The Back Story

 

How It All Started

It was a cold winter morning in Michigan. Desperate to get out of the house and give our three small children something to do, Shelly and I were sitting on the periphery of a breakfast-themed play area in a mall in Holland, Michigan. By chance, we bumped into the recently-retired high school teacher who served as Shelly’s student teaching mentor. After a little small talk, we started asking her questions about retirement. We were expecting exciting tales of freedom and travel and adventure!

Instead, she documented her elaborate couponing routine, which is what brought her to the mall this winter morning. She had a five percent off at Bath and Body Works. As it turns out, her pension from teaching wasn’t quite as much as she had anticipated, which is why she got into couponing. And her husband was in ill health, which limited their ability to travel.

We didn’t say it at the time, but by the look on Shelly’s face, I knew we were thinking the same thing - we’re toiling away at these unfulfilling jobs to reach this as the payoff?!? Indeed, that night we talked about the experience. We both recognized we were stuck in a pattern of working to buy shit we didn’t need to help mask the discontent of going through the motions of life, all in the hopes of reaching that glorious point where we could retire and really enjoy the freedom we craved. Meeting her mentor effectively burst that bubble. There would be no glorious payoff at the end of this road. If you want to know where your life would lead, just look at the people who have already traveled that journey.

Taking the First Big Leap

Being the kind of people who don’t tolerate stagnation, we decided we needed to make changes. Huge changes. That night, we started a systematic process that would eventually allow us to quit our “secure” teaching jobs and travel around the country as barefoot ultrarunning hobos. A few years prior, mostly due to a weird confluence of events, I had become a writer of sorts. I wasn't producing Chaucer, but I was decent enough to build audiences who were willing to buy my stuff. It was good enough to allow us to teach people how to run despite prior injuries, which ended up helping quite a few people. We had to leave a close circle of runner friends, who had become our first real "tribe" of like-minded people.

We eventually spent two years traveling about 50,000 miles though forty-some states in an adventure of a lifetime. It was an amazing, life-changing experience that forever changed us on a primal level. It taught us a valuable life lesson - it doesn’t matter what society wants you to do; you need to follow your own authentic path no matter how unorthodox that path may be. That’s the only way to truly live a life worth living. 

Our rig

 

Eventually we tired of the rigors of travel and temporarily settled in San Diego. After falling in love with jiu jitsu and mixed martial arts, our planned three month stay turned into seven years. While in San Diego, we fully and unapologetically embraced our love for lifestyle experimentation with anything and everything that interested us, and it resulted in some incredible and occasionally weird adventures. We were dirt-poor most of our time in Southern California, but we learned many, many life lessons.

It was here that I rekindled my love of studying one of my original academic interests - the psychology of sex and gender. Yearning to get back to helping people ala barefoot running, I started writing about love and relationships, which led to gender roles and the decline of masculinity and femininity in our modern world. As part of that process, I started an online group to help men rediscover what made them men. This amazing group of dudes led to to restart another academic interest - the study of evolutionary psychology and how our brains are likely hard-wired for very specific behaviors. Like tribalism.

The Second Big Leap

Eventually we grew tired of living in the city. It was stupidly expensive. And there were too many people, too much traffic, too much noise, too many taxes, too much regulation, and too many homeless crack heads. We had stuck around because we loved our San Diego Fight Club coaches and teammates, who formed our second unintentional "tribe", but enough was enough. 

Our Second Tribe

 

We both grew up in rural areas, and yearned to find a place more to our liking. In our travels around the country, we identified ten or so locations we’d consider relocating to, and Colorado’s Western Slope was at the top of the list. We love mountains, the people were very similar to us personality-wise, and it would be an ideal place to start our next big adventure - start a homestead. Since we had first met some sixteen years ago, we’ve often talked about our desire to own goats and chickens. And maybe a jiu jitsu gym. And start surrounding ourselves with like-minded friends. Now was our chance!

So we moved to Montrose, Colorado, a small town at the southern end of the Uncomphagre Valley in the shadows of the majestic San Juan Mountains to the south. The plan was to buy a house in town, live there for a few years, then buy acreage outside of the town and build our homestead, then the gym. In the process, we’d build our "tribe" of friends. At the time of writing, we’ve been here a little under three years. During that time, we made great progress towards our goals, but then the coronavirus pandemic hit.

While the coronavirus pandemic has altered the plans quite a bit, the elements of the end goal remain unchanged. We did realize, though, that a whole lotta people are weak and completely incapable of successfully navigating the challenges this pandemic has created. They simply don’t have the resiliency to handle an unpredictable event with an uncertain outcome. We also realized a lot of the friends we had met when traveling around the country, and a few of our friends we’ve made here in Montrose, were handling this pandemic in stride. We realized, with a renewed sense of urgency, that we needed to do whatever we could to bring these folks together and recruit more like-minded people. We realized the "tribe" we were building was way more important than we had assumed. This revelation really shouldn't have taken so long to discover given our experiences with our first "runner" tribe and our second "jiu jitsu" tribe, but sometimes I'm a slow learner.

The events surrounding the 2020 election has brought up an even more important aspect of this plan - unity. Given my academic background, I've had a long-term interest in the historical and psychological aspects of groups. Specifically, tribal groups. How and why they form, what costs and benefits they provide for the group members and the wider society, how the internal dynamics of the group works, and so on. Right now, our society has a very unique set of variables that lead people to form groups that are essentially ideological echo chambers. The combination of comfort, safety, and technology create a perfect storm for social division. I'll cover the precise details of this in a future post, but essentially the groups we form today divide us, and based on the events leading up to and following the election, we probably haven't been this close to mass social implosion since at least the late 1960's, and probably the Civil War. In short, a whole lotta Americans see their neighbors as enemies, and many are willing to actually harm each other because of that. That sickens me.

On top of what amounts to social decay caused by pandemic and sociopolitical strife, we've been dealing with the unfortunate logistical realities of owning a jiu jitsu gym. The standard martial arts gym model, which we inherited when we purchased our gym, is problematic in good times. In the era of social distancing, the jiu jitsu/ mma gym model is pretty much guaranteed to fail. If we want to provide a great jiu jitsu and mma training experience for our current gym members, we need a different model.

That brought us to where we are right now, today.   

The team that didn't let COVID beat them down

 

The Project and the Experiment

This project can solve each and every one of those problems, along with most if not all of the problems I mentioned in the first post. At the most basic level, this project is about connecting the right people in and around our community who have a passion about some skill, hobby, or knowledge with other people in and around our community who would benefit from those skills, hobbies, or knowledge. We can do this in a way that benefits the instructor, the students, and our community as a whole. We want to create a central hub, a clearinghouse of sorts, for knowledge and wisdom. This model also allows us to explore and experiment with different ideas to continually refine what interests us the most, what interests our students the most, and what can benefit our members the most.

This project also provides us with an easy, profitable way to surround ourselves with the kinds of people who have personalities, skills, and knowledge to help each other survive and thrive no matter how bad conditions may deteriorate during this pandemic or any future catastrophe. As a rule, I always plan for the worst-case scenarios, but expect the best. While I don’t expect we’d need a lot of the skills and knowledge we’ll teach at the school, I’m preparing as though we will.

These dual goals - creating a central community-based hub for the dissemination of interesting, useful knowledge, AND surrounding ourselves with the kinds of people who want to belong to a close-knit group of diverse people who are interested in sharing this knowledge, is the reason this plan has two elements. First, we develop the community school. Second, we create a tribe of people that help run the school AND provide each other with mutual aid, protection, a social network, and all the other benefits of tribal organization.

At the time of writing this post (January of 2021), we are at the ground floor of this project. I've been running a series of experiments at our gym for a little over a year, I have detailed plans for the future, and we've identified a very small number of smart, hungry people who add A LOT of diverse expertise neither Shelly nor I posses to help build this project. For the readers who follow this project, you'll meet them in the near future. Our next steps will involve altering the plans I made based on their input.

In future posts, I'll outline each of these two elements in detail, along with the underlying logical rationale. I'll also outline every aspect of the plan in great detail for the goal of replication. If this experiment turns out to be successful, I want other people to be able to repeat it with their own improvements. 

If you just stumbled upon this project and it interests you, leave a comment for discussion and join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thelabmontrose.

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