All The Smoke

The date matters: 21 October 2019. That’s when the first episode of ALL THE SMOKE dropped, and the “10-21-19” stamp has been baked into the show’s iconography ever since — literally, on the heel of a custom Air Jordan 4. Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson didn’t launch a podcast so much as they opened a confessional booth. Both men arrived with the only credential that counts in this format: they’d been there. Barnes played 14 NBA seasons and won a championship with the 2017 Golden State Warriors, earning a league-wide reputation as the enforcer nobody wanted to see in a dark hallway. Jackson — “Stak” — played 14 of his own, won a ring with the 2003 San Antonio Spurs, and became a folk hero as the soul of the “We Believe” Warriors. Between them: 28 seasons, two titles, and a combined highlight reel of battles, brawls, and locker-room lore that no studio analyst could ever fake.

That lived experience is the show’s entire operating system. When a guest sits down with Barnes and Jackson, the usual athlete-media dance — the clichés, the deflections, the brand-safe nothing — doesn’t survive the first ten minutes. These hosts know what the questions are really asking because they’ve been asked them, dodged them, and lived the consequences. The result is a running archive of never-before-told stories and genuinely honest opinions on the burning topics of the game.

The guest list reads like a Hall of Fame ballot crossed with a group chat. The crown jewel remains Kobe Bryant — one of his final on-camera interviews, conducted with the ease of a man talking to peers rather than press. Around it: Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Dwyane Wade, Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Garnett, Allen Iverson, Rasheed Wallace, Dwight Howard, WNBA legend Sue Bird, coaches Jason Kidd and Chauncey Billups. And then the show does what traditional basketball media can’t: it walks straight out of the arena. Snoop Dogg. Lil Wayne. Jamie Foxx. Kevin Hart. 2 Chainz. Freddie Gibbs. Activist Shaun King. NFL names like Michael Strahan, Tyreek Hill, and Keyshawn Johnson. The throughline isn’t the sport — it’s the culture the sport lives inside.

Virtually no topic is taboo, and that’s policy, not accident. The Xs and Os and the history of the game sit alongside social justice, politics, music, mental health, and the cannabis industry — subjects the league’s official channels touch gingerly if at all. Barnes and Jackson built the show athletes actually want to do because it treats them like adults with full lives, not content units with a stat line.

SHOWTIME recognized what it had. In 2022 the network signed the duo to a multi-year extension of the video podcast with expanded roles across SHOWTIME Sports platforms, and spun the catalog into a television series — Best of All the Smoke, four seasons and 40 episodes of themed compilations drawn from the interviews. By the show’s fifth anniversary in October 2024, the count stood at 231 episodes and climbing, with new conversations still dropping across video and audio on every major platform.

The empire kept expanding past the mic. The hosts teamed with renowned sneaker customizer The Shoe Surgeon on an All The Smoke Air Jordan 4 — premium build, show branding throughout, a smoked-out Air unit, and that “10-21-19” heel stamp — issued as a friends-and-family run of just 93 numbered pairs. They took the conversation on the road with An Evening With All The Smoke, a live tour that opened in Chicago. And the brand branched into baseball with All The Smoke Dugout, applying the same unfiltered formula to guests like 19-year MLB veteran Al Leiter. The show now lives on the Black Effect Podcast Network, still releasing new episodes with the same weekly hunger.

What ALL THE SMOKE actually changed is the power structure of sports media. Before it, the ex-player lane meant a suit, a desk, and a teleprompter — the sanitized version of a career. Barnes and Jackson proved the audience was starving for the opposite: players talking like players, with the stories to back it up. Every athlete-led show that followed — and there are dozens now — is working a room these two built. The interviews routinely generate real news, not because the hosts chase headlines, but because guests finally feel safe enough to make them.

There’s a deeper reason it works. Basketball is a players’ league in a way no other American sport is — the personalities are the product — and for decades the storytelling around those personalities was controlled by people who’d never set foot on the floor. ALL THE SMOKE handed the narrative back. When Stephen Curry or Kevin Garnett tells a story on that couch, it lands differently than it would on a studio set, because the two men across from them have scars from the same wars.

Why people watch and listen: because it’s the only place the real conversations happen. Not the press conference, not the postgame podium, not the PR-approved podcast tour — the late-night, lock-the-doors, tell-it-like-it-was version. Barnes and Jackson don’t interview their guests. They recruit them into the truth.