How To Develop Good Taste (the #1 skill today)
Chris Williamson and Jack Butcher pick apart two overused words, taste and slop. They cover what each really means, how to train your taste, and why AI-made work struggles to earn respect.
The gist
-
Chris shares Billy Oppenheimer's habit of saving things you like and writing down why, plus his own version for things he dislikes.
-
They read Ira Glass's taste gap quote: your taste outruns your skill at first, and only a large volume of finished work closes it.
-
Taste is described as the ability to tell good from not good, and slop as work made by outsourcing taste without clear intention.
-
Chris argues that calling something slop without explaining why is itself lazy, and points to Gossip Goblin's AI films as highly crafted.
-
They expect human made to become a selling label like organic, noting explainer channels already promise their research is done by humans.
What they recommend · 1 pick
What I like about what I like
Productivity
"There's a wonderful exercise I got from my friend Billy Oppenheimer. He has this thing called 'what I like about what I like,' where whenever he sees something that he likes, he..."
Chris, Joe, Tim and This Week in Startups agree on 32 things
See what they all use, in their own words. Paid ads are left out.
See what they all swear by Or pick your own peopleMade by someone on this episode
What I Dislike About What I Dislike
· Chris Williamson's
— An inverse taste exercise: capture things you dislike, write down w...
Also mentioned
0:44
Politics and the English Language
· "There's a great essay, George Orwell's Politics and the English Language. And he talks about how there's..."
1:50
The Taste Gap
· "There's a quote by Ira Glass... Taste gap is like a one-paragraph definition of like having taste means you..."
4:17
Claude
· "The way that these things are trained is like Claude, there's like textbook little marks on there that if..."
5:48
Gossip Goblin
· "This is like AI film, and you're not going to mistake it for not being AI film, but the level of craft is..."
Ads in this episode
Function Health. They're paid, so we keep them out of the picks above.
See what Chris recommends without being paid →
◎
Related episodes
Episodes covering similar topics
You’re probably sleepwalking through life (here's how to wake up) - Robert Greene
artificial intelligence
More from Chris Williamson
Women Are Moving Left. Men Aren’t Following.
Nov 06, 2026
How War Shaped Human Evolution - David Geary
Nov 05, 2026