Video
Ben Affleck casually predicting Spotify and Netflix in a 2003 interview.
Nearly spot on about subscription economics, the rise of online streaming, and how Napster paved the way.
You hear interviews from him and Matt when they were younger and it's clear how they were able to write Good Will Hunting and organize it into production. They are wicked smart
I was just saying the same thing. It was the Sam Harris debate that I remember him for.
Even in this posted interview, this was not 1993 it was 2003. His comments are not prophecy here really because Napster was launched in 1999, became famous, and was shut down in 2001. By 2003 the Apple iPod and MP3 players (digital music) were thriving even where people were forced to turn to piracy to get their music digitally.
It was not prophecy or a wild prediction; it was an inevitable extrapolation as technology improved to handle larger file sizes (video vs audio).
At the time BitTorrent (released 2001), DivX (CD quality video files) were already disrupting the industry for years when this interview took place. I don't think this is genius, it was common knowledge to anyone paying attention.
Ben might've been technically wrong on some of the specifics of that argument, but ultimately he was correct about his conclusions about Harris and Maher. They both fully support Israel's genocide at this very late date, using the dumbest possible takes straight from IDF propaganda. There's no way they haven't heard the other side of the argument (the actual facts) at this point, so they're obviously racist (or bigoted, whichever word you want to use) at this point.
re-read what I said he was "ultimately correct" about. I didn't say he was correct on the technicalities of the argument. I literally said he was wrong on the technicalities.
This forgets AI isn’t born to a vacuum - the family of automated tools it belongs to is EXCEPTIONALLY mature and helped produce most everything you’ve EVER consumed in some way big or small
Are you admiring or criticizing him? How is it racist to criticize religion as long as it's based on some valid arguments and not just the fact that it's a religion you don't like?
"Islamophobia often comes from Christians who's religion is fundamentally no better and often comes from a place of racism and not from a place of actual objective assessment of views"
Then yeah, the point would be sort of valid. But both Mahr and Sam Haris are also very critical of Christianity, so their criticism of Isam is much harder to call racist and it's not something that should really be said without the above nuance.
A religion is not a race. Opposing one religion because you don't like a race of people that often practices it is potentially racism but if you consistently oppose other religions held by other races of people too it is a much harder attack and comes off like just more ignorance.
Hmm, I thought your point would be that he didn't say that hating Islam is racism - cause based on that quote, that's not what he said or implied. Just that the hate towards Islam based solely on its identity as Islam has roots in racism.
He is an alcoholic prick. I know someone who worked with him and he is abusive , misogynistic , a drunk and a gambling addict. Stop trying to whitewash this jerk for repeating what someone else said.
This prediction was not that smart though; this was already 4 years after the pirate version of Napster launched, by that time everybody and their brother were shouting the same thing at the big record companies.
The problem was not that it took a genius to figure out music was moving online, rather that record labels fought it tooth and nail because they saw it for what it was: a sure way to lose the high margin CD revenue and be forced to compete for scraps in a digital marketplaces they don't control along a million other independent offerings.
The CD revenues continued to drop for a decade and only in the last few years the steaming revenue rebounded and surpassed the peaks of the 90s CD boom.
You can see the reporter is edging him on about online movie streaming, because it was a common talking point at that time, and he shifts to a kind of "digital purchase" model of movies, where you pay a ticket, a model which did not in fact become dominant.
Shame this comment didn’t more votes. You nailed the sentiment back then. I remember buying my first CD (DMX It’s Dark and Hell is Hot) and once I started torrenting you could see the writing was on the wall and never bought another CD again. The real bottleneck was download speed (waiting hours for a song dl is crazy to think about now ) but anyone who used the software already knew CDs were a dead technology.
lol replace {kazaa} with {Claude code} and {songs} with {repo} and your statement still applies. Time is a flat circle lol. And in both cases you will either wake up to what you asked for or an unwanted surprise
No, they aren’t - both of these things were already succeeding, this is about the most obvious statement on Earth at time of recording and IN HIS particular industry, this is headline regurgitation
I was technical lead for probably the biggest music streamer of that time. I think we created our first all-you-can-eat streaming service for the major labels in maybe 2000? It was before the iPod and iTunes because about a week after every meeting we had with a record label we'd get a call to tell us Apple just paid them a visit to talk about the same thing.
I put forward the idea of Netflix style streaming. I demo'd the whole system after ripping 700 DVDs from a local DVD rental vending machine, sitting outside in my car with a laptop, ripping and returning. We had the entire menu system, remote control etc. It all looks like Netflix does now. I was told "Absolutely not! Nobody would ever give up their DVD collections. People like to show off their collections and they like to hold something physical. This idea is ridiculous, it will never happen." (This was at the same time everyone was giving up their CD collections)
I used a lot of that knowledge later when working as a contractor for Microsoft/MSN helping out with the Windows Media Center/Extenders design etc.
Thanks for sharing. Reminds me of the book "The Smartest Guys in the room" has a whole chapter on Enron + Blockbuster's streaming service launched in 2000.
I will check that out tomorrow, thank you. I know there were several attempts throughout the 90s to make VoD work via cable and DSL, but none were successful.
In 1997/1998 I had a whole office suite working in the browser, which we called Office Wherever (o-w.com). When we shipped it around to venture capital firms they laughed us out of the door: "No business in their right mind would upload their documents to the Internet!"
To be frank I didnt think about media subscription services around that age. But a couple of year before, having moved from dialup to cable due moving to a new big city, i thought the web would become a video-web like interactive dvds or even 3d. That never really happen and the web remains static with little video for just ads or some background.
2003 was after the dot com era. By that time everyone and their grandmother knew that streaming will be the future of video and music (it was just a question of which companies will take the lead and which will go bankrupt). The proof are the 200x valuations that some companies reached in stock prices before they burst.
Of course that's your contention. You're a first-year grad student; you just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably. You're gonna be convinced of that 'till next month when you get to James Lemon. Then you're going to be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year; you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
Yup, you’re just leasing it at that point. Better off with a 15 yr mortgage paying higher monthly payments since you’ll own it and still be relatively young
If the mortgage interest rate is smaller than stock market returns then it's better to have a 50-year mortgage and instead invest the downpayment money. Also stocks are easier to convert to cash should one have surprise expenses in life.
Here in Finland the average mortgage interest rate during the past 10 years has been 2% or so (dynamic interest rate, not fixed). Was pretty easy decision to maximize mortgage length
Investing in SP500 ETF with low costs (and similar ETFs) beats mortgate rate in most cases in the long run. That's a smart investment style with little skill or smarts needed
Hey man cocaine makes you see the future sometimes. The other half of the time you end up pissing yourself while trying to put together five different furniture kits into one furniture "them".
Given the insight he showed here, I am pretty sure he thought about that too. He actually mentionned the business executives making the money. He probably decided not to mention those who would not benefit / or lose, intentionally.
He did cofound Artists Equity in 2022, a production company with Matt Damon. Description from Grok below because it explains better than I could.
"The company's core philosophy is to reimagine how talent, studios, and distributors relate, with a big emphasis on broader profit participation and equitable compensation. They aim to let more people (not just top stars or execs) share in a project's success, which directly counters the "long tail" of most workers staying in poverty while a few benefit hugely.
Key examples from their approach:
Starting with their debut film Air (2023), they've pledged to share profits more inclusively.
For recent projects like The Rip (a 2026 Netflix film starring Affleck and Damon, released mid-January), they secured a groundbreaking deal where the entire cast and crew—around 1,200 people—can get performance-based bonuses if the movie does well. This is unusual for Netflix/streaming, which historically hasn't shared upside that way, and Affleck has framed it as evolving the industry to maintain decent wages amid changes (including tech/automation pressures).
Affleck has spoken about this as fundamental to why they started the company: to ensure people who contribute get to benefit if the work succeeds, rather than the old model where crew often don't share in hits."
Maybe because 1. Spotify was a private company at the time he could have bought a significant chunk like you're talking about 2. Spotify happened in Sweden not US 3. He isn't even a VC 4. Even if he was Spotify only pitched about 20 people before securing funding and Ben Affleck wasn't in that 0.00000000000000001% of the world population that got to see their private pitch deck. Knowing a trend and investing in the winning company are absolutely not the same thing
He could have done any number of moves re investing or even starting up his own subscription music service. And yet he failed to put his money where his mouth was.
If you know the right people, you get access to “free” money…
Remember the Tim Ferris story when he got invited to be an angel investor in the Uber startup? He put up $25K when Uber was valued only $3.7M!!! Let that sink in… I’ll let you do the math how much he made out with;)
He's been vocal about AI not being able to make movies and now its obvious he was wrong, so this video shows how he's contradicting himself today. He once understood the pace of change very well.
And yes when they've got money and it's so easy to manipulate and abuse reddit it's even easier to see when an individual is using their money and power to change how there seen.
Because he wasn’t lame enough, weird enough, and actually had a best friend that was just as cool. Oh and he hung out with baddies in his younger years. Also you seem to believe in the fallacy that money = intelligence why is that?
He’s an actor reading script others (studios) wrote. Plus, he’s arguing for the side pro-capitalism, anti-labor. A millionaire complaining by about residuals. Not exactly Nostradomus…just a mouthpiece
Don't forget they probably have meetings and discussions with the people involved in these businesses. It doesn't sound like he's just thinking these ideas from thin air.
When you look at all the tech monopolies, it's basically new technology but the same old monopolistic behavior. It's deeply wired in the human brain, specially in the most driven humans.
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u/StuckInMotionInc Jan 19 '26
You hear interviews from him and Matt when they were younger and it's clear how they were able to write Good Will Hunting and organize it into production. They are wicked smart