Recording through a rough cold, Matt lays out a theory about where all of this is heading. The feeds are filling with AI facsimiles — synthetic influencers, fake Pitbull-and-Rihanna “collaborations” convincing enough that he checked iTunes to be sure — and he notices his own reaction hardening: the moment he suspects something’s fake, even if it’s beautifully produced, he’s gone. Disregarded, and a little angry about it. He thinks he’s not the outlier he might seem, and that as distrust compounds — even a five percent shift — a lot of people will simply start turning it off. What follows a flood of the fake, in his read, is a growing hunger for the real.

So what does someone building a business do about it? “Be authentic” is nothing new, and Matt admits he’s tired of the word. He wants something sharper: invest in your point of view. Not just what you believe, but how you arrived at it — because people will respect the way you got somewhere and follow you even when they disagree with the conclusion. A strong, curious, pressure-tested point of view that you’re willing to revise with new information is the thing that’s genuinely hard to duplicate, which is exactly why it’s becoming premium. He frames it as farming: go down into the soil of your business and your life and be willing to dig for what’s actually yours — your values, your lens, where they came from. He notes this can be a real muscle to build, especially for anyone coming out of a corporate culture that quietly disincentivized having a strong view, and points to a telling shift: companies now hiring PR firms to help their leaders show a personality and a perspective online. His closing challenge is pointed: what’s something you believe strongly but keep dancing around instead of saying plainly — “I despise this, and here’s why”? That might be exactly where your velocity is hiding.

Matt starts with a defense of boredom — specifically the stale-donut, mediocre-coffee, studying-the-carpet-pattern boredom of a conference breakout room. Because a bored audience is the greatest opportunity a speaker can ask for. When everyone’s tuned out, anything genuinely new snaps them back to attention. And newness, he notes, is finite by definition. A president is a lame duck by year six; anyone hot for a minute disappears if they don’t reinvent. The trick is to use your newness while you have it, and to keep finding fresh ways to say things when you don’t.

He proves it with a story from high school: a Rotary scholarship winner standing up at the local club lunch, cracking playful jokes across every political persuasion in the room without insulting anyone, and lighting the place up simply by being the novel kid who jazzed up their usual meal. They told him to come back anytime — a standing stage, lunch included — and his real regret is that he didn’t take it more often. Two lessons fall out of that afternoon. First, paint slightly outside the lines: be a little novel, a little unexpected, from a place of joy rather than provocation. Second, and more durable — get into a community and use it as your laboratory. Comedians grind through dive bars and hecklers before HBO; you need the same, a room of people who like and respect you enough to tell you when a bit lands and when you’ve stepped over a line. Your stage doesn’t need ten thousand seats. It can be a networking group, a mastermind, or a microphone at your desk. The catch is reciprocity: you don’t get fed unless you feed it. It’s gardening. The question for today: what’s the stage you’ll join or build?

Matt takes you back to where it started: a Tokyo apartment about a decade ago, a noisy Blue Yeti mic that picked up everything, and a podcast called Connections That Matter that ran maybe a dozen episodes before he let it go fallow. By the numbers it “failed” — barely any listeners, a classic case of “podfading.” But Matt frames it as the opposite of a failure. Those dozen conversations taught him the two things that quietly became the foundation of The Bigger Stage: people learn about themselves when they’re interviewed, and far more people than you’d expect are genuinely glad to be asked onto a show, even a small one, because it’s a chance to practice being seen.

From there he offers a permission slip disguised as a strategy. Ignore the noise telling you that more platforms and more posting is the answer — and ignore the opposite voice that says avoid it all. Instead, sample from the buffet. Open the TikTok account, put a couple videos on YouTube, try the Substack, and treat each one as reconnaissance: who’s here, how do people talk, how permanent do posts feel, does this match my personality and my purpose? You might use a platform for a month and walk away — that’s a win, because now you know what you’re missing instead of just fearing it, which makes you far less vulnerable to anyone whose interest is your endless attention. Then settle on the few you can actually sustain with the resources you have. He’s blunt about the trap for solopreneurs: try to do everything and you’ll do all of it poorly, and blasting identical content across every platform ignores that they’re all different animals. Try everything, keep what fits, and let the rest go.

Matt spent three hours on Saturday in a studio near Columbus Circle, at an improv-inspired session his colleague Meredith ran for a small group of people from different walks of life. Watching everyone play with a nearly empty room — a piano, some red curtains, a support pillar — he noticed something precise about what actually pulled the room’s attention. It wasn’t the prettiest movement or the cleverest bit. It was the reveal. His own head slowly rising from behind the piano got instant laughs; another person hiding in the curtains and then throwing them open created real intrigue. Every time, the energy bent toward what’s about to be shown.

Then he connects it to your feed. A social media analyst he follows recently noted that AI-generated infographics are underperforming, and Matt’s read on why is that they reveal nothing — they serve up something you have to decode, that feels like the same old stuff you’ve seen before, which is the exact reaction any whiff of AI-written copy triggers. Humans are wired for the reveal; it’s why nearly every culture built entertainment around emerging from behind a fan, a screen, a curtain. So when the advice is “be authentic,” Matt wants to be more specific: authenticity works because a personal story reveals something. Anyone can wear the nice suit and the Italian shoes — there’s plenty of nice. What holds attention is showing something real that people couldn’t otherwise see. He even turns the lens on himself, admitting he only half-revealed today, and leaves you with the harder challenge: how do you go deeper and pull out the revelation that’s actually worth sharing? (Get out of your comfort zone, get around other people, and see yourself from an angle you can’t find alone.)

Years ago in Tokyo, Matt read a book that hit him like water in the desert — Dr. Tasha Eurich’s Insight — and came away certain of two things: he wanted to actually know this person, and he had something to offer her too. He could have fired off the standard email. Great book, can we talk. Instead he sat down and wrote a proper long-form letter about what the book meant to him and why he thought they should meet, then assumed he’d never hear back. He did hear back. What she said, essentially, was that it was unlike almost anything she receives. That letter became a friendship that’s lasted years, survived a collaboration that didn’t work out, and opened doors he never asked it to open.

The point isn’t the doors. Matt’s argument is that American culture runs highly transactional — something he sees clearly after fourteen years living abroad — and that in an era of accelerating disruption, genuine non-transactional relationships are exactly what people are starving for. That matters most for anyone in transition: leave a big company after years of adapting to its culture and your own identity can be surprisingly hard to locate, which is precisely the gap a real feedback loop fills. He also makes a counterintuitive case for reaching out to people you assume are out of your league. It’s a bit like the old line about models never getting asked out because everyone assumes their dance card is full — prominence can be isolating. The only requirement is that you mean it. The weekend question: who have you neglected, who would you like to know, and what would it take?

Matt’s been stuck on a talk. He knew the topics, knew the material was in there somewhere, but couldn’t find his own angle on it — buried under operations, meetings, priorities, and everything else that pulls a founder away from the deeper stuff. Then a colleague and dear friend looked at him and simply laid it out: it’s this, because you lived that, because you value this. He was writing furiously. It was obvious the moment someone else said it out loud. His conclusion is that without genuine relationships, he wouldn’t have had the mirror — and the mirror is what shows you the thing you can’t see from inside your own head.

He also offers some relief for anyone paralyzed by the pressure to be original. You’re probably not going to produce a new theory of relativity, and you don’t have to. Simon Sinek’s idea about starting with why wasn’t new either — what was original was how he made people understand it, in a TEDx talk that was essentially one guy and a flip pad. Your experience, your perspective, your personality is the original delivery. From there Matt gets to the observation that gives the episode its title: game recognizes game. The people closest to you are close because you share critical values, which is precisely why they can see yours — and when they reflect those values back to you, they appreciate them in both senses at once. They recognize the value, and they increase it. (Anyone who’s been following the DAP framework will notice that’s the same word doing the same job in the middle of it.) The nudge for today: who can you reach out to for perspective, and what insight do you need to power your next move?

You’ll find no shortage of advice telling you to be everywhere, all the time, posting a dozen times a day across every platform. Matt listens to Gary Vee too — but he thinks that prescription quietly breaks down for the solopreneur or the founder building something real. To explain why, he reaches for a company most people have already forgotten: Quibi. Hollywood titan Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay and HP chief Meg Whitman, $1.75 billion in funding, premium short-form video built for the gaps in your day. It lasted about six months. They even named the company after the format — “quick bites” — which Matt argues is the tell.

His diagnosis is simple and it applies to you: Quibi led with format and left purpose and story for later. A new delivery system only matters when people already want what’s being delivered — tell someone their injection can become a pill and they’ll listen, but only if they were sold on the drug in the first place. Which is why the endless “should I be on TikTok?” debate misses the real question: what’s your story, your purpose, your intention? Delivery is fungible. And as a friend of Matt’s puts it, short-form without that foundation is just tissue box posts — used once, thrown away, no loyalty built, and burnout waiting at the end of the treadmill. His prescription is unglamorous and durable: get clearer on who you help and why, then find the method that draws it out of you — writing, a writing group, a Substack nobody reads yet, and reading widely (fantasy counts). Tend the garden instead of feeding the machine.

The New York Times found hundreds of AI-generated doctors, healers, and wellness influencers on social feeds — convincing-looking people who don’t exist, selling supplements to real consumers. Matt’s not here to pile on about how dystopian that is (it’s dystopian on its face, and there’s more coming). He’s interested in the opportunity hiding inside it. If the feed is filling up with synthetic humans, then being a real, accessible, meet-you-in-person human becomes the scarce thing — and Matt thinks that’s exactly where the next real leaders get built.

Which brings him to a correction of his own thinking. He used to believe you could skip the messy work of community — just do the podcast, grow the YouTube channel, collect the followers. He now thinks that was wrong. A million subscribers isn’t a million fans; plenty of people click subscribe without being all in on you. Community is the thing that turns an audience into a fan base, and it takes real feeding: showing up, telling the truth, apologizing when you blow it, creating actual chances to connect. He also opens with an entrepreneur who inspired him — a Japanese founder who built a health food brand against heavy family pressure and is now bringing it to the US, with the unmistakable energy of someone who will simply never quit. The questions to sit with: what are you building, what’s your intention behind it, and which community would be best served by it?

Matt watched the World Cup final this weekend (under mild spousal duress — he’s the first to admit soccer isn’t his sport) and came away far more struck by what happened after the whistle than during the match. Watching the trophy ceremony footage, he saw a masterclass in the wrong instinct: a stage that belonged to the winning players, and a guest who wouldn’t leave it. He’s careful to say this isn’t political commentary — there’s plenty of that already — but he couldn’t let the leadership lesson pass, because it was that clear.

The principle underneath it applies to every stage you’ll stand on this week, including the sales call, the team meeting, and the panel nobody’s filming. You can hold every title, command real power, and still look about two inches tall the moment you try to take a spotlight that isn’t yours. The inverse is just as reliable: graciousness, making room, highlighting others, and stepping off when it’s not your time is what makes a person look ten feet tall. Matt calls it quiet power — it lives in the pauses, in the message, in the inclusivity. He also notes we’re all unusually attuned to this, having grown up on playgrounds with the kid who took all the credit, which is why even small versions of it register. The week’s question: how will you make someone else shine?

Matt just stepped out of a recording with T.J. Winick — a broadcast journalist who spent two decades at ABC News (Nightline, Good Morning America) before crossing over to help companies build and defend their reputations — and he’s still buzzing from it. The through-line of Winick’s book Reputation Capital is deceptively simple: reputation is an asset you accumulate over time, like money in the bank, and when trouble hits, it’s rarely the catastrophe that destroys a brand. It’s the response. As Winick puts it, the best-managed crises are the ones you never heard about — which reframes PR from a monthly retainer for press hits into something you build early, strategically, and authentically (right down to how you show up in AI search through third-party validation).

But the part that lit Matt up is bigger than crisis management. Whatever business you’re in, you have a shot at thought leadership — and thought leadership just means helping people make sense of a complex, sometimes scary world. Own an HVAC company? You have a real perspective on energy prices, climate, even the metals in your supply chain, that could help someone understand why things are happening around them. The catch is that you usually can’t see your own leadership potential until someone helps you pull it out. So Matt’s takeaway lands where the week has been pointing: let yourself be interviewed, find the right partners, and let them draw the stories out of you like clay on a wheel. His weekend question: what conversation could you have that reveals something genuinely useful to the people you serve? (Recorded through the Canadian-wildfire haze blanketing New York — Matt sounds a little under the weather, and says so.)