Backstage w/ Matt Stone

Matt opens the week heading into Fast Company’s Innovation Festival (starting today, with an off-site on the creator economy in Brooklyn) and points to a telling Reuters signal: former Canadian PM Justin Trudeau just launched a production company, Hope & Hard Work, with his longtime chief of staff — following the path the Obamas cut with Higher Ground. The old post-role playbook was a book, some s...

Matt reads a Business Insider piece on Kara Swisher — the tech journalist who went from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal to building her own independent media identity through Recode, podcasts like Pivot, and books — because her counsel to journalists leaving downsizing institutions applies to anyone making that leap. And it’s happening far beyond journalism: people who earned multiple...

Back after Labor Day, Matt takes aim at a familiar social-media anxiety: the middle-aged professional watching a 23-year-old rack up attention with beach photos and matcha, wondering where they fit. His first move is to lower the stakes on something people over-worry about. A PostFast analysis of tens of thousands of posts looked at whether when you post matters — and found the differences across...

On the show built around the line “let their stories power their growth,” Matt closes the week with the clearest case for what that actually means. First, a market signal: British retailer John Lewis is launching Gift List , a YouTube chat show hosted by Angela Scanlon (Louis Theroux is a guest), for a strikingly specific reason — AI has upended search. A year ago just 0.3% of its customers used A...

No articles today, just decades of hard-won experience. Matt talks about the stretch every builder knows: you start something new, the vision thrills you, and then almost immediately you’re out in the desert — no water, no feedback loop, just a scorpion or two — because excitement doesn’t translate into traction, even when you’re taking all the right steps. He’s candid that he still feels it; he’s...

Lowe’s just assembled what’s being called the largest cross-sector skilled-trades coalition in the country — 75-plus members including NVIDIA, AT&T, Bank of America, and General Motors — aiming to help train a million tradespeople by 2035, against a projected shortfall of 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030. A company that sells the materials tradespeople use has an obvious stake in there being more...

Eileen Munoz spent nearly three decades in an insurance cubicle, never earning more than $70,000 and dreading Sundays — and when she finally quit in her mid-50s, she assumed the next thing would just be her old job “in a different font.” Instead, at 59, she’s doing around half a million dollars a year in the creator economy. Matt uses her story to puncture a myth he hears constantly from Gen X pro...

Matt’s thinking about jargon — the contagion of it. He traces his own history with it, from picking up the language of every industry he passed through to the intoxicating first year of law school, when a whole new vocabulary of Latin phrases made him feel like an insider. The problem is that insider language has an exclusionary effect, and it’s everywhere: he ran a quick search and pulled up the...

When Raj Subramaniam became only the second CEO in FedEx’s history — stepping out from under legendary founder Fred Smith, who died in 2025 — he did something telling: he wrote his own job description, and one central line in it was “guardian of the culture” Smith built. His promise, as Matt reads it, was that technologies, acquisitions, structures, and people may all change, but the cultural core...

An Inc. story caught Matt's eye — a bit of a puff piece, he's the first to say, but a revealing one: SEED Media founder Valeisha Butterfield gathered Fortune 100 and 500 executives on Martha's Vineyard for a "Corporate Creators" retreat built on a premise that would've sounded strange a few years ago — that senior executives should build an audience, intellectual property, and even independent rev...

Dolly Parton died this week at 80, and Matt — by his own admission not a devoted country fan — found himself moved to pay tribute, because if the word “iconic” means anything, it means her. This is a warm, reflective episode about a woman who transcended party, region, and genre, and who over many decades built something almost no one else could: a sprawling business empire that never once drifted...

The workforce is coming loose from its moorings. A Fortune commentary from the American Staffing Association’s chief economist reports that temporary help was among the fastest-growing job categories in 2026, up every month, with roughly one in ten new jobs this year being temporary — and the deeper point is that as employment becomes less permanent, the old assumptions linking company, career, an...

When Annabel and Emily Lui’s wholesale deals collapsed — right after they’d hired staff, leased production space, and bought equipment — the sisters behind British bakery Cutter & Squidge were down to about £15,000 and, with employees on the payroll, maybe a month of runway. They didn’t shut down. They poured what was left into a small physical pop-up, and that pop-up became the foundation of a fu...

YouTube is changing the rules — counting a view the instant playback starts (so everyone’s numbers jump) while quietly making real monetization much harder to reach and keep. Matt uses the shift as a way into a bigger warning. Those inflated view counts will make people feel good about clicks that might say more about a thumbnail than the content, while the money moves further out of reach unless...

A new Boston Consulting Group study, reported by Fortune, found that only 40% of former CEOs of billion-dollar companies felt satisfied with their transition out of the role in the first year — and the biggest struggle wasn’t money or boredom. It was identity and relevance. Who am I when the title’s gone? Matt’s quick to say no one’s shedding tears for retiring CEOs, but he’s talking about it beca...

Matt found a story in the AP that ties together nearly everything this show has been circling. Marisa Mender-Franklin was a teacher during the pandemic who dreamed of growing her own wedding flowers but owned no land. So she posted a single, specific ask to her local Facebook Buy Nothing group: she wanted a place to grow flowers. Her phone started pinging within minutes, and within a week she had...

Fresh from a doctor’s appointment and back on the mic, Matt reinforces the throughline he keeps landing on: building a business in 2026 is about community and events. His evidence is a Verge interview with Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of the news outlet Semafor, which has turned profitable in just a few years by doing what Smith calls an “anti-scale” business. Instead of the old maximum-traffic play...

Matt kicks off the week with joy on his mind — no articles, no data, just one tool worth stealing. He’s three weeks into a book club run by his friend and colleague Shannon Hernandez around her workbook Practical Joy: Simple Tools to Cultivate More Joy Every Day , and last week’s exercise stuck with him. It starts from a feeling most builders know: waking up and wondering how you ended up doing so...

A Fortune piece stopped Matt this week: only 12% of family businesses stay in the family by the third generation. The Goldman Sachs chairman quoted in it argues the culprit usually isn’t a missing legal document — it’s optimism, founders who keep deferring the hard conversations about who leads, what control actually means, and what the next generation truly wants, until entitlement and assumption...

Alex Cooper’s media company Unwell just took its first outside investment at a $500 million valuation, on its way, Matt suspects, to making her a billionaire. It started as one person (with a co-host) talking candidly into a mic and grew into a podcast network, live events, streaming projects, consumer products, and a creative agency. Matt’s quick to say this isn’t the path most of us are on, and...

Matt traces his relationship with media back to its root. As a kid he turned everything into a microphone, pretending to be a talk show host; in junior high he and his friend David recorded fake radio shows on a brick of a tape recorder, complete with invented commercial breaks. That thread runs straight through to his first podcast, Connections That Matter , where every guest told him some versio...

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...