Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 264 - Josh Smith - Founder of Montana Knife Company

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Josh grew up in Lincoln, Montana on the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. At the age of 11 Josh's baseball coach, Rick Dunkerley began teaching him how to make knives. About a year later, Josh began putting a shop together at his home, and at the age of 12 he joined the American Bladesmith Society. Over the next few years, Josh began forging and honing his craft. At 15 years old, Josh passed the Journeyman bladesmith test in Atlanta, Georgia at the Blade Show. Josh became the youngest bladesmith to ever pass this test. The Journeyman test is a two-part process. A test blade must be forged and heat treated with the capabilities to chop a 1" rope in half, 2- 2x4's in half, and then still shave hair. Once the cutting tests are done the blade must be able to bend 90 degrees in a vise without breaking. After passing the performance test the maker must present 5 knives to a panel of Mastersmith Judges. Each knife is examined closely to ensure the knife is made to the highest standard of craftsmanship. Josh continued to work on his craft and at the age of 19 he earned his Master Smith rating from the American Bladesmith Society. Josh was the youngest bladesmith to ever pass the Master Smith test. In 2002 Josh moved to Frenchtown, Montana where he now calls home. Josh and his wife Jessica live on a beautiful piece of property near the Clark Fork River where they own and operate the Montana Knife Company.

Good morning, everybody. Today's episode is brought to you by, you know who, Black Rifle Coffee. Now, this is going to come out on the 19th. So the past few weeks I was talking about getting your orders in stuff in time for Christmas, under the tree, stocking stuffers. I don't think you could probably make that at this point. I actually don't know what their shipping cutoff is, but let's assume that you cannot. But that doesn't mean you can't think ahead.

That doesn't mean you can't set yourself up for an awesome caffeinated junk. January. And if you want to do that, you should go to black rifle coffee.com. And the first thing I'm looking at is their coffee subscription, which I'm actually a member of. And I appreciate it because I don't have to go and order a bunch of coffee all the time. It's kind of a fire and forget, pun intended, if you will. And if you want to add the cleared hot blend of coffee, that is now an option. I'm not so sure they're in stock right now, but they are working on being able to stay in stock. It's an amazing blend of coffee. So of course it sells out almost immediately. I'm actually not sure if that's true. I just made that up. But that's where you can find it as well.

So now you're not going to have to go to two websites to get your coffee. You can just do it all on blackwifel coffee.com. Of course, the apparel, beanies, hats. I'm actually wearing one of their sweet new puffy jackets right now. Actually, not really puffy. It's a little bit of a down jacket. But they have coffee bundles. They have things that you can use to make coffee, stickers patches, however you'd like to fly that proverbial flag. So stop fucking around. Go to blackwifel coffee.com. Get all your coffee needs. Now, my guest today is a repeat guest, one of my favorite people. His name is Josh Smith. He is the founder of Montana Knife Company, which is based about two hours south of where I live.

And I think we met for the first time at one of the attacks, the total archery challenges, but the growth of his business over the last few years has been unbelievable to watch from, you know, essentially a two-car garage, fulfillment growing, product growing, and then the building that he just built next to that two-car garage, my suspicion is he'll outgrow it within a year. And they'll be looking at something in order of magnitude, if not multiple, orders of magnitude, larger. Shit, we talked about everything. Kind of his background, knives, business, mistakes, life, lessons learned along the way. The whole thing.

We went all over the place. So I'm going to shut up and let you guys enjoy episode 264 with Josh Smith. We're smooth here. We don't fail. Yeah. Sometimes we just make mistakes. On the occasion, a mistake is made. Here's the key question.

Is the AC on or off, Michael? Oh, it's off. I made sure of it. And the door is locked. That has got me in so many episodes. I'll be sitting there like blah blah blah blah. I'm like, fuck. It's hot in here?

No, it's like, what is that noise in the background? Oh. And I'll like pop. A son of a bitch. I literally just stand up and turn it off and come back. Yeah. Yeah, when we're doing mine, we may have, potential CNC noise in the background.

I'm not sure. We may have to, I may have to change the door on my office. Or do it. Not that you, I suspect, have a lot of off time. No.

I think you're quite busy. You could do it in times when the shop is not open because I've actually, after we're done here, I'll take you and Brandon and show you the coffee shop. One of my favorite parts about the build

is it's the blend of new construction in the historic building. And in the bottom of the historic building, there are some places that would be spectacular backdrops for a podcast. I mean, we're talking like original foundations from like the 1800s and you can see just the mineral. It would be amazing.

But if we did it during the daylight hours, I think you probably hear people making coffee and walking around. And that if you're going to take podcasting seriously, don't do it. Yeah. Do it in the off time. Well, in theory, it'd be cool if you could do it just occasionally like a cool podcast here and there, but the problem is like all this equipment. It's not like you're going to double your equipment. I mean, you're kind of a high roller. You might be able to. There are

actually very economic ways around it. So I just got a brand new travel kit and I ordered a bunch more. I haven't told Michael yet, but February 8th, Michael, we're going to do a podcast at the coffee shop at 8 p.m. Awesome. Because it's going to be closed, but we have an awesome fireplace there, like leather chairs and I have four people coming in. So I got enough microphones. I ordered they're the DGII mic that has you can find a really easy lavalier that can come up the shirt they all hold the original audio

on the microphone itself so you don't have to worry about having a backup and it can transmit it to a camera and I think I'll bring all the cameras over and probably just that the little switcher board and so he can do all that stuff right there it'll take 10 minutes to set up right I think it would be worth it yeah well and you're going to get so many cool people just randomly coming through or dropping by

and it be cool to be able to just grab the stuff and be able to set it up over there if you want to now and then for a little different look on the podcast. I'm going to find a way to use the downstairs and the upstairs. I think occasionally like a little bit of mood lighting, if you will, a little fireplace in the back. Maybe people wear pants. Are you going to, for the February 8th one, you're going to have like a crowd outside like college game day with signs? I feel like that would be extremely awkward. I don't know if I could do that actually. That would probably like you've been there when we've done the ones up the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation stage up in.

Yeah, in Park City. Is that Park City where we do that? Yeah, it's weird. I'm not, I don't know how, I know there are people in organizations who do live podcasts where they'll like invite people to a venue. I've heard them at Shot Show on some of these guys' podcasts that they've done. And it's, it's a great venue because there's, there's all the people there to grab guests. But the problem is, is the listener.

It's, I just don't like the background noise. It's just not super high quality. A lot of times when I'm listening to like your podcast in my shop, if I have noise going on, belt grinders and stuff, I have my earbuds in. And if the audio is not on point, I can't listen. So then I turn it off. So like I can always hear yours. I can always hear Joe's. But then there's other podcasts I like, but I have to listen in in the truck or something.

I can't have background noise. Yeah. So I'm glad to hear your starting yours back up again. Yeah. It's like I said, I'm sure it's because you just had so much free time. You were just off, you know. Yeah. fucking about.

Kind of lost my space. We needed to make knives on my podcast table. But invest in, and this is advice for anybody, invest in, I would say, first and foremost, these mics, the sure SM7B, I think they're. Yeah. SM7B. These are what, Joe, I mean, full disclosure, I didn't, I didn't create this list that I'll go through. But last time, or a few times before us, but Joe, I'm literally just taking pictures. I'm under the table.

He's like, what are you doing? Yeah. It's like nothing, just getting ideas. And I copied everything that he had. Right. If you don't have a good microphone, I personally, if I flip on or find a new podcast, have you ever heard one where people have tried to make them in their car? Oh, yeah.

I can't do it. Yep. I'm out. The second I hear, like, the car noise or somebody like yelling at them flipping them off. Somebody honk because they drive by. Yeah. I can't do it. So I would suggest for you, maybe even.

soundproof the room. Are you guys, how far along is the construction of the new building? I did. So yeah, it's, the building's finished. We're in the move-in process right now. But I did. I insulated, you know, it's in my office, but kind of like, talking upstairs, right? Yes, upstairs in the building. And what I did in my office is I actually put a track in, kind of like what you have with a curtain. I have a curtain I can just pull across because I have a couple windows in my office that you wouldn't, the lighting would be depending on the time of day, a problem for videos. I can pull that curtain across. The walls are insulated.

It's really nice. Pretty professionally set up. You could sound dead in the back of the door. Yeah, the door will be the only part that I potentially have to deal with. The nice thing is, is we have control of who's upstairs. So if I'm recording, I can pretty much just make sure no one else upstairs. No one's coming up there and talking. It's just other office people in there.

What's your plan for the podcast? hopefully launching back up here right at the first of the year. I have one in the tank right now. Tear came out from Black Rifle, shot some content, and we're doing some stuff with him. And we're just working on, actually my podcast table is being finished up this week,

and then we're going to start setting up all the video stuff. The thing is, is we have so many cool people that come by that want to see the shop. I've had people talk to me that are coming up for your grand opening. And it's like, they're not coming for my podcast, but we might as well grab one while they're there type situation. Well, it also doesn't have to be long.

No. I enjoy the fact that, you know, Michael and I can sit here and we can go, we've gone like three and a half hours before with, I think it was Nick Lavery was one of our longest. Yeah, that was a really good one. But you don't even realize you're going that long, but you can do a half hour or an hour with somebody, like super targeted, super focused.

And I think it'll be what you want it to be. Yeah. And I love, I love the model that, you know, a lot like what you do, definitely what Rogan does of just the randomness of guests. Like if we have guests in that do something cool, I want to chat with them. So it's not just like a knife-making podcast. I'm quite frankly not interested in talking a lot about knife-making. I'm more interested in what the guests are doing.

Speaking of knife-making, obviously you've been a guest before, but so this episode can stand-alone. You want to go through the wavtops of how you got into kind of knife-making, how MKC began. And just that way somebody doesn't have to go back and search their previous episode. Kind of quick version. I started making knives when I was 11. I lived in Lincoln, Montana. I grew up there. Shout out to the Unabomber.

Always got to throw that in there. That's what Lincoln's famous for. It's such not a good thing for the town to be famous for. I know. But actually, it's a cool little town right on the edge of the Bob Marshall. Lots of elk hunting and the river runs through it. Blackfoot River is there, you know, stuff like that.

So little league baseball coach started teaching me. I took it really serious and ended up, you know, sitting up my own shop and became the youngest master blade smith at 19 in the world, did that deal. And then kind of through life, I went full time making knives and life kind of kicked me in the balls a little bit, you know, the economy, just different things, having kids, divorced, the whole nine yards. So after about 10 years of making knives full time, I became a lineman for the local power company, you know, got an apprenticeship and went through that whole deal and did that for

right out of decade, I guess. But all along there, I had this idea of Montana Knife Company. I registered the name Montana Knife Company with the state of Montana when I was 19. It's kind of rude. I mean, it's like me saying Black Rifle Coffee, Montana. It's very rude. It's a big land grab, dick. Yeah. Well, CrossFit made that mistake early on. People would, as it was exploding in growth, like, cross. Fit California, and they realized you can't give them the state name and you can't give them city names either. Yeah. Because it really, really narrows down the business opportunities for other people. Yeah. Well, you know, when I was trying to think of a name of what I wanted my company to be,

and this is all like while I was doing custom knives. I knew I wanted to start a production company someday and make hunting knives, you know, make knives. So, but more on a production scale. And I was thinking of names. And every show I went to, if I was in Atlanta, Georgia at the Blade Show or New York City or Paris. It didn't matter what show I was at with my custom knives. When people would see that I was from Montana, they were like, oh, you're from Montana, and they would start asking questions. And honestly, this is pre-social media.

So you only read about magazine, you know, read about Montana in magazines or, you know, on occasional television shows. A River Runs Through it was like a giant movie for Montana, you know, kind of like Yellowstone today. Like, I'm not sure if it's in the, you know, for the best, but is what it is. I personally think it's hilarious that people get upset with me for posting on Instagram. Well, you ruined Montana. Of course, because the river runs through it, did nothing for Montana.

It's my pictures that are screwing it up. And of course, Yellowstone, one of the most popular TV shows, nothing for it. None of the National Geographic, like, Yellowstone Glacier Shows. They had no impact whatsoever. You and Kevin Costner are pretty much the same people. Yeah. Yeah. He has a little more cash than me.

He could afford a second podcast set up. Holy shit. Yeah, in his basement. He could just pay somebody to go do a podcast, just say things that are good and put my name on it. Yeah. So, you know, when I was thinking about it, Montana has such a mystique about it.

And that was back in the 90s and early 2000s. And that has never stopped. It's only grown. What do you think that comes from? Because I don't feel like North and South Dakota when you tell people you're from there. Sorry, anybody from North or South Dakota. We just took a huge listener drop from those two states. states, but I don't think if you told me like, hey, I'm from North Dakota. They're like, no way.

Yeah. I honestly, I think the marketing, and I'm not sure who came up with the idea of calling it the big sky state, but the big sky state is a hell of a branding marketing thing that, and I think you combine Yellowstone and Glacier Park. It's tough to take a bad picture here. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And it's such a, it's a state with so much variation, though a lot of our states have that. I mean, California, you're on the beach, and two hours later, you can be in, you know, driving up dawn or pass. I mean. So being born and raised in California,

people associated with the sand and water where I lived in southeast San Diego. I could have been in Mexico. Well, the border would have taken longer, but I could have been at the border in like 20 minutes. Yeah. I could have gone inland and literally been in a legit desert within two hours all the way up northern California. You're talking Redding, mountains, skiing,

But all of it. It actually, and also people think that everybody in California politically leans to the left. Right. If they were to take a look at the actual where that voting population is, you'd realize it's isolated to largely San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles base. And it almost everywhere else is red. Yeah. It's a very diverse state, actually. Well, in our own sales, we did some polling, and we've started to try to grow up a little bit as a company as we've grown here this year.

And so we... Who gave you that advice? I don't know. And a lot of it sucks. That's terrible advice. Yeah. Why would you do that? It was a lot more fun when it was just the Wild Wild West as a company.

But we did some polling and we started looking into our numbers. And our number one state for sales is California. Well, I wonder where California sits. Michael, can you look up to where California sits in the population of the U.S.? I bet you it's top five. That wouldn't surprise me. And that's kind of what we were talking about. It's so populated.

And everybody does like tend to, especially, you know, people around here tend to just think of California in one way as like, oh, super liberal or whatever. Not the case at all. Yeah. Looks like California's first place, 39 million. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. So we're just...

Weird the place that has the most people is buying the most knives. So if only 30% of the people there maybe tend to vote a little further right than left, that's a lot of people. Yeah. You know, so, yeah, Montana, I think on our... list is down a little ways and I'm sure it's just because of population you know last I checked it was one million it was under one million one hundred thousand I think it was like one million 40 or 50 thousand yeah we were under a million till you moved here and started talking about it well not talking about it was apparently but I posted on instagram one point one million

what one point one million for montana look at see this is what happens when I give you're the point one he corrects me yeah I said it was one million 40 000 and it's what a dick you were wrong log it first time ever I already did yeah so anyway back to back to the company I mean I named it Montana Knife Company but I never launched it just because I knew well I didn't have the money I didn't have the

expertise I had no idea how to do it and then as I talked about it for a decade with a buddy of mine that was more of a marketing type guy and he just kept like you got to do this I want to do it with you and honestly just was never the right timing a lot of it was personal stuff, just a lot of things professionally. And so finally, once I got remarried and I kind of told my new wife about it, she was like,

well, you got to do that. Like, you got to do it. And I really felt like she was the perfect partner to launch it with. So launched MKC in the, well, basically started kind of in February of 2020. I went to Winterstrong to Bert Soren's, uh, Sornex's farm, showed some prototypes around. And that particular community was incredibly, like, emboldening and encouraging. Like, you know, Burt at that Wintersong, it's an invite-only deal, and it's only like super high-performing or really cool people in their different crafts.

So, and it could be everywhere from, you know, military guys to or men and women to professional athletes, coaches, businessmen, hunters, crossfitters, I mean, the whole nine. The whole nine. it's just a melding of people who have done cool stuff. And, you know, when you don't live around, nothing against like the people in my town or the people I hang around around, but, you know, they're not that same caliber of people. And when you place yourself in that group, that whole birds of a feather type thing or if you want to be an eagle, hang out with eagles, when I left there, it was like,

when those kind of people are saying, like, you can do it and we got your back, I went home with like, I'm, I'm fucking doing it. Like, we're doing it. And you were still alignment at the time, right? Yep. I was alignment for the power company. And frankly, that was when COVID, when we flew out there, saw a few people in mass, we're hearing a little bit of stuff on the news. And then flying home, just in that few days of being at Winterstrong, it was like, wow, there's a lot more masks, more on the news. And within a week of being home, it was like, COVID was like taken over the news. It was becoming the big thing, you know. And, you know, back. Back in 2008 when we had a recession, and if you watch the news, we were headed to a depression and the world was going to end.

And I was making $5,000 custom knives. You know, it was a scary time, and that's part of why I jumped out and took a job with the power company and became a lineman. That was secure. Stability? Yeah, benefits. You know, I was going to get paid every day. You know, when you're making custom knives, just like artwork, if you screw it up, you lose that time. And I had four young kids and just, I just wasn't sure that I, I was noticing a lot of my heroes that were 60 and 70 years old were going to the knife shows and struggling to survive just as much as I was at 25.

And I was like, man, this is, I don't, I mean, I want to be able to take off and go hunt for a week and not think I'm breaking my family doing it. And so that, that job provided those benefits and that stability, kind of especially with a young family I needed. So, but, you know, back to. to 2020, I came home from that and right when I decide, I'm going to finally launch my company, COVID hits. And so my wife and I really talked about it and I said last time this happened, not a virus, but last time the economy and the whole world was basically panicking, I turned and kind of changed direction and allowed some of those outside things to affect my decision.

And this time I was like, I am fully ignoring it. I'm just going to launch my company and do my thing if the work. ends it ends. And so that's what we did. We just full steam ahead and launched it that year. In July, we launched our website. I went to TAC, Brandon, my now business partner. Then I was just hiring him to help me do some content. He called me when we arrived in Big Sky at my first TAC. I didn't have a booth or nothing, just went to this like try to make a few connections. I knew one person there or two people. And he called and he's like, hey, your website's live. And I was like, all right, here we go we have a website it was kind of a big celebration and that was 20 20 tack

um shot shot the mountain met some people you know jp with big chino outfitters was super generous let us hang out in the booth met like cole kramer um you know and different people throughout the industry some people at loophole and but all of it was just like i met dudley for 30 seconds and a lot of it was just like hey this is what i'm doing people like cool sounds good and off we went, you know, it wasn't nothing groundbreaking happened there. Um, but what's cool is, you know, through the rest of that year, we just kept pushing, kept pushing. And then by January 1st, that year of 2021, my wife's like, you have got to quit your job. And it was kind of a cool story. It was kind of funny the way it worked out. She kept telling me through like October,

November, you need to quit. Is it because you essentially had no time. You're Lyman during the day and then do an MKC at night. Exactly. Just long, long days. Candle, both ends. Yep. But I was feeling super selfish. I mean, let's face, a alignment job for people who don't know. It's a union job. It's a fun job. It's fantastic benefits, pay, the whole nine yards. And I could have raised my family and retired and lived a great life with that. So to quit that, especially in an area in Montana, there's not a lot of industry. There's not a lot of high paying jobs. To give that up is not a small thing. And I felt super. selfish like I'm going to give that up to just chase kind of what I've been dreaming of.

And so I kept resisting. And I ran out of vacation time in December and I went to my boss. Thomas Rhett, the country music singer, who I didn't know, just a blue checkmark message to me. And so I asked my daughters, he looked like a country singer when I looked at his profile. I asked my... This is probably you trying to figure out Instagram too. Basically. Yeah, I'm assuming you were not prolific at this point.

No. not at all. And I asked my daughters, I was like, do you guys know who Thomas Red is? And they're like, oh my God, I love him the whole night. And I was like, oh, well, he just sent me a message on Instagram. And of course they freaked out. So I was like, hey, it's called a Dadflex. Yeah. Well, he was at Big Sky. He was coming to Big Sky to go skiing and wanted to meet up and had somehow seen our knives somewhere. And didn't realize that I get this one all the time. Hey, I'm coming to visit Montana. Do you want to link up? And I'll say, where are you coming? And they go, Billings. I'm like, listen. Yeah.

I'm not against linking up with you. Yeah. That's nine hours away. You need to take one more flight. That's just nine hours away. Exactly. But it was one of those deals. Our company was so young and whatnot that you don't pass any opportunity because

you don't know where it's going to go. And so I went to my boss at work and I'm like, hey, in a couple weeks, this is who's going to be here. I need this day off. But I'm out of vacation time. And, you know, corporate stuff. He's like, sorry, man. You like, you used your time.

And I'm like, well, I need that day. And so I talked to him a couple times leading up to that. And I was like, you better really think hard on this. And I came to the morning of the December 30th. And I said, I need tomorrow off. And he's like, yeah, that's not happening, basically. And I said, well, I'll be done at noon today. So I went and did the job because we had a job schedule.

I didn't know screw our crew over. Went and did that job. And then at noon came back to the shop and handed my keys and checked out. and on the way home, basically. The only other drive home that was more terrifying or as terrifying was when I drove home, when my house was on fire and I could see the plume for 15 miles. Which that is a good story. And you did tell that the first time you were on the podcast.

So for that one, people should go back to that one. So you essentially burn the boats on the beach. Yep. Yep. Driving home, I almost puked. I mean, I was like, man, this is a move, you know. Isn't that awesome, though? I mean, I'm not particularly that drive, but now looking.

back three years. Yeah. And you know for the next four or five months, Brandon and I never took a paycheck. Brandon had quit his job, but he was like he was kind of starting his own little marketing firm when we were launching MKC. And so he had kind of made that move for his own firm. And he was doing the same thing, like just getting going, had made that big leap. And then MKC was starting to take off. And so we were both basically jobless. And at that point, it was like, here we go. And so we didn't, We agreed not to take paychecks until we could. It's funny, I paid my kids and I paid a couple of my employees that I have now that started a little bit part-time that spring, just helping out a couple times a week. They all got paid before Brandon and I got paid.

That's the way it should be, though. Yeah. Yeah. And we used our savings, and it kept going good. And I'll be honest, like, the biggest thing that the whole reason that this all I think went the way it went was, yes, there was hard work, but also the amount of people that just support. supported us. Just friends that are nobody really knows on up to people who had really big followings that had no business to have to support us. Like we weren't paying them or there was nothing to gain. We were so tiny that there wasn't anything to gain. They just did it out of

support, you know. It's interesting that happened for you right at the beginning of COVID. So I had heard rumblings of COVID in, I think it was March of 20 when it started kicking off. I remember it was early 2020. And I was in L.A. Because I was supposed to do Rogan show the next day. And L.A. lockdown that night. And I remember texting Joe, like, so are we going to do this? And he writes back, YouTube just told me that I'm essential.

So we're a go. Like, fucking perfect. So we roll in there. And it was wild. About a week after that, I was making. I'm making a good portion of my income doing public speaking and the years before that. And I have never had something like this happened where in a 72 hour of time period, it was just like a trapdoor open and every one of those opportunities fell apart. So I lost two years of speaking engagements in about 72 hours, which is fun.

Yeah. That's another one that you're just like, hmm. Yeah. That's okay. So here's what I was going to make and now here is what I am making and this is going to be very interesting. And I chose to double down on the podcast at that time because I didn't have any idea if the speaking was ever going to come back. And it was, I mean, I remember the airports. I flew a few times early on in COVID.

And it was at the old Salt Lake City Airport, not the new one, which I think I actually liked the old one a little bit better. I'm still hit or miss. I've run into you a few times at the new one. But I walked an entire terminal and didn't see anybody. Yeah. And I made a, I remember making a turn. and I saw somebody like half a mile away and I was on the right side

and they fucking walked all the way over to the left and we were like that. So weird. But it was a ghost town. I remember just thinking, okay, I've never seen anything like this. I have no idea if the speaking stuff will ever come back.

I have got to figure out something else that I can do. Yeah. And, you know, retail businesses were suffering. There's still empty businesses up and down Main Street. That's still one of the biggest things that kind of chaps my ass is that, you know, people were told you're not allowed to open your business, but Lowe's Home Depot, Walmart, Target, they can open their business. I mean, there's literally still gaping holes on Main Street in Callispell, not actual holes, but just empty facades. And I don't blame people for not wanting to go back into that, because if somebody can just come in and on a dime and say, your business is done, I wouldn't do that either. The Grizzly Hackle fly shop in Missoula, just a small little fly shop downtown that when it's busy probably has six or eight people in it.

And a lot of times probably has nobody in it. Imagine the margins they're probably working on per month. You know what I mean? They were shut down, but Cabela's right across town was open. You know, and he's like, so Cabellas gets to sell flies, but this tiny little fly shop in Missoula. But Cabellas will have hundreds of people in it. Well, they had forced market. Where else were people going to go?

Yep. Same with Home Depot. I mean, that was a nut house there. Everyone was doing home improvement projects. Like, we're off work. Yeah. It's crazy. We're off work, but we're getting more money.

And again, I'm not an expert at all those systems. It is interesting, though, if you go and Google the amount of fraud that has been captured and how little oversight there actually was to that money and how much money they can't really account for. Just give it a Google. It's interesting. But so I double down and that's where, you know, prices in town were low. This is for people who, this is a small office suite that if the curtains were down, it just looks like an office suite.

I think there was a psychiatrist in here before or something like that. But like, what can I actually do? I can double down on this and I realized I actually really enjoyed doing this. So I would travel to people in the pandemic and then as it kind of waned a little bit, got to the place where people would travel here. But this setup wouldn't be here if it wasn't for COVID as well. Yeah. But it's not that COVID caused that.

It was because it seems like both you and I got to a place where, like, I have to do this because I don't know what the hell else is going to happen. And I just don't ever want to be in the place again where I'm relying on somebody else to make a decision to determine whether or not I'm going to be able to pay my bills. And that's kind of where I was also with work. I love the guys I worked with and I love the work, the corporation and a lot of the BS that comes to working with that. Like I was a full-time knife maker for 10 years and before that I worked in my parents' excavation business and I never really had anybody telling me what to do. And a lot of it in those corporations, you know, sitting around at 420 waiting for the clock to hit 430 so you can walk out like you're waiting for the bell to ring in fourth grade.

Like I just, and I honestly, I felt like I had something that like could be greater, you know. And I would have never been able to live with myself. if I hadn't had tried, because I talked about it for 10 years. And if I hadn't done it then, honestly, I'm not sure when I ever would have done it. And if I would have just taken the safe approach when I was 60 years old, I know I would have looked back and been like, and I didn't want to be that guy like, well, I was going to do this, but here's this excuse and that excuse. Like the one good thing, the card I had in my back pocket, literally a card, is, you know, your, your union. card, I could go be alignment anywhere.

Maybe not back at my old job. I might not have gotten that one back, depending on where they're. You're employable, though. I could have gone contracting. I could go tomorrow. So it's not like I was quitting something that, you know, if things got really bad and all of a sudden I'm not paying bills, I could have. So I had a safety net that was kind of there, but not so, so nice of a safety net that I just kind of decided to go at this half, halfheartedly. I mean, it was, it was all in.

Well, also think about it from the perspective of your kids, telling your kids that they need to reach as high and as far as possible while you're sitting there talking about something for 10 years and not doing it. Exactly. No, it's 100%. And I have told my kids, I mean, I don't know that it'll really register them of what they've been seen and been kind of around and a part of until they're probably in their 30s. But that might be about the time that they're thinking about like really going after something. And I think it's they're learning and valuable stuff that they have no idea what they're learning and seeing. I don't think they'll appreciate it until late 20s, early 30s at best. Yeah. Because what they're going to need to do is go out and get some jobs that suck.

Struggle. Well, they just need to go get a shit job where they're not appreciated and the work is fucking mindless. And you have no sense of fulfillment. You're like, wow, this pays the bills. And my choices in the morning are brush my teeth with a six shooter or Colgate. You know, like. So my daughter's in college. She's a freshman.

How wild is that? And it's wild. Yeah, it's wild. Where's she going? Dylan and Western. Okay. Yeah, it's a small school. Good school, kind of a western town.

Good hunting down there. But she's off on her own. Yeah. On her own. It's about three hours away, which is about perfect. It's not too easy to get to, but. It's called on your own asterix. Yeah.

I can be home if I need to if I'm running out of food. Exactly. But, you know, she had money to write a check. for her whole first year of college when she left home because she did 4H. And so we raised 4H animals and she raised 4H pigs and 4H steers. And there were a lot of times I had to bitch at them to go feed, you know, their steers and their pigs. But what turned out is she wrote a check for that whole first year. And so she went to school and I kind of feel like she went down there like bills kind of paid,

having fun, living on some money in her account. And then it took about three months. and she texted me and she's like, I'm getting pretty short on money. And I was like, that's how that works when it's only one way. I said, it looks like you need a job because my parents never gave me any money after I left school or left home. I didn't either. They twist me right over to the government and the government paid me not a lot.

Yeah. So I was like, well, you're going to have to get a job. So, you know, she texted me not too long later and now she's working at Starbucks, our favorite coffee company. You're fucking dead to me. You dial her up right now and tell her to quit or this podcast is over. Yeah, yeah. So I, but here's what's funny about that job.

So now she's got a job that's working. She's going to work. She's opening. So five in the morning. And she's working for, I think, six hours and then going to classes. And I'm proud of her. She's working hard doing that. But then I start asking her.

I'm like, are you making good tips? And she's like, well, I don't really know. I haven't seen the tips. I'm not sure how they do that. And part of being a kid is like learning how to be proactive and like ask. Yeah. And I said, well, you need to go ask your boss. like immediately what's the deal with tips well you know it took her a little while she's still

not asking and I would ask her every time like to figure out the tip thing no she's just such a nice kid she's just like well and she works super hard I think she just thought like it'll work out and so finally she calls me or she texts and she's like I'm pissed and I was like what's going on she goes they take all the tips and they split it among all the people that close like later in the day. They add up all the tips all day and then like... The only people to get her to the closers? The closers.

Well, and she's like, I work in the morning. She's like, I open the start. I get out of bed at four. That can't be the case. Yeah, she's not. She's not. And so that's a really messed up policy. I could see them splitting it across all the shifts,

which is the only that actually makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. And it kind of boggles my mind. I still don't understand it. And there again, but I'm not going to fight her fights for her. Like, I don't know what. what's going on. I don't know if she's not understanding, but the whole point is, is like,

the whole shit job situation. Those are experiences that you need. Yeah. And she also has to handle that herself. Like, I'm not going to call down there and be like, I'm Demi's dad. Like, I might if she was 15. Yeah. But she's in college. Like, but those are the experiences that build you as a person to finally one day when you're 30, you're like, I've had enough of this shit. Like, I've worked 10 shit. jobs and I'm not going to allow other people or corporations or whatever to control what I do. And I told her, I said, well, it'd really piss me off if a barista does a great job, like at your new store, if a barista does an awesome job.

Why did you use the word if? Well, when the barista does an amazing job, unless it's me, because I've already told people my plan, whatever you order, Black Trip coffee, but you're paying an exorbitant fee. If you ordered a triple caramel macchiato, it's like, here it is. Like, sir, it's black, get the fuck out of here. There's your coffee. But I mean, if I tip that girl 20 bucks because she's a young, cute girl, you can tell us in college and like working hard and she's doing her greatest job. Like, if you're going to split amongst everybody, fine, because there are other people that aren't at the front counter that are making that whole thing happen.

But she sure is hell better be getting at least some of that tip. Yeah, because even if you give it to him in cash, Most of the stores just have a collective cash container. Right. Which if they probably enter it into the till somehow and then aggregate it out. I can't believe that it would be okay, though, to take tips from call it a 12-hour shift and only give it to the people who are at the tail end. I don't feel like that's... Yeah.

I don't consider that to be the correct decision for sure. It might be legal, but I think that's not the right way to treat people. And I don't know how all these different franchises are run if people do their own thing or what. I don't know how that would be. I think there would be a policy. But, you know, the other thing with that is, is like, when you tip cash, she also was like, I can't believe that they're not doling that cash out even evenly as cash, because that's kind of the point of a tip, right?

You get to kind of hide that money from Uncle Sam. I mean, maybe you do that. I pay my taxes straight up. I'm sure you do. I'm sure you do. It's not what you make. It's what it says you make on your taxes. Exactly.

Yeah. But as an employer, I would hope that, and maybe there's legalities you can't do it. But like, you'd hope that person could get that cash and stuff. Because they're generally not making a wage. I don't think they can take a cash tip straight from you. I think. Really? Even in a restaurant, you know, if you give somebody a cash tip, I don't think that person is getting 100% of it.

I think they go, from my understanding, they collect and aggregate the tips and tip everybody out at the end. Interesting. Well, you're going to learn a lot in the next few months, aren't you? Yeah. We like they're doing the we'll start hiring here in a week or two. And they're going to send a mobile training team up, which is awesome. So they can bring a staff up once we get our. Surprisingly enough, one of the long poles in the tent for us right now is our POS system.

Actually being able to execute transactions, crazy long lead time. But once we get that, we can do the training associated with it. And then I'll have an understanding of all the systems. Yeah. Yeah, that's going to be a, I know, and I think I'm sure you're going through it and going to go through a lot of it. I know for what we're doing right now behind the scenes. Like there's so much happening to try to grow up as a brand and all that stuff behind the scenes. Like the amount of things that I'm learning, we just hired a new director of operations in August.

Former Ranger came from Amazon. Just absolute brilliant dude. But the systems that he's building behind the scenes to help us track and all the, everything from buying the steel all the way through the knife sale and having it, you know, talk back to QuickBooks and talk to Shoeuvres and talk to, Shopify and the whole nine yards like. The benefit we're going to have there is that we are piggybacking onto an existing system. Yes.

What I can tell you is this. I'm really glad we're not the first Black Rifle Coffee outpost. I bet. Because we're a couple years in and I'm really happy that other people, the first people through the door. Yeah, first people through the door might leave a little bit bloodied. The systems have gotten better. They refined it. Now we're going to have the ability to, from my understanding, like if they have a special drink coming out for season,

and they can auto-update it through the server. So we don't have to go in the back and like all that exists. Like right now, this morning, actually, right after Jiu-Tzy before I walked past your truck, I was looking at an email, the introduction to the ordering process, like the credit application. So you know, the cups, the lids, the straws, like all this. So we're starting to get into that. And we didn't have to create that wheel. We're just being able to piggyback and draft off their momentum.

And that's been a gigantic learning curve for me because I am just an absolute, like regular dude. I mean, making a custom knife and running a production knife company are, I mean, the only thing that's the same is the fact that you end up with a knife at the end. But I mean, the whole entire process. And it's not like, well, it'd be like you trying to start what you're starting, but you'd go ask a competitor how to do it. Like, you're not going to get answers. Same thing for me. I didn't have, you know, we're not a franchise or something like that. So I had to just figure it out. And it's interesting in the custom. knife world. The reason I got so good so fast was because older knife makers were willing to share.

You know, they were willing to teach and share and you don't get as good as I got at 17 at anything unless you have mentorship. Yeah, the knowledge transfer. Yeah. So, uh, you don't have that in the production world, you know, you're not going to, they view you as competition. All right. You're not going to call up a big knife company and ask them how they do stuff. I mean, you know, they have in, you know, even ourselves now. I mean, everybody that we're working with signing NDAs and all this stuff. Like it's just a different beast. So the learning curve has been, well, it still is currently ongoing. It's massive.

Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about was more than anything, just how you're growing your business and what you've learned along the way. Because I, for me, the scariest day, for me professionally, and I would say the most freeing day at the same. I don't know the correct verbiage to use. So I left the military. I had been double-dicking. Double-dicking.

Tell us more. You were in the Navy. Yeah. It's double-dicking in the Navy. That's weird. Yeah, double-dipping. It's definitely plausible to think people were double-dicking in the Navy. The only time as I've heard the joke, people say, oh, I hear on submarines, 300 dudes go down and 150 couples come up.

I'm like, yeah, probably, I don't know. It wasn't on subs. They double-dick. Yeah, so there I was. Double-dicking in the Navy. And CrossFit on the weekends, and then I was able to get out, I had, like, for four, years I was double-dipping, which is not illegal. You just have to let your boss know that you're doing that. And I think they actually switched it. You have to actually get some paperwork to make it happen. But if it's not interfacing with your job or impacting it negatively, the military doesn't care that much. A lot of people actually do some moonlighting stuff.

So I had a smooth off-ramp from one to the other. But the day I decided to quit, I went from making what I thought at that time was a really good amount of money to staring at an abyss. of zero. Yeah. And I was, it was not a decision where I made. I'm like, I am 100% sure. And I was sitting there very much so questioning myself and balancing, is this the right decision? Why am I making this decision?

Why am I feeling this way? Is it something that's that I'm doing? Is this a perception issue? Do I need to fix this? And I got to the point. I'm like, okay, this is the right decision to make. But then looking at everything forward from that. And yeah, man, dabbled in professional skydiving.

flying airplanes on a, you know, charter perspective, the public speaking, starting the podcast, military contracting, teaching, skydye. It was wild. Yeah. Because I just, for a while, every opportunity that came up, they would just say, hey, do you want to me like, yes? Yeah. Because.

And honestly, I've, I've been trying to parent my kids to do this. And it's what I hope they do. Like, I hope they say yes to a lot of stuff. I mean, the whole just say no. Like, yeah, you want to say no to. certain things, but take chances and be willing to try stuff, especially when you're young, because, I mean, it's interesting. A lot of friends think I've had life figured out since I was 11, because I started making knives at 11, and I'm a knife maker today. So like, oh, you've just had

it figured out. And it's like, well, I was making knives, but I also worked for my parents' excavation company. Then I worked for an excavation company in Missoula. Then I started making knives again full time. Then I went to Northwestern Energy actually as a, as a production worker to become a welder. And then once I was working there, I saw what the lineman did. And I also saw the age in the room. And I was like, I'm going to be a journeyman and lineman way before a welder because no one's retiring on the welding side.

So I jumped ship to the lineman side. You know, now Montana Knife Company. I mean, I have seven different switches in my, what seems like, kind of perfect trajectory of like, oh, you knew what you were doing. So I've told my kids, like, as figured out as it appears. that I've got it, I only really have figured out what I'm doing when I was 39, like two years ago. It'll be interesting, though. I don't know your thoughts on this.

I agree with you and your ability to say yes to take opportunities, but you'll arrive at a point in your life where the most powerful thing you can say is no. Yeah. It gets to a place where you will be pulled in too many different directions. Like for my, so I have 14, 17 and 19. My advice to them is, fucking go to town. Take every trip that comes up. Take every opportunity. If you think you might be interested in a path, go walk down it a little bit.

And don't be afraid to move around because you have so much runway in front of you. But there'll be a point like the podcast is a good example. I did not start this podcast with the idea of generating revenue from it because I didn't actually know how that worked. I knew nothing about it. And then when the first advertising company that I worked with, it was actually relatively fast. And for people listening who want to start podcasts where they're thinking about that, an advertising company generally won't talk to you until you have about 10,000 downloads per episode, which sounds like a very small number.

And in the grand scheme of thing, where you have guys like Joe who has billions of total downloads. Right. And you do a little research, though, like your average podcast starting off is going to get maybe a couple hundred downloads. So there's everything in between. And I do not advocate or recommend people start podcasting to make money. Damn it. Well, you're doing, yeah. You just crushed my dreams.

I think you guys are going to be doing okay with, you know, stick with the pointy things. All right. Just remember all stabs hurt. But. Especially the double dicking. Oh, God, double. That was awesome. I'm going to make, Michael, we need to make a reel out of that one.

Yeah. Already on it. Can we see Gia sailor hat onto me too? That'll be perfect and a little neckerchief. Put some dicks in there. For sure. So I'm, and with my kids, it's just like go and do that. But as an example, as things start to grow and you start to figure out what you want to do.

Like for me, the most enjoyment enrichment I get out of is the podcast at this point. I love sitting down with people. And as it has continued to grow, there have been a lot of opportunities that have come with that. And early on, I was saying yes to everything because I was still in that place where I'm trying to figure out how the hell I'm going to pay my bills. You know, and if people think that, you know, it was an easy decision, you know, leaving CrossFit and stepping into that void, the first thing I did, the next day is I went through everything that I owned that I hadn't used in a little bit of time and put it on Craigslist. And for a month, just started selling shit out of my garage, got rid of a car, and just,

like, that's the point that I was at. Like, we had a savings, but I was like, I am in full survival mode. Simplify. Simplify and get rid of absolutely all of the excess. But as it grows, if you say yes to too many things, it starts diluting you. Yeah. And then you realize people actually show you who they really are. Yeah.

When you say no. It has been so fascinating as things have gone along. People will present an opportunity in their first intro where you meet them in person or you meet them online. It's very, hey, you know, we'd be so excited to this, that or the other. I'm like, listen, I'm not interested in that opportunity. And then the tone shifts. Right. Especially in person.

I'm like, there you are. Yeah. There's the real person. And you'll get to know who people are when you tell them no. We've been experiencing a little bit of that. I mean, in general, everybody's amazing, but definitely now that we've grown and, you know, we're much more visible and people are seeing opportunity. There's definitely a lot of opportunities coming. And I'm generally a pretty good guy, pretty trusting, and want to say yes to things because I appreciate people's interest in what we're doing.

But I'm definitely learning. And it's nice having a business partner. and actually hiring some other people to insulate myself a little bit from some of that, because I, you know, I've been kind of the face of the company. Brandon's kind of workhorse behind the scenes with the marketing stuff, but he was kind of built it around me as the knife maker and what I do. But, you know, being able to say, well, let me talk to my business partner helps, you know. And also, you know, we just hired a new community marketing manager, Sloan Brown.

From Yetty? Yeah. Is he going to leave Yetty? Well, he hasn't been with the Yeti for the last couple of year. Where do you go? He went off to start his own kind of thing with some other guys, I think. God damn it. He was my point of contact at Yeti.

Yeah. I got a different one for you. I'll give it. Perfect. I actually don't, I mean, I just go to the sportsmen and buy their stuff if I need it. Yeah, it's, no, we will get you hooked up if you know. I've known Sloan for a long time. He's awesome.

Yeah, so Sloan, I met Sloan actually at that first tack when I first launched MKC. And I think Sloan's been gone from Yeti for close to a year. I don't know how long it's. Maybe it's been over a year. But, you know, and that's kind of his story, whatever he went and did with some guys starting something they were trying to do. And I think he's still helping them just a little bit or something. I honestly don't know the details there. But he's kind of, you know, let us know he was getting back in it.

And for us, it's huge because, one, it helps us, obviously, you know, his Rolodex is, amazing, clearly. He's super well respected in the industry, absolute gym of a person. All the people I've been around as much as his names come up in my first couple years of being around like tax and stuff. I never heard anybody say a bad thing about him. So he's fantastic from that perspective. And it also helps insulate me a little bit from, and quite frankly, it's kind of a divide and conquer thing. Like I cannot keep up right now with the amount of DMs and the amount of opportunities and just people we want to connect with and meet with and you're going to have to talk to you have to have a conversation with yourself and decide what role do you want to have

in the company like if you want you know the founder the CEO the face of it like you're not you're not going to have time to do all that in the two years I've known it's like two years yeah the explosion in growth that you guys have had is unbelievable yeah so there is going to be a point where you're on riding a buck in bronco and you're just going to get hucked off if you're trying to do all that. Sounds like you actually have already arrived there. Yeah, no, it's there. And, uh, but honestly, I'm, but I would never, I would never want any, you know, people ask me like, how things go on and I never ever want to come across like I'm complaining because like, this is what we wanted. I mean, this is what we would have dreamed for. Um,

now you just got to figure out how to manage it and keep going. And quite frankly, I feel like my job above all else, quite frankly, is to be, um, a collector of talent and good human. So, you know, having Andrew come into the shop as our director of operations, phenomenal. Our employees at work for us right now in the shop are phenomenal. Brandon, amazing. You know, now Sloan Brown. We want to continue. I already know that I'm kind of a dumbass.

So as far as, like, what I know, I'm not, I don't have a lot of expertise in a lot of areas, right? So it would be, I think I reached a point for sure. and I think a good thing about not launching it. When I was 23, I probably would have tried to say I could do it all, or ego would have like, I know I can't do it, but I don't want to admit it, so I'm going to try anyway and fail. I'm at that point where I'm like, I don't know. If I don't know something, I'm going to say, I don't know.

And so I'm more interested in saying, I don't know, but I'm going to try and find the best person at that and hire that person. That's all you have to do. The leader doesn't, or the person in charge, they don't have to be the smartest person in the room. That's good. Well, the best leaders that I ever worked for, you're never going to be an expert at every aspect of it. They just staff their weaknesses.

And then they rely on the input of those people. They're still at the end of the day, you know, like the commanding officer of a SEAL team has a huge staff of people that are underneath them. And the last one that I worked with at Team 3, we would do a bi-weekly meeting, like a Monday and a Wednesday. And a lot of stuff would come up and you'd go around the room. At the end of the day, the decision that they're going to go is going to fall on the commanding officer. but he's not in there trying to tell everybody their own tea. Because I've worked for some people who think they're the smartest person in every room, and they are on an egg timer until they actually encounter a situation where they're not,

and it just doesn't go well. Yeah, I had to, we have a new employee that she's great, but she's only been there for about a month. She was kind of working contracting, helping us bookkeeping, but we got to the point where we need full-time help on that and brought her in. And she was basically giving me a play-by-play of every move she was making over text or email. And finally this week it was, you know, like, hey, I have something going on at this time, but my kid has a game. Can I change this meeting to whatever?

And I finally had to just say, take me off all that communication. I expect you to just do your job. I just had a ham sandwich and a Diet Coke. Well, and she said she's like, I've never had a job where I've had like this kind of freedom. And I said, well, I hired you because I trust you and I expect you to do your job. Like I only care about your performance. And if you do your job and you get it done, I don't want to know how the sausage is made. Just make it and make it good, you know.

Yeah. But I also want my employees to have that freedom where, you know, I've told them family first. If you have a, that's one of the things too, like working at a corporation. If I want, I had four kids all in sports. It's like I burned up a ton of my vacation time to go watch a Christmas play or a basketball game. I'm like, I am not having you miss that stuff for our company. Like, go to that stuff. And you don't have to use your PTO to go to that.

Like, I want to give you that time where you can just go and see that stuff, you know. But I expect performance. I expect them to just be able to do their job. And if they're not, I'll find someone else who can. I mean, that's kind of the deal. So I don't, and I don't think she quite understood just how. busy things are and I don't need that plugging things up but that whole putting like I don't know bookkeeping I don't know her job I don't know CPA stuff or CFO stuff I just know that's how you go to

jail if that stuff is not correct yeah exactly that's where I you go straight like who's the best tax professional within 50 miles give me that one exactly that's what we did who who's really good at doing payroll yeah welcome aboard I you might you might potentially do okay in prison with your jiu jitza background I would not do well in prison just saying I would get I would. Somebody would wear you as a condom and fuck somebody else. A hundred percent. And that's a bad look.

No, it is. I mean, that's a rough visual. I want you to think about that laying in bed tonight when you can't sleep. Michael's just disgustingly shaking his head over there. I basically knew that was the case, but I'd never heard it really put that way. But it's very depressing. In fact, I'm going to make sure my accountant really is the best now. That scares me.

Yeah. Okay. So that's the one part that honestly, before we hired anybody, Brandon and I went and found a CPA and we're like. It should be one of the first hires for business people. Yes. If you don't come from that world, and again, to go back to taxes, you know who's really good at knowing the gray area between expenses and ride off and gross versus net? People who look at numbers all day long. Yeah.

Leverage them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Or you can get sweet letters from the IRS a few years later saying, hello, sir, you have miscalculated your taxes and this is what you owe. Hopefully you got it in the account. I got an estimated tax bill from the state or state. city of New York when I was 16. I was going to the New York City knife shows right on in Times Square

at 49th and Broadway in the Crown Plaza Hotel and super high-end show. Pretty big honor to just even be in it. And I was 16 or 17 and did the show. And this guy walked around from the state and was like, when you do these shows, especially in California or New York, you have to pay sales tax in those places for what you sell there. And so he's handing out forms to every table holder. And I'm like, I'm a kid. I don't need to fill that shit out. Throw it away. These rules don't apply to me. Exactly. I'm from Montana. We don't have sales tax there. Except they do apply to you. Yeah, exactly. Well, several months later, I get an estimated sales tax bill for like $28,000 based on what they thought I might have sold based on the price of my stuff.

and what age were you again 16? Yeah, 16 or 17. You're like, this is more money than anybody has ever made in their entire life. A thousand percent. Yeah. So how could anybody ever pay a bill like this? I spent a lot of time on the phone with my mom standing next to me, like, helping guide that situation of like calling them and being like, okay, so this is actually what I sold. This is my age.

Like, how do we do all this? And I ended up paying, I think, $900 and penalties and late fees or something. It's a lot for a 16 year. It was a lot, yeah. Yeah, it was a lot. But that was a valuable lesson, though, at that point, like, oh, you don't want to ignore those guys. Even if you're just a little baby-faced kid, they don't give a shit. If you ignore your taxes, you might not hear about it for a few years, but you will hear about it.

Yeah, Wesley Snipes, he heard about it. Well, you know what's crazy about a lot of those situations is how little, again, I have no specifics, but how little interest or oversight, the individual seems to be. to have and how much trust they had with somebody managing their money. Yeah. And I don't understand like that level of wealth. I did like seven, eight, like I don't, I don't, it's hard for me to wrap my head around sums that are that big. But if I ever got to a place where I was making that much money and I had somebody who I

was paying to manage my money, I would at least talk to them and be like every quarter, we're going to carve out like four hours and please open everything up. Talk to me like I'm a fucking golden retriever. Yeah. and like lay this stuff out for me. Right. It's actually incredible when you look at the government will crack down on, you know, a 17-year-old going to a knife show or anyone else right now in business.

They will track every penny. But ask them about where all the money is from their like defense budget in the last few years or COVID. The best, the best comparison is, you know, the 600 bucks over PayPal and Venmo. Like you have to, the reporting around that. and then the DOD cannot account for 39% of their budget. Right. Yeah. It's wild.

For clarity, that's a large number. I believe, I don't know what the, Michael could look this up, the 2022 DOD budget is, but it's going to be in the multiple hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions. Yeah. Yeah. 39% of that is large. 1.64 trillion. Well, can you figure out with 30%?

39% of it is. I'll pull up the calculator here. It's going to be like $48 billion. I'm not sure. You might have to Google how many zeros are in trillion to even do your mouth problem. It's going to be about $48 billion. I'm going to say $79. Actually, no, it'll be $480 billion because a trillion is $1,000 billion.

I turn my phone into portrait mode for this times. 0.3-639 million. That's not correct. That's not. Billion. Billion. Yeah. That's gone.

Ask Nancy. I've got to imagine Nancy knows where a good chunk of that is. I don't think they do. No? Have you ever looked at the actual thickness, like, if they print out some of these bills that they vote on? It is mind-boggled. Thousands of pages. Like 39,000 pages.

And they'll give you 72 hours before they vote. I don't actually think there is any one person in the government who could explain where all of it goes. I think, and that's what. So Tulsi Gabbard's coming up to town in a couple months. And I'm fascinated to talk to her about politics, but it also scares the absolute shit out of me when she talks. Because I land in this place where I don't know if the current system that we have is actually salvageable unless we do a hard reset because the powers that be have been there for so long and have set up a system that is quite, I mean, you know, Joe talks about it all the time. Like when Nancy Pelosi's husband is the single, like, greatest stock picker ever. Right.

And everybody seems to be okay with that. Right. And I'm not saying it's impossible. I think it's improbable. Then there's an issue. But how do you solve that issue? Because the people that are there who are being enriched by that system. And I think all politicians, what do they call it the, when they put stuff into bills that benefits their,

the district that they work for. It's like a pork. Yeah. I forget what it's called, but it's, it's, they slight, I think they all do that. But again, so let's say somebody young and new and up and coming is like, I'm going to change the system. And then you get in there and you're not able to do anything because the people that have been there for the longest have set it up in their favor.

Like I think it's, you know, listening to people like, okay, I'm going to leave this party because I no longer agree with the ethics or what's going on in that party. that doesn't actually fix anything. I used to know John Tester. Pork belly. I used to know John Tester really well, one of our senators. In fact, he was my godfather when I was a young, young kid, and he would cut our beef. And he was just a wheat farmer and music teacher in Big Sandy.

Super good guy, knew him all pretty well. Excuse me. And, you know, he started into state politics. and then he got, you know, obviously elected senator. And he used to stop by. And it's interesting. Like, he used to stop by all the time by my parents' house. And in the beginning, he would stop when he was in Montana and he'd be driving by, say, from, like, Great Falls to Missoula.

And he'd stop in Lincoln and say hi to him. And he would just say things like, you'd just have no idea how. Like, I think his mind was boggled. Because I think he really genuinely was just what he advertised himself as, a farmer and a teacher. because that's all we knew him of forever before he became a politician. And it's interesting he was appalled and like I'm going to fight back and I'm going to post my schedule every day of what I'm doing. I'm going to be all, you know, transparent. And, you know, he ran as a Democrat.

I don't know what makes his politics one way or the other. I don't really care, but he was a good person. And I even argued against some of my conservative buddies. I was like, no, I know this guy. Like, I don't care if he's a Democrat or not. I'm going to vote for him because he's a good dude. those visits became less and less over time to where it's been years since I've seen or heard anything from him. And what I've seen is him become incredibly partisan.

And I don't, and I'm not saying this, take all politics out of it. I am not saying this from the standpoint of like I'm shitting on the guy. I think that place eats you alive. And I think you start having to make moral decisions of like, hey, John, I know you want this farm. Bill for Montana. But hey, bitch, you better play this game over here. Yeah. Quit pro quo.

Yeah. And I think, you know, you can only fight that so long. And like, you know, Tulsi fought it and found herself out. I mean, she ran for president. Couldn't even get on the damn debate stage. It's so crooked. So, and like a guy like John, then it lands me at the question, okay, was he actually always like that? or is the system so fucked that it will take you, even if you have the best people, the best people.

And it's like, it's like a bag of tea that you put into the water, right? The longer that it's in there, the darker it gets, the thicker that it gets. And I, I don't know the answer to that. I certainly do think that some people get into politics for the wrong reasons. Yep. Just like people are self-serving in whatever occupation that they get into. But if it's so fucked, how do we, how do we reset that? And that's the scary part is I truly don't think that's how John was.

Like, I know, I know that's not how he was as a human before. But if it can do that to him. And if it can do that to that guy who was as pure as the wind-driven snow, basically. I mean, if it can do that to that guy, I don't know how anybody, and it's why I, it's hard for me to even judge him that harshly. And I think it speaks to why we need term limits because I don't think, I think it takes a, incredibly special person like a Tulsi or somebody like that to stand so much on their on the you know to fall on their on their own sword yeah over their values and would I have respect I would have respected him way more to do his best for eight years and get out then still be in there however many years he's been in there

and and um you know I lost all respect for the man and it's unfortunate because I think somewhere down in there he's still just a farmer from big Sandy yeah but he's made two too many deals with the devil. And I don't care if left or right. The same goes for the people on the right. I mean, I want to be clear on that. This isn't a...

I'm talking about the entire political spectrum. I think it's such a giant dumpster fire that I think it's impossible. And unfortunately, I think, and, you know, you've heard Joe say it. And I think everybody kind of agrees. I mean, it's going to take... To fix our entire country, frankly, is going to take a disaster of epic. proportions that a 9-11 type of event or worse, frankly. Even a virus, like all we are are animals.

I mean, there's going to be a virus someday or what they thought COVID could be. Like, that'll happen eventually where there's going to be an epidemic that runs through us that kills 50% of the people. Something to make people rally, you know. Yeah, but look at what's happening. But what to be permanent. So we're both old enough to remember the few days or week or month after 9-11. It was as close as I had.

have ever in my life in 45 years of being alive, of which I probably don't remember like eight of those years anyway really well. So that's kind of pointless to say. But it was people were more empathetic. It was it was it felt like a sense of community for the first and only time yeah since I've been alive. But it doesn't last forever. COVID is an interesting one for me because I think about this too. And I don't care what people believe. Like you could believe that it is, the whole thing was a scam from the beginning, fully believe in everything that whatever particular science you want to look at tells you what I think was the most messed up was the messaging and the control measures that the government put on the people. And I think it has really tainted them on taking anything else seriously like that if it would to happen again. Yeah.

Because let's say something that did have a 50% fatality rate, which I think at around 5 or 6% it's catastrophic anyway. Like 50% would be like, that'd be like. Right. Even 10% would be ungodly. Mind-blowing. Yeah. There are.

And again, I only know the people that I know and I only see the things that I can see, but I don't, people are so frustrated with the information changing and this or the other and being told what to do and what you can't do. I think we're more susceptible to it going down that path because in the initial phases where it probably would be the most important to follow the guides

people are going to look in the room here and go yeah remember that last time yeah when you cried wolf yeah yeah no and I'm that guy I mean I would be that person who you know if I was unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place if I happened to be in New York for an event and I heard something on the news would be like whatever heading to

heading to the ball and and and or the Broadway show And, you know, it would be too late for a lot of people like me that just quite frankly are tired of the news in general. Yeah. So it's a, yeah, it's a scary, you know, I was listening to Joe's one, I think it's his latest podcast, that guy that has that YouTube show, the soft white underbellies? I haven't listened to it yet. I listen on the way up here. What's that YouTube channel about, by the way? It's, he, he just goes down on like Skid Row and he goes to all over.

the U.S. and talks to like just the most fucked up people. I mean, people really drugs, sex offenders. I mean, people who like a guy who was talking about how he was having sex with this eight-year-old daughter. I mean, this guy interviews the worst, the worst of the worst. You know, white supremacist, like all these people who were get on and everywhere from gang members to drug people. And they all have a common thing. And this is what I've been saying for years. And if I ever wrote a book, quite frankly, it would be on parenting because I think the only chance that we have is to somehow fix parenting government. Joe Biden or Ronda Sannas, none of these guys are fixing shit in this country from our real systemic problems, which all come back to every one of these people

that that guy interviews was either molested as a child or didn't have a father figure or didn't have any parents. That's where it all started. And the thing is, and I told my wife was a middle school teacher when I started MKC and she quit, kind of in the middle of COVID and came to work for us. But she would see so many things and come home and tell me about it. And I said, you know what's amazing? Is that eighth grade your teaching is going to be breeding in just a few years? And so all of these people that are that fucked up are all breeding.

And quite frankly, they're breeding faster than the people who aren't. There are so many people I know. that aren't having kids that should have kids that you want or and they're responsible right like it's expensive nowadays i'm only going to have one kid or two but these meth heads and people like that are having piles of kids it's a super scary um math problem that's going to be getting out of control it's already getting out of control yeah mean at some point not to reduce people to numbers but that does become a math problem it is it's uh and his whole point of doing that youtube channel is at first he was just photographing people but he started doing interviews and he's

trying to just have it be an educational piece of quite frankly it all goes back to these kids childhood yeah the parenting issue is um you know that's one of the things i've done a lot of things poorly in my life but i think you know and i don't think it's possible to do parenting perfectly but like that's the one thing i was pretty good at i thought was parenting and that being said it's freaking hard yeah like there's a lot of things that I would do different if I had four kids again. But I was probably sometimes too hard on my kids and too involved at times. But I think that's way better than the opposite.

Yeah, absentee parenting. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And to me, that's, you know, I talked to, I actually want to interview him on my podcast, my, our OB doctor. And he was talking about how hard it is to watch young 20-year-old. carry babies out of the hospital. And he's like, that baby's doomed.

I mean, at a two days old, it's doomed. Maybe I want to talk about something that can change the absolute trajectory of your life, literally overnight. Yeah. That mean, that's one of them, probably one of the higher ones up on the list. I tend to be kind of sometimes maybe if I was to analyze myself a little too judgmental at times, like that guy's a piece of shit. Why doesn't he get his shit together? And I think to this guy that has this YouTube channel, to his point, like,

when you actually listen to these people, I pulled up a couple of the YouTubes. Once I listened to Joe's podcast coming up here, just as I went through Lakeside, I turned on just a couple of his to listen to him. And he asked him about their family homes, you know, family situations. They had zero love, zero parenting.

They were given up before they could speak, basically. And then they were molested and whatever. And then he'll ask them, and these are people who are 30 and 40 years old or 20, 60 years old. The guy spent 20 years in prison. Every one of them asks, do you have any friends? And almost all of them are like, they don't even have a friend, much less love or support or a role model.

And the only reason that I'm as successful I think as I am with my company is I had an amazing childhood where my parents, when I was 11, let me go to a knife maker shop and freak and grind knives. Like the amount of responsibility they gave me, I mean, when I was 15, I was taking a dump truck and an excavator and driving west of town while my dad went east to go to. a basement. Did you have a driver's license? I had a driver's license, but I didn't have a CDL. I got my CDL the day I turned 18. There was a guy. I don't know if you've ever met him, Michael, but you probably have from judo. Ryan? Yeah, Ryan. He used to work at the front desk. At the front desk. He, if he shaved right now, he would have a hobo beard by tomorrow. Yeah. Like he as far, like, the first time I met him, his beard was down to like, if he probably

pulled it out belly button. No shit. And I guess that started growing at like 10 for him. So when he was like, Alia was telling me a story like 11 or 12 and he grew up doing concrete, he'd just get in the truck, start driving to work. Yeah. Probably going in buying beer at like 14 because it's like, Jesus, man, are you 64 years old? Yeah.

No license. Just getting it. after it in the old construction trade. I mean, that's farm kids in Montana, really. I mean, driving the farm trucks out or the combine out to the field or the tractor to take hay. I mean, I remember one of my first times I ever got to drive the backo off of the premises and go downtown was to get, my dad would let me take the backhoe down to get fuel and I was six. And it was. Yeah, because, I mean, backos can't do any damage, right?

Not high speed. God. Yeah. But I mean, I can never just, I don't know, drive it off the road and flip it or do. Yeah, just drive it through a house and keep going. But, I mean, you know, the point is, is my parents gave me a ton of responsibility, and then they threatened me all the time to take it away, you know. But I was raised on threats.

But honestly, like with my knife shop when I was in high school, it's like I had all these amazing things happening in the knife world, articles being written about me, and I was in magazines almost every month and all this stuff happening. And all the while at home, it was like, hey, if you get caught drinking or doing any drugs or whatever, locking that knife shop up for six months. So that kept me like that my knife shop was more important than partying. And to have that kind of parenting where honestly they gave me a lot of freedom and a lot of responsibility and a lot of chances to screw up. But that kind of parenting as contrast to no parenting and no support, no love, no consequences.

Yeah, it's, it's a, that's what's wrong with our country. And to think that we're going to have a politician come along. long. You know, as much as I think Ronda Sanis is awesome, I don't think he's going to fix our country. He might fix some aspects of it and help move the ball forward a little ways. But I think anybody who puts their faith in the government to fix the problems in their life is, in my opinion, a little bit misplaced. Yeah. The government, I think, can have an impact in your life. But if you think that the solution is the next person that we are going to elect is going to solve all the problems. Unfortunately, I think you're going to be wholeheartedly disappointed. And that really kind of

goes back to us launching during COVID, where I kind of made that decision like, I am not going to turn the TV on. I'm not going to watch the news. I'm not going to count on the government to save the day or to do anything forced. Like, we're just going to do our thing. And then count on the people that are around us, the actual friends of our brand and the customers that support us to actually like help drive us. And that's 100% exactly what happened. I mean, you know, I did listen a little bit. I haven't listened to it in a while, but I was listening back then to Andy Fricillo,

it was one of the people on his podcast that called it. There are going to be the kind of people that sit around and wait for the government to tell them they can come out of their house. There's going to be other people that put their blinders on and just fucking go. And that's kind of the path that we chose. And same thing like with your podcast. Like the people that did that are much better off today than the people who I think just. Well, like you said, though, too,

there you have to recognize that the blinders on and just going absent, you know, following and listening to the guidance, it comes with risk as well. Because like you said, I do believe it was really, really poorly handled and it'll impact people's response in the future. And if you make the choice to ignore everything, you know, freedom of to do what you want doesn't remove you from the, you know, the accountability and responsibility of your actions. Yeah. And that's kind of the whole Cried Wolf situation where, you know, some of us might down the road get eaten because we don't listen to them crying wolf when it actually does matter. But, I mean, I'm good with, I would prefer to have, you know, consequences for my actions and be free to make those choices and live with the result rather than be just told what we can do all the time. Agreed.

So back to the forming of MKC, because I said, like I'm fascinated with, you know, being in business for yourself is wild. You know, what you guys are doing is orders of magnitude larger than what I have going on. But I'm fascinated to hear about the lessons that you learned along the way. Because, I mean, I think when I first, yeah, when I first met you, you were just in that small garage where we made, I say we made my wedding ring. You basically made the ring and I stood there and you measured my finger because I didn't want to fuck it up. Which, by the way, I wore it diving in, I had my rubber one on because we just did J-J-2. but yeah I wore it diving in Hawaii and it tried to rust on me yeah saltwater doesn't like that kind of steel yeah no but I got it off and it's got a sweet patina though and some of the little

grooves though so I actually dig it nice yeah that's good well we can always buff it up if it ever needed it but buff it up that just totally I'm like yeah we'll dip it in the acid as a master blade smith I just figure we'll put it in acid and clean it out I'm not sure if that's the answer but no it looked great much it actually added to like a little bit of a darker color in the grooves it's pretty sweet I mean that's what happens to a car And it's steel like chef's knives. You see a lot of old, old chef's knives or swords. And they have this brown look.

And that's patina. And quite frankly, I love that stuff because that's, that's telling the story of where that thing's been. You can tell, like, that thing's been through some stuff. Yeah. You wish you could know the stories of like, well, how did that ring get that rust? Or how did that knife get that scratch? Yeah, I dove it once.

I was like, oh, this probably isn't going to work. Had the rubber one threw that one on. And it had the color change that I was looking for. Yeah. So you make the decision. You know, like I'll be done at noon on December 31st. Yep. And dry heave a little bit on the way home.

Yeah. How did it go from there, though? I mean, what was your plan? And then how did you guys are on an explosive growth curve. I'm just fascinated to hear how that played itself out. Yeah. I mean, it was at that point just incredibly long hours. A ton of it on my end was trying to learn.

You know, Brandon had more experience on his side of the business than I had on mine, even though I was the, you know, quote unquote master. Bladesmith, a lot of what I had for knowledge didn't necessarily apply to what we were trying to do, where Brandon had more of the marketing side from what he had been doing. You know, he was really a lot of the brains behind the marketing and the stuff that happened at the brand flag nor fail, clothing brand. So, you know, Brandon was probably more, he was more professional on his side and doing his marketing stuff.

But on my side, it was a combination of kind of that community management and talking to people, and making relationships and getting our knives out there, but at the same time, trying to figure out how to make more knives. And really building our website, learning a ton of them at that time was really just trying to figure out how to make more than, you know, like making a couple hundred knives for me was a lot when I was making one knife a month before. Well, what was your, the first MKC knife drop? Was it the Speedout you guys opened with?

Blackfoot. The Blackfoot. How many did you make that very first time? 200. We made 200. and I thought that was more knives than it would take us, you know, a year. I was going to say you're probably shitting bricks. You're like, you're like, you don't want to do 20?

Yeah, and what people don't understand, like they would get mad at us as we progress. Like, you guys aren't making enough knives. And what you have to understand is it's a multi-month process to make that many knives. And it also is a lot of money. And so you don't just, you know, I wasn't just shitting money. So, you know, it takes, you know, to do the size drops we're doing now, hundreds of thousands of dollars to do one. drop and all that you don't get any of that money back until the knives are all done and you sell

them yeah and then there's there's also testing and prototyping and being sure that what we're going put out because you know like the chef's knife when i was on here i think last time i mean you were just talking about it at that point yeah and we talked about it for a long time and people thought i was probably full of shit but there was a lot of stuff happening in the shop where we were trying to make sure we were getting it right because the last thing i want to do especially as a brand new brand is put something out and have it fail um it's So I just won't put something out if I don't think it's right. So during that phase, it was a ton of just learning how to set that up.

And I mean, I was, we still are. We're just starting to move out of it, but working in basically a two-car garage. We joke about the podcast, but I literally had my podcast table set up in this two-car garage part of my knife shop that we had to then take over. And I had to move my podcast stuff out. And that's where we're currently packaging and assembling and sharpening and doing all our knives. right now. So I don't think people realize just how small of a facility we were working in for kind of the size of the growth that was happening. And, you know, so a lot of it was figuring that out and a lot of it was working the relationships. I was not in the outdoor industry. I was just a fan.

I was a fan of Black Rifle Coffee or a fan of Yeti or Sica or whoever, Leopold. So starting to meet people and networking. And honestly, that's the biggest part I think. of our success has been people's willingness to help us and network with us and you know we try to work with really reputable people I'm most interested that's what I've found the been the coolest thing about this industry is how many just good people there are behind like these big brands you know a lot of people will see a brand like like nozzler like nozzle or like nozzle bullets and you just see a giant company but then you actually see like incredible humans behind the scenes that are actually doing the everyday work you know

Yeah. And I think that's why these brands get great, like Black Rifle Coffee. It's because they had really great humans running this, building this machine. So. What's the biggest mistake you guys have made so far? Man, that's a good question. I hate to say that we haven't made any mistakes, but. You guys never ordered the wrong type of steel?

We'll take 10,000. pounds of this steel and it shows up like, ooh. That was supposed to be a one, not a zero. No, we've had, we've had big, oh shit moments like a blade, like a big giant blades, a batch of blades warping in heat tree where all of a sudden you're, you're troubleshooting what's going on with the steel. We've had a ton of little mistakes that were all manageable, but a lot of times at the moment they feel like big things, you know.

But I don't think we've really had anything that's been, like a huge whoops. That's good. You don't have to have. Yeah. It's been, and that's why I kind of also live super paranoid every day that, like, the big one's coming. I'm just always trying to think of like, yeah, I always feel like every night I go to bed. I don't ever want anybody to think I'm taken for granted, like, oh, we've made it or we've arrived.

Like, I don't even think we've hardly gotten started yet, quite frankly. Which is terrifying to a degree because the size of the building you built right next to your current shop. Yeah. It's huge. Yeah. And I suspect you guys are already going to tap that capacity out. Yeah. So the next step is going to need to be 4x, 5x, 10x that size.

Gitty up. I was at. Exactly. I was at Stone Glacier's little Christmas party they had at their headquarters the other night. I happened to be in Bozeman and saw it was going on, stopped by there. And somebody asked us, like, so you're pretty content at like the size now? Are you guys going to try to keep growing? And I was like, yeah, we haven't even gotten started.

And I truly, and I'm saying that not from an arrogant standpoint, but from a like, I, it was that way when I was a kid with like trying to become, I wanted to become the best knife maker in the world. I never accomplished that. And I don't think that's a pretty hard thing to measure. And I wasn't even close. I would never say I was even close. But I was, I was a top maker of a bunch of guys. But that drive to just keep going. And honestly, in the hunting space,

it was always super frustrating to me as a hunter and a knife maker that I never really saw very many or any knife brands call themselves a hunting knife company. They always made hunting knives as like an afterthought. Like, oh, we make folding knives and it looks like we could make a little bit of money over that hunting space. So some engineer that's never hunted cranks out a knife that they call a honey knife and they put it out. It always kind of pissed me off that hunters also, never really respected knives

as an essential piece of their gear. And this is something I was saying the other night was hunters in the last decade will, they'll spend an amazing amount of money in optics. You know, they'll go buy a loophole or Swarovsky spotting scope, even though

they hunt in timber in western Montana and don't ever use it. They'll buy, you know, the best binos. They'll buy the longest range scope. They'll have a custom long-range rifle made. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars and just the stuff you've already mentioned. And then let's move to the gear.

So they're Sika gear or Kew or whatever brand you want to choose. The correct brand is Sika. Sika. Yeah. That's John Barclow. You need to support John. And I do support John and Dennis Zuck and the people in the Sica Depot where we have our knives for sale, by the way. A lot of people don't know that.

Well, that's where the idea kind of came from to maybe have another retail location, which we can talk about later. I'm just saying maybe. Maybe. Hypothetically, if people come to the BRCCC Calusbell, figure something out. Yeah, for sure. But with that sick of gear, you know, you got people worrying about their base layer and their mid layer and their coat and their rain gear and all this stuff. And you move to boots and the amount of money they're spending on that sick of gear, on their boots, on their binos and their rifle. Some of that stuff more important, I think, than others, depending on the kind of hunting you do.

The packs, the Kefaro pack or the Stone Glacier Pack or whatever, Eberley Stock. all these things. And then the last thing they do is grab a $20 knife and throw it in their kit. And the one piece of gear that you cannot forget on that trip besides your rifle is your knife. Because if you forget your rain gear, it might suck, but you'd be all right

or your base layer. You probably can't forget your boots, but you could probably go hunting most of boise and tennis shoes. If you forget your knife and you shoot something, you're fucked. Unless you know a farmer nearby that has a tractor.

Then you, you might be okay. You might be all right. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that is an overlooked item. And also what you can do with your knife and how you can use your knife throughout the year, a lot of the gear that you purchase for hunting season, you don't actually use 365 days a year. I'm going to disagree with you there. I see people who are hunting at Chick-fil-A. They are at the Taco Bell. The full Sitka head to tell, and I'm not judging it because I actually have a ton of their stuff. But also, you know, They make lifestyle gear too as a suggestion for people. I know that's an additional cost.

It's very much become a thing to see. And, you know, good for sick of gear. I think they were really the ones that changed the game with that that were wearing Optifade to a football game in October is like a chick wearing hunter boots. Like look at me and what I spend on my coat. I see that shit year round up here. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, oh, cool, cool. You want a burrito? Are you going to stock that burrito? Or what do we got going on? Yeah. Or maybe it's just a pair of pants that was on top of the pile. I'm not going to say I've never worn one of my favorite pieces that Sika makes is that just the vest.

I'm not going to say I've never worn that out in town. Their puffy is freaking bad to the bone. But, you know, the other part of it was that I saw happening that really was bothering me, especially right before I started MKC in the last several years. And I won't name brands and good for them for doing. doing their thing, but the replaceable blade throwaway knife bothered me. And, you know, I see the, I see the function and I see kind of the reasoning behind it. But what people don't really see is the hundreds or thousands of people that have come in my shop and asked me to sharpen their

dad's knife or their grandpa's knife or their uncle's knife that was passed down to them. And we only pass down very few things in our generation today. or ever. We passed down knives. We passed down guns, art, and jewelry. And maybe a watch or maybe a car occasionally. Real estate. Some real estate.

But as far as material items, you know, and you could definitely throw watches in there with, you know, some of that stuff. But really in general, there's some antiques, furniture, maybe, or something like that. But in general, knives, guns, art, and jewelry are the main things we pass down. And all of a sudden in our throwaway society, we're now. throwing away one of the few things that and that I've personally seen people thousands of times bring to me you know and like a knife that if you and I don't know maybe you have it but like when you were when you were a seal and you were carrying one of your blades if you still had that knife today and you know you're still using it and whatnot in 20 years 30 years 40 years from now you don't

think about it when you're 30 years old and using something but when you're you're dead and gone it's amazing how many people, like your grandson might say, this was my grandpa and he used this when he was a Navy SEAL back in the early 2000s. You used it for training. That's it. I hate to tell you out there, people, but in a lot of knife fighting going on. If you're knife fighting, you've done something horribly horribly wrong. We carried dive knives and you're issued K-bars in buds.

Having been back as an instructor, it's simply another item that we can critique students with. that it has to be sharp at all times and all this stuff. But yeah, it's attached in a plastic sheath with a dive flare on it. So if you get in trouble in the water, you can actually surface and use the flare, not the knife. Sure. But yeah, there's a, I don't even think I have any of those anymore. And I just started carrying a leatherman overseas because it had a small blade, but it also had all the other things that were in there.

It's, you know. But the point is, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's just a leatherman or a buck knife or something, you know, an old timer. It doesn't matter what the knife is. It matters who carried it. And it doesn't matter what you even did with it. It's the fact that, you know, it was grandpa and he was in Vietnam.

Yeah. Like, I don't know. He might have been a cook in Vietnam. Or maybe he was in SOG. Like, you don't know, but the point is, is there's very few things that you actually carry and use every day that you can pass down. Almost everything else, especially in our digital age, like how many watches nowadays are going to be getting passed down. you know digital digital's kind of changed some of that a little bit and I think that's you know I don't know I just think that that I'm trying to bring back some awareness and tell people like you might not seem important to you but trust me I've seen it on the other end where people come in and they're like hey man can you throw a tip on this um my grandpa must have broke it prying something or sharpen it and some guys are like I want to sharpen this old knife from grandpa and carry it and they're like sorry man I'd love to carry one of years, but this is my grandpa's, I'm going to carry it until I lose it.

And it's like, hey, if that's what brings you happiness, do it. Yeah. If sharpening it and putting it in your gun safe is what makes you happy, and you can pass it to your next generations, that's cool too. Like, it's not so much about the knife. I've had some collectible knives brought in my shop, but largely, they're knives that weren't special. Yeah, it's the story attached to it, not the actual item itself. Yeah, and I don't think our knives that we're making are incredibly special, from a, like an appearance standpoint,

they don't have fossilized ivory on them and they don't have gold pins or silver and all this stuff. They're simple tools that are meant to do a job really well, but it's on the purchaser, the person who owns it, to build the character and put that story into that knife and then pass it down. And that's what I really want to see. And I love already, you know,

the amount of people that are giving their sons or daughters are knives, their wives are knives in the kitchen. My mom still has, like, my great-grandfather's chef's knives. I have my butcher knife for my great-great-grandfather. I have a picture in my shop at him with a butcher shop in Toot, Montana when they settled there. And it's him with my grandpa standing there who's, like, five. And that butcher knife, you can see it laying on the butcher block right in front of him. And I have a-off shop.

Yeah. Like, I don't know anything about that knife, but it's badass, you know, to have. it. Yeah, it's the story. It's not the item. Yep. Out of all the blades you guys make, which one's your favorite? I lean towards the Blackfoot because probably sentimental for me, for me, that's the knife we launched the company with. And the reason I did that and I named it that was I grew up in the Blackfoot Valley. And I'm not a big fan of taking a lot of knives with you on a hunting trip. I think you only really need one. Minimal gear that's good gear. So you don't need multiple

knives, you need one good one. So that Blackfoot will do anything in the Blackfoot Valley. From fishing to deer and elk hunting to moose hunting bear, you know, take a horse trip in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. We have other models. You know, we did the Speed Goat, which is somewhat similar to the Blackfoot, but it's out of paracord. I love that knife just because it's super, super light. And people love that aspect. I tell you who loved that knife. I think I texted you this was my guide in Utah. Yeah. I whipped that thing out on that bowl and he was just like, what is that? I'm like, here you go, man. It's yours. That's awesome.

Yeah, it was great. I try to give them, you're very gracious and send me knives from time to time. And it's like, okay, I'm going to hoard over these 10 or maybe help spread the word a little bit and give them to people that actually mean something. Yeah, that means a ton to me. I mean, that's how we didn't have a marketing budget. I mean, up until just recently, frankly, we didn't spend any money on marketing because we didn't have it. And that's changing for 2023. three, but the greatest thing that ever happened for us was that exact kind of thing.

People like you just handing them out. And that's really how we spread our word was giving knives away, you know, with no strings attached. So that's one of the problems. I think that a lot of people in this industry, they tend to give stuff away, or I think less experienced people in the industry or new companies. They give stuff to somebody like you or someone else, and then they expect an immediate, like, posts on your Instagram.

or shout out. That's where it comes back to telling people no. Yeah. Because I say I do get people who will reach out. People are brands. And I'll be honest with you, man. I think I say no. If a hundred opportunities came my way, no bullshit, say no to about 95.

Yeah. One, because I have to, I look at it not from the perspective of what could this potentially bring me, but I have a very finite about of time. And I have things that professionally that I want to do, personally that I want to do. and where does this, if I were to say yes, where does this obligation fit inside of that? And if it doesn't fit, you're going to get told no. Yeah, and we're in a weird spot that I'm trying to figure out and learn how to manage because because we sell a product, if you wear sick of gear, I would love for you to carry our knife.

But if you wear Kuyu, I would love for you to carry our knife. And I've compared ourselves a lot to like a Yeti cooler where I think they did a good job of, it doesn't matter what gun you shoot or what camel you wear or what bow you shoot. We just want you to have one of our knives. They want you to have one of their coolers. And we would like to be considered one of the more premium and quality products in your gear. And if you're buying good quality gear, we want you to buy one of our knives. But with that comes some difficult decisions where you and I are both friends with several people from somewhat competing brands.

and people like, you know, Kaylee and a lot of the people at Leopold have been phenomenal. Or people at PSE have been phenomenal and Matthews and other brands. You know, so it turns into this hard situation where we're kind of trying to be Switzerland. And it's also hard because I have my personal feelings where you meet somebody like Barclow and you want to support Barclow or someone like him in another brand. Yeah. And you almost feel like you're cheating on them when you, you know, post, a picture with somebody in a competing brand. But I think most of the people that are professionals

also understand that it's, especially if you're not being, like, we're not, I'm not being paid by anybody. If you're a professional and you are in business, you should understand that other people can be professional and in business. And it's good business to aggregate out as much as possible. Yeah. And the guys like, I'll say like early, early on, I was talking to the Stone Glacier guys. and they were super nice. They gave me a pack. And I was down there, you know, probably several months after that. And I was like, hey, just so you know, like, Everly Stock's been amazing.

I mean, they gave me a pack. And just so you know, like we post pictures of that stuff too. It's not like Stone Glacier was paying us. But I said, you know, we're kind of Switzerland. And I just don't want to offend you guys because I appreciate your pack. And those guys at Stone Glacier were like, no, that's what you 100% should do. Like, you should try to be friends with as many people as you can that deserve it that are kind back. Let them have those battles, you know, and you can kind of sit back.

It's not like, coolers is a good example. It's not like a polarizing thing. You need to have something awesome to put your meat in unless you want it to taste like shit or be completely spoiled. Yep. And I agree with you. You need to have a high-quality knife. It's not something it is interesting, too. What did I see the other day?

It wasn't a bumper sticker, but on the back of the windows. I think it said exactly, coo you or die. I'm like, holy shit, dude. Did you found that cover? Like, fucking take it easy. People are crazy about, I mean, they, and we have them, which I love them. I mean, we have people that are that will send me DMs and they'll be like, you know, I know you gave so-and-so a knife and he usually posts about it, but did you see he posted a

a picture of a bench made? And I'm like, yeah, dude, it's all right. Like, I'm not, I'm not getting pissed off. But if I was going to, if I was paying somebody $100,000 a year, like, that's a different story. That's different. Yeah. But when I'm just giving away product, two. somebody. I want them to post pictures of our stuff because they like it and they like us and they

believe in it. And if they're also friends with Lucas at Grizzly Forge, rock on. Like, great dude, post pictures of it or, you know, half face blades. I mean, I grew up and was raised by knife makers. Like I said earlier, I only got to where I got because people shared. So I'm more interested in like what we're doing as a brand and we're just trying to do our best and collect super cool people along the way. If people like other stuff as well, that's great. I just enjoy that I posted that picture of your chef knife before I realized you guys had actually launched that.

No, that was perfect. My bad. No, that's awesome. When you gave it to us at the wedding reception, you didn't say, hey, don't post about this. It's true. No, we were so close to posting it. It was great. By the way, that wedding, I was thinking about this.

You sent me a picture of my wife and I at your wedding the other day. You'd just gotten your pictures back. And it got me thinking, and I was like, I was trying to figure out why I enjoyed that wedding so much. Because it was just a party. I've been to a lot of weddings that suck. Yeah. And I don't really. I've been to a lot of weddings that suck from soup to nuts.

45-minute ceremony, stuffy dinner. Leah and I talked about, we don't do any of that shit. Yeah. No, it was such an awesome. Like, my wife and I had so much fun. And I was trying to think, like, why was that so fun? Because, like, I don't like Andy. Of course.

I love Leah. Did you get the thank you? letter that I sent you? No. I sent it to your house. And it was like, Jess, thank you for putting up with this piece of shit. It was great to have you at the wedding. Yes, I got it. We, yeah. But I came to the conclusion, it was the people and it was just a party of like amazing individuals, you know. It was so fun. I don't, I don't know what I would have changed. What would, what would you guess the ceremony start to finish time was? Two minutes? I'm saying the under. I'm taking the around that. I was like,

I was like, Andy said it was going to be short. He was not bullshit. We were like in, out. Yeah. And it was What did the bear cost to hire? Oh, the bear that was walking around? I hadn't been at your, it was before the wedding. Was that the night before? Yeah. Yeah, I hadn't been there

like five minutes. Like had literally just like said hi, I think, to Dudley or something. And then walked around the corner and everyone was like, there's a bear. There was like just a bear. Just across the river. Yeah, across the river. And then your pet deer that you hired. Yeah, there was a dough and a buck that would literally walk up and eat apples out of your hand. Yeah.

Which that's not saying good stuff for their life expectancy. I mean, well, those are the tasty ones to eat, though. Can you imagine an hand-fed apple-soaked deer? It's like a pre-triggered, like if you use an apple pellet when you cook it. With the green one, with the apple in honey sprinkled on top? Yeah. We might have to go back. There little meat, little meat church rub shut out to meet church.

He's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. But now, we had such a good time that night. And it, you know, there was no speeches. People were apparently trying to get people to go up and talk on a microphone. I had already talked to the band. I'm like, you give this microphone to nobody. Yeah.

Like, no, it's not about that. We just want to celebrate with everybody and have a good time. I wouldn't have changed anything. The fucking food. Oh, my God. It was phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah.

And honestly, as busy as everybody's lives are, I felt like everyone was actually able to relax. Like it wasn't, you know, you go to a lot of places. And a lot of times, like, we're lucky to get to go to some cool events. But it's also still like business at the same time. Yeah. And it's hard to actually just fully relax. And everyone there just relaxed as friends and hung out.

Deli was my favorite, I think. Dancing on the table. Dancing on the table. But so I mean, God, he's lost a lot of weight. He's been keto for a year. I know. And he was not keto that night. He was dancing his ass off and I never saw him dancing without a slice of pizza in his hand.

It's true. It was like whipping everywhere. I don't think he had eaten, well, he was full keto and I don't think he had a drink. Maybe since I had been to his house, which was back in February and your wedding was what, July? August. August. I don't, I think that's when he finally like fell off the, the vegan wagon. But when he fell off, he fell.

Oh, yeah. It was a full five mile pile up. But it was. It was awesome. And then he got on that plastic table. I have a video of it in pictures too. I was convinced that the legs of that thing were going to just... You were like, John, get down.

I didn't care about the table. I was like, hey, man. Yeah, have him break his shoulder or something. No, it was so good. I've gotten a ton of feedback from people who, one, appreciated the shortness of the ceremony. Like, that's not what we're here for. It's the celebration after. Leah was stoked about it.

It was exactly what she wanted it to be. So it was good. No, it was phenomenal. Yeah. It was awesome. I pulled in my, Andy was like, yeah, bring your camper up. There's a big lot across the thing.

And I pulled it in. That's what I was told, by the way. Yeah, I pulled in. And the first person I see is the owner of the deal. And I'm like, all right, well, I'm going to just go park my camper over there. And he's like, no, you're not. And it turned into this like, well, I don't know who told you. And I was like, oh, well, but actually as it turns out, I said, well, because he said,

well, that field's owned by the neighbor. And we made a deal with a neighbor that we won't allow extra campers. And I was like, all right, I said, well, why don't you ask that neighbor? if a little cash will change his mind. And he comes riding his little bike back in about 30 minutes later. Yeah, go ahead, pull on over there. It's amazing how a little cash will help from time to time. Yeah.

Sir, there's a two hour away here to eat. Really? What do you think about this? Come right on in. Yeah, it was definitely, and it was worth every penny when we had maybe had a little too much to drink to just stumble across the road to our camper. How good were those huckleberry, the craft cocktail hook? I think they called it the Hucket.

I honestly was like maybe one of the best drinks in the middle. And it just kept having. I'm like, is there even alcohol in these? That's how you know it's dangerous. Yeah. You're like, I don't think there's any alcohol in this. And then you wake up and you're like, who's shit in my pants? Why is it purple?

Like what happened? No. No, it was good, man. I'm glad you guys were able to come up for that. It was everything we wanted it to be. Yeah. It was fantastic. It was really cool.

What's next for you guys? I want to take you over to see the coffee shop here before they close the construction down for today. But oh, tell me about, give me a recap of your hunting season for 2022. You kind of, you did some road time. Yeah, we did. We had a super cool experience, took Hank, my son, 14-year-old down to New Mexico. Your 14-year-old built like a 22-year-old for clarity.

Yeah, he's kind of a beast. He's a tank. Yeah. They call him Hank the tank. It's appropriate. Yeah. He's about 6-2 and 205 and built. But, uh, um,

And I can still absolutely kick his ass, but I'm definitely going to have to start Jiu-Jitsu just to defend myself against my own son because he tests me every day. Didn't you already sign up at SBG, Missoula? A while ago. Yeah, how's that going to go? They need one in Frenchtown. No, they don't. The 35-minute drive is a real problem.

You need a car that's capable from getting from Frenchtown to Missoula. It's true. Which you have. I wish I could pause the world for an hour or two in the morning. You had to prioritize your time. The whole prioritizing and first. figuring out time thing is definitely the goal for 23. No, the hunting was awesome.

I took him, well, actually, what was really kind of wild about it is Hank and I went and did a little elk hunting the week before here in Montana. It was smoky. It wasn't real good. We kind of came home early from that, knowing that we were going to New Mexico. And quite honestly, I was super busy and knew I was going to be gone for a week. So I'm like, we're going to go home. I have shit to get done. Then we'll go to New Mexico.

So he asked me when we got home that night, he says, can I go elk hunting back behind the house? And I said, yeah, that's fine. Go elk or deer, whatever. And so he takes his bow by himself. He walks back there. He gets up 5.30 or 6 in the morning, whatever, heads back there in the dark. And all of a sudden I get a phone call about nine in the morning or so. And it's him.

And I pick it up. And he goes, Dad. And I was like, yeah. And he goes, can I shoot a bear? And I was like, yeah, as long as it doesn't have cubs, I said, how far away is it? And he goes, 10 yards. I's like, you better shoot it. Yeah.

And so he goes, hold on. And he sets his phone down on speaker. And I just hear, whack. And then he's like, oh my God. Oh, my God. And I'm like, what is happening right now? And he's like, it's eating my face. Yeah.

He's like, it's dead. And I'm like, where are you? And he goes, right behind the house. And I was like, like, how far back? And he's like, go over to the living room window. And he's like, I go walking over the living room window. And he walks out of the trees and he just holds his arm up and he just waves. That's a Montana story right there.

Yeah. He was 400 yards from our back door. And so, yeah, he shot his black bear by himself. Super cool. And then we went to New Mexico. And a guy down there, super generous guy that's got a ranch that does some guiding. is a fan of the company and he messaged me and he asked me, he says,

does your wife hunt? And I said, well, she would like to. She wants to start getting into it. We'd just been talking about it. And he's like, well, he's like, I don't offer free hunts to men, but he said, I would like to offer a hunt to your wife and your kids for an elk.

And he's like, I love to get people into hunting. And he's like, I'd love to take your kids. I see what you post on Instagram. They look like good kids. So during archery season, drove Hank down there. We hunted for a few days, and it was really cool because we got on a herd in the morning, and we chased this bull, didn't work out, but we kept chasing these elk,

and then finally it got to the point where they were bedding down, and we weren't going to be able to move in on them. So we just slept basically right there on the edge of the herd, probably 300 yards away from where they were bedded in the timber. We just couldn't get in there. All day long stayed on them, and then in the evening they kind of started perking back up, getting ready to move out and feed and he ended up bugling that bowl in and Hank shot a nice five point at or six point actually at 30 yards.

That's awesome. Smacked it with his bow. Yeah, it was fantastic. What a savage. Yeah, it was awesome. So that was a pretty good seven days of hunting for him. Yeah. And then I took my wife back down there in rifle season and we took Natalie.

She is a W.W.E. wrestler and her husband, Jonathan, and Natalie Eva Marie, for people that want to look her up. But we took her down on her first hunt. Her and her husband are super nice people. And it actually kind of interesting because we actually kind of talked to a couple brands about maybe sponsoring. I won't name who, but like, well, she's not really our demographic. And I was thinking to myself, it's interesting because. If I was taking a lawyer or somebody, some famous lawyer from L.A., it would probably wouldn't be a problem, especially as well known as she is. But because she's got pink hair and kind of does what she does, all of a sudden it's not the demo. But when you actually get to talk into them, they're phenomenal people, amazing people.

And she was truly interested in getting into hunting. And since we've gone, she's gone like down the rabbit hole. And honestly, we actually found her through Cam Haynes had given her one of our knives. And we took her hunting and we filmed this hunt and we filmed her and Jess both. And they both got bulls. It was an amazing experience. But as hunters, and quite frankly, I think we have a responsibility as a brand and any brand that's in the hunting world that if you have an opportunity to expose hunting to someone with million, I think she's got 15 million followers over her platforms. you know, we could go do a hunt with Onyx and Leopold and put it out, and a bunch of hunters would see it.

But this hunt that we're going to put out on YouTube with her is going to expose the hunting world and the good side of hunting, done in a good way and explaining conservation behind hunting and getting new people in it and all that stuff. We're going to expose what we love to do to millions of people, which if all that does is just make people understand it better and not hate it or not very, vote against it. You know, they lost spring bear in Washington. Maybe if people were more educated and understood it a little better, they wouldn't just vote against it, you know?

Yeah. So it was interesting to experience, but just because she's got pink hair and she's a woman, you know, I don't think that's a reason to not take somebody like her hunting when you would, if it was the quarterback for the Eagles, you would take them in a hot second and everybody would want to sponsor it. And the guy probably would have less followers than her.

So it's an interesting. kind of dynamic. There's a lot of, I would love to be a fly on the wall on some of those conversations with Bernan's. Yeah. Because I agree with you,

it doesn't seem like they make the best decision for the overall community in general, not often, but sometimes. And I would like to be a fly on the wall for those conversations. Yeah, and I don't think, you know, I tried to explain,

like we're not, I'm super excited about the film. It's in, we're editing it down. It's actually really hard. When you make a film like that, it's hard to, to edit the time down because there's so much good stuff that happens.

It's actually harder than I think than people understand. You throw a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor just so it's not 40 minutes long. Like people only have so much, you know, bandwidth for time. But I think, you know, it's not that we did it just for followers. Like I could tell when we were talking to her that she was in this for the right reasons. And I honestly think she was, she's a great conduit to help spread the word. you know, frankly, we as hunters and brands in the hunting industry, it's also to our financial benefit to make sure hunting stays around and as many places as possible. And so, and, and it's also

what people don't understand is it's also to hikers and bikers benefit that hunters stay around because frankly, it's conservation dollars that pay for those bike trails and those fishing accesses and hunting access points for them to go bike on or to go look at birds in June. it's because of the dollars that are coming in from September to November that are paying for that. You know, it's interesting, you know, birdwatchers aren't taxed on what they buy or, you know, bikers, but basically damn near every piece of hunting gear, you know, bullets, ammunition, you talk to the people at Nossler and you start learning, you know, the taxes that are taken out through the Pittman-Robertson Act and where that money goes. and the amount of benefit to the general public and people as a whole is,

it's pretty incredible, you know. It's a complicated ecosystem for sure. I think people just want to simplify it, and they just say, don't ever kill anything ever. Right. Which, again, if people want to feel that way, I have no issue with that. I hope that you're not standing at a grocery store

looking at a meat aisle and selecting the T-bone you're going to eat that night because all you've done is outsourced, who actually is participating in the, the killing, which, and I'm fine with. And if you want to be, like, plant-based, like, I don't have any issue with that whatsoever, but take the time to maybe educate yourself

at least a little bit on that ecosystem because it is very nuanced and it's very intermeshed and intertwined. And I don't think a lot of people know that. Yeah, and I don't think, you know, like with Natalie's followers, for example, I think she's going to have a ton of followers that are vegan or whatever. Yeah. And I don't, I'm not trying to convert them to hunt.

I'm just trying to hopefully have them understand a little better what hunting is and not maybe hate it. Maybe just have an understanding and like, hey, you do your thing and we'll do our thing and no problems, you know, the activism side of just trying to understand each other a little bit better, you know. So that was all a really, really cool experience. Here in Montana, I ended up taking my daughter and son. I took Hank and then my other daughter, Macy.

It was her first year of being able to hunt. You know, she's being able to do the apprentice hunt deal, but that's only with deer. This was the first year being 12 that she could shoot an elk. And we hunted for several days, and we just weren't seeing, and you know what it's like on these places? Like there'll be no elk for day after day after day.

And then all of a sudden you go to the same spot you've been going. And they're partying. There's everywhere. And that's exactly what happened. We hunted for several days, didn't see anything. and we're kind of coming down to the end of season. My kids, they get straight A's.

They're great students. And I was like, you know what? It's Monday. We're coming up on Thanksgiving. You're not doing anything in school anyway, basically at this point. I'm taking you hunting. So kept them out of school that Monday morning. Go up there.

We start hiking and I glanced down on this ranch. I glass down to the other side and there's just elk everywhere. And we had been hunting that area for days. So we. hike back to the truck, we drove down and we parked and we actually hiked up that mountain where they were and put a stock on. They were in the open over this hill that I knew if we tried to make a stock, we would get busted. So I set them up in the timber and just said, we're just going to wait, because those elk are going to move to the timber. For sure. And sure enough, here they come

kind of feeding across and Hank and Macy both shot a cow elk. So that's awesome. And what's cool about that is we had already had a couple elk with Jess's bowl and Hank's bowl. And we also raised 4H beef and stuff so we had beef. So all that meat, I'm picking them actually on the way home from the butcher

in Ronan. All that meets going in a freezer in our shop for our employees. So our employees have a, we have a freezer in our break room in the new building and they can just take home wild game as they want to cook it with their family. So that's pretty cool. That's awesome. And I got that from

you know, Evan does that at Black Rifle. You know, you go in that kind of gym area where they have a fridge there and there's a stand-up freezer and there's a ton of meat in there and employees, you know, we pulled in there one night at Black Rifle H.Q And there was a bunch of employees just out there with a barbecue, just barbecuing, right, in the parking lot, just for fun.

That's the kind of culture I hope that we have down the road where if the employees want to hang out after work and barbecue elk steaks together, that's awesome. Yeah, I'm all about it. That's an awesome culture. Yeah. A lot of what I'm, I've told Evan, a lot of what I'm trying to build is, frankly, kind of a rip off from, I think, a lot of really cool things that he's done with his brand and how he's treated his employees and how they've built a culture. You know, it's kind of like, did the world really need more coffee when Evan started a coffee company?

Like, maybe not. Does the world need another knife? Probably not. Like, the world would probably be fine without MKC. but it's more about the culture, you know, our knives being made in America, hiring employees,

how we treat our employees, how we treat our customers, take care of our customers. That stuff that Evan kind of instilled with black rifle and that community field, that's exactly what we want to build. It's awesome.

What do you want to close with? I want to get you over there so we can see the shop. We've been at it for a couple hours. Have we? Yeah, time flies. I need to shut up. It's not good if you shut up

because the point of a podcast is a conversation. It's true. That'd be a tough one. No, we're back. We're in stock now full time on Speedgoats. That's a giant goal that we've accomplished. I think people thought we were like purposely marking things sold out or playing marketing games. We truly were just selling everything we were making.

We made a giant, we set a giant goal. We cut a ton of blades and we just tried to get in stock on one knife. And we've done that. It's been going amazing. So now there are knives all the time to buy on our website. Currently. Currently. We're running through.

Let's not make that an overall statement because by next week, you might not have it. Yeah, the herds of speed goats have been running out the door. But we're going to be in stock on our Blackfoot. We're trying to get in stock on our Blackfoot by March. That's our next goal is, you know, frankly just setting these goals and going after them. So the Blackfoot's the next knife. our culinary stuff. We did launch that.

It's been amazing. Those sets have been going out. It's incredible. We have more of those coming in probably February. You know, it's funny. We're doing great things, but we're also still, you know, we don't have some giant conglomerate that owns us. We don't have a ton of money backing it.

We're just taking, you know, the money we make and we're putting it back in the company and people are supporting it. So, yeah, go get a speed goat or a blackfoot. and um assuming there in stock yeah sign up for our email list and we'll

Brandon will make sure you know so speaking of Brandon let's go give you guys a tour all right cool awesome man thanks for coming thank you