It is hard to frame this as cause-and-effect but I read pretty fast and have little patience for serial-access formats such as podcasts. Indeed several years ago BC (before Covid), someone asked in a group: What will make you listen to a podcast? My response was: A transcript.
Things have changed since then.
Most podcasts now have auto-generated transcripts and I have appeared on several podcasts myself as a guest. But choosing to listen to podcasts remains more or less an uncharted space for me.
Then I discovered that as part of the promotional merry-go-round for their film The Rip, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were going to be on Joe Rogan’s podcast. As someone not-young and not-male, I am definitely not Joe Rogan’s core audience. But Ben and Matt are artists of my generation and Jay and Silent Bob notwithstanding, Good Will Hunting remains a most affecting film they made together.
In the meantime Ben Affleck Smoking memes have proliferated on the web, he has debated Bill Maher and Sam Harris on radical Islam, and while other video evidence of his fluency in Spanish exists, his character in The Rip allows him to be bilingual in Spanish and English.
Matt Damon as Jason Bourne meanwhile has rewritten the idea of a dangerous assassin, a reference to which (and to Hunter S. Thompson) appears at the start of the Joe Rogan episode.
It is a wide-ranging conversation. The creative process and how it is being shaped by the change in how films are now watched β not in the big screen of the cinema hall but on streaming services and small devices, with smaller attention spans, multitasking, and the ability to switch over if something does not grab you in the first few moments; the art of film making and how AI may affect it, albeit in limited ways, they argue, as the actor’s performance draws upon human lived experience; the economics of streaming services; their playbook for negotiating performance-based bonuses for the film crew; cancel culture and public shaming.
They are both great story tellers, bringing profound and hilarious anecdotes to make their points, and turning their memetic awareness into apt comments such as Matt Damon exclaiming: “we are communists, Joe, we are from Cambridge!”
While Charles Darwin, polymathic genius, descended from abolitionists, albeit cousin to a eugenicist, remains my ideal dinner guest, I think if Ben and Matt wanted some ace goat biryani, I would be happy to invite them over.
Meanwhile I am happy to report that another uncharted space has been charted — Joe Rogan’s podcast.
After all there is a life beyond the book, and uncharted spaces are all we have ahead.
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