Writing the intro to this newsletter sent me down a rabbit hole I wasn’t expecting to go down. Because the more I thought about whether I actually like Erewhon, Leora Cafe, caviar, or the Billboard Top 100 song Choosin’ Texas, the more I started thinking about what taste actually is.

To me, taste is different from style. It’s different from creativity. And I think it’s different from knowing what is cool.

Taste is your ability to take in a lot of different information, references, people, ideas and experiences and decide what is worth your attention. What belongs together. What doesn’t. What is good before someone else tells you it is good.

I actually think this is one of my superpowers, and one of the superpowers of HSR.

There is an infinite amount of business news, consumer news, podcasts, creators and content available to you. HSR is an exercise in editing all of that down into a very specific point of view on the consumer, creator and early-stage brand ecosystem. Who should you know? What company should you be watching? What cultural shift actually matters? Who should I bring on the podcast? What story is interesting but ultimately not relevant to an HSR Angel?

As my team gets bigger and the AI tools available to us get better, I weirdly find myself spending more time doing this. Editing things back to my taste. My new content manager said something recently that I haven't stopped thinking about:

You can't teach taste. And apparently, Silicon Valley disagrees.

This week, I’m giving my 2 cents whether taste can actually be taught, how algorithms might be making us worse at it, and why I think having a distinctly human point of view is only going to become more valuable in the AI era.

So let’s get into it.