Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 379 - Josh Smith

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

As Montana Knife Company's Founder and Owner, Josh Smith is the Master Bladesmith behind creating and designing working knives for working people that are built to last for generations. 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. In the very beginning, Josh would go to Rick's shop where he learned to remove stock blades under the guidance of Rick. About a year later, Josh began putting a shop together at his home. Josh's Dad gave him room to work in his equipment shop, and at the age of 12 Josh joined the American Bladesmith Society. Over the next few years Josh began forging and honing his craft. Josh turned 14 at the Eugene Oregon knife show where he met other incredible knife makers, all too willing to share their talents and knowledge with Josh. 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. At the Journeyman level a maker is not expected to show perfection but is expected to show a sufficient level of craftsmanship expected from a professional bladesmith. 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. https://www.montanaknifecompany.com/ Today's Sponsors: Black Rifle Coffee: https://www.blackriflecoffee.com/ BetterHelp: https://www.betterhelp.com/clearedhot  

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. We're going to go with a slightly different format for this Monday. And I'm curious to hear how it is received. I think it was pretty cool. Two weeks ago, I flew down and I visited Josh Smith and did a podcast with him. He is today's guest. And if you consume the podcast through a medium that has video, YouTube or Spotify, you'll notice that I have two main sponsors on every thumbnail.

One is Montana Knife Company. The other one is Black Rifle Coffee. And today is an awesome day because I get to combine the two. But I flew down there and we did a little bit of a vlog to show you behind the scenes and then also a podcast. And then his team did an amazing job and put those two together. So if you're on an audio only format today, you might hear some things or hear us talking about some things you may not be able to, you'll be able to follow, but it might

have a little bit less context. If you're in a video platform and today I would recommend perhaps consuming this via video because you'll get to see the vlog aspect and the podcast aspect. I think it's a really cool blend. And I'm curious to hear what the audience thinks. I definitely would not be able to do this with every guest because of the proximity that I have to Josh. But it's also not a bad idea.

So I can play with it a little bit. So again, I said Josh Smith is the guest for today, episode 379, founder of Montana Knife Company. If you listen to the podcast, you've heard me do a bunch of ad reads about them. They're just down in Frenchtown, Montana, getting ready to move into Missoula when their building is done. It's a really cool brand. Born and Bresd here in Montana, roots in Montana, and definitely growing globally. So that's the episode we're going to get into. Before we get into that, give me a second. Let me talk about the other co-presenting sponsor of the

podcast. You guys know what I'm talking about. It's Black Rifle Coffee. Let's pay the bills real fast. This episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. Let's mose on over to their website, shall we? What do we have here? We have a buy one, get one free. Coffee bags and K-cups, very straightforward. We have the roast they offer, some new releases. They've actually dropped a good amount of new merchandise from soft goods and drinking coffee type of offering. What do we have here?

Spring product drop. Gear up for the season with our spring product drop. A limited run of premium apparel and gear design for the BRCC lifestyle. Each drop features exclusive designs, high quality materials, and rugged functionality built on those who live boldly. Let's click on this. What's it look like? Okay, some coffee cups, some stickers.

Is this a 50 cal mounted on top of an old school RV? I support that. Coasters. Oh, I love this mug. We saw this one in the coffee shop. All right, I like this. So they're doing some seasonal releases, and what I'm an M talking about with is their energy drink.

I just tapped. I just clicked on that tab. This is one of the best sellers in our store, week over week. I am not an energy drink guy. This is not my jam, but people are loving this. Four flavors. Punch, Wild Frost, Ranger, Berry, and Prove. Project Mango.

200 milligrams of caffeine and it's not coffee. It's definitely an energy drink. If that's your thing, I highly recommend you check it out. Go to black rifle coffee.com. Let's get in the show. To the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. Andy's coming to do a podcast down here and he's flying down from Calispell.

He owns Black Rifle up there. It's pretty badass. So we're going to do that. We just had everybody up at our property for our two. morning meeting had the whole team up there yeah he came ripping by I think somebody just filled their coffee hot gun style now he's just showing off just burning fuel he's actually gonna land this time that thing holds ass you can tell that's a completely different machine than what he pulled out of yeah that makes

me want to have one of those things how nice How nice would that be the commute to work in, though? Not as close to three-wheelers. Your three-wheeler still beat the helicopter. Kept the helicopters with Hank. That way, if he gets clipped in the head first, I know I need to... It's like, don't touch the skinny shit. This thing is cool.

A lot of leg room in the back seat. Hank, I don't know if you'd fit in the back seat. I didn't like... ...fit metric for anything. All fucking pitchin knives. I figured you guys get sharpened. Oh, that's perfect. You want us to sharpen these?

that actually would be interesting. I don't. We can keep on the first thing. You still don't understand how this works? I don't just choose to remember the things that are important to me. You have a podcast. Anything Aidan says isn't important to me. You have a podcast, though.

You should understand how this works. I know. How much time do you have busy CEO of Montana Knife Company? Like an hour and a half. Should we start with it? I have to go get my real ID. My birthday's coming up in a couple weeks. And apparently that is becoming into effect like in a month.

You won't be able to get on a plane. You will if you have a passport. It's true. Who wants to haul a passport? Not me. Not me, but I don't think in CalSpell I could get a real idea appointment between now and when it goes into effect. I was actually surprised how easy it was to get one here because I thought it might be tough.

But apparently it goes quick. So, well, it's just a DL. It's a stupid. It's a different one. Yeah. And I don't think they actually confirm your. identification anymore. No,

than your normal driver's license, I mean, it's the same requirement for information. Yeah, I have to bring like two things that prove my address, right?

So something that's been like an electric bill or something that's been mailed to my home address. Okay. You have to bring birth certificate and like a passport. Okay. I mean,

it was a fair amount. But, and then you get a little gold star in your license. And I don't know why. Gold star. The driver's license. I don't know why my regular

driver's license still just, can't work. I think it's all ridiculous. You might be Osama bin Josh. It's, I might be. Have you been traveling a lot? A little bit. I ask because I've never sat down at a podcast table and been given a water of this size, but I have been given a bunch of these on airplanes. Are you stuffing your backpack full of waters? Yeah. I'm, uh, and, and, and also robbing the carts in the hotels of all the soaps. All right. Yeah. Um, I'm not where did you where we got those. I, I, again, I don't buy the waters around here. Have you seen the size of Hannah?

She probably thinks that's a full size when she holds it. I mean, she's a little, she's a little small. I get it. I have so many questions though. First question is who thinks this is enough water? It's,

we have a water shortage in parts of the world. So we're, you know, doing our part. Do we? I don't know. The earth is 70% water. Nowhere that I go. Yeah.

Earth is 70% water. I saw a, It was a podcast with Tucker, and he was interviewing, I don't know if it was some sheikh from Jordan or Bahrain or somewhere over there. And they were talking about their water supply being out of the Gulf. Are they doing desalination? And that's 100% their water supply. They were talking about with the Iran nuclear stuff.

If they had a, like forget about the Iran, like Iran having a nuclear bomb. just power plants or whatever. If they had a nuclear accident and they had that shit get into the Gulf, into the water, and poison that water, that every single one of those countries around there all use desalination, and they would all be out of water in three days. Have you traveled much over there? Only to UAE. Did you spend a lot of time or just kind of passed through?

Like 10 days. It's an interesting spot in the world. I understand from maybe an entrepreneur or a business methodology, you why you would want to go there, I could not do it. Could not do just like traveling. I could not live in the Middle East. Oh, no. I would fucking melt.

Yeah. I don't do well. A thousand percent. Yeah, with triple digit temperatures. I will say Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Like, we spent all our time in Abu Dhabi. Yeah. And this is, that's where we passed through.

That's where we passed through for the triple seven. Yeah. You go through areas that look like wasteland, not like a nuclear wastelander. I'm not talking about, uh, uh, ghettos or anything like that, just undeveloped and then the most incredible skyscraper you've ever seen. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a little jarring. It's unbelievable. And we flew into Dubai and then drove to Abu Dhabi. And I mean, it was, you know, that road for 80 miles or whatever it is was lit the whole way. It'd be like driving from here to Calsville and having a streetlight

every, you know, 500 feet. And then, um, honestly, like being in the city, Of course, that's back in 05 or 6. So height of the Iraq war. Yeah. What brought you over there? I made a sword for one of their shakes. I remember this. You told us on one of the episodes you got before.

Yeah. And so he flew us over there. And we actually were a guest at a hunting show there. So it was like a shot show, but in the Middle East. It was all hunting. And most of it was based around falconry. Was this the blade that you made that you completely ruined the gold for? No.

I ruined a blade, though. I've ruined many projects that I've worked on. But didn't you nuke your entire gold supply on one of these parts? I nuked my entire gold supply on a knife for just a state side customer. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. About a $12,000, $13,000 mistake or maybe more.

Current prices. Today's prices would have been probably $25,000. Yeah. But no, I went over there and, you know, was uncertain about security and whatever else. And we were there and I never felt so secure in a large city in my life. I mean, walked around, went to rest of the rest of, and did whatever, and it was freaking amazing. Have you ever been to Singapore?

No. One of the cleanest countries, probably on planet Earth. Really? Risk from a crime perspective, almost nothing. I traveled over there a bunch, not recently, actually, but I did a stint. I was working with a guy I met through fundraising, actually. He worked at Barclays, and I was kind of on the circuit speaking with them, but I would hit Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia once.

but was over there a half a dozen times, one of the coolest places I've ever been. Really? Zero risk whatsoever. Like spit your gum out on the sidewalk and you're going to end up talking with the cops type. Nobody's messing around. It's kind of funny if you actually, you know, uphold your laws,

how and are serious about it, how people will actually obey them. What do you mean? Well, like in our country where we tend to let people just walk in and steal something unless it's less than a thousand bucks, It's not a big deal. So I was at Huntington. I was doing a speech in L.A.

last week, two weeks ago, which, by the way, I spent more time in traffic than doing anything professionally while I was there. Right. But I walked over to the pier near the hotel I was staying at. And it said on a sign on the door, everything is priced at like $985. And the non-criminal discount is applied at checkout. And I'm thinking that's not a bad way to solve that problem.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they put it over whatever the amount was. Yeah. Non-criminal discount applied at checkout. Interesting. Which I think, though, probably drives your staff nuts because how many people are going to come up to you and say, what's the actual cost of this?

Exactly. And it was a super news store. Yeah. So maybe five bucks was the actual answer. Yeah. When I was down there last year, I just walked down on the pier. I was waiting, went down to do Mike Rose podcast. And I was just kind of killing some time.

How did you get linked up with him, by the way? because he seems awesome. I've loved that show, dirty jobs. He is awesome. Yeah. Okay, I now remember. I was trying to remember exactly which way. There was a customer of ours down in Nashville that loves our stuff.

And he works for Dave Ramsey, the Get Out of Debt guy. Yep. And Mike was doing some event there. And this guy coordinates a lot of Dave Ramsey's events. And he was telling Mike about us. and gave Mike one of our chef's knives and was telling Mike all about MKC and Mike was like, that sounds awesome, connect me.

So he connected us and then Mike had me come down and do his podcast and then him and I just hit it off. Mike is exactly the guy you would hope and think that he is. It's such a good dude. His show, the Dirty Job Show, it falls into the category of one of those train wrecks that you cannot stop watching. If you don't have an appreciation for the things

that make this clock tick and by that I mean our society after watching that show. I don't know if you have a soul. Exactly. No, and he did such an amazing job with that. And he, that's actually what I really raised my kids on because we didn't watch lots of TV

with the kids when they were young, but that was one of the shows on television. Like, you guys want to watch dirty jobs, we'll watch it all you want. Like, and at that point, there was reruns and it was on all the time. It was interesting because Mike kind of like fell into that because his mother called him one day,

He had been like doing voiceover stuff and television stuff and whatnot and just kind of your typical, uh, LA's, you know, celebrity type television personality. But how did he even get into that stuff? Um, he, I think he, he had, he told me all of it. Like he was in acting classes when he was young. He was in, uh, he's a hell of it, like a singer. He did a hell of a writer to player. Yeah, uh, plays. And, you know, worked his way just the various pass that take you to where you got. And his mom called him one day. She's very blunt.

And his mom said, you know, your grandfather, whose grandfather was like a blue collar worker guy. Your grandfather isn't doing so well. And you should consider doing something before your grandfather dies that he would be proud of. So she really sugarcoded it.

Yeah, she really sugarcoded it. And so he was thinking about it. he's like, I don't know. So he went down and he just took a film crew the next day. And he went down to downtown and found a crew working on the sewers and just said, can I just film? I mean, he didn't have the idea of dirty jobs yet, but can I just film what you guys do?

And he got down in there with him and was in the sewer. And he said it was like exactly what you would think it was awful. And filmed it. And then ultimately ended up creating during. 30 jobs. And one of the best shows that's ever been on television. It's great. Excuse me. Bless you. Would you might open a couple windows? It's hot in here. Hot in here. You have a sweatshirt on? I do, yeah. Yeah. It's okay. No, he seems fantastic. He can write like a son of a bitch too. That guy also just like, he just has the ability to just talk. Like when he, I saw an interview that was

just done. Some guy walked up to him at, I think it was Seema or some kind of a show that he was just at and asked him about the skills gap in our country and, you know, all the things that he talks about with college. And he just went off talking about and stating and rattling off all of the numbers and the percentage of people on welfare and the amount of people who are in debt, college debt and like all the various things. And he just has a way of talking where he's just easy to listen to and he's so good at telling a story. And by the end of it, you're just like, yeah, whatever you said, I agree with that. that.

I cut you off before you. So you were in Huntington Beach, we were talking about the non-criminal pricing. Oh, yeah. Well, just going down to the beach, gorgeous beach, but walking down there, the garbage and the homeless

and in one of the most beautiful places in America, I mean, that California is unbelievable. But. Yeah. And it's mostly not beach, but that's what makes the postcards. Exactly.

No, it's, uh, I mean, we live in Montana. It's a beautiful state, but there's no more beautiful state than California. I mean, the diversity between the mountains, the skiing, the vineyards. That's what I was going to say. You could go, you could be at the beach. You actually could do this.

You could be at the beach in the morning surfing. Yeah. In the L.A. Basin and by the afternoon, be snowboarding or skiing if you wanted to. Yeah. Just by driving east a little bit and up the mountain. You could go down to Mexico. There's the redwoods up north. They elk hunt. There's actually a good amount of hunting in California, more than northern parts. Yep. Desert. The whole wine country. tours. Oh, God. The, what is it, the 13 or 18 mile or whatever drive around like the Pebble Beach area. What's that down by Monterey? Yeah. I mean, you drive that, that stretch of that coast and whatnot. I toured that when I was down there one time. Just killing some time is unbelievable, beautiful. They have some problems at that state. They do. I'm from that state. Is that where you were born?

Mm-hmm. And raised, I guess so. California. Santa Cruz. Yeah. Coastal. What most people think. All of California is. That's where you grew up. That is where I grew up surfing and doing all that? I grew up. I grew up. I did junior lifeguards when I was younger. And I mean,

I dabbled in surfing. There were people who, I mean, surfing was offered as, were you on Baywatch? No. No, I was a child at the time.

Oh. And I did not actually go out on any rescues because I was a child. They offered surfing as an elective in my high school. That's how the surfing culture is there. Steamers Lane is very well known. Probably Mavericks is probably the best one. known in California, depending on the type of wave you want to surf, but that's more up by

San Francisco or more towards San Francisco. But I mean, I was around the water. Did you enjoy a grown up there? Was it a good childhood? My family had been in there for generations. So thankfully for me, it was very difficult to get in trouble. Really? So it was a great place to grow up, but it was an even better place to leave. I have a few friends that have stayed there. Nothing against those friends whatsoever. The view of the world is very different if you stay inside of that bubble versus getting outside of the bubble traveling and then come back. Right.

Yeah, we would have philosophical. We would have philosophical differences on some of the major, what I'll say, challenges that our country has and the solutions to said challenges. Yeah. But nothing against them. I mean, just review it differently. Were you, did you grow up somewhere close to where those fires happened? The fires in San.

Oh, yeah. So most of that was. if you go east of Santa Cruz up towards San Jose, which is the hub for most tech, Highway 17 is in that area. And that stretch right there is kind of where it burned. And then north along the coast, I think, along Highway 1. Okay.

That, uh, when I, when I flew in there for that podcast is we're dropping in there. Oh, you're talking to L.A. Yeah. Santa Cruz is, uh, 400 miles north. North. Yeah. But they actually had,

here's the thing. I am shocked that the L.A. Fires hadn't happened before. Yeah. So my brother-in-law is a San Diego City fire captain. The Santa Ana's are not unknown. Right. They whip.

And for people don't know what Santa Ana's are, it's an eastern wind. So it's coming from, and again, this is something people don't think about in California. They just think it's beautiful beaches and ocean, which it absolutely is. 50 miles inland, it's high desert. Yeah. Beyond it there, I mean, Palm Springs, if you go southeast of Palm Springs, it's like desert, desert. So when the wind starts whipping in from the east, it's like a hairdryer. Yeah.

And it's just waiting for a spark. And during that season, those guys are on call. They're gone for a week or two at a time. It's not like it's unheard of. I was shocked that it actually hadn't happened earlier than that in L.A. And from my understanding of what did happen, it had a lot to do with the angle of the wind because those Santa Ana's, if they're a little bit more northerly,

I guess it didn't have as much of an impact, but it was the perfect angle. And have they released yet, how much of that was natural versus... I haven't heard, like, what was arson and... I believe there was a healthy mix of both. Because I think maybe there was... one or two of them started potentially from power lines as well. Then they also, I'm pretty sure openly talked about catching people who were starting those

fires as well. For sure. In addition to that. Yeah. I don't know how that city recovers. 10,000 people displaced. I don't know. How would you get insurance again if you wanted to rebuild in that area?

Well, and when we were dropping in there to fly in, it boggles the mind when you look at those areas on the outskirts, L.A., how packed, how close those homes are together. I mean, just for my. It's just absolutely, you know, they're a foot apart from miles. I mean, once you get a fire going like that, I don't know how you stop it. And like you say, I don't know how it hasn't happened before and or how they're going to keep it from happening again. Because, you know, the rebuilding part too, like, yeah, what people don't understand and I understand what Trump was saying and I agree with somehow how he, the, the idea that he was trying to push them to cut some red tape and help rebuild. but you also can't just go into those areas and start bulldozing stuff immediately.

Because like when I was a lineman, when you have a fire like that come through, there's a few things to think about. One, gas. Like gas lines are coming out of the ground. You have, you know, regulators and they're shut off. But if people start just stripping across the ground with a blade or whatever and you break all that stuff off, now you have blowing gas, right? So you're talking about like the low pressure home supply gas?

The natural gas lines, yep, that supply that. So. I haven't thought about that. though they're not low pressure. I mean, they're medium pressure. They're low pressure after they go through a regulator. But when they come out of the ground, they're still at, you know, line pressure

from the main that they're coming from. Yeah. But when you, you have a burned out home there and you just take a back or a bulldozer and you just scrape off that lot, you have gas lines coming out of the ground on every single one of those.

So you have to go through and mitigate that danger and make sure that all those gas lines are, are taken care of. You then power-wise, you have junction cans and transatl, and transformers. And what you don't know is what's still hot

and what's not hot as far as energized. So you can't just assume, you know, well, that transformer's dead over there. This one must be dead too. So there's a lot of mitigating risk and like threat to life

that the power companies have to come through and just make sure everything's actually safe. Before you can even start. And then when do you even do that? Because then did you hear it switch from the fire danger to a mudslide danger? Right. Because all of the vegetation that was,

holding, that was one of the issues too. Those areas north of L.A., you're proximal to L.A., but you can feel like you're a little bit out of it because you have this lush vegetation. Yeah. That burns. So do you let the vegetation grow back? How do you mitigate that risk? Also, while it's gone and you need to do all that, they got a torrential rainstorm, which means you're going to get covered in mud. Well, and this goes back to something that we dealt with when, so when I was still a lineman. They had had, they have fires down there in California all the time, but they had had some major, major fires that burned up a ton of homes, maybe seven, eight years ago. Paradise fires. Six or seven years ago. And it was found to have been started by a power line

that, you know, touched a tree or whatever. And so the citizens that had, that was, that were affected by that, turn around, they sue like PG&E, right? They sue the power company. Well, the issue with that is guess who is going to pay for that. It's going to be the rate payers when they come out of that, right? And then you start turning this thing into, and this is where the discussion came to Montana. It's like, okay, it's hot and dry in August. Crazy hot and dry drought.

Does the power company make the decision, hey, we don't want to get sued if we happen to actually accidentally start a fire. So we're going to start shutting the power off every day at 1 o'clock until 9 o'clock at night. Or you could bury the power lines. That's easier said than done. Like go try and bury that many people.

power lines through a major city, you know, I mean. I feel like it's not that hard. Yeah. I don't know anything about electricity or power lines. Even like on Maui burying power lines, it's made out of volcanic rock. I mean, at times ditching power lines is easier said than done, you know, when it's volcanic freaking rock. I'm just saying it lowers the fire danger.

The other, uh, I'm not saying I understand the mechanics. Yeah. But the other, the other thing with these power lines is, is, you know, like in Montana, when we trim trees and vegetation away from our power lines, we have, the advantage that shit doesn't grow around here for like six, seven months. In California, your vegetation is growing 12 months out of the year. Um, you know, again, who's going to pay for all that, right? And even if you do that, like you were talking about the brush management and the trees and all that stuff in just subdivisions, like who's going to pay to keep the brush,

you know, to a non-dangerous fire level in an entire state that's already broke? Well, now that that fire has happened and they were already dropping some policies because of the limits that California had put on them, who is going to, so let's say they allow the vegetation to come back and they are able to get everything back, say, from power and gas. What insurance company is going to insure that and how are you going to get a building permit, let alone a construction loan without insurance? Yeah, bank's not going to loan against it. No, and a lot of times insurance companies will loan, I know, because I've burned my house down, will ensure you against like your own kind of accidents, right?

If you're burning pine needles or you cigarette or candle or something like that. But they won't on the act of God stuff. So floods. Force measures. Yeah. I don't know. And even as far as rebuilding that, there again with the infrastructure that all has to be put back in,

all those gas rig stations that all got burned, like everything has to be inspected. and brought back up to a safe standard. Power lines have to be rebuilt. All the junction cans, transformers like substations. I mean, there's a massive amount of work that has to happen before you can even hook a house up to that system, to that grid.

So they have a long road ahead of them. And what are those families do in the meantime? 10,000 families displaced. Yeah, I don't know. It's a challenge. I mean, we raised $325,000 through that hell or high water deal that we just did. Half of that we're going to,

we're actually going to build. a family, a home in North Carolina. Sweet. With half of that, we're, I guess kind of announcing it here, but we're working with Tulsi Gabbard's sister. Tulsi started a foundation when the Maui fires happened to help rebuild houses in Maui. Makes sense. None of this was real public. They just did it out of the goodness of their heart.

They didn't, they haven't actually done anything to talk about in public. Then when North Carolina happened, they just took their organization and went to North Carolina to help people. And they've been going just house by house building some houses here recently. So we're going to build one of those houses. And then we're also going to go down to California. And we're trying to work out the logistics of this. But we're going to go try and find just individual families that have been affected and write checks or basically like visa cash cards to those people.

Because it's going to be months, if not years, before they're building homes. So what we're going to try and do is go help some of those people to address that question. You just ask like, what are they going to do in the meantime? Yeah. I mean, you know, when my house burned down, I had to live in a hotel, but then I went and bought a camper. Yeah, but that works at the size and scale of one. Right. No, by the thousands, I have no idea. That's what I don't understand. And even the businesses that burn down, like, yeah, how do they rebuild? Even if you rebuilt a business, like, how long is it going to be until you have enough people around that are living there and functional to help support your business? I mean, I don't know. It's a, it's a nightmare. And who's to say that's not going to happen again in two years. Well, it's going to depend on, do they overmanage the place where the people wanted to live because it was the way, it was one of the selling points of that area. If you remove that, does it still have the same selling point?

I don't know. And if the government's going to pay to do that, then it is, what about Northern California? Are they going to, are they going to go log around all these small little towns that are, you know, you look at like a Sealy Lake in Montana? Like, is the government paid going to thin the forest around you because you happen to live in a forest. You could spin this out to all over the country. People choose to live in areas that are subject to hurricanes. Floods, Mississippi River, you know, Delta, all that. Montana, forest fires. And obviously there's forest fires in every western state. At the end of the

day, Mother Nature, she's a bitch. And if she wants to bitch slap you, she just will. And I'm not sure you can weed eat enough bushes out of the way to keep her from doing her thing. Funny you mentioned Sealy Lake. Have you heard anything about them selling the lodge there? I've heard this is a contentious issue. No. Where we live. Apparently some out of, like the golf course lodge? No, the one on. Oh, I'm sorry. It's not Sealy Lake. It's Holland Lake. The Holland Lake lodge. Oh, no, I haven't. Yeah. I think there's an out of town, out of state developer that was looking at it. And there is a very, what I will describe anecdotal. totally as an allergic reaction to somebody from out of state coming and doing that.

I mean, if it's for sale and someone wants to write the check for the amount, it's for sale, I'm not sure how you can stop them. What are your thoughts on non-Montanans moving into Montana, Josh? I hate all of you. That's fair. That's fine. I mean, you can waste time stressing and thinking about it or you can go do something productive. So Calispell was the fastest growing town in Montana, I think, last.

year. Yeah. For some context, I think it was 8,000 people. Calm down Los Angeles. It's not exactly East L.A. yet. Right. And having come from San Diego where I could probably while taking a piss, open my bathroom window and touch the stucco on my neighbor's house. Right. And it would legitimately take me somewhere between 20 minutes to two hours to get to work. And I never knew which day I was going to get. It was a roll of the dice when I went to the freeway. Right. I get it. It's interesting to me to hear people say that Montana is only for Montanans and they're worried about the secret

coming out because I feel like the secret's been out for a bit. The movie a river runs through it, not exactly coming from this century, actually. Right. The show Yellowstone, yes, that probably didn't help too much. But we have some new restaurants in Calispell. The airport is being rebuilt and expanded. You can't have one without the other.

I just, I can't figure out, I follow the, I can't believe I'm going to say this. It's a Facebook page, Flathead Valley 411. Anytime anything happens, within six comments, fucking Californians. Right. There was, what was the most recent one?

It was, somebody spray painted something. Fucking out of towners. Of course, it was local kids. It was local kids doing local kid shit. Right. But everything, oh, traffic. Oh, no.

I can't believe they're building a larger Costco. Fucking Californians. Don't you guys want a bigger Costco? I choose to worry about things I can actually affect or control. I mean, because there's, I mean, we live in this era right now where you can get on Instagram

and get mad about anything all the time. I mean, politics, whatever. I tend to be decent at like, read it, say, well, fuck that sucks. I hate that. But then also instantly for a big get about it and go do something that I can

actually, like how can I affect my employees' lives and make them better. How can I build my company? Something with my kids and my family, my wife, whatever, right? Go mow my lawn. How many people do you employ that are not from Montana originally? That's a good question. We should figure that out. Because what I'm saying here is you're part of the problem. No doubt. You're bringing in non-montanas. Your piece of shit. No doubt. Yeah. Well, you're not the first person to say that. So get in line. I also can't figure out. I've heard it all the way to you have to be a fifth generation Montana before you can call yourself that. Or I've heard people say you've got to stay here for 20 years.

then you're Montana, everything in between. It's a very interesting sliding scale. Yeah, well, it's interesting because people ask me if I'm from Montana, I am fifth generation Montana, but I'm not really because I was born in Colorado Springs. You're not a Montana at all. Right. My parents immigrated to Canada two days after I was born. And then it was 81 when the interest rates were insane.

They couldn't afford to make it up there. My grandpa lived up there running a ranch. And so they moved back down to Montana because my mom. mom was born in Bozeman. So I've lived here since I was six months old, but doesn't cut it. I'm an out of state or yeah, I'm a piece of shit too. To some people.

Yeah. You are the enemy. And the thing is with Montana like, sure, if I could have waved a magic wand in 1985 and just said no one else coming in and we all get to split up the ground that's left, like, okay, I guess if you're king, you wanted to just keep Montana to yourself. Like that, I guess would have been fun. But it's not the reality. of life. And, you know, we've actually been dealing to this, even with our new building that we're building, we're helping finance a water line that's actually going to eventually serve. We're basically helping bring city water to this section of Missoula where they want to, they want more development. The county does. The county's been working with us. So we're building this waterline that's going to serve a commercial subdivision and then eventually a subdivision for homes.

that makes sense. We're helping build that, and then the county's going to buy it from us when we're done. And it's just a public, private partnership deal. And we're essentially helping push along what we need quicker, but it's going to be a benefit to that area. We had to do something a little bit similar with the coffee shop

when we tapped into the water line. Yeah. Not the whole thing, but they basically said 10 feet in each direction. You get to upgrade this because it kind of helps us, but also you're getting your water as well. So let's just go ahead and help each other. I get it.

Yeah. And so they did not buy it back from us. People are, but people are complaining about these subdivisions. But then in the very next breath, people complain about the housing prices. Yeah. Right. So my daughters, two of them have just graduated in the last three years from Frenchtown. And I look at them, how are they, you know, one wants to be a school teacher,

the other one's trying to become a veterinarian. How are they ever going to afford to buy a house here? Well, if you don't build any homes, it's a supply and demand thing. If we don't build anything around here, it's going to become. big sky and white fish. Like go try to buy a house and white fish. Good luck. That is where you will find the million dollar or close to 1,000 square foot home.

Right. Exactly. Now, if you want your children to be able to stay here and afford to buy a house, you're going to have to build some homes. I mean, it's a pure and simple math problem with supply and demand. And so it's,

and then when you look at, when you look at industry, it's funny, I was at a public meeting where some old, they're always white-haired in like 75, and they're worried about their pension and their taxes going up. And they were complaining about this water system going in. And they were like, well, we need some industry, you know,

to come in here and provide jobs before we build this water system. And it's like, yeah, we actually, you can't build a building over 14,000 square feet without a water line to provide fire suppression. So it's a chicken or egg thing. Yeah. By us building the water system, we've now allowed that opportunity to build big buildings. Our building's 50,000 square feet. because of what we're doing, now companies like ours might move into that area and then they're going to hire people, right? And the wages, I don't know what the average wage of our company is, but it's up close to 100 grand, you know, 85 to 100 grand for an average wage. Those are good jobs. As compared to the other thing that could have gone on that property would have been a hotel. And you're going to hire some people to clean some rooms and maybe one or two managers. They're not going to be making six figures. Service level jobs, right?

hotels, some restaurants, some gas stations. We need some actual manufacturing companies that need professionals to come and work. We hire professional videographers, engineers, machinists, right? And then those people are going to make a good wage. They're going to turn right back around and spend that money in our community. Our enrollment in our school here is actually dropping in Frenchtown, if you can believe it. And I think it's based on price. The only people that can afford to buy homes around here don't.

have young kids. You generally see people moving here who are retired or sold their companies. They've raised their kids. Our enrollment three years in a row now in Frenchtown has dropped, even though you can't afford to, or you can't find a house here to buy. I can see that going another way too. I look at my oldest son's generation. He's 21. Starting a family for him is not a priority. Yeah. It's an interesting, not that it was a priority for me at 21. I think that his generation has a different thought process about relationships, though. He is working as hard as he can, riding his motorcycle as much as he can,

because you know this summer comes on a Wednesday in Montana. So get in when he can. Yeah. He, what his generation seems to be doing is they'll find two to four people to go in to get a place where they can, because it is relatively unaffordable. The price of housing, even in Calispell is going up. So what you find is that people have,

that age bracket will kind of come together and live together, but that's not bringing people to the school district. Right. They're not starting a family. It's not a priority for them to start a family. We were having a conversation the other night and he said, I don't think that I'm ever going to have kids. And I just asked him, you know, like, of course, live your life however you want to,

but why do you, why do you think that you would never want to have kids? And also, I also didn't think I was going to have kids when I was 21 either. Sure. You know, things change and priorities change in life. And he just said, I just don't feel like it's something that I would want to do. or something that is important. So it could be a combination of things.

I definitely think, I mean, there's no doubt the numbers show that people are having less kids than they were before. I mean, every generation from. Because they're terrible and exhausting, as you know. It's true. Yeah, they try to open boxes with chef's knives and price staples out and shit like that. I am not joking. I had to take, I had to take five minutes. So for people to know what we're talking about, Josh came up when Leah and I got married.

it was a proto chef knife, right? Yeah, it was ready. And he gave us a chef knife at our wedding, which was the most fun wedding fucking ever. Zero speeches. It was awesome. Like ceremony. It was a little long.

Yeah. What is it? Well, I told you why. My dad accidentally skipped a pay. 30 seconds. He hit the legal requirements. And he was so nervous. He was terrified.

He was going to say my ex-wife's name. Oh, my God. And he made the mistake of telling me that before. So I was needling the fuck out of him before that. Of course you were. I had no choice. So the way he got around that was he said, um,

anytime he was going to say both of our names, he made sure he said hers first because he was worried because he had abituated himself for so long, me and my ex. So you give us this awesome knife. Yeah, the ceremony, it was probably, I'm going to say the ceremony was under three minutes.

No doubt about that. I wasn't sure if it was, if it was maybe under two. It met the legal requirement. I'm not. so much sure how much past that bar it actually went. And then we went straight over to eating and drinking and having a good time. And the band was awesome. But you give us this chef knife. It's a proto. They're not even out yet. I had a nice butcher block, magnetic. It's just sitting

there and I come home one day. And I'm looking at the knife. And it is, it's like a cat with titanium claws had just sat there and just, and just, and I realized that my middle son Tyler, who was one of the smartest people on earth was opening a box that was full of staples with it. And it just, and I literally, I put the knife down. I just, like, this is one of those moments where I'm being tested. I want to go fucking insane. And I didn't. Yeah.

And he basically was like, yeah, it's my bad. Yeah. Like, it is your bad. Well, it was a tool and he needed a tool at that moment to do a job. So he used it. God. No, it's, it's, uh, it happens with kids. But I do think the other thing is, is you see kids,

I think they're very smart and practical. A lot of kids are these days and they're looking at like, how are they going to raise a family when they can barely afford to pay rent in the tiny little place they're in? That's what Riley, my oldest, it comes down to economics. And I'm trying to think back. I left living with my parents. They dropped me off for boot camp.

I did a night in a hotel with another dude as we were beginning our naval journey, got on an airplane, flew to Chicago, got on buses, ended up in Great Lakes. So I finished up my time in Great Lakes. I went to Virginia Beach for my A school, which is like your occupational school. That's full on open birthing barracks, I think two or three high bunk beds. But you're used to that from boot camp anyway, so whatever. Yeah.

Then went to San Diego for buds, but that's, you're living in the compound as well. Finally got out and checked into Team 5. First time I ever lived on my own. I didn't even live on my own. Shit, I had a roommate. We had an apartment. This carpet was from the 40s. Yeah.

It was rough. The carpet you had to rake. Yeah. Well, I didn't own a vacuum, nor did I buy one. So in two years, I never vacuumed it. But I'm trying to think of what the rent was. It was a couple hundred dollars per month from each of us. But I mean, my first Navy paycheck for two weeks was $800.

Right. So I think it was eating the vast majority of what it was that I was making, but I didn't care because I was independent. Right. He's not that way. Yeah. No, and I, I also think you have a lot of young kids. I've heard kids say, like, I'm just, I just don't want to bring kids into this world. Like, it seems like this world's messed up and whatnot.

My answer always is, is, that's rough. I don't think there's been any time in history that people haven't looked at something going on at the time. Like, I don't think anyone looked at times during the Great Depression and thought, this is a perfect time to have kids. Or how about World War I or World War II? Right. Or Vietnam. I mean, there's always been something, right?

And that's what I always say about just life in general. Like when people talk about how, you know, like, well, it's impossible to start a business today and it's impossible to succeed and whatever. And I'm like, I'm not sure it was any easier for my grandparents in the Great Depression. Yeah. You know, I think it's always hard. Well, my dad was talking about the price of housing up here. I think my oldest was there.

My dad loves to say this. My first house that I ever bought was 20 grand. Yeah. But if you ask him what his salary was, it was a fraction of what he was making. You know, so it's not like he was in relation to what the house cost. And I'm also not sure. My dad's a liar.

I'm not sure the house was actually 20 grand either. Right. He's just fading off into old age, just saying shit now. God, he's a nightmare. He just got a new phone. Fuck. He had an iPhone 6. Yeah.

He finally got it upgraded. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, I work with advertisers and they will send you oftentimes a portion of a script, maybe a framework or a skeleton, and talking points that they want you to hit. And I have the same thing in front of me right here for Better Help. but I just don't know. I don't think there's a script or a talking point that can really unpack the value that therapy and counseling has had in my life.

You could talk about, you know, you could read a compelling story. I just don't know if it captures it. And maybe people are here are tired of listening to me talk about the impact it's had on my life. And I don't really care. And this is one of the sponsors where I really support the mission because of the tremendous impact I've seen in my life in the life of other people. maybe right up front and tell you it's not magic it's not easy it's not overnight you don't go and just chat with somebody for an hour and all of a sudden your life is radically different it's

incremental at best it's hard work it takes commitment it takes the willingness to work through things you may not want to so you can get to a very low trajectory towards a distant horizon of where you want to be it's worth it the best analogy i think i've heard of is with a vehicle you can of course to service your vehicle until all of the lights on the dashboard are going off. Or you can be preemptive in nature. You can be proactive. You can have somebody look underneath the hood to make sure that everything that should be working properly is. I look at counseling and therapy is the same way.

Not saying that everybody needs to go get it, but if it's something that you're thinking about, if it's something that you're struggling with, in my own personal experience, it's had tremendous impact. So let's talk about better help here specifically. Traditional in-person therapy, it can cost anywhere between a hundred, to $200 to $250 per session. I've actually seen it more expensive than that. That adds up fast. With BetterHelp Online therapy, you can save on average up to 50% per session.

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slash cleared hot and you're going to get 10% off of your first month. That is better h-E-L-L-P, hotel echo lima papa.com slash cleared hot back to the show calls me why doesn't my headset work anymore i turned Bluetooth on why isn't this working like bring it to the house i had to explain to him explain to him that you know the Bluetooth is a different thing and it's a new device and all of the stuff right it's a journey so again i don't know if it's actually is how it's ever cost $20,000 but i definitely do think though there is a bigger disparity now between wages and what homes cost, especially in our area. Now, that becomes the question like, do you stay here, right?

Because you can buy a beautiful colonial home in Georgia for 250 grand. When I moved to your- Jess Byers, she was telling me they were looking, they've been looking to buy a home here, and she's one of my employees here. She's been looking at houses, and she was showing me the exact comparison to a place in Texas. and a kind of average starter home here is like 500, 600 grand.

It didn't used to be. And in Texas, she can buy, you know, like five acres in a 5,000 square foot house. I mean, it was crazy what you could buy down there. Yeah, but also Google summertime temperatures. Correct. That's the thing, right? Like, yeah, you can also buy a house in Johnstown, Pennsylvania for not very much money, but like also you might not have a job.

Eight years ago when we moved up here, I was doing that exact same exercise based off of what it was in California. You're always going to be able to do that somewhere. And it comes down to what you said. What are the pros and con? The con that we, my ex and I agreed upon was there's more opportunity for our kids to just do shit outside of a metropolis. Right. In Montana, then in San Diego.

And we needed to make the decision because my oldest was one year away from getting into high school. And I wanted him to have a year of time for a social circle. because I went from knowing nobody and starting in a high school. And as a young man, that's life sucks enough anyway as a young man. Right. Starting high school knowing nobody except for your sister who doesn't want to be known to be your sister. It's dog shit. F.

FYI. So it was a little bit of a shit or get off the pot. But when we were looking at it, we were blown away by what you could buy. We're going to be able to sell this house in San Diego, which we timed completely randomly. I'm not a real estate entrepreneur by any stretch. But we bought it on a short sale at one of the lowest times.

in the market after 2008. Yep. In the crash. We offered them so much under what it was already being short sale offered for that I was laughing. Like the bank is going to say no. Right. Almost an instantaneous yes. I was like, son of the bitch.

Holy shit. Yeah. Gated community. Like I need to be in a fucking gated community. I can never even remember the code to get in. Like, fuck. We were looking at what we would be able to buy. And even just the eight years I've been here.

That shit's gone. Right. I don't know. I don't know how my oldest would live here. And he's already talking about leaving. All three of my kids are now talking about where they're going to land next. And that's what I, that's what I do think is sad.

And that comes back to, uh, the question about like, well, are you going to support the local subdivision that's happening down there in that field? Like yeah, we all love to look at baby calves when we drive by and, and a green field.

But, you know, is your kid going to be able to stay here? Right. And I don't know that there's a right or wrong. answer. It's everyone's got their own opinion on that. But you're right. I don't see how kids are going to stick around. I also see our culture maybe eventually, and it's probably already happening, but shifting to more like other cultures where you see multiple generations living in one home, you know, where it might turn

into a situation where, yeah, where, you know, the grandparents aren't necessarily in an old folks home somewhere. They're in the spare bedroom and the parents are in the other bedroom and the kids are in the basement. I mean, I mean, I do see it being a case where like the 25 year old newlywed couple is living with the parents. And eventually when the grandparents are gone and, you know, maybe their parents are gone. They have that house to themselves. And by that point, their kids are probably living with them. Like, I do see that being probably one of the things that you see, which honestly might not even be a bad thing if it means family and family nucleus becomes a little bit more important to people. you know, there's advantages and disadvantages to that.

It's not real handy living with grandma and grandpa or mom and dad, but... I'm putting dad in a home. I've just started telling him. I'm just look at it. I'm like, you're going to eat tapioca and somebody's going to wipe your ass. Soon. Well, he sold his home in San, I mean, you want to talk about crazy. I mean, I'll leave the numbers out of it, but he sold his home in Santa Cruz, where I was born,

which it was also amazing to watch the home prices there because the Silicon Silicon Valley, just over Highway 17. There is fantastic wealth derived from that area. But it's a little bit inland. It's, you know, it's San Jose and it's southeast of San Francisco and south of Oakland. And yeah, you can find some really cool areas, but a lot of those people brought the money over Highway 17 and they would commute. And you watch the, especially along the shoreline.

And they would do kind of the classic, well, it's buy a 1950s home. By the way, we're actually going to just completely. scrape it and build a whatever it is, multimillion dollar, which fine if you got that kind of money, go for it. But the price of real estate started going up. So my dad walked from that sale with seven figures. Yeah. And I mean, he's renting now because why we invest that when you're looking at what you

could do with that money? So he can pay for his own ass wiping, by the way. I do think, though, you are going to see similar to down there how people commute into those cities, you know, hour, two hour commute. You know, the other options that people like kids your kids as age up and Cal Spill are going to have is like

well I want to buy a house but I might have to buy it out in Eureka and drive into CalSpell every day like here I think you're going to see people buying houses in superior it's already happening out in superior St. Regis and it's like you know what it's a 45 minute drive but it's beautiful I'm not stuck in traffic I'm driving along the river bottom looking at elk and bears and mountains well my middle son's going to MSU and he's in the dorms right now as I for every reason all freshmen have to be in the dorms. I'd never went to college so I don't know if that's a normal thing. Yeah. But they're looking at apartments and he is already looking way like up near Manhattan. Yep. To commute because it just drops the price substantially. Yep. And I so I definitely think that's

going to be the other option that people like the tradeoff is either leave the state entirely or spend an hour each way in the car. You know, you're going to see kids doing that. I've played both of those games. Pros and cons. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, uh, It's an interesting world. I mean, I don't, I thought actually a couple years ago that year and a half ago, as we saw inflation going up, rates going up, that we might actually see like a correction up here, like the 2008, 9. I was sitting there back then with zero money looking at all these homes around Flathead

Lake going, oh my God, I wish I could buy them all. Because I knew it would rebound like a slingshot out of that around Flathead Lake and all that, right? Did that crumble in 2008 as well? Yeah, big time. I mean, you could buy a house up there for 300 grand around the lake and now it's $2 million. You know, I mean, it was crazy. But I thought that might happen this time, but it didn't.

Like these interest rates went up. It hasn't happened yet. The other thing that's happening around here, though, with interest rates being up is no one wants to sell their house. Right. So even if they have to move, Brandon, Brandon moved down here from Calispell. Well, God, if he's got an interest rate at 2.8% or some shit. and why would you sell that in Calispell? I would say rent it out and find a rental down here.

That's what he's doing. And so that's the other thing that's really froze up this market is, you know, people aren't selling, they're buying houses, but they're not selling houses. So Clark and Travis work on programming that equipment out there along with Dylan, these guys. So you see like that process on the screen right there. That's literally what they're building to run in those machines. Michael, you need to learn how to do this immediately. You know how to code, right?

Yeah, basically. He does not. Do you have an inert knife? Michael really likes knives, but I don't trust him with one. Do you guys have a dull blade that he could practice with a year carrying perhaps? I don't even want him to think he could train with it. I'm fine with it being rubber like a dildo.

He just needs to carry it for a year and show responsibility. So that I can handle it real now. Where's those knives? Aiden, do you want to grab those? He has a cooler job. He didn't sit on my lap. I told him as we're taking off, you'll appreciate this. I said, you have one job.

I need you to hold them. my coffee and he keys up and goes, hold your cock. I'm like, no. That's what I thought. Yeah. I was like, all right. Sweet. So you gave me this as a gift a long time ago.

I came home one day and my fucking son was opening boxes with staples on it. It looks, it does look like in prying staples. I picked this thing up and I said, Tyler, did you get any packages? He goes, yeah, how did you know? I'm like, what did you open him with? He goes, well, I grabbed a knife. I'm like, the fucking gift that Josh gave.

and I'm looking at this. These are clearly, clearly fucking staple marks. So he's just in there and just like, or just, like, you motherfucker. This is why we can't have nice things because we have children. I had to sit down. I almost lost my shit on him that day.

I had to sit down at the dinner table because you had just given it to us too. For our wedding, you gave us that. I'm like, I'm one of these at the table just like, like, I'm not gonna do it. I'm not gonna do it. Yeah, well, we'll sharp. those things up.

I'm just not good at sharpening knives, but this is, I have this on a knife block. It's literally every knife that I have, the chef knife that I have. This is what we do. Do you keep these Kidex sheaths? Because they don't do any good in the kitchen, but to come down here and put them in a bag,

it's perfect. That's why we ship these with these sheaths so people can send them back in, because we do receive these back sticking out of the side of boxes and it's like, hey, it came with the sheet. I had them in the drawer and like, why did I save these? And then I'm like, I'm a fucking genius.

It still freaks me out you check the sharpness of the knife. that way. Really? Just dragging your finger along the blade. Now that I'm doing flight training, I have lots of questions. I think it's hilarious. I mean, I'm basically a pilot already. I've been in school for two days. It takes talent to hold them and not get the edges together. So I have your screwdrivers slash staple removers. Are they done? Yeah, we're good to go. We'll go get them. I'll have somebody clean them up. I don't feel comfortable with you walking around behind me with that like that so he trips and shives me what do you think the next four years will hold when it comes to that um i i think it's going to just be from montana i think it's going to be more of the same i mean

people are going to keep coming and it actually somebody put it to me a really good way during covid you know we got this influx of people during covid escaping california and washington all that and i was like man uh this is pretty crazy it'll be good when it slows down. He's like, it's never going to slow down. Why is that? And he goes, this is a guy in California. He goes, only a fraction of the people moved to Montana that want to move to Montana. He's like, the people that moved during COVID were the people who maybe they had sold their businesses or their kids already graduated school or whatever their situation in life, they were free at that moment to just say screw it, we're out. But there's way, way, way more people

that are like, my kids got, you know, he's junior in high school, two years left. I'm going to go. Or my business says five more years and I'm going to sell it or retire. He's like, there's a decade worth of people that all have plans that the minute their plans fulfill themselves, they're out. And so he's like, that pipeline is never going to stop coming. And that's the thing around here. You can either get grumpy about or you can just realize like the Montana in 20 years

isn't going to look like the Montana of today. And still going to be pretty badass. Still going to be better than the alternative. Exactly. So I don't, I think coming up here and buying a house for $700,000, though it seems insane to those of us that saw prices 10 years ago, probably still a smart move.

You know, in 10 years, I don't think you're going to gotten hurt by it. That's your daily dose of financial advice from Josh Smith. I will provide none because I have the worst timing ever on every type of investment notes. Yeah. I mean,

it's going to be interesting. With Trump, with everything that he's doing, if we do see serious inflation again, I mean, I think he is trying to somewhat kind of break things so he can rebuild it the right way. At least that's the theory. People are kind of losing their minds. They are. And he's only really got 18 months to do it because when those midterms hit, things better be headed back the way that people think they should be or else, you know, Republicans will

lose the midterms. And then at that point, nothing gets done. Yeah. you know. Yeah, it remains, I'm curious to see, I just don't think he's been in office long enough yet to really even get a pulse on what the changes, what the impact the changes are going to have.

What, eight weeks? I mean, how the hell can you expect? And our system is great, but also in another way, how do you get anything significant really done and then get to see the results of that in two years before the midterms hit? I mean, forget four years. In two years, if things aren't,

if everyone doesn't agree that it's going well, they're not going to get the opportunity for the next two years because two or three seats flip and it's over. How do you manage the uncertainty of that with growing the business that you have? I mean, the first time you and I met, I think there was just that little... My garage. Yeah, it was your garage.

Yeah. What is that? That's over your right shoulder somewhere closer to your house. Yeah. Yeah. Just basically two-car garage. Yeah. Glorified.

And you built this place and immediately recognized you needed more space. I told you was going to happen. And then we went, we actually had our company meeting this morning up at our new building. Just, I wanted the employees to be able to walk through it. And I wanted to explain to them what's going to be what before it's all done. That way they can feel like they kind of get to watch the process.

And as I saw everyone in there, I was like, I'm not sure if we made this big enough. You keep posting pictures of that building. I'm going to be clear on this. I am not an architect. Your building doesn't have a roof. It's true.

But you don't have to pay for air conditioning that way. You need to go back to the table. on that. Well, I'm generally in it, so... That's a horrible idea. Probably the reason why. That'll only save you at least probably $700,000. In regards to the economy and all that other stuff,

again, it's kind of like everything else I have the theory on. I control what I can control. So I don't worry about within reason. I don't. How far out do you guys think? Like when you're making your steel orders, how far out do you guys? 18 months.

Okay, so you've already got steel purchase for then, We've got steel purchased for a solid 12 right now. Okay. So into 2026. Yep. Okay. Yep. Yep.

And so we are... Where does it come from? Well, that's actually a really great question. So is this coming from China? No. So our steel is American made or has been. And this is what's interesting. A couple months ago, our steel supplier, the entire knife industry, frankly,

is steel supplier, filed for bankruptcy. it got sold out of bankruptcy to a steel company in Europe, Arestil. So the Ares steel bought Crucible. Crucible was the only steel that could atomize steel into a powder form and make the steel that we all make it. We all use for making knives as a powder technology steel. That we have been dealing with this for the last few weeks. So at least for the next probably eight to 12 months, all the steel that we bought is American made.

We have more steel actually still coming in that's still American made. But the entire industry is trying to figure out a couple things. One, the first question is like, well, is there another source in America? The answer to that's no. Well, just because it got bought by a European company doesn't mean they still couldn't produce here. They shuddered it. Really? Yep.

Oh. I mean, I actually asked the questions and looked into trying to buy it. Why did they shudder it after buying it? So this is kind of the condition of the steel industry. Crucible steel, crucible technologies has gone. I think that was their third bankruptcy as a company. Well, when you are short on money and you run a giant steel mill and you're short on money, you probably don't do a lot of maintenance, right?

So when I looked into buying it and I started to get serious about looking into that, I was told you're basically buying such a dilapidated problem that you would be better starting a steel manufacturing business in your field. So you'd be buying a lemon essentially. Yeah, a giant, potentially, I don't know this, but potentially environmental nightmare. You know, depending on their processes and what they do, safety nightmare, compliance, right? You know, there was a lot of issues with that facility. So Arest steel bought it.

And really what they were buying was the technology and the customers, right? They have the steel mills in Europe in various places in Europe. They can make all that steel over there. And they basically just took a competitor off the board. I was going to say, so it was a little bit of a chess move, but isn't there immediately inherent cost of getting that across the Atlantic? So that's the question. I mean, that's literally what we are trying to figure out today right now is like,

our tariffs going to apply. I'm talking to some people in the Trump administration about like, could we even potentially, if tariffs will apply, can we get a carve out? You know, like when you look at tariffs, okay, tariffs, whether you agree with them or not, let's just assume that they're a good move, that that's a smart move by Trump. Let's just go with that one for a second.

The problem is... Many people are not going to go along with you. Yeah, I understand. Yeah. So there's people right now listening going, fuck you, Josh. But assuming that we should tariff steal or any other good coming into America,

the question for us for manufacturing is, well, what are our other options? If there are no other options, if Trump is trying to force you to buy American versus buy cheaper Chinese or whatever, right? Cheaper European or whatever it might be. What if the answer is, hey, this product is not made in America period industry and it isn't going to be, I mean, you would have to, it would be years if you wanted to start a steel mill today to try to get to the place and good luck getting the permitting and whatnot to build that. If you have no other choice, should there potentially be carve-outs where it's like, hey, this steel is tariffed because, hey, bridge builder guy, you can buy that same steel over here in Pennsylvania. But hey, knife industry, we understand you have no other option for steel.

So we understand you need that for your industry to survive and your customers and whatnot. We don't want to jack up your prices, 25%. so we're going to carve that out and make that untariffed. You know, I think that's the, that's the nuances of what Trump's doing right now. And I think they're well aware of it. And they've said it. Muska said it. Like, we're going to break some shit.

And then we're going to figure out what we broke and then try to fix it. So that I'm trying to figure out how we might be involved in in the try to fix it part, where it's like, hey, here's what's happening. Can we fix this part of that policy? It's a risky game. I agree wholeheartedly in concept with the idea of Doge. You know, sometimes you need a scalpel. Sometimes you need a sledgehammer.

I just hope that those wielding the tools are choosing appropriately on those both ends and everything in between. Yeah. Yeah. It just what I'm glad is that they are doing something. It's the first time in my adult life I've seen our government at least appear to be trying to fix, you know, our deficit issue, frankly. Our national debt. like what are we passing on to our children? And I think we've all known or we should know that if we're going to fix that deficit issue,

then probably everybody will suffer in some way. Maybe it's tariffs on MKC Steel or maybe it's tariffs on coffee coming in for Black Rifle Coffee. Maybe it's your trail crew, your kid that's on trail crew loses his job. Like I'm not sure that anyone's going to come out of this unaffected. I have been in social media, I have just. come to the conclusion wholeheartedly is not a reflection of real life. It's not a reflection of my real life, I should say. The interactions and things that I see on social media are not reflective of the people.

I sit and talk with people at the coffee shop all the time. Yeah. I talk with people at restaurants. I talk with, I travel a lot as well. I talk with people in airports. I just don't have the same type of interactions. There is,

and it comes from the left, and I'm not being hypercritical of the left. I'm just saying what I've seen when it comes to specifically Doge. People keep saying, well, they're not finding any fraud, all of the spending that they're showing, it's not fraudulent. And what I want to say to those people is, are you okay with what that money was being spent on? Right. So perhaps it's not fraudulent, but maybe we could call it wasteful.

Maybe we could call it not the best utilization. Is it necessary? Is it necessary? And there is an unwillingness to acknowledge. And maybe it's because they feel it's the, if you give an inch, somebody will take a mile. there's an unwillingness to acknowledge that the system is fucked in any way if the ideology or the program came from the left.

Right. Why can't we be critical of both the left and the right? Two things can be true at once. You could be a little bit more socially liberal and you could be fiscally conservative. Let's just critique evenly across the board. Like you're telling me these fucking taxpayers are okay with some of these absolutely insane programs

that are being exposed. Right. And yet I'm aware you can go on the website and it was always there, but nobody does that. And the fucking people allocating the money know that nobody's going to do that. Why can't we just say that this is not the best utilization of our tax dollars? Yeah, and I got a bunch of hate from the right the other day because I posted something basically kind of quote unquote against Trump. What did you do?

Over the Epstein thing, I said, I basically was critical of the Trump administration that, hey, this is bullshit. Like you guys said you were going to release it. then you threw up this stupid optics thing you did with some influencers, and then in the end, you actually gave them nothing anyway. And now you're saying, well, we're still going to come out with more, but it's going to be heavily redacted. And my point is when it comes to pedophiles or any people of any, whether they're of power or not power, anybody fucking with kids in any way, right or left, or if it's Israel or it's whoever, I don't care, Trump himself, like whatever, it should be exposed. And, you know, I got a bunch of hate of basically like, you know, I thought you were a big Trump supporter and how dare you go against Trump or.

Does that mean you can't be objective? Does that mean that you can't like? Yeah. I like most of what Trump's doing right now. But right there, I think they're bumbling that horribly. Like, come out with the information. I don't care what it is or who it affects, you know. The issue that I worry about is people who are afraid to give any criticism. Because I agree with you. if you said you were going to do it, and then you didn't, you have arrived at a place where I think you deserve fair criticism. It doesn't have to be some ad hominem attack where you attack the person.

Let's criticize the fact that you promised this and didn't live up to it. That doesn't mean that I think you're a piece of shit. It doesn't mean that the rest of your policies. But that's fair. Yeah. And there might be some things that. There's going to be some redaction. Like let's protect sources.

Let's protect methods. But I fall in line with you. I don't think we should protect names of people that want to dittle kids. When it comes to Epstein stuff, there's nothing that I think needs protected. If it's something else in regards to national security stuff around a alien program or whatever, like, well, actually it's not aliens. Take it easy, sir. You know, fine, go ahead and redact things and whatnot if you really think it's for national security.

But when it comes to children, I don't care if it means that the leader of Israel is under the bus and our relationship with Israel goes to shit like don't care if if it means that other people see that hey when it comes to protecting our children of our country it doesn't matter who it is or what we're going to we're going to expose it you know and the fact that they maybe ran potentially a you know government Israel might have run a government operation against our own government officials like that's a problem you know it would be a problem i here's my suspicion based off absolutely no knowledge, data, awareness, or understanding about what's actually going on. Yeah.

I think that if they brought it out unredacted, there would be a far too close tie between our own government entities and Epstein. Yeah. I would not be shocked that he was somebody who the government was knowingly either facilitating or leaving alone to gather information to use the people for leverage. Yep. And that might break people's brains. comes to trust of our own government. And when it comes to abusing children, break it. I tend to agree

with you on that. Break the government on that. If the agencies, if our, if our morals have gotten that low that we're, we're using children to, you know, run a sci-op against whoever for whatever. Yeah. Break it. Like, that's not the government. And I don't think you would be, let's, let's, again, I'm hypothesizing here. I have no debt. Let's say it was the agency. So let's say the agency, via directly or through a subcontracting entity, which they do. It's a really easy way to get a cut out from being underneath government scrutiny

and then you can funnel money through a different direction. But let's say it's at the agency. I think people would struggle to not throw the entire agency under the bus and want to burn that to the ground. And then the reality is, if that was the case,

it would be a very small group of people inside of the agency. But what I want to see them is burned at the fucking stake. Exactly. Yeah. And if the program has to be torn down and rebuilt with ethical people, then I guess that's what we have to do. But I agree.

Go find those people. But the problem is for both sides of the government, it's going to be people from both sides for sure. It's a left and right issue. It's definitely not. If it was just a left issue, the Republicans would already come out with it. And that's the hypocritical part I don't like. Like, yeah, what's right is right, wrong is wrong there. I know there's a lot of gray area in government and in military and a bunch of the things that we do around the world. Much like your blades in front of us it cuts both ways that's the thing i don't understand why can't it's okay it's also even going outside of criticism i see people shouting down left or right anybody's thoughts without trying to understand where that person is coming from and it's okay to try to understand

in my opinion at least to try to understand where somebody is coming from because you can understand them without agreeing or accepting their premise but it gives you a better idea of who they are as a person and why they may think those things right that's also loss Fuck you, Trumper. Or what's the, what's the fuck you to the left? If you're on the right, you're a Nazi or fascist. What is it to the left? Communist.

Is it? Communist? Okay. Maybe. Whatever. All the stupid magical terms anyway, it's, yeah. People keep doing that it's absolutely idiotic. Yeah.

You know. No, the thing with our country, what I, what's unfortunate, we don't have a, a glass ball to kind of look into the future. but what we might find is some of the small pain points here and there, our stock market being down or a little bit of inflation or whatever, might FARC pale in comparison to the pain we might feel if we don't address these issues at all. And we let this spin out another 20, 30, 40 years.

And now our children, grandchildren are dealing with it. Because the national debt issues are, you know, are issues with our dollar, you know, with countries using potentially other currencies to trade on. Like, there's some serious issues that we better address or we're going to find ourselves in a bigger bind than we are today. That's for sure. Would you ever run for office?

No. Nope. I don't think I could be, I don't think if you put me at gunpoint, you could get me to do it. Yeah. So I've had a couple people that we both know that have tried to like talk me into doing something like state politics and then eventually like national.

You should at least be the mayor of Frenchtown. It's not incorporated. We don't even have a mayor. So start there. Yeah. The first one could be you. I'm the mayor of my building. All right.

Do you employees know that? But they don't respect me. No, I will say like, that's where I give like Tim Sheehe a ton of credit. That guy. The out of town or billionaire who's not from Montana who just tried to buy a ranch? Yeah. He's just a piece of shit. That really bothered me because.

Okay. For people listening, that was the, was the attack against she he that I received almost every day via text or somebody knocking on the door. Unfortunately, I was never there. Leah always got the brunt of that. I always missed the door to door people. Yeah.

God, I would have loved it. I would have wasted so much of their fucking time. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, tell me more. Yeah. The amount of text. I knew the election was over because the text message is stopped. I couldn't block numbers fast enough, but that's all it was. Out of town billionaire, this, that or the other crisis for Montana, out of towners are bringing in money. But that guy, here's what's interesting about.

that guy. He gets out of the seals, gets out of the Navy, and moves to Montana. So he's just, at that point, he's just a veteran who just decided like, okay, I'm going to land somewhere in the U.S. Where do we want to land? We're getting out of the military. Let's go to Montana. Goes to Montana, starts a business and grows that business to several hundred employees and worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It was aviation based, right? Yep. Yep. Working in the firefighting space with some of the technologies that they used in the military to keep firefighters safe. Starts that business, grows it up, and sells it. Now, is that not the ultimate veteran success story?

I mean, we have veterans. The big talk is like, you know, we have veterans killing themselves and depression and how do you transition. Now, here's a guy who transitioned to the ultimate success, not to a female, Andy. Careful with that word. Yeah. Choose a different one. and hired hundreds of people and donated millions of dollars to Montana, like the Bozeman's Children Hospital. I mean, he's very, has done a lot of philanthropy. Is that where he built his business

out of was Bozeman? Yeah. Okay. Yep. Built all that. Then got approached by Steve Daines a couple years ago explaining, hey, it looks like this election is going to come down to one U.S. Senate seat and we really need to beat Tester. Will you run? And his, answer was no. And then Dane started explaining it more and like, look, we need a solid candidate to go against this guy. You're a seal. You've transitioned out of the military. You grew this business. You've done all this stuff. You've got young kids, family. Like you're a good dude. So basically agrees, agrees to do it, runs, ends up winning. And in my mind, he has really no reason to have wanted to do that other than service to his country. Because

he's got a business still worth millions of dollars that he's still trying to run to this day. Like he still has to run that business. He has a beautiful ranch in eastern Montana where Greg Putnam is running it. And they're trying to basically set up supplying local beef to local restaurants and help bring that supply chain of our food to more of a homegrown type situation versus like Cisco. Have you ever seen a tinier seal than Greg Putnam? Um, he's pretty tiny. Yeah. But he puts that hat on, you know, he gets a little bit bigger.

He's coming up next week to do an episode with me. Seems like most seals. Most special ops guys are pretty small. You're like, you're big for a special operations guy. Well, imagine I have all my gear and I, whatever reason you have to drag me. Yeah. It's no wonder you got shot. Yeah.

Well, I just wasn't good at my job either. But it would take three of those little micro fuckers to drag me. I think I could put them in a pocket and just cruise along. It's true. Just hook him up like a little leash. Like, let's go, Greg. Yeah. But that guy, I was telling my wife, I said, imagine getting your life to that point where you have millions of dollars.

You have this beautiful ranch. You also have little kids at home going to school in Montana. Yeah. What reason do you have to want to leave and go to that shit hole in D.C. and do that and sit in meetings all day with a suit and tie on. Like, not me. Selfishly, I'm sorry. That's if you win. I'm going to go to my ranch.

That's if you win. His entire family got drug. Drug for 18 months. I honestly would never be willing to do it. that to my children. I would never be willing to do that to Leah. Right. Because it, it doesn't even matter if it's complete fantasy. They just throw shit against the wall. And it's not even people in Montana that it's all driven by D.C. I mean, when I was talking to Tulsi, we went to her swearing in. I was talking to Tulsi's husband, Abe, uh, when we were at dinner after her swearing in.

And he was talking about how horrible it got during that confirmation process. He was talking about, He's like, dude, I thought politics were bad. I thought running for office was bad. They found multiple more levels of like dirtiness that they tried to pull and do and the things they make up. And it's all coming from big money in D.C. And then they bring that into a state like Montana and they go door to door trying to feed that shit to people who are just trying to live their lives.

But no, I running for office after seeing what Tulsi's gone through, seeing what Shehee's went through and getting to talk to Sheehe a little bit. He has an office in the podcast studio building. Does he? So it used to be, the only reason I knew who Tester was is because I would walk from the coffee shop to the podcast studio, which, as you know, is a couple blocks right on the same street. I never saw Tester. I've never met Tester. But he had a guy working in there who had a glorious golden retriever.

One of the regrets of my life is that I never got to pet that dog. That dude was always in there. Never saw Tester once. As I was walking by the other day, I saw it changed from Tester to Shihis. So it must be just a state building. Really? Yeah. just changed the paint.

He's never been in there either. Yeah. No, not yet. I'm sure he'll come do your podcast. I'm sure he would too. So I have one touch point with him. I reached out for help with my FAA medical. Solved in like 72 hours.

Yeah. So speaking of that, people might not know this. Montanaans. Montani. Zinky. Yep. Has a little link on his website on his homepage.

So if you are trying to get a permit or you're trying to get a suppressor, suppressor. You're trying to get whatever and you're a Montana resident. You go to his homepage and you click on that and you just fill out a little form and say, hey, I'm trying to do this or that or whatever. I'm having an issue with the government in whatever way that that is. They will call you back at times less than 24 hours later. And I have personal experience with this. They are very helpful, which is very impressive that your U.S. representative for Montana is there to actually. help Americans. And they do coffee with Montanans every week. There's another side of that coin. And trust me, I am fully aligned with that. The frustrating part for me is that our fucking

government, these massive agencies are so inefficient and unwilling to actually do anything unless they get a little bit of a push. Yeah. That again, this is where I fall back. So one of the things right now, you know, they're talking about stripping 70 to 80,000 people from the VA, the Department of Veteran Affairs. Yep. There are a lot of people up in arms. I know there's a new, Doug Collins is the new secretary of the VA. And the first thing he said was,

listen, this isn't going to impact patient care. And just my understanding of the bureaucracy, looking at it from the military side, I'm looking at the VA. I believe there's people who are focusing on the 70,000, 80,000 employees that might be let go. There are currently 480,000 employees at the VA. Right.

There is a world that exists where patient care might get better because there might be an office full of people all doing the same thing. Right. And because they're all doing the same thing, they're wildly inefficient. Bogging it down. Bogging it down. There is a world where the veteran treatment might actually drastically improve by reducing the number of people working at the agency.

And that one I understand is a mental pretzel that people have to get their way through because all they're seeing is threat to veterans, which might be the case. We're going to have to see how it plays itself out. in my experience with the government, I look at it as a rare opportunity where efficiency actually might be regained. Yeah. I hope so.

I mean, I'm dealing with the Department of Transportation right now. Just trying to get a right-of-way permit, right, where we're building our building to remove a little bit of dirt in a... I mean, I grew up in excavation. This is a small, like, one-day project. Have you considered just doing it?

Oh, what? Yeah, I got shut down. So I could... Have you considered doing it at night? That would be the next move. I actually, I did get in a little bit of trouble because I started last March trying to get them to accept a meeting to come out and talk to them about what I wanted to do. We communicated and I provided all this communication. I'm actually filing a complaint in D.C. on this because we tried all summer to get them to come out and meet us on site and talk about this project.

We couldn't get that. So I told the excavation guy like, fuck it, start digging. He started digging. Two hours later, they showed up on site and shut us down. And I'm like, well, at least I got a meeting. How'd they know you were digging? It's right by the interstate you can see. Yeah, but who drove by and who tattled on you?

I have a good question. Snitches get stitches, bitches, bitches. Exactly. So we then went through the process of permit and whatnot. And I hired an engineer firm. They came back with a bunch of questions. We got all the engineering, hydrology, geotech reports, all the shit, grading, site drainage, all that.

Got all the way to the end. And they denied it. And literally, we've gone through this three times and now, in a row, the only real reason that they can come up with is they're busy. They just don't have time. And honestly, they don't have to do anything other than stamp a permit, literally. And again, it's that case. When I had my first meeting with those guys, I have a photo of it from November, 15 of their officials on a meeting with me talking about a right-away permit. And I'm like, this is like me and you could solve this in a half hour.

Yeah. It's like provide, make sure it's all engineered. Make sure the drainage is right. Tell me what kind of grass seed you want back down on it. I'll spray the weeds on it for the next 18 months to make sure it's back to how it should be. Fix the fence, which was already rotten.

So I'm going to pay to build MDT a new fence and, uh, efficiencies can be had. Yeah. Well, they are not. So they're being a pain in the end. I don't have a ton more time.

Tell me, you bought a helicopter. Yeah. Let's talk about that. No, we're going to talk about your knives because you're running out of time. So we're going to run. You don't want to talk about your helicopter? Let's talk about it on the next one. You're the one who has a timeline today.

I don't. Well, I don't care about what I have going. We can talk. Let's do the knives first. We'll do the helicopter second. Okay. Let's run out of time. So this is going to come out on the 28th.

You're going to have a tactical drop. I believe all four the knives are in front of us. So just run me through what these things are. Yeah. Yeah. This knife I'm holding is actually pretty cool. We took the famous V-42 knife dagger, and there's a lot of history behind that.

A lot of veterans will understand what that is about, was made for the Devil's Brigade, which was actually kind of the start of special operations in Montana, with a group from Fort Harrison and a group of soldiers from Canada. But that knife was pretty long, not necessarily the most practical knife to carry. It looks like a small broadsword. A little bit.

we reduced that down to a blade that you actually really could carry, made some changes to it, but also it's not an exact replica, obviously, but made this to where I feel like this, if you want to carry a dagger, you want something for self-defense, this dagger is pretty cool.

And we called it the V-24. Inspired by. V-42 was victory for 1942. So V-24 was, we started this last year in 2024, so that's what it is, victory for 2024. You've got the battle goat here. This is a kind of the sister. I don't know. I do have the war goat here. So we've got from being honest, I get confused with the goats because there's

lots of goats. Yeah, there's lots of goats. Herda goats. You got the mini, which by the way is fantastic for opening envelopes. I don't try to get into knife fights, but I do open a lot of boxes. It basically is the same blade as a speed goat. Because we had a ton of of guys actually carrying the speed goat is just their everyday carry in the military. We thicken that blade up a little bit, made a little more robust, made the war go, which is more of a ring carried dagger or a knife for, you know, extracting that blade out quickly, maybe not losing control of it. But also a lot of people don't like a ring.

So we did one here with more of kind of a bird beak design on the end of this. It's also really nice and it gives you a positive kind of place to pull that knife out. If you are in a self-defense situation, We see a lot of military or law enforcement officers carrying these. They're super lightweight. You have enough stuff on your kit as it is. Yep, exactly. And then we have our task force knife here.

This is just kind of that more robust, thicker, heavier blade that if you want to price staples out of boxes like your son. Or pick a pair of scissors, not a multi-hundred dollar knife, please. As a suggestion. Exactly. No, this is just a really robust kind of. to do everything knife. So that's our tactical. That drops coming up like March 27th, I think.

Right. Basically when the show comes out. Is it? Brandon, the man smarter than both of us is the one who put all this together so we could do this. Okay, perfect. Yeah, release it. What I want people to know with our tactical knives is, you know, I'm, I'm a hunter. That's why I started a hunting knife company. But I wanted to bring the same kind of quality and the same feel that we're doing in the hunting space into the military world. So whether it's veterans, active duty guys, we want to provide 100% American made, high quality blade. And then if you are carrying that and you're on the other side of the world or whatever, at least you know when you pull this thing out that a company that actually cares about what you guys are doing, you know, built this blade will stand behind them,

guarantee them for life, we'll resharpen them for free. And, you know, there's a lot of great knives out there. I just, I hope people understand how much we appreciate our servicemen and women, our law enforcement officers. I mean, frankly, the story of Montana knife company, or frankly, like a black rifle coffee, that doesn't happen in any other country in the world. Like our, our country, I don't, I don't have any examples off the top of my head. That's a broad statement. Yeah, I, well, I honestly believe the freedoms that we have in our country to start a company in your basement, whether you're Evan making coffee in your basement or me in my garage making knives and scale it to 90 employees and be doing what we're doing and be able to do it in,

I mean, mailing knives to other countries is damn near freaking impossible. So really? Yeah. Because of their requirements? Yes. A lot of these, I mean, we have to fake it for mailing knives to Canada. We have to call it culinary. We can't.

If you put knife on there, it gets shipped back. Are you sure that you want to talk about these things on a podcast? I don't really care. Canada is going to be our 51st state soon anyway. So, you know, there's very, I used to make that joke all the time and I plan to continue to do so. There's a varying response to it, depending on the city that you live in. Yeah. They're very also polarized left and right.

I feel, I'm a little upset at Trump that he stole my idea because I've been saying for years. I've been calling them the top hat of America for a fucking decade. Yeah. Alberta, Saskatchewan. I would like to have most of British Columbia. they can keep Vancouver if they want. I'll even trade, trade them maybe some land down here.

Maybe we'll just trade them California. Do we want Toronto? I've never been there so I can't say. But my guess is most of the crazy politics is coming out of that part of the world. I'm not so sure we want it. But Saskatchewan, pretty cool. Alberta.

A lot of people on Alberta are like, fuck yeah, let's go, 51st state. Cove is like, get, why don't you guys line up a mile of dick and just eat that? I don't know what happens to the, mail system the minute crosses the imaginary line just north of you. I don't even understand how the mail system currently works as it is anyway.

Yeah, it's crazy. But yeah, um, I would agree there. Canada's freaking awesome. I love Canada. I love it up there. Yeah. The fact that it's, I wish it didn't take me as long to get, I mean, it's 60 miles from Calispell, but God damn, it's 120 mile drive.

Yeah. Because first you have to go west for 40 miles. Right. Maybe in a helicopter, a little shorter though. Exactly. So speaking of a helicopter. Yeah, so there you go. Get your helicopter stuff out.

Well, I'm just interested in all this stuff because I'm thinking about getting my pilot's license. Which I told you you shouldn't do because you'll die. You didn't die. You and I are not the same thing. I mean, you're as retarded as I am. How's your jiu-jitsu journey going? About like my... Interest in starting, joined, paid full price and never did it.

I'm trying to save you time of money. But I can... Aviation might cost you your life. Jiu-jitsu, you might be a little sore. Well, I don't know. If I mouth off for the wrong person at Jiu-Jitsu, it might cost me my life. to you. You want you.

You'd be fine. So what made you decide to buy a helicopter? I mean, the fact that it presented itself is one thing. I don't want people to think that I am not a wealthy man. Let's put it to you like that. And I did not go into it alone either. Right. Well, sharing in buying of planes, helicopters a lot of times with the right people

can be a really good way to go. It would not have been possible without the help of somebody else. And I need to make sure that they're okay with me. talking about it publicly before I disclose. It's not that big of a deal, but I just don't want to speak for some of the else. Sure, sure. Um, one, the, the opportunity presented itself. It's a unique helicopter. So it's an M.B. A Messerschmitt. And then I forget what all the other Bs and the O's stand for because it's German and I don't speak German well. Yeah. 105. It's a P model. So it's an, uh, it actually flew with the German military. It was an anti-tank helicopter. They had to pull out.

So what year is it? What, what? 81. Okay. But just over 4,000 hours on it, which is absolutely nothing for an airframe. They had to pull 400. pounds of wiring out of that thing to demil it. Really? I'll show you on this side because I'll do a walk around before I take off. There's all these like mounting attachments for unfortunately the rocket pods that did not come with. Can we get those back? I don't think so.

We'd also have to get back to 400 pounds of wiring and let me just tell you, I don't know where they pulled it from, nor do I know how they would get it back in there. But it flew with the German military, did some time overseas in, I think, Saudi Arabia. And then it was in Boulder City. And it honestly was the price point and capability. So it's the same in principle helicopter that the Red Bull team has that they use for acrobatics. So what did you have to do to, you were a licensed pilot, airplane pilot, right? What did you have to do to get license to fly helicopters? Helicopter specific training.

The ground school that you are now thinking about doing, I suspect you'll quit within 30 days, is I didn't have to do that. So to get the licenses that I had, I went all the way up to my eight. ATP fixed wing, which is the same license that Delta pilots have in major carriers. So the knowledge portion of those tests, like general airspace, things like that, talking on the radio, that apply. Right. And they actually- Like all the IFR stuff and-IFR is a little bit different. I still have an IFR rating fixed wing. I'm not current, so I'd have to get recurrent in that. Some of my IFR training would count in a helicopter, but you'd have to retest again in a helicopter. Okay.

So for me, the helicopter was an adult. on rating. I was adding on to the licenses I had. And I found it to be really beneficial because flying a helicopter is not the hardest thing in the world, but it's not easy by any stretch either. And I can't even imagine trying to learn how to safely control a helicopter and at the same time studying for basic aviation principles of airspace and talking on the radio and speed and all of these other things. So I was able to shelve all of the book knowledge stuff. And when I would go do a lesson with my instructor, Kyle, it was like, this is do helicopter shit.

And that's all I had to worry about. That's why I was told, I was told to go through and get your, pretty much all your ground school stuff done. So when you go learn to fly, it's easier that way. You're not also trying to learn how to talk on the radio. Or at least you have a decent basis of knowledge

to then kind of apply it. Yeah. It's not the hardest thing in the world. Aviation in general. It's not the easiest either. Where we live, we're a little bit remote. Like even coming down today,

there's clouds in it. Right. And, you know, I'm checking the weather yesterday because I knew we were coming down. I have alternates. I know where I can get gas anywhere within the flight range of the helicopter. I know where I could divert too. There's always you just, you can also, the cool thing about helicopter. I'm just going to land and shut this fucking thing off and let the weather go through.

Right. So, you know, primary, secondary. There are a lot of days you can't fly down here, too. I mean, in Montana with, and I'm not sure about what the icing is like with a helicopter, but like with a small, like a Cessna. Very few helicopters or even small aircraft are certified for flight into an own icing. Yeah, so I mean, between the amount of fog we get and just days where it's kind of misty out, maybe it's raining at the house, but it's freaking snowing up high.

Yeah, you're going to be limited either way. Yep. The drives are still beautiful. But yeah, the helicopter's badass. It's, uh, and I'm going to use it just for content and doing cool stuff. Like, why are you talking with Brandon about doing cool stuff with MKC doing some hunting stuff? I mean, 100% chance I'll be looking for critters later in the year. It does seem like you're the kind of person that always,

And I feel like I'm a little bit this way. Like you're always trying to learn or grow or. I think it keeps me on. Once you master, like let's say a couple years from now, you've mastered the helicopter. That will never happen. It's the way I like juju too as well. So the guy who trained me in that specific airframe.

I think to my knowledge is the only person in North America who's able to sign you off in that airplane. In the United States, you don't need a type rating, but he gave me, put me through a type rating course and I achieved the type rating and doing it. over 10,000 hours, I think he's certified in 17 helicopters, and he'd be the first person to tell you you never master it.

Yeah. And that's the kind of stuff that it's very interesting to me. Jiu-Jitsu the same way. I don't, I mean, I've talked with people who have been doing it for 30 years. Right. And they are still seeing things that they hadn't thought of before. Sure. Exposing themselves to stuff that they hadn't even considered,

and they just enjoy the journey. Right. I don't think I would be interested at all in something you could master it a few years. Right. Yeah, makes sense. Cool. No, it's super cool. I mean, you landed the damn thing in my yard. When you came over the, you were hauling some ass when you came over the building here. That's pretty cool. It didn't seem that fast to me. It's very cool. It's a different perspective from the area. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, I don't often have helicopters go over 100 feet up, but I'll come back anytime. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Cool, man. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming down doing this. Yeah. What were we going to do for the tactical drop? You were going to do code Andy for 75% off? Yep, go ahead and type that in. All right, man. Thanks.

Is this your pre-trip? Yeah, I'm just walking around real quick. Do you want me to tighten some bolts on it for you? No. This is where Montana Knife Company would look good at. Yeah, good. That looks a little loose. That's good.

Just checking oil. It's supposed to be a little bit loose. So can you long line out of here? Do you have an attachment under there? You can get one. Could or are going to buy hunting season to haul my help out? We would just put it in the back. luggage compartment. Is that what this open up? Is that what this is? Yeah, this whole thing is luggage.

This is where you need the bear paws. You see how heavy the back end is? The bear paws just flattened out. Oh really? Yep, it's just plastic. I'm putting them on next week. When you take off, can I hang from the... You want to. Runner just for a little while. Where did they have the missing is attached to this thing? All this stuff right here. These are all brackets. All that stuff is for the external. So when you, when you practice and you testing this, do they have you get, like, do you to auto, do you auto rotate it all the way to the ground? Yeah, we did a whole bunch of stuff, like single engines, we'd be in a hover, he'd kill an engine. So how does the auto rotate work? I mean, so instead of pushing air down, the air rushes up through the blades and it keeps it spinning

and it leaves you enough kinetic energy that you can pull the collective, which is essentially the up down. You have enough kinetic energy stored in the blades that you can slow your descent down and stop your forward speed and hopefully just put it right where you want it to go. And you did that? How scary is that to auto-rowded? rotate yourself to the ground. It is less scary than you would think. Really? It's not it's a non-event. It's not that it's a non-event. It's you're falling out of the sky slower than you would think. You guys can stay right here when I started up if you want. You want you get it, Michael? Yeah. How many gallons an hour does it burn?

About 43. 43? It's about like a Ford. Where's all the gas stored? That smells good. Here we go. That's noise in aviation right here. Well, I guess not every day if someone Drop in for a podcast by helicopter.