Ep 51 Awareness Inside Acceleration A Conversation with Matt Hampton

Welcome to Remembering the Forgotten, a space where leaders think out loud without polish or performance. No scripts, no personas, just what becomes audible when the noise drops and the mind is free to speak for itself. These conversations are not about delivering insight. They are about thinking together in real time, Testing ideas against stillness, letting 2 open minds stretch each other. The intention is simple: to create a space where clarity can emerge and where listeners don't just consume perspectives but feel permission to engage their own thinking more honestly. Today I'm joined by Matt Hampton. Matt has spent much of his life moving through fast-changing systems, technology, culture, ideas, spaces where complexity is constant and reinvention is normal. But this conversation is about innovation. It's about clarity. We explore what happens when intelligence is no longer used to stay ahead, but to slow down. How discernment sharpens when you stop reacting to every new signal. How authorship begins when you notice where you've been unconsciously optimizing. This exchange is not about tools. It's about awareness inside acceleration. Because when the system steadies, thinking changes. And when thinking changes, the way we move through complexity changes with it. What matters here isn't speed. It's whether you remain intact while everything moves. And with that, Matt, welcome to the show. Happy to be here. Thank you. So before we begin, when I speak of coherence, I'm pointing to a state where nothing inside is in conflict. Body, thoughts, emotions, and action aligned, moving as one. No push, no urgency, no fear driving the moment. And when I speak of stillness, I don't mean silence. I mean the part of you untouched by expectation or performance, the place that knows before the mind tries to manage it. And that's the ground I'd like us to meet on today. Fair enough. So with that met, very specific, where can you just be yourself, untouched by expectation

Well, I don't know. There's a couple of ways I could answer this question, so I'm trying to pick a direction to start us off in. Well, I think that I am obsessed with this concept of metacognition, and the idea of metacognition is tough to get your hands around. Unless you are absolutely still, still, still, right? Because noise, I believe, interrupts that process, right? It gets in the way of really understanding how to think about your thinking, right? And you certainly need to be free of any client, family, friend obligation to sort of have that conversation because a lot of times it's a little crazy, right? It's a little bit— you don't necessarily want to share all of those thoughts, right, with the outside world. As they say, it's sometimes more about your inside voice that you want to talk about that with. But without that part of my life in particular, like, I don't know that I could do anything that I do. Right? You know, there needs to be this reflection time. I I laughed with my kids recently because I I will walk around my neighborhood and I'll talk to myself, like out loud talking to myself. And it's not

because by the way is a sign of high intelligence.

Now you know somebody had told me that, although it is.

I believe it is.

Yeah. Well, I'm then then I'm a fuck. I'm a genius because because I love doing it because I feel like it's almost like debate. debate practice, right? Yeah. Where you could, like, talk it out. So I started putting my AirPods in to make people think I'm on a phone call.

And,

and it's, like, funny because you walk by somebody having a full-blown conversation with yourself.

Yeah.

And they see you and they see your AirPods in, they're just like, oh, hey, keep on going. They don't even think twice. Meanwhile, I'm, I'm, like, in a full, full situation here talking to myself. But it's, it's super helpful. And, and to me, That's also sort of like a noiseless space because I get to choose the dialogue route that I take, and then I'll take multiple of them to kind of play it out, right? All right, if A, then B, if B, then C, if C, then D, right? Mm-hmm. And, and I find that to be super helpful, um, and I do that in the shower, I do that on a walk, I do that in the car. I mean, I do it wherever really the mood strikes, but it's It really— I, I find I used to do it once in a while. Now I'm doing it like several times a day, right? And, and it's super helpful.

So let's stay there for a moment. I'm a curious, naive person, and I wonder, who does Matt talk to? Tell me about it.

You know, there was a guy years ago named Zat Rana that said reality is redundant, and there was something weirdly complex about that very simple statement. Mm-hmm. And I've said it for— I've really— I've quoted him a million times. I have really, like, absorbed that comment deeply. And the reason it stood out to me, I think, was because if you look broadly, most people most of the time will reply a certain way. Mm-hmm. One of my biggest pet peeves is when you're getting into an argument with somebody, or not even an argument, a spirited debate with somebody. Yeah, I'm sure you've had this experience. You always, or no, that never drives me crazy. It's It's like one of my— it's very— and it's so predictable, right? It's like, okay,

it is.

Yeah. I said, first of all, you don't always or never do anything. That's the only always there is, right? And that's the only never. It's never never, and it's never always, right? Like, those are the only certainties. Okay. Bringing that up, in my view, has only 2 potential reasons why you would say that. One is you're just lazy. you just don't care enough about this conversation to put any thought into it whatsoever.

Mm-hmm.

And so you're just gonna spout out the easy dumb thing, right? By the way, the cousin of that is replying back based on memes that you saw on the internet, right? Like, these are also lazy. These are sort of telltale signs of the lazy. Um, or You actually believe some of these things, and that signals to me unexamined framework of, of how you're processing the world, right? You're— and these are kind of the same thing, but they are a little different, right? Like, one of them, lazy, could be time-based. Like, maybe I'm just lazy right now. Maybe normally I'm perfectly engaged, but today I just don't care. But like unexamined assumptions and having a conversation from an unexamined viewpoint is, is unfortunately very common, right? People read half a headline and report it as truth, right? They, they, you know, they hear something and they don't think to themselves, does this actually make sense? Like, you know, is this, is this really plausible. Like, you know, and sometimes— and I'm sure you've also seen this— sometimes the difference between that opinion or position and the truth is not separated by more than a Google search. Like, I mean, some of these things aren't even hard to get information on. And I'm not talking about—

I want you to stay here for a moment.

Yeah, yeah.

What if there is a third alternative?

A third alternative is the one I try—

Let me probe something.

Probe it.

I'm curious. Are people in a relaxed state when they use generalizations? Rarely. They're usually agitated. They're annoyed. Because I rarely would say, you know what, Matt? always leave the coffee on the table, right? No, I would not, right? So what if our language and what we're saying are actually mirrors of what's going on inside of us? It's not choice, it's a mirror.

You know, that's an interesting— that's an interesting separation because I think On one side, yeah, you're right. That's probably more, more true than I might have given credit for a minute ago. Right. So in other words, I think if you say, you know, all— and I love third rail type topics because it really kind of like solidifies it. Like if you say all Republicans are conservative and all Democrats are liberals, right? You don't necessarily have to be agitated to say that. Right? Like, you could be totally calm having a beer with your friends, right? Like, that, that could be— that is what I was talking about, I think, right? That's more of the unexamined framework, right? Like, the, I'm not really thinking about this too deep, I'm just gonna just say— and the lazy—

And I, I second that, right? I second that.

Now, if we were having a conversation after the State of the Union address where, you know, you are Hispanic and your cousin got deported by the, the, the, the administrative— this administration's, uh, immigration policies. Now maybe you're agitated as all get-up, and this is coming from a place of absolute impatience. Different, different, I think different things. But even both of those, what they have in common is that if you were to consider how you were thinking about the problem The problem is almost always different than what you're reporting at that moment from that position at that time. And problems— I was at an event years ago with Richard Saul Wurman, who created TED, right? And fascinating guy. But one thing that stuck with me with what he said was TED was started because the world isn't either/or, it's and. Right. It's— and that kind of stuck with me too, because, you know, you could be a Democrat and a Republican. You can go left and right in some cases, right? Like, there's a lot of things, right, that can— that aren't just a black and white answer. And I think the difference between knowledge and wisdom is in the ability to sort of dissect those nuances and know the difference of shade in between these things. Like, that is, is, I think, where we should sort of aspire to get to. Uh, what, what do they say? Like, a smart person solves a problem, a wise person makes the problem— avoids the problem altogether, right?

Uh-huh.

And why, why is that, right? Like, It's because they thought about it. Like, they've thought about it not just at a superficial, I read half the clickbait headline and moved on. No, they pulled this thing apart and atomized it in their hands and in their head and like really absorbed it at a molecular level and said, all right, I've got my head around this now. I can talk about it. Right. And, you know, I do technology and technology lives in that world, right? You know, user experience design isn't about how does your homepage look to you.

Mm-hmm.

It's how does your homepage look to every type of person that exists and how do you make it comfortable for all of those people?

Mm-hmm.

And that is, there's some pieces of that that are science-based, right? Like, you know, people read like this, they're colorblind, people do this thing differently, braille people do this thing differently. Like there's some science there. But it's also like real cognitive-based, right? Like, you have to really think about that problem to solve it. You can't just take a guess. There's no ChatGPT that's going to talk you through that answer. You got to really like almost live that experience to understand it enough to really do it. I was a martial—

Otherwise it becomes a garbage in, garbage out, right?

Yeah. And I was a martial art guy, have been my— for 25 years or so, and I didn't get good at martial arts until I started teaching it, right? And why is that? Because when you have to slow something down to the point of just so slow that it almost hurts, even though you did it like that when you learned, it was all new to you. So you were just sort of like struggling just to keep your head above water, right? Or in this case, keep a fist from hitting you in the face, right? But when you have to years later teach that same move to somebody else at that speed, now all of a sudden you see all these things that are different that you never saw before, and you understand that problem at a completely different level than you ever could have if you hadn't slowed it way, way, way, way down. I can't remember the movie and it's driving me crazy right now, but there's an art piece where they took a movie, and it was like an hour-long or 45-minute-long piece that in the movie was only something like 3 seconds, but they slowed it down and made it super exaggeratedly long.

Okay, that's interesting.

And the person who wrote the article said, I'd seen this movie a million times, but I never realized all the nuance that was inside of their performance. This person felt jealousy. This person felt rage. And now all of a sudden, whether it was true or not, you're thinking about this in a completely different way. And why is that? Because you slowed it down to almost stop and looked at it one moment at a time.

Is it similar when you have your self-talks?

Say that again.

Is it similar when you have your self-talks?

Yeah, for sure. It's in fact probably the apex of that is when I have my self-talks, because I can now stop myself in the middle of a, of a sentence and say, wait a minute, hold on a second. What if— what are the things that somebody's likely to say to me right now if we were in a conversation? Right? What are they going to tell me I missed? Or, or what are they going to say? What about this? Or what about that? Right? And, and the what if, what about this, what about that, you know what those generally are, is a reflection of an unexamined framework, right? Like, you are not examining anything that you're thinking about. You're just repeating back something somebody else said. And again, I don't know, I'm like, I'm not blaming anybody for this, that part. I'm not blaming people for their reaction because that's predictable.

So let me add something to that. It's a question. What is it you are talking with when you have your self-talks? That's the first question. The second part, Matt, is, is it of the same intelligence as you are when you ask the question, or do you sense you're talking with an intelligence in you that is beyond the one who asks the question.

Interesting. Well, I think for me, it's varied. It varies because what I'm doing is I'm trying to figure out— answering your second question first— I'm trying to figure out what a variety of intelligences might bring to this conversation. Here's what a complete doom-scrolling TikTok Luddite would say, and here's what a Nobel laureate might say, right? And maybe not that extreme, but for this conversation, you get what I'm saying, right? I'm trying to, like, pull this apart in a bunch of different ways because, to answer your first question, I'm practicing. I'm doing reps at the gym of clear thinking myself. I'm learning and relearning and relearning how to not just jump down a rabbit hole because somebody else told me to come in. Right? Like, I'm trying to say, wait a minute, I don't want to react like this. Having a conversation from a point of reaction isn't a conversation. It's a reaction. Those are different. Right. You know, we have 2 different words for that in the English language for good reasons. They're different. They're not, you know, and while a conversation could be a reaction, a reaction is not a conversation, right? Like, and so, but that takes practice. No one's born with that skill, you know? I mean, if you look at it from an anthropological standpoint, if you're different than me and you pose a threat, I'm gonna kill you. Like, that's it. Like, this is how we survive, right? This is built into our DNA. Yeah. That's a reaction. You're weird. You're freaking me out. Stab you in the face. Like, right? Like, this is very clear. This is how we all got here.

You think that's how we're born?

I think that's how we survived up till now. And if you look at 2 million years of evolution, you and I are only having this conversation because our ancestors were the strongest people in that line. That's it.

But shouldn't we, shouldn't we, you and I, be more evolved than—

Oh no, we for sure should. No, 100%. I'm not—

Why aren't we? I'm not at all saying we should— Why isn't society more evolved than it is?

But that's my point.

Because it's still in fight and flight and freeze.

I know, but that's the, that's the explanation for this behavior. It is at its core, I think, Survival, right? Like, if—

Why do you think that is? Because isn't it, isn't it basically stupid to stick to a survival mode when there is not much to survive, when there is actually so much potential to thrive instead? But something must be behind that thinking that keeps it intact in society, through school, through college, through business, through wherever it is.

Well, there's a couple things about that, right? One is, do you— do you— is it stupid to breathe every couple seconds? You know?

No, but that is— that is a normal thing. And I think survival is not—

Well, survival is absolutely a normal thing. I mean, you know what I mean? Like—

But if there is no threat, why would you fight it?

We don't respond to threats because we recognize them necessarily as threats, I don't think. I think we respond to threats because we have a reptilian piece of our body that says, get the hell out of here. Like, this is a problem, right? Like, there's a, there's a piece of us that's involuntary that we— you see a saber-toothed tiger running, you're going to turn around and book it the other direction, or you're going to grab the biggest—

That's the funny aspect. And I think—

or you're going to grab the biggest, sharpest stick that you can grab and try to, like, stand your ground, right? Like, that's—

I dare to be the devil's advocate.

No, I know. Listen, it's fair. But here's the problem, right? It's not It's fair from a rational conversation standpoint. It's not fair from an evolutionary standpoint, because if you think about how long ago was it that this luxury that you're talking about became an option? 200 years, maybe tops.

Okay.

Tops. And then when you look at the rate of change inside of that window, It, it, it's, it's un— it's unfair to ask a biological entity that's lived for millions of years one way to, inside of 200 years, change.

What do you think about neuroplasticity?

Neuroplasticity is a fun topic because that's the only reason—

Is it fun?

I love it. Yeah, I think neuroplasticity is awesome because if, you know, I know they've disproven it, but one of the most intoxicating topics like, thought processes I've seen in my adult life is this idea of the stoned ape theory, right? And I know it's been disproved, but the idea was we found a pile of mushrooms, we started eating them like crazy, and our brains grew differently. Now, I think that that's exciting for a couple reasons, right? One is, let's just say, how do you explain the evolution from I'm going to bang 2 rocks together to make a fire to, I created a space shuttle that's going to Mars. Right? And it's really interesting when you think about this, but like, everything that's on Earth right now that was required to make a cell phone and the internet was on the Earth when the dinosaurs were here. Nothing's changed. We didn't get a meteor with a bunch of shit we didn't have. No, it's all been here.

Mm-hmm.

The only thing difference was, is we figured out how to manipulate it. And once we figured out how to manipulate it, we can do this, and then we can do that. I mean, it keeps it going and going. But like, what made that happen? That didn't happen overnight, right? 2 million years ago, those human-like people, they weren't doing much of anything like we're doing now, right? And so something had to have changed. Neuroplasticity is, is, is an explanation of what can change that. Now we have different views of it. We don't need to go down too far down any of these rabbit holes, but like psychedelics, one of the most intriguing pieces about that is it literally creates new neurons. Like, you are now not— literally, you are not the same brain you were before that. And if you keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it, that neuroplasticity changes over time, right? And that makes it— makes you different, makes you pliable, makes you malleable.

Mm-hmm.

And I think that when you look at— my kids used to say fixed mindset versus growth mindset, right? You know, and I, and I loved that when I was— that they were teaching that to my kids in like kindergarten. But, you know, the problem is our current world, and to a lesser/larger degree, the Industrial Revolution onwards, has really encouraged a fixed mindset Because that's what makes money. That's what makes companies. That's what makes—

Let's stop here for a sec.

Sure.

I like what you just said. So basically, our environment shapes us into who we are today, correct?

Yeah, it's a contributing factor. Huge.

So your kids started out differently. You did not have a chance to observe yourself when you were a child, but you were able to observe your kids, right?

Sure.

And you have a couple, so you can compare.

Yeah, correct.

Did they start with that mindset when they were born?

Yeah, I think all kids do. And I'm, you know, caveat here, I have 2 art degrees. I'm, you know, like, I'm an entrepreneur, you know, for years and years. And so like, my kids have a— I'm a woodworker, I'm a photographer, I have telescopes, I have this. I mean, I've, you know, I'm a guy who has a— it's like a Disneyland for kids, right? They got everything under the sun here, right? So, but there's all these studies that are like, hey, you know, most kids are geniuses if you test 'em on that scale. And except for when they get to like 8 or 9, falls off a cliff. And why is that? Why? Yeah, it falls off a cliff because now all of a sudden, dumb-dumbs like you and I are teaching them a bunch of shit that they shouldn't necessarily be learning. And they start to fix that, it calcifies. It doesn't go anywhere. And then we systemically enforce that throughout middle school, high school, university. It keeps going and going. And now you get into the workforce and you're just supposed to be a cog in a machine. And, you know, people like me are the weirdos, you know, like, what do you mean you draw things and you paint things? What the hell's wrong with you? Like, you know, you're supposed to be in spreadsheet land in a cubicle somewhere and like just rubber stamp, rubber stamp.

Right.

So yeah, I think my kids were like that, but I think they hardened their minds just the same because at the end of the day, I didn't homeschool them. I didn't teach them. They're a product of the same world I am. And they, uh, you know, they just, they just keep solidifying. But one day, I'll tell you one example that made me really, really appreciate how plastic their minds, malleable their minds were. My son might have been 3 or 4. I was— he was young. And I was cleaning up after dinner, and he grabbed the towel out of my hands and he said, can I clean? And I was like, sure, come on, give it a shot. He starts cleaning, and he doesn't— he's not really cleaning, he's just mirroring me.

Mm-hmm.

But he gets to the other dish towel hanging. We have 2 of them in our kitchen, usually one over the stove and one of them over another hook over by the sink. And he gets to the one over the stove and he cleans the other towel with the other towel. Interesting. And it never would've occurred to me that, that, like, to do that. But he's not thinking about the logic of the situation. He's not thinking about, like, I'm cleaning and this thing is also cleaning and it's porous. It's not a hard surface like what we're also cleaning. He's not thinking about any of this stuff. He's not encumbered by this ridiculous line of thought. He just goes, no, I gotta clean the kitchen and this is how you do

it.

And it got me really thinking. Then I thought about art school. And I said, you know what's fun about art school? And I think everybody should go to art school, by the way. You, me, your mother, your grandmother, everybody you know, everyone, for a little time. Year, 6 months. Why? Art school doesn't care if you know how to paint, draw, sculpt. They assume that if you're there, you've got that under control, right? And you'll get better at it by doing it a lot while you're there. But you know what they do care a lot about? Critical creative thinking. And that's all they care about, really. And I've taught at big art schools, some of the biggest in the East Coast. I've gone to art school. I have 2 art degrees. Like, I, I've lived this. I, I have— most of my friends are artists. I mean, you know, I, I love it. I love that world. And you know what they all have in common? Critical creative thinking. It's all they do. You know, I just had this conversation with, uh, with somebody on a podcast the other day. The banana duct taped to a wall— that wasn't about bananas or duct tape or the wall. But asking that question, even like recognizing that a banana taped to the wall has a handful of variables, you ask most people Hey, talk to me about this painting. They're like, or this piece. It's a banana taped to a wall. Well, tell me, what about it? I mean, I don't know, it's a banana and there's some duct tape. But you know what they don't do? They don't do what artists do. They don't say, well, what kind of wall was it? Why that wall? Why not another different wall? What does the color of the wall matter? Does the material of the wall matter? What about the room that this wall is in? Is there a roof on it? Is it inside? Is it outside? Like, what are all these things that mean something but might not signal something necessarily quickly, but add to that subconscious perception that we all have of this thing. And that, that's what we were just talking about a little while ago. But that's that, that's that ability to dissect between the raindrops, as it were, right? Like, you're not, you're not, you're not looking at, at one thing. You're looking at this sort of hard-to-define sum of things and pulling apart what are the shades of also. In this situation, the wall is tall. It is also red. It is also— it is also— the banana is also yellow versus green. Banana could be brown too. It could be rotting. Like, why choose that banana, right? Like, what, you know, there's— what about duct tape? Duct tape comes in every color and pattern known to man. Why use silver duct tape? We all know what duct tape looks like. If it was camouflage, you'd still know it was duct tape. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's just— And that's the thing that fascinates me about stillness, about questioning, about metacognition, about all these things, is that when you think about them, you realize how much there is to think about.

You know what's interesting? And that's something that sticks with me for a while now. Cognition is thinking. Is stillness really thinking?

For me, for sure.

Entirely different area.

For me, it's the only place that thinking can happen, because in my day-to-day, you're, for better or for worse, you're problem solving, which is thinking, but it's thinking from experience versus possibility, right? Like, you know, I, at least loosely speaking, I should say broadly speaking, that's, that's how I see the difference, right? If I'm on a talk with myself around the neighborhood, I'm thinking about what could be possible. I'm role-playing. I'm saying, okay, well, what if they say this? What if they say that? What if they say this? What if they say this? And oh, by the way, I just realized that one of the pillars of my assumptions about this might be porous. Maybe, maybe I didn't have this right. And I catch myself in this all the time. I'm like, oh shit, you know what, I should—

So if I get you right, correct me please.

Sure.

You are having a conversation with yourself on a cognitive basis, basically one part that is not that biased because it's not, um, objective or objectified by the situation or the environment. But in the end, it's almost conversation with the better you, one that is less distorted, but it's still you. Is that correct?

Yeah, it's always going to be me, obviously. But I, I'm working through things that I think I know about the situation and trying to figure out if that's enough to be informed on it. Right. Like, because you can never know everything about the topic. Right. Like, it's not It's not like you're gonna ever find— there's no end, right? Somebody said, you know, you don't go to the gym to lift weights until a destination. You've never lifted all the weights, right? You're just—

Right. Just,

yeah, you know, like, so, but there is sort of like a don't, don't lose the good in quest for the perfect kind of moment here where you're like, okay, look, I know I have to have a conversation about this. I know I have to present this. I know I have to talk about this. I know, I know, whatever. The genius of things, or the wisdom of things, comes out of knowing, I think, all of the moving parts that you can and being able to maneuver effortlessly through that rather than coming to almost defend a position, right? Like, if you cut— it's, it's one thing, you know, if you want to defend a position, that's fine, but your opinion's not the only one out there. And if you wanna have a real conversation with somebody, you need to kind of figure out what colors their decision. Like, what made you think like this? And like, that comes from questioning, right? Well, you can't question somebody if you're in a defensive posture about the thing, right? Because you're not open-minded. Right. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, and so, but that takes, for me anyway, and maybe there's people that don't have this problem, but I need practice on that. Like, I need to be able to like workshop that and say, okay, This is somebody who's coming at it from this angle and this angle.

Basically, you workshop and prep almost than the actual conversation with the other person, huh?

Yeah, it's— it becomes easy. I've done a lot of Ironman, uh, you know, triathlons, right? And like, everyone's like, oh my God, that's exhausting. I'm like, actually, the day of the Ironman is pretty simple. Like, it's not— it's not exhausting at all. I mean, it's a long day, but you just Put one foot in front of the other until you're done, right? Like you just keep going. But the only reason you could do that is because you've trained for it for like a year, right? Like you're not— this isn't new stuff to you. This isn't like, you know, you're not inventing anything new on race day. You

know, now I begin to understand you a little bit better, and that's only because my questioning. Because for you, Everything happens basically cognitively in your mind, thinking, correct?

A lot, yeah. Yes.

Is there another part?

So I'm a hyper-physical person. So I definitely, like I said, I do woodworking, I do sculpture, I do a lot of photography, which is, you know, you're You have a— you're interacting with a machine still, right? Mm-hmm. I am physical. I like martial arts. I like Ironman. I like marathons. I like, you know, hiking. I like snow skiing, right? Like, I like physical things, but most of those— and I, you know, at the time of this interview, it's the wintertime in the Northeast in the United States, and I do a lot of skiing. Do you know how cognitive skiing is? Very— there's a lot going on. It's like a golf swing, you know, every golf swing is 37 movements put together into a quarter of a second, right? Skiing is very similar. So you can ski down a mountain, gravity is going to take care of getting you to the bottom, right? Like at its simplest form, you can just aim your skis to the bottom and you don't have to look pretty. You don't have to be pretty. You don't have to be fast. You don't have to be slow, but gravity will take care of this. You'll get eventually to the bottom. Mm-hmm. Now, it might be feet overhead going down the mountain, uh, or it could be a perfect beautiful S-curve going down and you look like an Olympian. I mean, there's a variety of ways, but if you want to do that beautiful S thing, that doesn't just happen. You need to practice it. But moreover, you have to know what you're practicing. You know, like, you have to actually understand the physics of, of skiing. And that involves manipulation of gravity. It involves manipulation of force. I don't— not a physicist. I'm not an engineer. I don't know these things intrinsically, or intuitively rather. I had to have somebody show me. Okay, well, how does this movement affect ski pressure? Well, how is ski pressure important? Why is it important? What does I— what do I miss out on if I don't do that? Not to say that I ever wanted to be in the Olympics, but I did want to understand what I was doing. So I've spent a lot of time thinking about skiing, not actually skiing. But when I do ski, and I'd like to think I'm a fairly competent skier, I, I ski competently because I've thought about it way more than I've ever done it.

That's an interesting aspect. You mentioned something Even more interesting for me, intuition. What part does that play in your life?

You know, I don't know if you and I have enough time to talk about—

That's what I saw coming.

Intuition, because here's the thing. I don't know personally that there's a huge difference between intuition and a lot of knowledge. Because to me, intuition is my internal LLM, right? It's like, you know, people are like mystified by how LLMs work. I said, look, it's a giant spreadsheet that grabs information really, really fast, right? That to me is another way of describing intuition. It's this huge, like, internal spreadsheet based on every word I've ever heard, every feeling I've ever felt, every ski slope I ever fell down. Synthesized into what LLMs also do, which are next token predictors. What comes next? That's what an LLM does.

So you don't think there is more than what we just described?

That's why I said, how much time do you got? Because like, this is one of those things. Yeah. You know, this is one of those things where you're like, intuition. Look, I, I, I have a podcast where we talk about like a bunch of weird health stuff, right? We've had people, we had one woman on Uh, who literally talked us into an Akashic Record meditation. Beautiful show, great experience. And, and if you take her at face value, we literally went into the Akash, like, just from our seats, and we were tapping the divine. Little nudge into the cosmos right now. Look, I don't disagree with her. In fact, I think there's a lot of feeling inside of me that feels like Neo from The Matrix. It says, I knew it, I just knew it, right? Like, there's this feeling that that is a true thing. And that, since I've never been to the Akash, like, I can't say that I have ever been there.

I see that,

right? I can't say that that's based on intuition. But here's the thing, if I'm walking down the street and I feel something behind me, that I think might be described as an amalgam of lived experience. I lived in New York City. I lived, you know, like, I lived in places where hyperattention is a survival mechanism as much as it is a convenience. And you, you just learn to do those things. When I'm in a business meeting talking to somebody about an iPhone app. I've built a gabillion iPhone apps. Like, I'm not— so like when people say, oh, what's your intuition tell you? That's a very normal callback to our earlier possibly lazy comment, right? This isn't an examined question, it's an unexamined sort of question because they don't know how to ask it better. But they say, hey, what's your intuition tell you? I could say, well, my intuition doesn't tell me shit. 30 years of doing this tells me this, though, if that's what you're really asking me. But what's the difference between those 2 things? At a certain point, they become—

It's basically like AI, right? It's all pattern recognition in the end.

I don't want to reduce everything to that, but it feels like that could be true. It feels like that could be very true. Because I'll tell you what, my intuition at 50, having lived in major metropolitan cities, 2 or 3 of them, having 2 kids, doing this, doing that, doing the other, my intuition's very, very different than my children's. It's very different than my 84-year-old neighbor who grew up without electricity in another country. Like, not good or not better or worse, but just very, very, very different.

Different.

You know? And so how do you explain that, right? Like, how do you explain the thing that we're calling the same thing with 3 different people, right? You're— you and I are in different countries. Your intuition's got to be different than mine, right? Again, not better, not worse, but just super different. There's things that you might call intuition that I'd look at and be like, holy shit, that's, that's amazing.

Common sense. Yeah,

like, and then there's other things where you say, and I'm like, man, my common sense tells me that this is very wrong. Like, and I'm not gonna buy into that at all. They're both intuition, but like, I, again, that's why I said I think intuition, if you, if you look at it one way, could be your own internal LLM. It's a, it's a next token predictor.

It's worth thinking about it.

Yeah. And that's why I said it's a complicated thing. You know, I did a lot of research on, uh, on human bias and, and the origins of inspiration and stuff, and the brain is such a fascinating a fascinating place. And when you look at neuroplasticity and psychedelics and stuff, you start to say, okay, well, if I'm literally creating a new neuron and then I got a new idea, like, did that idea come from the psychedelics? Did it come from my intuition? Did it come— where did it come from? You know, it's a— and you don't, you don't know. You just—

It's food for thought.

It is. Yeah.

That's why I look forward to connect you with my friend Stefan.

I love it.

It'll be a fascinating conversation. So I want to be mindful of your time.

Sure.

And I have one final question for you.

Lay it on me.

If someone feels overwhelmed right now, what would you want them to return to?

You know, I think I think I've always thought this, but I think in particular with reflection on this conversation, I think returning to intuition and checking to make sure that intuition is, is on stable ground is really what I think the only thing we should return to, right? Because at the end of the day, for the thing you have to do next, Your intuition isn't going to help me, right? Your intuition might be great for you and maybe a bunch of people else, but maybe not me. So ultimately, you can't really— you might be able to collect ideas from other people and whatnot, but like, you need to be able to return to yourself and check yourself out. In order to make any progress if you're in that overwhelmed state. And I think that that's a skill that most people were never really taught to do. And so because of that, they don't do it at all. I mean, I could list a dozen people that I know personally that I love— friends, family, people close to me— that have never done that a day in their life. Right. Like, it's not— they're not bad people. They just— no one taught them how to do this. And I think in a world where we're at, where the difference between— then the new currency, I think, is thinking, right? The new currency is how, how clear of a thinker you are. If you weren't ever taught to think for yourself— and in most cases the opposite is true, you were deliberately taught to not think for yourself—

Yeah.

puts everyone at a disadvantage unless you're paying attention and you do the work. Listen, if you want huge biceps, you got to go to the gym. Like, you know, you just— there isn't— there's no trick.

Critical thinking comes into it again, huh?

Well, that's what I'm saying. If you want to be a clear thinker, you have to practice clear thinking. You know, it's just like anything else. You want to play the guitar, you don't pick up a banjo. You know, like, you go grab a guitar, you know? And that's what I think we need to sort of focus on. And honestly, The thing to bring us back to your original question is this moment of stillness that people, I think, need to return to. I mean, at 45-ish, maybe a little earlier, maybe 45, 44, 43, I started a daily meditation practice. I'd meditated on and off for years.

Mm-hmm.

You know, I can't function in a day anymore properly without that. Like, there's plenty of days where I'll just miss it 'cause I'm busy, I got an early call, whatever, but I'm off that whole day.

Interesting.

Like, and, and it's not the kind of off that you can come back to. It's like, uh, oh no, I'm off. It's like, you ever had a hangover? You're, you're not— it's not like you're hungover in the morning and you're fine by dinner. You're, you're more hungover in the morning than you are at dinner, but you're still hungover that whole day. You got to kind of wait to go to bed and wake up and reset.

Makes sense.

You know what I mean? Like, that's kind of the only way to get out of that. And I feel like for me, that's where I'm at. Like, without that silence, Without that sort of introspection, like, you just— I can't. I'm not nearly operational like I am when I have it.

Fascinating. Matt, thank you so much for this conversation.

This was wonderful. I love, uh, I love a good brain conversation where you gotta force me to think about stuff.

This was Remembering the Forgotten, a conversation held in clarity, not performance. If something in this exchange shifted how you see, let it stay with you. A few quiet pointers are waiting below.