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 speeches, a few boards. Now the move is to build an actual media company. Scott Galloway did a version of it — business professor turned podcaster, co-hosting Pivot with Kara Swisher while building out his own podcast network. It’s happening everywhere, and it points to a landscape that’s fundamentally shifted: there’s no Oprah anymore, no single channel that reaches everyone. Attention is segmented across podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and countless niche platforms.
That shift lands on one practical question, whether or not you ever start your own show: where are your people? What are they listening to, watching, paying attention to — and are you there? Matt’s advice is to stop settling into the same few shows you’ve always followed and actively explore, ask people who they pay attention to, and let AI surface things you’d never stumble onto, because you’ll often discover an entire audience orbiting someone you didn’t know existed. He also shares a revealing signal from his own year of running The Bigger Stage podcast: the flood of pitches he gets from people (and their reps) begging to appear — often with videos that don’t move him — tells him that people now clearly grasp the value of getting third-party data about themselves out into the world, not least for how AI tools surface it. So even if you’ll never be Joe Rogan, the question stands: what shows would you want to be on, and if you had a show of your own, what would it be? (Housekeeping: Matt’s testing a Monday-through-Thursday cadence, leaving Fridays open — so don’t be surprised by the lighter week.)
