The Underrated Money Making Skill In 2026

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, guys, here's the deal. With the rise of AI, taste is going to be one of the biggest motes 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.
Alright 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 fufu 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 is 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 four 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 who are 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. 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. Johnny 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 were very inspired by it because 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 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 the 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. 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 wanna wear. If you wanna 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 Ogilvie. I would find famous David Ogilvie ads and I would spend hours every single day for six or eight 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.