Backstage w/ Matt Stone

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...

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’...

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...

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 bl...

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 ma...

No articles today. Matt’s still turning over the Your New Opening Line pilot in Denver, a small but mighty room of people each refining the opening to a talk, and he pulls out three lessons (plus a bonus). First, going blank. When you’re performing to a camera or working a talk, the harder you push, the more you get in your head, and it feels like driving straight into a ditch over and over. Get b...

Matt opens with a reflection from the Denver pilot of Your New Opening Line: the blank. When you’re working on a talk, you hit a point a few rounds in where it stops feeling fun and you start fighting it, right before it becomes fully integrated inside you. One participant lived it in real time. The fix isn’t to grind harder, it’s to break it up, let go, tell your mind you’re done with it for a mo...

Fresh off a trip to Denver, Matt opens on a Guardian story: a growing list of hotels, restaurants, and beauty spots are restricting photography and filming, not just because creators are there, but because content production wrecks the experience for everyone else. The Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc now requires permission for photo shoots after guests booked meals mainly to stage elaborate multi-outfit se...

[Note: This is the last Backstage episode this week. Back at it Monday, October 19th.] Matt opens on a fresh Axios piece from co-founder Jim VandeHei that names a real shift: business communication now has a third audience. For years executives communicated to two, the internal team and the external world of customers, investors, and the public. Now AI is a distinct third audience, because people...

Matt opens with apple picking in biblical New York rain (proof you can have a blast even when it’s pouring) and two Business Insider stories that pull in the same direction. First, the power of story. Denise Woodard founded Partake Foods after her daughter’s severe food allergies, selling allergy-friendly cookies out of her car. Her entire early marketing strategy was simple: tell the story of why...

Matt opens on a joyful note about his own year with The Bigger Stage, and a useful lesson hiding in it: you can design a narrow ideal client profile, but the reality is usually more diverse, held together by a common thread. For him that thread is helping people understand who they are and express part of it outwardly to differentiate, humanize, and move the hearts and minds that matter to their s...

Matt had networking on his mind after another great night with his own group, and a Business Insider story landed right on it. Alena Beliauskaya started inviting startup founders hiking because she loved the outdoors. That turned into 12 Scrappy Founders, a Bay Area community now 600-plus strong, mostly AI founders, generating around $10,000 a month, and she keeps it as a side hustle alongside a f...

If you don’t have kids, you may have missed the Anazala Family. Matt had, until a friend worked their first-ever arena show in Newark, the one that reportedly sold out in 25 minutes. Then he started digging, and something clicked. When people feel close to someone online, the next thing they want is to be in the same room. Digiday picked up the same signal this week, with creators and brands start...

Matt opens the week with a smorgasbord of signals that all point the same direction. New data from Talkadot’s State of the Speaking Industry report (a speaker platform, so a grain of salt) puts the median keynote fee at just $2,500, with corporate buyers around $4,500, while bureaus describe a professional market running from roughly $10,000 to $50,000. Only about 1 in 20 speakers reporting throug...

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 ti...

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...

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 tha...

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 numbe...

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 t...

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...

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...

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...

Closing the week from the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Matt reports on a morning that ran Russell Wilson, the Walmart US CEO, Tyra Banks, and Martha Stewart back to back to back. The through-line he couldn’t unsee: Russell Wilson opened with bravado and business wins, high energy and blinding diamonds, and only near the very end of his thirty-minute slot shifted to his family’s story, his fat...

The highlight of Matt’s day at the Fast Company Innovation Festival was watching actress Elizabeth Banks on stage with Marian Leitner-Waldman, founder and CEO of Archer Roose — a wine brand whose whole idea is putting genuinely good wine in a can. Three things stuck. First, the storytelling partnership: Leitner-Waldman had Banks on her vision board and, about six years in, landed her not as a cele...

Day two from the Fast Company Innovation Festival, and Matt’s synthesizing what he saw. He toured The Lighthouse, a gorgeous members’ campus for creators (Brooklyn and Venice) with plug-and-play studios for interviews, kitchen demos, outfit try-ons — a mini-studio for anyone who’ll pay the fee. Around it, the money is pouring in: Steven Bartlett of Diary of a CEO is deploying up to $400 million wi...