The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 403: Josh Smith—From First Blood to Last Bite

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

When it comes to work ethic, Master Bladesmith Josh Smith self-identifies as "the guy Mike is always talking about." At age 11, Josh was taught how to build knives by his little-league baseball coach. By age 19, he was the youngest bladesmith to ever pass the Master Smith test of the American Bladesmith Society. Today, he owns and operates the Montana Knife Company. Josh talks about giving up the security of a six-figure journeyman lineman job to start his own knife company, how he changed the way contestants are treated on Forged in Fire, and what it was like to build a sword for a sheik in Abu Dhabi. 

It is the way I heard it, and the title of this episode comes from the logo of the Montana Knife Company, which reads, and I quote, from first blood to last bite. Chuck's logos go, as slogans and mottoes, that one's not bad. It's pretty good. I like it a lot. I like it better than any other title we had. When in doubt, look at a company's logo. See if you can't use their motto. This guy, Josh Smith, who you're about to meet, has just become one of my very favorite guests of all time. It began a couple of months ago before I actually met him when somebody else who I had never met presented me with a gift

from the Montana Knife Company. It was, as you might imagine, a knife. Really? But not just any knife, John. Okay. So it's chef's knife. And it was unlike any other blade. I had had the pleasure to grip gliding as it did through various sirloins,

various, oh, I think the first thing I used it on was a whole chicken and I just cut it to pieces. Did you? Like a laser beam. Wow. It's such an amazing knife. And so I came home from this event and I went to this guy's website and I read about his story and I called him to thank him for the knife.

And you know, we had a conversation and found ourselves in violent agreement on a great many topics and he actually said to me and I think he says in this conversation, I'm the guy you've been talking about. Yes. Your whole life. Your whole life. Yeah, exactly. Which is a little stalkery and maybe even a tad creepy. So I said, what do you mean? And of course, he explained. Yes, he said, I'm the guy who gets up early, who stays late, who works all day, who cherishes work and work ethic. He worked as a lineman for a long time and finally quit that job to make knives full time. Yeah.

But growing up in Western Montana, I mean, it's a different breed of person, at least in my experience. And Josh epitomizes those people, and he really is the essence of the kind of person we were always hoping to find on dirty jobs and the type of individual who were trying to encourage through microworks.

Right. He was right. He is the guy I've been talking about for a long time. And today he is running a multi-million dollar knife company that is the toast of Montana and the envy of knife makers from sea to shining sea. He was on that show on the History Channel, forged in fire. Right. And in the space of literally like four or five years, he has carved out an amazing reputation in this really competitive and extraordinarily passionate place. And so bottom line, he just flew in and just sat down with us and presented me with the rest of this cutlery set for which I

There was nothing I could do except give him a bottle of noble because I don't have anything else around here I can hand out Seriously, you should send him a case because that those knives are worth a lot These knives are amazing. You're going to love this guy honestly. I mean strap in it's a really great conversation with a hardworking dude who not only took all of that happy horse crap we talk about all the time with work ethic and delayed gratification and skills and so forth and so on. He applied it through an entrepreneurial spirit. Yeah. And he built something extraordinary. He registered the name, the Montanaknife company.com when he was like in his late teens, I think. And it took 20 years to make it a reality. But he saw it.

He knew he was put on the earth to become a master, God, I hope I get this right, a master bladesman. I think, forgive me, Josh, if I got it wrong, but suffice it to say, you're a very big deal in your chosen field. And what a pleasure it was to chat with you and what an honor it is to share our conversation. In this episode, which we're calling from first blood to last bite, right after this.

Shameless plug Long before she was Peggy Roe, my mom was Peggy Noble, daughter of Carl and Thelma Noble. It was her father, Carl, who inspired me to pitch a show called Dirty Jobs to the Discovery Channel and later start a foundation that honored the kind of work Carl Noble did for a living, trade work, skilled labor. That foundation is called MicroWorks, and today I'm proud to tell you that we've helped thousands of people get the training they need to begin a career in the skilled trades.

In fact, we'd love to help you. You can apply for a work ethic scholarship right now at microwworks.org. We've set aside $10 million for this year's applicants, thanks to a number of very effective fundraisers, including the one with my grandfather's name on the label. I refer, of course, to Noble Tennessee Whiskey, K-N-O-B-E-L, which is now available in a variety of delicious mash bills, all of which you can peruse at noblespirates.com. In fact, if you spend 100 bucks and use code Carl, C-A-R-L, you'll get one tube of orange bitter-infused sugar cubes for free. That's code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered to make nine

perfect old-fashions every time. It's my favorite way to support Microworks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirates.com. K-N-O-B-E-L-Spirits.com. Soon may the noble men come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Welcome. Thank you for making the trip.

Oh, thank you for having me. I'm still not sure why you just reached out of it. This is Josh Smith, by the way, Montana Knife Company. Anthony, where are my manners? I have known of you. You know, we were talking earlier, and it's that weird sort of hive mentality, that peripheral sort of thing

that happens in Podcastlandia and other places. And you've just been one of those guys who I've heard so many people talking about. And then out of the blue chuck, I'm at this Dave Ramsey event, I don't know, six weeks ago, maybe two months ago. And some guy,

I don't remember who came up to me and gave me the single best knife I've ever owned. That's awesome. And I've owned a lot of knives. I have, for some reason, it's such a great gift to give. Yeah. And when you get a knife, at least, I can't speak for all men, but you never part with it.

So I've got this drawer full of knives, but this thing you sent me cuts through steak. I'm not even going to say like butter. It's like a laser. It's like a laser-guided knife that you made with your own tool. giant well-collised mitts. So thank you for that. Yeah, well, absolutely.

Well, I really appreciate him giving you that knife. And, yeah, I brought you a couple more to kind of fill out that set. But why would you send a guy you've never met a knife out of the wild? Well, you've been someone who, quite frankly, I'm the guy you've been talking about your whole career about this whole working man trade thing, right? Like my story, my whole life is. kind of, I'm that guy. I'm living the American dream. And through hard work and apprenticeships and honestly, I told you when we were off air, but my kids, we grew up watching dirty jobs, you know.

My kids loved it. And we don't watch. How old are they? Three girls and a boy, 2018, 16, and 14. So that's so crazy to think about that. You're right. That show went on the air 21 years ago. Yeah. And so your kids grew up watching me crawl through various rivers of, The flu fium. Yes, yes, of disappointment, regret. Yeah. I am so appreciative of your message about college and the trades and how you can get ahead in life. And I was the keynote speaker to high school graduation this year. My message really was, I was actually at the competing high school of where I went to high school. And it was on my 25th graduation anniversary.

And I said, if you'd have told the teachers back in my high school 25 years ago that I'd be the keynote speaker at Drummond High School. Right. Yeah, they would think the world's gone completely wrong. But I grew up in a tiny little logging town in Montana, and I told those kids, a lot of you kids sitting here, you look out and you see the big world and you see what's happening in all these big cities in this place and that place and you see these big brands pop up. And you think a lot of what they're doing is not possible because you're just from Lincoln, Montana, or drumming Montana. And your dad's a rancher. And how are you going to ever start a big brand or grow a big company or, you know, you're just. you know, be quote unquote successful.

And you don't want to go to college. You're not interested in college. And I went and duck hunted my way out of college. How does one duck hunt their way out? When your professor asks you not to come to class in your waiters anymore, you have a decision to make. And so I didn't go to class anymore at all. I mean, the birds were flying.

And, you know, we had a decision to make. You know, I grew up in the excavation world. My dad was a backo operator. We had a couple backos and dump trucks and excavators. Well, I learned to run backo actually chopping wood when I was like four with the bacco. My dad would tip blocks of wood up on end. And he'd set the back wall up. And I'd go around there with the loader and the teeth.

And I would chop the block of wood in half. And then he would tip it back up and turn it 90 and chop and we'd quarter it. Why is chopping wood among the most satisfying things to do on the face of the earth? I don't know, but there's something fun about it. It's a good feeling. It's manly shit. Well, it's that. I mean, you know, for me, we grew up not in western Montana, but in northern Baltimore,

but we had a big vegetable garden and a sort of a little fake farm, but we had a woodpile and woodstove. And that's how we heated our house. And so the big chores were you pick up the horse crap and then you go back into the woods and drag it up and cut it. And I, those are my best memories as a kid with my granddad and my pop up in the wood pile. Listen to them say things like chop your own wood. It'll warm you twice. Yeah. It was actually some of my worst memories too.

Cold, right? Well, I remember my dad telling me into the knife making part of it, I was all excited to go to a knife show and I was 14 years old. And my dad said, well, you can go to this knife show out in Oregon. But when you go, you have, the woodshed needs to be full before you go. go because I had my chores right and I'd been making my knives for months and I was all excited to go to this knife show and the night before we left my dad's very quiet dry not a yeller just gets his point across and he goes well those knives are nice but um I'd say it but you're not going and I was like why is that and he's like woodshed's not full and I mean it was a long ways from

being full too yeah and I worked well into the night getting that woodshed full before I could climb in the car the next morning to go to the knife show I remember that night, stacking wood wasn't as enjoyable. 14? I was 13. I turned 14 at that show in Oregon. Would you say you learned mostly the lessons that stuck and the lessons that mattered when you were that age more or less and through some semblance of work?

Oh, I mean, everything I learned was through work. Yeah. So I grew up in the excavation business, you know, from running backo. And by the time I was in high school, I was running jobs. and my dad was going a different direction. So I was very good with all that. What'd your dad do? He had an excavation company.

Oh, so you came by it? We had like four backos in an excavator. But we built it up. I mean, my folks got married. They had like $50 of their name. You know, and my dad's first backo was a hunk of crud, you know, cabless backo. And, you know, he grew his business all while we were kids all the way through high school. But we did that.

I also had a lawnmoyne business, you know, and when I started making night, I was 11. You know, I did that during high school as well. So those were all things that I did, you know, was all around work. We didn't travel and do a lot of stuff as kids. We worked. But honestly, again, my dad wasn't a yeller. It was, I had fun, but my dad would hand us responsibility and let us also kind of fail, right? Like, well, he's a matter of consequence. If the tool shed is full, you go. If it's not, you don't. We're not going to spend a lot of time laughing or crying about the outcome. It's just physics at this point. Yeah. And when we would finish jobs, excavation jobs or I would finish whatever I was supposed to be doing.

You know, it was always pretty good, but not quite good enough, you know. I do. I sure do. You know, but that's honestly how the knife makers judged me as a kid, too. I remember coming home through junior high and high school crying and telling my folks, like, these knives are never going to be good enough, you know, because these guys that taught me, it wasn't my dad that taught me to make knives. It was my little league baseball coach.

There was four or five guys in the state of Montefiard. Montana that were kind of constantly the guys I would lean on for help and advice. And I'd show them my new knives that I was all excited about. And they'd be like, they're all right, but this, this and this needs to be better. And what I didn't know is I was learning from guys who were also ascending at what was going to be a crazy pace to some of the best knife makers in the world. So while I was getting better, so were they. So I was never catching them, which was very frustrating as a kid.

So what I love so much about all of this is that you're firmly ensconced in a world that most people don't know exist. And that to me, you know, has always been interesting, not just from a TV standpoint, but just in general, whether it's barbershop or square dancing or knife making, whatever it is. Like I'd put Little League Baseball in another category because everybody kind of knows that. But how many people had a Little League coach who was also a knife maker?

Right. Who pulled the kid aside and said, hey. Yeah. Right? I mean, you just can't script it. No, and I think he knew I was pretty responsible. I mean, he, you know, with working to my parents' excavation business and stuff, you know, my folks bought me one of his knives for Christmas that year, and then he invited me up. And he was a tough guy, too, as an outfitter in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

He was a logger. Rick Dunkerley's his name, amazing knife maker. He taught me to make a couple knives, but then he said, I think it was his way of getting rid of me, frankly, is he was like, well, if you want to be a knife maker, you have to have your own knife shop, you know, and I'm 12 at this point. So I had a lawnmowing business, and I worked. for my folks so I took that money and I went bought a grinder and I put it in my dad's shop and I started making knives at home and then I would take him up to his shop to ask him to like critique me or help here and there and then I started making such a mess of my dad's shop when I was 1213 that my dad then took an enclosed a lean to on a machine shed outside uninsulated we actually

sawed the boards for my bench it's still there out of our own little bandsaw mill the trees that fall down on my dad's property he'll cut up and build sheds out over whatever. I'm nodding and saying, yeah, like everybody listening has their own little bandsaw mill. That's one does. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that band saw mill, yeah, out there by the lathe. Well, he built this bench at the height that he thought I would be someday. So I stood for the first three years on a milk crate grinding knives at my own grinder. And there's a picture me in Blade magazine when I'm 14 years old. They wrote an article about me and there's a photo of me in there in my car hearts in the winter standing on a milk crate grinding knives.

What do you reckon the subscription, you know, the distribution rate is for Blade magazine? I mean, I think it's pretty dang big today. Back then, I don't know what it would have been. That would have been probably 1992 or 35. Today, you know, with the growth of Forged and Fire on television. History Channel, right? Because I was on that a couple times. And back when I used to tell people I was a full-time knife maker in like the 2000s after I was out of high school,

people look at you like you're a crazy person. But today, because of Forgerton Fire, you know, it's a lot more mainstreamed than it was. Sorry to leapfrog around like this. I know. But it's really interesting. You strike me as a craftsman. Obviously, an artistic sensibility, which is why I called, really. I mean, I called you to thank you for the knife.

And then we chatted. And then I went on your website and learned some of what you're telling me now. That's just super interesting. so is this. Here, I'm going to read you this. Chuck, as a sometimes producer, puts together these fact sheets. I never read them, but I glanced at this real quick and learned, along with his younger sister, Sarah, they were raised in a small dog house that his parents built almost entirely by themselves. And then the reason I'm wearing glasses right now is because I can't see anything. It's actually a small log house. But honestly, Chuck, when I read this, I was like, this is amazing.

I had no idea. Josh Smith. sister and lived in a dog house. Very, very, you know, lean up, bring a house. So you're splitting wood, you're living in a log house. Yeah, it's a cool little log. I mean, it's more like a cabin, but we, my dad did all of the coping of the logs.

I mean, we, I remember being a probably eight or nine. What's coping mean? You know, when you, you have a round log and you want to fit another round log on it, you cut out essentially a V, but you have to describe those logs. And so if there's undulations, in the log along the way, they have to fit perfectly with each other. And so you go and you scribe, one side of it has like a carbide bit on the bottom, and the other side has a pencil.

And as it follows the contour of the bottom log, it leaves that contour on the top log. And then you chainsaw out that contour. And if you do it perfectly, you roll that log over and they just go together like a glove. Every craftsman I've ever talked to in any medium always tells a similar story of satisfaction as a result of two things coming together perfectly. Even writers. Remember our buddy Alex, you know, he was working with me on a book years ago. And he's like, you know, when you get the story right and you get to the last line,

you can almost hear it in your head. When it closes, like a box, it goes, snick, he used to say. It's the same thing with building log homes, which I had a chance to watch some guys do up in up in the UP, in Michigan. And watching them work and watching them use blades. Yeah. I guess that's the duality that I'm interested in. You grow up cutting grass with blades, splitting wood with blades.

Right. Now suddenly you've got to fill a tool shed with wood cut from blades. And then your little league coach pulls you aside and says, hey, you look like a knife maker. And then that's what I'm like, Chuck, I want to talk to Josh Smith. For real. This guy who lives in a dog house. I don't wear more. My sister and I, we peeled.

My dad brought home from one of his jobs. I was probably nine or ten. My sister was eight or so. And he brought home a ton of just rails from like trees they cut down from a job site. Like four inch diameter just rails. And he said, my dad said, if you peel all these, I'll build you guys a playhouse. So my sister and I peeled. Sarah.

Yeah. We peeled probably 100 of those rails by hand. And that means so are you guys holding like the saw, like drawing knives? Draw knife and pulling towards you and peeling all the bark off. And it's still there when we go up and we stay with my kids. Like we're going up next weekend to help my dad re-riff some sheds for his 70th birthday. Roof. That's so Montana.

RUFF. But we'll stay in that little bunkhouse that my sister and I peeled the logs of 30 years ago, which is pretty cool. Again, pardon the sidebar, but I'm just thinking. of things responsible parents today hand their kids. And like describe a drawing knife and what makes it such an effective and fearsome blade. Essentially, if you put handles, intersecting handles on the ends of a lawnmower blade

and then told your kid to put it on a piece of wood and pull it towards their femoral artery. That's it. That's it, man. I mean, the first time somebody handed me one of those things, I was a grown man, And I still felt my sphincter slamming shut. Because it was like, this thing is so sharp. And you really have to lean into it and pull right out of your torso.

Or, you know, with all of it. I had friends in high school that peeled logs, the lapkas. Their dad was a log home builder. You don't want your dad to be a log home builder because you get to peel logs for your job for the summer. Yeah. And you want to talk about some tough kids on the football team. Oh, my God. I mean, their shoulders and arms, they were tough kids.

Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Rowe gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues. You'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data for just, 3499 a month with no contracts and no commitments of any kind. You can see why I love these guys. If, on the other hand, you have better things to do with your time than watch my mom and me be impossibly charming together, then allow me to remind you here, without all the cleverness and charm,

that unlimited talk, text, and data on a blazing fast network for just 3499 a month really is an unmitigated bargain from an American wireless company that keeps all their customer's in this country, supports our veterans in a meaningful way, as well as the MicroWorks Foundation, and allows me to exploit my own mother in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just $3499 a month. At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row.

You ever detassel, corn, corn season? I haven't. Yeah, it's not really comparable, but it's just one of those geographic things. Yeah. You know, and it's just a lot of summer jobs, kids on farms and Nebraska and so forth, just going down the rows, taking the tassels off. Yeah. Little tiny blades, microscopic little things that'll cut you, and it's just a miserable job.

Yeah. But character. Yeah. All the work that we always did was all really, really. enjoyable and my folks paid us I mean honestly we were some of their best help my job as a little kid before I could do like the really heavy equipment stuff was my sister and I every night my dad rolled in at nine o'clock or eight o'clock or whatever time it was we had to go out and wash all the windows and the backos and the trucks and just make sure my mom was like when your dad goes to work

tomorrow morning at five in the morning I want him to have a clean machine clean truck my job was to grease all the equipment so I'd grease all the grease sarks on the backo every night and you know the things that and then it worked into actually going out on job sites, you know, like when we put in drain fields hauling pipe around. So my dad didn't have to jump on and off the back. Oh, getting pipe into the ditch and checking grade, running the transit. That was before lasers. We checked a ton of grade. And then as I got older, then I got to start running the equipment, you know, and, um. Do you still remember the first time you climbed on a big machine and turned the key and realized you were, you basically had a tiger by the tail?

I mean, honestly, I was so young, I wouldn't even be able to remember it because, I mean, I ran equipment when I was really little. Yeah. So it was a cool upbringing and just a great way to grow up, you know. I just think that that's worth belaboring a little bit. You know, it's a kind of singularity that you find, again, in really great, I guess craftsman is the right word, but also in great workers. I saw it on dirty jobs all the time, guys with really very little education. but they'd been doing this for so long that you didn't really appreciate them fully until you saw them on the machine. Yeah.

And then it was hard sometimes to figure out where the man ended and the machine began. That's my dad. Really? I mean, he actually competed when I was, you know, that junior high time frame. They had backo rodeos, actually, that dealerships would put on. Yeah. And my dad won all the regionals a couple years in a row and then went to nationals. and was bad at following directions

because he beat the winner by like four seconds, but he took a pipe out of order and they docked him like 10 seconds or something, I don't know. But my dad's is just an unbelievable operator. And everybody knew it, right? Yeah, everybody knew it. Everyone in town, like people would just sit and watch him. It's an extension of his hand.

And I got, honestly, I mean, I got really good on a machine too, but the way you run a machine smoothly is you move more than one control at a time. Right. If you won't move one at a time, be herky jerky. But if you're pulling multiple controls in different directions, everything's working fluidly. You don't move your arm one motion at a time. Right.

You know, and that's how you operate a machine smooth. It's art. It is. I mean, it truly is. You know, I make the point on this podcast a lot when we talk about work and we talk about craftsmanship, when you take the art out of a thing. Like when we took the art out of the vocational arts, we just like robbed it of this thing we're talking about right now, the mastery.

And even as like alignment, later in life, when I became an alignment for the power company, when you're building a power pole structure, you're building something that's going to likely be there for 100 years. In the old days, they used to put date nails in poles. And you would pull a date nail out that would say 22. Well, that pole was put in in 19202. And you're climbing up there and you're fixing something that a craftsman, alignment, you know, 1922 built.

And so I remember our foreman as I was being trained in my apprenticeship, you want to make that pole look like an algebra equation. Both sides look identically the same, right? What you do to one side, you do to the other, and the wires are all formed. Because you're also going to drive by that pole in your car every day to work. And are you proud of what you did up there? So it's that way in all different craft. I don't care if you're a plumber, an electrician. You open up a panel on a breaker box and you take the face off of it.

No one sees it back there, but 50 years from now or 20 years from now, someone's going to have to do some work in there. I'm going to pull that off and be like, well, whoever wired this really had took some pride. You mind if we linger on that trade for a minute? Yeah. Because our foundation has assisted a fair amount of aspiring linemen. And when I hear back from them, they're so enthused. I know a lot of happy people and a lot of different trades.

But pound for pound, I think linemen have a level of. self-actualization and I think it's because of what you just said they know that they're keeping the lights on literally yeah and they know that they're not doing it like an electrician would right they're out there without a net right doing something that most civilians understand intellectually is important but practically we have no sense of it Josh no I put in one pole with one team in Wyoming in Alliance no it was Alliance Nebraska I guess it was.

Yeah, man, I walked funny for about a week. Yeah, and had splinters and places I couldn't reach, you know. I mean, and these guys were just, it was such a tough group of good-natured, no bullshit, man. Yep. I want to know how you got into it and if you miss it. You know, and we are bouncing around and I'll eventually, I'll tie it all back to that. No, we'll land the plane, trust me. That's my only skill.

Eventually, I'll tie it back around to that drum and speech that I was talking about. But we'll get there. When I left high school, you know, I became a full-time knife maker. And I was really aspiring to become one of the best knife makers in the country. Like that was my goal. I was chasing these men that I'd been learning from. And, you know, I got pretty good in my 20s. And I, you know, got a good reputation and name for myself.

And well, right when I got out of high school and then I kind of bombed out of college after a year and a half, I started in construction engineering. And I'm like, I'm taking over my parents' excavation business on Lincoln, Montana. I don't need an engineering degree. And besides, man, as I recall, the ducks were flying. The birds were in the air. They were. They were flying.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, every old knife maker that I was kind of looking up to had told me, don't be a full-time knife maker. It's a hard living. It's a hard way to go. And of course, I was like, I can do it. I can be successful. Like, I'm the one that's going to beat the odds.

Hard for you. Yeah, exactly. Watch the meet. Yeah. The day I closed on my first home loan, I quit my full-time job, and started making knives full-time. I was doing excavation for a guy in Missoula when we had moved in there at the time. And so closed on my loan, quit my job to make knives full-time.

And I did that for about nine years. And I was making high-in custom art knives. You know, they were... But did you know what you were doing at that point? Like, I mean, had you had any success making knives when you quit the full-time gig? Oh, yeah. No, I was selling knives for $2,000 to $5,000 a piece. I mean, I was one of the better makers in the country.

I was doing well. I mean, I made a sword for a shake in Abu Dhabi. He flew me to Istanbul, Turkey, flew me to Dubai. Wait, wait. How old are you when you get flown to Istanbul? I was like 24. Yeah. Look, I'm sorry, man.

You can't just gloss over. You get a call from a sheik. Are you free to come to former Constantinople to fashion me a blade, young man? It was a funny story. I had bought this piece of property. I now live on, and it was a complete shithole. I mean, my mom. cried when we bought it. There was no road into it. It had a double-wide trailer on it that had

dog crap on the floors. I mean, it was just bad. But the location, it's 20 acres in the location was amazing. And I just saw the potential. There's garbage everywhere. It was awful. So as soon as I bought it, my dad brought his equipment in, we dug some test pits and we found gravel and water, groundwater. So we decided to build a road into it. And I ended up building beautiful pond over the next 10 years. But built driveways and did all that stuff. But the next spring, I was actually doing some fencing. And the couple days before that or weeks before that, I'd gotten an email from a guy. And he said, point of clarity, fencing. You're putting in a fence. You're not dueling with swords. Thanks for the distinction. Thanks for the distinction.

Because look, he runs the Montana knife company. The man says he's doing a little fencing. It's definitely where it stops. I want to be clear. This guy emailed me and he said, will you build my friend a sword? I said, I'm not a sword maker. I know a great sword maker. His name is Vince Evans. Call that guy. And the guy wrote me back.

His name was Hussein. He's from London. And he said, my friend really wants you to build him a sword. And I was like, I don't build swords. Call Vince. And is that the right verb, by the way, build as opposed to make or fabricate or fashion? I like to say build. It's fine with me.

I'm just curious. I just wouldn't group that verb with that noun. I'm a sword builder. Yeah. The bridge builder, yeah. Yeah, no, build a sword. Build knives, build swords. And so he said, my friend likes your Damascus steel.

He kind of pushed, and he said, he really wants your Damascus steel. He wants you to forge this. And he asked, well, you just send me some samples for my friend to see. And I was like, sure, whatever. Yeah, I'll send you some samples. I wasn't going to send you many samples. And so we could. later, I'm building...

Male Damascus Steel. So a week later, I'm building this fence and I get a phone call. I'd never talk to this guy and it's Hussein. And he's like, hi, Josh, this is Hussein. How are your samples coming along? And I was like, oh, they're coming along fine. I was just building one right now. And I was supposed to have him to him in the next like seven to ten days.

And he said, well, my friend would like to know if you can just bring them and show him in person. and I was like, bring the samples where? And he goes to London. He's like, we'll buy your plane ticket to London. And I was like, what's going on here? And I was like, well, okay. So we kind of agreed to it. And I got off the phone.

I'm like, holy shit, I got to build some Damascus. And so I did. I went to Forgeon. I didn't know what this guy wanted to see. I made a bunch of steel samples. And sure enough, 10 days later, I have a business class ticket to London. And I show up to the Capitol Hotel in London. and I'm supposed to meet him at one o'clock,

and one o'clock comes, goes, two, three, four. And I'm like, well, somebody flew me here. And finally, this guy walks in and he's like, oh, His Highness is out in the car. I'm sorry, I didn't. And I had asked the guy, actually, the night before we left, I said, can you tell me who I'm meeting?

Because this is strange. And he spelled out his name, and it was a shake from Abu Dhabi. And he's like, he speaks good English, don't worry about it, like, whatever. And so it was really cool. I met is Chekhammed Ben Zahey at Elnayan, and we actually went and got in the car, a really nice guy.

We went to the Wallace collection in London, which is an amazing arms and armor museum, and got a private room, got the white gloves on, got to measure up this sword that he wanted built. By the way, who's the Wallace in question? I don't know. I'm just going to say it's William. I have no idea. It's such a better story if it's Braveheart. Yeah, I'm going with it.

How much of the Braveheart Museum? Exactly. Good. Yeah, Mel Gibson was there. Yeah. In fact, I have a surprise for you, John. Mel, come on in here. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, we viewed this sword in this museum,

and the funny part of it is, is we went back to his hotel to kind of talk about the business details and making this sword. And we walk in this room, and all his bodyguards are there. They kind of stand up, and we start to talk about the sword, and he says, oh, he's like, we were late picking you up. He's like, have you eaten lunch or dinner or anything? I was like, no, I'm fine.

I'm not hungry. And he goes, no, no, you have to eat. You must eat. And I was like, no, I'm good. And he says, get him some food. And the bodyguards come over and they're like, what do you want? And I'm like, I don't know, like a burger or something. Like, I don't know.

And I'm telling you, 20 minutes later, they roll in a silver tray the size of this table with everything on the hotel menu under there. And he goes, you eat, we'll wait. And he starts watching soccer. And I'm in like a. 3,000 square foot hotel room with shake Hamid watching soccer and I'm sitting there You eat, we'll wait. And that was a moment I thought, I'll bet you my teachers in high school didn't see this

moment coming. And your little league coach. No, exactly. Maybe sword making's not so bad after all. Sword building. Sorry. My bad. But not to put too fine a point on it, but you're 24.

Had you been out of the country before? No, I don't think I had other than Canada. It doesn't count. America's hat. That's not even. I'm not even sure that's leaving Montana. No, and I mean, a few months later, he flew me to Istanbul, Turkey, went to the top Kappi Palace, and I was with their consulate, and we tried to look at a sword in there, and they had a government change in Turkey,

and we couldn't even see it. It was weird. And then when I did build the sword, he flew my ex-wife and I to Abu Dhabi. We delivered it. It was amazing experience. That must have been awkward going there with your ex-wife. Why wouldn't he? Yeah.

Timelines, Chuck. They're so important. Okay. So back to the thing is like I was a pretty serious knife maker. But as time was going along, 2008, 9 started happening, the housing market and all that stuff. I had four young babies at this point. And I started looking at making knives as a living one knife at a time. It's kind of a starving artist situation, honestly, where you make knives all up for a show, you go to it, you sell them, you're rich.

And a couple weeks later, you've paid all your business. bills and you're back to the grind. And I was teaching a friend of mine who was a journeyman welder that worked for the power company. I was teaching him to make knives in the evenings. And he's talking about his 401k and his paid vacation and that when he screws something up, they pay him double time to fix it. And I was like, man, those all sound like really nice things. I don't get any of that. And the 2010, by that point, I was really questioning, we were headed if you watch the news into a depression from a recession. And I was really questioning.

And honestly, I was seeing collectors that had $5,000 knife orders dropping out. You know, like, ah, the economy's bad. And so they had a backo operating job come open on the gas side to just be an operator for digging gas line. And so I applied for it and I got that position with the power company locally. So after about nine years of making knives full time, I went and I got this backo cooperating job. And I was going to be a welder, I thought, just talking to him. I was like, well, I'll get an apprenticeship and weld. And really quickly, I looked around the room when I got hired there, and all of the linemen in there, a lot of them were gray-haired. And I was like,

the opportunities there. That's it, man. And honestly, I started learning more about what linemen do. It's a cool, damn job, you know. For the novice, give me the short version. If you were the spokesman for amalgamated lineman. Yeah. Make the case for that trade. One minute you're on a backo, digging ditch, putting in some pipe for a subdivision,

and the next minute they call you in there, like, we got a tree in the line on the 230, up near the Idaho line. It's the dead of winter. You've got to take a snow cat to the top of a mountain trying to find this tree, climb the pole, hoist all the wires back up in the air,

replace a cross arm. By the way, you might have to hop on a helicopter to try to find the tree. we're not sure where it's at. Like, it's just so much variation in the job. There's a house out of power. You show up, you know, you fix it, or maybe the whole street's out of power

and you've got to call in a crew. And it is really cool when you roll into a neighborhood and everyone's out of power and you fix it. It's actually amazing. When everyone's out of power, people come out of their homes. It's time to meet your neighbors. They're on their backstep barbecuing, having a campfire.

You're up in your bucket truck fixing things and you slam in that cutout and all the lights come up. on and they all cheer for you and then they disappear into their house. That's so interesting, man. You are the keeper of civilization. Yeah. Essentially.

Do do do do do do do do do. The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure. But if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year.

Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it.

You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself. and see too how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable.

I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic. That's skillsusa.org slash mic. I'm talking skills, U.S. Skills, U.S.S.S.S. skills USA that lineman job I always tell people that is such an amazing career you know you start off you get a groundman job which is a grunt you're lower than whale shit do what you're told and then once you get your apprenticeship you start learning and it's very cerebral too I mean you're doing books you got to learn how electricity works transformer connections all the things and then it's also a lot of just

brute strength right climbing poles hoisting up wide with ropes and cables and it's hard work. I think one of the reasons that it's the one of the coolest professions out there is it's the closest you can find to a military feel, a unit feel in the civilian world. And by that, what I mean is if the three of us are on a crew and he's on the ground as a foreman and you're up in the bucket truck, I'm watching your back and you're watching mine. And if I screw up or you screw up, I might kill you. if I tell you the wrong thing, if I'm not watching your back or I make a mistake,

you have to have trust in me and I have to have trust in you. And you're truly watching out for each other's back. And you're depending on the word of the guy that is with you. Hey, that wire's dead. You can touch that. You can do this and that. And it's like, well, is Mike squared away? Do I trust him?

If not, maybe I'm going to go test that line. You're hard on each other. You're really hard on the new guys. Sure. You test them. How are they going to perform? And when you show up and it's a windstorm, and there's wires down everywhere,

and how are people going to perform under pressure? I wonder where you learned an appreciation for that kind of consequence. It's almost as if you had a dad who wouldn't let you go do a thing until the woodshed was awful. It didn't much matter how you felt about it at all. Yeah, exactly. Before I open these knives, and show their unrivaled, matchless beauty to the world.

Everything you've said, I think, really lays the pipe metaphorically because I want to understand how all of what you've described, and we'll get back to the speech, for sure. But as an entrepreneur, that's a different set of muscles from a tradesman, which are different from a craftsman. But I wanted to ask you about Montana in general, because again, most people listening to this have probably never been there. We know it's there.

We know it's big. Something about the sky, you know. But it's so massive, Josh. Every time I've been there, I've always come back with, it's different than Tahoe. It's different than other cowboy sort of towns. There's just something about the place that I've never been able to sum up. So I'll leave it to you. man, when they say big sky country, and I never really understood it until I started traveling more, you know, when I was out on the East Coast.

And there's something about the way the mountains come up out of the ground, the size of the sky, the length of time you can drive in a car without seeing another house or a farm light. And the variation in terrain from the west side of the state of, you know, mountains and trees and to the east side of the state, which is just rolling flatlands, you know, and cattle country. Us on the west side of the state, like to say the east side of the state, you can watch your dog run away for a week out there. That's for you people out by billings. But it's just,

and it's filled with just really good people that are working hard and not looking for a handout and they're there to help their neighbor. It's just a great place to be. I just, I mean, I asked for a couple reasons. First is, I told you offline, I got kicked in the head by a yak outside of Calisbe. I mean, everyone has.

On a dirty show. Who says that? I mean, it really rang my bell and production was worried and we had to kind of stop down for a day to make sure I didn't have some sort of hematoma or whatever. And I didn't. But in the time off that I had, I took the production van and I just drove up through glacier. Yeah. Like right up to the border and then back down and around.

And I've seen some things, man. I've been around. I have never seen anything as dropped. gorgeous as that. Yeah. Nothing. Yeah. And I was blown away by how accessible it was from Callispell, you know?

I was explaining that to somebody yesterday that one thing that makes Montana so special is the accessibility to public land. Yeah. If you're a hunter and you're in Texas, you have to find a lease or you have to pay or it's all private land, right? But in Montana, it's vast amounts of public land that's accessible. from almost every town you're in. And so even if you're not from a family with lots of money

or you don't have to have much to hop on your mountain bike and go up into the wilderness or hop in your car and run up in car camp or go fishing or hiking or hunting, it's a special place because most of what you see as you drive through is accessible to put feet on, which is really unique compared to most states. So you have access to unlimited beauty.

You got an old person. man who sounds utterly practical, highly skilled, utterly practical. Your poor mother just gets dragged along, you buy the giant shit hole and you move into it. And then they built the doghouse or the log house. It made her cry. It made her cry. Yeah. Honey, look what I got.

Oh, God. So, I mean, like all of these interesting different things, you know, and you played baseball, too, as a kid. What position did you play? A shortstop and pitcher, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it all sounds horribly and wonderfully well-rounded. And I'm wondering if that somehow is connected to whatever entrepreneurial muscle you're about to describe that led you to make the very things I'm about to reveal.

Yeah. I think the totality of like that never quit mentality of just plugging away, I think today we live in such a society of that everything has to happen instantly. and so fast, right? And an apprenticeship as a lineman is three and a half years. You know, a college degree is four years. Like, things don't happen overnight. It takes a lot. And then even when you turn out as an apprentice, you know, as a journeyman lineman,

they still don't trust you. It's like being a new Navy SEAL. Right. Like, you're not a Navy SEAL yet until they say you're a Navy SEAL. Right. I think sticking with something and working, I watched my parents build their excavation business from a cabless backhoe to four new backos and an excavator.

but it took them my entire child, it took them 20 years. It takes a long time and I think people a lot of times expect things to happen too fast. I registered the name Montana Knife Company when I was 19 years old, but I didn't launch it until I was 39. It was COVID. It was 2020. And thank God my mom was smart enough to, you know, register the name. She thought it was a great name and we talked about it. And then I talked about starting Montana Knife Company for 20 years and just didn't do it.

it because I didn't know how to start a production knife company. Like I was making high-end two, three thousand dollar knives one at a time. How do you scale that? How do you scale that? And that's kind of back to that drummond speech. I told these kids, I said, for a long time, I thought, well, I'm just from Montana. You're like, it's not possible to start a brand or do this or do that. And then I started to get to know some people that ran big brands. You know, somebody like Evan Hafer, we talked about earlier before the podcast that Black Rifle Coffee, I mean, he's just from Logging Town, Idaho, went to the military, and he started what ended up being Black Rifle Coffee. And I told those high school kids, what you end up realizing maybe

later in life is by growing up a rancher's kid or, you know, a plumber's kid or whatever, you learn resiliency in the hard work that a lot of other kids don't learn and the stick-toitiveness. At a certain point, you realize, like, why not? Why can't a really cool? cool brand start in small town Montana. I told my wife, my new wife, I had gotten my apprenticeship with the power company and I did the lineman thing, ended up actually divorced and then my house burned down. And so I was living in a camper in my driveway with my four kids and I was rebuilding my home. I sold my pickup. I barely hung on to my place and I was broke as hell 10 years ago this year. The Facebook memories popped up. I mean, I was,

I bought a piece of crap old 1980 Chevy from my foreman at work, and then the thing died on me two weeks later. And I was so broke living in my camper. I was so far away from starting this company. What do you do when your foreman sells you a lemon? Get laughed at by all the other journeymen. That's linemen. Yeah, that's right.

He just made fun of. Yeah. You know, but I went a few years of just grinding out, coming home, doing kids' laundry, trying to be a journeyman, lineman, not making much for knives, just trying to survive, frankly. And then I met my new wife. I met Jess. After we got married, as we were getting married, I kind of told her my idea this Montana knife company.

And every day in the bucket truck, I would talk to a couple of the guys about, like, this dream of what I wanted to build. This guy named Dave Kennedy in particular. And I would tell him, I'm going to build this company someday. And I'm sure he thought, this is never going to happen. But we talked about every day for years. In the bucket truck. Up in the bucket. You know, you're in the bucket.

You're working on wire doing whatever. And you talk, you bullshit about, you know, everything. But some of them are your dreams, like, we're going to quit this job and we're going to start our own this or that. I got a riff real quick just on the, in the same way that Montana is really important to this story in terms of the backdrop where you grew up. The conversations you have in a bucket. Yeah. I know for a fact, they matter. because the geography of the bucket, the location,

you're in a small place face to face with another dude whose life is in your hands. Yeah. And you're 30 or 40 feet up in the air. Typically surrounded by all sorts of things that will kill you if you touch it wrong. 7,200 volt wire. Just busting and humming and buzzing.

And so, yeah, that's when you start to talk about stuff that matters to you, I guess. Yeah. Your bucket list, I dare say. Yeah. I mean, it might be your issues that you're with your spouse. house. It might be what your kids are up to or it might be what your dreams are, you know. And when I met my new wife, I told her about this Montana Knife Company idea. And she said,

well, I've got the kids in the house. Get to your shop after work and build it. Do it. And I built some prototypes in 2019 and I took them to Bert Sorens. He owns Sorenx out in South Carolina to an event called Winterstrong. And it's his collection of friends from the outdoor industry and the fitness world and sports world. But, he only invites people of just really accomplished amazing things. And he lets the two communities kind of learn off of each other. But what you find is you're surrounded by just people who have done really cool things. Yeah. And it could be a Navy SEAL. It could be a guy that played for the Green Bay Packers. It could be a businessman, whatever. And I was there teaching,

forging with another knife maker that actually invited me there, Neil Camamora. I showed them these prototypes around. And that community there was incredibly supportive. They were like, you got to do this. You have a great story. These are great knives. Like when you're surrounded by so many people that have accomplished amazing things, when my wife and I left there in February 22 after that weekend, or 20 after that weekend, I was like, we're doing this. I'm going home and I'm doing this. And that was right, that was first weekend in February of 20 and right then COVID started bearing down. I just think, too, it's really important to point out,

that you'd already had a level of success. You made a sword for a chic. You know, it would seem that right in the wake of doing something that incredibly cool, you would go, that's it, I'm making knives. That's it. I got like all lights are green. Let's go. Let's do it.

But you didn't. Yeah, I wanted to build this brand all the while, before I ever started this company, over that stretch from my, say, from 20 years old to 39, when I started this, I noticed a trend. In stores, one, so many things were being made more and more overseas. And as men, generally, we have passed down for generations, knives and guns. And all of a sudden, I started seeing in stores like replaceable blade throwaway knives. Because a guy doesn't know how to sharpen a knife, we now buy razor blades and we throw them in the bushes or we throw them in the garbage.

because, you know, my great-great-grandfather and yours and everyone else probably sat around at night with no Instagram and just sharpened his pocket knife. Yeah. But now we don't know how to do that. So we're throwing those away. And we're, I sharpened over the years hundreds and hundreds of knives that guys would bring in and say, my grandfather was in Vietnam. He passed away. This is the only thing I have of his. It was his pocket knife. Or he carried this knife in Vietnam or he carried this knife as a logger in Idaho. It doesn't matter what the knife is. It mattered who carried it. And we're now throwing that away. And also, it doesn't have as much heart and soul when it's coming from Pakistan or China or whatever. And, you know, we also pass down, you know, artwork, maybe old cars or something like that. But we don't pass down a lot of things, jewelry.

And we live in this throwaway society. When you walk into Target, you can not throw a baseball and not hit something that's made to throw away. And it bothered me and I thought, I want to build a brand that builds something that's going to get passed down. That when you hand this Montana Knife Company knife to someone, even when that is sharpened away to next to nothing, someone's going to go, I'm just going to put it up here on the mantler in my safe. I'm not going to throw that away, you know, because my great grandpa might carried it, you know. Isn't that somewhat true, not just of guns and knives, but in the larger, like what, what is a knife? What is a gun? It's a tool. It's a tool. And when I think of my

grandfather's tool shed, he had a shop that was actually bigger than his house down the hill from him. And it was filled with tools from his dad and his granddad. And these tools had all been, the technology had rendered them not quite useless, but just obsolete. And yet there they hung. Yeah, even like an axe head that the handles broke off. They were everywhere. Right. They were everywhere. Or an old rake or a shovel that's been broken or something. And for some reason, you just don't want to throw that shovel head away. There's something to that because someone's hands wore that thing out. Right. It's got a story to it. And when a knife is in someone's pocket, or maybe it's, my mom has her great-grandmother's kitchen knives. I mean, they've been

sharpened away to nothing. But, my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mom, every one of them have their hands have used those. That thing cut a turkey at Thanksgiving in 1950. Right. There's something about it. So it's, when I started this company, I had no idea how to produce knives on scale at all. You can't just call some big knife company and ask them how they do it, right? And so I did everything wrong in the beginning. But I started, I made a couple hundred blades and met my business. And met my business partner Brandon. He helped me do the marketing side of it, built me a website. And in 2020, I just decided I'm going to ignore COVID because in 2010, I quit my job because I was worried about

the breaking news on television. And I told my wife during COVID, I'm not doing that again. I'm ignoring the breaking news on television. And I'm just going to control what I can control. And we're going to just build this. And we just ignored COVID. And my 14 year old daughter at the time, She's 18 now. She was helping grind handles. My little boy, Hank, at the time, he was five foot tall, barely now. He's 6'5 and a monster. But they were all helping me in the shop, put those knives together, and we were doing everything wrong.

How big's Hank? Six, five, you said? Yeah, 16-year-old, he's a monster. Oh, my God. Yeah. She's a gladiator. But the point is, is we just started building these in my garage, my two-car garage, you know, one knife at a time and learning. and this thing started to kind of ramp up and go well through 20.

In January 1st of 2021, I needed a day off from my job as alignment. I actually needed December 31st off. Thomas Wrett, the country music singer, had DM'd me and wanted to meet up and get a knife from me at a ski resort down in Big Sky. And I went to my boss at the power company and I said, hey, I need the 31st off here in a few days. but I'm out of vacation time. Right. And he was like, well, it's corporate. He's like, well, you're out of vacation.

I'm like, well, I have four weeks starting the next day, the first. Like I said, I need this staff. Let's figure out a way to move vacation around whatever. And he was like, it's not going to happen. And I said, well, this is a big deal. I don't know what's going to come of it. I asked him about it a few times. And finally on December 31st, I walked in and, or December 30th, I said,

hey, what about tomorrow getting that off? And he was like, well, it's not going to work. And I said, well, I'll be done at noon. And that's when I quit my job to go full-time making knives for, you know, doing my Montana Knife company dream. Do do, do, do do do do do do. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird.

It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. It's just that I don't envy him. That's why MicroWorks doesn't have. have an HR department for better or worse. And it's also why I use ZipRecruiter whenever we need to expand. ZipRecruiter has proven themselves a million times over by helping countless employers get through the hiring process faster and more effectively than ever before. And now they have a new

feature that instantly shows you the most interested, the most passionate, and the most qualified candidates first. This is a huge time saver, hours and hours of save time. And it helps people like me find the people who can function in a non-traditional work environment like microworks. In other words, ZipRecruiter works for me, and they'll probably work for you too. Post a job for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash row. And watch what happens. Odds are you'll find a human resource that just happens to be a great fit for your company in 24 hours or less. ZipRecruiter.com slash row.

ZipRecruiter.com slash row. The smartest way to hire. Interesting juxtaposition that you just said that. You said kind of a big deal. I don't know what's going to come of it. Yeah. But it was still kind of a big deal. Yeah.

You had to go do this thing. And the only way you were going to be able to do it is to basically burn the ships. Yep. Right? Yep. And that's exactly. And my wife had been telling me for two months, you got to quit your job and do this. And I was like, uh, I don't know.

I mean, it felt selfish because, you know, a lineman's making 110 to 15 grand a year, benefits, paid vacation, all the things, right? And I have four kids. It feels selfish to quit your job and chase your dream. You have a guarantee. Like, that lineman job is a great career. Yeah. And I just kept saying, like, I just, I don't know. And that was finally the moment where I was like, and as it turns out, I mean, I went and met Thomas, great guy.

He got a knife. Nothing came of it down the road. It's not like that was no big landmark thing, but it was the like tipping point. Yeah. And so the next six months, we didn't, my Brandon and I didn't take a paycheck.

Every dollar we made, we just put into making knives and we, you know, we made 200 and we sold them and then we made 250. We sold them and we made 300. And we just kept using that money to buy more steel,

buy more hand of material. Eventually hired Tristan, who was in high school, school. He was graduating. A straight-a-student had a full ride to college on an academic scholarship. This is a kid that grew up camping in his yard, like doing outdoor stuff. He's just an outdoorsy kid, right? But he's really smart. And he was in high school. And I hired him in 21 in the spring before he was out of high school. He worked for me through the summer and fall came in 21. and he had a choice to go to college or to keep working for us.

Mind you, I have one employee, two, maybe two at that point, making $12 an hour. Four years ago. Four years ago. And Tristan would just back and forth over this decision. And I said, hey, man, I can't promise you anything, but there's something special going on here. I think you can see it. You do what you need to do, but I think this is special. So he decided to skip college that year.

for us all through the winter and he just kept seeing it build and for the next two years every year came along the fall and he's like man do i go to college and today he's managing 30 employees for us on salary making a great salary and he's getting a college education at work and he's working for my director of operations who ran all the operations for amazon for their spokane store he's getting a PhD in operations on salary. It's amazing. How many employees now altogether? 65.

How many knives will you turn out around them? This year we'll do about 150,000. 150,000 individual knives. And they range in price from what to what? 200 to 350. And then, you know, we sell apparel and cutting boards and all kinds of things. And what's really cool about what we've done. built is it's all in America. I got to go see where our steel is rolled. I got to see what we've

been doing a lot of this. I had to have done in other shops around the country. You don't just start a production facility out of the gate. You hire shops to do things. And then as we grew, I started bringing processes in-house. And we've been bringing them in. This was all in my two-car garage in 20, 21. And in 22, we built a new shop in my horse pasture, about a 10,000 square foot building. We grew out of that. We just bought 27 acres and we're just starting, we're going to break ground on a 50,000 square foot manufacturing facility this fall. So you did it. It's awesome. Yeah. Before I unveil these knives and show their magnificence to the world, we ought to at least

toast your success here. Absolutely. This whiskey has my granddad's name on it. Oh, that's awesome. Noble Tennessee whiskey. I wanted to do something. We didn't sit. COVID out either. In fact, I don't know, I didn't have the same experience you did, but I was so agitated by March, April, by May, I was just jumping out of my skin and I just felt like something so tragic was afoot. I was getting all these letters from people like you who grew up watching dirty jobs with their kids and they're like, man, essential work is headline news. This show should be back on the air. And I was so grateful to have a chance to do that, you know, to bring it back. Yeah. And so my pop, who sounds a lot like your dad, you know, not around anymore, obviously,

but we got some pretty good whiskey, put his name on it. What was his name? Carl Noble. Karl Noble. K-N-O-B-E-L. Electrician by trade. That's cool. Not alignment, but an electrician. Well, cheers to Carl. Well, cheers to MKC. Amazing. Well, you know, the whole thing is, is I hear your message all the time about, you know, the trades and it's not that college is the wrong choice for a lot of people. You know, my daughter is going on a basketball scholarship this fall for college. She's going to be a veterinarian. She's been riding around with a veterinarian, large animal vet, horses, cows. She's been riding around with Angela Clark for the last five years. She started riding around with her when she was in seventh grade, castrating horses and

doing surgeries and she comes home and she's sitting at the dinner table telling us about the horse sheath she cleaned out today and like just all this grosses out my son but uh hank six five hank yeah he grossed out by his sister she's that beautiful um but the point is you know she needs to go to college to accomplish her dream of becoming a veterinarian but i told those kids when i spoke at their graduation and actually in there i had spoke at one of the younger grades in that school earlier in the year. I wished I would apply myself more in school when I was younger as far as I ended up learning some of the math and some of the things that my teachers wanted me to learn in seventh, eighth,

ninth grade. I ended up using in my lineman career, you know, when I got my apprenticeship, I had to go buy the book math for dummies because I didn't pay attention in high school because I thought it was dumb. And I wished I had to paid more attention then, but I also told those kids, if you don't go to college, you're not a failure. A lot of people were telling us when we were graduating high school, like college was, that's how you became successful. Sure. But I watched my dad become successful over 20 years, you know, very successful. And also not rich. Like, successful doesn't necessarily mean

rich, but grew a great business and raised a great family. And I told those kids, too, you can grow a big brand like what we've grown. I mean, we're working. We're working. with all these huge companies and I'm meeting people like you and Joe Rogan and all these neat people. And I said, what you end up finding out is those people are just like you. You know, they've just done extraordinary things because they ground for 20, 30 years at what they do to get to where they got. And they also had a moment in their life like you did when you get these two convergent

and divergent thoughts. It's kind of a big deal. I don't know what's going to come of it. We don't have to. but you either act on it or you don't. Yeah. I'm sure Rogan has great stories in the early days about, you know, burning the ships and taking the risk and finding yourself in the middle of the lake.

And you either keep going. Yep. Or you turn back. Yeah. You know. But what does success look like? What will it take if it hasn't already happened to look at MKC and go, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's it. It's amazing because people think they congratulate me that I've made it. congratulations you've made it. And I'm like, we're trying to figure out how to finance a 50,000 square foot building now. We need to sell knives more than ever at the moment, right? I don't think there ever is that moment. I don't know how you ever just sit back and be like good enough. Done. Yeah, we made it. Right. I think success for sure has already been accomplished by the fact that we've hired 60 people here in America on jobs with benefits and paid vacation and we're making knives in America. And we've accomplished the American dream, but we haven't. Like,

we still have so far to go because there's still processes we don't do in our own shop. I want to build a knife start to finish in my shop. But that's going to take years. I still want to build folding knives. Right now, we build fixed blades. I still want to see every American soldier carrying one of our blades. I want to help our community. You know, we buy, we go to the local 4-H auction and we buy, last year we bought like a steer at the local 4-H auction that the neighbor kid raised and we put it in our freezer in the shop for the employees to take home at night. I think there's so much more. And one thing that I want to see, and this is really up your alley, you know, how do we make America quote-unquote great again,

right? I see these politicians all talking about everything overseas, but I don't see them talking much about how they're going to fix at home, right? Because I think the problem at home is hard. It's really hard and it's in front of our face. Yeah. I actually talked to Trump Jr. was at my place a few weeks ago and I talked to him about this and I said, what if the government actually funded a program where we built a huge warehouse right in the dead center of the inner city? A big empty building. Yeah. And you brought a bunch of kids in and I'm talking like 14, 15 year olds. 13 year olds and you said there's water at the edge of this building we're going to lay out some rooms in here we're going to put a bathroom down at that end we're going to put in a kitchen and we're

going to build some walls all the way through this building we're going to wire it we're going to turn the lights on in this place we're going to plum it we're going to put sheet rock all through it we're going to paint it we're going to do every trade essentially that is is out there you know from framing wiring, plumbing, mechanical, sheetrock, paint, trim, carpet it, tile it. We're going to have a party at the end of the year and we're going to wreck it out. And then what all you kids are going to learn is there's, I'll bet you, all of those kids are going to find something in that project throughout that year that trips their trigger. Maybe they just love to paint.

Maybe they love trim work because they're detailed. Maybe they like to swing a hammer and drive nails in. But what you then tell those kids is, did you know this summer? you can go out and you can go knock on any one of these builders' doors and get on as a grunt for them this summer and probably make 20 bucks an hour. Right. And when you graduate high school, you'll probably within a year be running a crew. And in five years, you'll be one of their main foreman and in less than 10, you'll probably own your own your own company. That's how you provide actual hope. Like if you're in the inner city and you don't grow up in Lincoln, Montana and your dad doesn't own a tobacco business,

where's the hope? When I walk around L.A., when I drop into L.A., and I see a little kid that's born in the middle of this, of L.A., how is that kid ever going to get to run a Baco or swing a hammer? How does he even know what's possible? He doesn't. He doesn't. And look, I...

And the only way that they're going to know what's possible is if we... And if we built that, all we're building one time is a big empty warehouse, and then every year we frame it out and we wreck it out. But it's something real. that you teach those kids. And when they're like, hey, this summer you can go join the gang and you can go do whatever, or you could go get a job and make $20 an hour as a high school kid. It has to happen.

And, you know, I'm fine if the next president makes it happen. I'm fine if the feds lean into it. But I'm not holding my breath. Yeah. I feel like, you know, we've been at this 16 years now with Microworks. And the last couple of months, I've had some really odd encounters with some billionaires who you know. And they're looking at the headlines. And they're having these same conversations in many cases in the C-suite and in other cases on the construction site.

But I really feel like for the first time in my life anyway, there's a singularity that's starting to happen. And the headlines are catching up to some of my smack. And people are starting to say, Jesus, you know, every five knife makers who retire to replace them. Or cross-out knife maker and put in welder. Yeah. Steam for their pipe. Lineman, right?

Yeah. The shortages are unbelievable. So one of these gazillionaires, I think, I mean, can you imagine if Jeff Bezos just said, look, I own all of these fulfillment centers. Yeah. And there's so much dead space in them. What if I just put in a shop class? Yeah.

Like, why are we waiting for high schools to do that? What if Walmart calls Home Depot and says, is look, let's take some trucks and outfit them, right, with all these different trades. And you can put them in the Walmart parking lot on the weekends. And you're going to love this. And this actually, I didn't even think of this. When I was a senior in high school, we had 20 kids in my class.

And there was probably eight or nine of us that took what was called construction class. Jim Heisler taught it. He was the shop teacher. And construction class was like, you build something like a shed, right? Yeah. And so I talked to Mr. Heisler and I said, I need a knife shop because I'm graduating high school. I'm going to leave. This was my dad's idea. I'm going to leave and go somewhere. I don't know where, but I'm going to need

a knife shop wherever I go. So I was a senior. I bought all the materials and my senior class built a 10 by 14 shed that you would basically see at Home Depot, but it was wired, insulated, not sheetrock, but plywood on the inside, painted. And we built it on six by six skids. And And later that winter, when we had it finished, we put some hooks on the front of it. My dad and I, I brought a backhoe down there and towed it down the highway on the ice home to my parents' house. Just drug it down the highway. I made a sconce and wood shop once. That was the knife shop.

When I got married and moved into Missoula, I basically built it like an RV. There was a breaker panel in it, but I had a 220 cord hanging out the side of the shed. And when I got my first job with an excavation case, company in Missoula, I parked it next to his shop and plugged it into a welder outlet, and it ran all my lights and everything in my shed. And I made knives in that shed for the next four years. That's a version of what I'm talking about. We've become a weirdly sedentary people. You've got to pry people out of their zip codes now anymore. It goes to your point, too. Everything, starting with us, needs to be more mobile than it currently is. You've made a

portable knife shop. Yeah. And it's still at my house today. And, uh, The thing is, is though, is like, when people say shop class, I'm not talking in high school about making bread boxes. We need to teach kids how to build things for real. Like, maybe you can't frame up a whole shed and maybe you can't frame up the whole thing that I explained. But maybe all you do is frame up a 10 foot long by 8 foot tall wall and show kids how to run wire through it and how to wire outlets and plum and do different things. we have to teach kids real actual skills that they can use. Having said all that, mind if I open these things up now?

Please do. Take a look at them and share their magnificence with the world. This is a bison leather roll that's made by an awesome leather worker in Idaho, Francesca. She's an amazing, she's like 25 years old. And she, her medium is bison. She started making leather sheaths from her dad who was a knife maker when she was a kid, and she's got an amazing Teton leather company, amazing leather company.

They make all our sheaths. So this is a cutlery set, and I assume like everything else on your site that I just looked at, it's all sold out. Are you just back-ordered forever now? We don't take back-order, but we do drop. So every Thursday night, we launch knives on our site. You've got to sign up for our email list,

and then people get online. You have one of these knives, so this is the other three knives that makes a full set. That's our Big Horn Chef. there. But yeah. This is, it just, it feels right for starters. I mean, back to the art of a thing.

How do you make it feel so good in the hand? You know, we draw these things up in the beginning of the company. I would custom make everyone, I would make model after model. And this is where I said, like, I was doing some things maybe not exactly the most efficient. Now we can actually kind of 3D print drawings and stuff, but then I'll still go grind blades and actually feel them in the hand. Yeah. And make sure you have the balance right.

Another knife maker, actually, Mareko Malmasi, he's a chef's knife maker. He helped actually design these chef's knives because there again, I'm not a chef. I want to make the best tool possible for the person using them. So Mareko had a lot of experience in chef's knives. He helped me design these. It's kind of like the tactical knives.

I get a lot of feedback from actual veterans. I didn't serve. I asked active duty guys, veterans, as we're designing knives, I'm handing them prototypes, and they're, hey, rip this apart and we'll change it because I want to make what's the best tool for that person. Did you talk to Jocko in that crowd? Not on our knives, but I actually just sent his son, Thor, a knife. He's in SEAL Team 5, and I sent that whole crew, his whole platoon, our new tactical knife.

Jocko's great. I'm talking about Jock Wilnick. and I mean just No pressure son but your name is Thor Yeah Okay we're all Yeah

We're all counting on you to save the day dude Yeah Thor's awesome He's nice kid Does he know Hank? I don't think they've met no No they haven't met I think Thor and Hank together

Would be formidable Yeah This is what you call your Full Tang construction Yeah As I recall Chuck that means the steel And the blade runs

All the way through the length of the handle. Yeah, I got to get rid of my half, half ones. Your half tang? Yeah, my half tank. Be careful. Those are very sharp, man.

This looks very sharp. What makes it great? Well, the steel, first of all, it really starts with the steel. This is magna-cut stainless steel. There's another really cool story with that. Tell me. When I turned 13 years old at the Oregon Knife Show

in Eugene, Oregon, a really nice knife maker offered to share his table with this little kid named Josh. His name was Devin Thomas. Everyone called him Haas. He was a big guy. And he made Damascus steel. And so he...

And it just makes so people understand what is Damascus steel. It's layers. If people think about... Most people think about samurai swords. Layers and layers of steel forged together. Like in my shop at home, I can forge steel at 2,500 degrees. Two pieces of steel when pressed together or hammered together will forge well to each other. So back in the old days, if you wanted to make something and you only had this thin bar of steel,

you could chop it up in pieces or you could fold it over on itself and you could create the size and dimension you needed under a hammer and a forge. Every town had a blacksmith, right? To work on wagon wheels and all that. Maybe the most critical vocation throughout history. Without a doubt. They were making swords. They were making literally wheels for wagons, armor. everything. I have a dumb question. Yeah. Why is the blade black? So that's a saracote finish. It's a finish

that just helps food slide off of those blades really nice. And on other types of steel that aren't stainless, it helps prevent the steel from rusting. And it's also just kind of our look. Most of our blades and our stuff have been black. And that sarah coat just helps protect the steel. But with the magna cut, Devin was sharing this table with me way back then out of the gracious goodness of his heart. 30 years later, today, his kid Laren, who wasn't born then, is a PhD metallurgist and invented magna-cut steel for knife makers. We were the first company to come out and use it, and it's a phenomenal steel.

It's highly stain resistant, holds an edge really well, it's tough. Most steels that knife makers have used in history were made for another reason, for another purpose, right? Ball-bearing steel, 5,200 steel. It's made to resist wear and to. industry. We make knives. MKC. does out of ball-bearing steel. But that was made to make ball bearings and then knife makers

repurposed it because it works well. But magna-cut steel was made for knife-making. Is the idea to work with the hardest steel that you can or does it need to be soft enough to hold a great edge? Yeah. It's a great question. So it's like a number one pencil, a number two pencil.

And the number three, like three is real hard. Yeah. And one is like a skid mark. People seem to gravitate to two. So it depends on the use of the knife, right? So that's a great question. The harder a piece of steel is, the more brittle it is. And it's an inverse scale.

As that blade softens and becomes less hard, your toughness goes up. Tensile strength? Yes. Yep. So, for example, as that blade softens way, way down, that steel gets tougher and tougher to the point where actually it becomes like, mild steel where you can bend it back and forth, but it has no edge holding ability. It's not hard at all. I said I became the youngest master blade smith in the world when I was 19, right? To do that, I had to hand forge a blade, finish that knife. It had to be able to chop a one inch rope

in half and one chop, right? That shows sharpness. That's not too hard. Hemp? Yep, one inch hemp rope. You then had to take that same blade without sharpening and chop two, two, two, two, by fours and half as many chops as you want. And when you get done, that blade has to shave hair off of your arm. When you're done with that, you then have to take that blade and bend it 90 degrees in a vise without breaking it. That's what I'm doing. That's the crazy part. Yeah. I've seen this done in competitions. Yep. Maybe even in forged and steel. Yep. Which we can circle back to. But it's, I mean, it's science. It's metallurgy. It is. But it's also that alchemy and that art and the, That's where the scientific part meets the craftsman part.

Right, because there's no precise playbook that says, do this, this, this, and this. And behold, Arthur, you may pull Excalibur from the Rock and go about your business. And I might heat-treat a knife like that for a camp knife that's going to bend and flex and you're going to pry and do all that. But for a chef's knife, I don't need that bend and whatnot. So I'm going to leave it actually harder, which means it's going to take a finer edge, it's going to hold an edge longer. but if I know I'm sending a knife to Afghanistan with one of our soldiers, I actually don't want to be as hard. I want to make sure he doesn't break that.

He's overseas. He's in Afghanistan. He can't send it in for war any work. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time? Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it.

The genie is out of the bottle. The poop is out of the goose, I'm afraid. AI is here to stay. And every business in the country is asking themselves the same question. How do we make it work for us? Well, the answer to that question varies, but you'll find it in a free guide that you can get right now at netseweet.com slash mike. It's called demystifying AI.

It's totally free. It's essential reading for anybody trying to make sense of a future that appears to have arrived yesterday. Netsuite, of course, is the number one AI enterprise resource planning software out there, trusted by over 43,000 businesses. With Netsuite, you can use the AI of your choice, GROC or Clawed or chat, GPT, whatever else is out there to connect to your actual business data, all of it, and automate all of those tiresome time-sucking, soul-deadening manual processes.

This is AI built into the system that's currently running your business. Learn more at netsuite.com slash Mike. And while you're there, pick up their free business guy, demystifying AI. It's filled with super useful information. And again, it's free at netsuite.com slash mic. That's netsuite.com. So again, what that knife is being used for. And that's the difference.

Like with Montana Knife Company, we are purpose building each knife depending on its use case. It's not just being stamped out in China, and it is what it is, right? Also, the steel is expensive. We're not trying to make the cheapest knife out there. It's going to take a little bit of we're making quality. This is, what, $1,500? Yeah, yep. I think $1,300 for this set.

The other thing you're getting with us, for the life of this set or any knife you buy from us, you send it into us. sharpen it for free and send it back the next day. So for people that don't know how to sharpen and don't want to learn, I want people to send those to us. I had a buddy tell me, you're going to go broke sharpening knives. You're going to pay somebody to just stand there and sharpened. I'm like, that means we've sold a lot of knives. Yeah, it does. And that sells more knives. If you get your knives back and you're telling your neighbor, man, I've had these knives for a year. They were dull as hell. I sent them in. They were back in three days and they're sharp as hell. Imagine a car dealer. who said, we appreciate your business.

You bring this back every six months. We'll change your oil. We'll charge you for the cost of the oil, period. Yep. Right? Yep. That's how you build a brand. Yeah.

And that's how you forge, dare I say, loyalty. Yeah. And that's by an American, back to, that's how things should be. If things are built in America, and you can email that brand and get an answer within 10, 20 minutes. And then they're going to say, hey, you broke your tip off your knife?

What were you doing? Oh, you were doing something kind of stupid. Yeah, don't do that anymore. And we're going to send you a new knife anyway. You know, and we do that all the time. Can you recycle a jacked-up knife? No, we don't do that. But sometimes we might fix it up and I'll stick it in my haystack in my barn.

What? You know, or I'll give them away to, like, buddies or something. You know, it's like I put a new tip on one. You know, we make our knives thin. Like our hunting knives, I don't want you. you carrying more weight than you need to carry. That's what I want to ask you about. So you mentioned these different applications,

and I just wonder how many buckets there are practically. I get the soldier, and I imagine the hunting world is its own thing. Yeah. And I imagine cutlery is its own thing. Yep. Is there another thing? There is, and it's a big one coming. It's almost like I gave you these questions asked.

You're doing a really good job, man. Thanks, you know. Thank you. It's my only skill. I think it was the one sheet I gave him. Yeah, yeah. So he's not reading. Oh, you mean the one that's a good.

as you grew up in a doghouse. Yeah. We're working on developing our own folding locking mechanism for a folding knife. And so we're targeting 2026 to come out with a pocket knife, right? So every dirty job you went on, I'll bet you 90% of those people had a pocket knife in their pocket. Right. And we're a hunting knife brand first. That's what we launched off into.

That's I'm a hunter from Montana. We went into the culinary knives. The tactical stuff were just launching. but the folding knife down the road, that's really something that it's everybody. Kind of like culinary knives. Everyone cooks, right? Everyone is potentially our customer.

Not everyone hunts. But folding knives, women carry them, men, all different trades. So that's really the big one. But honestly, that's what we need our new building for, our new manufacturing facility. We filled up this building that we're in. We're actually getting some equipment in here this fall and we have to move a piece of equipment out

just to make room for it. We're just jammed. Two generations ago, the average guy was walking around with a pocket knife. What happened? I don't know. I think less people have jobs where they have to do things with their hands. But I mean, I just walked down to the beach right down here. I wouldn't want to go down there without a pocket knife.

Fair. Or a sword. Go on a bottle of noble. Build me a sword. It definitely seems like there's a little. less people carrying knives. But I would say actually that pendulum feels like it's swinging back around because it is hard to carry a gun.

Self-defense is something that is important. Even out hiking, everyone should have a pocket knife. Yeah. Really should. Yeah. So that's the next phase. That's the next big one. But that's a couple years down the road.

We're really trying to build out the rest of our tactical, our tactical knives. This year we have some butcher knives coming out for those butcher's out there. That's the one thing you're going to see us as a. brand. We're not necessarily going to, like, the butcher market for what we're doing probably isn't massive compared to like culinary or the tactical world. But we're going to build knives for people who need a knife for their job. So I might sell less knives to butchers that I'm going to sell like folding knives to guys in their pocket. But if that means we make 5,000 butcher knives or 10 or 2 or whatever that number is, make them great. Yeah, we're going to make them as

great as we can. We're working with actually the bearded butchers. I don't know if you've seen their page. Yeah, I have. Funomenal. Amazing. They're awesome. I wanted to ask you too. I'm also curious, what did the sheik want with the sword? Yeah, a lot of guys ask me that. He actually is a real studious

he's a guy that loves his history of his region of the world. And so Ottoman Empire stuff. Yeah. Yeah, there's a book, Arms and Armour of Iran. Amazing. Amazing. What they built back in those days, the 1700s.

Shake actually sent me some original 1700s armor that's absolutely incredible. Because I kept trying to talk him in actually to some other things that I didn't want to build that sword. Actually, that sword was a real pain in the ass. But he had no interest in, you know, American stuff or European stuff. He wanted his kind of Iranian region. He wanted some of that, that old sword and that history. He wanted the history.

That collection of the Walsh collection. He wanted it done in today's Damascus steel and in, and, in, what I could do. So I built him a couple swords and a few daggers. Yeah. That's a good one too. I built him a couple of swords. We keep track of potential titles as the conversation goes.

Oh. I built him a sword and a couple of daggers. It's a good one. So how long we've been talking, Chuck? I don't want to be... Over an hour and a half. Okay, great. So I've got to land the plane pretty soon.

So we've got to come back to your speech in a moment. But I also got to ask you about forged and fire. you, well, how do I say this the right way? Reality TV is a siren song of sorts to a lot of people and a lot of different worlds for a lot of different reasons. Yeah. You know, and I'm sure you're thinking of American Chopper

and all these different worlds that that world can help magnify. And you mentioned it earlier, and I wanted to ask you then, what kind of bargain did you? you make or did you think you might have to make? Because the beauty of going on a show like that is to amplify your industry. Yeah. Which is a good thing. The danger of going on any reality show is that somebody's going to screw it up. Yeah. And turn you into something you don't want to be portrayed as. I'm just curious how that calculus played out for you. No, it's a great question because the first year it came out, I refused to go on it. They asked and I didn't want, I'm very proud

of my craft, right? And we are professionals in what we do, as far as knife makers, right? I didn't want to go on something that was going to make us look like asshats, right? And, you know, reality television can have that effect in certain, depending on how it shot and what shows. After seeing the first year, I thought they did a pretty good job of representing knife making respectfully. And so I went on it. You know, knife makers have their problems with it, but you also have to understand they're making television and you're trying to fit something in, you're, 40 minutes or whatever it is in an episode, four guys make it. A lot of stuff is going to hit the cutting room floor.

And I get that. But they didn't try to interject or infuse drama that was ridiculous or anything like that in there. Was it manufactured, not manipulating? No, it was not. It was a contest, though, right? It was a contest. Chopped with steel. It was.

But I thought, I've always thought, I haven't watched it honestly in the last few years, but those years that I was on it or that it was going, I always thought they did a good job with that. Yeah. I understand that things are going to have to hit the floor, right? The one thing that bothered me the first year was, or the first couple of years, was that they never sent back, you know, as a contestant, whatever you made on there, they kept, right?

And I would be okay with that except for the only person that ever got money from that show was the guy who won. He won 10 grand, right? So the way that show works is it whittles down the first four to two and then two go head to head. And so those two make a beautiful sword or whatever they make. It's a challenge every week. Yep. Different challenge.

Yep. And you go back to your home shop. Each of you do. You and I go back to our shops. We have a week. We make what they've told us to make. We come back to New York and we present it to the judges, right? And they test it and they do all their stuff.

Okay. Let's just say you win, right? You get 10 grand. I've just spent basically the last three weeks of my month as a knife maker dedicated to this show. I don't win any money, but they also keep the item, right? And I go home, and what really bothered me was, is they kept saying that we're about the knife maker, we're really wanting to highlight knife makers.

Well, they don't even say, like, it just says Josh from Montana. They're not putting your website on there. They're not even putting your last name a lot of times. And my thing is, is when they asked me to come on the second year in a row, I said, I'll come on, but I want to talk to the executive director. I have an issue. and basically they were like yeah yeah yeah and it got all the way down to the day before I was supposed to leave the guy called me and he says hey you haven't signed your contract yet you got to get you to sign your

contract and I'm like well I'm not coming I'm going skiing with my wife and they were like what are you talking about and I said I told you I wanted to talk to and you know long story short an hour later I got a call and it was from the executive director very nice person at first he was annoyed and I said hey man. They always are at first. I'm not trying to, I don't need blue emmins in my locker room or whatever, my dressing room. He said, here's the deal. And I explained it all. And he said, man, I've only ever made shows like with cooking, fashion, whatever. I said, when a guy places second on the show or first or whatever, for a lot of these

knife makers, that might be the highlight of their career. Yeah. I've done some cool things. The Forged and Fire thing was cool, but it's like not on my resume of cool things I've done. but for a lot of guys, a lot of these guys that go on that show are hobbyist makers. That's like the biggest thing they've ever done. Maybe they're sort of bent or broken half on the show or whatever. Fortune Fire doesn't need it. Send it back.

And I said, even if you want to keep all of it through the year and do your promo stuff, but at the end of the year, send it back. And that guy said, you know what? I can't promise you anything other than I'm going to try. And I said,

that's all I want. I'll see you in New York day after tomorrow. And so I flew out. And actually he came in and he talked to me and he's like, hey, I'm going to try. I promise you. That was a really good point. It was seven months later, I got a random text. It was both the swords that I had made on that show. And he said, both of these are coming back to you and every contestant from now and I'll get their swords back. Wow. Do you remember his name? I regretfully, I do not. I wish I did. Did he work for the

History Channel? He did. Yep. And he was very, very good person. I mean, look, I just asked credit where it's due. I wish I could give him the credit that's due. but he said history channel like some people fought him on it you know and oh yeah he went to bad about it and i explained to him i said hey the sword i made on that first season it's in your basement rusting right now at the studio in the bronx and he was like i don't know about that i knew one of the judges he's a knife maker it's a small world and uh i said no it's in your basement with rust all over it and it's a beautiful sword and uh when he called me back a few hours later he was like man i got to apologize he's like you're right that thing's not they're not they're not

being taken. I said, I know. They're in a case in your thing. Nobody's looking at them. I said, all those swords in there mean more to the guy who made them than they mean to you guys. This is, I mean, you've said a lot of memorable things in the last two hours. That's so important for me to hear for a lot of different reasons. I'll only tell you because you brought up dirty jobs and it was so important to not leave those people who welcomed me into their home feeling like they were being used as fodder or a punchline or just a necessary part of some. I mean, this was really before reality TV was truly a thing. Yeah.

You know, and the thing that saved us or didn't save us, but the thing that allowed me to do that was the behind the scenes camera, which Taylor now is my, like, our go-to guy for that. And like, whenever you show the viewer the truth of the thing, you know, you get credit. Yeah. And I just really feel for craftsmen who would be brought in there and knowing their swords rotting somewhere in a basement. And they came in, I mean, it's just, it's unnecessary

and good for that executive. Yeah, no. And I don't think they were doing anything malicious when they weren't sending them back. They just didn't know. They're making a show. It's a thing they made, whatever. But you don't understand.

It took me 30 years. to get good enough to the point to go on that show. Like when I make something like that, I am creating something with my hands. It means a lot, right? And even if that thing's broken half, you know, Bill and Ohio that never went to a knife show in his life

and he does it in his garage, and he's a dentist during the day or whatever, and he makes knives and he happened to get on forged and fire, it might be the biggest moment his knife-making career. You know, I've done other really cool things, but it was just the idea of it. Camera does funny things to people. Yeah.

You know, funny good and funny not good. But mostly just interesting. Taylor, do you remember who made that sign for me? Was it Dragon Forge? Dragon Forge, yeah. In Pine, Colorado, it was Rory, right? Look at that for me for a second. Drink that in, man.

That is iron and copper and... No, it's beautiful. I mean, he hand forged all those points. It took a long time. you know and they gave it to me yeah which is funny because it's 140 pounds at least yeah that was a nightmare to hang but one thing i want to point out you know the success i'm having and everything that i'm doing today with montana knife company and where i've been and stuff it all is because one because a guy rick dunkerly my little league baseball coach invited me to a

shot right and then it's also because there was no youtube there was no shows, there was no forged in fire, right? I had to go ask people how they did stuff, and they told me. The knife making community was never secretive. It was, we would have hammerins, and it would 30 and 40 guys would get together at our shop, and we would forge till two in the morning. The guys were sharing ideas, and they're playing with different things, and then back then there was no social media, so they'd go away for five months and show up to a knife show, and you saw the results of what they had learned at that hammering plus where they took it from there.

Steve Shackleford, the editor of Blade magazine, would write articles about us up there, and he nicknamed our region, the Montana Mafia. And it was these knife makers in Montana were working together, just pushing each other.

And coming up with ideas, I got to where I got because the knife making community was willing to share ideas. A lot of other industries, you go to art shows, and a lot of other people. They hide their tips and their techniques.

The knife making community is really, really cool in that way. That's great. How do people get involved? Like, where can somebody go who's listening to this, aside from... I mean, other than the Internet, right, the American Blade Smith Society, that's where I passed my master

and journeyman Smith test through. You join the American Blade Smith Society. They have directories of knife makers in your area. You know, and generally, if you kind of come hat in hand and you knock on somebody's door and you seem, you know, you're there for the right reasons. Guys will help you. They'll give you tips. And if you put some effort in, they're going to keep helping you more and more. Would you tell those kids at high school in that speech of yours? Just because you're from that small

town Montana or Wyoming or Idaho or wherever you're from, it doesn't mean you can't do great things. You can't go out and create a brand, right? You don't have to go to college. You know, I told them when I was in their class, good job A students for being A students and C students. Those are going to make really great employees someday. But I did. I said in that graduation speech, you missed out on some things that you think you missed out in the city. But all the while you were getting what was most important, which was work ethic, drive, never give up attitude. And it's how I ended up growing a brand.

And I said, you're sitting there looking at the big city. but what you don't know is a lot of those people are looking back at your Instagram going, I can't believe they're dragging cows around by the whole. My kids are in 4-H, right? My little girls are dragging around a 1,400-pound steer and riding horses and doing the things they do. And I said, you're jealous or sometimes you think you're missing out on things in the big city, but it's really the other way around. Those kids are missing out on things in your hometown.

Grass really is greener in Montana. Yeah, it's true. Do you ever see a river runs through it? Yeah. That was made about our river, the Blackfoot River where I grew up. The big Blackfoot. Yeah. I swear, Chuck, have you seen this? Of course.

That was Norman McLean wrote that book. Oh, really? And that last page, man, I read this thing probably 20 years ago. Do you remember how it ends? It's like Robert Redford's narrating it. And the old man, or the kid is now the old man. And he's standing there in the canyon. And he's fly fishing.

And the music is like impossibly beautiful. And the photography is impossibly beautiful. And talk about a trade. This guy McLean, he writes, I'll probably get it wrong, but he says, now all of the people I knew when I was young and didn't understand are dead, but I still reach out to them. and standing there in the Arctic half-light of the canyon.

All existence flows into my soul. The memories and the sounds of the little Blackfoot River, the big Blackfoot River, and the count of a four-count rhythm, and the hope that a fish will rise. And then he writes, Ah, in the end, all things merge. into one and a river runs through it. That's really cool. That's where you think it ends.

And then you turn the page and he says the river was cut from the great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On the rocks are priceless teardrops and below them are the words and some of the words are theirs. And then I am hauntled. by waters. That's amazing. It's like, damn. I mean, it's, you know, there are a lot of ways to make a knife, right? Yeah.

Well, it's been quite a ride. It's been quite a journey, but I'm living proof of everything you've been talking about. It's hard work, not necessarily taking the easy path or the prototypical path. But I want kids and people to know, or people that are adults that are chasing their dream, I get messages all the time about how inspired they are. I posted it when I quit my job and I was driving home, I almost got sick. I mean, I wanted to puke because I had just quit a dream job. A journeyman-alignment in our area with paid vacation and all the benefits and all that with a family and I quit that.

Like, my dad wasn't happy. Yeah, I bet. Because my dad busted his ass as a self-employed backo operator his whole life. He would have loved to have had paid vacation and benefits. fits. So I think he thought I was crazy. But if I had never chased that dream, you know, I talked about Montana Knife Company forever. I don't know how I would have lived with myself had I not given it a try. And what was the worst that was going to happen? I was going to have to go get another lineman job somewhere. Fill up another woodshed. Yeah. Yeah. The reason we're running out of media is because

with the possible exception of my mother, this is the best conversation I've had in ages. And the nicest gift I've gotten since Rory made me that sign. Well, thank you. Really? Your mother's amazing, by the way. Yeah, she's something awesome. America loves her. She's out of control.

Just finished her fourth book. She's amazing. I'll send you a copy if you want. Please do. Please do. With a pocket knife. Yeah. What a pleasure.

Well, thank you. Anytime. Thank you for what you do for America. It's a pleasure. Thanks for what you do for cooks and hunters and soldiers. Josh Smith, everybody. Oh, I assume it's Montana at knifecompancom or something close to it. Yep.

For God's sakes, go there and get some knives, people, or this shirt that I'm wearing. Or a hat. There you go. Or what in the world was this? Yeah, that's our seasoning. Another cool American brand tactic calories that you put that on a steak, it's going to blow your mind. You know, sometimes you make stuff like, he was like, hey, let's do a seasoning together. It's like, oh, that sounds good, you know, it's cool.

It's got our logo on it. And then you put it on a steak, you're like, that shit's actually. That's pretty pretty good. Yeah. Well, eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. Josh Smith. Thank you. Cheers.

When you leave a review, only five stars will do, not just one or just two or just three, we were hoping. Four. As in a one more. Just a quick review with five stars two. America's first pledge was freedom. Jeep still carries that fighting spirit. With the Jeep Declaration of Deals, we're pledging our allegiance to the American people

with great deals on the luxurious Grand Cherokee, with available three-row seating, premium craftsmanship, and tech that turns every drive into an adventure. Or Jeep Rangler with legendary 4x4 capability and open-air freedom. Because freedom deserves the vehicle built to carry it. Jeep, there's only one. Hurry into your local dealer for the Jeep Declaration of Deals. Jeep has won more awards over its lifetime than any other SUV branch.

Jeep with the Jeep Grill or registered trademarks of FCAUS LLC.