Matthew McConaughey’s newest role: self-help salesman of 'The Art of Livin'

It took 12 minutes and eight seconds for someone to say, “Alright, alright, alright,” and just a little longer than that for bongo-esque beats to sound.

Matthew McConaughey on Monday cleared away the last cloud of smoke around his folksy brand of omnipresence to reveal a long-coming truth. Behind Austin’s so-called minister of culture, a cult of personality amasses.

The Austin-based movie star hosted a free, multi-hour webinar, “The Art of Livin’,” which was open to the public. Promotional material touted the online event as an inspirational experience to help people “make sense of the senseless” and revive their soul. The webinar yoked an Oscar winner to the lucrative self-help industry and some of its biggest names, specifically Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi.

That much-criticized self-help industry — worth $11.6 billion in 2019, according to one market study — operates from a place of lack experienced by its customers. You want more, and you’re right to want it, several speakers assured viewers on Monday. It’s an economy of grievance.

If the average person wants more, then it stands to reason that McConaughey, Robbins and company do, too. That’s why you might want to continue the journey you started for free with McConaughey’s “immersive learning experience” titled “Roadtrip: The Highway to More,” Graziosi eventually revealed. (McConaughey excused himself for that part.) The full package, apparently worth $3,961, could be yours for only $397 just because you “showed up for yourself” and tuned in. (“Or 3 payments of $150!” as a QVC-style price sheet displayed on the screen cheerfully exclaimed.)

Once the sales pitch came halfway through “The Art of Livin’,” the comment section revolted. “Didn’t expect that this event would turn into a sales pitch…deception?!!” one viewer wrote. “​Huge RED LIGHT — paid course — can't afford,” another typed.

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Not to blame the marks, but the man himself was pretty clear from the beginning. “We have all intention of supplying what you demand,” McConaughey said.

Regardless of intention, “The Art of Livin’” will be a fascinating cultural artifact of our moment. People from all over planted their flag in the YouTube chat stream: from Tyler to Midland, Austria to South Korea, Nashville to Austin. High-noon stock music, the kind you’d hear in a museum exhibit about stagecoach robbery, filled silences. Janky animated fireworks exploded behind speakers. Sometimes, a swirl of Snapchat filter-grade stars turned everyone into Lynda Carter.

Instead of an audience, a green-screened wall of Zoom boxes haunted the frame, while the production crew kept an itchy trigger finger on their soundboard. The canned laughter and applause would have given David Lynch reason to file a copyright complaint.

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Intro chatter assured the 2 million viewers from 155,000 countries that they were a community, “starting as strangers but united by wanting more.” Graziosi spoke of McConaughey in near-messianic terms. After reading the actor’s best-selling memoir, “Greenlights,” “I wanted more McConaughey!” he said of origins of “The Art of Livin’.” Anytime someone who wasn’t the star of “Interstellar” spoke onscreen, they reminded the audience that McConaughey would be back.

That was certainly true, and usually heralded by the sound of a drum. It wasn’t actually a bongo; perhaps a djembe.

McConaughey’s public persona — Voltron-ed together over three decades from the component parts of “Dazed and Confused,” “True Detective,” “The Wolf of Wall Street” and his real Austin-by-way-of-Uvalde origins — is inescapable in this city. He’s a University of Texas professor who stands watch over Royal-Memorial Stadium like a revival preacher in burnt orange. Austin FC games, galas, Willie Nelson concerts — that drawl lies as thick in the air as pollen.

And now, that personality is truly a product, available to the unenlightened in just three easy payments.

Either despite its sales pitch or maybe because of it, “The Art of Livin’” was pure, uncut McConaughey. The actor gave himself to the captive audience, stringing aphorisms together in between extemporaneous stoner philosophy and vaguely biblical sentiments.

It was the beat poetry of late capitalism.

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The art of livin’ represents your dream, he explained, but the deeds needed to get to the dream are more like science. And yet, McConaughey vibrated with the imprecise language of motivation, calibrated to take on whatever shape the listener needed.

There was ostensibly a method to McConaughey’s flow, though his numbered points surrendered to the v-i-b-e-s. Metaphors came at a clip. He spoke of playbooks and building homes. He rhymed often — name, claim and declare!

The future is foggy, he said, and you might ask yourself, “Is this all there is?”

You don’t know who to trust or who to believe in, he said.

We’re chasing fads, he said, revolving instead of evolving.

The genie in the bottle is still a genie, he said.

We need solid ground, higher ground — more value, more choice, more divinity, more love, he declared.

McConaughey also shared rambling bits of his personal stories from “Greenlights.” For example, how he found himself at the top of the fame game and then fled Hollywood for a revelatory experience at a monastery, and how he had a nocturnal emission during a 1995 dream about floating down a river surrounded by African tribesmen. (Well, he did promise the viewers “more,” and that’s a lot.)

A couple times, McConaughey took to the drum while he read out comments from viewers spilling their secret shames and desires. He paced back and forth toward the camera, often placing himself in extreme Norma Desmond closeup. His hands gesticulated wildly. He cut through his own chicken-fried fortune cookies with that signature smooth-talk snicker. His eyebrows must have logged enough sky-high miles to get their pilot’s license.

It’s been said that if anyone unlocked the secret to self-improvement, then there’d be no need for a self-improvement industry. Folks like Robbins, Graziosi and now McConaughey are selling feelings. Under that premise, “The Art of Livin’” succeeded. McConaughey on Monday booked millions of people for a journey into his emotional world, and even if your mileage varied, you couldn’t say the man didn’t do his job.

The event’s other speakers formed a united front. Marie Forleo said the path to more lies in doing less. Trent Shelton, invoking rhetoric from the pulpit, told viewers that they’re custom-made.

Robbins, whose name is synonymous with self-help, dispensed some dubious thoughts. Teachers are underpaid, which wouldn’t be the case if they could just find a way to make investors some money instead, he ruminated. Having three kids isn’t a valid obstacle to achieving your dreams — that’s just fear talking, he said. And the concept of imposter syndrome is just pop psychology, said the wealthy pop psychologist.

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After more than four hours of content, it was almost refreshing to hear Robbins remove the feel-good varnish of what it means to sell “more” to people who have less. Purchase the “Roadtrip” course package as a favor to yourself, he urged the audience. “It’s not going to change my life economically,” he said. How magnanimous.

I’m sure that the intentions behind “The Art of Livin’” were good, on some level. McConaughey, puckishly profitable as he is, spoke with soul. There were helpful sentiments to be found amid the laugh track and the cynical sales pitches.

But a sense of uncanny artifice animated every last frame of this fan club initiation-cum-infomercial. That included a moment when McConaughey, close enough to your screen that it was liable to fog up, knowingly called out his flock for the “lies you might be telling yourself.” He bit his thumb, and I’d like to imagine it was to keep himself from laughing at the irony.

During his big finish, McConaughey warned viewers that the “culture be selling us Kool-Aid about what we should be emotional about.”

“Watch the Kool-Aid,” he said.

A couple million people were already watching. The minister, as is his historic penchant, wore no clothes.

About the author

Eric Webb until recently covered arts and culture for the American-Statesman for more than a decade. You can follow his work online at www.ericwebb.me.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Matthew McConaughey live event 'Art of Livin' includes Tony Robbins