Season 3 | Transmission 12 | Taste Debt : The Access Problem
Saturation to many is boring. Because it requires time and patience. It's a decade of unremarkable reps before the pattern recognition kicks in, and almost nothing about modern life rewards patience with a decade of unremarkable reps at anything.
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THE OPEN
This is Tenor. Signals Before Surface. I'm Geoffrey Colon.
Fifteen minutes. One signal. Before it surfaces. Every Sunday. Because the rest of the week is already spoken for.
This is Season Three on Taste Debt. Transmission number 12.
Last transmission I made a case that's probably still sitting uncomfortably with some of you who sent me direct messages on it. That most people who are certain they have taste really don't. They have a preference that the algorithm handed to them, a contrarian streak they mistake for depth, or technical vocabulary standing in for something they've never actually tested.
Fine. Say you take that seriously. Say you actually want real taste, not the imitation. The obvious next question is: how does taste get built? And the honest answer to that question is more uncomfortable than the first one, because it's not really about effort. It's about access.
In other words, this transmission is going to piss you off more than the last one.
THE SIGNAL
Here's the mechanism, stripped down to its actual components. Taste is built by encountering a large volume of things across a real quality spectrum. Experiencing the genuinely excellent next to the genuinely mediocre. Both options are close enough together that the difference registers, while someone with more developed taste than you tells you what you're looking at and why.
Two requirements are really required to build taste. Nope, it's not AI. Don't listen to some tech bro who wears a vest tell you that. Anyone wearing a Patogonia vest in 2026 should be suspect. The two requirements are saturation, and articulation. Most people who fail to develop taste in a domain are missing one or the other, not both. And most people who succeed at it were never told they had two separate things going for them. They were just told they had good taste, as if it arrived all by itself.
Take away saturation and you get someone with a sharp critical vocabulary and almost nothing to apply it to — all theory, no calibration. Take away articulation and you get someone who's consumed an enormous volume of a category and still can't tell you why one thing beats another — pure exposure without the scaffolding that turns exposure into judgment. You need both, running at the same time, for many years, before taste stops being luck and starts being reliable.
THE SURFACE
1. THE SATURATION REQUIREMENT
A sommelier doesn't develop a palate by drinking a few memorable bottles of wine. They develop it by tasting thousands of wines, many of them unremarkable, in close enough succession that the differences between good, very good, and exceptional start to organize themselves into something felt rather than argued. Editors who can spot a manuscript worth publishing in the first page have usually read tens of thousands of pages that weren't. The volume is not incidental to the skill. It is the skill, or at least the raw material it's made from.
This is the part people most want to skip. Saturation to many is boring. Because it requires time and patience. It's a decade of unremarkable reps before the pattern recognition kicks in, and almost nothing about modern life rewards patience with a decade of unremarkable reps at anything.
Unless of course we talk about true wealth. Ask people who invested annually since age 19 and are 54 if they're wealthy. They didn't play the lottery and most likely they're worth $4 to $5 million. But that's for another episode.
2. THE ARTICULATION REQUIREMENT
Volume alone plateaus. This is the part the algorithm conversation from last transmission undersells. You can consume an enormous quantity of a category passively and still never develop taste in it, because nobody ever made you say out loud why one thing was better than another, and being forced to articulate the difference is where the actual learning happens.
This is what a real mentor relationship does that a syllabus can't. Someone who already has developed taste in a domain, standing next to you, saying not just ‘this one, not that one’ but ‘this one, because of this specific thing it's doing that the other one isn't.’ That sentence is worth more than a hundred more hours of unaccompanied exposure. It's also the exact thing that's hardest to get access to.
3. THE ACCESS PROBLEM
Here's the sentence this whole transmission has been building toward: saturation plus articulation, sustained over years, has historically been gated by proximity to money, geography, and institutions. The unpaid internship at the magazine only some families can afford to let their kids take. The parents who brought a child to museums and concert halls before the child ever asked to go. The junior designer who happened to land at the one studio with a creative director who had patience and was willing to explain in detail, why a decision was a 'best practice,' or more importantly, why it was wrong.
None of that is about talent. It's about who got the reps, who got the articulation alongside the reps, and who got both for free because of circumstances that had nothing to do with them personally. Which means a meaningful amount of what gets called ‘great taste’ in any industry is quietly downstream of who could afford years of unpaid access to quality, explained by someone qualified to explain it. Taste debt, it turns out, is not randomly distributed. It correlates with exactly the kind of privilege that's most invisible to the person who benefited from it, because it never felt like privilege. It felt like having good instincts.
THE SO WHAT
So what do you actually do with this information, whether you're trying to build your own taste or build it into an organization?
First, if you're building your own: stop consuming broadly and start consuming deeply in one narrow domain at a time. Saturation only works when it's concentrated enough for comparison to actually happen. A little of everything produces a little of nothing. Some good examples from my taste building as of late. The difference between Muay Thai, Dutch kickboxing and Japanese K1 kickboxing. You have to go really deep to see how they are different, and how they are related. It also helps that I'm training for one of them currently.
Second: find someone whose taste you already trust, and don't just absorb their picks silently. Make them explain the reasoning, every time, even when it's annoying to ask. The explanation of how they came to that decision is the important focus. The recommendation alone is nearly worthless without it.
Third, if you're building this into an organization: audit whether your ‘great instincts’ hires are actually just proxies for who could afford unpaid years of access before you met them. If your talent pipeline quietly requires that kind of privilege to even arrive with taste already formed, you're not hiring for taste. You're hiring for a specific kind of financial background wearing taste's clothes. Building real access: paid apprenticeships, deliberate mentorship time, exposure programs, is the only way to find taste in people your current pipeline structurally cannot see.
@djgeoffe Modern leadership lacks taste because it lacks 1. Saturation 2. Articulation 3. Access We’re building organizations all based on speed but that lack judgment and taste. And that will lead to creative destruction before reconstruction takes place. Also a reminder it takes reps and mistakes to build character and judgment. Something we seem to want to “skip over” in our frictionless societies. #podcastrecording #reps #tastedebt #management #expertise
♬ original sound - Geoffrey
THE CLOSE
That's Transmission 12 of Season Three all on Taste Debt.
Here's the tool I want to leave you with: the next time you or someone else gets credited with ‘just having great taste,’ ask the follow-up question nobody asks. Where did the reps come from? Who explained them? Who paid for the years it took? Taste that can't answer those questions honestly isn't instinct. It's an unpaid debt someone else's circumstances financed.
Next transmission goes further into what happens when saturation and articulation are both present but pointed at the wrong thing entirely. When an enormous amount of expensive taste-building produces exquisite judgment about something that stopped mattering. That's next week.
This transmission is supported by Posted.Careers — a zero-noise job network that scrapes roles directly from employer sites and deletes them after 72 hours. No stale listings, no recruiter spam, just real, current openings. Find it at Posted.Careers.
This is Tenor. Signals Before Surface. I'm Geoffrey Colon. New transmissions every Sunday. One more thing. Want to watch me record this live? Tune into my TikTok on Friday afternoons. And want to discuss this week's signal? Join us every Sunday at 12 midnight Easter at Tenor FM Live over on Tenor.FM
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