How To Get Ahead Of 90% Of People in 2026

Why does it matter? Because AI just made 'can you build it' the wrong question.

Building is no longer the hard part. AI commoditized that. What separates winners now is whether people feel something when they encounter your work — your website, your brand, your product. This episode lays out a concrete, four-step process for developing taste deliberately, not by accident.

• Taste is now the primary economic moat — the new version of 'who can hire the most engineers'
• Good taste has a learnable structure: decide, copy, learn the rules, study history
• Blind copying isn't laziness — it's the actual mechanism for absorbing excellence
• The iPod traces directly back to a 1953 German radio, and that lineage is replicable by anyone

AI killed the engineering moat — taste is what's left

Raise the most money, hire the most engineers, ship the best product. That playbook is dead. Sam's framing is blunt: "Previously, it was about who can build stuff... That's not really the hard part anymore."

The hard part now is making someone land on your website — or meet you in a room — and feel pulled toward you before they've consciously processed why. "There's something special here. I want to give them money. I want to follow them."

This is a structural shift, not a soft one. When AI flattens the cost of execution to near-zero, the only thing that can't be automated is whether your work emotionally lands. That's taste. And the people who treat it as a learnable skill — rather than something you either have or don't — are going to have an enormous advantage over everyone still optimizing for output speed.

Good taste has a four-step process — and most people skip the first one

The four steps: decide what you want to say, blindly copy the people already saying it, learn the underlying rules, then study the history. Simple. Almost nobody actually does all four.

The first step — deciding what you want to say — gets skipped constantly. People jump straight to copying things they vaguely like without knowing why. That's how you end up with a Frankenstein aesthetic that doesn't cohere.

The definition Sam pulls from David Marks' Status and Culture is surprisingly precise: good taste requires "proposing an identity that matters to be valued in the community of your choice" and then using your choices to "clearly, congruently, and authentically communicate that identity."

Stripped of the academic wrapper: figure out what you actually believe and value, then learn to speak that in a language other people can feel. Everything else — the copying, the rule-learning, the archiving — is just execution on that foundation. Skip the identity work and the rest is just noise.

Blind copying is the on-ramp to originality, not a shortcut around it

Six to eight months. Every single day. Sam would find famous David Ogilvy ads and copy them out word for word on paper during his apprentice period. Not to plagiarize — to absorb the texture of what made them work.

This is called copywork, and the reason it functions is that excellence has a feel you can only internalize from the inside. You can't think your way to understanding why a piece of writing lands — you have to inhabit it. Same reason nobody learns guitar by being handed one and told to write a song. You play Jingle Bells first. Then a rock song. Then after months of that, you start to feel why certain chord progressions create tension and why the release feels so good.

The practical application is literal: find 30 or 40 websites that speak to you over a few weeks. Then print them out and draw them pixel by pixel — where are the buttons, what do they say, what's the spacing. If you're in Figma, copy them exactly. The point isn't the output. The point is what happens in your hands and brain while you're doing it.

The iPod came from a 1953 radio — great taste is always stolen from history

Germany, 1919. Walter Gropius, angry post-WWI architect, creates the Bauhaus school as an act of defiance against ornamental Victorian design. Everything reduced to its function. Nothing decorative for decoration's sake.

That philosophy produces Dieter Rams, who applies Bauhaus minimalism to consumer electronics at Braun and designs the T3 radio in 1953 — minimal buttons, elegant, timeless.

Decades later, a designer in California becomes obsessed with the T3. Studies its history. Understands why every decision was made. His name is Steve Jobs. Jony Ive has said directly that the iPod was inspired by that radio — they wanted to steal it.

The point isn't that Jobs was derivative. It's that his legendary taste wasn't magic. It was the product of deep historical research into a specific design lineage. "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." Three to four months of doing this seriously puts you ahead of 90% of people.

Good taste masters the rules. Great taste knows exactly which ones to break — and in what order.

George Clinton was a studio Motown musician before he was Parliament. He mastered the form completely — learned every rule of what made Motown work. Then he said: "I have something in my soul that I need to say," and broke the rules deliberately, creating a psychedelic funk that still sounded unmistakably Motown underneath.

Dr. Dre sampled Clinton constantly. That's where G-funk came from — gangster funk, the sonic DNA of NWA and early Dre. Kanye did the same thing, chopping up old Supremes records, pitching them up and slicing them weird until something totally new emerged.

The lineage: slave songs → gospel → Motown → Parliament → Dr. Dre. Every break was only possible because the person breaking already had full fluency in what came before. Rule-breaking that lands as genius is earned. Without the mastery underneath it, the same move just looks like incompetence.

Sam's framing: good taste is following the rules to say what you want to say. Great taste is taking those rules and breaking them. You can't skip to the second part.

Your taste preferences aren't random — they're a map of your actual values

Sam noticed he kept getting drawn to military clothing, workwear, and Ivy style. He read the histories — Dressing the Man, Black Ivy, deep dives on denim. The pattern that emerged wasn't aesthetic. It was identity.

Midwestern stoicism. Blue-collar work ethic. The frontiersman mythos. Old money as aspiration — not because he grew up with it, but because he wanted to build decades of family tradition that he didn't have. "These are things that I identify with and I really like them."

This is the test for whether your taste is real or borrowed: can you trace it back to something you actually believe? Aesthetic choices that cohere around a genuine identity feel different from a random collection of things that look cool. One communicates. The other just looks like you tried.

Taste is the new leverage — and it's only going to compound

Every tool for building is getting cheaper and faster. The gap between 'I have an idea' and 'I shipped something' is collapsing toward zero. What that means is the bottleneck shifts entirely to judgment — can you tell the difference between something that resonates and something that doesn't?

The people building that muscle now, deliberately, through copywork and archiving and rule-study, are accumulating a form of leverage that doesn't depreciate. The Swiffer mop wasn't technically better. It just had a better name. David protein bars don't have a secret formula. They have taste. That gap is widening — and it starts with three to five months of work most people won't bother to do.

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Topics: taste, design, creativity, personal branding, AI, competitive advantage, Bauhaus, Steve Jobs, copywriting, fashion, entrepreneurship