‘I have the money, you're broke': Ben Affleck reacts to viral video rejecting son's expensive request
Ben Affleck is teaching his children that they shouldn't expect any handouts from their famous father.
Last month, the 52-year-old actor made headlines after he and his son, Samuel, were featured in a viral video during which he shut down the 13-year-old's request for a $US6,000 ($A9393) pair of Dior Air Force 1s.
During a Tuesday appearance on Today with Jenna & Friends, The Accountant star spoke out about his exchange with Samuel and opened up about his approach to parenting.
'He wanted these sneakers, and I was like, 'These sneakers are $6,000, what are you talking about? What are you going to do: mow lawns? You got $6,000?'' Affleck quipped. 'He was like, 'We have the money.' I was like, 'I have the money! You're broke.''
Affleck said it's important for his children to understand the value of hard work.
'You love your kids. You want to give them everything and do everything for them, but I think you definitely do them a disservice by not connecting [if] you want something that you want, you have to work for that,' he said.
The Oscar-winner shares Samuel with his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner, along with two older kids.
Affleck revealed that Violet, who is a freshman at Yale University, and high school student, Fin, are both already gainfully employed.
'My oldest two have jobs. In fact, one just got a job, the kind of classic teenager working a shop job; I won't say what it is,' he said. 'My older one in college is working and trying to get an internship for the summer.'
'And yeah, my son, who's 13, he's reckoning with that reality right now. He's looking at no shoes in his closet. Well, he's got shoes, just no crazy-expensive, fancy shoes,' Affleck continued.
'And I'm like, 'Well, if you want that, you can work 1,000 hours,'' he added. 'You know what I mean? Minimum wage. And once you work 1,000 hours, you may not want to spend that on a pair of shoes.'
In the original video that was shared on March 3, Affleck and Samuel could be seen browsing various pairs of shoes at a sneaker convention, where Samuel spotted the Dior shoes. Upon seeing the hefty price tag, Affleck told his son, 'That's a lot of lawns you got to mow there.'
Affleck was raised in a middle-class family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The actor's mother, Christopher 'Chris' Anne Boldt, is a former elementary schoolteacher who received her master's degree from Harvard.
Affleck's father, Timothy Affleck, who struggled with alcoholism for years, did not attend college and held a variety of jobs, including working as an auto mechanic, bartender and janitor at Harvard.
Timothy and Chris Anne, who also share son Casey Affleck, 49, divorced when Affleck was 12. After moving to California, Timothy eventually embraced sobriety and worked as an addiction counsellor.
During a 2018 interview with Grazia Daily, Timothy told the outlet that he was proud of Ben and Casey for staying humble after rising to fame.
'Both of my sons are hard workers. They have a tremendous amount of empathy, they don't forget where they came from, they're very kind and generous. Those are the qualities that I value,' he said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
7NEWS
17 hours ago
- 7NEWS
$400m blow for Justin Baldoni as Blake Lively claims ‘complete vindication'
It Ends With Us actor and director Justin Baldoni's legal battle with Blake Lively hit a roadblock on Monday, when a federal judge dismissed his $US400 million ($A613,900,000) countersuit. Baldoni and production company Wayfarer Studios sued Lively and her husband, Ryan Reynolds, for defamation in January. He sought at least $400 million for damages that included lost future income. It also named publicist Leslie Sloane as a defendant. Baldoni filed his lawsuit about two weeks after Lively sued him and others tied to the film, alleging harassment and that a coordinated campaign was launched to ruin her reputation after she came forward about allegations of poor treatment on set. An amended complaint from Lively alleged that Baldoni also made other women on set feel uncomfortable. Baldoni also sued The New York Times for libel after he accused the newspaper of working with Lively to smear him. US District Judge Lewis J. Liman also tossed out that lawsuit on Monday. Liman said in the court filing that Baldoni's legal team can amend the claims of tortious interference with contract and breach of implied covenant by June 23. 'Today's opinion is a total victory and a complete vindication for Blake Lively, along with those that Justin Baldoni and the Wayfarer Parties dragged into their retaliatory lawsuit, including Ryan Reynolds, Leslie Sloane and The New York Times,' Lively's lawyers Esra Hudson and Mike Gottlieb said in a statement. They said Baldoni's lawsuit was a 'sham' and that 'the court saw right through it'. 'We look forward to the next round, which is seeking attorneys' fees, treble damages and punitive damages against Baldoni, Sarowitz, Nathan, and the other Wayfarer Parties who perpetrated this abusive litigation,' Hudson and Gottlieb said. Baldoni's attorney, Bryan Freedman, did not immediately return a request for comment Monday. The months-long feud between Baldoni and Lively exploded after the pair wrapped filming of It Ends With Us, a film adaptation of Colleen Hoover's book. Lively alleged in her initial complaint that she was sexually harassed by Baldoni while filming and was targeted after she expressed her concerns. Lively also accused him of hiring a crisis publicity firm to engage in a 'social manipulation campaign' to ruin her reputation. Baldoni has denied the allegations. Taylor Swift was dragged into the bitter legal battle after Baldoni's attorney tried to subpoena her as a potential witness. A spokesperson for Swift quickly blasted the subpoena as a way to 'use Taylor Swift's name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait'. Last week, a federal judge refused to let Lively dismiss claims of emotional distress on her terms. Lively had offered to drop the claims instead of providing her medical and mental health records as requested by Baldoni's legal team. Lively and Baldoni's trial is scheduled for March.
Perth Now
a day ago
- Perth Now
Lisa Kudrow: Friends was a lot of work
Lisa Kudrow found Friends to be "a lot of work". The 61-year-old actress became a household name playing Phoebe Buffay in the sitcom, which ran from 1994 to 2004, but the role didn't come easy to her because she and her alter ego were such different people and she was determined to be a "good student". Speaking to Parker Posey for Variety's Actors on Actors series, she said: "It became fun. It was fun the whole time because the cast had fun. "Phoebe was so far from who I was as a human being, it was work — I needed to justify everything she was saying in my head so that it felt like she meant it and it was real to her. It was a lot of work. "I remember Season 2 or 3, I went, 'Oh my God, I'm not doing the work.' And [Matt] LeBlanc went, 'What's the matter with you? You're her. You don't have to.' "The worst thing was wanting to be a good student. That's what hurt me the most." Parker was most recently seen playing wealthy matriarch Victoria Ratliff in the latest season of The White Lotus and she urged Lisa to pitch for a role in the next installment of Mike White's satire anthology. She said: "Oh, Lisa, you should be in Season 4. If there's a big enough TikTok campaign, then it'll happen." Lisa quipped: "Because that's how it works. No, it doesn't." Parker agreed: "It doesn't. Because who knows what Mike White is writing or where these stories are going to go?" While Lisa would like to work with Mike, she admitted she has reservations about taking on projects that are "too dark". She said: "Work with Mike White? Yes. I love Mike White. I've hung out with him at a party. "He's social. And Brad's Status was my favorite movie that year. I emailed him to let him know, because I had to — it was so good, I had to. I don't do that a lot... "I might not be his cup of tea, which is allowed to happen too. But I do get nervous about inhabiting things that are too dark; I try to avoid that. But you didn't really have to, except for the scenes where your head's blown off. But it's pretend."
ABC News
a day ago
- ABC News
A game of deception and extraction: How influencers embody the logic of social media - ABC Religion & Ethics
If you want to know how something ends, consider how it begins. Social media, we were told, was about connection, a new frontier for community, dialogue and shared experience. But its origin story tells a different truth. These lofty ideals, if they ever existed, were championed by an anti-social Harvard drop-out who launched a site to rate women's appearances side-by-side. From its inception, this technology was less about connection and more about control, comparison and commodification. We were told that social media would connect us all. It was implied, therefore, that we were deficient in connection — that we needed a new media, a 'social' media, to bring us together. This media would strengthen communities, forge new ties among disparate peoples; they could find and bond with each other in our messy, lonely, world. If you want someone to buy something or use something, first tell them they are lacking. Social media told us what we lacked was each other . What we were given was a euphemism, an appeal to our longing for each other: used to build systems that monetise our attention, our trust and our behaviour. If there was ever any semblance of real connection on social media — if, for instance, in 2010, connection meant sharing images of your dinner or updating your status as Roman does in Easy A to 'is having an OK day and bought a coke zero at the gas station, raise the roof' — it no longer exists. In 2025, 'social' media is a marketing machine: if you're online, you're either marketing, being marketed to, or often, both . At the centre of this online circus is the influencer. Enter … the influencer These characters, the dramatis personae in this digital narrative, present themselves as relatable, authentic, just-like-you-but-a-bit-better, friends. But peel back the thick, thick layers of performance and what remains is simple: they are salespeople. Their job is to blur the line between personal expression and commercial transaction — to make persuasion look like friendship. Influencers are the foot soldiers of the algorithms that dictate the plot of these online theatrics. They execute the narrative demands of the platforms that created them — platforms built not for connection and truth, but for squeezing every morsel of attention out of the audience as possible. Out of you . Influencers form so-called 'parasocial' bonds with their followers. Parasocial bonds are one-sided relationships designed to feel 'authentic', intimate and personal, but which are in reality strategies of marketing co-dependency to convert intrinsic human need into profit. In this light, 'para' might as well stand for para- sitic , given the way this dynamic drains the audience of its most precious resource: time. These commercial actors, these merchants, surreptitiously deceive their followers by disguising their intent as care and guidance. Influencers convince their followers that they simply aim to help and serve — they just want to help you get your house in order. Whether it's supplements, diet tips, morning routines, Stoicism, lads' holidays to Afghanistan, self-help advice, every post is a sales pitch. The influencer's power lies in their ability to disguise commercial intent as information provision, to blur the line between personal expression and advertising. The result is a highly effective form of trickery: a follower believes they're receiving genuine guidance, when they are in fact being sold something — often underpinned by ulterior motives or undisclosed sponsorships. History isn't short on charlatans, quacks or snake oil salesmen. But today's influencer is more powerful and more pervasive. They speak over experts. They shape public opinion. And in many cases — vaccine hesitancy being just one example — they're winning. It's only 'content', after all … Influencers, many of whom shy away from the term (perhaps because of an awareness of its negative connotations), sometimes prefer to be referred to as 'content creators'. Creators of 'content'. It all seems rather innocuous. It's just content, after all. Content never hurt anyone, did it? Content is merely a benign, ethereal, substance, isn't it? In fact, what exactly is this content, anyway? What is this content that we are being force fed? Well, advertising, mostly. Advertising a lifestyle, a product, a belief system or an identity, a pursuit or hobby, a charity or a cause. A point of view or an ideology. We are advertised fake 'transformations', unhealthy diets, quack science on everything from the benefits of saunas and the importance of protein (has anyone else wondered why the cottage cheese is sold out at the moment?) to the unfounded dangers of vaccinating children — as if one of the greatest achievements in modern science is something to be suspicious of. Influencers are anything but friends. Nor are they neutral acquaintances. They're specialists in online manipulation and the attending offline effects. In fact, many influencers are so talented that they convince their followers that they are experts — and not only experts, but experts willing to convey their expertise pro bono and altruistically. And thanks to their more relatable appeal, influencers can compete, and win, against actual experts — thus spreading inaccurate information or worse. Influencer Brian 'Liver King' Johnson attends the UFC 276 event at T-Mobile Arena on 2 July 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Jeff Bottari / Zuffa LLC / Getty Images) The real-world ramifications of this can be disastrous — ranging from genocide to a rise in communicable diseases, to false or misleading 'bro science' about whichever 'wellness' fad is trending. And when it all goes wrong, an influencer unlike an expert, can throw up their hands and claim they're just a regular person, just giving their opinion — 'do your own research'. There's no real accountability, no check and balance on their power. There's no skin in the game. No concrete consequences for an influencer's negative actions. The result is a system where influence is high, but responsibility is low. These realities facilitate influencers having a fundamentally insincere relationship with their followers. Take Brian Johnson, otherwise known as 'Liver King', who convinced many of his followers his physique was built on an ancestral lifestyle, and not thousands of dollars' worth of performance enhancing drugs and supplements. He sold an ideal he didn't live by and profited from the deceit. He is but one extreme example in a broad-spectrum dishonesty part of a continuum where influencers blur the line between image and reality, often at the expense of those who trust them. Smoke and mirrors This seems to be what 'influencing' is: a game of deception and extraction. Perhaps (para) social media was always destined to become this. A host network for quackery and fakery. A mirror held up to us by a small, always on, aluminosilicate glass device — not to connect us, but to sell us back to ourselves. It began with comparison, with ranking humans against one another, turning people into objects to be judged on screen, and that cold logic never went away. Today, the same machinery, the unseen architecture dictating so much of these nefarious activities, drives influencers to package their lives as 'content' and compels audiences to 'consume' it in the hopes of filling a chasm that social media itself created. Cui bono ? Not the audience, drained of time, attention and trust. Not the public, misled by pseudo-experts with no accountability. The beneficiaries are those who profit from the illusion — platforms that sell our data, advertisers that sell us solutions to problems we didn't have, and influencers who sell themselves as friends. The only remedy is for users to be more discerning. To reject unsolicited advice masquerading as care. And to ask, seriously and soberly: Do these people really have your best interests at heart? Samuel Cornell is a PhD candidate in public health at the University of New South Wales. Prior to his academic studies and career, he briefly served in the Royal Navy.
