Tag: friction

Easy Diets

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In November 2025, Rich Roll release a podcast about fasting. This compilation episode included an overview of why fasting works, how to fast, an additional details. But, what stood out was the importance of design.

Dr. Valter Longo spoke about the effectiveness of a 12/12 fast. That includes a twelve hour eating window and a twelve hour non-eating window.

Roll pushed back, asking is that enough non-eating time?

Yes, Longo explained, there are positive health effects but more importantly it’s easier to do.
Dr. Michael Greger said the same thing – only in reverse. Greger’s early advice was about a daily dozen set of foods people should eat. A dozen foods a day?

Inconceivable! Vizzini shouts.

That led to a lot of explaining by Greger. It’s aspirational. It’s a suggestion. It’s something to work towards.

Actions are based on frictions. How easy is something: to understand, to follow, to fit with my current worldview?

Better fits may not be perfect fits, but they’ll happen more.

Summer frictions

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Anna Lembke told Andrew Huberman:

“So we’re all forced to make stuff up, whether it’s being a scientist or being a doctor or being an Olympic athlete or climbing Mount Everest. And people really vary in their need for friction. And some people need a lot more than others.

And if they don’t have it, they’re really, really unhappy. And I do think that a lot of the people that I see with addiction and other forms of mental illness are people who need more friction.”

I (finally) bought Thinking in Systems: A Primer in June 2025. It was an early summer read and focused a lot of summer thinking (before back to school gears up) on systems thinking.

Friction is an accessible dial.

Find a verb/noun combo and make it easier/harder. Don’t put your phone on the desk (like really, don’t).

But maybe it plays a more central role in the system.

Maybe friction is akin to vanilla in baked goods: Gotta have it, but just the right amount.

A fellow teacher told me she’s ready for her students. Summer break (we get seven weeks) is too long. We had a similar feeling. One night everyone at cereal the kitchen was a mess. This is what degenerates look like, I explained. The current patterns of summer don’t have enough frictions. It’s what people crave with schedules. It’s why people run races. Competition is friction. Constraints are frictions.

We’ll end in the spirit of Tyler Cowen: Friction is underrated.

The 9th Best College Town

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In his review of College Towns, Ray Delahanty (aka CityNerd) combines the walk, bike, and transport scores along with census data to score college towns.

Places score well (highly) on good urbanism, design, walkability, pedestrian streets and so on.

Corvallis Oregon ranks ninth, thanks to high bike use based on census data.

But, “it’s a little puzzling because the bike infrastructure isn’t exactly world class which goes to show how important culture and habit are for transportation choices“.

There’s a beauty to good design. We love design. It’s satisfying. It feels like we’re doing something.

But it’s not the root level.

Design is superficial. It’s shines. There’s polish.

Done well, design relies on points of friction, human needs, and feelings of belonging (like identity). Design is on culture and habit. Design must align with basic issues.

Positive Feedback Loops

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“But today I think about it as my mission in life is to get as many people as possible into positive feedback loops,” Graham Duncan told Tim Ferriss.

It’s why he spends so much time interviewing, talking with, and hanging out with people. “So I like getting the design right up front…I don’t wanna put something into somebody. I wanna have them do the thing that they wanna do anyway.”

Or as someone else said recently: don’t be trying to run up a down escalator.

One joy of YouTube is the rabbit hole. Find a niche and let the algorithm pump your feed full of whatever randomness.

One of my trips was the Toyota Sienna. One reviewer noted: it just doesn’t fight you. It’s not the top categorically – but there are no weaknesses. It’s a “floor-raiser”.

Positive feedback loops. Running up a down escalator. It just doesn’t fight you.

Alignment matters. It doesn’t make the knots less tangled but it makes untying them a lot easier.