Here today we have an interview with the founder of No One Coming (formerly BFE Labs), Morgan Atwood.
Morgan is something of a modern Renaissance man, with a diverse background and some unique takes on ideas and concepts that I believe are quite relevant to the readers of this blog – as follows is the discussion we had, lightly edited for brevity.
Hey Morgan, thanks for taking the time to sit down with me today. To begin, can you tell us how you got started with No One Coming?
I usually say by accident, but that’s not quite right. No One Coming is the result of a little more than ten years professionally teaching, writing about, and building tools for “survival” as BFE Labs.
I was a ranch kid, growing up in the wilderness, so I had a lot of solid foundations for field craft, and a lot of opportunity to practice and improve.
I’d been involved in martial arts of some form or another since I was a kid, and got really interested in defensive skills during that period, and started seeking out training. This lead to more general personal protection training, and getting hooked in with a really good community of folks from what’s now the Total Protection Interactive forum.
At 18, instead of starting college, I got EMT-B certified. With some of the influences I’d picked up from my online community, I was also exposed to the idea of tactical medicine and the early Tactical Combat Casualty Care guidelines, and got really interested in “what does this mean for me, on the civilian and individual side”.
Then, I put everything down to go to college and work on a psychology degree. That didn’t go as planned. I didn’t struggle academically, but I struggled with wanting to be there. I was fascinated with my academic interests, neural plasticity, and TBI treatment, but not with the work.
The university I attended engages in a lot of geology, petroleum, and exploration activities.
I was friends with a lot of these people, and they started coming to me, asking questions about field craft, wilderness survival and first aid. Then people started asking me to teach some medical stuff more formally.
That was largely what prompted the birth of BFE Labs in late 2008, which allowed me to bring together everything I was interested in: knife and tool making (which I have now been doing for over 20 years), wilderness skills, self protection, and medical skills. Every gig I took was to keep the project alive: wildland fire, getting back into EMS, security and anti-poaching gigs for large ranches, in turn feeding more real world practicality into what I was writing, teaching, and building.
More than a decade of that has brought everything together into a very integrated model of “survival”. I’ve learned that survival is a holistic concept, seemingly disparate pieces that work best brought together in a functional whole, and use that understanding to teach and promote this concept, as well as the discrete skills that make it up.
That’s quite the resume! It’s awesome to see someone able to take their passion and turn it in to a functioning, capable business venture, especially while helping other like-minded individuals on the way. In that same vein, could you tell us what your favorite part of the business is? How about your least favorite?
Favorite part? The people.
Least favorite part? The people.
Industry drama and inside baseball is cancer. I am driven to speak the truth, based on more substance than feelings, about things that are in my lane, and have unfortunately paid the price for doing so more than once.
There are a lot of sacred cows in many of the arenas I play in, and a lot of them are very closely tied to money and influence.
That, more than anything else, has discouraged and worn me out over the years.
It is the people who are honestly and earnestly growing and learning that keep me going. These are the good people who are only here to put their egos aside and grow; those who are interested in making their lives and the lives of others better, safer, and more capable.
That lights my fire like nothing else.
That makes a lot of sense. I’m glad to hear about the good folks, and like to think that many of my readers would themselves fall into that category, as I hope I do!
Before we wrap this up, would you like to share anything in particular with the readers that I haven’t asked you about?
Let me drop some philosophy about why I do what I do:
Essentially, with everything I teach, write, and make, I am advocating for preparedness. That’s a word that has a lot of baggage, spawning visions of Burt Gummer-esue survivalists and paranoiacs barricading themselves into physical and social isolation.
True to stereotype, there are people who live that way and call it “prepared”. I think that’s a sad and tragic response to concerns about personal safety.
We live in what is arguably the safest, most prosperous, time in human history with less to worry about than any of our forebears, and more potential to live lives of value and meaning
[ed note: here’s a good article, for those unfamiliar].
Why be isolated from that?
I advocate preparedness, not to live in fear, peering over shoulders, hiding from life and not going places where “something” might happen, but just the opposite. I choose to live, to see the show, kiss the girl, take the trip, have the adventure.
Everything I do is about taking a posture that makes that possible, no matter what. No One Coming exists to push the idea of an overall posture of skills, tools, and lifestyle that makes you hard to kill while simultaneously helping you have a life worth living for.
Do you have any exciting promos or sales running or coming up soon?
We’ve got an ongoing sale on a few different medical items right now, including stocked kits and combos of Rescue Hooks and TMT tourniquets.
In the next week or two, we’ll be starting a new schedule of product drops, with the release of a batch of handmade knives.
Your readers can get free shipping on anything in stock with the code SHIPSHOW at checkout.
That’s great, Morgan – I’m sure my readers will be excited to see your next knife drop! Let me know when it comes out and I’ll post a short update post letting everybody know!
Sure thing, thanks for talking with me!
That’s all for today – be sure to check out No One Coming on their website, their store, and on Facebook and Instagram, and if you like what you read above, be sure to look out for some blog posts from Morgan!
If you’re interested in medical gear, take a look here – it’s a good post to begin with if you’re just getting started. If you’re mostly here for the gear, this isn’t a bad place to start working through the back catalog!
-T