The Art of Time's Filter: How Music, Memory, and Meaning Find Their Way Through. John Candeto And Matt Reustle On JUST PRESS RECORD

I started trying to get into the new Playboi Carti album last week. Then I hit a song sampling one of my favorite songs ever (William Bell’s “I Forgot To Be Your Lover”) and…I had one of those, “What am I even doing trying to connect with this” moments, resulting in me dipping out for more familiar “classics.”

Ever notice how certain songs refuse to fade no matter how many decades pass? Or how that cheap paperback your grandparents read to you somehow outlived countless New York Times bestsellers? What about - the smell of that paperback? Like the Narnia books in the trailer at the beach I can still smell. Why can I touch those pages, smell those smells, and taste those summertime Cokes in my mind, while I’m going to probably forget about this Playboi Carti album as soon as I stop writing about it?

Matt Reustle and John Candeto joined me for a Just Press Record conversation that kept circling back to this beautiful mystery – the way time sorts through human creation and preserves what matters.

"Time is one of the best filters we have," John told us, dropping what might be the most elegant framing of wisdom I've heard in I don’t even know how long. We started the conversation talking about bedtime stories for kids but somehow found ourselves excavating deeper truths about the endurance of meaning across generations and geography (and this is why I love this show format so much).

Matt didn’t hold back either. You have to hear him describe the first time he stood in Patagonia, convinced he'd somehow landed on another planet ("How is this possibly our planet?"), and then how John recounted stumbling into Cologne Cathedral during an organ concert that hit him "like a ton of bricks." These aren’t just remember when a memory formed stories, or even just reminders to travel, they’re poking around something fundamental about how we experience wonder that defies our attempts to rationalize it, even while it’s weaving itself into our seemingly logical brains.

What hit me the hardest, reflecting back on our conversation, was their shared recognition that our "rationalist straitjacket" (another piece of John Candeto’s prose) often prevents us from acknowledging what we instinctively know to be true. The smell of fresh-cut grass that instantly teleports Matt back to high school soccer fields. The Rocky theme song that mysteriously improved John's test scores in college. The way certain songs can shave 20 seconds off Matt's mile time with no logical explanation why.

It’s all anti-slop too. It speaks to the depth of art and our connection to it. It speaks to how you (they) can’t Artificially and Intelligently incept a memory in the deepest corners of your brain. You can trigger it, once it’s there, but you can’t recreate the backstory in your memory. Art-Official Instincts are part of us - which, man, that’s hopeful, and is such a great reminder within this context.

"I don't know why playing Bob Dylan helps me make better decisions," John admitted, "but I believe it does." Isn't that the most fascinating paradox of all, deep inside of this? Some truths can only be understood through experience, not explanation. It’s “I Forgot To Be Your Lover” all over again. It’s bottled up complex emotions, that even when borrowed, they beg your brain to go back to the source.

We found ourselves circling around these beautiful, inexplicable connections between senses and memory, over and over. How a particular rubber scent instantly conjures track meets, how Johnson & Johnson baby powder might be "one of the most powerful olfactory triggers on the planet" because of how many childhoods it's touched. These aren't just nostalgic curiosities, they're evidence of how much deeper our understanding runs than our rationalist tools can measure.

And, because they’re both successful business people of their own accord, they get into how this psychological logic gets used in the world around us.

As Matt put it, "We live in this world of polarization... because it's a much simpler way to scale an idea of this is good, this is bad." But the reality, as we unpacked over the course of an almost two hour hang, is that the most meaningful parts of life exist in nuanced spaces that defy easy categorization. They persist through time's filter, precisely because they contain complexities worth revisiting.

John's meditation on the cathedral builders who started work knowing they wouldn't live to see it finished begs deeper questions, it forces you to frame how or if or why any of us should work on the next great pyramid that could outlast our life? He’s scraping at questions like, what wisdom gets passed through time's filter when we think beyond our individual lifespans? What are we building today that might take generations to complete? What happens beyond my memory of those childhood vacation reads, how can I make something that might matter for somebody else?

I knew John and Matt would go deep. I’m thrilled it went deeper than I could have imagined. I hope it makes you question how much of what you know to be true defies your ability to explain it, and why that might be precisely what makes it worth passing on.

What’s at stake in preserving these non-rationalist ways of knowing in our lives, careers, businesses, families, and beyond in 2025? I’m sure Playboi Carti is going to be foundational for a younger person (OK, a young dude, and that is also concerning me right now), but I’m going back to play me some William Bell today. I don’t want to be strictly nostalgic, but I want to feel my way through all the memories around that song.

Listen now, it’s Phronesis Fund founder, Art of Quality podcaster, and all-round power law expert John Candeto meeting Colossus CEO, media mastermind, and Business Breakdowns podcast ringleader Matt Reustle for the first (official) time on JUST PRESS RECORD: