Backstage w/ Matt Stone

Matt earned LinkedIn Top Voice a couple of years back the hard way — no AI, just writing a steady stream of his own thought pieces until the editors noticed. So when he says he’s changed his relationship with the platform, it’s not sour grapes. It’s clarity. He walks through the thing most creators never reckon with: LinkedIn’s revenue engine is, and has long been, recruiting. Talent Solutions was nearly two-thirds of its revenue before Microsoft bought it and remains the largest segment today, and the platform’s newest AI hiring tools alone just crossed a $450 million run rate. That’s the god the platform actually serves. It wants everyone in the pool so recruiters pay a premium to fish in it — which is exactly why Top Voice badges, LinkedIn groups, and “post it and it’ll get shared” never delivered the community or the leads they seemed to promise. You and the platform are serving different purposes.

So what should you do instead? Not abandon LinkedIn — keep it semi-fresh, publish a newsletter there, repurpose it to Substack and beyond — but put it firmly in its place and stop letting it eat your week. The deeper move is to tend your roots. Unless you’re an expat or living somewhere without a local market, the biggest quiet mistake Matt sees is neglecting local networking for the online kind: the grocery-store, coffee-shop, kids-at-the-same-school relationships are the strongest bonds, and your online presence works best when it reinforces those rather than replacing them. Underneath all of it is the fundamental he keeps returning to: none of the posting matters without a genuine point of view. Forced to choose between developing yours and cranking out AI content, he’d put the effort into the point of view every time. His end-of-week prompt: what is your relationship with the platforms you’re on — and are you serving your own life and business, or someone else’s?

Matt’s been chasing a hunch with data: the speaking industry feels like it’s struggling, and both a (openly biased) vendor study and his own conversations with working speakers point the same direction. Some of that is just wind you can’t control — bigger trends blowing against you that have nothing to do with the quality of what you’re building. So where should your focus go? Not, he argues, down the black hole of social media. Go on LinkedIn and you’ll see polished content creators with big followings who seem to be winning — but notice what they’re almost always selling: marketing for LinkedIn, to an audience of people already on LinkedIn. It’s the most densely populated pool they could be fishing in, which makes their success a poor template for a consultant, coach, or founder whose real business lives off-platform.

The reframe is the takeaway: social media is about credibility, not visibility. The data Matt keeps finding shows little causal link between content production and direct leads — while roughly two-thirds of people still report the bulk of their revenue coming from personal referrals, from people who already know, like, and trust them. So posting to be discovered is a frustrating game; posting so that when someone gets referred to you and checks you out, they find a real person with a track record and a few good thoughts — that’s the point. He’s blunt about the trap of engineering a post for 30% more engagement with zero evidence it yields 30% more quality leads, and about the danger of mirroring creators when you’re unsure what to do. The discipline he’s after: a light system for sharing genuine thinking without letting it devour your week, while you put your real energy into building and serving a community. Serve it, learn from it, and let what you learn become the content — a virtuous cycle. (There’s a squeaky chair. He knows. Oil is coming.)

Matt’s a year into building The Bigger Stage, and he uses this episode to define the word at the center of it: iconic. It’s not what most people assume. He starts with the state of the platforms — a growing body of reporting that people are posting less and pulling back from spaces that feel like performance, drifting toward smaller, participatory rooms where real relationship is possible. He’s blunt about the trap it sets for everyone else: there’s now a whole class of creators whose entire job is to live on an ecosystem and manufacture an image there, often curated to look uncurated (he remembers a law school classmate disheveled in all the perfect ways). If you run a business serving people off-platform, that polish is the wrong yardstick to measure yourself against — and forget the hand-wringing about whether “personal branding” is dead, because your brand was only ever your reputation, which will always matter.

Then the switch that defines the term. Jordan Thomas lost both legs in a boating accident at sixteen and started a foundation from his hospital bed to get prosthetics to kids who couldn’t afford them. Years later, waiting at a prosthetist’s office, a woman named Shannon approached him: she’d seen his story on CNN, it moved her to adopt a child with limb loss, and her daughter turned out to be receiving support from his foundation. His line is the one Matt wants you to keep: the most powerful thing you can do as a human is have an impact on someone’s life and they never know your name. That, Matt says, is the real iconic transformation — the marriage of your point of view, your purpose, and your passion into a story that spreads when you’re not in the room and keeps working after your name falls away. The iconic language of The Bigger Stage was never about lights on you. It’s about what you do while the light is there, and who you help before it moves on.

A British fiction magazine — Take a Break’s Fiction Feast, built entirely on human-written short stories for women — has started replacing its freelance writers with AI, and Matt thinks it’s about to backfire. Not just because readers tend to recoil from creative work once they know a machine made it, though he believes they will. The deeper mistake is the sequence. The magazine is having AI generate first drafts and bringing humans in afterward to approve them. Matt’s experience runs the opposite way: write your own rough, imperfect draft first, then hand it to AI to pressure-test, poke holes in, and suggest angles. Starting from a pool of pre-existing machine material and expecting something genuinely creative to come out isn’t how creativity works.

From there he shares the principle he’s actively building his own practice around, learned years ago from a neuroscientist: your brain will focus on whatever you point it at. It’s tempting to drop a fragment of an idea into ChatGPT or Claude and get back something fleshed out and agreeable — but the moment it’s done for you, your brain stops processing. The missed opportunity is the struggle itself, because that’s what digs down into the soil of your thinking, your memories, how you actually see the world. And here’s the reframe worth keeping: you can set your brain on a problem the way you set an AI agent running and walk away — pose the question, do a little writing, then go live your day and let it work in the background. Writing is how you start that process and keep molding the idea like clay, where no two pieces come out the same. His prescription for a world drowning in synthetic content: use the tools for processes, files, and organization, but reserve the majority of your creative thought for yourself. Nurturing ideas takes time — are you willing to put it in, a little every day? (He also mentions he’s investing more heavily in Substack and building community there, so that’s the place to drop him a note.)

MySpace is coming back. The owners (who bought the site in 2011) have been sitting on the once-dominant platform for years, and they’ve just confirmed they’re relaunching it — not because they rushed to revive it, but because they’ve been waiting for the right moment, and they think the moment is now. Their bet is that people are exhausted: worn out by algorithmic feeds optimized for outrage and addiction, and increasingly describing Instagram, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn as places they go to perform rather than connect. Layer on an internet flooded with AI content nobody’s sure is real, and you get a growing pull toward smaller rooms — Discord servers, Substack, group chats, niche forums. Matt felt a version of it himself over the weekend, watching a labeled “government survey” call ring twice and letting it go, because so much now is faked as real that the default response is simply to disregard.

The lesson he draws is the one worth pocketing. The projects you research, start, maybe even have a little success with, and then set down aren’t dead — they’re part of your repertoire, waiting. Sometimes an idea isn’t weak; the timing is just wrong, and conditions change. So keep two things going at once: don’t stop creating new stuff, and don’t count the old stuff out. Dust it off now and then and ask, is this relevant now? It might just be. He connects it back to the through-line he keeps returning to: as fake content multiplies and the cereal aisle of options stretches a mile long, the premium moves to whatever makes people feel human — the talk, the story, the experience that helps someone see themselves and feel connected to you and to others. Even in tech. Especially in tech. The question to carry into the week: what project could you take another look at to give yourself an unfair advantage in the conditions you’re in right now?

Matt walks all the way back to high school for this one. Four straight student-government wins — middle school class president on through school vice president — had him certain the top job was his by right. He got up at the assembly, gave a perfectly competent, perfectly familiar politician’s speech, and figured the coronation was a formality. Then his opposite number, a sharp, rule-breaking kid named Warren, got up, mocked the entire process, and promised something he plainly couldn’t deliver — longer breaks, or a longer lunch. Matt was sure everyone would see through the joke. Warren won. The administrators were dismayed. Matt was stunned. And decades later, with Warren now passed, Matt’s verdict is genuine and generous: kudos to Warren. He had something going on up there.

The lesson has two parts, and they’ve both aged well. First, people are pulled toward the new and the revealed — even a slightly unrealistic promise beats a competent rerun, because Warren was simply more entertaining and a big freshman class didn’t know Matt as the career politician. Second, and the one Matt’s hardest on himself about: he treated the speech as a continuation instead of its own event. He walked in as the emperor addressing his subjects, and the truth is nobody owes you their attention — you don’t have a right to an audience finding you interesting, ever, no matter what you did last time. So every talk, every interview, every pitch is its own thing, and the only move is to stay present and break your own mold a little.

His weekend questions: what does “different” look like for you, and who could you ask for the honest feedback on how you’re coming across?

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.)