How To Live The Perfect Life, Using Data - Seth Stephens-Davidowitz - #474

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. He's a data scientist, economist and an author. Imagine if you had access to millions of data points, which tell you exactly what makes people happy, or makes people attracted to you, or what actually influences your child's outcomes in life, or the most reliable way to become rich. Well, Seth did, and then he wrote a book about it with all of his findings in. Expect to learn how you can conduct a survey to test different appearance styles to find out which is the best for you, which personality traits result in the happiest relationships, what activities will make you the most and least happy, the secret industries of people who become rich in America, how to hack luck using data, and much more. This episode is absolutely awesome. I love when people find a way to cut through all of the rhetoric and stories and narrative and just give you the data, just tells you what you need to do. You want to be happy? These are the things you should do and these are the things you should avoid. You want to be attractive? You want to find a partner that you're going to love for a while? You want to become rich? You want to become famous? This is what people who have done it did. And you can take that as you wish. It's so cool. The book is awesome. If you enjoyed it, it's linked in the show notes below. Don't trust your gut, go and buy it. Seth's a great guy and this book's phenomenal. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Seth Stevens-Davidowitz.
dude, your new book is absolutely awesome. This is what people want, someone that has access to loads of data to actually come up with and do. It's like, look, just tell me how I'm supposed to live my life, please. Can you just give me the money ball for my existence? That would be great, thank you.

**Seth Stephens-Davidowitz** (2:07)
Yeah, that was the motivation for the book is that, it's legitimately the book I wanted to read because I'm obsessed with self-help. Like, it's a little embarrassing because I'm supposed to be such an intellectual. And my bookshelves are just filled with self-help, like how to get more powerful when I was single, how to date better, how to be happier, how to whatever. And I'm so frustrated because I read all these books and I'm like, I just don't believe, I'm like, this isn't really based on very much. You just like had an idea and you just told me it's not like up to the rigorous standards that I'd come to expect from data analysis. So I'm kind of just like, okay, what would actually be like, what if you just explored all the areas of life and just said what the data tells you on it? And like, you know, like, I've also noticed that a lot of self-help books, when they say they're evidence-based or like science-based, somebody just has a point they want to make and they just Google some study that confirms it. And like, that's not how I wrote this book. I literally had no idea what I was saying on any of these topics. I'm like, I don't know what I'm saying about dating. I don't know what I'm saying about entrepreneurship. I don't know what I'm saying about happiness. And I'm just like going to find the best studies and the best data and the best whatever. And then like, here, that's what I'm saying now, so, yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (3:20)
It does make other books feel inconsistent and insubstantial. You're like, hang on a second.
What did you say? You just told me a nice story. It's just a story that happens to fit some eat, pray, love narrative that sounds nice.

**Seth Stephens-Davidowitz** (3:43)
I think it's right.
I think it's also a misconception that people just want to read stories. That's kind of an idea that they tell authors. You just tell stories, tell stories, tell stories. And everybody who's read my book so far, which I'm just going to say that you're supposed to say the name a lot, Don't Trust Your Gut, some people remember it. But everyone who's read my book has been like, I've been enthralled by the tables and the charts, which is like, again, that's not usually what you put in self-help books, like tables and charts.

**Chris Williamson** (4:12)
dude, seduced by a nice bar chart, that's what people needed more of.

**Seth Stephens-Davidowitz** (4:18)
People are like coming back with very subtle points, like where I'm like, wow, the closest everybody was reading the book was actually the tables and charts and figures, and I'm like, oh, I think there were misconceptions about the audience for books and what they actually want. I think people do want things that are a little meatier and a little more substantial and a little more data driven.