Uncle Mud – Natural Building Chieftain

Uncle Mud

Episode 22.

Who is your tribe? Is there a “community” of people already out there that would love what you do? Could you create one by scratch?

Chris Mcclellan (better known as “Uncle Mud”) has a special skill in finding and bringing together easy-going, like-minded individuals to create spectacular structures out of mud and junk lying around. Though he started out a business owner of a computer company, a life threatening situation made him rethink what his priorities were. Now, he travels the world, and has the world travel to visit him to learn his techniques in natural building.

What would it be like to design your life around an ideal lifestyle versus around an income number? Listen Now!

Find more about Uncle Mud: http://www.unclemud.com/
Support him here: https://www.patreon.com/unclemud
Like and Follow him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unclemud/

Find out the business events secrets for growing and strengthening ANY company: http://brianjpombo.com/secrets/

Full Transcript

Uncle Mud: One of the things about having a midlife crisis and I would say a heart attack is a midlife crisis. If you survive it is that we were able to like reassess what we wanted to do, and start planning for a better outcome for our

Podcast Intro: If you’re someone who refuses to go along to get along, if you question whether the status quo was good enough for you and your family.

If you want to leave this world better off than you found it and you consider independence a sacred thing.

You may be a prepper, a gardener, a homesteader, a survivalist, or a farmer or rancher, an environmentalist or a rugged outdoorsman.

We are here to celebrate you whether you’re looking to improve your maverick business or to find out more about the latest products and services available to the weekend rebel.

From selling chicken eggs online, to building up your food storage or collecting handmade soap.

This show is for those who choose the road less traveled the road to self-reliance for those that are living a daring adventure, life off the grid.

Brian: Uncle Mud aka Chris McLellan raises free range organic children in the wilds of suburbia, in Ohio, building houses and pizza ovens and wood stoves with mud and junk is his way of sharing the can do spirit he writes teaches workshops and hosts a mud pit and DIY building demonstrations at fairs across the US.

The rocket mass heaters and his double wide dropped his heating bill from nearly $1,000 per month for propane to less than $75 per year.

Your results may vary but this guy is happy. Follow him on patreon.com/UncleMud or facebook.com/UncleMud.

Uncle Mud, welcome to the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Uncle Mud: Thank you very much.

Brian: Well then besides just what we heard in your bio, tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Uncle Mud: I like to play in the mud. Found a great job where I get to be a kid and go like to summer camp. And do an artist residency program were we get kids like as young as seven, an impact driver and have them help us build a tree house or have them help us.

Make a pizza oven that they have a pizza party for their parents. And later, they come to visit, we get all muddy and then go jump in the lake and then do it again, it’s great fun.

But it also kind of illustrates the divide between what a person can do and what we feel like we’re encouraged to do, we’re kind of encouraged to leave things to the experts and go buy something rather than make it and that just doesn’t sit well with a lot of the kids that I work with.

And doesn’t sit well with me. So we just have on build our sense of ourselves.

Brian: Sure. That’s great. How did you get to here?

What’s your life story up to this point?

Uncle Mud: So when I was kid in high school and broke my leg. And I like to build forts in the woods and, and electric little electric cars and things like that. And my dad bought me a copy of Lloyd Kahn’s book Shelter. That was almost as old as I was.

But it was stories of people building their own plates out of things they found around them, all of these ways in which people may do and that’s made do but also turned their life and their house art.

I’ve worn out six copies of that book and on to be able to write some articles for Lloyd to become friends with him. And he introduced me to the crew at Mother Earth News Magazine.

I started writing for them, started teaching mud building at their fairs, and actually started with just having a mud pit that the kids play in because their parents had come to these fairs.

Each of them with a huge list of different workshops they wanted to participate in different events they wanted to see. They’re just dragging their kids around to go to all these things until surprise, surprise, the kids kind of melt down.

So we wanted to do something that the kids get to have fun and it turned into amazing success. Get them sculpting little fairy houses, building things with the bricks and sticks and mud and stuff that I had sitting around for my presentations.

And then later I ended doing presentations for the up because they got curious and so I’ve been doing that since about 2012.

It’s grown into also going and building houses for people teaching workshops all over the country.

We’ve been go to Jamaica. I teach mud building workshops because people up in the mountains only make 20 bucks a day and a sac of cement is 10 bucks and nobody can ever finish their house.

So we go up and find clay and we find fiber and find sand and we mix everything together, build houses.

And we’ll go walk by the side of the road pick up all the bottles of people drop. And because there’s no trash service there, turn them into windows. Because it can get really expensive with windows in your house there.

Everything has to be shipped into the island.

You know, we’ve even started teaching a two week shop class for homesteaders up in the mountains in Montana every summer for permies.com. Do get people to have the skills and the confidence they need to go out and have their own place out in the woods, whether it’s wiring so they can set up their own solar or, and understand how much power they can use before they start to build their battery bank.

Or whether it’s letting them drive a 16 ton excavator or weld or push a sawmill. These are things that, don’t really get taught in school, but are really quite handy, if you’re going to do things for yourself.

So nice little confidence builders and the materials that we try to use for these confidence builders are also materials you can get out of a dumpster or on Craigslist or dig a hole in your backyard or, instead of buying two by fours, go out in the woods and find the trees kind of in the shade of another tree and not going to do well. Especially when to do it with a tree that that has that maybe has some character to it and even curves around something else that he grew around.

Those little trees make a great handles for a door that is spending 30 bucks and driving 40 minutes to a big box store. Go for a walk in the woods with a handsaw come back and shape something a little bit.

That’s God’s hardware store.

Brian: At what point did this go from being a hobby to almost like a profession or a way of life for you that when it grew into you basically being a teacher? How did that come about?

Uncle Mud: Well, I had some wonderful opportunities. 2004 I was in California for computer business for a workshop for computer business I own there wasn’t any place, less than about $200 a night to stay in.

But there was campground with a hot springs about an hour away. And I went there. There’s these people sitting in a corner laughing and scribbling on a piece of paper. And they just kind of struck me as having fun.

And whatever they were doing, they were very intent on that they were having a good time with it.

When I got home. I was on the internet, and I found some pictures of houses being built with natural materials. There was a guy on the internet who had a natural building school, but the number for the school was, it was disconnected and there was there were only about six pictures of anything you’d ever done. 35 years that were on the internet.

I needed to find this guy. Was getting ready to buy a plane ticket and fly back out west. And see if I could find this guy and a friend, I mentioned it to a friend who said, Oh, he’s not going to be there then actually be about six hours from your house at a natural building colloquium.

So I grabbed my daughter and who was thinking at the time, we drove out to Bath, New York for the Eastern Natural Building Colloquium and met about 200 of our new best friends.

Got me several lovely natural builders, including SunRay Kelley, whose work I’d been admiring and who happened to be the guy who was sitting in the corner with his friends scribbling away designing the Harbin Temple that they later built with drawn clay and beautiful cedar wood went on to write a book with him and get more and more involved with helping people teach workshops.

Learning was, I was going along, how to do this stuff myself? And how to support other people’s efforts, by publishing books on these subjects or getting a group together to learn how to do it in the process of managed to survive a heart attack.

But that told me that I needed to do something else with my time other than ended all in front of a computer being on call for 24 hours a day, does that was taking a toll on my health.

So at that point, I dropped down to about half time, got a partner for that business, and started doing more traveling and more empire building and teaching writing.

And that daughter that was with me when she was six, has actually built her own two storey treehouse, she turned 18 and moved into it and lived there for about a year before going off to be a missionary and then coming back and getting married. And she just left to go work on a civil engineering degree.

So she wants to be able to just stamp her own plan, so she’s been right in the thick of it with the natural building thing. My whole family has a bunch of friends, we end up being, The Mud Family, traveling all over together, doing events together.

Brian: That’s just that’s so awesome. Living the dream there, it seems. I mean, you could tell and for those of you who are were listening to this and may not have heard me discuss it before, I got to meet Uncle Mud at the Mother Earth News Fair in Albany, Oregon, and got to see his one of his presentations on the Rocket Mass Heaters.

And you can just tell from how you carry yourself and how your crew around you all carry themselves that you’re having a good time.

I mean, you’re doing one presentation right after the other. I think you’re probably one of the most prolific presenters there for the entire thing. You’re just go, go go.

And you could tell you’re having a great time and obviously by how much you travel and everything else you must enjoy it right?

Uncle Mud: Yeah, absolutely. We actually have figured out a way for my wife and my kids to travel and do this with us to. You know, one of the things about having a midlife crisis and I would say a heart attack is a midlife crisis. If you survive it, is that we were able to like reassess what we want to do, and start planning for a better outcome for our time.

Sometimes, it’s a little challenging, like when you have to jump in the car and drive a quarter of the way across the country to go to go each for two days straight, and then drive again, that can be a little much, but we’ve been able to figure out how to keep the cost down.

I mean, we got a little camper we’ve made out of our Prius that just fits us and it’s good enough gas mileage, that we can afford to do these things rather than having to have a big RV and in a big bill to go with it.

And we can spend more time together and focus on the thing that we care about.

Brian: That’s great. We’ve been talking to a lot of other speakers and vendors from the Mother Earth News Fairs and just kind of looking at, you know, the business end of things and why they plug into these things.

So besides the enjoyment that you get from it, what is your organization or everything that you’re doing right now or your business? What do you get out of going to these Mother Earth News Fairs?

Uncle Mud: The most amazing thing is that the Mother Earth News Fairs, people who show up for those, tend to self select, as really great. I mean, the relative ratio of cool people to jerk is really, really low there.

Compared to host a being stuck in traffic on your way into work. There’s a pretty high ratio ratio there, infact it’s easy to become one of them myself. I’m much more interested in hanging out with people who have already decided that they’re going to do something that they care about whether it’s having chicken or living off grid, or just homeschooling or building a mud house.

There’s a certain focus you get, people get, when they say I’m going to come to the fair and learn about this.

Or even the people who come there to teach or organize it and choose to spend their time organizing cool fairs like this rather than, say something that might be more lucrative like working for an amusement park or something.

The people just have this dedication to something that is feeding their souls.

I really like being around that and it makes it worth the effort, we’ve been transitioning from being dependent on my wife being a full time teacher.

She’s been still a full time teacher, but she’s been able to work the production in in the work for an online charter school, that of being in a school that takes all of our time and has time each day, every day.

That up now we can, we can work online in the car while we’re driving to an event or while we’re camping somewhere if she has to, and that gives us a great deal of freedom.

The rocket heaters gone from thousand dollars a month, propane down to $75 a year for hardwood cut off the local flooring mill that the bit of freedom itself and do other things I want to do with that time. Like stop and visit people who’ve been doing other cool things and take pictures and video and report on that.

We’ve been starting our own version of podcast again, or we just we go visit somebody do something fun. We’ll post the video on YouTube under the Uncle Mudd channel. Most of that actually been collecting Patreon.

Patreon.com/UncleMud, we’ve been collecting all of the things, we’ve been writing the interviews and and the projects that we’ve been doing. Over the last 15 years. We’ve been collecting that in one place, so people can come and look at it and kind of join us on our little adventures.

Commercial Break: Okay, we’re going to pause the conversation right there. What you’re listening to right now is a special edition podcast. These episodes all have to do with the Mother Earth News fair in Albany, Oregon of 2019 at the time I’m recording this, we have learned so much about how to take advantage of events and I want you to be able to use this information in your own business.

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They’re talking about how to use events, books, and speaking all to build your business.

That’s BrianJPombo.com/secrets.

BrianJPombo.com/secrets and now back to the conversation.

Brian: Where did the Uncle Mud moniker begin? How did that come about?

Uncle Mud: Well, we were at a workshop where….my name is Chris, and there were about seven other Chris’s there. So when somebody would say Hey, Chris, and all of us would look up, it kind of got the pointless like saying, hey, you started calling me Mud instead.

Because I always the one in mud, actually adopted that and Uncle Mud came to better represent the sense we want to create for this, because the natural building tribe has become an extended family for us.

We always know that people will stop by and visit they with us when they’re on their way through and we can do the same thing and catch up on their little projects and on who’s having babies and who’s going to college and gone and built themselves a little cottage in their parents backyard.

That sense of family just keeps getting bigger and better and my mother sisters and my brothers will show up and build something with us or go with us to check out something cool that like Deek Diedricksen up in Vermont does YouTube channel videos of the cool tree houses and tiny houses that you visit.

He was at the Mother Earth News Fair here in Texas to hear our doughters tree house. Saw her presentation on her treehouse and invited us to come and teach at one of his workshops. Because they learned how to build cool things out of junk mail us like old washing machine doors to make funky windows for their tree houses, things like that.

But they didn’t know how to use the mud. So we came down and showed them, because it’s a really cool tool for your tool belt. And we just keep running into situations like that.

Brian: That’s so cool. Very cool. Would you have any recommendations for anyone looking to have the type of ability to do lifestyle design like you’ve done for yourself?

And let’s say someone’s in a similar position, they’re stuck in a position either they have a business that they’re kind of stuck with or they’re in a job that they don’t like, and they want to break out and do something like you’ve gone and done.

What would you recommend to them?

Uncle Mud: Well, the first thing is probably to take a radical grip on your finances. Money is the reason we have anything nice is that my wife, Heather will pays very close attention to the money coming in and going out.

Often her mood is very much affected by ratio of those things. And my goodness, like, last year, there was a time when she just was in a really bad mood because we seem to be behind on things. And it was puzzling to me because as far as I was paying attention, it seemed to be making good money.

And I finally said where’s all the money going?

She said well, we’re just short because I paid off the house. And so you’re in a bad mood because we don’t have any money because we don’t have any money because you paid off the house so that we wouldn’t have to spend that money.

And she says, Yeah, basically.

I said, that’s okay. Well, weather this and we did and she just looked at it and said, You know, that’s actually going to be doing better than any of the way other ways we could invest our money right now. So let’s get rid of a liability.

Let’s pay down the car early. Let’s accept that something might be a little bit of a struggle, but let’s take this as a game and make a challenge out of it.

And there’s so many things that are really games to do the people and the companies that make lots of money off of their game like a mortgage, for instance, that’s an old French word for death pledge, back then 30 years was a death pledge.

Now we live a little bit longer, but by then the house is worn out that we need a new roof and now we have to borrow money for that and so on and so forth.

But just figuring out ways to lower your expenses, gives you a great deal of freedom to then go do something else that you want to do.

And then if you figure out how to do something that pays the bills, but it’s also something you love. Even if you’re only able to do it part time, like the mud building.

I still have to go in and punch the time card keep sometimes we keep my computer business going, but I’m able to spend more more of my time and energy doing this thing I love just really kind of focusing on something I would recommend to people who want to be able to make those decisions.

So maybe two bedroom apartments that have a three bedroom apartment. We wrote an article from other news a few years ago.

And it’s actually been evolving since then, have this notion of too small to fail in opposition to the bank, that we all seem to have to support with our tax money because it’s too big to allow it to fail.

But on the other end of that, let’s just say we do an experiment, where instead of spending $600 a month for our share of the rent, or an apartment, we go make a deal with somebody to build a little cottage in their backyard.

Maybe that cottage is not on land I own so that kind of risk and it might be in an area where not legal to be something like that and live in it. So that the risk, and you don’t know very well how to build something. So that’s a risk.

But we’ve been conditioned to believe that a 30 year mortgage on a couple of hundred thousand dollars is no risk at all.

Or even though who knows what’s going to happen to the economy in the meantime, who knows if I’m even still going to be with the person that I made this big purchase with, that I’m going to continue to pay on, you know that the risk that we’ve been conditioned to think is, is perfectly natural.

But if I spend $6,000, building a cottage, and I live on somebody else’s land, with the agreements that is theirs after five years, and I walk away after five years, instead of spending $600 a month on rent, I walk away with $30,000 in my pocket, and that that was a risk even if it doesn’t work out with this damn there for a year before I get a job someplace else or they’ll walk away with 1800 dollars compared to the money that would have been flushed down the toilet by being a renter.

Or maybe I’m there for three months and I get the building halfway done and have a fight with the person who’s whose land it is or something else doesn’t work, and I have to leave.

Well, I’m down 1,800 dollars, by comparison, but I can kind of walk away from that crash landing of 1,800 dollars. Now if I’d gone and bought $60,000 tiny house on wheels, and parked into these people’s place and then found out that I can’t park it in that town, and I don’t have a place to park it. Well, that’s a lot more risk for relatively diminished returns.

I mean, now I’m tripled screwed because now I’m finding a place for me to stay. And I’m paying the mortgage on this tiny house that I couldn’t live in and I’m planning on paying for a place to store it, keeping the expense low. Like like my daughter’s treehouse.

We got maybe $2,000 into it and a fun family project, there was every chance that we could get a note saying, hey, yeah, people can’t live in treehouses, stop it.

If it was used for you month, or a year, and then that happened. Well, okay. I’m disappointed, but I’m not. I’m not devastated. I’m not trouble financially for it. So there’s these risks that we can take that are now too small to fail.

Brian: Absolutely. Great point. And really good advice for those of you listening.

Uncle Mud, if we were to talk a year from now, if we had you back on this show, and we were to look back over the past 12 months, what would have had to have happen for you to feel happy with your progress?

Uncle Mud: Oh, wow!

Well, there are a lot of things that would be exciting that I’d be very pleased if they happen like building more buildings with people. I actually enjoy a lot more the process of supporting somebody else’s build just got back from North Carolina where we built a pizza oven with a community and a rocket mass heater to heat one of the houses in this intentional community and all the friends and family neighbors came out in support of this.

We got it this whole thing done in a long weekend. It was fantastic fun and you know, generally natural building is a slow process, but we get enough hands in it and it’s a fast process and it’s a fun process.

So doing more of that is what I’m looking forward to this year. Spending more time encouraging people follow their dreams and to not be scared of them.

Start with something that didn’t work three times you could still be excited by it fourth time and have it work and then do something bigger and then do something bigger get yourself comfortable with taking a particular chance and then when it when you’ve got it well practice do more that can become kind of natural for us.

Whereas we could also become natural for us to hide in the house watching TV all day or only going out to work and get groceries and then you know we come to the end of our life and what do we have to show for it?

But if we figure out how to do something so that we can be around our babies and our grandbabies being around our sweeties more being out in nature or or out on the road, if that’s what you like, these things go our souls in a way that simple paycheck doesn’t, as much.

So yeah, finding more cool projects to do with people that would make me very happy. Watching, I enjoying watching my kids. I have an eight year old at home and another in college right now, going off and, you know, living their dreams and kind of fun to live vicariously with them without having to stay up late and take tests and all that.

Just get to enjoy their successes and encourage them when things don’t go as well. We’re actually gearing up to do more workshops.

We’re going to be in Jamaica the second half of January building rocket heaters and like a water heaters and we’re building a bath house down there out of bottles that left by side of the road by people because they don’t have a trash and, and reason Cobb and the local limestone, we built a pizza oven in a village where most of people there hadn’t ever had pizza at a pizza party for the village.

It was a lovely, lovely thing to spend time on. It’s really kind of fun the our adopted village called Mr. Muud but they they come out and and get in the mud with us and and we’re looking forward to demonstrating more with composting toilets down there.

Because you know, the water down there is just what you can catch off your roof. And if half the water in your house going through your toilet that uses it up pretty quick and then you got to spend a lot of money to get another truckload of water up there.

You know, but not just down in Jamaica, this coming week we’re going to be in Neosho, Missouri at the Ozark Homesteading Expo, just teaching these kind of classes, building a pizza oven on a trailer that somebody’s going to take home from the event, but not until after we’ve made some pizza with it.

And then it will be….in mid September, we’re going to be in Seven Springs, Pennsylvania, for the Mother Earth News Fair. Doing the same set of things. Topeka, Kansas for the Mother Earth News Fair, in mid October, we’re going to be building a pizza oven there.

We’re building a couple of rocket heaters between now and then. We do really enjoy getting people to come out and work with us on the things you want to learn how to do.

Something like this, you can come to a workshop where we feed you and teach you everything we know. And you participate in the build, so that you’ll be able to do it when you get home. Or sometimes we have internship positions where people just come and stay in our treehouse and, and work with us on a local project.

We’re really enjoying the quality of the relationships we get with people who are so interested in improving what they know and what they can do. That’s a fantastic type of person to hang out with.

Brian: Yeah, that is so cool. What a great opportunity. What could listeners who may be interested in finding out more about all things Uncle Mud, Besides the Patreon and Facebook site that we mentioned, is there anywhere else they can go?

Uncle Mud: So I have a website, UncleMud.com.

And if you want to join us one of the fairs, go to MotherEarthNewsFairs.ccom, is a good place to connect with us and see what our schedules are going to be at, we’re going to be at all the fairs this year in Texas and, and the Tennessee and Virginia and Oregon, Pennsylvania and Topeka in 2019, 2020.

We’re gonna be working with people on buildings and ovens and so forth appear in Cleveland, Ohio, I live out in the boonies of Cleveland, we have wonderful partners that we work with in Michigan and Washington State and down in North Carolina do build.

And we try to keep it local because you know, you’re going to find the soil slightly different, wherever you are. Certainly the climate different than Texas permitted you where it is here.

We want to figure out how to stay cool in Texas, with passive cooling and here up in Cleveland, we want passive heating. We want to try to keep warm, six months of the year.

You know, whatever your climate, we kind of want to make sure that we get the right information, because it’s easy to look on YouTube or get a book that was written for Australia or the Southwest, and then wonder why it doesn’t work where you are.

Like, we’d like to have people succeed better than more often than that.

Brian: Absolutely.

Well, are there any questions that I didn’t ask you that you’d like to answer?

Uncle Mud: Let me ask us, what are some of your favorite things to interview about?

Brian: I love digging in to the person’s background and their causes, and the things that they’re really interested in and not you’ve covered most of that. And then I also like to see where they’re thinking in the long term as far as their business and where they see things going. And you you pretty much covered all that. So…

Uncle Mud: Yeah, well, so you and I would definitely agree on the power of story.

You know, we get so much bad news, even on our Facebook feeds. So much of the chaos of what the world is going through, and relatively a little encouragement and just finding out that somebody succeeded in doing the thing that you were sort of thinking about is very encouraging.

Instead of your cousin telling you Oh, yeah, well you know those people got out services called on them you’re going to go down in flames because you don’t know what you’re doing and whatnot. Now let’s let’s stick with something positive.

But yeah, there’s there are things to be aware of, but they shouldn’t be paralyzing us. We should be continuing to try to live our dreams and our adventure, and we should be sharing with each other, the successes and the nuances that lead to success.

So don’t tell me a failure story. Unless you’re telling me the specific of the things that didn’t work on the road to the thing that worked.

Or telling me where you are on that road, even if that is included a bunch of breakdown. Let’s figure out where to go from there, rather than giving up, and the stories that we can share of people succeeding and Okay, what’s your recipe for a limewash?

What’s your replacement for straw when you couldn’t find any?

What have you done for lowering your electric bill so that you could afford to go off grid with a couple of solar panels instead of $60,000 array so that you could continue to watch the big TV and and have the air conditioning.

Let’s all just like chat about what worked, instead of just throwing up our hands and saying, well, I guess we’re doomed. We may be, but we’re gonna have a good time on this trip.

Brian: Absolutely. I love that most about you. It’s like your bio says about sharing the can do spirit and I think that’s what you’re all about. I can’t wait to see more from you in the future. We’d love to have you back on the show because I know we’ve just barely scratched the surface of your perspective on things and where you’re going from here.

So Uncle Mud thank you so much for being on the Off The Grid Biz Podcast.

Uncle Mud: Well, thank you for having me. I have the Uncle Mud Facebook page. And if you’re doing something fun, or you’ve had a success with building something out of mud or junk, I’d love if you’d share it with me on the Facebook page.

Because the stories, let’s share people’s successes and be proud of what we’ve done. Even if it has cracks in it. That your crack that you’ve made, and not some experts fancy thing, but it’s yours.

It was good enough and I’d love to see more and more and share more and more examples, if it’s good enough.

Brian: Awesome. Thanks so much.

Uncle Mud: Absolutely. Have a lovely day.

Brian’s Closing Thoughts: Really a great interview, something worth going back and relistening to. I know I got more out of it, relistening to it again.

I like Chris’s focus on collaboration. Networking with other people, always finding another way to be able to plug in with people who either have more experience than you and something or even less experienced than you and something and being able to take your skills and meld them together into something better.

That’s a really cool approach to life.

Just in general, approaching life in a different way, you know, not accepting all the norms just because that’s the way it is. That’s the way we grew up with it, really questioning things, but doing it in a real light hearted manner.

And it’s given power to his concept of lifestyle design, being able to just live the life you want to live.

At the same sense, if you’re looking to change your life, taking that radical grip on finances that he talked about, you know, paying off your debt, being too small to fail, having those situations where getting rid of those risks that are keeping you from growing, that whole makes a lot of sense.

One of the strongest concepts that he put forth was that idea of having a tribe and what he called his Natural Building Tribe. So people with all the same direction, having an interest in natural building, he’s created a community there.

It’s a community that spans the globe, he’s been able to go all over the world, training people how to do these very simple techniques.

And in some cases, it’s life changing.

He’s developed that sense of family with complete strangers. And that’s a real magical ability to have and you can tell that he has it and he’s growing his business that way, which is really cool.

Overall, I’m certain this is not the last we’ll hear from Uncle Mud. He’s got a really interesting perspective on things and a lot that we can learn from whether you’re going through a midlife crisis or not.

Outro: Join us again on the next Off The Grid Biz Podcast brought to you by the team at BrianJPombo.com, helping successful but overworked entrepreneurs, transform their companies into dream assets.

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I’m Brian Pombo and until next time, I wish you peace, freedom, and success.