Modern Wisdom - #134 - Seth Stephens-Davidowitz - How Much Does Google Know About Me?

Episode Date: January 16, 2020

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a former Data Scientist at Google and a writer. There are things which you write into Google which you have never told another person. Our search history is a window into the deepest recesses of our mind which has never before been available. Time for the big data analysts like Seth to step in and look at what we can discover from these information. Why do people commit suicide? How many Americans are racist? What is the most popular type of pornography in India? And what is the biggest determining factor in a child's development? Extra Stuff: Buy Everybody Lies - https://amzn.to/2QZqHH0 Follow Stephen on Twitter - https://twitter.com/SethS_D Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh yes, hello humans, welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Seth Stevens-Davidowitz. He is a former data scientist at Google, now turned author and writer. We're talking about big data today. Previously, we touched on something similar actually. If you listen to the episode I did with Professor David Carroll, one of the main guys in Netflix is the great hack documentary. But rather than working out the ethical concerns of whether or not we should be concerned about people capturing our data, we're actually going into the data itself anonymously. You see, the fact of the matter is that Google knows things about you that even your closest

friends don't, because the things that you type into a search engine in the privacy of your own web browsing are often things that you've never told anybody else. So in short, Seth has a window into your soul that maybe you didn't even know was there and we're going to look at it today. So get ready for this one. Oh yeah, also, if you are new here or if you haven't hit the subscribe button yet, please do so. It would make me very happy indeed. Now please welcome the wise and wonderful

Seth Stephen Davidowitz. So first things first, how do you describe what you do for work on a day-to-day basis? Well, so I guess I'm a data scientist and an author writer. So I spent most of my time on books. I wrote everybody's lies. I'm trying to write in the process of writing another book. And other than that, I don't know. A lot of random projects. I do random consulting for companies.

And there's not necessarily a standard day, but. I got you. Is it a lot of time on spreadsheets, so similar sort of applications? Yeah. Are the coding language. There's a lot of time on spreadsheets or similar sort of applications? Yeah, the R, the coding language, there's a lot of time with that. Kind of moving back and forth between R and Google Docs, because I guess the combination of data science, which is R and writing, which is Google Docs. And then, sometimes just researching a lot of like reading.

So a lot of reading other people's studies, kind of reading what other people are talking about since I can't just write about my own studies. Which is a shame. Yeah. Yeah, we love it. So you wrote a book called Everybody Lies, New York Times Best Seller, but I heard that you wanted to call it How Big Is My Penis. Is that right? That is correct. You wanted to call your book big is my penis? Is that right? That is correct. You want to call your book, how big is your penis? No, how big is my penis? How big is my penis? Basically, the reason for it is that that's one of the top.

I talk about how many ask more Google more questions about their penis than any other body part. And that one of the top questions they ask Google about, the penis is how big is my penis, which is just like an absurd question to ask Google. Right, you're not gonna be able to answer that. I kind of thought that that title would kind of get the flavor of some of the things I was talking about. That kind of, but I think one of the things that my research has shown is the absurdity of the human condition, the absurdity of the human condition, the absurdity of people. We kind of put it up very presentable front, but in the privacy of your own home on their Google search engine or the websites they visit and they go to porn hub, they kind of just show

a different side of themselves, which is a little bit stupider, a little bit less polished, a little bit weirder, a little bit sometimes nastier. But I think it's kind of an interesting view of people that we haven't really previously had. Yeah, that totally unfatted view where you don't think that anyone else is watching, but the data analysts are watching. You are. Well, the data I analyze is all anonymous and aggregate, so I don't know that any particular man searched out because my penis, I just know that lots of men are. All right.

You know what I think? I think there is an opening in the market for an app, which can use AR. Like augmented reality, you hold it up to your face, you angle the penis, and then it works out how big it is. Well, how would you, you'd have to know how big the face is, right? You need like something behind. You need to be like in standing in front of the Hikel tower or something. But then you need to know the distance. And I know the distance, yeah, but I don't think just compete, yeah.

I don't know. Yeah, Ruler is easier, isn't it? Anyway, anyway, we're getting off, we get enough track. Um, so you have this unique. I think the question is so important to them that I think one of the reasons they ask that is like, there's almost like men don't want to face the moment of truth.

Like it would be easy to just measure but they're like, is there another way to find the answer? Cause there's so much insecurity, I guess, and fear and anxiety around the process. Have you seen the South Park episodes where they do that? Where they do what? They measure their penis. Have you seen this? I haven't seen it.

Anyone who's listening, if you get the opportunity to go back and watch the South Park episode where they all measure each other's penises, it's unbelievable because they there's some people who have really small measurements and they all get really, really angry. So then they create this new formula where they adjust for the yaw, like the height of the penis and then they divide it and they create this ratio and it actually makes it like several feet long. And then every all of the problems that everybody had has been completely accounted for. Now you're saffon in sports, I remember like my friends I rear nerdy,

but we're like we're nerdy and very very competitive. So like we'd get out the stats at the end of the year. I played baseball and then like We'd all like create the you know You'd have like the basic stats like you're adding average your home runs your rbis your runs Whatever and then we'd all create metrics Like how we should we should wait the different categories? To kind of come up with overall offent, the kind of overall production. And we all came up with some metric where we were ranked number one.

That's the adjusted penis size. So why call it everybody lies then? Why was the book everybody? Well, first of all, my publisher chose that title. But I think it's a good title. It kind of gets the point. Some of my research, which is that people in their day-to-day life lie a lot, so we lie face-to-face. We also lie surprisingly somewhat to anonymous surveys. That's a traditional way we tried to

understand human beings historically, what they're thinking, what they're going to do, what they have done, why they do the things they do is surveys, so Gallup or Pew or Quinnipiac or another organization will ask people questions. And even with this methodology, even though it's anonymous, people do shade their answers to try to sound good. Maybe they're lying to themselves. Maybe they're just in a habit of lying. They don't have an incentive to tell the truth, so they are more likely to say they voted in a previous election than they did. They exaggerate how frequently they have sex. If you ask them in surveys, you compare that to actual condoms sales.

I show in the book like it doesn't correspond at all. So you know, how free, what media they consume, how free they're watching kind of high browse stuff versus low browse stuff, they'll all lie in the surveys. But now thanks to the internet and largely Google but other websites as well, we have kind of a new window into people that I think gets cut through the lies a lot. So Google, for example, you see people searching how to vote, where to vote, that's really predictive

with their actually no vote. You talk, see them searching about sexless marriage or sexless relationship. My boyfriend doesn't want to have sex with me. And then you get kind of a more realistic picture of how what happens in many relationships. And you see people searching for their sexual insecurity or you see people, what they actually want to read, the media they actually want to consume. I think it's really much more accurate.

And then there's a whole section on pornography. I mean, talk about an area where there's been a huge amount of deception because it's kind of, there are so many taboos in that area. I think we really do have unprecedented window into people's kind of sexual sexuality that we've never had before. Thanks to pornography and I analyzed in everybody in everybody lies Kind of have a whole section or analyze just porn up what people actually want to Which you know make people giggle, but it's also I think pretty fascinating and you kind of revolutionary You kind of this window into people's minds that we didn't have with I mean, you know You all of human history up until five years ago. We didn't know that we didn't know what people fantasized about It's actually we might have had some clues by novels, people wrote, or some theories

that some people like Freud came up with, or there's some surveys that Kim Z. study, but it's kind of a little bit, another question on how accurate that was, kind of a biased sample, but I think now we kind of have really much better clues in that arena. So kind of over and over again, I think. So there are just so many areas where I think we do have on-press head insights to people. Yeah, and then it's your job to sift through this aggregated anonymous data and try and analyze

of come up with some correlations between things and some interesting insights. Yeah, I think that's kind of the talent. There's kind of an art to data science. I think data science people kind of don't usually associate with creativity. We usually think of art, you know, a painter's creative, a musician's creative, a data scientist. We think it's kind of this nerdy, just kind of sit by a computer, plugs the numbers in. And I think creativity is a huge part of data science. Otherwise, you kind of just drown in the data. And you don't really know what's interesting.

So kind of, the creativity is kind of looking through all that and finding those nuggets of wisdom, you know, the how big is my penis search or the, the, my other favorite is Indian. And the top Google search, my husband wants in India is my husband wants me to breastfeed him. And that's like India. Yeah, no, I'm not joking.

That's like India and nowhere else. And also breastfeeding porn is a recently popular in India, nowhere else. I don't know if it's important. That's kind of the types of things that, I mean, that's kind of like, that's kind of shocking in many ways, because it's not talked about.

It wasn't really acknowledged without this data. And it kind of shows that some sort of fetish can develop in one part of the world and nowhere else and become kind of somewhat widespread. I don't think it's the majority of Indian men, but it's certainly a large number. A significant minority, yeah. Minority without being talked about at all.

How else would you find about that? How else would you know? Yeah, you wouldn't find out about it without without this type of data. So that yeah, so things like that, I mean, you know, kind of finding those insights amidst, you know, just kind of roles and rows of data is kind of an art and something that you get better at with practice and takes a lot of creativity. One of the things that I absolutely love, porn hub issue, a bunch of stats at the end of each year, nothing, they don't delve into it, like you do, but it's like, I'm out of play time,

the top searches by area and stuff like that, and even the things that they do in-house, it's pretty powerful. Oh yeah, and I know some of the data scientists there, and they're really good, and it is just, I think people don't take it almost seriously enough, an academia or sociologist. I kind of reach out to Pornhub when I write my book,

and I really want to look at your data. I'm explaining them with data scientists, I showed them some of the work I had done writing columns from New York Times, and they agreed to give me the data, but I would have thought that I'm like, do you get 10 emails a day from like sex researchers or sociologists and they're like I like, no, you know, they're kind of comfortable with the methodologies they've been using for 50, 60 years and you know, the academic kind of loosely and doesn't change that quickly and you know, so it's kind of, I think your instinct and my instinct is all that is like, wow, that's

fascinating, like you know, and you know, relative to kind of just another survey of out human beings and what they're doing, what they're interested in sexually actually seeing, this data from this enormous site of sexual fantasy or sexual desire is pretty wild. What happens when you receive the porn hub stats in your drop box or overweat transfer or whatever it is? Is it just like this gargantuan kind of sticky like disgusting sort of been stuck or whatever it is. Is it just like this gargantuan kind of sticky like disgusting sort of, been stuck?

So whatever. Did it feel like Iki open in that file versus opening another one? I'm a little bit like socially oblivious. So like for me, it's just like, I might as well just be getting a data set of like interest rate historically, you know, an inflation historically

and running the numbers on that. To me, I'm just, except this one was more interesting to me, but I'm not like, oh, this is a weird use of my time. We're like, a lot of people would be kind of queasy looking at this or embarrassing with the virus looking at this. I don't really, whatever part of the brain normal people have, that kind of chis- chis away from that type of research

or that type of activity, I definitely don't so. I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was- I was found the right industry to be in that. Yeah, well, I kind of just invented this industry, I think, but yeah, it does fit my personality. If you have like, you're kind of a little bit, I guess, shameless and not pleasing. I think there's kind of a good combination, which is that I built up before I wrote my book, I built up all these credentials. I did a PhD in economics at Harvard, and I went to Stanford, it's like, philosophy, I was right or familiar at times, I worked at Google.

So I think when I do this, people aren't like, people are like, give me a lot of leeway. Like if I was like some 20 year old in my bait, like 20 year old, with no qualification, I'm just like, hey, you know, I'm analyzing porn, everyone would be like, you know, that herb, or like, what's that guy doing? But like, from with me, no qualification and just like hey you know I'm analyzing porn and I'm gonna be like you know that River like what what's that guy doing but like from with me it's like oh you know this is science like I I think The people assume a certain respectability with me just based on the credentials that I kind of get away with

You know more than I than I otherwise would I think You know if if I didn't have the credentials and I came out with the research I did, I think a lot of people would be like, wait, that guy just blocked himself and is a part of it and watched porn. Yeah, this is just him. This is him and his breastfeeding, his breastfeeding stuff. Yeah, with the credentials, it's kind of like, oh, that guy is, you know, exploring the deepest recesses of the human psyche.

He's got this veneer of like, respectability and academic kind of justification, right? Yeah. And I get invited to like all these talks and like prestigious places and it's never like, you know, it's a, it's a, and I, I, I, you know, which I, I'm kind of like, did you, you, you feel free like my book or like how, how filthy it is and how inappropriate it is at times but I get for some reason I just keep on getting away with it. Preven proper academics everywhere and there's you just swimming in porn hub statistics towards

the stage to say hello to everyone. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I talk I usually you know bring up some of the porn data but I try to I try again I try to use the that once the introduction comes and there's so much respectability that it's kind of like, people kind of go, go up, you know, I can kind of take them along. I'm like, uh, ride, so. Got you. So what else, what else have we learned from porn? Let's stay with porn for a second before we get away from porn.

Were there any other sort of surprising things that came up other than the... There's some of them, I think, when I came, when the book came out, people said they were really shocking to me me I didn't find this shocking so for example the popularity of rape porn among women is very very striking in data a huge percent of heterosexual porn searches or videos watch her women are her kind of violent humiliation against the woman and much more popular among women than men about twice as popular among women than men That That didn't shock me there have been surveys that kind of have talked about that a lot of women have these types of fantasies and

Kind of just in my conversations with friends. I very honest friends. This is kind of you know This kind of come up in my life that That it didn't when I when I saw the date on like oh my god that shock like I kind of, you know, this kind of come up in my life that it didn't, when I saw the date, I'm not like, oh my god, that shot, I kind of put it. I mean, look at the most popular book of the last- Yeah, yeah, yeah, so- 50 should be right. But, you know, it still is, it still did have, I think what was more interesting is you actually can compare the percentages around the world and it's not correlated all with how women are treated. That's kind of interesting. It's not like also what you mean. In other words, so you have like some

areas like Berkeley, California, like parts of, you know, or parts of Sweden or Finland or Netherlands, which Finland now is a female prime minister and like there were there was really much progressive attitudes towards women than you have areas like Saudi Arabia, Iran, where women are really held back. And it's not like, so you could really rank kind of how women are treated, are they treated like second class citizens?

How egalitarian is. Yeah, and you might, you could imagine that that could affect how women think about themselves and kind of affect their fantasies, but it doesn't seem to, you know, it's a pretty... It's universal, universal design, you watch some hardcore point. Even if women are crawling off,

telling, you know, saying they could be everything, they're equal to men, they're, you know, they're still is, that fantasy seems to exist and about the same number as the places where women are saying like men should dominate you, men are the, you know, the, it should be the leaders of society, so that was pretty interesting. That is, that is really, really fascinating. Do you ever ask the why question? Do you ever bother to delve into that, or do you just sort of stick to the, to the data?

So I'm trying to, in the next, in the next level, you know, I think there are, you know, it's, I think the initial thing, initially I was kind of just presenting the facts, and I have, I have made much progress. I thought other people would come up with theory, initially I was kind of just presenting the facts. And I have made much progress. I thought other people would come up with theories. So I thought when I wrote the breastfeeding one, people are going to like, maybe there's some explanation that's very obvious that, you know, I didn't know that, but nothing's come up, you know, to kind of explain this. So I don't know if it's tough.

I think, you know, I think there are definitely some areas. So definitely, I think people are more attracted to people they grew up around, or like people like them. I think, maybe more, maybe because of their environment. So there's kind of been this long idea that opposites attract. And I think if you see in dating data, it's not true at all.

So in dating data, it's very, very clear that people are drawn to people who are similar to themselves on just about any dimension you could measure. And pornography data, it also seems to be the case. So if you look at areas that have high African-American populations, they tend to watch porn featuring African-American, so men in that area, those areas tend to watch porn featuring African American women in large numbers. So it's not like, you know, yeah, I think you could imagine that it would go the opposite way and the fantasy of the black man would be, you know, the white cheerleader or something. I don't know that you could have met, but it's definitely not the case. That kind of, I

think, also moves towards the wide direction, then maybe sexual, I do think that one of the things you see is that sexual fantasies needs to be related to childhood in various ways. So people tend to have fantasies from their childhood and fantasize about baby sitters or teachers. I think there's kind of a, there's kind of maybe kind of key moments in childhood where people kind of get imprinted sexually. That also dovetails with some other research in fields of sexuality that child and imprinting

is really important in developing adult sexuality. So I would explain why if you know a black man had grown up around a lot of black woman, he'd probably move more likely to be attracted to black woman than my wife had in me. Yeah, I get that. What about when we're talking about the split between heterosexual and homosexual, there must be some interesting insights there about how many men and women are being truthful about their sexuality? Yeah, so one of the things that's also striking the day, which also didn't surprise me just because it had come up

in conversations I'd had with Ray Honest France is the popularity of lesbian porn among women who otherwise consider themselves totally straight. And I think, you know, I don't think that they're necessarily in the closet. So I think about, I don't remember these examples. I think something like 20 to 25% of pornography views from women or for lesbian explicitly lesbian porn. And I think you know this has come off in surveys of focus groups a lot of women you know that they live in Berkeley or San Francisco or areas where it's totally you know

or where we're you know in this day and age, I think it's pretty okay to be lesbian. I don't think there are many social pressures to be heterosexual and they consider themselves straight. They only wanna pursue relationships with men, but they're just like, the female body's hotter. Like it's just, they can, I think, disconnect kind of the real, emotional woman

or maybe sometimes, I don't want to over-denerize, but woman may be better at disconnecting the kind of emotional romantic connection to just your physical in interesting ways possibly. I don't know. That's quite unique insight because I doubt that the equivalent would be true for men with gay porn. Yeah, what you see with men is that gay porn is about 5%, depending on the site you look at, but it seems like about 5% of male porn, maybe a little bit lower, is for gay porn. And one of the things you see is that it seems pretty clear, it's almost as high in areas where it's hard to be gay, where a lot of fewer men say their gay. So a place like Mississippi or Alabama or Tennessee, if you ask men, are you gay?

Only about 1 to 2% of men will say they're gay, whereas in New York and California, about 4% of men will say they're gay. But the gay porn searches are almost the same everywhere, which I think says that a lot of the men in Mississippi are in the closet. You know, I do think you also see with the searches. So the number one search, like one of the top searches, right, in the same session where someone searches gate porn, is gate test. There's always kind of ridiculous searches. I like that how big is my penis search. I ask you the ridiculous questions to try to figure out like,

are you gay? But I think, and these searchers are much more common in the place where it's hard to be gay, the gay as searches. And I think when you see these kind of the search strings, you kind of see a tortured man, or man who's really uncomfortable with his sexuality, and is trying to find some way to prove that he's not gay.

You know, but- Almost to himself, he's not proving it to any of the else, right? Yeah, there's some stupid internet test. So I think you do see kind of the torture that some gay men feel in places where it is hard to, yeah, and it's changing, thankfully, a fewer and fewer parts of the world now. You know, having anti-day attitudes, but there still are a lot of places.

Yeah, it's interesting now where you're talking about these strings of search terms, where you can weave together an narrative of what's going on. Were there any other strings of search terms that you thought were particularly interesting or anything you've come across recently? Yeah, so one of them I've been working on articles now, but I've been looking at a dark topic with suicide. I think it's an important topic because you could imagine if you had a search string, if you had a string of searches and someone searches how to commit suicide, you could imagine

looking at the searches earlier and kind of getting a view of what's causing them to have that thought. I think that's another area where we don't have right now a great idea of why everybody, you know, why people think of suicide because there's so much stigma around that whole area. And one of the things I found, which is really surprising, was a somewhat common cause of suicidal thought among young people, a somewhat common cause of suicidal thought among young people is herpes, getting diagnosed with herpes, the STD, which kind of sounds a little ridiculous. It's a disease that's actually pretty common, and it's not one with life threatening the physical symptoms, or to the best of my knowledge, fairly limited.

But I think the stigma is immense, you can imagine that you're a young person who's just gone diagnosed with herpes. When people are 18, 19 years old, I mean I'd go back to my own experience in that age group, you don't know what's going on. You don't know how the world works. It's such a time of extreme paranoia that there's something fundamentally wrong with you. I mean, it's kind of like the kids in Mississippi are searching gate porn and gate test. It's so easy to get paranoid that you're kind of lacking in some fundamental way. You don't know what's common, what isn't common. I've heard stories of women that, if you're little girls who freak out when they first grow breast,

that they have breast cancer or something. It's like when you're a kid and when you're, I think the possibility for kind of extreme paranoia is very high, and it can, the data says, it can lead you to be so much pain and so much anxiety that you actually think of committing suicide. So I think that's really a promising area of research to kind of get in the mindset of the suicidal, particularly young people, feeling suicidal, and maybe starting

to fight these attitudes. The other thing I found is the number one search in the search train, when people search herpes and how to commit suicide is celebrities with herpes, which is they're basically looking for role models. That's actually a common search for just about any illness, so people who have depression search celebrities with depression, people have back pains, search celebrities with back pain, people are looking for role models for heroes of theirs who share their condition so that they feel less stigmatized and I looked on, what kind of happens when you search celebrities with herpes?

And if you search celebrities with just about any illness, celebrities with depression, huge number of celebrities openly discuss their depression in part to fight the stigma, celebrities with back pain, celebrities with, and just about any illness you can think of a long list of celebrities saying they're kind of coming out of that closet to help. I think to their credit to help their fans who might also be struggling with this problem, but celebrity purpees you see basically with the top sites at least last time I checked was just celebrities denying they had this. It's the opposite.

Yeah, then you can imagine, all right, like put all this data together. You have young people, they're Dino's, they're thing-o-communic suicide, they're looking for celebrities with herpes, instead of getting created with a list of celebrities' videos saying, you know, this is nothing to be ashamed of. It's not a big deal. I live with this. You know, it's, uh, you have celebrity saying, I would never have. No, no, it's, uh, you know, yeah, it's, it's kind of like, it kind of, every time I tell this, it does make people giggle. And, you know, I admit, I've giggled sometimes myself, but I think it actually is, like,

kind of profound and, and serious and shows the power of this, kind of this unpharmished window into the human mind and how powerful that could be. A lot of people are suffering in ways that it makes us giggle because they're so silly, but to that person, it's not silly. It's like they might as well be in Auschwitz. The pain that someone a suicidal person is feeling, no matter what the cause of it, is extreme. So I think getting a sense of better sense of the,

people's kind of darker thoughts can be really helpful. And that kind of, we kind of have that kind of suggest kind of an obvious way to change it Get more celebrities to say to cut you know say they're Verpes I'm not sure I'm not sure how you mandate for that But yeah, you're right the social I don't know you'd say the social policy implications the welfare implications the advertising role model the Everything there's the downstream from this, you know, third order,

fourth order, fifth order effect of us realizing this, super, super profound. I hope, you know, we're only halfway through this, but one of the things that's certainly coming to mind at the moment for me is that you're right. What you've done so far with your first book is kind of just laid out the facts, right? This is, this is what it is.

That's the surface level of the permafrost, right? But the roots underneath, that's the job of a lot of people. Several orders of magnitude more people than a guy with, with a, with our code and a Google doc like. Yeah, yeah. And there are, there are, there are lots of people in this area and you know, data science is just exploding in all kinds of ways. And I think a lot of people are,

I think definitely millennials or people younger than millennials are also looking, it seems like the values are shifting a little bit where it's less about just making money. So I think initially everyone's kinda like, oh, data science, that's a lucrative field, I can get a job at getting more people to click on ads or work, get a job in finance, which are totally fine jobs. Low in the holds, they're swimming through porn hub data five years after they finished

that. I have a lot of people reaching out to me that they're kind of bored of studying. They like data science, but they're kind of bored of getting people to click on ads. And they feel kind of unfulfilled and lacking purpose. And I think there are ways to use this data towards social good as well. But what's your, so we're in 2020, you just crossed the threshold into the year of the presidential election in America. I mean, this must be like you staring down the barrel of the Superbowl for your your Industry, is it you're just gonna have inundated with loads of different types of statistics and then you can measure them before and look at what happens afterwards Have you got some plans for this?

I play around every election. There are definitely insights in the internet. You know, I think Nate Silver of 538 does a really good job of making projections based on kind of all the data. So it can be hard to be, you know, tough to beat his predictions. You know, he put so much thought and care into. Did he? Did you retweet something of his about, was it the Democratic nominees? Was that like this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, he kind of, he just built a model of the democratic nominee. And I just thought that this wasn't based on data.

This is actually just based on my intuition that he's maybe underestimating Biko Bloomberg's chances just because he's his whole kind of in the past models, the past elections where he's building the models from. There's never been a candidate who is willing to just spend billions of dollars to try to get elected So I think we don't really know how that's gonna play out and that kind of you know makes me say you shouldn't You know, I think in his model boom works at 1% or or something like that And I kind of think you know maybe 5 to 10% just because

The amount of resources is gonna throw at this problem going.. What's the, have you looked at much data? I don't know whether you can predict this far out, but have you looked at much data for moving forward into 2020? I think it's time out. This far out is tough. You need to look closer. I think so many people just aren't really thinking about their election. A lot of it, a lot of the general election will come down to who's going to actually turn out to vote.

And that we're going to need to wait a few weeks before the election, we're going to really get clues on who's actually going to turn out to vote. You hear the story that people decide as they cross the threshold into the voting booth, right? It's like the decision that they actually feel like they make is that, but it must be so interesting to compare because you have exit polls that don't, you know, in the last election that you guys had,

that exit polls didn't marry up tremendously well with what actually happened. But were you, did you have more of an insight about what was going to go on, or retrospectively would you? I said Trump was going to win, but I don't know if that's because I'm a genius or pessimist because I'm just always that's going with genius. I'm always predicting horrible things are gonna happen but there are some

clues so one of the interesting things that correlates with voting outcome is the order you put candidates and searches so a lot of people they search Trump Clinton polls or Clinton Trump polls or Trump Clinton election. You can see if you actually look historically the order if people put Trump Clinton first they're much more likely to go Trump. They put Clinton Trump for Clinton Trump Clinton first and more likely to go Clinton. And that's kind of interesting because it might almost be subconscious and you could imagine someone like they've been searching Trump, Clinton election, Trump Clinton polls, Trump Clinton debate, and then they say, if you ask them, they're undecided.

And they go to the polling place and they think you're undecided in a few seconds before they class their vote. As you said, they say, okay, you know, I'm feeling Trump. Well, maybe they weren't undecided all along. And if you like looked at the data, they were giving away subconsciously, which way they were gonna go. Have you looked at much of Sam Harris' work on free will?

I do know, I do know some of that work, yeah. Yeah, there's some interesting stuff on that about when they say, raise your left or right hand or like pick a random city or whatever it might be. And if they put people into, is it FMR eyes, whether it can kind of do brain scans and stuff like that? And they're able to tell when someone made the decision to do the thing they're going to do before they do it. And also before they think that they realized when they were going to decide to do it.

And that's kind of this is like a more grown out version of that. Yeah. Definitely. I'm sure it happens. Yeah, I'm sure it's a pretty widespread phenomenon. Yeah. So, I'm looking at some of the things that I pulled out of the book. Can we talk about what should you say on a first date if you want a second? Oh, yeah. Well, that's not my study. That's study researchers. They actually had people go through speed dates and they had people taped their dates, like tape record, everything that was said.

And then after the date, it was heterosexual dates. The man and the woman said basically whether they want it to go on a second date, so they could actually correlate the words said on the date with the probability that both you like the other person and the other person likes you. So some of the things weren't that surprising. So for example, if a woman laughs at a man's jokes, she's more likely to like him if she wants to go on a second date. I'm pretty well known.

Men to get a woman to like them are, they're supposed to use words that show kind of support and care, so you could say things like that must have been tough or that must have been tough or that sounds hard, that kind of increases the probability that a woman likes you. And then sometimes people like give away, again, subconsciously, how they feel, or maybe not so subconsciously. But if a woman uses what are called hedge words, she says things like maybe you're kind, then she's much less likely to like the guy.

Regardless of what your topic is, maybe I like cheese, maybe I want to desert. If you want a second day, kind of whatever, it's kind of like she's kind of giving away that she's not excited about the guy in saying those things. That's a pretty interesting thing. And then the more a woman talked about herself, the more she likes the guy and the more likely the guy is to like her. So I like a good successful date tends to have more more. The woman uses eye more.

The more a woman uses eye, the more likely it's a successful date from both peoples perspective. So kind of the conversation shifts towards the woman's life. That's a good sign. I wonder if Neil Strauss could rewrite the game or could do like the game 2.0, but just do it off the back of like big data analysis. I think it's definitely promising, definitely a lot of these. I think a lot of the roles that people have come up with,

some of them are probably true, some of them you find out the data are in true. It's interesting to have some of the sort of, I don't know whether you call it like folklore or some of the stuff that people pos it about human nature, right? Like you have, from Neil Strauss, just a guy that tries to teach someone pick a part history with real-world experience to a doctor who's got a degree in psychiatry, psychology or philosophy or you know human behavior or behavioral economics, whatever it might be. For the most part, people are just kind of creating these proxies or this like closest, justifiable reason for why they think someone

does something and trying to link these two things together. And then there's you who's kind of just got this x-ray screen that actually gets to look at precisely what it is without them being worried about signalling to a researcher, without them being worried about it coming back to haunt them at work because they said that because they agreed that they voted for some terrible political party with bad views or whatever it might be. It must be, there'll be a lot of them fields I think that might end up becoming ousted or like you know, kind of really, really upended with some of the

things that big data will come up with. Well, that's not just me, but yeah, it's definitely partly you. This type of research is very powerful to all. No, sometimes it just confirms what people previously thought, again, that a woman laughs at a man joke, that means she likes him. I think that's one that we kind of figured out without data analysis, without tape recording. Everybody's all these dates and follow and you know, mining the text, but they're definitely our areas where I think you know, our intuition and our theories have been wrong because they haven't been based on data.

So what you said that you're working on a second book at the moment? What some of your research been or what have you been interested in recently? So my second book is on how you can use data to make better life decisions, kind of going off this idea of what you should say on a first date, partly based on the motivation of my book is that when I read the, when I, you can actually see now, you can get data on what registers with people as they read your book, because on Amazon, Kindle, you can see the most underlined lines. Oh, the highlight function, yeah. Exactly.

So one of the things I noticed is that people seem really interested in ways they can improve their own lives, which kind of fits the everyday lives theme, because I think people don't necessarily like to admit that as much. People don't particularly intellectuals, the time you will be drawn to my book, like to say they don't read for self-help, they read to learn more about the world or to kind of help other people. And I think you definitely do see people want to know what can I say in a first date, how can I make more money, you know, how business should I start?

So based on that, I'm basically just catering to the masses and writing a book on how you can use data better life decisions. Yeah, you can use data to work out what you should write in a book to have another New York Times best seller. Yeah, I guess that's the motivation. But so I'm going through all the different areas of like parenting and dating and

happiness and Wow, so have you have you elicit any interesting insights into parenting or happiness recently? Yeah, well, I mean, I think a lot of it's researching other people's data But we'll talk about other people's data I don't think not enough people know about but I'm really fascinated by these people who do happiness studies I don't know if you've heard about this. They ask people, they ping people different times of the day and they ask them what they're doing and they're mood. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I've said about them.

Yeah, so I think that's just kind of a really fascinating window into human happiness that I think hasn't been fully, hasn't been fully discussed. So there are always kind of interesting things and there's like some kind of interesting counter intuitive things. So for example, when people are drinking alcohol, they get a big boost in happiness. That's not surprising. So you get like three or four points on a hundred points scale of happiness if you're drinking

alcohol. But one of the things that's interesting is that people tend to drink alcohol when they're doing something already fun. So if they're're doing if they're socializing with their friends or they're having sex Then they tend to drink alcohol, but actually if you drink alcohol then it only gives you a tiny boost in happiness or no boost But if you drink alcohol when you're doing something boring which people like never do or Or much less less likely to do then you get a huge boost in happiness So you actually like get a, if you're like cleaning, you know, sweeping or the floor or something, or commuting to work.

Obviously, there are reasons sometimes not to drink during these opportunities, but it's actually more effective if you're happy. So I think people use alcohol to try to take a good experience or a great experience and make it epic, which doesn't really work, instead of kind of, kind of, avoiding the doldrums kind of,

it's kind of an anesthetic, right? Yeah, which is dangerous advice. It's kind of a path towards alcoholism. So I want to be very careful that like a lot of people can addicted to alcohol and want to just, just telling people to drink anytime they're bored or unhappy isn't necessary. You have to use caution, but it does kind of show. I think one of the things I'm trying to show

is ways that we make counter to, like the ways that counter intuitive decisions, kind of things that don't feel right can be right. So it doesn't feel right when you're having fun with friends. You know, or you're doing something really fun, you really feel like if I start drinking, this is going to take it, this is going to take me to the next level and it tends not to work out that way. You know, so, but, you know, you don't always think, oh, you know, if I have a beer to now when I'm doing something, you know, just, just, it's really boring thing, then I, you

know, that, that it'll be just fine and fun and I'll be all right. So, that's kind of, it's really interesting. It's so fascinating that it's a small proportion of the enjoyment from typical drinking activities come from the drinking and most of it comes from the activities that start, the pool, the whatever. That's probably one of the reasons we think drinking with friends is so much fun, because drinking with friends is so much fun. But being sober with friends also is so much fun. So, yeah, so we don't kind of distinguish that a lot of the reason it's so fun is because of the activity and we could just do it without it. So like, you get a huge bump in happiness if you drink while you're like getting ready to go out Rather than when you actually go out like because that's boring

So like so maybe it's so like I think people are sober when they're like taking a shower and like getting dressed And then they go out and they start and they have a few drinks So maybe from a happiness receptive to shout out the few drinks and have a drink in the shower Mm-hmm kind of enjoy the Getting dressed that you enjoy the getting dressed activity will be okay. Now taller, bolder, okay. And then you go out, you sober up, but then you're ready having fun, so it doesn't really matter. Yeah, it levels out that happiness a little bit more. How about parenting? What cool stuff

did you have you found out about parenting? The thing that data tells us on parenting. So one of the big early studies on parenting, this wasn't even necessarily big data, but they found that they kind of studied adopted kids and they found that overall the parents you have, the place you grow up, like the household you're in, doesn't make a huge effect on your overall life outcome. So effects pretty small.

So if you get adopted by this family here, or that family there, you tend to end up pretty similar. So, it's not a huge effect. So, it seems like the overall effect of parenting in that huge. But then recently, they found studies mining huge amounts of people have moved, kids who have moved during their childhood. And they found that the neighborhood you grow up in, if you move to certain neighborhoods, you do way better. So I think if you put together these two findings, the overall effect of your house isn't that big, of the household you grew up in isn't that big,

but the neighborhood you live in is pretty big. It means that it's single effect of parenting is where you raise your kids. So that has way bigger effects than basically I argue everything else you do as a parent combined. Basically the particular area you raise your kids and one of the reasons for this is that role models are really important for kids and the role models aren't just you. So if you see like girls who grow up in neighborhoods with lots of female adult female scientists are much more likely to become scientists themselves.

They kind of see they kind of see role models. African-American boys who grow up around a lot of African-American male source successful who stay married, who have jobs are much more likely to do it themselves and it's not necessarily true their own parents. So kind of one of the things, kids kind of discount advice from their parents frequently or rebel against their parents. So your parent, you know, if you're an African American boy, your dad leaves you, you may just be,

you may decide I'm gonna be the best parent ever because I don't wanna be like my asshole dad or your dad's a great dad, you're gonna, you kind of rebel the other direction. I can never live up to him. So it's kind of the parent relationships very complicated, but the neighbor relationship is not so complicated. It's kind of like if you have a pool, your black one, you have a pool at a good room, African-American role models on the street, that's unambiguously good. So in general, kind of like, the almost the best way to parent is kind

of just get a lot of other people to do the job for you. To, you know, they're just gonna discount anything you say. But if you kind of surround your kids with people who live life the way you want your kids to end up, that will have a big impact. And you can use this, you can use this finding kind of lots of ways. Kind of, I think parents try to lecture their kids

too much, try to lecture their kids too much, try to lecture their kids. And you got to do this, you got to do that. And I think a better way is take one of your friends who they admire to kind of tell them that where it's more likely to kind of, they'll want to live up to it. It kind of you utilize the fact that, I think,

from the evidence that other people are much more influential on your kid than you are because again, their relationship with you is very complicated. Yeah, it's so funny that you can outsource parenting to the Joneses next door and be like, right, you take our kids and I'll take your kids and you be as good as you can and I'll be as good as I can and we'll just have loads of Elon Musk's. And it means you got to be cautious in who you, the juniors you choose, the particular juniors are juniors you choose. You can also have bad role models in the area and you know that they see a guy who's just like is lazy all day and just drinks all the time and seems to be having a good time and he's like oh I want to be like

yeah I want to be like that. Yeah I'm not sure, it's a cliche, right? It's the cliche of the parents that spend several thousand, tens of thousands of pounds dollars per year sending their kid to some super high-end private school or they get them home-tuted and they've, you know, they've tried to give them all of the opportunities and the head start in life or whatever it might be. And this kids in with a bad crowd and grows up to be some drug dealer or getting trouble all the time, always getting kicked out of schools or whatever it might be, despite the parents' best efforts to try and have such. I think the key is that you can't, I think you can't, I think what the way I read the evidence is you can mold your kids too much because they can rebel,

you have to do it more subtly, basically. You have to be more subtle in putting them in situations without them realizing it. Where the kids have to want those outcomes, the outcomes that you want for your kids, you can't tell them to want them. They have to learn to want them themselves if they're really gonna go to it because they can be in the nicest school in the world if they're goal in life is just to party and

you know have fun and You know not to achieve academically or not work hard then they'll just do that You don't matter what you tell them no matter what school you send them But if you can somehow give you know give them early on what you tell them or what school you send them, but if you can somehow give them early on, some people who they think are really cool, who work really hard and are at achieved academically, then they'll want that in themselves. They'll ask you to go to the private school. They'll ask you to get a tutor, and that's going to be really powerful. The best thing you can probably do is trick them so that they're like,

I want a tutor and you're like, well, I don't know if I can afford it and then you finally eventually give in, make it like they're like, make it they're fighting you to, yeah, make it so that they're kind of, like you're holding back what they really want. They actually- It was They actually plan all along.

Yeah, actually we have a don't let them realize that. I think that's more effective than saying you have a tutor, you got to be there, you got to play the piano, you got to do this. But again, yeah, the plan can work. It's just you got to, you know, like, oh, somebody that think really cool. I was tutored as a kid. Like that's how I got really successful. That's a kid. Like, that's how I got really successful. That's how I got really, that's how I eventually,

like, did these things that now you think are really cool. Yeah. I'm going to, okay. Yeah, I've heard, I don't know whether this is true, but I remember hearing some stories about where parents would treat vegetables as kind of precious, and there's a reward, kind of like they do with sweets to children and they'd manage to kind of flip this sacrifice reward matrix on its head so that kids will

like really clamoring these the children were really clamoring to get vegetables because of this basic like I don't have it, I want it. Yeah, I think that I think that probably yeah, yeah, I think it's like that's gonna be like finding out that Santa Claus Isn't real or sorry if anyone's kids are watching I'm supposed to put a warning on before I do stuff like that if you are listening with your children in the room So sorry, but it's the same as that right like it's like one day they'll grow up and they'll be like 14 and realize hang on a second they'll grow up and they'll be like 14 and realize hang on a second vegetables weren't a treat all along that I've been lied to for the last 14 years of my life by these tyrants that I've got as as parents for that's man that's so interesting I wonder if any of the listeners can think back to who their role

models were that were outside of their immediate nuclear family, maybe older brother, or maybe, sorry, outside of their parent family, like older brother, friends, neighbors, whatever it might be. I wonder if anyone can try and work out where some of their passions that they thought were completely self-created actually may have come from. I always wanted to be a football coach.

Well, three doors down was this professional football or whatever it might be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'm trying to think in my own experience. I definitely. Data science, someone with low to low to spread. I want to be a professional athlete.

I think that's just from television. And that's also just like a lot of people want to be a professional athlete. I think that's just from television. And that's also just like a lot of people want to be a professional athlete. I didn't need to live necessarily near any professional athletes. You know, some dreams probably are just pretty standard. But I definitely do get an academic drive that probably came last for my parents. And more from like, yeah, I did see some people like, had gone to these really good schools and like kind of the respect that I thought they'd gotten

from having gone really good schools, which there were a number of people in my neighborhood who had gone to MIT or Harvard or Stanford and they did have this respect and I'm like, oh, I could have that respect if I go to one of these schools. Maybe it did. You look at your CV now, you just swimming in big school diplomas and all different qualifications.

I think that was from seeing that because my parents didn't go to fancy schools or anything. But yeah. It's obviously complicated. Parents also can sometimes be a role model and a lot of times kids do just follow in their parents' footsteps. But I do think the parent relationship is complicated and you do frequently see kids rebelling against other parent areas ways whereas nobody, again, like the the friends or neighbors, I think nobody, at a young age, most people think their friends and neighbors are pretty cool or their friends' parents are pretty cool. Or in like, oh, I'm going to rebel against what that person did or something. Yeah, for sure.

Um, did you do some stuff on the stock market? I was having a little bit of a look. Did you look at the way that the stock market moves and gaming the stock market? Absolutely. But I didn't have too much success. It's pretty talk. Stock market is pretty, uh, pretty chaotic. And I think, uh, you know, one of the conclusions that come up in my book is that

it's a lot easier to find insights into racism or child abuse or abortion or these other areas because unfortunately there's not as much talent trying to find those insights as the stock market. So the stock market you're impeding against astrophysicists and everybody's trying to figure out the stock market. And so it's a little bit more challenge, but... Yeah, you can't trade racism on the open market, can you? Yeah, you can't get rich finding a new map of racism in the United States. You can get rich finding hidden inefficiency in the stock market.

So I think there's definitely much more talent towards the stock market that it can be tough with public data as I've historic used finding kind of an insight. What about you mentioned abortions there? There's the thing about the Bakali sort of abortion crisis thing. Can you take us through that?

Yeah, well, I was just shocked by how frequently people search on Google for doing yourself abortions for kind of giving yourself a miscarriage, giving yourself an abortion. And these searches are almost highly concentrated, almost perfectly. If you look at where these searches are, almost perfectly map of place where it's hard

to get an abortion. And they went off a lot in 2011 when there was kind of a crack down the United States against legal abortion. So I think, and also if you actually look at the data, it does seem like there are missing pregnancies in those areas. So births, basically births have gone down a lot and abortions have kind of... abortions kind of all have gone down and you kind of do the math. It seems like probably there are some... There's kind of a bit of...

Some things happening, some not. I think a lot of that probably is off the book. Some of it's not back. There are sadly people literally search how to use a code hanger to give yourself an abortion. But some of it's kind of abortion pills, which now people are getting online, which some people say it's actually a good thing. Some abortion rights activists say it's actually a good thing because they're pretty safe

and they're way for people who don't, who are in areas where it's hard to get a legal abortion, to kind of still have an abortion without other control. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is a huge disaster, necessarily, but. Got you. So most of what we've spoken about today so far has been to do with Google. Were there any other platforms that you were able to pull data from that you could look at? Yeah. So, for now, as I talked about, I analyzed Stormfront. That's kind of a white supremacist site. Also an interesting data set.

I analyzed Wikipedia where successful people tend to be born. Where are they born? College towns and cities, mostly. So, and yeah, that's, yeah, that, that, I'm part of that sky of the genetics. They probably have, you know, if you're a kid of professors, you're more likely to be smart yourself and be more likely to be notable in various ways. But I think some of it is exposure to innovation.

Again, I'll expose, early exposure. So you see rock and roll stars are much more likely to grow up in college towns. I think the part the reason for that is because college towns are kind of places of musical innovation. The record they have, you know, they historically, they kind of change it without these kind of record stores that were kind of cutting edge, people, you know, really cool bands in common play, and they had good radio stations. So I think part of it, the early exposure to innovation. Go ahead, and what about Facebook?

We got, we've got anything cool that you've realized to Facebook recently that you've had to date it from. The only thing that I did is it looked like being correct, but I looked at, so Facebook, you can measure, for basketball, I looked at how many fans everybody has on Facebook. So I look for basketball players,

basically how many fans basketball players have. I want to see how white basketball players compared to black basketball players. So historically, it's been thought that white players get a boost in fandom. And a lot of teams have thought to... We've thought that a lot of teams hired, like, as their 12th player, their lowest bench player or white guy, just because... The token white guy.

Yeah, token white guy, because people will be more like, here you go. So you can actually... You can imagine building analysis where you know basically how good every player is in basketball you can control for all their stats So how many points they score how many of you down they have how many assists they have etc They say like controlling for that all else equal how many fans they have on Facebook and what you see is that African-American players just have went away more fans mostly due to a huge bump up among African American. They basically get a little bump from everybody. They're a little

more popular among white people, a little more popular than Asian people, a little more popular than Hispanic people, than among African Americans. They're just an enormous gain in fandom for African Americans are much more likely to support a black player who's equally good as a white player. And you got the white player who's number 12 on the bench, who hasn't done anything, and he's got like five likes on his Facebook page. No, no, no, no, yeah, but the point is that if the black guy hadn't done anything, he'd have 10 likes. So the point is the same player. It seems like, you know, again, contrary to some historical idea that there's kind of a racism bias against black players in the NBA. There seems to be a fan of anything, a big mis to black players

in building fanbays. Got you. So the final question that I wanted to ask is actually one from Jordan who's part of the Modern Wisdom Project. And he was saying, have your insights from big data change your use of technology or I think the only thing is like Google myself more. An answer. But otherwise I think I don't really think there's made a big change. Go at you. Yeah. Well, it's one of the things certainly that's come up here is it is a very Interesting insight into human nature into what it is that we do and all the stuff like that

But as you say this anonymous aggregated data is precisely that like it's happening But I don't know that it's you as is it's the guy next door Yeah, yeah That's okay. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, which is interesting. Anyway, man, this has been absolutely awesome. If we got a date or an idea in mind about when the next book is going to come out.

Right, you got 21, but I'm not sure exactly when. You got to get through this presidential election and then you're going to have to do all of your cool. Yeah, I think I'll probably should during the election because everyone, probably should join the election because everyone's focused on the election. Yeah, I was talking to Paul Bloom from Yale. And he was saying precisely the same thing.

He's doing this new book about suffering, about how people really enjoy suffering. He'd managed to find a link between BDSM and meditation, which actually sounds exactly like one of the things that you would have come up with out of big data. And he was saying, he was like, ah, I think it'll maybe be finished like, first draft start the year and blah, blah, blah.

And I was like, oh, cool. So we're gonna get it next year. And he's like, no, man, it's an election this year. I'm not releasing anything. Okay. So 2021 hopefully we'll get a load of new literacy stuff through. So where can people find you online? Is that the one that follows stuff? Where are they going?

Probably just Google, Seth, everybody lies. Nobody's going to remember my last name. So just Seth, everybody lies, and then they'll find my Twitter and everything else. So...