Separate the Work From the Machine

Matt’s voice is still raspy from a cold, but the theme is the point: showing up, even when it’s hard. The lead data comes from Axios (Nov 10), using Spotify data: 82.6% of congressional candidates appeared on at least one podcast during the 2026 cycle, winners made nearly three times as many appearances as losers (96% of winning House candidates vs. 67% of losers), and appearances clustered in competitive races. Matt flags it clearly as correlation, not causation, the podcast-heavy candidates were likely doing a lot of other things too. But it sparks the real reflection: selling anything, especially big-ticket services, means selling yourself. Investors back the entrepreneur, not the plan, because they know the plan will change. People spending real money are buying you.That takes him back through his own sales history, and it’s the heart of the episode. He once ran a painting franchise (legally Matt Stone Painting), nailing signs to telephone poles and sending mailers that pulled maybe a 4% response. The point of the signs and mailers was never direct conversion; it was familiarity, so that when you knocked on the door in your polo, people already half-recognized you. Social media, he argues, is the modern version of those telephone-pole signs and mailers: necessary for awareness, but not, for most service businesses, a flood of inbound clients on its own. He’s a LinkedIn Top Voice and it didn’t bring people to his door with casseroles and contracts. He’s gotten clients who saw something on LinkedIn that nudged them or validated a belief, but cold-to-high-value-signup almost never happens from the feed alone.Then the fundamentals, the part he most wants people to hear. The higher the ticket, the longer the sales cycle, because it takes longer to build trust, minimum six months, often a year or more. It’s why buyers hire a McKinsey even at ten times the price: a known name feels safe, they feel covered. Trust is everything. Another seeming paradox: messaging matters, but the real early-years invitation isn’t perfect wording, it’s someone thinking “that person understands my pain, I’m open to a conversation.” Obsessing over exact product names, service names, and prices can be a rabbit hole, the treadmill feeling of motion without progress, like switching supermarket lines and waiting just as long. Across everything he’s sold (paint jobs, multi-million-dollar solar, website projects for Hollywood studios when the web was new, even pagers), the only thing that changed was how long trust took. The fundamentals never changed: consistent outreach, going to meetings and groups and conferences and doors, being helpful, building a garden, inviting people in, speaking to their needs more than to how you solve them. He’s hearing from people across his network who are in the desert, doubting, despairing, the Lawrence of Arabia “I’m not an animal” moment, and he’s been there too. His message, delivered with real love: it will work. Keep doing the fundamentals and the clouds do part, it just takes six to nine months for higher-ticket work, and showing up is about 80% of it. He closes on the bigger moment: Microsoft just offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 people, and a lot of folks are about to be out building something for the first time. If this gets one person through one more day closer to freedom and feeling valued again, he’s done his job.Source: Axios, “Exclusive: Winning candidates appeared on more podcasts” by Sara Fischer (November 10, 2026). Data: Spotify.https://www.axios.com/2026/11/10/midterm-election-candidates-podcast-interviews 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’s voice is a few octaves low with a cold, but the theme carries: where media goes, there are lessons for every business, because the whole environment is changing. He grew up assuming TV as he knew it would last forever, then YouTube quietly replaced appointment television, and almost nobody blocks out “Thursday at 9” anymore. That shift is the backdrop for today’s story, from Axios (Nov 10): The Bulwark, an independent media company founded around 2019 as a home for anti-Trump conservatives, has signed an exclusive three-year deal with Vox Media. CEO and publisher Sarah Longwell projects more than $30 million in revenue this year, split roughly evenly between advertising and subscriptions, meaning well over $10 million in subscription revenue alone. That took about seven or eight years to build, a reminder that growing and monetizing a real audience is slow work.Here’s the move Matt wants founders to notice. Once you hit that level of growth, you often don’t have the commercial infrastructure to keep scaling. The Bulwark had options: spend their earnings building an in-house ad team (liability, no guarantees), or sell outright and become employees. Instead they partnered. Vox will now handle advertising sales and marketing across the Bulwark’s podcasts, videos, newsletters, and live events, while the Bulwark stays independent and keeps making the thing it’s good at. In other words, they separated the creation of valuable intellectual property from the infrastructure required to commercialize it. And because they already had the audience, they had the leverage to strike that deal on good terms. Matt’s translation: wherever you are, don’t get stuck thinking the only way past your current ceiling is to build everything yourself. You’ve grown as big as you can in your current shoes, you could hire a team to make new shoes, or you could partner with someone who already has the factory and give up a percentage for it.He connects it to AI and creativity. When you ask AI tools to design your business model, they’re drawing from the known universe, what already exists. But this is a new era, so the call is to get off the platforms, collaborate with real people, and try models that weren’t heard of before. He points to a second data point (Media Post, via IAB): creator advertising is approaching $44 billion, yet there’s still no agreed-upon way to measure whether it’s worth it, so companies are pouring money at creators because they don’t know where else to go. That gap will sort itself out, and sorting it out is itself a business opportunity. We’re in a Wild West moment, like the early internet, where it feels like anything is possible before everything gets corporatized and measured. There’s real blue ocean right now. His plan for the day: go have a creative, off-platform conversation with a filmmaker friend about his own business model and possible partnerships, because those conversations open up ideas you can’t find on a screen. Find your creative partners. And on Veterans Day, as an Army brat who grew up on bases, he closes with real gratitude to all who’ve served.Sources:The Bulwark / Vox Media (Axios): “Exclusive: The Bulwark joins Vox Media’s podcast network” (November 10, 2026)https://www.axios.com/2026/11/10/bulwark-vox-media-podcast-advertising-marketing 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 with a story he found more thought-provoking than inspiring, from an Inc. profile (Sept 23) of Ryan Levesque. In 2021 Levesque had the storied founder life: two connected companies, The ASK Method Company and the software platform Bucket.io, more than $100 million in cumulative revenue, seven appearances on the Inc. 5000 (even the Inc. 500), and two bestselling books, Ask and Choose. Then came the unraveling. During Texas’s historic freeze, he drove to help his sister-in-law and found her gray and huddled under a blanket with her dog in a powerless house; they spent days around a fire, and that unplugged stretch, along with his own health history, became a wake-up call. He saw he was on an endless treadmill, “a trained animal in my own social media circus.” So he and his partner took the company to market. A $40 million offer collapsed. Then a $70 million leveraged buyout collapsed too, partly because the Ukraine war rattled the markets. The giant exit evaporated overnight.Instead of chasing the next deal, Levesque paused and started reading philosophy, biology, and permaculture. He flew to Vermont for a permaculture design certification, lived in a tent, bathed in a pond, worked the land, and loved it. Eventually he moved the family from Texas, lived in temporary housing until they found the right place, and bought a farm. He reimagined the whole business, he still writes, advises founders, and runs retreats, but now from the farm where he lives with his family. The Inc. piece ends with his verdict: the $70 million collapse was the greatest blessing of his career. Had it closed, he might have spent another decade running a high-stress digital machine. His advice to founders: build a company you never want to exit.Matt’s take: there’s nothing wrong with a big exit, you build something, you sell it, great. And “build with the exit in mind” is sound practical advice. But a lot of founders make the exit the primary motivator, and you don’t actually know where your company will end up. Levesque was blindsided by his own health, a freak Texas storm, and a war. Haven’t we learned life is unpredictable, with far more outside our control than inside it? So building a company around satisfaction and sustainability, one you could exit someday if you want to, is a strong point of view. Matt thinks it’s actually better for reaching a bigger stage, because when the work is tied to who you really are, you’ll likely go further. He closes with the question: what does satisfying and sustainable look like for you, and what does scaling even mean inside that frame? He also mentioned the founder he met the night before, a whiskey entrepreneur who sold her company, bought it back, and is now building something more meaningful by giving discarded brands a second life, learning from that first exit. The universe, he notes, keeps putting these stories in front of him. He wants to get Levesque on The Bigger Stage podcast.Source: Inc.com, “A $70 Million Deal Collapse Nearly Broke Him. Now, This 7-Time Inc. 5000 Founder Is Building an ‘AI-Proof’ Empire on a Farm” by Stephanie Davis (September 23, 2026).https://www.inc.com/stephanie-davis/ryan-levesque-ask-method-choose-ai-proof-vermont-farm/91409444 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 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