Backstage w/ Matt Stone

Matt spots a tell in a Digiday headline: Zoom is leaning on creators to boost its AI search results. Zoom is Kleenex for video meetings, but it wants to be seen as a full end-to-end AI platform — and paid ads alone won’t rewrite that reputation. So it partnered with journalist-podcaster Nayeema Raza (30,000+ followers, a sponsored six-part series, a fall keynote at its conference) as a bet on auth...

Bret Stephens wrote a New York Times plea this month titled “I’m Begging You: Never Write With AI,” and it clearly got under Matt’s skin — in the productive way. Stephens’ case isn’t about ethics (a citation handles that); it’s that writing with AI is mentally weakening, because writing is how we actually develop and test our ideas, and outsourcing it enfeebles us. Matt finds most of it compelling...

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...

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...

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 b...

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 gene...

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 a...

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...

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...

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; an...

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...

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 c...

Years ago in Tokyo, Matt read a book that hit him like water in the desert — Dr. Tasha Eurich’s Insight — and came away certain of two things: he wanted to actually know this person, and he had something to offer her too. He could have fired off the standard email. Great book, can we talk. Instead he sat down and wrote a proper long-form letter about what the book meant to him and why he thought t...

Matt’s been stuck on a talk. He knew the topics, knew the material was in there somewhere, but couldn’t find his own angle on it — buried under operations, meetings, priorities, and everything else that pulls a founder away from the deeper stuff. Then a colleague and dear friend looked at him and simply laid it out: it’s this, because you lived that, because you value this. He was writing furiousl...

You’ll find no shortage of advice telling you to be everywhere, all the time, posting a dozen times a day across every platform. Matt listens to Gary Vee too — but he thinks that prescription quietly breaks down for the solopreneur or the founder building something real. To explain why, he reaches for a company most people have already forgotten: Quibi. Hollywood titan Jeffrey Katzenberg and forme...

The New York Times found hundreds of AI-generated doctors, healers, and wellness influencers on social feeds — convincing-looking people who don’t exist, selling supplements to real consumers. Matt’s not here to pile on about how dystopian that is (it’s dystopian on its face, and there’s more coming). He’s interested in the opportunity hiding inside it. If the feed is filling up with synthetic hum...

Matt watched the World Cup final this weekend (under mild spousal duress — he’s the first to admit soccer isn’t his sport) and came away far more struck by what happened after the whistle than during the match. Watching the trophy ceremony footage, he saw a masterclass in the wrong instinct: a stage that belonged to the winning players, and a guest who wouldn’t leave it. He’s careful to say this i...

Matt just stepped out of a recording with T.J. Winick — a broadcast journalist who spent two decades at ABC News (Nightline, Good Morning America) before crossing over to help companies build and defend their reputations — and he’s still buzzing from it. The through-line of Winick’s book Reputation Capital is deceptively simple: reputation is an asset you accumulate over time, like money in the ba...

For anyone who keeps saying “I need to get out there, I need to do a talk” and hasn’t yet, Matt has a short, direct nudge. The stage you’re waiting for probably already exists — you’re sitting in it. He tells the story of a networking group he’s part of, where he was invited to give a ten-minute talk to twenty-eight people in a room with the same croissants, coffee, and fruit basket as always. Sam...

Matt’s back with a warning he’s aiming squarely at himself as much as anyone: creative atrophy. He uses AI tools constantly and says so plainly, but he’s noticing what happens when you outsource the thinking rather than the tasks — the posts all start to look the same, the output looks fine, and the muscle quietly wastes away. His half-joking name for the alternative is MattGPT. He has a brain. He...

Matt’s back after time away for a family loss, and he returns with something useful: a dead-simple framework for building a story on the fly. He’s skeptical of the elaborate storytelling models making the rounds on LinkedIn — the Pixar method, the hero’s journey — because nobody actually constructs a story in real time out of those. What he reaches for instead comes from an unexpected place: ten y...

Matt’s been thinking about the distraction economy — the way modern work fragments your attention before a single idea can fully form. The Microsoft data is brutal (knowledge workers interrupted roughly every two minutes all day), and it’s the enemy of the thing Matt cares most about: a deeply developed story. He reaches for a metaphor from his years in Japan — great ramen broth isn’t fast. Someon...

Subtitle: Matt resets Backstage around its real purpose — and shares the storytelling shift that made a bored panel remember him for the rest of the day Description: Backstage is changing, and Matt’s being upfront about why: he changed the name before he changed the show, and now it’s time for the style to catch up. Going forward this is a sharper daily dose for founders, entrepreneurs, and leader...

The CN Tower turns 50 today — it opened to the public on June 26, 1976 — and Matt can’t stop thinking about what makes a tower iconic: the way one structure becomes shorthand for an entire city, from Toronto to Seattle’s Space Needle to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It’s his new metaphor for the operator-to-icon journey. Becoming an icon means raising a tower rooted deep in your base — your brand, yo...

In 1886, a teenage cellist touring Brazil was pushed onto a podium nobody else could hold: a hostile crowd, a walked-out conductor, and a full performance of Aida with no rehearsal. He led the whole thing from memory. His name was Arturo Toscanini, and that accidental night, which the history books place somewhere in late June, launched one of the longest, greatest conducting careers ever. Matt’s...