This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes.
Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Minush Zamorode. And I want to talk about a force that is happening all around us. And it's something that we actually will 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. This 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 tribose, which is rubbing or too rub. And it is the science of interacting surfaces and relative motion. We look at wear friction lubrication. And there are so many examples.
Your 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. And 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. Yeah, 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 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 gonna remove that plaque. Probably gonna remove your teeth as well.
So 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 periodonal 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. And I used friction and wear 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'd 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 the chew.
We use something called a tribometer and the tribometer itself will measure the force of friction. So we can see for our conditions what that forces that's resisting the motion and what you can also do is measure where 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's exactly what a tribology lab is. And each tribology lab will be a little bit different depending what they're studying. So 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 removing plaque. You do the bench top 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, tell me another project that you've worked on. My PhD work.
was looking more at syringes, which is very topical nowadays. But 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 and the arm, which there will be friction there. That isn't 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. Oh, 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.
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. And 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.
What's the big deal with tribology? Let me give you one more example. No matter where you are right now, you've 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 drive train. Did 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. It'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 where friction can be reduced by up to about 40% which would translate to over 8% 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, it'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 emissions. 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, right, you see it, you know, I feel like that way with friction, like I can't do anything now without thinking about it. That is exactly what friction and tribology is. And 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 writing 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. So 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 cars 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. Thank 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 Vale. You can watch her full talk at TED.com. So 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.
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. On the show today, friction. I'm Anush Zamarodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR, I'm Minush Zomorodi. On the show today, friction. In the tech world, entrepreneurs want as little friction as possible in their products so that we keep coming back. We expect everything to be first, fast, free, and frictionless. This is Yale, Eisenstadt.
Yael is an advocate for building slower tech, for adding friction to social media platforms to keep misinformation from spreading. She is also a Facebook whistleblower. I first spoke to her in 2022 in the run-up to the US midterm elections, and now with the presidential elections around the corner, her story is more relevant than ever.
It starts at the Kenyan Somali border right after 9-11, where Yale 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, you know, 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 it's cliches, 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. It's very soft skill, right? It's 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 meanings. 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. It 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 US? 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 our democracy was secure. We were okay 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 US. And in 2015, just the way
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 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. And 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 in different communities around the world, including the ones that I had worked with along the small 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 US at that point. How much did you blame social media, or I don't know, Fox News, or where were you looking in terms of the source of the problem? I mean, sort of on 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.
One 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. And 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 that 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.
Yep. 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, tell us what happened. So I started speaking to more and more audiences, especially of technologists. You know, I learned how was Facebook designed? How was it incentivized? And the more I learned, the more I started speaking about them and then they called. What'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. Um, because, oh yeah, no, we need that. That's exactly what we need, you know, 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, um, 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 whatever it is. So I went in, I would say cautiously optimistic that maybe this 2018 moment
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 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. What 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. So what did you do in those first few days? Like did you start making trouble? Probably. So, you know, I did, I started reaching out to as many people as I could. I wanted to understand why we would fact check certain information on the newsfeed.
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 I sent that up the chain,
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 US midterm 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 are two things there. The first is what they said, which was, as soon as we set 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, which 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. 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. That 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 and 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. I worked for three different administrations, Republican and Democrat. What I was trying to do was protect the integrity of our elections by building plans. Some of it might slow things down. Some of which might mean that you have to reject some ads. But my plan would also possibly anger certain political actors that Mark Zuckerberg did not want to anger.
And eventually, not too long after this, you were fired. Yeah. So instead of adding friction to the platform, you became the friction. Oh my gosh. I was definitely the friction. Everything I was proposing definitely would have added some friction in. And yeah, my understanding is though that in 2020, there were actually attempts to add some friction to these social media platforms ahead of the election. So what did that look like? What did you see?
Yeah, so, you know, for Twitter, for example.
If you wanted to retweet an article, before you could retweet it, you would get this pop-up, I think it was, asking you, have you read this article? That is friction. I got that pop-up, totally. Yeah, building in friction says, before you share this, have you read it? Or another way to add in friction is, if you're gonna share this article, you have to actually add your own thought. You have to add words into your tweet. And that might seem like a bit of an annoying thing, but think about what it's doing. It's making you slow down.
It's making you actually think for a second, is this a good idea? Do I even know what this is really saying? So that's what friction is. And the funny thing is, to the best of my understanding, Twitter actually did see that some of the political rhetoric was tamped down a bit and misinformation was actually slowed ahead of the 2020 election. But my understanding is Twitter admit that this worked, but then after the election reversed it.
So listen, the companies know how to do these things. The real question is, why don't they? And that's because that's not going to help them make more money. The power that comes with that, the money that comes with that is more important than figuring out how to create healthier discourse or even the bare minimum of figuring out how to ensure
that you're not allowing people to fundamentally destroy trust in our elections. I mean, the big lie, which spread like wildfire on social media. Facebook had many ways to build an enough friction to slow that down and then to possibly decide, you know what, we're not going to let the big lie spread. They had all of those tools. They just chose not to use them.
You know, there will be people listening who are like, this ship has sailed. You raising the flag is not going to do anything. And I wonder, A, if you think that's true. And B, what you think that means for upcoming elections here in the U.S.? That's a great and difficult question. I would say this. A lot of this is very much in the public consciousness now. I mean, people say, oh, we all know that Facebook does X, Y, or Z. That comes from
years of people raising these alarms. So I personally will disagree with that ship has sailed. But that said, I am now working with groups that truly want to change the incentive structures around how our public discourse happens. And I'm super encouraged that there are companies really thinking about these things differently.
The question is whether they'll be funded, whether they'll be successful, but every little piece of the puzzle, whether it be legislation that's written, whether it be companies who want to operate differently, every single one of those nuggets matter. No, it's not happening fast enough. Yes, I am still terrified for upcoming elections because so many fundamental issues have not been fixed.
But if I can't hold on to a little bit of green of hope of this sort of dinosaur slow societal shift, then I just lose all hope. So I do think that these things don't matter. I do think we can continue to both pressure the companies, pressure our governments, and pressure the people who finance the next wave of companies to think differently about all of these incentive structures.
That's Yael Eisenstadt. She is a senior fellow at Cybersecurity for Democracy, where she researches how generative AI is affecting political discourse. You can see her full talk at 10.com. By the way, Meta never responded to our request for comment on Yael's allegations.
And another quick update, Meta does prohibit disinformation about voting, content that might mislead people about voting locations or times, but they still do not fact check political ads. And since the midterms have allowed ads stating that the 2020 presidential election was stolen or rigged.
On the show today, ideas about friction. I'm Anush Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anush Zamorodi. On the show today, friction.
And right now, I would like you to imagine you are running down a rocky hill in a pair of shoes that are way too tight. If it's too tight, then you're going to hurt your body from inside. Your toes and all your legs are going to be really painful. Like, it's going to hurt. It's going to lead to blisters. You're going to have blisters, first of all. You're going to have all of these pains internally.
Okay, so now imagine you're going down this hill wearing shoes that are way too big. If you're wearing a big pair of shoes, then you're gonna break your skin from outside. Just put, it's just gonna slide in and out. You're gonna get some cuts at the back of your foot. You're gonna get cuts in other parts, you know, because it's not fitting well. This is what everyday life can be like if you wear a prosthetic leg.
Lots of pressure soles, lots of back pain and heat pain. And it can be hard to get a good fit. So just walking, never mind, running down a hill, can lead to that pain. Now prosthesis have several components. The biggest problem that was affecting the pain was on the socket, which is the part that connects to the body.
The prosthetic socket has to be perfectly fit for you to be comfortable and for you to avoid injuring yourself even more. This is David Moina Sangay. I am sitting in my office in New Englandville in Freetown Sierra Leone.
From that office, he serves as the nation's education minister, as well as its chief innovation officer. But before joining the government, David spent years in the US researching and testing ways to make better fitting prostheses.
And what he discovered was that it all came down to having just the right amount of friction. So there's a fine balance between how friction plays here. You want the friction, you want to attach your prosthetic leg to your biological leg to prevent your leg going in and out so loosely in the socket, but you also don't want it to be too tight.
Because then what's going to happen is you're just going to have these internal soft tissue stresses and strains. Solving this problem became a personal mission for him. Here's David Sangay on the TED stage. I was born and raised in Sierra Leone, a small and very beautiful country in West Africa. A country reached both in physical resources and creative talent.
However, Sierra Leone is infamous for a decade-long river war in the 90s when entire villages were burnt down. An estimated 8,000 men, women and children had their arms and legs amputated during this time.
As my family and I run for safety when I was about 12 from one of those attacks, I resolved that I would do everything I could to ensure that my own children will not go through the same experiences we had. The world in fact be part of a Sierra Leone where war and amputation were no longer a strategy for getting power.
As I watched people who I knew, loved ones, recover from this devastation, one thing that deeply troubled me was that many of the amputees in the country will not use their prosthesis. The reason I will come to find out was that their prosthetic sockets were painful because they did not fit well.
So David, was this specifically a problem in Sierra Leone? Or is this just every person who wears a prosthetic leg has to deal with this, this pain that can come from where the cup of the prosthesis connects to the body?
So when I started this, I thought, look, this is a serial viewing problem, because that's what I knew. And then I went to the US, and I met Professor Hugh Herr. He's a Professor of MIT. He's a double amputee himself.
And here was a tenured MIT professor with all kinds of patents and really brilliant and runs his own lab. He's a double amputee and he has the same problems as the people in Sierra Leone. And he had a robotic ankle. So even the state of the art prosthesis, he had the same issue.
Yeah, exactly. He had powerful robotic ankles, but he had the same pressure saws and his prosthetics socket saws the same way that other people's prosthetics socket saws. And we connected on this. We connected on the fact that this was unacceptable and how was it that
didn't matter whether you were in Freetown and a kid who was begging on the street or you had a professor at MIT or an ex-military person in the US, you all had the same problem. So you ended up going to MIT? And what did you say to your professor? Did you say, like, I want to try and solve this problem with you? How did you even begin to tackle it?
So when we were developing the technology in 2014, thesis was this. If you touch the human body, it's made out of different materials. The tissue, the fat, the skin, and the bone react to these external pressures when you walk or when you stand. So we said, okay, if the body is made up of multi-material,
Then a prosthetic interface is socket that is also multi-material will minimize the internal stresses and strains. You essentially just want to have soft where you need soft, but you also want to be structural. Okay, so how do you get a prosthetic leg to be more human?
So just below your kneecap, if you press below your kneecap, that can take a lot of load on that tendon. So we essentially drove a lot of the pressures through that to the patellar tendon and then also to the back of your leg because your back of your leg has lots of muscle.
And we removed the pressures from what we call the fibula head. So on the outside of your leg, just below the knee, if you rub your hand down, you feel some bones there. You see a really sharp bone. Yep, yep. I found it. It's kind of knobby. Yes. And that's the fibula head. Almost every amputee will tell you that they have a pressure so they are a pain or blister. It's a worse place for them. And so you essentially want that to be super, super soft.
And then if you rub your hand on your shin, your tibia, that has little skin, right? So if you have friction there, you're going to be in pain all the time. So just imagine then that the amputees have most of their pain on the fibula head and then on the tibia and then on their legs.
And so we were building these models that would reduce pressures at those locations and put it in other places where you can take those pressures. I use magnetic resonance imaging to capture the actual shape of the patient's anatomy. Then use finite element modeling to better predict the internal stresses and strains on the normal forces and then create a prosthetic socket for manufacture.
We use a 3D printer to create a multi-material prosthetic socket which relieves pressure when needed on the anatomy of the patient. You know, when I watched your talk, you had one of these sockets on stage with you. And I was kind of surprised. It was very beautiful. The one that you had was rainbow colored. It almost looked like sand art. It was pretty. All right, it was gorgeous. It was gorgeous.
The thing with the multi-material 3D printers is that each material has different color and you can choose. And I must say, I knew I was going to pass my thesis when my professor said, oh, it's sexy. And then he also said, it's like working on pillows. And so if I think if your professor says it felt like working on pillows compared to what he had and that it was sexy, then I think I was like, OK, fine, I'll get this PhD.
So you have since returned home to Sierra Leone. You are the country's first chief innovation officer. More recently, you were also appointed the minister of education. It's impressive. I mean, my understanding, though, is that while you're no longer working on the project, it is still up and running. Yes. And it's very interesting. I go to church and then someday this is past Sunday, this gentleman comes. I don't know where he heard it from or something, but he'd heard about the bionics working with life.
Oh, I'm so happy that this is coming. I can't wait that I can use my prosthetics here because he wasn't paying and he was showing me his pain. So even though they know that I'm a minister and I'm in education and CIO, you still have lots of people who still come to me to say, so these prosthetics work. When am I going to use it? Oh, they're excited about it. OK. Yes, absolutely. So what do you say to him? Like if he's like, when am I going to get it, minister? What do you say?
I see soon. I see look where I'm working on it. And it's really wonderful. That's David Moena Sangay. He is Sierra Leone's Chief Innovation Officer and Minister of Education. His book, Radical Inclusion, will be out in 2023. And you can see his full talk at TED.com.
So on this episode, we have heard about all kinds of friction, but we can't talk about friction without talking about relationships. And real quick parents, this last segment, delves into some more mature content with potentially offensive language. So we want to end our show with some ideas, even some advice about how to deal with conflict in our relationships from someone who creates romantic tension and friction for a living.
My name is Elon Gale and I'm an unscripted television producer. Elon makes reality TV shows. Big, popular reality dating shows. For a decade, he produced The Bachelor. His latest show was called, F-Boy Island.
So you could say that Elon's job is putting people into situations full of conflict and friction. For me, I think that so much of what causes friction and dating, and obviously what we try to put into dating shows, is that people have wildly different desires around the same events.
Of course, everyone wants the first impression rose. It means you're safe on their first night, and there's 30 girls here. In a classic dating show, there's usually one person who is the object of desire. I think he's just so dreamy and cute, and I wanted to kiss him so bad. And there's many people who would like to, in concept, to be with that object of desire. I'm gonna go see him and remind him of the spark that we have. And, at the end of the day, only one will. The claws are out, man.
Most people are going to be unhappy because there aren't enough satisfactory conclusions. When I want something, I get it. Always. Know if and or but.
Let's talk about your latest show, F. White Island. The three of you are hoping to find love in this tropical paradise. So the gist of the show is that three of these three women who get their pick of 24 men, they're all living together on this island. But here's the rub. Some of these men are quote unquote, nice guys and others aren't. He's really cute, but he looks like he's gonna ruin my life.
In the real world, somebody who wants to just hook up and then move on will ghost you. But on your show, there's no ghosting. There is only hashing it out, being in a room together, which presumably is why it makes for good television.
Oh, absolutely. I think that what we've tried to do are take these tropes that exist in the real dating world and play a game. It's really a game show to try to win a big cash prize, which disincentivizes the ghost thing. I definitely think we have a strong connection and I want to pursue this with you.
I'm a little confused because, you know, we talk and she told me yesterday that you told her the same thing. I know you. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know.
I think it's because we're really, really used to not getting what we want in life in small ways all the time. And I think that on dating shows, we get to watch people have an emotional reaction to wanting something and either getting it or not getting it. It's hard to hear how much love somebody has for you, but they still don't choose you.
I know you've been out of the game for a while. You're engaged yourself to be married. I am also married, but I have a sister who sometimes is on dating apps and I have never seen anything with less resistance than the swiping that gets done after
You know, not liking the shape of a guy's chin. Sure. Goodbye. So, what's the biggest thing that the real dating world has in common with these artificial situations that you put people in?
Oh yeah, I mean I think that that's one of the things that people are struggling with currently both on dating shows and in dating in general is that there's a lot of parts to people and they're super super super complex and Getting to know someone is hard work Because you have to build trust and you have to open yourself up and share common interests There's a million things you have to do that are so much more difficult than swiping right or left
It does feel a little ironic that we are asking you, Elon, for relationship advice. Considering you've spent most of your adult life on these reality dating show sets. But I do want to know, like, how do you think people can get through these confrontations, these frictions that every relationship inevitably faces?
I think sometimes you have to just let people live in their delusions. Wanting everyone to understand your point of view with people that you love can sometimes be very damaging.
It's something that I'm not always good at because I sometimes I feel myself pulling towards a needing to share reality all the time. But I think that we have to accept that a lot of us in our personal lives have very, very different lenses. And it's okay to not see eye to eye on everything. And sometimes it's better to just accept rather than understand.
That's reality TV producer and writer, Elon Gale. He's the author of, you're not that great, but neither is anyone else. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week about friction. This episode was produced by Fiona Guerin, Rachel Faulkner White, Matthew Clutier, and Katie Montaleone. It was edited by Katie Simon, Sanaaz Mezgenpour, and James Delahussi.
Our production staff at NPR also includes Katherine Seifer. Our theme music was written by Romtine Arablui. Our audio engineers for this episode were Patrick Murray and Gilly Moon. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feline, Michelle Quint, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Daniela Bellarezzo. I'm Minush Zamorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
