Matthew McConaughey showed up at a small bookstore with 70 people on the porch. Someone asked him for his chicken-salad recipe, he shared it, and the clip went viral. It's a perfect example of how a tiny, photogenic moment becomes a pseudo-event that spreads across TikTok.
Matthew McConaughey did an event at the bookstore.
It's like one of the biggest movie stars in the world talking to 70 people on a porch of a bookstore. But I kept thinking like, why are you doing this? And then it was funny. Someone got up and asked, I heard you have like a great tuna salad recipe. And he was like, I do.
Recently, your chicken salad recipe went viral.
The tuna salad. Yes. He proceeded to give a very specific step-by-step recipe for this tuna thing. That video alone did, I think, like 9 million views on TikTok. And then you realize, oh, like, it's stuff like this. You know what a pseudo-event is? Yeah. A pseudo-event is like gather the media for the express purposes of telling them something that you could have just called them on the phone, but you're making it photogenic or telegenic. And so like the purpose of the event, not that it was this Machiavellian thing, but he's talking to 70 people, but he's actually talking potentially to an infinite number of people.
