The Underrated Money Making Skill In 2026

*Get Sam's top 7 books for entrepreneurs (+ his reading strategy):* https://clickhubspot.com/gdms Episode 809: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) teaches the one skill you need to know to become irreplaceable in the age of AI. — Show Notes: (0:00) Taste is your moat (2:20) Case study: Apple (7:57) The rules (9:08) Learning taste — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  All right, guys, here's the deal with the rise of AI. Taste is going to be one of the biggest moats 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 four-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

• 0:43Sam Parr?

  and gets them to move and buy and follow and do what you say.

• 0:55Sam Parr?

  All right, 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 foo-foo 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."

• 1:39Sam Parr?

  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.

• 2:24Sam Parr?

  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, 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 designed now that our economy, our culture has been destroyed and we are something new.

• 3:08Sam Parr?

  Previously in old Germany and a lot of Europe at the time, it was very ornamental. If you've 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, the language that he was speaking at the time was that defiance and hope. And this idea that it wasn't about status. It wasn't about making something look extra fancy.

• 3:50Sam Parr?

  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

• 4:34Sam Parr?

  if you zoom in on it, there's not really too many buttons. It's very minimal, but it works and it's beautiful.

• 4:44Sam Parr?

  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 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.

• 5:29Sam Parr?

  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 this 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 want to 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 want to wear.

• 6:14Sam Parr?

  If you want to 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 copy work, where you find work that you love. So for example, I really love David Ogilvy. I would find famous David Ogilvy 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. All right, I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week.

• 6:57Sam Parr?

  And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I want to see what worked for the winners that I love and what strategies they use. And then I want to see what mistakes did they all make? What were the common flaws that they all had? And I just want to avoid that. And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life. And I did that. And 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.

• 7:41Sam Parr?

  And you can scan the QR code below if you want to read it. Or there's a link. You guys know what 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. 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 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.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 of tension

• 8:25Sam Parr?

  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 are 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 want to have good taste, you are using tradition. To create constraints in 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 want to say and following the rules to say it. The definition of great taste, which we're not going to talk today, is then taking those rules and breaking them. But we're just talking about good taste. It's a very simple process. All right, I'm going to give you guys another example.

• 9:10Sam Parr?

  I told you I got into the taste game about two or three years ago because you boy wanted to look nice. I didn't like how I looked in certain photos, even though I was, I'd gotten fit. I went through a fitness journey where I'd gotten unfat and now I thought now's the time to dress nice. I want to dress nice. I think it's cool to dress nice. I want to 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 giddy 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 unfollowed every single person that I followed on Instagram.

• 9:52Sam Parr?

  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 I opened up my Instagram, I would get shown them, plus the algo 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.

• 10:37Sam Parr?

  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 look like. Or if you're wearing a sports jacket, how long it should go. So for example, there's a thing called the rule of thirds, where you want your sports jacket to go down to your thumb. And all of that is rooted in basically British aristocracy, a lot of the rules that were created. That's what it's rooted in. 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

• 11:20Sam Parr?

  of different styles. The first style that I was drawn to was things that were military influenced. So I loved leather jackets, chinos, basically World War II stuff. I also loved workwear, 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 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 1960s, black men in America started copying the Ivy style, which is a traditionally white person's fashion. They wore it out of an act of defiance and wanting to fit in. And I thought the way they looked was badass. I thought it was so cool. I love the story of this. And I told you I love denim and workwear. So I have tons and tons and tons of book on denim. And I

• 12:05Sam Parr?

  learned the history behind these things. And the reasons why I noticed I love these styles was one, I'm from the Midwest and I sort of love Stoicism. 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 lots of denim and I wear a lot of like cowboy looking clothes, which people will tease me for, because I love this idea of like a cowboy. I love this idea of a soldier, because it's adventurous, it's kind of frontiersman, and it's very American. These are things that I identify with and I really like them. 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

• 12:46Sam Parr?

  something I had growing up. And so it was aspirational to me, because I aspired 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 kind of sang 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 workwear, of this Ivy style fashion. And you guys who are watching, I get teased all the time by the way I dress.

• 13:31Sam Parr?

  I don't execute well all 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 web design. So if you guys want to 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 want to tell others. I want you to save that website. And over the next three and four weeks, do that a ton. You're going to have 30 or 40 websites that are part of your identity. You're not exactly sure why, and that's okay. Next step, what I then encourage you to do is to print them out.

• 14:14Sam Parr?

  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 by pixel, where the buttons are, what they say, X, Y, and Z. If you are actually a designer, you can go on Figma, 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 and looked into a lot of this because I was trying to give a design analogy,

• 14:59Sam Parr?

  and then I realized I don't know enough about design to do it. A lot of it comes from Gutenberg. When Gutenberg created the printing press in the 1500s, 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 1950s, there is this Swiss school of thought for certain bits of design. Everything had to be very neutral because the Swiss were 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 universal and neutral. And so are you trying to say something that appeals to everything? Then you would go and learn all about this school of thought and 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 or five months doing that,

• 15:42Sam Parr?

  you will be better than 90% 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 of founders, people ask this question all the time. People who have made 10 or 50 million dollars, how do you spend it? How do you invest it? And so to help solve this problem and answer this question, I actually interviewed 80 plus founders, guys like Scott Galloway, Alex Ramosi, Brian Johnson, people who are worth 50, 100, even billions of dollars. And we got them to reveal everything. So their net worths, how much they pay themselves, their monthly expenses, their portfolio, things like that. And we turned these 80 interviews into one document.

• 16:26Sam Parr?

  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 want to see behind the net worths of people who are worth billions of dollars and their portfolios, their expenses, everything, you go to joinhampton.com/reveal. Again, joinhampton.com/reveal. Check it out.

• 16:45Sam Parr?

  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 Dr. Dre. I love Dr. Dre. Dr. Dre, everyone knows him as Dr. Dre. But before that, he was the DJ and I guess like beat maker of NWA, which is one of the most groundbreaking hip hop bands of all time. It was kind of like the first time that gangster rap kind of came. To be and the reason I think that that's interesting is because Dr. Dre sampled a ton of music by this guy named George Clinton, who was the lead singer and guitarist in a band called Parliament. Parliament was popular in 1970s and they sort of made this like funky like rhythm

• 17:29Sam Parr?

  and blues style music as if he was on psychedelics, which he was. He took a ton of psychedelics and it's like this very like psychedelic sounding music and Dre sampled him constantly and that's why Dr. Dre's music in the 1990s, it was called G-Funk because it was like a funk music, but gangster, gangster funk, G-Funk. Well, if you go back in time, you'll see George Clinton previously was a studio musician for Motown. In Motown, you guys probably all know Motown, the Supremes, 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.

• 18:13Sam Parr?

  But then when one person breaks away, they start creating something totally brand new and that's where George Clinton came in. He was a studio musician and he played Motown wonderfully, but he goes, okay, I master this. I know how to do this, but I have something in my soul that I need to say, which is like, I want to be a little bit funky, a little more psychedelic. And that's when he broke the rules of Motown. But his stuff, if you looked to George Clinton's music, it still is very Motown influenced, which then influenced Dr. Dre. And it's all a 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 samples stuff. And if you listen to early career Kanye or early career Dr. Dre,

• 18:57Sam Parr?

  a lot of his samples, it's just taking a cover. So for example, Express Yourself, one of my favorite songs by NWA and Dr. Dre. It's just like basically a cover. They basically looked at this old song from the seventies and it's just the beat playing and Dr. Dre rapping over it. But then some of his other stuff and some of Kanye's other stuff is they take old Supremes 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 it creates something totally new. That's great. That's not good. That's great. But 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. What language were they speaking and why does that speak to you? And so my friends, that's the my process for

• 19:41Sam Parr?

  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 going to make stuff, the likelihood of you succeeding, if you have good taste, I think is 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 Swiffer mop. And on the podcast, he said, the Swiffer mop wasn't particularly different than the other mops. We just named it something kind of interesting. And so the point being is that having good taste and picking the right name, the right 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,

• 20:26Sam Parr?

  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. All right. That's it. Let me know in the comments on Spotify and YouTube if you dug this. Talk soon.

• 20:57Sam Parr?

  All right, 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 Fonzie Camayo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.