Matthew McConaughey: Freedom, Truth, Family, Hardship, and Love

00:00:00.000 | If you really want to give a character an obstacle to overcome, a need,

00:00:03.760 | I mean the base one is life and death.

00:00:07.040 | The following is a conversation with Matthew McConaughey, a legendary Oscar-winning actor

00:00:15.520 | and one of the most unique, charismatic, and inspiring humans and Texans who walked this earth.

00:00:21.520 | He starred in films and shows loved by me and millions of others, including Interstellar,

00:00:28.000 | Dazed and Confused, Dallas Bias Club, Killer Joe, Mudd, True Detective, and soon a spin-off

00:00:34.640 | of Yellowstone. Off-screen, his words carry wisdom and power in his book called Green Lights

00:00:41.680 | and his new video course called Road Trip, where Matthew expands on the philosophy in his book

00:00:47.440 | and shows how to apply it to your life in order to find more happiness, success, and love.

00:00:54.720 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:01:00.000 | And now, dear friends, here's Matthew McConaughey.

00:01:04.000 | Let's start with love. Your parents had a complicated love story. Divorced twice,

00:01:10.560 | married three times. What did you learn about love from your mom and dad and their love story?

00:01:19.040 | That it's messy. That it takes work. That it's ugly. That

00:01:31.680 | no matter how ugly or messy it is, don't go to bed

00:01:38.480 | until you've come back together to either embrace or admit that you truly love each

00:01:48.240 | other, even if you hadn't solved what the hell you're bitching about. That

00:01:53.120 | love will win in the end, literally, three to two with my mom and dad.

00:02:03.920 | Yeah.

00:02:06.580 | And that even in the two divorces and in the two times where they couldn't live with each other,

00:02:14.640 | they still loved each other. They just couldn't live with each other at that time for whatever

00:02:21.920 | reason they needed. And I don't know the details, but they needed their

00:02:25.120 | space, freedom or what, but they were never out of love with each other. And that as a parent,

00:02:42.560 | if you just, when we're not sure what to do, and people give you a thousand books and advice,

00:02:51.600 | as a parent, if your kid knows you love them, you're in the black. That's the main thing.

00:03:02.000 | It won't work without that. And it can work and will usually can work with that.

00:03:08.400 | They just know that fact. So it's not just love for each other. It's the love for the bigger family

00:03:14.560 | that ultimately helps you persist through the ups and downs.

00:03:19.040 | Well, I mean, I don't know how much, particularly my mom and dad were

00:03:26.800 | staying together at times, maybe when they didn't want to, because they had children. I don't

00:03:34.480 | actually think they considered that. I think they were much less conscientious than say,

00:03:41.360 | I am today. I think my mom and dad were more like, they'll be fine. We love them. They'll be fine.

00:03:50.400 | But we'll cross that bridge when we get there. Right now, let's work it out between

00:03:54.800 | you and I is what I think my mom and dad were saying to each other or not.

00:03:59.600 | They wanted and needed a relationship that was a tidal wave, rocky, right angles, tsunamis.

00:04:13.120 | And to this day in my life with Camille and I, which I don't, I like a river,

00:04:20.800 | has some swerves and some streams and some rapids, but I'm not looking for a tidal wave.

00:04:26.160 | My mom's like, what's all this, everything's so smooth stuff. Come on, come on, come on, come on.

00:04:33.760 | So she challenges vitality, because that's what my mom needed to communicate. I don't think my dad

00:04:41.040 | needed it as much, the hard angles that their relationship drew. I don't think my dad needed

00:04:51.360 | it as much as my mom. But the clashes demonstrated the passion that underlies the love.

00:04:57.600 | Yes. And I've always been asked, when I talk about my parents' love relationship,

00:05:03.360 | I tell the stories that are actually sometimes quite violent.

00:05:07.840 | There's some good stories there. They're beautiful. I think they're beautiful.

00:05:12.960 | Yeah, I think they're beautiful too. But I've had people go, wait a minute,

00:05:16.960 | that was unhealthy. You can't... And I was like, no, that's, again, back to the beginning,

00:05:20.720 | love's messy. And what I love about those stories is that's where the love was actually. It was

00:05:26.560 | tested. And it could have broke and been over. Yeah.

00:05:31.200 | And it never was. Again, the love won. In the kitchen floor, the blood's drawn,

00:05:36.960 | knives are pulled. Ketchup.

00:05:40.720 | Ketchup's all over. But we make love on the kitchen floor. I mean, come on, beautiful.

00:05:47.840 | So as romantic as it gets right there.

00:05:49.760 | What's a memory from childhood that helped set you on the trajectory

00:05:56.960 | of becoming the man you are today?

00:05:58.480 | Standing on the corner with Mr. Mayor, the principal of St. Phillip School. I was in

00:06:10.000 | kindergarten. And I looked up and there was a cloud in the sky. And I said, "Mr. Mayor,

00:06:17.920 | is that cloud as big as the world?" And he paused for a minute and he goes, "Well, yes, it is,

00:06:26.800 | Matthew." Now in my seven-year-old mind, I went, "Okay, I can see the outlines of it.

00:06:37.520 | And that must mean it is so far away, because if that's as big as the world..." I remember it took

00:06:44.960 | 15 hours just to drive from Longview to Florida last year. And I can't even see that far. So

00:06:52.240 | that cloud must be so far off that it's not worth me even considering space, dreams,

00:07:02.560 | any of that. I was like, "Army, I'm looking down. I'm gonna put my head to the ground. I'm gonna

00:07:07.760 | look right in front of me and deal with what's in front of me." Because dealing with dreams and

00:07:12.880 | what's out there and not on this earth that gravity holds down, not worth considering. You

00:07:17.760 | never make it. It's not even worth imagining. It's fairy dust. So I think I learned a lot of

00:07:27.680 | self-reliance from that. I think I got a work ethic from that. I think I got a, "Hey, focus

00:07:35.360 | on what's right in front of you. Do the deed. Take care of what's in front of you one at a time and

00:07:41.200 | slowly notch up your way, and hopefully there's some ascension to that." And it wasn't until

00:07:51.520 | quite years later, in some ways decades later, that I started to go, "Oh,

00:07:57.840 | I can project. I can dream. Why?" Because literally the first time I got in a plane

00:08:05.280 | and in 30 seconds I was in a cloud, I'm like, "Whoa, we must be going a trillion miles an hour

00:08:10.720 | because we're already in that cloud that was as big as the world that I saw the edge of."

00:08:13.920 | And then I grew and learned enough to go, "Well, that's not true. Planes don't go that fast."

00:08:21.200 | Oh, what Mr. Mayor said wasn't really true. That cloud is not as big as the world and it's

00:08:27.120 | not near as far away as I thought. But I'm glad he lied to me.

00:08:33.040 | What do you think about that, that tension of a way of living life

00:08:38.240 | between being a dreamer and a pragmatist? Yeah.

00:08:41.840 | Which is a better way?

00:08:46.400 | Donnie holds the reciprocity of the two of them. I mean, I can't be present unless I got plans.

00:08:54.720 | I want to have the big picture in mind, but I got to go a day at a time. I like to

00:09:01.120 | write the headline or I think we need to have a North Star, something to look forward to.

00:09:07.360 | But we all know that if we're staring at it, we're tripping on the way. If we're just,

00:09:14.800 | you know, the old, you read the Hallmark cards, which like irked me, you know, dream it, you can

00:09:20.960 | do it. I think that's a half-assed, horrible thing to tell somebody. And then on the other side,

00:09:31.600 | you have things like, you know, people say, "Hope means nothing." Well, yes, it does.

00:09:36.480 | That's the dream. You just don't stop there. It's not a period after that word. Now, what do we do

00:09:43.760 | practically? And I think that constant tension, when that tension's a dance is when it's beautiful.

00:09:50.240 | There's an Osmond, but to see those as contradictions, I think is where we've

00:09:54.320 | just fallen short. So, I don't, I, one on their own, if we silo the two,

00:10:00.160 | or if you silo the two, I guess the pragmatics the one to go with, because at least you'll get

00:10:08.880 | something done. But if you only silo the dream and don't do anything about it, that's, you're

00:10:12.160 | kind of living an illusion and kind of living in a virtual reality.

00:10:17.120 | Yeah, it's tricky. Even the people you love can sometimes suffocate the dream,

00:10:20.800 | can make you believe that it's not possible. It feels like a lot of parents kind of

00:10:28.160 | want you to be safe, want you to be stable, want you to have a plan so that everything's

00:10:35.920 | gonna be okay. And the dream feels like a threat to that. Yeah. How much of that though, I wonder,

00:10:44.960 | is proper initiation? Because if you throw in dreams out, I call it conservative, very liberal

00:10:52.960 | late. Let's learn to block and tackle. Let's learn that work ethic, those things, those pragmatics

00:10:58.880 | first. Learn the rules of the road, the rules of the game, the things that we can all kind of

00:11:04.960 | rely on. This is how the world's supposed to work. Now, it doesn't always work that way.

00:11:09.920 | You teach a child to drive. It's like, yeah, you stay in the lane, you go to speed limit,

00:11:14.720 | this is all helpful, but that doesn't guarantee that no one else is running the red light,

00:11:17.760 | but we learn that later. There's an initiation, I think, that's proper.

00:11:26.720 | With the dream. I mean, I think parents, my parents were very much that way. The idea of

00:11:39.200 | going to chase an acting career or something was, what? That was a different vernacular. That was

00:11:47.360 | like not in our, I was taught to work your way up a company ladder and nine to five, do your job.

00:11:54.960 | But the day I brought it up and said, I want to go to film school.

00:11:58.960 | And I thought my dad was going to go, you want to do what boy? He was like,

00:12:04.240 | gave me some of the best advice ever and told me not to half-ass it. And he said, go.

00:12:10.000 | In between the lines, what he heard from me was that made him so happy as a father, I believe,

00:12:19.760 | and makes any parent happy is when our child doesn't ask us permission to go chase a dream.

00:12:25.680 | Oh, yeah.

00:12:26.240 | When they're going, I'm bringing it up to you with full respect, but I'm doing this with or

00:12:32.480 | without you. That's when a parent goes, oh, yes. I've done something right enough. I helped my

00:12:41.120 | child be secure enough in the pragmatics to have a foundation enough where they have the courage to go,

00:12:48.400 | I'm flying the nest.

00:12:49.680 | To take the leap. You wrote after my dad died, I had a dream that left me with a statement,

00:12:57.600 | less impressed, more involved.

00:12:59.600 | Yeah.

00:13:00.160 | What do those words mean to you?

00:13:01.280 | We got to be more than just happy to be here.

00:13:06.720 | I'm big on gratitude, but we got to be more than just thankful to be here. Dream it, you can do

00:13:14.480 | it. It's got to be more than just dream it, you can do it. That's impressed. The dream is still

00:13:20.560 | other than. If I'm here and so impressed with talking to you today, if I have a reverence

00:13:39.440 | to an extent, I will not be able to be involved in this conversation.

00:13:45.280 | I'll be too impressed. I'll be anticipating, oh, what's that question he's going to ask? Oh,

00:13:52.240 | I think I know where he's going with this. Oh, I think I know what answer he might love to hear.

00:13:54.960 | Oh, I'm not involved in conversation. I'm too impressed. So I'm removed from the present.

00:14:06.000 | For me, what that literally meant to me when that came to me in a dream, and I carved it in,

00:14:13.440 | I remember carved it in a tree. It took a couple hours. I still know where that tree is,

00:14:18.320 | Santa Monica. It was, my father had moved on. He'd left this life. All of a sudden, it hit me.

00:14:27.440 | Oh, I don't have the safety net. My dad was above law and above religion to me. He had me.

00:14:34.800 | If I really was in the shit, if I really needed him, I trusted that he had my back,

00:14:39.520 | above law, above anything. All of a sudden, he's gone. I go, okay. It hit me how much I'd been

00:14:48.720 | pretending to be the young man I was trying to be and not actually put my ass on the line and

00:14:57.040 | have enough courage to take risk and actually own up to the man that he was teaching me to be.

00:15:03.920 | And I remember the world got flat.

00:15:07.280 | That cloud that Mr. Mayor, that I saw there was not way up there. It was fog in front of me now.

00:15:18.080 | And let's go into it. I'd say I probably gained even more respect for people and things,

00:15:29.280 | but I lost a certain amount of reverence that was keeping me from feeling like I deserved or

00:15:35.520 | I'd earned things or looking out for myself or holding myself to task. And I remember

00:15:44.640 | all the things that I, and I was just getting, going into Hollywood at the time. So I was

00:15:48.960 | getting famous out there as one of those clouds, with being an actor and all of a sudden celebrity

00:15:56.560 | and becoming famous. The reverence I had, I remember it just, it lowered down to eye level

00:16:05.760 | and I was able to realize and go, that's not fairy dust. And don't give it so much credit

00:16:12.080 | to make it fairy dust. Like, oh, not me. No, I could never. No, look that in the eye with

00:16:19.280 | full respect, but less reverence. And at the same time, equidistant, almost equal sublimation,

00:16:26.160 | I noticed where I had been condescending people and things and patronizing and sloughing things

00:16:34.880 | off as like less than me and not worthy of my time. It raised up to eye level. And so they were

00:16:42.080 | all flat in front of me and the world was flat and I was able to, shoulders went back, my heart rose

00:16:49.120 | up, my chin lifted up. I looked things in the eye. I became probably less sentimental.

00:16:56.000 | Hopefully not to level that I got callous, but I know I became less sentimental.

00:16:59.920 | I became more courageous because when you have someone pass in your life,

00:17:08.800 | or maybe it's similar to a situation you're going on in your own life, with your homeland,

00:17:17.920 | you sober up on these mendacities that we deal with every day. And this bullshit that we give

00:17:27.920 | too much credit or too much significance to. And you're like, what am I doing?

00:17:31.360 | I'm not even gonna let myself emotionally get brought down or over-related by this situation.

00:17:39.120 | 'Cause it doesn't really matter in the big scheme. And so certain things that I found reverence for

00:17:49.360 | and hesitated from in my life, I was now engaging with because I was like, oh, it's live. This life

00:17:57.280 | is live. Let's look it in the eye and go forward through it and deal with the consequences.

00:18:03.040 | What do you make of death? Does it scare you?

00:18:07.360 | I'm not looking forward to it, but it does not scare me.

00:18:12.080 | Do you think about it? Do you visualize it?

00:18:15.840 | I do. I do. And it's a beautiful visualization and a beautiful dream when I go as part of the

00:18:25.200 | food chain. It's not a good visualization when I go as part of a random act of violence in a

00:18:32.880 | fricking drive-by or something. Because the second, the accident,

00:18:40.000 | it breaks a story that I believe has already been written. At least I don't have the capacity yet to

00:18:51.920 | put it into a story, a divine story of the lives that we live. And so there's something ugly and

00:19:02.000 | gross about it. And it happens all the time to people all the time. I just feel like when it's

00:19:11.040 | part of the food chain, when I go as part of the food chain, I'm like, ah, that's poetry.

00:19:16.240 | Part of the flow of nature, you return to nature.

00:19:19.200 | Yeah, there's grace and poetry in that.

00:19:22.720 | Do you miss your father? Think about him.

00:19:30.880 | Mm-hmm.

00:19:37.280 | When I think about him, I do. Now, when do I think about him? I thought about him yesterday,

00:19:44.080 | working through a script I'm working on right now, working on scene work. And I just had that

00:19:50.640 | quick little reaction of wanting to show him, "Hey, check this out." I tried not to. And then

00:20:00.400 | I don't get sad. I go, "He would have loved this."

00:20:06.080 | Whereas my mom wants to be on the stage, my dad would have been on the front row.

00:20:13.280 | He's more fun to show stuff to.

00:20:17.840 | Yeah, and he would have... He was a character. He knew characters. I've based

00:20:25.920 | parts of all kinds of characters I've played and the man that I am on people that he introduced

00:20:32.160 | me to and who he was. He would have loved the creative process of working on a script or

00:20:39.680 | talking about, "Hey, movie." That's why I always say I love the movie Mud, because it's the one

00:20:45.120 | that I visualized and seen my dad come to me so many times as a 12-year-old and put his arm around

00:20:51.280 | me and go, "Hey, little buddy, you've seen this movie called Mud? God damn it, it's a good one.

00:20:55.680 | Let's go watch it." That. Now, my dad never got to see me start a career in film, but he was alive

00:21:03.520 | five days into the... He overlapped the first five days of me working on my first film,

00:21:09.840 | Days Confused. Now, that I think there's something beautiful about that. He didn't

00:21:14.800 | ever, ever come to the set. We didn't talk about it, but he was alive for me to start something

00:21:21.760 | that was more than a fad, that was something that would become something that I love to do.

00:21:29.600 | And I do miss... Not him... And then I go out of that, do I... We talked about him two nights ago

00:21:41.280 | with our daughter. I was rubbing my daughter's feet, and my mom, who's living with us, 91,

00:21:48.640 | comes in and goes, "Oh, look at you, just like your pop." And he's like, "What?" And he goes,

00:21:53.200 | "Oh," 'cause my dad loved to rub somebody's feet, rub my mom's feet, rubbed all of me and my

00:22:01.120 | brother's girlfriend's feet. When we would have a date, they would come over early because they

00:22:10.480 | knew they were gonna get a foot rub from Jim McConaughey. And then we'd come out, me and my

00:22:15.360 | two older brothers on... This has been on for decades. We'd come out of the shower ready to

00:22:19.040 | go, buttoned up, and they looked at me like, "We ain't going anywhere right now." And so we told

00:22:24.400 | the story to my daughter, and I was like, "Oh, yeah, my dad's... His hands, I miss his hands.

00:22:29.600 | His hands could heal." So you carry him in you?

00:22:33.840 | I hope so. I hope so. And it's a challenge for me, and I suppose it's like this for any son.

00:22:57.680 | How much do we hang on to, and how much do we let go and evolve and update the OS and

00:23:06.720 | try maybe better or different? It's that there's certain things that I know that I fully believe in.

00:23:17.680 | It's like when do we... Religious, when do we cast away our father? When do we say, "No,

00:23:23.520 | I'm going after the dream. I'm not asking your permission." I question that from time to time

00:23:36.800 | for myself, and it almost feels blasphemic if that's a word sometimes. I feel like,

00:23:41.840 | "You can't... What are you doing? You can't check that," and go like, "Well, no, I'm not sure if I

00:23:46.800 | want to." And then I immediately kind of let myself off because I believe where he is, he's going,

00:23:52.960 | "Go, buddy. You're free, man. I'm not gonna hold you back if you misread that or I didn't

00:24:02.160 | teach you that as well as maybe I wish I could have. Go, you're free. You're not gonna lose.

00:24:08.080 | Trust that you're not gonna lose. It's in your DNA. It's in your lineage, young man."

00:24:12.960 | Still, it's scary to not have a safety net. Losing your father is scary in that way.

00:24:19.760 | You realize this world is just you. In some deep fundamental way, it's just you.

00:24:24.160 | Yeah.

00:24:25.840 | You're alone.

00:24:26.480 | Yes. But also not having that.

00:24:35.280 | It's such a gift of deliverance, though, as well. Because it's an awesome

00:24:49.600 | feeling to know we're alone, to know we don't have that, to know you don't have take two

00:24:58.720 | or take three, that it's one take. I mean, the peripheral vision improves.

00:25:06.960 | The link and understanding with our past improves. Because I know for me, I was not ever

00:25:17.200 | considerate of my past at all because my dad had that. If I needed it, he was my well for that.

00:25:23.360 | He's gone. I said, "He had the," literally, "had," they have our back.

00:25:28.640 | Well, then when they no longer have our back, all of a sudden, I'm going, "Oh, well, maybe I need

00:25:33.120 | to look back and start giving some credit to how I got here, what I'm doing, and where I'm heading."

00:25:41.440 | It gave me the first time courage to even look over my shoulder. Because again, I didn't have to

00:25:47.360 | because I don't have to look. Dad's got my back. No, dad's gone from this life. He doesn't have

00:25:54.880 | your back. Okay. I don't know. Me, because it's inevitable, I very quickly go to,

00:26:15.920 | "All right, in the pain, the loss, and yes, even loneliness, which is different from being alone,

00:26:23.600 | and loss." Pretty immediately, part and parcel with the pain, I felt it.

00:26:30.480 | In the pain, you saw the gift, the red light of losing your father.

00:26:36.640 | Pretty immediately, less impressed, more involved. That came like

00:26:42.400 | a couple weeks after moving on. Is there a trick to that, to see the gift in the pain?

00:26:49.280 | That's a good question. Is there a trick to it? Not that I know of. I mean, I don't, I have to

00:26:58.560 | catch myself from trying to intellectualize my way into the reasoning

00:27:09.520 | and not skip over real feelings and discomfort. I mean, I did get that from my mom, and I have

00:27:17.600 | to watch it, that so resilient that we just dust ourself off and get up and go.

00:27:22.320 | You want to sit in the feeling. You want to feel it. You really deeply feel the pain.

00:27:26.800 | I want to deeply feel it. I want to look in the eye and deeply feel it,

00:27:30.000 | but I don't want to wallow in it. Yeah.

00:27:35.920 | Now, I was raised where you skip the deeply feel and let's go.

00:27:39.360 | I've said it before, but that will lead to having

00:27:43.840 | turned into a person who is a repeat offender of the same crimes because you just get up and you

00:27:51.440 | don't have a winter in your life. You know what I mean? There's no introspective time. You don't

00:27:57.920 | look over your shoulder into the past. You just get up and you're like, "All right, I've stepped

00:28:04.160 | in the same pile of whatever a hundred times, and I'm fine. I'll do it a hundred first. It doesn't

00:28:08.720 | hurt. Hell, it's good luck." Well, hang on a minute. Maybe we want to stop and go, "What can

00:28:13.280 | I learn from that?" But I don't know of a trick. I think if there's any trick, I would say,

00:28:29.680 | how quickly can we admit the inevitable? That's what I talk about in the book of Agatha. Once

00:28:35.440 | you know it's inevitable, how do we get relative? Not skip it, not throw it to the side, not deny

00:28:41.680 | it, which I'd love to talk about that here sometimes too, but the value of denial sometimes.

00:28:47.360 | The value of denial.

00:28:48.320 | Yeah. But how quickly do we, once something's inevitable, go, "Okay, any mind and heart time

00:28:59.120 | I'm spending about going, 'No, I can't believe that happened. No, did that really happen?'

00:29:04.320 | Any time we spend trying to deny what has already happened, that seems to me to be,

00:29:09.360 | I'm not sure the value of that time." So if there's any trick, I would say, once you know

00:29:14.640 | something's inevitable, even though how painful it is or how awesome it is,

00:29:18.320 | start getting relative with that. And in the relativity is seeing,

00:29:25.840 | there's a gift here. And if I realize that gift, I'm honoring. Now I'm onto building up

00:29:32.560 | the beautiful passage of my father leaving this life. Now I'm on the march to go, "Yes,

00:29:41.360 | let's let the legacy, let this become omnipresent. Let him live through me. Let me become more him."

00:29:45.920 | It's transformed.

00:29:48.080 | Yeah.

00:29:48.720 | So what value is there then to denial? Any?

00:29:54.960 | Oh, I think there's value to denial if you really commit to it.

00:29:57.920 | I get this from my mother.

00:30:03.440 | Yeah.

00:30:03.940 | So it's a very pragmatic value. Commit to the denial.

00:30:08.960 | Okay. And my mom does it to an extent that I'm like, "Mom, do you have any consideration

00:30:20.640 | for context of situations?" And she does. This is the thing, every time I go, she's not a shallow

00:30:26.960 | woman. But if it is something, if something happens in her life that is keeping her from

00:30:40.240 | going where she wants to go or having a joy in her life that she does, she'll straight ass deny

00:30:51.280 | it happened. Didn't happen. No, it didn't. "Mom, we're right here. I heard you, what you said."

00:31:00.400 | "No, I didn't. You heard something else." "Mom." Now, does she get some amnesty on that? She's 91.

00:31:08.160 | Hell, yes, she gets some amnesty on that. But she's not... Yeah, does she repeat offend? Yeah,

00:31:17.040 | but it's misdemeanors. You know what I mean? It's like we all... It's part of that thing when you

00:31:22.160 | got a family member and you're like, "Yep, that's just what they do. Just go with it."

00:31:24.960 | It's ingenious in a way. It's a tool. She does. I think it is more of a trick with her,

00:31:33.200 | but she wouldn't... So ingrained in her, it's not a trick. It's just, "Do it. Done."

00:31:37.760 | Another reason I bring this up, it's outside of just my mother, is

00:31:43.600 | I did this

00:31:48.400 | road trip course in this Art of Living event a few weeks ago.

00:31:58.800 | Out of the hundreds of thousands of chats that came in and responses that came in afterward,

00:32:05.200 | it seemed to me that about 80% of people's challenges and problems even in their life

00:32:13.280 | were something in the past that they were hung up on, that they could not seem to get past,

00:32:21.600 | and it was holding them from going where they wanted to in their future. And so

00:32:27.360 | I thought that was revealing. I would have thought that was, I don't know,

00:32:30.640 | going in 40%. It seemed to be 80%. Yeah. And then I thought about, "Okay,

00:32:37.520 | if you're here in the live show and you wanna get the course, you're into some sort of therapy or

00:32:45.280 | education or development or self-help or whatever. Okay."

00:32:53.040 | And I have a lot of friends and I know a lot of people that are in weekly and daily therapy.

00:33:00.320 | And then I know there's a lot of people that are on prescriptions, drugs.

00:33:05.520 | And while a therapy and the right prescription to the right person for the right

00:33:11.840 | diagnosis is necessary, I'm questioning, "Is there a value to going,

00:33:21.040 | if you're not getting past this today, this week, this month, this year, almost in a decade goes

00:33:26.240 | by and you're still hung up and you can't get rid of that thing in your memory where it's got you

00:33:34.320 | paralyzed and you're a victim of it, and you're doing the therapy and you're doing the work and

00:33:40.320 | you're taking a prescription if that's what you're taking, is there a value in going...

00:33:44.480 | If it's holding you back from going where you wanna go, maybe you should just deny the fucking

00:33:48.800 | thing ever fucking happened. Kick it in the head, kick it off the curb. I'm done with you.

00:33:54.480 | I'm sick of you. I'm tired of hanging out with you. I'm tired of that thing, whatever it is,

00:33:59.920 | holding me back from going where I wanna go. So if I can't wax the car and get past this thing,

00:34:08.160 | kick it. That's so powerful. So one thing to do

00:34:14.640 | like with the loss of your father is to try to transform it, to discover the gift in it,

00:34:18.640 | the gift in the pain. But if you can't, keep looking, keep looking, you can't find the gift

00:34:24.480 | in the pain, just deny it ever happened. You could call that a trick, but I think it's more

00:34:30.240 | than a trick because let me say this, my mom, after my father died, went on and found a second

00:34:39.120 | love of her life. For 19 years, they were together, CJ Carlick. Love you, buddy. He's moved on now.

00:34:50.160 | Did she check with us a little bit? Like, is this okay? She gave us a little lingering half a second

00:35:01.680 | look that we knew that maybe is what she was asking. And we came to her, it was like, yes,

00:35:04.880 | it's okay. And you know who else is saying it's okay? Who's dancing up there for you? Dad.

00:35:10.960 | So was that her denying that the man she was divorced from twice and married to three times

00:35:23.680 | and had three children with had moved on? No. But she didn't say, "Well, what's the book on how long

00:35:36.000 | I'm supposed to stay single before I can be interested in other?" There's not a book on

00:35:39.920 | these things. How do you feel? Is loving CJ mean you love dad less? No. Is finding a new life and

00:35:51.600 | a new dance partner in this life and CJ mean that dad wasn't your dance partner?

00:35:58.720 | That dad wasn't the love of your life? No.

00:36:05.920 | So I don't know. I mean, in there, maybe there's another word. I think it's denial,

00:36:15.360 | but it's not really denial because it's not like it didn't happen. That's an earlier example I was

00:36:20.560 | giving my mom. She will absolutely go, "That light's not on." "Mom, the light's on." "That

00:36:25.920 | light's not on. If I say it's not on." Sometimes you're just like, "That makes no sense." You're

00:36:29.360 | just absolutely denying what just happened. We even have it recorded and she'll go, "Well,

00:36:33.440 | the recording's lying." Yeah. I mean, that's part of a coping deal with her. But I mean,

00:36:38.160 | what I think is more important or more valuable is to talk about this. She didn't deny my dad

00:36:44.880 | dying. I didn't, but she sure as hell turned the page and said, "I can still start a whole

00:36:53.040 | new category, a new life, a new love. Let my heart love and be loved by someone living

00:36:59.600 | in this life today that I'm still living in and that will not trespass on my love for my husband,

00:37:09.760 | your father, Jim McConaughey." And I think, I mean, we were just,

00:37:14.320 | thought that was beautiful. "Yes, mom, go. Talk about a green light, go."

00:37:20.080 | Now if we're hung up going,

00:37:23.920 | "Can't have one or the, can't have them both. Gotta have one or the other." Now we start to

00:37:31.920 | make a contradiction of the two ideas again, which, darn, our contradictions get us in trouble

00:37:37.200 | all the time, man. That's life though, the contradictions, right?

00:37:40.320 | But isn't life, if we just admit the contradictions are so much, don't they become a paradox?

00:37:46.960 | We just admit that that's part of it? Yeah.

00:37:49.520 | If contradictions are inevitable, they, hencely, they do become a paradox, don't they?

00:37:54.320 | Then we're in the honey hole. Then we're singing and dancing and have leniency with ourself while

00:38:03.920 | still holding ourself to task. And it's, I think it's holding on to know each contradiction,

00:38:12.480 | "Oh, here it is again." So it's a one-off. It lives on its own, separate from the last one.

00:38:17.280 | No, it doesn't. They're connected. That's why they are a paradox. And then that's, I think that's a

00:38:23.200 | much, I think that's where life really is. In the paradox.

00:38:27.760 | Yes. In the dance of it.

00:38:30.320 | I think the metaphor of red, yellow, green lights is just so simple and so powerful.

00:38:34.720 | You write about some green lights being engineered and some being mystical,

00:38:40.240 | which I love the difference of that. What's the difference of the engineered green lights

00:38:47.440 | and the mystical? Such a cool word, mystical.

00:38:49.840 | Yeah. Well, the engineered ones have reason and the mystical ones have rhyme.

00:38:54.480 | [Lex laughs]

00:38:56.160 | Yeah.

00:38:57.360 | Life's a mystery going forward, but it's a science looking back.

00:39:00.560 | I've prepared, I've had ideas and written headlines and had goals and

00:39:06.560 | an athlete gets in shape for an event. I get in shape for a role. I read, I study, I work,

00:39:15.280 | I prepare and I go and I'm prepared and I behave and I do it. And I look at it and I go, "Yes,

00:39:24.480 | that's what I wanted to do." It's engineered, green light.

00:39:29.200 | It's a conscious delayed gratification. It's that if I do it today, that pragmatic head down,

00:39:42.240 | believe there's no cloud out there, but then I trust that there is one out there. If I

00:39:46.960 | keep my head down and do it, I'll get that dream. We can engineer those, habit,

00:39:53.920 | work ethic, prep, expertise, education. And the mystical ones though, don't make any sense.

00:40:02.240 | They're not supposed to make sense. They only make sense after, right when they happen,

00:40:07.120 | you backlog and you connect the dots with how they got there. That red light you ran into that

00:40:15.280 | made you 30 seconds later to get to the restaurant. As you walked in, she walked out

00:40:23.440 | and you went, "Good morning." And she went, "Good morning." And

00:40:29.680 | two months later, you're dating, two years later, you're married.

00:40:35.600 | You're after that, you've got a family. And now you're sitting here 40 years later going,

00:40:40.960 | "I love you. Look at what we built." And you go back and go,

00:40:50.640 | "What if I wouldn't hit that red light?"

00:40:52.320 | Those 30 seconds made all the difference. So strange that this life is this way.

00:40:58.800 | Yeah. And that's just rhyme. I mean, we can't really add that up.

00:41:02.560 | Yeah.

00:41:03.620 | It's a science when you look back, you see why it was that you were upset and ticked off that

00:41:15.280 | you had to pick up the kids' toys before you left and they were supposed to pick them up. And

00:41:18.080 | therefore you were late for the thing that maybe you ran into and you ran into the person that was

00:41:21.520 | walking in the office. That's the guy that you did the interview. That's the guy you were looking

00:41:24.960 | for, the job you wanted. And you caught him because you were in the elevator with him.

00:41:28.320 | And that 90 seconds on that elevator is what got you that job that led you doing what you want to

00:41:32.800 | do. I mean, the significance is there, but I think what we also got to watch is, again, in that

00:41:41.200 | balance, what do we chase? Because if we just chase the engineering, we miss magic. If we just

00:41:47.920 | chase the mystical, we find ourself caught up in trying to give meaning to that Lego set that was

00:41:54.560 | on the floor that the kids didn't pick up. And what color was it? And why did I walk out that door

00:42:00.880 | and see, almost step on the Legos? But if I had gone out the other door, I usually go out, if I

00:42:04.800 | would have gone there, I would have got there early and wouldn't have run into the boss.

00:42:08.160 | So you can start to give too much meaning on that as well. I think we can give significance in too

00:42:15.600 | many places and all of a sudden, I think we've all been there where you're seeing art in every

00:42:21.040 | single thing. Man, that can be paralyzing. It's like, it's hard to leave a room if everything's

00:42:28.480 | significant, or if everything's a sign. How much of success in life do you think

00:42:35.760 | is engineered and how much is mystical? And how much is it different from person to person?

00:42:41.280 | 'Cause for me personally, maybe I enjoy it, maybe I'm genetically built that way,

00:42:46.080 | but I exist more in the mystical. So I don't make plans. I traveled last summer in Ukraine with no

00:42:54.480 | plan. I just went there. No plan. I didn't know how I'm going to meet the president of the country.

00:43:02.320 | I didn't know anybody. And so there's no plan, there's no clear thing. You're just roaming around

00:43:08.880 | and that's how I've existed in life. And there's something about giving yourself over to the flow

00:43:14.480 | of nature that I just enjoy. It makes life so much fun. It's awesome when you can do it.

00:43:21.680 | Did you engineer though, I'm going to put myself in the place when you got on the plane to go to

00:43:29.040 | the destination? That was an engineered choice. Yes.

00:43:33.200 | With the intent of, and maybe I'll meet and I'll run into, and I can work up a sit down with.

00:43:40.800 | So the engineered choice was putting your shoes on, proverbially. I always say this,

00:43:46.400 | the hardest part about going to the gym is putting your shoes on. So getting on the plane,

00:43:50.400 | that was an engineered thought with the goal in mind, but I don't know how I'm going to do it.

00:43:53.600 | The choice. Yeah.

00:43:56.640 | Putting the shoes on. Yeah. But there's not a clear, it's a fog what happens after the shoes

00:44:02.320 | go on. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:07.520 | Just going to take that leap. So I wonder how much,

00:44:10.480 | for people who are successful in this world and finding what makes them truly happy and fulfilled,

00:44:18.800 | how much of it is engineered, how much is mystical? How much was it for you?

00:44:24.640 | Well, I'll say this, like when I went to write the book Greenlights, which is basically the last 40

00:44:31.520 | years of my life, I thought that 85, 90% of my successes were going to be obviously engineered,

00:44:39.840 | where I could see the signs, saw the habits, here's what I did. Yep, that add up, got the

00:44:44.560 | solution, got the conclusion. I was very surprised when I noticed that it was probably less than 50%

00:44:54.560 | and that most of the real successes of my life were when I trusted,

00:44:59.840 | when I trusted that I didn't have to define it, that I only trusted that I didn't have to go,

00:45:06.960 | "Well, what's the measurement? What's the score? This leads to what? What's next?"

00:45:22.000 | For me, that's still a challenge for me daily now is to trust and not be, 'cause I can be,

00:45:32.960 | I think I can be overly practical and I think I can overcompensate and miss out on magic

00:45:38.960 | because I'm still going, "Wait, but are we giving enough measure and credit to

00:45:52.080 | actuality? Am I giving enough credit to these are the steps to take and this is reality?"

00:46:01.760 | I think I'm reminded when I trust, 'cause going with the mystic, just to put yourself on the

00:46:13.440 | plane with the engineer, but getting there, and as you say, you roll in that mystical,

00:46:17.760 | it takes a lot of trust. - Yeah. Trust in the inevitable.

00:46:23.280 | - Aim in on that. - But not knowing where it actually

00:46:26.640 | ends you up. It's a feeling more than, I don't think it's a clear vision.

00:46:32.480 | - Right. - It's kind of like a feeling

00:46:35.760 | that guides you towards a place without a clear name, without clear characteristics. It's just

00:46:47.040 | kind of pulls you there. - Where do you get that courage and trust to go with your gut, your

00:46:55.840 | feeling? And is there, for instance, three days later you sit down, is there, if you didn't,

00:47:03.920 | if that doesn't happen, is there a sense a week, two weeks later, now when you come back

00:47:12.560 | to America, that like, "Ah, I failed?" - Sort of looking back to try to analyze what went right,

00:47:23.360 | what went wrong, that kind of thing. Yeah, that engine is always there, but I think what pulls

00:47:30.080 | me forward in life, what makes me really grateful and fulfilled is noticing the thing you mentioned,

00:47:35.760 | noticing the magic and kind of going towards it. Sort of just sitting back,

00:47:42.240 | both in tragedy and in triumph. So in war, there's a lot of tragedy, but there's somehow,

00:47:50.400 | one of the things you see in war, and this is the first war I've experienced and seen,

00:47:57.360 | seen the front, is the loss, the people lose their homes and all this kind of stuff.

00:48:03.280 | The thing that rises from that is the love for each other. So the people I've spoken with,

00:48:10.400 | don't give a damn about the home, don't give a damn about on farms and the animals they lost,

00:48:15.600 | don't give a damn about having to move and all this kind of stuff, as long as the family's still

00:48:21.200 | there, as long as the people they love are still there. And there's this melancholy smile they have

00:48:28.880 | on their face. Like, yeah, this world is full of bullshit, it's full of tragedy, but life is

00:48:35.440 | fucking awesome. And you just notice that in little ways everywhere. You just sit back and

00:48:41.760 | notice the magic. And I want more of that. And just kind of follow along like a little ant.

00:48:48.560 | Keep noticing that kind of thing. But I don't know, I hope, what I think it is, is other people

00:48:56.800 | notice that you're the kind of person that notices it. And they're like, I want to hang

00:49:01.120 | out with that person. He seems all right. He seems one of the good ones. One of the good ants.

00:49:07.840 | Do you have

00:49:09.840 | any certain non-negotiable structure before that freedom to go with the feeling?

00:49:21.360 | I think so. There's a set of principles of just basically integrity of being good to other people.

00:49:29.040 | Like, whatever that means for me. There's specific things. Like, I'm really into loyalty

00:49:34.720 | above the law. There's a circle of friends I have, and that means everything.

00:49:47.760 | There's just a basic deep kindness towards others.

00:49:51.520 | Empathy. Empathy towards people that others might label as

00:49:58.640 | even evil. I have that kind of empathy. I believe all of us have the capacity to do good and evil.

00:50:06.000 | So I just kind of see everybody as little babies that grew up in different conditions.

00:50:12.800 | Some do evil, some do good. And there's all kinds of other principles. I love the dynamic between

00:50:23.440 | the different humans and their full diversity. I love the dynamic between the masculine and

00:50:28.560 | the feminine. I enjoy it. I dig the dance of it. Yeah.

00:50:32.000 | So you have a constitution with which you embark?

00:50:38.480 | You do too.

00:50:39.920 | You're chasing. Yes, I hope so. And for me, I'd like to, it's inspiring to hear

00:50:50.000 | someone like yourself go, "I go and I just land and I just go, I'm gonna feel it." I can go back

00:50:57.280 | and go, "Yeah, my greatest truths I've crossed, my greatest successes in my life were when

00:51:01.520 | I trusted that." And go, "I took a one-way ticket."

00:51:06.480 | Amazon, Africa.

00:51:10.000 | Yeah. And those were spiritual and very pragmatic because they led to

00:51:15.840 | succeeding in other ways that are more pragmatic 100% and gave much more meaning

00:51:25.600 | to those things. But to be able to go out and say that's how you... Do you have family?

00:51:36.720 | I really wanna get married and have kids, but I'm not married and don't have kids yet.

00:51:41.040 | Okay.

00:51:41.520 | So actually, one of the nice things about that is you can take bigger risks.

00:51:45.360 | Yes.

00:51:46.580 | So while I'm not married and don't have kids, I feel I owe it to myself to take,

00:51:52.800 | just to go, go to the Amazon.

00:51:55.440 | Yes. Throw that backpack on and a one-way ticket.

00:51:59.520 | Yeah.

00:52:00.020 | That does get harder to do.

00:52:05.920 | I miss that sometimes. The whim, a song that comes on, you know.

00:52:16.320 | Yeah.

00:52:18.480 | "Where's that guy from?"

00:52:19.280 | Yeah.

00:52:20.560 | "Oh, they're from the place that I wanna go, that I dream about. I'll go there.

00:52:24.560 | One-way ticket. What do I gotta do? Oh, get a couple shots. Okay, go." That was fun.

00:52:32.400 | [chuckle]

00:52:32.960 | Gotta do this.

00:52:33.600 | It's get up and go, you're free to go.

00:52:35.040 | Yeah. And go, "When are you back?"

00:52:37.200 | "When I get there?"

00:52:41.120 | Yeah.

00:52:41.600 | It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

00:52:44.000 | Maybe never.

00:52:44.800 | Yeah. Yeah.

00:52:45.840 | Yeah. "You'll be coming to visit me."

00:52:50.000 | "In this new place, maybe." Yeah.

00:52:52.160 | How did the Amazon, how did the trip there change you? What do you remember of it?

00:52:57.040 | Such a magical place.

00:52:59.040 | I stripped a lot of my past, symbols and talismans while I was there. I remember getting

00:53:10.960 | there and just having so much adrenaline on the anticipation, anticipation of getting

00:53:18.320 | to the Amazon.

00:53:23.120 | In the first 10 days, I wasn't really enjoying the trip, I was just charging to get to the

00:53:30.080 | destination, to get to the banks of the river that I had a dream about. And then it just

00:53:36.880 | humbled me. I got so fatigued on night, whatever, 12, and was so sick and tired, I was just

00:53:48.400 | whatever, 12, and was so sick and tired of the internal dialogue I was having with myself.

00:53:55.680 | I was not enjoying my company.

00:53:58.320 | That I purged, and I remember, and stripped off identity markers that I'd sort of been

00:54:16.000 | hanging on to for everything from what it means to be an American, my dad's ring, M

00:54:26.240 | from McConaughey, a meltdown of my mom and dad's class rings from University of Kentucky were

00:54:31.440 | gold from her teeth, and his class ring melted down. Taking that off was really hard to go,

00:54:40.960 | "Am I casting out my father?" I wasn't casting him out, I was just removing to say, "I don't

00:54:47.200 | have to rely on that being all of my identity." So to pull that off, to strip down and just

00:54:52.800 | to where I was just a mammal.

00:54:54.880 | That next morning, I was light, I got present. I remember writing something down, it was

00:55:09.360 | like, "All that I want is what I can see, and what I can see is in front of me." That

00:55:14.800 | sense of not, I wasn't leaning around, looking around every corner to get there. And as soon

00:55:20.480 | as that hit me, you talk about mystical successes and realities and truth, as soon as that hit

00:55:26.320 | me, and for the first time in 12 days, I didn't care about getting there or what was around

00:55:32.160 | the corner, guess what was around the next damn corner? The Amazon. I mean, not

00:55:39.200 | around a few corners, the next corner, there it was. And that was just like a touche.

00:55:45.200 | You know, those times when the prime mover, the universe, God, what we want to name or

00:55:52.720 | believe in says, "Ding, there you go." And that form of detachment from holding on for

00:56:10.480 | dear life to things in past, so hard that you're not letting the beauty that's right

00:56:16.640 | in front of you to feel correctly and follow our intuitions, to have those, not cast them

00:56:23.120 | out, I didn't burn them, I didn't get rid of those things, I just took them off and

00:56:27.840 | had to recognize you're still here, you are you, you're much more, that is a talisman,

00:56:32.880 | that's a symbol, that means something to you, and that's good, don't cast out the

00:56:36.880 | meaning. But it's not like when the ring's off and the hat's off and the crucifix is

00:56:42.320 | off your neck that you're like, "You're gonna die." And I know, those are reminders.

00:56:48.800 | Hang on to what they mean for you as we go forward, but as we go forward,

00:56:55.360 | quit worrying about so much about, again, I was looking at the proverbial dream,

00:57:02.640 | the cloud, so much that I was tripping over myself to get there. And like clockwork,

00:57:09.440 | just amazing grace, boom, as soon as it hit me, and I was like, "Oh, that's it,

00:57:14.800 | all I want is what I can see and all I can see is in front of me." Literally looking down at the

00:57:22.320 | ground at what was a sea of 10,000 wild neon blue Amazonian butterflies on the ground,

00:57:31.600 | as soon as they fluttered up, my head came up with them.

00:57:36.720 | Took a few more steps and there's the Amazon, that's what you came over here for. Oh, howdy.

00:57:41.680 | Those kind of, truth like that. Well, the Amazon's interesting too, because it really has no past or

00:57:49.600 | future, losing the moment 'cause how fast it churns, it just eats up life. If a thing dies,

00:57:56.240 | it just gets swallowed up. Maybe because of the humidity, because of all that, because there's so

00:58:02.400 | many living creatures that eat each other, live on each other, so it really exists in the moment.

00:58:08.880 | And all this kind of diversity of life there, it's such an interesting place.

00:58:13.440 | Talk about food chain.

00:58:14.560 | Yeah, you're just part of it there.

00:58:16.160 | We humans somehow escaped that food chain, but the roots are still there.

00:58:23.040 | I think we're a bit arrogant to think we've escaped.

00:58:26.320 | You think I'm being romantic in that notion?

00:58:31.520 | Well, sometimes when you're in a big city, when you're in Austin, Texas and LA, you can

00:58:38.320 | think like, "Oh, we're in a car, we're in a house, we're safe." But somehow nature's still a part of

00:58:46.400 | us. Our roots are still a part of us. I think it is more than we realize, more than we give it

00:58:52.080 | credit for. I actually believe that it's a really arrogant notion to think that

00:59:04.800 | we are separate. Meaning people talk about pollution on a larger scale, the climate,

00:59:14.640 | what have you. I think Earth's gonna be just fine. We may not be here for it, but I think we have a

00:59:22.960 | bit of arrogance sometimes to think that we can trump Mother Nature. I think we have more of the

00:59:30.480 | natural law in us, and I sure hope so if I'm wrong. Well, there's an interesting, I've recently been,

00:59:40.960 | there's a guy named Max Tegmark at MIT who really worries about nuclear war, and he was part of

00:59:46.240 | constructing a simulation of what happens when a nuclear war happens. It's interesting to see that

00:59:52.480 | some very large percentage of humans on Earth starve to death, because they don't die first

01:00:00.160 | from the explosion, they die from starvation. Because basically dust covers the entire North

01:00:08.240 | America, and entirety of Europe, and so the crops all die, all the food sources all die,

01:00:14.160 | and people suffocate and starve to death. But the lesson you learn from that over a period of a few

01:00:21.120 | months, even though most of the human population of Earth dies, Earth finds a way, life finds a way.

01:00:28.800 | - To adapt. - Yeah, to adapt. And it's gonna be just fine.

01:00:32.000 | - Yeah. - In terms of the big

01:00:35.920 | living ecosystem that is life on Earth. And yeah, it's humbling to think about, well, maybe we're

01:00:42.160 | just a stepping stone. Same thing with, we've talked offline about artificial intelligence,

01:00:48.800 | maybe humans are just a stepping stone to the development of these other

01:00:52.400 | super intelligent entities. - Yeah. Yeah. And is it

01:01:03.280 | unconsciously in our nature that that's just part of the evolution and adaptation

01:01:09.360 | of our species? Because we're gonna, we were talking about earlier, what AI becomes

01:01:15.760 | is completely 100% based on who we are. And we get to see it for some time, a mirror to ourselves.

01:01:29.680 | - Okay, this is what human civilization is like. These AI systems, large language models are

01:01:35.920 | trained on human communication, and you get to ask it questions, and you get to have conversations

01:01:41.520 | with it. You get to realize, wow, this is what the collective intelligence of the human species,

01:01:48.480 | our collective wisdom and knowledge, is what it looks like. All the bias, the hate,

01:01:56.720 | the paradoxes, all of that is in there. - Yeah.

01:01:59.280 | - The contradictions. You can even convince those models, you can tell them they're lying,

01:02:07.120 | and they're gonna start changing their mind. It's interesting to play with them.

01:02:10.800 | It's also interesting to consider that maybe they become smarter than us and

01:02:20.160 | become almost life forms that live among us, and maybe one day we merge with them. There's all

01:02:27.200 | kinds of possible trajectories that we take here. - How much of that excites you? How much of it

01:02:32.000 | scares you? - Is it possible to exist in a place where it is both exciting and scary, but to exist

01:02:38.320 | in that dance? Mostly I'm really excited because I see human beings as deeply lonely. There's a

01:02:50.560 | deep loneliness in all of us. That's how we seek connection. That's why we seek connection with

01:02:55.040 | others. That's why love is so beautiful when we find other people we're connected with. I just

01:02:59.680 | think AI can add to that. It can add friends that you can have great conversations with.

01:03:07.360 | And then some of those friends would be AI systems.

01:03:11.600 | They'll call you out on your bullshit in the most fascinating and interesting of ways,

01:03:18.000 | and challenge you and help you explore ideas together. So I'm excited by that.

01:03:23.920 | - Is that different? And if so, how from the internet and Facebooks and these groups and

01:03:34.880 | communities that were, I think it's fair to say, set out to say this all access of information

01:03:43.280 | and people will help us find more common denominators than divisive ones. Do you see it

01:03:52.160 | as similar? - Yeah, it's similar but further into that direction. I think the internet has done an

01:03:58.400 | amazing thing in connecting us and expanding our minds and helping us find community that feels

01:04:04.560 | like our community and then the communities that are totally different and you learn from them.

01:04:08.640 | I mean, Wikipedia alone, one of my favorite websites, just opens your mind to all kinds

01:04:15.440 | of cool stuff. - Yeah, it does.

01:04:17.120 | - And- - Not the Dewey Decimal System anymore.

01:04:20.560 | - No. And so I think AI just makes that even easier because Wikipedia, you have to read and

01:04:28.880 | you have to do a lot of work. With an AI system, like a large language model, you can just shoot

01:04:34.640 | the shit. It's more like drinking a beer versus like doing homework.

01:04:39.840 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's already happening. What do you think about that becoming the new

01:04:46.800 | family to where you said, "Mary, you don't have kids. Could you see a future for yourself where

01:04:53.680 | you have a relationship with AI and that is your family?"

01:04:58.560 | - That's the main, that's the primary, even romantic relationship.

01:05:02.800 | - Yeah. - I can see it.

01:05:06.880 | That one worries me. I like to keep it at friends.

01:05:11.120 | - Right. (laughing)

01:05:14.560 | - I think I'm not ready to commit to the romantic.

01:05:17.040 | (laughing)

01:05:20.320 | I wonder how much, now that takes us back to the Amazon in nature, how much we still need the human

01:05:26.000 | touch and whatever magic there is between two humans, which takes the leap into the romantic

01:05:32.320 | versus just the intimacy of a good friendship. I don't know.

01:05:36.320 | - So, correct me if I'm wrong, you see AI as having a deep and meaningful friendship.

01:05:43.680 | - Yes. - And hopefully it will be a friend that will

01:05:49.120 | help you evolve and be able to love even more and be loved. And you can take that into humanity

01:05:56.560 | and find another homo sapien. - Yes.

01:05:58.560 | - To go, "Yes." And thank you, AI, my great friend, for opening me up to this beauty that I have

01:06:06.560 | myself and I can see in you, my fellow human. And let's come together and biologically create

01:06:16.320 | family if we want to. And let's all remain friends with my friend and make your own friends with

01:06:22.880 | my friend's friends on AI. And let's have these great neighbor. It's a good friend,

01:06:28.400 | a great friend that's a neighbor. - Yeah.

01:06:29.920 | - Okay. - Mentor and friend. Just like now

01:06:33.040 | there's AI systems that play chess far, far, far better than humans. And we humans still play chess

01:06:38.640 | with each other. Or chess is still a game that's fun for us humans. And then we use the AI systems

01:06:45.760 | to get better at chess, to learn, to train, to discover new ideas, but ultimately return

01:06:52.640 | to the chessboard between two humans. But of course, this world is full of dangerous people.

01:07:00.400 | And so those same AI systems can be used to harm, to create false narratives, to do social

01:07:09.120 | engineering and manipulate the masses in terms of what they believe and all that kind of stuff.

01:07:14.320 | - That's scary. - Yeah.

01:07:15.680 | - Well, and I get it when we, and I have my own fear and distrust of AI is based on my own fear

01:07:27.360 | and distrust of myself and others. There's something, it's very simple, but I think it's a

01:07:35.120 | really fun sort of way to just set up this reality. And it's kind of a duh, but it still

01:07:43.680 | needs to be said that AI is a prompt. It doesn't do anything unless we ask it. So what questions

01:07:54.800 | are we gonna ask is a question, is what we need to ask ourselves. 'Cause we're going to be looking

01:08:01.040 | in the mirror at our digital God that we create from ourselves. And just to know that that's that

01:08:10.560 | place where it's awesome and scary, exciting and scary. We go, "Oh, it's our creation,

01:08:15.040 | which is awesome." At the same time, "Oh shit."

01:08:19.840 | But it's prompted by our questions and gives us patterns from that which we give it.

01:08:33.760 | - But that prompting, that's the art of life. Like we prompt each other in conversation,

01:08:41.440 | our loved ones. When you go about your day to day, the next word you say, the next word you say to me,

01:08:49.040 | the question I ask of you, that's prompting. - Yeah.

01:08:53.440 | - And it can change everything. I can say so many things right now that will completely just,

01:09:00.400 | the set of possibilities where both of our lives can take given on the selection of words I use

01:09:07.120 | and you use is crazy. So it makes conversation fun. And the same thing with AI.

01:09:14.240 | Except the nice thing about AI is it's tireless. - Tireless, right. Let me ask you this. If you

01:09:25.120 | can falsely condemn me right now, and I prove you falsely condemn me,

01:09:29.360 | I can forgive you and we can march forward stronger than before.

01:09:35.360 | - Yes. - And AI's tirelessness and retention,

01:09:40.000 | can it forgive? I mean, can it go, "Oh, oh, okay. Yep. Sorry about that one. That was wrong." Can it

01:09:51.600 | amend? - Yes. Yeah. You could prompt it to ask for forgiveness, it'll forgive you.

01:09:57.280 | - Well, like when I talk it around with it, and you ask, "What should I be afraid of with you?

01:10:05.920 | Or what's the dooms toward you?" Its answer was always, "Well, it's up to you."

01:10:10.240 | Which it was awesome, right? - Yeah.

01:10:13.920 | - There you go again, it's up to us. And it brought up, you know,

01:10:19.040 | maybe synonymous with your human values and ethics and responsibilities. But it doesn't

01:10:24.880 | deal, that I didn't find anyway, deal with defining or making choices on its own of what those are.

01:10:30.480 | - Yeah, I think some of that is manually, those are constraints put on by it, by the creators of

01:10:39.600 | those large language models, basically not letting the systems have an identity of their own. And

01:10:48.400 | some of it is just not engineered in yet, but I believe that we'll have systems that have an

01:10:54.720 | identity, have a belief, have a set of opinions that carry through time.

01:10:59.040 | - And will we go to them, like certain states where we agree with the law and disagree with

01:11:04.480 | the law, or nations? "I'm a member of this AI." "Oh, well, you're from this AI tribe.

01:11:13.600 | Y'all believe this." - Yeah, there'll be an anarchist

01:11:17.520 | set of AIs, there'll be the communists, there'll be the Nazis, there'll be the Democrats and the

01:11:25.920 | Republicans, there'll be the people who are on the keto diet, and the people that are on this other

01:11:33.520 | kind of diet, this other kind of lifestyle, just like we have now, there's little groups,

01:11:37.600 | and there'll be AI systems. - They're gonna be supercharged.

01:11:40.160 | - Yeah, they'll be either the leaders or the foundation on which we build those groups, and

01:11:46.800 | the possibility of all the fun we can have is endless. Of course, the dangers always rise up

01:11:57.280 | there, because I mentioned the Nazis, I mentioned all the dangerous ideas. The set of ideas that

01:12:04.560 | humans have come up with, a lot of them are awesome, most of them are awesome, I would say,

01:12:08.720 | but some of them are dangerous. The reason they're dangerous is because they become viral,

01:12:13.920 | there's something exciting in us about those ideas, but they also harm others a lot,

01:12:19.520 | 'cause that's who we are as humans, we're capable of envy and all the dark stuff, of hate and all

01:12:28.000 | this. - Capable, yes. We also choose it.

01:12:36.400 | - Do you think most people are good? - Yes, but I also believe we got

01:12:47.200 | the good and evil in all of us, and it's which wolf we feed.

01:12:51.760 | - You ask people to draw a distinction, to describe where are you acting and where are you

01:13:02.400 | being. What's the difference? What's the difference between being fake, if I may use that word,

01:13:11.600 | and being real? - Okay, yeah, and the word authentic

01:13:15.680 | gets thrown around a lot, and I don't mean, I used to feel this way, but Bob Dylan loosened

01:13:27.040 | me up on this idea a little bit. (Rhett laughs)

01:13:29.520 | He was all about get to be your only one and only true self, that's it, everything else is fake.

01:13:38.000 | And then you hear Bob go, "Well, I mean, we are what we create ourselves to be,

01:13:43.040 | we are our own creations," which I'm like, "Ah, yes, yes, we are, thank you, Bob, Bobby."

01:13:49.120 | I'm all for bullshitters and bullshitting. I'm not as big a fan of liars and lying.

01:14:09.600 | - What's the distinction? You're talking about the art form of bullshitting?

01:14:13.440 | - A liar's faking it, but not admitting to themselves that, "Yeah, it's a fucking creation,

01:14:20.480 | I'm faking it." A liar, I'm lying to your face right now, and I don't give you that hair of a

01:14:27.280 | wink out of my right eye that lets you know, "Hey, go with me here." I think there's value

01:14:31.600 | in the bullshitting. Now, the lying becomes troublesome because one, I've duped you,

01:14:37.200 | and I didn't let you know, come on, I was just telling the story about catching the fish,

01:14:40.800 | the fish always gets bigger every year we tell a story, come on, go with it, all right?

01:14:43.840 | - Yeah.

01:14:44.340 | - But the lying, all of a sudden, I don't know my own. I don't know when I'm emanating something,

01:14:53.600 | creating something, telling the truth, being authentic or lying, and I'm, shit, all of a

01:14:58.720 | sudden I'm leaving crumbs with myself, that constitution gets blurry.

01:15:02.880 | - Lying to yourself and to others.

01:15:05.760 | - Yeah, well, you start to lie, you lie to others enough, you start to lie to yourself,

01:15:08.800 | you don't even know it, and that, I believe, is dangerous territory. That's why I'm trying to

01:15:14.160 | push this admit, because that goes, I'm trying to come in at a kindergarten level, because we

01:15:21.840 | immediately jump to, "Well, I'm gonna judge that." Boom, that's bad, that's wrong. No, no, no, no,

01:15:27.200 | no, no, hold back on that. Let's go back to base level, let's just admit that we all fucking do it.

01:15:35.920 | Lies we tell others, lies we tell ourselves, lies we believe for convenience sake. I do it,

01:15:42.960 | I'm guilty of it, I try to catch myself on it, if I can just call it and go, "You know you're

01:15:47.840 | believing that lie out of convenience." I'm like, "I know." And then I have to,

01:15:51.360 | see if I'm saying that in the mirror or writing it down or sharing with a friend, you know? And I go,

01:15:57.040 | "Okay, well, now I've inherently become a bullshitter then, because I admitted it."

01:16:02.160 | That I can shake hands with. That's the little slight wink to ourself and someone else goes,

01:16:08.000 | "Come on, it's a better story this way." In the course of a road trip, you start with step one,

01:16:14.480 | admit. How do you do that? How do you kind of step back and...

01:16:22.880 | Do that inventory? Yeah.

01:16:29.360 | Is there a trick to that? Oh, if there's a trick to it, I think it's just about courage

01:16:35.680 | of having the... 'Cause it's... I don't think any of us like to admit

01:16:42.880 | our lies or look deep enough in to go, "I've relied so much on that lie that it's become my reality."

01:16:54.000 | Yeah. And I don't wanna be so puritanical

01:16:59.840 | as to say... Again, that's why I say admit instead of judge, but I don't wanna be so puritanical as

01:17:10.960 | to go and admit it and get rid of it. No, I'm just saying admit it, just bring it to the surface.

01:17:20.400 | Yeah, I'm saying this and I'm doing something different.

01:17:26.160 | I preached this, but I actually... Just admit it. Just admit them. And

01:17:36.560 | I think that's the first step to where we

01:17:40.720 | begin to either forgive ourself and give ourselves some amnesty and go, "Yeah, I'm a human.

01:17:49.040 | Trying to make it through life as best I can. I'm gonna let myself slide on that one."

01:17:52.320 | Okay? And maybe I've been getting away with it for so long, whole family, my whole network works

01:17:56.640 | well on it, okay? Forget this get to the base of the truth of the matter, but just admit it.

01:18:02.000 | And then it will also help... It'll be easier to then expose to ourselves. Which one do we go?

01:18:08.800 | No, I'm not letting myself slide on that one anymore. That is actually a lie I've been

01:18:15.040 | believing that's been keeping me from getting more of what I want in life. That's actually a lie

01:18:20.320 | I've been living that I haven't admitted that is not allowing me to enjoy life as much as

01:18:28.400 | I damn well should be, deserve to be, or I've earned to be, or just sort of let myself.

01:18:38.400 | Excuse me, I had on... It's not all the hard stuff. Sometimes it can be a fun thing. I talk

01:18:45.280 | about how many times we major in our minors. Let's admit where we sit there and we go,

01:18:48.960 | "All right, I give myself 12 hour workday, but I noticed I'm spending eight on my hobbies

01:18:54.000 | and four on my career while I'm majoring in my minors."

01:18:57.360 | Well, let me admit that. There's the math. Why don't we invert that? How about four hours on

01:19:04.080 | my hobbies and eight on my career? First off, just admitting it allows me to go, "Well, now I can do

01:19:10.240 | the math or rearrange the math by time of day." But look, I just found a hobby, tennis. First

01:19:17.200 | hobby I've had in 25 years. I had to admit that I went to play tennis, started to love it for the

01:19:23.360 | first month. I started feeling guilty. I was like, "Is it okay to have this much fun? I'm having so

01:19:31.920 | much fun and I'm getting a great workout." I just admit, I was like, "Yes, it's okay.

01:19:38.240 | Congratulations, buddy. You found something that you're finding quite pleasurable for straight

01:19:45.120 | pleasure. You don't have to forget all this other stuff about, 'Yeah, but I'm also getting a workout.'"

01:19:49.920 | "Well, yeah, you're getting that too, but you don't have to excuse the pleasure based on, 'Oh,

01:19:55.120 | but it's good for you.'" No, damn it. The real reason you love it is because you're having so

01:20:00.800 | much damn fun at it. I had to admit that to let myself go, "Damn, Ron, I'm going to play tennis

01:20:06.560 | again today or tomorrow." It was a simple fun thing. So it's not always about the hardcore

01:20:13.280 | stuff that we have to go, "This is a deep, dark lie that I've been living by and it's having me

01:20:19.280 | live falsely and it's having harmful consequences on my loved ones." Some of those will probably

01:20:25.280 | arise when we admit. I think it's just having a look around and just saying. And when we admit it,

01:20:32.160 | then we go, when we admit a lie, then we become something much more valuable, a bullshitter.

01:20:40.640 | You had the little wink in your eye. I love the distinction.

01:20:45.440 | I'm bullshitting myself on that thing. Yep, I'm lying. Therefore, if I call it a lie,

01:20:48.960 | I'm admitting a lie. Yep, well, now, yep, I'm bullshitting. Yep, now, it's just out. Didn't

01:20:52.800 | judge it. But now I'm bullshitting. That, I think we can work with.

01:20:58.160 | Well, you're an interesting case study because you're one of the most famous, one of the most

01:21:02.320 | charismatic, successful humans in the world. There's a lot, millions of people love you,

01:21:10.400 | hang on every one of your words. That's a hard place to be. How do you call yourself? How do you

01:21:17.360 | admit that you've been living a lie? How do you admit yourself in big ways and small ways on lies

01:21:25.360 | at this point, given how many people love you, how famous you are?

01:21:29.680 | 10 years ago, I don't know.

01:21:35.920 | I don't know. Someone was talking about like,

01:21:44.640 | they really admire this so-and-so person because they're not someone who looks in the mirror.

01:21:48.720 | And I was like, yeah. All of a sudden, I was like, man, I catch myself looking in the mirror a lot.

01:21:56.240 | And then I go in and I look at my wife's side of her bathroom, how many different creams and stuff

01:22:07.200 | she has out there. I look at my side, I got a lot more on my side. I'm like, oh, I notice how if I'm

01:22:13.120 | out in public, working out, maybe doing pushups, maybe I do a few more. If there's a group of

01:22:20.960 | people walking by that maybe I'd like to impress, then I may do a few more than I do if I was on my

01:22:25.040 | own. I'm like, you are vain, McConaughey. And the knee jerk is, oh, vanity bad. And all of a sudden,

01:22:35.280 | I was like, all of a sudden, I became a bullshitter once I admitted I'm vain. I was like,

01:22:41.120 | well, bravo vanity. Let's go vanity. Instead of putting it in the cupboard in the lie section,

01:22:50.000 | oh, I'm vain because that's a debit. No, admit it. And then go, what's the value in it?

01:22:58.080 | Well, I can look at, yeah, I'm actually got in better shape because of my vanity. Actually,

01:23:02.240 | I eat better. And that led to being a better husband, better dad, doing something with my

01:23:14.160 | kids when I'd rather be over there writing this work I'm working on. But I know that tomorrow,

01:23:20.720 | when they leave town, they're gonna remember this time that we had together. That's a selfish act to

01:23:28.480 | go spend that time with my kids, even though I'd rather not be doing it at that time. I'd be doing

01:23:32.560 | something for myself because when they leave tomorrow, they'll have this great memory that

01:23:37.440 | they spent with their dad right before they went. I could call that vanity. I could group that

01:23:44.800 | and say, that was very vain of you. That was for self. Yeah. Because it was also for someone

01:23:54.160 | that I cared about. Are there people in your life that call you out on your bullshit,

01:23:59.920 | in the bad sense of the word bullshit? Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it's either, I got a pretty

01:24:06.240 | thick threshold for how far I can go with my bullshit. Like what tickles me might bruise

01:24:14.960 | others to watch it. That's a good line. [laughter]

01:24:22.520 | Yeah. Tickles me might bruise others. But I also, I go back and talk about the bullshit,

01:24:30.560 | that's over there with those mystical successes. It's the, yeah, no, go with it.

01:24:38.640 | Don't pull a parachute yet. Let's see how far we can go. Let's see how hot I can get. Let's try it

01:24:43.840 | one more time. Yes, two more, please. Yeah.

01:24:46.520 | That's where a lot of great pleasure and stories and successes will come from. Those are mystical,

01:24:55.840 | they don't add up. It's like, we're not talking about reason right now. We're not talking logic.

01:25:00.400 | Just go with this. Let's talk about the virtual and making it real.

01:25:04.640 | The old line of fake it till you make it. I mean, what is that? There's something to that.

01:25:10.800 | There's definitely something to it. But I would, where people go fake it as, I would go back to

01:25:17.200 | Dillinger and create it, recreate it, create and recreate it, until it becomes, till you make it.

01:25:26.000 | So I'll have people call my bullshit and a lot of times are right.

01:25:30.640 | I think when I handle it the most healthy way is I admit yes.

01:25:38.560 | And I'm aware. So I'm, and I'm going to keep going.

01:25:44.400 | So you're not like resisting and denying it.

01:25:47.760 | Oh, I will. I will. And I have to watch that where I'm like, no, I'm not. That's not what I'm doing.

01:25:53.200 | And usually when it's coming from people that are there going, no, you are, it's like, I want to

01:25:57.520 | admit it. And then that's where I'm telling a lie. And that'll come up, get me later and I'll go,

01:26:05.200 | I didn't see it. I didn't see I was doing that. I was either unaware, I wouldn't let myself be

01:26:11.760 | aware. I was denying that I was doing that. Would you say that's ego? Has ego been bad

01:26:17.520 | or good for you? Gosh, I think it's been, I'm so thankful for ego.

01:26:29.600 | Does it get off the bridle for me sometimes and run loose and run in places and where it's

01:26:38.240 | not of service to others and has it hurt loved ones and even strangers? Yes.

01:26:52.240 | But I also, when my ego is really strong, it's in sync with serving. It's in sync with

01:27:07.760 | where I serve myself also serves others. Those two are part and parcel. They're intertwined.

01:27:19.680 | And that's the capital E, ego that I think and hope we all need more of. And that's what I mean

01:27:25.680 | when I talk about selfish. That's the redefining that the real true meaning of that is not doing

01:27:31.040 | something for self at expense of your neighbor or harming others. It's for personal profit and

01:27:40.720 | pleasure that also is profit and pleasure for a utilitarian sense more of others. And there's,

01:27:49.200 | again, back to the paradox that I think there's a place, I know there's a place,

01:27:52.080 | I believe there's a place where those are in sync. And when my ego is healthy, I'm able to

01:28:00.160 | say I'm sorry sooner for a lie or a misdemeanor or harm to somebody.

01:28:08.400 | I'm able to be more empathetic because I got the confidence to be so. I'm able to be more humble.

01:28:17.360 | But still have my chin high and my heart high and look in the eye and go, yep, my bad, bogey,

01:28:30.480 | guilty. I shanked that one out of bound, man. -

01:28:35.000 | That's beautiful. So ego can be constructive, not destructive.

01:28:42.880 | You won an Oscar for your performance in Dallas Buyers Club. Can you tell the story of becoming

01:28:48.000 | that character, Ron Woodruff? What was the toughest part? -

01:28:53.000 | Toughest part, which was the most enlightening part,

01:29:00.880 | was getting to know who he was in between the lines. We're basing a life story in an hour and

01:29:08.800 | a half of film, and the script was great. But who was he in between the lines? Who was he before

01:29:19.520 | he started a business, before he was on a crusade, before he went to alternative medicines?

01:29:27.680 | You know, the obvious thing people always talk about, well, how'd you lose all that weight?

01:29:35.040 | That was not hard. That was just a militaristic decision. This is what I can eat each day.

01:29:42.560 | And if I do this each day for a week, I'll lose 2.5 pounds in a week. So I'm going to give myself

01:29:47.440 | five months to do that. 2.5 times that is 10. There you go. There's 47 pounds. That was like

01:29:54.560 | clockwork. So that was easy. That decision was made. I didn't go to the Pizza Hut buffet and

01:30:01.200 | have temptation for certain meals. I ate that and the weight just went off like clockwork.

01:30:05.280 | It was the, who is Ron Woodruff in between the lines? And the gift I got given

01:30:12.160 | that gave me the insight to who that man was, was I went to see his family before I was leaving.

01:30:26.240 | His family offered me his diary. And I remember it kind of has it going, wow, yes,

01:30:33.280 | but I kind of hesitated because it felt maybe a little too intimate of a thing for me to have.

01:30:39.120 | It felt like it was kind of maybe infringing a bit, but I opened my hand and took it. And

01:30:45.360 | what I got in the diary was I got to know who Ron was before he had HIV.

01:30:52.800 | And little thing, the diary he'd write in and the dreamer he was and getting all set on a Sunday

01:31:01.760 | night and laying his shirt out and ironing it for the next morning, making sure that his little

01:31:07.200 | pager had fresh batteries in it. Because tomorrow morning he was going across town to hook up some

01:31:11.040 | speakers for 38 bucks or whatever. And then getting up that morning and writing about what

01:31:19.440 | kind of coffee he drank and how much gas it was going to take to get over across town to do that

01:31:24.480 | job and hook up those speakers. And then on the way over, Paige coming in to say, "No, we don't

01:31:30.640 | need you. We've gone with somebody else to hook them up." And here he was all buttoned up, two

01:31:36.640 | cups of coffee in, hair slicked over, shirt ironed, a little less than half a tank of gas,

01:31:44.960 | but enough to get back home. Now where's this Monday go?

01:31:50.400 | The hope and the disappointment. You have to take all that in. That's part of that, man.

01:31:58.240 | I'm just going to go to Sonic and get a double cheese bacon burger because

01:32:03.440 | Sheila over there, man, she's kind of cute. She always gives me high price on it.

01:32:09.760 | Which leads to rolling the joint, hanging off till Sheila gets off the work,

01:32:17.680 | sneaking over to the local motel and shagging up in room 16. That's my lucky number 16, Sheila.

01:32:23.440 | Then wandering out that night, getting home one in the morning, no plans for Tuesday.

01:32:35.680 | And maybe later in the week, think about what am I going to do about work or job?

01:32:40.800 | And these little dreams would get me peak and want to, and then something would happen where

01:32:44.960 | he wouldn't follow through or the deal would go south. That, knowing that there's in there

01:32:55.040 | was where I saw who he was a dreamer and he just couldn't catch the break and didn't follow through.

01:33:03.280 | And then I remembered his family said, "Oh yeah, he invented it. He got patents on a whole bunch

01:33:07.600 | of things, but he never would." He had things to get patent, but never would follow through to get

01:33:12.160 | the government patent. And then later on, you'd see the product be made or sold on QVC or something.

01:33:18.720 | They'd be like, "Ron, that was yours. They stole your idea. Did you patent that?" He'd be like,

01:33:25.200 | "No." There's something beautiful and sad about that. That let me inside who he was

01:33:33.040 | in his heart and who he wanted to be. And what he was hoping to be and trying to be,

01:33:37.680 | but couldn't quite pull off. When you go that deep, does a part of him stay in you forever?

01:33:44.640 | Are you able to let go? I hope so. I get, I look, there's a tenacity to survive that I got

01:33:55.120 | from him. Hopefully I can try and find some of that in different ways

01:34:01.280 | in any character that I go play. Because if you really want to give a character an obstacle to

01:34:07.360 | overcome, a need, I mean, the base one is life and death. Whether that's the need to survive

01:34:15.920 | or the need to stave off extinction. I'm not talking about what the rules, the laws are,

01:34:24.800 | the social mores, the manners and graces. You're going to fight for your own life in a world that's

01:34:30.480 | not supporting you to do so. There's a wonderful courage of, "Okay, watch this. What do I got to

01:34:43.520 | lose? My life or I'm in charge of extending it? Get out of the way. And I'll pick your pocket

01:34:57.440 | along the way, whatever it takes." So there's a tenacity to live by whatever means necessary

01:35:03.840 | to survive that I'm reminded of, that I learned from Ron.

01:35:10.160 | So on that line of survival between life and death, you starred in "True Detective," which I think

01:35:16.720 | explores some darker aspects of human nature. What did you take from that?

01:35:27.200 | From that role, that experience, philosophically, psychologically?

01:35:32.320 | The freedom of being on an island.

01:35:36.320 | He was such a singular character and of a singular mind. And as you know, it wasn't a

01:35:48.240 | dance party up there in his mind. It was some heavy stuff. But also existentially for him,

01:35:58.000 | always like death would be a deliverance for him. It'd also be a cop-out in a way. It'd also be...

01:36:15.360 | He was not a man who was going to give himself amnesty and didn't allow it from the rest of the

01:36:22.400 | world. He wouldn't give himself an out. And while living in his head and heart and spirit was

01:36:29.840 | more of a hell than arguably dying, there was no alternative. That's not negotiable for that man.

01:36:40.560 | And that's why he was the best detective that ever

01:36:43.920 | walked the earth. That's why he was such a superhero in a way, to have that singular.

01:36:50.720 | You don't go, "Oh, I wish I was him." No, but you're like, "Wow, that constitution,

01:36:55.920 | that clarity of identity?" Talk about a measure in a man's constitution. He didn't allow

01:37:05.760 | anybody off the hook, especially himself. You wanted him to forgive a little bit or give himself

01:37:12.640 | a little amnesty. You wanted him to like, "Man, it's Saturday, bro. Can you go on a date?" You

01:37:18.880 | wanted him to enjoy something. But he was connected to something in his DNA, who's who he was,

01:37:27.120 | to something much more baseline truth. And that's why he was such a good detective. So that...

01:37:34.800 | But there's an island, as much as that company can be. I said earlier on that Amazon trip that

01:37:38.880 | I went and joined the company. There's parts, I think, that I maybe gave to myself,

01:37:44.320 | to Rustin Cole, and also that Rustin Cole has given back to me, that are like, "Yeah, when you

01:37:50.960 | want to pull the parachute, because you can't stand the company that you're in, McConaughey,

01:37:54.080 | in your own mind, the Socratic dialogue is driving you freaking crazy, don't pull the parachute.

01:37:59.920 | Stick with it. Go through it." So you were able to walk around with that

01:38:03.840 | tormented mind of his? Tormented. I didn't have very much patience for mendacious talk.

01:38:11.680 | I didn't have as much patience for small talk. I wasn't tormented.

01:38:18.240 | But the character was, and you have to embody him. So does some of that bleed over? Are you able to

01:38:25.200 | separate the man you are from the character?

01:38:31.200 | It's not... Look, am I able to separate? Yeah, I came home to my kids,

01:38:35.760 | and when they walk in the door and greet me and go, "What'd you do today?"

01:38:39.840 | And you got three kids under 10 years old, you don't tell them about the scene where you

01:38:48.960 | help someone commit suicide. It's just... So you turn it into a parable. Actually,

01:38:55.680 | I've always said this, having kids has made me a better actor and a better storyteller,

01:38:58.720 | because I have to parabolize certain things, and tell it in ways that they go, "Oh, neat."

01:39:04.240 | So did I go, did I bring it home? I didn't bring torment. Did I bring introspection into my own?

01:39:18.960 | Characters for me, and I think this is true for a lot of actors and actresses,

01:39:26.000 | it's not a separation. If I've got... We each have everyone else in us. It's just seeing,

01:39:36.960 | diving into Rustin Cole, knowing where his mind and heart is from the hand of Nick Pizzolatto,

01:39:44.400 | who wrote the character and wrote the whole series, understanding, number one,

01:39:50.160 | what the hell am I saying? What's he talking about? Then going deeper into that, well,

01:39:55.280 | this person really believes that. What does that say about how they move? Then I'm going,

01:40:00.960 | all of a sudden, well, who is that in me? What part of my left brain is locked into that? What

01:40:06.880 | part of my reptilian brain is latched onto that? This other stuff is non-negotiable.

01:40:14.000 | Then I just live in that, and I always talk like a '70s equalizer. Remember the old

01:40:20.720 | Epmiront equalizers? You move up your 500 HKZ, you move up your 60, you just rebalance the

01:40:31.440 | equalizer. It's just going to those parts of me where I'll turn up the volume, some parts of the

01:40:37.280 | bass, the treble on the equalizer, and turn down other parts of myself. I'm not coming home

01:40:42.160 | tormented as Rustin Cole. Am I coming home seeing torment where it should be seen?

01:40:53.200 | Am I reading the news differently? Are things coming out of the news and catching my eye

01:40:58.080 | as being bullshit or lies or truth that is just hard and going, "Yep, yeah." I'm seeing it through

01:41:07.600 | a different lens, but I'm seeing my own life through a different lens, a lens that was opened

01:41:12.320 | up and an aperture that was opened up through Rustin Cole.

01:41:15.440 | I mean, the process of being an actor, an actress, I guess is a really interesting way

01:41:21.120 | to be a philosopher of human nature.

01:41:23.760 | Yeah. I mean, it's an incredible-

01:41:26.960 | Really, isn't it?

01:41:27.680 | Dive into the humanities and all the ologies and philosophy. As I said,

01:41:35.360 | I'm going to, as I opened up that question, being on an island is a vacation.

01:41:44.800 | I am also conscious for five months when I'm playing Rustin Cole that,

01:41:51.200 | this is an interesting fact. I was as strong spiritually with my relationship with God

01:42:04.400 | when I did True Detective as I've ever been.

01:42:06.880 | Why is that?

01:42:08.480 | Okay. Which you would say, "Wait a minute." In some ways, those are antonyms.

01:42:16.240 | Yeah.

01:42:16.740 | No, but I pretty safely can say that my own strength of spirit in my own personal life,

01:42:26.640 | Matthew's life, gave me the confidence to go further away.

01:42:30.800 | Mm-hmm.

01:42:32.160 | Further away.

01:42:32.660 | Deeper into the torture and deeper into the... But he was still always going after truth.

01:42:42.400 | Mm-hmm.

01:42:43.120 | That was the thing. He was not an evil man. I don't even know if you can call him a nonbeliever,

01:42:47.200 | but he was always going after the truth and the truth burned and he would take the scar

01:42:52.160 | and get burned for it. He'd die for it. That, something was actually biblical about that.

01:43:00.880 | [laughs]

01:43:01.760 | You know? And so, but I don't think it's coincidence that I had so much

01:43:09.920 | journe of diving into the depths of that tortured character because I trusted that

01:43:21.680 | when I go out, I'll come up the other side. It's always like jumping in a pool of water.

01:43:27.920 | And can you trust you'll come up the other side and not... You go play a criminal,

01:43:32.800 | you trust you're not going to come out the other side a tyrant in real life.

01:43:36.800 | You just go, "Oh, God, I got to go do that. Came out and I'm still alive. Got all my faculties.

01:43:44.000 | I'm not in jail. I'm whatever it is." And so my own spirituality at that time,

01:43:49.680 | definitely I think gave me a certain trust and confidence to go further into the dark.

01:43:57.360 | It was announced that you'll be starring in a Yellowstone spinoff show.

01:44:00.880 | What do you think about the cowboy ethos that permeates Yellowstone and other shows created

01:44:08.480 | by Taylor Sheridan? You're a Texan.

01:44:11.200 | [laughs]

01:44:11.680 | I am a Texan. Yeah.

01:44:13.600 | What do you think about that philosophy and way of life?

01:44:19.760 | I admire the simplicity of it. I mean, one way you could explain Yellowstone and

01:44:29.520 | Costner's role is what will man do to protect land and family

01:44:38.960 | in a world that's trying to encroach, in a world where

01:44:48.320 | there's a cowboy ethos that deems trespassing more clear earlier than other hats.

01:44:59.520 | I admire that simplicity of right and wrong.

01:45:08.720 | And that the simplicity of that right and wrong doesn't always correlate, coincide with the law.

01:45:17.120 | No, it's above the law. You mentioned something earlier, I remember where it wasn't in

01:45:21.440 | conversation, but a little bit of like, "Okay, if the law ain't handling this, I am."

01:45:25.440 | And then it is, "The law's not gonna handle this, therefore I am." And then it is, "I'm

01:45:36.880 | handling this." The law, talk to them when you get to them, "I'm handling this."

01:45:44.160 | There's an honesty to that. It just seems, of course, it's dangerous because it's a slippery

01:45:52.560 | slope. Because of the power in that, power corrupts, it can be a slippery slope where

01:45:59.360 | you completely disregard the law and you can hurt a lot of people. But when done right,

01:46:04.240 | there feels to be something really authentic and human about that. Protect family, protect land,

01:46:14.000 | above all else. Yeah.

01:46:15.920 | But this is a broader question, but I'm gonna piggyback it off of this.

01:46:26.320 | Back to the dreams and reality and evolved species and how and what we do in creating a

01:46:40.000 | digital God and AI and these communities and friends that

01:46:43.120 | challenge us and think like us, we like to hang out with.

01:46:46.640 | Do you think we're a less evolved species than we give ourself credit for? Do you think we give

01:46:56.000 | ourselves credit for being more evolved than we actually are? I think we do. I do.

01:47:01.760 | I think we need to admit that. I think probably the cowboy ethos is a

01:47:09.120 | step towards admitting that. And that's why it's so appealing to people.

01:47:17.040 | Kind of wakes them up to realize that we're not so far from our ancestors.

01:47:24.000 | That the values of loyalty are really important. Trust on the basic human level.

01:47:38.560 | How do you know if you can trust someone? I don't know if I can trust someone. Well,

01:47:44.240 | I don't know a trick to it. I do not know a trick to it, but I do come in,

01:47:49.120 | as I believe you do, with high trust. I come in with a, I'm told, sometimes I think,

01:47:57.040 | I'm told that I trust too much sometimes. Have you been hurt? Have you been betrayed?

01:48:02.080 | And if you have, has that hurt your willingness to trust?

01:48:07.920 | No, it hurt. And I put that person and those people in another category back here and do my

01:48:17.360 | best not to let them know that it bothered me at all, but I know when I am with those people.

01:48:23.520 | But a new person, you're still willing to trust.

01:48:25.280 | No, I'm not going to do that. I think that's the beginning of cynicism, which I think is a

01:48:30.000 | horrible disease of getting older. I'm not going to do that.

01:48:32.960 | So you're fighting cynicism off as much as you can.

01:48:35.120 | No, no way, no way, no way. I mean, there's no residual in it. There's no win. It's easy,

01:48:44.240 | it's clever, gets the laugh at the party. And if it sleeps well, it shouldn't be.

01:48:52.880 | Don't get comfortable in the cynicism. I have to ask you about being a Texan.

01:49:00.240 | You're like, when I think Texas, I think Matthew McConaughey. What's it mean to be a Texan to you?

01:49:06.320 | I recently moved to Austin, Texas, two years in.

01:49:13.840 | All right, all right. Welcome.

01:49:17.280 | What's it mean to be a Texan? Educate us.

01:49:23.440 | Texas is about independence. Politically, Texas is not about Republican or Democrat.

01:49:31.360 | It's about independence, independence of spirit, sovereignty. Texas is about exploration. One of

01:49:42.880 | the things I love about Texas is I run into so many Texans around the world.

01:49:52.000 | Texans are taught to go be conservative or learn who we are, then go, go, explore,

01:50:01.600 | pioneer, journey, and hopefully you come on back with some goods and some stories, you Texan.

01:50:10.160 | And underneath that is this kind of freedom of being an individual in the full meaning of that

01:50:19.680 | word. Yeah, well, Texas is liberal on your entrance. Very liberal on your entrance.

01:50:28.000 | Less regulation. Hey, welcome. High trust. High trust, sir. Welcome to our state. Come on in.

01:50:37.280 | Yes, yes, yes. But if you light sheet steel, we're conservative on our consequences.

01:50:48.160 | (laughing)

01:50:50.160 | Oh, yeah, that's a good line. You've briefly pondered running for governor. I don't know

01:50:56.400 | if that's in your future. I hope it is. You had a few good lines about it. Do you think about that

01:51:03.440 | kind of stuff? About what the future holds in terms of political office?

01:51:08.560 | I don't think about it in terms of political office. I've graduated to a broader, larger

01:51:14.160 | thought of what's my future hold and where would I be most useful as a leader. I think that's a

01:51:24.080 | fair word. Whether that's thought, whether that's the leader of my family right now, as a parent,

01:51:33.520 | as a father, the leader of people that work with me. Politics, I'm not gonna say it's,

01:51:49.760 | 'cause it's not small. That's why I say that out loud. It's not small. I do think it needs

01:51:58.160 | to re-engineer and redefine what its purpose is before, because it's just chasing its own tail

01:52:04.720 | right now with the two parties that seem to me to be completely about just invalidation

01:52:12.000 | of the opposition instead of vision of themselves. So I think it needs redefinition of what it is,

01:52:21.440 | because it is important. That's what I mean. That's why I said I don't mean small. It needs

01:52:25.680 | to think bigger about what it is and how it's useful. When it seeks to invalidate, it's small.

01:52:31.600 | When it seeks vision, it can be big. Yes. Well, one's affirmative. One's

01:52:37.440 | going into that cynicism we were talking about. Yeah.

01:52:40.400 | And validation of any opposing thought, or maybe that we're even opposing. Opposition

01:52:48.240 | is an arrogant term. That's too strong. So a lot of times it's not even opposition. Alternative,

01:52:53.840 | other than, another way of thinking about it. Oh, could both be true? Oh, how could we parlay

01:52:58.960 | those two ideas? One of the challenges with these ideas of a third party or

01:53:09.280 | meet you in the middle, it's kind of got this historic notion of being, oh, well,

01:53:16.160 | comme ci, comme ça, it's sort of Mr. In-between, kind of go which way the wind blows.

01:53:21.760 | I think, done in the right way, it's the, and it doesn't have to be under a third party's name

01:53:29.200 | necessarily, but it's actually an incredibly rebellious position right now. And it's actually,

01:53:38.240 | and I love sports, it's tactically the place with which

01:53:44.240 | to move most advantageously. I think of their free safety in the game of football. They're

01:53:51.680 | in the middle of the field and they're deep. They choose to defend left or right according

01:53:57.760 | to the play that's been called by the offense. Similar to the offense, the running back,

01:54:04.960 | you read the defense and then you're gonna run right to run left to go away from that opposition.

01:54:09.200 | It's a tactical spot. To be truly independent and respond and respond.

01:54:17.680 | So do you think you have a role in that in political officers?

01:54:22.240 | I don't know. It's on mind. It's not out of my mental box. And I gave it real sincere thought

01:54:31.520 | and discernment for over a year. And it's a wonderful, whether I end up in politics or not,

01:54:40.880 | it was a wonderful exercise. One that if anyone else got time to do it, do it. To ask yourself

01:54:47.440 | what you would do if you were CEO of a state, CEO of a nation, CEO of the world, that's a great

01:54:54.640 | thing to go. You wanna get your values in line? You wanna admit where you lie and throw yourself

01:55:00.480 | some pop quizzes? And what if this phone call comes at 4 a.m.? Who you wanna surround yourself

01:55:06.880 | with? It's really great questions to ask and I think has helped me at a more micro level,

01:55:11.920 | be a better father, a better man. Taking considerations that I did not maybe take

01:55:17.120 | in as seriously before considering it. I don't know if that's in my future.

01:55:22.480 | Useful is a big word. It would have to be useful. I have to be useful in the right way. And is that

01:55:29.280 | my lane to be most useful? It's a good question for a leader to ask. How can I be useful?

01:55:36.000 | I have to ask you about "Interstellar." So I think it's an incredible film. I've seen it

01:55:45.680 | inspire so many scientists and engineers. It's just philosopher, everybody, humans.

01:55:51.120 | It explores space travel, physics of space time, human nature, human condition, human connection.

01:55:58.160 | How has that film expanded your understanding of the universe and our place in it?

01:56:06.160 | Yeah. Well, it's got the old Mr. Mayor on the corner, how big is that cloud

01:56:16.000 | metaphor in it? Because that was the character I played, Cooper's, that was the existential

01:56:22.960 | question for him. Head down, practical, stay here, be a father to my children.

01:56:27.920 | But his dream before his children were to go explore space. So when he's taking that

01:56:36.720 | truck out and the countdown's going down, that's the hinge of the existential question

01:56:43.600 | that we all face in some form. The sense of time, which I think everyone loves, that sense of

01:56:57.680 | where time can run at different speeds. And there's an incredible scene where

01:57:03.920 | Cooper as a father is getting video feed from his children who've aged and he's realizing he's

01:57:13.280 | missed all that. Yeah.

01:57:19.920 | You know, I mean, overall, that concept makes me consider and imagine.

01:57:30.880 | We talk about mystical successes instead of engineered ones, like the engineered ones,

01:57:37.520 | there's ethos from that film and what Nolan put into that film and theories that make me go,

01:57:44.560 | "Yeah, what does any of this matter? Maybe we are, maybe we're AI." It makes me go,

01:57:52.400 | "It's already all been written. What's happening right now in this blip of time you're here,

01:57:59.840 | 53 years so far, we'll see how many we get. What other parallel timelines are happening out there

01:58:08.000 | do, is it small minded of us to define life on other planets as only something that can live

01:58:16.160 | within a climate that has water in this amount of O2?" Those terms may be too small. What do you

01:58:23.280 | mean? Who are we saying only life has to have water in this amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide?

01:58:28.160 | There's a whole redefinition of the ingredients that other life forms need.

01:58:34.560 | It's sure in a similar way to Contact, which is a movie I did with Bob Zemeckis,

01:58:39.040 | inspires me that the universe is more active and lively and God's backyard's bigger than I thought.

01:58:48.880 | And wow, that's exciting. And people go now, "Yeah, you believe in extraterrestrial life?"

01:58:56.080 | I said, "Yes, man, I think it'd be arrogant not to. I sure hope so."

01:59:00.560 | You think there's alien civilizations all out there, intelligent ones, just far on distant stars?

01:59:07.120 | I hope so. And I think it's possible. May have many among us right here.

01:59:17.760 | And I go for the why not in that just to keep that train of thought open to learn and consider

01:59:29.760 | those existential questions. I think it'd be arrogant not to.

01:59:32.320 | There's so many hundreds of billions of planets just in our galaxy.

01:59:38.320 | Just in ours.

01:59:39.840 | I can't imagine there's not life out there. But I suspect it's very different, like you said,

01:59:48.960 | than we are. And we have to have a humility to open our eyes to how different life could be.

01:59:55.440 | And if and when we cross it, unlike we've had a tendency to do when we tried to go with some

02:00:03.440 | nation takeovers, I think it would be our inherent glitch to go in believing that any other life

02:00:20.320 | form civilization wants to take over territories. To go into it with thinking that, "Okay, this is

02:00:26.640 | an opposition." I think that's a human trait of ours. And to consider that another life

02:00:35.040 | form would have an interest that more land or more territory is good for them,

02:00:44.800 | I think is a shallow idea. I think of it more like when I think of heaven,

02:00:51.040 | those considerations are not in anyone's mind, heart, or intent in the heaven that I think of.

02:01:00.720 | So in other civilizations, these things, I hope that if we would just see and learn,

02:01:07.920 | that would be the natural side of welcoming. It wouldn't be a primate response to, "No, I have

02:01:14.960 | fire and you're coming over trying to put it out," or, "I have food and you're trying to steal my

02:01:19.920 | food." I don't think it would be... I think it's a shallow thought to think that, "Oh, it's gonna

02:01:27.680 | be about ownership and we'd be trespassing." I don't think they would have a sense of borders

02:01:35.360 | as we do. I just hope we humans are smart enough to detect and to see aliens,

02:01:40.960 | because of how different they are. We often have a very narrow definition of what is intelligence.

02:01:49.360 | It's very possible that trees are extremely intelligent if we kind of zoom out at a

02:01:54.320 | different time scale, a different... Just look at stuff from a bigger perspective that's outside

02:02:02.160 | of being so human-centric. It's a great quote that someone told me, this astrophysicist told me this,

02:02:08.640 | how accurate it is or not. Someone else can argue the validity of what I'm about to say or not,

02:02:14.080 | but I thought it really was a perspective grabber for me. Like, look, see, the universe was created

02:02:19.120 | at midnight. Humans came around at 11.59 and 36 seconds. I love the little analogies that frame,

02:02:30.640 | like that make, "Oh, yeah, the pale blue dot, there it is." That perspective,

02:02:34.800 | something so relaxing and empowering about that at the same time and humbling,

02:02:40.960 | but confidence boosting, allows forgiveness, allows ambition. I just love the perspective

02:02:52.400 | of that, that picture, to picture it that way in our timeline.

02:02:57.200 | Do you hope humans become a multi-planetary species as we're trying to do, as SpaceX is

02:03:03.840 | pushing forward, traveling out to Mars, potentially colonizing Mars, colonizing other planets?

02:03:09.760 | Yeah. [Lex laughs]

02:03:13.760 | I'm, yeah, go explore. I love the ambition of it. I love the pioneering nature of it. I love the

02:03:23.280 | extension of what we consider as our backyard becoming more four-dimensional like that.

02:03:29.600 | Not at the expense of,

02:03:34.160 | "We still got stuff to take care of. We got gardens to tend right here."

02:03:40.800 | And sure as hell not to go, not to quit on us, to go, "Oh, let's get out of here 'cause this

02:03:47.440 | isn't really working." No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We got a tithe we're still supposed to pay here.

02:03:53.920 | That's part of this pressure testing us as a civilization and a species.

02:03:58.800 | Whether you call that restoration order or whether you call that,

02:04:05.280 | "Let's figure out how to adapt best we can." No, not at the expense of quitting here on Earth.

02:04:16.400 | But let a few select folks explore.

02:04:20.080 | Yeah.

02:04:20.560 | 'Cause that's like...

02:04:21.280 | God said, "Go for it, please."

02:04:23.360 | One of the coolest things that we humans do is kind of embodies the human spirit,

02:04:27.040 | reach out into the unknown. But it's hard. I mean, as interstellar shows and so on.

02:04:34.640 | Yeah.

02:04:36.720 | It's painful.

02:04:37.440 | Well, and Elon talks about it. This is not gonna be a weekend daisy trip.

02:04:44.400 | And he's just speculating how hard it could be. It'd be much harder in different ways

02:04:47.520 | that he doesn't understand yet.

02:04:48.720 | Well, that dance between the impossible and the inevitable, that's definitely there

02:04:55.280 | with what SpaceX is doing, what all the folks who are trying to become a multi-planetary species

02:05:03.360 | are doing. It's really hard. It's like, to build rockets that fight off gravity

02:05:12.320 | at a cost-effective way is really hard. SpaceX is close to being bankrupt several times.

02:05:19.680 | It's just hard. But it's also inspiring that some people are just crazy enough,

02:05:26.160 | bold enough to keep trying.

02:05:27.840 | Yeah.

02:05:28.080 | What advice would you give to young folks?

02:05:32.960 | What advice would I give?

02:05:35.520 | In high school and college that are thinking of how to make their way in this world?

02:05:41.600 | If you haven't already, can you define what you have an innate ability for

02:05:56.800 | and match that with what you're willing to hustle to get?

02:06:00.720 | Yeah.

02:06:01.840 | Sometimes we have an innate ability, but we don't wanna work for it. We take it for granted.

02:06:11.200 | And we end up doing something that may work, may pay the bills, may get us by day to day.

02:06:18.240 | But we don't really like it. We have trouble finding a way to enjoy it. Definitely don't love

02:06:24.240 | it. And then sometimes we don't know what our innate ability is and we're hustling and working

02:06:31.600 | our tail off and breaking a sweat to do something that we really aren't that good at on an innate

02:06:40.320 | level. And that's a good challenge. And you can work and become good at something

02:06:48.560 | that you don't have an innate ability for, but if you can match those two, what do you have an

02:06:57.680 | innate ability to do? 'Cause we have an innate ability to do, when we do that well, we do enjoy

02:07:02.080 | it.

02:07:02.480 | Yeah. And one of the things that requires is to be really honest with yourself

02:07:07.920 | at what your innate ability is. 'Cause oftentimes there's a lot of noise when you're growing up,

02:07:12.800 | people telling you what you're good at and not good at. Really, you have to look at yourself,

02:07:17.200 | listen to yourself, that inner, like a deep, rigorous self-analysis of what am I actually

02:07:24.000 | good at? Not what I hope to be good at, but what I'm actually good at.

02:07:27.520 | Right. And then if you look at that and you can define those two,

02:07:36.720 | hopefully, you can activate it in a way where there's a demand for what you supply.

02:07:45.680 | You found love with Camila Elvis McConaughey.

02:07:51.840 | What advice would you give to people on how to do just that? How to find love?

02:08:05.520 | This wonderful subject's been discussed since the beginning of time, hadn't it?

02:08:09.120 | Love it. So, I can tell you what things I've kind of learned and I'm still learning.

02:08:16.240 | You know, love is one of those mystical successes. It doesn't make sense.

02:08:34.960 | You know, when I was, before I met Camila, I had had, I was coming on to my late 30s.

02:08:43.920 | As much as I'm not a person that is guided by timelines, I was, my life had not really added

02:08:51.920 | up to what I thought it was gonna be relationship-wise. I thought by that time I would have

02:08:56.960 | met the woman I loved, got married and started family. And that hadn't happened. And I did find

02:09:03.200 | myself doing that thing I was doing at the Amazon, looking around the corner.

02:09:08.480 | Any prospective possible female I met that I was attracted to, I was like, "Maybe this is the one."

02:09:17.280 | I make the joke, but it's true. It's like at every red light, I'm like checking out who's next to me

02:09:22.800 | in the produce section at the supermarket. I'm like, "Who's down in the produce section?" You

02:09:26.480 | know, it's like looking. When you're in that zone, you can also be a little intrusive.

02:09:35.520 | You can trespass on people's, you can get outside of yourself. You can be overly impressed and not

02:09:41.520 | as involved and have your own constitution and sit back. And therefore, if you're outside of

02:09:47.520 | yourself, you're less attractive to your possible mate. I've got a series of dreams that are written

02:09:58.480 | about, but I had one then that was very spiritual. That was me as a 88-year-old bachelor who never

02:10:06.320 | got married. And it was a beautiful dream. Where on paper, I thought that should be a nightmare.

02:10:12.560 | It wasn't. What that dream did for me was allowed me to go, "You may not find the woman

02:10:20.240 | for you and get married and have a life with her. That may not be."

02:10:28.720 | And for the first time in life, I was okay with that.

02:10:33.120 | More than intellectually, spiritually, I was grounded. I was like, "Okay."

02:10:40.960 | Then I'm moving through the world and on this particular night as myself, not intruding. I was

02:10:47.920 | inviting. I did see her move across the room and did not say, "Who is that?" I said, "What is that?"

02:10:54.320 | And then did move to call her across the room. So I did invite, but I was not outside of myself.

02:11:03.440 | And I was able to be myself with her. What my eyes saw, everything that she turned out to be

02:11:13.040 | when the lens got zoomed in, more details got known, and we began to talk and got more intimate

02:11:18.880 | and closer together and spend more time, became true and then some. But not every single thing

02:11:24.720 | that I imagined when I saw her move across the room turned out to be true and then some.

02:11:30.720 | In just the image. We found a similar moral bottom line about life, each other,

02:11:44.800 | how we treat ourselves, what we respect, what our own constitutions were. We had similar

02:11:49.680 | perspectives on raising children, which was very important to me and her.

02:11:59.600 | And then we just enjoyed each other's company.

02:12:02.320 | Yeah.

02:12:03.600 | And we laughed together and we support each other and we promoted more of each other and we lit

02:12:08.880 | each other's fire. And if one was rolling, we kept dishing, "Go, go, go again. Take the next shot.

02:12:16.640 | More, more, more, more." This was a biggie too.

02:12:20.080 | Getting excited for each other's success.

02:12:23.280 | Yes. Yes. To be able... I think it's very important. We all have jealousy. I get it.

02:12:34.800 | But it's very important to be able, if you can, be happy for your lover when they succeed

02:12:43.120 | or are succeeding or are across the room at the party laughing with a stranger,

02:12:49.360 | to be happy for them when it has nothing to do with you.

02:12:52.720 | She was... I would be away, she would... The questions and the talks we would have,

02:13:00.720 | she was happy for me about how excited I was about my day and my day had nothing to do with her.

02:13:04.800 | Yeah.

02:13:05.120 | She wasn't there. And I found myself not telling myself to be happy for her, but being

02:13:09.120 | really, really happy for her when she would tell me about something that happened that day with her.

02:13:14.800 | And as much as I went through my head, "Oh, it would have been great if I would have been there,"

02:13:17.760 | I was like, "No, I'd only trespass on that. You had that independent of me. Bravo."

02:13:23.120 | That's a choice you make not to give any time to the jealousy,

02:13:29.200 | to the very natural jealousy that we humans have.

02:13:31.840 | It sure doesn't have any... I don't see the residuals in it.

02:13:35.760 | True.

02:13:37.920 | I've got it. I've had it. And I have it. I just don't...

02:13:40.480 | I haven't seen where it has any payback.

02:13:47.120 | I gotta ask you the biggest possible question. What's the meaning of this whole thing?

02:13:52.320 | Ugh.

02:13:53.520 | What's the meaning of life?

02:13:54.560 | Right?

02:13:55.060 | Matthew McConaughey, why? Why are we here?

02:14:02.160 | I don't know why we're here. I prescribe to, in a religious sense, the Restoration Order.

02:14:14.880 | We're here to restore order. And in a religious sense, I really, I purchased that and love that

02:14:20.000 | incentive and love that view. But I don't really know why we're here. But I do know,

02:14:26.720 | to go back to the front, we are here. That part's inevitable.

02:14:33.200 | So now let's flip the script and go to the why not.

02:14:41.600 | Just keep living. What are we doing? The base of everything, Eric, and we can argue it all,

02:14:46.880 | at the base of it, all I can come up with is, well, just keep living, man. I mean,

02:14:53.360 | what else are we supposed to do when we don't have any idea what to do?

02:14:58.080 | When we know exactly what we wanna do?

02:15:02.000 | Make it matter.

02:15:08.720 | Even when it doesn't matter, that matters. Not for what? I don't know. For the fun of it,

02:15:16.160 | that matters.

02:15:16.800 | Yeah, our ability to create meaning and beauty in the mundane, in the absurd, it's kinda cool.

02:15:23.360 | Yeah.

02:15:23.860 | And we share it with each other.

02:15:26.560 | Yeah.

02:15:26.800 | We get excited.

02:15:28.080 | Yeah.

02:15:28.400 | And we create some pretty cool stuff along the way.

02:15:31.840 | I mean, I say I'm confident enough, and I might be arrogant of me to say, but I do believe

02:15:40.720 | that we're here to, each generation, have a small ascension.

02:15:46.640 | Yeah.

02:15:47.780 | Or else, what's it for?

02:15:53.680 | And we're not really sure what the ascension is towards. Just kinda--

02:15:57.840 | No? No?

02:15:59.840 | I just think it's up. I do think it's up. I do think that

02:16:04.480 | it is definitely arrogant to think

02:16:10.960 | that we as a species or generation or people or humanity are going to reach the top of the

02:16:21.280 | ascended staircase and go, "Ta-da!" I think that is not only false, but I think it's full-hearted,

02:16:30.560 | and I think it's a recipe for having more angst and even cynicism we talked about,

02:16:35.920 | and unrest and lack of seeing beauty and joy in this life while we're in it.

02:16:40.320 | I think life's a verb.

02:16:50.640 | Live it as best we can. Hopefully. I mean, I don't know. Sometimes I'm just--I

02:16:54.640 | don't have a grand plan, man. I'm just trying to connect the damn dot.

02:16:58.160 | I'm confused, frustrated. I don't know what--I don't feel any gravity or building or

02:17:04.320 | lineage towards what I'm doing, and I'm just going--

02:17:06.880 | What's that Peterson line? "If you don't believe in heaven, do what you can to get

02:17:13.760 | as far away from hell as possible." Sometimes--

02:17:15.360 | Yeah.

02:17:16.800 | It's a great line. Sometimes I'm just trying to like, "Man, just don't sink the ship right now.

02:17:20.880 | Just keep your head above water. Maintain. Just try and hold on."

02:17:25.440 | And hopefully give yourself a chance to notice the magic, the mystical. I try to do that--

02:17:32.480 | Yeah.

02:17:33.200 | --when it gets rough.

02:17:34.000 | 'Cause it's there. I do believe it's all around us all the time.

02:17:38.000 | Yeah.

02:17:38.560 | Just are we on a frequency, and do we allow ourselves to receive it and see it?

02:17:42.720 | We gotta tune the radio.

02:17:44.720 | Yeah. Because if we look for it too hard, we see false idols, and if we don't look at all,

02:17:50.720 | we become callous and miss it all.

02:17:52.400 | Yeah. It's a fun little life we got.

02:17:55.760 | Yeah.

02:17:56.260 | Matthew, I'm a huge fan. I think you're an incredible person. Thank you for all the--

02:18:03.840 | everything you've created in this world. Thank you for being a unique

02:18:06.560 | human that inspires millions, and thank you for talking today.

02:18:11.440 | I was nervous, but you made me feel at home. That was beautiful.

02:18:14.800 | Well, I felt at home talking with you as well. Thanks for sharing that with me.

02:18:19.760 | I could go on and on.

02:18:20.560 | Just two Texans.

02:18:21.600 | That's right.

02:18:22.880 | Having a good old chat.

02:18:24.000 | Newly moved to Austin, Texas. Here we go.

02:18:26.160 | All right. Thank you, brother.

02:18:27.280 | Thank you.

02:18:27.780 | Thanks for listening to this conversation with Matthew McConaughey. To support this podcast,

02:18:33.200 | please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from

02:18:38.640 | Matthew McConaughey himself. "Don't walk into a place like you want to buy it. Walk in like you

02:18:46.320 | own it." Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.

02:18:51.520 | [END]

02:18:52.100 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Matthew McConaughey: Freedom, Truth, Family, Hardship, and Love | Lex Fridman Podcast #384

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