For anyone who keeps saying “I need to get out there, I need to do a talk” and hasn’t yet, Matt has a short, direct nudge. The stage you’re waiting for probably already exists — you’re sitting in it. He tells the story of a networking group he’s part of, where he was invited to give a ten-minute talk to twenty-eight people in a room with the same croissants, coffee, and fruit basket as always. Same room, same meeting — but it had grown more vibrant since his first visit, and it hit him: this was a bigger stage than it used to be, without ever changing rooms.

That’s the whole reframe. A stage isn’t a TEDx spotlight or a conference hall of 10,000 (which, let’s be honest, is usually a couple hundred). It’s any place where familiar, friendly people gather regularly and trust each other — a low-pressure room to work your material, ask for real feedback, and get better every single time. Matt did the talk differently than ever before, got great feedback, and it still wasn’t perfect — which is exactly the point, because you just keep doing it and keep refining. He closes with a practical on-ramp for the person who senses they’ve got a story but can’t quite grab it: let yourself be interviewed, watch it back, and pull the story out like clay on a wheel. The takeaway to carry into your day: treat the world as your stage, and step onto the one already in front of you.

Matt’s back with a warning he’s aiming squarely at himself as much as anyone: creative atrophy. He uses AI tools constantly and says so plainly, but he’s noticing what happens when you outsource the thinking rather than the tasks — the posts all start to look the same, the output looks fine, and the muscle quietly wastes away. His half-joking name for the alternative is MattGPT. He has a brain. He intends to use it.

So he offers three things he does daily to keep the fire lit. Get quiet — turn off the podcasts, the music, the YouTube, everything — because silence is oxygen for a fire, and cut the oxygen and the fire goes out. Let your mind wander, not chasing shiny objects but stepping through a Narnia-style doorway into a place of wonder and memory. Then ask yourself questions, because as his mentor taught him, your brain will focus on whatever you point it at — you just have to leave the browser open long enough for the answer to come back. He also makes a case worth hearing on why storytelling isn’t actually a trend (it has never once not been relevant), why “brand” mostly just means reputation, and how much of the in-and-out chatter is driven by social media marketers doing their job. Plus a tease: a new partnership he’s excited about, coming in the next couple of weeks. The question to sit with: what will you do today to take your brain to the gym?

Matt’s back after time away for a family loss, and he returns with something useful: a dead-simple framework for building a story on the fly. He’s skeptical of the elaborate storytelling models making the rounds on LinkedIn — the Pixar method, the hero’s journey — because nobody actually constructs a story in real time out of those. What he reaches for instead comes from an unexpected place: ten years running high-impact feedback conversations with leadership teams. His insight is that feedback and storytelling are chasing the same goal — not just to be absorbed, but to inspire action. The shorthand is DAP: Describe, Appreciate, Prescribe.

He walks through all three. Describe the facts to set the scene and invite people in — concrete detail is what makes a workplace a listener has never entered suddenly feel familiar (everyone’s stood at a water cooler). Appreciate those facts — the meaning, the judgment, how you felt, the insight you drew — which is where the real value lives. Prescribe what it means going forward, for you and for the person listening. Land all three and your audience can see themselves in the story and imagine acting differently because of it. Matt closes on the law that ties it together: a story has to be memorable to be actionable — because if they forget it, they won’t do it.

Matt’s been thinking about the distraction economy — the way modern work fragments your attention before a single idea can fully form. The Microsoft data is brutal (knowledge workers interrupted roughly every two minutes all day), and it’s the enemy of the thing Matt cares most about: a deeply developed story. He reaches for a metaphor from his years in Japan — great ramen broth isn’t fast. Someone stirs a giant pork bone for hours and hours, tasting and tending until the flavor goes deep. The best stories, the best ideas, come from exactly that kind of patient simmering, and we now live in a system that fights us on it at every turn.

Then comes the twist worth sitting with. AI feels like relief — your taxed brain hands off the work and gets back something complete and instant. Matt uses these tools every day and says so plainly. But the danger is real: lean on them too hard and you stop stirring your own broth, stop throwing your own clay on the wheel, stop building the muscle that makes the thinking yours. His bet for what’s next is that protected, quiet, tool-free space to read and write will be the differentiator for anyone building something with real meaning underneath it. The closing challenge: how will you carve out — and fiercely protect — the time to show the true depth of your thinking?

Subtitle: Matt resets Backstage around its real purpose — and shares the storytelling shift that made a bored panel remember him for the rest of the day

Description:

Backstage is changing, and Matt’s being upfront about why: he changed the name before he changed the show, and now it’s time for the style to catch up. Going forward this is a sharper daily dose for founders, entrepreneurs, and leaders who’ve realized their personal stories are a real business advantage — with a warm nod to the legacy audience of friends and family who’ve been here since it was a personal journal. Then he gets to the actual lesson: how to tell a short story that lands.

The proof is a panel he sat on years ago, bored stiff by a by-the-numbers format, who decided to answer his question with a story instead of a list — and watched the whole room wake up. People brought it up in follow-up meetings for the rest of the day; the story traveled beyond him. Matt’s point is that storytelling is a muscle, not a gift: it takes practice to keep stories accessible and to drop into that mode with energy, clarity, and presence. A practical, slightly reflective one on why “you know what that reminds me of…” beats “trend number one is…” every time — and a closing challenge to notice what makes you pay attention to someone else today.

The CN Tower turns 50 today — it opened to the public on June 26, 1976 — and Matt can’t stop thinking about what makes a tower iconic: the way one structure becomes shorthand for an entire city, from Toronto to Seattle’s Space Needle to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It’s his new metaphor for the operator-to-icon journey. Becoming an icon means raising a tower rooted deep in your base — your brand, your story, your personality — that throws a beacon far past it. The catch is that towers take a long time to go up, and the base has to be ruthlessly focused before the signal can travel.

Which leads to a candid reflection: Matt’s own tower is still under construction. He’s wrestling with a real tension in who he serves — the established, hypergrowth founders he’s built around versus the people in transition whose stories tug at his heart — and why focus, not breadth, is what finally gets a structure off the ground. Along the way: a warm recap of his first “DiNNr” (six people, two and a half hours, the real stories behind the polished exteriors), a quick lap through this day in history, and a Substack milestone coming into view. A reflective Friday send-off to close: who will you connect with this weekend, and what will you do to take care of yourself?

In 1886, a teenage cellist touring Brazil was pushed onto a podium nobody else could hold: a hostile crowd, a walked-out conductor, and a full performance of Aida with no rehearsal. He led the whole thing from memory. His name was Arturo Toscanini, and that accidental night, which the history books place somewhere in late June, launched one of the longest, greatest conducting careers ever. Matt’s takeaway is the part worth sitting with: the conductor was already inside the cellist. The skill drew from the same source; it just hadn’t found its form yet.

It’s a story for anyone building something: the plumber, the programmer, the operator who became a founder and discovered the role asks for more than the craft that started it. But Matt’s real point is readiness. You can’t know which moment is yours, so you prepare, stay curious, and keep your heart open to good risk. Along the way: the deliberate next layer of his YouTube strategy taking shape this summer, a two-hour sales webinar that turned into a masterclass in how not to sell (shame and pressure guarantee the opposite of a sale), and a peek at tonight’s intimate storytelling dinner in SoHo. An energizing one — with a question to carry: what’s the moment you’re quietly getting ready for?

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A small note from the cutting room: Toscanini's accidental debut is pinned by historians to two competing dates — June 25 and June 30, 1886 — so the exact day is debated rather than settled. Either way, the story holds.

Matt’s long-form founder interviews have always been the aspirational top of the Bigger Stage — proof of what’s possible after years of building something real. Now he’s adding the layer he’d always planned to: a sharper, more useful YouTube track aimed upstream, helping experienced professionals launch themselves as their own company and sell their story, their why, to win clients on their own terms. Same channel, same mission, deeper reach. The refinement (insiders hear it first) extends the strategy rather than replacing it — meet people where they’re searching for answers, and the path to working with founder-CEOs opens up naturally downstream.

Underneath the platform tactics is the principle that’s been guiding the whole build: what you do is fungible, but why you do it isn’t. The meaning beneath the work is what survives layoffs, lost titles, and the day an “orange meteor” comes for your business — and it’s the thread that lets one channel serve very different audiences at once. There’s also a summer weather check, a very honest gripe about World Cup traffic through the Lincoln Tunnel, and a candid note on staying disciplined when results lag behind the effort. A focused one for anyone refining what they’re already building.

On June 23, 1868, the first typewriter patent was granted — but the machine that eventually put QWERTY in everyone’s hands almost didn’t get made at scale. The company that pulled it off wasn’t a printer or a publisher. It was a firearms manufacturer in trouble. Matt digs into how Remington, struggling after the Civil War dried up its business, reinvented itself around the typewriter, and why the least obvious partner turned out to be the perfect one.

That history opens up a sharper question for anyone building something: most of us go looking for partners who can send us business. Matt makes the case that this is exactly the trap. The better lens is asking who’s remaking themselves right now — and where their reinvention happens to overlap with what you do. (Case in point: the viral shoe brand that just rebranded itself into an AI company.) It’s a short, practical reframe on why the best partnerships start with intention rather than extraction.

It’s Monday, June 22nd — 92 days to fall, the World Cup is quietly turning NYC and Northern NJ into a parking lot, and Matt is back behind the mic with a confession: summer is a recession. Not the scary kind — the calendar kind. Fewer appointments, more out-of-offices, the slow exhale most businesses feel once the kids are out of school. And the smartest move in a recession, as a fellow named Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood when he signed the GI Bill in 1944, is to invest. Matt threads together that bill, a muttering Galileo, and the quiet art of planting now so you can harvest later.

From there it gets personal. Matt digs into why growth always starts with letting go — even when the thing you’re letting go of is your baby — why process beats results on the days you’ve completely lost the plot, and what he’s putting in the ground this season, from a health reset to a reading stack with some uncomfortable parallels to right now. Oh, and one more thing: the daily journal is officially back. So what are you going to take a shot at today?