Transcript
00:00:00Right now, while you're watching this, someone just typed one sentence into a
00:00:03computer and got back 100 finished logos. Someone else made a song in the
00:00:10time it took me to tell you about the logo. People are producing novels,
00:00:15business plans, movie posters, all of them in seconds at almost no cost. For the
00:00:21first time in history, almost anyone can make almost anything. That's good news,
00:00:28no doubt about that. Here's the question nobody wants to sit with. If a computer
00:00:34can make everything faster and cheaper than you ever could, what exactly are you
00:00:39for? I've spent 20 years writing about work and what makes people good at it.
00:00:43The answer might come down to a single skill. It's not coding, it's not prompting,
00:00:49it's something older and far more human. The people who have this skill are about
00:00:55to pull away from everyone else. And the strange part is you spent your whole life
00:01:00building it without ever giving it a name. It is taste.
00:01:06Not taste buds, taste. A point of view. The sense that some things are good, some things
00:01:12are less good. Now that matters more than at any point in your life. Again, for almost
00:01:16all of human existence, the bottleneck was making. You could picture something
00:01:21extraordinary in your head, but turning it into a film, a song, a building, a business, took years of technical know-how.
00:01:28Most people never developed. The dreamers were one group, the doers were another group, and the
00:01:34gap between them was enormous. Well, AI just shrunk that gap. The dreaming and the
00:01:38doing are now nearly the same act. You can describe it and ten seconds later it
00:01:43exists, which sounds like the greatest gift ever handed to creative people, and in
00:01:47some ways it is. But look closer and you'll see what actually happened. The hard
00:01:50part didn't disappear, it moved. When making things was expensive, the scarce skill was the
00:01:56ability to make them. Now that making things is nearly free, the scarce skill is the ability
00:02:01to know which ones are any good. Generation got cheap. Judgment got priceless. You want proof?
00:02:08Watch what happens to an industry the second it gets cheap to produce. Take mine, books.
00:02:13Researchers at Cornell and the University of Minnesota looked at what happened to publishing
00:02:17after ChatGPT showed up, so that between 2022 and 2025, the number of new books released
00:02:24roughly tripled. Tripled! If volume were the same as value, we'd be living during the greatest
00:02:31literary golden age in history. But we're not, because over that same stretch, the average
00:02:37quality of published books went down. A world with infinitely more stuff is a world, by definition,
00:02:43with lots more crappy stuff. And the only thing that separates the good from the bad is someone
00:02:48standing there with the taste to tell them apart. Think about what a model actually does when you ask
00:02:54it for something. It hands you options: 20 melodies, 50 logos, 100 headlines. But here's the thing it has
00:02:59a tougher time telling you: which ones are right for you? It has no idea what's good or bad. It doesn't
00:03:04have a point of view. It feels nothing when it shows you the brilliant one, nothing when it shows you the
00:03:09forgettable one. It's just predicting the next statistically most likely word over and over and
00:03:14over again at impossible speed. You have to choose. You have to apply taste, which means that over the
00:03:20long run, the machine needs you far more than you need the machine. So the real question was never
00:03:26whether AI is coming for your work. It's whether you've developed the one capacity that makes you the
00:03:31person who decides instead of the person who gets replaced. And here's the good news: taste isn't
00:03:36something you're born with or you're not. It's a skill you can build, and it runs on three rules. Rule
00:03:42number one: create more than you consume. You do not develop taste by just watching. You build it by
00:03:48making. This is the rule that lots and lots of people get wrong because consuming feels creatively
00:03:54useful, and it is to a point. You can spend an entire day studying brilliant work, feeling inspired,
00:03:59and yet developing little taste at all because taste comes from the friction of making your own thing and
00:04:06watching it fall short of what you pictured in your head. Every draft you scrapped, every project that
00:04:11embarrassed you a year later, every time you looked at your own work and thought, nah, not yet. That's
00:04:17the gym. That's the gym where muscle gets built. The model trains on a billion examples of everyone
00:04:22else's work. You get to train on your own work. So keep taking in great stuff: art, film, writing,
00:04:29the occasional YouTube video, but watch the ratio. If you're consuming 10 times more than you're creating,
00:04:36you're starving your taste. So flip the ratio. Make more than you consume, and your taste will compound.
00:04:42Rule number two: get comfortable with saying no. Now, here's the objection I can almost hear forming.
00:04:50Taste is just opinion. It's subjective. Who are you to say what's good? And look, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
00:04:57I get it. Taste is subjective. But subjective is not the same as arbitrary. A subjective judgment
00:05:02is still a serious one. Taste isn't a shrug. It's a stand. It says, no, that's not good enough. No, that's not it.
00:05:09No, we're not shipping that. And saying no is harder than ever because the machine just handed you a hundred options, and every single one of them is fine. That's the problem.
00:05:19Fine is everywhere, which means that fine is your enemy. The professional isn't the one who can generate
00:05:25the most options. She's the one who can look at 99 perfectly acceptable choices, throw them all out,
00:05:32and protect the one that's actually great, even when everyone else in the room has already said,
00:05:37those are fine. Rule number three: if your taste never changes, you don't have any taste. Pull up something
00:05:42you made three years ago and were proud of. If you look at it today and you change nothing,
00:05:48not a single thing, that's not proof that you had great taste back then. It could be a sign
00:05:53that your current taste is slipping, that it's stopping evolving. The creators who matter over
00:05:58a whole career are not the ones who found their lane at age 25 and stayed parked there for the next
00:06:0340 years. They're the ones who remained a little uncomfortable, who kept getting surprised by what
00:06:07they loved, who treated their taste not as a trophy they won once, but as a practice they show up for
00:06:13again and again and again for the rest of their lives. So there it is: create more than you consume,
00:06:19get comfortable saying no, and let your taste keep changing. Remember the question from the start:
00:06:24if a machine can make anything, what are you for? Well, you're for the part the machine can't do. It can
00:06:29generate forever, but it can't care. It can hand you everything, but it can't tell you what's worth
00:06:34keeping. In a world overrun with competent forgettable stuff, the rarest thing on earth is a human being
00:06:40who can look at all of it and say, "This one. This is the one that's human. This is the one that's true.
00:06:46This is the one worth making." That's taste. That's a skill and it's been yours the whole time.
00:06:53If you like this video, I think you'll like another video I made about the six skills AI will never
00:06:57replace that will help you take your learning to the next level and you can find that video right here.
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