never mind again.

40:15 I think in general, we have the way that we look at lots of crimes upside down.

40:19 So we put murderers in prison for a really

40:22 long time because we think that that's justice,

40:24 which is, sure, that's one version where it's,

40:27 you know, an eye for an eye kind of.

40:29 You know, life for life.

40:30 There's obviously the more extreme version of that, which is the death penalty,

40:33 which I don't adhere to, but I could see the rationalization of, well,

40:36 you stole somebody else's life, so you don't deserve to have one.

40:39 But there's also the other side, which is,

40:41 if we're looking at prevention, murder is really...

40:43 Like, they're not going to...

40:45 People aren't going to go out and murder again.

40:48 So that is...

40:48 That's a really low risk in terms of recidivism, actually.

40:51 And high risk are things like fraud and elder abuse and sexual violence.

40:56 And so in some ways, sometimes our sanctions are upside down in terms

41:00 of how we can actually make society safer,

41:03 and they're in line more just with how we perceive justice to work.

41:07 So there's, there's big fundamental questions about how we organize

41:09 our justice systems and what we want them to be for.

41:13 Can you just linger on that a bit?

41:15 So how should we think about everything you

41:18 just described for how our criminal justice system forgives?

41:22 If they are very unlikely to murder again,

41:25 how would you reform the criminal justice system?

41:29 I think forgiveness is up to the victims' families,

41:32 and quite often, when you speak with victims' families,

41:35 there is this divide where you have some who

41:39 are much more keen on something called restorative justice,

41:42 which is where they...

41:43 what they want is for the person to apologize,

41:46 the perpetrator to apologize, to explain how it happened.

41:50 Also, quite often, I mean,

41:51 you look at some of the other consequences in the other context,

41:54 it's sort of, like, teenage boys who are part of gangs,

41:57 for example, is the other context.

41:59 And it's a teenage boy killing another teenage boy.

42:02 These are kids, and the parents of a teenage boy understand that.

42:06 This isn't...

42:07 they don't think of this other perpetrator as this grown man who has...

42:11 I don't know.

42:12 I think we think of it as this fight

42:16 between the parents of both teenage boys in that case,

42:19 but really, often what parents want is to just

42:23 understand how this could happen and, in some ways,

42:25 to allow the other teenage boy to still have a life

42:27 and to not steal theirs as well, or his as well.

42:31 So there's that restorative justice model where forgiveness,

42:33 I think, belongs to the families.

42:35 Some families, of course, want the most extreme punishment.

42:38 That's also...

42:39 I can understand how that would be a response

42:42 that's triggered if you've suffered a severe loss.

42:44 But if we're looking to make society safer,

42:47 putting people who've killed in prison is not actually the answer, right?

42:52 Because if we want society to be safer,

42:55 it should be based purely on what is most likely

42:57 to deter crime and who is most likely to engage in it,

43:02 and that's where I think we've got it upside down.

43:05 If I could just stick to The Bad People Podcast,

43:08 there's an episode on incels called Black Pill, Are Incels Dangerous?

43:11 So are they dangerous?

43:13 What's the psychology of incels?

43:16 So that episode was all about what it means to espouse certain kinds of views,

43:21 especially about women,

43:22 and what it means to be in an environment that is fueling the fire of...

43:29 well, hatred of gender.

43:31 And so, and the idea of entitlement.

43:33 So I think one thing that we see often in crimes, of all sorts actually,

43:39 is this sense of entitlement that drives the perception

43:42 that I'm allowed to engage in X because of something else.

43:47 And I deserve to have a life that looks like this, but I don't,

43:52 and so I'm going to go take it,

43:54 or I'm going to go do something to show my dissatisfaction in life.

43:58 And so if you think that all men deserve to have a happy life,

44:03 sort of a Disney version with a woman at home who's taking care of the kids,

44:07 and it's the sort of white picket fence ideal that we've been sold.

44:10 We have been told that that is what we should have.

44:13 Like, I understand where it comes from, and the question though, is,

44:19 are we entitled to that or is

44:21 that the idea that that's something we should strive towards?

44:23 And I think the answer is no, nobody's entitled to a good life.

44:27 I would like to see freedoms and rights manifest in such a way

44:31 that everyone is able to achieve the kind of life that they themselves want.

44:36 But you're not entitled to it.

44:37 And so that's where I think it can get a bit crossed and we

44:40 can be sold these lies that are

44:43 basically impossible for everybody in society to achieve.

44:47 And understandably people get angry,

44:49 and if you're angry and if you feel entitled and if you're

44:52 in this group where everyone else is thinking the same way as you,

44:55 yeah, that can make you dangerous.

44:57 And the internet gives you a mechanism to be your worst self.

45:03 And it can reinforce that worst self.

45:05 You see other people saying, "Yeah, I feel the same way.

45:07 Do you want me to help you?"- Oh, the internet.

45:13 So, one more episode, you interviewed the lady Cecilia, who got Tinder swindled.

45:17 Can you tell what happened with the Tinder swindle situation?

45:21 So, the Tinder Swindler, that was a person who pretended on Tinder

45:25 to be a rich guy who had this lavish lifestyle,

45:29 and he would match with women on Tinder, and very quickly love-bomb them.

45:34 So he would send them all kinds

45:37 of messages and immediately start being very emotional,

45:41 very sharing, pretend that he's messaging from his private jet,

45:45 or actually message from his private jet,

45:47 but pretend that he's in love with this person very quickly.

45:51 And then he would invite women,

45:54 in this case Cecilia, to very expensive, luxurious dates.

45:58 So he would whisk them away to Paris, or he would show them his private jet,

46:04 or he would take them to a really expensive restaurant,

46:06 almost to prove that he, in fact, is this really wealthy guy.

46:10 And he would simultaneously be building up the story of a future together.

46:15 You see this in people who are really

46:18 problematic in relationships in a lot of ways.

46:20 I mean, this is not just in scams or in criminal settings,

46:24 but problematic relationship styles often involve

46:27 someone who is creating this idea

46:30 of a future together that you can just see it now.

46:33 You know, "Our kids in the garden running around.

46:36 You're the only one for me." That kind of language,

46:39 like almost planning your wedding on the third date.

46:42 That kind of thing is what he would weaponize.

46:45 And she, Cecilia, was looking for love.

46:47 She wanted all of those things, and so it worked really well.

46:51 He ended up doing is defrauding her of lots of money,

46:55 and she ended up taking out loans, and her family were giving her money to help

47:00 what he was saying was this critical situation.

47:03 Very classic fraud.

47:05 It's a critical situation where he was being followed,

47:07 he was under attack, and he needed her to pay for some things.

47:10 He needed her to pay for some flights, until she ran out of money.

47:14 And then she realized that this all was a big fraud.

47:18 This was a love scam.

47:19 So, the reason that we spoke with her is partly to show how it can happen,

47:25 and I think it's really important to remind people

47:28 that this is something everybody is capable of believing.

47:32 Fraud works because people know what we want to hear,

47:36 and they tell us the things we want to hear.

47:38 And so, I think all of us, there's a tailored version of fraud that could appeal

47:42 to basically everybody if they have enough information about you.

47:46 Yeah, and by the way now, in modern day,

47:49 AI could probably better and better do that kind of thing.

47:52 Do the tailored version of the story that you want to believe,

47:57 and love is a topic on which that would be especially effective.

48:03 Yeah, because you're playing with people's emotions,

48:05 and you know that they're vulnerable in that way.

48:07 And most people want to be loved and want to love,

48:10 and so it's a really manipulative way in, and I think it's really horrible,

48:17 but it's also something that we all almost underestimate.

48:22 So we think, "I would identify fraud.

48:24 I would know if someone was trying to scam me of money," until it happens to us,

48:28 and then we go, "Oh, wait.

48:29 That did just happen." And then we get really embarrassed.

48:33 And so I think talking about it is really important,

48:35 and seeing it as not this thing that happens to dumb people,

48:38 because that is sometimes how it's framed.

48:39 It's like, "Oh, such an idiot." "She was so gullible." Was she?

48:43 Or was she just a nice person who wanted to believe that this person

48:47 was capable of loving her, which I would hope we all are.

48:50 Yeah, and I hope she and others that fall victim

48:52 to that kind of thing don't become cynical and keep trying.

48:57 Yeah.

48:57 Yeah, that's right, that's right.

48:59 Those kinds of things can really destroy

49:00 your ability to be vulnerable to the world.

49:03 But, I mean, it sounds like this same kind

49:06 of thing is just commonplace in all kinds of relationships.

49:08 That's the puzzle that it could be a...

49:10 If you find yourself inside of a toxic relationship with a, quote,

49:14 "Love bombing," It could be a lot of manipulative,

49:17 fraud type of things, right, inside a relationship.

49:21 ...in this spectrum.

49:22 Well, and coercive control is becoming more of an issue,

49:24 where that's when somebody, for example,

49:26 in a relationship takes control of the finances,

49:28 and that's often a man in a relationship.

49:31 That's sort of traditionally because it falls often along these gender lines.

49:35 But the problem is if that person then starts to weaponize

49:38 the fact that they're controlling the finances and starts using words like,

49:42 "I'm going to give you your allowance," instead of going,

49:45 "You've paid as much into this as I have,

49:47 and so this is our shared money," and starts using that and controlling

49:51 things and controlling how the other person lives in that relationship,

49:55 that's when you get into things that are called coercive control.

49:59 And things like jealousy can also be used in that way.

50:01 Is there any way out of that?

50:03 Maybe the jealousy study,

50:06 or is this a vicious downward spiral whenever there's any

50:09 kind of signs like this that means you're screwed, get out?

50:14 Or is this just the puzzle of the human condition

50:17 and humans getting together and having to solve that puzzle?

50:22 I have non-traditional views on jealousy.

50:24 I'm not a jealousy researcher, but I have done some research on sexuality and I

50:31 personally think that jealousy is basically always a red flag.

50:35 Because what it means is that the person

50:38 who is jealous isn't secure in the relationship,

50:40 and the reason that they're not secure in the relationship is either because

50:44 the relationship is wrong for them or because they are insecure in themselves.

50:47 And I don't think it is a sign of love.

50:49 I don't think it is a sign of, you know, you want to protect your mate.

50:53 I think it is mostly control, and it's the desire to control and to possess.

50:57 And jealousy, we know,

50:58 is a precursor to intimate partner violence almost always.

51:00 As in, not all jealousy leads to violence, of course,

51:04 but all violence is the jealousy as a precursor.

51:06 And quite a lot of that is imagined things that the partner is doing,

51:10 not even based on reality.

51:11 Then we go back to our deception detection research,

51:14 where we're bad at telling whether someone's lying or not.

51:17 And so if you're basing how you're interacting

51:19 with that person on a faulty lie detector, you're going to make bad decisions.

51:24 So, the research also bears out that most people are really bad at monogamy.

51:28 So, most people either have cheated on a significant other,

51:31 maybe not their current significant other,

51:33 but a significant other or have cheated multiple times,

51:36 and that's just consistently found in the research.

51:40 So, maybe there's justification to be jealous?

51:43 I think it's the other way around.

51:44 I think monogamy is setting us up to fail.

51:46 So, I think monogamy is a social construct.

51:48 That's a nice idea for some people,

51:50 and I think that at least based on the research on how people actually behave,

51:54 they're not actually behaving in a monogamous way.

51:56 If you're cheating on your partner, that is not monogamy.

51:59 That is polyamory, potentially.

52:00 So, the love of multiple people.

52:03 And it's lying, and it's...

52:05 It doesn't have to be that way.

52:08 So, I'm polyamorous, and I believe that you can love multiple people.

52:12 I don't know that everyone is always going to meet lots

52:14 of people at the same time that they're going to love.

52:16 But I think that there's been a move towards more people embracing open

52:21 relationships and non-traditional relationship structures,

52:23 and I think that is healthy to at least have as an option.

52:28 I think the idea that there's just one size fits

52:30 all for relationships is really harmful to a lot of people,

52:34 and it just doesn't really work for everybody.

52:37 Well, if you could just focus in on one component,

52:39 it seems to me one of the problems is honesty

52:42 as a hard requirement and good communication is another hard requirement,

52:49 because that feels like the prerequisites for avoiding all these problems.

52:56 And I guess with jealousy,

52:58 what I'm thinking of is actually not an instance of jealousy,- Oh,

53:01 yeah- ...so where you have a feeling of, "I

53:03 feel left out," or, "I feel-" It's more that sort

53:06 of persistent feeling of, "I am a jealous person." And that's

53:09 where I would say that is usually a red flag.

53:12 And you're right.

53:13 It might...

53:13 It's a red flag partly because it

53:15 means the person's probably bad at communicating, or you are as a couple.

53:18 It's not necessarily just the jealous-- Together- ...person's fault.

53:21 It's just that there's something happening

53:23 in this dynamic that is bad psychologically,

53:25 and that should be addressed, or maybe it's not the right relationship.

53:30 So, the fact that a lot of people cheat,

53:33 does that mean every single person that cheated?

53:35 Does that mean they're probably not going to be good at monogamy?

53:39 I guess if you can just analyze all of human civilization

53:42 as it stands and give advice that's definitively true for everyone.

53:47 Not-- That's exactly what psychologists do all the time.

53:49 Yeah.

53:50 Okay.

53:50 Generalize.

53:50 We make sweeping statements.

53:52 This is great.

53:52 No, I think it's really interesting because I see all those things as romantic,

53:56 choosing not to cheat, choosing to dedicate yourself fully to another person.

54:00 I mean, it's all just romantic,

54:02 and then some people do cheat, and your heart is broken.

54:05 You write a song about it, and then you move on.

54:08 You try to repair yourself and be

54:11 vulnerable to another human being and all that.

54:13 But why deny yourself the beautiful spectrum of human experience?

54:16 It's like eating one meal for the rest of your life.

54:18 Like, why?

54:19 You don't have to do that.

54:20 You could just...

54:21 You can have lots of beautiful people around and...

54:27 Well, for me, actually, focusing on a single thing, you get to explore.

54:31 You mentioned puzzle.

54:33 Over time, you get to see the nuance, like the beauty of the puzzle.

54:36 You realize it's an infinitely long

54:38 project to really understand another human being.

54:40 And so, if you focus, you don't get distracted.

54:43 So, that applies.

54:44 I'm a person when I find a meal I really like, I'll stick to it for a long time.

54:50 I'm definitely a monogamy person, I think.

54:52 But that also could be a component of where I grew up.

54:55 You know, there's a certain cultural upbringing,

54:58 and maybe my brain is not allowing...

55:01 ...myself certain possibilities, you know?

55:03 I think it's more that I want people to feel like they have a choice,

55:08 and that's the important thing.

55:09 And I think all we see is monogamy everywhere, all the time,

55:12 and it's just one version of how we can live our lives,

55:15 and I think it's not the only.

55:16 And I think that having conversations

55:18 with your partner as well, especially early.

55:20 It's harder to bring this up later on, but to have it early and say, you know,

55:24 "How do you actually want to structure your life?" And I think,

55:27 "How do you want to restructure your relationship?" is part of that.

55:29 And especially if you're going to commit yourself to one person,

55:32 one primary person, or one exclusive person, that's part of it.

55:36 And I think then you also, you know,

55:39 don't have to lie to each other if you do cheat.

55:41 Or you can talk about it in a different way if you feel like there's, you know,

55:45 certain capacity to be honest about whom you're attracted

55:49 to and how that might impact your life more generally.

55:52 So, how difficult is polyamory?

55:53 I think a lot of people would be curious about that kind of stuff.

55:57 Does jealousy come up?

55:58 Is it difficult to navigate?

56:00 It can be.

56:01 I mean, all relationships can be difficult to navigate.

56:03 Sure.

56:03 I think it's the same.

56:04 And the same respect,

56:05 so if you're going in because you're trying to fix something about yourself,

56:08 you're going to have a hard time.

56:10 Hmm.

56:10 Much like if you're dating a single person.

56:11 If you're trying to fix something, and this is going to be the solution

56:14 to the thing that you feel is broken about yourself, it's going to be hard.

56:18 But if you're going in, coming from a good place,

56:20 and you're going, you know, "I want to be open,

56:22 and I want to connect with people,

56:23 and I want to love people or a person," then you're going to have a better time.

56:28 What's the perfect polyamorous relationship look like?

56:31 Can you really love multiple people deeply?

56:34 I think so.

56:35 You can love people in different ways.

56:36 Also, you can love lots of people deeply, I think.

56:37 And I think, again, it's...

56:40 So, research on bisexuality, so I'm bi, has also found that people who are bi

56:45 are more likely to be in non-traditional relationships.

56:50 And one of the reasons for that is probably also

56:52 because we constantly get asked to justify our sexuality as well.

56:55 And so if constantly you're being asked if one person's enough for you,

56:59 if one gender's enough for you if you're in a relationship with one person,

57:02 for example, you know, if I'm in a relationship with a man, do you miss women?

57:06 And it's like, I don't ask you that if you're in a relationship with a woman.

57:09 Do you miss women?

57:10 Like, you probably do.

57:12 But that's just other women than your partner.

57:14 It has nothing to do with being bi.

57:16 And so I think there's this constant barrage of questions of what does it mean?

57:21 Is it real?

57:22 How do you choose?

57:23 What does a relationship look like?

57:24 Do you constantly want threesomes?

57:25 There's this constant hypersexualization also,

57:28 especially of women that we find in the research that can also lead

57:32 to really negative outcomes for mental health

57:34 and for things like risk of sexual violence.

57:36 But on the other hand, you've got bisexual people themselves saying, "Yeah,

57:39 but I feel like I also have this superpower that I can love more widely,

57:44 and gender doesn't really matter in terms of whom I'm capable

57:47 of loving." And so relationship structures almost come with that conversation.

57:51 It's not that we need to be non-monogamous

57:54 or that we need to be in these kinds of relationships.

57:57 It's more that I think if you've engaged

57:59 so deeply with your sexuality partly 'cause society's

58:01 forced you to, then you're also going to be

58:03 thinking about relationship structures more generally and going,

58:05 "Actually, I'm going to choose this one."- Yeah, that's interesting.

58:08 I mean, your sexual preferences and relationship structure preferences.

58:14 Some of the choice has to do with how society's going to respond to it.

58:17 So if you have to explain it every time you go to a party,

58:22 you might maybe not want to do that or talk

58:26 about it or at least be open about it.

58:29 Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of annoying

58:31 conversations you have to do if you're polyamorous.

58:33 Like, some of which you've mentioned.

58:35 And yes, there are effects of like over-sexualizing the people involved.

58:41 Yeah.

58:42 Or thinking they're lying.

58:43 So with men...

58:44 I wrote a book called Bi:

58:45 The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality,

58:47 and I did that after I created a bisexual research group.

58:51 So, I wasn't a sexuality researcher, but as a bi person and a scientist,

58:55 I was interested in the science of bisexuality, and I couldn't really find it.

58:59 It was really hard to figure out what people were actually

59:03 learning about bisexual people in comparison to other kinds of queer people.

59:10 And one of the things I found is

59:11 that the terms that are used are not necessarily bi.

59:14 And so it could be things like plurisexual.

59:16 So, if you type into Google Scholar the word bisexual,

59:18 you're going to get a lot of confusing

59:20 things also because bisexual is used for, like,

59:23 two sexes where you have multiple sex or you can change,

59:25 and so they're bisexual.

59:28 Right.

59:28 Yeah, which is different entirely.

59:30 And so I think partly out

59:32 of that, researchers started using words like plurisexual,

59:35 and omnisexual is another one.

59:36 And so if you're looking for research on this, plurisexual is probably the word.

59:40 But- What does omnisexual mean?

59:42 It's just the same.

59:43 It's just another-- Okay.

59:44 Got it.

59:44 another word where it's all.

59:46 Sometimes pansexual is also used.

59:47 And again, the idea being that it's all genders.

59:53 So how should we think about bisexuality?

59:57 Is it fluid, like day to day, month to month,

1:00:01 year to year fluid who you're attracted to?

1:00:04 Or is it at the same time have the capacity

1:00:06 to be attracted to anyone or attracted to everyone?

1:00:09 What's the right way to think about it?

1:00:12 I think the right way to think about

1:00:13 it is that I'm not attracted to most people,

1:00:15 but I can be attracted to people regardless of gender,

1:00:18 much like you're probably not probably not attracted to most people,

1:00:21 but you are attracted to people of a certain gender, maybe.

1:00:24 And so that's...

1:00:25 It's the same as being heterosexual in terms of potentially

1:00:28 my pool of people whom I might be interested in.

1:00:31 It's just that the gender is irrelevant.

1:00:33 What's the biggest thing that people misunderstand about bisexuality?

1:00:37 The biggest thing that researchers

1:00:39 find people misunderstand about bisexuality is

1:00:41 that it's a phase and that it's this idea that it's transient,

1:00:45 that it's always changing, and that it's a stepping stone.

1:00:48 So, I think a lot of people still see bisexuality as on the way to Gay Town,

1:00:54 sort of like you're, you're on your way,

1:00:56 but you haven't quite committed and you're

1:00:58 still stuck in expectations of society.

1:01:00 You haven't quite let go yet, but really you're gay.

1:01:03 And that's especially true for men.

1:01:04 So when you look at research on bisexual men,

1:01:07 which is actually how the research started.

1:01:09 So, I think now when we think of bisexuality, we think of women.

1:01:13 And it's true that today twice as many women identify as bisexual as men.

1:01:17 But if you look at the history

1:01:19 of this and the research on bisexuality over time, it was the other way around.

1:01:24 So someone called Alfred Kinsey was one of the first

1:01:27 sexuality researchers in recent history certainly, and he,

1:01:30 after World War II, did this really big study

1:01:33 of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, it was called.

1:01:36 He was a biologist himself, so he thought of taxonomies,

1:01:39 and he was doing research on gall wasps, so insects.

1:01:42 And this idea of human sexuality was sort of thrown at him after

1:01:47 the war because there's also this whole move to get people to, well,

1:01:52 reproduce and to rebuild America.

1:01:55 So sexuality was partly, and sex, specifically,

1:01:59 was becoming more of an area of interest,

1:02:01 both in terms of research and in terms of policy and funding.

1:02:05 So Alfred Kinsey was asked,

1:02:07 "Do you want to do a class on human sexual behavior?" And he was like,

1:02:12 "I know nothing about this." So he spent about a year just

1:02:16 listening to students' questions about what they want to know about sex,

1:02:20 and he realized that he was looking for research to try

1:02:25 and build up this course that he was probably going to teach,

1:02:28 and he realized that he couldn't answer most

1:02:30 of their questions because the research hadn't been done.

1:02:32 So a lot of the questions were around, "What is normal?" You know,

1:02:37 "If I feel this during sex, is that normal?

1:02:39 How often do people have sex?

1:02:40 Should I want these?

1:02:41 What about these fantasies?

1:02:42 What does it mean?

1:02:43 What if I have homosexual fantasies?

1:02:44 What if I engage in this kind of..." And so

1:02:46 he was looking at all of these questions and collating them,

1:02:49 and then he went out and did these huge studies,

1:02:52 and he interviewed thousands of people himself,

1:02:55 but also had all these research assistants who were

1:02:57 out there interviewing people in America about their sexual behavior,

1:03:02 which, I mean, just picture the time.

1:03:04 This is the 1940s.

1:03:07 This is quite a conservative time.

1:03:08 I mean, certainly more than we might expect now.

1:03:11 And here's this researcher asking incredibly personal questions

1:03:15 about thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and he ended up finding,

1:03:22 and this is one of the big findings in this book that he published

1:03:26 called "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,"

1:03:27 which was a best-seller for an entire year.

1:03:31 He sold out auditoriums.

1:03:32 They had to sometimes add the room next to the room

1:03:36 he was in because there was so much desire to go

1:03:40 to his lectures about sex that they had to connect radios

1:03:46 to other halls to give people enough space to sit down.

1:03:51 He was basically a rock star.

1:03:53 And again, I think this challenges the misconception we have about sexuality,

1:03:59 that we think of it as this sort of woke thing now.

1:04:02 that the rainbow flag and all this stuff

1:04:04 is sort of this modern invention almost.

1:04:06 But this is the '40s.

1:04:08 This was happening.

1:04:09 People were going to these talks.

1:04:11 People were having these conversations,

1:04:12 and he created something called the Kinsey Scale.

1:04:15 And so the Kinsey Scale is from zero to six,

1:04:18 and he found that it was not useful to apply

1:04:21 a binary to people's sexual desires and sexual orientation.

1:04:24 It was more useful to put them on a continuum

1:04:27 because most people were not exclusively homosexual or exclusively heterosexual.

1:04:32 Most people were somewhere in between.

1:04:34 And so zero was exclusively heterosexual tendencies,

1:04:38 and six was exclusively homosexual, and he would place people based on all

1:04:42 of the things they told him somewhere on the scale,

1:04:45 and about half of men were somewhere in the middle,

1:04:49 not exclusively either, and about a quarter of women.

1:04:52 Now, think about the time.

1:04:54 It was a very conservative time.

1:04:56 Well, and it's post-war though, so I think that mattered as well.

1:05:00 So there's something called a homosocial environment,

1:05:02 which has nothing to do with being gay.

1:05:04 That has to do with being in a situation where

1:05:07 you are with people of the same gender as you.

1:05:09 So a homosocial environment are things like prisons,

1:05:11 where you only have men or only have women,

1:05:15 war, which, at that point, they just had.

1:05:18 And so you have a lot of men who are exclusively in the company of men,

1:05:22 and maybe looking around going, "Well, now that my options are different,

1:05:25 maybe I'm going to choose from this pool." Anyway,

1:05:28 so he found that it was that way around,

1:05:32 that a lot of people have these fantasies or actions that they've engaged in.

1:05:36 And then there are other researchers,

1:05:37 other male researchers, who found similar things,

1:05:39 and then at some point in the '70s,

1:05:41 it swapped, and it felt like maybe more people,

1:05:44 more men were identifying as gay,

1:05:46 and there were maybe fewer people who would have called themselves bi,

1:05:49 and suddenly this became a thing more for women.

1:05:52 So I think that there's some social things going on.

1:05:54 There's some research things going on that actually bi men

1:05:57 are have been studied for a long time as well.

1:06:00 Okay, so you said a lot of interesting things.

1:06:02 So there is a difference between the truth and the socially acknowledged thing.

1:06:07 So there's social elements.

1:06:08 I don't know, this might be anecdotal,

1:06:11 but I know a few women, friends of mine, who identify as bisexual.

1:06:17 I don't know a single guy friend who identifies as bisexual.

1:06:22 They're either gay or straight.

1:06:24 So there's still a social thing going on.

1:06:28 Definitely.

1:06:28 Right?

1:06:29 Definitely, and I think that research consistently shows that bisexual men

1:06:35 are more likely to identify as, well, as gay or straight.

1:06:39 And gay, well, it depends.

1:06:41 So if they have what we might refer to as a homosexual lifestyle,

1:06:46 so they engage in sort of going to queer parties,

1:06:50 maybe go on Grindr or other gay apps, that would be much more a lifestyle thing,

1:06:55 where you've embraced and you see this as part of your identity,

1:06:58 that you are part of this queer community.

1:07:00 It's much easier to say you're gay than bi,

1:07:02 most often, also because there's queerphobia within the queer community.

1:07:06 And so you might get gay men saying to a bi man, "Oh, come on, you're...

1:07:10 "I was bi once." That's a classic.

1:07:12 "I was bi once," or "Come on, you're actually gay." It's

1:07:15 the same that you get the other way around with bi women,

1:07:18 is that because it's seen as performative,

1:07:21 the idea being that bisexual women are doing it for attention,

1:07:26 but the attention of men, specifically, that, well,

1:07:28 they're all going to go back to men anyway and they're just doing it.

1:07:31 It's a phase.

1:07:32 It's this thing that they're doing actually to be sexy to men,

1:07:35 not because they're actually interested in women.

1:07:37 And so there's this lesbian-bi thing going on, which is often quite hostile.

1:07:41 Not always, but often.

1:07:43 And there's this gay male bi thing going on, which

1:07:47 is different in nature but is also potentially hostile.

1:07:49 So in both, saying you're bi can be problematic, but for men more so.

1:07:53 Do you like the Kinsey Scale as a sort of very simple reduction to...

1:07:57 that there's a spectrum?

1:07:59 I also saw the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid that adds

1:08:03 a few parameters like who you're attracted to, how you're actually behaving,

1:08:07 the fantasies you have, social preference,

1:08:09 lifestyle preferences, all that kind of stuff.

1:08:12 Self-identification, what you actually say publicly.

1:08:14 All those different dimensions.

1:08:16 Or is the Kinsey Scale a pretty damn good approximation?

1:08:21 The Kinsey Scale's a good start.

1:08:23 And the Klein Grid, I think, is much more fun in some ways.

1:08:28 So the Klein Grid came out of research

1:08:31 by Alfred Kinsey and others like Havelock Ellis, but we won't get into him.

1:08:36 And Fritz Klein was a male researcher doing research also on sexuality.

1:08:40 He was specifically a therapist,

1:08:42 and he was looking at people who were struggling with their sexuality.

1:08:46 And so people would show up in the 70s and 80s in his practice,

1:08:50 and they would say, "I'm struggling with my sexuality." And he would say,

1:08:54 "How can I help you?" And they would say things like,

1:08:56 "I wish I wasn't interested in men,

1:08:58 and I'm a man." And he would then work through what that means.

1:09:02 Does that mean you don't want to have these feelings?

1:09:05 Does that mean that you don't want to have these attractions?

1:09:08 Does that mean that the implications of how

1:09:10 your friends and family will see you that's the problem?

1:09:12 And so he created this much more complex scale,

1:09:15 which I think is really interesting for everybody to do,

1:09:18 no matter what their sexuality is.

1:09:20 Because what it is is it gets you to think about things like,

1:09:24 yeah, your sexual identity, easy.

1:09:27 Not just that, but in past, present, and ideal.

1:09:30 And so if you say, "Well, I used to identify as straight.

1:09:34 Now I identify as bisexual." And then I have in my head...

1:09:37 This doesn't mean that other people think this.

1:09:39 In my head, I have an ideal, which could be straight,

1:09:42 because that's what maybe society's told us we should be.

1:09:44 But it could also be something be something else.

1:09:47 So I've also had friends who've gone,

1:09:49 you know, past, present, straight, straight, but ideal bi.

1:09:52 So you get into these interesting dynamics where sometimes people just

1:09:55 wish they were a different sexuality than they were for other reasons.

1:09:59 And then there's other things

1:10:01 in the, in the scale that ask about your lifestyle.

1:10:05 So, for example, if you are going to parties, queer parties,

1:10:08 if you have queer friends,

1:10:09 then you might have a homosexual lifestyle, even if you're straight.

1:10:12 But then again, it's how much lifestyle would you like?

1:10:15 And so for me, that was a real moment where I was looking at that going, "Wow,

1:10:21 my lifestyle's really straight." "And maybe I need to change

1:10:23 this." And so he was using these attractions and fantasies and identities,

1:10:27 and the past, present, ideal, to help people to think through all

1:10:32 these complicated feelings we have around our sexuality,

1:10:35 and to identify sticking points.

1:10:38 Yeah, that's fascinating.

1:10:39 So maybe the presumption there is if everything's aligned,

1:10:42 the fantasies, the ideal partner, the...

1:10:45 all those things, that's probably the healthiest place to be?

1:10:49 Right.

1:10:49 And so he would look at especially the ideal and the present.

1:10:53 And if those were different, so if you said,

1:10:56 "I wish I was bi but I'm straight," or "I'm bi but I wish

1:10:59 I was straight," or "I'm homosexual and I wish I was straight," he would say,

1:11:03 "Let's talk about that," and he'd try to work through it.

1:11:06 And the term he used for bisexual people who were

1:11:08 uncomfortable in their own sexuality was being a troubled bisexual.

1:11:12 And so I think you can...

1:11:14 I think any sexuality can be troubled.

1:11:16 I think you could be a troubled straight person,

1:11:19 a troubled homosexual person, a troubled asexual person.

1:11:21 And just thinking about why and which aspects are maybe missing,

1:11:25 I think is really healthy for people to do.

1:11:27 Meaning there are some puzzles that you haven't quite figured out,

1:11:30 maybe you haven't been honest with yourself about your preferences,

1:11:32 all that kind of stuff.

1:11:33 I don't really like talking about honesty with yourself.

1:11:35 I think that's a high bar.

1:11:37 And I think it's also often weaponized against people, especially by men,

1:11:40 where it's this idea of you're not really being honest, you're actually gay.

1:11:43 So I think this idea of we're not being

1:11:45 honest with our own sexuality, that's a big word.

1:11:47 I think it's more that maybe you haven't had the right framework or the right

1:11:51 words to think about aspects of your sexuality that are troubling to you.

1:11:55 How obvious...

1:11:56 When a person is bisexual,

1:11:57 how obvious is it to identify the sexual orientation grid?

1:12:01 Like how big is the sign, whatever you are?

1:12:07 I think the sign is smaller than we think it is.

1:12:09 I think that there are...

1:12:10 There's this tendency to assume that sexuality is something that we find,

1:12:18 and keep, and consolidate from our teenage years, maybe early 20s.

1:12:23 You maybe get university thrown in, sort of if

1:12:26 you get your experimental year as an undergrad.

1:12:28 But you kind of have to choose.

1:12:31 And that is a difficult requirement, I think, for a lot of people,

1:12:36 because you can't possibly know all of the things and all

1:12:40 the people you might be interested in at that point.

1:12:43 And we change in every other way.

1:12:45 Why wouldn't we change in this way?

1:12:47 So I think giving ourselves also the ability

1:12:49 to reappraise where we're at with our own sexuality,

1:12:53 our own desires, our own relationship status, all these things,

1:12:56 is important to keep us happy and healthy and to not run into issues

1:13:01 that we know are faced by a lot of homosexual but also bisexual people.

1:13:06 Research has found that bisexual people are more likely to self-harm.

1:13:09 They're more likely to be the victims of sexual violence,

1:13:12 more likely to be isolated, more likely to be stalked.

1:13:16 There's lots of different aspects of being bi that are negative.

1:13:20 The reason for that is mostly because bi people

1:13:23 are least likely to be plugged into the community.

1:13:26 So when you're going through stuff like this, and you feel different,

1:13:29 and you're constantly being asked about your sexuality,

1:13:31 if you're open about it, or you're hiding it, that's also troubling.

1:13:35 You're going to have these negative consequences,

1:13:37 especially if you don't feel like the queer community is really a place for you.

1:13:40 So that's where also finding your people really matters.

1:13:44 Since we're on the topic of sexuality, one of the things you touched

1:13:47 on in your book on evil was kinks, sexual fantasies.

1:13:53 I think the point of describing that was

1:13:55 that we often label that as evil or bad.

1:13:59 What can you say about what you've learned

1:14:02 from kinks and sexual fantasies from writing that book?

1:14:06 So the reason I included kinks and evil and sexual conversations

1:14:10 in general is because it is so often thrown into the same conversation.

1:14:15 So if someone comes to me and says, "Julia, I want you to help me explain why

1:14:21 this person killed this other person." And they'll often say,

1:14:25 "Did you know that he or she was also into," insert kink here,

1:14:32 or, insert nontraditional relationship structure here, or insert whatever.

1:14:38 And I respond to that by going, "Okay,

1:14:42 so?" And I think people use these words like, "Oh,

1:14:45 he was really into BDSM," and think that that's

1:14:48 going to have this really important impact on me.

1:14:51 Or, "Ooh, they were swingers." And so, and again, I go,

1:14:56 "Yeah?" That's you know, almost like, "And in other news,

1:14:59 they were swingers." It's like that is not related to this crime at all,

1:15:03 unless, you know, one of the partners was killed.

1:15:06 But people see this as a defect of character,

1:15:08 and kink is very much seen as a defect of character in many circles,

1:15:13 especially in sort of broader society.

1:15:16 And that is wild to me because if

1:15:18 you look at research on sexual fantasies and kinks,

1:15:22 a lot of people have at least one.

1:15:25 So a lot of people, BDSM being the most common,

1:15:29 are engaging in or interested in BDSM.

1:15:32 So things like choking or things like restraints or being

1:15:36 degraded or doing the degrading of other people in bed, consensually of course,

1:15:41 that is something that a lot of people

1:15:43 fantasize about and a lot of people engage in.

1:15:45 And so these kinks and these fetishes,

1:15:48 they are much more commonplace than we sometimes think about them as.

1:15:51 Now, on the other hand, we obviously need to be careful not to assume

1:15:55 that because in pornography BDSM is almost ubiquitous,

1:15:58 it feels, that that means everybody wants this.

1:16:00 That is absolutely not the case,

1:16:02 but we also don't want to marginalize it and say it's almost nobody.

1:16:06 It's somewhere in between, and the main thing is always just to ask

1:16:09 and to have open conversations about what it is that people actually want in bed

1:16:13 and to make sure you have things like safe words,

1:16:15 so, you know, putting in the restraints to make sure

1:16:18 that these interactions are safe and consensual and then being able to explore.

1:16:22 And, I mean, there's everything from, you know,

1:16:25 pup play where you dress up as a puppy and you engage

1:16:29 in either just general frolicking or sexual

1:16:31 behavior to other things like blood play,

1:16:34 which is when you pierce the skin to release some sort of blood.

1:16:37 That can be scratching.

1:16:38 That can be cutting.

1:16:39 That can be of yourself or your partner.

1:16:42 That can be this idea of, you know, I don't know,

1:16:45 it's this taboo thing you're doing together, and it's sexy in its own way.

1:16:48 And so everybody has their own versions of what

1:16:51 they find attractive and rubbing up against people,

1:16:53 you know, sort of unsuspecting, pretending that someone's sleeping.

1:16:58 There's this wide range of things, and I think people also feel often deeply

1:17:04 ashamed about the things that they are interested in.

1:17:06 And I think that is also really sad because

1:17:08 it makes it more likely that people are going

1:17:11 to not be able to live that part of themselves

1:17:13 and also that they think there's something wrong with them.

1:17:15 And that can spiral into things like, "Am I evil?

1:17:18 Am I bad?

1:17:19 Am I a bad person because I

1:17:20 have these fantasies?" And that ties in, unfortunately,

1:17:22 with homosexuality and bisexuality and the way that certainly

1:17:26 historically and in most parts of the world still today,

1:17:29 these queer lives and queer identities are still villainized.

1:17:32 They're still seen as lesser, as bad, as a sign of a defect of character.

1:17:37 And if people see that within themselves,

1:17:39 they're going to think differently about themselves, and we...

1:17:41 Well, society is going to treat them differently.

1:17:43 So it's all about destigmatizing.

1:17:45 I really liked what you wrote about, I guess it was in the context of BDSM

1:17:48 or maybe sadomasochism or maybe just the submissive-dominant dynamic,

1:17:53 like why that might be appealing, the disinhibition hypothesis.

1:17:57 I guess this applies generally to sexual fantasies is if you live them out,

1:18:03 that you could just let go of all the bullshit that we,

1:18:06 that we put up in normal society.

1:18:07 That you could just be all in, fully present to the pleasure of it.

1:18:14 Right, and that's what research has found on fetishes, especially on BDSM,

1:18:17 is that the reason that people say they like it...

1:18:19 I mean, it's hard to explain why you have a fantasy.

1:18:22 But if you go into the finer questions and really dig deep,

1:18:26 you can find that people will explain a version of, "Well,

1:18:30 I can really let go, and I don't have to...

1:18:33 If someone is telling me what to do, then I don't have to make any decisions,

1:18:37 and I've spent all day making millions of decisions,

1:18:40 and I don't have to in this context.

1:18:42 And I really like that because it's freeing."

1:18:44 And so that's that disinhibition hypothesis is that the reason

1:18:47 that we often go to things in the bedroom

1:18:51 that in other contexts we don't like or even find repulsive,

1:18:55 like I don't in normal life potentially want to be told what to do.

1:18:58 But maybe when you move into the bedroom,

1:19:00 you go, "Yeah, but this is a different context,

1:19:02 and I kind of want the reverse of what I

1:19:04 want in my day-to-day life." And so I can also understand,

1:19:07 like, furries and that sort of completely

1:19:09 living as another species of it, even is...

1:19:13 It's a really interesting psychological phenomenon of release

1:19:17 and of letting go of social pressure.

1:19:20 But I think that also applies to...

1:19:22 Because you mentioned submissive, that's more straightforward to understand.

1:19:24 I think that also applies to dominant, because like,

1:19:28 yeah, you don't have to walk on eggshells.

1:19:32 It's the clarity of it.

1:19:34 That was really interesting.

1:19:35 Having read that from you, that really made me think that there is a deep truth

1:19:41 to that, to like being true to whatever the sexual fantasy is.

1:19:45 It's not just the fantasy itself that's appealing,

1:19:49 it's the being free in some sense.

1:19:53 It's the being free,

1:19:54 and the juxtaposition there is that you are free because of the fiction.

1:19:58 Like you're playacting,

1:20:00 but it's touching at something deep inside you psychologically.

1:20:04 And so that's where it sort of feels weird, but it also makes sense.

1:20:08 I mean, this is also why we like fiction,

1:20:11 because it allows you to maybe be somebody else,

1:20:13 have someone else's thoughts in your mind for a while,

1:20:16 and you really get to live as that for a bit.

1:20:18 So I think, yeah, the truth and fiction

1:20:21 sort of circle is always an interesting one.

1:20:25 So you've, for researching the Bi book, the bisexuality book,

1:20:29 what have you learned about sexuality in general, human nature, sexuality,

1:20:33 and how it's practiced in terms of different communities?

1:20:37 And I'm sure there are subcultures and stuff.

1:20:39 Yeah.

1:20:39 What have you learned?

1:20:41 So, the research on human sexuality, I think, is interesting,

1:20:43 because we keep finding that people have

1:20:47 these desires that they feel weird about, that they...

1:20:51 Unless they have a community or an app

1:20:55 that you can go to to live those fantasies,

1:20:59 they can feel quite troubling to the individual and they can make you unwell.

1:21:04 And that's true whether it's about your sexuality,

1:21:06 so being gay and being unable to live as a gay person,

1:21:09 or if that's wanting to engage in BDSM and not having an outlet for that.

1:21:14 So that can just make you unhappy.

1:21:16 So I think that the stigma there is that that unhappiness

1:21:18 is going to lead to some sort of horrible manifestations of crime.

1:21:21 I think that is mostly nonsense,

1:21:23 but it's more that I'm concerned about the mental health consequences

1:21:27 for the individual who's unable to explore those sides of themselves.

1:21:31 And in research on kinks and sexuality, it's just about also making sure that we

1:21:38 have visible representation of certain kinds of communities.

1:21:40 And so that's one of the reasons I ended up writing Bi.

1:21:43 I came out in Evil.

1:21:44 Making Evil is the UK title, Evil in the US.

1:21:47 I came out because I was writing about

1:21:50 all the things we associate with the word evil,

1:21:52 and homosexuality certainly is one of those things.

1:21:55 You came out as bisexual, by the way.

1:21:56 Yeah.

1:21:57 Yeah, I came out as bisexual.

1:21:58 And I came out as bisexual in the book, and I did it specifically,

1:22:01 and I wrote it this way, as well,

1:22:03 because I was talking about the importance of visibility,

1:22:07 and how it's through visibility that you realize that the people around you,

1:22:10 people you already know and love,

1:22:12 are part of this community that otherwise feels other.

1:22:17 It feels foreign, it feels abstract, and maybe it feels scary.

1:22:20 But if you realize that actually you've got gay friends

1:22:23 or you've got friends who are into certain kinds of fetishes.

1:22:25 certain kinds of fetishes,

1:22:26 or you've got friends who are whatever sexuality aspect you're talking about,

1:22:29 you suddenly go, "Oh,

1:22:31 it's gonna be much harder to dehumanize these people." And this is where all

1:22:36 of this kind of comes for me from a really sad place is the...

1:22:41 You could talk about Bi as this project

1:22:42 of love and how I was finding the community.

1:22:44 I was trying to write something that would sort of bring us all together.

1:22:48 But it's also because I'm constantly terrified

1:22:51 that my rights are going to be stripped back.

1:22:53 And we know that the laws around homosexual behavior

1:22:58 and the rights around bisexual people as well, they're in flux.

1:23:05 There's no straight line of acceptance.

1:23:07 And just because right now I happen to live in a time and place

1:23:12 where I'm allowed to be openly bisexual and I can engage in homosexual activity,

1:23:16 that doesn't mean that that's gonna stay, not even necessarily in my lifetime.

1:23:20 And so I think, much like writing Evil at a time when you're

1:23:23 not at war and you're able to think really deeply about these important issues,

1:23:26 I think we also need to be thinking about things

1:23:29 like sexuality and other issues that are important to us.

1:23:31 And if we want to preserve our rights,

1:23:33 we need to normalize these issues and make sure that they're

1:23:36 visible so that people find it harder to dehumanize those communities.

1:23:39 And so I'm always terrified that bisexual

1:23:41 people are gonna be hypersexualized, dehumanized again,

1:23:44 and that there's going to be laws against basically just who I am.

1:23:47 Did you hear from a bunch of people after Making Evil After Evil, the book,

1:23:51 and mentioning and coming out in that book and then writing,

1:23:54 the Bi book that, that are bisexual and maybe what are some stories?

1:24:01 I'm sure...

1:24:02 'Cause I haven't seen much material on it as you spoke

1:24:05 to, so I'm sure they felt lonely without a community, right?

1:24:09 Yeah.

1:24:09 A lot of people felt seen by the book.

1:24:11 So it was really beautiful,

1:24:12 the fan mail I got and the sort of responses to the book.

1:24:15 And I got them from all over the world.

1:24:17 And so in the book, I also spoke with some researchers who

1:24:20 were stationed or doing research in countries

1:24:23 where bisexual behavior specifically is illegal,

1:24:26 or homosexual behavior was illegal.

1:24:28 For a long time, bisexuality was, especially in women, well,

1:24:31 actually, homosexuality in women in general was sort of seen as...

1:24:35 it was, it was a blind spot, 'cause what counted as sex is sex with a penis.

1:24:41 And so women can't have sex with one another.

1:24:43 And so a lot of laws around homosexuality are specifically applying to men.

1:24:47 And certainly, historically, that's the case.

1:24:49 So we're talking about like sodomy and that involves men and not women.

1:24:54 And so if you look at the evolution of laws, for a while, women were kind of...

1:25:01 like it was socially not necessarily acceptable,

1:25:03 but they were kind of getting away with it legally.

1:25:06 But then more recently, especially, as bisexuality gets more visible as well,

1:25:11 certain countries have started writing it

1:25:13 specifically into their constitutions and so specifically

1:25:15 into their laws that bisexual identities and behaviors

1:25:18 are also seen as problematic and illegal.

1:25:21 So again, these laws change all the time.

1:25:24 But in terms of fan mail,

1:25:26 especially from people in countries where homosexuality

1:25:28 and bisexuality are illegal or are seen as problematic,

1:25:33 are socially condemned— that was particularly important,

1:25:36 so that those people were particularly writing saying, some of them also saying,

1:25:41 "Can I translate this into this other language, on the DL, like on the down low?

1:25:45 And just, like, distribute this to my friends?"

1:25:47 I had people sending me messages saying,

1:25:50 "I'm at X airport or in X country where this is,

1:25:53 this would be considered contraband." Like this book,

1:25:56 my book is a banned book, fun fact.

1:25:59 Nice.

1:25:59 It was banned.

1:26:00 I, I sold the rights to a foreign publisher, and right after it was sold,

1:26:04 the laws changed and they sent me this really sad email saying,

1:26:07 "Unfortunately, we can't publish your book because

1:26:08 it's now considered part of the, like,

1:26:10 gay agenda, sort of promoting gay and homosexual lifestyles.

1:26:14 And so we can't publish it anymore." But there's,

1:26:17 I take like a little bit of pride in the fact that it's a banned book,

1:26:20 but I find it really sad, obviously, as to what it means,

1:26:22 but it also makes me feel like it's more important.

1:26:24 And that's what people were writing to me about.

1:26:27 What advice would you give to young people,

1:26:29 or just people in general that are trying to figure

1:26:33 out their sexuality or how to speak about their sexuality?

1:26:38 I'd say try and read widely on issues around sexuality.

1:26:43 Books like mine, but also other books might

1:26:46 help you to navigate whether or not you're,

1:26:50 you know, what labels there are and also

1:26:52 whether or not those labels are good for you.

1:26:55 I think things like the Klein grid are really helpful,

1:26:57 especially for people who are more analytically minded like you and I.

1:27:00 I think it gives you a construct to work

1:27:02 with and numbers to work with, and that can be really helpful to try and go

1:27:06 almost seeing your sexuality as a mathematical equation.

1:27:08 And I think that can be quite useful.

1:27:10 And if that's how you think,

1:27:12 then look at the Klein grid and see if that helps you to navigate things.

1:27:16 A bit of a tricky question, but what are the pros and cons

1:27:19 of coming out publicly as a non-standard sexuality?

1:27:23 From a recommendation perspective,

1:27:25 what are some benefits and what are some challenges?

1:27:31 So the benefits are that you can, well, live authentically.

1:27:34 You can just be yourself.

1:27:35 So I do feel more free in who I am and who I'm able to sort of be online,

1:27:40 for example, now that I'm out.

1:27:42 And because I came out after, in my 30s,

1:27:44 I think also it was almost a foot-in-the-door technique as well,

1:27:48 which is a psychological technique of first coming

1:27:50 in and then coming with your big ask.

1:27:53 And so I'd already published two books.

1:27:56 I was already an established scientist.

1:27:57 I think if I tried bi first, I, A, wouldn't have been able to publish the book.

1:28:01 It was the first mainstream book on bisexuality ever.

1:28:03 And B, I don't think I would've been taken seriously as a scientist.

1:28:07 And so having the other stuff first and then bi as sort of a side project,

1:28:13 that was acceptable.

1:28:14 But I think the other way around wouldn't have been.

1:28:16 I think it was still brave.

1:28:18 I think you mentioned somewhere, maybe in an interview,

1:28:21 that there was some concern of being

1:28:23 sexualized when you covered the topic of sexuality.

1:28:26 There still is, but I actually find

1:28:28 that it's done the opposite most of the time.

1:28:31 So I think, as a woman, especially a young woman in the public eye,

1:28:37 you're sexualized anyway, unfortunately.

1:28:40 And so that is and was already a huge part of my online experience.

1:28:46 And actually, I think coming out as bi,

1:28:49 A, you get allies who suddenly are like, "We're on your side.

1:28:52 We're going to help you fight the hypersexualization." And people

1:28:55 get almost more weird about it in a good way.

1:28:59 They get a bit quiet about it because they're like,

1:29:01 "Oh, now it's an identity thing.

1:29:02 So maybe I shouldn't comment on what she's wearing." And it

1:29:06 sort of, it almost disarmed some of the more sexualized comments.

1:29:10 So for me, I have to say it was mostly a positive experience.

1:29:14 The incels didn't know what to do with it.

1:29:16 Exactly.

1:29:17 Like, "Ugh."- Just to go back to the beginning,

1:29:21 what got you interested in criminal psychology?

1:29:23 Well, if you look at my trajectory into academia and then through it,

1:29:29 basically what happened is I was ready to go study art.

1:29:33 Nice.

1:29:34 That's what happened.

1:29:34 I had my portfolio ready to go.

1:29:36 I was going to study art at undergrad,

1:29:38 and then my grandfather intervened and was like,

1:29:41 "Being an artist is a really hard life.

1:29:44 Maybe you should reconsider."- What kind of art?

1:29:46 Sorry to take that tangent.

1:29:47 Uh, painting.

1:29:49 That is wild.

1:29:49 I would not have expected that, cause you're so super analytical.

1:29:53 Yeah, I am, but I also really like surrealism,

1:29:55 and I really like messing with the sense of reality,

1:29:58 which again, is obviously something that then

1:30:00 wove its way into my academic work.

1:30:02 Um...

1:30:03 That's cool.

1:30:03 But he was also right.

1:30:04 I've always been very intellectual, let's just say.

1:30:07 I skipped a couple grades in school.

1:30:09 I was part of the chess club.

1:30:10 It was very much I was the clever kid.

1:30:14 And so, but there's also a part of me that's just like, "But art is beautiful.

1:30:18 I love making art and it can speak to so many people." Anyway,

1:30:20 my grandfather convinced me not to do it,

1:30:22 and then I applied instead for psychology.

1:30:25 Although at that point you just had to say social sciences.

1:30:28 You didn't have to specify, but I knew it was probably going to be psychology.

1:30:32 And the reason for that was because my dad has paranoid schizophrenia.

1:30:36 And so I think one of the reasons I'm

1:30:38 so obsessed with this idea of what is real,

1:30:41 and that is in every way that, that...

1:30:45 I mean that in terms of what is real in terms of perceptions of right and wrong,

1:30:49 what is real in terms of our own memories of the world,

1:30:53 what is real in terms of what happened in a crime,

1:30:55 what is real in terms of perceptual abilities and neuroscience, what is real.

1:30:59 I mean, I mean that in every way,

1:31:02 and I think that's because I grew up with someone who

1:31:05 had a unique view of what is real in real time.

1:31:11 And so seeing that, I think just affected me profoundly,

1:31:15 because not only was it very destabilizing in terms of my upbringing,

1:31:18 but also it's just in your face that people

1:31:23 quite literally are seeing and hearing different things than you.

1:31:27 And to not jump from that to what

1:31:29 else are people perceiving differently than me,

1:31:31 I think I think would be almost like a missed opportunity.

1:31:34 And so I went to study psychology partly

1:31:36 to understand that and what was going on there,

1:31:38 and then that took me down the sort of reality hole.

1:31:40 And honestly, the reason I went into criminal psychology,

1:31:44 is because I could have gone into any other,

1:31:45 but the criminal psychologists were the most fun.

1:31:48 I feel like lots of psychologists take themselves so seriously.

1:31:52 And I just, I couldn't.

1:31:54 I was like, "I don't, this isn't the vibe." And so the criminal psychologists,

1:31:58 they had this gallows humor.

1:32:00 They were doing arguably the most serious of the crimes and the cases,

1:32:04 and yet, were somehow having fun and having nice lives.

1:32:09 And I saw myself and I went, "Well, I want to do this version." And so I did.

1:32:15 Yeah, that's great to hear, that a criminal psychologist,

1:32:17 because probably they have to really,

1:32:19 more than any other subfield, confront the reality of the mind.

1:32:24 And it's often quite procedural.

1:32:26 So I'm also much more interested in applied

1:32:29 sciences because I like the idea of, you know,

1:32:33 what do we do with this information?

1:32:36 And the thing that interests me most from a research perspective,

1:32:38 I mean, I did my PhD in false memories,

1:32:41 so implanting false memories of committing crime,

1:32:43 which was the study that ended up going viral because I was the first to do it.

1:32:49 And I built on a history of people implanting

1:32:51 false memories of various kinds of other emotional events.

1:32:54 But it was the first time someone had

1:32:56 combined false confessions research and false memory research.

1:33:00 And so that was the research of Elizabeth Loftus and Saul Kassin.

1:33:03 So false confessions was Saul Kassin and false memories was Elizabeth Loftus.

1:33:07 And I was just doing them both at the same time.

1:33:09 And the question was, could you get people to believe that they committed

1:33:12 a crime that never happened and confess to it?

1:33:16 And not just that, but believe that it actually happened, so remember it?

1:33:20 And the answer to that in short is yes,

1:33:22 you can, especially using specific leading and suggestive interview techniques.

1:33:26 And so the procedural learning from that, which

1:33:28 is what I'm most interested in, I don't,

1:33:29 like that's sort of a party trick to be able to actually do it.

1:33:31 And that's just so that you can then take that and go, "Okay,

1:33:34 well, how do we prevent this?" And so I've since trained police lawyers.

1:33:39 I've trained people at the ICC,

1:33:41 the International Criminal Court, who deal with collective memory,

1:33:43 so they deal with hundreds of witnesses at a time in war crimes.

1:33:47 And the question is, how do we try to preserve

1:33:50 as original as possible memory without contaminating it?

1:33:53 Because well, or at least without contaminating it any more than it already is.

1:33:57 And that's where social psychology, I think, excels,

1:34:00 is that we have done lots of research

1:34:02 on how social settings change what people say,

1:34:05 and to some extent, what people believe.

1:34:07 And I think that's also where actually the leap to things like AI,

1:34:11 I think, is not far, because ultimately, the way that we're engaging with large

1:34:16 language models and generative AI in general,

1:34:19 is that it's structured as a social interaction.

1:34:22 It's structured as a conversation most of the time now, and that is what we do.

1:34:27 I mean, that is literally what I train the police on doing,

1:34:30 is how to make sure that you don't distort people's

1:34:32 memories in the process and how to ask good questions.

1:34:35 So you get confabulations from both sides now.

1:34:37 You get confabulations from AI and from the people.

1:34:40 And the problem is that there's a third thing, which is the in-between,

1:34:43 that I'm not sure is getting enough attention right now.

1:34:46 And I wish that there was more integration

1:34:48 of social scientists like me and people who

1:34:51 do investigative interviewing and have done it for decades

1:34:55 to understand what is happening in the in-between.

1:34:57 And so that we can both teach the people

1:34:59 and the AI to respond better in that situation.

1:35:03 I mean, it's really interesting.

1:35:04 Are you saying that there's a drift of some kind in terms of on both

1:35:08 the AI and human side when they're interacting

1:35:10 together that we need to be very clear about?

1:35:14 Yes.

1:35:14 What we've created with Gen AI is basically the ultimate false memory machine.

1:35:22 We have created a tailored experience of something that is most

1:35:27 of the time telling you what it thinks you want to hear,

1:35:32 and then it's uncritically giving that to you.

1:35:35 Or sometimes, of course, there are other things where it's appraising

1:35:38 whether or not this is truthful or not.

1:35:40 But it is giving that to you.

1:35:43 And there's no safeguard from you just going, "This is truth,

1:35:46 and this is my past," or, "This is how I remembered it."

1:35:50 And the problem is that not only

1:35:52 is AI potentially distorting people and their memories,

1:35:56 never mind the factual basis on which they're relying,

1:35:58 but it's also the other way around:

1:36:00 that potentially by asking leading or problematic questions,

1:36:03 people are changing how the AI is creating the content,

1:36:07 which is in turn on some fundamental level potentially

1:36:09 having an impact on how it's discerning truth from fiction.

1:36:13 And so that's where the false memory in human minds and confabulations in AI,

1:36:18 I think, are much more similar than we think.

1:36:22 And when I first saw AI confabulate, hallucinate, I was like,

1:36:26 "This is what people do all the time." It's

1:36:27 just that we can't fact-check them all the time.

1:36:29 We're not in a conversation constantly being like, "Well, is that quite right?

1:36:32 I'm going to use that for my homework," right?

1:36:36 So, it's both juicy and really troubling.

1:36:40 Well, right now the interactions are pretty ephemeral.

1:36:42 They're short-lasting, and there's not really a deep memory to the interactions.

1:36:46 But this could get a lot worse if the AI is personalized to a degree

1:36:51 where it remembers things about you so

1:36:54 that you can then start to, over many interactions,

1:36:57 feed the narrative about your past that you

1:37:01 construct together with the AI over time.

1:37:05 But you don't even need that.

1:37:06 So this is what we find in investigative interviewing,

1:37:08 which is police interviewing of witnesses and suspects,

1:37:11 is that all you need is a leading question or a suggestive piece of information.

1:37:16 In a short interaction, most people,

1:37:18 most police officers don't spend a long time,

1:37:20 and they have no memory of this person's past.

1:37:22 They know basically nothing about them except for things related to the crime.

1:37:26 And yet we know that within that very short,

1:37:29 maybe half hour, one-hour interaction,

1:37:31 people's stories can change fundamentally.

1:37:33 And the problem is that if you have a memory of something,

1:37:37 that when you pull it up, in that social interaction, it's sort of live.

1:37:42 It's like active.

1:37:43 And when you then finish that interaction, it sets back down.

1:37:48 And the thing is that if you put it back in a different way,

1:37:50 what's going to happen is the next

1:37:52 time you're going to remember the latest version.

1:37:54 And you might not realize that it shifted.

1:37:56 So over time, it can shift and you don't realize it, and that's your truth.

1:38:00 And that's where even just short interactions can

1:38:03 have a profound impact on the human mind.

1:38:06 Wow, so you can modify memories that quickly?

1:38:09 Yeah.

1:38:09 We do all the time in experiments.

1:38:11 Okay, can you speak a little bit more to false memory?

1:38:13 So, like, it's just fascinating.

1:38:15 So things happen to us.

1:38:17 We humans do things in the world, and then we remember them.

1:38:21 And most of our lives, I guess, is lived in memory,

1:38:24 in remembering the things that happened to us.

1:38:27 And you're saying that we can modify the story

1:38:30 we tell about the things that happened to us?

1:38:34 That's fascinating.

1:38:35 So what do we know about this ability to have false memories?

1:38:40 We know that false memories are common,

1:38:42 that they're a feature of a normal, healthy brain.

1:38:45 They're not this glitch, they are a feature.

1:38:48 And we know that false memories are incredibly common,

1:38:53 in terms of if you think about basically any memory...

1:38:56 Now, I'm interested in autobiographical memories.

1:38:58 This isn't memories of facts.

1:39:00 This is memories of experiences, things that you've lived in some way.

1:39:04 And of those autobiographical memories,

1:39:07 basically every single autobiographical memory you have is false.

1:39:09 The question isn't whether it's false, the question is how false.

1:39:13 You're despairing over there.

1:39:14 Well, I mean, yeah, that's...

1:39:16 I mean, it's both beautiful and terrifying...

1:39:18 ...that nothing is real.

1:39:20 No, that's not, that's not what I'm saying.

1:39:21 Okay.

1:39:22 I'm just saying that everything has a degree of falsehood to it.

1:39:25 And this is where sometimes I'll get accused of being like, "Oh, but that...

1:39:28 does that mean we can never use witness statements?" That...

1:39:31 I'm not saying we can't use any witness statements.

1:39:33 I'm just saying that we need to be

1:39:35 careful because even if people say things with confidence,

1:39:37 it doesn't necessarily mean they're true, or if they have multisensory details,

1:39:40 they're describing in very specific detail what they smelled,

1:39:43 what they heard, what they...

1:39:45 whatever.

1:39:45 It doesn't mean it's necessarily true.

1:39:48 Most of the time, our autobiographical memories are good enough.

1:39:54 And that's where...

1:39:55 memory scientists talk about this as gist memory.

1:39:57 Our gist memory for events, much like for text, you get the gist of it, right?

1:40:03 You're good enough.

1:40:04 You generally remember accurately approximately what happened.

1:40:06 But it's when you get to the so-called verbatim details,

1:40:10 the specific details of memories that you find people are often really bad.

1:40:17 Now, most of the time that doesn't really matter

1:40:19 because you remember you hung out with a friend,

1:40:21 you remember you were at this university,

1:40:23 you remember approximately what your favorite cafe was,

1:40:25 you remember this important negative or positive event.

1:40:28 Fine.

1:40:29 You don't actually need to know exactly

1:40:30 what you were wearing and drinking and saying.

1:40:33 But in a criminal justice setting, you do need to remember exactly what

1:40:36 you were drinking and saying and doing, right?

1:40:39 And so that's where we have this need to break down this human

1:40:45 capacity for memory to this level of detail that it's just not made for.

1:40:50 So that's where the verbatim stuff can get you into trouble,

1:40:53 'cause with criminal cases, I suppose the tiniest details really matter 'cause

1:40:58 then the lawyers can really zoom in on that.

1:41:01 particular detail, and then you could just make that up.

1:41:03 And then the interrogation with a leading question, as you were saying,

1:41:07 can just alter your memory of a particular detail,

1:41:10 and then everything will hang on that detail.

1:41:13 Right, and if that particular detail is someone's face,

1:41:15 then that's a really big problem.

1:41:17 You're right.

1:41:18 And so, and it can also be an entire false memory.

1:41:22 So this is where in my research and in research like mine,

1:41:25 we've implanted, well, memories, what we call memories or false memories,

1:41:29 of experiences that never happened at all.

1:41:32 So while most things are modifications of real memories, false memories,

1:41:36 complete false memories are when you

1:41:38 think you experienced something that you didn't.

1:41:40 And we all have them.

1:41:41 We all have some memories that can't be true,

1:41:44 and we usually realize them, for example,

1:41:46 when we talk to our parents about our childhood

1:41:48 or when we talk to friends and we say,

1:41:51 "Remember that time we did this?" And your friend will go, "That happened to me,

1:41:55 that didn't happen to you." And you become

1:41:57 what is known in research as a memory thief.

1:42:00 Where you've stolen somebody else's memory and you've accepted it,

1:42:05 or your brain has accepted it as your own.

1:42:07 And that's possibly because the other person told it

1:42:09 in such vivid detail that you could imagine it,

1:42:11 and basically your brain was like, "Well,

1:42:13 this feels real now." And so the next time you thought about that, maybe,

1:42:17 maybe not the next time, but maybe after a couple of times of thinking about it,

1:42:20 you started going, "This happened to me,

1:42:22 right?" And then you integrate it into your autobiography.

1:42:26 How hard is it to insert false memories?

1:42:29 Not hard.

1:42:30 It's very easy to distort memories or to insert small false memories.

1:42:34 It's harder to convince people of entire events, especially specific events.

1:42:38 And this is widely debated exactly how easy

1:42:40 it is to implant a specific false memory.

1:42:43 It's also one of the big debates around my own

1:42:45 research is that when I was writing The Memory Illusion,

1:42:48 which was my first book, and the research that was in line with that, there was

1:42:52 this huge debate between me and a couple of other academics

1:42:57 about what it means for something to be a false memory

1:42:59 and how we should talk about the ease with which they're implanted,

1:43:02 and that is still one of the biggest scientific debates in our field.

1:43:06 And to me, I think that's...

1:43:08 So the coding stuff is about the difference between what

1:43:12 some people call a false belief and a false memory.

1:43:15 So I think this thing happened or I remember this thing happened,

1:43:19 and that is a really difficult differentiation often because all

1:43:23 we have as social psychologists is what you're telling me.

1:43:26 And I can ask you, "Do you think it really happened or not?

1:43:29 Do you believe it really happened?" But it's really hard to differentiate,

1:43:34 and so I've always thought that you need to ask people about the specifics,

1:43:36 like, "All right, how confident are you in this memory?

1:43:39 All right, do you feel things in this memory?

1:43:41 Does it feel like other kinds of mem?" Right?

1:43:43 Sort of, like, describe the nature of this experience rather than being like,

1:43:47 "Do you think this is a real memory?" Because

1:43:49 that's a hard thing to ask people to do.

1:43:52 So you want to get indirectly as many signals

1:43:55 as possible to show that they actually believe the thing happened.

1:43:58 Or that it approximates a memory in their minds.

1:44:00 That's right, rather than just a thing they think kind of sort of happened.

1:44:04 But other people think that it's an easier to differentiate line.

1:44:07 So for me, that it's almost impossible to differentiate the two.

1:44:10 Other people think it's more clear.

1:44:12 And then in terms of the frequency, so in my research,

1:44:15 70% of people became convinced that they committed a crime

1:44:20 that never happened or experienced another important emotional event.

1:44:23 And that number as well is challenged in that people go, "Well,

1:44:28 does that mean that 70% of people can have false

1:44:30 memories like this?" And the answer is no, obviously not.

1:44:34 That's just in my sample.

1:44:35 That's just these specific six false memories.

1:44:37 And it could be that I think 100% of people are prone

1:44:41 to some version of this, just maybe not in this specific study, right?

1:44:45 That if I had to come up with different false memories to implant,

1:44:49 or if I was a different person myself and people trusted me differently.

1:44:52 There are again, those social factors that make

1:44:54 it more or less likely that I'm going to be able to convince you that something

1:44:58 happened in your life that you can't remember.

1:45:00 And in one study, obviously, I can't capture that.

1:45:03 But it also doesn't mean that 70% of the time people are, you know,

1:45:06 it might be 1% of the time or 0.1%

1:45:08 of the time that people have these complex false memories.

1:45:10 I guess you're just speaking to the fact

1:45:12 that you don't know how representative the sample is.

1:45:14 But even from one study, that's a crazy, that's incredible.

1:45:19 Well, it's not- That's a-- ...just representativeness.

1:45:20 It's also that we shouldn't take individual studies in that way.

1:45:24 Sure.

1:45:24 Like I'm not saying that 70% of people always have false memories either.

1:45:27 Like it's it just means in this one study,

1:45:29 more people than not developed these complex memories.

1:45:32 What was the methodology for implanting the false memories?

1:45:34 This is so cool, by the way.

1:45:37 Human memory is so fascinating,

1:45:39 and the fact that we can engineer memory—- It's good that it's fast.

1:45:44 ...it's so interesting.

1:45:44 It's also really interesting that we live so much of our lives in memories.

1:45:47 And that you can mess with that, you can shape it.

1:45:53 It's interesting.

1:45:54 It's mostly, I think, a good thing that we can shape it.

1:45:56 I think so.

1:45:57 Yeah.

1:45:57 I think the fact that memory can be false in the way

1:46:01 that I do it in my study is a result of the fact

1:46:05 that our minds are made to creatively recombine information to solve problems

1:46:10 in the And so even the fact that we have this gist memory,

1:46:15 it's because we're optimizing data processing.

1:46:18 We're basically saying, "These are the most important things from these events,

1:46:22 and the other details are irrelevant.

1:46:24 Don't remember that.

1:46:26 Gone.

1:46:26 And now I'm going to work with that to try

1:46:28 and solve what life comes up with." And the ability to be

1:46:32 creative and intelligent relies on our ability to take memories

1:46:35 from the past and pieces of them and to creatively recombine them.

1:46:38 And so that's what false memories are, except that that then can look bad

1:46:43 if you're trying to remember something specific.

1:46:45 And so in my research,

1:46:47 I used leading and suggestive questions like, "Close your eyes.

1:46:50 Picture the event that I'm trying to implant." So I was implanting,

1:46:54 for example, "You're 14 years old.

1:46:56 You were in contact with the police.

1:46:59 The police called your parents,

1:47:01 and you assaulted someone with a weapon." And then the question is,

1:47:05 "What do you remember?" And you say to me as a participant,

1:47:09 because you've been selected out

1:47:11 to specifically never having had this experience...

1:47:13 And just to be clear, a weapon, I don't mean a semi-automatic weapon.

1:47:16 I mean anything.

1:47:17 And usually it was a rock.

1:47:19 And so people would say,

1:47:20 "I found..." 'Cause a weapon is just anything you use to hurt another person.

1:47:24 And I did this study in Canada.

1:47:26 We don't have guns in the same way as in some other parts of the world.

1:47:29 And so it was unlikely that my participants would have been like,

1:47:32 "Yeah, I totally have all these guns." And so they would take something,

1:47:35 an object, and hurt somebody else,

1:47:37 or they stole something, or they hit somebody.

1:47:39 So those are three of the conditions.

1:47:40 And I randomly assigned people to them,

1:47:43 and they knew that I contacted their loved ones ahead of time,

1:47:46 so they were participating in a childhood memory study,

1:47:50 an emotional childhood memory study, and they knew that.

1:47:53 And then I contacted their parents ahead of time

1:47:56 to get information about what they were like as teenagers,

1:47:59 where they lived, friends, basic things,

1:48:00 and to make sure they hadn't ever experienced any of the target events.

1:48:04 And then with that information, I said to the participants,

1:48:06 "Okay, so there's these two things your parents reported happening,

1:48:08 and one of them is a true one." And so

1:48:11 I'd always include a true one to build rapport,

1:48:14 which is, "I'm doing the what not to do of interviewing, right?"- Right.

1:48:18 I'm laying it on thick.

1:48:20 To see what's possible.

1:48:21 To see what's possible.

1:48:21 Because you have to push it to also show that it's that I can

1:48:25 do this in this context so that we can warn police to not do this.

1:48:28 So I said, "We have these two incidents that your parents reported,

1:48:32 and one of them was you had a skiing accident," blah, blah, blah.

1:48:35 one.

1:48:36 The second one was an incident where you were in contact with the police,

1:48:38 but we'll get to that." So we'd first

1:48:40 have 20 minutes talking about the true memory,

1:48:43 which people, you know, they're getting going.

1:48:45 It feels good.

1:48:46 I've got a structured interview as well,

1:48:48 which I'll then mirror in the false memory.

1:48:50 So it all feels very legit.

1:48:52 And then we get to the second memory, and I say this, you know, I...

1:48:55 "There's this other important memory

1:48:57 that your parents recalled." And then they'd say,

1:48:59 "I don't remember that." And I'd say, "Oh, okay.

1:49:02 But I have this really detailed account.

1:49:03 All you have to do is remember it."

1:49:05 And then I would do the illusion of transparency,

1:49:08 which is a really powerful psychological tool,

1:49:09 which is to make people feel like they

1:49:11 know what's going on when they don't really.

1:49:13 And the thing I would do is just say, "Well, you know,

1:49:16 if you want to, we can do this memory retrieval technique

1:49:20 called this imagination exercise." And I don't like to call it repression,

1:49:24 but sometimes we hide away memories that we don't like about ourselves.

1:49:27 And I'm using words that people know and mechanisms that people

1:49:30 have heard of that are frankly quite disputed in actual science.

1:49:34 But people go, "Oh, well,

1:49:35 maybe I did repress this." And then everybody says yes.

1:49:38 Like technically they could say no.

1:49:40 They can say, "No, I don't want to do that." But they go, "Yeah,

1:49:42 of course I want to know." And so I

1:49:44 do this imagination exercise where people close their eyes,

1:49:46 very simple, and just imagine what could have happened, basically.

1:49:49 And every time they say a detail, my very first detail ever,

1:49:52 I remember this because I was so

1:49:54 excited 'cause they've got their eyes closed, right?

1:49:56 And I'm right next to the head of department

1:49:58 because they were worried 'cause I was a PhD student...

1:50:00 that, you know, the ethics of it, the consequences.

1:50:03 Like it took years to get the protocol

1:50:05 through ethics and- ...to make sure it was safe.

1:50:08 Anyway, I'm s- I'm grinning as the person

1:50:10 with their eyes closed says the most trivial detail,

1:50:14 "I remember a blue sky." And I remember going,

1:50:19 "It's working."- Did you know it was going to happen at all?

1:50:22 Oh, no, I had no idea.

1:50:23 I had no idea.

1:50:24 That's so fascinating.

1:50:25 And so from the trivial details, and I'd always say,

1:50:27 "Yeah, good job, good job." You know, social reinforcement, little treat.

1:50:31 And they would remember more and more details,

1:50:34 and then they'd get more specific, and then they'd tell me who it was

1:50:37 they allegedly attacked or stole from, where they were.

1:50:40 And those details had to come from them

1:50:42 because I don't know enough about their lives, right?

1:50:44 So this is the other thing with false memories;

1:50:46 it's basing it on lots of real pieces of memories,

1:50:48 real places, real people, real feelings.

1:50:49 They're just woven together in a way that never happened.

1:50:52 And so just three interviews and you've got 70%

1:50:55 of people confessing to a crime that never happened.

1:50:58 First of all, great study.

1:50:59 Great, great job all around.

1:51:01 To what degree has this been elaborated on and proven further since?

1:51:06 Because it's a super powerful idea, whether it's 70% or any kind of percent.

1:51:11 What I wanted with the study is just to show it's possible.

1:51:14 That's really the powerful thing, that it's possible.

1:51:17 Right.

1:51:17 And so it could've been two people and I would've been happy.

1:51:19 The fact that it was so possible was frankly quite surprising to everybody.

1:51:24 And we did in fact cut the study short 'cause we told

1:51:26 ethics that we're only going to have like a 13% hit rate.

1:51:29 We were like, "This is working really well.

1:51:31 We're gonna stop." So,

1:51:33 and that was just because of, you know, how power calculations, whatever.

1:51:38 Science.

1:51:38 Because science.

1:51:39 And since then there have been other studies on implanting false memories.

1:51:46 There have been ones also using AI tools,

1:51:48 so like whether or not we remember or think we remember incidents differently

1:51:54 or better if they were created with AI images of ourselves or videos.

1:51:58 So, there was a study that came out, I think it was this year,

1:52:03 by a team including Elizabeth Loftus,

1:52:05 which showed that if you turn photos of yourself into videos using AI,

1:52:10 that you are more likely to believe those things happened

1:52:12 in the way that AI is telling you that they did,

1:52:15 even though AI has absolutely no idea.

1:52:17 And then, you are more likely to remember it with high confidence

1:52:20 that it happened in the way that this AI has created it.

1:52:23 And so, we can see that there's lots of versions

1:52:27 of this, whether it's in interpersonal

1:52:29 social interactions or interactions with tech.

1:52:31 And there's a big replication that's happening right

1:52:34 now at the University of Maastricht of my study,

1:52:37 or is about to happen, hopefully actually, is where we're at.

1:52:40 There's a lot of questions I want to ask you.

1:52:42 Like one of them, doesn't this mean that at scale you could

1:52:45 have something like a government use propaganda to mass gaslight a population?

1:52:53 So, implant false memories using AI, using, using whatever tools they have?

1:53:02 Yes.

1:53:03 That is definitely already happening.

1:53:06 That's terrifying.

1:53:07 Is there any- anything you've learned about defending against that?

1:53:13 I guess knowing that first step is just knowing that it's possible.

1:53:16 That's already a very powerful piece of knowledge.

1:53:19 That's right.

1:53:20 So, the first thing that's important is for people

1:53:22 to understand that they are capable of creating these false memories,

1:53:25 and that they're not this really unusual, hard-to-generate thing.

1:53:28 They're actually a normal memory process.

1:53:30 And that insight is why I wrote The Memory Illusion,

1:53:34 is because I think people need to just understand that their minds work like

1:53:37 this, and that they're really glitchy when it

1:53:39 comes to the accuracy of their autobiographical memories.

1:53:42 But again, that that's probably ultimately a good thing

1:53:45 as well in terms of our overall human experience.

1:53:49 But then, what happens if you do have an important

1:53:52 piece of information that's important and not being distorted, right?

1:53:55 You are a witness of a crime, for example,

1:53:57 and you now know that this is going to be important.

1:54:00 What do you do?

1:54:01 And the really simple answer is don't trust your brain.

1:54:03 Just make sure you write it down.

1:54:05 Assume you are going to forget everything.

1:54:07 Assume you're going to forget no matter how important,

1:54:11 how emotional, how intense, how much you say to yourself.

1:54:14 This is a failure of prospective memory, it's called.

1:54:17 "I will remember." You won't.

1:54:18 Just assume that you're not going to remember.

1:54:20 And the closer you get to the time at which an event happened,

1:54:26 and we call this contemporaneous evidence,

1:54:28 the closer you get in time, the more high-quality that memory is going to be.

1:54:31 And I think there's this myth sometimes that if you're

1:54:34 drunk or if you're high or if you're really emotional,

1:54:36 that somehow you should wait.

1:54:38 You should sort of like go home, sleep it off, and then recall your memory.

1:54:44 is not what the current advice in memory research actually says.

1:54:48 It's in the moment, as soon as possible,

1:54:51 write it down, record it outside your brain.

1:54:53 You can do it again when you wake up,

1:54:55 but then at least you have an original version.

1:54:57 Yeah.

1:54:57 You used the analogy of a Wikipedia page for memory.

1:55:00 I think that's a pretty useful way to think about it.

1:55:03 It's kind of crowdsourced by all the different influences you have,

1:55:06 all the different experiences, all the other people,

1:55:10 you telling other people about the memory,

1:55:12 that all of that edits the page, the Wikipedia page of your memory.

1:55:18 It does.

1:55:19 And collective and individual memory are these really interesting...

1:55:23 They interact in a really interesting way.

1:55:25 So I would always say when I train, for example,

1:55:29 people who go to deal with warlords in the German military.

1:55:34 I was working with agents who were going

1:55:36 abroad and who were in these really difficult

1:55:39 situations where they had to remember a lot

1:55:41 of information that was important for national security.

1:55:43 They couldn't just sit there with a tape recorder being like,

1:55:45 "Hey," or like, their phone, being like, "Hey, Mister Warlord,

1:55:48 can you just talk into this a bit closer?" You can't do that.

1:55:50 And so you have to remember it.

1:55:52 And so what they were doing is they were coming back from their deployments,

1:55:57 and they would meet up immediately and have a team meeting,

1:55:59 could be like, "What did you remember?

1:56:01 What happened?" And the problem is that they

1:56:03 would do that before writing their notes,

1:56:05 and that is, that is the wrong way around.

1:56:08 And so they don't do that anymore because I've told them not to do that anymore.

1:56:12 But it feels good.

1:56:13 It feels like collectively, we are going to remember more details.

1:56:17 Because you do, but it doesn't mean that those details are right.

1:56:20 And so that's where I'd always say have

1:56:22 your own version before you talk to anybody.

1:56:24 Then, and my colleague, Dr.

1:56:27 Annalise Fredevelt, is one of the experts on the effect of things

1:56:31 like eye closure on memory and collective memory, and she has found,

1:56:35 repeatedly, that if you remember things together,

1:56:38 especially if you've already got an original version of your own,

1:56:41 you do usually remember more details.

1:56:43 And especially if you are helping each other to remember,

1:56:46 like in a relationship.

1:56:47 You'll have someone who's better at remembering certain kinds of details,

1:56:50 maybe names or what happened or what you were doing,

1:56:54 and the other person's better at when it happened.

1:56:56 And so you can have these complementary

1:56:58 memories that come in in social situations,

1:57:01 and you can then have more details that are remembered after.

1:57:05 Right, but there are conflicting forces here.

1:57:06 So that's true, but also as you said,

1:57:08 it's true that together, you can weave a narrative that never happened.

1:57:13 So together, you can solidify the thing that actually happened,

1:57:17 maybe if you take notes beforehand.

1:57:19 But at the same time, if you don't take notes,

1:57:22 then you can just make things up very effectively together because you're like,

1:57:26 yes, ending the whole time, like building together a castle that's false.

1:57:32 Or distorted.

1:57:33 Distorted.

1:57:34 Yeah.

1:57:34 But you can also sometimes go back to your original account and go,

1:57:37 "Actually, no, that, that was a bit wrong." And so my, as again,

1:57:42 an analytical person and someone who works as an expert witness on memory cases,

1:57:45 I just want to see all the versions.

1:57:47 I want your version history.

1:57:49 I want the complete version history of your memory,

1:57:51 and then I can tell you whether I think things have gone wrong here.

1:57:54 And if so, why?

1:57:55 Have you seen like different versions of memory and they're really conflicting?

1:58:01 Like what have you learned about memory

1:58:03 from that, that they can be very conflicting?

1:58:06 People explain the same experience as very different.

1:58:09 Well, there's different people having very

1:58:10 different memories of the same experience.

1:58:12 And there's the same person having different memories of the same experience.

1:58:15 And so I work in both, in some ways, as an expert witness,

1:58:19 but mostly in the individual changing their story in a dramatic way.

1:58:24 Ah, yeah.

1:58:25 So a witness or an alleged victim saying that they, you know,

1:58:28 having X story the first time they go to the police, and then three years later,

1:58:33 having a very different, sometimes categorically different account.

1:58:36 And the question is are they just,

1:58:39 were they just too shy initially to say what really happened?

1:58:42 Were they, were they under pressure from other people?

1:58:46 Were they not really remembering?

1:58:47 You know, why has it changed?

1:58:49 Or could it be that they have been

1:58:53 undergone some really problematic like hypnotherapy or just shady

1:58:57 therapy in general that has like convinced them

1:58:59 that things are maybe much worse than they initially remembered?

1:59:02 And it's not that therapy doesn't nec- Like

1:59:05 therapy can bring out more details, for sure,

1:59:07 but the problem is that certain kinds of therapy mirror what

1:59:10 we do in false memory research in terms of implanting false memories,

1:59:13 and it just makes it really messy and you just...

1:59:16 It makes the quality of the evidence really low because we can

1:59:19 no longer tell what is because of the therapy and what's actually remembered.

1:59:22 This is so fascinating.

1:59:23 What are the ways you can possibly figure out which is true,

1:59:26 the thing you remembered initially or the thing

1:59:29 you're now remembering four years later?

1:59:31 Receipts.

1:59:31 That's all you got.

1:59:32 You have to look at your original versions.

1:59:34 If you only have your version now, the only thing you can look for is

1:59:38 evidence that confirms or shows that it didn't happen.

1:59:41 If you can't access that, then it ultimately is a matter

1:59:45 of, especially if you've got like two people saying completely different things,

1:59:48 it ends up being a battle of confidence ultimately.

1:59:51 This is a tricky question, but you mentioned therapy.

1:59:56 It does seem like what therapists do is they want to find a problem,

2:00:01 and they can then just project the problem

2:00:04 and then convince you the problem existed.

2:00:06 So how do you know...

2:00:08 Is like therapy even an effective...

2:00:10 It takes a very special therapist not to implant, right?

2:00:14 A trauma that never happened or, or details

2:00:19 that never happened to a trauma that did.

2:00:22 It depends on the kind of therapy.

2:00:23 So there's a lot of therapy that is evidence-based and that is very

2:00:26 much focused on tackling sort of feelings and reactions that you have right now.

2:00:32 Then there is an area or a bunch of areas of therapy, including psychoanalysis,

2:00:37 which are very focused on trying to find

2:00:41 retroactively sources of mental illness in your personal past.

2:00:47 And I am very critical of the kinds of...

2:00:52 Well, both from an explanatory perspective,

2:00:55 but also from a false memory perspective.

2:00:57 I don't think that we are the way we

2:00:59 are because of individual incidents that happened to us.

2:01:01 I think that is a wild thing to think about the brain.

2:01:04 Like to be like you, you are the way you are because of this one

2:01:07 interaction you had that one time is like...

2:01:09 I mean, maybe this explains a tiny bit of you,

2:01:12 but what about all the other life experiences you have every single day?

2:01:14 And so I think that there's sometimes

2:01:16 an oversimplified searching for answers or sources

2:01:17 of problems that we have that sources

2:01:18 of problems that we have that I don't like.

2:01:21 I don't think it's true.

2:01:22 And I think that there can be

2:01:24 an uncautious approach to memory, as you were saying,

2:01:27 where you have someone who is saying things and your role as a therapist

2:01:33 is to help them manage their emotions now and to feel better.

2:01:35 That's the other thing is that they have a very different role than I do.

2:01:38 A therapist is trying to manage the person's well-being now.

2:01:42 whereas I am looking at the evidentiary quality.

2:01:44 That is a complete...

2:01:45 I'm almost like the not quite the other side, but I'm in a very different role.

2:01:49 Well, you just want the truth.

2:01:51 Well, I'm criticizing and analyzing their memories,

2:01:54 whereas the others, the therapists, are more likely to be trying to help

2:01:57 them manage the memories in their day-to-day life.

2:01:59 And so it doesn't matter if they're true or not to therapists.

2:02:02 What matters is that they're troubling to the people themselves.

2:02:04 But once you get into a courtroom setting, as you say...

2:02:07 the facts and what actually happened matter.

2:02:09 And it's not just what you remember, it's what actually happened.

2:02:14 Maybe you can speak to the other,

2:02:15 the non-courtroom setting, because this is all...

2:02:17 The positive side of it is you can basically shape your memories to be happier.

2:02:25 I mean, I find this in myself.

2:02:26 Maybe you could speak to that.

2:02:28 If I, you know, look into past relationships, if I just think about,

2:02:31 or maybe speak to others about the positive things...

2:02:34 really think.

2:02:35 Just think, like, I focus my mind on the memory, on the positive memories.

2:02:40 And then everything just becomes more positive.

2:02:43 And I think it makes me feel like I'm way happier about my past.

2:02:50 So there must be something to that, 'cause I

2:02:54 almost start to forget that the negative stuff happened.

2:02:57 And then the same thing on the flip side is if you focus on the negative,

2:03:01 then the negative stuff just overpowers everything else and you

2:03:06 have a very heavy negative feeling about your past.

2:03:10 So that seems, like the way to live a healthy life,

2:03:16 a happy life is just to focus on the positive.

2:03:18 Not to sound cliché, but like basically modifying your memories

2:03:23 continuously that everything was just great.

2:03:25 Is there something to that?

2:03:28 Well, the essence of that is right.

2:03:30 There is something called state-dependent memory,

2:03:32 which is that you're more likely to remember things that were consolidated

2:03:36 or created as memories if they match the state that you're in now.

2:03:42 So if you are sad now and your brain's just sort of going,

2:03:47 you're more likely to remember other sad

2:03:50 times because your memory and the emotional

2:03:51 state of your brain is basically already activating those networks of sadness.

2:03:56 And it's like, here are some other sad

2:03:58 things and shitty things that happened to you.

2:04:00 And it's the same with if you are embarrassed.

2:04:02 That's the classic one that we usually use as memory researchers,

2:04:05 is that moment where you do something

2:04:07 embarrassing and for the next like six hours,

2:04:10 all you're thinking of is all the other embarrassing things you've ever done.

2:04:13 And it's like your brain is like,

2:04:15 "Would you like some other embarrassing stories?"

2:04:17 And obviously you're going, "No, thank you.

2:04:20 Please stop," but you have this spreading activation,

2:04:23 as it's called, of just these synapses,

2:04:26 just lighting up new networks, and you're going,

2:04:29 "Ah!" And there's this other memory that's attached to the same feeling.

2:04:32 So it's the same with happiness,

2:04:34 is that people who are happier tend to remember more happy memories.

2:04:37 So most of the time, unless you're depressed,

2:04:40 most people look back at their lives with a rosy reminiscence bias.

2:04:45 They're more likely to remember the positives than the negatives.

2:04:48 But it's not quite the way you were describing it.

2:04:50 It's not quite that you only remember the good,

2:04:53 the objectively good things that happened.

2:04:55 It's more that your interpretation of the things

2:04:58 that you've experienced is either neutral or positive.

2:05:01 For me, for example, growing up with my father with apparent schizophrenia,

2:05:06 that is something that I see as a net positive.

2:05:11 So obviously at the time,

2:05:13 it was experienced in a complicated way, but in hindsight,

2:05:16 it defined my life and it completely gave me a perspective

2:05:18 of the human mind that I just wouldn't have had otherwise.

2:05:22 So I see that as a positive part of my autobiography,

2:05:25 and that is what good therapy should be doing.

2:05:29 It should be taking negative experiences

2:05:30 and not overwriting them or changing them.

2:05:32 Our brains do that naturally anyway.

2:05:34 But trying to work with what you've got, the experiences, the true experiences,

2:05:38 but then just shifting the emotional content so

2:05:41 that how you're dealing with them now is good.

2:05:45 How much of what this Daniel Kahneman type of idea is,

2:05:50 that we live a lot of our life in memory?

2:05:54 Like, it's not, you know,

2:05:57 there's the direct in the moment experience of a thing,

2:06:01 and then there's remembering that thing over and over and over and over.

2:06:05 So there's like, I don't know, getting married or whatever,

2:06:08 like some pleasant thing that if you, over a lifetime,

2:06:12 the pleasure you derive from that thing is disproportionately,

2:06:16 most of it is from remembering the thing we're experiencing it.

2:06:20 Is there something to that?

2:06:22 I think so.

2:06:23 And his experiments where he asked participants if they were offered

2:06:26 this holiday that they could go on— ...but they wouldn't remember it.

2:06:30 So they'd have the present-day experience of enjoyment on this holiday,

2:06:34 I think it was a tropical vacation or something that he'd offer people.

2:06:37 And he then said, "Well, but you're not going to be able to remember this.

2:06:42 Would you still go?" And a lot of people say, "No,

2:06:44 I wouldn't go on that holiday if

2:06:46 I can't remember it." I think that's interesting,

2:06:48 and I think that sort of "pics or it didn't happen",

2:06:52 so that the social media generation obviously is perhaps even more in line

2:06:56 with that, also in terms of how you deal with that in a social context.

2:07:00 Sharing those memories with others and those experiences and which

2:07:03 experiences end up being the important ones in our lives.

2:07:07 Yeah, there's a real case to be made.

2:07:08 There's this kind of ridiculous thing

2:07:11 that happens now whenever something cool is happening.

2:07:14 People take out their phones and film it.

2:07:15 But the case for that is that, yeah, this gives you something to look back at.

2:07:20 So it's worthwhile to take a picture, actually.

2:07:23 Although it's even more worthwhile to pay attention.

2:07:24 Attention is the glue between reality and memory.

2:07:26 And so if you're using your phone to not have to pay

2:07:30 attention and not have to put any work into remembering it,

2:07:32 then you're going to look at that picture later and go,

2:07:34 "What was this?" 'Cause you've tried to outsource

2:07:37 it in a way that our brains don't work.

2:07:40 How hard is it to modify memories from a neuroscience perspective?

2:07:44 So if you look at brain-computer interfaces like Neuralink, for example,

2:07:48 do you think there's a future

2:07:50 where we're implanting or modifying memories directly?

2:07:55 Yeah, I mean, that's basically what we do as human beings already,

2:07:58 and I don't see why tech couldn't do exactly the same thing.

2:08:01 Just speed that up.

2:08:02 So right now, we could do that with language, right?

2:08:04 We just talk to each other and modify them, and we just speed that up.

2:08:07 Language, but also thinking about it yourself.

2:08:09 So you can, it's called autosuggestion when

2:08:11 you suggest things to yourself that didn't happen.

2:08:13 And that often comes from reading something or seeing something

2:08:16 or thinking about something or hearing somebody else's story and going,

2:08:19 "Did something like that happen to me?" And then

2:08:21 you start picturing it and thinking about it, in what context it could have.

2:08:25 And then you start to basically implant a false memory in yourself.

2:08:27 And so that can happen as well.

2:08:29 And I think with things like Neuralink,

2:08:30 it would be the same where you'd have the ability to do that.

2:08:34 And, but again, I still think that this interaction

2:08:37 between humans and AI or AI-like systems is...

2:08:41 it is the same as a social interaction,

2:08:43 which is why I was saying it's so important, I think,

2:08:45 that we have social psychologists in the room, because ultimately,

2:08:49 whether it's an AI or another person, it's the same brain that you're modifying.

2:08:53 So what you're worried about there is that you become untethered from reality,

2:08:56 like you fabricate too many details about the memory?

2:08:59 Like, if a human is interacting with AI,

2:09:01 and the AI is telling the human what they want to hear,

2:09:05 are you worried about over time you start to just

2:09:07 have a very overly modified version of your past narrative?

2:09:15 I'm not necessarily worried about the fact

2:09:19 that AI and generative AI can create false memories.

2:09:24 That is, again, something we've also been doing for a long time.

2:09:27 Like modified photos is something pre-AI that we

2:09:29 had that was already messing with people's minds.

2:09:32 Even just what you have in the frame of a shot.

2:09:35 So if you take a holiday snap and you're omitting, like,

2:09:38 a really important part of what actually happened on that holiday,

2:09:41 'cause you're taking a picture of the nicest part and not the, you know,

2:09:43 the garbage behind you...

2:09:44 That is going to have an impact on your memory as well.

2:09:47 And so we've...

2:09:48 that...

2:09:48 Versions of that have always existed.

2:09:50 And historically, if you go even further back, I mean,

2:09:52 in some ways we've never been closer to facts than we are now.

2:09:56 There's this whole idea of like, "Oh,

2:09:57 we're living in this post-truth," or blah, blah, blah.

2:09:59 But that is not true.

2:10:01 I mean, we didn't even know how to write for a long time.

2:10:05 We had no way of reliably cataloging information,

2:10:08 never mind the scientific method, never mind reliably sharing it with one

2:10:13 another or fact-checking quickly with things like Google.

2:10:16 So I mean, we're so close to facts, but that in some ways I think is the...

2:10:21 The worry is that we've gotten comfortable feeling like we can just

2:10:24 access things that aren't modified or that are less likely to be modified,

2:10:27 and now they're more likely to be.

2:10:28 And that can interface with our memories.

2:10:32 So just a practical...

2:10:33 Is there like a protocol for self-modifying

2:10:35 memories so you can live a happier life?

2:10:39 There is, yeah.

2:10:40 It's called cognitive restructuring.

2:10:42 When you actively, deliberately change an aspect

2:10:45 of a memory usually for some therapeutic outcome,

2:10:48 so to be happier, to be better in some way.

2:10:52 That's really interesting, right?

2:10:53 Not just for if you have some kind of issue,

2:10:55 but just how to have a life well lived.

2:10:59 Right?

2:11:00 Does that work?

2:11:01 Yeah, it totally works.

2:11:02 I do it all the time.

2:11:04 Again, it's about thinking about experiences you've had, positive or negative.

2:11:07 Usually the negative are the ones we need to work on more.

2:11:12 And thinking instead of, "Wow, how terrible was that?" Thinking,

2:11:15 "What did I learn from that?

2:11:16 What has this given me that other people haven't experienced?

2:11:19 What is it that it taught me me about who are my friends?

2:11:23 What are these insights that I've won

2:11:25 from this experience?" And so I think that is

2:11:28 an important part of resilience that we

2:11:31 ideally need to celebrate and teach more than...

2:11:34 the opposite, which is hanging in the negatives.

2:11:37 That's probably really good for relationships too, right?

2:11:39 Together you form the collective memory, and you work on that.

2:11:43 You can just fabricate or modify towards the positive.

2:11:48 Well, with relationships,

2:11:49 one of my favorite research on memories is that if you ask people

2:11:53 in relationships who does most of the housework

2:11:56 or who does most of certain things, the numbers that they give you...

2:11:59 So like someone will say, "I do 60%." The other person will say,

2:12:02 "I do 50%," and you add them up,

2:12:05 that's more than 100%, and that's basically always the case.

2:12:08 And o- on lots of different fronts, people will claim that they do more,

2:12:11 and if you ask them how much their partner does, they will diminish it.

2:12:14 And so one of the tips I always say for relationships

2:12:17 in terms of memories is actually just sharing what you're actually doing.

2:12:21 So if you've...

2:12:22 Initially it feels a bit cumbersome because it's quite unnatural to be like,

2:12:27 "I've just taken out the rubbish.

2:12:29 I've just taken out the bins," or, "I've just

2:12:32 booked us a hotel." But saying it out loud

2:12:35 means the other person is able to perceive it

2:12:38 and then can add it to sort of their internal,

2:12:41 like, star chart of how much you've done in the relationship.

2:12:44 And they're more likely to And they're