Friction

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0:39I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And I want to talk about a force that is happening all around us. And it's something that we actually, we learn about in school. Friction. Friction is the force that opposes motion. So very much a basic physical concept. Two things rubbing together. But usually when we say there's friction, we're talking about a conflict, which can make friction sound like a bad thing. Friction very much has a bad reputation. That's just the truth of the matter. And it comes from the definition itself, you know, resistance to motion.

1:30This is Jennifer Vale. Maybe I should start a campaign to try to raise awareness around the fact that friction's a good thing. It's the reason our cars don't slide off the road. It's the reason we don't fall on our face. We do need friction. Jennifer is a friction expert. I am a tribologist, someone who studies wear and friction of materials. And if you've never heard of tribology, I hadn't. The word tribology has the origin in the Greek word tribos, which is rubbing or to rub. And it is the science of interacting surfaces in relative motion. We look at wear, friction, lubrication. And there are so many examples.

2:13Your car tire rolling against the ground is one. Or your new sneakers hitting a basketball court. The squeaky basketball shoes is probably one of the best examples of the sound that friction can make. Which is what wears out the soles of your shoes. Yes. And why do certain fabrics like wool irritate our skin? They cause more friction. That was going to be my example. But something like ice skating. That's low friction. And if it's too low, you'll lose your balance. Friction is one of these things. It's always there. And we deal with it all day long. But we hardly notice friction unless it's causing problems, like a painful blister or tension between friends.

2:57And there are situations that could use more resistance, where quick and seamless can lead to trouble. So today on the show, ideas about friction. how this force can be dialed up or down to improve our lives. Because tribologist Jennifer Vale says you want to get it just right, even on the smallest scale. Brushing teeth, for example. For sure. And I feel like I'm worried that I'm doing the friction wrong all the time because if you do it right, you get rid of the germs, you get rid of the plaque. But if you do it wrong, you erode your gums. It seems like a very fine line with finding the right amount of friction.

3:42Yeah, so this is another one of these benign activities we always do that is actually a pretty complicated friction problem. The toothpaste and toothbrush are working to remove or wear the plaque from your teeth. Jennifer Vale continues from the TED stage. You have hard materials. Those would be your teeth. Soft materials like your gums, the toothpaste, the toothbrush. There's lubrication, the form of saliva and water. the dynamics of the person doing the brushing, and more. I promise if we put diamonds in your toothpaste, you're going to remove that plaque. Probably going to remove your teeth as well.

4:17So there's a fine balance to be had between wearing the plaque away and not damaging your teeth and gums. We all brush our teeth on a regular basis. How many of us brush our pets' teeth? Animals as adults commonly get periodontal disease, so we really should be brushing their teeth. So what pet food suppliers are trying to do is incorporate plaque removal in things like treats. If you have a dog, you may have observed that you give your dog a treat and it magically seems to disappear after just one bite. So the added challenge here is how do you remove plaque when you have one bite? I developed a benchtop test to study this problem, and to do so I had to mimic the oral system of dogs.

4:56And I used friction-aware measurements to study the effectiveness of that treat on removing plaque. All right. So how exactly do you do this, Jennifer? What we do is get a material that mimics a tooth. And then we also have the dog bone itself. So we could see maybe different recipes, even different shapes or roughness of that treat, how that impacts this. We would have a mimic plaque on the tooth and you load these two samples together and you rub them back and forth at a speed similar to what you do with a chew. So we use something called a tribometer, and the tribometer itself will measure the force of friction.

5:39So we can see for our conditions what that force is that's resisting the motion. And what you can also do is measure wear and see the plaque removal. Can you just, like, describe for me what your lab looks like? because right now I have kind of like a Willy Wonka-esque vision in my mind of like, you know, lab tables with things that are just rubbing against each other and sort of like a kooky kind of situation. But what is the lab like? The lab is a bunch of pieces of equipment rubbing things together. That is exactly what a tribology lab is. And each tribology lab will be a little bit different depending what they're studying.

6:18So if we're talking about a dog biscuit, we want to start with your hypothesis and designing your system. We think this is going to be better at removing plaque. You do the benchtop test that either confirms it or sends you back to the design table. And when you have something that looks promising, then you would go ahead and give that to the dog and monitor the plaque over time in their mouth and see, did it do what you thought it was going to do? There are so many applications. All right, tell me another project that you've worked on? My PhD work was looking more at syringes, which is very topical nowadays.

6:55But yeah, vaccines, right, exactly with vaccines. And a lot of times when I tell people that I was looking at syringes, they automatically assume I mean the needle in the arm, which there will be friction there. That is a problem to look at. That wasn't what I looked at. I was actually studying the stopper in a syringe. And the stopper is one of these things where you really don't pay attention to it, but you would if it wasn't doing its job. If friction was working against you so much that that needle is having to be pushed multiple times and harder and harder because the stopper is getting stuck, you would definitely know.

7:30Oh, no. So, okay. So you want there to be very little friction because you want the vaccine to be delivered into a person's arm very quickly. And smoothly. But the other trick here is we have some syringes that we need it to be smooth and quick. And then there are some drip systems that are actually really large syringes where there is a stopper and it rotates really slowly. So these stoppers cover the full spectrum of different conditions. And it's critically important that they seal the vaccine or whatever they're administering to keep it sterile, to keep it from getting contaminated, which causes the problem with friction.

8:05And so how do you execute that syringe down the barrel so that it moves smoothly? And when you think about it, it's such a well-designed system because you have not had to think about it before. But what's the big deal with tribology? Let me give you one more example. No matter where you are right now, you got to this location somehow. Maybe you walked or rode your bike. But for most people in this room, you probably came in a car. Just think about all the tribological systems in a car. You have your personal interactions with the car, the car's interactions with the road, and everything under the hood and in the drivetrain.

8:44Did you know that about one-third of the fuel that you put into your internal combustion engine vehicle will be spent overcoming friction? One-third. Tribology research has helped us reduce friction and therefore increase fuel efficiency and reduce emissions. Holmberg and Erdemer have actually done some great studies showing the impact tribology research can have on reducing our energy consumption and they found that looking over the span of 20 years, we had the opportunity to reduce the energy consumption of passenger vehicles up to 60%. We think about all the cars in the world, it's a lot of energy we can save.

9:21It's part of the nearly 9 % of our current global energy consumption that the authors identified tribology can help us save. This is through new materials, new lubricants, novel component design, doing things like making wind turbines more efficient and reliable. This happened just by putting 31 people in a room who viewed the world through a tribology lens. Energy losses due to wear and friction can be reduced by up to about 40 percent. Wow. Which would translate to over 8 percent of global energy consumption. So there's a big opportunity here. And it all comes from the fact that friction is a non-conservative force.

10:02It's dissipating energy. if we can minimize it in these contacts where we don't want it there, then we can help conserve energy. And that also translates to emission. So tribology turns out to be a nice little tool set that we have in our pockets for climate change battles. It's funny because after talking to all these folks, I feel like, you know, when you're pregnant and you look and you're like, oh my God, everyone's pregnant because you like, you see it, you know? I feel like that way with friction, I can't do anything now without thinking about it. That is exactly what friction and tribology is.

10:40And I always say it's a blessing and a curse. And if I have to see it everywhere, everyone else has to see it everywhere. It's to the point if something squeaks, I will cringe a little bit. Or if I hear someone riding a bicycle and I'm just like, oh, you need to use a different lubricant on that chain. But it is everywhere. If I have to see it everywhere, you have to see it everywhere. But when that happens, when people start seeing it everywhere, that's when the innovation starts to come. That's when we start having that energy consumption going down because people are thinking about it in this way.

11:16So it's just a very sneaky thing that it has a bad reputation, but I think we also need to appreciate it. I think we need to reframe it a little bit. Reducing energy through friction is a great thing, but we also need friction. I want my car's brakes to work. I want my shoes to have good traction. So just recognizing it's there and thinking about how we coexist with it and use it to our advantage, whether it's getting more of it or reducing it. Well, Jennifer, I hope that I provided the right amount of friction in our conversation that I smoothed the way to give answers, but pushed back just enough to make sure that you clarified the work that you do.

11:56Thank you. Thank you. I hope I didn't wear you out with this conversation or rub you the wrong way. Beautiful. The puns don't stop in tribology. They don't stop, do they? My God. It's a slippery slope. That's tribologist Jennifer Vail. You can watch her full talk at TED.com.

12:20So we just learned how friction affects us in the physical world. But what about the virtual? Coming up, a conversation about adding a lot more friction to our online experience. We Americans have come to expect that things are going to be easy and free and convenient. And we don't want friction in our lives. We want to be able to order dinner and have it as our door as quickly as possible. It's what we've come to expect. But are we sure that's the best idea when it also comes to political rhetoric, to how we debate incredibly important topics that matter for our entire planet? When we come back, Facebook whistleblower Yael Eisenstadt tells her story.

13:07On the show today, friction. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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15:07Talks daily, wherever you listen. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, friction. And in the tech world, entrepreneurs want as little of it as possible. Their goal is to build frictionless platforms and gadgets that are intuitive to use and keep us coming back. What has happened is now we expect everything to be first, fast, free, and frictionless. But are we sure that's the best idea when it also comes to political rhetoric, to how we debate incredibly important topics that matter for our entire planet? This is Yael Eisenstadt. She's known as an advocate for building slower technology and as a Facebook whistleblower.

15:58But we'll get to that. Her story really starts on the Kenyan-Somali border right after 9-11, where she was working in counter-extremism for the State Department. Everything that I learned from my time overseas was that things take time. Engaging with people who aren't like-minded takes time. But a big part of my role was sitting down with communities who really hadn't had exposure to Americans or to many Americans. and as cliche as it sounds, sort of building bridges as opposed to being this here, I'm American, I'm here to help, let me tell you what you need. It was more let me listen and figure out if there's ways for us to cooperate or at the very, very least find that we actually have some form of common humanity.

16:50It's very soft skill, right? is a much more diplomacy side than more hard skill of other sort of counterterrorism tools. The point of this diplomacy was to slow the spread of extremism, add friction by taking lots of time to just talk. I mean, I would go back to the same villages over and over again. And I would sit and drink tea for hours. I would attend community meetings. I would sit with women's groups and just chat about what it means to be a woman in America and what it means to be a woman in their community. I mean, a lot of it sounds kind of weird and non-quantifiable and all of that, but it is.

17:36It really is spending a lot of time engaging mostly with people who have very different experiences than you. That is already friction. So when did you realize that this diplomacy, this kind of friction, needed to be deployed back home in the U.S.? Like, when did you start to see extremism spreading here? Yeah, so, you know, I left government in late 2013. And my goal at that point, you know, I always focused overseas. I think I had taken for granted that we were OK, that our democracy was secure. We were OK at home. My role was to focus on conflict abroad, on threats coming in from overseas. I didn't really have my focus on the U.S.

18:25And in 2015, just the way the rhetoric was going, the way people largely online but offline as well were starting to engage with each other. just completely started paralleling things that I had seen in my counter-extremism days and made me do a complete 180 and focus all my efforts on, oh my gosh, what is happening in the US. To be clear, I don't mean that I feel that everyone should get along and have the same political views and everyone should be polite to each other. It's not that. But there's a difference between disagreeing over issues and just fundamentally hating the person who has a different opinion than you.

19:12And so that's when I started digging in and really trying to figure out what was that because I truly, truly believed that we were becoming not only our worst enemy, our own worst enemy, but that we Americans were starting to become radicalized in some of the exact same steps that I had seen that people had been radicalized in different communities around the world, including the ones that I had worked with along the Smalia border. And so I didn't have the answers. I didn't know what it was about yet, but I knew something really terrifying was starting to happen in the U.S. at that point. How much did you blame social media or, I don't know, Fox News?

19:53Or where were you looking in terms of the source of the problem? I mean, sort of all of the above. So yes, it started with really looking at the news, but then honing in more and more on social media. And to be clear, not because I think social media is at fault for all of our societal ills or for some of the very real rifts in American society, but it did start to become more and more clear that the way certain social media companies were designed, They were taking advantage of those rifts and starting to monetize that anger, that divisiveness. And that's why I started getting really focused on social media.

20:40One of the problems you helped identify and draw attention to was that these platforms have a lack of friction. Like there is no spending hours drinking tea and debating ideas online. These companies help us share information as easily and as fast as possible to the point where things, many say, have spiraled out of control. Yeah, absolutely. This is a world optimized for frictionless virality. And if you want to be able to compete with the world that our online ecosystem has created, you have to be frictionless. And we all know now that companies like Facebook, for example, or I guess we'll call them meta now, their entire business model is they want you on their platform as long as possible.

21:33And so constantly feeding you content as quickly as possible is part of how they do that. And the idea of actually building a system to help you slow down, building a system with friction that allows you to stop and question, am I sure this is even true? Like that's what friction is. Friction is these signals that helps you slow down so your brain can actually process what it's receiving. And that's not how these platforms are designed. I mean, it's kind of antithetical to how they make their money. Okay, so here's the twist, though, Yael. Here is the twist to the story, to your story. It's that here you are, a Facebook critic, and then you went to work at Facebook.

22:22Yep. All right, before you tell us what happened, just want to mention Facebook parent company Meta pays NPR to license NPR content. Get that disclosure out of the way. Tell us what happened. So I started speaking to more and more audiences, especially of technologists. And the more I started speaking about this, the more my name started to get out there. And I think at some point I started honing in on some of the way Facebook, you know, I learned from others also, how is Facebook designed? How is it incentivized? And the more I learned, the more I started speaking about them. And then they called.

23:00What'd they say? I mean, so this is where I like to say they're very good at telling you what you need to hear. Because, oh, yeah, no, we need that. That's exactly what we need. And they started making me feel like they meant it. And then on the same day that Mark Zuckerberg testified in the Senate, that famous hearing in 2018 about Cambridge Analytica, I listened to the entire thing and heard Mark Zuckerberg say over and over again how much he was going to prioritize elections integrity. And then a minute after that hearing ends, they call me with an actual offer. And the offer is to be their elections integrity head in what was called their business integrity division, which it's the part of Facebook that really works to protect advertising, to protect the things they monetize from bad actors or from, you know, whatever it is.

23:59So I went in, I would say, cautiously optimistic that maybe this 2018 moment, this Cambridge Analytica scandal, the 2016 elections, all of that, maybe the company truly did want to finally figure out who do they want to be in this space. This is not a company that's just connecting friends or just, you know, serving you cute cat videos. This is a company having a profound impact on so-called public squares, on how political engagement happens, on elections themselves. And so I thought maybe this really is a pivot point for them. So, yeah, how could I say no? Tell me about day one or the first few days.

24:44What do you remember of that time? I mean, the first few days were insane. to be frank. So day one, it really did feel a little bit like a cult indoctrination. It was a lot of like, you're the smartest in the world. The only way you got hired by Facebook is because you're the best. You're the brightest. Day two, I had my first meeting with my boss and my boss told me in that very first meeting that they're changing my title. They're going to figure out my job description. And now when I was hired to be the global head of elections integrity ops, Yeah, we're just going to call you manager now until we figure out what to really do with you.

25:18So what did you do in those first few days? Did you start making trouble? Probably. So I started reaching out to as many people as I could. I wanted to understand why we would fact check certain information on the news feed, but why we're refusing to do the same thing in advertising and started posting questions about it. And so my team put together this amazing plan on how to, at the very least, ensure that political advertising was checked to make sure it wasn't engaging in lies about how to vote, where to vote, when to vote, like your most basic online voter suppression tactics. and when we sent when I sent that up the chain that we had a whole plan it was coordinated across multiple parts of the company that it wouldn't be about censoring speech it would be very specific about voting information and this was by the way to protect the U.S.

26:21midterm election that was coming up I was pulled into a very senior person's office I was yelled at that I made them look bad. I was accused of all sorts of things that really were shocking to me. But what was it that they disagreed with? I mean, the tools that you were proposing, like what was it about them that they didn't want to do? So there were two things there. The first is what they said, which was as soon as we sent up this plan, and again, it's a plan to basically make sure that political advertising ahead of the 2018 midterm elections was not engaging in voter suppression tactics. And the first thing was, well, what is the prevalence right now of that?

27:07Which is their way of saying, is it a problem? My response was no, because political advertising hasn't started beefing up yet for the 2018 election. What I'm doing is helping anticipate a problem that's coming so that we can stop it in advance. Well, that's just not really the Facebook way, because what I was, I mean, back to the word friction, what I was proposing is going to put friction in the system. But after everything, after Cambridge Analytica, after the Russian interference in our election in 2016, you don't recognize how important it is to make sure you don't let your platform be used in a way to negatively affect our election.

27:45That to me was shocking. So that was, that's one side of it. The other side of it is a political decision. Fundamentally, that moment was a political decision on behalf of Mark Zuckerberg and others at the top to ensure that they were not angering the party in power at the time. Because to be frank, if we were to start cracking down on ads that were engaging in lies about the election, that would disproportionately affect one party over the other because one party was engaging more in lies about the elections than the other. The funny thing is I came in having worked in a nonpartisan world my entire life.