As I continued to make videos, my goal was to speak to people like me. People who appreciated the gratitude but had no use for the pity; who did not need thanks for their service because they were more thankful for it than anyone could imagine. They were grateful for the chance to serve. I wanted to reflect their reality back to them so they would know that they weren’t crazy for not being crazy. I also wanted any veterans and current active military who might be struggling to know that it was okay to laugh in the face of the horrors of war, that they could be proud of what they’d accomplished, and that there was at least one place online where no one would judge them either way. I wanted the world to know that veterans like me, who loved man shit like beards and whiskey and guns and hot chicks in American flag bikinis, weren’t ticking time bombs waiting to explode. We were normal people who just so happened to have gone through some extraordinary experiences and come out the other side proud of our accomplishments, grateful for our brothers and sisters, and ready to apply all that experience to the next chapter of our lives in the civilian world…and thrive.
This was the mindset that Jarred and I shared as we set our minds to parlaying the popularity of our videos into an actual business. And we did it, principally, by listening to the voices of the very people we were trying to serve. It wasn’t hard. With a fan base built largely from men aged 18 to 35 in the military community, believe me when I tell you that these dudes had fucking opinions. About everything: what they wanted, what they thought was funny, what they thought we were doing right or wrong, what they wanted more or less of. More importantly, they had ideas that were, by and large, way crazier and more fucked-up than anything Jarred and I could come up with on our own, by which I mean to say, they were awesome. So we started to aggregate and sort all their feedback, looking for patterns we could use to come up with sketch concepts, songs to parody, and business ideas to explore.
The first thing we launched was a T-shirt business. Military people have a tendency to wear cool lifestyle T-shirts, to work out in them, to have them on under their gear. If we made shirts with the same attitude and commitment to quality that we brought to making videos and used some of the more popular videos and what we would today call their “meme-worthy” content as inspiration for the designs and then used the videos to promote the shirts, we could turn some of this attention we were getting into a real business.
We called the company Article 15 Clothing, after the provision of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that governs getting in trouble but not that bad in trouble. Not “Did you order the Code Red?” court-martial trouble; more like fucking a ███ contractor, dressing up like Jessica Simpson, bringing a dude’s head and shoulders back in a Glad-bag kind of trouble. As active-duty Air Force, it was Jarred’s not-so-subtle way of saying “Fuck you, pay me” to the commanding officers whose stupid rules always made his job harder to do—I mean, to the extent that anything in the Air Force is actually difficult.
By any reasonable entrepreneurial standard, Article 15 Clothing achieved success right out of the gate—seven-figure sales in the first year—and with that success came expectations, the kind you cannot fail to meet if you intend to retain your customers and survive, let alone grow. We weren’t just T-shirt peddlers, after all, we were also a mission-based business—like TOMS, except instead of “Sell a shoe, give a shoe” it was “Sell a shirt, give a freedom boner.” Yes, on one level, people just wanted more. More T-shirts, more videos, more stuff. But on a deeper level, what we were hearing was a desire for a deeper connection.
I was getting messages on Facebook and emails in my inbox from all kinds of people, but especially veterans. Married guys with a gang of kids who’d been out of the service for a while, who missed the camaraderie of military life and saw their old Army buddies once a year if they were lucky. And they’d be like, Bro! I love your stuff! Man, what I would give to be able to hang out and drink with you guys, even just for one night! Keep it up!
Jarred and I and every member of the team we’d begun to assemble at Article 15 were getting these types of messages on a nearly daily basis. (I still get at least one per week, and I’m boring as fuck now.) It was flattering, and it was yet another indication that we were on to something in the name of good, but more than that it was the spark for two more ideas: If all these people wish they could drink and hang out with us, why don’t we start a whiskey company and do a podcast? So eventually we did.
The whiskey company we called Leadslingers Spirits. The podcast we called Drinkin’ Bros. Both are amazing, but only one was really a good idea. I won’t say which, but word to the wise: If you hate having a fun, profitable, relatively frictionless professional life, the heavily regulated whiskey trade is the perfect business to get into. Brown liquor is great because it fucks you up nice and good. The whiskey business is awful because it fucks you up the butt without any lube and blames you for bleeding on its sheets. In contrast, for the one-hundredth episode of Drinkin’ Bros we had two people have sex in front of us and we commentated it like a UFC fight. I’ll leave it to you to choose which of these experiences you would prefer to be a part of.
In the middle of all this growth and entrepreneurial experimentation, we had our craziest idea yet. When I was overseas, we had this group chat on Facebook Messenger that we called “Kinetic Kill” where we bullshitted and brainstormed the way any company with a distributed workforce might. One night, we were kicking around sketch ideas when Jarred threw out something way more radical than a sketch concept: “Dude, we should make a fucking movie.”
Okay, bro, yeah, we’ll just make a movie. What the fuck are you talking about? Movies aren’t sketches. They’ve got stories and actors. You need grips and shit. Movies cost a lot of money, even the low-budget ones. But the more Jarred talked and the more other guys on the chat chimed in, the more possible the idea seemed. More than a few fans had asked us to do something longer-form in the video space. There was definitely demand. And we could crowdfund it, just to be doubly sure that the demand was big enough. If only our moms donated to the campaign, we’d know it wasn’t real. If we got close enough to our initial goal fairly quickly, then we’d know that success was really just a matter of getting the word out.
Pretty quickly we came to a consensus around an idea: It would be part comedy, part war epic, part zombie movie. The general gist was a group of buddies in the military save the world from a zombie apocalypse by bringing to bear all of their military training. Basically, it would be every military person’s dream of slaying bodies in the name of survival (not that ISIS and zombies are too far apart in their thinking).
I floated the idea to the twenty or so American ███████████████ I was working with overseas at the time who knew what I did on the side. They lost their minds. It was like Santa had come on the 4th of July with a bag full of guns and a team of Victoria’s Secret elves intent on giving up their secret. For America, obviously. The support from my ██████████████████████ was unequivocal, and their feedback followed the same general pattern, like a military Mad Libs: