“Friction is what makes pearls. If you don't get a sand in the oyster, you just get an oyster. Now, sand in the oyster doesn't always make a pearl, but it is necessary to pearl building.”
More or Less · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Context
Asked what part of life gets worse if AI agents handle everything for us, and what humans should deliberately keep doing, Gordon opened with this. He went on to argue that constraints are the friction worth keeping.
Transcript
…So I'm getting double hit, I guess, on that front. And every AI agent, well, at least maybe not some of the harnesses, but ChatGPT always ends with a question. Here's the answer. Now would you like to do this? Now would you like to do this? And it's sort of an example of that all over again.
…gets worse if like an AI agent wins for you? And then what can we leave in and like deliberately leave in for the human to do? Or is it that you have to sort of run so many tokens to figure this out that we've kind of created the ultimate? Ultimate game with AI. How do you kind of think about this?
That's like three questions at once. So I start out saying, you know, friction is what makes pearls. If you don't get a sand in the oyster, you just get an oyster. Now, sand in the oyster doesn't always make a pearl, but it is necessary to pearl building.
What is friction in that example?
Constraints. I mean, here's friction in the AI. It's 10 other people are doing the same prompt as you. You got to do something better than them. What do you do? So it's, so
that's interesting. You
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