Ben Affleck Gets REAL About Hollywood, Matt Damon and Michael Jordan
All The Smoke
The Black Effect and iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 7.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2026
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ben Affleck joins Matt and Stak for a wide-ranging conversation about creativity, control, and staying grounded in an industry that rarely allows for it. He talks about building Artists Equity with Matt Damon, why ownership matters more to him now than ever, and how their friendship has survived fame, failure, and everything in between. B
en reflects on choosing when to step in front of the camera and when to stay behind it, why he’s never felt the pull of social media, and what it takes to be comfortable being misunderstood. He also shares stories from directing Air, working closely with Michael Jordan, and the sports movie he still hopes to make one day.
The conversation moves through defining moments like Good Will Hunting and The Town, lessons learned from Rob Reiner, handling paparazzi at the height of fame, and his respect for filmmakers like Ryan Coogler. Ben also gives his honest take on artificial intelligence in entertainment and what to look out for in his new Netflix film, The Rip.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:04.2 | Welcome back, All the Smoke, 2026. |
| 0:06.8 | We get to start with a banger. |
| 0:07.9 | Man, new year. |
| 0:09.0 | Shout out Netflix. |
| 0:10.0 | New Devils. |
| 0:11.0 | For this partnership and obviously giving us the opportunity to sit down with our next guest. |
| 0:16.9 | Someone I'm a huge fan. |
| 0:18.1 | I've been a fan for a long time. |
| 0:19.4 | Yep. |
| 0:20.1 | And has a company called Artist Equity, which we're going to get into, which I think is absolutely amazing. But without further ado, welcome to the show, Ben Affleck. Legend, legend. Appreciate you, Ben. Good to be here. Thank you very much. Honored to be here, man. New movie release. Coming soon, the RIP, January 16th. Got a chance to watch it last |
| 0:39.9 | night. This is the first partnership between Netflix and artist equity, a production company, |
| 0:44.7 | you and Matt launched in 2022. Your company is pretty revolutionary when it comes to the streaming |
| 0:51.4 | age, but also the structure in which people who work for you are rewarded. |
| 0:55.5 | Can you break that down? |
| 1:12.7 | Yeah, sure. This is the first time. Look, like, you know, we had these strikes a couple of years ago and this business, we were talking to this before we started, you know, like things are changing a lot, right? And so there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of fear. and one of the things is like hey you know cost got to come down and |
| 1:12.1 | blah blah and and yet you know you have this whole streaming universe that's obviously really |
| 1:17.1 | expanding has a lot of value and the old days you understood what the value was of stuff you did |
| 1:22.0 | because you know you see the box office and and that kind of thing and there was a value associated with |
| 1:26.1 | it and so |
| 1:27.5 | during the strikes one of the things that we were trying to work with the guilds |
... |
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