The Underrated Money Making Skill In 2026

1. Taste is the new moat. With AI removing the difficulty of building, the hard part shifts to appealing to people emotionally — making someone feel there's something special worth buying, following, or paying for.
2. Define good taste precisely. Borrowing from David Marks' 'Status and Culture,' good taste means proposing an identity valued in your chosen community, then using your choices to congruently and authentically communicate that identity — i.e., deciding what you want to say and learning to say it well.
3. Start by deciding what you want to say. Most people skip this step and copy randomly without knowing why. Clarifying the identity and message you want to project is the foundation of the entire process.
4. Blindly copy the people you admire. Just as you learn guitar by playing Jingle Bells before writing songs, you develop taste by literally copying work you love — word for word, pixel by pixel — to absorb its 'texture.'
5. Learn the underlying rules. Read books, blogs, and watch videos to understand WHY things work — why a website feels trustworthy, why a chord progression creates tension, why a jacket length looks right.
6. Study the history. Tradition provides the constraints and framework you operate within. Knowing the lineage (Gutenberg, Swiss design, Bauhaus, Motown) deepens your fluency in the visual or cultural language.
7. Good taste vs. great taste. Good taste is following the rules to say what you want; great taste is mastering the rules and then deliberately breaking them — as George Clinton, Dr. Dre, and Kanye did with sampling.
8. Taste pays off financially and emotionally. The right name, brand, and aesthetics materially raise your odds of success (David protein bars, the Swiffer renaming), and being surrounded by things that 'sing to you' genuinely makes life happier.

Why Taste Matters More Than Ever in the AI Era

Sam opens by framing taste as one of the biggest moats available in 2026. Historically, competitive advantage came from who could build things — who could raise the most money to hire the most engineers to produce something good. With the rise of AI, building is no longer the hard part. The hard part is appeal: getting someone who visits your website, talks to you, or meets you to think 'there's something special here, I'm drawn to this, I want to give them money, follow them, and do what they say.'

He promises that by the end of the episode listeners will know a four-step process for developing good taste, and that applying it will make them 'richer in the soul' but also 'richer in the wallet,' because they'll know how to make things that appeal to people's emotions and move them to buy, follow, and act.

Defining Good Taste

Sam stresses that the question isn't whether you have taste, but what good taste is. He cites David Marks, author of the book 'Status and Culture,' who defines good taste as requiring two things: first, proposing an identity that matters and is valued in the community of your choice; and second, using your lifestyle choices to clearly, congruently, and authentically communicate that identity.

Sam translates this academic definition into plainer terms: good taste is determining what you want to say, in what language you want to say it, and then learning to speak that language effectively. He also previews a distinction he'll return to — good taste is following the rules to say what you want, while great taste is taking those rules and breaking them.

The Four-Step Process

Sam introduces a four-step process he says he assembled from many books he's read: (1) decide what you want to say; (2) blindly copy the people you like who are already saying what you want to say; (3) learn the rules underneath what they're doing; and (4) study the history.

Step 1 — Decide What You Want to Say

This step gets skipped most often. People jump from copying one thing to another without knowing why. Clarifying the identity and message you want to project gives the rest of the process direction.

Step 2 — Blindly Copy

Sam compares this to learning guitar: no one hands a beginner a guitar and says 'write a song.' Instead, you learn by playing 'Jingle Bells,' then progressively more complex songs, absorbing the 'texture' of what makes something work. The same applies to dressing like someone you admire (wear exactly what they wear) or building a website (copy ones you like word for word).

His personal example of this is copywork. As a fan of legendary adman David Ogilvy, Sam spent hours every day for six to eight months during his 'apprentice period' copying famous Ogilvy ads word for word by hand on paper. Copying others, he says, teaches you the texture of what makes them great.

Step 3 — Learn the Rules

Here you read books and blog posts and ask why things work: Why do I like how I look dressed this way? Why does Stripe.com feel trustworthy before you read a single word? Why does a chord progression create satisfying tension when released? This is the theory part, and Sam notes there is an abundance of books and YouTube videos explaining the rules of nearly any domain.

Step 4 — Study the History

Sam's favorite step. Tradition provides the constraints and framework within which you speak, live, design, or write. Understanding the historical lineage of a craft both deepens your fluency and explains why the rules exist.

Case Study: Bauhaus, the Braun T3 Radio, and Steve Jobs

Sam illustrates the process with the story of the Braun T3 radio, invented in 1953. The roots go back to Germany in 1919, just after World War One. Germany had lost the war, its economy was ruined, and many young people felt a loss of identity and anger at their country. One such young, angry designer (an architect) was Walter Gropius. Reacting against the ornamental, fancy Victorian aesthetic of old Germany and Europe — which he associated with the older generation that had led the country into ruin — Gropius created a new design movement called Bauhaus and founded a school to teach it.

The language Bauhaus spoke was one of defiance and hope. It rejected status and ornamentation in favor of reducing everything to its essentials — designing only what's necessary for the user, questioning whether every flourish was truly needed (the answer being no). Decades later, German designer Dieter Rams, a devotee of Bauhaus and minimalism, was hired by Braun to make a new radio: the T3, a beautiful, minimal, functional object with very few buttons.

Fast-forward to early-2000s California, where a designer named Steve Jobs was obsessed with the T3 radio, studied its history, and understood why every decision was made. Jony Ive has written that the iPod was directly inspired by the T3's 'less is more' philosophy. Sam's argument is that Jobs followed the same four-step process: copying what he loved, learning the rules, and understanding the history of timeless design.

Case Study: Sam's Own Fashion Journey

Sam got into 'the taste game' about two and a half to three years ago. After a fitness journey left him 'unfat,' he still disliked how he looked in photos and wanted to dress well — to impress his wife and because he finds it cool. He used himself as a guinea pig for the four-step process.

First, to set up the copying phase, he unfollowed everyone on Instagram, then re-followed only the people he had bookmarked because he thought they looked cool — even though he didn't yet know why. This flooded his feed (and the algorithm) with people speaking the visual language he wanted to learn. For step two, he blindly copied them: he checked which brands they tagged and bought a bunch of those items. Over time he noticed what he was genuinely drawn to and what he wasn't.

Then he learned the rules by reading books. He held up 'Dressing the Man,' a textbook-like guide that tells you, based on your face shape, what your collar should look like, or how long a sports jacket should be — including the 'rule of thirds,' where a jacket should reach down to your thumb. Many of these rules, he notes, are rooted in British aristocracy.

Discovering His Identity Through Style

As he went deeper, Sam noticed he was drawn to three styles: military-influenced clothing (leather jackets, chinos, World War II-era pieces); workwear (denim, functional, blue-collar clothing); and Ivy style. He read more to understand why, including 'Black Ivy,' a book about how in the 1960s Black men in America adopted the traditionally white Ivy style as an act of defiance and a desire to fit in — a story Sam found badass and inspiring. He also collected many books on denim and its history.

Reflecting on why these styles resonated, Sam connected them to his own identity: as a Midwesterner he loves stoicism and the 'shut up and work' value; he loves Western/cowboy clothing and the adventurous, frontiersman, distinctly American imagery of the cowboy and the soldier; and he loves the 'old money' vibe because it represents decades of family tradition and continuity — something he didn't have growing up and aspires to build. Once he understood that these values 'sang' to him, everything clicked and he knew which language he was trying to speak. He admits he doesn't always execute well, but it's still good taste because he understands the language and speaks it mostly well.

Applying the Process to Web Design

Sam suggests applying the same process to building a website with AI. Over the next month, every time you see a website that 'speaks to you,' save it — you'll accumulate 30 or 40 sites that reflect your identity, even if you don't know why. Then print them out and, if you're not a designer, draw them out by hand bit by bit — buttons, copy, layout, pixel by pixel. If you are a designer, recreate them exactly in Figma. Next, ask what label these designs have in common, research that style, read books, follow people on YouTube, and find the rules.

He admits he had to research design history for this analogy because he doesn't know enough about it himself. Much of design traces back to Gutenberg, who in the 1500s had specific reasons for line spacing that we still follow. In the 1950s, a Swiss school of design insisted everything be neutral — because the Swiss were neutral and wanted people from all countries to read something and instantly understand it; much modern design's universal, neutral feel comes from there. Knowing this helps you decide whether you're trying to say something universal. Spend three to five months on this process, Sam says, and you'll have better taste than 90% of people.

Good Taste vs. Great Taste: The Hip-Hop Lineage

Sam illustrates great taste — mastering the rules then breaking them — through the lineage of hip-hop sampling, using Dr. Dre as his entry point. Before being known as Dr. Dre, he was the DJ and beatmaker for N.W.A, one of the most groundbreaking hip-hop groups and an originator of gangster rap. Dre constantly sampled George Clinton, lead singer and guitarist of the 1970s band Parliament, whose funky, psychedelic rhythm-and-blues sound (Clinton was literally on psychedelics) gave Dre's 1990s music its 'G-Funk' (gangster funk) character.

Going further back, George Clinton was previously a studio musician at Motown — one of the first times Black music became mainstream. Motown drew on the gospel music before it, which in turn drew on slave songs sung in the fields. It's all tied together by tradition, but when one person breaks away, they create something new. Clinton mastered Motown, then said he had something funkier and more psychedelic in his soul and broke Motown's rules — yet his music remained Motown-influenced, which then influenced Dr. Dre.

Sam contrasts two levels of sampling. Early-career Dre and Kanye often simply took an old song's beat and rapped over it — essentially a cover, like N.W.A's 'Express Yourself,' which uses a 1970s song's beat. That's good. But other work by Dre and Kanye takes old records (Supremes-era material), pitches them up, speeds them up, and chops them into something entirely new — that's great. You can still achieve good taste, though, simply by being an archivist: digging through what was great in the past, asking what language those creators spoke, and why it resonates with you.

Why Taste Pays — Economically and Spiritually

Sam closes by arguing taste matters more than people think, including for economic stability. If you're going to make things, having good taste raises your odds of success. He points to David protein bars and to a past MFM guest who renamed the Swiffer mop — who admitted the Swiffer wasn't meaningfully different from other mops; they just gave it an interesting name. Picking the right name, brand, and aesthetics genuinely matters.

He also makes the emotional case he initially held back: this stuff is good for your soul. Being surrounded by beautiful things that 'sing to you' makes life happier. For a long time Sam felt he knew what he liked but lacked the language to describe it or explain why — and the goal of the episode was to give listeners both the method to develop taste and an appreciation that it can make them happier and richer.