What do Jack Butcher and George Mack mean by taste and slop?

George Mack called taste and slop the two words of 2026, used constantly but never defined, so that saying either one signals status without saying anything. Jack Butcher defined taste as the ability to tell good from not good, and slop as outsourced taste: work produced with a powerful AI tool and no human intention guiding it, which leaves the tool's tell-tale marks on everything.

• Mack credits writer Billy Oppenheimer with a habit of noting what he likes and explaining why, and keeps a matching list of what he dislikes.
• Ira Glass's taste gap was read out: beginners' taste exceeds their work, and only a volume of work closes the gap.
• Another panellist pushed back that calling something slop without saying why is itself slop.

▸In their words

“Taste is the ability to discern between good and not good.” Jack Butcher · at 1:04:32 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Modern Wisdom (2026-10-26). Read the whole episode summary →

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