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 that don't get them 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 kind of 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 is totally fine jobs. 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 unfurfilled and lacking purpose.
And I think there are ways to use this data towards social good as well. Seth, how are you doing? Very good, how are you? Very good, thank you.
I'm excited for today. Big data and all this sort of stuff. It's going to be cool. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it.
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 spend most of my time on books. I wrote everybody lives.
I'm trying to write. I'm 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 or similar sort of applications? Yeah, I are the coding language.
There's a lot of time with that. 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 I'm just researching a lot of 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, lovely. 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 How Big Is Your Penis?
No, How Big Is My Penis? How big is My Penis? No, basically, the reason for it is that that's one of the top. Well, I talk about how many ask more Google more questions about their penis than any other body part.
And then one of the top questions they ask Google about. The penis is how big is My Penis? Which is just an absurd question to ask Google. You're not going to be able to answer that.
So I kind of thought to that title, we 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 people. We kind of people kind of put on a very presentable front. But in a privacy, they're on home on their Google search and their websites, they visit them.
They go to Pornhub, they kind of just show a different side themselves, which is a little bit stupid or a little bit less polished, a little bit weirder, a little bit sometimes an S-tier. But I think it's kind of an interesting view of people that we haven't really previously had. Yeah, that totally unfettered view where you don't think that anyone else is watching, but the date run lists are watching. You are.
Well, the data analyzes all anonymous aggregates. I don't know that any particular man's search is my penis, I just know that lots of kind of kind of. 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 it is. Well, you'd have to know how big the face is, right? You need something behind.
You need to be like standing in front of the Eiffel Tower or something. But then you need to know the distance. And then you know the distance, yeah, but I don't think just compared to that. I don't know.
Yeah, rule is easier, isn't it? Anyway, anyway, we're getting off track. So you have to be unique. I think the question is so important to them that I think one of the things 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. Have you seen the South Park episodes where they do that? Where they do what?
They measure their penis. Have you seen this? 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 there's some people who have really small measurements and they all get 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 just happening in sports. We're nerdy and very competitive. So we get out the stats at the end of the year at like baseball and then like, we'd all like create the, you know, you 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 weight the different categories to kind of come up with overall offense, the kind of overall production. And we all came up with some metric where we were ranked number one. Some of the stuff. That's the adjusted penis size.
So why call everybody lies then? Why was the book ever been? Well, first of all, if I publish it or chose that title, but I think it's a good title. I kind of guess the point, some of my research, is that people in their day to day life lie lots of like face to face.
We also lie surprisingly somewhat to anonymous surveys. That's a traditional way we try 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. 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, I show in the book, like it doesn't correspond at all. So, you know, what media they consume, how frequently they're watching kind of high brow stuff versus low brow stuff, they'll all lie in these surveys. But now thanks to the internet, largely Google but other websites as well, we have kind of a new window into people that I think gets to capitalize a lot.
So Google, for example, you see people searching how to vote, where to vote, that's really predictive whether actually to vote. You can see them searching about sexless marriage or sexless relationship. My boyfriend doesn't wanna have sex with me. And then you get a kind of a more realistic picture of 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 want to consume. I think it's really much more accurate. And then there's a whole section of pornography. I mean, talk about an area where there's been a huge amount of deception because it's kind of, there's so many tattoos in that area.
I think we really do have unprecedented window into people's kind of sexuality and that we never have to work. Thanks to pornography and I analyze it and everybody lies, kind of a whole section where I analyze just porn off what people actually watch porn off with champagne and people giggle. But it's also, I think pretty fascinating and kind of revolutionary kind of this window into people's minds that we didn't have. You know, 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, 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 that Kingsley 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 of losing that arena. So kind of over and over again, I think.
So there's just so many areas where I think we do have unprecedented 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 of 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, painters creative, musicians creative, a data scientist.
We think it's kind of this nerdy, just kind of sit by computer plugs the numbers in. And I think creativity is a huge part of data science. Otherwise, it's kind of just drowning 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, how big is my penis search or the, you know, 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. That's like India and nowhere else.
And also breastfeeding porn is a recently popular India and nowhere else. I'm not talking about this thing. 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. 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 a majority of Indian men, but it's certainly a large number. A significant minority, yeah.
In a minority without being talked about at all. How else would you know? Right? How else would you know?
Anyone can find out about it without this type of data. So things like that, I mean, kind of finding those insights amidst 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. 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, I'm out of playtime, the top searches by area and stuff like that. And even that, even the things that they do in house is 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 in academia or sociologists.
I kind of reached out to Pornhub when I write my book and I'm like, I really want to look at your data. I'm a data scientist and show 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, you get 10 emails a day from sex researchers or sociologists.
And they're like, no, they're kind of comfortable with the methodologies they've been using for 50, 60 years. And academia kind of slowly doesn't change that quickly. And so it's kind of, I think your instinct and I instinct is all that. It's fascinating, like, 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 this data from this enormous site of sexual fantasy or sexual desire is pretty wild.
What happens when you receive the Pornhub stats in your Dropbox or like over We Transfer or whatever it is? Is it just like this gargantuan kind of sticky, like, disgusting stuff or whatever? Did you think I key open in that file versus opening another one? 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 rates historically, or an inflation historically and running the numbers on that. So 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 with this. I don't really, whatever part of the brain normal people have that kind of shies away from that type of research or that type of activity. I definitely don't.
So I was in it all. You found the right industry to be in that? Yeah, 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 shameless and not crazy. 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 created a PhD in economics at Harvard and I went to Stanford. So I was writing from 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 baby, 20 year old, like with no qualification, I'm just like, hey, you know, analyzing porn, everyone would be like, you know, that's a fervor. Like what's that guy doing?
But like for 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 that I kind of get away with, you know, more than I otherwise would. I think, you know, if I had the credentials and I came out with the research, I did. I think a lot of people would be like, wait, that guy just flocked himself in his apartment and watched porn.
Yeah, this is just him. This is him and his breastfeed and stuff. But with the credentials is 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 invited to like all these talks and like prestigious places and it's never like, you know, it's a, you know, which I kind of like, did you read like my book or like how guilty it is and how inappropriate it is at times? But I guess for some reason I just keep on getting away with it. Urban proper academics everywhere.
And there's you just swimming in porn hub statistics towards the stage to say hello to everyone. Yeah. Yeah. I talk.
I usually, you know, bring up some of the porn data. But I try again, I try to use the ones being 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 that along on my ride. So 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 within you? No, no, no. I think when I came out, people said they were really shocking to me. I didn't find this shock.
So for example, the popularity of rape porn among women is very, very striking in data. A huge percent of heterosexual porn searches or video, video, video, etc. 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 didn't shock me. There have been surveys that kind of 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 kind of, you know, it's kind of come up in my life that it didn't when I saw the data on 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. And it's failed. 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 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, you know, or you have Sweden or Finland or Netherlands or Finland. That was a female prime minister and like there were, there was really much progressive attitudes for women. And then you have areas like Saudi Arabia or Iran where women are really held back and it's not less.
So you could really rank kind of how women are treated or they treat like something like that. How we know what's our name is. Yeah. And you could imagine that that could affect how women think about themselves and kind of, you know, affect their fantasy, but it doesn't seem to, you know, it's kind of a privilege.
It's universal. Universal design. You watch some hardcore porn. Even if you're going up telling, you know, saying they could be everything, they're evil to men.
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. That is really, really fascinating. Do you ever ask a why question?
Do you ever bother to delve into that or do you just sort of stick to the data? I'm trying to in the next level. You know, I think there are, you know, it's, it's, I think the initials 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. 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 that grew up around or like people like them. I think probably maybe more, maybe because they're environment. So there's not been this long idea that opposites attract. And I think if you see in dating data, it's not true at all.
So dating data is very, very clear that people are drawn to people who are similar to themselves and just about any dimension you could measure. And pornography data 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, I think you could imagine that it would go the opposite way.
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 Y direction that maybe sexual, I do think that one of the things you see is that sexual fantasies need to be related to childhood in various ways. So people tend to have fantasies from their childhood and fantasize about babysitters or like teachers or I think there's kind of a, there's kind of a, maybe kind of key moments in childhood where people kind of get imprinted sexually.
That also, that also entails with some other research and feels of sexuality that childhood imprinting is really important in developing adult sexuality. So I would explain why if you know a black man is grown up around a lot of black women, he'd probably be more likely to be attracted to black women than a thing, like, kind of being grown up. Yeah. I get that.
What about when we're talking about this split between heterosexual and homosexual, there must be some interesting insight to there about how many men and women are being truthful about their sexuality. Yeah. So one of the things that's also striking today, which also means just because they did come up in conversations like that with Rayontas Renz 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 that. I think something like 20 to 25% pornography views from women are for lesbian, explicitly lesbian porn. I think, you know, this is a common surveys of focus groups. A lot of women, you know, they live in Berkeley or San Francisco or areas where it's totally, you know, or where we are, you know, in this 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 religious 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 woman or maybe sometimes, I don't want to over-generalize the woman, maybe better 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, but you see when men is that gay porn is about 5%, you know, depending on, 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. And one of the things you see is that 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 their gay. It's a place like Mississippi or Alabama or Tennessee, if you ask men, are you gay?
Only about one to two percent of men will say their gay, whereas in New York and California, about four percent of men will say their gay. But the gay porn searches are almost the same everywhere, which I think says that a lot of men in Mississippi are in the closet. You know, I do think you also see with searches the number one search neck, 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 search.
I like how big it might be in a search. The past few ridiculous questions to try to figure out like are you gay? But I think, and these searches are much more common in a place where it's hard to be gay are the gay test searches. And I think when you see 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 find some way to prove that it's not gay.
Almost to himself is not proving it to anybody else, right? Yeah, there's some stupid internet test. So I think you do see kind of the torture that some gay man feel in places where it is hard to be gay, which is changing, thankfully, fewer and fewer parts of the world now have anti-gay attitudes, but there's still a lot of places. 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 particularly interesting or anything you've come across recently? Yeah, so one of them, I'm working on article on this now, but I've been looking at it, you know, the dark topic with suicide. I think it's an important topic because you could imagine 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 was really surprising was a somewhat common cause of suicidal thought among young people is herpes, getting diagnosed with herpes, the STD, which kind of sounds ridiculous. It's not, it's a disease actually pretty common and it's not one with, you know, it's not life threatening, the physical symptoms are, so that's my knowledge, they're limited. But I think the stigma is immense and you can imagine that you're a young person who's just kind of diagnosed with herpes. When people are 18, 19 years old, I mean, if I 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 gay porn and gay tests. It's so easy to get paranoid that you are kind of lacking in some fundamental way or, you know, you don't know what's common, what isn't common.
I've heard stories of women that, little girls who freak out when they first broke 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 so much pain and so much anxiety that you actually, I think, will commit 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, and maybe starting to fight these out. The other thing I found is the number one search in the search ring, 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 pain, search celebrities with back pain. People are looking for roles or 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.
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 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, it's a leverage with herpes. You see, basically, on the top side, at least last time I checked, it was just celebrities denying they had this. It's the opposite.
Yeah. And you can imagine, all right, like put all this data together. You have young people, they're dying of this herpes. I think it makes you decide they're looking for celebrities with herpes instead of getting created with a list of celebrities' videos saying, this is nothing to be ashamed of.
It's not a big deal. I live with this. You have celebrities saying, I would never have. You know, yeah, it's kind of like, every time I tell this, it does make people giggle and I admit I've giggled sometimes in myself.
I think it actually is kind of profound and serious and shows the power is kind of this unvarnished window into the human mind and how powerful that could be. And, you know, there are a lot of people. A lot of people are suffering in ways that it makes us giggle because they're so silly. What to that person?
It's not silly. Well, the in Auschwitz, 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 sense of a better sense of the people's kind of darker thoughts can be really helpful. And you know, that kind of, we kind of have that kind of suggests kind of an obvious way to change it, get more celebrities to say, say, you know, say, herpes.
I'm not sure how you mandate for that. But yeah, you're right. The social, I don't know what you say, the social policy implications, the welfare implications that advertising role model, the everything 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 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 a code and a Google Doc. Yeah. There are a lot of people in this area. And 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 getting more people to click on ads or work get a job in finance, which is totally fine jobs. And lo and behold, they're swimming through Pornhub data five years after they finished their degree.
A lot of people are reaching out to me that they're kind of bored of studying. You know, they're, 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 unfurfilled and lacking purpose. And I think there are ways to use this data towards social good as well. Go.
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, this must be like you staring down the barrel of the Super Bowl for your industry. Is it just going to 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? Yeah. 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 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 so much thought into it. Didn't he?
Did you read something of his about, was it the democratic nominees? Was that like this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Well, he kind of, he just built a model of the democratic nominee. I just thought that this wasn't based on data. There's actually just based on my intuition that he may be 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 and try to get elected.
And so I think that's going to play out and that kind of makes me say you shouldn't, you know, I think in his model, he works at 1% or something like that. And I kind of think maybe 5 to 10% just because the amount of resources is going to throw at his problem. What's the, have you looked at much data? I don't know whether you can predict this far out.
But if you looked at much data from moving forward in 2020. I think it's time out. This, this part, this 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 or a lot of it. A lot of the general election will come down to who can actually turn out to vote. And that we're going to meet so wait, you know, a few weeks before the election where we'll really get clues who's actually going to turn out to vote. Yeah, 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 would you? I said Trump was going to win, but I don't know if that's a genius or pessimist because I'm always, let's go with genius. Let's go with, let's go with, let's go with things are going to happen.
But there are some, 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, Trump election and you can see 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, Clinton, first they're more likely to go Clinton. And that's kind of interesting because they 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 you're undecided and then a few seconds before they, they say, okay, I'm feeling Trump or maybe they weren't undecided all along and if you look at the data, they were giving away subconsciously which way they were going to go.
Have you looked at much of Sam Harris who's working on Free Will? I do know, I do know some of that work. Yeah. There's some interesting stuff on that about when they say raise your left or right hand or pick a random city or whatever it might be and if they put people into 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 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. I'm sure it's a pretty widespread phenomenon. Yeah.
So this, I'm looking at some of the things that I pulled out of the book. Can we talk about what, what should you say on a first date if you want a second? Oh, yeah. Well, that's not my study.
That's a study of researchers. They actually had people take, they were in speed, they were going through speed dates and they had people tape 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 wanted to go on a second date. So they can 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 surprising. So for example, if woman laughs at a man's jokes, she's more likely to like him when he's second date. Well known men to get a woman to like them are 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. Maybe not so much. But if a woman uses what are called head words, she says things like maybe you're kind of then she's much less likely to like the guy.
Regardless of what the topic is. Maybe I like cheese. Maybe I want to desert. If you want a second day out kind of whatever it's kind of like she's kind of giving away that she's not excited about the guy and saying those things.
That's the great thing. And then 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 the woman uses I more the more the woman use I more likely to successful date from both people's 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 off the back of that big data analysis. I think it's definitely promising. You know, definitely a lot of these.
You know, 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 aren't true. So 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 of philosophy or 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 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 appended with some of the things that big data will come up with.
Well, that's just me, but yeah, I don't think it's part of you. It's type of research is very powerful to all. It's not just confirmed with people. Previously thought again, that woman laughs at the man joke that that means she likes him.
I think that's one that we kind of figured out without data analysis about tape recording every once in a while, all these dates and mining the text, but there definitely are areas where I think our intuition and our theories have been wrong because they haven't been based on data. So what you said that you were 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 like decisions kind of going off this idea of what you should say on a first date. And then the first thing that I'm really interested in is the data based on part of the motivation for my book is that when I read the, when I, 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.
Oh, the highlights, 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 area lies theme because I think people don't necessarily like to admit that as much people don't particularly intellectuals that have you drawn to my book, like to say they don't read for self-help, they need 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, what can I say in a first date helping to make more money, you know, when, how, what business should I start? So based on that, I'm basically just catering to the masses and writing on how to use data in a better life decision. Yeah. You can use data to work out what you should write in a book to have another New York Times bestseller.
Yeah. 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 elicited any interesting insights into parenting or happiness recently? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think a lot of it's researching other people's data.
We're talking about other people's data. I don't think none of them know about it. I'm really fascinated by these people who do happiness studies. I'm not even a part of this.
They ask people, they ping people different times of the day and they ask them what they're doing and they're moving. Oh, yeah. 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 they're all these kind of interesting thing 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 points 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 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 never do or much 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, a lot of cleaning out, sweeping or something or commuting to work, you know, obviously there are reasons sometimes not to drink during these opportunities. But it's actually more effective. You're happy to 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 kind of low. It's kind of an understanding, right?
Yeah, which is dangerous advice. It's kind of a path for alcoholism. So I want to be very careful. And like a lot of people are addicted to alcohol and I want to just telling people to drink anytime they're bored or unhappy isn't necessary.
You know, 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 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 you're having fun with friends, you know, you're doing something really fun. 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, but you know, you don't always think, oh, you know, if I have a beer to now when I'm doing something that's doing sort of boring thing, then you know, that that'll be just fine and fine. And I'll be all right. So that's kind of 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 starts the pool. 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, you know, that a lot of the reason is so fun is because of the activity and we could just do it without it.
Oh, for like reason. Yeah, like, like, 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, because that's boring. So maybe it's 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 have a few drinks and have a drink in the shower. Kind of enjoy the getting dressed activity will be OK. That now tolerable and OK. And then you go out, you sober up, but then you're ready having fun.
So it doesn't really matter. Yeah. It's levels up that happiness a little bit more. How about parenting?
What what cool stuff did you found out about parenting thing that data tells us on parenting? So one of the big early studies on parenting, this wasn't necessarily big data, but they found that they kind of like adopted adopted kids and they found that overall the parents who have the place you grow up, like the household you're in, doesn't make a huge effect under overall like outcome. So that's pretty pretty small. So if you get adopted by this family here, 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 that huge. But then recently, they found studies mining huge amounts of people who 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 grow up in isn't that big. But the neighborhood you live in is pretty big. It means that a 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 and clients, 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 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 males who are successful who stay married, who have jobs are much more likely to do it themselves.
And it's not as 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 going to 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 going to 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, your black boy, you have a cool, African girl, African girl models on the street, that's unambiguously good. So in general, kind of like the almost the best way to parents is kind of just get a lot of other people to do the job from free.
You know, they're just going to 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 in kind of lots of ways. Kind of any, I think a parent tried to lecture their kids too much, try to lecture their kids and you know, you got to do this, you got to do that. 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 want to live up to it. 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, your 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 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 lots of Elon Musk. And it means you got to be cautious and the Joneses you choose, the particular Joneses are giants and you can also have bad role models in the area. You know, that they see a guy who's just like 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. Yeah, it's a cliche, right? It's a cliche of the parents that spend several thousands, tens of thousands of pounds 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 kids in with like a bad crowd and grows up to be some drug dealer or, you know, getting trouble all the time, always getting kicked out of schools or whatever it might be despite the parents' best efforts to try and help us.
I think the key is that you can't, I think you can't, I think 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 they're, you know, the kids have to want those outcomes.
The outcomes that you want your kid, you can't tell them to want them. They have to want, learn to want them themselves that they're really going to go to it. Because they're going to be in the nicest school in the world if their goal in life is just to party and have fun and not achieve academically or not work hard, then they'll just do that, you know, no matter 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, you know, are, you know, are achieved academically.
And they'll want that in the self. They'll ask you to go to the private school. They'll ask you to, you know, get a tutor and that's going to be really powerful. You know, the best thing you'll probably do is trick them, is that they're like, I want a tutor and you're like, well, no, I can afford it.
And then you finally, you eventually give in, make it like they're like, make it they're fighting you to make it so that they're kind of like, you're holding back wasn't really wanting. It was actually your plan all along. Yeah, actually, it was your, yeah, 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 think really cool. I was tutored as 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.
And now you think are really cool. Yeah. 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 were like really clamoring these, the children were really clamoring to get to vegetables because of this basic like, I don't have it. I want it.
Yeah. I think that probably, yeah. Yeah. It's just kind of like, that's going to be like finding out that Santa Claus isn't real.
I'm sorry if anyone's kids are watching. I'm supposed to put a warning on before it is stuff like that. If you are listening with your children in the room, I'm so sorry. But it's the same as that, right?
It's like one day they'll grow up and they'll be like 14 and realize, hang on a second, vegetables weren't a treat all along. I've been lied to for the last 40 years of my life by these tyrants that I've got as parents. But that's, man, that's so interesting. I wouldn't 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 their parents 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, in three dollars down was this professional football or whatever it might be. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I'm trying to think of my own experience, definitely. Data science, someone with loads of spreadsheets. 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. So I didn't need to live necessarily near any professional athletes. You know, some dreams probably are just pretty standard, but I definitely did get an academic drive. They probably came less from my parents and more from like, yeah, I did see some people who 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, which there were a number of people in my neighborhood would gone to MIT or Harvard Stanford.
And they did have this respect and I'm like, oh, I get out of that respect if I go to one of these schools. Maybe it's- You see me now, you're just swimming in big school diplomas and all different qualifications. I think I was. I think that was from seeing that because my parents didn't go to like fancy schools or anything.
It's obviously complicated. I mean, parents also can sometimes be of course a role model and a lot of times kids do just following their parents' footsteps. But I do think a parent relationship is complicated. You do frequently see kids rebelling against other parents in various ways, whereas nobody, again, the friends are neighbors.
I think the young age, most people think their friends and neighbors are pretty cool. The friends' parents are pretty cool. Or like, oh, I'm going to rebel against what that person did or something. Yeah, for sure.
Did you do some stuff on the stock market? I was having a little bit of a look. Did you look at the way the stock market moves and gaming the stock market? A couple of it.
I didn't have too much success. It's pretty tough. Stock market is pretty chaotic. And I think one of the conclusions that come up with my book is that it's a lot easier to find insights into racism or child abuse or abortion or at least other areas.
Because unfortunately, there's not as much talent trying to talk those insights as the stock market. So the stock market you're impeding against, you know, cash real physicists and physicists. Everybody's trying to figure out the stock market. And so it's a little bit more of a challenge.
But you can't trade racism on the open market, can you? Yeah, yeah. 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. It can be tough with public data as I've used to finding an insight. What about you mentioned abortions there?
There's the thing about the back alley sort of abortion crisis. Think you take us through that. Yeah, 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 mapped of place where it's RTN abortion. And they went off a lot in 2011 when there was a crackdown in the United States against legal abortion. So I think and also can actually look at the data. It does seem like they're missing pregnancies in those areas.
So births have gone down a lot and abortions have kind of... Abortion has also gone down and you kind of do the math. It seems like probably there are some things happening somewhere happening. 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 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 is 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 people. How's that control? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not.
It's not. If you just ask her necessarily. Got you. So most of what we've spoken about today so far has been to do with Google.
Whether any of the platforms that you were able to pull data from that you could look at. Yeah. So I talked about I analyze Stormfront. That's kind of a white supremacist site.
Also an interesting data set. I analyze Wikipedia where successful people tend to be born. Where do they? Where are they born?
College towns and cities mostly. And yeah, that's that's that's that's that part of that's kind of 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, it really exposes you see rock and roll stars are much more likely to grow up in college towns. I think the part part of these are bad is because college towns are kind of places of musical innovation. The wreck the death they historically it's not changing with any kind of I think record stores that were kind of cudded edge caught people, you know, really cool band to come and play and they had good radio stations. So I think part of it the early exposure innovation.
Got you. What about Facebook? We got anything cool that you've realized our Facebook recently that you've had to take it from. Well, I think I did.
It's a little bit incorrect, 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 if how white basketball players go 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, white guy just because it's so good white guy. That's why I got people to be more likely to go. So you can actually imagine building analysis where you know basically how good every player is in basketball.
You can control for all their stats to how many points they swore, how many points 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 to point way more fans, mostly due to a huge bump up among African Americans. They basically got a little bump from everybody.
So they're a little more popular among white people, a little more popular engaging people, a little more popular than Hispanic people. And among African Americans they just a 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.
He 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 a black guy hadn't done anything, he'd have 10 likes.
The point is the same player. It seems like again contrary to some historical idea that there's kind of a racism bias against black players and the NBA. There seems to be anything a bit to black players and building fan base. Got you.
So the final question that I want you to ask is actually one from Jordan who's part of the Mon Muslim Project and you're saying have your insights from big data change your use of technology. I think the only thing is I Google myself more. Otherwise, I don't really think there's made a big change. Got you.
Yeah. It's one of the things certainly this 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 it's the guy next door. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Definitely. Yeah, which is interesting. Anyway, man, this has been absolutely awesome. We got a date or an idea reminder about when the next book is going to come up.
Right. You got 2021, 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.
Yeah. Probably just during the election because I wonder if we'll be some of 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 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 that with big data. And he was saying he was like, oh, I think maybe we finished like first draft start the year and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh, cool.
So we're going to get it next to you. And he's like, no, man, it's an election this year. I'm not releasing anything. So 2021, hopefully we'll get a load of new literacy stuff through.
So where can people find your own line? Is that there one of the full-y stuff? Where can they go? Probably just Google set everybody lies.
Always remember my last name. So just set their realize and I'll find my Twitter and everything else. Awesome, man. Thank you so much.
I really appreciate your time. I'm going to try and work out who was that I lived in here at home and see whether the influence was on me. Great. Cheers, man.
Thank you so much.