A backstage pass to The Bigger Stage, where host Matt Stone covers the behind-the-scenes lowdown on his journey to build The Bigger Stage brand, business, and show, and the business and life lessons he's learning along the way. mattstone.substack.com
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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…
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…
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…
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…
