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OUTLINE:

Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

(00:00) - Introduction

(05:57) - Relationships

(10:44) - Dreams

(22:56) - Fear of death

(34:40) - Overcoming pain

(57:45) - Amazon rainforest

(1:04:29) - AI

(1:17:45) - Truth

(1:25:50) - Ego

(1:33:34) - Dallas Buyers Club

(1:40:03) - True Detective

(1:48:49) - Yellowstone

(1:53:51) - Texas

(1:55:43) - Politics

(2:00:29) - Interstellar

(2:03:26) - Aliens

(2:10:23) - Advice for young people

(2:18:42) - Meaning of life

The following is a conversation with Matthew McConaughey, a legendary Oscar-winning actor and 1 of the most unique, charismatic, and inspiring humans and Texans who walked this earth.

He starred in films and shows loved by me and millions of others, including Interstellar, Dazed and Confused, Dallas Bias Club, Killer Joe, Mudd, True Detective, and soon a spin-off of Yellowstone.

Offscreen, his words carry wisdom and power in his book called Greenlights and his new video course called Road Trip, where Matthew expands on the philosophy in his book and shows how to apply it to your life in order to find more happiness, success, and love.

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And now, dear friends, here's Matthew McConaughey.

Your parents had a complicated love story.

What did you learn about love from your mom and dad and their love story?

That no matter how ugly or messy it is, Don't go to bed until you've come back together to either embrace or admit that you truly love each other, even if you hadn't solved what the hell you're bitching about that love will win in the end, literally 3 to 2 with my mom and dad.

And that even in the 2 divorces and in the 2 times where they couldn't live with each other, they still loved each other.

They just couldn't live with each other at that time for whatever reason they needed.

And I don't know the details, if they needed their space, freedom or what, but they were never out of love with each other.

And that As a parent, if you just, when we're not sure what to do, and people give you a thousand books and advice, As a parent, if your kid knows you love them, you're in the black.

And it can work and will usually can work with that.

So it's not just love for each other, it's the love for the bigger family that ultimately helps you persist through the ups and downs.

Well, I mean, I don't know how much, particularly my mom and dad were staying together at times maybe when they didn't want to because they had children.

I don't actually think they considered that.

I think they were much less conscientious than say, I am today.

I think my mom and dad were more like, they'll be fine.

They'll be fine, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Right now, let's work it out between you and I is what I think my mom and dad were saying to each other, or not.

They wanted and needed a relationship that was a tidal wave, rocky, right angles, tsunamis.

And to this day, in my life with Camilla and I, which I don't, I like a river, has some swerves and some streams and some rapids, but I'm not looking for a tidal wave.

My mom's like, what's all this, everything's so smooth.

So she challenges like vitality, because that's what my mom needed to communicate.

The hard angles that their relationship drew.

I don't think my dad needed it as much as my mom.

But the clashes demonstrated the passion that underlies the love.

Yes, and that's, I've always been asked, you know, when I talk about my parents' love relationship, I tell the stories that are actually sometimes quite violent.

They're beautiful, I think they're beautiful.

But I've had people go, wait a minute, that was unhealthy, you can't, and I was like, no, that's, again, back to the beginning, love's messy, and what I love about those stories is that's where the love was actually.

In the kitchen floor, blood's drawn, Knives are pulled.

What's a memory from childhood that helped set you on the trajectory of becoming the man you are today.

And I looked up and there was a cloud in the sky.

Mayor, is that cloud as big as the world?

And he paused for a minute and he goes, well, yes it is, Matthew.

Now in my 7 year old mind, I went, okay, I can see the outlines of it.

And that must mean it is so far away because if that's as big as the world, I remember it took 15 hours just to drive from Longview to Florida last year, and I can't even see that far.

So that cloud must be so far off that it's not worth me even considering.

I'm gonna look right in front of me and deal with what's in front of me because dealing with dreams and what's out there and not on this earth that gravity holds down, not worth considering, you never make it.

It's not even worth imagining, it's fairy dust.

So I think I learned a lot of self-reliance from that.

I think I got a, hey, focus on what's right in front of you.

Do the deed, take care of what's in front of you 1 at a time and slowly notch up your way and hopefully there's some ascension to that.

And it wasn't until quite a years later, in some ways decades later that I started to go, oh, I can project, I can dream.

Because literally the first time I got in a plane and in 30 seconds I was in a cloud, I'm like, whoa, we must be going a trillion miles an hour because we're already in that cloud that was as big as the world that I saw the edge of.

And then I grew and learned enough to go, well, that's not true, planes don't go that fast.

That cloud is not as big as the world and it's not near as far away as I thought.

What do you think about that, that tension of a way of living life between being a dreamer and a pragmatist.

Donnie holds the reciprocity of the 2 of them.

I mean, I can't be present unless I got plans.

I wanna have the big picture in mind, but I gotta go a day at a time.

I like to write the headline or have a, I think we need to have a North Star, something to look forward to.

But we all know that if we're staring at it, we're tripping on the way.

If we're just, you know, the old, you read the Hallmark cards, which like irk me, you know, dream it, you can do it.

I think that's a half-assed, horrible thing to tell somebody.

You know, because you talk, and then on the other side, you have things like, you know, people say hope means nothing.

And I think that constant tension, when that tension's a dance is when it's beautiful.

There's an Osmond, but to see those as contradictions, I think is where we've fallen short.

So I don't, I, 1 on their own, if we silo the 2, 0, if you silo the 2, I guess that the pragmatics the 1 to go with because at least you'll get something done, but if you only silo the dream and don't do anything about it, that's you're kind of living in an illusion and kind of living in a virtual reality.

Even the people you love can sometimes suffocate the dream, can make you believe that it's not possible.

It feels like a lot of parents kind of want you to be safe, want you to be stable, want you to have a plan so that everything's gonna be okay.

And the dream feels like a threat to that.

How much of that though, I wonder, is proper initiation?

Because if you throw in dreams out, I call it conservative, very liberal late, let's learn to block and tackle, let's learn to work ethic, those things, those pragmatics first.

Learn the rules of the road, the rules of the game, the things that we can all kind of rely on.

This is how the world's supposed to work.

You teach a child to drive, it's like, yeah, you stay in the lane, you go to the speed limit, that's all helpful, but that doesn't guarantee that no 1 else is running the red light, but we learn that later.

There's an initiation, I think, that's proper with the dream.

I mean, I think parents, my parents very much that way.

The idea of going to chase an acting career or something was what?

That was like not in our, I was taught to work your way up a company ladder and 9 to 5, do your job.

But the day I brought it up and said I wanted to go to film school and I thought my dad was gonna go, you wanna do what, boy?

He was like, gave me some of the best advice ever and told me not to half-ass it and said, go.

In between the lines, what he heard from me was that made him so happy as a father, I believe, and makes any parent happy, is when our child doesn't ask us permission to go chase a dream.

When they're going, I'm bringing it up to you with full respect.

That's when a parent goes, oh, yes, I've done something right enough.

I helped my child be secure enough in the pragmatics, to have a foundation enough where they have the courage to go, I'm flying the nest.

You wrote, after my dad died, I had a dream that left me with a statement, less impressed, more involved.

We gotta be more than just happy to be here.

I'm big on gratitude, but we gotta be more than just thankful to be here.

It's gotta be more than just dream it, you can do it.

If I'm here and so impressed with talking to you today, if I have a reverence to an extent, I will not be able to be involved in this conversation.

I'll be anticipating, oh, what's that question he's gonna ask?

Oh, I think I know where he's going with this.

Oh, I think I know what entry you might love to hear.

For me, what that literally meant to me when that came to me in a dream.

And I carved it in, I remember carved it in a tree.

Still wanna, I still know where that tree is, Santa Monica.

All of a sudden, it hit me, oh, I don't have the safety net.

My dad was above law and above religion to me, he had me.

If I really was in the shit, if I really needed him, I trusted that he had my back.

I go and, okay, it hit me how much I'd been pretending to be the young man I was trying to be and not actually put my ass on the line and have enough courage to take risk and actually own up to the man that he was trying to, that he was teaching me to be.

Mayor, that I saw there, was not way up there.

It was, I kept, I'd say I probably gained even more respect for people and things, but I lost a certain amount of reverence that was keeping me from feeling like I deserved or I'd earned things or looking out for myself or holding myself to task.

And I remember all the things that I, and I was just getting, going into Hollywood at the time, so I was getting, fame was out there as 1 of those clouds, you know, with being an actor and all of a sudden, celebrity and becoming famous, the reverence I had, I remember it just, it lowered down to eye level.

And I was able to realize and go, that's not a, that's not fairy dust.

And don't give it so much credit to make it fairy dust.

No, I could never, no, look that in the eye, with full respect, but less reverence.

And at the same time, equidistant, almost equal sublimation, I noticed where I had been condescending people and things, patronizing, and sloughing things off as like less than me and not worthy of my time.

And so they were all flat in front of me and the world was flat.

And I was able to, shoulders went back, my heart rose up, my chin lifted up.

I became probably less sentimental, hopefully not to a level that I got callous, but I know I became less sentimental.

I became more courageous because, you know, when you have someone pass in your life, or maybe it's similar to a situation you're going on in your own life, with your homeland, you sober up on these mendacities that we deal with every day, and this bullshit that we give too much credit or too much significance to, and you're like, what am I doing?

Why am I, I'm not even gonna let myself emotionally get brought down or over-related by this situation because I'm, this is, it doesn't really matter in the big scheme.

And so certain things that I found reverence for and hesitated from in my life, I was now engaging with, because I was like, oh, it's live.

Let's look it in the eye and go forward through it and deal with the consequences.

I'm not looking forward to it, but it does not scare me.

And it's a beautiful visualization and a beautiful dream when I go as part of the food chain.

It's not a good visualization when I go as part of a random act of violence in a fricking drive-by or something.

Because the second, the accident, It breaks a story that I believe has already been written.

At least I don't have the capacity yet to put it into a story, a divine story of the lives that we live.

And so there's something ugly and gross about it.

And it happens all the time, to people all the time.

I just feel like when it's part of the food chain, when I go as part of the food chain, I'm like, ah, that's poetry.

Part of the flow of nature, you return to nature.

I thought about him yesterday, working through a script I'm working on right now, working on scene work.

And I just had that quick little reaction of wanting to show him, hey, check this out.

And then I don't get sad, I go, he would have loved this.

Whereas my mom wants to be on the stage, my dad would have been on the front row.

Yeah, and he would have, and you know, as what he would have, we would have, he knew He was a character, he knew characters.

I've based parts of all kinds of characters I've played and the man that I am on people that he introduced me to and who he was.

He would have loved the creative process of working on a script or talking about, hey, movie.

That's why I always say I love the movie Mud, because it's the 1 that I visualized and seen my dad come to me so many times as a 12 year old and put his arm around me and go, hey little buddy, you seen this movie called Mud?

Now my dad was, never got to see me start a career in film, but he was alive 5 days into the, he overlapped the first 5 days of me working on my first film, Days Confused.

Now that, I think there's something beautiful about that.

We didn't talk about it, but he was alive for me to start something that was more than a fad, that was something that would become something that I love to do.

And I do miss, not him, you know, and then I go out of that, do I, we talked about him 2 nights ago with our daughter, I was rubbing my daughter's feet.

And my mom, who's living with us, 91, comes in and goes, oh, look at you, just like your pop.

And he goes, oh, because my dad loved to rub somebody's feet, rub my mom's feet, rubbed all of me and my brother's girlfriend's feet.

When we would have a date, they would come over early because they knew they were gonna get a foot rub from Jim McConaughey.

And then we'd come out, me and my 2 older brothers, this has been on for decades, we'd come out of the shower ready to go, buttoned up, and they looked at me like, we ain't going anywhere right now.

And so we told the story to my daughter, and I was like, oh yeah, my dad's, his hands, I miss his hands, his hands could heal.

I hope and it's a challenge for me, and I suppose it's like this for any son.

How much do we hang on to and how much do we let go and evolve and update the OS and try maybe better or different?

It's that there's certain things that I know that I fully believe in.

It's like, when do we, religious, when do we cast away our father?

You know, when do we say, no, I'm going after the dream, I'm not asking your permission?

IIIII question that from time to time for myself, because I, And it almost feels blasphemic if that's a word sometimes.

You can't check that and go like, well, no, I'm not sure if I wanna, really.

And then I immediately kind of let myself off because I believe where he is.

I'm not gonna hold you back if you misread that or I didn't teach you that as well as maybe I wish I could have, go, you're free.

It's in your DNA, it's in your lineage, young man.

Still, it's scary to not have a safety net.

In some deep fundamental way, it's just you.

It's such a gift of deliverance though, as well.

Because it's an awesome feeling to know, to know we're alone, to know we don't have that, to know you don't have take 2 or take 3, that it's 1 take.

I mean, the peripheral vision improves, you know, the link and understanding with our past improves, because I know for me, I was not ever considerate of my past at all, because my dad had that, if I needed it, he was my well for that.

Well, he's gone, you know, except he had the, literally, had, they have our back.

Well, then when they no longer have our back, all of a sudden I'm going, oh, well, maybe I need to look back and start giving some credit to how I got here, what I'm doing and where I'm heading.

It gave me the first time courage to even look over my shoulder.

Because again, I didn't have to, because I don't have to look.

So, I mean, I don't know, me, because it's inevitable, I very quickly go to, all right, in the pain, the loss, and yes, even loneliness, which is different from being alone, and loss, Pretty immediately, part and parcel with the pain, I felt it.

In the pain, you saw the gift, the red light of losing your father.

Pretty immediately, less impressed, more involved.

I came like a couple weeks after moving on.

Is there a trick to that, to see the gift in the pain?

I mean, I don't, I have to, I have to catch myself from trying to intellectualize my way into the reasoning and not skip over real feelings and discomfort.

I mean, I did get that from my mom and I have to watch it, that so resilient that we just dust ourself off and get up and go.

You wanna sit in the feeling, you wanna feel it, you really deeply feel the pain.

I wanna deeply feel it, I wanna look in the eye and deeply feel it, but I don't wanna wallow in it.

Now I was raised where you skip the deeply feel and let's go.

And I've said it before, but that will lead to having turned into a person who is a repeat offender of the same crimes, because you just get up and you don't, You don't have a winter in your life.

You don't have, there's no introspective time.

You don't look over your shoulder into the past.

right, I've stepped in the same pile of whatever a hundred times, and I'm fine.

I'll do it a hundred first, doesn't hurt.

Well, hang on a minute, maybe we wanna stop and go, what can I learn from that?

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#384 – Matthew McConaughey: Freedom, Truth, Family, Hardship, and Love