But guess today Seth Stevens-Dividowitz has a very special gift. He's a data whisperer.

You give him a pile of data and he will find an interesting story.

We're living in an incredible era, a data explosion that's giving us answers to all these

kind of age-old, very important questions. What makes you rich, what makes a successful

data, what makes people happy, what makes you look better.

Welcome to People I mostly admire with Steve Levin.

Seth parlayed his Harvard PhD thesis which analyzed data on Google searches into a data scientist

job at Google and a best-selling book entitled Everybody Lies. Now he's back with a brand new book.

It's called Don't Trust Your Gut and it's more or less a self-help book for data nerds.

A great example of the kind of thing you do so well is the part of the book where you

talk about how you have a lifelong frustration with the way you look and then you finally

decide to do something about it. Can you explain how a data scientist approaches a makeover?

So there's all this research on how you look influences your life outcomes. So

Alexander Todorov, I think he's with you at Chicago, has done these studies that you can predict

70% of the winners of gubernatorial elections just based on showing people a face of the candidate.

It's really actually depressing. It's like she's already really that superficial. Yes,

you can predict how long someone's sentence is going to be based on what they look like or how far

they're going to rise in a military career based on what they look like. I have lifelong

been insecure about how I looked. The way I usually respond to it is just ignoring it and dressing

poorly and making some self-deprecating jokes. And I'm like, wait a minute, maybe I can

influence this a little bit. And there also is research that how you look and vary a lot,

like subtle differences can change dramatically how you're perceived. So there's this app face app

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