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

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 #bigdata #google #datascience - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  There are lots of people in this area and data science is just exploding in all kinds of ways. And I think a lot of people are definitely millennials or people younger than millennials are also looking, you know, it seems like the values are shifting a little bit where it's less about just making money. So I think initially everyone's kind of like, oh, data science, that's a lucrative field. I can get a job at, you know, getting more people to click on ads or work, get a job in finance, which are totally fine jobs. They're kind of bored of studying, you know, they like data science, but they're kind of bored of getting people to click on ads and they're, you know, they feel kind of unfulfilled and lacking purpose. And I think there are ways to use this data towards social good as well.

• 0:43Chris Williamson?

  Seth, hi, man. How are you doing?

• 0:45Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Very good. How are you?

• 0:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very good. Thank you. I'm excited for today. Big data and all this sort of stuff. It's gonna be cool.

• 0:54Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, I hope so.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  Looking forward to it. So first things first, how do you describe what you do for work or on a day to day basis?

• 1:04Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Uh, well, so I guess I'm, I guess I'm a data scientist and an author, writer. So, uh, you know, I spend most of my time on books. I wrote Everybody Lies. I'm trying to write, I'm in the process of writing another book. And, uh, 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.

• 1:30Chris Williamson?

  I got you. Is it a lot of time on spreadsheets or similar sort of applications?

• 1:34Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, R, the coding language, there's a lot of time on that, kind of moving back and forth between R and Google Docs, uh, cause I guess the combination of data science, which is R and writing, which is Google Docs.

• 1:46Chris Williamson?

  Got you.

• 1:47Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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.

• 1:57Chris Williamson?

  Which is a shame.

• 1:58Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, would be lovely. So you wrote a book called Everybody Lies, New York Times bestseller. But I heard that you wanted to call it How Big Is My Penis? Is that right?

• 2:11Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  That is, that is correct.

• 2:13Chris Williamson?

  You wanted to call your book How Big Is Your Penis?

• 2:17Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  No, How Big Is My Penis?

• 2:18Chris Williamson?

  How Big Is My Penis? Yes.

• 2:19Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Well, no, basically, the reason for it is that that's one of the top, well, I talk about how men ask more, Google more questions about their penis than any other body part. And that one of the top questions they ask Google about their penis is how big is my penis? Which is just like an absurd question to ask Google, right? They're not going to be able to answer that. I kind of thought that that title would kind of get the flavor of some of the, some of the things I was talking about. Uh, 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 people. We kind of, people kind of put on a very presentable front. But in the privacy of their own home, on their Google search engine or the websites they visit and they go to Pornhub,

• 3:00Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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. Uh, but I think it's kind of, it's kind of an interesting view of people that we haven't really previously had.

• 3:16Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, that totally unfettered view where you, you don't think that anyone else is watching, but the data analysts are watching. You are.

• 3:25Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Well, the data I analyze is all anonymous and aggregate. So I don't know that any particular man searched how big is my penis. I just know that lots of men apparently.

• 3:37Chris Williamson?

  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, it works out how big it is.

• 3:52Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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 standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or something.

• 4:01Chris Williamson?

  But then you need to know the distance.

• 4:03Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  And they know the distance, yeah, but I don't think just, yeah, I don't know.

• 4:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, a ruler is easier, isn't it? Anyway, anyway, we're getting off, we're getting off track. Um, so you have this unique.

• 4:16Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Men like when they, 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? Because there's so much insecurity, I guess, and fear and anxiety around the process.

• 4:34Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen the South Park episode where they do that?

• 4:37Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Where they do what?

• 4:38Chris Williamson?

  They measure their penis. Have you seen this?

• 4:40Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  I haven't seen it.

• 4:41Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 5:07Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  That used to happen in sports. I remember like, uh, my friends and I, we were nerdy, but we were like, we were nerdy and very, very competitive. It's 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 batting average, your home runs, your RBIs, your runs, whatever. And then we'd all create metrics, like how we should, we should weight the different categories, uh, to kind of come up with overall offense, like overall production. And we all came up with some metric where we were ranked number one.

• 5:40Chris Williamson?

  That's the, that's the adjusted penis size. So, um, why, why call it Everybody Lies then? Why, why was the book Everybody?

• 5:47Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, first of all, my publisher chose that title, but I, I, 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 lie face-to-face. We also lie, surprisingly, somewhat to anonymous surveys. That's the traditional way we've tried to understand human beings historically. What they're thinking, what they're gonna 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.

• 6:29Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  They don't have an incentive to tell the truth, so they are more likely to say they voted in the previous election than they did. They exaggerate how frequently they have sex. If you ask them in surveys, you compare that to actual condom sales, like I show in the book, like it doesn't correspond at all. So, you know, how, what media they consume, how frequently they're watching kind of highbrow stuff versus lowbrow stuff, they'll all lie in these 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, whether they're actually gonna vote. You see them searching about sexless marriage or sexless relationship.

• 7:13Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  My boyfriend doesn't wanna have sex with me. And then you get a kind of a more realistic picture of how, what happens in many relationships. You see people searching for their sexual insecurity, or you see people, what they actually wanna read, the media they actually wanna 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 analyze, in Everybody Lies, kind of have a whole section where I analyze just Pornhub, what people actually watch on Pornhub, which, yeah, makes people giggle, but it's

• 7:58Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  also, I think, pretty fascinating and kind of revolutionary, kind of this window into people's minds that we didn't have. I mean... You know, all of human history up until five years ago, we didn't know that. We didn't know what people fantasized about sexually. We might have had some clues by, you know, novels people wrote or some theories that some, you know, people like Freud came up with or, you know, there's some surveys, the Kinsey study, but it's kind of a little bit, no, there's 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 unprecedented insights to people.

• 8:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and then it's your job to sift through this aggregated anonymous data and try and analyze or come up with some correlations between things and some interesting insights.

• 8:52Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, that, 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 is creative, a musician is creative, a data scientist, we think is 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, my other favorite is Indian. Then 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.

• 9:37Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  That's like India and nowhere else. And also breastfeeding porn is reasonably popular in India and nowhere else.

• 9:46Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  That's kind of the types of things that, I mean, that's kind of like, that's kind of, 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, you know, the majority of Indian men, but certainly a large number.

• 10:07Chris Williamson?

  Significant minority, yeah.

• 10:09Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Minority without being talked about at all.

• 10:12Chris Williamson?

  And how else, how else would you find about that, right? How else would you know?

• 10:15Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, and 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 rows and rows of data is kind of an art and something that you get better at with practice and takes a lot of creativity.

• 10:33Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that I absolutely love Pornhub 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 amount of playtime, the top searches by area and stuff like that. And even that, even the things that they do in-house is pretty, pretty powerful.

• 10:51Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Oh yeah. And I know some of the data scientists there and they're, they're really good and they're, and you know, and it is just, it's kind of, I kind of, you know, I think people don't take it almost seriously enough, you know, an academia or sociologist. I kind of reached out to Pornhub when I was writing my book and I'm like, can I, I really want to look at your data. I explained I'm a data scientist and showed them some of the work I had done writing columns for New York Times and they, they agreed to give me the data. But I, 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, no, you know, you know, they're kind of comfortable with the methodologies they've been using for 50, 60 years. And, you know, academic

• 11:32Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  kind of moves slowly and doesn't change that, that quickly. And, you know, so it's kind of, I think, I think your instinct and my instinct is all is like, wow, that's fascinating. Like, you know, and, you know, relative to kind of just another survey about human beings and what they're doing, what they're interested in sexually, actually seeing kind of, you know, this data from this enormous site of, of, you know, sexual fantasy or sexual desire is pretty, pretty wild.

• 12:01Chris Williamson?

  What, what happens when you receive the Pornhub stats in your Dropbox or like over WeTransfer or whatever it is? Is it just like this gargantuan kind of sticky, like disgusting sort of stats or whatever? Did it feel icky opening that file versus opening another one?

• 12:19Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  A little bit like socially oblivious. So like for me, it's just like, I might as well have just been getting a data set of like interest rates historically, you know, and 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. Or like a lot of people would be kind of queasy looking at this or embarrassing Paris looking at this. I don't really, whatever part of the brain normal people have that kind of shy, chides away from that type of research or that type of activity. I definitely, so I wasn't at all.

• 12:51Chris Williamson?

  Found the right industry to be in then.

• 12:54Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, well, I kind of just invented.

• 12:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 12:58Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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 queasy. 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 to study philosophy. I was writer for The New York Times. I worked at Google. So I think when I do this, people aren't like, people are like, give me like, a lot of leeway. Like, if I was like some 20-year-old in my, like, 20-year-old like with no qualification, I'm just like, hey, you know, I'm analyzing porn. Everyone will be like, you know, that pervert, like, what's that guy doing? But like, with me, it's like, oh, you know, this is science. Like, I think that people assume a certain respectability with me, just based on the credentials

• 13:43Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  that I kind of get away with, you know, more than I otherwise would, I think. You know, 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 locked himself in his apartment and watched porn for two years.

• 14:00Chris Williamson?

  This is just him. This is him and his breastfeeding, his breastfeeding stuff.

• 14:04Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, but with the credentials, it's kind of like, oh, that guy is, you know, exploring the deepest recesses of the human psyche.

• 14:11Chris Williamson?

  He's got this veneer of like, respectability and academic kind of justification, right?

• 14:17Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah. And I get invited to like, all these talks and like prestigious places and it's never like, you know, it's a, and I, you know, which I, I'm kind of like, did you read like my book? Or like, how filthy it is and how inappropriate it is at times? But I, for some reason, I just keep on getting away with it.

• 14:37Chris Williamson?

  Prim and proper academics everywhere and there's you just swimming in Pornhub statistics towards the stage to like, say hello to everyone.

• 14:44Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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, you know, I can kind of take them along.

• 15:00Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Right, so.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  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 surprising things that came up other than?

• 15:08Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Some of them, I think, when I, the book came out, people said they were really shocking. To 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, videos watched by women are for kind of violence, 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 have very honest friends, this is kind of, you know, this has kind of come up in my life that, that it,

• 15:53Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  that it didn't, when I, when I saw the data, I'm not like, oh my God, that shocked, I kind of put it.

• 15:57Chris Williamson?

  I mean, look at, look at the most popular book of the last decade.

• 16:01Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Right, yeah, yeah, so.

• 16:03Chris Williamson?

  Fifty Shades of Grey.

• 16:04Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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 at all with how women are treated. That's kind of interesting. That's not, it's not like.

• 16:17Chris Williamson?

  How so, what do you mean?

• 16:18Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

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

• 16:44Chris Williamson?

  How egalitarian it is.

• 16:46Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, and you, you might, you, you could imagine that that could affect how women think about themselves and kind of, you know, affect their fantasies, but it doesn't seem to, you know, it's kind of a pretty.

• 16:55Chris Williamson?

  It's a universal, universal design to watch some hardcore porn.

• 16:59Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Even if, even if women are growing up telling, you know, saying they could be everything, they're, they're equal to men, they're, you know, there still is, that fantasy seems to exist in about the same number as the places where women are saying like, men should dominate you, men are the, you know, the, should be the leaders of society. So that was pretty interesting.

• 17:16Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 17:23Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  So I'm trying to in the next, in the next level, you know, I think there are. You know, it's, it's, I think the initial thing, initially, I was kind of just presenting the facts, and I have, I haven't made much progress. I, I thought other people would come up with theories, so I thought when I wrote the breastfeeding one, people are gonna like, maybe there's some explanation that's very obvious that, you know, I didn't know that, but nothing's come up, uh, you know, to kind of explain this. So, I, I don't know, it's, it's tough. Uh, 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, uh, or like, people like them. I think probably maybe more, maybe because of their environment. So

• 18:04Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  there's kind of been this long idea that opposites attract. Uh, 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, uh, they tend to watch porn featuring African-American, so men in that area, those areas tend to, uh, watch porn featuring African-American women in large numbers. Uh, so it's not like, you know, uh, 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, the white cheerleader or something. I don't

• 18:45Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  know that you could imagine, uh, but it's definitely not the case. Uh, so that, that kind of, I think, also moves towards the Y direction than maybe sexual. I, I do think that one of the things you see is that, uh, sexual fantasies needs to be related to childhood in various ways. Uh, so people, uh, tend to have fantasies from their childhood. They fantasize about, uh, babysitters, or like, teachers, or, I think there's kind of a, there's kind of, uh, maybe kind of key moments in childhood where people kind of get imprinted sexually. That also dovetails with some other research in, in fields of sexuality, uh, that childhood imprinting is really important in developing, uh, adult sexuality. So that would explain why, if, you know...

• 19:30Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  A black man had grown up around a lot of black women, he'd probably more likely to be attracted to black women than a man who hadn't been grown up.

• 19:40Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 19:51Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, so one of the things that's also striking today, which also didn't surprise me just because it had come up in conversations I'd had with very honest friends, is the popularity of lesbian porn among women who otherwise consider themselves totally straight. And I think, you know, I like, I don't think that they're necessarily in the closet. So like, I think about, I think it was, I don't remember the exact numbers, I think something like 20 to 25% of pornography views from women are for lesbian, explicitly lesbian porn. And I think, you know, this has come up in surveys or 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,

• 20:32Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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 want to pursue relationships with men, but they're just like, you know, the female body's hotter. Like, it's just, they can, I think, disconnect kind of the real emotional, women are maybe sometimes, I don't want to overgeneralize, but women may be better disconnecting the kind of emotional, romantic connection to just your physical in interesting ways possibly, I don't know.

• 21:07Chris Williamson?

  That's quite, that's quite unique insight because I doubt that the equivalent would be true for men with gay porn.

• 21:14Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, what you see with men is that gay porn's about 5%, you know, depending, it depends on the site you look at, but it seems like about 5% of male porn, maybe a little bit lower, is for gay porn.

• 21:26Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  And one of the things you see is that it's a it's it seems pretty clear, you know, it's almost as high in areas where it's hard to be gay, where a lot fewer men say they're 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 that a lot of the men in Mississippi are in the closet. You know, I do think you also see with the searches, the number one search, like one of the top searches, right in the same session where someone searches gay porn, is gay test. There's also kind of ridiculous searches. I like the how big is my penis

• 22:10Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

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

• 22:35Chris Williamson?

  Almost to himself. He's not proving it to anybody else, right?

• 22:39Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, to some some stupid internet test. So I think you do see kind of the torture that, you know, that some gay men feel in places where it is hard to gay, which is, you know, it's changing. Thankfully, fewer and fewer parts of the world now have anti-gay attitudes, but there still are a lot of places.

• 22:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting now where you're talking about these strings of search terms where you can weave together a 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?

• 23:11Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, so one of them, I've been I'm working on an article on this now, but I've been looking at, you know, a dark topic, but 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 what like one of the things I found which is really surprising was a somewhat common cause of suicidal thought among young people

• 23:53Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  is herpes, getting diagnosed with herpes, the STD, which kind of sounds a little ridiculous. It's not a, it's a disease actually pretty common and it's, it's not one with, you know, it's not life threatening. The physical symptoms are, to the best of my knowledge, are fairly limited. But I think the stigma is immense and you can imagine a young person who's just gotten diagnosed with herpes, when, when people are 18, 19 years old, I mean, I try to 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

• 24:35Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  who are searching gay porn and gay test. There's, it's so easy to get paranoid that you are kind of, you know, lacking in some fundamental way or, you know, you, that, that you're not, you don't know what's common, what isn't common. I've heard stories of, you know, women, that little girls will freak out when they first grow breasts, that they have breast cancer or something. Like, you know, 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, as the data says, it can lead you to be in so much pain and so much anxiety that you actually think of committing suicide. So I think that's really a promising area of

• 25:20Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  research to kind of get in the mindset of the suicidal, particularly young people, they're feeling suicidal and maybe start to fight these attitudes. Another thing I found is the number one search, when, in the search string, when people search herpes and how to commit suicide is celebrities with herpes. Which is they're basically looking for role models. It's actually, that's actually a common search for just about any illness. So people who have depression search celebrities with depression. People have back pain, 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 Google, what kind of happens when you search celebrities with herpes?

• 25:58Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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, 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 celebrities with herpes, you see, basically what 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.

• 26:39Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  You have young people, they've diagnosed with herpes, they're thinking of committing suicide, they're looking for celebrities with herpes. Instead of greet, you know, getting greeted 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, you have celebrities saying, I would never have.

• 26:58Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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. I think it actually is like, kind of profound and, and serious and shows the power of this, kind of this unvarnished window into the human mind and how powerful that could be. And, you know, that a lot of people, a lot of people are suffering in ways that, that's, 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 an Auschwitz, like, they might, like, the pain that someone, a suicidal person is feeling, no matter what the cause of it, is extreme, so, you know, like, so I think getting a sense of, getting a, getting a sense of, a better sense of

• 27:45Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  People's kind of darker thoughts can be really helpful and can, you know, that kind of, we kind of have a, that kind of suggests kind of an obvious way to change it, get more celebrities to say, to, you know, say they have herpes.

• 27:57Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure, I'm not quite sure how you mandate for that, but yeah, you're right. The social, I don't know what 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, this is what it is. That's the surface level of the permafrost, right? But the roots underneath, that's the job of, of a lot of people, several orders of magnitude

• 28:42Chris Williamson?

  more people than a guy with, with a R code and a Google Doc, like.

• 28:48Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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, you know, I think definitely millennials or people younger than millennials are also looking, you know, it seems like the values are shifting a little bit where it's less about just making money. So I think initially everyone's kind of like, oh, data science, that's a lucrative field. I can get a job at, you know, getting more people to click on ads or work, get a job in finance, which, which is totally, are totally fine jobs.

• 29:18Chris Williamson?

  Lo and behold, they're swimming through Pornhub data five years after they've finished their degree.

• 29:25Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  But I think, you know, a lot of people are reaching out to me that they're, you know, that they're kind of bored of studying, you know, they, they like data science, but they're kind of bored of, of getting people to click on ads and they're, you know, they, they feel kind of unfulfilled and lacking purpose. And I think there are ways to use this data. Towards social good as well.

• 29:42Chris Williamson?

  Got you. What's your, so we're in 2020, you've just crossed the threshold into the year of the presidential election in America. I mean, this, this must be like you staring down the barrel of the Super Bowl for your, your industry. Or is it that 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 year?

• 30:04Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, I play around every election. There are definitely insights in the internet. I think Nate Silver of 538 does a really good job of making predictions 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, he put so much thought and care into building.

• 30:24Chris Williamson?

  Did you retweet something of his about, was it the Democratic nominees? Was that like this week?

• 30:29Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but I did. 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 Michael Bloomberg's chances just because, you know, 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's willing to just spend billions of dollars to try to get elected. So I think we don't really know how that's going to play out. And that kind of, you know, makes me say you shouldn't, you know, I think in his model, Bloomberg's at 1% or something like that. And I kind of think, you know, maybe 5 to 10% just because the amount of resources he's going to throw at this problem.

• 31:12Chris Williamson?

  Got you. 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?

• 31:21Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  I think it's, I think this time out, this, this part, this time out, this far out is tough. You need, you need to look closer. You know, I think so many people just aren't really thinking about their election or, you know, 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 gonna need to wait, you know, a few weeks before the election, we'll really get clues on who's actually gonna turn out to vote.

• 31:45Chris Williamson?

  You hear the the story that people decide as they cross the threshold into the voting booth, right? Like, it's like the decision that they actually feel like they make is that. But it must be so interesting to to compare because you have exit polls that don't, you know, in the last election that you guys had, the 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?

• 32:12Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  I said Trump was gonna win, but I don't know if that's because I'm a genius or a pessimist, because I'm just always.

• 32:18Chris Williamson?

  Let's go with genius.

• 32:20Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Okay, yeah, 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 in searches. So a lot of people, they search Trump Clinton polls, or Clinton Trump polls, or Trump Clinton, 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, Clinton Trump, Clinton first, they're 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, they go to the polling place, and they think they're undecided. And then

• 33:05Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  a few seconds before they cast 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.

• 33:20Chris Williamson?

  Have you, have you, have you looked at much of Sam Harris's work on Freewill?

• 33:24Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  I do know, I do know, I do know some of that work, yeah.

• 33:27Chris Williamson?

  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 FMRI's, where they 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 gonna 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. Drawn out version of that.

• 33:56Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, definitely. I'm sure it happens. Yeah, I'm sure it's a pretty widespread phenomenon.

• 34:00Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah. So this, I'm looking at some of the things that I pulled out of the book. Can we, can we talk about, um, what, what should you say on a first date if you want a second?

• 34:11Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Oh, yeah. Well, that's not my study. That's a study of researchers. They actually had people tape. They were in speed, there are people going through speed dates and they had people tape their dates, uh, 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 wanted to go on a second date. Uh, so they could actually correlate the words said on the date with the probability that both you like the other person and that the other person likes you. So some of the things weren't that surprising. So for example, uh, if a woman laughs at a man's jokes, she's more likely to like him, to want to go on a second date. Well known. Uh, men, to get a woman to like them are,

• 34:57Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  they're supposed to use words that show kind of support and care. So you have to say things like, that must have been tough, or, uh, that, that, that must have been tough, or, you know, that sounds hard. Uh, 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, so she says things like maybe or kinda,

• 35:27Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  then she's much less likely to like the guy.

• 35:30Chris Williamson?

  Regardless of what the topic is, maybe I like cheese, maybe I want a dessert.

• 35:36Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Do you want a second date? Kind of whatever. It's kind of like she's kind of giving away that she's not excited about the guy in, in, in saying those things. So that's, that's pretty interesting. And then, uh, The more a woman talks about herself, the more she likes the guy and the more likely the guy is to like her. So like a good, successful date tends to have more, more, the woman uses I more. The more a woman uses I, the more likely it's a successful date from both people's perspective. So kind of the conversation shifts towards the woman's life. That's a good, a good sign.

• 36:11Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if, 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.

• 36:19Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  I think it's definitely, it's definitely promising. You know, definitely a lot of these, you know, I think, yeah, I think a lot of, a lot of the rules that people have come up with, you know, some of them are probably true. Some of them you find out the data aren't true. So.

• 36:39Chris Williamson?

  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 posit about human nature, right? Like you have from Neil Strauss, just a guy that tries to teach someone pick apart history with real world experience to a doctor who's got a degree in psychiatry, psychology or philosophy or, you know, human behavior, 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

• 37:23Chris Williamson?

  at precisely what it is without them being worried about signaling to a researcher, without them being worried about 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 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.

• 37:52Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Well, it's not just me, but yeah, I definitely.

• 37:54Chris Williamson?

  Yes, no, but partly.

• 37:57Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  This type of research is very powerful tool. You know, sometimes it just confirms what people, you know, previously thought again, that a woman laughs at a man joke. That that that means she likes him. I think that's one that we kind of figured out without data analysis, without tape recording. Everybody, all the, all these dates and, uh, and, you know, uh, mining the text, but, uh, there definitely are areas where I think, you know, our intuition, uh, and our theories have been wrong because they haven't been based on data.

• 38:27Chris Williamson?

  So what you you said that you're working on a second book at the moment. What's some of your research been or what have you been interested in recently?

• 38:34Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Uh, 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, part of the motivation for my book is that, uh, when I read the, when I, uh, what, what, you can actually see now, you can get kind of data on what people, what registers with people as they read your book. Because on Amazon Kindle, you can see the most underlined lines.

• 39:02Chris Williamson?

  Oh, the highlights, highlight function. Yeah.

• 39:04Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  I like, exactly. So one of the things I noticed is that people seem really interested in ways they can improve their own lives, uh, which kind of fits the everybody lies theme because I think people don't necessarily like to admit that as much. People don't, particularly intellectuals, the type of people who would 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, uh, kind of help other people. And I think you definitely do see people want to know what, what can I say on a first date? How can I make more money? Uh, you know, when, how, what, what, what business should I start? Uh, so based on that, I'm basically just catering to the masses and writing a book on how you can use data to better life decisions.

• 39:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, uh, you can use data to work out what you should write in a book to have another New York Times bestseller.

• 39:47Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, I guess that's, that, yeah, I guess that's the motivation. But so I'm going through all the different areas of life and parenting and dating and happiness and.

• 39:56Chris Williamson?

  Wow. So have you, have you elicited any interesting insights into parenting or happiness recently?

• 40:01Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I think a lot of it's researching other people's data, but talking about other people's data that 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 their mood.

• 40:18Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I have heard about them. Yeah.

• 40:20Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, so I think that's just kind of a really fascinating window into human happiness that I think hasn't been fully, you know, hasn't been fully discussed. So there are all these kind of interesting things and they're like some kind of interesting counterintuitive 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 point scale of happiness if you're drinking alcohol. But one of the things that's interesting is that we tend, people tend to drink alcohol when they're doing something already fun. So if they'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.

• 41:04Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  But if you drink alcohol when you're doing something boring, which people like never do, or are much less, less likely to do, then you get a huge boost in happiness. So you actually like get a bigger, if you're like cleaning, you know, cleaning up, sweeping or the floor or something, or commuting to work. You know, obviously there are reasons sometimes not, not to drink during these opportunities. But it's actually more effective for your happiness. 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 break, avoiding the doldrums.

• 41:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of an anesthetic, right?

• 41:43Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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 are addicted to alcohol and want to just, just telling people to drink anytime they're bored or unhappy. Isn't necessar, you know, you have to use caution, but it is kind of, it is, it does kind of show. I think one of the things I'm trying to show is ways that we may, we may counter into, like the ways that counterintuitive decisions, kind of things that don't feel right can be right. So it doesn't feel right when, 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.

• 42:23Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  You know, so, but, you know, but, but, you know, you, you don't always think, oh, you know, if I have a beer or two now when I'm doing something, you know, just, just doing this really boring thing, then I, you know, that, then I'll be just fine and fine and I'll, I'll be all right. So.

• 42:35Chris Williamson?

  That's kind of, that's really interesting. It's, it's so, 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.

• 42:47Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 42:47Chris Williamson?

  The playing darts, the pool, the whatever.

• 42:50Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  That, yeah, 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, uh, yeah. So we don't kind of distinguish that, you know, that a lot of it, the reason it's so fun is because of the activity and we could just do it without it.

• 43:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fascinating.

• 43:08Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, like, like, uh, you got 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, cause 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 they go out and they start and they have a few drinks. So maybe from a happiness perspective, you should have a few drinks and have a drink in the shower. Uh, kind of enjoy the, uh, getting dressed act, you know, the getting dressed activity will be okay. That now tolerable or okay. And then you go out, you sober up, but then you're already having fun. So it doesn't really matter.

• 43:41Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah. It's levels out that happiness a little bit more. How about, um, parenting? What, what cool stuff did you, have you found out about parenting?

• 43:49Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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, 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. See, that's pretty, 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 is that huge. But then recently they found studies mining huge amounts of people who have moved, kids who have moved, uh, during their childhood. And they found that the neighborhood you grew up in, if you move to certain neighborhoods, you do way better.

• 44:35Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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 the single effect of parenting is where you raise your kids. So that has way bigger effect 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 grew up in neighborhoods with lots of adult female scientists are much more likely to become scientists themselves.

• 45:20Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  They kind of see role models. African-American boys who grow up around a lot of African-American males who are 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 want to 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 relationship is very complicated, but the neighbor relationship is not so complicated. It's kind of like, if you have cool, you're a black boy, you have cool, good African-American

• 46:03Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  role models on the street, that's unambiguously good. So in general, kind of like, almost the best way to parent is kind of just get a lot of other people to do the job for you. 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, you know, you can use this, you can use this finding in kind of lots of ways, kind of, I think parents try to lecture their kids too much. Try to lecture their kids and you know, you gotta do this, you gotta 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.

• 46:47Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Kind of utilize the fact that I think from the evidence that other people are much more influential on your kid than you are. Because again, you are, their relationship with you is very complicated.

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's so funny that you can outsource parenting to the Joneses next door and be like, right, you take, you take our kids and I'll take, 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 like loads of Elon Musks.

• 47:13Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  And it means you got, it means you gotta be cautious in who you, in the Joneses you choose, the particular Joneses or Johnsons you choose. You can also have bad role models in the area and you know that, 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. There's like, oh, I want to be like, yeah, I want to be like that.

• 47:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, for sure. It's a cliche, right? It's the cliche of the, 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 tutored and they've had, 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 kid's in with like a bad crowd and grows up to be some drug dealer or so, you know, get in trouble all the time, always getting kicked out of schools or whatever it might be, despite the parents' best efforts to try and help.

• 48:08Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Exactly. I think the key is that you can't, I think you can't, I think what, what, the way I read the evidence is you can't mold your kids too much because they can, they can rebel. You have to do it more subtly, basically. You have to, you have, you have to be more subtle and putting them in situations without them realizing it where they're, you know, the kids have to want.

• 48:28Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Those outcomes, the outcomes that you want for your kids, you can't tell them to want them. They have to want, learn to want them themselves if they're really gonna go to it. Cause they can be in the nicest school in the world if their goal in life is just to party and, you know, have fun and, you know, not achieve academically or not work hard. Then they're, they'll just do that, you know, no matter what you tell them, no matter what school you send them. But if you can somehow give, you know, get, give them early on, uh, some people who they think are really cool, who work really hard and, and, you know, are, you know, are, achieve academically, then they'll want that in themselves. They'll ask you to go to the private school. They'll ask you, uh, to, uh, you know, get a tutor and that's gonna be really powerful. You know, the best thing you could probably do is trick

• 49:12Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  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, uh, yeah, make, make it so like, uh, make it so that they're kind of like, like you're, you're holding back what they really want.

• 49:33Chris Williamson?

  It was actually your plan all along.

• 49:35Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

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

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Yeah, I've heard, um, I, I don't know whether this is true, but I, I remember hearing some stories about where parents would treat vegetables, uh, as kind of precious and as a, a reward, kind of like they do with sweets to children. And they'd managed to kind of flip this sacrifice reward matrix on its head so that kids were 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.

• 50:29Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, I think that I think that that probably yeah, yeah, I think.

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  Which is kind of like, it's like, that's gonna be like finding out that Santa Claus isn't real or whatever. 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, I'm so sorry. Um, but it's the same as that, right? Like, it's like one day they'll grow up and they'll be like fourteen and realize, hang on a second. Vegetables weren't a treat all along. Like, I've been lied to for the last fourteen years of my life by these tyrants that I've got as as parents. But uh, 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 um immediate nuclear family.

• 51:13Chris Williamson?

  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, uh, in three, three doors down was this professional footballer or whatever it might be.

• 51:38Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:39Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating.

• 51:40Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, I'm trying to think in my own experience, I definitely.

• 51:44Chris Williamson?

  Data science, someone with loads of, loads of spreadsheets.

• 51:48Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  I want to be a professional athlete. I think that's just from television, but and that's also just like a lot of, a lot of people want to be professional athletes. I didn't live necessarily near any professional athletes, but you know, some, some, some, some dreams probably are just pretty, uh, pretty standard. But I definitely did get an academic drive, uh, that probably came less from my parents and more from like. Yeah, I, I, 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 to really good schools. Uh, which there were a number of people in my neighborhood who had gone to, you know, 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.

• 52:27Chris Williamson?

  Look at your CV now, you're just swimming in, swimming in big school diplomas and all different qualifications.

• 52:33Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  I think I was, I think that was from seeing that, because my parents didn't go to like fancy schools or anything. Uh, and, and, but, uh, yeah.

• 52:43Chris Williamson?

  Good.

• 52:45Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  It's obviously complicated. I mean, parents also can, you know, sometimes be, of course, a role model and a lot of times kids do just follow in their parents' footsteps. Uh, but I, I do think the parent relation, relationship is complicated and, you know, you, you do frequently see kids rebelling against other parents in various ways, whereas nobody, again, like the, you know, the, the friends or neighbors, I think nobody, at a young age, most, most, I think most people think their friends and neighbors are pretty cool, or their friends' parents are pretty cool.

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:12Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Uh, aren't like, oh, I'm gonna rebel against what, what that person did or something. So.

• 53:16Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 53:25Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  A little bit. I, I, I didn't have too much success. It's pretty tough. Stock market's pretty, uh, pretty chaotic and I think, uh, you know, one of the conclusions I come up in my book is that it's a lot easier to find insights into like racism or child abuse or abortion or, uh, 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 competing against, you know, astrophysicists and everybody's trying to figure out the stock market and, you know, so it's, it's a little bit of a, you know, a little bit more challenge, but,

• 54:01Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, you can't trade, you can't trade racism on the open market, can you? So.

• 54:05Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, you can't get rich, uh, finding a new map of racism in the United States. Uh, you can get rich finding a hidden inefficiency in the stock market. So I think there's definitely much more talent, uh, towards the stock market that it can, it can be tough with public data, as I've historically used, uh, finding kind of an insight.

• 54:26Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What about, you, you mentioned, uh, abortions there. There was the, the thing about the back alley, uh, sort of abortion crisis thing. Can you take us through that?

• 54:35Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, well, I was just shocked by how frequently people search on Google for do it yourself abortions, for kind of giving yourself a miscarriage, giving yourself an abortion, uh, and these searches are almost, uh, highly concentrated, almost perfectly. If you look at where these searches are, almost perfect lit map of place where it's hard to get an abortion. And they got, they went up a lot in 2011 when it, there was kind of a crackdown in the United States against legal abortion. So I think, uh, and also if you actually look at the data, it does seem like they're missing pregnancies in those areas. So, uh, births, uh,

• 55:08Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Basically, births have gone down a lot and abortions haven't kind of, abortion's kind of also gone down. And you kind of do the math, it seems like probably there is kind of a missing.

• 55:20Chris Williamson?

  Something's happening somewhere.

• 55:22Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Happening, and I think a lot of that probably is off the books abortion. Some of it's not back, there are sadly people literally search how to use a coat 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.

• 55:54Chris Williamson?

  Have birth control, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:56Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  It's not a huge disaster necessarily, but.

• 56:01Chris Williamson?

  Got you. So, most of what we've spoken about today so far has been to do with Google. Were there any of the platforms that you were able to pull data from that you could look at?

• 56:10Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, so, as I talked about, I analyzed Stormfront, that's kind of a white supremacist site, also an interesting dataset.

• 56:20Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  I analyzed Wikipedia, where successful people tend to be born.

• 56:25Chris Williamson?

  Why do they, where are they born?

• 56:27Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  College towns and cities, mostly, so.

• 56:33Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  And, yeah, that's, that's, yeah, that, part of that's kind 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, exposed, early exposure. So you see rock and roll stars are much more likely to grow up in college towns. I think the part, part of the reason for that is because college towns are kind of places of musical innovation. The rec, the, they have, you know, they historically, it's kind of changing, but they have these kind of,

• 57:10Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  they had record stores that were kind of cutting edge, caught people, you know, really cool bands would come and play and.

• 57:19Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  They had good radio stations, so I think part of it would be early exposure to innovation.

• 57:25Chris Williamson?

  Got you. And what about Facebook? We've got anything cool that you've realized off Facebook recently that you've had data from?

• 57:33Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  One of the things I did is a little politically incorrect, but I looked at, so Facebook you can measure for basketball, I looked at how many fans everybody has on Facebook. So I looked 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 kind of white players get kind of a boost in fandom and that a lot of teams have thought to. We thought that a lot of teams hired like as their 12th player, their lowest bench player, a white guy, just because.

• 58:07Chris Williamson?

  The token white guy.

• 58:08Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, token white guy because people would be more likely to go, so you can actually, you can imagine building an 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 rebounds they have, how many assists they have, et cetera. 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 way more fans, mostly due to a huge bump up among African. They basically get a little bump from everybody. So they're a little more popular among white people, a little more popular among Asian people, a little more popular among Hispanic people. And among African Americans, there's just an enormous gain in fandom.

• 58:47Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  For, you know, African Americans are much more likely to support a black player who's equally good as a white player.

• 58:54Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 59:00Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  No, no, no, no. Yeah, but the point is that if the black guy hadn't done anything, he'd have 10 likes. 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, if anything, a big miss to black players in building fan base.

• 59:23Chris Williamson?

  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 changed your use of technology or?

• 59:37Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  I think the only thing is I Google myself more now that I'm in.

• 59:42Chris Williamson?

  What an answer.

• 59:45Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Otherwise, I think, I don't really think this made a big change.

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  Got you, yeah. It's one of the things certainly that's come up here is 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 it's the guy next door.

• 1:00:11Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely.

• 1:00:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, which is interesting. Anyway, man, this has been absolutely awesome. Have we got Seth, have we got a date or an idea in mind about when the the next book's gonna come out?

• 1:00:24Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Probably 2021, but I'm not sure exactly when.

• 1:00:28Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna get through this presidential election, then you're gonna have to do all of your cool.

• 1:00:32Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Yeah, I'll publish it during the election because everyone's gonna be focused on the on the election.

• 1:00:37Chris Williamson?

  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 you would have come up with out of big data. And he was saying, he was like, I think it maybe be finished like first draft start of the year and blah, blah, blah. And I said, 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.

• 1:01:10Chris Williamson?

  So 2021, hopefully we'll get a load of new literacy stuff through. So where can people find you online? Seth, they wanna follow your stuff? Where could they go?

• 1:01:23Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Probably just Google Seth Everybody Lies. Nobody's gonna remember my last name, so just Seth Everybody Lies, and then they'll find my Twitter and everything else.

• 1:01:31Chris Williamson?

  Awesome, man. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. I'm gonna try and work out who it was that I lived near at home and see where the influence was on me.

• 1:01:44Seth Stephens-Davidowitz?

  Great.

• 1:01:44Chris Williamson?

  Cheers, man. Thank you so much, dude.