As I thought about my brother and Brehm and Barraza and other guys we’d lost during deployments, everything that got me to where I was in that moment, I just remember how pissed I was at all those Facebook people. To defuse some of my spite, I picked up my guitar and started strumming some chords, talking to them out loud through my computer screen, you fuckers and your champagne problems, everyone’s got ’em. Before I knew it, two hours had passed and I’d written and recorded a song that would become my first YouTube video: “Champagne Facebook Problems.” Little did I know it would change my life forever.
* Since this got redacted, I want to be clear that this was a human I fucked.
Chapter 16
Hey, Aren’t You That Dude?
I didn’t publish “Champagne Facebook Problems” right away. I sat on it for a few days as I considered what to do with it. I’d used GarageBand to record the audio tracks and the camera on my MacBook to record the video, so I wasn’t exactly psyched with the production quality. And on a more basic level, the whole thing felt kind of embarrassing. I mean, sure, I’ve always loved playing music and writing songs, but I’m a former Ranger and was working as ████████████. Calling attention to yourself like this isn’t something you do unless you’re a contestant on The Voice or you’re a Navy SEAL. #sickburn
Still, something about the process of coming up with an idea and producing a piece of content with a message that I thought more people needed to hear tapped into a feeling that was bigger than my macho insecurity—a reservoir of creativity within me that I’d unwittingly spent the previous ten years covering up with muscles, tattoos, body armor, and guns. All it took was the crushing boredom of private military contracting to smash a crack in that façade and allow some of the creativity to vent.
For all of it to fully vent, however, my creation had to reach more than an audience of me, so I hit “publish” and told a few buddies about it to get the ball rolling. Even at this early stage, I knew I had more videos in me, but if nobody wanted to watch them, I wasn’t going to waste my time. Fortunately, by telling my friends, who told their friends, “Champagne Facebook Problems” got a few thousand views and I got a few hundred subscribers to my YouTube channel, which I called “MBest11x,” in the first couple weeks. In retrospect, that’s not a lot, but when you’re first starting out, anything more than nothing feels pretty amazing. As the investor Peter Thiel says, the hardest part of any creative or entrepreneurial endeavor is going from zero to one.
Plus, on a personal level, seeing the likes and the subscriptions and the comments tally up, however small, was actually really rewarding. And not in the social media validation whore kind of way either, you judgy bitches. More to the extent that something I had created was resonating with an audience that wasn’t my classmates or close friends. In high school, with Blind Story, people liked us but we didn’t have “fans.” Nobody bought any CDs or merch (not that we had any). Like with most high school bands, half of the admiration we received was from people who just thought it was cool that they knew somebody who owned a microphone. The response to “Champagne Facebook Problems,” that was a different beast, and I wanted to tame it. So for the next year and a half, I treated my time off like a daddy’s girl in a freshman dorm: All I did was experiment.
I made a video called “Exploding Bear!!” using 30-plus cases of ammo, a giant pink teddy bear, and some Tannerite, all or some of which (depending on who from Battalion is reading this right now) I purchased drunk online one night, flush with all that contractor money.
I did a video sitting at a desk talking straight to the camera called “How to Pick Up Chicks.” (Short answer: Lift with your legs.) Then I moved away from talking to the camera and I did a sketch about all the dumb shit guys do, just to see how a video might turn out if I scripted it and tried to act a little bit. That video was (geniusly) titled “Dumb Shit Guys Do,” and it was the first one I’d done that I was actually proud of. The editing was better, the ideas were sharper, I added title graphics and outro music with a “Subscribe” tag at the end that made it seem like I knew what the fuck I was doing, and I was able to incorporate some military-specific material into other pop culture stuff that made the video even more relevant to the people I already knew would be my core fan base: military dudes and dudettes.
It was good enough, I thought, to warrant reaching out to a couple of the bigger online military communities to see if they’d share it. With each video I made, my audience was growing, and the messages I was getting were more enthusiastic, so clearly I was doing something right. One of the first places I tried was a large general-interest military page on Facebook run by an active-duty Air Force guy named Jarred Taylor. I sent him a message along with links to my other videos to show him who I was and what kind of content I was capable of making. Fairly certain he had received tons of requests like this, I didn’t think he would reply. I was shocked when I got a message back two minutes later. It was terse and simple: “Can we talk? Here’s my number.”
I was confused. What did he want to talk about? Are you gonna share the video or not? Yes or no? The next day, I dialed Jarred’s number, not really sure why I was doing it. He picked up right away.
“Dude, I’ve been searching for someone like you for a long time,” he said, virtually unprompted. “I love your videos, and I think you have a really great presence. I can help you.”
“How so?” I asked. I was unsure what “help” meant in the context of YouTube videos. Plus, isn’t this how aspiring models end up dead in a river? Some predator sees potential in them and uses a camera to lure them into a van that locks from the outside?
“I own a video and graphics company,” Jarred continued. “I’ve been doing production for the last ten years on my own. Everything from music videos and commercials to sketches like yours. A bunch for people in the tactical space. I think I have some contacts that could help us.”
Help us with what?
“Look, I would love for you to come down to El Paso where I live so we can shoot a bunch of stuff. We need to get you better production.”
“What do you mean?” I was skeptical but excited.
“I’m talking about making people think you are already a successful personality. A brand. Come down to Texas and we can talk more. I’ll shoot everything when you’re here.”
“Shit, I can’t. I’m deploying in like a week.”
“Okay, no problem, just come down when you get back.”
After we hung up the phone and I replayed the conversation in my head, I found one thing especially remarkable about it. In all of his sentences, Jarred used the word “we” when describing what he wanted to do. It’s like we were already partners on something that didn’t even exist yet. I wasn’t a personality. I was just Mat. I was a guy who liked playing music and blowing shit up who happened to have a lot of time on his hands.