Most Replayed Moment: Matthew McConaughey - The Comfort Crisis Is Destroying Your Potential!

The excerpt opens with the host holding up a list Matthew McConaughey wrote in 1992. The host says it is dated a few days after his own birthday. Fatherhood is first on the list, and the host asks two things: does McConaughey wish he had left any goal off, and is there anything he wishes he had added?

McConaughey says he "wouldn't change a thing about it" and reads all ten aloud: become a father; find and keep a woman for me; keep my relationship with God; chase my best self; be an egotistical utilitarian; take more risks; stay close to mom and family; win an Oscar for Best Actor; look back and enjoy the view; just keep living. He says he does not know what he would add.

Be an egotistical utilitarian.

The host notes that McConaughey has brought up "needing resistance" two or three times. He ties it to the conversation's larger question of what makes a well-oriented, stable man, and asks whether resistance is a goal to aim for. McConaughey answers that it is "just a necessity". His examples include a successful life "at the top of the high rise with money". He links this to the host's friend, who he supposes "went to Christianity for a very similar reason", and argues that "a certain amount of guilt is very healthy" because it sets boundaries.

His central image is physical. A life with no shame, embarrassment or guilt is, in his words, "four-dimensional" and has "no form". Without gravity, he says, "You have no leverage anymore". The likely result is "more anarchy than art".

You've got to have gravity to have form. You've got to have some resistance to have some form. You've got to push off of something to go somewhere.

He backs this up with a line he has heard from "great artists": "Limitations reveal style." He also returns to the metaphor from his earlier book Greenlights. A life made only of green lights, with no yellows or reds, would leave a person going "in circles until you run out of gas and get dizzy." He asks, "How do we evolve or devolve without resistance?"

McConaughey adds a qualification of his own: "picking the right resistance is, is an art in itself", and he says he has been "clumsy with it". When fame and success arrived, he describes feeling he didn't deserve the attention, "the caviar and the champagne". He says he would "fuck things up on purpose" to feel grounded again.

I'd trip myself running downhill so I could bloody my own nose and go, ah, now I can feel.