Fifty-eight days until summer, still chilly, and it feels like they’re going straight from late winter into summer with something brutal in between. Welcome to Backstage—the podcast is officially rebranded. Cadence still TBD, aspirationally five days a week but thinking three for consistency. Things are changing, lots more activity. Planning a very exclusive, very cool invite-only dinner concept, probably launching in June. After sharing trivia about the Library of Congress being established (1800) and the soda fountain patent (1833—almost 200 years of bubbles), he reflects on yesterday’s 21st anniversary of the first YouTube video. In the grand scheme, 200 years isn’t that long either.
Here’s what’s taking shape with The Bigger Stage: shows, the main podcast, networking and community events, plus he’s adding opportunities for people to record themselves talking about what’s important for their business—doing their pitch, having a conversation about it, getting artifacts to help integrate it into their psyche and go off-book faster. Yesterday he met with people from LinkedIn, talked about AI challenges and threats, but also how everyone’s using it. Nobody’s saying they’re not. So the question becomes: how can humans best collaborate to do what only humans can do? That’s what The Bigger Stage is all about.
Example: He doesn’t have time to manually write podcast descriptions every day, so AI takes his transcript and turns it into a description. He reads it, sometimes makes changes, but the ROI isn’t there to spend forever on it. He’s grateful for that. However, the only reason it works is because it’s taking a transcript of what he’s already said without AI. When AI takes things you’ve done that are original work, great. But if you surrender your thinking to AI, that’s not going to produce something he wants out in the world. Even when using it to help write, he writes pretty fulsome pieces, then treats AI as his editor, not his writer.
The Bigger Stage is creating stages for people to express themselves more effectively, entertainingly, engagingly—bringing out more humanity in messaging as we build businesses, movements, influence to make the world better. The question: What are you doing today to cultivate collaborative relationships? Partnership isn’t as easy as it sounds. It takes real intention and humility to pull off truly great collaboration—different incentives, even with good people. Things have to be very aligned, high trust. But we’re going to need more partnerships moving forward, not fewer. So we’ve got to get better at humaning.
