Something You Should Know - Is AI Eliminating Your Choice? & Tribology Explained (It’s Everywhere)

Episode Date: March 23, 2024

Every home has batteries sitting around in a drawer somewhere waiting to be used. This episode begins with some interesting advice about how to use and store batteries – and how NOT to. Listen and you will understand why it really does matter. https://www.kickassfacts.com/battery-facts/ Artificial intelligence keeps creeping into our lives more and more every day. While AI can be pretty cool and helpful, there is a downside. In fact, there are several downsides. That’s according to Jacob Ward, NBC News technology correspondent, and author of the book The Loop: How Technology is Creating a World Without Choice and How to Fight Back (https://amzn.to/3JBMmh2). Jacob joins me to explain how artificial intelligence is used in medicine, retail, government, and other areas and how it provides benefits as well as creates problems. Do you know what the word “tribology” means? If not, you are about to as you listen to my conversation with physicist Laurie Winkless author the book Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces (https://amzn.to/3JwTg7i). Simply put, tribology is the science of surfaces and how they interact with other surfaces. For example, why some surfaces stick together, and some don’t and why some things feel good to the touch and others do not. This is all part of physics and Laurie explains how it works and how it affects your life.  Getting something you want is good. But you know what’s even better? Not LOSING something. This is an important principle that is often used in advertising. It can also work in your attempts to persuade someone. Listen and I will tell you how. Source: Noah Goldstein author of The Little Book of Yes (https://amzn.to/3ipi4SW). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Indeed is offering SYSK listeners a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING We love the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast! https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/business-podcasts/think-fast-talk-smart-podcast Go to https://uscellular.com/TryUS and download the USCellular TryUS app to get 30 days of FREE service! Keep you current phone, carrier & number while testing a new network! NerdWallet lets you compare top travel credit cards side-by-side to maximize your spending! Compare & find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, & more https://NerdWallet.com TurboTax Experts make all your moves count — filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund, guaranteed! See guarantee details at https://TurboTax.com/Guarantees Dell TechFest starts now! To thank you for 40 unforgettable years, Dell Technologies is celebrating with anniversary savings on their most popular tech. Shop at https://Dell.com/deals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know. If you have a lot of batteries in the house, there are some things you should know about them. Then the good and bad of artificial intelligence. It's great for some things, but it also limits your choices. So I think that we're gonna see just enough choice to make us think we are making choices while in fact, you know, shrinking those choices down.

You see this in, you know, industry after industry. Also, a simple way to persuade someone and you don't wanna miss it. Plus the secret science of stickiness, like what makes glue so sticky? Super glue, the way that it gets its stickiness is that it is incredibly sensitive to the presence of water. So I think a lot of people think that super glue hardens when it gets into the air, but it's not the air so much as the water vapor that's present in the air.

All this today on Something You Should Know. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. Something you should know.

Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi. This may sound weird, although I've mentioned it before, but this part of the podcast, this part of the episode, is the last thing I do before the episode is assembled and uploaded and you can hear it. So I've already heard what you're about to hear and I think you're really going to enjoy this very interesting episode of Something You Should Know. And first up today, batteries. You know, in our house, in our kitchen, we have

a drawer that is full of unused batteries ready to go. And I think pretty much in every room in our house, there's at least one or two things powered by batteries. I mean, batteries power a lot of things in our lives, from our cars, our phones, laptops, tablets, toys, tools, you name it. And there are a lot of things about batteries you may not know. For example, there's no reason to store batteries in the refrigerator. Anything you gain in shelf life, which is minimal, will be offset by other problems like rust or internal damage caused by the cold. Virtually no battery manufacturer recommends storing batteries in the refrigerator.

Apple suggests 32 degrees Fahrenheit as the lowest operating temperature for an iPhone because a cold smartphone battery can drain really fast. It might say it has ample power and then suddenly go dead. When you're jumping a car battery from one car to the other, connecting the positive to the negative and the negative to the positive could actually result in damage to your alternator or even an explosion. It's optimal for your lithium-ion smartphone battery to top off and keep its charge between 40 and 80 percent, rather than let it drain all the way down to zero and then charge it all the way up to 100. It's not a good idea to store loose batteries in a drawer.

They could short out if the terminals touch metal in the drawer or other batteries. Do you know what happens to old batteries that are turned in to be recycled? They're actually turned into fertilizer to help grow corn. Keeping your laptop computer plugged in all the time actually kills the battery faster. And there's this battery-powered bell at Oxford University that has been continuously ringing for over 175 years. No one knows what the battery is composed of and no one wants to take it apart to see because then the bell would stop ringing. And that is something you should know. You make decisions every day. What to buy, what to eat, what to wear, what music to listen to, where to work, who to go out with.

You make these decisions. And they may be good decisions, they may be bad decisions, but they're your decisions. More and more, though, what's happening is those decisions that you make are being put into algorithms and fed back to you to help you make your next decision. For example, if you listen to music on Spotify or some other streaming music platforms, after a while, Spotify or whoever will start recommending music for you to listen to, based on your past listening and maybe based on what other people like you are listening to, so you don't have to do the work of finding new music to listen to. Well, it's not necessarily a bad thing or a good thing, but it is artificial intelligence nudging you in a direction to make a decision they think you should make.

It's what Jacob Ward calls the loop, and the implications are potentially huge. Jacob Ward is the technology correspondent for NBC News and author of the book, The Loop, How Technology is Creating a World Without Choice and How to Fight Back. Hi, Jacob. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. So I just gave the example of how music services use AI to recommend music, but give another example of how the loop works. From now on, every script that is ever written is subjected to an analysis by artificial intelligence as to whether or not it matches up with some of the patterns that we've seen in other successful scripts.

And when I say scripts, I'm talking movie scripts here, because there are companies right now that actually run movie scripts through pattern recognition systems to see whether there are parallels to other hit movies from the past. That sort of thing, on the one hand, may bring all kinds of interesting new ideas up to the surface. But on the other hand, it may be that we wind up in this loop, this repeating pattern of past hits until basically we were watching the same movie over and over again. And whether you're looking at the way art is being analyzed right now, movies, music, all sorts of parts of our lives are being subjected to this kind of analysis. And my worry is that it's going to shrink our choices going forward.

Well, that seems like a somewhat benign example, just because, I mean, it's sort of that way now. That's why we have movies like Taken, Taken 2, Taken 3. It's the same movie. I mean, more or less, it's the same movie and people keep going to see it. So what? So what? Yeah, well, that's right. But we're also looking at this kind of thing, you know, moving into basically all corners of our lives because there's this irresistible pull on the part of anybody who has a budget to oversee toward trying to use a pattern recognition system to save them money and save them time. And so you're seeing this in everything from, you know, the Transportation Safety Administration looking at a, you know, pattern analysis way of analyzing baggage, right? You baggage, what's in your bag.

They spent $1.5 billion on a system that was trying to figure out whether you looked nervous and untrustworthy in the security line on the way into the airport, or whether they could automate the process of pulling suspicious people out of line. We've seen it in systems like PredPol, a predictive policing system that basically tells beat cops, here, based on statistical patterns in the past, are the places most likely to see crime today, tomorrow, the next day. You know, those sorts of systems are all using

the same pattern recognition algorithms. And when I say the same, very often it is the same. They're really just the same off-the-shelf software packages being deployed, not just for recommending you the next piece of music you should listen to, but also recommending who gets a job, who gets a loan, who gets bail. And that pressure, which is a combination of both the efficiency of the algorithm and also just the capitalist pull toward trying to be cheaper and faster, is, I think, creating a really powerful incentive to abandon these longer-term, more human-driven decision-making systems that we have and get into these really slick, really fast, but ultimately very opaque systems for making decisions for us. Well, I assume the reason for these kinds of AI technology programs, whatever they are, that identify nervous people in an airport line, if they don't work, they're not going to last very long. And if they do work, well, isn't that a good thing? Because human error

might let the terrorist go by in the line, whereas the machine catches him. I think that's right. I think, you know, from the people making these systems, you know, when I speak to the software engineers who are building these systems, you know, they almost always have a good, you know, some very moral ideas in mind. They're typically trying to correct for some sort of human error. And we've seen places where it is deployed and is fabulously effective in improving on human performance. I mean, if you look at something like the diagnosis of cancer, especially dermatological conditions, if you have a mole on your back, right, that is precancerous, it turns out humans are nowhere near as good at spotting those as a system that has

been trained on tens or hundreds of thousands of images of precancerous moles. So that kind of system, amazing. But here's the thing, right? I talked at one point to a hospital system that was trying to deploy a way of basically pre sort of forecasting who among their patients was most likely to have a cardiac event in the coming shift. And at the beginning of a physician's shift, it would basically say to them, okay, here is your list of patients to look at this day in this order. And, you know, on the one hand, fantastic, like could be a hugely helpful thing because maybe that system is better at forecasting who's going to have a cardiac event than somebody else. Here's the problem.

When you talk to people who are using that system, I was talking to the makers of that system and the hospital system. I asked, well, does anyone ever question that list or do they just go for it? And they say, oh, no, one guy once asked how these decisions were being made. But no, everybody else just kind of goes with the flow because they want to be saved the time. You know, they don't want to have to think about that. And here's the other part of it, right? I was talking to somebody who studies medical malpractice and he was saying that the number two, sometimes number three, sometimes number two top cause of a medical malpractice lawsuit is a failure on the part of the enough to ask the person, hey, could you please roll over so I can look at your back? So on the one hand, we have this incredible push toward efficiency that

is great at spotting, you know, which mole is going to become cancer. On the other hand, there seems to be this increased pressure on physicians to move fast, to rely on these systems such that they may be missing really important stuff. And so for me, there's this tension, and you see it again and again, between a really effective way of improving on human performance and a kind of doing away with our critical faculties that took a lot of time, took a lot of difficulty, maybe subjected the humans to liability lawsuits, right? There's all this stuff that people are trying to get away from with AI, but may in fact be costing us the ability that we have as a species to make good decisions, to use our judgment, and to make the right choice ultimately. So when a doctor does that, has anyone then said, okay, let's look at the results.

And now that we've instituted this algorithm and doctors are doing it this way instead of the old-fashioned time-consuming way, are more patients being saved? Or is it just efficient? Or what's the result? Well, the tough part, right, is that we are not yet in a place as a society, I think, where we're measuring the bigger picture. Typically, when you see results from these sorts of studies, they find these very specific, very tightly bounded kind of results. So, for instance, as I mentioned, the use of a piece of AI to forecast which mole is going to turn into cancer, it turns out is much, much

better than human analysis, right? Just a trained technician looking at it much, much better. I mean, you know, if you look at, for instance, you know, right now the state of the art in detecting some sort of trouble in your heart rate is a physician with a stethoscope listening for the lub-lub-lub-lub of your heartbeat and trying to figure out if it sounds weird. Putting that kind of thing through an automated system may be vastly better. The problem, and I think very few people are measuring this problem, is that you may at the same time be causing that physician to say, you know what, there's an automated system that's doing this analysis for me. So I don't have to pay as close attention to other parts of this examination. I may not need to ask somebody or, you know, really pick apart, you know, how they

are doing, right? We rely on physicians to be very sensitive, you know, detectors of all sorts of things. And I worry that if we begin just automating the things that they've been doing in the past, we may get better at spotting moles, right? We may get better at detecting arrhythmia in their heartbeat, but will they get worse at interacting with people and detecting all the other things that we rely on physicians to do? So what you're really talking about are unintended consequences, because for the most part, all of this stuff is done with good intentions to make things easier and more efficient. That seems to be the goal. But but there's fallout to that. the book was I spent time with a federal judge named Mariano Cuellar, who was describing to me the possibility of making certain aspects of the legal system wildly more efficient.

And his example was entering a guilty or a not guilty plea. And he made the very good point that it is a total pain in the neck to enter a plea in court. You have to go through all these different steps. You've got to appear. There are all these rules governing, depending on what state you're in or whether it's a federal jurisdiction, governing whether you are automatically entered as being not guilty if you don't show up properly. There's all these sort of steps that make it a very cumbersome process. But he says that that is part of a legal principle called weak perfection. And the idea is that you actually create a system that is intentionally

burdensome so that the person that is subjected to it has to bring their higher faculties to bear. He said, you know, we could make it like Tinder. You could swipe left for guilty, swipe right for not guilty, but you'll never get a chance to enter this plea again. There's no do-overs. It's going to change your life. And you have to, as a result, build the system to force us to engage our higher functions.

And the problem is, especially when you're looking to make money off people, nobody wants to do that. They don't want to build a system that engages our higher functions. And the problem is, especially when you're looking to make money off people, nobody wants to do that. They don't want to build a system that engages our higher function. You always hear in the design of software and user interface designs, the idea that you want to try and reduce friction. They talk about, you know, you're trying to reduce friction on onboarding somebody into a new thing. If you sign up for Amazon, they want to make it as fast as possible. And that is great in all sorts of ways. But it turns out that with something like, you know, a physical, right, or something like

entering a guilty plea in federal court, maybe we shouldn't be trying to make these things frictionless. In fact, maybe the friction is an important part of protecting the best aspects of who we are. We're talking about artificial intelligence and how it's changing the way you make decisions for your life. My guest is Jacob Ward. He's the NBC News technology correspondent and author of the book, The Loop. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind.

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Shop now in-store or online at BestBuy.ca. Exclusions apply. So, Jacob, from listening to you talk, one of the things I'm hearing, and I guess this is a thing that upsets and concerns a lot of people, is if, for example, you're a doctor and now you have this artificial intelligence that can do things that you used to do, well, it kind of dulls your skills. You know that if you don't catch something, the machine will.

So you maybe don't have to be quite as careful. It kind of reminds me of, remember, before smartphones and before you could store phone numbers in your phone, you had to remember a lot of people's phone numbers off the top of your head. And so people got pretty good at it. But now nobody's very good at it, but now nobody's very good at it because you don't have to do it anymore. That's absolutely right. I mean, you know, for me, one of the starkest examples of this tension, right, the incredible opportunity of AI

and also what are the sort of long-term risks that we are taking by using it was played up by this system called Co-Parenter. Co-Parenter is a company, one of many, that is a mediation system for newly divorced parents trying to co-parent a kid. And basically, if you go to one of a dozen or so family courts in the United States and you cannot get along and you keep coming back before the judge, the judge will eventually order you to communicate only through this system, co-parent term. What it basically does is it offers, it's a text and chat platform for going back and forth with your ex. And when you guys begin to fight, it actually detects it because it turns out that human conflict is incredibly predictable. It follows very similar patterns.

And so when you start to text your ex, I'll never give you another dime, you lying, whatever, it will jump in and say, hey, hey, whoa, are you sure you want to write this? It could get you back into trouble. Instead, would you like to use this kind of language? And by the same token, it will also suggest agreements when it detects that that's happening. So when you guys are writing back and forth about who's going to pick him up on Thursday from karate, it'll say, it looks like you're about to agree on something. Would you like to use this standard template? Now, on the one hand, I think that's fantastic because according to the company, 85% of couples who use this never wind up in front of a family court judge again. I interviewed people who use it and they

said, I'm getting along with my ex like I've never gotten along with them before. It's incredible. On the other hand, I think a generation ahead to that kid who on the one hand has had the benefit of both parents in his life getting along, it's pretty great. On the other hand, will he grow up knowing how to have conversations with difficult people in his life? Or will he only know how to follow the instructions of a robot mediator? So let me push back on two of your examples and ask you to comment on them. First of all, that co-parenting software. And you're concerned that what happens to little Johnny later on. Well, what would happen to little Johnny later on if he spent his childhood listening to mommy and daddy swearing and screaming at each other?

Well, that's right. So I agree with you completely, right? I would rather have a child like that have the short-term benefit of that thing. But I also worry that just as we are coming to expect that a hiring manager should have only a couple of days to fill a position, right? Or just as we are coming to expect that a physician only needs a 10-minute sit down with a patient to find out everything that she needs to sort out whether that patient has a stroke coming up or whatever it is. I worry that we are going to not put adequate resources into something like social services if we are coming to rely on a system like that. For me, again, it's not about necessarily

not deploying these systems. It's about evaluating the degree to which those systems are going to represent a temptation for society to do away with some really important things. I would like, in the short term, a system like AI to be deployed on something like social services, to pair people who are living on house with the social services they need, or let's say to identify every apartment that is at risk of giving lead poisoning to the kids that are going to grow up in them, right? But I also think we can't just expect that that is then going to replace the need for social workers or replace the need for frontline physicians or the inspectors

who are going to have to go in and make sure that places are safe. And the other example that I would push back a little on is the idea of filtering movie scripts through AI to try to duplicate the success of previous movies to reduce the chances of a movie flopping. And the potential risk, you said, was that movies would become very much alike. But I don't think the audience would put up with that. I don't think most people would keep going back to a movie. That's why there's only Taken 1, 2, and 3. Taken 4 would really be pushing it a bit

and i don't think people would go see it and so so i guess what i'm saying is that the marketplace would course correct that i i agree with you up to a point i think that's right that i think that that human beings won't go see the same movie over and over again not the very same movie but you know the if the if the lessons of the last few years of moviemaking have taught us anything, right. It's that there is a enormous appetite to keep going back to the same well over and over again, right. From X-Men to Avengers to, you know, those, those movies, it is the same movie over and over again, same characters, you know, same canon. And what the drive for efficiency in this country tends to do is creates the illusion of choice just enough to keep us coming back.

If you remember back to the 80s with the invention of Gap style, Gap classic style, they were one of the first companies to say, okay, everybody's going to wear khakis. And here are five colors of polo shirt, right? And they, it was sold at the time as this kind of, you know, preppy classic, you know, Kennedy kind of style. But what it was also doing was creating a world in which that company didn't have to make as many versions of the shirt anymore. They could make a smaller number of quote unquote classics, right? So I think that we're going to see just enough choice to make us think we are making choices while, in fact, shrinking those choices down. You see this in industry after industry.

Talk about what I mentioned at the very beginning here, a streaming service recommending music for you. that seems pretty benign and pretty useful. What's the problem with that? definition of human values, right? And the things that we think of as being important about being human to know kind of what's worth defending or not. I was sitting in a meeting once of a bunch of social scientists on one side of the table, political scientists and sociologists and psychologists. And then on the other side of the table was a group of AI people who were building a system that they wanted to absorb human morals and human values and ethics because they recognized that more and more and more times you know ai is being asked to decide who gets a job who gets a loan who gets bail right and so they wanted to automate the a sort of an absorptive process for pulling in human values. So they had this idea where they

said, we're going to basically create a bunch of fill in the blank statements, and we're going to have humans fill in those blanks, and that's going to teach the computer. So basically, for instance, you know, say something like it would be totally inappropriate for me to do X with my coworker, right? And then you have humans fill in that sentence enough times. And pretty soon they said the AI will be able to pick up the patterns and regurgitate them and absorb them into its future decision-making. And in conclusion, the guy making the presentation said, that's how we will arrive at a set of universal human values. And then he sat down and he said, now I'll take your questions. And every hand on the academic side of the table went up and this political scientist went first and she said, I have three questions. What is universal? What is

human? And what are values? Because we as a society, we don't know enough about ourselves to encode this stuff. So I agree with you. I love the songs that get suggested to me by this algorithm, but I don't know that Spotify or anybody else has actually thought through what it means, what it costs humanity to no longer know the names of bands. We're not thinking about that. Our measurement is efficiency and user response. And if you look at the popularity of something like online sports betting, if we only are using efficiency and user response as our metric, that winds up looking like the best possible industry around. And we know that catering just to our instincts in the most efficient way possible is not always good for people. So I just don't think we've sorted that stuff out yet. We're not really even talking about it. We're, we're really only talking about the miracle that is AI when it comes to efficiency. Well, I think we all know that there are consequences when new technology shows up, but with AI, it seems different somehow. It seems that there are more consequences and deeper consequences and also consequences that we don't really think about that are worth thinking about.

I've been speaking with Jacob Ward. He is the NBC News technology correspondent, and his book is The Loop, How Technology is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Jacob. Appreciate your time. I really appreciate it. to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Jacob. Appreciate your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for making the time. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks,

and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology.

That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Whether you realize it or not, you have dabbled in tribology. If you've ever

lubricated a surface so something doesn't stick, that's tribology. It's about surfaces and how they interact with other surfaces or don't interact with other surfaces. It's why post-it notes are sticky but not too sticky. Why super glue is super sticky. Or how non-stick pans work. It's about how a bug can land sideways on a window and not fall off. That's tribology. And someone who is a real expert on this is Lori Winklis. She is a physicist turned science writer and author of the book

Sticky, the Secret Science of Surfaces. Hi, Laurie, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks very much, Mike. It's lovely to be here. So explain where this science of surfaces or tribology started. You could probably argue, you know, that tribology has been something we've been doing for millennia. There is some evidence that the ancient Egyptians knew that by adding a particular quantity of water to sand, that they could make it easier to slide heavy objects on sand. So that is very much tribology in action. That's manipulating or changing a surface in order to make it do something for you.

That's effectively what tribology is all about. So jump forward to today and how is tribology, the overall umbrella term tribology, how is it showing up today? Well, these days, tribologists are found in a huge range of different sectors. You know, we're talking about everything from the food industry. There are food tribologists whose job it is to put some science behind what we call mouth feel. You know how foods feel in our mouth and how they interact with our tongue. That's a whole area of tribological science by itself.

And then you've got tribologists who are working in the automotive sector. They might be interested in tires and how tires move on a racetrack. And then you have some who are working at a much smaller scale, those who are working in the electronics industry, for example, because every time your hard drive switches itself on in your computer, it's an interaction between a very small probe and a very quickly moving disk. And understanding that interaction is also part of tribology. So tribology is one of these sciences that most people have never heard of, but it sits right across a huge range of different sectors. So one surface that I know you write about and that I found really interesting was the surface of ice because ice when it's really cold is not especially slippery but when ice starts to melt it can be really slippery. So why is ice so slippery then?

Oh well that's a really difficult question. It's pretty recently that we've understood why exactly ice is slippery. I think in school we tend to learn about, you know, you put some pressure on the ice and maybe you melt a little bit of it and that's what causes you to slip. But in truth, when you look at the surface of ice, its behavior changes a lot at different temperatures. So ice that is incredibly cold and we're talking about, you know, minus 100 degrees C. So very, very cold. That type of ice is not slippery at all. But what happens on the surface is that as the temperature increases and gets closer to ice's melting point, the surface

molecules start to shake off some of their bonds. So they're bonded to their neighbors, their water molecules, they're all bonded together. They start to shake them off. And at a particular temperature, minus seven degrees C, most of the molecules on the surface of ice are free to roam. They roll around the surface as if they are tiny ball bearings. And that reduces the friction so, so, so much. It makes ice ultra slippery. And between minus seven degrees C and zero degrees C, which is kind of where most of us would interact with ice, you know, if we skate or if we snowboard, they're the kind of temperatures we're talking about. All of the surface starts to soften as well. So you get this combination of a super slippery surface and this kind of slightly mushier, slightly softer ice underfoot. So that's

why ice is slippery. Since the name of your book is Sticky, let's's talk about sticky. And glue is about as sticky as you can get. So let's talk about that. There isn't one glue that will stick any material to any other material. Every single material combination on the market, you can find a glue for that. You can find something that will hold them together. And that's really because sticking or adhesion, that's a property of the system. It's not really just about the stuff you put in between things in order to join them together. You have to really have a very good understanding of the two surfaces. Any of you who might be listening who has painted a piece of furniture will know that you're told to sand a piece of furniture before you apply a paint. That's partly, in fact, to roughen up the surface

and to clean some of the contaminants off it so that your paint will stick. So really, for me, stickiness is less about the stuff, less about the sticky stuff, and more about what we're sticking it onto and sticking it with. Well, that's interesting what you just said about sandpaper, because I think of the goal of sandpaper is not to roughen something up, but to smooth it. It depends really on what you're trying to do. You are smoothing it to a degree, but mostly what you are doing is you are giving the paint a uniform layer to stick on. So the paint doesn't necessarily need it to be ultra

smooth. It just needs to be very uniform. It needs to be very consistent. And if you are trying to put, if you're trying to stick something together, you actually, that roughness sanding it can actually be a problem. So it can stop the glue from spreading around the way that you want the glue to spread. You want the glue to move around and fill in any gaps and any holes to get as good a contact as you can between the objects that you're trying to join. But with paint, all you're really trying to do is to get a coating to stay in place. And usually the best way to do that is to keep your surface as clean and as consistent as possible. So sanding kind of does both of those things. And so what's going on when sometimes I'll see in a fountain or in a swimming pool, a bee will land on the water and can't get

out. And yet you would think, well, why not? I mean, it seems like it should be able, how hard could it be? But obviously it's very hard. Yeah, water really likes to cling on to things. That's the major thing. Because water has what we call a high surface tension. Its molecules are very attracted to one another. So it can be hard to break that bond. It can be hard to escape. That's where this surface tension comes from. So something like an insect landing on some water, it will instantly be saturated. So the water will instantly stick to the insect. And the insect doesn't really have the mass. It's not heavy enough really to be able to exert enough of a force to be able to pull some of those water molecules apart. So water is, in some ways, water you can think of as a very sticky substance because it really likes to wet things. It really likes to cling on to things, including poor little hairy insects. You mentioned glue before. And

again, this is one of these things I never think about. But then when I see someone's written a book about this, it's so interesting because there's glue that works really well. And then there's like super glue that works really, really well. And then there's that glue on a post-it note that doesn't seem to work all that well, but works good enough. Yeah, exactly. Like there really is a glue for every possible need. And the post-it note and the super glue, I had to really talk about them because everyone has them in their life, you know, and they do seem like contrasts. So you've got, like you said, you've got a post-it note that has this pretty mildly sticky substance, I would say on the back of the paper, but it does its job,

right? It holds the post-it note in place on whatever surface, maybe it's a bookmark or something. It holds it in place, but it doesn't then damage the paper underneath, or it doesn't pull a little bit of your computer screen off every time you pull a post-it note. So you don't need a very sticky glue in order to do that. It just needs to hold enough to do its job. Super glue, the way that it gets its stickiness is that it is incredibly sensitive to the presence of water. So I think a lot of people think that super glue hardens when it gets into the air. And that is true, but it's not the air. It's not having a chemical reaction with the air so much as the water vapor that's present into the air. And that is true, but it's not the air. It's not having a chemical

reaction with the air so much as the water vapor that's present in the air. And that's also why superglue tends to harden seemingly just instantly on things like your skin, because your skin is always kind of damp. You know, humans are constantly respiring. We are constantly generating water vapor. So our skin, even dry hands, will have a little layer of water on it. And that's exactly what all of the molecules, they're called cyanoacrylates, that are inside superglue. Once they sense the presence of water, those molecules align and harden almost instantly. So you really want to keep superglue away from things like your fingers or, you know, your mouth or anywhere where there's a lot of water, it will instantly harden. For many of us in our daily lives, stickiness has to do with food. You know, we cook in pans and the food will stick to it. And then we also have non-stick pans that hopefully the food

won't stick to it. Why is food so tricky? So with a pan that is just a metal pan, again, we're kind of back to talking about roughness. Metal surfaces are really great and very robust, but they can and do get scratched up and damaged in use. So they are already rough and then we use them a bit more and they get slightly rougher and then we scrub it in the sink and then it gets a little bit rougher. So each time we do that, we do increase the chance of food sticking to it in the future. With nonstick pans, they are usually coated in Teflon. And Teflon is a material that has been described, the bonds that exist between Teflon molecules has been described as one of the strongest bonds in chemistry. When you look at Teflon chemically, what you have is a long chain of carbon, and it's surrounded by

a cloud of fluorine atoms. And that carbon-fluorine bond is immensely, immensely strong. And it produces a surface that is effectively just completely unattractive to any other molecule you can think of. So nothing wants to stick to it. There's no way in. The surface is very, very smooth. There's no kind of loose hanging bonds, chemical bonds waiting around for things to stick to. There's just no way in. It's quite impenetrable. I guess we can't really have a conversation about surfaces without talking about lubricants. We use lubricants to protect surfaces from other surfaces. But I found it interesting that you said we don't really understand how lubricants work exactly. I mean, we do, but there's a lot more that we need to know.

So we tend to use lubricants everywhere. Anyone who's ever owned a car, for example, will have put some sort of lubricant into their engine. So we use them a lot and we rely on them a lot. And every mechanical system you've ever interacted with has some sort of lubricant into their engine. So we use them a lot and we rely on them a lot. And every mechanical system you've ever interacted with has some sort of lubricant involved. But actually, it's only pretty recently that scientists have started to look at it from a very scientific point of view, you know, to try and really fundamentally understand what happens where these things meet. So what's actually happening at the interface between the lubricant

and the surface underneath? And particularly what they're particularly interested in is what happens when you have a very thin layer of lubricant, maybe just a few atoms thick. And that's really where we're trying to answer some really fundamental questions about friction and where it comes from and what it is and what happens when you're just talking about a few atoms. So this is a product or a series of products that we use on an everyday basis, but trying to further our understanding of them has really started to push us down a very interesting and very curious path of research. Of course, the way human beings interact with surfaces of any type is through the sense of touch. So there must be a lot of interesting things going on there. There's actually a lot of really interesting stuff in that area. And I think it's made me

look at my fingers in a different way. So, you know, we think of our fingertips and you, if you're looking at your fingertips right now, you'll see that they're covered in this rigid skin, this ridge skin, we call it papillary ridges. What's been really interesting has been that scientists are starting to question precisely why we have these ridge, this ridge skin. And again, this might seem like something very obvious, but there are lots of different theories to explain why we might have them. One is that their presence might allow us to grip things more easily. So we are primates, lots of primates have, well, all primates have fingerprints, not too dissimilar from ours. Maybe we evolved them

because they allow us to climb trees and to hold onto things. Maybe it's about grip. But there's also another idea that the shape and size and distance between the ridges on our fingertip skin is very precisely defined so that it makes it easier for receptors that are inside our skin, so our fingers are humming with information. If you think about what it feels like to touch something and how much information we can gather from touching something, all of that information is being gathered by these receptors that are buried deep within our skin. But the idea is that perhaps there are some of these sensors that are particularly attuned to the frequency. And by that, I mean how many of these ridges there are packed into each square centimeter of our skin.

Perhaps that amplifies the effect. Perhaps the fingertip skin is actually helping the sensors deep within our skin to get even more information as we slide our fingers along the edges of a book, for example. So there's still a lot of questions around that. For sure, grip has something to do with it. There have been some pretty interesting results that directly contradict one another as to when our hands get wet, does our wrinkly skin, does that help or does it hinder our ability to grip things? Lots of contradictory studies on that. But I'm quite interested in this idea that maybe we have evolved them in such a way that

they help us to feel more sensitively. Well, I thought it was pretty well established that the reason your fingers get wet or get wrinkly when they get wet is to help you grip. You're saying that that's not in stone yet. No, it's not. And actually, the thing about the wrinkly skin is that it's what we call an autonomic response. It happens automatically. Our body doesn't actually make a decision to cause our skin to wrinkle. And it's not because water penetrates into our skin, which I think is something that a lot of people believe. It's actually to do with chemistry.

There are sweat glands all over our fingers. And at the very base of those sweat glands, deep within our skin, again, there are these receptors. There are these little things that are collecting information. glands all over our fingers. And at the very base of those sweat glands deep within our skin, again, there are these receptors. There are these little things that are collecting information. When our hands spend a lot of time in the water, those sweat glands notice that change in chemistry. It's no longer surrounded by air. It's surrounded by H2O and sometimes salty water, right? It notices that change in chemistry and it actually causes structures inside the skin to shrink. So just like if you took the poles out of a tent and the tent collapses, our skin collapses because these structures inside our skin have shrunk. So it's not that the water is actually plumping up the skin or anything. It's actually a chemical response. And it happens, it shows that our nerves are working.

That's effectively what it does. It's actually used as a test of nerve function. There are some results that suggest that it helps us to grip things. But there are genuinely contradictory studies, exactly precisely the same study that has been carried out by three or four or five different research teams. Some will say, yes, it definitely, these wet wrinkles definitely help us to grip onto things more easily. Some studies say they make no noticeable difference and other studies say that they don't help at all. So that is, the jury is still out on that. So I guess you would say this is kind of on the cutting edge of tribology, or at least that's what it sounds like to me,

is this idea of making coatings for boats so that boats actually never get wet. So you've got to explain that. There is this plant, this fern called the Salvinia fern, and it lives on the water. It forms these huge mats that can sit on the water. And for a very, very long time, scientists have known that it is extremely water repellent. That's how it can float on top of the water. Relatively recently, some botanists started to try to investigate precisely why and how this plant manages to be quite so water repellent. Now, there are lots of water repellent plants in nature, but this one does seem to have something special to it. So when you look at the leaf of a Salvinia fern, this fern both attracts water to the very tip of the hairs, but also repels water from the whole rest of the structure.

And that traps a layer of air within the leaf structure. And it's a permanent layer of air. It's almost impossible to break that down. So the scientists, having now realized this, are now working on coatings that use the same structure, this combination of a very water attracting tip and a very water repellent rest of the material. And they're attempting to put coatings on boats. And what that would mean would be that you could have a boat that never gets wet. It has a boat that has a layer of air that is trapped around it permanently. And it would have an impact on things like fuel consumption, for example, because it's much easier to push through the air than it is to push through the water. So you could actually really reduce the environmental footprint of large boats

if we could have them coated in materials like this. Yeah, well, imagine a boat that doesn't get wet. That would be something. This whole conversation has been about things I'd never really given much thought to, never knew. I never even knew that the topic of tribology existed. I don't think I even knew the word tribology existed, but I do now. I've been speaking with Laurie Winklis. She is a physicist turned science writer, and her book is called Sticky, The Secret Science of Surfaces.

Say that five times fast. There's a link to the book in the show notes. Thanks, Laurie. This was really fun. Thank you so much. It was lovely chatting to you, Mike. Here is some very simple but powerful advice. Gaining something is good, but not losing something is even better. Noah Goldstein, author of the book Yes, says you can have a big influence on other people by pointing out what they stand to lose instead of what they stand to gain. That's why in advertising, you see

the phrase, don't miss it, much more than you see the phrase, take this opportunity. The next time you want to sell an idea or some advice, emphasize what the other person stands to lose by not acting on it. And that is something you should know. Hey, I need your review. If you haven't left a review or haven't left one in a while, reviews really help. They really help us move up the charts on all the podcast platforms and it gives us credibility.

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