XPC#5 - Sandy Pentland: "This is the Dominant Effect. Period."

Xapiens at MIT

The Xapiens Podcast (XPC) Episode 5:

Join Xapiens Co-Director Bobby Johnston in a discussion with Alex (Sandy) Pentland. Sandy is a professor at the MIT Media lab, is on the advisory board for the UN Secretary General, UN Foundation, Consumers Union, and OECD, co-led the World Economic Forum leading to GDPR, and has delivered keynote addresses for OECD, G20, World Bank, and JP Morgan. He has co-founded a long list of companies (for example https://cogitocorp.com/, https://www.ginger.com/, and https://www.endor.com/).

He is the author of several books, the two discussed in this podcast are Social Physics (https://www.amazon.com/Social-Physics...) and Building the New Economy (https://www.amazon.com/Building-New-E...) which was published in October 2021.

We did not have enough time to cover in the breadth nor depth necessary to really understand all of his ideas, so I highly encourage you to read his books (social physics is also available as an audiobook), or watch some of his great video content available online, for example: https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/re...

REFERENCE LINKS:

Paper discussing social physics as spin glass: https://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1357

Crowd sourced rare disease website: https://www.patientslikeme.com/

Why healthcare doesn't screen healthy patients: https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158...

We don't know the mechanism of action for Tylenol (acetaminophen / paracetamol): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21054...

US Healthcare spending as percent of GDP: https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statisti...

Links to 1980s China Diet Study:

https://www.cornell.edu/video/playlis...

http://web.archive.org/web/2009022322...

https://nutritionstudies.org/the-chin...