Name: Matthew McConaughey | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #625
Uploaded: 2025-11-20T01:46:48.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Matthew McConaughey | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #625' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-11-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Matthew McConaughey | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #625' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-11-20. Transcript available.

Matthew McConaughey | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #625

Today's guest is a legendary actor, author, thought leader, just a real vibe
curator.
He has a new book out called Poems and Prayers.
We had a great time down here in Austin getting to know each other.
Today's guest is Mr. Matthew McConaughey.
Glad to be here.
Yeah, thank you so much, Matthew. Nice to meet you, man.
You too, bud. Where are you from?
I'm from Louisiana.
Which part?
I'm from Covington, Louisiana, down there about 40 miles north of New Orleans.
Okay. I love Louisiana, where the weeds grow a little taller and the chassis is
just a touch looser.
But my family, my dad's mother, the Maitlands, had a school in Morgan City.
So we would go to Morgan City every year for the Shrimp Festival.
My dad grew up later, lived in a city park outside of New Orleans.
And my best friend, who's since passed away, was from Zachary, Louisiana.
And I was raised in East Texas, so that Louisiana humidity bleeds over a little
bit over the border there, you know?
Oh, yeah. It's like somebody just exhaling a big, hit a cigarette smoke over
there.
We used to hit Hirsch Coliseum, man, because you could drink at 18 and get over
there for, my first concert was RAT.
Yeah.
Remember them?
R-A-T-T?
R-A-T-T, man.
Yeah, dude.
Laying down, round and round.
Yeah.
And I'd go to WWE matches over there.
Bro, you were in the best place for wrestling.
Yeah.
I got kicked out of Hirsch Coliseum twice.
You got kicked out of it two times?
Two times, which is tough to do.
Yeah.
But if you spit a loogie on King Kong Bundy when he's coming to the ring, yes,
they will try to kick you out.
But then you get put, you get kicked out, and there is a window on the exterior
of Hirsch here that goes to one of the bathrooms from which I snuck back in.
And then I had a hidden bag of rotten tomatoes, and I pelted Skandar Ackbar
from the stands and got kicked out of...
That's awesome, dude.
Bro, they should have paid you for being there.
Bro, you're helping from the crowd.
Bring up Skandar Ackbar.
There he is.
Yeah.
God.
Remember, that was the bad guy at that time.
Always, dude.
They always had that little kind of cheeky bad guy, you know?
Yeah.
We had Kevin Von Erich on here.
Oh, there we go.
And that was pretty special, man.
Yeah, that's cool.
I loved wrestling at that time.
It was so fun, man.
Hacksaw Jim Duggan was my guy.
Yeah.
Hey, I'm out with a two by four.
I saw him.
I went to Hulk Hogan's funeral, and Hacksaw was there.
Yeah, there we go.
It was pretty cool, man.
All my heroes were there.
I had figurines of them at home, and the figurines are taller these days, and
half of them are a lot of guys in wheelchairs.
It was kind of tough to see, because you see just the remnants of these heroes,
kind of like the stained statues in a way, you know?
Yeah.
It was pretty...
It was magnificent and weird, you know?
It was beautiful and sad.
It's like you almost want to pretend that things are just in a certain place in
time, you know?
Your book kind of goes into some stuff like that.
Yeah.
Were you an Evel Knievel fan?
I didn't get into him much.
We'd see him like...
I think I saw him do one jump, but that might have been just a touch before I
was kind of awake to the world.
I got into it because my brother turned me on to him, my older brother, Pat.
Anyway, he was just thinking about, you know, fallen heroes and icons that, you
know...
I got to know him later in his life when...
Evil?
Yeah.
I got to know him pretty doggone well, man.
I was trying to...
You know, there's still a story out there to be told on him, a movie to be made.
And I was around it and developing it for 25 years.
And, yeah, there we are, spoke at his funeral.
No way.
That's so cool.
Yeah.
What kind of guy was he?
Oh, man, you know, he did not...
People, the misconception are like, he had a death wish.
He didn't have a death wish.
He had a life wish, dude.
He was, as he said, he needed to jump because he needed to sweat in his boots.
It was almost like...
I think his, when he got on the bike and put his hands on the handlebar, I
think his pulse
went down.
Meaning...
You know how there's certain boxers that get the shit beat out of him and they're
like,
dude, you're taking four fights here.
It's too many.
And they're like, tell you, no, I have to.
My life outside when I don't have to train or get ready for a fight is tougher
on me.
It's too scary.
A lot of guys say that.
You know?
And I think he will...
He would always say like, hey, he wouldn't postpone any jump.
Even if it was impractical.
Even if his engineer's like, dude, you're not going to make it.
He was like, well, the American people want and they paid their tickets and
they're going
to show up on time.
We're going to do this.
I mean, I think part of that for him, my opinion is that he was like, no, I got
to...
I have to jump.
Right.
I can't postpone these things.
Well, also to have that level of integrity with time itself, with the clock of
life, right?
Yeah.
To be like, because I've postponed things.
I'll feed you.
I'll be 10 minutes late.
I'm going to be 15, 20.
But to say, to tell time, to tell like existence, I'm going to be there and
meet existence right
there.
That's pretty ballsy.
I mean, these days it's super ballsy, but yeah.
I mean, it's just, I think it's a ballsy thing for anybody to do, but he was
like Red
Bull before they made a damn liquid.
Remember?
I mean, he was...
Hell yeah.
People would tune in to feel something.
Dream sports, you know?
I remember people just in the yard, if he was going to jump one night, they'd
have people
out in the yard fucking drinking Dr. Pepper and fucking just massaging each
other's shoulders.
Oh, yeah.
And the thing, you know what happened?
What got kind of sad, but it's just true, towards the end of his career, and I
saw this
with this, it happened with his son at a jump too, is people started, first
came, wow, he
made the jump.
Wow.
Then it became like, I'm coming for the wreck.
I'm coming for the crash.
And I've been to jumps where, you know, because he always come out first, right?
There's the ramp.
Here we go.
Oh, he's just bypassing.
Yeah.
You got a little tease.
Yeah.
You got to do a couple of run-arounds, get everyone going.
Get the bra off a little.
And then he's getting the crowd going up, and they're all just, you know,
pulling down.
Here we go.
And then he does it.
Boom.
And soon as he lands and makes it, it's almost like, I saw so many people like,
oh, shit.
Yeah.
Stomp the cigarette out, throw that Dr. Pepper in the trash can and leave.
Yeah.
That dang it.
You know?
Yeah.
Good for him, but yeah.
No, but he made a, he was a legendary cowboy, man.
Let's look at one of these.
This is Caesar's Palace.
Oh, and he created this.
He called, he was in a motel, and called the head of Caesar's, all right?
And said, hey, my name's, you know, Bobby Bernstein.
I'm with ABC Wide World of Sports.
I hear this guy, Evel Neville, is going to jump your fountain.
And they're like, what are you talking about?
I don't know Evel Neville.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Hung up the phone.
Called back.
Another voice impersonated.
I'm with Wide World of Sports.
His name is Bob Knight.
I hear this evil Neville is going to, he did it like three times.
And finally, the guy on the other end of Caesar's was like,
who the hell is this Evel Neville, Evel Neville guy?
Find him.
Right.
And they ended up calling back.
Evil answers his own as evil and goes, yeah, I'll do it.
And worked out the door.
But he created that jump.
And this jump is, look at the violence afterwards.
I mean, he jumps the fountain.
And look at the crash, man.
Boom.
Boom.
Here we go.
Oh, shit.
Oh, can we talk impact?
Eh, bro.
That's, yeah.
There ain't no smoking mirrors with that, man.
There ain't no mattress that's going to fix that.
No, sir.
There ain't no posture.
That ain't AI.
You didn't fix that in post to make it look worse.
Oh, Evel.
Oh, dude.
Yeah, there was just something like, there was something special about that
time where it was like, I don't know, the moment meant so much more.
You know, there was something, there used to be something about the past that
the moment you couldn't copy it or you couldn't record it.
Like, I think that's why those times, you talk about some of this in your book,
man, and it's like about time and like, God, like the moment of when I was a
kid or sitting there laughing with my friends.
Like, the moment was so much more real because you were never going to get it
again.
Right.
And you didn't, you couldn't necessarily record it.
And you sure as hell couldn't share it.
There's a study on this, man.
I don't know if I'm going to say it's like 20 years ago or 25.
The moment was the biggest dopamine rush.
The jump, the cresting of the mountain, the pulling off whatever you tried to
pull off.
Yeah.
Scientifically measured, the biggest dopamine hit.
Cameras and, you know, mobile devices and stuff come out.
It slowly turned to the recording of the moment.
The snapshot.
Okay.
Not the cresting of the hill, but we just recorded it.
The ownership of the moment.
The ownership of the moment, right?
And then, what has happened now and has been around for 25 years, the biggest
scientific
dopamine hit that we get as humans is not the doing of the deed.
It is not the recording of the deed.
It is when we press share.
Really?
Now, that's a little bit like living in third person.
Like, we're all running around going, my rush is not when I run for a touchdown.
My rush is when I see myself on the jumbotron running for the touchdown.
And that's a slippery slope, man.
You know what I mean?
Well, it's slippery, but it also seems hard to even conceptualize who I am then,
you know?
Yeah.
Am I myself?
Am I just a viewer of myself now?
That's it.
We're much more voyeurs now.
Right.
And our identity comes from being objective, trying to look at ourself from
outside.
And now comes from, well, what did you think of what I did and how?
Yeah.
And that's the worst.
What did you think of what I did?
Because then that's the only...
That will be my definition of who I am.
Yeah.
That we got to watch that.
Dude, my sponsor tells me, he's like, you're not who they think you are.
You're not who you are, and you're not who you think they think you are.
Yeah.
I think I might...
I don't know if I messed it up or not.
No, but I hear what you're saying.
Yeah.
He's like...
But yeah, it's just interesting how that...
Especially for these kids these days, man.
It's hard enough as adults.
But I think as adults, we put our thought process onto them, and I think they
live in a different
world and realm that we kind of can't conceptualize because they don't seem as
affected as...
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
And it's hard to even know.
No, I hear you.
I hear you.
But I hear what you're saying, too.
It's like...
I'm not trying to be a dinosaur, either.
I don't want to be a dinosaur dad, you know what I mean?
I don't want to be one of those when my kids are going, geez, yeah, it sounds
like, you
know, give it another TED Talk from back in the...
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
But I hear you.
Because there's some things that they're just with.
It's just part of their vernacular.
This thing's an extension of their arm, that kind of sharing and socialization.
What do you mean?
That's like having a conversation.
Yeah.
And we're going, I could say what I was...
You and I were just talking about it because they could understand it.
They would go, okay, but that's not how it is.
Yeah.
You know?
Right.
It's...
I mean, it's all kind of...
I mean, it's all fascinating.
I mean, even when we were talking about, like, I just got back from the Ole
Miss game.
I know you were at...
It was fun, man.
You guys were rolling, man.
And Lane's doing a great job of keeping y'all mentally in the right spot with
all this
noise about him going to Florida or elsewhere.
Yeah.
He big boyed it.
He big boyed it.
Look what you mean.
Meaning he didn't go the traditional, no, it's not true.
We want to keep the noise out.
He went, we got this.