That's it. That's the whole test. It works on money, on markets, on software, on your sales funnel, and on the people you hire. Here's how to use it.
You will never remove all the friction. Improving anything is the long, iterative process of raising trust and lowering friction, one step at a time. Every small step counts.
Every business needs great systems and great people. It's never one or the other. The same two questions are a clean gut check for both.
Once someone is on the team, ask:
If someone isn't doing either, it's worth asking why they're in the seat. If they're doing both, they're adding value, whatever their title says.
Follow any system far enough back and you see the same pattern. Each step forward made it easier to rely on and easier to use. Then follow it forward to its logical conclusion.
Barter, then wampum and shells, then coins, paper, checks, credit cards, digital payments, and crypto. Each step was harder to fake and easier to move.
In 1985 you had to be on guard with everybody you dealt with. Cash could be lost or stolen and checks could be faked. Then credit cards gave you chargeback protection, and suddenly people could spend more freely without worrying about getting burned.
Banks and intermediaries added trust, but they also hold the power to abuse it: freezing accounts, blocking transactions, playing with your money. Crypto's answer is to replace trust in an institution with trust in math. You don't have to trust a central bank or a middleman; you can verify.
Logical conclusion: trust moves from people who could abuse it to systems anyone can check.
Haggling with strangers, then fixed prices, brands, money-back guarantees, reviews and ratings, escrow, marketplaces, and one-click checkout. Each step lowered the risk of buying from someone you can't look in the eye.
Logical conclusion: reputation that follows you everywhere, so honest dealing is the cheapest strategy and dishonest dealing gets priced out.
Couriers, postal mail, the telegraph, the phone, email, messaging. Each step was faster. The next frontier is trust: verified senders and proof of who is really on the other end, because speed without trust gave us spam, scams and deepfakes.
Logical conclusion: every message is instant and its source is provable.
Horses, rail timetables, cars, airlines with safety standards, GPS, ride-share. Getting into a stranger's car went from the thing your parents warned you about to completely normal, once ratings and live tracking closed the trust gap.
Logical conclusion: you trust the system, not the individual driver, and that makes it safe to trust strangers.
Rumor, the printing press, encyclopedias, search, Wikipedia with its public edit history, and now AI with cited sources. When a step made knowledge faster and easier to check, society got smarter. When a step only made it faster, like an endless feed, trust dropped, and we're all feeling it.
Logical conclusion: fast answers you can trace back to the source.
Trust in the 1950s was high. We'd just won the war, we knew our neighbors, and kids played outside. It eroded through the 80s as the world globalized and we lost the ability to look people in the eye. Since the 90s it's been rebounding, largely because technology keeps closing the gaps: chargebacks, reviews, trust indicators, class actions. When there are fewer ways for people to abuse trust at the margins, more people get to live trusting lives.
That's not a case for a nanny state. There's a happy medium. But the direction is clear.
Logical conclusion: a society where trust is the default because abusing it no longer pays.
When a "better" system only removes friction without adding trust, people reject it or regulate it. Think spam, scams and deepfakes. When it only adds trust while piling on friction, people route around it. Think bureaucracy and compliance theater. The systems that win do both.
Right now everyone is trying to add AI to their business. Most of them are adding AI on top of friction. That just makes the friction go faster.
Fix the system first. Raise trust, cut friction, and then let agents run the better system.
The winners in this next era won't be the people who click buttons fastest, or the people who hire others to click buttons fastest. Agents make all of that irrelevant. What's left is the human beings, not the human doings. And the human beings need to be architects of better systems.
Better systems increase trust and decrease friction.
Score each part of your business on trust and friction. Be honest. Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere; it all runs in your browser.
Take a sales funnel. Going from no product front end to one that books calls reliably and turns a profit isn't one big leap. It's dozens of small steps, and every one of them either removed friction or added trust: clearer offers, proof on the page, fewer clicks to book, follow-up that actually shows up. The same goes for a mastermind, a team, or any process you run. Keep asking the two questions, keep taking the next step.
A better system increases trust and decreases friction. Trust means you can rely on it to do what it says, every time, without watching it. Friction is the effort, waiting, risk and second-guessing it takes to get the outcome.
Yes. Once someone is on the team, ask two questions: are they increasing trust, meaning you and the organization can rely on them, and are they decreasing friction through what they do? A business needs both great systems and great people, and these are two simple gut checks for whether either is adding value.
Adding AI on top of friction just makes the friction go faster. If you've ever been camping, you know faster friction makes a fire, and now you're a firefighter. Fix the system first by raising trust and lowering friction, then let agents run the better system.
No. You never remove all of it. Improving a business is the iterative process of increasing trust and decreasing friction, one step at a time, over a long period.
If you'd like to learn how to build better systems and put agents to work on them, start here.
Learn more at Build with Optimus