Backstage w/ Matt Stone

Matt Stone Enterprises
  • 5.0 (7)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Daily

A backstage pass to The Bigger Stage, where host Matt Stone covers the behind-the-scenes lowdown on his journey to build The Bigger Stage brand, business, and show, and the business and life lessons he's learning along the way. mattstone.substack.com

  1. 2d ago

    They're Not Stealing Your Face

    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/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    They're Not Stealing Your Face

  2. 3d ago

    The Bait and the Song

    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? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    The Bait and the Song

  3. 4d ago

    Aim Small

    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? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    Aim Small

  4. 5d ago

    A Smaller Community, Really Dialed In

    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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    A Smaller Community, Really Dialed In

  5. Sep 24

    Your Content Is a Storefront

    Matt closes the week with a reframe he says he’s adopting for good. It comes from a National Retail Federation profile of Ella Livingston, the Ghanaian-American founder of Cocoa Asante, whose family has grown cacao in Ghana for generations and who turned that legacy into a chocolate brand that went from local to national, in meaningful part through social video. The lesson her team learned: stop treating your content as an advertisement and start treating it as a storefront. So many businesses today have no brick-and-mortar location, no room with people always walking in, and social can be the facsimile of that storefront, the place people walk in, meet you, and feel your energy with their own eyes. A traditional ad says “here’s my chocolate, buy it.” The storefront approach says “I’m in Tennessee, but let me introduce you to Ghana, to my family, to where this cocoa comes from and why we build our supply chain to take care of the farmers.” That kind of storytelling invites people into the living room of your business, and it can get them excited before you’ve launched a thing. Matt ties it to his standing objection to “personal branding,” which he thinks cheapens the work, because it implies building a facade around you. Approach it instead as helping you tell your true story in many ways, and you still get a brand, but with intention behind it and a far more genuine result. He frames the day’s other signal (YouTube moving into television-scale, IP-retained programming, per Outlook Business) as the same story from the platform side: producers no longer have to choose between owning their work and getting distribution, but the window is open now and consolidation is coming, so if producing is your thing, this is the time to play. Underneath both is the refrain he keeps landing on: just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Find the sandbox, the art form, the platform that’s actually right for you and your audience (Instagram is dead for some, wonderful for others) and build your storefront there. The question to carry into the weekend: what are you building, and where does your storefront live? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    Your Content Is a Storefront

  6. Sep 23

    Live Is the Point

    Matt opens with a one-on-one from the night before, hearing a colleague’s immigrant story and feeling the whole relationship deepen in real time, because you understand someone, and trust them, when you can see your own experience reflected in theirs. That’s the thread through everything Backstage is about: people lean in, collaborate, and stay loyal when your story lets them see themselves. Then to the signal of the day, a Variety piece on business podcaster Sammi Cohen launching Social Commerce Network, a livestreamed business-news show airing three times a week with the explicit goal of becoming a next-generation CNBC for people who get their news on their phone. Half breaking news, half short interviews with the CEOs actually in the story. Her audience skews younger and about 70% women, a deliberate contrast with legacy business media, and Matt’s note is that knowing your demographic that precisely is what makes a media business fundable. The bigger pattern: broadcast is dead and cable is trailing off, and this is what’s replacing it. Cohen’s touchstone, TBPN, a daily Silicon Valley talk show, was just acquired by OpenAI (its first media buy) because the show promotes what OpenAI calls “constructive” dialogue on AI, a reminder that if you’re building media, it’s worth thinking early about who might one day buy it and why. But Matt’s real takeaway for the rest of us is about live. Live means right now, this is what’s happening, I’ll help you understand it, and it creates the interactivity and authentic-moment feeling people crave. It’s the same reason a live stage still thrills, though Matt argues the stage now has to be reimagined as facilitation, not presentation. He calls the standard conference panel (a moderator walking three people down a list of questions) outdated, and says what he’s chasing is more unpredictability, more interaction, more of a post-panel experience. The question he leaves you with: how can you create more interactive experiences for the people you want to reach, and build the initial audience that lets you grow into everything else? Article: https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/sammi-cohen-social-commerce-network-scn-live-business-show-1236867067/?utm_source=chatgpt.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    Live Is the Point

  7. Sep 22

    A Personality With a Point of View

    Matt braids two stories that look unrelated and aren’t. First, a new IBM study (with Oxford Economics, 1,500 CHROs and 8,800 employees): 71% of chief HR officers say the most essential skill now is the ability to supervise, validate, and override AI output, yet only 29% of employees rank judgment as important, and 60% of workers worry AI is eroding their skills, with critical thinking the one they name most. The people at the top want judgment; the people in the trenches, buried in keep-it-moving pressure and left to manage the AI shift alone, don’t see it that way. Second, a set of ad-industry reports (which Matt flags as biased) showing podcast advertising delivering strong ROI, with host-read, entertaining ads producing the biggest brand lift regardless of the host’s follower count. Here’s the connection. Reach matters and podcasts are gaining it, but the relationship with your audience matters more, because it means you know who they are, you have their trust, and entertainment carries the rest. And underneath all of it sits the thing IBM is really pointing at: critical thinking is part of your unique expression. Information is a commodity now, so how you see and interpret the world is your differentiation. A personality is great, but you need a personality with a point of view, and a point of view requires actual thought, analysis, friction. That’s why overusing AI is quietly dangerous. When something’s done for you, the human instinct isn’t to work harder, it’s to stop thinking about it, and every bit of friction you remove is learning you skip. You don’t develop judgment by consuming media; you develop it by getting in the ring. Matt’s proof is his own week: four-plus hours at a Black Podcasters Association gathering he’d meant to leave early, staying because people were sharing real points of view (including one he disagrees with, that reworking a talk show into a podcast “isn’t podcasting”). He didn’t debate it in the moment, but he’s been chewing on it ever since. That’s the point. Being able to speak is good; having a point of view is better. Without one, it’s just more noise. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    A Personality With a Point of View

  8. Sep 21

    The Offline Bet

    Still decompressing from two whirlwind weeks of Fast Company and the podcasting-community circuit, Matt surfaces the theme that kept coming up: human connection and real-life experience are only going to grow, and social media’s role in delivering that feels increasingly uncertain. He points to a TechCrunch piece that gives the trend teeth. These aren’t first-timers chasing a fad. They’re founders who already built and sold real companies, now putting their money and priority into getting people physically together. Brynn Putnam sold Mirror to Lululemon for $500 million and is building Board, an interactive gaming table designed as the philosophical opposite of a solo screen. Tristan Walker, who sold his grooming company to P&G, is scaling Heirloom craft schools where people learn skills together, screens down. Bonobos founder Andy Dunn has turned Pie into a “social life operating system” for run clubs and watch parties. The Wing’s Audrey Gelman runs a countryside inn with monthly murder-mystery dinners that force strangers to actually interact. Matt’s read: when people who’ve already won are betting their next chapter on connection, that’s a signal worth heeding. A Harris Poll (sponsored, he notes, by a hotel, so grain of salt) found two-thirds of Americans now prioritize experiences like travel over material things. People want to go and do things together. Social media still has a place in this, as a way to find the people who want to belong around a topic, but Matt’s growing conviction is that it has to convert into something more, something real, or the fatigue wins. He’s candid that he opens his own feeds now and feels no pull at all. So he closes not with a lecture but with a genuine question he wants to talk through with listeners: what’s your relationship with social media right now? Is it nutrients or just distraction? Has it changed? He’s asking sincerely, and inviting the conversation onto Substack. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mattstone.substack.com

    The Offline Bet
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About

A backstage pass to The Bigger Stage, where host Matt Stone covers the behind-the-scenes lowdown on his journey to build The Bigger Stage brand, business, and show, and the business and life lessons he's learning along the way. mattstone.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Matt Stone Enterprises
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    320
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Matt Stone Enterprises, LLC
  • Show Website
    Backstage w/ Matt Stone