Backstage w/ Matt Stone

[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?

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 allergy-friendly cookies out of her car. Her entire early marketing strategy was simple: tell the story of why she started the company, then let people taste the product. That story is what attracted customers and investors, including Jay-Z’s Marcy Venture Partners, which Woodard says was sold not by a plan but by why she was doing it. (She did scale too fast, 300 stores to 5,000 in a year, 10x revenue with infrastructure that couldn’t keep up, which nearly killed the business, but Matt’s point is she never gets near that problem without the story that got her off the ground.) The lesson he keeps hammering: when you’re small, a powerful story lets you punch way above your weight, because people invest in you, not the plan. The plan will change. They’re betting on whether you can grow, learn, and adapt.

The second story is Bird CEO Robert Vis, who cut his workforce from over 1,000 to 120 and says AI is making high-agency generalists more valuable, people who grasp the larger objective, exercise judgment, and own the result rather than just executing tasks. Matt agrees generalists are valuable (as a Gen X generalist with a law degree, sales, and even trades skills behind him, he counts himself one). His worry is upstream: judgment and generalist wisdom require real experience and a feedback loop, time in the trenches, learning by doing. Between social media and AI doing the work for people, he’s not sure we’ll grow enough people with enough genuine experience to become those generalists. So he turns fear into opportunity. The move is to deliberately keep yourself in a garden where ideas get exchanged and pressure-tested, book clubs, philosophy clubs, hands-dirty work, places with deep thought and a real feedback loop. He’s got a specific plan to reinvest in that for himself, because it’s easy to lose touch with it on these platforms. His question: how are you tending your wisdom garden?

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?

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, mostly AI founders, generating around $10,000 a month, and she keeps it as a side hustle alongside a full-time job. What’s more interesting than the revenue is the design: no mixers. They hike, camp, dirt bike, play poker, do things together. You get to know someone over eight hours on a trail in a way a name-tag event never delivers. Matt connects it to a Denver group called Accelerent, whose leader gently corrected him when he said “networking group.” No, we’re a relationship group. They do everything a networking group does, just built entirely on intentional, high-end relationship building.

His read: a lot of people are done with traditional networking, and there’s real opportunity in giving them a way to come together that’s non-salesy and built around something they actually enjoy. The on-ramp is smaller than people think. Get three people in a room. If each brings three, you’re at twelve, and then it compounds. He runs the economics (a hobby quietly throwing off a few thousand a month, with room to become a full business if she ever wanted it) and frames it the way he frames YouTube: the activity itself can be the product, or it can be how you monetize everything around it. Underneath it is the metaphor he keeps returning to, his Japanese father-in-law’s garden, known across the neighborhood, built from a few plants years ago and fed patiently ever since. That’s how you build community in 2026. The screen is a great bulletin board for staying top of mind, but people want to meet somewhere real. His advice: start in your own local community and dive in. His questions: what’s the best event you’ve been to lately, or the one you wish someone would host?

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?

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 professional market running from roughly $10,000 to $50,000. Only about 1 in 20 speakers reporting through the platform earns $20,000 or more per event. Matt reads that as two distinct markets: a large commodity mid-market, and a smaller authority-driven tier where scarcity, a book, and real media visibility command dramatically higher fees. Starting at $2,500 to $5,000 is nothing to sneeze at. It’s just worth knowing the ceiling lifts a lot when you build authority in the right ways.

The rest of the episode circles his standing theme: trust is the coin of the realm. Business Insider notes that human visibility is becoming more valuable as AI content floods LinkedIn, with candid photos, selfies, and unscripted video stopping the scroll because people respond to visible signs of a real human behind the content. Matt’s known the power of a genuine high-resolution face for years, and even when he uses AI to adjust an image, he tells it to leave the face alone. Meanwhile more people are betting on themselves, younger professionals going independent with cheap AI tools, founders seed-strapping from personal networks instead of institutional VC, which means a flood of new founder-led stories competing for attention (great for what The Bigger Stage does, and more crowded at the same time). The Financial Times sizes the US creator economy around $44 billion in 2026, even as competition, burnout, and AI-generated content raise the stakes, and creators chasing big AI sponsorship deals worry that association with AI could erode the very trust they depend on. His open also offers a lovely aside: he’s reading a book about a doomed 19th-century South Pole expedition, and it reminds him that people crave adventure even knowing suffering comes with it, which is exactly what a great talk can do, take people somewhere outside their normal world. Build the trust, show up as a real human, keep building authority, and the future is yours.

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/

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 day, and Gen Z averages 78. In a world of endless short clips and thumbs flying, people will still give long, sustained attention to a voice they trust and choose. His read: we don’t have less patience for content, we have less patience for low-value content, and we’ll pour time (and money) into the voices that genuinely feed us, usually the ones that invite us to see ourselves in them. That reframes short form and long form. Short form is the bait on the hook, a couple of notes from the opus that tells new people you’re there. Long form is where the relationship actually gets built. And consistency is part of it too. Matt’s candid that bouncing around on posting days hurt his own show, and that landing on a reliable Monday-through-Thursday rhythm builds trust as much as the substance does.

The second signal comes from the speaker world, where he’s watching keynotes shift from sit-and-listen toward do-it-now. The programs catching his eye promise research-backed, tactical takeaways, peer conversation, and design sessions where the whole room works the problem in real time and produces something before anyone leaves. People don’t want to watch the movie and get on with their day. They want to stop it and talk about what they just saw. Matt notices he keeps designing his own workshop exactly this way without planning to, a sign your instincts are picking up signals before your conscious mind catches up. He ties it back to a decade of leadership and feedback work, where the deepest learning almost never came from the materials or the theories. It came from finally having the real conversation. The through-line for both signals is the same: connection is where the value is. Don’t sell out the human race just yet. Settle in for the long haul, become a voice people trust to curate and to feed them, and get your audience doing something, not just hearing something. His question: how can you get the people you’re reaching to make or produce something during or right after your message, instead of just consuming it?

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?

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, and a majority have bought something on a creator’s recommendation in the last six months, with the number climbing among Gen Z and millennials. Nearly half of those younger consumers say they feel a stronger personal connection to social creators than to TV personalities or actors. Deloitte’s own takeaway for brands is to move away from one-off celebrity campaigns toward long-term creator relationships built on audience fit and trust rather than raw follower counts. Matt’s honest about what he still wants to know (what share of all consumers this actually represents, and that it’s consumer data, not directly B2B), and that caution is the point.

The heart of it is a mindset shift. It’s easy, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, to think success is a big follower number, but Matt’s met people with massive counts doing nothing with them, numbers collected over years of pivots. The real question is whether you have a group who will actually respond to what you put out, what you recommend, offer, and invite. He also warns against measuring yourself against professional platform creators whose entire existence is producing content that performs on that platform. If your core business is in another field, you won’t out-post them, and you shouldn’t try. Set your own metrics, do what you can do authentically and well, and stay in your sweet spot. Underneath it all is a principle that ties back to the old email-list playbook: build a following, ideally a real community, that trusts you over time. He’d take a smaller community that’s genuinely dialed in over a big one that’s just a number, any day. The catch is that everyone now has the same chance, so there’s noise everywhere. Be in it for the long haul, figure out what works for you, and stick with it.