Taste Is the New Intelligence⁠↗

In an age where AI can generate anything, the question is no longer “can it be made?” but “is it worth making?” The frontier isn’t volume—it’s discernment. And in that shift, taste has become a survival skill.

Because when abundance is infinite, attention is everything. And what you give your attention to—what you consume, what you engage with, what you amplify—becomes a reflection of how you think.

We used to associate intelligence with accumulation. The smartest people were the ones who knew the most. But that model doesn’t hold anymore. AI knows more than anyone. Wikipedia is free. The internet has flattened information access so thoroughly that hoarding knowledge is no longer impressive. What matters now is what you do with it. How you filter it. How you recognize signal in the noise. Curation is the new IQ test.

The people with taste aren’t always the loudest. They’re the ones whose work has resonance. Whose rooms feel calm. Whose recommendations always land. They have an internal tuning fork that rejects the cheap dopamine of novelty for something more enduring.

What sets Rubin apart isn’t technical mastery. It’s attention. Intuition. The ability to sense what feels right before it’s logically apparent why it works. His presence in a studio isn’t to dictate. It’s to sense. To listen deeply. To cut away noise until the essential emerges.

curation isn’t just about art or objects—it’s about inputs. What you read. What you follow. What you trust. Algorithms respond to what you consume, so your inputs shape your outputs. If you watch drama, it feeds you chaos. If you seek signal, it feeds you depth. The algorithm isn’t biased—it’s obedient.

That’s why taste is a responsibility. It’s not just about what you like. It’s about what you allow in. Taste is how you protect your mental environment.

We now get to curate our own environments. That’s power. But it’s also responsibility. Because taste isn’t just what you consume. It’s what you amplify. It’s what you normalize. It’s what you signal to others is worth attention. You are what you pay attention to.

When you sharpen your discernment, you stop being swayed by trends. You stop needing consensus. You stop reacting to every new thing like it’s urgent.

But taste requires subtraction. It means not participating in every viral moment. It means not resharing something just because it’s getting attention. It means opting out of the churn.

There will always be creators. But the ones who stand out in this era are also curators. People who filter their worldview so cleanly that you want to see through their eyes. People who make you feel sharper just by paying attention to what they pay attention to.

Curation is care. It says: I thought about this. I chose it. I didn’t just repost it. I didn’t just regurgitate the trending take. I took the time to decide what was worth passing on. That’s rare now. And because it’s rare, it’s valuable.

“The details are not the details. They make the design.” — Charles Eames

When everything is infinite, curation becomes sacred.

Steve Jobs famously said, “Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing.”

Taste isn’t about having one interest. It’s about threading coherence through your many interests. It’s the connective tissue between the books on your shelf, the music in your car, the way you write emails. It doesn’t mean boring. It means intentional.

We associate aesthetic with surface. But good taste is deep structure. It’s the throughline in someone’s life. You can see it in the design of their home, the cadence of their speech, the way they treat people, the books on their shelves.

This is the difference between eclectic and scattered. Between multidimensional and messy. Taste is what gives your multitudes a spine.

Having taste often means choosing the thing that’s harder up front but more satisfying later. The slow movie. The challenging read. The outfit you wait to afford instead of buying five that kind of work.

Bad taste is immediate. It’s sugar. It’s scrolling. It’s dopamine without digestion. Good taste is remembered. It lingers. It teaches. It reshapes your interior.

Underneath all of this is something deeper: taste as a spiritual orientation. Not in the religious sense, but in the felt sense of alignment. Of knowing what your energy wants. Of feeling what’s harmonious and what’s out of tune.

You build taste the same way you build strength: by choosing the heavier lift. The richer input. The slower hit. The thing that doesn’t give you a dopamine spike, but gives you a deeper signal.