Joe Rogan Podcast #2440: Matt Damon & Ben Affleck (Transcript)

If they don’t ask you anything about the movie, they come in and go, “so how you been?” You know? And you’re like, oh, shit, this is going to be bad.

The Transformation of the Film Industry

JOE ROGAN: Is it weird? Like the transformation of the film industry seems like a lot of it is moving towards these big streaming movies now.

BEN AFFLECK: Absolutely. I mean, look, it’s because where most people have gone to watch them. Like used to be the only place you’d go see movies in the 1940s. Like every American went to the movie every week, basically. But it was because it was that or watch the cows walk by. You know, that was the only… And then TV comes around. It’s little. And you see these little serials.

But, you know, what happened was now this is why it’s totally changed the whole thing. Because you got 300 million people, 330, whatever, is watching, you know, Netflix. And it’s a lot harder to get people to go into the movies.

JOE ROGAN: There’s also YouTube, there’s also TikTok.

BEN AFFLECK: There’s also my kids. Like, it’s hard to get them excited about a movie. Yeah, because that’s what we had.

MATT DAMON: I mean, yeah, that was our… I mean, our teen years were just… Every weekend we’re at the movies. Yeah, there’s just no question about it. You were going to go and usually not get into one because there were too many people. And then you just see what else is playing and go to that.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it seems like it was kind of slipping away because so many people were watching streaming already. And then COVID came around and everyone was locked down and no one was going to the movie theater. And then it just set.

The Impact of COVID on Cinema

BEN AFFLECK: I had this like, drama that was coming out, like, right when COVID hit. I really like the performance movie. It’s not an alcoholic guy who’s kid… Kid dies and becomes alcoholic. It’s dark movie. But I loved it. And I could tell, like, we’re f*ed. No one’s going to go see it. The theater see this movie.

And it wasn’t even that streaming. Streaming really blew up, you know, of course, during COVID. So, you know, look, they rushed it onto streaming. People actually saw it. I was like, well, all things being equal, I’d like people to see it, you know, and it’s not like my dad had an 11 inch black and white TV and that’s what was TV viewing.

JOE ROGAN: Now it’s like $200.

BEN AFFLECK: You got a f*ing 65 inch flat screen, like, and good sound. So of course people are willing to… And then streamers also started making great shows. You have Adolescents. I don’t know if you saw. I think that’s one of the best things ever done.

JOE ROGAN: I haven’t seen Adolescents. Unbelievable. What is it?

MATT DAMON: Oh, my God. I don’t want to spoil too much of it. It’s only four episodes. They’re all one shot. They’re all one shot. Each episode is one entire shot.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

MATT DAMON: So the cast, they took… I think I talked to the director about it, that the cast took, I think a week to rehearse each one and then a week to shoot it. And so they do it twice a day. It’s the full hour. They would choreograph the entire stuff. Yeah, it’s really…

BEN AFFLECK: And then the acting is great, but that’s…

MATT DAMON: I mean, just dismiss that even you could even call it a gimmick. It’s not in this case, but the performances and the writing and what it’s about, it’s as good as anything you’ll see. It’s phenomenal.

BEN AFFLECK: What is it on Netflix?

MATT DAMON: Netflix. Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: You know, you have like… It’s not even an anomaly. There’s Baby Reindeer, there’s f*ing Succession, there’s Game of Thrones, Ozark.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: You know, it’s just like, okay, well, they’re doing great shit out there. It’s not like this sort of implied thing before was like, yeah, well, TV’s…

JOE ROGAN: Not as good, right?

BEN AFFLECK: As interesting. It’s a serious.

The Evolution from TV to Film

MATT DAMON: When we started, it was… There was a different… I mean, like, like George Clooney, for instance, like there was a big thing, you know, he very famously, you know, became this superstar on ER.

BEN AFFLECK: That show.

MATT DAMON: 40 million people a week were watching that show. It was the biggest thing, right, because there were only a few channels to tune into. And that show was the biggest one. And George never renegotiated his contract. He wanted to work in movies and it was like, you can’t go from TV to movies.

BEN AFFLECK: People can do it.

MATT DAMON: And he really strategically and kind of patiently, like he joked that on the last episode he was on, Anthony Edwards, you know, his co-star, was making a million bucks for the episode and he was making, you know, 20 grand or whatever his deal was. Like, he could have renegotiated, but he would have had to give more years.

BEN AFFLECK: How bad he wanted to get off TV.

MATT DAMON: That’s how bad he wanted to get off of the biggest TV show in the world. Because there was such a big kind of level change between features and TV.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it was a giant difference in quality. It was also this… The breaking it up for commercials.

MATT DAMON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: It was just a different experience.

BEN AFFLECK: You know, there’s all these rules. Like you can’t say this, can’t do that, can’t swear, no kind of violence and all the things people want to see in movies, you know, and then… And also it wasn’t as interesting. And then now that’s the… Tethered to these schedules and all this stuff. Whereas you get this shit like you don’t have a schedule and you can take a bunch of risks. So… And that started happening, and then it was kind of like, well, this all is just as good, if not better than what’s in the movies.

The Rise of IP and Conservative Filmmaking

MATT DAMON: Well, then movies started to move towards more IP. And because it was hard to get…

BEN AFFLECK: People to come to the movies, everyone got scared and thought, well, you have to have to be a sequel or superhero movie.

MATT DAMON: And so an interesting little movie… Kind of in the 1990s when we kind of came onto the scene, you know, there were a lot of really good independent movies that were being made.

JOE ROGAN: There was.

MATT DAMON: There was, you know, it was a really great time to be making movies. People were… They were making daring movies. And then everyone just got way more conservative because it’s huge. Like, the business is so different theatrically and streaming because the… To put out a movie theatrically, you have to put so much more money behind it to publicize. Like, you’re trying to get everybody spending…

BEN AFFLECK: About what the budget was to make…

MATT DAMON: It, to advertise it.

The Economics of Modern Filmmaking

BEN AFFLECK: 50% of the theatrical.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, because you split it with the movie house right through the exhibit.

BEN AFFLECK: So a $25 million movie, to break even, you got to make $100 million.

MATT DAMON: And you got to get everybody to not only know about the movie, but to show up like that Friday night, like that specific time for that specific movie, and to cut through all the noise that people are contending with.

BEN AFFLECK: And it just becomes about risk. And nobody wants to take the risk, so they don’t want to make something new because it’s such an investment. We’re going to lose our f*ing money. And the streamers have stepped into that. And like, no, you’re not necessarily have a star. You could try something more interesting or didn’t have to be a superhero movie, whatever it was.

And also, I think it’s like, frankly, like, people my age, it’s first of all, it’s expensive, right? You take your whole family, it’s $100, you’re on a streaming service, $20 a month. You can watch all you want. So you can’t be cavalier about, like, you’re just going to price it however the f* you want and expect everyone to be indifferent to that.

And then also, the idea of, like, for me, there’s a lot of stuff. I make that decision, like, do I want to see the Odyssey on a big screen? F*ing death. I went to the theater to just watch the trailer for that movie and did I one battle after another, I wanted to go see in the theater, but there’s movies of people that I really like and respect where, yeah, and I got a good system and shit, but I’m like, look, I’ll watch and I might get tired. I won’t pause it and take a piss or the kids, whatever it is that’s conducive to my lifestyle.

JOE ROGAN: And most people are.

BEN AFFLECK: I think most people are, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But there is the experience of seeing it with a bunch of other people. Awesome movie with a bunch of other people. It’s like a shared experience.

The Theater Experience vs. Streaming

MATT DAMON: I always like an attention. Way more attentive. Like when I went to see one battle on IMAX, you know that feeling. There’s nothing like that feeling. I took two of my kids and two of my nephews and my wife, and we all went, and it was just, it was like, and you’re in with a bunch of strangers, people in your community, and you’re having this experience together.

I always say it’s more like going to church. You show up at an appointed time. It doesn’t wait for you. It’s versus the experience of watching at home, I think. You’re watching in a room, the lights are on, other shit’s going on, the kids are running around, the dogs are running around, whatever it is. It’s just a very different level of attention that you’re willing to or that you’re able to give to it.

And that has a big effect. And it also ends up having an effect or is starting to have an effect on how you make movies. Like, for instance, Netflix. Standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you usually have like three set pieces, one in the first act, one in the second, and one in the third. And they kind of ramp up. And the big one with all the explosions, and you spend most of your money on that one in the third act. That’s your kind of finale.

And now they’re like, can we get a big one in the first five minutes to get somebody? We want people to stay tuned in and can, and it wouldn’t be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue, because people are on their phones while they’re watching. And so then it’s going to really start to infringe on how we’re telling the story.

BEN AFFLECK: But then you look at our lessons. It didn’t do any of that.

MATT DAMON: It didn’t do any of that.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s f*ing great. So I think it’s…

JOE ROGAN: And it’s dark, too.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s tragic and intense. It’s like guy who finds out his kid’s accused of murder, and it’s like, and there’s long shots in the back of their head. They get in the car, nobody says anything. I think there are those. Look, I wish. That feels more like the exception.

MATT DAMON: It’s so masterfully made that it feels a little more like the exception. I hope it’s not.

BEN AFFLECK: My feeling is just that it demonstrates that you don’t need to do any of that shit to get people. Like, and I think, you know…

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

BEN AFFLECK: Look, hey, the town had the action scene in the beginning, the first five minutes, because it’s a common trick that you would go, like, let me grab them and get them invested in them. It’s like the movies that start with the hero hanging from the cliff, and now we’re going to flash back to the beginning and tell you how they got there.

Adapting to Cultural Change

BEN AFFLECK: I always feel like, complaining about it makes me feel like one of these guys was like, when I was a boy. Like, you always want to freeze the culture at the time when you, I don’t know, felt more like, we didn’t used to have these phones. The f* are all these phones? And everybody’s looking…

JOE ROGAN: I get it.

BEN AFFLECK: Yes. It’s true also. It’s like supply and demand. People want to look at their phone. They can look at TikTok they want. They’re going to do that. I think what you can do is make shit the best. You can make it really good. And people can still go to the movies. Not like we have this idea that it’s like an existential threat. Everything that comes along is going to destroy everything.

Instead of, like, what history suggests is that there’s like marginal encroachments. Things shift. As television came along, there was less theater going. That’s not going to happen. And people are still going to go to movies because of what you said. Like, it feels like a cool thing to do. I’m going to go see the Odyssey. I guarantee you, in a theater, no matter what, fewer of them, you could argue. That’s because I have more choice or whatever it is, it’s hard to fight supply and demand. That’s the trick, right?

If people want to watch a bunch of stuff at home because they invested in TVs and cost us money, they will. But the upside of that is, like, I can try to do something hopefully that’s like, that actually doesn’t need to have the most urgency to get you to come to the theater with your family. That’s a little more experimental or risk taking or whatever in that way.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you got to adapt. I mean, there’s no way you’re going to change people’s viewing habits now. I mean, what percentage of Netflix is actually watched on phones? It’s got to be pretty high, which is insane.

MATT DAMON: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: Even watching on a laptop for me is kind of like…

JOE ROGAN: Kind of sucks.

BEN AFFLECK: It sucks, yeah. That’s a joke that I like to…

MATT DAMON: Make with every director I work with. Like when they’re really puzzling over a shot or really grinding out something, I go, “You know, it’s not going to look as good on the phone.”

BEN AFFLECK: Just everyone gets angry out of their tails. No, that’s going to look great this big. But keep walking around and lighting that wall.

The Algorithm’s Influence

JOE ROGAN: It is weird, though, the concern for the algorithm, like, making sure that people watch. Like, look, we’ve got data that shows within the first five minutes when this happens, they tune out. So let’s, like my buddy Tony Hinchcliffe, he’s got Kill Tony and now it’s on Netflix. And so they’re giving him notes now and they can give him, like, but they’re not telling him what to do, but they’re saying, like, this is when people are tuning out. And so let’s just, so you have that data now. Decide how you want to edit things. It’s like, oh, yeah, it’s slippery slope.

MATT DAMON: It is, because it’s like the bar for walking out of a movie theater is a lot higher than from just changing the channel. Right. And oftentimes, directors will want to make a movie that is challenging and upsetting. And I remember Terry Kinney, my friend, great actor, and he told me about the experience of seeing Taxi Driver in New York for the first time in ’76 or whenever it came out.

And he said, what I remember is not only the movie, but I remember standing at the back because I had got up. I got up out of my seat and I went. But I couldn’t bring myself to leave because I was so invested. But I was, so he goes, I was standing at the back by the door watching the movie. And he goes, and there were two…

BEN AFFLECK: Other people standing next to me who…

MATT DAMON: Were doing the same thing.

JOE ROGAN: Just because they were disturbed?

MATT DAMON: Because the movie was disturbing them so much.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MATT DAMON: Which is not a bad thing. Right. So had that been on Netflix or Amazon? Somebody go, I’m just disturbed. And they turned and they changed the channel.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MATT DAMON: Like, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make Taxi Driver.

JOE ROGAN: Right. That’s true. Like the investment of going to a place is much greater.

The Pacing of Classic Cinema

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah. One of the values of that is that you could, you look at movies from the ’70s, eight, the first act was 25, 30 minutes.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN AFFLECK: The verdict for this great movie takes a long time to get a deer hunter.

MATT DAMON: Yeah. I mean it’s…

BEN AFFLECK: And you’re right, like what you’re saying, the threshold for walkout is real. Like any scene, like, I want to watch naked alone. You flip the f*ing. So you are battling that. And I watched Le Mans…

JOE ROGAN: The other night, Steve McQueen, and there’s no one talks for like five minutes. There’s no talking. It’s just a bunch of stuff getting done. Just a bunch of people doing things. And it’s like, wow, you could make a difference. You could let it air out back then. Yeah, it was, they had a different respect for what it was. Like you were telling a story and you’re going to let it air out.

MATT DAMON: Well, they also knew where their audience was. They were in a theater that they…

BEN AFFLECK: Part of it was they wanted to come there. I mean, the great story I like is the first time they debuted a movie. Guys with a projector in a room full of people. It was a movie of a train pulling into the station. So they put the reel up and they did demonstration and they showed the people and everybody missed it because they were turned around staring at the projector. They never f*ing seen anything like that.

The technology’s upstaging, but you come for an event, come for a thing, we’re all going to be here. That’s part of it. It’s, I don’t know, there’s competing arms that you can think, well, what do you get to do? And some people just go ahead and f* it. Like Jim Cameron’s Avatar.

MATT DAMON: I’m going to make my three hour…

The Economics of Modern Filmmaking

BEN AFFLECK: Movie and people are going to come and great. You know what I mean? And people say, oh, well, you can’t have a three hour movie. He’s like, well, I’m Jim Cameron and I’ve actually got the number one and two movies. I think I got this. He goes ahead and does it.

You know, this history is full of people who got told a bunch of conventional wisdom and were like, yeah, but we’re going to do something different. And as it turns out, that’s actually what people want too. It’s not for you to just repeat the other s* that’s been done before.

JOE ROGAN: One of the things I read that I thought was really f*ing cool is you guys set it up so that if this film performs well, the entire crew gets bonuses. Yeah, that’s awesome.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, hopefully it’s successful.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a f*ing great movie, man.

Investing in the Crew

BEN AFFLECK: It’s a fun movie, but it’s good. But it’s not like we’re saints or philanthropists. It’s completely self serving in my opinion, because in order to do the job well, everybody who’s working on it has to be really invested and give a s* about the result, not their paycheck only.

And sometimes you work with a crew that just happen to be great anyway, even though they don’t really have to care about it and they do. And what we saw was that makes your movie better.

And then there’s just the thing of the business is changing. You see these strikes and work stops and all these fing questions. In order for this, I think to survive and to be a good middle class fing artist, artisanal craftsman job, we got 1,200 people that need to have reliable jobs.

And part of the negotiations is always like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but we’re all going to get fed. We have no participation. Used to working on movies and that goes to actors too, where you go, oh, we all invested. It was really hard and we fing put in the extra effort, somebody else walked away with all the success.

And my theory with Matt was we were like, how about, let’s say, okay, it’s just fairness, right? If this thing actually blows up and does really well, you should benefit from that. People have been given sort of promises of participation back in that haven’t come true. This is like everyone got their rates, everyone got their hourly. No one cut anything. This is just an exercise in actually proving that it’s not bulls*, that if there’s success, you’ll get some extra. A little success, a little extra, a little more, a little more.

Above the Line, Below the Line

MATT DAMON: Like you said, because it’s fair. You know, and in success, the people who made the movie should participate in that. And also with this one, which was important to us, they delineate above the line and below the line, right? Above the line being like us, the director and the cast. And below the line being kind of the more blue collar side of our industry.

BEN AFFLECK: And like painters, grainsman, camera people, everybody else, drivers.

MATT DAMON: And so we just wanted, we believe, when we started this company, we were like, look, we know who makes our movie better, right? It’s not, this has kind of been mispriced the whole time. The economics have been wrong. When there’s a big success, everybody who had a hand on it.

BEN AFFLECK: Because you see a great director that people rely on or an actor that’s considered bankable, they’re all going, okay, I need all my people.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, every great director I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with a lot of them, they have their regular crew members that ride or die with these people. Because, I mean, and you said it to me when we were starting the company, you were like, you know those department heads who are each handling cinematography, your camera department, your grip department, your electric, all these people are ultimately the people who make the movie good. They make a demonstrable difference in how good your movie is.

JOE ROGAN: And imagine once you get a good flow with a great crew, you got the band. Yeah, there’s no need to bring in new band members. Let’s do this again.

Creating the Right Environment

BEN AFFLECK: Because they, and then everybody knows what we’re trying to do. So then what makes it, you’re trying to get something special, something interesting, something fing magical. In some moment, you have to, if people are tight or they’ve been out of shape or fs up the environment, people aren’t relaxed. Actors can’t do their best work.

And that does make a difference between something that’s good, average, great, whatever. And I think that if you say it makes cognitive sense to people. But if you look around like Colin Anderson, camera operator, right, not the cinematographer, but I would tell you he’s, I think he’s the greatest camera operator that is in Hollywood.

And if you want evidence that he shot Marty Supreme, he was the camera operator in one battle after another. You look at his resume and you’re like, oh, that’s interesting. These are all f*ing great movies. Now, is he personally responsible for all of it? No, because it’s a collaborative medium.

There is no, you can be a painter and paint by yourself. You can be a novelist and do that, sing, write music. You can’t do this job alone. There are a lot of people that go into it.

Even when I realized Matt was the lead in the last movie I did, Air, that I directed, having somebody so fing good in your movie who also shows up, does his job, is friendly, isn’t fing around or playing games or being weird, that sets this tone. Everybody else kind of goes, okay, well, what’s Damon like? Oh, I see this. We’re taking it seriously, but nobody’s going to be a dick. We’re all going to do our job. We’re not going to take ourselves too seriously, but we’re going to take the job really seriously.

And immediately everybody kind of snaps into that. That trickle down effect goes across the whole thing. And I think the best thing that I know how to do as a director is just create an environment where people feel like they show up. People like me, they’re rooting for me. I can f*ing embarrass myself and be bad, and it’s not going to be in the movie. And it’s not going to make me feel self conscious.

MATT DAMON: And I’m listening to my ideas.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah. And if I have something to offer, they’re going to go, oh, that’s a good idea. You know what I mean? And that’s kind of the trick, in my view. And then you’re depending on the gifts of all these people.

Every single one of them, some woman’s assistant prop master is coming up with the stuff that Phil Knight found, his waffle from the shoe. They found it on eBay. That extra mile. You know what I mean? If you make people feel like it matters and you give a s and that they’re contributing and, oh, cool, let’s do a close up of that. That’s really fing cool. They’ll die for you. They’ll go all the way and it changes the whole world.

MATT DAMON: And if you bonus them, you know, it’s not just all, it’s not just raw.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s not just raw.

MATT DAMON: There’s an actual codified bonus structure to say we, this is the way of recognizing that s* right in your paycheck too.

BEN AFFLECK: This is the way of recognizing that s* right in your paycheck too.

MATT DAMON: That’s very real.

A New Model for Success

JOE ROGAN: And you guys develop this. Is this, so is this something that you would like, kudos to you guys addressing this, first of all, and recognizing it and having that attitude because it’s so important and so easy for big movie stars to just think about themselves and their own.

MATT DAMON: We’re communists, Joe. We’re from Cambridge.

BEN AFFLECK: Keep the car running.

MATT DAMON: No, no. But each deal has had this kind of, each deal that we’ve done so far has been different because we’ve made deals with different studios and platforms and stuff.

BEN AFFLECK: And just involved us basically retroactively going, hey, we came in under. We did a great job as extra money. Here you go. This is the first time that we were able to actually create a schedule where it’s like, and by the way, we wouldn’t be able to do that without Netflix going, okay, cool. You think you can make this work? We’ll give you a shot. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to do it.

So we had to say, look, we’re not asking you to take a cut, but if we can, and we can tell you if the movie is watched as many hours in the first 90 days as this movie that you all know what it is, then that’s 20% of your salary, let’s say, right? Just take a hit. So it’s like, yeah, you make more money, your bonus is more. It’s all just pegged to where you’re at just because that was the most fair idea we come up with.

MATT DAMON: So they gave us five different levels, right? The first couple we hopefully we can hit and maybe the third, maybe we get. And then it got to the kind of single, double, triple, home run.

BEN AFFLECK: Kind of like single, double, triple, home run, home run, f*ing grand slam.

MATT DAMON: The fifth one was 110% of all Netflix viewers or something like that. So it’s everybody who has a Netflix account watches it. And then 10% of them watch it again. And we were like, but that’s what happened.

BEN AFFLECK: We were laughing.

MATT DAMON: And then K Pop Demon Hunters came along and actually did that. That’s the first movie that’s ever.

BEN AFFLECK: Jesus.

MATT DAMON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think a lot of autistic kids watch that over and over and over.

BEN AFFLECK: I haven’t seen.

MATT DAMON: I haven’t seen it. But, I mean, somebody’s watching it over and over.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, dude. People love it.

The Streaming Model Challenge

BEN AFFLECK: I mean, the value of it is that, because before this, one of the big things and everybody’s fighting over in the strike is like, well, share your chance. There used to be residuals, right. And residuals, and it was only for SAG and a few other things, but it was like, and you knew if you had a line in the movie and there was a certain number at the box office, well, you’re going to get another $2,000 bucks.

And that was a big deal. You’d get that check in the mail and like, okay, I could pay the rent for another month, and I can do that s*. But then there was this sort of ill, what constitutes success? Because streamer doesn’t actually sell another ticket if you watch that movie. Right?

JOE ROGAN: It’s hard to tell.

BEN AFFLECK: Well, why did you sign up for this service? Right. So for a while, everyone’s looking at the first thing that you looked at when you subscribed to somebody. Okay, you’re going to go buy Hulu. What did you watch first?

JOE ROGAN: The Bear.

BEN AFFLECK: Well, The Bear must be creating value for us. But you can’t assign a strict numerical value to it because it’s like a box office where you can go, well, Oppenheimer’s a billion dollars or whatever. And that’s another billion dollars on our balance sheet because streamers are doing a subscription model.

You know, it’s whether it’s like a gym membership, where in the f*ing first of the year, you’re like, I’m going to work out again.

JOE ROGAN: I’m going to work out again.

BEN AFFLECK: I’m going to buy that annual membership. And you go twice or you go to the gym every single day, you’re paying the same amount.

The Streaming Landscape and Content Consumption

JOE ROGAN: Also, the weird thing is with streaming, when you’re opening up Netflix, it’s not like you go to the movie theater and there’s seven movies playing. You’re opening up Netflix, and you have an unlimited option list. It’s insane how much content. You could waste the rest of your life sitting in front of Netflix and then die and have millions of hours more to listen to or watch.

BEN AFFLECK: You’re right. Like, when we started researching that and built our own data to pull people and examine all this stuff, it’s actually all the library stuff that people are watching all the time. If you said, like, the new stuff is theoretically what keeps people with the subscription or whatever, but in terms of volume of time, I think, and doesn’t come from them, but it looks a lot like, we’re going to watch Orange is New Black and the episode of Suits and the old Seinfeld and Friends and Cupcake Wars. That’s what’s… because Americans watch six hours of TV a day.

MATT DAMON: Right?

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. And then the other six hours they’re on their phone.

BEN AFFLECK: How does anything get done?

The Making of The Rip

JOE ROGAN: How does anything get done when you started to make this film? Like, what is the process? Like, how did you guys agree on it? Like, what did you guys have it written first?

MATT DAMON: Joe Carnahan wrote it before you knew.

JOE ROGAN: You were going to Netflix with it?

MATT DAMON: Yeah, yeah. He came to us with the script. And we’ve known Joe for a really… He did a movie. His first movie is called Narc, I don’t know if you ever saw. Yeah, so we met him way back, 25 years ago or something like that. And so we met him back then, and Ben did a movie of his in 2004, I think. And so we’ve known Joe for a really long time and kind of been in touch with him over the years.

And he just sent this to us and said… We read it and we thought it was great and bought it for the company. And then we started talking to Joe about how he saw how he wanted to do it, and he suggested that we actually do the movie. And we were like, yeah, why don’t we do it?

BEN AFFLECK: It seems basically because we like it and we’re not trying to just do our movies. We want to be doing movies with all these people that we like, respect and… And then, the way we sort of set it up is such that to try to get, like, the… Historically, the way it’s worked is like the studio will own an IP or a script or whatever, and then they’ll say, “Okay, we want you to do it. Okay, well, how much? Well, how much did you get for the last one?” Right? And you go, then what’s the budget? And then that’s how they assign a value to it. Right?

But my belief was, well, especially when these streamers were coming into the market and chasing stuff is like, this movie may be worth more, it may be worth less. And that, like, we’re all just subject to that. So we’ll try to get the best price for it and we’ll all share it pro rata. And essentially that was the same process. We’ve done eight, I guess, movies or so now, and we took it out and people wanted it.

And then one of the things that was really appealing about Netflix was that they were open to this idea that we’ve been trying to institutionalize and was like, “Okay, great, that’s really meaningful because ideally it becomes a template that other people go, hey, we want to do that thing.” And I mean, oh, here’s the paper.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, that’s the thing. Like, a lot of people say that they would want to do it, but now the template exists, so it’s like plug and play. So if you’re not full of s* and you really do mean that, then guess what, just take this and…

BEN AFFLECK: And it also is going to let you, I hope, manage the risk. In other words, the argument you always have is like, “Well, s, we got to invest all this money in the movie. So you can’t have your protagonist be too objectionable, that’s too edgy, or can’t be R rated because it costs this much.” I get it, right? You’re going to put all your money into it. You want… You don’t want money to fing disappear. You want to make money.

Okay, so like, when we wrote the first movie that we’re… Good Will Hunting, it was like, we knew that had to be a cheap movie, people talking in rooms to each other. Because no one’s going to put a bunch of money into a movie with us no one heard of.

MATT DAMON: A movie with us no one heard of.

BEN AFFLECK: So it was like, okay, what can we do that’s interesting? And try to keep it as inexpensive as possible so that we can make the argument that someone should make the movie. That same logic carries through every time you’re asking somebody to invest in something.

So what I’d like to have happen is to say, okay, now that we know there’s a reliable system where we understand that, like, in success, we’ll actually benefit. We can lower the price up front for you so that you can have a low f*ing barrier to entry, so that you can take the risk, so that we can do something really interesting. That’s an original idea. That’s an Anora or a Sinners or Marty Supreme or whatever it is. And then if it’s successful, we’re not all sitting here like aholes, where you guys walk off with all the money and you can have that happen in an ongoing way so that you can make more interesting stuff.

AI and the Future of Filmmaking

JOE ROGAN: A lot of the stuff that was going on with strikes was centered around AI and what AI is going to do to the business. Like, where do you feel is going to be the biggest problem with AI? Is it going to be with people’s likenesses? Because there’s a lot of that where they want to use extras and own their digital rights forever, essentially be able to recreate them in any kind of film. But then there’s also, you’re going to have films that are written by artificial intelligence. You’re going to have scenes that don’t involve people. And it gets weird, right?

MATT DAMON: It gets really weird. But this is actually an area of expertise for him.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah, we’ve been spending time looking at this. Like, my belief is sort of like, what’s going to happen with electricity? Well, a lot of s is going to happen with electricity. Some of it’s going to be good, some is going to change stuff. Some of it’s going to be, it’s going to be s that kills a bunch of people. Like, it’s opening a door that you can’t talk about it in a kind of a blanket way.

But I think with what I see is, for example, if you try to get ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to write you something, it’s really sty. And it’s sty because by its nature, it goes to the mean, to the average, and it’s not reliable. And it’s… I mean, I just can’t stand to see what it writes.

JOE ROGAN: Now.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s a useful tool if you’re a writer and you’re going, “Ah, what’s the thing? I’m trying to set something up. Or somebody sends someone a letter, but it’s delayed two days and gets…” And it can give you some examples of that. I actually don’t think it’s very likely that it can… It’s going to be able to write anything meaningful or in particular that it’s going to be making movies like from whole cloth, like totally novel. Like, that’s bulls*. I don’t think that’s going to happen.

I think it’s not… I think it actually turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it and really what it is is going to be a tool, just like sort of visual effects and yeah, it needs to have language around it. You need to protect your name and likeness. You can do that. You can watermark it. Those laws already exist. You can’t… I can’t sell your f*ing picture for money. I can’t. You can sue me, period.

I might have the ability to draw you, to make you in a very realistic way, but that’s already against the law. And the unions are going to… The guilds are going to manage this where it’s like, “Okay, look, if this is a tool that actually helps us, for example, we don’t have to go to the North Pole, right? We can shoot the scene here in our parkas and, you know, whatever it is, but then make it appear very realistically as if we’re in the North Pole. It’ll save us a lot of money, a lot of time. We’re going to focus on the performances and not be freezing our a out there and running back inside.” That’s useful.

Just like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn used to be driving their car and there’s a wind blowing a painting behind them and it looked goofy. Now, you know, in computer generated, people use a lot of computers, computer generated stuff, and some of it is going to replace just that. Like instead of 500 guys in Singapore making $2 an hour to render all the graphics for a superhero movie, there’s going to be able to do that a lot easier.

There’s already laws around and guild guidelines around how many union extras you have to use. But also we’ve been tiling extras. Like, there weren’t a million orcs in Middle Earth, you know what I mean? Invictus. There weren’t all those people in the stadium. Like, that’s something we’ve been doing. It kind of feels to me like the thing we were talking about earlier where there’s a lot more fear because we have the sense this existential dread.

JOE ROGAN: It’s going to wipe everything out.

BEN AFFLECK: But that actually runs counter, in my view, to what history seems to show, which is adoption is slow, it’s incremental. I think a lot of that rhetoric comes from people who are trying to justify valuations around companies where they go, “We’re going to change everything in two years, there’s going to be no more work.”

Well, the reason they’re saying that is because they need to ascribe a valuation for investment that can warrant the Capex spend they’re going to make on these data centers with the argument that, like, “Oh, you know, as soon as we do the next model, it’s going to scale up and be three times as good.” Except that actually ChatGPT 5, about 25% better than ChatGPT 4 and costs about four times as much in the way of electricity and data. So those are nicely plateauing.

The early AI, the line went up very steeply and it’s now sort of leveling off. I think it’s because… And, yes, it’ll get better, but it’s going to be really expensive to get better. And a lot of people are like, “F* this, we want ChatGPT 4.” Because it turned out like the vast majority of people who use AI are using it to, like, as companion bots to chat with at night. And so there’s no work, there’s no productivity, there’s no value to it.

I would argue there’s also not a lot of social value to getting people to focus on an AI friend who’s telling you that you’re great and listening to everything you say and being sycophantic. That’s sort of a side issue, I think, for this particular purpose, like, the way I see the technology and what it’s good at and what it’s not, it’s going to be good at filling in all the places that are expensive and burdensome and they make it harder to do it. And it’s always going to rely fundamentally on the human artistic aspects of it.

The Value of Authentic Performance

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think the more it becomes ubiquitous, the more people are going to appreciate real things that are made by real people. You know, like, you still appreciate a handmade table. You know, you’re going to appreciate, like, did you see The Beast in Me? Claire Danes?

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah.

MATT DAMON: No, I didn’t.

JOE ROGAN: Great.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, I heard it was great.

JOE ROGAN: That lady.

BEN AFFLECK: Whoo, terrific.

JOE ROGAN: When she’s in a scene, you’re just like, Jesus Christ. Like, you… Like, her f*ing lips are quivering, like you believe everything that she’s saying.

BEN AFFLECK: But you’re right, people want that.

The Art of Authentic Performance

MATT DAMON: I did this interview with Dwayne Johnson because when people are in these awards things, they sometimes have other actors interview them. And I did this interview with Dwayne and I asked him. There’s this scene in the Smashing Machine where he’s overdosed on drugs and his buddy comes to see him in the hospital. And it really walloped me, this scene. I thought it was so great.

And I asked him, and I was just like, “Can you just tell me about this scene? Like, Benny Safdie directed it. Did Benny write that? Did you work on that scene with them?” He goes, “No, we actually worked on it together.” And I go, “But how did that scene come to be?”

And Dwayne goes, “Well, my father was an alcoholic.” And I don’t remember if he said substance abuser or alcoholic, but I didn’t know the man. I don’t want to impugn him, but he had a substance issue, whatever it was. He goes, “And when he would talk to me, you know, that’s how he would defend himself.” He was almost a bargaining thing, because there’s this thing when this guy comes to him, he’s overdosed.

And Dwayne’s amazing in this scene. He’s going like, he’s going, “Yeah, isn’t it crazy? And then I woke up and I mean, I could hear him, but I couldn’t really hear him.” And you see him and he’s kind of tap dancing. And his friend finally kind of holds his feet to the fire. And at that moment, Dwayne literally starts to burst into tears and just pulls the hospital sheet up over his head. And it’s like, I mean, it just, it was, I’m not doing it justice if you haven’t.

BEN AFFLECK: I know you’ve seen it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MATT DAMON: But he said, so he explains that about his father, and then he goes, “And when my mom was diagnosed with stage three lung cancer, I was with her when the oncologist came in, and she was lying in the hospital bed. And when he gave her the news, she pulled the sheet up over her head, and I looked at her, and she just looked like a little kid, you know?”

And I was like, all right. Like, so that, right, is two traumatic events from this guy’s life. From his life experience. And the actor in him, right, sees this scene, goes into his memory, pulls these two things out, understands that they’re appropriate for this scene, and he can marry them together in the scene. And then he goes and performs it that way.

And a dude walking in off the road, goes to the movies, sees this, understands somehow that it’s fing real. I didn’t know why. That’s why I wanted to ask him. How did that scene come to be? I genuinely didn’t know and made me tear up. And, you know, like, that is, there’s no fing AI that can do that.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s a whole lot more than photorealistic images.

MATT DAMON: That you could have an AI understand Dwayne’s face and move his face into different. No f*ing thing could ever do that.

JOE ROGAN: The complications of real life experiences relayed.

MATT DAMON: That is a completely human. That is an artist. That’s a piece of art. That comes out of a lived human experience.

Emily Blunt’s Powerful Performance

JOE ROGAN: That movie gave me so much anxiety. There’s moments where Emily Blunt is arguing.

MATT DAMON: I really said, I think that’s the best she’s ever been. You know, we live in the same building in New York. She’s like a very dear friend of mine. And I was like, I really think that’s the best she’s ever been. And then I blurted that out to Chris Nolan. And he kind of stopped and looked at me like, he didn’t say it, but he was kind of like, “She’s pretty f*ing good in my movie, too.”

JOE ROGAN: Well, she’s great, period.

MATT DAMON: She’s great, period.

JOE ROGAN: She’s great, period. But there’s something about that. Well, I knew Mark. I knew Mark from, I met Mark in 1997 when he was fighting in the UFC. So I knew the whole journey of him. And I was so happy for Dwayne because it was a film where instead of being this fing superhero, blockbuster hulk of a man, he gets to be that, but be a great actor. And, you know, you can’t really get a person to look like that, to express emotions and express. And he was Mark Kerr. If you know Mark, I mean, it was fing great acting.

MATT DAMON: I completely forgot it was him. And somebody who had seen it before told me that was going to happen, and I was like, all right, we’ll see. And it was like, from the second it started.

BEN AFFLECK: It didn’t get the credit it deserved in terms of like, the amount of people that went to see it. But I think overall, in time, people appreciate that’s what people go back to.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Because it’s a movie about MMA. So a lot of people, like, I don’t want to see a movie about a bunch of f*ing meatheads. But it’s not. It’s just a movie that happens to be around MMA. But it’s a great movie. The scenes are fantastic.

MATT DAMON: Fantastic.

JOE ROGAN: The acting is so good. And even the fight scenes, they’re so realistic, man. It’s really like they, I saw all those fights. They recreated those fights about as good as you can get, and just his crazy struggle and, you know the story behind the documentary, the Smashing Machine?

MATT DAMON: No.

The Documentary That Changed Everything

JOE ROGAN: So the Smashing Machine was made when Mark was at the height of his powers in Pride. And he was the most terrifying guy in the world. He was 265 pounds of solid muscle just blowing through people. Didn’t even look like a human being. Everyone was terrified of him. No one knew he was a drug addict. No one knew.

And he spiraled out as they were filming, and he let them film him. Let them film him shooting up. Let them film him, like, bringing this giant bag of pills with them and all this shit everywhere and just completely falling apart. While they were supposed to be capturing this hero movie of the greatest fighter in the world. He’s falling apart, like, live in front of the documentary. It was f*ing amazing documentary.

BEN AFFLECK: I got to see it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s really good. But I was so happy that they put it in a film. And I was so happy that it gave Dwayne a vehicle to show what he’s really capable of. Because he’s so limited by a lot of just the parameters of the roles that he was in.

MATT DAMON: And by, like, galactic success. Right. He had to and will continue to have to push for that. Right. Because what he wants, and not because what, because what they are going to continue to want him to do is, you know, the thing that mints them money.

BEN AFFLECK: But I suspect that his experience and feeling about this movie from the conversations I’ve had with him, this has changed him.

Breaking Out of the Box

JOE ROGAN: Well, I mean, it’s like this thing that these superhero guys have to do where it’s like something has to change because otherwise you’re going to be boxed. And with a guy that looks like that, it’s so easy to put him in that box. And so you see him now, he’s thinner, he’s lost a lot of weight. Dave Bautista went through a very similar thing.

MATT DAMON: He wanted to be.

JOE ROGAN: He wanted to have more range. Wanted to have, you know, more opportunities to do exciting and different challenging things.

MATT DAMON: Well, I think also coming from where he came from. Right. It’s like, you talk about going from TV to movies in the old days. Try coming from wrestling to it. To, like, the biggest movie star in the world. Right. It’s very, it’s like, it’s incredible that he did that. And now he’s in this place where he’s got this leverage as, because he’s so beloved and you know, that he can kind of tailor what he wants from here on out.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s hard to bring the audience with you. Right? No, no, no. I know you like this thing, but let me, let me show you something else. You know, it’s sort of like, you go to the concert, the band wants to play the new songs, play the f*ing hits, you know.

JOE ROGAN: So he’s a little Gilded Gays. All right. Satisfaction. Yeah, no, I love the song, too. My acoustic thing that I did.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I went to see the Stones, and when they were here in town, and there was a few songs they played that were like new songs.

MATT DAMON: Oh, really?

JOE ROGAN: See, the audience is like, okay, okay.

MATT DAMON: Go get a beer.

JOE ROGAN: Get the other one. Yeah, that’s. But, I mean. But, you know, every artist, I guess, has to make that choice. And he’s made it. And it was amazing vehicle, too, because he still kept that superhuman, hulkish frame, but also showed, like, God, there’s like, amazing depth there.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Power of Empathy in Film

BEN AFFLECK: And that’s the thing that’s, I think, especially because it’s collaborative. It happens to other people. That’s what movies do. That other shit doesn’t do. It’s just, just create. Like you feel for people. It’s empathy. It’s all made up. Right. That’s not him. It’s the old. It’s all an illusion. It’s all bullshit.

But if you do it really well with, like, you know, somebody that seems to really be feeling something, like, all of a sudden, I think what it does, it touches, like, these things in ourselves. You know, it has that same effect that Dwayne went through, of articulated to you about, like, these moments that were kind of burned into his memory then.

Really, the best movies are kind of almost blank screens that we project our own fing. Like, oh, yeah, my father died, or I went through this with my kid, or I’m fing. I feel f*ing alone and miserable. Here’s this, like, hopeful moment that someone has to go, maybe I can. Maybe I can do something. You know, they inspire you, they touch you, they move you. And it’s the thing to go for. The other thing is, you know, is to tell the lighter story, to go through the more typical sort of tropes of it all.

MATT DAMON: Either way, you’re in somebody else’s perspective for a few hours. And hopefully it breeds compassion.

The Magic of Being Present

JOE ROGAN: Well, when it’s done right, there’s a magic to it where you forget that it’s happening and you’re there. And the most amazing trick is when it’s done by famous people. You know, I was talking to Ethan Hawke about this. There’s a scene with him and Kevin Bacon in that movie with Julia Roberts about the end of the world. I forget the name tomorrow. Something people find it.

But great fing movie. But there’s this scene where he’s trying to get, he’s talking to Kevin Bacon. Kevin Bacon’s got a gun to him and it’s so. F. I know that’s Kevin Bacon. I know that’s Ethan Hawke. It doesn’t matter. Like, you’re f*ing locked in. You’re locked in. You’re like, oh, shit, that’s the magic.

And he was like, “But I’m locked in too.” Like that’s, it’s like a hypnosis. It’s like everybody is in the scene in a very bizarre way. Like, you have the lines, but you’re living it. And that’s either done or it’s not done. And when it’s not done, you could tell someone kind of just performative.

MATT DAMON: You feel it when you’re watching.

BEN AFFLECK: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: If it’s.

MATT DAMON: Does that thing and it pulls you in, then it’s happening.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the magic of film.

BEN AFFLECK: And sometimes you trick people, I guess, but for the most part.

MATT DAMON: For the most part, you don’t.

BEN AFFLECK: You’re feeling it and you, it’s really happening. Yeah, it’s much more like other human.

MATT DAMON: Beings recognize human beings experiencing real.

The Art of Acting and Authentic Performance

BEN AFFLECK: They, like, I know what sorrow looks like without having to. I can’t break it down for you or I even, you know, we all know kind of what like, oh, he’s a little anxious right now. Or did I maybe offend him? Or, you know, all these little things. And when some, like in the rare moments when these big feelings or things happen, you feel it too, you know.

And usually, like an example is this old saying about, like, you know, actors try to cry. People try not to cry. Like, because when you’re really experiencing that s*, you don’t want people to see it. You want to hide it. You want to. No, I’m okay.

JOE ROGAN: I’m fine.

BEN AFFLECK: You know, it’s like you want to pull the sheet up over you. Yeah, exactly.

MATT DAMON: But the other thing that really interesting from our side of doing it, because he and I have talked about this a lot, is, and I’ve always said publicly, like, great actors are good enough for both of you. Like, when you’re in a scene with a great actor, that thing that Ethan’s talking about, that hypnosis or whatever you want to call it, that energy that, that place where you go.

BEN AFFLECK: They’re bringing you right with it.

MATT DAMON: It’s like a f*ing tractor being. They will suck you right in with them. And like, as quickly as you look into their eyes and you’re like, you’re like, just there, and it’s like, and it’s not like it’s like riding the easiest wave you’ve ever ridden in your life, you know, it can be the hardest thing in the world, and it can be the easiest thing in the world when you’re with a great actor. It just, it’s just if the scene’s.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah, that’s a real paradox. Is like, all the stuff that I’m the most proud of. The weird thing about it says felt very easy at the time. And the s where you’re banging your head against the wall trying to get blood from a stone and killing yourself and the whole thing, and it just, and ends up fing feeling empty.

And the thing about the stuff that I’m proud of is my insecurity is like, should be harder than this, right? Are we, like, we working hard enough? Are we, you know, and learn to kind of just trust that God feels good. Let’s just keep going, you know?

Creating Authentic Conflict On Screen

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s some scenes in this movie, without giving too much away, where there’s conflict between you two guys that seems so real, and that’s even harder to recreate because you guys are good friends and you’re making the movie together, and you’ve got this scene where you’re acting in this and with the conflict with the two of you guys, the movie, but it’s very f*ing real.

MATT DAMON: The reason that it was real, I like that scene. The reason it works, I think, is because he’s coming at me and he’s, he really needs to know something. And I’m completely blanking him. Like, I’m just, he’s going, you got to tell me.

JOE ROGAN: What’s going on, man.

BEN AFFLECK: He’s like, it’s awesome. Like, what, what is going.

JOE ROGAN: What is the thing? And I.

MATT DAMON: And I’m just, like, literally kind of blanking him in this bizarre way, which, which, like, was really frustrating him in.

BEN AFFLECK: Real life because he, he was that feeling of like, it’s f*ing tell me, dude.

MATT DAMON: It’s you and me. Like, he finally goes. He screams out, “I don’t trust you right now.”

BEN AFFLECK: That’s a f*ing problem.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

MATT DAMON: Which is like, what you would say to an old friend. Like, what are you doing, man?

BEN AFFLECK: Like, what, what?

MATT DAMON: What are you doing?

BEN AFFLECK: Like, are you like, the betrayal.

MATT DAMON: Tell me the f*ing.

BEN AFFLECK: The betrayal is lie to me or tell me the truth. I, lie to me or tell me the truth. Talk to me and, like, step out, step our whole relationship, and all of a sudden just act like, give me this weird look.

MATT DAMON: Of just like, I don’t know, you know, like.

BEN AFFLECK: And so we were doing the scene. It was really pissing him off. I could see him, like, getting. The one line that wasn’t written that I saw, I didn’t remember doing was, “I would have never, you like this.”

MATT DAMON: I would have never, you like this.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: Which I didn’t remember saying is, I like that. Keep that thing. I wouldn’t have you.

JOE ROGAN: And I was.

BEN AFFLECK: I was like, what is he? I thought, what did I just. And I so watched the playback. It was one of those rare moments again, it was like where it was that thing of you doing all the work by not doing anything. Which I didn’t expect that to be the choice that you made. And it just was confusing and it felt like just, you know, leaving you out in the f*ing cold. I think the only thing I could rely on is like, you know, I wouldn’t do this to you.

The Power of Improvisation

JOE ROGAN: So in those moments where you’re ad libbing a line, where a line comes, is it just that feels like that’s what you say?

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah.

MATT DAMON: Just kind of like he couldn’t stop from saying it.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

MATT DAMON: You know, but you have to be.

BEN AFFLECK: Working with somebody that makes that okay. You know what I mean? Because the part of your brain that will, like, govern you or tell you something’s not okay. Whatever will step in. If it’s sort of like, you know, listen, I expect you to f*ing do this box. And there’s, there’s directors and writers who really do really care about every word. Precisely. And that, you know, and that’s, that’s how they do it. And that’s fine. That can be great too, for me.

Like, it, I find it becomes more interesting and sometimes better stuff happens. If you actually feel like you don’t have to say any of the lines. I don’t have to say any of the lines in the scene, then I’ll tend to say the ones that feel right. But it’s that fake thing that never happens in life, which is, I’m never sitting here talking to you and think, what’s my next line? What am I supposed to say? And how should I say that?

MATT DAMON: And it’s not about the lines ever. It’s not about the words about what’s the scene, about what’s happening in the scene.

JOE ROGAN: It’s one of the reasons why Curb Your Enthusiasm is so great. Because Larry David just gives you a place to get to.

MATT DAMON: Yeah. It gives them kind of a loose agenda.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s going to happen. And then films a bunch of stuff and everybody figures it out.

MATT DAMON: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: And a lot of times that shows about the awkward in between. People are missing each other or not, not sure of themselves, and a little embarrassed.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a genius show.

MATT DAMON: It really is.

JOE ROGAN: And people talk like, we’re talking. Like, you occasionally talk over each other. There’s a stumble. There’s no one. Like, what the f* are you talking? There’s weirdness.

The Importance of Listening

MATT DAMON: Because what’s also happening is that forces you to really listen. Right. And that is, that is the hardest thing to kind of learn for young actors, I think, is it’s really all about listening. And, like, I did a bunch of movies with Paul Greengrass, and that’s how he works, where he, where you just know the agenda going in. You know, some basic things that you, you know, what your guy needs going in.

Like, I was playing a chief warrant officer, and I had to go through a door, and there was a guy, and I needed to interrogate him, and I, this is what I needed to know from him. I needed to secure the house with my guys, and I needed to get to this guy. We needed to make sure everybody here was secure.

JOE ROGAN: So.

MATT DAMON: And it just, and they, and he put me with a bunch of real combat veterans, and we f*ing went in and, you know, they’re the experts.

BEN AFFLECK: Another thing that does your job for.

MATT DAMON: You, it’s just being around the real people.

BEN AFFLECK: Joe putting the CO from Miami, you know, all in these parts, and it just, like, by osmosis, you feel more legitimate. The thing feels more authentic to the audience. You don’t know why, because you don’t know what the, what the f*ing culture is of the tactical narcotics team in Miami. But when you see the real guys, you kind of, oh, you’re like, yeah, that seems right.

JOE ROGAN: Miami is the perfect place to have it, too.

Working with Real Tactical Teams

MATT DAMON: Well, it’s also specific to this because it’s based on this real tactical narcotics team in Miami. And, and the guy who ran that, this guy Chris Casiano, is Joe’s friend, and he’s the guy that my character’s based on. So Chris was Chris. We went, you know, we rode along with Chris down there. We went with that team and watched them operate and then hung out with them. And then they came up, and they were, you know, all in the movie.

And Chris was around as a technical advisor the whole time. So any question, like, little details, all right, how do I go through this door? What do I do? What do you do here? What’s the protocol here?

JOE ROGAN: What.

MATT DAMON: You know, all of that stuff was kind of overseen by him. So that it, so that it was how they really do it.

Miami’s Cocaine Cowboys Era

JOE ROGAN: That whole fing town is so. Did you ever see Cocaine Cowboys? Yes. The entire fing graduating class of the police academy one year either wound up murdered or in jail.

BEN AFFLECK: That’s what happens. All of a sudden you push so much f*ing money into something and it’s like before they even kind of figured out, like, you know, and it was, there wasn’t even a lot of stigma. It was like, ah, cocaine, whatever. It’s kind of rich guys fun drug. But, you know, it’s just some statistic about like, you know, the amount of money in the banks in Miami was like the same as the rest of the country.

JOE ROGAN: More banks per capita in Miami than anywhere else in the country.

MATT DAMON: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Because they were just laundering money.

MATT DAMON: Right?

JOE ROGAN: And they got away with it. They literally got away with it.

MATT DAMON: Have you ever flown over Bimini? You know, so if you ever fly over Bimini, there are all these like, Cessnas underwater, all these planes, like around the island. Because what they used to do, Bimini’s like the closest. It’s 50 miles off the coast of Florida. They would come in with a plane full of drugs and just crash the plane into the water. They would land on purpose? On purpose, because there’s no Runway on Bimini.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s like, f* it, we’re dump the plane, the water.

MATT DAMON: They would have 10 cigarette boats, like a flotilla of boats waiting. They would crash the plane. They’d offload the drugs as the plane was sinking, right? And, and then they put it.

BEN AFFLECK: They put it, the Coast Guard like, figures.

MATT DAMON: They’re always coming for them. That’s why they have 10 boats. They throw the drugs into one of the boats and they got a 1 out of 10 chance of making it.

BEN AFFLECK: They just scatter and that.

MATT DAMON: And the Coast Guard goes after one of them and hopes they get the right one.

JOE ROGAN: And not.

MATT DAMON: It’s just like, no, it’s just taking a cruise tonight. What’s the problem, officer? But the planes are still all submerged.

JOE ROGAN: Like you could, the water’s so clear, you can see how many f*ing. Oh, wow. There you go. That’s crazy. How many planes are out there?

MATT DAMON: I flew over it five, 20 years ago, but I mean, there’s.

BEN AFFLECK: I don’t know how long.

MATT DAMON: I mean, but if you think of probably the cost of one of those little Cessnas, probably wasn’t. I mean, with the amount of drugs they were moving on.

JOE ROGAN: Dad.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, there you go.

JOE ROGAN: F*ing wild.

BEN AFFLECK: They’re kind of landing where it’s sort of shallow. Yeah. They land and it’s like, f* it.

MATT DAMON: We can swim five to ten feet of water. And what do they land at? Whatever 55 knots. So you just try to.

BEN AFFLECK: Water looks nice, too. Like, yeah, sure.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MATT DAMON: It won’t be comfortable, but I mean, Sully landed at 737. Whatever it was in the water. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: F*ing wild. What a crazy part of our culture that that happened.

MATT DAMON: Yeah.

The Cocaine Era and Miami Vice Culture

JOE ROGAN: The whole cocaine run during the 80s in particular, like, Miami Vice, all that s*. It’s like it shaped the entire country for sure.

BEN AFFLECK: Oh, yeah.

MATT DAMON: I just remember that one guy in that documentary who was like, I think he was from Boston, and he was the pilot, and he had figured out the route, and he was like, “Man, we could have gotten away with this forever. Somebody talked,” and he knew that’s the only way we would have been caught. He was like, “I had it all.” He was clearly really smart.

BEN AFFLECK: Guys did, too. You know what I mean? There’s a whole lot of people out there that were like, “Yeah, we had a nice run. That’s why I got eight houses.”

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. That’s one of the real crimes that people got away with was bringing cocaine into this country. There’s a lot of people that got very wealthy, including banks, which is just really crazy.

BEN AFFLECK: Banks with the jewelry companies. There was like more Jaguar dealerships in Miami than everywhere else in the country. And it was like, doesn’t pay to ask questions. So, yep. I guess a lot of people like our cars here.

MATT DAMON: You don’t say. All cash. Sure.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah. We can make you a deal.

MATT DAMON: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: How many backyards in Miami still to this day have bags just buried somewhere that nobody knows about?

BEN AFFLECK: Probably worth just checking.

MATT DAMON: When you buy a house in Miami, just dig the yard up.

JOE ROGAN: Well, at least find out who owned it before you. Oh, he’s a pilot. Get a truck, get a tractor. It’s time to dig up the backyard. I mean, one of those guys in the films had millions of dollars just buried in his backyard. They had nowhere to put it. They were making so much money, they just had to bury it places.

MATT DAMON: That’s f*ing crazy.

The Temptation of Corruption

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s why it’s a perfect backdrop for the film, you know, because you know that the situation that the cops, without giving away too much of the plot, but the situation that the cops are dealing with is a very real situation. I mean, so many DEA agents turn dirty. So many cops turn dirty. It’s because it just can get so much temptation.

BEN AFFLECK: Like, you take these people, you know, you got like six, seven people. They fing work for a living at the same bulls they have to deal with. And there’s $20 million, you know, and it’s, I mean, it makes for great drama too. Even like the, you know, with the performances. Because all of a sudden somebody’s thinking, like, okay, how are they going to react? You know, who’s going to be the first person to say, you know, “We’re going to have to turn this all in,” you know, and getting to play that s*.

And for me also, I like, you know, without being sanctimonious or preachy. Because I really think movies, we’re talking about, like, what they do well, what they do very poorly is deliver messages or a lecture. As soon as you get into that thing, yeah, the audience is like, you know, “I’m going to go to church for that or fing school. I don’t need that s here.”

But I like that what was underneath it is like, this is a fing hard job. And that there’s a, like there’s a lot of value. Like these characters, the ones that are trying to do their job are trying to get through the day and just at the end of the day have done their job like they said they were going to do, you know, adhere to the fing ethics that they’re supposed to and at the end of the day, be able to sleep at night and believe there’s some value and not fing stealing the money or flipping somebody over, you know what I mean? And doing all that s.

And that’s the win. The win doesn’t have to be get away with the bag of money or fing, you know, save the world from, you know, the evil scientist laser beam or whatever. It’s like the end of the day, if you can fing live with yourself and say, “Look, you know, I quitted myself according to what the f*ing expectations were and what am I, true to my word.”

And I think there’s so like, that’s a, I don’t know, that affected me. I found that kind of moving. And you can’t do it if you create, like, if to credit to Joe’s script, like just two dimensional characters, “Oh, I’m the hero, I’m the villain,” or “This person would never do that.” They all have to be real people. Like, it would be subject to temptation.

Money just represents whatever that thing is you think you want or that’s going to make your life better. You’re, you know, it’s something different to everybody. But, you know, especially when you’re like, you’re facing like real, you know, the custody thing or the sick relative or whatever it is, that’s, it’s a real thing. Nobody’s immune to that kind of temptation.

You know, sometimes I think it’s cavalier to be like, “Oh, well, you’re dirty.” You’re not putting people in a very tough situation a lot of times, particularly if they’re feeling undervalued. Like the woman scene where Catalina’s like, “I get fing pissed. I get yelled at. I get s on. You know what I mean? Like, I’m out here grinding every f*ing day.”

You know, it’s a lot to ask, and I think it’s worth kind of making that, you know, heroic without sort of indicating too much.

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s really well written because there’s no suspension of disbelief moments, and that’s hard to do in a big blockbuster action movie. There’s always one movie moment in a movie where, like, what? Come on, how do you do that? You guys don’t have any of those. There’s none of that. And I loved it. I loved it. I loved that aspect of it, too, where it felt like all of it was like, I believed it. I believed it.

The Importance of Authenticity

BEN AFFLECK: And that’s really a credit to Joe and his taste. And that’s why we really felt like this guy knew how to make narc. He kind of obviously understood this world and understood that it has to, above all, it has to feel real. And that’s why he was open to, like, okay, whatever happens, you throw in a line, maybe it’s good. Can’t get your feeling hurt if it’s not, you know? But you got to be able to take that shot. And we’re all down, you know, trying to spend time with people. I mean, I kind of feel for these cops. A bunch of actors descend on you, and they’re like, “What kind of sweatshirt is that?”

MATT DAMON: You know, it was like that Michael J. Fox, James Woods movie. Remember that movie? I forget what it was called, but he’s, Michael J. Fox is an actor following around James Woods. He’s studying him for a character. And James Woods is a real leg detective. And he’s just like, “Get this guy away from me.” I kept thinking of that.

BEN AFFLECK: What kind of hair gel you, yeah, exactly.

MATT DAMON: All these questions, you know, but they were very tolerant of us, which was nice and really, really helpful, you know, because it’s always detail. It’s always details. It’s like, how fastidiously do you kind of mine for those details? Because I’ve always been convinced that an audience, it’s like you were saying they don’t analyze why they don’t believe something. They feel it, they just don’t believe it. And it’s usually because those details are, you don’t get those.

BEN AFFLECK: And that’s the only thing. Like, I’m not great at imagining something. Let’s invent this. Everything that I’ve done that I like has been a result of something I found in research. Like, for The Town, I went down and just went through the, you know, all the prisons, you know, out there, Massachusetts federal prison stations, and sat down and talked to guys who robbed trucks and banks and, you know, kind of sometimes, you know, you want to know.

And then sat down with the FBI guys and was like, “What are they like?” And the great s, you know, for me is that, you know, and I’m in, I’ve been like Walpole, or I’m in the prison of Dedham or whatever, and I’m, to some guy, I said, after talking for two hours, you know, I was like, “Is anything just fing weird ever happened or f*ed up anything you remember?”

The guy was like, “Yeah. One time, you know, we were coming out of this thing, we robbed his truck. And, you know, we had the mask, we got the switch car. We drove around the corner. Whatever we pull up, we get out f*ing guns, the masks, old things. And we look over, and it’s this cop sitting there doing construction duty.”

And I was like, right then he tell me a story. I was like, “Oh, s*.” I was like, “What happened?” He goes, “No, he looked at us. We looked at him. He looked the other way.”

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

BEN AFFLECK: And I was like, “Really?” He goes, “Yeah, he didn’t want to end up on the wall at the VFW.”

Research and Real Stories

MATT DAMON: These guys with full automatic weapons, masks on, switching cars.

BEN AFFLECK: I was like, “All right, I’m putting that in the…”

MATT DAMON: And it’s in the, it’s a great moment in The Town, like in the movie, because, you know, Renner, they all jump out of the things and they, and then any, oh, yeah, here it is.

JOE ROGAN: It’s great.

MATT DAMON: And it’s this awkward…

BEN AFFLECK: They just stop.

MATT DAMON: He sees him. They see him.

BEN AFFLECK: He’s like, “F*. We have to kill this guy.”

MATT DAMON: Nope. He turns away. Okay. Wow. It’s such a great, but that’s straight from research. I always loved that story. And then he, and then the line is here that he put it here and one on up at the wall of the VFW.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah, it was a great line.

MATT DAMON: You know, it’s a great line.

BEN AFFLECK: It was such a simple explanation for what? Why do you think he, what do you think he did? You know? And why? And that’s exactly what it would have been like. That guy, next day’s picture would have been up in the wall at the VFW, you know, and he knew it, and everybody knew it. He said he didn’t want to do it like that. You know, that was, and that kind of stuff is, I don’t know, it’s very human. Human calculations and interact. I mean, it’s a very extreme version of it, but it also doesn’t have, sometimes it’s not dramatic at all. You know, it’s like, that was an easy decision, and the guy never says anything. I didn’t say anything, you know, and kind of can’t really blame him, you know?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, The Town was a great f*ing movie, too, man. And I knew a lot of people like that, you know, from boxing gyms and stuff. I knew a guy was a hitman for Whitey Bulger. I knew a guy who’s a friend of a brother of mine who went to jail for that. For murder. For killing people. Yeah. What town did you grow up in?

I lived in Newton. Yeah, I grew up. I lived in Jamaica Plain for a little while. I lived in Newton, but I spent a lot of time in Boston because I was fighting. I was mostly training. And so I was around a lot of these, like, very shady characters who were in the fighting world, and a lot of them had backgrounds in crime.

One of the guys that I went to, that I trained with, he went to jail for a little while, and then he got arrested because a guy got killed and they broke every bone in his body with a hammer and kept injecting him with cocaine to keep him awake while they were doing it. And then they cut his hands off and cut his head off. And this guy that I used to train with got arrested for that.

MATT DAMON: Jesus.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. He didn’t wind up going to jail for that. He’s dead now, but he was somehow or another, at least peripherally involved.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah, well, I didn’t do any fighting, but I went around and found a lot of things about being an actor. People will talk to you, which is a f*ing amazing gift. Even if somebody’s like, “Oh, yeah, I kill guys,” they’ll just come out and, like, it’s kind of the rules all of a sudden don’t apply.

Like, these guys in the prison, what the f* are they going to talk? You know what I mean? But they’re interested in it for whatever. And so you avail yourself of that. And then I had people around that movie who everybody knew. Yeah, he did that job. He never got arrested. And so people, you know, meet people and talk to them.

And it’s interesting because it’s such a good lesson for doing this job, which is that they’re never how you think they’re supposed to be. Like the murderer person, right? There’s always something a little… I remember one guy was supposed to be like this really violent, kind of loose cannon f*ing guy who supposedly had done all this shit, stabbed and killed two people, Faneuil Hall and shot these guys in a robbery.

And he shows up with his polo shirt kind of tucked in. “How’s it going?” Just like, I never would have put this guy on killing four people. You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Have a good time. So I love that one movie.

BEN AFFLECK: And you’re just thinking, f, man. Like, this is why. And it’s a really good lesson for, you know, we tend to read a script and, okay, this guy’s the tough guy and he’s going to be the… It’s like you work with, like, I had the fing opportunity to train with these Delta guys. Like, you know, it’s the most elite special forces combat f*ing operators in the world. I mean, the SEALs will take exception to that. But just numerically, right? There’s been less than 900 guys ever in the history of Delta.

You meet them and they’re not the biggest guys, they’re not the toughest guys, they’re not trying to f*ing be hard. And, you know, they’re the most relaxed, at ease. And I found myself just being like, finally I was, “Can I just ask, what do you think makes somebody qualify for the Delta Force? Like, what’s a good Delta operator?”

“It’s like, you know, problem solving, problem solving.” The guy goes, “Yeah, it’s probably like your job.” I was like, “No, let me take a notice. It’s really not like my job. I appreciate it. There’s a very big f*ing difference.” He’s like, “Ah, you solve problems.” I gave him, “No, try to kill me. That’s the thing.”

But that was the closest insight I got to, which was, I’ve always kind of thought this about guys like Brady or something. There’s guys that just don’t get tight and that they are kind of able to problem solve when the problem is like, well, that helicopter’s crashed, and we’re 200 miles inside Afghanistan and we’re outnumbered f*ing six to one. How do you think we should get home?

Like, just having your wits about you to make that calculation while, by the way, you’re in a fing gunfight and things. I’m sure that does make… Because those are the people where I’d be in a fing panic and I have no idea what to do. And you get attracted to the person who seems to have it like, “Hey, we’re going to be okay. Everybody get your shit. We’re going over here.” You’ll just follow that guy. You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: But it’s a good look. It’s not always the most… Maybe it’s just because they’re so confident. They’re not like, I don’t need to prove that I can kick anybody’s ass. I don’t even get in fights. It’s, like, of a weapon, you know, it’s just a… It surprises me how those kinds of extraordinary experiences in people, or extraordinary people don’t always manifest themselves in how they show up.

The Reality Behind Tough Guys

JOE ROGAN: Right. We have caricatures in our head of what these tough people are like. Well, you see that about MMA fighters. Like, there’s a lot of MMA fighters. You meet them, they’re like the sweetest, nicest, friendliest people in the world.

MATT DAMON: I remember going to one of the events in LA, I think it was at Staples, and I was backstage and was talking to one of the lawyers for the UFC about… We were talking about Conor McGregor, and he was telling me a great story about him.

And this guy walks up and he’s in chinos, like, khaki pants, and a blue button up, kind of business shirt with spectacles. And he’s very small, and I kind of don’t really regard him, and I’m still hearing this story. And then Patrick goes, “Matt, do you know Henry?” And I turn and it’s Henry Cejudo. And I’m like, this f*ing guy could wreck me.

BEN AFFLECK: Absolutely. F*ing destroy me.

MATT DAMON: And he is the guy that some dummy would try to pick on.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah, right.

JOE ROGAN: You know what I mean?

MATT DAMON: Like, he does not… He’s not carrying himself like he’s… He just is the thing, you know.

BEN AFFLECK: And find out a little bit too late. Yeah.

MATT DAMON: Don’t find that one out late.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of guys do, unfortunately. Yeah, that’s… It’s… Well, they don’t have to prove themselves. Right. They do it all the time. The same with Delta Force. Guys like this idea, like this outwardly brash tough guy, usually that kind of machismo. And that’s bullshit. That’s… You’re using that because you’re insecure. And the secure people are very calm and genuinely very friendly.

MATT DAMON: Really nice. That’s been my experience.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s crazy, right?

BEN AFFLECK: It was really beautiful, too. You know, I feel like, what a great guy. And you feel like, that’s nice of you to be so sweet to me, because you obviously don’t have to be. I’ll just give you my watch if you wanted that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. No, it is a fascinating thing. It’s like we have these ideas in our head, these caricatures, you know, of what a tough man is, what a good woman is, what this is, what that is. And I think one of the beautiful things about film, a film is really good, is you see these complex characters, and it sort of reformulates in your mind like, what a person actually is.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, it’s seeing all kinds of different people.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah.

MATT DAMON: And… Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree.

Finding Humility and Understanding Complexity

BEN AFFLECK: Look, the fundamental challenge, I think, in life is to find some humility, which means actually thinking you might be wrong about the shit that you’re pretty sure about. And it means that you kind of have to assume somebody else might have a point. You know, it’s not like just writing everybody else off who disagrees with you, because f* him, he’s stupid. He’s an asshole. You know, like, those are things that actually take work to get to, because the first instinct, because you just defend your idea or whatever, it’s easier is to just…

MATT DAMON: That it’s a zero sum game.

BEN AFFLECK: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MATT DAMON: That two competing ideas can’t exist.

BEN AFFLECK: That somebody can’t be a good person and believe it.

MATT DAMON: Right.

BEN AFFLECK: Like, if you’re going to say you disagree, we don’t believe so. I don’t know, what about this? What about that? But once you find yourself relying on, like, well, I need to zero out this person’s humanity in order to defend my idea, I think that’s a pretty good indicator that there’s something wrong with the way you’re thinking. Like, because it can’t be that you’re right about everything and everyone else is bad who disagrees with you.

JOE ROGAN: I think that was one of the most interesting things about the Sopranos, is that the main character, the guy that you loved, was a f*ing murderer. Yeah, he was like, who would murder his friends. He was a complete mobster and a thug. But you really loved him.

MATT DAMON: Loved the shit out of him, cared about him.

BEN AFFLECK: It was so complicated rewatching my daughter right now, doing the part that you found yourself being like, I don’t know, I think you probably has to kill him now.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, that’s also great. A great actor. Like, there’s a very famous story about Marlon Brando when he did Streetcar Named Desire. And Tennessee Williams, who wrote it, freaked out because he was making Stanley Kowalski… He was making people empathize with Stanley Kowalski.

And Tennessee Williams was like, “But I wrote him as a brute.” He’s just… He was like a two dimensional brute who just came and beat up his wife and was just… And was supposed to be this kind of dark, looming force over the play, but Brando was like, “No, he’s a human being and I’m going to play him like a f*ing human being.” And it changed the play.

BEN AFFLECK: But Williams reflects life in the real world. Yeah, everybody’s the hero of their story. Everyone has the reasons for why they’re doing. And people don’t set out to be like, “I’m just going to…” Or hurt someone or dominate the world. Like, you think, well, I got to protect what I have. It’s like even, you know, not bringing back this movie, but it’s like what I liked about RIP was it was kind of the slippery slope. You know, the first time you take a little money and then, well, you know, I got covered.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t want to go to jail.

BEN AFFLECK: I have my reasons why I did that. But now I’ve told a lie. Now I got to cover that thing. And now you have guys who both live by this code that’s very, “Hey, you protect the people who are with you and you got to have this f*ing…” And so now as two are very similar, like by that kind of slippery slope of ultimately find themselves, you know, willing to kill one another because…

And it’s really not… I don’t believe in that one choice term. It’s like more, how do you find yourself? You dig yourself in a f*ing hole because you’re just covering up the… Trying to fix the last problem that’s arisen, you know, and everybody thinks is, of course, roots for themselves is like themselves. That’s what we have to be concerned with. Ourselves, our needs, our families, our basic shit.

It’s hard to expect people to go like, “All right, and what about, you know, like, what they think?” And I think that’s… I think it’s a much more honest evaluation of people. And it allows for complexity and forgiveness and f*ing all the shit that’s sort of beautiful about people. Like, rather than this notion of, like, well, we’re going to be binary, good or bad, perfect or not, whatever. And any infraction, then it’s like permanently stains you.

Cancel Culture and Public Judgment

JOE ROGAN: Like we were talking about earlier about people that have been canceled, you know, that this idea that one thing you said or one thing you did, and now we’re going to exaggerate that to the fullest extent and cast you out.

MATT DAMON: Of civilization in perpetuity.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s f*ing crazy.

MATT DAMON: And it’s… I was… Because I bet some of those people would have preferred to go to jail for 18 months or whatever and then come out and say, “No, but we can’t. I paid my debt. Like, we’re done. Can we be done?”

The thing about that, you know, getting kind of excoriated publicly like that is it just never ends. And it’s the first thing that, you know, it’s just… It just will follow you to the grave.

JOE ROGAN: I think it’s also this problem that people have with people that are in the public eye. They have this desire to chop them down always, you know, and anybody that stumbles in the public eye, they want to destroy their life and they want to just pile on. And you’re not there with them. You don’t feel the empathy. You’re not talking to… They’re not a human being. It’s just text on a screen.

The Power of Forgiveness and Redemption

BEN AFFLECK: Right. It’s just like kind of like I was saying, like that kind of sixth grade instinct to be like, oh, he’s in trouble. You know, there’s this human, like, we have dark, f*ed up instincts too sometimes to, like, isolate people or get joy out of someone else’s. They’re in trouble because maybe because part of it’s saying, hey, it’s not me, you know, so if you can point the finger, everyone’s looking over there. We feel safer, you know?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s like, yeah. And to take any forgiveness out of it, you know, is a really fed up thing because then it makes it impossible to actually go, all right, yeah, I did that. F. S*, that was wrong. I get it. You know, because it doesn’t matter. Once you’ve said you’ve done it, you become like an outcast. And I don’t think anybody wants to think, you know, like, you’re the sum total of who you are is your worst moment.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN AFFLECK: You know, it’s sort of like, you know, I think you want to be judged just as well. Are you capable of doing something good or something beautiful? It’s not to say, to forget, you know, there’s people that just over and over and over and they’re doing horrible s*. Don’t care.

JOE ROGAN: I get it.

BEN AFFLECK: No one’s trying to like absolve that. But you remove the ability to sort of forgive people or look at them in a complicated way or else it’s kind of become those things. It’s like a get one of ours or one of them. The instinct to get like a team tribal oriented and it just becomes a sport.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. It’s also like, who wants to live in a world with no forgiveness and redemption? That’s crazy. Like, that’s just denying the very nature of human beings. And that people do things that they regret and they do, and then they become better people because of it.

BEN AFFLECK: And some of the people I would rely on the most, like trust my kids with the most have done s that they really regret and you know, was objectively wrong. And then people have been like, ah, s, I did that. I fing, whether it’s like addiction. I got myself down this fing road. I did this. I did this. They’re able to go, I did it. I’m sorry, it’s real. I shouldn’t have done it. It was wrong, actually, that those people can become someone that’s very trustworthy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: Because you’re like this motherf*er will say if they’ve done. They’ll actually look at their own behavior. They’ll acknowledge it. And then you feel good and you feel much versus someone who tells you, like, I always get right, everything’s perfect.

MATT DAMON: Well, it’s like, it’s all about evolution. Right. And in our own personal evolution. And we’re all on our own path towards that. Like the idea of attacking someone, it’s like, oh, so you aced the test. Like, put your pencil down. Like, you nailed being human. You’re done.

JOE ROGAN: If you nail being human. That’s not possible. Because you forgot about the part about forgiveness.

BEN AFFLECK: Giant part. By definition, if you’re out there throwing stones.

JOE ROGAN: It’s most of the people that I find, especially when there’s someone that’s publicly in trouble for something. Most of the people that I know that have attacked people have a lot of questionable s* in their past. And it’s almost like they’re trying to hide that by going on the attack.

BEN AFFLECK: That’s the thing. Like, if I can point my finger. It’s like, I’m going to be safe.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, he’s a good guy. Ben’s a good guy. He’s calling them out.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Meanwhile, you know.

Wake Up Dead Man and the Role of Grace

BEN AFFLECK: Like, yeah, it’s like you told me to see Wake Up, Dead Man.

JOE ROGAN: The knives.

BEN AFFLECK: That, the third knife. And I watched, I really liked it. I thought it was a really interesting. Like, you know, I’m not a religious guy. I don’t like, that’s, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

BEN AFFLECK: You know, there’s the religion, then there’s people who’s supposed to rational. I thought was a really beautiful movie about, like, what’s the role of grace in life, you know?

MATT DAMON: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: And a really honest examination of that. Like, sitting side by side with, yeah, okay, you don’t believe that, but, like, and, you know, saying it’s not about, like, whether it’s going to argue over f*ing evolution. It’s about, like, how graceful are you in your life.

MATT DAMON: Life?

BEN AFFLECK: You know, how much f*ing dignity can you afford other people? I know you will recognize and see that there’s maybe something bigger than yourself and that there’s a reason to, to, like, to try to sort of be, to find that grace to get better, you know? It was really beautiful and kind of rare and really surprised.

MATT DAMON: I was really surprised, too. I kind of put it on and not, you know, not thinking.

BEN AFFLECK: I thought it was going to be a murder mystery.

MATT DAMON: I loved it. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I loved it, too. I think it’s one of the best of the three.

MATT DAMON: It was my favorite of those.

JOE ROGAN: Those are great. Daniel Craig is great in that role.

MATT DAMON: He’s fantastic.

JOE ROGAN: Goes from James Bond to that and so many other things as well.

MATT DAMON: Josh O’Connor, that, who played the priest. Because I first saw him on the Crown.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah, I liked him a lot.

MATT DAMON: F*ing man. What an actor. He is really, really good.

Consuming Film and Sharing It With Family

JOE ROGAN: How much film do you guys consume? Do you spend a lot of time watching films?

MATT DAMON: I mean, well, with the company, there’s a lot. Like, if we’re working as we’re watching cuts after cuts and going to the editing room, like, there’s a lot of kind of work around all the stuff that we have going that eats into a lot of time.

BEN AFFLECK: Mostly trying to keep up with what people are doing. My issue is really that, like, we’ve kind of developed this pattern where all these sort of movies that come out are more interesting and very, like, they’re all jammed out at the last f*ing month of the year. And so all of a sudden, you’re trying to race.

MATT DAMON: Movies.

BEN AFFLECK: I got really lucky. Like, like, recently my son, you know, 13, decided he wants to, like, watch movies, you know. And I, like, give him s. Like, what are you fing, we always look on TikTok and s*, like, let’s watch a movie. And, you know, he’s kind of blowing me off and rolling his eyes, and he’s like, you know, I mean, if you’re a dad, you’re kind of an a fundamentally. Like, come on, dad. You don’t know what’s going on. You know what I mean?

Like, he told me one time, he was like, dad, I said, let’s watch this movie. I played him the trailer. It was, I can’t remember what the movie was. It was a good movie, and the trailer was good. He just looks at it and goes, you know what you guys ought to do? You guys ought to work with some of the TikTok editors.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

BEN AFFLECK: I went and told the editors. I told Billy and Chris back there. I was like, guys, I got news for you. You guys got to say. But now he’s like, all right, let’s watch. Like, what are some movies I should watch? He got Letterboxd. He got into that thing, you know, it’s like. So I said, okay, what are the great movies? I’ll give you a list. I start giving him a list base, started watching them.

And so, I mean, this is, like heaven for me. So it’s like, okay, what are you watching? King of Comedy. Like, last week, you watched Taxi Driver, King of all these Scorsese movies. And it really was like, oh, man. I, because in my mind, I’m like, sure, I’ve seen that movie. I know. I watched them again. It was, I like seeing. I realized how much better they were than I even could appreciate when I watched it when I was younger.

And it really, and it was just the most beautiful f*ing experience for me to watch my son like, like taking an interest in the, you know, the older two have always been a little bit like, yeah, dad, no.

MATT DAMON: Great.

BEN AFFLECK: But, hey, you guys want to come to the premiere? No, not really. Guess what? Come to the set now.

JOE ROGAN: I’m good.

BEN AFFLECK: You know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s just too much familiarity, you know, you grow up with a dad as a movie star, just like, the kids got it.

BEN AFFLECK: And I get it. You got to be your own person, do your thing. They have all their own. And I get, you know, I never even. So I never expected it from my son, and I don’t know that he’s going to, you know, and I wouldn’t want to lean on him, like, hey, get into the family business. Most of the time it’s just like, you know, we go to, like, basketball games, baseball, all that type of stuff.

JOE ROGAN: But it.

BEN AFFLECK: But this was a really, that was like, like, so joyful, you know what I mean? I sit there and watch the movies with my kid. I was like, this doesn’t get better. This is the happiest I may ever be in my whole life. You know, right here. Watch this movement. And he’s like, whoa. He’s telling me what he thinks. You know, just like, like, honestly, the rest of it, you can f*ing keep it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s awesome.

BEN AFFLECK: That’s the best.

The Dream of Making Films

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s great that you guys still love film. You know, it hasn’t become just a job. It hasn’t become a thing that you do. You really enjoy it and love it.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, it was never a job. I mean, it really, like, it was like an absolute dream. From the time we were kids, we did f*ing high school theater together, you know?

JOE ROGAN: Like, that’s crazy.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah. It was like, we’re lucky to get it, and lucky to. The whole idea that you could even, the goal is, like, to make a living, to not have to be like, well, I’m an actor, you know, slash waiter, contractor, dental assist, you know, like, actually, I can earn money.

MATT DAMON: I can.

BEN AFFLECK: And we always figured, like, I don’t need that much, especially if we have kids.

MATT DAMON: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: You know, okay, we can make a living. Or it’s, you know, maybe it’s f*ing going to be dinner theater, or maybe it’s going to be right. Maybe it’s going to be.

MATT DAMON: There’ll be a job somewhere that we can find where we can do this and keep doing it. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s something that, I mean, I love when people love things. I spend time on YouTube watching people, like, fix watches, you know. Like, I don’t know why, but I love when people make furniture. I love watching people do things that they really love, that they’re invested in. I think we all have that thing in us where we see someone who’s got a passion for something, someone who really loves it, and that’s what everybody really wants in life, to be lost in the thing you love. To have a purpose.

MATT DAMON: And it’s beautiful watching someone else with true purpose.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: Very hypnotic. It reminds me of Joe versus the Volcano, where he goes in to buy luggage. “You like luggage, sir?” He’s like, “Luggage is the central preoccupation of my life.” Guy’s a luggage salesman, and he f*ing loves.

MATT DAMON: He loves nothing more than luggage.

BEN AFFLECK: And it’s the greatest scene. I asked Tom Hanks about that when.

MATT DAMON: I did Saving Private Ryan. I was like, can you tell me about that scene? Because we love this scene so much. And he named the actor. He’s a Broadway actor, I guess. The guy came in, he worked for like one day in this scene, and he’s so good in that movie.

And then at the very end, he’s showing him all the luggage, and Tom Hanks has unlimited money to spend. He thinks he’s dying. And so he basically goes like, well, what’s the best luggage? And he goes, well, if you know. And he opens. If I had the means, sir. And he opens up this thing, and there’s this trunk, and it’s like this music plays. And he opens it, and Tom Hanks.

BEN AFFLECK: Is like, I’ll take two of them.

MATT DAMON: May you live to be a thousand years old.

BEN AFFLECK: This is the greatest day of his life.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, God, that’s amazing. You guys have been in some f*ing bangers, man. Saving Private Ryan, that opening film, the Storming of the Beach.

MATT DAMON: Unbelievable.

JOE ROGAN: That might be the most realistic depiction of war that’s ever been made.

The Making of Saving Private Ryan’s Opening Scene

MATT DAMON: So I remember reading the script, and there was all this dialogue, all this stuff that was written. I came late because I’m only in the, he shot it chronologically, and I’m only in the last, the last act of the movie, basically.

And he told me on set. I was saying how, I go, how did it go? The beginning. There’s that, all that dialogue with them on the boat coming in, and Stephen goes, he just goes, I cut all of that out. He goes, no talking for the first 27 minutes of this movie. Whoa. And that was when I was like, oh, my God, this movie is going to be unbelievable. I think Tom says like, I’ll see you on the beach or something. Guys are puking.

BEN AFFLECK: Look at the man next to you. Yeah. Remember, he’s not going to live, too.

MATT DAMON: That was the script, right? Remember that?

BEN AFFLECK: It was.

MATT DAMON: It was. Look at the man next to you.

JOE ROGAN: He won’t live.

BEN AFFLECK: Feel like two out of.

MATT DAMON: Three of you are going to die. So look to your left. Look to your right.

BEN AFFLECK: And feel bad for those two sons of.

MATT DAMON: Because they’re not going to make it. It was stuff like that. And Ste is just like, nope.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

MATT DAMON: No. These guys are puking everything. It’s like the things up. You could just hear, and it’s just like, and then just boom. And you’re into it. And also they did this incredible, cinema changing.

JOE ROGAN: Open the shutter.

MATT DAMON: Open the shutter all the way.

BEN AFFLECK: Skip the bleach process in developing the film.

MATT DAMON: I don’t, and I don’t know if they’re going to 22 or 23 frames anywhere in there, maybe. But I just remember maybe it’s just the open shutters just.

BEN AFFLECK: It just means that instead of the motion blur is what makes something that moves across the frame quickly. If you look at each frame, it’s like a blurred thing. And when you roll those at 24 frames, it gives you the illusion that it moves across fluidly.

And if you basically open the shutter up so you get much more light, each frame takes a super sharp picture. And when you run those together, the piece of dust goes.

MATT DAMON: And so the mortar explosions are going, and you get that feeling that you’re adrenalized and you’re seeing. And it’s just, and nobody had ever done it.

BEN AFFLECK: She’s the master of the thing.

MATT DAMON: Yeah.

Spielberg’s Mastery and the Nature of Greatness

BEN AFFLECK: Understood how to use the tools and combined with a great idea, and it’s just masterful. That’s just how you do it. There’s nobody who directs movies who doesn’t go, I Spielberg. That’s how you do it.

You say one of the things a guy that’s passionate and also caring about something, that with that much passion is kind of connected to greatness.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: And it’s, I think, why we love to see that. Whether sports, f*ing fighting or whatever it is, there’s something that makes you kind of love being alive and also love that person.

When you see Michael Jordan, there was that whole movie that we did, Air, really all about what does it mean to be great? And how does it touch everybody and change everybody and make people want to f*ing improve their own lives? Because somebody’s just better at that thing than anybody else in the world. It’s transfixing.

I find that really fascinating. People who are great at something and the mystery of what does that do to your life? And how did you get that way? And what does it take?

JOE ROGAN: And what’s the cost? Because to truly be great at something, you have to kind of almost abandon everything.

BEN AFFLECK: I’ve seen that in various ways, in that kind of just empirical, personal study. I haven’t seen anybody who I think qualifies for that, who didn’t also seem to be really suffering 100%.

And you’re like, damn, you should be so happy, you’re the greatest. And interviewers always, how do you feel right now? There’s that sense of either it’s never finished or it’s never enough, or they can’t enjoy it or they’re carrying.

So that line we put in Air where it’s like, and you have to be that, you have to be that thing, it’s a kind of a burden too in a way, 100%. And I just see that. And that’s why we want these heroes and people who are great to flourish, have their life and have it all in hand. There’s all this tragedy and all this stuff that happens too. And it’s, yeah, that’s like you say, there seems to be a real cost.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s always a massive cost in personal relationships because there’s no way you have the time for other things. And the obsession that you have to be the best at something, you have to abandon almost all your concern for everything else.

You have to have this single minded focus and that comes with a cost for the rest of your life because you damage relationships. You feel like a piece of shit.

BEN AFFLECK: And you see that up close and that’s not admirable, right? You don’t give a f* about anybody else. No, I do. I just care about this more.

So imagine that you’re making the sacrifices and it’s causing injury to people and you know it and you don’t want to hurt them, but you can’t help it and you’re getting rewarded for it. It’s complicated.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s crazy because you inspire all these people that don’t know you and you ruin all your relationships.

BEN AFFLECK: Maybe that’s why I say don’t meet your heroes.

The Power of Greatness and Its Impact

JOE ROGAN: There’s something to it, man. The relationship is, but it’s just, we all grow from it. There’s a fuel to watching greatness. There’s a thing that hits you and lights you up where you want to do more, you want to be better, you want to whatever it is that you can do, whatever it is you do, you become more.

Whether it’s a great game, a winning touchdown, whether it’s a great film, a great song. Yeah, it lights you up. And it’s the fuel that we all live off of, that consumes that. We consume to make our culture move forward.

MATT DAMON: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: There’s like a sacrificial element to it. The people that do it, and we all feed off of it, and it feels like, well, that’s the person that doesn’t get enough out of it.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right. But in great filming, how many lives have been changed by decisions made after great films? Like, when I was a kid, I think I was like seven or eight or something when Rocky came out. And I saw it and immediately.

BEN AFFLECK: Ran around the block I’ve never worn in my life.

JOE ROGAN: I was eating raw eggs. I’m like, this is going to change my life. There’s things that happen when you see something truly great that it makes you want to be better as a human being.

BEN AFFLECK: I remember where I was when I saw Denzel Washington play Malcolm X. Went to the movies, watched that movie, and I remember leaving. I’m at almost 19. I’m thinking, I want to be a better man. I thought that in my mind because of what I had seen this actor do and this perform and the way, that was the only real conscious thought I had.

But I remember having it and kind of being surprised by it. And it does it. That shit can, it’s really touched me, a lot of f*ing people’s work. And that’s why you get that, you see people, you want to let them know, and tell them.

And I always think people come to me, hey, I love that movie. I always feel, yeah, you don’t have to say that. It makes me kind of uncomfortable. And I don’t ever put myself in with those figures who I think are like, oh, but there’s these towering giants who have done this.

I don’t know. It’s, I finally kind of arrived to a place where I was like, those uncomfortable. Oh, I saw a couple hunting. It made me want to go out to Hollywood and write a script. And I think, oh, shit, I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: How about.

BEN AFFLECK: You know what I mean? At a certain point I figured, okay, you know what? Whatever it is, great.

The Cost of Fame and Success

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s the thing, the cost of your fame. There’s going to be a bunch of people that are going to come up to you and they want to say those things to you. And wanting them to say those things to you is the opposite of the mindset that you need to make those things right.

BEN AFFLECK: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Which is, it’s so counterintuitive. You think once you become really successful, you make a bunch of great things. It’s going to be awesome having all these people come up to you. Like, no, no, no, I’m doing something else right now. And I can’t be all wrapped up in the fact that I’m changing your f*ing life.

BEN AFFLECK: So I can’t satisfy it or take any fing joy in that because I don’t think I’m good enough. I need to fing, you know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: Right. Never satisfied. Yeah, you can’t. And that’s the darkness of trying to do something great. You’ll never be satisfied.

BEN AFFLECK: You see it in a lot of the fighters. The same kind of thing. The great, great fighters.

JOE ROGAN: Well, also fighters have a very small window of greatness. There’s only a certain amount of years. We could burn the RPMs at the red line and then eventually the knees go, the back goes.

MATT DAMON: Is it earlier than other sports? It must be.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I think so, because Tom Brady is still elite. I bet he could probably play football right now. I bet he, how old is Tom now? 41.

MATT DAMON: He’s probably 47 or 8 now. Probably.

JOE ROGAN: I bet he could still play.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, I mean, but that’s a, yeah, I mean, that’s a very specific skill position. And the way he played it, he.

JOE ROGAN: Right, but running back, no, right cornerback. The elite levels of MMA, especially with USADA testing and now drug free sport testing when they are making sure that people aren’t on testosterone and growth hormone, all these different things.

You have nine years. You have nine years at peak performance. That’s legitimate.

MATT DAMON: How long’s Jon Jones been going?

Jon Jones: A Freak Among Freaks

JOE ROGAN: Jon Jones is a freak of all freaks because Jon Jones beat Daniel Cormier when he was on coke. That was one of the funny things he said in the press conference for the rematch. Daniel was talking shit. He goes, “I beat you when I was on coke.”

I mean, he was getting arrested, he was partying. When he fought Gustafson, he beat Gustafson and he didn’t train at all. I talked to his trainer. He’s like, he didn’t even show up at the gym. He was never there. He was never training. He could just show up and beat everybody’s ass.

MATT DAMON: I saw a thing on my Instagram feed of a fighter and I don’t know who it was, but he was a heavyweight. And he goes, “I had the chance to spar with Jon Jones, to work with Jon Jones.” And he goes, “I knew about it months ahead of time.” He goes, “I got every, my nutrition, everything was absolutely flawless. I got my sleep, everything was on.”

He goes, “I show up at the gym that morning,” he goes to me and five other guys, he goes, “he comes in.” I think he went to sleep at 4 in the morning or something. Out all night. And he goes, “he ran through all six.”

JOE ROGAN: That’s my buddy, Brendan Schaub.

MATT DAMON: Is that who it was?

BEN AFFLECK: Okay.

MATT DAMON: Yeah. It was the funniest story. And then I just knew, like, that’s a level. But imagine being that elite and realizing there’s another level.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Brendan was a top 10 heavyweight, and Jon wasn’t even a heavyweight. Jon was a light heavyweight. It was a lower weight class. And he just beat everybody’s ass. And he said, this is his warm up. I mean, he has a unique aptitude for MMA. But also he had two brothers that were Superman. Chandler Jones played for the Patriots, and Arthur. And so these guys are super athletes, and so they’re beating the shit out of each other all the time.

So they’re constantly in competition with elite athletes from the time he was a child. So he was just so tuned into competition, and he was so intelligent. His fight IQ was above and beyond everyone’s, and he would study tape meticulously.

The Devastating Spinning Kick

MATT DAMON: Well, that spinning kick that he did where he said he, and I think he thanked his Taekwondo coach and he said he had been working on this one specific kick from both sides because of something he saw on the tape. And he got it off and hit this guy so hard. Not even on his liver side. He hit him on the other side. And you see it shudder through his entire organ structure.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. His heel was deep into his body cavity. It was f*ing gnarly.

MATT DAMON: Yeah. And he just practiced this one specific. And he even said, he goes, “It is a devastating shot.” There’s not a human being who could take that.

JOE ROGAN: No. It’s like getting hit by a car. Yeah.

MATT DAMON: But getting hit by a car in one spot. You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: The size of a foot. 13 foot.

MATT DAMON: Oh, yeah, Here it is. Watch this.

JOE ROGAN: He sets him up. Boom. It’s just, it’s over.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, no, it’s over.

JOE ROGAN: And this is Jon moving up to heavyweight because light heavyweight wasn’t a challenge anymore. He decided to become a two division champion. I mean, Jon was a freak.

BEN AFFLECK: You see it rumble through him.

JOE ROGAN: And by the way, that was almost a little bit glancing because he caught him with a bent leg. He wasn’t even fully extended, which was even more devastating. But Jon realized that as a heavyweight, he didn’t have the power that he had at light heavyweight. And so he said the most powerful kick is a spinning back kick. So I’m just going to work on that kick over and over again because that’s the one tool that I have that can knock a heavyweight out with one shot.

MATT DAMON: Wow. Okay.

BEN AFFLECK: That’s just not just the physical stuff. He’s also like a genius.

The Pursuit of Greatness

JOE ROGAN: Well, he’s also the most meticulous when it comes to game planning and study. He will not take a short notice fight. Even a guy that he could fing beat any day of the week, he could wake him up at 3 o’clock in the morning, he could f that guy up. He will not take that fight unless he gets a full training camp to prepare for that fight.

Well, it’s just greatness. But Jon’s troubled. Jon’s been arrested a bunch of times and DUIs and all kinds of crazy shit. And he’s a wild fella. And in that pursuit of greatness, I’m sure has cost him a lot of shit in his personal life. But when he knocked Stipe out and then did the Trump dance in front of the whole world, for that moment, he’s on top of the world.

But then again, it’s like the same thing. As soon as you get back, what’s next? There’s another challenge. Doesn’t matter how many people love you now, it’s not good enough. There’s someone else looming. You got to beat this guy.

BEN AFFLECK: That seems like an agonizing thing to both have the complete compulsion to have to get to the next level. And the next level keeps f*ing moving the goalposts.

JOE ROGAN: I’ll never forget I interviewed Matt Hughes after he lost to BJ Penn. He lost the welterweight title to BJ Penn. And I’m interviewing him inside the Octagon. He said, “I’m going to be honest with you, it was actually a relief.” And he goes, “The pressure of being the champion and having someone chasing you forever.” He goes, “I’m going to be honest. I thought it was an incredibly brave moment for a guy to say that who is this f*ing amazing human being, this warrior to say, I just got to be honest, it’s a relief.”

Losing my title feels like a relief. And I was like, wow, that is so brave to be that honest in front of everyone. Because everybody’s like, you just got your ass kicked. “This is a relief. You know, I took a burden off my back. I’ll be back. I’m going to regroup. But I needed that. I needed to just step off the f*ing top of the hill for a little while.” Jesus Christ.

BEN AFFLECK: You got to be like a great, actually relief to be able to say something like that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: Instead of feeling like you got to hide or pretend it and go.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: It was a lot to carry. And you know.

The Reality of Fighting

JOE ROGAN: Well, the thing about fighting is everything you try to hide gets exposed. You’re exposed completely during camp because they’re doing these round robins. They’re taking five guys and they’re rotating them in with you. So you’re doing five rounds with fresh guys. So you got one guy who’s fing warmed up, getting ready for you, and then you’re fing out of breath and they give you a 30 second break instead of a minute. And then they’re throwing in these monsters.

And you’re exposed, you’re getting beaten in training, you’re getting smothered in training, you’re exhausted. You’re always reaching your limits because the only way to surpass those limits is to hit them. You got to hit them and then they got to figure out where their limit is. And okay, next week we want to do one extra round. We’re going to do this, we’re going to do that, we’re going to do more strength and conditioning. We’re going to push you past wherever your capacity is right now.

So you’re always breaking, you’re always at the point where you can do no more because it’s the only way to. And you can only maintain that. The condition that they get in when they step into the octagon, it’s not possible to maintain that.

MATT DAMON: No. Right, right.

JOE ROGAN: You can only get.

MATT DAMON: You have to aim at that one moment.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you have to peak. And then if you f* up and over train, which a lot of those guys do, just because they’re such savages, they never want to leave the gym, then they don’t peak right. And then they come in and they’re exhausted. They didn’t recover properly. And then in between rounds, they’re too tired and they can’t go out for the next round. They’re too beat up. That happens too.

MATT DAMON: I imagine that level of exhaustion has to be just insane when you over train. Oh, God. In an actual championship and you realized you’re.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no, you can’t bounce back. And this guy is f*ing blasting your legs with kicks and hitting you with punches and you can’t get out of the way anymore.

MATT DAMON: Do you think, was it Khabib who said that they should just do 25 minute, just.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, a lot of people said that. That. I mean, that’s a. What songs are playing. What’s going on?

MATT DAMON: The Tedeschi Trucks Band playing in my pocket.

JOE ROGAN: That’s hilarious.

MATT DAMON: Sorry about that.

The Debate Over Fight Format

JOE ROGAN: Well, Royce Gracie always said that, that was how he fought in the early days.

MATT DAMON: They just straight 25 minutes.

JOE ROGAN: He was like, look, he goes, “If we’re on the ground,” he goes, “I don’t want them to stand back up again and go in between rounds.” And he goes, “I need time to cook them.” That’s what he would say. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s what Jiu Jitsu is all about. Jiu Jitsu is all about staying one step ahead of you until you become exhausted and then they eventually finish you.

MATT DAMON: Like a.

BEN AFFLECK: Like a boa constrictor. Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it’s the real. That’s. But there’s this balance of making it interesting for people to watch. I’ve been a proponent of no stand ups. Don’t ever stand anybody up when a guy takes you down. When you get an advantage at the beginning of the round anyway because a striker gets to be standing up when you didn’t earn it. So you should never get stood up in a fight. I don’t care if the guy’s doing nothing, if he’s holding you down and you can’t get up, that’s how it should be. It’s more realistic. But it’s the balance of it being.

BEN AFFLECK: A sport people want to watch.

MATT DAMON: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: Making it.

JOE ROGAN: Because people get. When people grab someone and take them to the ground, nothing happens. People go, “Boo.” You hear the audience. And then the referee gets a little motivated and he stands people up. And I’m always like, ah, don’t stand them up.

MATT DAMON: I never thought of it that way. That the beginning of the round starts to the advantage of the.

JOE ROGAN: Always, always. You’re in a position you didn’t earn. You never got back up. I think they should put them right back to where they were at the end of the round, because it’s one fight, it’s not five fights. So if you start it standing up at the beginning of each round, that’s a new fight.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, right. In a way, you’re pitching, how quickly would the UFC go out of business? Real quick, 30 seconds they’re on the ground, and then it’s 24 and a half minutes.

The Intensity of Combat Sports

JOE ROGAN: Dude, I’m a terrible business guy. I would give the fighters more money. I would f* up the whole business model. I would get rid of the cage. I would have them all fight in a basketball court, just put mats on the ground, in the basketball court. I don’t think you should have a cage. I think the cage gets in the way. It becomes a way to get back up. Because you press your back up against your back up again, and you’re in the middle of the center of a mat, it’s very difficult to get back up. And that’s realistic. You’re using a foreign object to help you perform.

But, you know, there’s the whole macho thing about people fighting in a cage, and it’s like they lock you in there. Yeah. It’s just. But I mean, in terms of inspirational performances and things that you. When you see, like, the human spirit elevated to the highest possible place when two very skilled men or women are fighting in a cage where they prepared for this for three f*ing months. And then, you know, the referee’s like, “Are you ready?”

BEN AFFLECK: “Are you ready? Let’s go.”

JOE ROGAN: And it’s like that moment, like, is. It’s not like anything else in all sports.

BEN AFFLECK: I think that’s the moment that, like, people show up for. They build the intense. It’s the same with, like, the old Tyson fights or whatever. Like, “Now it’s going to happen.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And there’s. There.

BEN AFFLECK: You can’t help but have that feeling once it. You know. And, yeah, some fights end up being disappointing, whatever, but that moment is always there.

The Tyson Era

JOE ROGAN: Well, Tyson was a crazy example of what we were talking about with greatness, because, like, you could dedicate whole life. You could get up in the morning at the right time, you could eat all the right foods, you could do all the right training. Then you see that guy.

BEN AFFLECK: There’s nothing I can do.

JOE ROGAN: I have no chance.

BEN AFFLECK: He had the look in his eye. It was one of the only fighters where you just see the other guy was scared. Yeah. Usually they at least hold himself together, where they come off like, “Oh, I don’t know, this guy looks pretty tough.” Guys who fight Tyson in just would start and they’d feel that moment, too. “Oh, shit, they’re letting this tiger out, and here he comes.” And it was like, yeah, well, we’re.

JOE ROGAN: Old enough to remember when he was in his prime, and those fights were like, executions. He didn’t want to pay for the pay per view because they were so f*ing.

MATT DAMON: I swear. I mean, I mean, Jamie might be able to prove me wrong, but I’m pretty sure that they cut to Alex Stewart and they cut to his wife, and she was crying. And this is when they’re coming to the center of the ring and she does.

BEN AFFLECK: But by the way, for good reason.

MATT DAMON: Like, “This man might kill my husband.” You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: Like, we certainly going to beat the f* out of him. And she knows it, and the world.

BEN AFFLECK: Knows it, and guys were ready to quit. Remember that dude, Hurricane or whatever, white kid who fought him, Pete McNeely? When he came out, this guy couldn’t wait to throw the towel in. He had it ready, like, you know.

JOE ROGAN: He was ready to go. “All right, that’s good.”

MATT DAMON: The bell rings, he picks up the towel.

BEN AFFLECK: You got more. Save your guy’s life. You know what I mean?

JOE ROGAN: McNeely’s up now, too. When you hear him talk, it’s rough. It’s rough to hear.

MATT DAMON: Oh, really?

The Dark Side of Fighting

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I saw him get interviewed recently. That’s the dark side of the sport of MMA and of fighting. You know, you talk like, I had Johnny Knoxville on here yesterday, and Johnny Knoxville was knocked unconscious 16 times. Yeah, that’s what I said. And I’m like, “Holy shit, man.” And he seems normal. Like, he doesn’t seem like he’s got brain damage.

Now when you’re talking to guys and you know they have brain damage, they’re slurring their words, and they’re still fighting. Their words all mumbled together, like, you have no idea how much they. They’re struggling, and they’re going to be struggling in a downhill slope for the rest of their life. It’s not going to get better. It’s going to get way worse. Because the real brain damage occurs, like, 10 years after the injuries. That’s when it really sets me really.

BEN AFFLECK: Just keeps it worse.

JOE ROGAN: It keeps getting worse. I mean, there’s some therapies they can do now. There’s they do and Knoxville did some of it. Like this magnetic therapy that they do that re stimulates neuron growth and. And oddly enough, mushrooms, like psilocybin has been shown to regenerate mushrooms, all of.

BEN AFFLECK: A sudden cure a whole bunch of shit.

JOE ROGAN: I know. Well, probably always has.

BEN AFFLECK: All of a sudden they acknowledging it. Yeah.

Psychedelics and Healing

JOE ROGAN: Well, one of the things that’s opening the doors for them to acknowledge it is soldiers. Because it’s always been kind of like a left wing ring thing to be into psychedelics. But all these soldiers are coming back with PTSD and drug addiction and a lot of CTE from bombs blowing up and IEDs and concussions. And the only thing that’s helping them is psychedelics.

So it’s kind of like in Texas, former governor Rick Perry has started the ibogaine initiative. So they’re using ibogaine to help all these different soldiers, which is ironically the drug that Hunter S. Thompson claimed Ed Muskie was on when he was running for president. Oh, really? Yeah. Remember when he sank Ed Muskie’s.

BEN AFFLECK: What is ibogaine?

JOE ROGAN: It’s from the Aboga tribe and it is a psychedelic that is in no way recreational. It is a very difficult experience. It’s not fun for anybody. It’s like a 24 hour trip. I haven’t done it, but my friends that have done it say that it’s basically like you see your entire life play out before you. You see where all your problems come from. You see where all of your emotional hitches are.

MATT DAMON: Jesus.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And with addictions, it has an 80%, I think it’s 84%. With one treatment, they quit whatever they’re hooked on. Not only that rewires the brain, so the physical pathways to addiction, like someone stick to opiates, gone, completely severed. So you literally don’t have a physical addiction to opiates anymore. So with one treatment, 80 plus percent.

MATT DAMON: Of people, that’s incredible.

JOE ROGAN: With two treatments, it’s in the 90s.

MATT DAMON: That’s amazing.

JOE ROGAN: It’s amazing. And it’s been illegal, you know, since like 1970 in this country.

BEN AFFLECK: The sweeping psychology has it like a clinic or whatever.

JOE ROGAN: Well, Rick Perry, because he’s worked with soldiers and because he’s worked a lot of veterans that, you know, and he’s a very compassionate and intelligent man. He realized like, “Okay, maybe I’m wrong about all this psychedelic stuff.” And so he started getting behind this ibogaine initiative. They passed it in Texas and now they’re doing it with soldiers and they’re going to do it with police officers.

And I mean, police officers experience more PTSD. Like I have a good friend who was a cop in Austin and he said, and he was also in the military. And he said, “What I saw in the military was not compared to what I saw as a police officer,” really. He goes, “I was seeing death and violence on a daily basis.” He goes, “When you’re deployed,” he goes, “Yeah, you’re going to see some horrible shit, but you’re going to see some horrible shit mixed in over a course of time, where you go out and things go live every day.”

MATT DAMON: Every day you’re going directly to somebody who’s having the worst moment of their life.

JOE ROGAN: And every day, you’re pulling someone over and they might shoot you. You have no idea. You’re pulling up to tinted windows. You don’t know what the f* is going on. You’re running the plate, the license is expired. You have no idea who’s. Who’s in the car. You don’t. You don’t know anything. And you’ve seen all the videos. We’ve all seen videos of cops getting shot down, like, when they’re pulling over a car. We’ve all seen it.

And so these guys are living with this fing PTSD all the time, and then they have to live in real life. They’re supposed to go home and they’re supposed to just be a normal dad and a normal neighbor, and their fing head is just a hurricane of chaos. And ibogaine has been very beneficial for those people to just sort of come down and try to find the root of all this stuff and get them off pills and get them on the straight.

MATT DAMON: That’s great.

Hunter S. Thompson and the Ibogaine Story

JOE ROGAN: That’s amazing. I don’t know why we got on the mushrooms. Well, ibogaine, because during the presidential elections, he started spreading these rumors. And it’s in the documentary. What is that documentary? Is it Fear and Loathing? Gonzo. Gonzo, that’s right. In that documentary, Gonzo, he talks about it. So he’s getting interviewed by Dick Cavett. And he goes. He goes. “Yeah,” he goes, “There was a rumor running around that Ed Muskie was on ibogaine. And I knew about it because I started that rumor.” What?

BEN AFFLECK: He made it to him.

JOE ROGAN: So the guy completely cracked. So, like, this guy was like, a frontrunner for the president, and he f*ing completely cracked because everybody thought that he was on drugs. Because Hunter S. Thompson was just running around, like, saying, “There’s Brazilian witch doctors who are coming in to treat this guy.” It’s crazy shit.

MATT DAMON: That’s great.

BEN AFFLECK: They were like. And Hunter would know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But it’s crazy that he chose ibogaine, too, because ibogaine is like, it’s not a recreational drug. And it’s not a drug of addiction, it’s literally a drug that stops addiction.

BEN AFFLECK: But that he was the guy that would have the full, the whole book’s full of these drugs. You never heard of a really casual way?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, of course. “Four of us stopped to get ibogaine.”

BEN AFFLECK: At the one gas station that should. Needles and nothing. Yeah, sure. No, of course you do.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But it does help people that have brain damage as well. It’s supposed to like cause some sort of neuro regeneration.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: There’s stuff out there that can help people, but a large percentage of these fighters are silently suffering and we don’t ever hear about it.

Combat Sports and Brain Damage

BEN AFFLECK: Don’t they say like it’s supposed to be that it’s like the argument is because they’re not using a glove like that football supposed to be. I mean wasn’t that the sort of rationale that like you were going to have less impact in boxing because the boxing gloves.

MATT DAMON: No, but it’s, remember it’s all like the sub concussive blows. It’s like, it’s not necessarily the, the one shot knocking you out as much as the repeated kind of like small, like little bit of brain.

BEN AFFLECK: I’m sure that’s like they’re all bad for you, you know what I mean?

MATT DAMON: Like a version of knocks to the head are not a good thing to be avoided.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well it’s also what you take in training too. We’re only considering what happens during a fight. If a guy has 40, 50 MMA fights, that’s four.

MATT DAMON: How many rounds does he have right in the gym training?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, training camp is brutal and depending upon how intelligent your camp is, like some people are really smart and they’ll spar where they’re not hitting each other hard and then maybe one day of the week they go live. But you do it with trusted. You know, they’re, they’re very close to you. These are people that you care about and love so they’re not going to try to hurt you on purpose.

But sometimes not. Like, sometimes you’re in a hostile gym and you know, you got a spar with people you don’t even know. They’re from other countries, you have a big name, they’re trying to take you out. You know, it’s. But the, the amount of damage these guys take. I mean I don’t know if football’s better or worse. They’re all. The thing about football is the big impacts are way worse because when you’ve got a 300 pound super athlete that’s.

BEN AFFLECK: F*ing full Tilt all the way from across the field.

JOE ROGAN: Boom.

MATT DAMON: Running start.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you’re getting hit by a truck and that, but it’s not targeted necessarily at your head. So what is better and what is worse? Boxing’s bad. You have less options. MMA is slightly better because if, especially if you’re a grappler, you can take guys down and you can beat them up on the ground, but ultimately, you’re paying a price.

But for that glory, for that one moment when they win and the f*ing 16,000 people are on their feet screaming, there’s probably no drug like that that could ever reproduce it. And those guys chase that high for their entire life. And then after it’s over, they feel oddly detached.

BEN AFFLECK: Nothing ever rises to that level again.

JOE ROGAN: Right. You can make films until you’re 100 years old. You can make great films forever. You can do the thing that you love forever. They have a little window, a little window of greatness.

MATT DAMON: That’s a really tough thing about being an athlete.

BEN AFFLECK: You were talking to Pete Sampras that time we met Sampras years ago, and he was like, we were probably, I don’t know how—

JOE ROGAN: We were 30.

BEN AFFLECK: He was 32 or something like that. And he was kind of, we were like, oh, my God. He had all these wins and Grand Slams, and he had a kind of vaguely like, yeah. He was like, yeah, you guys, look, I’m about to retire. I’m finished. Or, young guys were just getting started.

MATT DAMON: The thing is, you get better at your job the more you do it. And so it’s that thing with the athletes. I was having this conversation the other day. It’s like, you have all the physical skills at the beginning, but you become better at your sport as your skills are declining.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The body just doesn’t want to do it anymore.

BEN AFFLECK: You’ve got to just come to, like, become Greg Maddux, and compensate with all the tricks and location. But that’s why that drama of the aging athlete is so powerful. It’s like, oh, do I still have it in me? Can I still do it? Is what I’ve learned enough to compensate for what I’ve lost?

The TRT Era in MMA

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s an interesting story about Vitor Belfort. So Vitor Belfort won the UFC heavyweight tournament when he was 19 years old. That was the first event I ever worked at in 1997. I mean, he was one of the all time greats for sure. But as he was getting into his 30s, he was starting to decline.

Then the UFC allowed fighters to use testosterone replacement therapy and boy, did he fing use it. I don’t know what his levels were, but they were like superhuman levels. And there was a moment in time for a few years where they allowed him to use testosterone therapy and people refer to it as the TRT Vitor years because he was fing terrifying, because he has the mind of a veteran, incredible amount of experience, but now his body is moving like a 25 year old. And so he was just annihilating people, just lighting people on fire.

MATT DAMON: So they’re not allowed to use testosterone?

JOE ROGAN: No. They can’t use anything.

MATT DAMON: How about peptides? Can they use peptides?

JOE ROGAN: Nope, not even peptides. They’re trying to take that and reform that, but there’s a lot of ignorance about peptides, what they actually do. All it’s allowing you to do is soft tissue injuries heal quicker and optimize your body’s ability to produce hormones. So instead of adding exogenous hormones, you’re allowing your body to produce them more naturally and it just makes you more healthy for a very unhealthy job where you’re getting hurt all the time.

It’s going to be better for the sport, better for the athletes to allow them to all use it. And it’s also, there’s no long term damage that it’s going to do like steroids, where it shuts down your endocrine system. So I hope they reform it. But the idea was that there’s so many f*ing loopholes and so many people cheat. Big camps used to hire scientists, so they had a scientist on staff that was not only procuring stuff that would slip by the test because there’s the BALCO stuff with Barry Bonds to clear.

There’s stuff probably right now that people are using that’s flipping through and there’s a lot of experts that have, one of the things is animal derived testosterone. So testosterone, they use a carbon isotope test, I think, I believe that’s what they use to figure out where the testosterone came from. So if your testosterone is at a very high level, they test all your other ratios. They go, well, no, it all seems likely. He’s just an outlier. He just has naturally high testosterone.

But testosterone that you get from synthetic testosterone is derived from a wild yam, believe it or not. It’s not animal derived testosterone. So the composite of it varies when they run the tests on it and they can determine that.

MATT DAMON: It’s a yam based testosterone.

JOE ROGAN: It’s exogenous, not endogenous. But if they can figure out a way to, and there’s a lot of proof of concept to this, can they figure out a way to extract testosterone from animal sources, something like that? Well, they injected Hitler with taurine. Hitler was a f*ing guinea pig for this one doctor who tried a bunch of shit on him. And one of the things they did was inject him with bull testicles and stuff to try to keep him virile.

But there probably are athletes right now that are using some shit that they haven’t figured out yet. So to give them any loopholes at all, they’re like, no, no, no f*ing loopholes. No IVs, no nothing.

MATT DAMON: No IVs, no vitamins?

JOE ROGAN: Right. But the problem with IVs is you can mask testosterone and mask steroids by over flooding the body with liquids.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So then when you add more water, you would just fill them up with saline and then when they go to piss, nope. Clean.

MATT DAMON: Look at the ratio.

JOE ROGAN: Because so much water is being processed through the body that it doesn’t have time to show the testosterone. So there’s a way to mask it, especially with things that you would add to the IV. So you can’t. It’s only food and approved supplements through really high level labs like Thorne, like Thorne supplements where it’s third party tested. So they can’t do anything. But for a while they let them do it. And those TRT Vitor days are my favorite fights to watch.

BEN AFFLECK: Did they stop doing it because they thought it was advantaging certain people or shit happened that they’re like, this is f*ed up?

JOE ROGAN: Well, they look at the difference. That’s TRT Vitor on the left and that’s him on the right when they made him get off of it. Look at the difference. I mean that’s fing stunning. On the left though, dude, that motherfer was terrifying.

When Luke Rockhold fought him, he told me, he goes, dude, when I stood next to him at the weigh-ins he had muscles on his teeth. He goes, this fing dude was so jacked. He was so scared. I was like, what the f is he on? Because he knew he was on something. It’s just, it’s cheating. It really is. Because you can jack your levels way above a normal human being’s.

Because that’s what a lot of guys, there was a few fighters that were pulled from cards because, say if a really high level is like 1,100, they were testing like 1,800, 1,900. They were like people that have never lived before. They were a science project, a different species. And they were insanely confident. Because they were essentially like a raging gorilla. They were just insanely confident and just so fired up. They couldn’t wait to smash somebody because they were just f*ing maniacal. They’re a berserker.

So it’s not a person anymore. Now you’re a science project. It’s not, there are rare outliers who like Tyson when he was in his prime. It’s rare physical specimens and that’s part of the game. But that’s God, that’s nature. This is not BALCO labs. And so they won’t allow them to do anything anymore. And that’s why. It’s because too many, and Vitor was one of the guys that tested way over the line. And then they decided.

BEN AFFLECK: But that’s what they’re going to do.

MATT DAMON: If you say it’s legal, they’re just going to take as much as—

BEN AFFLECK: More is better.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, if you say, oh, you did one cc a week, they’re like, I heard five, I heard five cc’s. And these guys are just training five times a day and they never get tired and they recover like that. And then they never have to worry about soft tissue injuries because they heal like you’re a fing six year old. Your body just like fing Wolverine.

The Wolverine Stack

Well, that’s the thing about peptides too. The Wolverine stack. BPC-157 and TB-500. I don’t know if you ever get injured, if you ever get injured, get immediately on BPC-157 and TB-500.

MATT DAMON: I didn’t hear about TB-500. What’s that one?

JOE ROGAN: Thymosin beta-500 in conjunction with BPC-157. It is a f*ing phenomenal stack and just really helps injury.

MATT DAMON: I didn’t know they called it the Wolverine.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what they call it. The Wolverine. Yeah. Because you f*ing heal incredibly well. Quickly. I was talking to a pro football player, pulled his hamstring. He’s like, dude, I shot that shit right into my hamstring for two weeks. And I was right back on the field.

MATT DAMON: Wow.

JOE ROGAN: I was like, that’s nuts. I go, what is a normal rehab? He goes, three months. He goes, in two weeks, I was back on the field. I go, what the f? He goes, I don’t know how bad the injury was. He goes. But to me, it’s like, f, I pulled my hamstring. I’m f*ed now for X amount of days. He goes. And two weeks later, I was playing full tilt. I’m like, that’s nuts.

MATT DAMON: And going right into the area of the injury.

JOE ROGAN: Right into it. Some people think you don’t have to do that. They think it’s systemic, so you just stick it in your fat, on your side. But he’s like, no. And most athletes will tell you the best benefit is local. Shoot it locally into the area.

BEN AFFLECK: And it just has just, like, cortisone or whatever. What is the—

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, cortisone. But cortisone just masks it or whatever. Not only that, it has a tendency, if you do it too many times, to weaken tendons. And so it could actually exacerbate the problem. Because it takes away the pain. Yeah, it takes away the pain. But, I mean, then there’s the Enhanced Games that are coming out.

The Enhanced Games

MATT DAMON: In Vegas this year, where they’re like, I know. My friend had that idea a long time ago. He was like, you should just do the drug Olympics for cash. He goes, do it in Vegas for cash. And then the Enhanced Games, they’re doing it. I sent him a day. I was like, they’re doing it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s just like, I’m down.

JOE ROGAN: I love it.

BEN AFFLECK: Let’s see what this human being can do.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what I think. I mean, look, when Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa and those guys were cracking out home runs, it was—

BEN AFFLECK: One of the most exciting baseball.

MATT DAMON: It was pretty—

BEN AFFLECK: That’s why they didn’t do anything.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN AFFLECK: It was not a mystery to anybody.

The Evolution of Baseball and Performance Enhancement

BEN AFFLECK: But Avery’s tuning in. The Bash brothers, right? Baseball on a strike. You know, they almost destroyed that league. And then people started watching, and then Bonds is like, well, these two guys are hitting this many home runs. I’m the best player in baseball. Which he was.

JOE ROGAN: Yep.

BEN AFFLECK: And when he did it, it lights out. You know, I mean, he had a year where he only swung and missed 26 times. 162 games, three and a half bats a game. Only swung and missed 20. I mean, that’s just, you know. And, yeah, McGuire get, like, just like, move his wrist to get the ball out of the park. And it was like, it was fun to watch.

JOE ROGAN: And when people say, like, steroids don’t make you a better athlete. Oh, they don’t. Maybe don’t make you a better athlete.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But if you’re a f*ing Barry, if…

MATT DAMON: You’re already an elite athlete. Yeah, it may.

JOE ROGAN: If you let Jon Jones do all the juice he wants, he’d be fighting until he’s 50 and f*ing people up. And they say, Jon, we’ve really come to our senses like this. Sports all about excitement. Want to give the people what they want. Give people. Let people make informed choices based on their own discretion.

BEN AFFLECK: Oh, it’s like, welcome back.

JOE ROGAN: Then all of a sudden, Jon looks like Vitor in that picture.

MATT DAMON: He’d be undefeated, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: John beat Vitor when Vitor was in his prime. And Vitor caught John in a full arm bar. Totally locked his arm out. Hyperextended, popped it went backwards. You can see the video of it. His elbow is going that way. A wooden tap. And then beat him in the next…

MATT DAMON: Round with one arm.

JOE ROGAN: Yep, one arm. His arm was f*ed for like a year after that. Yeah, yeah.

MATT DAMON: Give that man some steroids.

JOE ROGAN: Let him be the king of the world. Yeah, yeah.

The Dream Team and Professional Athletes in the Olympics

BEN AFFLECK: The dream team. It’s like, you know, the first time the pros went to the Olympics, whatever the year won every game by 70 points. Yeah, it wasn’t close, but it was a hell of a lot of fun.

JOE ROGAN: It was fun. Well, the argument for that made sense, though, because, like, these other people are being compensated in their countries.

BEN AFFLECK: Oh, yeah, I have no problem then, by the way. Now it’s got more. That last Olympic championship was. That was great game against France. That was fabulous. You know, I mean, yeah, they’re going to wreck some smaller countries and stuff, but, okay, you’re playing pros, they’re playing pros.

The whole definition of amateurism has gotten a little bit like, you know. It’s like people find, like, a convenient definition of it according to what they’re. You see, in college sports, it’s just changing and stuff.

Look, I got no problem if you’re going to apply the rules evenly, but sometimes when it feels like it’s just an excuse to, like, for the NCAA to make a billion dollars off the TV deal. I’m like, no, no, you guys, you’re getting, you’re getting education, right? It’s like a little bit like, yeah, education. You guys are making a lot of money because people want to see Nebraska play.

JOE ROGAN: It’s exploitation. Yeah. And I’m glad they’ve changed that with college sports because these guys are the reason why you’re filling up the seats. And they deserve that money.

BEN AFFLECK: Not everyone’s going to be in the NFL.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN AFFLECK: You know what I mean? Some of them. That’s their window to make that money. You know what I mean? Like, it’s hard.

JOE ROGAN: It’s hard. The risk of catastrophic injury is always there.

MATT DAMON: Constant.

JOE ROGAN: Constant. Yeah.

MATT DAMON: And the metrics for. It’s like, what is it, a two, two and a half year career or something?

JOE ROGAN: Yep.

MATT DAMON: Depending on your position. But I mean, it’s such a long.

BEN AFFLECK: Seems just fair and obvious. So you pay a kid to flip a cheeseburger out of college, but not to, like, right.

MATT DAMON: You know, come on.

The Longevity of Acting Careers

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s the great thing about doing something where you’re not relying on your body. Like acting.

MATT DAMON: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You can, you could kind of do…

BEN AFFLECK: It forever, you know, keep going so you lose it. You know, it’s really. Yeah, it’s great. And it’s got its own competitive aspect and it’s a lot. But like, okay, great. If it’s, if you get a really bad on yourself and then the expectation is, well, I got to do something that’s interesting enough that people want to watch it. Well, that’s the proposition.

Choosing Projects and the Director’s Role

JOE ROGAN: How do you guys decide, like, on projects that you choose? Like, I’m sure you have so many options now. Like, what makes you say, this is what I’m going to spend the next six months doing?

MATT DAMON: It’s really. I mean, there are a bunch of different factors. Like, the director is being the most important one. But if you read a script and like we’ve read so many thousands and thousands of scripts and written so many scripts and worked on so many movies that if we read something and it’s that thing we were talking about earlier, you know, you get that kind of emotional.

Something happens when you read it, you go, okay, well, then you pay attention to it. Maybe read it again, go, wait a minute. You know, if it moves you in that way, ultimately the big decision is saying yes, because you’re going to spend.

BEN AFFLECK: The last point over which you have total control, you know, and then you’re.

MATT DAMON: In, then you’re in. And you’re in whether it’s good or bad. I mean, I’ve been on those movies where I knew a month into a six month shoot that like this is not going to work and that is.

BEN AFFLECK: That is the worst.

MATT DAMON: It is. I came to think of that. It happened.

BEN AFFLECK: They’re going to shoot us all when it comes out. Yeah, okay.

MATT DAMON: It’s like it’s all bad. It’s going to be 80, 16 hour days in a row and then a post production period that’s going to be pretty fraught and then it’s going to come out and we’re going to get f*ing crushed.

BEN AFFLECK: And then you’re going to have to sell it. You’re going to have to walk the f*ing plank and sit down with access, you know what I mean? Like so saw the movie.

The Importance of Press and Promotion

JOE ROGAN: How important is that stuff still today? Like the press stuff, is that still important?

MATT DAMON: It is. I don’t know to what degree either each specific thing is.

BEN AFFLECK: I mean it’s kind of ironic because we were talking about coming on this show today and remember we were saying.

MATT DAMON: I was like doing this show, this.

BEN AFFLECK: Is probably more meaningful than the rest of the stuff we do in aggregate.

MATT DAMON: To promote this movie. Like we spent this whole week in New York doing, you know, I don’t know how many interviews, you know, the quick ones with all the outlets, five.

BEN AFFLECK: Minute interviews, all the evening shows, the day shows, all that stuff.

MATT DAMON: And this just given how many people listen to the show will be more meaningful, we think, I mean that’s our.

BEN AFFLECK: We were speculating historically, right. If you look at it, that’s it. Because they’ve changed to like all of it feels kind of produced and forced and advertised and people have become resistant to anything that feels kind of like a gimmick and a shtick.

And you go on and you do your song and dance and they say the thing, it looks great and nobody cares. Like they’re looking to go either because somebody they know says it’s interesting or somebody that they trusted and a trusted person is in like your, like I said, your feed, right. And it’s your friend or your cousin or they affix that to somebody which has become a more rare thing.

Like who’s like a legitimate neutral arbiter. I can’t predict what they’re going to say. Before I go there. There are few of those, fewer and fewer of those people in the world. Even those are proliferation of more and more voices and it’s kind of paradoxical like, like the form of entertainment is getting shorter and shorter and shorter.

So you’re like a seven second, you know, advertising company. We do most of the spots that we release, like 15 second spots, six second spots for social, the ones most people see. And then there’s this one form which is like long form discussions that are whatever, two hours long.

And the amazing to me is, you know, in a world where it seems like you can’t get people to pay attention for more than, you know, a few seconds, there’s a kind of a hunger for that. So there’s like this form and that’s why you see these are getting more popular.

Obviously you have this massive audience and it’s kind of flying in the face of the whole other trend. And I think, and I don’t know that it probably has something to do with like, who do I think is authentic and am I actually willing to extend my two hours of my time to sit there and listen through and that an argument that people probably do appreciate and understand conversations that have context and nuance and where there’s like a back and forth.

They’re just much more selective about who they’re willing to kind of give that sort of voice to in their life.

The Power of Organic Word of Mouth

JOE ROGAN: It’s also the voice of the public too, because when people start talking about things online and things go viral online and people just start like saying how great they love the film or how great this album is or something like that, it just takes off organically now. Yeah.

BEN AFFLECK: And that has more, more weight than anything. You feel like somebody else who obviously has no dog in the fight is going, hey, this is great, you should see it. I’m the same thing. If I hear somebody tell me like, you know, who I respect, yeah, you got to see that thing that means more to me than anything. Right. Because I believe that.

And so if the closer you can get to that, which is why I think the act of a like telling the same, you know, like telling the same like story about you should go see the movie to a bunch of people with a certain like, limited reach. It’s just not that efficient.

But you have to, because it’s like, well, we sat down with our own interester, Zenaka and talked about the movie, you know, and you kind of do that ostensibly because it means a little bit more in that market.

But I think ultimately it’s like more and more people see, realize they’re being sold to see through the f*ing act and this sort of bullshit of it. They recognize that, you know, you go out and sell every movie, you know what I mean? The good and the bad. And then we got to decide, well, which one? And who can you count on?

Well, it’s mostly going to be that, like, the word of mouth, your friend, and now you can see that person in your media experience, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And I think it’s also, we know that when you’re sitting down with extra or these things, like, that’s just their job to sit down with people. They’re not doing it because they want to.

BEN AFFLECK: Right.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it’s like they got told.

BEN AFFLECK: Go talk to that person.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

MATT DAMON: And we got told, go talk to them.

BEN AFFLECK: Go do the ritual. And they say the thing they say, and we say the thing we say, and everyone goes home and says, we did our job.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the benefit of an independent podcast, is that like, with me, I don’t talk to anybody I don’t want to talk to. It’s just like, I literally do the whole thing on my phone. I go, oh, yeah, that sounds cool, and that’s it.

The Value of Long-Form Conversation

BEN AFFLECK: But that, I think, means a lot. At least this person making this choice. And I’ve listened to it a bunch, and I actually find myself agreeing with a lot of the time, so I’ll give it a shot. It’s exactly—

MATT DAMON: I think, also, this format, at least I know why I started listening to podcasts was because in the world, the divisive kind, the way everybody was talking, these sound bites and all this s*, and it was just the ability to just listen to human beings talk often who had different points of view but had a civil conversation.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MATT DAMON: Was such a welcome thing, you know, given the hysterical kind of frenzy of divisiveness.

BEN AFFLECK: It just feels—

MATT DAMON: It’s just, you know, if I open my phone and look at the news, I was like, “F*.” Just put it down. It’s just I feel my cortisol level go up. And to actually hear people, listen to people I know I don’t agree with, but listen to them and just think about it. You know what I mean? Approach life with a little bit of humility. Hold on to what you believe, obviously, but keep listening.

JOE ROGAN: It’s also there’s not a lot of opportunities in the real world to have long conversations with people, so people are kind of starving for that.

Media Incentives and the Truth

BEN AFFLECK: I know. Isn’t it funny that this has become the shared cultural experience? We listen to that podcast and then actually experience that. And also, why don’t people trust the media? Well, because the media doesn’t do that, because they compress it and because the truth isn’t money. Because actually doing that doesn’t make money. It’s just ratings.

And the perceived idea that if you simplify it or you position it one way or you engender outrage, that’s simple. Or just pure one-sided ideas that are simple. But the news used to be—the idea was, look, here’s the FCC. We’re going to let these networks broadcast their shows and make money on it. But here’s the deal. You got to give an hour of that and lose money on that hour to tell the news and try to tell it objectively.

Then it started to be, no, you got to make money for that hour too. And if you’re going to make money, that’s a different incentive than tell the truth or report the news or any of those things. And people try to hybridize them. But at the end of the day, you’re a more successful reporter if more people watch you because advertisers pay more and then they’re doing the same thing, looking at their data. What are people watching? What kinds of stories?

And I think it’s simple answers because you’re making it into a profit game. Those incentives are not aligned with just trying to get down to even reporting basic facts.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it was a weird time. It’s like we have more access to information than ever before, but so much of it is horseshit. You know, it’s hard to stay balanced. And I think that’s why it’s good to listen to people just talk and then you recognize the flaws in their thinking. You feel ego, you feel deception, bullshit.

BEN AFFLECK: It’s true. People will reveal themselves. We actually don’t need that many editorialists to be constantly telling us what to—

MATT DAMON: Think and how to think.

BEN AFFLECK: People actually have pretty good intelligence. You know, if someone’s bullshitting you, eventually they’ll kind of hang themselves. Like you said, you’ll get that vibe. After a while, he kind of started repeating his shtick and I kind of didn’t really talk about what I was wondering about. And you form your own. That’s forming your own opinion.

The Danger of Talking Points

JOE ROGAN: Judge Pete Buttigieg actually talked about that being dangerous on podcasts. He’s like, because you go on there and you have your points, but you’ll get revealed over the course of a few hours. You can only stick to these lines—

BEN AFFLECK: Talking points. Yeah. And then what happens is people just—there was an art to, “Look at how great that communicator. They stick to the message and they do their points.” Okay, 30 seconds, 60 seconds. But any longer than that, it just starts to look like a robot. And you know, I saw you do the same hand gesture and the same bit with that.

JOE ROGAN: You know, sometimes you find out they’re full of s* just by having them talk about other things. Tell me, do you like cooking? You know, just and then you just see some concocted—

BEN AFFLECK: They’re thinking, what makes me look good if I talk about cooking? Well, I’ll tell you what, because what would the focus group say? That’s exactly it.

MATT DAMON: Do I cook or do I not?

BEN AFFLECK: What does that make me? Feminine? Or does it make me open to cultural—you know, it’s just, what do you like to cook, man? I don’t cook. I just, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s the other thing about people that are online too much is they’re so concerned with other people’s opinions that they don’t have enough time to formulate their own. You’re just so concerned with how people are going to perceive everything you say that you’re handcuffed. You’re terrified to misspeak.

MATT DAMON: Right.

The Freedom of Not Giving a F*

BEN AFFLECK: I think that in general is a real fing danger. I mean, we were talking the other day, we were saying about one of the benefits of getting older and doing this for a long time is you realize nobody really gives a s as much about you as you think. Just kind of let me not give a f*.

MATT DAMON: Nobody remembers being in your 30s and thinking, “This is really important.” And then you realize, no one—

BEN AFFLECK: How am I going to come off? What’s going to be—no one.

MATT DAMON: Actually, it’s not that big a deal. Nobody cares.

BEN AFFLECK: These people are mostly worrying about themselves in their life. And yeah, there’s this illusion that they pay a passing moment attention or it’s in some story or something. It’s like you’re f*ing staring at it because it’s about you.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

BEN AFFLECK: You know, you said that about me. Nobody else, really.

MATT DAMON: Nobody cares.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And if they do, they’re usually f*ed up. Something’s wrong. Why concentrate on this other person’s life? You’re probably trying to ignore your own bullshit.

Well, listen, man, your movie’s fing awesome. I’ve loved so much of your films over the years, so it’s been really cool to be able to have you guys in here and talk about this. It’s been great. Thanks for having two very normal, nice movie stars. You guys are cool as f.

MATT DAMON: Give us a couple more hours.

BEN AFFLECK: Yeah, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: I enjoyed it, and I really enjoyed The Rip. It’s great. And everybody go see it. It’s great.

BEN AFFLECK: I loved it.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you. Thanks for being here.

BEN AFFLECK: Pleasure.

MATT DAMON: Bye, everybody.

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