Backstage w/ Matt Stone

Matt opens the week with a thread running through two stories: trust is human, and it’s getting more valuable as AI floods every feed. He starts with a small moment, watching a short video over the weekend that carried an “AI” label in the corner. The content was someone presenting a point, much like what Matt does, and the instant he saw that label, he discounted it and started scanning to see whether the person was even real. That reaction got him thinking about founders building authority. Fictional, clearly-generated characters are fine, we’ve watched digital actors for years. But when it’s someone presenting themselves as an authority having an honest conversation with you, AI in the mix breaks the trust.Then he found a Fortune piece (Nov 6) interviewing Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor, who argues that belief is fundamentally human. Kickstarter is a community of people who believe in a creator and want their work to exist, which Matt says mirrors a founder building authority: people who believe in you stick with you through the inevitable rough patches, because the founder will flounder at some point, but first they have to trust you. The data point that jumped off the screen: a 2026 study of about 63,000 Kickstarter campaigns found that projects carrying an “AI use” label raised roughly 40% less money and drew nearly 25% fewer backers. Matt is careful, causation or correlation, we don’t know, but he takes it as a serious signal. His conclusion isn’t anti-AI; he uses it more than ever for scripts, editing, images, and distribution. The line he won’t cross is handing over his creativity, or his face, when the goal is trust. It’s why he likes the interview format: let AI edit and distribute, but keep the human conversation genuinely human. That’s where the value lives.He closes with a feel-good story (Times of India, Nov 4): in 2015, Atlanta teenagers Jack Faught and Calder Johnson started selling Christmas trees from a pickup truck to pay for college, about 30 trees that first season. A decade later, Trees for Tuition runs seven Atlanta locations and reports more than $230,000 in community donations, including around $120,000 in scholarships for 58 students (self-reported, not independently audited). What Matt loves: they started by solving their own problem, then used the business they built to solve it for others. He offers it as a frame for any founder, even with an established company. How could you take a fresh look at your purpose, deepen the meaning and goodwill underneath it, and align your business with a genuine cause? Not as a marketing ploy, though it may be the best marketing you ever do, but as a real question: how could you use your business for good, beyond the good you already do for clients? A warm thing to sit with heading into the holidays.Kickstarter / Everette Taylor (Fortune)“Kickstarter’s CEO is championing human creativity in a flood of AI” (published November 6, 2026)https://fortune.com/2026/11/06/kickstarter-ceo-everette-taylor-human-creativity-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

Matt closes the week on presentations and speeches, prompted by the post-election messaging swirl and the ongoing shift he keeps watching: creators are gaining real leverage over broadcasters. The old model was pay for ads or get discovered by a network. Now creators build their own followings on platforms like YouTube and negotiate from strength, becoming valuable to the very distributors assembling multi-personality platforms. He won’t go deep on the economics today. His point is what it means for the rest of us trying to become known and respected for what we bring to the market, and why we bring it.His recommendation: everybody needs a talk. Whether or not you’ll ever speak publicly, design a signature talk, start with 20 minutes. What’s my point of view? What am I trying to disrupt in how people think? A talk forces the real questions: Who am I talking to? What’s the context? How do I hook them at the start and hold them to the end? What do I want them to think, feel, and do? That same clarity feeds everything, website copy, program design, all of it. And a stage gives you everything to work with, body, clothing, gestures, breath, pauses, tone, the music and dance of it all. Matt makes it personal: a year ago he gave a talk at Unscripted built on his previous decade of work in feedback and leadership development. Writing it wasn’t hard, and AI couldn’t make it for him, he had to find the point and the stories himself. But performing it was a mirror. His discomfort revealed not that the material was wrong, but that he’d already moved on to the next thing, he was looking backward, and you can’t get anyone excited about something you’re not excited about. That was the gift of actually standing up and doing it.Even practicing alone in a mirror or on camera counts, because the writing is where the idea develops. You put it on the page, read it, play with it, maybe socialize it, and that process builds not just a point of view but a unique way of expressing something that matters. There aren’t many genuinely new ideas, Matt notes, but there are endless new ways to express important ones, every time he’s on the mic, it’s a moment that will never exist exactly again. He ties it to his growing conviction about AI: he uses it more than ever for tasks, summaries, and data, but he’s increasingly skeptical of handing it the thinking. Ask it about business models and it’ll follow you anywhere and indulge you, which traps you in what’s already been said and done. If you’re building something new, you can’t live there. You have to trust that you carry a deeper truth and a reason for doing the thing, and not surrender your judgment to the tool. So build the talk. Do it analog as much as you can. Even if you throw it away and never present it, it will reveal something, if it’s hard, that’s telling; if it comes out too easy, be a little suspicious and look at that too. 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

Karl Bushby, an English ex-paratrooper, just completed a 28-year, 31,000-mile walk around the world, arriving Monday at his mother’s home in Hull, England, where she met him with “Where have you been?” and a “Welcome Home Son” banner. He set out from Chile in November 1998, crossed four continents and 30 countries, nearly died more than once, spent roughly a decade getting across Russia, and survived on the kindness of strangers and sometimes food left on roadsides. Matt opens by connecting it to the week’s other quiet-then-loud story, the election, and the old line about how change (and bankruptcy) happens “slowly at first, then all at once.” The business lesson: do the fundamentals every day, build skills and relationships, keep showing up even when it seems pointless, and when the external conditions you can’t control finally turn your way, you’ll look awfully lucky. Luck is preparation meeting a shift you didn’t cause.But the part that really caught Matt is what Bushby said near the end. The adventure became his identity (“Karl is this, an adventurer, and has been for half his life”), and now that the chapter is over, he faces a reckoning: “Everything that I am and everything that I know of me is going to go away. I will have to figure out who I am again.” A fellow walker, Angela Maxwell, put it well: he doesn’t love walking, he loves the mission, the passion, the purpose. Matt sees the parallels everywhere in his own world. You don’t have to walk around the globe for this to apply. When you leave the corporate job to start something. When you’ve built the company but now have to rise above operating every piece of it. When the very success you’ve had becomes the biggest threat to thriving in the next chapter. Those transitions don’t happen overnight. Going into the unknown not knowing how you’ll make it, that’s starting a business. Getting your whole sense of value from one operational posture for years, that’s the trap that makes the next chapter so hard. Matt’s bet: Bushby’s understanding of what he did will keep changing as he tries to translate it into what’s next, and that translation is a journey of its own. He closes with the questions that matter for everyone: What does your next chapter look like? How does the journey so far inform it? And what do you still need to let go of to move forward?Sources* Associated Press: “Karl Bushby completes 28-year, 31,000-mile walk around world, returns to mom’s house”https://apnews.com/article/karl-bushby-world-walk-hull-england-0317df0d80138f045eed4dc15db50c10* BBC: “Karl Bushby ends 28-year walk around the world”https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq8rz38jr50go 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

On Election Day, with the energy in the air, Matt turns to one meaty study that matters for anyone selling services. 6sense’s 2026 Global B2B Buyer Experience Report (4,611 buyers across three regions) is some of the strongest recent evidence that the buying decision happens long before a prospect ever contacts you. The numbers tell the story: 96% of buyers stay current on vendors between purchase cycles, 92% of eventual winners are already on the buyer’s initial shortlist, 82% end up choosing the vendor they preferred before any seller contact, and about 59% of the journey is done before first contact. And a fascinating split on AI: 81% use it somewhere in evaluation, but only 26% use it to actually discover vendors. Discovery is still organic, a feed, a referral, watching your work, and AI mostly comes in to evaluate what people already found. Even then, only about 17 to 21% call LLMs an influential source; existing knowledge, internal conversations, vendor websites, and professional networks still lead.Matt’s through-line: there’s a difference between generating a lead and developing buyer preference. By the time someone contacts you, they usually already know several providers, have run across their ideas, heard recommendations, watched the videos, and formed an opinion about who’s credible. They’re not discovering you in that call, they’re validating two separate things: are you credible, and is this worth it? (The report found 62.1% of services buyers said justifying the category’s value was harder than picking a provider, the “I know you’re smart, I’m just not sure the service is worth it” problem.) This is why getting your story out consistently and relentlessly matters so much. When you show how you think, how you see the world, people may even disagree with your conclusion and still hire you, because the way you got there was smart enough that they want you pressure-testing their own thinking. It’s not about how many videos you’ve made, it’s what’s in them: consistent, authentic, high-integrity, and varied enough to show different sides of you. The goal isn’t to be known, it’s to be remembered, trusted, and preferred. And that takes patience. People need time to see you’re stable, that you haven’t switched a million times, that you keep showing up, so you must be real. Settle in, keep showing up, and let familiarity become trust.Source: 6sense, “2026 Global B2B Buyer Experience Report” (released November 2, 2026; 4,611 B2B buyers across North America, APAC, Continental Europe, and the UK & Ireland).https://6sense.com/research-reports/2026-b2b-buyer-experience-report/ 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

Matt opens November with two signals pointing the same way. First, from Digiday: SiriusXM signed Paige DeSorbo and Hannah Berner’s Giggly Squad podcast to a reported $160 million multi-year deal, and weeks later the pair sold out multiple nights at Madison Square Garden (per the piece). The eye-catching number isn’t the real story. It’s how SiriusXM now describes its model: fifteen years ago, podcast networks bundled shows and sold ads across them; today they build commercial relationships around individual creators and their audiences, across four connected channels, audio, video, social, and live. Advertisers want integrated creator relationships, not isolated ad reads, and video clips have become a top discovery engine (one cited stat: 84% of clip viewers say clips have at least sometimes turned them into regular listeners). Matt’s takeaway isn’t “start a media company.” Giggly Squad is an exceptional outlier, and podcasts are still hard to make profitable. The point is that the old mass-audience world (NBC Thursdays, the MASH finale) is gone, replaced by niche and personality. People don’t follow faceless brands, which is why company pages flop on LinkedIn. He follows Costco for the deals, but that’s not a relationship. You can “prepare the ground” with short-form so that by the time someone meets you, they already feel they know, like, and trust you. In a feed full of spam and nonsense, that earned relationship is everything.The second story, from the New York Times (Sarah Kessler, Oct 31), gave Matt, a JD and licensed lawyer himself, a jolt: “The New Hot Job in Law Doesn’t Require a J.D.” Firms, legal departments, and legal-tech companies are hiring “legal engineers” who combine legal knowledge, workflow design, and AI. Legora has built a global team of about 200 since 2024 (roughly 70 hires in the past year), and some roles pay $220,000 to $300,000, often without requiring a law degree. What caught Matt isn’t the job itself, it’s the bigger pattern: as AI reshapes how work gets done, expertise becomes valuable in brand-new ways. When you reinvent your company, you also have to reinvent yourself, and that’s a real market and marketing opportunity. There may be a whole new way to apply or systematize your skills that you’d never have imagined, if you’re willing to knock down a few walls in the construct you live in. And the engine that makes any of it run is communication: positioning and storytelling, told clearly in whatever medium is yours. To collaborate with people you wouldn’t normally reach, you have to get out of your routine, try new things, take a class, join a group, and keep sharpening how you communicate. Do both, reinvent and communicate, and you build the kind of relationships that carry you into the next chapter.P.S. — SourcesGiggly Squad / SiriusXM (Digiday): “Giggly Squad’s SiriusXM deal signals a shift from podcast networks to creator ecosystems”https://digiday.com/media/giggly-squads-siriusxm-deal-signals-a-shift-from-podcast-networks-to-creator-ecosystems/Legal engineers (The New York Times): “The New Hot Job in Law Doesn’t Require a J.D.” by Sarah Kesslerhttps://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/31/business/dealbook/legal-engineer-jobs-ai.html 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

Matt closes the week with two companies that quietly prove his thesis. First, a feel-good one from the Wall Street Journal: The Gund Company, a 75-year-old family-owned specialty manufacturer in St. Louis, has never conducted a single layoff, while averaging 18% annual growth for a decade, with about 1,300 employees and sales nearing $400 million. Its third-generation CEO credits a philosophy that puts employee well-being over short-term results, backed by a fast feedback loop and constant improvement. The website looks a little dated, Matt notes, but the homepage video of actual workers feels fresh and authentic, proof that behavior leads, not polish. It reminds him of the long-history Japanese companies he knew: culture reinforced through storytelling, updated by a real feedback loop. He wants to go find and tell more untold stories like this, and hints that’s where the next chapter of The Bigger Stage podcast is headed.The main event is Lush, the cosmetics brand. The headline says they quit social media, but Matt is careful: they quit social media ads, not social media. Back in 2021, over concerns about privacy, algorithms, and platform harm, Lush stopped posting and advertising on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat (and later X), and five years on still hasn’t gone back to paid. Instead they poured into creator partnerships, brand collaborations, in-person experiences, email (6 million+ subscribers), and their own app (2.8 million users), with collabs alone driving roughly £34 million in sales, on nearly 9.4% revenue growth. They still use YouTube, Pinterest, Bluesky, and Substack organically. What Lush figured out, Matt argues, is that if you just place ads you’re paying the platform to push glossy information at people, and that’s not enough to build a loyal customer who re-ups again and again. Relationships are. Partnering through creators and collabs, going direct, inviting people into real-life experiences around shared values, that feels different, relationship-centered rather than information-centered, and it even inoculates you a bit from over-associating your brand with the platform. The lesson for everyone: what you see others doing isn’t necessarily the best way for you. The question underneath all the jargon (influencers, collabs, experiences) is the same one, how do you build real trust with your people, unseparated by fancy graphics? That old glossy-ad way isn’t gone, but it’s not what builds something new today.The Gund Company (Wall Street Journal)“Bosses Want the Secrets of the Family Firm That Has Never Had a Layoff in 75 Years”https://www.wsj.com/business/management/gund-company-no-layoffs-family-businessLush (Digiday)“How Lush quit social media ads and still drove growth”https://digiday.com/marketing/how-lush-quit-social-media-ads-and-still-drove-growth/ 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

Matt threads three stories into a single through-line. First, the scale shift: YouTube captured a record 15.8% of all US TV viewing in August (Nielsen, via Axios), more than Disney’s 9.3% and Netflix’s 7.7% combined-distributor shares. Studios are chasing it, Netflix is building a science series with creator Mark Rober, Disney is developing content with Dude Perfect. What matters most to Matt isn’t the numbers, it’s why: people want to feel connected to the people they watch. On YouTube you can comment and maybe get a reply, a relationship (real or not) that polished network TV never offered. The lesson for business: know your style. Are you an entertainer or an educator? Match it to you and your audience, and create things that invite people in rather than leaving them passive.Second, the run clubs. Ahead of Sunday’s NYC Marathon, brands are partnering not just with the marathon but with small grassroots running clubs. One creator runs Sprint and Sip, a club with about 30 regular participants, and turns it into content for 85,000 Instagram followers, now drawing brand partnerships (nearly 30% of brands in running-related TikTok content this year come from outside fitness, up from 25%, beauty especially). Thirty people. Matt’s point: you do not need a large audience to change your world. Third, the deepest one: Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, an Ohio neurosurgeon whose brother’s death led him to medicine and whose 18-year-old son died in a drunk-driving accident. He began speaking at schools, then started explaining complex medical topics in plain language on social media, and has now reached millions and retired from practice to keep teaching. A perfect arc: personal story to deeply held mission to talks to bigger stages to a company. Matt threads all three together: start with something personal, something you love or believe in (running, science, wine, whatever), bring people together around it in a way that’s authentic and genuinely helpful, and build a community, however small. The opportunity is greater than ever, and it’s choose-your-own-adventure (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, an event) as long as there’s a real story and a real mission underneath. Do it, and the gravitational pull around you builds until you’re choosing who to partner with instead of sitting in the silence. His nudge: what will you build that invites people in? Start where you are, local first, and let it feed the rest. 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

Matt threads two stories that look unrelated and aren’t. First, AI is changing how people find you. The Daily Mail is running experiments across the US, UK, and Australia to see whether publishers can help brands show up more often in AI answers, and building a commercial “generative engine optimization” (GEO) offering around it. They map the questions buyers ask AI agents, track which brands and sources get cited, then create material to lift a client’s visibility. One early test reportedly moved an unnamed finance brand’s prompt visibility from about 50% to 75%, though Matt notes that’s encouraging, not proof of causation. The most revealing bit: one brand found Claude drove just 0.1% of its tracked referrals but roughly 11% of its conversions, a reminder that AI’s influence hides in the gap between clicks and outcomes. Forbes is reportedly doing similar advisory work.Second, Tommy Harper, the producer behind Star Wars and Top Gun: Maverick, is shutting down VeYou, his six-month-old app that aimed to be the HBO of microdramas. His response isn’t to quit the content business, it’s to keep producing and distribute through TikTok, YouTube, and other platforms. The reason: when the big platforms already own the audiences, competing with them for attention is prohibitively expensive. (And the ground is shifting fast, Owl & Co. found that roughly two-thirds of microdramas released outside China last quarter were AI-generated, up from 3% at the start of the year.) He chose to supply the platform rather than fight it. Matt’s link between the two: both are really about story before platform. Getting caught up in platform-versus-content is cart before the horse. There are behemoth platforms you can’t out-fund, but you don’t need a platform to work on the power of your story, you can tell it at the Rotary Club, Toastmasters, your networking group, or for free on YouTube. The more you work the narrative, the more chances you get to tell it, the better it resonates, and only then do you have a real foundation if you ever want your own platform (Oprah started a channel, not a cable company, which is essentially what YouTube gives you for free now). And it’s true for AI visibility too: a clear, credible, compelling story is what the tools crawl for, so Matt would rather sharpen the narrative now than chase every optimization tool. You need both, but if you do one first, it’s the story. A deep enough personal story is unique by definition, because no one else has your exact combination of experiences. 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

Matt opens the week connecting his tagline to a hard trend. New research cited in TopRank Marketing’s B2B report found that 96% of B2B companies are largely invisible in early-stage AI discovery (a visibility-index finding, he’s careful to note, not that 96% never appear in AI answers), even as buyers increasingly ask chatbots for shortlists before they ever visit a website. The old SEO game of blog after blog stuffed with keywords is over. What helps buyers find and evaluate you now is independent interviews, third-party mentions, credible collaborations, and recognizable expertise. Which is exactly why Matt’s interview-first approach exists: media that demonstrates a real point of view is becoming an AI-era discoverability strategy, not just a branding play. If you want a bigger stage, you need a voice.Then the Backstage report. Friday he recorded his first multi-guest podcast episode, with fractional CMO Gauthier Sezgin and PR founder Ryan Walker, both of whom he calls genuinely authentic, and he’s now working out how he wants to produce more collaborative formats. He also caught the afternoon of Entrepreneur’s “Impossible” conference in Brooklyn, and the real lesson came from the contrast on stage. Gary Vaynerchuk delivered his usual (post constantly, free social media won’t last forever, use it), which is fair even if most people can’t match his output. But the standout, to Matt’s own surprise, was Megan Thee Stallion. He’s not a fan of her music per se, but as a presence she floored him: no scripted lines, real thoughts in real time, vulnerable, warm, and completely believable, a model for building genuine connection with an audience. Telling contrast: Gary posts hundreds of times a day, while Megan said she stays largely off social media for her mental health and lets her team handle it. Then Robert Irvine closed by reading from a script he clearly hadn’t internalized, and after Megan’s realness it landed flat. The takeaway Matt keeps coming back to: real beats scripted, every time. Authentic speaking is simply more powerful, and that’s the whole game. 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

Matt closes the week on a Business Insider piece with a counterintuitive lesson. Research from Morning Consult (run for Business Insider) and Edelman shows a big generational split on influencers: only about 31% of boomers trust influencer recommendations, versus roughly 62% of Gen Z and 64% of millennials, and only about a quarter of boomers follow content creators at all, compared to the vast majority of younger people. Boomers are also more likely to say they trust influencers less than they used to, have never bought anything on a recommendation, and find the content annoying. Matt, a self-described forgotten Gen Xer, can relate, though the lawyer in him wants to pin down what we even mean by “influencer.” He means the professional kind, the person whose whole business is taking pictures of themselves and building a following to tell you what to buy (think the LinkedIn influencer whose entire business is teaching you how to make money on LinkedIn, a bit of a closed loop).Here’s why the “problem” is actually an opportunity. Boomers account for about 42% of spending among affluent US households (Visa), yet marketers pour tens of billions into creator partnerships aimed at much younger audiences. Some agencies even report stronger conversion from older, more experienced creators, while brands stay reluctant to use them. So two takeaways. First, don’t sleep on the boomers, depending on your business, there’s a whole market of healthy, financially capable people, often on their second or third career and moving to the next thing, that service businesses ignore at their own expense. Second, invest in real relationships. Matt’s clients range from Gen Z to boomers, and his advice is the same to all of them: don’t judge yourself against social media influencers. Your opportunity is to build trust the slower way, show up in person and online, do the one-on-ones, sow into the soil and fertilize it for real, and build a loyal community. With so much nonsense flooding social media, the differentiator is simple: don’t be nonsense. His questions for the weekend: who do you actually follow, does the word “influencer” even matter to you, and what’s your honest relationship with all of 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