House Calls Podcast

What Does Success Really Mean?

With guest Matthew McConaughey,

Actor & Philanthropist

Hello and welcome to House Calls. I'm Vivek Murthy and I have the honor of serving as U.S. Surgeon General. I'd like to introduce you to actor Matthew McConaughey, one of Hollywood's leading men. Today, we'll be talking about loneliness and social connection. This episode was recorded before a live audience at the University of Texas at Austin. What does it mean to succeed? When I talk to college students, this is a big question that weighs on their minds. Success in our world is often measured by money, material things, career progression, but by trying so hard to get validation on the outside, students often lose their sense of self-worth. I had this in mind as I sat down with Matthew McConaughey in a room full of hundreds of students at the University of Texas at Austin. Matthew's many things: an actor who's appeared in more than 40 feature films, as well as a producer, writer and philanthropist. He's someone who is wildly successful. Yet even in the face of that kind of success, there are struggles. In this conversation, Matthew shares his own stories around loneliness and isolation, particularly during his youth. He also talks about how he has learned to define success for himself by being clear on who he is and by staying close to loved ones. This conversation is a beautiful reminder that no one is above loneliness and that our relationships to friends, family and ourselves is where we find the real meaning of life. Special thanks to UT Austin for hosting this conversation at the end of this episode, we field some great questions from students which are presented by UT Austin President Jay Hartzell. And as usual, please let us know your thoughts on any future episodes you'd like to hear on House calls. Email us at: HouseCalls@HHS.gov (audience applauds)

Is anybody still tired from Saturday's game? (audience cheers) I'm still exhausted. My gosh, we didn't need to make it that dramatic.

How you doing, Matthew?

I'm doing well, Vivek. Doing very well. Glad to be here with you and be talking about this frontier and how to handle things better from the neck up.

Absolutely. Well, I'm so glad that we're here together as well. And I'm so glad that all of you are here. Thanks, everyone, for coming. How are y'all doing today? (audience applauds and cheers) Yeah. Well, I'm particularly excited to be here, because as some of you may know, our office has been focused on youth mental health and on loneliness and social connection in particular. Loneliness, unfortunately, has become this widespread crisis in our country, where more than half of people in our country are struggling with loneliness. And it has real implications for our mental health and for our physical health. So this is one of our stops on our college campus tour that we're doing, our We Are Made to Connect tour. But the reason it's special for me to be here at UT in particular is it was back in 2015, when I had just started my tenure as Surgeon General, then under the Obama administration, that I came to UT. And if you'd asked me, "Hey, what are you gonna focus on as surgeon general?" I had a whole bunch of issues, but this was not on the list, the issue of loneliness and isolation. But it was conversations here that actually helped me realize how powerful and common an issue loneliness was. I remember a group of students coming up to me one by one and saying, "You know, I love being at UT, but I feel like there, I feel like people don't really know who I am. I feel like I can't show up and be myself. I feel really alone." And that wasn't just true at UT. I started to hear that at colleges everywhere, all around the country. And so I'm really grateful to folks here at UT for helping me realize just how powerful an issue that was. So really glad that we are here to talk about it. Matthew and I are gonna have a conversation today for the first half of our discussion about loneliness and mental health more broadly, and then we're gonna open it up to some questions and answers. At the very end we have a challenge, actually, that we're all gonna take part in together, and I'm excited for that as well. So Matthew, I just wanna start-

All right.

with this conversation because, first of all, just so great to talk to you.

You too.

You know, I think people know about the incredible work that you have done. You know, and people have watched your movies. I'm sure many people here could rattle off a long list of your greatest hits. And you have incredible accolades in that regard, but one of the things I actually appreciate even more about you is just how thoughtful and insightful you've been on issues related to mental health, related to the broader vision and values that we need to have as a society, on thinking about how we redefine success in ways that serve all of us. That's the stuff that makes life good. And that's the kind of stuff that we all need to learn at some point. So I wanna start this conversation by asking you about your experiences with loneliness and isolation. We've all struggled with it at some point in our life. I certainly have. But tell us, like, about a time in your life where you struggled with loneliness. And how'd you deal with it?

Well, I've had many times in my life, some shorter and longer than others, where I had loneliness, lack of a sense of significance, felt no traction or viscosity with my past, was uncertain about the haziness in the future, which will make a person be very anxious in the present. Australia was a year where I went away at two weeks out of high school, and I went to, as an exchange student, to Australia for a year. And I thought I was gonna be living in the metropolitan, in city of Sydney. And in the 1980s, I don't know if y'all remember Elle Macpherson. She was a supermodel. I was like, she's gonna be on the beach. I'm gonna find her. It was gonna be great. That was not the trip. I ended up living about four hours outside of that city, in a little farmhouse in the middle of a desert. With the family, that was odd, to be fair. And I had lost my friends. I'd lost my truck, my driver's license. I didn't have my golf clubs, where I was a four handicap. I didn't have Mom and Dad. I didn't have any bounce of understanding reason and where I was in the world. I was alone. And being alone turned into great loneliness 'cause I was confused, I was frustrated. They had different rituals and expectations of me than I had. And I was trying to go, "Wait a minute, what is a cultural difference, and what is right and wrong?" And I didn't know what was right and wrong. Until that family asked me to call them Mom and Pop. And that was the first thing that gave me clarity. And it was six months into the trip, and I was highly confused. I had been writing 14-page letters to myself and answering them. (audience laughs) All right? Yeah, mentally, I was imploding, but I was hanging on, going, "I gotta believe there's something on the other side of this confusion." And actually, when that family asked me to call them Mom and Dad, that was the first clarity that I had as a 19-year-old young man of like, "No, I don't care of cultural difference. I don't care about anything. That I'm not doing. I've still got a mom and dad." And I remember telling them out, going, (laughs) I had this funny line, I said, "And my mom and dad's still alive," like I needed to give it some context. (audience and Vivek laugh) But having that clarity that I was like, "Nope, that's black and white for me," set me off for the next six months of that trip, which made it, I got out of loneliness. I was still alone, but I found my own path. I had something that was clear to me. I had something, the first thing after six months of confusion. I found certainty. And that gave me a leg to stand on. It gave me an identity. Gave me judgment again. It gave me discernment. It gave me to understand context, to go, "No, that's not for me, but this is." But I was extremely lonely at that time. And since then, I've tried to learn that there is a difference between being alone and loneliness. And I think it is very important for us all mentally to be able to be alone with ourselves. I've taken many trips off on my own. The first 12 days are hell. I do not enjoy the company. I've got monkeys on my back, demons chasing me, guilt, regret. I don't like the look in the mirror. I don't like the Socratic dialogue going on in my head. I cannot stand the company. And it gets bloody between me and me. But I've learned when I've stuck with it in that isolation, around day 12, all of a sudden, some grace comes. And I've, thankfully, had times where I realized, "Oh, okay, we are all the only one we're stuck with no matter what company we keep." So it takes work to try and get along with ourselves. And so I've gone through many bouts of loneliness like that, but come out, stuck with it long enough, where I've come out of a lot of them shaking hands with the fact, where I've said, "Buddy, McConaughey, I'm stuck with you. We better figure out how to get along." What am I gonna forgive? What am I gonna say the buck stops here? But I've had many, and still do, at my age of 54, with a career and a family. I still go through bouts where I do not feel significant, as I said in the beginning, or don't feel connected with the lineage of my past, and uncertain about my future, and very wobbly and in limbo in the present.

Mm. That's powerful to hear. And I suspect many folks out here may relate to that feeling of intense loneliness. In fact, just by show of hands, how many people here know somebody in your life who is struggling with loneliness? Yeah. It's almost everyone. This is a near-universal experience. And like Matthew was saying, you can feel lonely even when you're around other people. So just to define it, loneliness is a subjective feeling. That the connections you need in your life are greater than the connections you actually have. And what matters is the quality of those connections, right? It's not how many people you've got around you, right? It's do you have even one or two people who you can be yourself with, who you can show up for and just be who you are, and not try to be somebody else or put on a mask or try to put on a performance? Will they show up for you in a crisis? Will you show up for them in a crisis? Those are the connections that remind us that we're not alone. And Matthew, I'm curious, like, in your life, as I think in many people's lives, there's so many forces that are probably calling on you for your time, right? There's career. You know, people who want you to do this or that or the other, et cetera. How have you managed to protect and invest in the relationships that matter to you the most?

Look, it's hard to know who the hell we are. It's hard to know what we want to do. So let's give ourself a break first and go through process of elimination of who we're not, what we don't want to do. Those people we don't want to hang out with. That bar we keep going to 'cause we keep thinking it's gonna be a great time, but every day, the next day we have the worst hangover, even though we drank the same amount. Why did we have the hangover? 'Cause the conversations, because the gossip, because the lack of trust, because someone got burned, and you walk away feeling a little icky. You gotta start eliminating those first, I think. And that's a lot easier than saying, "Well, I know what I want to do. I know who I am." I mean, we are who we want create ourselves to be, but it's a lot easier to say, "I'm gonna eliminate the things, the people, the places in my life." Even the thought patterns. Catch them, 'cause they're a slippery slope, and eliminate those first. And by sheer mathematics, you end up with more of what will feed you and what is more you, more of those people and places and things that do serve you and your own identity by eliminating the ones that don't feed you. Then, you know, this is a time for y'all. Your life's all ahead of you. It's why so many people take liberal arts. Liberal arts are every piece of furniture in the living room. You're trying a little of this. I wanna sit over there. Maybe I'll try that. This is a great time for that. But that's also there's great uncertainty in that. But don't lose the curiosity. So how do you be curious and try these things, but yet go with all the pressure that you have about what are you gonna do? Who are you gonna be? Where am I gonna be? Y'all have more pressure on, I think, now than any generation about, no, claim what you're gonna do, where are you gonna be, right now. You're like, "Man, I'm 20 years old in college." I'm making my way. This is a time to dream and try things out." Where the world's telling you, though, "Uh-uh quit dreaming. Get it on paper. What's the purpose? What's the function? I wanna hear the math in what you're gonna do." And you're going, "I don't know." Look, then certain non-negotiables come into your life. Family. Maybe you meet the spouse, you start a family. All of a sudden, life in some ways becomes harder, but less complicated because you have some non-negotiable, black and white things in your life that all decisions are based off of that first. That's paramount. I would even argue I became a better actor when Camila and I had children.

Wow.

That became more important than my career. And when that became more important, I had the same amount of respect for my career but less reverence for it. I was able to be more involved with my career and less impressed with it. Therefore, I was better at it.

Can I just stop you there for a sec? I just wanna underscore, circle, highlight that last part that Matthew said, because I think this is a part where I think society, we lead young people and students astray, right? We lead them to think that actually that career stuff, the courses you're taking, the prep that you're doing, the resume building, the applying and getting that fancy job, the internship, all that is at the very top right, ahead of everything else. But what you just heard Matthew say is that actually defining those priorities at the top as being people and relationships, that that made him better at his career. So I think there's this false choice that we're sometimes pushing people to make. Hey, choose between people in your life, choose between your career. That's not the choice. Like, we are better in everything we do when we are anchored to the people that we love, the people we care about. It's very powerful, what you said.

100% I mean, again, I think this goes back to we have to restore and redefine what success means. In the dictionary, literally, the definition of success has changed over time. The original definition had to do with character and wealth of spirit. It is fame and money. And that's what you're getting sold every single day. We're all getting sold that. Okay, so if success today is based on quantity, which it is, it's a fool's errand if it doesn't have quality, which is to the relationships that you're talking about, with others and ourselves. And forming some non-negotiables and having a value-based moral bottom line about yourself and what you'll stand for and what you'll stand against. That gives quality to the quantity. I'm a capitalist. I'm all for quantity. trust me, I know plenty of people that have the most money, the most toys. Lonely son of a guns. They made it to the top, and they're sitting there going, "Well, boy, did I run the fool's errand. I don't know what means anything in my life. I can have everything, but I don't even know what I want. And I don't have anybody to share it with. And I don't even enjoy my own company." And so, you know, measure quality when you're chasing quantity. And that's the question I think we all have to ask ourselves. What's our more? More what? More is not just a quantity number. If it's for real profit, it's gotta have quality. And that entails sacrificing. That entails saying, "No, my relationships are really important." Maybe it's family, maybe it's friendship. Maybe it's a lover, a spouse. That those really matter and need to mean something. And those have a currency, an incredibly valuable currency, of quality that we need. And I think we need to redefine success.

I couldn't agree more. Like, I'm just kind of curious, how many people here find yourself questioning whether the definition of success that you've been sold your whole life is the right one? That's a lot of people.

Yeah.

And I gotta say, I'm glad that those hands went up, because better to be questioning and searching now than in 30 years, right, after you've lived much of your life. I think it's good that you're questioning. And I think the thing we've gotta ask ourselves is, at the end of our life, when you're 80, 90 years old, you're sitting in that rocking chair, you're looking back at your life, like, how do you want to feel? Do you wanna feel guilty? Do you wanna feel regretful? Do you wanna feel fulfilled? Like, what do you wanna feel? One thing I'll just tell you, based on my own experience as a doctor, taking care of patients at the end of their life. You know, I've had the privilege of sitting with people in the final hours of their life, of holding their hand, of listening to the stories that they share. And I'll tell you that what they all have shared to a tee, and what they all talk about, is not how big their corner office was, how fancy their job was, how much money is in their bank account, how many followers they have on Instagram. This is actually not what people reflect on at the end. What they talk about is actually remarkably consistent. They talk about their relationships, about the people they loved, the people who love them, the people who broke their hearts. You see, at the end of our lives, when only the most meaningful threads of our existence remain, what floats to the top are our relationships. And we don't have to wait until the end of our life to realize that. We can start right now by saying, "Hey, there's nothing wrong in pursuing a fancy job or pursuing money or pursuing fame." Nothing wrong with that. The problem is when we think that that's what's gonna define our happiness and drive our fulfillment, right? So we just gotta be super clear-eyed about what's gonna drive that fulfillment. And it turns out it's our relationships with one another. And so if you find yourself in this quandary, where you're like, "Hey, I got all this. I could be, you know, volunteering for this club. I could be doing, you know, taking that extra class. I could be doing this internship outside. Or I could also be spending some more time with my friends. I may have to give up one of those things." look at your time with friends, your time investing with family, your time staying in touch with people you love, getting to know people more deeply, look at that as just as important as the time you may put into your classes, time that you may put into physical activity, into other core pillars of health. Yeah. Matthew, I wanna ask you also, like, we, you know, we were talking, you and I were chatting last week, in know preparation for today, and one of the things that you said, which really struck me, is you talked about the importance of being comfortable and clear on who we are, right? Of having a strong connection with ourself, right? We often talk about connection, we think about connection with other people, right? But connection starts with ourselves. If you know yourself, if you're clear about your value as a human being, it's much easier to go out into the world and connect with other people. Tell us a little bit about how you've come to think about your own sense of self. And you've got kids too. You've got three wonderful kids you're raising. Like, how are you guiding them in anchoring themselves in a healthy sense of self?

(laughs) And I've got two of them that are teenagers now, so it's a whole new rodeo for us to navigate. Look, first with Camila and I, and we came together talking about knowing self. We came together, our basis was we had a common moral bottom line. Different ways of going about things, but we had a common moral bottom line, about how we wanted to be parents, about how we wanted to treat each other, about who we expected ourselves to be in the dark and alone, without each other. And we came together on that. Look, children, we learned very quickly. My biggest surprise first having children was, "Oh my gosh, it's much more DNA than I thought." (Vivek laughs) I thought it was 90% culture, and I was like, "Oh, no, they are who they are." As a parent, we can shepherd them and try to put what feeds them in front of them and try to remove some of the harms out of their way and their path, but they are who they are. We have expectations. And I think this is for our family, but I think this is also an example of what I think we need to do with each other and in society, 'cause we've lost these expectations. And we've lost this sort of an understanding of value-based bottom line amongst ourselves, where I have an expectation, you have an expectation of me, and we're gonna pretty much follow it. There's always gonna be tyrants and bad agents that are not gonna follow it, but we can have an understanding that if I say, "Can you grab so-and-so out of my fridge in my house?" and you see my wallet when you're walking by the table, I just kind of have an expectation you're not gonna grab my wallet and steal. Can I have that? You know, I think we should be able to have that with most of our relationships. We talk a lot about delayed gratification in our family. And this is a bit of what you're speaking of about when you're trying to measure what your values are and who you are. We're asking everyone to project a little further into the future when you say, "How are you gonna be remembered?" You don't have to necessarily go to your deathbed and go, "What's your eulogy gonna be?" although I'd recommend it if you can do it. But try to project a little further into your future and go, "Well, who do I wanna be then? What do I wanna see my daily life being? Who are my friends gonna be? What are we gonna be talking about?" It's a fun little test to do. In our family, you know, kids think they're gonna live forever. You know, while you eat one cookie now, I'll give you a cookie every day for the next week. Or you can have two cookies now. They're going two cookies now. Forget tomorrow, I want my cookie right now. But I'll never forget I had a chance to give a delayed gratification teaching example to them. After I'd won the Oscar for "Dallas Buyers Club," I had all the kids go, "What'd you get the trophy for, Papa?" And I said, "Do you remember a year ago when Papa, we were living in New Orleans working, and Papa was getting up in the morning going to work before you get up, and I'd come home at night, and you all said I was skinny, I looked like a giraffe?" And they're like, "Yeah, we remember that. We remember that." I go, "Well, look, the work that I did every day there for that two months, a year later, my peers gave me a trophy for it." all their heads clocked, and they went, "Wait, so you can do something today and get rewarded tomorrow?" Like, yes, you can. (audience and Vivek laugh) Yes. And I'm always looking for places to help them project into their future, while still being able to be kids. As I say, we were saying with you all, it's time to test things out. It's time to dream. It's time to check out all the furniture in the living room. You're college students. But if you can, as soon as you can, to project further, not just on success of what my job's gonna be, but what Dr. Vivek's saying, relationships. What do I wanna see? And it may not go that way. I have plenty of friends that are like, "30 years old, I'm getting married. Gonna have two kids, have a white picket fence, and a dog." I have some that are 50 right now and don't have that because they held onto it so strong that they actually pushed the rest of the world away. Because when that didn't happen, they were holding on too tight. So sometimes it doesn't turn out how we want, but to have that plan and hang onto it, about what the relationships and the value in your life's gonna be, and how you're gonna find joy going through your life, just have it. It's fun. It's a dream sheet. Just have it out there and project. And you'll find that it'll lead towards it or something similar. You know, it's sort of an invisible, sort of unconscious North Star for ourself and the value and the quality of our life.

Yeah. That is beautifully said. And, you know, I know we're gonna transition to Q&A, so we're gonna get some of your questions in just a few minutes, but before we do that, I just wanna ask you, there are many young people out here, I think, who are probably wondering, what are the practical things I can do in my life to build friendship? And one of these that has often struck me is it's in the little things that we do, the little gestures, the small moments of kindness, that we build strong bonds. It's not always about the grand gestures. I was really struck in your book, which, by the way, Matthew's book, "Greenlights," incredible, incredible book, for those of you who have not read it. But I was really struck by this story that you shared of a time in your life. I think it was after you made "A Time to Kill," where you were suddenly incredibly famous, well known. You took some time away and ended up going to this monastery, having this four-hour confession session with the monk there. And at the end of this four to five hours of just being so honest and so open about everything you were going through, you looked to him, and he just looked at you quietly and he said, "Me too."

Me too.

Can you explain to us the power of that moment? And what does that tell us about how we can show up?

Yeah. Oh my gosh. I had gone and I was purging, confessing, tears running down my face, snot running out of my nose, man. And I was done, and I was ready for the hammer to come down on me. And he looked at me with the kindest eyes and, after about 15 seconds of silence, said that. He goes, "Me too." And I went, "Oh, whoa." And the value of that is, is that a solution? No. But it let me know it's, oh, it's the human condition. Oh, this is life. Oh, I'm not the only one. The world's not revolving around me. And when we have problems, when we're confused, we feel like the world is revolving around us. And to be told and shared through relationships, "Hey, me too," ah. Oh gosh, thanks, man. I thought this was the reservation for one party that I don't wanna be at. It's amnesty, almost, that allows us to forgive maybe ourselves, to untie the knot. It's even humor to untie the knot that we may be in that can go, "Oh, the knot just untied." Oh, okay, okay. I thought I was the weird one here. I thought I was the freak. I thought I was the one-off. I thought I was the alien. I thought I was… No. Oh, you got that? It's the human condition. And that's the start, that platitude, to understand that it's a plural situation amongst us humans. That's the floor that allows us to then go, "Okay. Well, now let me go find my answer and get out of this. And hey, maybe you can help me figure this out since you've been through it too." Very helpful. And that's what that did. That's what that did for me. I remember I lost 15 pounds of weight off my shoulders when he said that to me. And I was able to move on. And I wasn't able to just go forward and forgive myself for everything. I got the courage to actually say, "I forgive myself for that, but the buck stops here. I'm not pulling that crap anymore, this thing I've been doing." And I got the courage to do that, where before I was just tense. And I didn't have the courage to stop doing what I shouldn't have been doing, and I also didn't have the courage to forgive myself for what I probably should have forgiven myself for.

I mean, it's such a powerful, powerful story. And to me, like, when I read that story, what it illustrated was the power of simple acts in friendship. You know, the Brother Christian saying, "Me too." What he's saying to Matthew, in some ways, is, "Matthew, you're not alone. I went through this as well. I've experienced this as well. I can understand your pain." Think about when each of you go back out into your lives, right? When I asked you how many people here knew somebody who was struggling with loneliness, almost every hand went up. To help address loneliness in our lives, we don't need to solve everyone's problems, right? Brother Christian didn't solve all of Matthew's concerns on that day, in that moment. But we just need to show up for other people in their lives. And I would encourage you to think about that. The question of, how can I show up for other people? It could be you just call to check in on a friend who might be having a hard time. It could be that you share a bit openly about maybe what you're going through with a friend who's having a hard time so they also know they're not alone. It could be when you're in the dining hall the next time or eating out, and you see a fellow classmate who's eating alone, that maybe you just go up to them and say, "Hey, you mind if I sit here? Are you open to chatting?" Like, it seems like a big move to make, but I'll tell you, in a world where so many people are struggling with feeling alone, so many people are feeling like they're the only ones going through the heartache, the confusion, the anxiety. Just having someone else say what Brother Christian did to Matthew, me too, I'm here, you're not alone, that can make the world of difference. You don't have to fix everyone's problems. You just need to be alongside with them to make a difference in their lives. We're gonna transition to some Q&A. And we're excited that President Hartzell, I think, has some questions that have been collected from all of you that he's gonna share.

Yeah. Great, thank you. And I've got a couple of questions that students submitted beforehand. And I think it's a nice segue, Doctor, from what you were just saying. So first question for you is, you know, many of our young people wanna make a difference in the community, both local, state, national level, not beyond just even their friend circle. What can they be doing to make that kind of a difference or impact in this area?

I think the first start, or actually, before the start of going over and saying, "Hey, me too," reaching out and having a relationship, checking out, letting someone else know, "Yeah, I hear you," Dr. Vivek talks a lot about connection. He said it a couple times. The first connection's gotta come with us and ourselves, or else we're going out there and we're just scatter shooting. And we won't find those valuable relationships because we won't know what we value, so we won't know what to look for in others. So check in with yourself before you check in with the world. You don't have to go solve this school's problems, like he said, the world's problems. That old act local, think local, you're local. Check in with what's going on between your ears. What's the connection between your head and your heart, what you want and what you need? Try and make those two meet. It's a fun exercise to get to know yourself before you go out and get to know others. And you'll be a better connector. You'll be more help to that person when you go, "Hey, me too."

Absolutely. And just building on what Matthew said, I think what he's saying is the starting point. Okay, if our sense of self, our connection of self, is not strong, much harder to connect with other people. I'd also say is like, I was with a group of UT students earlier today, and one of the topics that came up in our conversation was social media as well. And about how sometimes on social media, while it can help us sometimes connect with folks here and there, stay in touch with old friends, sometimes there's so much noise in social media that pushes us to constantly compare ourselves to other people, constantly take stock of our life in an unhelpful way, that sometimes that can actually drag us down. And several of the students who were there today said to me that they actually had to just step off of the platforms altogether. And then that actually helped them a lot. You know, that maybe they weren't in touch with as many people. But the people they were in touch with, those are good relationships. They could live life on their terms, define success on their terms. So I'd encourage you just to take stock, as you're doing what Matthew said, which is to think about yourself, your sense of self, what's important to you. Is to take steps to quieten the noise around you. And that may include renegotiating your relationship with social media. 'Cause I guarantee you this: If you're out there… Well, let me just ask you. How many people have kind of struggled a bit with your relationship with social media? How many people have felt like it's made you feel worse at times? And you're not alone. This is like, literally every campus I go to. Like, everyone's hands go up.

Me too.

Yeah.

Me too.

And me too. Yeah.

Yeah.

And so like, we've taken certain steps in our lives to help manage this. But I just want you to know that if you're having trouble, like, managing this, it's not because like your generation was suddenly born with dramatically less willpower than prior generations. That's not what's happening. It's the environment around you. It's the platforms, which have been designed to maximize how much time you spend on them, right? Not to maximize your quality of time, not to maximize your mental health and wellbeing. Maximize the quantity of time. And the various features on there manipulate you into spending more and more and more and more time, even if it comes at the expense of your sleep and your in-person interaction with other people. So this is a place where we all have to make a decision in our life about whether or not we let those influences persist or not. And I tell you this about what other students are doing so that you know that if you're struggling with social media, you're not alone. And if you decide you want to step off and take a break, there are others who are doing the same thing. And that's a perfectly reasonable step to take. Yeah.

On that note, just y'all know the algorithm (audience laughs) is designed for quantity. Check it. Is it giving you quality? And that's what he's saying.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah.

Much more succinctly and better said. (audience and panelists laugh)

That's Professor McConaughey.

Yeah. (laughs)

So second question. Given all you've been through, both of your careers and journeys, do you still have people from, you know, childhood, high school, college you stay in touch with, friendships, relationships? And then how do you maintain those, given all of the pulls on life?

Yeah.

Go ahead.

I do. Most of my best friends in my life I met here at the University of Texas. (audience cheers) I did. Whether it was at the Dell house or whether it was just through classes and extracurriculars around most of the friends, I still have one, two, three, four, I've got about six from high school, three from middle school, nine from UT. And then I've gone on to meet new people through my industry as I've gotten older. And then you become a parent. You inevitably become friends. with your kids' parents. And trust me, when your kids like another kid and you like their parents, you're like, "Yes." When your kids start liking another kid and you don't like their parent, you're like, "Ah, I don't think it's gonna work."

Right? Me too.

Right? Like, oh my gosh. So, I mean, look, one way for me to maintain my older relationships is right here at the UT games, that I've got a box. We still get together with that same group. And my mom comes, and they know my mom from high school, or they know my mom from college. And that's a ritual place where a lot of the friends that I made here and in high school and previous, I don't necessarily work with anymore, but we do convene by ritual at home games here at DKR, and that's our catch-up. And we don't need to be any closer than that. They don't need to come work with me. I don't need to go work with them. We don't need to have Christmas together. That's a really nice connection at that level.

So beautiful. You know, I feel blessed to also have some friends from earlier in life I stay in touch with. But it wasn't always that way. I was telling Matthew earlier that when I was Surgeon General the first time, I made a big mistake, which is that I put my job above everything else, family, friends, everything. And I lost touch with a lot of people. I was really lonely during that time. And, you know, you can imagine like, the conversation in your head. Oh, you know, this is really important. I gotta put all my time into this job. Or you're in school. I gotta put all my time into my classes. I'm a college student. I'll deal catch up with people later after college. These are the stories we tell ourself. But it turns out that when you're disconnected from other people, you just don't show up for the rest of your life as well as you could. I could have been a better Surgeon General if I was better connected, I think, to the people I loved in my life. And that was a lesson I took this time around. When President Biden asked me to come back and serve as Surgeon General, this time around I went to my wife Alice. I said, "Alice, you know, he's asking us to come back to government." And she just looked at me, and she said, "So what's gonna be different this time?" And she didn't mean, what issues are I gonna be working on? That's not what she's asking about. She's like, "How are you gonna live your life differently this time?" And so what I've tried to do, in correcting for that past failure, was to say, "Okay, now I'm actually going to stay in touch with family and friends." And what does that mean? It means that when I'm with my family and friends, that I try to really be with them. Not distracted on my phone, not, you know, checking my inbox, not looking at the scores on ESPN, even though I love checking the scores on ESPN. It means being focused on them, listening to what they're saying. The second thing it means is, and this is gonna sound maybe like I'm an old fogy, but it means picking up the phone when people I love call, right? And it's so often, like, you know, we like, eh, I'll just like, text them and call them back later when I have time, and we like, silence these calls and we move on. But sometimes just picking up the phone for 5 seconds or 10 seconds to say, "Hey, I'm about to walk into this auditorium with a bunch of UT students. I can't talk to you right now, but hey, is it okay if I call you later? It's great to hear your voice." It takes 5 to 10 seconds. But we are programmed and evolved over time to understand not just the content of what someone's saying, but to appreciate the tone of their voice, the sight of their face, their facial expressions, their body language. So that makes a difference. The last thing I did, and this made perhaps one of the biggest differences in my life, is when I was struggling with loneliness during that time after I served as Surgeon General, 'cause I hadn't invested in my community, lost touch with friends, I had an old friend who came up to me and said, "You know, Vivek, do you know what your problem is?" Your problem's not that you don't have friends. Your problem is you're not experiencing friendship. You still have those people from way back in your life. You think they don't care about you, that you've lost touch with them. You feel guilty about reaching back out again. But like, I guarantee you, if you reached out to any of them and just said, "Hey, I'm thinking about you. Sorry, I haven't been in touch, but I wanna know how you're doing." you will experience friendship again. And I think what I ended up doing is, building on that advice, I had two dear friends who I loved a lot but saw very infrequently. You know, like, maybe once a year we would see each other. And in 2018, when we were all struggling with loneliness and being a little bit lost, we made a commitment to each other. "You know what," we said, "we're gonna actually build something called a moai." A moai is an old Okinawan tradition where a small group of kids early in life would be brought together by their parents who would say, "Okay, going forward, the five, six, seven of you, you're gonna have each other's backs. You're gonna be a moai." So that means health issues, financial issues, feeling lost in life, having issues with family, you're gonna step in and help. That's what you're gonna do. So we said, "You know what, we're gonna form our own moai, the three of us." And what that means is that once a month we video conference for two hours and we just talk to each other. We don't just get distracted by devices. Second, we talk about what matters. And the stuff that friends don't often talk about, we'll be open, we're vulnerable. So we talk about our health, our family, our finances, our fears, all of that. And the last thing we said is in between. When something happens in our life, good or bad, we're gonna text, call, reach out, to each other spontaneously to say, "Hey, I'm struggling with this. Can we chat?" And then we'll all get on the phone and we'll talk. That commitment, that moai, in the last five years has changed my life. I made fundamentally different decisions about work, about my health, about my family, because my moai stepped in and said, "Hey, you're saying all the right things, but it doesn't sound right. You know, you're giving us all the reasons why you should do this, but your heart's not in it. Something's off here." And that helped me change course. So these are some of the things that I've been working on, but hey, look, this is a work-in-progress for all of us. We're all students of connection. We're all students, you know, of life, and we're trying to learn how to get better at this. So our hope today is that if you leave here thinking a little bit more about the power and importance of building social connection in your life, investing in your relationships, that that will be good. That'll be time well spent. That'll be an investment that'll help you. As we close out today there, I wanna share a challenge with you, that I mentioned this in the beginning. But this is something that we're gonna do quickly, but we're gonna do together. We have designed something that we call our Five-for-Five Challenge. And this is where we are asking all the students that we meet on college campuses around the country to engage in five acts of connection over the next five days. So one a day. And that could be either expressing gratitude to someone in your life it could be extending support to someone in your life who needs it, or it could be asking for help yourself, okay? These three simple acts of connection, this could take you two minutes a day. But when it comes to how you feel, those two minutes over five days will make you feel dramatically better. And what we're gonna do, this postcard that you have in front of you, on your chairs, this explains what that challenge is. It gives you a chance to write down what you're doing each of the five days and to jot down how it made you feel, just so you can reflect on that. But we're actually gonna make this even easier. We're gonna do the first day today, together, okay? So here's what I want each of you to do. This is gonna take us about 60 seconds. That's it. I want you to focus on gratitude for a moment and think about somebody in your life that you're grateful for. Maybe it's somebody who showed up for you last week when you were having a hard time to check on you. Maybe it's someone who, a few years ago, recognized that something you had worked so hard for didn't work out, and they came in to remind you that you're not defined by your failures, but you still have what it takes. Maybe it's somebody who's just been a positive, steady force in your life, and you just don't say thank you enough. And you want them to know how you feel about them. Think about that person. Just by show of hands, how many people have someone in your mind that you're thinking about. Okay, almost everyone. Great. Now here's what I want you to do. In the next 30 seconds, we're gonna use technology for good. Okay? I want you to take out your phones, and I want you to now write either a text or a very short email to them. Just open up a text message or an email to them. And here's what you're gonna do. It could be one line, or it could be two or three. But I want you to tell them that you are thinking about them and why you're grateful for them. Okay? Just take 30 seconds to do that. (upbeat music) And as you're thinking and writing, when you're done, I want you to turn the flashlight on on your phone and hold it up so that everyone can see that light. Okay, beautiful. Love this. Look at all those lights popping up. Take another 15 seconds to finish. And keep your lights up. This is great. That's beautiful. (upbeat music) Okay. All right. So keep finishing up if you need to, but I want you just to look around the room for a moment. Look at all of these lights held up. Look at all of those beautiful lights. Each of those lights represents a ray of human connection that's gone out, a ray that someone's gonna receive. Someone is gonna open up your text message or your email, and maybe they were having a bad day, maybe they were feeling down about themselves, maybe they were feeling alone, and they're gonna feel better. They're gonna remember that there's somebody who loves them, somebody who cares about them, somebody who values them. That is the power of what you can do in 60 seconds. And if you, for the next five days, do something very similar, a small act of connection, it will have a powerful impact. And the last thing, I just wanna say this. Look, there are a lot of issues that we're dealing with in society at this time. A lot of stuff that's going on. I know this is a really hard time. But here's also one thing that history and our scriptures teach us. Which is that when we are alone, even regular, everyday adversity can feel overwhelming. But when we are together, when we are clear that we have each other's backs, that we support one another, there are few things that we can't take on, as harsh and difficult and hard as they may be. And this is a time where we need to be with one another. But we shouldn't be suffering alone. And so as we move out, like, into the rest of our lives, as you go back to school, as you think about the future, about what you want and what you wanna create, I just want you to remember that, at the heart of building a fulfilling life, at the heart of being happy, is building these relationships that we're talking about today. And it starts small, with the hello that you say to somebody on campus, with taking a moment to check on someone who's having a hard time, by picking up the phone when someone calls, and by picking up the phone to call other people. And it also takes conserving our energy, right? Like, what do we fritter our energy away on, right? Is it social media? Is it conflict? Is it getting involved in other people's business? All those things might be good and fine in the moment, but pay attention to how it makes you feel. Does it make you feel more drained? Does it make you feel less good about yourself? And if the answer is yes, then try putting those aside bit by bit and focusing on what makes you feel good and on the people who know you. If we do this together, we can create a more connected society. A society that's grounded in the core values that Matthew and I were talking about today. The world, like, too often tells us that our worth, your worth, my worth, all of our worths, are defined by our ability to be rich, famous, and powerful. But our worth, your worth, is not dependent on that. It's intrinsic. It's based on your God-given ability to give and to receive love, to be kind, to be generous, to serve, to act with courage. Those are skills and qualities that you had long before you came to UT. I look at my own kids. When they were born, they were loving and expressive and joyful. All of us were that way. And so what we're talking about today is fundamentally about our journey, not to transform ourselves into someone we're not, but to return to who we fundamentally are. And if we do that, we will be happy, we will be fulfilled, and we won't feel alone. So I'm grateful to all of you for today. I'm grateful to the president, to the staff, to the faculty, the entire university that made today possible. I'm grateful to Matthew, not only for this conversation, but for being a leader, a voice, a human being who shows up as a real person, who can talk about the stuff that matters, our mental wellbeing, our relationships, our values, and a redefining success on our terms. Thank you again all for this time. Just really grateful for this time. (audience applauds and cheers)

Thank you, Brother. Thank God we did this.

We have a little gift. Thank you, Vivek. Thank you, Matthew. And just as a small further investment in your children's future.

Oh gosh. (laughs) I love it. Thank you. (audience applauds) Thank you. We were just chatting earlier, and I was saying when I came in 2015, I got a UT cap, right? The orange cap. And I wear that all the time, and everyone in DC thinks that I went to UT, 'cause I'm always wearing that hat. So I'll add this to the collection. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, y'all.

Thanks, everyone. Appreciate you. (audience applauds) Thank you for joining this conversation with Matthew McConaughey. I hope you’ll tune into our next episode of House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. Wishing you all health and happiness.