Ben Affleck
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Episodes
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Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist · Ben Affleck on “Animals,” Matt Damon, and His Family
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How Did Movie Wipeouts Turn Ben Affleck Into a Director?
Ben Affleck says failure and setbacks brought some of the best things that ever happened to him. He got lucky and successful young, then hit real failure not long after. Three or four movies in a row wiped out. He thought he might not work again, and people he had taken for friends stopped calling him back.
He decided he had to make it again as a director. The pitch for his first movie was that he was not in it, because that was where his acting career stood. Every movie he made felt like make or break. He had to work or he was not going to work. The pressure made him work harder and stay more dedicated, which he says is what it took to succeed. Early on as a director the work was all-consu
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Why Do Data Centers Create So Few Jobs?
Ben Affleck says he heard Chamath, someone he has known for a long time, say something he thought was pretty smart. He retells the point: people told they are sharing in the value of new development cannot be left with a theoretical future promise. Carnegie and Rockefeller built museums and parks. The railroads were an evident public good, and money also went into the communities around them. Neighbors will embrace data centers only when a benefit is evident with a data center in the backyard. Otherwise they will say a builder is going to spend all the money, create 200 jobs, and leave them staring at a giant concrete square stuck in the water and the power.
The water line after that exchan
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Why Does Ben Affleck Call the Slowdown a Cartel?
Ben Affleck says colluding to manage frontier spending downward creates a cartel. One of the four companies in a frantic race, already at a quadratically increasing spend for a smaller marginal improvement on each model, would feel great if rivals agreed to dump less money in.
He says any view should be heard critically, including the incentive behind it. The businesses have advertised that they must be in charge because the technology is so dangerous it could kill us all. Affleck says the danger pitch is a bad argument. He points to a company that named itself OpenAI to promise open models, then pivoted to a for-profit closed system. He says the pivot probably means the company cannot alwa
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Why Does Ben Affleck Tie Congo's Ebola to America?
Ben Affleck says philanthropists should not show up and dictate how local work gets done. Flying in people from Europe or North America and paying them to stand around as experts leaves no real value and no real improvement where they work. His model is to invest in local organizations until they become sustainable and need no further investing. The work includes women victims of gender-based violence in war, capacity building with coffee farmers and growers, education, internal health, access to clean water, and healthcare.
The abrupt dissolution of USAID raised the stakes. Affleck calls USAID a tiny fraction of the US federal budget and a very meaningful piece of the aid that goes out to
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What Example Does Ben Affleck Want His Kids to See?
Ben Affleck says what really stays with him, and what he hopes his children take from his life and career, is that their dad did not give up and did not hold himself above anybody else. He was successful in direct correlation to the hard work he put in. Sometimes you work hard and still do not get there. Doing the work anyway leaves an esteem that no one can take away.
A happy life follows from your own sense of what counts as success and failure. It does not need someone else to say the work was great, and it does not need the approval of the whole world. He loves Animals, wants people to see it, and thinks they will like it. He makes movies mindful of the audience, their time, and their e
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Is AI Always Error Prone?
Ben Affleck says artificial intelligence is always going to be error prone. A calculator, the kind of computing people already know, gives the same precise result every time someone says four times four. Artificial intelligence is probabilistic. It works like a bookmaker setting a line and finding a mean, then landing in a zone. When a result is wrong, or when the system states something with tremendous authority and then admits the fault, the miss is how the technology does what it does successfully.
In 1982, traders had computers sell a stock as soon as it hit a certain number. Everybody did the same thing. The computer sales dumped the stocks, caused a panic, and wiped the market out. Th
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Why Share Movie Incentives With the Crew?
Ben Affleck knows for absolute certain that a movie is better when the people making it share the incentive to make it good. The environment is better, the likelihood of quality is higher, and the experience of the human beings doing the work improves.
If all twelve other people in the room are invested, they stay a little longer or try a little harder and pick up an extra piece or an extra shot, because people are going to watch. If all someone cares about is the check and going home, and nobody treats the person as important to the process, the extra shot gets no help. A slider that is off is just too bad. Some people still work to a higher standard anyway, just because of who they are, a
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Why Wouldn't Jen Garner Play Ben Affleck's Wife?
Ben Affleck asked Jen Garner to play his wife, and she told him she was not going to do it. He thinks she is a great actress, and he wanted to see another side of her because he knows her so well. He says she is, as usual, a little wiser than he is.
Matt Damon had just gotten the Odyssey, and Ben Affleck says Damon was as happy as Affleck had ever seen him the day he got the job. Affleck knew it meant a lot. Damon had already had the opportunity to do lots of work, and the Odyssey was clearly meaningful. Affleck was really happy for him. He calls the experience great, and he thinks it would have been great even absent the result. Affleck decided to play the part himself rather than risk som