Before the Event
I registered for the event and was immediately taken to a page asking to become a VIP for $47USD. This is the first high pressure tactic. They say don’t leave the page because you’ll never be able to go back. This is the only time you’ll be presented with this opportunity. I accidentally went back and was able to return to the page with no issues. I even double checked just now that the page was still in my history.
Benefits of the VIP Experience:
- 25 meals donated to Feeding America (Yay for feeding people!)
- Private Zoom room w/ MM (I’m skeptical)
- Extra hour of Training (Live Q&A)
- Movie Set Bonus Package (Meh)
- VIP Zoom Background (Oh god no. I don’t need everyone to know I got suckered in)
Just take a moment to look at how many meals have been donated. That makes over 34,000 people in the VIP room. That also makes the event worth about $1.6 million USD at the time of my purchase.
Of course they have to put an arbitrary discount on the VIP access page ($297 $47). Not sure how a “private” Zoom room is worth $300USD but okay. Then there are the add ons:
- $17USD for lifetime access (will you actually watch it again? I know I wouldn’t)
- $77USD for the “confidence collection” (this does not seem like a good deal)
The $47USD was already a plunge for me, so I opted not to add anything on.
Some History:
So it doesn’t look like Matthew McConaughey just met up with some people and decided to put on this event. Having joined the Facebook group, there are already 526.6k members and Mastermind.com is an admin. Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi are the founders and also happen to be speakers at the event with MM.
What is Mastermind.com?
Mastermind.com is a platform to “sell what you know online”. The pricing is hidden and only shows what a free, 14-day trial will get you. They tout that “Mastermind.com promises to redefine what “Self Education” means to the world.” I’m sure they believe that, but I don’t. I like Coursera. I’m starting to see why they would have approached Matthew McConaughey. Mastermind.com’s own Facebook page only has 8.4k members, whereas Matthew’s Facebook page has 10 million. It’s hard to sift through the Art of Livin’ page for actual relevant information because everyone seems to want to share their life story there. There are also files that were uploaded in August of 2020, but I haven’t been able to access them. That begs the question, though, if this is the first time MM has done this event, what was on the page for the previous 3 years? There are some interesting things in the albums from 2020 and when looking at past events, one can see multiple events from Dean Graziosi.
I have a feeling that like most things, I won’t like this either. HA!
*Of course Tony knew who Tony Robbins is. I hadn’t a clue! Tony knows all the other Tonys.
List of speakers at the event are:
- Matthew McConaughey
- Tony Robbins
- Dean Graziosi
- Marie Forleo
- Trent Shelton
- Karissa Kouchis
Friday Before the Event
Interestingly enough on Friday we get an e-mail that contains a video of Dean Graziosi explaining that this event is actually Matthew McConaughey’s vision and that he and Tony are just helping him along. They’re still pushing the VIP pass, but with 954,000 meals donated so far that puts us at 38,160 people in the “private” Zoom room. Does this mean we’ll be in 40+ different private rooms?
Saturday Before the Event
I sat down to watch the bonus materials for being a VIP. They’re clips of MM talking about his experiences working on different film projects. It just made me sad, not because of what he says, but because giving up on my dream still really hurts years later. It was interesting to hear what he had to say, but not worth $47USD ($63.31CAD).
At 14:03 PST I got another e-mail saying my homework is to put the event in my calendar (already done), and to invite people (I’m still skeptical, so no). This e-mail stated that there are over 2 million people joining, and by the meal count, we’re closing in on 40,000 people in the VIP rooms. Oh boy. I mean, it’s great for feeding hungry Americans, but if you have a question, do you really think you’re going to be able to ask it?
I came across this YouTube video that I thought was interesting. I had no idea that MM had already released a book and a journal. She seems to think this event is to funnel people into Mastermind.com. Oh wow. MM. MasterMind. Trippy. She goes over the terms of service, where it mentions a subscription to Mastermind.com. That’s unfortunate, but not surprising. The further I went into the video though, I thought she was too closed-minded as the things he was saying made sense if you actually think about it, and how he was doing things made sense from an artistic perspective. She goes on this thing about real McConaughey vs actor McConaughey, but who has their real self on social media? It’s all curated. Also, as an actor myself, every character I’ve ever played is a part of me for better or for worse, and every character I’ve ever played has been me. There will be overlaps. The ad hominem attack just isn’t for me.
She also goes on about how he was hired for Sales Force for $10 million/year after laying off 8,000 employees, despite not understanding that 8,000 employees cost a lot more than $10 million. For simple math, if that 10 million went to the 8,000 employees, they’d be making $1250/year. I’m not saying this event isn’t a grift, but some of the points I think she’s missing. The way I understood it, she made it seem like the $47USD I spent would automatically sign me up for a Mastermind.com subscription from which I could not exit. I doubt this is the case.
The Event
The event started a little late. I got into VIP room #68 that has 522 people at 10:10AM. It feels silly with the fake laugh track and applause with the virtual stars. It makes it feel so fake. I mean, as someone who has worked in film, I know how essential these stupid little things are, but it also isn’t authentic. Why not hire 50 people to sit in the audience and laugh and clap on cue? It sure would help the presenters.
The sound is mono, so that’s annoying.
Around 10:15, MM shows up and both studio feeds start playing, but of course they are not in sync. There’s a significant delay, so I wonder why even bother with the second feed. I can’t even tell if this is live. Just for shits and giggles I decided to look at the Facebook and YouTube feeds, the quality is sooooo much better than Zoom. There are only about 12,000 people watching on Facebook and 414,000 on YouTube. They keep saying 2 million people though and just shy of 50,000 people registered for VIP. That’s not even 500,000 people watching, never mind 2 million.
10:35AM 555 people in my room now. He honestly seems a bit high and sounds like the preachers I had to listen to as a kid. They tell us to pay attention, but also to keep the chats going. Can’t really pay attention if we’re constantly in the chat. This is feeling so religious and I want it to end. But I promised I would do the whole thing.
10:39AM and there’s already a lot of people who have dropped off.
Dean says “sometimes sales is love.” Oh geez. It’s coming soon. What are they actually selling? It’s nice to recognize the prime though. The whole talk was about how paying for someone to speak knowledge to you can change your life. It changed his.
Around 12:30 the bomb drops. It’s another course. My Zoom chat explodes. Some people are so excited; they didn’t see it coming. Some people are pissed. Some are disappointed. Some are desperate for the course but can’t afford it. Anyone who says anything even resembling criticism of this sales pitch gets reprimanded by the mods and by adamant supporters who say that we’re the ones who need the program the most and that at least they care about working on themselves. I laughed out loud. One of the mods said they hoped I had gotten something from the speeches so far. I haven’t. Partly because I don’t think MM prepared or he’s high or scared or disinterested or something, and Dean was just priming for the sale. Partly because once the sound became stereo the visuals never matched up and I can’t watch that, so I started taking and editing pictures for my blog. And partly because the chat room was so constant and so distracting.
13:20 only 208k on YouTube, 6.1k on Facebook, and 437 left in my Zoom room. A lot of people were not expecting and very unhappy with the sales pitch. They lost almost 50% of their streamers and, surprisingly, even a fair amount of VIPs.
14:09 and the event is supposed to be over. It is not. Remaining participants: 197k on YouTube, 5.7k on Facebook and 403 in my private Zoom room.
14:49 and people are getting upset. They blocked off a certain amount of time and it’s still going. Many who paid extra for the Q&A will miss it because they have to go to work, pick up their kids, go to appointments etc, which means they’ll miss out on the only “real” benefit of paying for VIP. The responses from the chat moderators are to be thankful that the speakers are “giving more”. There is no need to give more, and in fact, many are receiving less. There is a lot to be said for being concise.
Around 15:30 it finally ends. Then we are made to wait for another 15+ minutes staring at the promo screen to try to sell us the program again. This time more bonuses have been added to increase the value, and therefore the event discount, to try to better entice us.
The Q&A
After more than 5.5 long hours we (whoever still had the time) finally started the Q&A session.
15:47 – Here we go.
Of course they brought all the speakers (except Tony, as he was not in the studio) on stage for the Q&A. I anticipate that this will reduce the number of questions being asked.
It’s actually pretty cute. The people whose questions get asked are brought up on the screen and are unmuted, so they then get a chance to speak with the panelists. Many people in my Zoom room don’t understand that there are about 50,000 VIPs. One poor guy thought that each one of us would get to ask a question and that our room was the only room. I felt sad for him. Many people thought our room was the only room because that’s how it was sold.
I wonder if all the participants who could ask questions were plants or just from one room. “livin12383” was the only one who shared their screen for the questions to be asked.
16:33 It’s finally over. Those of us who paid for that extra hour did not get the full hour. We also only got 5 or 6 questions asked total because most of the panelists had something to say for each. These are motivational speakers though, not intellectuals, so most of what they said was just fluff. There was an amusing moment when one of the speakers told the questioner that X was happening in the questioner’s life and she started shaking her head. Bunch of fortune tellers these, and bad ones at that.
Verdict: Snake Oil
At this point I don’t care how useful the talks were to some people and I don’t care if Matthew’s new program could be useful to others. The fact that they were so dishonest about it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. They used high pressure sales tactics, sales priming, dishonest marketing and many, many “white lies” to further their cause. They kept pushing the VIP everywhere, knowing that it was misleading and gave no real value to anyone. They’re preying on many vulnerable people, most of who can’t afford the $397USD price tag. Why is it that expensive anyway? It makes no sense to me. If top universities, and even Google can provide courses for a much cheaper price on Coursera, even the classes on MasterClass are cheaper (yes, I bought one of those too XD), why is supposedly life-changing content that expensive? Especially when it’s touted as something you need.
Having listened to McConaughey now, I wouldn’t pay for his advice. He is not an intellectual. He doesn’t sound well-studied. He sounds like a self-important guru who wants to be loved by millions. He obviously doesn’t want to actually help people, as he wouldn’t have teamed up with Dean and Tony for this project, and he would have put it at an accessible price point. There were people in my Zoom who said they had $45 in their bank account. This is sad, because they spent $47 for the Zoom room. The “private” Zoom room wasn’t even a benefit. In fact, I found being in a VIP room a drawback. The constant comments were distracting, and the quality was worse than YouTube and Facebook. People were trying to connect in the chat and being told not to, that they should go to the Facebook page (with 675,000 people on it) and find one another there. How ridiculous!
I feel bad for the people who took the “private Zoom room with McConaughey” to be literal. I feel bad for the people who took the “limited Zoom spots” to be literal because Zoom really does have limits. I feel bad for all the people who thought that McConaughey was doing it from the goodness of his heart. And I feel bad for those who feel they need his course to improve their lives. There is so much online, for free, including hours of all of these speakers. There are books that can be accessed for free at a library or Libby. There are successful people in most people’s communities that can potentially be approached and asked for guidance. If you have $397USD extra and want to spend it on Matthew’s program, and get registered for a MasterMind subscription, go for it. It might be fun! You might learn something. I spend money and take time for random courses all the time; my sewing class a few years ago cost more than that. But take it with a grain of salt. What does MM actually know that is legitimate and doesn’t just sound good? I mean, he thinks he came up with the idea that your strengths can also be your weaknesses. That’s not something new, I’ve gone over it in therapy. What can he offer that isn’t already known and available for cheaper? Maybe it’s just superb formatting, but also know that Marie Forleo said she got through it in 2 days. That’s not a good sign. At no point in time do I want to purchase a course for $397USD that I can get through in 2 days.
After 6.5 hours what I’ve learned is to never pay a dime to any of these people ever again as they are a bunch of dishonest and manipulative bogies. I’ll probably read their books via Libby though.
Oh, I finally found the cost of MasterMind: it’s $47USD/month.
If you attended the Art of Livin’ Event, let me know what you thought of it. If you signed up for MM’s class, also let me know! I’d love to hear what you think of it and if I’m wrong.
Update: June 16 2023
Two things: I read MM’s book Green Lights. He mentions multiple times that he’s a grifter in the book. The second is an update on their e-mails.
On April 29, they sent their “final message”, and on May 8 “one final thing to say”, but I’m still getting e-mails from them. I’ve attached the screenshot to show the frequency. This is annoying, but I haven’t unsubscribed to see how long they send them and if they eventually morph into something else.
wanderingfawn 