Pod Insights On with Kara Swisher Friction Matters: Resistance Is a Feature, Not a Bug About this episode Friction gets an bad rap, according Jennifer Vail. As a tribologist, she studies interacting surfaces in relative motion, and she’s worked on everything from aerospace materials to syringes to dog food. Her new book, Friction: A Biography, explores the science of rubbing surfaces, the history of lubrication, and why “frictionless” is a dangerous fantasy.
Kara and Jennifer unpack everything from Roman chariot “pit stops” to ball bearings and how tiny tweaks in texture and lubricant chemistry can save massive amounts of energy. They end with a discussion of behavioral friction (the kind tech companies want to get rid of) and Kara makes the case for “good friction” in tech, work, and relationships.
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Transcript 10,717 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:12 Kara Swisher? Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is tribologist Jennifer Vale. Tribology is the study of friction, wear and lubrication between the interacting surfaces in relative motion. It's a little-known but hugely important discipline. Jennifer is also the author of a new book entitled Friction: A Biography. It's a fascinating look at the history of how humans have learned to understand and manipulate friction. We don't often think about the effects of friction, but once you become aware of them, you realize they're everywhere and impossible to unsee. I'm excited to talk to her about it because in technology, one of the things technologists try to do is eliminate all friction, including in social interactions.
0:57 Kara Swisher? It's had an enormously bad effect on our society. Chatbots, the way we talk to each other, the way we conduct friction online, has become something that's been very deleterious to our species, I think. And so it's really important to understand the good and bad parts of friction. Of course, I'm a friction-filled person, and I have done very well by it. And I think it's really important to do that for creativity, for innovation, and for basic humanity. Our expert questions come from astrophysicist Adam Becker and health policy expert Ezekiel Emanuel. This conversation will leave you feeling much smarter. It's a kind I really want to do here on On with Kara Swisher. I know I talk to a lot of big names and stuff like that, but it's these issues that are
1:39 Kara Swisher? critical, and Jennifer has a lot to say on it, so stick around.
1:52 Kara Swisher? Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week. As they utilize all the reporting resources, a Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And the Guardian's not owned by a billionaire. They fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.
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3:48 Kara Swisher? Jennifer, thanks for coming on ON.
3:51 Speaker 03 Thank you for having me.
3:52 Kara Swisher? I really appreciate it. This is a topic that matters a lot to me, and I think it's important. It's about the word friction, and it's a critically important thing in every aspect of life. So why don't you start with the bigger picture of friction and why you decided to write, what is a memoir, actually, about a scientific thing and also an emotional thing?
4:13 Speaker 03 Yeah, so I can't say that friction was something as a kid I thought I would end up having a career in. I didn't know it was possible to be a trebologist until right before I started a PhD. But as I started the work on my PhD, I realized... All of us are tribologists. We're dealing with friction all the time. It's ubiquitous. It's everywhere. And there's not that many areas of science that actually touch on everything. You know, friction is at the cellular level. It's in space. So there's a lot of stories to tell with friction. And the view of our evolution as a civilization can actually be seen through the lens of friction and how we have evolved to understand it and how that's led to progress.
4:56 Speaker 03 So the memoir came about sort of naturally with friction telling its story to me and me realizing it was interesting enough to other people that we should put this on paper and talk about it.
5:05 Kara Swisher? So tribology, explain, or tribology, however it's pronounced, explain what that is for people. It is the study of friction.
5:12 Speaker 03 Yes, it's the science of interacting surfaces in relative motion. So we're looking at friction, wear and lubrication specifically. And, you know, if it's a word you haven't heard before, join the club. It's a fun buzzword of the day. It isn't that old as a field of formalized science. It's actually almost exactly 60 years from today. March 9, 1966 is when that term was coined.
5:37 Kara Swisher? By whom?
5:38 Speaker 03 It was the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary proposed it. And Peter Jost was heading up this committee that was looking into failures in manufacturing plants where the equipment was breaking and they thought it was simply due to bad lubrication. But when they looked into it, they realized there was actually lubricant present. So there was a bigger problem happening. And as they dug into it, they realized part of it was the design of the equipment. Part of it was the material selection. Part of it was the wrong lubricant being used. Some of it was the practice around lubrication. And they were like, oh, no, this is an engineering problem. This is a chemistry problem. This is a physics problem. It's a mechanics problem. That's a whole field in itself. So they couldn't just call it lubrication,
6:21 Speaker 03 which is what they started the report as. And so Peter Jost reached out to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, asked for help. They came up with tribology. It's rooted in the Greek word that means to rub. So we rub things together.
6:35 Kara Swisher? You've called yourself the ambassador for friction and you say it gets a bad rap. I know we sort of talked about that, but what motivated you to challenge people to think about friction, even if they think about it all, because it's all around them? Walking through air is friction. Everything is friction. Sex is friction. Relationships are friction. A car is friction. Talk about how, what motivated you to think about it?
7:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, what motivated me to think about it as I need to start changing perspectives on it? As a tribologist, I think any tribologist will tell you, whenever we hear the term frictionless, we get a little bit, that's not quite right, friction's there. And people would say this, like frictionless was a better thing, was a good thing.
7:18 Kara Swisher? Silicon Valley does it. We'll get to that in a minute.
7:20 Speaker 03 So it, it just plays into this almost naturally bad reputation friction has. You know, the definition of friction has resistance in it. Um, in school, you're always told, ignore friction to make it an ideal problem. And I just realized how much we have this bias against it and don't realize how necessary it is that it's helping to keep our, the plates in the earth stabilized. You know, when the friction slips, we have an earthquake that you're able to drive because of it. There's all these positives with friction. It's around us all the time. We don't necessarily appreciate it. As a tribologist, you start to see it everywhere and appreciate it. And so I just figured, if I see it everywhere, so should you.
8:00 Kara Swisher? And you're giving a good rap. I agree with you. This is why I loved your book. So a lot of us learn about friction in high school physics. I only took a semester of that. Were showed, uh, an inclined plane and then given formulas that either ignore friction, as you said, or treat a coefficient of friction as a fixed constant. My son, who is a mechanical engineer, talks about this all the time with me and I sit and stare at him. In reality, there are multiple kinds of friction, of course. Talk about how friction behaves in the real world and why it's much more complicated than the simplified models we're taught in school.
8:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's, um, one of the many misconceptions of friction, if like a broken record with it, is that it's a material property? That it's just something inherent to the material. If I'm, you know, writing with a pencil, people will think that the friction is just due to the lead in the pencil. It's actually the whole system that we're looking at. It's the friction between the pencil and the paper. So both of those things play into friction. And so we've actually had to do a lot of debunking and re- Framing how people think about friction because for a very long time they thought it was a constant that I'll select this material and I'll go ahead and have an expected value of friction, which is not the case. It's more complicated than that.
9:12 Speaker 03 In many ways, we can simplify friction, but you do have to take in the entire system. You can't just isolate the box. I need to know the box and the floor. And if you've ever had to push a heavy box on the floor, like you know, when you first start pushing, you sometimes almost face plant because all of a sudden it gives and it's much easier. That's something called static friction. So when something sits for a while, it has the opportunity to get you more sticky with the the contact, get more adhesive bonds. And so you actually have to use more force to break.
9:43 Kara Swisher? With the floor.
9:44 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly with the system. And then you'll break those forces and you still have friction, but it's less. And so that would be, we would call that dynamic friction. So you have two types of friction there that you have to think about. So if you're trying to study friction in a system, you have to look at that startup. You know, a lot of my career as a trebologist has been focused specifically on that static friction. When I start up a car, how much oomph do I need to overcome the friction to get everything going? That sometimes is the most important part that maybe people don't think about and there's different mechanisms behind it. There's the friction involved with solid on solid, solid with, you know, fluid. You know, we all know the tricks, add water, add grease
10:28 Speaker 03 to try to make things more slippery, but changes the friction of your system and how you might want to calculate it. And then, of course, moving through air and through water like ships and planes, drag a totally different type of friction to consider.
10:42 Kara Swisher? Right. So what are some of the common sense beliefs that are wrong?
10:45 Speaker 03 Well, the main one is that friction's bad. Friction is just there, right? We just need to deal with it. We can manipulate it. Sometimes people think because it's there, we don't have a choice. But there are ways that we can either make more of it if we need it, or we can have less of it, depending what we're trying to do. And they sometimes will think that it's a hundred percent, just make things rough. But sometimes rougher surface can actually help us reduce friction. So it's not a one size fits all. I would say friction is one of these things where there's always some sort of exception, even when we talk about our laws of friction. One of the ones that people will cite is that it's independent of the speed you're moving something, but that one gets broken all the time.
11:28 Speaker 03 So there, you can't lump friction into one thing other than it's the force resisting motion between bodies, but that's about all we can do. You can't, can't make a stereotype around it beyond that.
11:40 Kara Swisher? Right, right. We'll be back in a minute.
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15:18 Kara Swisher? So you know, one of the themes you come back to in the book is the idea that friction has been one of the hidden engines of civilization. And that understanding could lead to even more breakthroughs. To control fire, for example, humans had to learn how to generate heat through friction. To make a wheel useful, they had to balance high friction at the ground for traction with low friction at the axle. And ancient shipbuilders were engineering boats to deal with, as you said, drag friction in water. Talk about your favorite moments in history where mastering friction was a breakthrough that enabled a transformative innovation?
15:49 Speaker 03 I think for me, when I was going through this book, I was surprised at all the different examples throughout history of where we've been manipulating friction, whether we fully understood what we were doing or not. There was with the Roman chariots, you know, they were greasing their axles, but I think it was Pliny who noted, there was a note in an ancient text that said during chariot racings, there was a red glow, because the frictional heating could get that high. So if you imagine as the person driving the chariot standing above that axle, your feet would get really warm. And what they would do for this was they would actually, after a certain distance or laps, splash water onto the chariot to cool down the frictional heating, which also
16:34 Speaker 03 keeps greases from igniting. And so I thought it was really fun that this was essentially the first pit stop that we had in racing. And it was a necessity because of friction, because things just got very warm. Another interesting one, whether it was intentional or not, is that the Egyptians may have been using water to help optimize the friction in sand as they were moving sledges. So they found a painting that depicted, you know, an Egyptian carrying a vase of water in front of a sledge, moving a very heavy statue. And so some-
17:11 Kara Swisher? This is to build the pyramid.
17:12 Speaker 03 In this case, the painting was moving a large statue, but it would have been applicable for pyramids too, because the last thing you want when you're moving those heavy stones is extra resistance, and moving stuff in sand is not the easiest. So researchers- Saw this and thought, well, they may have just been splashing water because it was part of a ritual. But actually, could that have been helping the mechanics of this whole process? And they did find that splashes of water, the way it changes how the sand is behaving would lower the friction and make it easier for a sledge to move over it. So it may have not been intentional, may not have been why they started doing this. But they accidentally found a way to just make the friction
17:55 Speaker 03 more in their favor to move these really heavy objects around in the sand.
17:59 Kara Swisher? You know, I was just at the Air and Space Museum and there's a whole thing about flying, of course, which is all about resistance and friction, correct?
18:06 Speaker 03 Correct, yes.
18:07 Kara Swisher? And by the way, there was a right sister for people who don't know, and the mother was also very, I'm sorry, I always mention it because I'm like, come on. There was a sister and a mother.
18:15 Speaker 03 I appreciate that because even with all my research, they were never mentioned.
18:19 Kara Swisher? Well, they are now at the Air and Space Museum until, you know, some Trump administration official figures it out. But maybe they don't listen to this. Anyway, talk about ball bearings. It's an underappreciated but incredibly important innovation. I mean, these are these little steel balls that are often used in all manner of of mechanical things.
18:37 Speaker 03 Yeah, they're they're there to give us rolling friction instead of sliding. Rolling friction will always be lower. And it's amazing because if you were to look up on the internet, modern ball bearing raceway, it looks exactly like a sketch that you will find in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. So they haven't really had to change much in their design. We had a grasp on these pretty early on. Uh, the craziest example to me came from party boats that Emperor Caligula created in a landlocked lake. There had been rumors of shipwrecks in this. It was Lake Nemi, a volcanic crater lake.
19:16 Speaker 03 For for years and years and years, and finally in eighteen ninety, divers got down there and found them and confirmed there's shipwrecks down here and they're big. So it was this whole, why are there these giant ships in this landlocked thing? Well, it turns out Caligia, who was wildly unpopular, just made giant floating party boats. And on those seemed to have some sort of rotating platform or stage. Um, maybe the first rotating club stage, I don't know, but they were on large bronze balls. So these were, you know, this bizarre show of friction engineering that the Romans did to help rotate these platforms. Those were ball bearings.
19:53 Kara Swisher? Right.
19:53 Speaker 03 And then Da Vinci sketched them out. The big innovation that came with ball bearings was when we were able to manufacture the stainless steel kind and get them very uniform and smooth. But that's largely, uh, you know, ball bearings have stayed the same over time. Cause when you have a good solution, you have a good solution.
20:09 Kara Swisher? Why wouldn't you go with it? So if you ask most people what friction means, they probably picture two solids rubbing, right? Fluid friction is where things get complicated though. When did people start to study to understand the comments like flow, viscosity, turbulence? And what did that unlock?
20:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, I love where friction takes you since it's everywhere. And when the big breakthroughs with understanding friction of fluids came from the internal friction fluids feel, which is viscosity. Uh, Isaac Newton suggested viscosity existed, that there'd be friction between the layers. And if there was high friction between the layers, it would resist flow. That would be high viscosity, something like honey. That's usually the example. Low friction between those layers, you flow very easily like water. And the, a nice breakthrough that came through how to measure and understand the relationship between flow and viscosity came from simultaneous work being done by a hydraulics engineer, Gautam Hoggan, looking at how to move river water through pipes.
21:09 Speaker 03 And then, um, I'm going to butcher his name, Poiseu, who was studying blood. So you have blood and you have pipes. But at the same time, they came to the same conclusion and they determined how you could set up experiments with different pressure, different flow and understand what viscosity was. And that was just one step of the way, cause there's also how fluid flows, it can be smooth or it can be turbulent. And then there's this big question of, well, if you have solids in contact, how does the fluid even get in between that contact? That's what we want to do, right? To lower friction. And so, um, a gentleman Named Osborne Reynolds is the one who figured out how to adapt lubrication theory.
21:52 Speaker 03 And found the pressures in the system can cause the fluid to manage to sneak in there. I mean, we all know. If water is insidious, it will go anywhere.
21:59 Kara Swisher? Everywhere.
22:01 Speaker 03 And it actually, the fluid can have enough internal pressure to separate some of those solid contacts. And that lubrication theory really set us running and understanding how we can design machinery equipment to have lower friction.
22:14 Kara Swisher? You were talking about blood flow, which is studied a lot. I happen to have what's called thick blood. And it's one of the reasons for my stroke was because the thickness of the blood. The viscosity was high. Is that correct? That it was or low?
22:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, so high, if you had thicker blood, I would imagine it would be higher viscosity. So. Not flowing as easily, higher resistance to flow. Yes.
22:39 Kara Swisher? Exactly. And it can cause real problems in health if that's the case. If people don't drink enough water, for example, it happens, you can get very sick and it affects your blood. And you can be born that way, which is interesting. The industrial revolution wouldn't have happened if scientists and engineers hadn't figured out how to stop metals from destroying each other. Because a lot of the industrial solution is metal upon metal. We learn about the advances in iron production, steam engines, machine tools and factories. The unsung heroes of industrial revolution was lubrication that kept the shafts, bearings and gears alive. Long enough to run continuously because if not, they'd wear each other out.
23:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, so we get into lubrication, it gets complicated fast. So what a lubricant can do, you know, obviously the goal is to completely separate those solid contacts.
23:27 Kara Swisher? Two metals, for example.
23:29 Speaker 03 Yes, are two metals. And if you look at the surface of those metals, even if they seem smooth and you start zooming in. You notice that the surface of the metals, they're going to have hills and valleys. That's just how surfaces are. And the contact will be at the high points between the surfaces. So we want the lubricant to get in between there to separate them. If you put too little lubricant in there, you might just have dots of it around. But it's not really separating those high points on the contacts. So you're still dealing with the high friction of the metal on metal contact. And you can go from not separating any of those to starting to separate them.
24:10 Speaker 03 And the friction can start to drop dramatically, which in some cases could be a problem as well.
24:16 Kara Swisher? Too much.
24:16 Speaker 03 You need to know, are you going to be in the high point, the low point? And then eventually you hit the minimum where you have separated all of those out. And you get your low friction that presumably you want because you want to separate your metal on metal. But if you start to put too much grease in there, you can actually start to get friction creeping back in because of the viscosity of the lubricant that you're using. So there's like a sweet spot.
24:41 Kara Swisher? Anyone who's grinded a gear knows that, who drives a shift car. I drive shift cars. I don't think anyone does anymore, but I'm an old person and I'm quite good at it. Um, I drive them in San Francisco, so that's, yeah, I know, I'm good at it. But anyone who's had that app and can understand that, who's ever used any kind of gear mechanism in a car, uh, which we don't do anymore really, but it's still existing. It's just a car is doing it itself, an automatic.
25:07 Speaker 03 And it can get very complicated with the automatic having to do it, especially with start-stop systems that we have in cars now to save emissions. That's tough because if you're starting and stopping, where's the lubricant going? So they've actually, most systems now will have a separate, small little pump to keep that circulating so that you don't suddenly have high friction at startup again and high wear. Because like you said, metal on metal is, you want to avoid that as much as possible.
25:34 Kara Swisher? Right. Um, in the book, you explain how friction is a massive but overlooked cause of global warming, speaking of emissions. In order to lower our carbon output, we need to get better at managing friction. And you can get very dirty very quickly by not managing it correctly. You write the quote, "Only about twenty-one point five percent of the fuel we put in our cars is used to move them," which is incredible. Even as we changed EVs, and that's a slow process, friction caused rolling resistance, lubrication needs contact wear, still reduces a car's energy efficiency. Why don't we pay more attention to the energy caused by friction? And what would it take to significantly reduce vehicle energy usage if that's ultimately caused by friction?
26:17 Speaker 03 It's a great question. I'm I'm not entirely sure why friction was overlooked for so long. I think it's really because friction overall has just probably been one of the most underappreciated forces in our lives. As we're getting more and more awareness of it, people are tackling it. And even just from the start of my career to now, I have seen so many more tribology labs show up in industry that never existed before. And, you know, it sometimes is unglamorous, which might be another thing.
26:47 Kara Swisher? Yeah, efficiency is not glamorous.
26:49 Speaker 03 Yes, and and sometimes, you know, people like the design of the overall shape of the car, which does help with friction and drag, right? But if we really want to reduce and save as much energy as possible, you have to be looking at every little thing that's moving. And sometimes that doesn't seem like the sexiest problem to be working on. When in fact, if you're able to reduce the friction and all of those little moving components, even 10%, it adds up. Hopefully, people have seen this because we've been making great strides in it with the fuel efficiency of internal combustion engine vehicles. You know, these these cars aren't getting any smaller and they're not getting any less powerful. All of these things mean the fuel efficiency should be dropping off quite a bit. But it's not like we're still making improvements.
27:31 Speaker 03 And it's because people are finally noticing friction. We have new lubricants with different viscosity to help optimize that. We have surface texturing, a lot of work has been done there. So if you change the texture of a part, does it help trap that lubricant in there and get even lower friction? A lot of actually really clever innovation going on in these small areas that people haven't really noticed, except for the fact that hopefully they're not having to put as much gas in their cars as they were before.
28:00 Kara Swisher? Or else they're like, we got plenty of gas, so who cares, right? That's part of it, right? Of course, the other impact is rather severe. Um, you know, anyone who's watched a speed skater knows with their swimmer, they're always trying to reduce friction. But one of the things that's important is thinking about friction in cars or anywhere requires systems thinking. And that's a more difficult because it crosses so many, so many disciplines of what's happening. Um, every episode, we get an expert to send us a question. We have two for you. Let's hear the first one.
28:28 Speaker 04 Hi, I'm Adam Becker, author and astrophysicist. My big question for Jennifer is, you know, it makes sense that studying friction can lead to Massive gains in energy efficiency in many different areas. But how do we know that that's actually going to lead us to use less energy? Or at least, you know, less nonrenewable energy? The reason I ask is that there's this thing called Jevons paradox that says that as you increase efficiency, can actually increase the usage of relevant resources, not decrease it. You know, we saw this in the 1800s. People got better at using coal more efficiently.
29:12 Speaker 04 And that actually led them to burn more coal, not less. And, you know, recently we've gotten much better at getting lighting to be much more efficient. You know, using LEDs rather than fluorescents or incandescents. But we don't use less energy on lighting than we used to. So how do we know that efficiency is really going to lead to these, you know, massive gains in fighting the climate and energy crisis? Thanks.
29:36 Kara Swisher? It's very relevant, new data centers, obviously.
29:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a great question and a great point. Part of it, my, part of my answer is probably my own optimism and a little bit that I think every little bit helps. And in some cases, I a hundred percent agree. As we make things more efficient, people, you give an inch, they take a mile type thing. So that may happen. But I personally, my driving habits haven't changed. So the fact that I have a more energy efficient car means at least my usage, I'm able to save. And if I can multiply that across however many people might be like me, not changing their habits, then you are still saving that, that chunk. And I think any little bit is worth pursuing and worth putting towards that battle.
30:24 Speaker 03 There's maybe the 20% available. Do I believe we'll be able to get all of that? Not necessarily, but I think it's an opportunity for us to start chipping away at it. But I do think he makes a great point that as we make things more efficient.
30:38 Kara Swisher? We have a voracious appetite.
30:39 Speaker 03 Yes, I always want more.
30:41 Kara Swisher? So if we take Adam's point, let's assume we do want to increase energy efficiency. If excess friction is leading to massive energy losses, just in the car category, what's it doing on a global scale? What are the highest leverage friction losses? If you had to pick a shortlist of climate and relevant friction interventions that scale, what would you prioritize first and why?
31:00 Speaker 03 The transportation sector is the biggest offender. And then you obviously can break that into cars and planes. A surprising one is also energy generation. Right? So hopefully, we will move to renewable, more and more renewables. But in the meantime, any, even with renewables, we want wind turns to be as efficient as possible. So that they, what the wind that they're getting, they can most efficiently convert to electricity, not having to deal with the friction in the motors that they're dealing with. So different ways to chip out there. I think energy production is probably one of the most surprising areas where friction is a significant factor.
31:42 Speaker 03 And you have it from traditional power plants where you have, you know, the turbine engines, very similar engines to what's in a plane. Right? And if you can make that as efficient as possible, then you have more efficient energy production. And I do think that that is an opportunity for us to be chipping away at that bigger number.
32:02 Kara Swisher? Hmm.
32:03 Speaker 03 I mean, I spent a chunk of my career just creating materials to actually act in between metal on metal to reduce friction. And the whole point was to make them as small and thin as light as possible, because it's literally every single little ounce is what they're trying to save because it impacts the efficiency of those airplanes. So amount of luggage that we bring, all of that is taking big impacts on our energy usage.
32:27 Kara Swisher? Right. So speaking of planes, talk about winglets. These are actually making them more energy efficient. What's a winglet?
32:33 Speaker 03 So if you look at the tips of planes, I do this on every plane I go on because they all have something different on the tips. You know, there's the little winglet that's arcing up. Sometimes it's a big loop. Sometimes there are little forks on there. They're all different. And these are designed to optimize the airflow around the wings to maximize the lift to drag ratio so that we can minimize the drag, use, you know, the way the air is flowing to provide more lift with the tips of the wings. I just think it's really fascinating that we don't seem to have one universal design that seems to be the best. But I think that is the exclamation point on why, particularly with fluids and fluid friction, it's just complicated. It's hard to model that.
33:15 Kara Swisher? Right. You sit on the wing of every plane you go on.
33:18 Speaker 03 I maybe.
33:21 Kara Swisher? We'll be back in a minute.
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36:05 Kara Swisher? So in the last part of the book, you start to push unexpected territory away from engineering and physics into topics like medicine and outer space. For example, friction plays an important role in biology. Living things move even at a molecular level. When proteins fold and unfold, they're constantly fighting internal, something called molecular friction. What creates internal friction during protein folding? And why does understanding the mechanism matter for designing therapeutics? There's a lot of activity. I just finished a CNN docu-series, which includes talking about gene folding and gene editing, et cetera.
36:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, I might ask your opinion or to correct me if I am wrong in how I'm misunderstanding it.
36:44 Kara Swisher? I'm no doctor, but I'll try from my interviews, but go ahead.
36:48 Speaker 03 I mean, maybe the people you spoke to can help me with this, too, because it's an area that I find fascinating. And this is one of these areas where I think the question is, what role does friction play and how much does it matter? I mean, things are moving, so we know friction is there. But I don't know if we have a clear picture of how big of an influence that has. It could be that, you know, the more friction there is, maybe that's causing too much energy to require for folding. And maybe it is a reason why sometimes the folding fails. If protein folding fails, that can lead to things like Alzheimer's and really serious diseases. So of course, we want to understand everything that goes into the folding. But I don't think it's 100% clear, the role that friction is playing in that.
37:33 Speaker 03 But we know it's moving. You have these molecular chains, the amino acids, as they're connected and start to fold and move, they're going to experience friction. And sometimes it's the friction from the turning. Sometimes it's, you know, energy barriers that they're having to overcome in this process. Different mechanisms involved in that and people are studying different types of bonds and interactions between amino acids that might cause more or less friction. But the big question is, what does that mean on on the overall process? And I think we're still trying to understand that, but if we're trying to model this process to be able to predict it or target therapeutics, we need to understand the impact of every variable and friction is one of those variables.
38:18 Kara Swisher? Which is why they're using AI to do so because it can do it much quicker. One of the things that people, as much as AI gets deserved attacks for lots of different negative things, one of the positives, the ability to take drug discovery and squeeze the time and the amount of computing that is required to do so and testing, which is a big deal, meaning they can come up with more therapeutics or they can eliminate therapeutics that don't work very quickly. It usually takes a long time and many, you know, dead animals essentially, but they don't necessarily have to do it. The other part is I I did a lab at Stanford that's doing something called millibots, which are tiny little, they look like Fantastic Voyage, little tiny things they inject
39:00 Kara Swisher? into people's veins and then they will get rid of a stroke. I had a stroke myself, so that's why I visited it. And previously, they they still use using a catheter, but catheters have friction against veins are very strong. People don't realize how strong veins are. But but the catheter can cause damage and if it goes up into a stroke clot and it breaks it apart, it can keep going. And these millibots don't, they just keep going because and they're manipulated by AI magnets and a mapping of your of an individual brain is fascinating. But friction is what we talked about the whole time, almost the whole time.
39:39 Speaker 03 Yeah, um, yeah, I'm gonna have to look into that because.
39:42 Kara Swisher? I'll I'll send you the thing. It's a lab at Stanford. But the people working on it, interestingly, are mechanical engineers working with scientists because it's a mechanical engineering problem, really.
39:53 Speaker 03 And we're seeing that more and more. So my background is in mechanical engineering. And actually, my professor, Greg Sawyer, who was running the He now runs a department of cancer engineering at the Moffett Research Institute because he has also pivoted that way because we're seeing so much how there's mechanical engineering that we marry with the biosciences and you have amazing technology like that. And I can see why friction would do that because if you're trying to travel through our body and through veins into target a very specific spot, if you run into too much friction or you don't quite have the flow quite right, it's not going to be able to deliver what you want. And
40:33 Speaker 03 sometimes I remember my professor Greg Sawyer said he would have situations where the scientists would say, oh, something like that. I don't think that's possible. But the engineer wouldn't realize that it shouldn't be possible. It would just sort of design it based on the variables of engineering and it would work. So I think it's very exciting what we're seeing with the marriage of those disciplines.
40:54 Kara Swisher? Absolutely. There's a, it's a, it's a, it's magnets is what they use magnets and AI. It's really quite crazy and it's, it's eventually they will, they will be able to just inject it and then someone in Boston can run the program in Arkansas, right? And so you prevent strokes, which then leads to all kinds of medical interventions that will cost, be very safe money is really ultimately.
41:17 Speaker 03 It's amazing.
41:18 Kara Swisher? It is amazing. One of the things that my son was working on as an intern was using hydrogen in fuel injection engines, how you could control the blasts, right? And how you do and friction plays a huge part in that. There's all kinds of and uses of, of these scenarios and mechanical engineering scenarios are a big part of this, which is really interesting. And, you know, of course he has to study chemistry and physics at the same time, but it's a really interesting multi-disciplinary thing. Now, on the other side of the spectrum, you have astrophysics. Now, interestingly, I'm having a doctor ask you an astrophysics question. Listeners might be surprised to learn there's friction in outer space since it's a vacuum. So that, that in mind, let's play our second expert question.
42:00 Kara Swisher? Hello, I'm Ezekiel Emanuel. I'm a physician, a bioethicist and a health policy expert. And I'd love to ask Jennifer the following big question. I've studied a lot of chemistry and physics and thinking about space, outer
42:17 Speaker 07 Uh, friction is an interesting question. In outer space, temperatures are very low and there's big vacuums without any molecules between various areas. So, there's one question uh, that relates to the temperature. You can't have liquid lubricants because WD-40 would evaporate and freeze. Um, so you need solid lubricants. What is a solid lubricant? But more importantly, in the vast vacuum, is there any friction? Uh, I understand there's quantum friction. Uh, I'm not sure what that means. Maybe you can explain to me what quantum friction is, but it's not two surfaces rubbing against each other. And therefore, the question
43:01 Speaker 07 is, do you need lubricants for quantum friction and overcoming quantum friction? What would that mean for space exploration? Thank you.
43:11 Speaker 03 So, okay, we'll start with temperature, um, and the solid lubrication. And it's not just temperature. I mean, temperature's a big one, right? You can't have it. But there's also the radiation going on out there. It is the most challenging environment we can have, but we still have satellites, we have space stations out there, things are moving. And so, we do use solid lubricants. And the most common ones are, it's graphite, like you use with your pencil. So, you have experience, you know that graphite moves nice and smooth. There's also molybdenum disulfide, and often you have to use a combination of both because graphite actually really needs uh, water available to it to be able to keep it lubricious.
43:54 Speaker 03 Because what happens with these solid lubricants, you're trying to have the layers of the solid lubricant transfer from the solid lubricant surface to the other surface, and then lower the friction. But when graphite does that, it'll have some, gives again chemistry, dangling bonds. And if it latches on to the wrong thing, the friction's actually gonna get quite high. So, out in space, we don't have a lot of water. So, that's when something like molybdenum disulfide, which thrives in that vacuum condition, will be able to transfer the layers. It has low energy between its layers to do that, gives us the low friction. The probably the most famous solid lubricant is the most controversial one, that's Teflon, right? It seemed like a miracle product, but now we're finding it it persists forever. It was not handled
44:38 Speaker 03 well by the companies making it. But that that is a very famous solid lubricant. We also have, you know, researchers all the time developing new composite materials, blending different materials to try to get the performance in these extreme conditions, because you have extreme high temperatures, depending where you're at, extreme low temperatures, and you have the radiation, and it's just a crazy environment that we have out there. His other question was quantum friction, which that one can be a bit controversial, because technically, the definition of quantum friction, it's very specific variables that you have to have set up, has to be in a
45:18 Speaker 03 vacuum, and you have to have things that are not charged, but are polarizable. So as the electrons are floating in the cloud, you might have more on one side than the other, and it's sort of, it's a fake charge in there. Water is a good example. But you have these conditions on it, because if you're trying to figure out if something's happening at the quantum level, you have to remove temperature or anything from the environment that might be causing it. And so what the theory of this quantum friction is, is as you have, you know, quantum fluctuations, the particles jumping in and out of the quantum, are they causing drag on each other? That would be quantum friction. And some, some people say yes, and they think that they have measured it. Others are very adamant that this doesn't exist. There's not a consensus on it
46:03 Speaker 03 right now. It's, it can get to be a bit of a feisty category there. And it's also one that some people are like, does it actually matter? You know, we understand friction more on the macro scale. We understand how to work with it. Do we really need to know on the quantum scale? And I think that that's a slightly ignorant view, because we've had that view on other forces in the past. VanderWells forces are a good one. And those are the forces that cause echoes. That's how they can climb up the wall and defy what seems like defy physics. So I think it's worth pursuing and understanding, because we don't know what we don't know.
46:37 Kara Swisher? Right. And it can tell us a lot about how planets and galaxies evolve, correct?
46:42 Speaker 03 Yes. I mean, who knows what it could tell us? We don't know. It totally understands it.
46:46 Kara Swisher? Gecko people, geckos, what the?
46:50 Speaker 03 We're over here trying in labs to mimic exactly Gecko's climbing and that is all due to Vanderwolds, which at some point people were like, oh, those aren't real, who cares about that? So I don't know what we don't know about quantum friction or where it could take us. I think it's worth pursuing and sometimes it's worth pursuing some things because of what you discover along the way, even if it remains inconclusive. But there are other types of friction happening out in space. You know, it's a vacuum, but it's such a dynamic place that of course, there's a lot of friction happening.
47:18 Kara Swisher? It's just not as apparent as it is on planet Earth, for example. So last thing I want to talk about is behavioral friction, which we mentioned earlier, for example, in a more mundane way, one click ordering on Amazon reduces so-called friction of consumer experiences when they're considering whether or not to buy a product. That's a very simple way of doing it. Tech companies obsess over how to reduce behavioral friction, but without it, there'd be no creativity, no innovation, no sex. What do you think about non-physical friction? When is it something to be designed out of our lives and when is it a feature we should preserve and even add back in? The whole point of tech is to, if they use the word, it's when I started to pay attention to friction in this regard. They want it frictionless. They want it, they use the word seamless.
48:02 Kara Swisher? They have a service called seamless. They want it to have no barriers in order to sell you more stuff, in order to get you pulled in. Algorithms are the lack of friction. It gives you the next thing that you already wanted, right? It's all designed that way. And this series I'm doing, without friction, for example, chatbots that are sycophantic, no friction from the chatbot, which is always agreeing with you. Without friction, our cognitive abilities are going to get less and less and our neuroplasticity is going to suffer. That friction creates it, but we have the whole tech industry trying desperately to get us into a frictionless environment to buy and to respond to chatbots and have relationships with chatbots. And I know it's far afield, but it's the same thing.
48:46 Kara Swisher? It's the removal of friction as if it's a problem and not an asset. Can you talk about that?
48:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, they're really, they're perfect metaphors. Um, the physical force of friction is obviously quite different. But just like if you ignore its existence and don't fully appreciate it, you lose out a lot. If we hadn't figured out how to work with friction in the best possible way, we wouldn't progress and move forward. And I keep saying, very similar, I am worried that as we keep moving towards frictionless in the things we do, we're losing our ability to think critically and actually work through processes, which, you know, it's exactly what have to do with the physical friction. You have to think through the whole system and the process and really understand what you're trying to do. When you make it so easy, we lose that little bit. Um, and, and the example that I tend to use is with, you know, GPS and maps.
49:37 Speaker 03 Of course, I love, love that, use it in my car all the time. But people make fun of me because I also have an atlas and physical book of maps in my car. And, you know, some people are like, I don't even know how to use these things anymore. And that, that just worries me because, you know, what, what if you end up somewhere with no signal or just something happens or your battery dies? You, you need to be able to think your way out of that situation. And by making things frictionless, I think we're losing, like you said, some of that cognitive ability. And it's also changing behaviors in so many ways because we just expect things like this now. It should be easy. I shouldn't have to do this. We see this when we're providing technical support for people doing, you know, engineering scientific problems. They just want us to tell them what the answer is.
50:19 Speaker 03 And it's like, no, I, I can tell you how to use your instruments to try to get that answer, but I, I'm not studying what you're studying. I can't give you that answer. And so we lose a lot of productivity, a lot of thinking skills. And it, it seeps into the organizational structure. Everyone wants, oh, we want to be frictionless, but you, you better have friction in companies so that someone can push back and speak up if it's not the best idea or there's another way. Think creatively, like you were saying, it, it sort of stifles creativity if we don't embrace the fact that friction is a good thing.
50:54 Kara Swisher? Yeah, it's an interesting thing because I've had so many arguments with tech people about this, and especially right now around chatbots, right? Where it does lead, it will lead to actual cognitive problems with our society, not just loneliness, but it's trying to, they're trying to solve loneliness by creating frictionless partners, right? Which, they love to use the word chatbots, which I think is an adorable term for what is a synthetic relationship. And everyone who is in these, I'm like, there's nobody there. There's nobody, there's nothing there, and it's designed to, to not push back. And even though this is sort of a trope, for women, they get a man who always responds to them, and this is for straight people. For a woman, for a man, they get a woman who always agrees with them, right?
51:34 Kara Swisher? And it creates a real problem for, not just human propagation, but humanity to be able to work together, correct? When, when all the friction is either made hateful, which means you don't want to engage in it, or the friction is not there, you are only with people in your, and you know, they're called silos for a reason, right? You end up with only people who you're in violent agreement with, which to me describes Silicon Valley almost to a T, except for a couple people. Like this week, we've seen it with Anthropic, saying, "No, we will not be doing that." That was a human making that decision, not a bot. Which is, of course, the right answer if you're going for efficiency and lack of friction.
52:15 Speaker 03 Right.
52:16 Kara Swisher? When I was at a dinner party, they, they're like, "Well, if someone said how to solve world hunger, a bot would say kill 10 million people." And, and that would be a good answer.
52:26 Speaker 03 It's, it's a way to solve it.
52:28 Kara Swisher? It's a frictionless solution. And so, I'm going to stick with this line of thought for the last question, but shift is friction as a design choice to friction as a governance choice. In complex systems like supply chains, electrical goods, large tech platforms, some friction shows up as rules, buffers, redundancy checks, guardrails. It slows things down, it can also prevent catastrophic failure. What's your framework for deciding where to add those guardrails and slack, even if it makes the system less efficient and with more friction? And how do you tell the difference between healthy friction that provides resilience and dead friction that just wastes time and energy?
53:06 Speaker 03 I think it goes back to how we were talking before, taking that systems approach. And you have to think of second order consequences, which is something I'm worried that these frictionless processes we're doing now, it's eliminating our ability to think of second order consequences. So you have to sit here and think, this is my process. I need to put this guardrail up here because if I don't, the person operating this machinery could fall in. It might be a 1% chance, but it is not worth risking that 1%. If I remove that guardrail, what might happen? This speeds up, this speeds up, but this might happen. It's really thinking
53:41 Kara Swisher? Of consequences.
53:42 Speaker 03 Of the consequences. And I, I just think we're seeing more and more that there's a lack of thought around consequences other than the immediate. We're doing this right here now because that will move this one needle and that's all I care about. And then, you know, you have 10 other needles that all start breaking. So it's just like with physical friction, you have to assess your system and figure out where is the friction? Where might I accidentally introduce friction if I change this part? And is this friction that is helpful to me? Is it detrimental to me? Is it neutral? And what can I do about these things? And if I do so, what happens next? It's a very engineering approach, but I think we have to do that with social and processes and everything in, in the workplace as well. I think that's the way to look at things.
54:27 Kara Swisher? So when you think about the people running our thought processes right now, running our social, our politics, everything else, there's a, they're very frictionless type of people. Either you just go along or you, they're trying to eliminate it. What is the implications for humanity with no friction?
54:45 Speaker 03 I think it's very dangerous and it's the kind of thing that'll keep me up at night. Uh, we need that friction. If someone has a terrible idea, even if it's well intentioned, I'm not going to get into, but just, someone needs to be able to speak up and push back and provide a little bit of friction. If we all just want to be frictionless. Terrible decisions will keep being made. They will have knock on consequences that we might not be able to undo. We have to be able to develop the skills to have these conversations, to accept that friction is okay. Um, yeah, that's a big thing with the chatbots. I worry about the ability of people to actually handle human interactions
55:28 Speaker 03 and conversations when they're not easy. I hear it, you know, even in the workplace sometimes like, well, I don't want to have that conversation because they're mean. It's like, they're not mean. They're just literally challenging your idea and, and giving you a different perspective. And you have to have those perspectives or else you just end up risking going down a terrible path that you may not be able to hit the brakes on and reverse.
55:52 Kara Swisher? It affects everything. This is one of the points I'm making in this show is like, this is actually has longevity implications, right?
55:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
55:58 Kara Swisher? When you have, it, it will affect the human race in a way that, and also no one gets to have sex then, because guess what's the most friction filled thing is sex.
56:07 Speaker 03 Yep. Something tribologists have to study too.
56:09 Kara Swisher? Yeah, absolutely.
56:10 Speaker 03 They don't design themselves.
56:11 Kara Swisher? Yeah, no, they don't. Anyway, I really appreciate it. Generous is a wonderful book and it's so well worth reading and such an important issue because as you said, it covers so many parts of our world and it's a critically important part of us and we should reclaim it from the people who are trying to take it away from us.
56:28 Speaker 03 Resistance is progress.
56:29 Kara Swisher? Progress, yeah. Anyway, thank you so much.
56:31 Speaker 03 Thank you. Appreciate it.
56:35 Kara Swisher? Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Michelle Aloy, Catherine Millsop, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Catherine Barner. This episode was engineered by Xander Adams and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get a ball bearing. You get a lot of ball bearings. If not, you get to travel with Elon Musk in space and in space, no one can hear you scream, which you will do if you're traveling with Elon Musk. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.
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