ReThinking: Matthew McConaughey on avoiding cynicism and finding gratitude

0:00I had this three and a half hour monologue with Carl Sagan. and when he was done and talking about where we are in the universe where the earth is where our galaxy is where this universe we're in there's multiple universes and a black hole in the middle and basically it's expanding just as a balloon does as the universe expands and our galaxy is right here at the top left corner of the number five on a clock and right he got to the end and I was overwhelmed and in myself I was like therefore God exists and before I could say it he goes and therefore God doesn't exist. I went, wow. He and I laughed our ass off.

0:41It was beautiful. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

1:02You probably know Matthew McConaughey from one of his many acting roles. I love his space movies Contact and Interstellar. Or the cult classic Dazed and Confused. Or Dallas Buyers Club, where he won an Academy Award. But Matthew is also an entrepreneur, philanthropist, teacher, and prolific writer. And he just published his second book, Poems and Prayers, which was built on decades of his journal entries, poems, and life lessons learned. I say what I believe I should, I do what I believe I would, I act as though I believe I could. We talked about optimism and cynicism, about chasing dreams and falling short of them, about finding gratitude, and because I couldn't resist, his take on all right, all right, all right.

1:50Matthew McConaughey, welcome to Rethinking. Hey, what are we thinking about? I think that's up to you. Belief, I hope. I think it's in short supply. I believe we need to think more about it, pursue more of it, which is part of the reason I really wrote the book. I found myself falling into a little more doubt than I was comfortable with in myself, God, others. And I also started to notice I was becoming a bit cynical. And I've already said, buddy, if that disease of cynicism comes on, You stave that son of a bitch off. You can go be a skeptic, but don't go into that little disease of cynicism.

2:27It's an early death, buddy. And I felt it coming on, and I wasn't ready to wave the white flag and say, oh, so this is just kind of how it is. So, belief. Wow. Okay, first of all, I'm sorry. Matthew McConaughey, you're the ultimate avatar of confidence. You experience self-doubt? Oh, yeah. Yeah. When? Why? Well, look, doubt comes from me when there's a gap between my aspirations for myself, for what I want or who I'm trying to be and want to be, and who I actually am. And I have doubts of feeling like a fraud. I have doubts because I don't believe I'm meeting the mark, which is actually the definition of sin.

3:08Sin comes from archery. It's to miss the mark, to miss the aim, to aim wrong. And to hear it in those practical engineering utility, utilitarian senses, just takes the onus of the agnostic side of me of going, oh, well, it's so religious. No, it's very practical. I'm picturing you holding a bow, trying to shoot an arrow, and missing a bullseye. When did that happen recently? I mean, yesterday. I'm getting ready to head ahead out on this tour with the book. I'm going to be away from my kids for a while. And looking at the calendar, wait, how many days can we minimize? I'm not away. And I had work to do yesterday, and I'm running out of days to spend with them now before I hit the road.

3:54And I'm being overly self-indulgent to do the personal work I think I need to do. While my kids are in the house, I'm like, ah, you're missing the mark, man. Shut the book, McConaughey. Get in there with the kiddos. That was yesterday. Talk to me a little bit about what you do in those moments, because you're not going to cancel the book tour. No, not going to cancel it, no. So what I do is I try to front load. I try to get ahead. I try to get into a really good spot with family, with my wife. Thankfully, my wife's coming with me on the tour. But with family and the kiddos can catch up on really what's going on with them.

4:30So we're solid. We're going to leave on solid space with our relationship with each other, where they are in their life, where I am with mine, them understanding where I'm going and why. So, you know, when you're solid like that, you're not racing against time as much. You kind of go through the day and you go, oh, I'm under the same sun as my dad. And it makes it easier when I return home, we'll be closer to just picking up where we left off rather than, okay, we got to do something really special together and meaningful to catch up. And we have to do that sometimes, but no one, I think, ideally likes to do that.

5:06So that's how I deal with it. And I also understand that as much as I revere fatherhood, they know and understand now in the age of age that papaya has to go off and create and do work and try to get what he wants and conquer things and et cetera. And I think that's also a good thing for my children to see. It's a really great antidote to the guilt of working is to remember, hey, this is part of being a role model for my kids. Yeah. And I don't think we can overlook that. So let's talk about the hopeful skepticism that you mentioned earlier. And it's so strange for me to hear you say that you fell to any cynicism because you just exude optimism.

5:50Your energy leaps out of every room. I'm glad to hear that. And I am an eternal optimist. But, or and, skepticism, discernment, being discriminant with your choices and judgment. That's wise things. Cynicism is looking around at reality, the evidence, and the facts. Things we're all susceptible to, the news feeds, the whatever. And you're going, do we have a compass? Doesn't seem like we have an expected and agreed upon compass here. So cynicism came from me going, maybe that's just how it is. Maybe that's as good as it is. And yeah, we know the cynic, man. They're clever. They get the laugh at the party.

6:37It's academic. It's, wow, that's good. But you also don't believe. They live in doubt of so much, if not everything. And I think that's an early death. As I was reading and as I'm hearing you now talk about cynicism, I was thinking about the psychology research on this cynical genius illusion where people assume that cynicism is a sign of intelligence. And you alluded to that. You said it's clever. But it actually turns out to be a defense mechanism against being exploited. Yeah. So we've got in this particular paper data from almost 200 ,000 adults across 30 countries. People who have poor reasoning skills are more likely to see the worst in human nature, to assume that people are selfish and untrustworthy.

7:22And that's how they protect themselves from the people who are, but they overgeneralize it. Okay. It's protection. Exactly. And so I'm curious, knowing that, what were you guarding yourself against as the cynicism was creeping in? Guarding myself against... Risk, curiosity, romance, mentorship, real, fulfilled love, trust. Probably protecting my heart as much as my head. Yeah. Do you have a view on how to self-protect without getting cynical? Because I think what the cynic does is they assume the worst in others. And therefore, they end up avoiding the worst. But they also miss out on all the upside.

8:07and all the good that people are capable of. Yes. Look, the skeptical side gives us a compass and an identity, a discernment, and a judgment of, oh, I prefer this over that. I'd like to hang out with these people over those. But as you still make a choice, skepticism still gives you the chance to make the right and more positive choice, but you believe in it. Cynicism doesn't allow for the belief. I love the sharp distinction you make between skepticism and cynicism, because I think a lot of people, they don't see that discerning is different from disbelieving and that you can have a high bar for what you believe while still being open to believing.

8:47Yeah. And that's where the optimism comes in. There's more than one way to be right. I mean, to be curious, to still go, well, I don't know. I mean, that's what belief is. That's what faith is. I don't know God exists. I don't know there's a heaven. I do know and believe that heaven or not, pursuing and believing in something and chasing it makes this life better while we're here. I wonder how far that goes. Like, what was it like when you won the Academy Award? Right. Well, that exceeded, because I didn't even have an imagination. All I was, I was in there just going like, I looked at all the names.

9:28I was like, my name's the only one that starts with M. So if you hear, mm, they called your name. and I heard, mm, all right? That's a situation where I didn't have a higher expectation. I, and I mean this in the most respectful way, I've never done a performance or been a part of a movie that met my expectation. And I've been a part of some good ones. And I think it's safe to say I've given some good performances. I'm not saying I look back and go, oh, if I could have gone back and done these scenes differently. I'm not saying that, but I look at it, I'm going like, boy, the idea that I had about what I could do or what the film could be was so divine.

10:05And that's the reason I did it. And it comes in and maybe it didn't reach divinity, but it moved. It was art. It was true. It was omnipresent. It touched mythology, past and future and rose. Those are all awesome things that I don't think I would have experienced if I wouldn't have gone in and imagined divinity at the outset. the challenge is that moment when reality comes in and you meet its measure and you see it came in below and the overcompensation problem is then we go oh man no no it's that moment how quickly can we go okay a minus wow pretty damn good it didn't ace it you know what i mean it didn't meet the magic of divinity, but I was having something.

11:01That's the gap where sometimes I get hung up on that. We're thinking, no, no, no, no, no. How did that not meet the mark of divinity that I was going for? You can hang on to that too long and bang your head against a wall and go, no, no, no, you gotta come back. There was a time to come back to reality and realize that it wouldn't have been what it was. It wouldn't have reached the heights that it did had you not been chasing the divine. Am I hearing you right that the Oscar itself exceeded your expectations, but you were disappointed in aspects of your performance? Not disappointed. No, I'm not saying disappointed.

11:38I want to be clear on that. I thought Dallas Buyers Club, I thought Jean-Marc Vallée did an incredible job directing that movie. I thought performances across the board were great. Everything. I didn't think there was a false moment in it. I thought my performance was excellent work. Wouldn't change a thing. it was still, I think, a great piece of art. I think it came alive. I think it felt relevant. I think it felt urgent. A massive amount of emotions going by just viewing it. Many people did. It became a mortal thing, though, a mortal piece of art. And it is still in a capsule. and it's there for all time, but I don't think it was divine.

12:24I don't think it became, well, a movement, a life, a way of life for humanity. So the gap is not so much between your effort and your performance. It's between your performance and the potential for impact. Well, not a measurable impact. Like, well, how's the box office? I'm not, well, did it win the Academy? I'm not measuring on that. Those are mortal measurements. I'm measuring off of my idea of what it could be is alive and effervescent and, as I said, deitific, and it's an immortal measurement, a mythological measurement. And that's, I think, part of where my optimism comes from, a belief in the potential, the possibility.

13:10Ooh, stuff I don't even know but believe in. It could be. Ooh, it smells like it. It feels like it. Ah, what if? art, people, myself, God, a belief in that. And belief is very different than hope. Hope is like, doesn't have a pathway, you know? Doesn't have an engine behind it. If you gotta get what you hope for, the dream comes true that you were hoping for, some form or fashion you got lucky or fortunate, right? But if this dream comes true that you believe in or you get to that destination, that's because you saw it. you believed in it and you made one step at a time to get that. That old term, dream it, you can do it.

13:53Oh, geez, I don't like that. I'm like, don't tell people that. You want a horrible thing to tell people. Dream it, you can do it. What? No, no, no, no, don't tell someone that, man. A lot more than that. Yeah, at least tell him that's the first of many steps. Yeah, at least, please, yes. Now, okay, so you're kind of laying out this paradox for us that on the one hand, high aspiration, drive you to excellence. On the other hand, high expectations can drive you to misery. And we want the best of both worlds. The way I've always thought about this is to say, I want to keep my aspirations high, but my expectations modest.

14:31So I go into a project with two goals. I have an ideal outcome that would be best case scenario. And then I have a minimum acceptable outcome where I can say, yeah, that was good enough. It wasn't as great as it could have been, but I'm not going to be disappointed if I get there. How does that land for you? Do you do the same thing? It lands really well. And I'm getting better at myself doing a form of that of, look, the aspirations are high. I'm firing out of bed every morning, man. I'm doing everything. I'm covering on my bases. I'm turned on, man. Let's make sure, whether you call it preparation, whatever it's going to be.

15:03And then as soon as I step away, then I go, doesn't matter. Let's see what happens, man. I mean, does it feel better if it does well? Yes. Do you wonder if it doesn't do well, is there something I could have done? Could I rearrange? Is it not that I go about that? Yes. But I'm trying to get much better at going, it lies where it lives. And I've also learned and can give myself a little amnesty in that sometimes things pop up and live their greatest life years down the road. You know, dazing, confused. No one went and saw that when it came out. It's a cult classic, you know? Sometimes little movies pop up.

15:47Talk about films. Interstellar did really well in the box office, but boy, it had a little 10-year resurgence. Like, it became like a new movie that everyone wanted to see for the fourth time. You know, sometimes art pops up later on, and you find something's found. An album, music is found, a book is found that all of a sudden goes, This is really relevant. Sometimes it's just the right timing. Sometimes it's the wrong timing. Sometimes the tornado or the hurricane came in last night and you declared this morning and it took your front page, bro. I think about this all the time. I think about all the artists who didn't even live to see their success.

16:25And what a tragedy it is for somebody to say, well, my book only sold a million copies. You're lucky you got to see any of those sold. You're right. Okay, so I want to ask you then, Do you ever look back at your past work and feel embarrassed by it? Well, not in film. No, like I'll sit down and have a hoot and holler at Texas Chainsaw Massacre Next Generation right now. It's fun, man. I got a mechanical leg. It's hilarious. And I was never embarrassed about that. Although the reason I bring that up is when that was being released after I had done A Time to Kill, I did have people around me going, oh, you don't want this out right now.

17:04And even then I was like, why not? Because it's not serious enough art? Yeah. The choice is like, no, that's part of the living resume. I was quite embarrassed to write green lights. I had this treasure chest full of journals. And I mean, I could go look over and peek at something and go, oh, geez.

17:28Uncomfortable. Shame. Guilt. And I went to Camilla, my wife, and I'm like, hey, I got this trunk full of all these journals. I think there's some good stuff in it. You know, when I die, will you mind going through that and see if it's worth putting out? And she goes, you do it. You know? She goes, I'm not doing that. Don't put that on me. And then she got me, helped me to load up the back of the truck with my steaks and my journals and water and tequila and head off to the desert for two weeks alone. You know, I went off. And trust me, The first eight days of sitting there looking, reading journals, stuff about me, it was hard, bro.

18:07I was going, are you kidding me? Oh, who the fuck did you think you were? You egotistical little prick. I can't believe you did that. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Trying to shake guilt and shame and embarrassment. But after about eight days, those same stories I started to giggle at.

18:29And I started to go, well, at least you tried. you know or or those stories where i was embarrassed about would be followed up with me eating shit or me me me me falling on my face eating crow and i would be like oh actually if you weren't the cocky little shit mr know-it-all you thought you were you wouldn't have put yourself in a position to get humiliated mcconaughey oh okay that's cool then i started to go oh there's a rhythm here these guffaws these things where you did not meet your expectation oh okay good Yeah, it's part of life. Everyone does that. Don't edit that part out. It's so fun to hear you narrate that arc of learning to laugh at yourself.

19:10Because I think so many people look back at their past mistakes and they're embarrassed by them. And they're over-identifying with their past self. As opposed to saying, look, the stupid things I did in the past, those are not a mark that I'm incompetent. They're actually a symbol that I've grown. and now I can see those limitations and realize that I've transcended them. Yes. And then to carry on and go, I hope I have the courage to do some stupid shit in the future. I hope I don't now say, oh, that's enough to learn. I've got my cozy, secure walls now. Don't take any chances. Maintain. And I'm in a time now where I'm like going, Maybe you need to scoot some things off the desk.

19:56Maybe you need to put out a couple of campfires and double up and lean into these ones that mean the most to you.

20:06So this reminds me of something you wrote that stopped me in my tracks when I was reading the book. You wrote, the negative is singular, the positives are plural. Please sell them as such. That was so interesting to me because in psychology, we see the opposite. People are so good at pluralizing the negative. One way that jumped to mind right away is if you look at just the vocabulary the average person has for negative emotions, the list is a mile long. There are all these nuances and ways of capturing different kinds of unpleasantness. On the positive emotion side, people are like love, joy, maybe amusement, serenity.

20:44I'm running out of terms pretty quickly here. So talk to me about reversing that. Well, for starters, it's more fun. Compounding assets. Why not try and be great at what we're good at instead of working so hard to be better at what we suck at? Speak of the negative in the past tense and you will block its prophecy in the future. In there is an internal optimism, but I think it's more than that. I think it's internal pragmatism. I think it's survival. It's, I'm gonna go back to belief. We got good wolves and bad wolves, man. Both are hungry. Which one are we feeding? Feed you a good wolf. And more goodness will come.

21:25More value will come to your life. You will see more value in others. And in seeing that in others, they, many times more than we give credit for, will respond in kind. It's also how we wallow in crisis. Don't give the crisis credit. It's looking for credit. It wants you to wallow. It loves company. Misery loves company. is a very true statement. We somehow feel like, oh, what is it about when we like to feel like the victim, when we want the victimhood? What is that? And we need to watch that and catch ourself and go, that's not feeding me. That's how you make the goodness plural, the positives plural, and the negatives singular.

22:07Block the negatives path to prophecy. Ask yourself who or what you die for. Start there. Then you're gonna find yourself living more for what you believe in, and that's going to make positives plural. It's a selfish act, ultimately, I believe. Partially, at least. The ultimate selfish act, I believe, is also the most selfless act. There's a place where what is best for us is what's best for the most amount of people. The egotistical utilitarian, I call it. It was a paper on it in college, I remember.

22:38Egotistical egalitarian, I love it. Egotistical utilitarian, yeah. So I guess something else that I was curious about around making the positives plural. You've talked a lot about and you write a lot about gratitude. Let me read you two lines of yours that particularly struck me. First one was, you said, the thanks you expect will hold you entitled, but the gratitude you give will breed freedom. Yeah. I've run into so many challenges with people who give with the expectation of gratitude coming back to them and then feel slighted or disappointed. You obviously have an antidote to that. Talk to me about that.

23:21Well, we all know it. We don't necessarily do it. I know it. I don't necessarily do it all the time either. The unconditional gift, the unconditional giving, the unconditional gratitude, it ties a bit into high belief, but then realistic expectations. The giving has to be one way. And if you're playing quid pro quo about, oh, I got to get the same back. Now we're competing. Now we're playing tit for tat. We've seen relationships blow up because of that shit. We've seen divorces over that stuff. I've lost girlfriends over that stuff because we were competing. You know, tit for tat, tit for tat, uh-uh.

23:58Not a way to go. And it doesn't allow for grace either. What's tricky about it is, you know, in some ways gratitude is feedback that you made the difference you were hoping to. And so when it doesn't come, in a way that's somebody telling you, you missed the mark. Okay. That goes to the other thing that you captured. So you said that you like to begin your prayers with gratitude. Yeah. Is that a daily habit for you? Yeah. It came from just a certain practice of before meals, we went around, hey, say your thank yous. And everyone says thanks. And we still practice it a lot today. And it's wonderful to have friends over.

24:35Again, some of my friends, non-believers. No one has any trouble going, hey, thank you for this. They may not preclude it with dear God, but it really becomes a healthy thing. And if you try it out there, it at least makes the food taste better. It really does. Gratitude, I think, is a great place to start. Most of us can find something that we're thankful for. I was surprised when I first read some research showing that people who were randomly assigned to make gratitude lists weekly got more of a happiness boost than those who did it daily. And it seemed like for the daily people, they were either running out of meaningful things to be grateful for, or it just became a chore as opposed to something you paused and really marked the moment with.

25:22How do you think about that? I'm betting you it's the second, and I've done that before too. When all of a sudden, you know, the prayer becomes a mantra. There's this food on the table, good Lord, peace, all the best, Amen. What? What'd you say? Do you even know what you said? But I think it's because it just becomes a chore and a habit that doesn't have the thought or originality behind it each time. And that can take a moment, you know? And we also don't, we always don't make that moment. I always don't make that moment. But it does mean a lot more when I do make that moment. Or I'll tell you this great story.

25:56We had this foundation, Camilla and I, Just Keep Living Foundation. And after school, the curriculum, we did this gratitude circle. And they're high school kids. So I noticed that to sit around in a circle out loud and say something you're thankful for ain't cool. Right? So everyone's just like, thank you for the Just Keep Living program. And the next person goes, thank you for the Just Keep Living program. And it went like that. And I was like, tell them, come on. I was like, this ain't good. This ain't working. And so I remember we went on Halloween, right before Halloween one time. And I was like, I got to loosen this gang up.

26:26And it got to me. And I was like, I said, I'm going to start this song. I said, I'm thankful for the kiss I got from my wife this morning with tongue. And they were like, ooh, yeah. Like, oh, man. All of a sudden, they opened up and they started going, man, I'm thankful it's Halloween because I'm going to get some candy. All this fun stuff. Cut to two weeks later, they're sharing things like that my grandmother got out of the hospital, that my dad got a job, that my sister graduated. Oh, but it unlocked. The humor unlocked everyone to go, oh, I don't have to be shy and precious about this. And, you know, I'm big on humor.

27:05And I think it unties a lot more knots than it binds. And I don't think we give humor enough credit as a means to find gratitude. I hear the humor in it. I also hear a little vulnerability goes a long way. That you're not too cool to appreciate a kiss from your wife. Right. So I was struck by something that you wrote in Greenlights that I think is echoed now in poems and prayers. You wrote, I never wrote things down to remember. I always wrote things down so I could forget. And now you're publishing four decades worth of poems and journal entries that you wrote down to forget. Why? Because I need to remember.

27:47More. or this writing of this book and this tour I'm doing is definitely for me. This is helping pull me out of my own doubt. So through this process, hopefully I'm going to have and will strengthen my own belief and faith in myself and others. Me as a believer in God, I want that. And to have this conversation with others like this, I'm so damn excited about that. And am I going to connect with myself in new ways along the way? I already am. This is in part your therapy then. Sure. And your confessional, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Put them all in there.

28:33Okay, I want to do a lightning round. What is the worst career advice you've gotten? It's a lot of people that see acting and a lot of actors that believe that when we do our craft well, we are just supposed to go inhabit another. But that's only half the journey. It's about seeing yourself in them, the common humanity, and then coming back because when we perform, it's always, always extremely personal and should be and is. All right. You've been in two epic space movies, Contact and Interstellar. Yeah. How did your view of outer space change from starring in those two movies? it was like, oh, God's backyard's bigger than I thought.

29:19And that's me growing up, small town. I had a principal who told me at kindergarten that that cloud in the sky was as big as the world. And so when I said, if that's as big as the world, then I can see the outskirts of it. It's so far away. I'm not even going to think about outer space. I'm just going to look down and deal with the ground. And so I didn't dream. I just learned to deal. Then, of course, you grow older and you get on the first few flights and all of a sudden your plane's in the middle of that cloud. And all of a sudden my idea of the backyard and how you can look up and how space travel and possible life out there, wow, that would be awesome if there was.

29:54And yes, that's an explorative place. But before then I was always like, nope, I'm a sailor before an astronaut. Don't even talk to me about being an astronaut. It's too far off to deal with, but I'm much more of an astronaut's mind now. Wow. How do you really feel when people shout, all right, all right, all right at you? Pretty damn good. And here's why. Dude, I walked on the set of Days Confused on Thursday night in the summer of 1992. And there were three lines written in that script for my character. And I wasn't supposed to work that night. I was just doing a hair and makeup test. And Richard Linklater comes up and circles me and is like, yeah, right on.

30:29Cool. All right, this is Wooderson. Yeah. And I go, all right, man. He approves. And I go to say goodbye. And he goes, hey, hang on a minute. I got this, you know, this girl Marissa Rabisi is playing the redheaded intellectual over here. And she's got her kind of nerdy friends in the car. You think Wooderson would maybe go pick her up? I'm like, yeah, man, Wooderson likes all kinds of chicks. Boom. Next thing you know, I'm in the car getting a lot of there, Mike. We go up. Opening of that scene, I say those three words. And they were three affirmations of what my character did have. He had his car.

31:01He had rock and roll. And he had a doobie, the Slater. and he was going to get the fourth thing that he liked, which was going to pick up the redhead intellectual. So in my mind, I was like, oh, I got three out of four. Going to get the fourth. All right, all right, all right. First three words I ever said on camera. And if you see the film, it's not even on camera. It's a wide shot above. First three words I ever said. And look, Adam, I didn't know if that was going to be this little hobby one-off thing I did one summer for a week in Austin and never did it again. And it turned out to be a career.

31:35And that's the first few words I said, and they precede me to this day? I ain't arrogant enough to not enjoy that. That's awesome. I love your perspective on that. Never gets old. Nah. What is something you've rethought or changed your mind about lately? My children. I talked to a friend of mine, Bart Nags, who's successfully raised three daughters. and as my kids are becoming teenagers, he goes, McConaughey, just do whatever you can to maintain access to them. So before that, if they shared something, I would interrupt and go, hey, hey, hey, you shouldn't be doing that. I would make judgment and then speak it.

32:24So we do that. Our kids will start to not share things with us. to hold my tongue when they're saying something and sharing something that maybe they shouldn't do to hold my tongue and just listen, go, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, and withhold judgment and then talk about it. And then maybe at the end, cast, well, you know, if you do that, this could happen. It's helped us maintain access. I think that's powerful. Yeah. Okay, so you wrote in the book, you said, I'm not quite sure how to do it wrong, but pretty damn sure I didn't do it right. What's that about? Oh, geez, what's that not about? It's just a flip on the, you know, you learn how to do it right by doing things wrong.

33:06It's just a little amnesty that we can have with ourselves for kind of fucking something up. You know what I mean? I've had those moments a lot. It made me smile when I read that. It reminded me of when we were on stage in Austin a few months ago. Yeah. And at the very end, this thought popped into my head, and I think I thanked you for making sure we don't get it all wrong, all wrong, all wrong.

33:30And somebody came up to me afterward and said, congratulations, that was a solid dad joke. That's a pretty good dad joke, man. I wanted it to be a real joke. I mean, if you just said, all right, all right, all right, might have got to laugh, but then it'd been like, well, why'd you say that? The author's sitting right next to you, Adam. But you flipped it. You made a show. Don't let me make sure we don't get it all wrong, all wrong, all wrong. I bought it. I purchased. Well, this has been such a blast. Oh, thanks, Adam. Appreciate it.

34:27and Leighton Brown.

34:32I don't know that if you come over, you're not going to steal a coaster? That would be a very unambitious thief. I'm looking around. There's not much in here yet.