The Underrated Money Making Skill In 2026

alright guys here's the deal with the rise of ai case is gonna be one of the biggest mo 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 the money i want to follow them i want to do something because they seem interesting and at the end of this episode you were gonna know the four step process to develop good taste and if you follow exactly what i say i promise you you were gonna feel a richer in the soul but b you're gonna be richer in the wallet because you will know how to make stuff that appeals to people's emotions and get them to move and buy and follow and do what you said i feel like i could rule to where to know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a try everyone this podcast is gonna 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 gonna start by explaining some things that seem a little fu food and a little academic but i promise i'm gonna 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 out choices to clearly congruent 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 choices 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 wanna 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 gonna explain all of this but first i wanna show you an example have you ever seen this radio it's called a t three radio it was invented in nineteen fifty three it's called the braun t three radio most people haven't seen this but i'm gonna tell you a story about this radio and by the end of the story you're gonna know how it was one of the most important objects ever designed and you still are impacted by this radio today so germany nineteen nineteen basically world war one 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 were angry at their country they're angry at had a lot of things because their economy had just been ruined and there was just one designer named walter g and he was a designer he i believe he was an architect at the time but he was an angry young guy and he was trying to act 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 were 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 g he hated that because he was saying like look you guys are the ones who got us send this war you older their folks who are all into this fancy stuff i'm angry at that and so he created this new type of design called ba house so he created this school where he started teaching everyone this style of design and it basically the the language that he was speaking at the time was that of defiance in 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 bow house 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 ba house the answer is no you don't all you have to do is you have to do what's only necessary that was the his whole point of design the whole bow house design well there's this guy named diet rams a german designer who was all about the bow 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 t three 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 alright so fast forward decades later we're in the early two thousands there's this designer in california who's obsessed with the t three 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 more johnny iv has written many times where he was like the inspiration from the ipod was this radio and we wanted to steal it and not steal it it didn't say steel but he said we were 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 a guitar someone wouldn't just give you a guitar and say alright 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 alright let's play this little bit more complicated song let's play a rock song because do 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 so if you're wanting to learn how to dress like someone you can just literally copy and where 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 is to learn how to become a better writer is this thing called copy work where you find work that you love so for example i really love david og i would find famous david og v 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 alright 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 wanna see what works for the winners that i love and what strategies they use and then wanna see what mistakes did they all make where 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 so i listed out seven 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 seven 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 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 seven 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 three 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 you see 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 dot 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 attention 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 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 wanna 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 wanna say and following the rules to say it the definition of great taste which we're not gonna talk today is then taking those rules and breaking them but we're just talking about good taste it's a very simple process alright i'm gonna give you guys another example i told you i got into the taste game about two or three years ago because y boy wanted to look nice i didn't like how i looked in certain photos even though i was i'd had gotten fit i went through a fitness journey where i've got gotten un fat and that i thought now's is the time to dress nice i wanna dress nice i think it's cool to dress nice i wanna impress my wife and so i got into fashion about two 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 i i un followed every single person that i followed on instagram and 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 opened up my instagram i would get show them plus it the a go 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 two 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 something called a rule thirds where you want your sports jacket to go down to your thumb and all of that is rooted in basically british ari a lot of the rules that were created it's it's that's what it through to do and so i actually read this book to figure out the rules and then i read two more books i noticed that when i was going down this journey i noticed i was drawn to a couple different styles the first style that i was drawn to was things that were military influenced so i loved leather jackets chinos knows basically world war two stuff i also loved to work wear 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 then i started asking 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 nineteen sixties black man in america started copying the ivy style which is a traditionally white person's fashion they wore out of an active defiance and wanting to fit in and i thought that the way they looked was badass ass i thought it was so cool i love the story of this and i told you i love denim and work wear so i have tons and tons and tons of book on denim and i learned the history behind these things and the reasons why i noticed i love these styles was one from the midwest and i sort of love stoic 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 a lots of denim and i wear a lot of like cowboy looking clothes which people will tease me for but because i love this idea of like a cowboy i love this idea of a soldier because it's adventurous it's kind of frontiers and it's very american these are things that i identify with and i and i really like 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 drilling up and so it was it's aspirational to me because i aspire 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 kinda saying 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 work wear of this ivy style fashion and you guys who are watching i can't tease this all the time by the address i don't execute well of 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 design so if you guys wanna 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 wanna tell others i want you to save that website and over the next three and four weeks do that a ton you're gonna have thirty or forty websites that are part of your identity you're not exactly sure why and that's okay next up 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 pixel where the buttons are what they say x y and z if you are actually a designer you can go on fig 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 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 gut when gut created the printing crest in the fifteen hundreds 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 nineteen fifties there is a swiss school thought for certain bits of design that everything had be very neutral because the swiss 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 in universal and and neutral and so are you trying to say something that appeals to everything then you would go and learn all about this school thought in this way that people would design and you learn the history of all of this and if you do that if you spend about three to four to five months doing that you will be better than ninety percent of people when it comes to having good taste what do you do with the money once you've already made it this is a question sean and i ask our successful guests all the time and the reason we ask it is because if you are successful if you do have a little bit of money information on how to spend or invest your money it's actually really hard to come by and i know this because inside of hampton which is my community founders people ask this question all the time people have made ten or fifty million dollars how do you spend how do you invest it and so to help solve this problem and answer this question i actually interviewed eighty plus founders guys like scott gallo alex from mo brian johnson people who were worth fifty a hundred even billions of dollars and we got them to reveal everything so their net worth how much they pay themselves their monthly expenses their portfolio things like that and we turn these eighty interviews into one document and i don't think you can find this type of information literally anywhere on the internet and it's completely free so if you wanna see behind the net worth of people who are worth billions of dollars and their portfolios or expenses everything you go to join hampton dot com slash reveal again join hampton dot com slash reveal check it out now like i said earlier the way that you get great taste is then you you figure out all those rules and you start to break some of them i can give you a really good example i'm a huge fan of doctor dr i love doctor dr doctor dr everyone knows them as doctor dr but before that he was the dj and i guess like beat maker of n which is one of the most groundbreaking hip hop bands of all time it was kinda like the first time that gangs rap kinda came to be and the reason i think that that's interesting is because doctor dr sample a ton of music by the sky named george clinton who was the lead singer and guitar in a band called parliament parliament was popular in the nineteen seventies 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 time at psychedelics and it's like this very like psychedelic selling sounding music and dr sample tim constantly and that's why doctor dr music in the nineteen nineties it was called g fun because it was like a fun music but gangster gangster fun g fun well if you go back in time you'll see george clinton previously was a studio musician for moto town in moto town you guys probably all know moto town the supreme 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 or 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 studio musician and he played moto town wonderfully but he goes okay i mastered i know how to do this but i have something in my soul that i need to say which is like i wanna be a little bit funky and a little more psychedelic and that's when he broke the rules of moto town but his stuff if you looked to george clinton's music it still is very moto town influenced which then influenced doctor dr and it's all line of how the 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 sample stuff and if you listen to early career kanye or early career doctor dr a lot of his samples it's just taking a cover so for example express yourself one of my favorite songs is about my n and doctor dr it's just a basically a cover they basically looked at this old song from the seventies and it's just the beat playing and doctor dr wrapping over it but then some of his other stuff and some of kanye other stuff is they take old supreme 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 create something totally new that's great that's not good that's great but you could still get good just by being an 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 it's 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 sw mop and on the podcast he said the sw mop wasn't particularly different than the other mop we just named it something kind of interesting and so the point being is that having good taste in picking the right name the night 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 alright that's it let me know in the comments on spotify and youtube if you dug this talk soon i feel like i could rude to where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go travel never looking back alright my friends i have a new podcast for you guys to check out it's called content is profit and it's hosted by luis and ph ka after years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like red bull and orange theory fitness luis and fo are on a mission to bridge a gap between content and revenue in each episode you're gonna hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're gonna hear share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit so you can check out content is profit wherever you get your podcast