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

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh yes, hello humans. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. He is a former data scientist at Google, now turned author and writer. We're talking about big data today. previously, we touched on something similar actually. If you listen to the episode I did with Professor David Carroll, one of the main guys in Netflix's The Great Hack documentary. But rather than working out the ethical concerns of whether or not we should be concerned about people capturing our data, we're actually going into the data itself anonymously. You see, the fact of the matter is that Google knows things about you that even your closest friends don't. Because the things that you type into a search engine in the privacy of your own web browsing are often things that you've never told anybody else. So in short, Seth has a window into your soul that maybe you didn't even know was there and we're going to look at it today. So get ready for this one. Oh yeah, also, if you are new here or if you haven't hit the subscribe button yet, please do so, it would make me very happy indeed. Now please welcome the wise and wonderful Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. So, first things first, how do you describe what you do for work or on a day-to-day basis?

**Seth Stephens-Davidowitz** (1:37)
Well, so I guess I'm a data scientist and an author, a writer. So, I spend most of my time on books. I wrote Everybody Lies. I'm trying to write. I'm in the process of writing another book.
And 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...

**Chris Williamson** (2:01)
I got you. Is it a lot of time on spreadsheets or similar sort of applications?

**Seth Stephens-Davidowitz** (2:05)
Yeah, R, the coding language, there's a lot of time on that. Kind of moving back and forth between R and Google Docs, because I guess the combination of data science, which is R, and writing, which is Google Docs.

**Chris Williamson** (2:18)
Got you.

**Seth Stephens-Davidowitz** (2:19)
And then sometimes just researching, a lot of like reading, so a lot of reading other people's studies, kind of reading what other people are talking about, since I can't just write about my own studies.

**Chris Williamson** (2:28)
Which is a shame.

**Seth Stephens-Davidowitz** (2:30)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (2:30)
Yeah, it would be lovely. So you wrote a book called Everybody Lies, New York Times bestseller, but I heard that you wanted to call it How Big Is My Penis?

**Seth Stephens-Davidowitz** (2:42)
Is that right? That is correct.

**Chris Williamson** (2:45)
You wanted to call your book How Big Is Your Penis?

**Seth Stephens-Davidowitz** (2:48)
No, How Big Is My Penis.

**Chris Williamson** (2:49)
How Big Is My Penis, yes.

**Seth Stephens-Davidowitz** (2:51)
Well, no, basically the reason for it is that that's one of the top. Well, I talk about how men ask more, Google more questions about their penis than any other body part, and that one of the top questions they ask Google about their penis is how big is my penis, which is just like an absurd question to ask Google.
They're not going to be able to answer that. I kind of thought that that title would kind of get the flavor of some of the 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 the privacy of their own home on their Google search engine or the websites they visit and they go to Pornhub, they kind of just show a different side of themselves, which is a little bit stupider, a little bit less polished, a little bit weirder, a little bit sometimes nastier, but I think it's kind of, it's kind of an interesting view of people that we haven't really previously had.

**Chris Williamson** (3:48)
Hmm, yeah, that totally unfettered view where you don't think that anyone else is watching, but the data analysts are watching, you are.

**Seth Stephens-Davidowitz** (3:56)
Well, the data I analyze is all anonymous and aggregate, so I don't know that any particular man searched how big is my penis, I just know that lots of men appear.

**Chris Williamson** (4:08)
You know what I think? I think there is an opening in the market for an app which can use AR, like augmented reality, you hold it up to your face, you angle the penis and then it works out how big it is.