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Google Knows Your Darkest Secrets - The Truth in Your Searches with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

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What happens when you peer into the dark underbelly of the human psyche? How should we react when we uncover the raw truth of human nature and emotion, sexuality, and racism? We explore all of this in this fascinating interview with our guest Dr. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. 
What can research about condoms tell us about human nature and the problems with survey research? Why the #1 google search for “my husband wants” in India will blow your mind. What does searching for celebrities with herpes have to do with hidden suicide rates? We explore all of this and much more with Dr. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. 

  • What’s wrong with surveys?

  • Social desirability bias can massively skew the results of surveys. 

  • Why do people lie when they take surveys? How can that massively impact research results?

  • What can research about condoms tell us about human nature and the problems with survey research? 

  • Women say they use 1.1 billion condoms, men say they use 1.6 billion condoms.. but only 600mm condoms are actually sold in the US total. 

  • People lie about both the frequency of the sex they’re having and whether or not their sex is protected. 

  • People tell google things that they don’t even tell their closest loved ones. People tell google about hidden health problems, secret dark thoughts, pornographic preferences, and much more.

  • Google, Facebook, and social media and data porn sites can reveal the darkest facets of the human psyche

  • What did researchers uncover from digging into troves of data from top porn websites?What can that tell us the truth about societies deepest sexual desires?

  • The #1 google search for “my husband wants” in India will blow your mind

  • The truth revealed by in depth study of human behavior is that everyone is weird in their own way, and that’s OK. 

  • What happens when you peer into the dark underbelly of the human psyche? How should we react when we uncover the raw truth of human nature and emotion, sexuality, and racism? We explore this and find out how to go forward from here. 

  • What does searching for celebrities with herpes have to do with hidden suicide rates?

  • There are many people struggling with things that aren’t openly talked about. 

  • A huge source of unhappiness is comparison to other people’s cultivated personas - when you peel back the onion and look at people’s searches, you would realize that everyone goes through suffering, anxiety, doubt, and weird thoughts.

  •  Rejection is not personal 

  • How looking back through search results can be used as a potential medical diagnostic tool.

  • Moneyball for your life. Applying big data to hacking and improving your life decisions. 

  • Moneyball for parenting - one of the most important factors revealed by data for raising your kids. 

  • Most people are too concerned with people thinking they are weird. 

  • Don’t be normal, be polarizing, to find a better fit for yourself. 

  • Homework: anytime you’re feeling bad about your life just type “I am always…” into google autocomplete. Realize that everyone is struggling and suffering and that is part of the human experience.  

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

What happens when you peer into the dark underbelly of the human psyche? How should we react when we uncover the raw truth of human nature, emotion, sexuality and racism? We explore all of this and much more in this fascinating interview with our guest, Dr. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed all things sleep. Sleep has been under attack for the last 10 years and yet, it is one of the most powerful things that you can do for your performance, your health, your mental well-being and your body. In our previous interview, we explored how to improve your sleep, how sleep works and what you can be doing to sleep better with our previous guest, Dr. Dan Gartenberg. If you want to get a good night's sleep, listen to our previous episode.

Now for our interview with Seth. Please note, this episode contains mature and adult content.

[0:02:02.9] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Seth is an author, data scientist and speaker. His book Everybody Lies was a New York Times bestseller and an economist book of the year. Seth is a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times and has worked as a visiting lecturer at the Wharton School and a data scientist at Google. He received his BA in philosophy from Stanford and his PhD in economics from Harvard. Seth, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:31.8] SSD: Thanks so much for having me, Matt.

[0:02:33.4] MB: Well, we're really excited to have you on here today. Your work and your research is so fascinating and I can't wait to dig into it. I'd love to start out with a really simple question or idea, which is what's wrong with surveys and the way that we try to collect data about humans and our behavior and human nature? What's the problem with the current methodologies that we're using?

[0:02:58.4] SSD: Yeah. One of the problems is, so there are actually lots of problems with surveys. One of the problems that I focus on the book is that people lie to surveys. There's an issue called social desirability bias, where people don't say what they're really thinking, or really going to do, or why they do the things they do. They say things that are socially desirable. 

If you ask people, are you going to vote in an election? Far more people say they are going to vote and actually go out to vote in an election. If you ask people are you racist? Just about nobody says yes, even though many, many people are racist. Many times we see that what people say isn't really true and that the bias is in the direction of what's socially desirable.

[0:03:36.3] MB: Tell me a little bit more about the concept of social desirability bias and what causes people to do that and how it can negatively impact survey results and research results.

[0:03:47.5] SSD: Well, I think we don't really know. Technically, surveys are anonymous so people don't need to lie. I think there are a couple of reasons people lie. One is that people lie in their day-to-day life. Your wife, or husband asked you, “Do I look good?” You tend to just say yes, even if they don't look good. Or was the dinner good? You say yes, these little white lies as we go through the day.

Then a big issue in surveys is there's no incentive to tell the truth. You don't have an incentive to lie necessarily, but you definitely don't have an incentive to tell the truth. If someone asked you, Gallup or Pew asked you a question on some topic that might be a little sensitive, people just assume, “Well, what do I gain by telling the truth?” I'll just tell something that just makes me feel good, or look good. There's really no reason for me to tell my secrets.

[0:04:38.4] MB: It's almost like their identity is playing into that and people want to see themselves in a certain way, even if they're not trying to deceive the survey or necessarily, perhaps they're really trying to reinforce a certain identity, or a certain characterization of themselves.

[0:04:53.8] SSD: Yeah, that definitely does play a role.

[0:04:56.3] MB: There's a great series of examples that you had. You touched on voting as one of them. Tell me the story about condoms and what some of the survey research revealed about that.

[0:05:07.8] SSD: Oh, yeah. I looked at data from the General Social Survey. That's this big data set every year produced by the University of Chicago. They asked men and women how frequent they have sex, whether they use a condom, whether it's heterosexual sex. 

You do the math and basically, American women say they use 1.1 billion condoms every year in heterosexual sexual encounters. American men say they use 1.6 billion condoms every year in heterosexual sexual encounters. By definition, those numbers have to be the same. There are only a certain number of condoms used every year in heterosexual sexual encounters. We know that somebody's not telling the truth, lying about this.

I reached out to Nielsen. They have actual ground truth data on how many condoms are sold every year in the United States. We have a woman saying 1.1 billion condoms used, men saying 1.6 billion condoms used. Well, according to Nielsen there are only 600 million condoms sold every year in the United States, some of them used by gay men and some of them thrown out. Basically, I think everybody's lying about this.

I think I do further research that I think they're not just lying about whether they're having protected sex, they're lying about the frequency of sex. I think there's a lot of pressure in today's culture for both men and women. It's a little stronger among men, but it's there for everybody to say you're having more sex than you actually are having, because I think it's people don't want to admit if they're not having sex, they're having very little sex. It shows the strong pressures in our sex-obsessed culture to maybe exaggerate how much people are having.

[0:06:36.7] MB: You discovered a methodology to start to see through some of these illusions and peel apart the social desirability bias that can skew research results. Tell me, how did you discover this new methodology and what is it?

[0:06:52.9] SSD: I was doing my PhD in economics. I don't even remember. One day, I just saw that Google had released this tool called Google Trends, which allows researchers to look basically how a search term when it’s searched, where it's searched, how frequently it’s searched. 

Right away, I became obsessed with this data set, in part because I suspected and I think I later confirmed that people would be really, really honest on Google and they tell Google things, that they don't tell other people, they don't tell their friends, their family members, their neighbors, their doctors, their psychiatrists, surveys, people pour their heart out to Google.

People will tell Google about their sexual desires, the pornography they want to watch. People will tell Google about their health problems, even health problems that might be embarrassing. People will tell Google about their dark thoughts, racist thoughts. People will tell Google about problems, their big struggles they're going through child abuse, self-induced abortion, there are all these areas where people might be really shy to talk about these with other people, but they really do pour their heart out to Google.

[0:08:03.8] MB: It's such a fascinating thing to uncover and this idea that you may not ever think about that in your daily life. I certainly hadn't thought about it that way until you phrased it like that. The fact that we really do tell Google our deepest, darkest thoughts, the things we wake up at 3 a.m. and Google in the middle of the night, we tell Google all of our fears and fantasies. Oftentimes, there are things that we would never dream of telling, even some of the closest people in our lives.

[0:08:33.8] SSD: Yeah. It's definitely an interesting window into people. I've expanded it beyond Google. I also in the book, I got data from Pornhub, what videos are searched for and watched all around the world and that also is an interesting data set, where people – if you ask people, many people I don't think they're going to be necessarily want to say what they're watching or what they're searching on Pornhub, but the data set is really, really interesting and revolutionary for the study of sexuality. I think really there is corners of the Internet where people are giving us windows into the human psyche that we've never had before.

[0:09:11.2] MB: I want to dig into that a little bit, because you have some fascinating conclusions and research that have come out of that. Tell me a little bit more about what came out of the research that you did on sites like Pornhub and what fascinating things you revealed about the darkest facets of the human psyche.

[0:09:28.9] SSD: Yeah. Pornhub. I mean, I think the general conclusion from Pornhub data is that sexuality is a lot more varied than we're usually told. I think when I was growing up, there was an idea that sexual fantasy was basically Playboy magazine. It was this very conventionally attractive, big-breasted, thin, maybe blonde-haired girl next door. I think Pornhub data really reveals much wider array of sexuality, like heavyset women are very, very popular on Pornhub and that's not usually talked about.

Usually, we think that skinny is attractive and heavy isn't attractive. You see widespread desire for heavier women. Then people's fantasies are just very politically incorrect sometimes. Violent pornography, even rape porn is about twice as common among women than men, which isn't usually talked about. It doesn't mean that women want to be raped, or that makes rape less of a crime, but it does show that people's minds are not – they don't always go places necessary they'd want them to go and sexual fantasy can be politically incorrect, basically.

[0:10:39.3] MB: The interesting thing about a lot of this data and this applies well beyond research into human sexuality is that these are the hidden, real trends and patterns and thought patterns that are driving human behavior. It's so interesting that a tool like Google, or a pornography website could be used to peer into and almost become a mirror to look back and give us the truth about something that people would potentially never reveal in traditional survey style research.

[0:11:10.6] SSD: Yeah. My favorite fact I uncovered in all of my research is that the number one Google search that starts with, “My husband wants,” in the country of India is, “My husband wants me to breastfeed him.” That's India and a little bit of Bangladesh and nowhere else. Also, pornography for adult breastfeeding is much more popular in India than anywhere else. That just shocked me.

Then I think I published that and then they did some research and they asked people in India about this. Everybody's like, “No, no, no. That's not a thing in India.” I'm confident based on this data that it is reasonably widespread sexual fantasy that developed in India and a little bit in Bangladesh and nowhere else and isn't talked about at all, which is just fascinating for a lot of reasons that a sexual fantasy can develop in one part of the world and nowhere else. What caused it? That something can be widespread. Because it's shameful, just not be talked about at all and not be ever acknowledged. Yeah, that's – it really does change how you view the world.

[0:12:17.7] MB: It's as if you've started to really see and understand human nature in a way that very few people have and in a way that may even be a little bit uncomfortable.

[0:12:29.0] SSD: Yeah, there's definitely an uncomfortable element to it, because I think people lie. There are two islands. One of it which I think is comforting is that you can feel less weird knowing that other people are also weird. I think a lot of human suffering is because everybody else puts on a front of how their life is going. I think a lot of people think that their problems are – they're uniquely messed up. I think the data from Google, or from Pornhub shows you, “All right, everybody's a mess in their own way, or weird in their own way,” and even if it's not talked about and there's probably nothing particularly abnormal about you. That I think can really comfort people.

There is also a dark side. Another reason people lie is people lie in socially desirable ways to say, for example, “I'm not racist.” I uncovered in Google searches a huge amount of secret, explicit racism in the United States, people searching for really, really nasty jokes about African-Americans in huge numbers. That does make you feel worse that people might be if you're black, people might be smiling at you and shaking your hand and being really friendly and nice, but then they're going home and searching things like N-word jokes that is an uncomfortable fact that this data reveals.

[0:13:48.3] MB: How have you grappled with that and what have you taken away from that research? How have you thought about what we should do with that information?

[0:13:59.7] SSD: Initially, I just was uncovering these facts that are hidden, but now I'm more interested in how we can use it to change society. Instead of studying how much racism is there, say can we use this data to understand what actually lowers racism, which may be different from what people talk about. 

Yeah, I think there are just a lot of secrets. I'll give you one study I'm working on a little bit. It's preliminary, but I'm doing this study on what people search for before they search for suicide, which I think is really, really important. I don't think we really know it necessarily why people choose to end their life, or think about ending their lives, because there's so much stigma around mental health and suicide.

I found that a big complaint is health problems, about 30% of people before they search for suicide searched for some health problems. Many of the health problems in the data set I was looking at – there's actually a different data set. It's an AOL data set, which allows you to track anonymous individuals over time, not Google which doesn't allow you to do that. 30% were health problems and the number one health complaint was depression, which isn't any surprise. We know that depression is a major risk factor for suicide and anxiety was very high.

Then near the top in the data set I looked at was herpes, the STD. People search for herpes, and then basically that they've gotten a diagnosis of herpes, then they search looking to commit suicide. That shocked the hell out of me, because that's not really usually considered a risk factor for a suicide. I think the reason for that is the stigma around the disease. Some young people when they get the diagnosis that being young, it is a period of life where there's a huge amount of paranoia and nobody really knows what's going on, what's normal, what's weird and many people can get very paranoid.

I was also looking at this data and I said, okay, what else do people search when they search herpes and suicide? I found the number one other search for people searching herpes and suicide was celebrities with herpes, which is actually a common search for many illnesses. If people have searched – suggest they have depression, they searched for celebrities with depression and I think people with an illness like to find role models, people who have that disease and have spoken out about having that disease and it makes them feel better, so they know they're not alone and they know that some of their heroes also have struggled with this problem.

Then I googled what comes up when you search celebrities with herpes. When I looked, as I checked, basically all that comes up is a list of celebrities accused of having herpes who deny they have herpes. They're a couple B list, or C list, or probably D list celebrities who do say they have herpes to try to lower the stigma, but very, very few celebrities and no real A list celebrities.

That's disturbing that you have this data uncovered by searches that there seem to be a large number of people, particularly young people greeting a diagnosis of herpes with thoughts of suicide and they're looking for role models. Instead of having a list of top celebrities saying, “I have this. It's not a big deal. It's nothing to be ashamed of.” We have a few celebrities saying, “I would never have such a horrible illness. It's so embarrassing that I would never admit it,” basically. I think that literally based on my analysis, if celebrities admitted that they had herpes that literally would save lives.

[0:17:24.9] MB: It's so interesting that even the concept of retroactively looking back through search histories and saying, okay, someone is searching about suicide, which is a predictor of potential suicide rates, let's figure out what's causing that. The ability to even just go back through their search history and see the evolution of those thought patterns is such a fascinating research methodology and creates so much potential for really truly understanding how people think and behave.

[0:17:57.4] SSD: Yeah. It's sad too. It makes you more compassionate, because some of these search strings, I just remember this one guy, he's in horrible back pain and just over and over again, he's like, “I need to end my life. I can't take this back pain anymore. Blah, blah, blah.” It just makes you compassionate, because you really have no idea who's in back pain. It's like, you might walk around and be jealous of some guy, or girl, or like, “Oh, that person has everything.” If they have back pain, they might be going literally insane on the verge of suicide because of that. You just really don't know what's going on in other people's minds.

I think when you look through some of this data, I think it does make you more compassionate, more easy on other people. There are a lot of people struggling with things that aren't openly talked about. Even people who probably on the outside look like they have everything, or look  like they have it all together.

[0:18:53.3] MB: I think that that is such an important life lesson. One of my favorite quotes and I'll paraphrase it a little bit, but it's this idea that everyone you know is fighting a battle that you know nothing about. Your research has really in many ways uncovered the truth behind that and peered into the soul of many people and realized wow, there really is so much suffering and struggle that we never hear about, never see about, especially in today's world which ironically, the surface level of all these technologies, all of the social media is this glossy veneer of my life is perfect and it's amazing and look at me going on vacation and eating all this amazing food and taking wonderful photos. Yet the flip side of that, the same technology platforms are basically hiding and housing the deep, dark secrets of all of these people.

[0:19:48.9] SSD: Yeah, definitely. That's a good way to put it. Sometimes I do wonder if we'd all just be happier. I’d never suggest this, but if literally all our searches were just revealed, or all our Internet behavior would just be revealed, it would be embarrassing for five seconds, then I think we'd almost have a better society at that point. I think a huge cause of unhappiness is comparison to other people's lives and other people's cultivated lives. The lives that they put on social media and the lives that they might talk about when they're trying to impress you.

I think a lot of us feel our lives don't compare. Then if you saw people searches, you see just about everybody's going through a lot of suffering and a lot of anxiety and a lot of doubt and a lot of weird thoughts. I think it would just make everybody feel a little more normal, a little more okay in who they are. I hope that at least my book and some of the research I've done will do that on an aggregate stick scale. You don't know for any individual, okay, what's that person going through, but you know through this data that a lot of people, a huge number of people are going through things.

It's a good excuse to go easier on yourself and on other people. You go easier on other people, because you know they're going through things. You go easier on yourself, because you're like, “Okay, I haven't failed as much as maybe I feel I have. Other people also have problems and issues and struggles and difficulties and it's totally normal.”

[0:21:16.5] MB: Such a great insight. We've had a number of really good interviews on the show about the power and the importance of being self-compassionate. I'll throw some of those into the show notes for listeners who want to dig in on that. You brought up a really good point earlier and just underscored it again, which is this notion that as a researcher who's actually coming through this data, you've uncovered so many fascinating trends. One of the changes that it's created for you is that you've become more compassionate and more understanding of other people and their quirkiness and their own struggles and challenges. What are some of the other changes, or lessons that you've pulled from doing all of this groundbreaking research?

[0:22:01.6] SSD: Dating is another one. When you see the pornography data and how much variation there is and what people search for, I think when I first started dating a while ago, I viewed the world as everybody is ranked 1 to 10. Brad Pitt or whatever is a 10 for men and Natalie Portman is a 10 for women and goes down from there. I think you do see in the data that that’s not really as true as you might think. There are some people into just about anything.

I think one experience that I've been through and I think other people maybe can relate is you get rejected by someone who you think is a 5, or a 4 and then you go on a date with someone who you think is a 7 or 8 and she's into you and you're like, “Why?” Well, you might just be her type basically. That makes rejection a little less personal too, because you might really just not be – it's not just that I'm lower on the ladder than you are, it's more just like, okay, I may not be your type. Just keep going out and trying until you find someone who is your type and you are their type.

[0:23:12.8] MB: Yeah. That's a really important lesson, this idea that this false narrative, or the social construct of some dating hierarchy doesn't really exist. This could be applied to any – even something like sales, right? If you don't have a pipeline of opportunities and you give up after the first no, or the first rejection, you're missing out on a huge array of potential that – and this could apply to any endeavor in life. If you don't cultivate a number of opportunities, you may not get to where you need to get, because there's so many different reasons that people may like you, or your business, or your opportunity, your idea, your podcast, your research, whatever it might be, you as somebody in the dating pool, all these different pieces. 

A lot of times it's a process of discovery to go out there and put yourself out there. You have to be willing to be rejected and fail a few times to really find a good match for yourself.

[0:24:08.4] SSD: Definitely. I think yeah, the variation in taste is really, really important, I think. Yeah, it's the same with entertainment, or a podcast. Some comedians – I might find a comedian really funny. My friend may think that person's not funny. Then there might be another comedian where it's completely reversed. You just have to find your market and put your content out there widely and find your market and not take the rejection so personally.

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[0:26:06.2] MB: I want to zoom out a little bit and dig into a couple other themes from your research. One of the more interesting papers that you produced that I thought was fascinating discussed the relationship between opioids and anxiety and panic attacks. Tell me a little bit about that work and how you decided to research that and what some of the conclusions were.

[0:26:29.6] SSD: Oh, so I just was interested. There's been a big rise in anxiety searches in the United States over time. There's this tool Google Correlate, which allows you to see basically what searches are made the same time periods that searches for – If you put a search, anxiety or panic attack, it will tell you what searches, track that search in a time series that when weeks and when those searches are high, panic attack searches are high.

One of the top when I looked at it was opiate withdrawal. That was really interesting, because I'm like, “Wow. Are opiates playing a big role in the rise of anxiety?” Again, something that's not really talked about. In general, the whole anxiety thing is interesting, because I think I live in New York City, I live in Brooklyn, I'm from the New York area. I think there's a stereotype of urban intellectuals being really neurotic. There's Woody Allen and all these movies about being this neurotic New Yorker and Larry David expanded on that idea.

If you actually look at the data, where is anxiety highest, where panic attack is highest, it tends to be rural areas, poor areas, places with lower levels of education and I think areas that have been really hit hard by the opiate crisis. I think that was just suggestive evidence. It's not definitive, okay, the opiate crisis is causing a rise in anxiety. I think it's highly suggestive that that's playing a role.

[0:28:04.5] MB: Very interesting. What are some other fascinating connections, or things that you've uncovered in your research peering into some of these search result trends?

[0:28:18.2] SSD: One of them, this actually isn't my research, but I think it's an important one. The Microsoft researchers have looked at people who searched for pancreatic cancer, suggesting they just got diagnosed with a pancreatic cancer. What are they searching the weeks and months before that. They found really, really subtle patterns of search symptoms, basically what symptoms they searched. They found things like if you search indigestion followed by abdominal pain, that's a risk factor for pancreatic cancer.

That really wasn't known to the medical community and that's I think a really fascinating way to do medicine, to mine these enormous data sets with thousands or tens of thousands of people who just say they got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and what symptoms were they searching in the lead up. The key with pancreatic cancer is the earlier you find out, the higher your survival rate. We can potentially use this information to maybe help people earlier on.

[0:29:09.7] MB: That's wild. That in many ways reminds me of the same methodology from some of the research around suicide and in the sense of looking for people who searched for pancreatic cancer and then tracking that back through time and saying, well, what were the prior searches that were precursors to them having that potential diagnosis? The whole idea of using that as a medical diagnostic tool could really open up some fascinating possibilities.

[0:29:35.9] SSD: Yeah, definitely.

[0:29:37.4] MB: I want to change gears and think about how we can take some of the lessons and ideas from your research and apply this to our own lives. I know you mentioned to me that you're working on a project about how we can start to use data to make better life decisions. Tell me a little bit more about that.

[0:29:57.1] SSD: This is I guess right along with the theme of your work. I just really noticed in my own life that I'm obsessed with data. I really love the book Moneyball and the movie Moneyball. I'm a big baseball fan, so I was obsessed from an early age about data analytics in how they transformed baseball. I've used in my own business, like when I worked at Google, I was using data to help make decisions.

When I think about the big decisions of my own life, I would say I'm about as nerdy and data-focused as it gets. I would say basically, I've largely gone on my intuition, just followed advice of other people. I haven't really used good data and I haven't done things. One of the great things about the Moneyball example is that baseball teams start doing all these counterintuitive things, these things that looked wrong and felt wrong, but war according to the data actually right.

Baseball teams started widely using the infield shift, where you put all the infielders – you put mostly infielders on one side of the infield. It looks crazy. You're opening up one side of the field totally. It looks like it can't possibly be a good decision. Yet, the data suggests more times than not, it's the right play. I can't really think of many examples in my own life where I've done something that felt wrong, but it was justified by the data.

I wanted to say what would be a Moneyball approach to life, to the big life decisions, to dating, to parenting, to career, to health, dieting, to happiness. What would be things that maybe, or many of them might be counterintuitive, many of them might feel wrong, but actually according to the data are better decisions. That's what I've been exploring for the last couple years and hopefully producing a book based on it.

[0:31:51.0] MB: What have you uncovered so far and which decision categories have you started to dig into?

[0:31:55.9] SSD: One of the ones I like is parenting. If you actually look at the data on parenting, I think it's pretty overwhelming that the number one decision you make as a parent that counts more than every other decision combined is where you raise your kids. There's new evidence that they've tracked using tax data, kids who move from one part of the United States to another part of the United States. 

They found that growing up in certain parts of the United States just gives you a massive advantage, even tiny neighborhoods are massive advantages, relative to the other things parents do the evidence for a long time has said overall, parenting has actually a pretty small effect, whether you read to your kids, or whether you ban video games, or what advice you give them, all these things seem to add up to not that much.

Then the neighborhood you raise your kids in adds up to a whole lot to the point that I think more than 50% of the impact to a parent will be what neighborhood you raise them in. Then there's all these data using these places, the best places, both the places that have historically been the best places to raise your kids and the characteristics of neighborhoods that are best places to raise their kids. 

What seems to matter more than anything else it's not the economics of the area, whether it's growing or not, it's not necessarily even the schools, traditional metrics of school success, it tends to be the people around the area, whether they're good citizens themselves, whether they're good role models for your kids.

I think one of the reasons for this, the evidence starting to suggest is that kids frequently will tune out what you tell them. If you give them advice, they'll go through a stage where they're like, “Ah, that's stupid. I'm going to try something else.” They go through a stage where they think you're a clown and you're crazy and everything you say is wrong, but the neighbors they’ll always respect and think highly of.

For example, girls who move to areas with lots of female scientists, if their neighbors are female scientists, they're much more likely to become a female scientist. Basically, what it suggests is as parents, that's counterintuitive, so I think parents just assume okay, the big things are how I raise them, the models I sell, or the career advice I give them, the opportunities I offer them, the lessons I teach them, the books I read to them, the presents I give them. I think what this suggests is really the big thing you're going to give them is the people you put in their environment, people you put near them, the other adults you put near them, who they're going to model themselves after and track.

Again, these are not necessarily the places you'd normally think. It's not necessarily, okay, go to the suburbs where there's some highly ranked school. That may not be the best role models. There may be better people, better role models in other parts of the country.

[0:34:44.3] MB: Very interesting. Coming back to the framework that you're using for this, I love the Moneyball approach to solving some of these big challenges in life and using science data and research to find sometimes counterintuitive strategies is such a great methodology for trying to implement really anything.

[0:35:05.0] SSD: Yeah, definitely. Another one is dating, because this came up in this discussion of porn, but there's actually a study where they've shown that woman who shave their heads do surprisingly well in online dating sites and getting lots of dates, which you think would be totally crazy. Women shaving their heads is not usually thought of as attractive. It goes to the point that there are different types and people are into different things. By doing something that really expresses your personality, you can really become 10s to some people.

I think the intuitive strategy in dating is you rank yourself on a scale of one to 10 and you try to say, “What can push me higher? If I'm a five, how can I make myself into a six on average?” I think the better dating strategy is to increase your variance, not your mean. Instead of saying if you're a five, don't try to say what makes me a six on average. Say what makes me a 10 to some people? Do things that might be a little bit more – that some people are going to find really unattractive, but some people are going to find really attractive.

[0:36:12.1] MB: That methodology of increasing your variance instead of your mean in general is a great mental model. Dating is certainly one example where that can be really effective. I think even drawing that out and having that as a tool in your tool about of mental models is a great and very counterintuitive method for potentially improving your output, or your results in many different fields.

[0:36:36.9] MB: That's true. I agree. It depends a little on how big is the market, are there different preferences for your product, I guess. Yeah, I think in general it's probably not done enough. I think a lot of people are really concerned with people thinking they're weird. Doing these things frequently requires getting your variance high, frequently requires doing things that will make some people think you're weird.

If you shave your head as a woman, you're walking down the street, some people are going to think, “That person's a weirdo,” but it's actually the better strategy. If you have an outrageous product, that's going to cause some people to think you're weird, but it could mean some people are really into you.

Yeah, I think artists have found this a lot. Bob Dylan, I remember when he was starting out, he just got extreme reactions, very polarized reactions. Some people loved him and some people hated him and thought he was the weirdest guy ever and why's this guy singing. That was a good thing. I think Dylan had this personality where he didn't care so much about people thinking he was weird, which helped him a lot.

[0:37:47.2] MB: If you look at a field, even as broad as success, if you want to achieve something that not a lot of people have achieved, you have to do something that not a lot of people are willing to do. That same idea of doing things that people may say, “You're weird. Why are you doing that?” Those are often the exact things that you need to, or should be doing if you really want to stand out, if you really want to create results, if you really want to achieve something.

[0:38:13.8] SSD: Yeah. I mean, I definitely learned that in my own life. I was working at Google and I remember I was in this beard garden with a couple my friends, a bunch is random people and I was about to quit my job to write my book. I was reading sections for my book to them. It was I think a section on sexuality, or pornography, which I thought was really interesting. They were just like, “Who the hell is this creep? He's so weird. Why is he quitting his job at Google? You have a good job. You're going to quit to write this book.” Then it ended up working out really, really well.

Yeah, I think now if people think I'm weird, I don't really think it's bad. I usually think that's a good thing. I'm a little concerned when everybody thinks what I'm doing is really normal, or everybody thinks it's a good idea, because again, yeah, just being meh, okay to everybody, it is not usually the way to win in modern society.

[0:39:04.1] MB: That's a great lesson something I've also experienced in my own life. It's so important to really think about – I almost use it as a contra indicator. If I'm doing something, or a positive indicator. If I see something I'm like, “This seems weird and people might judge me for doing this,” I often think to myself, “Maybe that means that that's exactly why I should do it.”

[0:39:27.4] SSD: Yeah. You got to stand out. Attention is so hard to get these days. I think so many people are – there's such a high pressure to conform and to not be weird, basically. People feel that so strongly. I think you got to try to fight against that.

[0:39:43.0] MB: Seth, for listeners who want to take something that we've talked about today and concretely implement some of these themes and ideas into their lives, or use what we've discussed to improve their lives in some way, what would be one action item that you would give them as a step to concretely implement or use this to improve themselves?

[0:40:03.7] SSD: Maybe any time they're feeling bad about their lives, just look at Google autocomplete and type something like, “I am always.” You'll see all these people. “I'm always tired. I'm always hungry. I'm always thirsty.” I think typing in things like this and seeing what's on people's minds, I found that usually makes me feel a little better when I'm really hard on myself, makes me a little more compassionate.

[0:40:30.4] MB: That's a great and really simple hack to realize that everybody is struggling and everybody is suffering, and that you are not an isolated island. That part of the human experience is almost to feel the solution that you're alone, when really, we're all going through the same things.

[0:40:51.7] SSD: Yeah. Again, I think at least myself, but I'm guessing a lot of other people really can be hard on their selves, thinking that everybody else has it figured out. We personally don't. Literally, Google autocomplete. Just type, “I hate.” You see, “I hate myself. I hate my wife. I hate.” You just see, okay, a lot of people are struggling and confused.

[0:41:13.5] MB: Well Seth, where can listeners find you and your work and all of your research online?

[0:41:18.9] SSD: I always suggest just googling Everybody Lies Seth, because I have a complicated last name that nobody's going to find. If you Google Everybody Lies Seth, you'll find out who I am and see all my website and my Twitter feed and anything else you'd want.

[0:41:35.2] MB: Well Seth, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing some really fascinating and thought-provoking research and some interesting life hacks and strategies to implement as a result of it.

[0:41:46.7] SSD: Thanks so much.

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