Backstage w/ Matt Stone
by Matt Stone Enterprises
A backstage pass to The Bigger Stage, where host Matt Stone covers the behind-the-scenes lowdown on his journey to build The Bigger Stage brand, business, and show, and the business and life lessons he's learning along the way. mattstone.substack.com
Episodes
-
Relationships Over Ads
Matt closes the week with two companies that quietly prove his thesis. First, a feel-good one from the Wall Street Journal: The Gund Company, a 75-year-old family-owned specialty manufacturer in St. Louis, has never conducted a single layoff, while averaging 18% annual growth for a decade, with...
-
You Don’t Need a Big Audience
Matt threads three stories into a single through-line. First, the scale shift: YouTube captured a record 15.8% of all US TV viewing in August (Nielsen, via Axios), more than Disney’s 9.3% and Netflix’s 7.7% combined-distributor shares. Studios are chasing it, Netflix is building a science series...
-
Story Before Platform
Matt threads two stories that look unrelated and aren’t. First, AI is changing how people find you. The Daily Mail is running experiments across the US, UK, and Australia to see whether publishers can help brands show up more often in AI answers, and building a commercial “generative engine...
-
Real Beats Scripted
Matt opens the week connecting his tagline to a hard trend. New research cited in TopRank Marketing’s B2B report found that 96% of B2B companies are largely invisible in early-stage AI discovery (a visibility-index finding, he’s careful to note, not that 96% never appear in AI answers), even as...
-
Don’t Sleep on the Boomers
Matt closes the week on a Business Insider piece with a counterintuitive lesson. Research from Morning Consult (run for Business Insider) and Edelman shows a big generational split on influencers: only about 31% of boomers trust influencer recommendations, versus roughly 62% of Gen Z and 64% of...
-
Into the Ditch
No articles today. Matt’s still turning over the Your New Opening Line pilot in Denver, a small but mighty room of people each refining the opening to a talk, and he pulls out three lessons (plus a bonus). First, going blank. When you’re performing to a camera or working a talk, the harder you...
-
From Discovery to Retention
Matt opens with a reflection from the Denver pilot of Your New Opening Line: the blank. When you’re working on a talk, you hit a point a few rounds in where it stops feeling fun and you start fighting it, right before it becomes fully integrated inside you. One participant lived it in real time....
-
Not a Content Studio
Fresh off a trip to Denver, Matt opens on a Guardian story: a growing list of hotels, restaurants, and beauty spots are restricting photography and filming, not just because creators are there, but because content production wrecks the experience for everyone else. The Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc now...
-
The Third Audience
[Note: This is the last Backstage episode this week. Back at it Monday, October 19th.] Matt opens on a fresh Axios piece from co-founder Jim VandeHei that names a real shift: business communication now has a third audience. For years executives communicated to two, the internal team and the...
-
Tend Your Wisdom Garden
Matt opens with apple picking in biblical New York rain (proof you can have a blast even when it’s pouring) and two Business Insider stories that pull in the same direction. First, the power of story. Denise Woodard founded Partake Foods after her daughter’s severe food allergies, selling...
-
The Booster Rocket
Matt opens on a joyful note about his own year with The Bigger Stage, and a useful lesson hiding in it: you can design a narrow ideal client profile, but the reality is usually more diverse, held together by a common thread. For him that thread is helping people understand who they are and…
more -
A Relationship Group, Not a Networking Group
Matt had networking on his mind after another great night with his own group, and a Business Insider story landed right on it. Alena Beliauskaya started inviting startup founders hiking because she loved the outdoors. That turned into 12 Scrappy Founders, a Bay Area community now 600-plus strong,...
-
Sold Out in 25 Minutes
If you don’t have kids, you may have missed the Anazala Family. Matt had, until a friend worked their first-ever arena show in Newark, the one that reportedly sold out in 25 minutes. Then he started digging, and something clicked. When people feel close to someone online, the next thing they want...
-
Two Speaking Markets
Matt opens the week with a smorgasbord of signals that all point the same direction. New data from Talkadot’s State of the Speaking Industry report (a speaker platform, so a grain of salt) puts the median keynote fee at just $2,500, with corporate buyers around $4,500, while bureaus describe a...
-
They're Not Stealing Your Face
Matt has AI fakes on his mind. If you’ve been on YouTube and seen someone who looks and sounds exactly like a creator or commentator you know, in their usual setting, but on a strange channel saying things you’ve never heard them say, you’ve met the problem. He’s learned to assume that unless…
more -
The Bait and the Song
Matt braids two signals into one argument about attention. First, fresh German research (the Seven.One Audio Podcast Report 2026) that cuts against the everyone-has-a-goldfish-attention-span story: overall daily podcast listening jumped 44% year over year, active listeners average 75 minutes a…
more -
Aim Small
No articles today, just a candid, thinking-out-loud one. Matt names something he catches in himself: disappointment about the response he’s getting online, until he digs underneath it and finds his mind has raced three steps ahead and set an invisible standard of success that isn’t rooted in any...
-
A Smaller Community, Really Dialed In
Matt opens the week with a Deloitte finding that reinforces the thread he keeps pulling: among people who follow creators, trust translates directly into buying. Per Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends research, a large share engage with creators daily, most return to the same ones over time…
more -
Your Content Is a Storefront
Matt closes the week with a reframe he says he’s adopting for good. It comes from a National Retail Federation profile of Ella Livingston, the Ghanaian-American founder of Cocoa Asante, whose family has grown cacao in Ghana for generations and who turned that legacy into a chocolate brand that…
more -
Live Is the Point
Matt opens with a one-on-one from the night before, hearing a colleague’s immigrant story and feeling the whole relationship deepen in real time, because you understand someone, and trust them, when you can see your own experience reflected in theirs. That’s the thread through everything…
more -
A Personality With a Point of View
Matt braids two stories that look unrelated and aren’t. First, a new IBM study (with Oxford Economics, 1,500 CHROs and 8,800 employees): 71% of chief HR officers say the most essential skill now is the ability to supervise, validate, and override AI output, yet only 29% of employees rank judgment...
-
The Offline Bet
Still decompressing from two whirlwind weeks of Fast Company and the podcasting-community circuit, Matt surfaces the theme that kept coming up: human connection and real-life experience are only going to grow, and social media’s role in delivering that feels increasingly uncertain. He points to a...
-
Start With the Story
Closing the week from the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Matt reports on a morning that ran Russell Wilson, the Walmart US CEO, Tyra Banks, and Martha Stewart back to back to back. The through-line he couldn’t unsee: Russell Wilson opened with bravado and business wins, high energy and…
more -
Maybe You Don't Need a Bottle
The highlight of Matt’s day at the Fast Company Innovation Festival was watching actress Elizabeth Banks on stage with Marian Leitner-Waldman, founder and CEO of Archer Roose — a wine brand whose whole idea is putting genuinely good wine in a can. Three things stuck. First, the storytelling...
-
When Everyone's a Creator, No One Is
Day two from the Fast Company Innovation Festival, and Matt’s synthesizing what he saw. He toured The Lighthouse, a gorgeous members’ campus for creators (Brooklyn and Venice) with plug-and-play studios for interviews, kitchen demos, outfit try-ons — a mini-studio for anyone who’ll pay the fee....
-
Where Are Your People?
Matt opens the week heading into Fast Company’s Innovation Festival (starting today, with an off-site on the creator economy in Brooklyn) and points to a telling Reuters signal: former Canadian PM Justin Trudeau just launched a production company, Hope & Hard Work, with his longtime chief of…
more -
Plant the Flag
Matt reads a Business Insider piece on Kara Swisher — the tech journalist who went from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal to building her own independent media identity through Recode, podcasts like Pivot, and books — because her counsel to journalists leaving downsizing institutions...
-
Report from the Frontier
Back after Labor Day, Matt takes aim at a familiar social-media anxiety: the middle-aged professional watching a 23-year-old rack up attention with beach photos and matcha, wondering where they fit. His first move is to lower the stakes on something people over-worry about. A PostFast analysis of...
-
Start With a New Story
On the show built around the line “let their stories power their growth,” Matt closes the week with the clearest case for what that actually means. First, a market signal: British retailer John Lewis is launching Gift List, a YouTube chat show hosted by Angela Scanlon (Louis Theroux is a guest),...
-
People Love to Be Sold To
No articles today, just decades of hard-won experience. Matt talks about the stretch every builder knows: you start something new, the vision thrills you, and then almost immediately you’re out in the desert — no water, no feedback loop, just a scorpion or two — because excitement doesn’t…
more -
Lead the Whole Industry
Lowe’s just assembled what’s being called the largest cross-sector skilled-trades coalition in the country — 75-plus members including NVIDIA, AT&T, Bank of America, and General Motors — aiming to help train a million tradespeople by 2035, against a projected shortfall of 2.1 million unfilled…
more -
A Different Font
Eileen Munoz spent nearly three decades in an insurance cubicle, never earning more than $70,000 and dreading Sundays — and when she finally quit in her mid-50s, she assumed the next thing would just be her old job “in a different font.” Instead, at 59, she’s doing around half a million dollars a...
-
Take Them on a Field Trip
Matt’s thinking about jargon — the contagion of it. He traces his own history with it, from picking up the language of every industry he passed through to the intoxicating first year of law school, when a whole new vocabulary of Latin phrases made him feel like an insider. The problem is that...
-
Guardian of the Culture
When Raj Subramaniam became only the second CEO in FedEx’s history — stepping out from under legendary founder Fred Smith, who died in 2025 — he did something telling: he wrote his own job description, and one central line in it was “guardian of the culture” Smith built. His promise, as Matt…
more -
Operator, Authority, Icon
An Inc. story caught Matt's eye — a bit of a puff piece, he's the first to say, but a revealing one: SEED Media founder Valeisha Butterfield gathered Fortune 100 and 500 executives on Martha's Vineyard for a "Corporate Creators" retreat built on a premise that would've sounded strange a few years...
-
A True Icon: Remembering Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton died this week at 80, and Matt — by his own admission not a devoted country fan — found himself moved to pay tribute, because if the word “iconic” means anything, it means her. This is a warm, reflective episode about a woman who transcended party, region, and genre, and who over…
more -
Be the Mast
The workforce is coming loose from its moorings. A Fortune commentary from the American Staffing Association’s chief economist reports that temporary help was among the fastest-growing job categories in 2026, up every month, with roughly one in ten new jobs this year being temporary — and the...
-
What Would Your Pop-Up Be?
When Annabel and Emily Lui’s wholesale deals collapsed — right after they’d hired staff, leased production space, and bought equipment — the sisters behind British bakery Cutter & Squidge were down to about £15,000 and, with employees on the payroll, maybe a month of runway. They didn’t shut…
more -
The Attractive Nuisance
YouTube is changing the rules — counting a view the instant playback starts (so everyone’s numbers jump) while quietly making real monetization much harder to reach and keep. Matt uses the shift as a way into a bigger warning. Those inflated view counts will make people feel good about clicks…
more -
Trophies and the Troll
A new Boston Consulting Group study, reported by Fortune, found that only 40% of former CEOs of billion-dollar companies felt satisfied with their transition out of the role in the first year — and the biggest struggle wasn’t money or boredom. It was identity and relevance. Who am I when the...
-
The Clear Ask
Matt found a story in the AP that ties together nearly everything this show has been circling. Marisa Mender-Franklin was a teacher during the pandemic who dreamed of growing her own wedding flowers but owned no land. So she posted a single, specific ask to her local Facebook Buy Nothing group…
more -
Become the Center of Gravity
Fresh from a doctor’s appointment and back on the mic, Matt reinforces the throughline he keeps landing on: building a business in 2026 is about community and events. His evidence is a Verge interview with Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of the news outlet Semafor, which has turned profitable in just…
more -
The Joy Compass
Matt kicks off the week with joy on his mind — no articles, no data, just one tool worth stealing. He’s three weeks into a book club run by his friend and colleague Shannon Hernandez around her workbook Practical Joy: Simple Tools to Cultivate More Joy Every Day, and last week’s exercise stuck…
more -
The Cake Is Already Baked
A Fortune piece stopped Matt this week: only 12% of family businesses stay in the family by the third generation. The Goldman Sachs chairman quoted in it argues the culprit usually isn’t a missing legal document — it’s optimism, founders who keep deferring the hard conversations about who leads,...
-
What's Your Repeatable Format?
Alex Cooper’s media company Unwell just took its first outside investment at a $500 million valuation, on its way, Matt suspects, to making her a billionaire. It started as one person (with a co-host) talking candidly into a mic and grew into a podcast network, live events, streaming projects,...
-
A Stage With No Rules
Matt traces his relationship with media back to its root. As a kid he turned everything into a microphone, pretending to be a talk show host; in junior high he and his friend David recorded fake radio shows on a brick of a tape recorder, complete with invented commercial breaks. That thread runs...
-
Which Lane Are You In?
Matt spots a tell in a Digiday headline: Zoom is leaning on creators to boost its AI search results. Zoom is Kleenex for video meetings, but it wants to be seen as a full end-to-end AI platform — and paid ads alone won’t rewrite that reputation. So it partnered with journalist-podcaster Nayeema...
-
Beware enfeeblement
Bret Stephens wrote a New York Times plea this month titled “I’m Begging You: Never Write With AI,” and it clearly got under Matt’s skin — in the productive way. Stephens’ case isn’t about ethics (a citation handles that); it’s that writing with AI is mentally weakening, because writing is how we...
-
Whose God Are You Serving?
Matt earned LinkedIn Top Voice a couple of years back the hard way — no AI, just writing a steady stream of his own thought pieces until the editors noticed. So when he says he’s changed his relationship with the platform, it’s not sour grapes. It’s clarity. He walks through the thing most…
more -
Credibility, Not Visibility
Matt’s been chasing a hunch with data: the speaking industry feels like it’s struggling, and both a (openly biased) vendor study and his own conversations with working speakers point the same direction. Some of that is just wind you can’t control — bigger trends blowing against you that have...
About this show
A backstage pass to The Bigger Stage, where host Matt Stone covers the behind-the-scenes lowdown on his journey to build The Bigger Stage brand, business, and show, and the business and life lessons he's learning along the way.
mattstone.substack.com
Hosted by
Matt Stone Enterprises
Categories