Friction Matters: Resistance Is a Feature, Not a Bug

20:39Kara Swisher: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 the understanding of the compass like flow, viscosity, turbulence. And what did that unlock?

20:52Jennifer Vail:Yeah, I love where friction takes you since it's everywhere. And one of the big breakthroughs with understanding friction and fluids came from the internal friction fluids feel, which is viscosity. Isaac Newton suggested viscosity existed, that there would 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 gautief hagen looking at how to move river water through pipes and then um i'm gonna butcher his name poisso who was studying blood So you have blood and you have pipes.

21:46Jennifer Vail: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 because 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 uh lubrication theory 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 everywhere 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.

22:43Kara Swisher:You were talking about blood flow, which is studied a lot. I happen to have what's called thick blood. And that'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?

22:58Jennifer Vail:Yes. 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, exactly.

23:09Kara Swisher: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 Revolution is metal upon metal. We learn about the advances in iron production, steam engines, machine tools, and factories. The unsung here of the Industrial Revolution was lubrication that kept the shafts, bearings and gears alive long enough to run continuously because if not, they wear each other out.

23:45Jennifer Vail:Yeah. So when 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.

23:56Kara Swisher:Two metals, for example.

23:58Jennifer Vail:Yes, our 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 and metal contact. And you can go from not separating any of those to starting to separate them.

24:39Jennifer Vail:And the friction can start to drop dramatically, which in some cases could be a problem as well, because 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 and 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

25:10Kara Swisher:anyone who's grinded a gear knows that who drives this 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 happen can understand that who's ever used any kind of gear mechanism in a car, which we don't do anymore, really. But it's still existing. It's just the car is doing it itself, an automatic.

25:36Jennifer Vail: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.

26:04Kara Swisher:Right. 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 21.5 % 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, whereas it still reduces a car's energy efficiency. Why don't we pay more attention to the energy costs caused by friction?

26:39Kara Swisher:And what would it take to significantly reduce vehicle energy usage if that's ultimately caused by friction?

26:46Jennifer Vail:It's a great question. 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. we might take efficiency is not glamorous 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.

27:50Jennifer Vail:You know, 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. 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 car as they were before.

28:29Kara Swisher:Or else they're like, we got plenty of gas, so who cares, right? That's part of it, right? And of course, the other impact is rather severe. you know anyone who's watched a speed skater knows what they're a 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 it crosses so many so many disciplines of what's happening every episode we get an expert to send us a question we have two for you let's hear the first one 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.

29:13Jennifer Vail:But how do we know that that's actually going to lead us to use less energy or at least, you know, less non-renewable energy?

29:21Kara Swisher:The reason I ask is that there's this thing called Jevons paradox that says that as you increase efficiency, you can actually increase the usage of relevant resources, not decrease it. We saw this in the 1800s. People got better at using coal more efficiently, and that actually led them to burn more coal, not less.

29:46Jennifer Vail:And recently, we've gotten much better at getting lighting to be much more efficient using LEDs rather than fluorescence or incandescence. 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 massive gains in fighting the climate and energy crisis? Thanks.

30:05Kara Swisher:It's very relevant. New data centers, obviously.

30:08Jennifer Vail:Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question and a great point. part of it might part of my answer is probably my own optimism and a little bit um that i think every little bit helps and in some cases i 100 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 chunk. And I think any little bit is worth pursuing and worth putting towards that battle.

30:54Jennifer Vail: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, We have a voracious appetite. Yes, we always want more.

31:10Kara 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 short list of climate-relevant friction interventions that scale, what would you prioritize first and why?

31:29Jennifer Vail: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, even with renewables, we want wind turbines to be as efficient as possible so that 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.

32:11Jennifer Vail:And, you know, 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. 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.

32:50Jennifer Vail:So the amount of luggage that we bring, all of that is taking big impacts on our energy usage. Right.

32:56Kara Swisher:So speaking of planes, talk about winglets. These are actually making them more energy efficient. What's a winglet?

33:01Jennifer Vail:So if you look at the tips of planes, I do this on every plane I go 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.

33:35Jennifer Vail: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. Right. You sit on the wing of every plane you go on. Maybe.

33:50Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

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36:55Kara Swisher:Hilton, for this day. So in the last part of the book, you start to push on expected 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 docuseries, which includes talking about gene folding and gene editing, et cetera.

37:31Jennifer Vail:Yeah, I might ask your opinion or to correct me if I'm wrong in how I'm understanding it. I'm no doctor, but I'll try from my interviews, but go ahead. 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.

38:07Jennifer Vail: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. 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 the 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's one of those variables which is why

39:11Kara Swisher: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 in 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 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 into people's veins and then they will get rid of a stroke.

39:57Kara Swisher:I had a stroke myself, so that's why I visited it. And previously they still use using a catheter, but catheters have friction against, veins are very strong. People don't realize how strong veins are, 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 brain, of an individual brain. It's fascinating, but friction is what we talked about the whole time, almost the whole time. Yeah. I'm going to have to look into that because...

40:35Kara Swisher:I'll send you the thing. It's a lab. But the people working on it, interestingly, are mechanical engineers working with scientists because it's a mechanical engineering problem, really.

40:46Jennifer Vail: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 tribology lab, he now runs a department of cancer engineering at the Moffitt 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 and to 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.

41:25Jennifer Vail:And 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.

41:47Kara Swisher:Absolutely. It's magnets is what they use. magnets and AI. It's really quite crazy. And eventually, 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, save money, is really, ultimately.

42:10Jennifer Vail:It's amazing.

42:11Kara 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 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 multidisciplinary thing. Now on the other side of the spectrum, you have astrophysics. Now, interestingly, I'm having a doctor ask you an astrophysics question.

42:46Kara Swisher:Listeners might be surprised to learn there's friction in outer space since it's a vacuum. So that in mind, let's play our second expert question. 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 space. 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 that relates to the temperature. You can't have liquid lubricants because WD-40 would evaporate and freeze.

43:33Kara Swisher:So you need solid lubricants. What is a solid lubricant? But more importantly, in the vast vacuum, is there any friction? I understand there's quantum friction. 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 is, do you need lubricants for quantum friction and overcoming quantum friction? What would that mean for space exploration? Thank you.

44:04Jennifer Vail:So, okay, we'll start with temperature and the solid lubrication. And it's not just temperature. I mean, temperature is 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 water available to it to be able to keep it lubricious 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.

44:58Jennifer Vail:But when graphite does that, it'll have some, I guess again, chemistry, dangling bonds. And if it latches onto the wrong thing, the friction is actually going to 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. Probably the most famous solid we're hitting is the most controversial one that's Teflon, right? It seemed like a miracle product, but now we're finding it persists forever.

45:30It was not handled well by the companies making it.

45:34Jennifer Vail:But that is a very famous solid lubricant. We also have 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. 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 vacuum and you have to have things that are not charged but are polarizable so as the electrons are floating in their cloud you might have more on one side than the other and it's sort of it's a fake charge in there.

46:25Jennifer Vail: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 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 people 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 right now.

46:57Jennifer Vail: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. Vanderwall's forces are a good one. And those are the forces that cause geckos. 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.

47:31Jennifer Vail:Right. And it can tell us a lot about how planets and galaxies evolve, correct? Yes. I mean, who knows what it could tell us? We don't know. Geckos, people. Geckos. What the fuck? And we're over here trying in labs to mimic exactly geckos climbing. And that is all due to VanderWaal, 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.

48:03Jennifer Vail: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.

48:11Kara 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?

48:46Kara Swisher: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 use the word seamless. 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 want it, 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.

49:25Kara Swisher: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. It's the removal of friction as if it's a problem and not an asset. Can you talk about that?

49:45Jennifer Vail:Yeah, they're really, they're perfect metaphors. 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 on 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 and the things we do, we're losing our ability to think critically and actually work through processes, which it's exactly what we 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.

50:22Jennifer Vail:When you make it so easy, we lose that little bit. And the example that I tend to use is with GPS and maps. Of course, I 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 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.

51:02Jennifer Vail: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. And it's like, no, I can tell you how to use your instruments to try to get that answer, but 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 seeps into the organizational structure. Everyone wants, oh, we want to be frictionless, but you better have friction in companies so that someone can push back and speak up if it's not the best idea.

51:38Jennifer Vail:Or there's another way, think creatively, like you were saying, it sort of stifles creativity if we don't embrace the fact that friction is a good thing.

51:47Kara 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 not push back. And even though this is sort of a trope.

52:19Kara Swisher: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? And it creates a real problem for not just human propagation, but humanity to be able to work together, correct? 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 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.

52:56Kara Swisher:Like this week, we've seen it with Anthropics 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. When I was at a dinner party, they're like, well, if someone said how to solve world hunger, a bot would say, kill 10 million people. And that would be a good answer. It is a way to solve it. 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.

53:40Kara Swisher: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? How do you tell the difference between healthy friction that provides resilience and dead friction that just wastes time and energy?

53:59Jennifer Vail: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.

54:33Jennifer Vail:It's really thinking of the consequences. And 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?

55:10Jennifer Vail: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 the workplace as well. I think that's the way to look at things.

55:20Kara Swisher:So when you think about the people running our thought processes right now, running our social, our politics, everything else, 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

55:38Jennifer Vail:i think it's very dangerous that's the kind of thing that'll keep me up at night we need that friction if someone has a terrible idea even if it's well-intentioned i'm not going to get it get into it but just just always really 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. You know, that's a big thing with the chatbots.

56:16Jennifer Vail:I worry about the ability of people to actually handle human interactions 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 it affects everything this is one of the points i'm

56:47Kara Swisher:making in this show is like this is actually has longevity implications right when you have 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.

57:00Jennifer Vail:Yep. Something tribologists have to study too. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, they don't.

57:05Kara Swisher:Anyway, I really appreciate it. Jenner, this 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 are trying to take it away from us.

57:21Jennifer Vail:Resistance is progress.

57:23Kara Swisher:Progress. Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much.

57:25Jennifer Vail:Appreciate it.

57:28Kara Swisher:Today's show is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsop, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kerwa 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.

58:04Kara Swisher: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.

58:21Kara Swisher:Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. As AI reshapes professional services, law firms and in-house teams are rethinking how complex work gets done. Harvey AI is an AI platform built specifically for the legal practice, helping teams analyze documents, draft with precision and collaborate securely across matters. Today, more than half of the AM Law 100 use Harvey. Learn more at Harvey.ai.