Backstage w/ Matt Stone

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 millennials, and only about a quarter of boomers follow content creators at all, compared to the vast majority of younger people. Boomers are also more likely to say they trust influencers less than they used to, have never bought anything on a recommendation, and find the content annoying. Matt, a self-described forgotten Gen Xer, can relate, though the lawyer in him wants to pin down what we even mean by “influencer.” He means the professional kind, the person whose whole business is taking pictures of themselves and building a following to tell you what to buy (think the LinkedIn influencer whose entire business is teaching you how to make money on LinkedIn, a bit of a closed loop).Here’s why the “problem” is actually an opportunity. Boomers account for about 42% of spending among affluent US households (Visa), yet marketers pour tens of billions into creator partnerships aimed at much younger audiences. Some agencies even report stronger conversion from older, more experienced creators, while brands stay reluctant to use them. So two takeaways. First, don’t sleep on the boomers, depending on your business, there’s a whole market of healthy, financially capable people, often on their second or third career and moving to the next thing, that service businesses ignore at their own expense. Second, invest in real relationships. Matt’s clients range from Gen Z to boomers, and his advice is the same to all of them: don’t judge yourself against social media influencers. Your opportunity is to build trust the slower way, show up in person and online, do the one-on-ones, sow into the soil and fertilize it for real, and build a loyal community. With so much nonsense flooding social media, the differentiator is simple: don’t be nonsense. His questions for the weekend: who do you actually follow, does the word “influencer” even matter to you, and what’s your honest relationship with all of it? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

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. The fix isn’t to grind harder, it’s to break it up, let go, tell your mind you’re done with it for a moment. Same trick works on camera, “this isn’t the real take, I’m just going to riff,” and then you nail it. Totally normal, part of the process, and you keep going until you get free and easy with it.Then the signal, and it rhymes. A Digiday piece reports that The Verge has rebuilt its audience team for “Google Zero,” the post-search era where Google referral traffic dries up. For years publishers chased search optimization, social distribution, and raw traffic. Now The Verge organizes around three audience groups, anonymous visitors, registered users, and paying subscribers, and specialists in newsletters, community, and analytics, with each person carrying a growth target instead of a page-view number. The whole aim shifts from discovery to retention: turning occasional visitors into people who intentionally return. Tellingly, more than half of their subscriber sign-ups now come from readers going directly to the subscription page, a deliberate decision to buy, not an incidental one while reading an article. That’s the difference from the old model, Matt notes, where you put bait on the hook (a blog, a PDF) to capture an email. This is building a relationship first, so that when someone’s ready, they come find the sign-up page themselves. He maps it straight onto building a business with media: yes, you want attention and short-form discovery, but never at the expense of giving people reasons to come back, things to do, multi-phase offerings, exclusivity. He points to his own show’s regulars, the ones who comment and quote it back to him, as the equivalent of paying subscribers, client or not. His question: what’s the one thing you could offer on an ongoing basis, exclusive to people who join at a deeper level, that pulls them into your fold? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

[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 external world of customers, investors, and the public. Now AI is a distinct third audience, because people increasingly discover companies, products, and experts through AI-generated answers rather than search, and agents are starting to research and decide on people’s behalf. VandeHei’s fix starts with clarity: consistent language on what matters, why it matters, and what evidence backs it up (Axios does it with its Smart Brevity structure). Matt’s addition is the tension underneath. Humans respond to personality, story, and emotional resonance. AI systems want accessible, structured, consistent information. There’s overlap, but they’re not the same, and he’s honest that an obviously AI-written one-to-one email is a turnoff, because it leaves you less connected to the person who sent it.That leads to the heart of it, a defense of human messiness. We play in the mud. We stumble, repeat ourselves, search for the word, and that imperfection is itself a signal that we’re working things out in real time, so natural that listeners fill in the word right alongside us. The danger isn’t using AI, Matt uses it like everyone, it’s letting the structured, machine-readable version drown out the searching, stumbling, unfiltered human process. His bet is that demand for unassisted human communication only goes up as AI does more of the analysis, because living in a bot-driven comms world simply isn’t satisfying. Sitting at a cafe with a friend, communication unaided by anything but a cappuccino, now feels like a beautiful indulgence, and he thinks that feeling has merit and whole businesses will be built around it. His own answer to doing both at once is the interview: being interviewed by a high-EQ person who senses where you are emotionally and pulls the thread instead of marching down a question list. It captures compelling human narrative and documents your professional identity in a form AI will recognize, and it’s why long form still resonates even in the short-attention era. His question: what’s the most meaningful thing you do that’s completely offline? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

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 express part of it outwardly to differentiate, humanize, and move the hearts and minds that matter to their success, not just clients, but future employees and collaborators too. Then to the signal: a Wired story that the Center for Humane Technology, the online-safety nonprofit co-founded by Tristan Harris of The Social Dilemma, is laying off about half its non-founder staff and ending its policy research and litigation work to go founder-led, leaning on public education, briefings, and Harris’s own public profile. The board says a founder-centered approach is the most effective way to advance the mission. Some former employees worry it’s trading institutional capability for one person’s visibility.Matt’s read, offered as interpretation rather than fact: this looks like an organization recognizing it got ahead of its own economics, that its founder is still its best asset, and that it needs more booster rocket before it can run on built-out infrastructure. That’s the analogy that anchors the episode. A founder is a booster rocket. To get the shuttle into space, you need that heat and fuel burning hot. Flame out too early and you never reach orbit. But keep it up long enough, in the right direction with the right strategy, and eventually the boosters fall away and the thing floats on its own. Every founder-led organization faces the same conundrum: if you walked away for six months, would it keep going? And it’s okay if the answer is no, that’s just a stage. The danger is not knowing which stage you’re in. The work is to use the founder phase to speak the vision into reality, then patiently build the revenue lines, the IP, and the team that don’t depend on you. Matt’s thinking about it for The Bigger Stage himself. His question: are you still in the booster-rocket phase, or have the boosters fallen away? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

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 is to be in the same room. Digiday picked up the same signal this week, with creators and brands starting to treat real-world turnout as proof that an audience is actually a community.But Matt isn’t telling you to book an arena. For most founders, the arena is a 100-seat room, or ten of the right people around a table. He makes the case for why entertaining people counts as helping them, why it’s risky to keep all your relationships on someone else’s platform, and why a small event this season might be the smartest next step toward the bigger stage.What kind of live events matter to you? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

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 he’s on a person’s official channel, what he’s watching may not be real, a skepticism that used to feel tinfoil-hat and is now just well-founded. He points to Washington Post reporting on the bipartisan No Fakes Act, which would create federal protection against unauthorized digital replicas of a person’s voice or likeness while preserving exemptions for news, commentary, satire, and parody. Physician-creator Joel Bervell found an AI version of himself endorsing a product he’d never used, and named the real harm precisely: the fake wasn’t simply borrowing his face, it was borrowing the trust tied to his medical license and his relationship with his audience. Therapist-creator Kati Morton says she runs into fakes of herself all the time. For creators, this isn’t just identity theft, it’s a threat to sponsorships, credibility, and hard-earned audience trust.Matt’s point goes past the danger to the opportunity. In a world where you can no longer assume what you see is real, the move is to build a clearly-owned home base, channels plainly labeled as the real ones, where you show up yourself and keep a genuine feedback loop with your audience (and he’s careful, as always, not to call every following a community). That home base does double duty: it deepens the intimate trust that makes your work matter, and it gives you a place to warn people when a fake shows up wearing your face. He frames it as another form of hacking, copying you without ever touching your account, and admits it’s hitting different than past threats. But he doesn’t think a truly post-factual world can sustain itself. People don’t like being tricked, except when they opt into it, like a game, and the more they realize some of what they’re watching is fabricated, the more they’ll double down on the voices and places they trust. So build the trust, and build a space where people know for certain they can find the real you.Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-creator/2026/09/30/verified-creators-tech-firms-push-no-fakes-bill-rein-ai/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

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 real strategy. It’s a comparison he didn’t even know he was making, sometimes to an old-media model that’s gone (the daily talk show with millions of viewers is dead and buried), and sometimes to a YouTuber with five million followers. The neighbor has a Maserati and you have a Toyota, so surely you should have a Maserati. Maybe, maybe not, but that’s not the point. The point is how much of your dissatisfaction is rooted in an expectation you never consciously chose.His antidote is two words: aim small. Not small ambition, but a small, concentrated group of people who are genuinely all in on what you’re about. That’s how the bigger stage actually gets built. A hundred highly engaged people will change your life, and if each refers you to a handful, you’re at a thousand before long. In a world of too much of everything, the real danger is losing yourself in it and forgetting the next thing, the person in your immediate circle, the next step. Platforms will keep changing (AI is accelerating it), so if you build your identity around a platform instead of around who you serve, you can spend ten years chasing a stage that’s dead by the time you arrive. Serve your people first, and change mediums with them as they move. Matt’s honest that social media is both indispensable and dangerous, that it can quietly turn you into an unpaid worker unless you’re actually serving there, in which case you measure by whether people are getting value, not by likes. He points to his own steady, unforced Substack growth (the overall audience doubled over the year, still climbing, with almost nothing pushed) as proof that concentration beats chasing. His question: what are you expecting of yourself that you don’t even realize, and what does meaningful growth look like for you? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

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 went from local to national, in meaningful part through social video. The lesson her team learned: stop treating your content as an advertisement and start treating it as a storefront. So many businesses today have no brick-and-mortar location, no room with people always walking in, and social can be the facsimile of that storefront, the place people walk in, meet you, and feel your energy with their own eyes. A traditional ad says “here’s my chocolate, buy it.” The storefront approach says “I’m in Tennessee, but let me introduce you to Ghana, to my family, to where this cocoa comes from and why we build our supply chain to take care of the farmers.” That kind of storytelling invites people into the living room of your business, and it can get them excited before you’ve launched a thing.Matt ties it to his standing objection to “personal branding,” which he thinks cheapens the work, because it implies building a facade around you. Approach it instead as helping you tell your true story in many ways, and you still get a brand, but with intention behind it and a far more genuine result. He frames the day’s other signal (YouTube moving into television-scale, IP-retained programming, per Outlook Business) as the same story from the platform side: producers no longer have to choose between owning their work and getting distribution, but the window is open now and consolidation is coming, so if producing is your thing, this is the time to play. Underneath both is the refrain he keeps landing on: just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Find the sandbox, the art form, the platform that’s actually right for you and your audience (Instagram is dead for some, wonderful for others) and build your storefront there. The question to carry into the weekend: what are you building, and where does your storefront live? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

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 as important, and 60% of workers worry AI is eroding their skills, with critical thinking the one they name most. The people at the top want judgment; the people in the trenches, buried in keep-it-moving pressure and left to manage the AI shift alone, don’t see it that way. Second, a set of ad-industry reports (which Matt flags as biased) showing podcast advertising delivering strong ROI, with host-read, entertaining ads producing the biggest brand lift regardless of the host’s follower count.Here’s the connection. Reach matters and podcasts are gaining it, but the relationship with your audience matters more, because it means you know who they are, you have their trust, and entertainment carries the rest. And underneath all of it sits the thing IBM is really pointing at: critical thinking is part of your unique expression. Information is a commodity now, so how you see and interpret the world is your differentiation. A personality is great, but you need a personality with a point of view, and a point of view requires actual thought, analysis, friction. That’s why overusing AI is quietly dangerous. When something’s done for you, the human instinct isn’t to work harder, it’s to stop thinking about it, and every bit of friction you remove is learning you skip. You don’t develop judgment by consuming media; you develop it by getting in the ring. Matt’s proof is his own week: four-plus hours at a Black Podcasters Association gathering he’d meant to leave early, staying because people were sharing real points of view (including one he disagrees with, that reworking a talk show into a podcast “isn’t podcasting”). He didn’t debate it in the moment, but he’s been chewing on it ever since. That’s the point. Being able to speak is good; having a point of view is better. Without one, it’s just more noise. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

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 blinding diamonds, and only near the very end of his thirty-minute slot shifted to his family’s story, his father’s struggle, the sacrifices that got him his start. The energy in the room transformed in that moment. And Matt’s takeaway is a question: what if he’d started there? The whole talk would have landed differently, everything recast in that light. The Walmart CEO followed a similar shape, opening on supply chain and trends before edging toward something personal later, never quite arriving.That’s the lesson, and it ties the whole run together: your personal story is your best story, no matter how big you are. You can run the world’s largest retailer and it’s still the personal narrative that makes an audience lean in. Because if someone can see themselves in your story, you’ve got them. Matt’s image for it is sharp: no matter how big the diamonds around your neck, a person without them can look at you, and if they see themselves in you, the reflection they catch through those diamonds is themselves. That’s far more powerful than “look at me, I’m great.” He also clocks the crowds (Tyra and Martha packed the room), Tyra’s genuine but carefully bounded vulnerability, and the sheer value of being there in person: he met online contacts face to face, recognized them by their voices, and felt how different real-life connection is. His closing questions, heading into the weekend: what’s the personal story that makes everything else you do more powerful and relatable, and what can you do to be kind to yourself? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

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. Around it, the money is pouring in: Steven Bartlett of Diary of a CEO is deploying up to $400 million with Authentic Brands (the Reebok/Shaq/Elvis licensing machine) to turn creators into full companies, on the thesis that a creator is a founder, not just someone making content. But Matt could feel a tension in the room — a field saturating with young, polished people positioning as experts they haven’t lived long enough to be. When everyone’s a creator, nobody’s that special, and it feels, he says, like a bubble straining to break. A sharp Decoder piece crystallized it: YouTube didn’t remove the gatekeepers, it swapped tweedy human ones for an algorithm that still decides whether you’re seen at all. The ring is open, but you’re being curated just the same.So where does that leave a real expert? Matt points to Oprah — who understands group psychology and reinvention better than almost anyone — now doing traveling podcasts instead of a fixed studio, and staging a two-hour immersive “AHA” experience at the Las Vegas Sphere with an art-and-music collective. Grab-the-mic-and-talk isn’t enough anymore; the frontier is experiential. She can go big because she has the resources, but the principle scales down: whatever you build should be experiential and unmistakably yours. Matt’s refrain lands hard here — don’t put yourself in someone else’s image. Just because you can start a podcast doesn’t mean you should; for you it might be a poetry slam, an IRL night at a café, a theater event. In a moment when the early boom is giving way to something no one can name yet, and where a few players will eventually take most of the pie, copying what works only makes you derivative. The real opportunity is to get more creative, lean harder into who you are and who you’re not, and build the thing only you could. His question: what could you do that’s authentic to you, creative, and worth experiencing — something that makes people understand your value even more? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

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 applies to anyone making that leap. And it’s happening far beyond journalism: people who earned multiple six figures inside big institutions are heading out on their own, voluntarily or not, and discovering that a half-million-dollar salary and a “please subscribe for $12 a month” Substack are entirely different games. Swisher’s advice, notably, is not “follow your passion.” It’s assess your risk tolerance, keep skills that are always saleable, sense what audiences will want before they ask — and, above all, have something distinctive to say.That last one is where Matt digs in. You rarely get to say something genuinely new, but you can be distinctive — substantively (going against a common belief) or stylistically (the way you deliver it, the way a drug company engineers whether a treatment arrives as a pill or a shot). The hard part, especially for people whose muscle was built in collaborative or diplomatic corporate settings, is planting a flag on a real position and defending it. A point of view sharp enough to break through will attract people who fight you and leave nasty comments — and Matt’s tell is that the faster and more reptilian the reaction, the less thought behind it. That comes with the territory. Draw on the credibility and relationships you earned over decades, then get comfortable saying what you actually think, a bit more candidly and fearlessly than felt allowed before. His closing question is the sharpest distillation yet of the theme he keeps circling: if your former title disappeared, what still makes someone curious about you? The substance is there, he promises — put the prompt to your mind, go for a walk, and let it surface. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com