Matthew McConaughey (and that voice!) on the "Greenlights" and bumper stickers that made him

Note: Text has been edited and may not match audio exactly. 

Courtney Reimer: Hi, I'm Audible Editor Courtney Reimer, and I am truly delighted to be talking with Matthew McConaughey today about his new memoir, Greenlights. McConaughey is, of course, an Academy Award-winning actor, more on that later, the star of critically acclaimed HBO show True Detective, and the unforgettable voice behind a wildly popular and parodied series of Lincoln car commercials. His versatility as a performer has led some to refer to his career trajectory as the McConaissance, to which he can now add published author and full-length audiobook narrator. Welcome, Matthew.

Matthew McConaughey: Good to be here, Courtney. Thank you for that introduction.

CR: Yes. So this book, Greenlights, is really something else. I mean, I was excited when I saw it pop up as something that would be coming soon, and then I was able to get an early listen to some of the audio and it's even more delightful than I expected. So, I'm so glad you narrated it yourself, as if there was any other choice, but I will get to the art of narration a little later because your voice is really... it's kind of a persona unto itself. But let's start with the title. Why did you call it Greenlights?

MM: Yeah, Greenlights. So, I've been keeping diaries for 36 years, daring myself to open the treasure chest that I keep them in and see what was in there, but too scared to do so for the last 15 years of my life, not a big fan of looking back, figured embarrassment, shame, etcetera. But a couple of years ago, after that treasure chest of diaries that I take with me everywhere started barking at me and said, "Hey, open us up. I dare you," and I decided to. And I share with my wife and I said, "You know what? I got to go see if there's something worthy of putting into a book or some form like that, within these diaries." And she goes, "Pack them up, get the heck out of here, and don't come back until you got something." So I went away to the desert and with those diaries, nothing but those diaries.

And I remember the first four days thinking I had an idea of what they were going to be. I remember thinking they were going to be quite academic. And after about four days, I noticed that I was trying to put a square screw into a round hole. And I was like, "No, no, no. You know what? Don't have any idea of what you think these are going to be. Why don't you just let them tell you what they are?" And so, I started categorizing things in all the diaries and I ended up with seven to eight piles. It was a stack of stories, it was a stack of people, places, prescribes or prescriptions as I call them, poems, prayers, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers.

So I had these stacks, whatever, I mean that is seven or eight in front of me. And then I said, "Okay, let me go look through those and see if a central theme comes out of those." And that's where Greenlights came from. I really started to notice through all of those categories ways in which I had engineered green lights for myself in life. Ways in which red and yellow lights in my life crisis as hardships had later turned green or revealed the assets or the lessons learned from those hardships. 

I realized how certain green lights had fallen in my lap by fortune. I don't know how or why, but [I'm] thankful they did. And I learned how through the 36 years of diaries, things that I thought, "Oh, I would never want this to happen to anyone. I don't know why this happened to me in my life. If I could just erase that thing in my life." I learned that sometimes I very quickly saw the green light lesson learned there. 

Sometimes I didn't notice until 10 years later. And sometimes I didn't know until 20 years later, and some of them I still haven't seen the green light in [it], but I trust that it will come either in this life or the next. And so that's where Greenlights came from.

CR: I found that so fascinating that, for 35 years, you've been keeping, and you know what, my husband keeps a diary, but he calls it a journal. But I like that you very deliberately call it a diary.

MM: Yeah.

CR: And so there's something evocative about that term. Could you tell me a little bit about what keeping a diary means for you? 

MM: So, the question of "why?" It's been a great question for me and one I've been interested in all my life. When I look back at what I was writing down, when I was 14 years old, I found in the writing of this book that I'm the same guy. I was just younger. My questions on the same subjects now at 50 years old have evolved, but I don't have any less questions, on the very same subjects that interested me when I was 14. I've always been interested in that existential question of "why?" 

I've always been interested in, like, "Who am I? I need to find out, trying to find that need to know myself better than anyone." How did I or… Through the diaries, I've found many years of being lost, trying to find myself. I've found ways that I didn't find myself. I first figured out who I was not. And by process of elimination ended up finding myself. I remember looking at the diaries early on… When do we go to diaries? Usually when it's tough. When our girlfriend or boyfriend broke up with us. When we're lost, when we're trying to really figure stuff out. That's what my early diaries were. I then noticed in my early 20s that I had a section about, I'm going to start writing my diary when things are going well. When I feel I'm succeeding. When I feel I am catching a green light. And I remember writing about, Hey, we're so told, and we'd have such a habit to dissect our failures and our hardships. I think, why don't we dissect our successes, dissect our happiness and see if we can find a science to satisfaction.

And I found that later on in life, when I would get in a rut again, I could go back to those times, when I was rolling and catching green lights and go, "What were your habits at the time, Matthew? Who were you hanging out with? What time are you going to bed? What were you drinking? Where were you going? How were you waking up? What was your first thought in the morning?" And I found that I could restart repracticing some of those habits and scientifically find my frequency again, by practicing habits that I had practiced when I was succeeding.

CR: That is actually very good advice. And it reminds me a lot of gratitude journaling, but more of almost subconscious like, "Okay, I'm just going to write this down and it'll be a record and I can go back to it and kind of relive it and take from it what worked."

MM: It's a form of a personal contract. 

CR: Yeah.

MM: It's why I love to say on business calls, "I love doing conference calls. I want everybody on the phone because you're making a verbal contract." If I say, "Yes, I've got that handled," and I don't do it later on when I go, "I didn't say that."

CR: There're witnesses.

MM: "There were eight people on the phone and everyone heard you say that." It's a part of what's fun about sharing this book. I'm making a contract with you, the reader. And I say at the end of the book, "Hey, I'm not making straight A's in all of these things I'm talking about. I don't have all these wisdom bombs lit, all these prescribes lived. I don't have them all down. I'm still in process on. By sharing the book with you I hope that down the line, if I'm out of line, you'll nudge me back because you read it in the book and go, 'Hey, remember you said this.'" "Oh, thank you."

You'll be that piece of the diary that is dissecting success when I'm in a rut somewhere and you'll nudge me back to go, "Hey, no, you wrote this, you shared it with me and get back in line."

CR: But there's also something for us, the readers or listeners as the case may be. It's not just you sort of saying bear witness to this. I want to quote you here. You describe it alternately as an album, a love letter to life, an approach book. And this from the intro: "I have no interest in nostalgia, sentimentality, or retirement that most memoirs require. Although I like preachers, I'm not here to preach and tell you what to do." However, there are lessons here, right?

MM: Yeah. Well, look, I knew and I do like to preach and I do like preachers. All right. But I understand I also don't like to be told what to do. There's many stories in the book where I've got not-great advice, but just someone saying like, "Yeah, it's part of the human condition. When I was in trouble or lost." Sometimes that's what we want to hear. Sometimes I have gotten great advice, sometimes... 

My most enjoyable read of the book was my audio read. Because I did get to perform it again. .... I got to give you the nonverbal cues that I think can be quite enjoyable if you'd like to hear me tell a story.

In this book, I share truth bombs, aphorisms, wisdom that I've crossed that maybe landed on me that maybe I am the author of. Maybe they were given to me by other people. Maybe I stole them along the way. Maybe I malaproped the situation and figured my way out of it and wrote that down as well. So, I'm sharing those, but I do understand, this one really fun, fun, fun, sort of prescription, is processes that I had in writing the book.

When do you use the first person "I"? When do you use the second person "you"? And when do you use the royal "we"? Well, the ultimate is the royal “we.” But you have to watch it because it can become platitudinal. It can become sort of I'm speaking for all of us. But I found that the more personal into the first person I went, the deeper into the how do I feel about it? What happened to me? How do I feel about it? 

Actually, the more it embraced the royal “we” and became more objective, became something that more people could go, "Oh, I see myself in that. That's the human condition. Yes, I have my own example. Maybe I don't have that same story that you have, McConaughey, but I've had that kind of red light in my life or that kind of yellow light. And, Oh, here's how I looked at it. That worked or didn't work." Or, "Oh, I see how you looked at it. I'm going to try that." 

So, the more personal I got, the more sort of utilitarian and applicable, I say, that the book got and the stories got. So, to balance that through the book was a really fun challenge for me because, yes, they are personal stories, but they can be subjectively adapted by you, any reader, and utilized daily in your own lives that are separate from mine.

CR: And to your point about sharing things that are tougher or more your red or yellow lights, you didn't share all the glories. You've shared some things that were deeply personal—abuses you suffered as an adolescent, [the fact] that you wanted to be a lawyer but you went a different direction. Just some of the less savory parts. How did that feel to get some of the red lights out there too?

MM: Well, it didn't feel like a purge. It didn't feel like, "I'm going to let the world know this thing about me." It wasn't ever tragic. I didn't ever feel victimized in them. And I think that's part of why I wanted to share them. Maybe there were places where I was a victim, but I'd never felt victimized in those situations. 

So, for me, I wanted to share them because you obviously see that those certain red lights of being molested at 18 or losing my virginity to blackmail, those didn't end up defining my future or the way I go about life. When I talk about my family and I tell the love stories, they're always stories of discipline. And so why is that? 

And I've been thinking about it. Because a lot of the stories I tell about the way my mom and dad loved each other, the way we were disciplined, the corporal punishment or whatever, the belt, or a set of grounding or whatever it was. On paper, sometimes people... Their hand goes over their proverbial mouth, "Oh, my gosh, call child protection services, or you must have been [in] therapy to get through this." 

No, no. The reason that those are love stories to me is that, they were red lights, but they never could pierce the bubble of the green light of love that was around our family. So, I think I write about them as the greatest love stories because, they're where our love seemed to be most challenged, but would never be broken as a family.

So, it heightens the love. I get turned on. I get tingles when I talk about it. I have always told those sort of almost violent stories of discipline as the greatest love stories in my family, with my mom and dad, with how me and my brothers were raised. And I think that that's why, because, as much of a red or yellow light as a reader may think those are, they never had a chance against the green light of love that surrounded the family and surrounded every relationship within our family. And so, I think that's why I'm honored with those stories.

CR: Sort of keeping with the sort of automotive metaphor that's here, the bumper stickers, we have to talk about the bumper stickers. 

MM: Yeah.

CR: So, you collect bumper stickers, and I noticed in the audio throughout, you would say, "Bumper sticker." Was that a literal bumper sticker you were referring to?

MM: Some of them are literal bumper stickers. I mean, I call them that. I don't collect bumper stickers. I mean, my bumpers have a few bumper stickers on them. Some of my trucks or cars in the past have had even more bumper stickers. I just have always loved the informality of a good bumper sticker and what it can tell you about who's behind the wheel. And it can tell you someone's religion. It can tell you if they're a parent, how many kids they have, pets they have, who they're voting for, where their politics lie, where their values lie. 

I love that little impression that a bumper sticker can give and how a person wants to say, "Hey, this is who's behind the wheel of this associated car, automobile, or truck." And they're fun. You read one and if it goes against your grain and you don't agree with its politics, you don't start slamming the horn and pull them over to get in an argument. It's a bumper sticker. You know what I mean? It's sort of this—

CR: Sometimes you slow down and look and see who's behind the wheel though. You got to know.

MM: ...Because you get a picture in your mind. It's also really nice to see how close are we on our stereotypes.

CR: Right. 

MM: Of, well, let me see what's in that car. I got this great story... One of the greatest first bumper stickers I ever read. The story that I didn't include in the book, maybe it'll be in another one. But I'm driving through East Texas, I'm on the way home from work one day and was a little slow, winding little, two-lane blacktop. The speed limit is 45. I come up on this car, that's doing about 25, slowly cruising. And it was a '77 Bonneville. And the back end was leaning, right bumper was almost touching the summit. 

And in the car, you see this guy's driving, hand up on the wheel, left hand on the wheel, leaning over to the middle of the bench seat. And there's these three young kids just climbing all over, pulling on him. You can tell he's balding early. You can tell, his head he was younger, but he was balding early. And then you see these three kids, two of them don't have shirts, one had a baby blue dirty shirt with a rip in it and their scraggly hair. And they're climbing all over, no seat belts. This is before even seat belts I think were a law, but it wouldn't have mattered for this guy.

And you saw this guy was not even trying to say, "Hey, guys, kiddos, settle down." You could tell, that this drive home, he's probably picking them up from school or wherever they were coming home from. And you could tell that he deals with this every day. This is just his kids fighting over him. And it's just part of the deal. And this is why he's balding early. And he had one bumper sticker on the back of his bumper. That was the bumper that was hanging in touch on the road. And it was put on crooked. It said, "My kid beats your honor student's ass." [laughter] Well, that's the perfect bumper sticker for that guy. Yeah. That's yep. Yep. 

We are each writing our own eulogy right now. 

CR: That's where that matched up. The bumper sticker matched. 

MM: He's not raising scholars. He's cashed that check, said this is where we're going. This is who we are, going to go home and try and pay the rent for another week and move on. But that bumper sticker was the image I saw what was in the car first, and then the bumper sticker. I was like, "Ugh, that's the poster for that image that I just saw."

CR: The crooked detail is nice too. Yeah. 

MM: Yeah. Yeah. 

CR: So, in addition to the diaries and the bumper stickers and all of that, you found a piece of paper. I love this moment, a scrap of paper. I don't know if it was on a bar coaster, but I know you've had…of the 10 goals in life written in 1992. Among the things...September of '92, I guess it's important to have that detail, win an Oscar for Best Actor, which of course you went on to do, congratulations. Well, the thing that stuck out to me was, be an “egotistical utilitarian.” I want to know what that is. And this is a triple question. How many of those 10 things do you think you've achieved?

MM: Well, in some form I've happened to achieve all 10 of them, which is what kind of blows my mind because when I wrote that down, I never looked at it again. I left that in that diary and never looked at it again. I didn't consciously have that list in my mind to achieve, but subconsciously obviously I remembered them. Because I've done and I'm still doing all 10 of those. One's very specific, win an Oscar for Best Actor. 

That makes me go, "What were you talking about?" At that point, I hadn't even admitted to my friends or family or myself that I wanted to be an actor. But I look at that and I go, "Well, you damn sure admitted it to your diary."

CR: Yeah. 

MM: I was still in film school. I'd just had my first acting gig in Dazed and Confused, first film. I didn't know if that was going to be just a one-off hobby. But, evidently, I did know I wanted to do that. And I look back and I go, "Wow, I know I wanted to do it really well." To call that out and then to have achieved that, but not even remember that I had written that. And then I found that going through and writing of this book, I never remembered I wrote those down. Going through my diaries I found that list. 

So I've found that list since I won an Oscar, since I've done those other things on the list, which is a wild exercise I bet going, "Well, evidently, subconsciously, you remembered it all. And it was written inside your lineage, Matthew, because you went off and, in some form, you achieved all of them, even though you never consciously looked back at them or tried to go to and make them happen consciously."

But egotistical utilitarian is this: I remember I wrote a long paper, an essay in college. And it is a little what I was saying earlier. The more personal I got in the book, the more “I” I got, the more ego I looked into me. The more selfish I got, the more selfless the message became. So where do the I meet the we, the egotistical utilitarian? Where's that place where, what we want is what we need, what we need is what we want? 

Where's that place…where we look as good as we feel? And we feel as good as we look. Where is that place where we understand the responsibility and freedom and the freedom of responsibility? That place right there is the place I call the honey hole, that's the egotistical utilitarian. That is, where's the place where we can make choices in our daily lives that are the best for us?

Also, there are also, the choice has the best for the most amount of people. That's the egotistical utilitarian. I mean, that's what the great prophets have. When we are selfless we actually are more, we realize... Again, we realize that we are more selfish when we're selfless. I've been working on for decades [a] redefinition of the word "selfish," because I'm a fan of the word. 

It's usually thrown down as like a very hedonistic thing that is just for you. And I would call those short-term choices that give us short-term gain, I would not call that being selfish. I'd call it being an actually unselfish. A choice…delayed gratification comes up in my theories of life in the book. The selfish choice is the one that pays you back for the longer amount of time with real value, the long money. So, the choices we can make today that we may let it right now, but if we regret it tomorrow morning, wasn't really a selfish choice?

CR: Because you're not benefiting as much as you need.

MM: Is it more selfish to make the choice today that tomorrow you go, "Yeah, good move." And the next day, and the next day, you go, "Yeah." Isn't it more selfish choice to make choices in life where we can go out into the world and not have to look over our shoulder to see if someone's there, who we lied, cheated, or stole from? What's more selfish? 

I think it is more selfish to make the choices that you don't have to do that, so then you can go forward in life, much more present and move freely. You're teeing yourself up for living green lights in your future. That's a more selfish choice to me. So that's my redefinition of that and that's who the egotistical utilitarian is.

CR: Thank you. I like that. So, your voice, as I mentioned at the top, it's basically a persona unto itself at this point. And I'm wondering had you listened to... You've done a lot of voice work, obviously. We've mentioned the commercials, you've done animated stuff and sing. So, in creating this, though, how did voicing it compare to writing it? Was one easier than the other?

MM: Well, so the first process, let me go back and refer to the first process. I've told a lot of these stories around the proverbial campfire. I've told these stories at dinner parties, etcetera. I've performed them and you're getting my innuendo, you're getting my raised eyebrow, you can tell I'm teeing up the punch lines coming, or you can feel the humanity coming out and how I'm talking about somebody. Although the facts I'm giving you, maybe scary, like stories of my family and how they loved each other. 

But the way I'm telling it, you're going, "Oh my gosh, I see how much love you have, how much humanity you give these people." Now we get to the written word. I'm going to go write the book. Well, I think that initially, "Oh, why don't I just record myself telling the best version of that story and then transcribe that story to the page. And that'll be the best version written." Negatory. No, it's not.

CR: It didn’t work.

MM: It's too much. No, it's too much. It's too long. I found that I had to go back and the written stories are about 30 percent shorter than my performed story. The written word made me really get disciplined on being specific with the right word at the right time. The one that sums up that situation, because the written word doesn't give you this intonation. It doesn't give you that pause. 

CR: You have to pick the word.

MM: You have the ellipsis, but boy, you can also overdo the ellipses. If you try to write it like the told story, all of a sudden you have all these things in quotes, all these things in, what do you call it? The slanted word, italics. Things, italics, parenthesized, and you're trying, and you're going, "No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not flowing." So, that was the first challenge to understand that no, the written word, the written story and its best version is different and shorter than the performed version. 

But then when I got to go perform the book, which I basically read what was on the page. I did it all pretty much in kind of one take. It was fun. It was easy. Actually, my most enjoyable read of the book was my audio read. Because I did get to perform it again. I got to play the voices. I got to give you some of the intonation. I got to give you the nonverbal cues that I think can be quite enjoyable if you'd like to hear me tell a story. And I got to give the little [makes a sound] here and there.

So, in my audible, I gave music to the stories, through my telling. And it was really fun. And I really enjoyed the book and it went by like that. When I read the book on page without the audible I'm a slow reader. It felt like it was a good book, but it's a long book. But when I performed it “audioally,” it just [zippp sound]…just rip through it. And I was like, "Oh, this is a luck. This is a song." And I really enjoyed it. It was my most enjoyable read of the book because I was reading it out loud.

CR: There are so many great turns of phrase in here, obviously. And the fact now you've mentioned that they’re stories you've told before, it comes through that you're very familiar and you've been very deliberate in the words you chose to describe various things. I think this is your words. I didn't transcribe it exactly. But you said, "The book is sort of a résumé on its way to becoming a eulogy"? 

MM: Yes. 

CR: So, that's wonderful. I think we all should have that be how we live our lives, but…

MM: Our life is the résumé. 

CR: ...Yeah.

MM: We're in the résumé right now. 

CR: Yeah. 

MM: We're going to die. 

CR: Yeah. 

MM: There will be eulogy. Our story will introduce us for the rest of time after we're gone. So, what I'm saying is, as I write about that the sole objective begins with the end in sight. I started reading and writing this book, started… probably part of the reason I started writing. It was like an "Oh, well, let's jump forward to the eulogy." What would that be? That's a great question to ask ourselves. What's my eulogy going to be? 

And it was a very exciting idea to me. It didn't make me go like, "Oh, no, no, I can't believe." Well, we're all going to die. Let's just admit it and think about, "Hey, how cool could your eulogy be? Hey, how cool the story can that be?" Well, who's writing it? We are, right now.

CR: There's the “we.” We. 

MM: Yeah. We are each writing it, our own eulogy right now. 

CR: Yeah.

MM: And so, that led me into things, and we talk to the children about it. With online comments people put. "Remember those comments are going to outlive you."

CR: They're forever.

MM: Those comments will be in your eulogy. They're forever. You're going to be gone. They'll still be around. So, think about it with the daily choices we make. We're writing our résumé on the way to our eulogy right now, each one of us individually. 

CR: So, of all the things in here, if there was maybe of your 10 goals of—we talked about egotistical utilitarian—if you had to have a very abbreviated eulogy, is there... If somebody was going to say in 10 words, this is who Matthew McConaughey is. Well, of all the things that you've done, is there one that you say that was him?

MM: Well, I'm most alive as a father. I write in the book. I mean, it's the only thing I ever knew I wanted it to be. I remember at eight years old, and my dad was big on sirs, ma'ams, and pleases and thank you. And I remember on the sirs, when he introduced me to his friends, "You stand there, you look up to him, you give him a firm handshake and you look them in the eye and you say, 'Yes, sir. Nice to meet you, sir.'" 

And I remember at eight years old, after I'd been doing that for years, having this sort of realization that came over my eight-year-old mind that, I know I'm saying "sir" as a matter of respect, but the consistency of everyone I said "sir" to was, they all had children. And I was like, "Oh, it's because they're fathers. Oh, that's it. Oh, that's when you made it, when you become a father." 

And I remember that being something like… That's the big deal in life as a young man, become a father, then you've made it. So, that's where that came from at eight years old. I knew it and have always known it and still know it, that's something that I ever have known that I wanted to be. So that would precede anything that has come with my fame or an Oscar or something like that. But that would be primary.

CR: Thank you for saying that because that's your dedication…to the one thing I knew I wanted to be...

MM: The “one thing I ever knew I wanted to be and family.”

CR: Yeah. And so, that's to being a father is the one. Yeah, that's great. I was just noticing that we've managed to have this whole conversation and ignore some pretty major elephants in the room, which we can continue to ignore. Maybe we'll cut it out, but I do wonder how the pandemic changed your craft or has changed you, would this book have been the same written in some other time? 

MM: Yeah. The meat of the book was basically written before the pandemic. I've continued doing some editing during the pandemic, but the book was basically written. And then I did go back after the pandemic and the culture revolution and add some paragraphs at the end of the book, because I felt like in these times it needs that context. I need to at least say, bid adieu in the book as I'm going out towards the end of the book and bring up the context at the times. 

...As you see in reading the book, I enjoy my solitude or try to, or at least take a lot of time. I've taken a lot of time on my own, in my past. So, I'm adaptable. Also, it has to do with my job. With my job, I travel the world, I go play a character. That's my singular focus. And I like a singular focus. So the adaptation to be quarantined just on that level, just to be quarantined on my own house or own property, which we are doing, that part was not hard for me. I've had to share a lot of how I've gotten comfortable with that with  my family.

We brought in my mother, who's 88 years old. She's been with us for seven months. At 88, you've got a routine, older people have a certain routine, you throw them at that routine, it can be tough. It can be a little clumsy and it was for a while, but she's now rolling. Had to do it with the kids. "What's going on?" They don't understand what's going on. "Why can't I go see my friends? Why can't I go back to school?" 

So, we've been very honest about why, they understand it. We've engaged with them about our decisions we're making to quarantine as a family and why. Mainly, because we have an 88-year-old, their grandmother with susceptible pulmonary challenges. So, that's the highest risk people out there right now, and we're going to do our best to not bump into this thing called COVID. So, the family understands that we're taking one for the team. They're understanding that, look, "This isn't going to go on forever. We're never going back to how it was, but this isn't going to go on forever." 

And how can we make the best of what we've got right now? And look, I sit in a privileged position. I've accumulated enough wealth to have my pantry full. You know what I mean? 

Hopefully there's some nudges and tools and things I've heard along the way in the book that can help others find their frequency and create green lights in their own life and others' lives.

MM: And the fridge in the garage. I don't have to work today to pay my rent tomorrow. There's a lot of people that do. So, I've continued writing, working on other stuff. I am writing my diaries, I'm writing about this process of going on tour, talking about this book. I wrote a lot about the process of the writing of the book, which I find really wildly interesting. 

I'm also writing about, what is this process of sharing it? How is it translating? To the "we." How are you or anyone else, what are you getting from it? I'm taking notes on, what does somebody specifically say that they got from the book that they loved?

CR: Right.

MM: Some people are like, "No, this actually is one thing you said is helping me in my life." Or, "Oh, this is a similar thing [that] happened to me. I didn't know. I thought I was the only one. And reading your book. I said, 'Oh, I wasn't the only one.'" So, I'm writing down what is translating to people. 

CR: That's great. 

MM: And that's fun.

CR: And I think this kind of book is appropriate for right now because it is somewhat storytelling, but it's also, there are those nuggets that we can take away. And I think people need some of that guidance that they might not have previously, or didn't know they needed before. We're a little more raw and open now.

MM: We're in a very distrustful time, and you start not trusting others, you end up not trusting yourself. You're not sure what to believe in, your social contracts are broken with the rest of humanity, then they start to break with ourselves and then that goes back and forth. And then you don't trust yourself. Then you don't trust others. Then you'd break the social contract with yourself. Then you don't believe in it with others.

And so, we've got to find a frequency again, and hopefully there's some nudges and tools and things I've heard along the way in the book that can help others find their frequency and create green lights in their own life and others' lives. So we can all get lit green.

CR: That's the message. Right? Matthew McConaughey, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today about your book, Greenlights, which of course you've voiced. I really appreciate it. And I love the book.

MM: You are welcome. And I enjoyed the talk.

CR: Thank you. Bye-bye. 

MM: Bye-bye.