The name “Matt Harding” probably doesn’t ring any bells but there’s a good chance that you’ve seen him dancing. He’s not one of the professionals on “Dancing with the Stars” nor has he been on “So You Think You Can Dance.” Implicit in the title of the latter television show is that the contestants think that they can dance well. Matt makes no such claim.

In fact, he has managed to make a living dancing badly in what I would describe as a hybrid aerobic-Irish step-chicken dance, except that might offend my Irish stepdance friends.

Matt is the unassuming star behind the phenomenally popular YouTube videos that show him dancing all around the world from places like the beach in Santa Monica, Calif., to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, to a rock suspended 1000 meters in the air in Kjeragbolten, Norway, to Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the world’s largest salt flat.

What does he do besides dance badly? According to his bio, he is a “32-year-old deadbeat from Connecticut who used to think that all he ever wanted to do in life was make and play videogames. Matt achieved this goal pretty early and enjoyed it for a while, but eventually realized there might be other stuff he was missing out on. . . . Matt’s Xbox Live screen name is BadDancer. He plays a lot of Rock Band.”

The genesis for his first video came when he was traveling around Asia and a friend suggested he do his unique dance with the motorbikes of Hanoi whizzing by in the background.

Matt’s bad dancing attracted a corporate sponsor, Stride Gum, and he made a second video, traveling to yet more places, and a third one, this time with many other people dancing with him.

Matt created a website, wherethehellismatt.com to keep his friend and family updated on where he was in his travels. “Where the Hell is Matt” has become such a well known moniker that he doesn’t even use his last name on his site.

His unique dancing style has attracted millions of viewers – with over 40 million YouTube views – as well as thousands of people who want to join him in dancing badly. He explained the logistics of getting people to dance with him in this video; he put a sign up page on his Web site and got 25,000 interested parties, who he e-mailed when he visited their city. That led to 40 events around the world with sometimes only five people showing up and sometimes 180.

But for more rural areas that are not heavily e-mail dependent, like Africa, Matt had to rely on guerrilla style filmmaking; he would just start dancing, and the kids would generally join him (the adults tended to be more skeptical). It was his visit to Rwanda in the making of his second video where young kids joined him in dancing that persuaded him that a video with him dancing with others would be even better than his previous ones where the primary draw was the cool locales.

Matt has achieved fame but not wealth through his videos, though he has managed to avoid a nine to five work schedule since embarking on his second video. As he noted a few years ago:

“The most valuable thing in the world right now in my opinion is attention. And that if you can get people’s attention and hold it even for just a few minutes – a lot of people, we’re talking a couple million people for a few minutes – you can make a living off of that if you can reliably do that. Attention is a very valuable thing because there’s so much stuff to distract us now.”

Matt did a piece in March for the NPR segment, “This I Believe.” He used to dance to annoy his co-workers but through his travels and dancing he has managed to break down some barriers that previously existed by focusing less on the differences with others.

You can listen and view the full piece here:

“People want to feel connected to each other. They want to be heard and seen, and they’re curious to hear and see others from places far away. I share that impulse. It’s part of what drives me to travel. But it’s constantly at odds with another impulse, which is to reduce and contain my exposure to a world that’s way too big for me to comprehend….

“My tribe has grown into a single, impossibly vast social network, whether I like it or not. The problem, I believe, isn’t that the world has changed, it’s that my primitive caveman brain hasn’t.

“I am fantastic at seeing differences. Everybody is. I can quickly pick out those who look or behave differently, and unless I actively override the tendency, I will perceive them as a threat. That instinct may have once been useful for my tribe but when I travel, it’s a liability.

“When I dance with people, I see them smile and laugh and act ridiculous. It makes those differences seem smaller. The world seems simpler, and my caveman brain finds that comforting.

“I believe my children will have brains ever so slightly better suited to the vast complexity that surrounds us. They will be more curious, more eager to absorb and to connect.

“And I believe when they look into eyes of strangers, what they will see before the differences are the things that are the same.”

Here are some other videos:

First Video

Second Video