Matthew McConaughey - THIS IS Why You're NOT HAPPY In Life (Change Your Future Today)| Lewis Howes

I've done my best work when we rap. And I'm like, okay, see y'all tomorrow morning. And they're like, no, that's it. We rap. The show is over. You're like, oh, really? Oh, wow. Stay in the zone, in the process. And I found that more results will come your way. I think you gotta have a dream. The School of Greatness.

Really? Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes.

Welcome back, everyone, to the School of Greatness. I'm so excited we have the iconic Matthew McConaughey in the house.

My man, thank you so much for being here. How are we doing, Lewis? Good to be here, buddy.

Man, I've read your book, man, and it was hard, I'll tell you what, I'm dyslexic, so it's hard for me to get into a book and finish a book, but the way you tell stories is truly captivating. So congrats on this book, so inspiring. There was a point in the book where you said your first exchange student family asked you to call them mom and pop, I think it was, mom and dad, and you said no. which was, I guess, challenging moment where you had to kind of stand up for what you wanted. But why do you feel like values are so important for you? And what did that lesson in that moment kind of standing up for your values against authority of a place that had you welcomed in, feeding you, housing you? How did you learn on that?

Well, let me answer that. I'll come back to what I think values overall mean and how they've helped me get to where I am and go where I think We all hopefully need to go. But that story was, I was in Australia for a year, two weeks out of high school I went over there. And for the first time I was all alone, I was in a foreign place, I was forced into great introspection, existential questions of who, what, where, when, why and how. I didn't have a crutch, I didn't have a car, I didn't have a girlfriend, I didn't have a job, I didn't have money, I didn't have my parents, I didn't have friends. and I was lost in trying to find a bit of a compass and an anchor. And some odd things were going on for me and my relationships with some people there, where I was questioning my own sanity. And I was kind of going along with everything. And that moment where I was asked to call someone mom and pop was a seminal moment because in my chaotic life and my anarchic brain that I was living in at the time, That was the first bit of real clarity that I was like, no, that is not open for discussion. All these other odd things that have been happening to me, I've been tallying up to, oh, it must be a cultural difference. It must be a cultural difference. This was something that I went, culture my backside, man. I don't care, place, time, whatever. That's not negotiable for me. So I said, no. And it was very clear, and it gave me clarity. It gave me some identity. and it was just an obvious thing to deny or that I could never call someone. So I mean, look, the values are inherent in that, but that helped me, that really helped with my sanity to have that sort of, something that was so clear to me that was black and white. I needed that at that time in my life. It's hard to find those things in life in general, you know? And how many times do we call, compromise a shade of gray, when actually the right kind of compromise is the eye of great light and truth. At the same time, we feel like we need as humans something to grab a hold of, something to grasp hold of. It can be very good for us, it can also be very dangerous for us. Look at what's happening now in our nation. The divide is people running to the extremes because they need something to hold on to, to have an identity. to feel like they have a purpose to have a foot on the ground in these chaotic times we're in. But the values of family, what that means, the values of loyalty, the values of accountability, responsibility, the responsibility of freedom, the freedom of responsibility, fairness, those are things that I was raised on that I've found that are never going to go out of style. And I actually think we could all double down on them personally and as a society now. For sure.

You talked about identity. Is there ever a moment in your life after that moment where you lost your identity, where you felt like I'm losing the grasp of who I am? I know you talk about in the book of like looking yourself in the mirror a lot and asking that question of are you happy with what you see in the mirror when you look in your eyes? Was there ever points where you lost it fully and you had to kind of reach?

I've never lost it fully. I've never lost it fully. I have a pretty good threshold and a pretty good quick trigger for if I'm not feeling fully myself, I need to go remedy it, which may be taking a walk about myself with the backpack for 22 days to Peru or Africa or meditating or praying or going and sitting still for a while or going back to what I know I can rely on, family and sitting there and clearing my head about all this other ambitions that I may have in my head. I've never lost it fully. And if anything, I've been It's been a nice, I would say a good trait of mine, that my trigger is very quick for if I'm starting to feel imbalanced or lack of identity, not understanding exactly who I am, my feet are maybe not on the ground. Maybe my head and my heart and my spirit, my loins are not aligned. You know, I always like to say, let's have an autobomb. When we're really rocking, we have an autobomb between our head and our heart and our spirit. Just boom. You know what I mean? Sometimes that gets blocked and you start going, wait, it feels like a two lane highway or maybe that's now down to a one lane blacktop. I need to take a minute. I gotta step back and clean it out and widen up the lanes here and get aligned again. So thankfully, I've had a pretty good short trigger and threshold for realizing when I'm feeling like, oh, I'm headed that way and I need to do something about it. So never fully lost my identity, but have calibrated and had to recalibrate and had many walkabouts to go check back in with myself, let memory catch up and have a Socratic dialogue with McConaughey and end up forgiving stuff and then saying, enough's enough with this other stuff. And you're the only person that I'm stuck with McConaughey, so we better figure out how to get along.

You got to have good company with yourself. What's the thing that's been the hardest for you to forgive?

That's a good one. I can forgive others much easier than I forgive myself.

So the thing with you that's been the hardest to let go of?

Thing for me, you know, there's no deep, dark crimes in my closet. There's no real violence or whatever really hurts someone. I've been, I've got times where I've been ugly. And I did not know or realize at the time, especially the life that I live now in the last 25 years, that my words coming from me with my platform and some perception of me can come at you in bold print and from a large megaphone and can mean more. Things that I'll, things that may tickle me, I've noticed can bruise others. and I bruised some people along the way and didn't notice it until after and didn't notice the impact it had on them. I'm like, what? Really? Oh, I thought that was, oh, so I've done that and I've tried to, I haven't swept everything up and made full amends yet. And I'm happy to say, I think it's a pretty short list. It's not a long list, but I've done that and I have some guilt over that and I still have some amends to make that.

Really? So you feel like you haven't fully forgive, let go or...

I need to make amends. I think I've let go, but I don't think I can fully let go until I make amends with them.

You've forgiven yourself for what you did or how you communicated, but you haven't... Yeah, that wasn't cool.

But my intent, you know, we have to watch this, I think, a lot in life is what we mean to say and what's actually being received can be... There can be a gap between that.

Absolutely.

I mean, I'm all for intent. I think I write about this in the book, the words are momentary. The intent is what's momentous. And I think we could have some more amnesty, forgiveness on this, the way we're attacking words and the value of giving words these days. But there's times of my intents been misconstrued. There's times, look at it, it happens all the time in a doggone email. If someone puts an exclamation mark, if you're having an early morning and you think they're yelling at you, Right. If you're not a morning person, you think that, oh yeah, they're really happy. So you don't get that, do you need the emoji, you know, to let you know how I'm feeling or what I really mean by it? And that gets, it gets, it can, some of it can, you can miss the intent or get someone at a bad time and they don't receive it how you meant to. And so I've got some amends to make with some people in my past. And I, you know, I procrastinated some of that because I know they're gonna be, I feel they're going to be long, Long, drawn out conversations. I may be wrong. They may be like three minutes, the person may go, oh dude, I forgave you that long time ago, I forgave you that. We're good.

Isn't there a chapter in your book about taking hills?

Yeah.

Climbing hills?

Yeah.

Would that be a hill for you to climb, which is like doing the hard thing and addressing the thing that's going to take a long time or it's not going to be uncomfortable?

Well, there's climbing hills and there's also it's about handling the nose. or the crises in life, if we handle the no's, they're actually more important than even handling the yeses sometimes. Meaning, I've always tried to practice, if I get offered a script, say, for a movie, and I form a relationship with so said director or producer, and then it comes a time, you know, I've got five scripts maybe I'm working on. I formed a relationship walking down the line forward with, say, three, four, five different directors. and gotten to know 'em, had a drink with 'em, had a meal with 'em, talked to 'em on the phone, know about the family. And there comes a time where I'm gonna have to say no to two out of those three or four out of those five.

Wow.

Well, it's very easy to tell my agent to go, just let 'em know. But I've tried to practice, I'll let 'em know either in person or by a phone call. And those calls are hard because each one of those directors thought I was going to be a yes, right? And so while those calls were hard, when I hung up the phone with them, I gained more respect. They respected me more for making the hard no call. And I noticed that more and more we realize that like that people are big boys and girls. They kind of understand when they're told no or when someone's turned down, it's part of it. And if we realize that even if we ask the question, 50% of the answer could be a no, no matter how well this is going. And that comes and that's inherent in the request. The answer could be yes or no. And when we hand our no's personally, by making that personal call or doing it in person, I've found that that's been an additive in compounding assets in my future.

Yeah, I think we also gain confidence and belief in ourself that we can take on challenging things in the future and we have more pride in like, Hey, I did the hard thing. you know, it's kind of like this self-reward of like, wow, okay, I believe in myself. I can do this. I don't need to always pass everything off to someone else.

No, no. I mean, you know, that. That chapter about taking the hill or, you know, it's also about not creating false drama when it's not needed. And I see a lot of people do that, and I've fallen into susceptible to do it as well. The drama is going to come. Real drama is going to come. Someone's going to get sick. Someone's gonna get hurt. We're gonna really screw up and then have to handle it. Something's gonna hap, or the world's COVID's gonna come. Something's gonna come that's real. And so don't look for the false drama when it's not there. And people have a habit of it. I've done it before myself. And that's sort of the inverse of take the hill and climb the hill is there's an art to running downhill, which I write about in the book. When things are going well, Don't trip yourself in face plant because it's going too good. Don't get nervous. Oh my gosh, it's going so good. No, embrace it and stay in stride because the uphill will be there in a minute and you'll have to break a sweat and it'll be hard again.

Yeah, how did you not self-sabotage when you were just getting hit after hit and opportunity after opportunity and you were going downhill? How did you not do that? Were you self-sabotage? And what do you recommend for other people? So they don't do it when the opportunities are great.

Great, great, great topic because I have tripped myself running downhill before. I have face planted, you know, broke my nose to proverbially make sure I was felt. It's like you don't need to go that hard, you know what I mean? We don't need to draw blood, McConaughey, just to make sure we can feel. So there's been times I've not been graceful when I was running downhill. But I shook hands with the fact that, okay, obviously it means you give a damn. Obviously it means you're trying to read through the mendacities of life. You're trying to get down to the common denominator about what really matters to you. You're trying to understand all this affluence and things coming to you that you never had yesterday, but now you have, and you want 80 hours in a day, but they're still only giving 24. I gotta get some discernment in here. And for me, I've had to, I've been, had the ability and I have taken what I call Fuga Mundi, a walkabout. I have taken those solo trips with myself. I have, what we talked about early in the conversation, gone to a place where I could hear myself think, where I could get my head and my heart aligned. In those times of great affluence, sometimes It's all heady. And I have a piece in the book about when you can, ask yourself if you want to before you do. Well, in times of great influence, we have a lot of I can in front of us.

Lots of opportunity.

And too many options can make a tyrant out of anybody. So it's a very heady thing. And sometimes that's times when it's like, okay, this all makes sense in my head, but I don't really feel it inside my spirit. I don't know if it's really me. if it's really good for me, if this is gonna turn me on and help BB and feed me. But geez, I mean, I've never had the option before. It sounds awesome. I mean, yes. Well, that's not a bad thing to do, but we gotta check in on that because you can look up and the tank can be on reserve. When you look in the rear view mirror and go, Whoa, I over-leverage myself with things that did not feed me and pay me back. And so how do we, we need to take that time to go check in. and it can be a hairy, hairy time, man, because the answers don't come quickly sometimes. Yeah. And when they don't come and you're shaking monkeys off your back and you're not enjoying your own company and none of it makes sense and it's all confusing and you're looking over there and you want to go, whoa, you want to go to entertainment or communication or you want to pick up the phone or you want to drink earlier or you know, one of those things that come up to mask that, you got to hold, try to hold back and say, no, I'm going to sit in this discomfort. This is a prudent a penance I am taking to get to know myself and listen to myself. And there's prudence in it.

Why do you think so many people try to resist discomfort when so many great things come from being in discomfort? Why do we resist it?

I mean, look, we all like pleasure over pain. But I think what we forget sometimes is that there's a greater pleasure that can come with going through a pain. I mean, you can have little pleasures if you don't. I mean, it's admirable to see some people that are like, just glide through life forever. Woohoo. Those people are not really ambitious though, I find. They don't really, they're not really on the chasing down a better self or chasing down a higher existence or chasing down different truths. And it's admirable. It's fine. It's fine. If you can be the kingdom of your own castle and that's the world you live in and that's just how you walk and go, bravo. as long as you're not harming other people. But if you go through resistance and you choose resistance at the right times and you go through it, you have greater, more evolved pleasure on the other side of it.

So true.

Again, responsibility and freedom. That relationship is really at the core of a lot of this. That's true. There's a responsibility to freedom and freedom in the responsibility. And the responsibility is the hard work. You know, the freedom is the Saturday. The freedom is what we want. The responsibility is what we need. You go through what you need, when what we want actually is what we need and what we need is actually what we want. That's the honey hole where, hey, I look as good as I feel and I feel as good as I look. Ta-da! you! know, where we're selfish and selfless at the same time. that's, I know what I'm chasing.

When we take responsibility and we have structure, which you've talked about also, and kind of have those, not limits, but you have some structure and some boundaries, you can really be flexible and free within those boundaries, which I think is powerful. But if we have no responsibility and no boundaries, it's hard to really create that.

There's no form. The Janarchy, I mean, let's go all the way down to The basics, gravity. Without gravity, there's no form. And with that gravity, there'd just be chaos and anarchy. Some people do it the other way. I call this version what you were talking about, conservative, early liberal, late. Meaning, what are the rules of situation? Let me get my structure. Let me check my sandbox and make sure there's no glass and sharp objects in it. So I can, once I've checked all that, now I can blow in the wind and do backflips naked in my sandbox. Or now I can get on my 16-lane highway that I've checked out, I've seen it's clean and I can swerve all through those lanes. Some people go the other way. They jump off the cliff and say, I'll figure it out on the way down. That's also you as well. It's not how I choose, how I've found it works for me, but...

It sounds like values are really important to you. Identity and responsibility are important to you. Why do you think it's so hard for the younger generation, the millennials, Why is it so hard for them to find their identity, take responsibility and develop values? And what advice would you have for the youth on how to find all three of them?

Look, I'm going to go back to a version of saying, too many options can make a tyrant of any of us. This, look at the world that a lot of our young people are living in. We're all connected, but nobody's with each other. Their world is massive. They have more outreach than any of us ever have. But they're more isolated than ever before. So it's inevitable human nature. Me, I'm betting you, I've got, I feel sound with myself. My spirit feels good. I've got three children and a wife. But even I'll have a different reaction if you give me a thumbs up on my comment or a thumbs down.

Even you, the great Matthew McConaughey.

Even if it's just, well, wait, what was that about? Is that a constructive criticism or do you just not like me? Were you going to put a thumbs down anyway? Or what was the thumbs up about? It can affect you. And so a lot of our youth is living in that world where their emotional feelings about themselves and their own identity is based off your reaction, strangers' reactions, some of them which may not have even read or cared about what you were actually putting out and didn't care about the intent. And that can affect you. I'm not saying, and so I think we got it, there's a responsibility to that world that we, to whatever extent the millennials live in it, there needs to be, they need to edit and govern back themselves with what they allow themselves to be out there, how, Proverbial naked they are to like I'm sharing it all with the world. I'm sending it out to a bunch of strangers and they're gonna come back to me and let me know who I am. Wow. Uh-. No. Check in. And remember this, you millennials, that like, dislike comment that you put today, that's gonna outlive you. It's immortal. It's permanent. you and I are not permanent. That comment is think about before you click and what you put out. Are you putting out something today that you're going to look forward to looking back at? Are you putting out something today in your resume of life that is going to write your eulogy after you're gone, which is going to introduce you forever.

Wow.

When you're gone, think about it.

How did you, I mean, you've done, it seems like a million movies, so many big hits, but there are some that got some controversial feedback or bad reviews, right? There was different stages that you had. How did you handle it as a creator, as an artist, as an actor, when you got negative reviews, or when it didn't hit the expectation of the box office or whatever you guys had? How did you deal with that to say, you know what, I'm not gonna let the opinions of others Bring me down.

Well, they did bring me down sometimes after it.

Really?

Look, my favorite word in the world is unanimous. I know I'm never gonna get it. There's no such thing. But that's still what I'll chase. And I know I'm never gonna get it. So I'll be underwhelmed for the rest of life. And that'll be fine if I keep enjoying the chase, right? I did this exercise one time. I sat down and I had my publicist gather every bad review over 20 years. Not the bad review. And it was a thick, it was a thick folder.

It was a big book.

In ways it was more constructive than reading the good reviews. There were some people I could read that, oh, they already didn't like me. This review was written poorly before they even saw the movie. I could just tell. You could hear the snark in the opening comment. There were other ones that had constructive things to say. No, McConaughey, this is what I love about you, that you do that is quintessentially you, and you didn't, I don't know who you were, who you were trying to be in this, you missed the mark. You didn't give you that heart that you give, or something that I could say is essential that I can give to every role no matter what I'm playing. So some of it was very constructive and I went, mmm, you're right, mmm, you're right. And had to go back, look in my diaries during those movies, what was I doing? What was I eating? Who was I hanging out with? Where was my mind? How was I feeling about this? Was I working hard enough? Did I prepare enough? Did I get complacent? Ah, yeah, you did. You got complacent there. You thought you had it going. And that's kind of this, that's actually the scene that this critic's pulling out saying, you know, you lost me right there, Mccann. And I'm like, yeah, I was lazy in that scene. So, look, other times, there was a real pivotal time in my life when I was on a roll with romantic comedies. Crush it. I loved doing those. Crushing the record.

Like a 10 year old just like, boom, boom, boom.

Took the baton from Hugh Grant and turned up the speed.

Let's go, baby.

It was great, man. They're fun. I was getting paid handsomely. They were making a lot of money. What the challenge became, though, that was the only thing I was getting offered. With the success of those, any dramas I wanted to do, the opportunity to do those became less and less and less and less until it was like, no. McConaughey is the shirtless on the beach rom-com guy. And I remember looking in the mirror going, okay. And yes, I'm sure this on the beach because those rom-coms are paying the rent for the house I've got on the beach that I'm running shirts on. Yes, I worked to get that. I looked that in the eye. Fact, that is me. Now, that does not mean that it didn't become A thing that became like a pigeon hole. Oh, that's all McConaughey is and does. And it was a time in my life where Camila and I just had our first child. So do you have children?

No kids, not yet.

You'll see when and if you do. A man is never more masculine than right after the birth of his first child. And I don't mean macho. I mean the clarity. That Audubon we're talking about, about mind, heart, Spirit and loins. It is so clear, the first six months after your newborn, don't double down, triple down on any instinct you have, career wise, relationship wise, anything, stock market, just triple down on them. You'll be right. It's an incredible time. Anyway, I had just had a newborn. Camila had had the newborn. So my life was so vital, man. I mean, I was loving harder. I had more rage in the right places. I would get sad my emotions, the ceilings and the basements were really incredibly vital. And the rom-coms have a much thinner bandwidth for those, for those how you can feel about something. The ceiling and the basement are compressed quite a bit and that's how they're built. They're built, you're supposed to bounce along the clouds. They're built to be buoyant. And I was like, I wish I could find some work that would challenge the vitality and drama, great drama I have in my own life. Those things weren't coming to me. So since those things weren't coming to me, I decided to stop doing what I was doing, which was the rom-coms. Now, I'm figuring this is going to be a bit of a dry spell in my career, but I don't know for how long. I shed many a tear on the shoulder of my wife talking about, you know what, I want to make a change. I want my career, some work to challenge the man I am to challenge the life that I'm living. I mean, that means I'm not going to go with work for a while. Call my money man. He says, you can take off. You've handled your money well. Call my agent. He goes, do it. I work for you. We got to go ahead. And then I stopped. I said, I moved down to Texas. You didn't see me on the beach. You didn't see me in the rom-com. You didn't see me in the tabloids. You didn't see me anywhere. Rom-coms kept coming in as offers.

Nope, nope.

Nope, nope, nope. And then one comes in with an $8 million offer. Let me have a read of this one. I read it. Pretty good. No, thank you. They come back with a $10 million offer. No, thank you. They come back with a $12.5 million offer. Dot, dot, dot. No, thanks. They come back with a $15 million offer. I say, let me read that again. I read it again. Same script, word for word, as the original $8 million offer. But at $15 million, oh, it was written so much better.

It looks good, doesn't it?

It was more dramatic. I got angles on this. I can make this work. Oh, yeah. I ended up saying no. And that really got the message across to the industry, okay, McConaughey ain't serious, he's not doing any rom-coms. Then nothing came in for about 10 months, nothing, dry as a bone. And after 20 months of a desert and nothing coming in and saying no, first saying no to what I was doing and then nothing coming in at all, all of a sudden I became a new good idea. McConaughey for Killer Joe, Magic Mike, Mud, True Detective, Dallas Buyers Club. All of a sudden, that was a new novel, good idea. Why? Because I'd unbranded. I had stepped away and I was gone. They didn't know where I was. Couldn't find me on the beach without my shirt. You couldn't find me in a rom-com. And I became a new good idea. So that's kind of the most dramatic sort of hinge point in my career that deals with how I dealt with you know, how I was perceived or how, what I was doing in my career.

This is a very important question. If it was 25 million, would you have done it?

No. I wouldn't have done it for 100 million.

Why?

I'd already met my, no, I'd already made the, the, the, the Socratic Oath.

You were committed.

It was, I was in, I was in. If it would, it would have got more excited. The more, the fact that the money went up, it was kind of, it was such a buzz to even, have the courage to say no to it. And it empowered me to go, mm-mm.

That's cool, because you go back to your values and your identity of like, no, that's not who I want to be anymore. This is who I want to be. You call it un-branding. Is that what you said?

Un-brand. Yeah, un-brand it to then rebrand.

Yeah, I think that's powerful. It's like we should always be in a stage of reinvention. You reinvented yourself as a father. You reinvented yourself as an actor. And I think that's really powerful. Good for you, man. It's hard to turn away those checks.

Yeah, well, you know, I'd saved my money well. I was appreciating the basics, had a roof over my head. I would have found, honestly, in that two years, I considered other vocations. I considered other careers.

Like what?

Ah, coach. A high school football team, a teacher, fourth grade teacher, orchestra conducting, wildlife guide. I did a lot of writing at the time. Didn't have a book put out at that time. I did a lot of writing at the time. I didn't have the confidence, I think, to write the writing was worth publishing, but I was still doing a lot of writing at the time.

So if you would have not gotten the dramatic roles that you were looking for after two, three, four, five years, You would have gone and been a high school football coach or a writer or a wildlife guide for 60 to 80 grand a year and been just as happy?

Well, I'm pretty sure. I'm almost definite I would have been just as happy. Because I get, one of the central themes in the book is that when faced with the inevitable, get relative. That's really one of the key tools in the book is how do you get relative when you deem a situation inevitable? So how do you start making an upside of what could be perceived crisis? When and how we do that is really one of the keys to satisfaction in life. If you do it too early, okay, for say for that instance, if I had said, okay, it's been two years, that's enough, I give, I'm going off to do something else. Well, that would have been the wrong choice because I would have been a quitter. Look what happened. I just had to outlast him and it'd take 20 months. If I'd have pulled the plug at 18 months and done something different, I would have been a quitter, right? I didn't endure enough. But there's also situations that you can bang your head on through endurance where you're actually acting out the definition of insanity. You're trying to get something done the same way over and over and over and not getting the results you want. So you need to back up and relatively speaking, pivot. Wait, let me reapproach this situation. Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Let me pivot. Then there's other times you just got to wave the white flag and say, you got it, you win. I'm going to go fight another battle up here. So when do we do one of those, each one of those with every given situation? That's sort of the honey hole, the tool that really, I think, can be helpful to us.

I'm not always watching the award shows. Sometimes they're on and I see them, but it's not like the thing for me to watch. But I remember watching the year you won the Oscar. And I remember your speech was, has to be one of the most iconic speeches of all time from an awards show. And you talk about chasing your heroes, your 10-year self in the future. I'm curious, if you could put yourself 10 years from now, 60, because you just turned 50, what would your hero at 60 say about who you are today? looking back?

Wow. Yeah. It's a great question. And one I think we should all ask ourselves. Have I had that great sit down with our future self? I think you'd say, make sure. Make sure you trust yourself. Make sure you did a good job of trusting yourself. But you know what? You could have even trusted yourself more. There's always where you could even trust yourself more. you made some things. Maybe. Maybe you made some things a little too hard. Maybe where they didn't need the resistance. Just sit back and trust yourself. So I made some things hard because you. You felt like you needed to feel it. Now you. You already done the work. You would already. You already laid the. Laid the rails on the road just now. Right. Now. Stay vital. Keep those rails greased. Keep yourself in shape mentally, spiritually, but overall, you. You've done it. You did it. You're doing good at trusting yourself. and I'm proud of how you, you know, my favorite thing about you, 50 year old Matthew, is that you give a damn. And sometimes I wish you, what are you maybe giving yourself a break in places where you didn't. But you know what? That's who you've always been. And shoot, now that I look in the mirror at 60, that's who I still am, too. So anyway, Thanks for getting me here to 60. It's great to see the kids all out of the house now. And me and our wife Camilla are having a great time, kind of like a honeymoon again. The kids are out of the house and we've got a new season in life. And you did a good job being a parent. You were a good father. And that was the thing you always wanted to be. It's the thing we've always known that we wanted to be. The only thing we ever knew we wanted to be. And you weren't perfect as a father, but you did a doggone damn good job. job as a father. Oh, yeah. And let's keep rocking.

Let's keep living.

Yeah.

That's a beautiful reflection of your future hero.

I haven't had one of those before. I had until just now. I haven't really thought about it that way. And thank you for asking that question. Of course.

That's beautiful. I'm curious. You mentioned, I want to ask about your dad here in a second and the impact he's made on you in the biggest lessons. But you've talked about your wife many times. What do you admire about your wife the most?

I admire how instinctually, without any intellectual mathematics at all, no matter what she's doing, no matter what job she's on, no matter what she's handling, if something comes up, to help me or the kids or the family out. She so elegantly sets what she's doing down and comes and handles that and helps and helps puts family first like that. It's just. And she does it such a graceful way. Look, hence why she's got 162, 000 emails, you know what I mean? She's able to do that over there. Me. I would be like, yeah, I'll be right there. Let me finish this up. You know what I mean? She's able to just go, Nope, I know what really, really, really matters. This is all stuff that I should do, but this is not of the greatest import. She, Louis, I'll be right back. Very gracefully. And she would do it in a way where you wouldn't go, She walked out on my show. No, you'd be like, it'd be one of the better interviews you had in moments in an interview because she'd come back and go, yeah, my son just said so and so and I had to help him so and so. And you'd be like, wow, how elegantly she can make that of most import at any given time. Her family, me and the family of the most import at any given time and how graciously and elegantly she can do it is one of my favorite traits of her.

Mmm. That's beautiful. Now, we have a few things in common. We both love football. Unfortunately, you like Texas football and I like a hot state. We're not in the same conference, so I'll support Texas football from afar. It's okay. If you're from Michigan, it'd be harder for me. We both have the same middle name, which I just found out. Yeah, David. So I'm not sure if that's your mom that gave you that name. I'm not sure if your mom gave you that or your dad gave you that or it was a combination, but we both have the underdog mentality I like to think of. We're always in that underdog David versus Goliath. You've talked about being an underdog in your book and also in your speeches on YouTube, a lot of great speeches of you on YouTube. Your father, who I'm assuming was a part of giving you the name David, was a big impact on your life. A lot of amazing lessons in this book. Again, I want to remind people to make sure they get this book if they haven't got green lights yet. But your father put a big impact in your life. He passed when you were, I think it was five days in shooting your first movie, is that correct?

Shooting Days Confused. First move ever made. Yeah. August 17, '93.

And you were 20?

92. So I'm 20, 92, 22, I think.

So something we have in common is when I was 22, my dad got into a near-fatal car accident. He was in New Zealand with his girlfriend at the time. My parents got divorced. His next girlfriend, they were in New Zealand traveling. I was 22 years old. He got in a car accident, was in a coma for three months. And we didn't know if he was going to live or die. he's still alive today, but he's a completely different man. He's not there physically and emotionally like he was. It was almost like I lost my dad that day, emotionally, mentally. We can have conversations, but there's a lot of Amnesia. It's a lot of asking who I am and things like that of the past. But that moment for me made me. It was a rite of passage. You talk about rite of passages in your life as a man, and it. I would not be where I am today doing the things I'm doing today without that experience of essentially losing my father emotionally and mentally. And you lost him physically. He was gone physically from your life at the same age as I did. Where do you think your life would be if he was still here? Do you think you would be able to have the impact you have on humanity? Do you think you'd have the relationship, the children? that you have or would something, would things be different because you don't have what you call in the book that safety net?

It's a great question and I don't know the answer. I mean, my, you know, these existential questions are always fun to go over because it's all a mystery going forward. It's all a science looking back. Yeah. And we can connect the dots looking back. You know, I don't know what else I would be doing because this is just what I've done and I've only done it once and I've been doing it once. I do, maybe I would have, him passing on, and that year in Australia are two moments that I do often question. Would I be sitting here right now talking to you with the life I have if it didn't happen? I'm very confident that I would have had some sort of enriched life that I felt satisfied and felt joy and living if I'd have been doing something else. But at the same time, those moments, what I can really speak to is that I manned up when he moved on. I don't know how you felt when you didn't lose your dad physically, but emotionally, I, you know, a father for me, he was my safety net. Those values that he was teaching me, I still had in my hip pocket that, oh, if I only kind of, use them 85% of the time, I'm good, 'cause he's got my back. He's above law, he's above government, he's my safety net in case I really need him. So I'm kind of half-assing these values he's teaching me, or maybe I'm doing pretty good at 'em, but I'm not committed, 'cause I got him. And then he was gone, basically. And all of a sudden I was like, whoa? Oh. And I remember this, I write about this in the book. I remember this was something that came to me. Just keep living came to me, which was about keeping his spirit and what he taught me alive in life after he's gone. But also this four words, less impressed, more involved. I remember things after he moved on, things that were mortal in life that I had reverence for. Fame, money, success, people. And all of a sudden, While I still respected them, instead of looking up at all of them, they came down to eye level. I looked them in the eye. They were mortal. I had full respect for them, that they were mortal. I could be involved with them, looking them in the eye. Things that I looked down upon. I was condescending, patronizing, ah, geez, I don't like that. Look at her, look at that. All of a sudden, those things, rose up to high level. The world was flat. I could see further, I could see wider, I could see more clearly. And I was standing taller and my head was higher, my heart was higher. And I was like, it's time to man up and become a man, my friend. And this is how you need to see the world. You need to have the courage to follow through. And that does not mean, you know, that is always not the most popular decisions. quit half-assing yourself, quit doing things just to get along or if you disagree with it. We're not going to be that guy who makes the joke at the party that makes more people laugh, but everyone walks away disrespect anymore. It was the beginning of understanding, what are the choices you make? Again, the compounding assets that are choices, the choices we make compounding assets for our future? How do we be more true and kind to our future selves? How do we start making some more choices, make choices that, by hook or by crook, they're gonna be brave, courageous choices that you can look in the mirror, if it works and go, Yep, I'm responsible. And if they don't work, you go, Yep, that's on me. Quit living in limbo. straddling a fence here or there. Be smart, don't be foolish, don't dive in. Courage to take more risks. Courage to get uncomfortable with that fame and be able to go, the world needs you here right now. The studio wants you to pick out a picture. You're as hot as can be, but I don't care. I gotta check out with, go spend some time with me to figure out this. The courage to do those things, I don't know if I'd have done those things. I had the courage to do them. because maybe I would have still been stuck in, no, I'm so happy to be here. I'm so impressed to be here. I'm so thankful I have these options and these possibilities for success. Thank you. Well, if you're so impressed with something in your life, even our relationships, you can't really be involved in them. If you're overly impressed with me or I'm overly impressed with you, you and I can't even have a real conversation. Because one of us is holding the other on a pedestal. Look at our relationships. Our girlfriends, our wives, our friends. If we hold them up on a pedestal, unfair. We don't really have a relationship with them. We've got them in this immortal bubble of being a super human or a super woman. It's not fair to them. And then what happens in the reflection of their eyes? They see us the same way. Then we're both dealing with, we're both for rent. We're both not leveling. We're both too impressed with each other to be actually be involved.

I mean, it sounds like you learned a lot from his passing and you grew a lot and you held true to that courage that you're talking about, which I think has made you the man you are today.

I've tried to, I mean, it's a constant, as you know, it's constant in process work. I've evolved my questions and eliminated a lot of things in my life that did not feed me. did not turn me, turn on my true self. I tried to eliminate those and keep more things in front of me that are things that will feed me and feed my best wolf since we've got two wolves in us.

Yeah, we do. I love that. I love that story. What do you think of the five things we should all eliminate to live a better life?

First, we got to quit hanging out with those, those people that, that sort of only turn on our most banal selves. It sometimes are the easiest people to go to. 'Cause they're the life of the party. I've been that guy before. Like I said, the life of the party, tell the joke that's about someone that's not in the group. It's on them, we all snicker. And it's great, you got the biggest laugh with Conan, but everyone walks away going, I don't respect him as much. So again, one of those long-term choices. Think about long money, not short money, long money. Places. Hey man, geez, why do I have a nasty hangover every time I go to that bar? I don't know, is it the drink? Is it the people? Is it whatever it is? I just don't, every time I wake up the next morning after going to that bar or that place, I feel, eliminate that. Quit trying to make that place work. We got to eliminate this thing, this habit we all have in society right now, which is, I raise me up if I put you down. It's false. It does not have a return. There's no ROI in that. It appears to be, it goes back to that, what do we tell millennials about everyone living online and social media with comments? There's this false sort of impetus that, oh, I'm taller, I win if I make sure you lose. That's not winning. There's room for us both to win a blue ribbon, but we may do something different. And to covet or be jealous of your success, and if I don't like you, And lose, man. I want to see that guy fall. That's, you're giving yourself a disease to think, oh, that's going to raise me up. So again, it's short money. It's short money.

Yes.

It may be even counterfeit. There's a few things. We've had this tendency to put our finger and point at disease before we point at health. We rubberneck at the car wreck on the other side. Love to see a wreck. Wow. You know what I mean? Dissect, here we go. We love to dissect problems. Well, start dissecting success. Start looking and deconstructing your life, your choices, those people you're hanging around with, those places. When things are going well, when you're like, ah, I feel like I finally caught a groove here. Go put the pen to paper or look down or start dissecting. What am I doing? Because there's a habit. There's a science, there's some science to satisfaction. And we don't just get there by dissecting our failures. And when we're in a rut, we need to be confident enough to go, well, things are going well and I can't take this for granted. What is it I'm doing? Oh, I prepared more. I didn't have stress. I mean, it goes down to the, I always call this delayed gratification. Teeming yourself up for a green light. Starts with the simplest thing. And this is what I mean. Enjoy putting the coffee in the coffee filter the night before. So the next morning you can get up and just go, boop, press the button. Aha, look at me. I teed myself up for a Saturday. I got a green light. Instead of the next morning going, oh gee, where is it? Because sometimes it's hard to make your coffee when you hadn't had your coffee. Like it's hard to find your glasses when you don't have your glasses on. I mean, tee yourself up for some little pleasures, some Saturdays, tee yourself up for some green lights. Kiddos, work, you gotta, you know, it's Friday, you got that morning meeting you're gonna lead on Monday morning, or you got that homework you gotta turn in, and you just finished on Friday, and you wanna go kick back and head out and relax, 'cause you're gonna wait till I'll do it Sunday night. Sometimes it's pretty cool to go, you know what, I'm gonna get it done right now. Because Sunday, dude, I'm gonna watch football, I may be hanging out with my friends, Sunday night game may be a good one too, I may wanna go late, and I don't wanna have to think, I go like, oh, I gotta get home and do that. so I'm gonna tee up myself for some freedom on Sunday night by handling the stuff right now. So Sunday night I can be like.

I'm ready for tomorrow.

I'm ready for Monday. And look, that doesn't mean don't be a hedonist. That doesn't mean, that's the responsibility and the freedom. That doesn't mean you're not free. It's actually giving yourself more freedom. Yep. It's actually giving yourself more pleasure later on. I love delayed gratification. It's one of the things you'll see when you have, if you have children, It's one of the great things, I think, to try and get them to understand. You know, when I won the Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club, I had a really cool teaching lesson. My kids were like, what's the trophy for? And I said, well, it was given to me because my people in my industry deemed my work really excellent. And they go, yeah, but what's it for? And I went, you remember a year and a half ago when Popeye was really skinny and you said his neck looked like a giraffe? And they're like, yeah. And I go, remember how you wake up and Popeye was already gone to work? And then Popeye would get home , and we'd have a dinner and then he'd have to go study and go to sleep. And he did that for like two months and he was gone all day. They're like, yeah, I go, what I was doing that was on every day then. Someone gave me a trophy for today, a year and a half later. Wow. So what you do today, what I was trying to get across to him is like, what you do today can matter tomorrow. You can be rewarded for it. If you do something really well today, you can be rewarded. You can get a green light for that later on in life.

You may not get the reward today.

You may not get it today. So trust that you can be rewarded at the same time. Let's look at the inversion inversion of that. Go ahead. Lie cheat steal. All right, now what? Lie cheat steal, broke up on the tax, cheated on so and so, whatever, whatever. I'm not buying green lights to the future. Why? Because now everywhere I go, I gotta look over my shoulder and see if someone's there that I owe money or someone's there that I cheated. and all of a sudden now I'm not present and I'm stressing because someone goes, oh yes, so and so is here. That's not a green light, it's a yellow light. It's stress, unnecessary stress because I left crumbs then, yesterday. Don't leave the crumbs, to yourself up for some freedom. The responsibility of not picking up your crumbs to handling stuff, buys you your green light's freedom in the future. We're going like, I'm fine, I can walk in anywhere. I don't have to look over my shoulder. I'm living in do my best to live a life where I don't have to live over my shoulder. It's a good thing for us each to do with ourselves. Yeah. And it's selfish. That's the other thing. It's selfish. And I have a full redefinition of selfish. I'm for what is selfish. It's also selfless. But it's teeing yourself up. It's being cool to and kind to your future self. And it's also what's best for the most amount of people.

Absolutely.

Got that egotistically utilitarian.

You mentioned how a lot of people are trying to tear other people's buildings down. When I interviewed Kevin Hart, he said that greatness was about helping other people succeed as well, not just you succeeding and tearing other people down, but also making winners around you and building other people up around you as someone who's great. I love this quote by Jim Carrey. I don't know if I'm going to say it correctly, but he said, I hope everyone becomes rich and famous so they can realize that's not the answer to life. Something like that he said in a speech one time. It seems like so many people on social media want to become rich and famous. What have you learned about both of those things? And what advice would you have to someone who is working so hard for fame and money Based on the lessons we've learned.

Look, first off, what have we all learned about rich and famous? If you are rich and famous, you can be president. Ta-da. Right. Now, look at the definition of success. If you go back in the original Webster's dictionary and read the definition of success, it is vastly different from the definition of success today. We have put, especially in America, fame and money at the top of the ladder for what you need to get to succeed, to be successful. And if you're successful, you have respect of peers because you're famous, because you've got more money. Or the order of what we're telling our children and ourselves to aspire to, it's out of order. It's not in order. It's part of the reason we have distrust in leadership today. There's nothing wrong with pursuing money. I love money. There's nothing wrong with fame. It's fickle. Fame is a mistress. It's not a wife. Right. So, you know, and you have little, you know, trysts with fame. But it's not a, it's not an end-all stay. It's not a real destination. I don't think it should be. Nothing wrong with pursuing it. But then we get into this question. Okay, so we all want relevance. We went this morning, we all want relevance. Yes, I agree with that. I do too. Relevance for what? That's the question we ought to ask ourselves. What do we want to be relevant for? I want to be fame us because I made a sex tape? I'm pretty sure I can get famous if I do that. Pretty sure you can get famous if you do that. what's that you want to be famous for? I don't know. I'll pass on that one. It's, it's, you know, it's, it's out. It's a bit out of order. And we need to ask ourselves that question. All right. If I want to be relevant, which everyone does, what I want to be relevant for, I think that's just a good question to ask ourselves. And, and, and again, coming off what you said, Kevin Hart said, yeah, we want it for us, but can we be, can we, can we be famous for for doing something that we enjoy, but also other people, it builds up other people's wealth. We don't have to. Again, I'm gonna go to Barkley here for a second. You get rich and famous, that's not your, I don't believe it's your responsibility to be charitable. No, it's your choice. It's a choice for anybody. Is it your choice to make or not? It's not responsibility because I'm in a position to. No, I have to make the choice. Now that may be a more responsible choice by me, that gives me more freedom. because I feel better helping other people out and it makes me feel good selfishly when I see them receive something and go, wow, thank you, which is a selfish good feeling. So it has payback that I would say is again right there, responsibility and freedom, that it's paying me back and it's paying some other people back. I would stick with that. I would just end it on that. We want to be relevant. Ask ourselves, what money and success? Look at the definition of success today and the definition in the original Webster's dictionary. And it is out of order, especially in America, what we are telling each other to aspire to be, to be deemed successful, to get respect. Yeah. With Donald Trump became president. I had so many people friends that were so surprised. I'm like, what are you talking about? At the very base of it, just the lowest common denominator. What do we tell people to be in this country? Rich and famous. He was that. He was on TV and he's rich. that's what we tell everyone is successful. So it's not surprising he became president. Wasn't to me. That's what we've been telling you. We're telling everyone you need to be to succeed in life. Again, if that's your only pursuit and you disregard certain integrity and you disregard being true, true, being as true as you can to yourself, that's short money. Yeah. Very long money.

Oh, get that long money, baby. That's why I love your. Your long money, your Instagram bio. I love. 'cause it says husband, father, then actor. You lead with the thing that you want to be relevant for, that you want to be known for, that you care about deeply the most, which I really admire and respect about you, even though that may be some small, subtle thing that someone doesn't see or recognize. I recognize that that's there purposefully for you. It's not, you know, Oscar award winning best actor in the world, People magazine sexiest man alive. Although that's fun too and you can put that out there, but that's not what you lead with. I think is, and my thought is that's very intentional that you did that and I recognize that. So I think I admire that a lot about you. I know I have seven minutes left with you. So I want to be very respectful of your time and ask you a few final questions. Again, I'm going to keep mentioning this. Make sure you guys get this book, Green Lights, because it's truly inspiring, some incredible stories. Matthew goes in deeper on a lot of these topics and gives you a lot of fun, humorous, powerful, emotional stories to tie into to remember as well about these lessons. So check this out. My question for you, I've got a few final questions. One is, what is your biggest fear? And what's been the biggest fear you've ever had to overcome?

My biggest fear. I tell you my least favorite feeling in a certain emotion, a feeling that I have constantly challenged and battled with, is a sense of significance. And I think a lot of that comes from, and this may go back to my 60 year old self telling my 50 year old self, hey, you could have trusted yourself a little more. But I feel a need so often to achieve and accomplish. at the same time, I know in my heart that as we've been saying, you don't, there's no destination. It's all a verb. Life's a verb. It's process. You don't ever achieve. So I'm trying to reframe that into going, well, keep achieving in the pursuit of the unachievable. I mean, and make steps. So I do want to evolve, but a lot of times I'll emotionally feel insignificant if I don't achieve. achieve something. And I think it's a, sometimes it's good, because it is good to accomplish. It is good to set a goal, get what we want, go after it. Other times it's like, you kind of just need to sit still or just stay in your perpetual motion and go forward and quit. Don't miss the process for the clenching seek of the result. Don't let the result tell you, oh, now I'm significant. you know what I mean? At the same time, I've had a lot better results when I was stuck to the process. When I wasn't as worried about the result, when I, the best golfers shoot the best rounds, when they walk off 18 thinking they're going to the next tee box and someone's got to tell them, no, you finished the round, you shot 63. Oh, I did. No, I've done my best work when we rap and I'm like, okay, see y'all tomorrow morning. And they're like, no, that's it. We wrap. The show is over. And you're like, oh, really? Oh, wow. Stay in the zone, in the process. And I found that more results will come your way. So I've battled that. I battled that sometimes of making sure to remind myself to stay in that because I can get result oriented to an extent that I don't feel a sense of significance or a real lineage to my identity. if I don't achieve the thing that I want to achieve. And I find out later, maybe it wasn't what I needed to be, it wasn't what I was really trying to achieve anyway, but I sometimes need a measurement. I need to can have more patience with myself to go, that's really not, this is part of the process, because this is another achievement down the line that you don't even know you're working towards. You know what I mean? So give yourself a break. You're in process, stay in process.

I think this is really powerful for any goal-oriented, driven person, whether they're an actor or not, to realize that even you deal with that challenge, that fear that, I don't know if I call it insecurity, but a fear of, am I making having significance in my work and am I still relevant in my work or whatever the thing is that's.

How am I doing as a father? How am I doing as a husband? You know? Am I doing as good as I can do in those places in my relationships? Can I be a better friend? You know? Oh, I could have been a better friend. I could have done that better, you know.

That's beautiful. I'm glad. Thank you for opening up about that. And I gotta be respectful of your time. I got three minutes on asking these two final questions. This is called the Three Truths. I asked this question to everyone at the end of my interviews. And it's a hypothetical question. So, you've written a memoir, 50, you share a lot of your wisdom and truths in here. I want to imagine you're 100, you're 150, you're as old as you want to be. And for whatever reason, hypothetically, all the movies, the books, the work, the interviews that you've done in your life, they all got to go with you to the next place. So no one has access to Matt McConaughey's content anymore. It's all gone. With you to the next world, wherever that is. But you get to leave behind a note, a love note to the world that is your three truths, that this is all people would have to remember you by from your content. And it would be the three lessons that you would leave behind to the rest of us, or what I like to call your three truths. What would you say would be yours?

Oh, great question. Let me riff here. Value, values. Make sense of humor your default emotion. And remember that you will have thousands of crises in your life and most of them will never happen.

I don't think I've heard those three before. Out of a thousand plus episodes, I don't think I've heard those three. So those are beautiful. I want to acknowledge you, Matthew, for the significance that you continue to make every single day in your life. whether it's a fear or you feel like you're not, I think it's amazing the way you show up. You show up for your wife, you show up for your kids, you show up for the work you do. And even, I was chatting with Emmanuel the other day who you did the second episode, I believe, of uncomfortable conversations with a black man. And you show up in moments when the world is uncertain or when our country and our nation is going through so much unease and you continue to show up and make a significance in so many people's lives. So I acknowledge you, Matthew, for being fun-loving, for living life, for, you know, doing your thing, but also for being a real human being every single day to the best of your ability. And obviously, we're not perfect, but I. I see you showing up and you're making a difference, and I really acknowledge that beyond the awards and the acknowledgments and the to acting. So I really acknowledge that for you, man.

Thank you, Dustin.

Of course, my final question is coming, but make sure you guys get this book. I'm telling you, it's going to be a game changer for you. Go get it right now. Green lights, you're going to love it. Get it for a friend as well. It'll be the best gift you get them all year. Final question really quick. What's your definition of greatness?

Greatness. Well, you know I love you, Nanos, and you know I love perfection, even though I don't think I'll ever achieve him or that they either are achievable in this life. Greatness is pursuing that. Staying in the race, committing to the chase to be our better self, be better families, communities, civilizations, and people. Stay in the race. America's promise, our country's promise is opportunity and greatness. We're not ever going to arrive. The top 10 C-suite times that we're in right now, cultural revolution, we're not going to come out of this and go, oh, now we've found perfect justice.

No.

But as long as we keep evolving, as long as we got an ascension, that's called evolution. Stay in the chase, commit to the chase, stay in the race. And that's greatness. It's staying in the process of the chase. Yet.

My man, Matt McConaughey, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate you.

Louis David, I enjoyed it.

Appreciate it, man. If you want more greatness in your life, then you gotta check out this video right here. He had a great quote that said, Rest at the end, not in the middle. And that's something I always live by. Not gonna rest, I'm gonna keep on pushing. There are a lot of answers that I don't have, even questions that I don't have, but I'm just gonna keep going.