Backstage w/ Matt Stone

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), for a strikingly specific reason — AI has upended search. A year ago just 0.3% of its customers used AI to find products; now it’s about eight times that, and because large language models favor third-party advice and live conversation over brand messaging, the retailer is generating exactly that kind of talkable, conversational content. It’s the split Matt keeps naming: media for humans and media for machines — and conversation feeds both. It’s also, he notes, the premise The Bigger Stage was built on, playing out faster than he expected.

Then the heart of it: Sonos. After a 2024 app redesign nearly sank the company, new CEO Tom Conrad’s first diagnosis was, of all things, narrative — Sonos had been behaving like a hardware company. So he changed the story first: we don’t make individual products, we make the Sonos system, hardware and software as one interdependent whole. Only once that story was in place could the org chart, priorities, software investment, and customer experience realign behind it (he restructured the whole company within about three weeks). Matt’s takeaway is a principle that scales all the way down to the personal: if you want to change something, you start with a new story. It’s true for a company and true for you — the story you tell yourself about your fitness, your next chapter, your business sets the direction, because the brain moves toward whatever you point it at. His questions to carry into the long weekend: what story do your employees, your partners, and the market tell about you — is it accurate, and is it pointed backward or forward? And what story refinement would put your ship somewhere completely different a year from now? What story are you going to write this weekend?

John Lewis article: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/sep/03/john-lewis-youtube-chat-show-angela-scanlon

Sonos article: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/988368/sonos-ceo-tom-conrad-ai-smart-home-fabric-app-redesign

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 translate into traction, even when you’re taking all the right steps. He’s candid that he still feels it; he’s building a workshop right now and rode a whole wave of “no one will come” before waking up clear-eyed the next day. The self-doubt is universal, and it does something specific and unhelpful: under fear, the amygdala throws a hood over the prefrontal cortex, and the very care and curiosity that would help you connect gets arrested by survival brain.

His way through is a reframe worth keeping: people actually love to be sold to — they just don’t want to feel sold to. In a world drowning in options, it’s a genuine relief to trust someone enough to take their advice. Think of the shoe salesperson who truly listens (your wide feet, the spot where every shoe rubs, the soles that wear out) and pulls something off the shelf you’d never have considered — not the priciest, not the cheapest, but right, and here’s why. That feels like a gift, and they’re selling the whole time. So when you’re in no-man’s-land, the move is to drop into consultative, curious, genuinely-helpful mode — not asking “what do you need?” but getting into real dialogue, sometimes offering nothing but listening so well that the person feels truly seen. Matt’s watched that turn into deals more times than he can count, when even he thought he had nothing to offer but attention. His close: your greatest gift is your genuine care for other people, and if you don’t let fear drive the conversation, the opportunities start dropping like ripe fruit. How can you show up today as a great listener and thought partner — and what might that do for your mood as you cross hard terrain?

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 jobs by 2030. A company that sells the materials tradespeople use has an obvious stake in there being more of them. But what makes CEO Marvin Ellison’s move interesting to Matt is the diagnosis underneath it: part of the shortage is cultural. America spent decades selling college and white-collar work as the default path and quietly casting the trades as the consolation prize for people who didn’t succeed academically. Lowe’s isn’t just trying to widen the pipeline — it’s trying to change the status narrative. And changing the story, as Matt’s whole show argues, is often the real work.

That’s the transferable lesson, whatever you sell. The most powerful growth strategy isn’t better selling — it’s leading your industry by bringing genuine value to the whole ecosystem and convening people around a cause that matters to you and to them. Do that, and selling gets easy, because you’re not just visible, you’re respected for what you bring. Matt (who once owned a painting business and has a soft spot for the trades) frames it as the outward-facing version of becoming a center of gravity: pull the field together around something real, and your reputation does the work. He opens the episode with a complementary signal from the media world — YouTube Live now commands roughly 60% of livestream watch time, a reminder that “live” and long-form are relationship media (people staying, connecting) while short video is merely discovery media. His reframe for the age everyone’s calling the creator economy: we’re not becoming content creators, we’re becoming connection creators. The question to sit with: in your lane and your community, how could you serve and lead in a way that brings real value to everyone in it?

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 year in the creator economy. Matt uses her story to puncture a myth he hears constantly from Gen X professionals: that cameras, TikTok, and social media belong to younger people. The data says otherwise (Fortune, citing Adobe, has pegged the average creator at around 40, and newer research suggests age can actually increase how much expertise an audience assumes you have). But Matt’s real insight is that the obstacle was never the camera itself. It’s never having expressed a point of view publicly — especially in service of your own business rather than an employer’s.

That’s the deeper shift. Spend a career representing a company and you know exactly where the boundaries are; your point of view is a value used on someone else’s behalf. Strike out on your own and suddenly it’s just you, accountable not to a boss but to an audience — and for a lot of people that feels vain and unnatural, like walking around holding a mirror (Matt reaches for Miss Piggy). His fix is the one he’s built his whole practice on: skip the performance and just talk. He does interviews precisely to pull the point of view out of people, because a conversation feels natural where staring into a lens with no one in mind feels like screaming into an abyss. His own trick: he keeps a real listener in his head (he names his friend Tina, who he can picture smiling) so the mic becomes a conversation. He closes on the feedback loop — selling small items online gives you fast, brutal signal; bigger-ticket offers mean a longer loop you still have to nurture — and on the quiet power of being interviewed: it doesn’t just pull out your ideas, it reveals the limiting beliefs you’re using to talk yourself out of the thing you most want to do. The question: what’s your version of reinvention, and what media hang-up is standing in the way?

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 insider language has an exclusionary effect, and it’s everywhere: he ran a quick search and pulled up the military-derived terms business swims in (war room, battle plan, boots on the ground, beachhead, kill switch) and the industrial-engineering ones (bottlenecks, throughput, feedback loop, stress test). Useful in their place — but even when everyone in the room shares the jargon, people glaze over.

The antidote comes from an Inc. piece on Reed Hastings, analyzed by communication expert Carmine Gallo: Hastings repeatedly converts complicated leadership and AI ideas into simple, named metaphors. “Team, not family.” “Farming for dissent” — because a farm is something you never stop tending, always working the seasons and cycles, actively cultivating disagreement rather than passively waiting for it. The principle is to connect an unfamiliar idea to something the audience already knows, and to give important behaviors language people can remember and repeat. Matt is an unabashed devotee of the farm metaphor himself (a farm is simple to picture yet endlessly complex — soil, timing, seasons, one plant affecting another), and he widens the lesson: because we think in pictures, a vivid metaphor paints one, and even a spoken “imagine…” can lift people out of their jargon walls. His favorite frame for it is the field trip — that childhood jolt of wonder when the ordinary day cracks open into an adventure, a feeling we never outgrow. He notes this will be central to his upcoming “Iconic Introduction” program for established experts and executives leaving corporate. The prompt for the week: what jargon could you replace today with a metaphor or short story that takes people somewhere?

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 reads it, was that technologies, acquisitions, structures, and people may all change, but the cultural core will not. Matt’s skeptical by default of glossy CEO profiles (he says he’d want more data, and is only half-joking that he might just email Subramaniam and ask for an interview), but the sentiment lands, because it names the hardest problem in growth: when you start a company, your DNA, heart, and values are in it — and keeping that alive as you scale from five people to a thousand is brutally difficult.

The thing most worth protecting, Matt argues, is trust — and it matters most precisely when you’re small and nimble. With few layers between you and your people and clients, the link between high trust and fast growth is close to causal (he points to Great Place to Work data, cited by Fortune, suggesting dramatically higher revenue growth in high-trust smaller companies). So how do you preserve it as the bureaucracy thickens? Through storytelling and aligned action. The stories we tell around the campfire reinforce our values — this is who we are, this is what we stand for — which is why PR isn’t all noise, and why the narrative has to be backed by behavior that matches it. Matt loves the small proof in the FedEx piece: their new DataWorks business traced back to an unsolicited white paper from a young employee, a thread from the past the CEO recognized and pulled forward. Get the story and the actions right, and you can change almost everything about how you operate without touching why. His weekend question is the one that ties the whole run together: everything else is fungible, so what are the few things in your enterprise that absolutely are not — and have you started making artifacts to preserve them?

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 ago — that senior executives should build an audience, intellectual property, and even independent revenue before they need them. Participants learned three paths (executive-facing creator, quieter domain authority through LinkedIn and Substack, or a non-social ecosystem of workshops and communities), and the detail that stuck with Matt: accomplished C-suite leaders starting with the basics, like getting comfortable speaking into a camera. It tells you this is a muscle even powerful people haven't built — and that developing a persona, distinct from but promoting the company, has gone mainstream at the highest levels.

This is where Matt sharpens his own framework. The Bigger Stage is about turning operators into icons — but there's a middle step he names clearly here: operator, then authority, then icon. Authority means you have real power and influence inside a circle; people know you within the bubble, but you have no visibility outside it. The retreat is teaching exactly that authority-to-icon jump. And whether you're a Fortune 100 executive or a "corporate refugee" who left to build their own thing (Matt's thinking of a client finishing his book and eyeing stages and boards), the requirement is the same and non-negotiable: a point of view. Knowledge is cheap now; what's scarce is a point of view plus personality — a genuine perspective, grounded in real thought and experience, delivered by someone likable and energetic enough that people want to stick around. He nods to the individualization happening everywhere (Puck's big-personality reporters who collectively form the brand) and to why "personal branding" undersells it: it's really about which authentic part of your identity you pull from, for which audience, again and again. As his guest Jeremy Sirota put it, if you don't have a point of view, I can't help you. Matt's question: are you an operator, an authority, or moving into iconic?

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 many decades built something almost no one else could: a sprawling business empire that never once drifted from who she was. Matt walks through the arc — how she kept ownership of her songwriting catalog rather than just taking recording income (she wrote “I Will Always Love You”), then built Sandollar Productions, Dollywood, the Stampede dinner shows, resorts, and her own record labels — as a study in patience and consistency. It took decades, and every piece of it stayed true to her values.

From that, Matt draws the qualities worth admiring and learning from. She was radically inclusive, but she led by showing rather than shouting — modeling love, kindness, and openness instead of wielding a hammer. She built experiences, not just merchandise: you could step into a world she designed. She was astonishingly consistent, owning a look so completely that only she could pull it off — proof that when you truly own your lane, people stop finding it strange and it simply becomes you. She never took herself too seriously, yet was tough as nails and whip-smart, with a graceful way of never stepping into a ring she didn’t choose. And she managed to be intensely public and genuinely private at once, giving people real access while holding clear boundaries. Matt closes on why losing her stings especially now, with the country’s unifying threads frayed — and on the invitation she leaves behind: to build our own stages her way, over the long haul, without ever letting go of love, kindness, and inclusion.

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 deeper point is that as employment becomes less permanent, the old assumptions linking company, career, and identity come apart with it. Matt reads that and sees confirmation of something he’s been feeling in the marketplace, right down to a tension in his own positioning: is he B2B or B2C? His answer is that the question is dissolving, because the people move. The professional you win as a client today, embedded in Company A, is increasingly likely to be fractional, contract, or gone tomorrow — which means even a B2B relationship is really a relationship with a person who’s about to change boats.

So the strategic conclusion lands where the whole run has been pointing: build loyalty with people, not logos. When a client is a company, rising temporariness inside it shortens how long that company stays your client (unless you’re an Oracle or Microsoft with tentacles so deep that switching is too costly to risk). But when you build a genuine community — people who feel personally invested in you and you in them — they follow you wherever they go, even when they strike out on their own. Matt frames his own blended identity as the case in point: licensed attorney, consultant, media figure, someone who’s built businesses multiple times and can serve as concierge, counselor, advisor, and coach to people leaving corporate for the lonely, frustrating work of building their own thing. In stormy seas where people are constantly jumping from ship to ship, you want to be the mast with the flag they can point to and follow all the way through. His question: what does your community look like — and what could it be that would serve people even more?

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 down. They poured what was left into a small physical pop-up, and that pop-up became the foundation of a fully bootstrapped business now doing nearly £8 million a year with around 50 employees and more than a million customers served. Matt pulls two threads from their story. One is the challenge they name themselves: scaling without losing the identity shaped by their immigrant parents and a childhood in the family restaurant — the fragile moment when a company grows past the garage and the founder no longer knows everyone, yet still wants it to feel like theirs.

The other is the move that saved them, and it’s the heart of the episode: when you’re over your skis, the answer is usually radical simplification. Going back to the pop-up. For a solopreneur, that means fewer offers — try things quietly behind the scenes, and only put the winner on the billboard (it’s what big companies do with R&D, what Japanese firms do when they spin up a separate subsidiary to drill for oil). The pop-up’s real gift is the feedback loop: a little trailer with a window and no insulation between you and the customer, which is exactly how you discover and then hone your signature dish. So Matt’s questions are pointed. If you had a pop-up, what would it sell? What’s the one thing — the donut that outsells the rest — that draws people to you? What does your gut say, what does the data say, and how would you find out by asking the people who know your work? Radical simplification is hard to do alone, because it’s all about the feedback loop — the reason the best performers all have a coach and a camera on their swing. Go simple, drill down on your best thing, get it better than anyone else, and let the acceleration build from there.