The Underrated Money Making Skill In 2026

All right, guys, here's the deal. With the rise of AI, taste is going to be one of the biggest moats that you could possibly have. Previously, it was about who can build stuff, who could either raise the most money to hire the most engineers to make something good. That's not really the hard part anymore. The hard part now is going to be appealing to people. Someone going to your website or talking to you or meeting you and thinking, there's something special here. I'm drawn to this. I want to give them money. I want to follow them. I want to do something because they seem interesting. And at the end of this episode, you are going to know the 4-step process to develop good taste. And if you follow exactly what I say, I promise you, you are going to feel, A, richer in the soul, but B, you're going to be richer in the wallet because you will know how to make stuff that appeals to people's emotions and gets them to move and buy and follow and do what you say. All right, everyone, this podcast is going to be on how to develop good taste. And I'm telling you, this is probably the most important thing that you can learn about right now. There is actually a process to develop good taste. I'm going to start by explaining some things that seem a little foo-foo and a little academic, but I promise I'm going to make these incredibly tactical so you can actually today, after listening to this, go and apply them immediately. Now, the question is not whether you have taste or not. The question is, what is good taste? And good taste, it's defined by this guy named David Marks. I read his book called Status and Culture. It's pretty amazing. He says good taste, it requires two things. One is proposing an identity that matters to be valued in the community of your choice. And the second thing is using your lifestyle choices to clearly, congruently, and authentically communicate that identity. That's a very academic definition, but basically what I think it means— good taste is determining what do you want to say and in what language do you want to say it, and then learning how to speak that language effectively. The question then is, how do I develop good taste? And there is, in fact, a process. This is a process that I've stolen from a bunch of books that I've read. And so it's a 4-step process. The first is to decide what you want to say. The second one is to blindly copy the people who you like and who are already saying what you also want to say. The third is learning the rules underneath what they are saying. And the fourth is studying history. And I'm going to explain all of this. But first, I want to show you an example. Have you ever seen this radio? It's called a T3 radio. It was invented in 1953. It's called the Braun T3 radio. Most people haven't seen this. But I'm going to tell you a story about this radio. And by the end of the story, you're going to know how it was one of the most important objects ever designed. And you still are impacted by this radio today. So Germany, 1919, basically World War I had just ended. Germany lost the war and a lot of young people in Germany, they were kind of had a loss of identity. They are angry at their country. They're angry at a lot of things because their economy had just been ruined. And there was this one designer named Walter Gropius, and he was a designer. He was— I believe he was an architect at the time, but he was an angry young guy and he was trying to— and he was into design. He was trying to figure out what is design now that our economy, our culture has been destroyed and we are something new. Previously in old Germany and a lot of Europe at the time, it was very ornamental. If you ever seen like a Victorian chair, if you're listening to this at home, imagine that like a very Victorian chair, like something you would see on Hunger Games, like very ornamental. Well, this guy, Walter Gropius, he hated that because he was saying like, look, you guys are the ones who got us in this war. You older folks, you're all into this fancy stuff. I'm angry at that. And so he created this new type of design called Bauhaus. So he created this school where he started teaching everyone this style of design. And it basically— the language that he was speaking at the time was that of defiance and hope and this idea that it wasn't about status, it wasn't about making something look extra fancy. It was about reducing everything to its essentials. So basically Bauhaus was all about like, how do I make what's only here for the user? So for example, I have a photo of some of the tables and chairs. Every single thing was questioned, meaning do we need this beautiful iteration or this beautiful design on this chair? According to Bauhaus, the answer is no, you don't. All you have to do is you have to do what's only necessary. That was his whole point of design, the whole Bauhaus design? Well, there's this guy named Dieter Rams, a German designer who was all about the Bauhaus school of thought. He loved minimalism and he was hired by a big company called Braun to make a new radio. And that was the radio that I showed you, the T3 radio. And this radio was really interesting because if you zoom in on it, there's not really too many buttons. Uh, it's very minimal, but it works and it's beautiful. All right. So fast forward decades later, we're in the early 2000s. There's this designer in California who's obsessed with the T3 radio. He loves it. He studies the history of it. He knows why every decision was made about it. And his name was Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was a huge fan of this radio and this idea of like having less is more. Jony Ive has written many times where he was like, the inspiration from the iPod was this radio and we wanted to steal it. Not steal it. He didn't say steal, but he said we are very inspired by it because of it was just a beautiful, timeless product. And the argument that I'm trying to make is that Steve Jobs actually followed this process. And let me explain what that process is again. So the first thing is to decide what you want to say. This step, it typically gets skipped a lot. People jump around from copying to thing to thing, but they don't exactly know why they're copying it. But I do think that copying is important. So for example, if you were to learn guitar, someone wouldn't just give you a guitar and say, all right, Go write a song. That would be ridiculous. They would give you a guitar or a piano and they would say, play Jingle Bells. Here's exactly how you copy this song. And then eventually they would tell you, all right, let's play this little bit more complicated song. Let's play a rock song. 'Cause you like rock and roll? Okay, cool. Let's play rock and roll. And after doing this for a while, you start to understand the texture. And that's why we blindly copy. So after you decide what you wanna say, you just blindly copy it. So if you're wanting to learn how to dress like someone, you can just literally copy and wear exactly what they want to wear. If you want to build a website, you just find websites that you like and you literally copy them word for word so you can learn the texture. This is the part where practice is really important, and a lot of people think that this sounds too good to be true, but if you literally just copy someone word for word for practice, you will learn. One of the best ways to learn how to become a better writer is this thing called copywork, where you find work that you love So for example, I really love David Ogilvy. I would find famous David Ogilvy ads and I would spend hours every single day for 6 or 8 months when I was in like my apprentice period. And I would copy his work word for word on a piece of paper every single day. Because when you start copying people, you learn the texture of what makes them great. All right. I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week. And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I want to see what worked for the winners that I love and what strategies they use. And then I want to see What mistakes, uh, did they all make? What were the common flaws that they all had? And I just wanna avoid that. And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life, and I did that. And so I listed out 7 books that made a meaningful difference in my life, and I explained what the differences that they had on me or what actions I took because of the book. And then also I listed out my very particular ways of reading because I'm pretty strategic about how I read and how I read so much and how I remember what I read and things like that. And so I put this together in a very simple guide. It's 7 books that had a huge impact on my life. And you can scan the QR code below if you wanna read it, or there's a link. You guys know what to do. There's a link in the description. Just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide that I made. So it's the 7 books that had a massive change in my life, and then also how I'm able to read so much. So check it out below. Great. Step 3 is to learn the rules. And so this is when you actually go and you read a book, you read blog posts, and you actually ask yourself, why do these things work? When I dress this way and look this way, I like how I look, but why? Or when I'm designing a website, why does this website that I go to when I go to stripe.com, what about that website makes it feel trustworthy before I even read a word? Or for music, why does this chord progression, why does it make this amazing bit of tension that feels really good when it's released? And the cool thing is that there's like, this is like actually the theory part. There's tons and tons of books, there's tons of YouTube videos on actually how to learn this process, learn the rules. And the final bit is to study the history. For me, this is the most fun part. But the reason being is when you want to have good taste, you are using tradition to create constraints and a framework, and it's your job to speak or live or design or write within those constraints. Within that framework. The definition of good taste is doing exactly what I said, which is understanding what you want to say and following the rules to say it. The definition of great taste, which we're not going to talk today, is then taking those rules and breaking them. But we're just talking about good taste. It's a very simple process. All right, I'm going to give you guys another example. I told you I got into the taste game about 2 or 3 years ago because ya boi wanted to look nice. I didn't like how I looked in certain photos, even though I was I'd gotten fit. I went through a fitness journey where I'd gotten un-fat, and now I thought, now's the time to dress nice. I want to dress nice. I think it's cool to dress nice. I want to impress my wife. And so I got into fashion about 2 and a half years ago, and that's when I learned about this process. And so I was sort of a guinea pig on what this process was. And so the first thing that I had to do was I had to figure out what it is I wanted to say, and I had to blindly just copy. And at first what I did was I unfollowed every single person that I followed on Instagram. The second thing that I did was I had bookmarks on my Instagram of people who I thought looked cool. I didn't exactly know why they looked cool, but I thought they looked awesome. And I only followed those guys. I followed those guys. So every time I opened up my Instagram, I would get shown them. Plus, the algo started showing me people like them. And so there was this intense amount of just exposure to these people who were speaking a language that I wanted to speak. And so for step 2, I just blindly copied them. I figured out what brands were they tagging, and I bought a bunch of them. And then after doing that for a while, I started noticing what I was like, what I was super into and what I wasn't into. And I started figuring out why things started looking good. And then I read a few books on the topic. Check this out. There's this book called Dressing the Man. It's right here. It looks like a textbook. It literally is. It's pretty amazing. I was shocked that these things exist, but there's literally books. I'm holding it up now that show you based off of your face shape, what your collar should, your collar should look like, or if you're wearing a sports jacket, how long it should go. So for example, there's a thing called the rule of thirds where you want your sports jacket to go down to your thumb. And all of that is rooted in basically British aristocracy. A lot of the rules that were created, it's, it's, that's what it's rooted in. And so I actually read this book to figure out the rules. And then I read 2 more books. I noticed that when I was going down this journey, I noticed I was drawn to a couple of different styles. The first style that I was drawn to was things that were military influenced. So I loved leather jackets, chinos, basically World War II stuff. I also loved workwear, which basically just means what, like, poor workers would wear. Denim, a lot of functional clothing, just basically blue-collar stuff. And then the third one was this thing called Ivy style. And I started to ask myself why. And so I read these books. This is another book that I love. It's called Black Ivy. It's about how in the 1960s, Black men in America started copying the Ivy style, which is a traditionally white person's fashion. They wore it out of an act of defiance and wanting to fit in. And I thought the way they looked was badass. I thought it was so cool. I love the story of this. And I told you I loved denim and workwear. So I have tons and tons and tons of books. On denim, and I learned the history behind these things. And the reasons why I noticed I love these styles was, one, I'm from the Midwest and I sort of love stoicism. I like working hard. Just shut up and work. That's like a Midwestern value that frankly I love. I also noticed that I love like Western clothes. So if you notice, I wear lots of denim and I wear a lot of like cowboy-looking clothes, which people will tease me for because I love this idea of like a cowboy. I love this idea of a soldier. Because it's adventurous, it's kind of frontiersman, and it's very American. These are things that I identify with, and I, and I really like them. And of course, I love this, like, old money vibe because I love this idea of decades and decades of keeping money and values and traditions within the family. That's not something I had growing up, and so it was aspirational to me because I aspired to be a family man that created decades and generations of tradition within my family. and I found myself drawn to those things. And because those values kind of sang to me and it's something that I wanted to portray to everyone else and something I wanted to portray to myself, those are the fashions that I noticed I was drawn to. That was the identity that I wanted to project, and everything clicked. So I started learning the rules. I studied the history. I just blindly copied the people who I thought looked cool. And now I understood that I know exactly how to speak the language of this, like, traditional workwear, of this Ivy style fashion. And you guys who are watching, I get teased all the time by the way I dress. I don't execute well all the time, by the way. The way that I dress, it is good taste because I know the language that I'm trying to speak and I speak it mostly pretty good. This process though, it could be used on web design. So if you guys want to create a website this month using AI for a project, what I would encourage you to do is for the next month, every time you see a website, that you think just speaks to you, where you're like, this is saying something that I also want to tell others. I want you to save that website. And over the next 3 and 4 weeks, do that a ton. You're going to have 30 or 40 websites that are part of your identity. You're not exactly sure why, and that's okay. Next step, what I then encourage you to do is to print them out. And this— I'm not a designer, so I would have— I would do it this way. I would print it out and I would literally write it out, the website, like I would draw it out. Bit by bit, pixel by pixel, where the buttons are, what they say, X, Y, and Z. If you are actually a designer, you can go on Figma and I highly encourage you to copy it exactly word for word. Just copy pixel by pixel that website. Next, ask yourself, what label do these all have in common? So for example, there's tons of different types of design that a website could fall into, like there's different styles. Ask yourself, what is that called? And then you go and research it. So you have to read books, you have to follow people on YouTube, You can read lots of blogs and you actually find the rules. What does this mean and why? And by the way, for this video, I went and looked into a lot of this because I was trying to give a design analogy, and then I realized I don't know enough about design to do it. A lot of it comes from Gutenberg. When Gutenberg created the printing press in the 1500s, he had very specific reasons why the line spacing should be the way it should be. And that still is how we do a lot of things. And then in the 1950s, there is this, uh, Swiss school of thought for certain bits of design that everything had to be very neutral. Because the Swiss were neutral and they wanted people from all different countries to be able to read something and know exactly what it means. A lot of design comes from that, which is like universal, uh, and neutral. And so are you trying to say something that appeals to everything? Then you would go and learn all about this school of thought and this, uh, way that people would design. And you learn the history of all of this. And if you do that, if you spend about 3 to 4 or 5 months doing that, you will be better than 90% of people when it comes to having good taste. Now, like I said earlier, the way that you get great taste is then you, you figure out all of those rules and you start to break some of them. I can give you a really good example. I'm a huge fan of Dr. Dre. I love Dr. Dre. Dr. Dre, everyone knows him as Dr. Dre. But before that, he was the DJ and I guess like beatmaker of N.W.A., which is one of the most groundbreaking hip-hop bands of all time. It was kind of like the first time that gangsta rap kind of came to be. And the reason I think that that's interesting is because Dr. Dre sampled a ton of music by this guy named George Clinton, who was the lead singer and guitarist in a band called Parliament. Parliament was popular in the 1970s, and they sort of made this like funky, like rhythm and blues style music as if he was on psychedelics, which he was. He took a ton of psychedelics, and it's like this very like psychedelic sounding, sounding music, and Dre sampled him constantly. And that's why Dr. Dre's music in the 1990s, it was called G-Funk because it was like a funk music, but gangster, gangster funk, G-Funk. Well, if you go back in time, you'll see George Clinton previously was a studio musician for Motown. And Motown, you guys probably all know Motown, the Supremes, people like that. It was basically one of the first times that Black music became mainstream music. And the reason why it became mainstream music was they looked at the gospel music before them. The gospel music and what the gospel music looked at was slave songs of like these, like things people would, would sing in the fields. And it's all tied together by tradition. But then when one person breaks away, they start creating something totally brand new. And that's where George Clinton came in. He was a studio musician and he played Motown wonderfully, but he goes, okay, I master this, I know how to do this, but I have something in my soul that I need to say, which is like, I want to be a little bit funky, a little more psychedelic. And that's when he broke the rules of Motown. But his stuff, if you listen to George Clinton's music, it still is very Motown influenced, which then influenced Dr. Dre. And it's all a line of how this stuff works. And that, in my opinion, is the process of developing great taste. But if you go and listen to like any of the hip-hop samples, you'll notice like even Kanye, what makes Kanye so great is he samples stuff. And if you listen to early career Kanye or early career Dr. Dre, a lot of his samples, it's just taking a cover. So for example, Express Yourself, one of my favorite songs by N.W.A. and Dr. Dre. It's just like basically a cover. They basically looked at this old song from the '70s and it's just the beat playing and, Dr. Dre rapping over it. But then some of his other stuff and some of Kanye's other stuff is they take old Supremes or old whatever and they bring it up a bunch of pitches and they speed it up and they chop it up in a weird way where it creates something totally new. That's great. That's not good. That's great. But you could still get good just by being an archivist and going back in time and digging through what was already great in the past. What language were they speaking and why does that speak to you? And so my friends, that's the, my process for developing good taste. I could go on for this stuff forever because I actually think this matters a lot more than you think. I think it matters for economic stability. If you're gonna make stuff, the likelihood of you succeeding, if you have good taste, I think is a lot higher. Than if you have not good taste. I think if you look at like, for example, David Protein Bars, or we had a guy on here who renamed the Swiffer mop, and on the podcast he said the Swiffer mop wasn't particularly different than the other mops. We just named it something kind of interesting. And so the point being is that having good taste and picking the right name, the right brand, the right aesthetics, it actually matters. And also, which I didn't want to appeal to so far, but I do think, believe it to be true, which is this shit feels good for your soul. Being around beautiful stuff, stuff that sings to you, it honestly makes my life happier. And a lot of times I always felt like I knew that, but I didn't have the language to describe what I liked or why I liked it. And I hope that I've now shown you, A, how to develop good taste, but also how this shit can actually make you happier. And definitely it'll make you richer. All right, that's it. Let me know in the comments on Spotify and YouTube if you dug this. Talk soon.