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

October 14, 2025·2 hr 49 min·5 clips

Criminal psychologist Julia Shaw explains why evil is a continuum, not a binary label of monster or non-monster.

The conversation begins with moral difficulty. Julia Shaw is introduced as a criminal psychologist working across psychopathy, violent crime, evil, police interrogation, false memory, deception detection, and human sexuality. That range gives the episode its charge. She does not come across as someone chasing shock. She sounds like someone trying to understand the machinery behind behavior that can be frightening, confusing, or destructive. Sex becomes one of the main doors in. Julia describes Alfred Kinsey as a biologist who was pulled toward human sexual behavior after the war, when reproduction, policy, funding, and public curiosity were all pressing on the subject. He did not start as an expert. He spent about a year listening to students, collecting their questions, and realizing that the research needed to answer them mostly was not there. The questions were blunt because the silence around them was so thick. People wanted to know what was normal, how often others had sex, what fantasies meant, and whether homosexual fantasies or experiences changed who they were. Kinsey's answer was to go out and ask. He and his assistants interviewed thousands of people in America in the 1940s, with intensely personal questions in a culture Julia describes as far more conservative than now. The scale still feels wild. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male became a public event, popular enough that auditoriums had to be expanded. Under that story is a quieter point: private shame often survives because nobody has studied the thing plainly enough. The ending widens out. After crime, sex, memory, and environmental crime, the conversation turns to protecting life because we may be alone in this galaxy. The host closes with gratitude and TS Eliot's warning that evil is often done by people with good intentions. The episode is serious without going numb. It treats murder, sexuality, and environmental crime as linked questions about human nature, responsibility, and the fragile systems people keep misreading.

As heard by us

A patient, wide-angle conversation about crime, memory, sex, and moral uncertainty.

Julia Shaw pulls murder, sadism, false memory, interrogation, deception, bisexuality, and green crime into one conversation. It is not tidy, and that is part of what gives it weight: criminal psychology, sexuality, and moral judgment keep circling the same human questions.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a serious, wide-ranging look at crime, memory, and sexuality.

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