The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 485: Josh Smith—Made FOR America

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Founder and president of Montana Knife Company Josh Smith sits down with Mike to discuss his unlikely path from working as a lineman to becoming one of America's premier master bladesmiths. The conversation dives into the grit, craftsmanship, and obsession with quality that helped turn a small operation into one of the fastest-growing knife manufacturers in the country. The two also talk about the grand opening of MKC's brand-new 50,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Missoula, where Josh explains why controlling his supply chain matters now more than ever—and what "Made in America" actually requires behind the scenes. Along the way, Josh gives Mike an exclusive look at a brand-new blade that hasn't been released to the public yet. It's a conversation about work ethic, American manufacturing, entrepreneurship, and the sharp edge between tradition and innovation. Tip o' the hat to our excellent sponsors ZipRecruiter.com/Rowe to post a job for FREE. GoodRanchers.com Use code MIKE to get $40 off your first order and free meat for life. SkillsUSA.org/mike Join the skilled trade movement!

Well, it's the way I heard it, as you probably knew. I'm Mike, and my guest today is Josh. And with me in PH3 is Chuck. Should I be more formal with the names you think? I don't think you can't. Josh Smith, Chuck Klausmeier, Mike Rowe. All that's true. Josh Smith, if he sounds familiar to you loyal listeners, it's because he's been on a couple times once in 2024. And then once we did a remote with him and our friend Bayard Winthrop. that's right uh shortly after the tariffs yeah instituted right because i was really curious to hear from people who were making stuff in this country you know and the tariffs were headline news and i guess they're still in the headlines but it's a really um well it's a sensitive topic for a lot of reasons mostly because it's been politicized horribly but there are consequences and many of which

are unintended, I think, that are worth acknowledging. But that's really not why I want to Josh back on. Josh Smith, who created the Montana Knife Company six years ago up in Frenchtown outside of Missoula in the great state of Montana, really had a milestone. He built an enormous manufacturing facility. Yeah. And it's not just beautiful to look at. It's extraordinary in that $5,000. people traveled from all over the country to stand in line for a chance to get a tour of the factory floor. And he's encased the whole thing in glass so people can stand in like the lobby and look at the product being made, which I just think is terrific. I mean, honestly, I didn't think there were 5,000 people in the state of Montana. Well, I don't know that there are,

but that's why I said they came from all over. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And, So why Josh Smith? Because he's making a truly useful product for Americans and anybody who wants one. He's doing it in this country. He went from working out of his basement on his ranch to employing 121 people. He's built a $70 million company. Yeah. And here he is doing this incredible unveiling, this remarkable milestone.

And I just, for the life of me, I felt. terrible that I couldn't be there personally because he did invite me. But I was kind of just appalled that there was no national media there. And he invited them, you know. Yeah. Like this is a chance to cover one of the great American manufacturing success stories in the last five or six years. And it sure does seem like with everything out there, all the commitments and all the desire to reinvigorate the trades and re-sure and re-industrialize, this would be a, a cornerstone. You think it'd be a slam dunk for national media to pay attention to it. Yeah. You know, and listen, and one of the things that comes up in this episode that's really important is the

fact that he's getting ripped off by imitators. People are, you know, buying what they think is an American-made Montana knife. And in fact, it is not. And so if you are looking to get a Montana Knife Company knife, there's only one place to get it. And that's on his, website, montana knife company.com. And why would you do that? Why do you really need another knife? I don't know. I'm not sure how your cutlery is currently arranged or what your practical needs might be, but I can tell you this, study after study is proven. People feel better after buying a knife from MKC. It's just the act of doing it. They're not cheap, but Josh has done so many things right. And his customers have rewarded him in a way that only a truly engaged customer can by

showing up to celebrate the opening of this facility. So I invited it back on. Also to thank him, you know, he told me a couple years ago he wanted to do something nice for the MicroWorks Foundation. And so he made a custom blade for MicroWorks, which sold out in about six seconds. I mean, hundreds of them. And we raised, I don't know, know, $60,000, $65,000. And then he created something called the rocker, which is the ultimate working man utility knife. Yep.

And pledged like 10% of sales to microworks forever in perpetuity. Yeah. And that's generated close to $200,000 so far for a work ethic scholarship program. So yeah, I'm biased. I like Josh. I like his product. I like Montana. I like what he's doing up there.

And, you know, the more I talk to him, the more certain I am that we're back in the right horse here. If you need a knife, suffice it to say. There's only one sensible place to get it. And if you want a really fun, honest, transparent conversation about what it takes to run a business, a manufacturing business in these United States here in the year of our Lord, 26,

we'll stay tuned. Because this episode is called Made for America. which will be explained at the very end. So stick with us, Josh Smith right after this. 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 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

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ZipRecruiter.com slash row. smartest way to hire. You live up by San Francisco. Is that right? North, north of the city. Not far. Just over the bridge. So you still,

my wife and I were talking about being surprised that you were still in the state and... Yeah. I'm surprised. I'm paying taxes here. I'm surprised myself. I sure.

Are you? Especially as much as you're gone. You know what? It's funny. I was just driving over the Golden Gate yesterday going in to narrate a pile of shite. And I'm like, God damn, I can't believe the toll on this.

bridge. It's gone up like... How much is it? It's like nine or eleven dollars or something. But I'm thinking, what's the toll for the state, you know? Like the toll just to wake up and breathe here. Oh, it's steep. It's hefty. My next door neighbor just got his residency. He's got a dental practice right down here in L.A. or somewhere. And he's just spent more than half his last year of 25 in Montana because now he's paying income tax in Montana and he's about to sell his business. If you're just joining us, folks, it's the joys of living in California with Josh Smith. By the way, dude, welcome to a very short list, aside from my mother and I guess one or two other. Salina Zito.

Selina Zito, who writes a great column called In the Middle of Somewhere. We don't have a lot of people back twice. Really? Really. Well, I'm honored. Well, don't be honored because I'm going to exploit you and pick your brain shamelessly here. Thank you for making the time. Yeah.

Well, and how is your mom? My mom's good. She's working on her fifth book, almost finished. She's like, God, is she 88 or 89? I mean, she's old, man. I have to look it up. She's very old. She's amazing.

She's incredible. Yeah. And my dad is like 93 or 94, and, you know, he's just living their best life with the botchy ball, you know, and they've got the book club, and they got the pool tournaments, and they've got the, you know, geez, all the games, the boggle, and the, what's the one we always joke about Chuck, the game with the funny name?

Oh, right. What is that crazy game? You know, and she always says, is it pronounced this or that? Yeah, yeah, what is that? Maybe that should just be the name of the game. Oh, God, yeah. Do you remember that?

What? Rummy Cube. Rumi Cube or rummy Club. Or Rummy Cup. Or Rummy Cub, yeah. Well, I mean, to answer your question, This is a perfect example of the kind of exchange you could expect to enjoy at the O'Krest retirement community. A sentence starts, a proper noun, vanishes from the short-term recall,

and maybe a half hour spent trying to identify what it was I thought I wanted to say. Welcome to the show. Yeah. Perfect. Big congratulations, man. Thank you. You guys, just in a way of a quick bit of back story, in case I didn't do it in the preamble, Josh has been making knives now with MKC. What are you in six or seven years?

This would be year six, yeah. I mean, kind of year five, really. Which is nothing, which is young. You're very, like for a manufacturing company, you're still early, early innings. But what a milestone you've just hit in Montana. Thank you for the invite. I'm so sorry I couldn't make it.

Josh opened an incredible facility where, I mean, the handiwork is truly on. display here. Yeah. It was a glass building. Yeah. And, you know, I'm just, he walked in the studio 10 minutes ago and I'm watching this video on YouTube and they're like thousands of people turned out to see what you built. And I got so many questions for you, but how do you account for that, man? Why do people care about the business of making knives? I think it's the American dream manifesting right in front of people's eyes. And they've gotten to watch the struggles and watch me start it right from scratch in my garage in COVID in 2020 you know and it was just at that time

my daughters and my son and my wife and I and uh you spin that forward today it's 121 employees and it's been really I mean I quit my day job December 30th of 2020 so we kind of consider that like our first day like we're still a lineman then yep I was a lineman for the power company yeah and so that was really what we considered day one is January 1st of 21 when it was like, okay, we're going to go after this. Yeah. And a couple buildings later, you know, built the second building out of my two-car garage and my horse pasture because it was like, I'm not sure this is really going to go for a long time, but we'll see.

And we were in that about three months and realized we're going to grow out of this building. And that's when we started looking for ground and built what we just moved into, which is 51,000 square feet of manufacturing space. With a black rifle coffee in a retail store inside of that. In Missoula. In Missoula, Montana, which is, I'm very, very proud of that because it's not a manufacturing base. It's not a place people go to. It's not a hub.

No, it's a place to go fly fish, you know, but it should show anybody and everybody out there that you can be anywhere in this country now and. start a company and build an American brand, which is what we're building. Yeah. Well, look, I mean, that's why I wanted to have you on again. A, to say congratulations for this. I'm looking at the, yeah, the video right now. Why is it going fast forward like that?

Is that intentional? No, that's you, dude. I don't think it is. That's weird. Well, something going on there. Yeah, it's a play thing. Yeah, I'm standing on a fire truck there. It's funny, we had so many people there that I had to, we climbed up,

The fire department brought out their fire trucks, and we spoke to the people in front of that. We had between four and five thousand people attend that day. That's so crazy, man. I still can't get over it. Mostly from out of state. People, they were out of rental cars in Missoula on Thursday afternoon for a Saturday event. It was crazy. I mean, this sounds paternalistic.

I don't mean to ask it this way, but do you, I mean, do you fully understand what kind of engagement that represents when a knife customer, will drive from out of state to stand in line at three o'clock in the morning for the privilege of touring a manufacturing facility where the aforementioned knives are fashioned. That's weird, man. It's weird for sure. I mean, it's people ask me all the time. They're like, why? And we ask ourselves. I mean, in a way, don't understand it. In another way, it's a positive story. It's one of the few things that you look out there and you see and it's so positive. Everything about it is positive. It's that you know, we didn't sell out to VC like we bootstrapped it. And I constantly over the last five years have been on social media saying like my, I mean, my employees got to watch and this was

really good for them. They got to ask me, why are those people stretching a tape measure across your house? And it's like, because I'm putting, Brandon and I are putting our houses on the line to build this next building. Like we're borrowing and we're doing everything we can. And we talked about the struggles all the way along of growing manufacturing and how do you start with nothing. And I didn't know how to do this. I was alignment. You know, to scale everything I did, I did wrong in the beginning as far as like the first 200 knives I made. I did it all wrong. And I realized this isn't scalable. And I started researching and just improving each day. But I think the reason it resonates is because it's, we've done it in front of the public. And it also,

I'm just a regular person. I'm not some fancy business guy or celebrity or had big money behind us. And I think people want to come out. Most people just said they wanted to come up and just say congratulations. That's it. You know, I think there's a micro macro element to everything you've done. You know, it's, yeah, you're one guy. All Shucks, Josh Smith, Montana, grew up where you did.

did background, what it is, and you've built this thing. You know, that kind of story relates to individuals. But all of this is playing out right now at a time in our country that is just incredibly consequential on a macro level, you know, from tariffs to reshoring, reindustrializing. Like this idea that, you know, can we do it? Like, can America actually actually? surely get back to the business of making things. Yeah. You answer that question in the affirmative. We do.

You're doing it. This really does actually relate exactly to your message. And here's how what you preach about so often with apprenticeships, the trades, this is the evolution of that. So I went through an apprenticeship. You know, I was a struggling custom knife maker in 2009 when the housing market crashed. and $5,000 knives were the first thing to leave people's budgets. And so I had four young kids, you know, kind of a starving artist knife maker.

And I went and got, well, honestly, really I started as a groundman, but I got an apprenticeship to become a lineman. That apprenticeship leading into becoming a journeyman alignment allowed me to put a little bit of money in the bank and take a look, kind of step back from my business and say, I want to start this Montana knife. company that I'd been dreaming of doing. But the apprenticeship and becoming a journeyman gave me the basically a little bit of money to be able to survive and then build this on the side. And the thing about what we're doing is we're showing that you don't have to be somebody

special with a business degree to grow what we've grown. If you've gone through an apprenticeship and you're, you know, a journeyman or a foreman on a crew figuring out how to put a pipeline over a mountain or build a power line over a mountain or plum of giant apartment complex, you are problem solving every day. You're managing people. You're leading. You're following plans. You're working, you know, you're dealing with finances. You're doing everything that you do to build a business. You're doing in your day job. And I think what people need to see is you can get that apprenticeship. You can put 10 years in and gain that experience. And you can go leave that and chase your dream and have the confidence that I've been doing all this in my career. I've been problem solving. You know,

I've been leading people. I've been seeing how not to be led. I mean, honestly, that's when I was at a big corporation at a power company. I took more out of there about how I didn't want to treat my people than how I do. You know, and so I think what you are doing and what the young folks who are getting these apprenticeships and going into the trades will find is there's some of them that will come up with an idea and they'll transition out of that into chasing their own. own dreams and building their own version of Montana Knife Company in their interest. Well, it's interesting. You know, I thought of you a few hours ago, not just because I knew you were coming in,

but because I was talking to this woman, McKenzie Price, who runs these things called Alpha Schools. And it's rooted, really it's an attempt to save public education, which, as you may have noticed, is kind of crap the bed in a fairly spectacular fashion from sea to shining sea. Yeah. And she refers a lot to the Socratic method and the Aristotelian way of learning, which was the original mentorship. So Plato, mentors Socrates, who mentors Aristotle, who teaches Alexander,

who goes on to be pretty great. And they're like, run the world. Yeah. That's an apprenticeship program. You know, way before we use that word. Do do do do do do do do. Dumb. I love stories.

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dot com American meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch, get good ranchers now. E-Ha! You know, the first time I talked to you, you talked about this theme as well, and I've just become so convinced in the last 18 months that the apprenticeship model, the mentor model,

it's not negotiable. We must have it. We must have it back in this country. We must have it in our schools. We must have it on the job site. We must have it. The entrepreneurs must have it. But so too must Jensen Wong.

And, right, it's just, there's just no getting around it. And so I'm really interested. I wanted to ask you, how do you teach the business of doing what you do? You make arguably the highest quality blade in the country. Right. How do you teach people how to do that? Well, you know, to be honest, it's something that I've had to learn and transition even how we do it. Because the way that we build our knives is not the way I custom forged every single knife.

And so I even had the opposite of me teaching someone how to do that. I had to go find people that had the skills to build these knives at scale and then take what I know about knives and put it in that model. Right. When you're using CNC machines, computer controlled, you know, milling machines and stuff like that. It's not stuff that I used in my custom knife making, but I knew what made a really good blade. I knew how to heat treat it. I knew, you know, the geometry of blades. And so when you take that custom, and I think it can be this way for other, you know, you take a custom home builder.

And then how do you build thousands of apartment, you know, one at a time, right? And so part of it is also going out and finding people who are experts in their area and just empowering them to do what they know, to do. Let it be great. We're bringing in the entire heat treat process in-house, and far as I know, we'll be the only knife company in America heat-treating all of our knives in-house. Why is that significant? Why should people give it that? That's the heart and soul of the blade. I mean, if you don't heat-treat the steel correctly, it's not going to perform, it's not going to cut, it's not going to be tough. And again, I think it's just proving everybody has just settled in. Frankly, I went against my own board. Like, my board of directors will love to hear this. But, like,

My board of directors who are very, very wise businessmen, and I'm not denigrating them because it's quite the opposite. I've learned a lot from them. But they told us not to buy land, not to build a building, not to buy the equipment. Okay, well, in the last 18 months, I've spent $18 million on building to building and buying equipment, all against their advice. But they're now seeing the benefit of I now control my own supply chain. I'm not asking this. You know, when I started this in my garage, I know. needed to have blades cut in New York. I needed to have blades ground over here. I need to have

knives heat treated in Pennsylvania. But now you're sitting in line behind the big dogs. You're at the whim of the UPS driver making it on time to get your parts to you to put them all together to just find out that the people you had make your parts made them wrong and you got to start all back over. The list of things that have to go right. Yeah. For you to even have a shot at being brilliant is mind boggling. It was mind boggling. And it was mind boggling. And it was mind boggling. And It proved to be very challenging at times. Now, it's equally challenging buying that much equipment and trying to find employees that actually know how to run that stuff, right?

And this is the other thing I'll tell people, you know, it's not just becoming linemen and becoming plumbers. And I've heard you talk about it, but please become a machinist. Please get into learning how to heat treat. We and the manufacturing industry, the only way we're going to build a manufacturing in the U.S. is to have an employee pool that we can actually employ. And we are going to be doing, you know,

some basically apprenticeships and whatnot through our company. But for right now, we're realizing, like, my Swiss lathe guy, he was a young machinist. And the Swiss lathe... I got a lathe guy. He's in Bern. Where is he in Zurich? Where is he?

Well, a Swiss lathe is a lathe that makes screws. Yeah. Right? We could not find an employee to do that. And that's a $750,000 machine that we, We bought and we could not find someone to operate it. So we flew the tech in from the company and he started teaching a young machinist in my shop that had never seen this machine. And he's now running it.

But we are needing more of those kind of professionals. You know, we need programmers. I need design engineers, process engineers. You know, we are making parts on scale. And that's actually really hard to find. You can find a machinist that makes one part here and there. But we're making hundreds of thousands of parts now. you know, we'll make 200,000 knives this year.

Well, at what point is it efficacious for you to buy the lathe? Well, we bought the lathe. The problem is you can't, it's finding the employee. You know, when we were looking at it, and it's like, we have to own that supply chain because by owning that lathe, we can now custom make our own screw at the exact length, at the thread pitch that we want, it opens up all of our design possibilities.

And you can do that in Montana? Yep. We're doing it in our own building right now. What about you told me a story about a grinder? I think it was a grinder. Yep. This is another not inexpensive tool that's critical to your delivery process. But that was in Germany, wasn't it?

That's right. Yeah, it's a bevel grinder. Yeah. And there's two manufacturers of bevel grinders on the planet, and they're both in Germany. It's a bevel grinding machine that grinds basically the face of the blade down, to an edge. And they grind lawnmower blades. Anything that's a blade, basically, in America, is ground on these bevel grinders. In Germany. But they're made in Germany. And so we just got

that grinder you're talking about. We just got that in about five weeks ago from Germany. And, you know, the discussion at that point was around tariffs. And that was kind of a bit of a contention. Take all the politics out of it for a minute. It didn't make a lot of sense to me to tariff manufacturing equipment when you're trying to build manufacturing. Re-infigureate manufacturing. Right. It'd be different if I chose not to buy an American grinder, but there is no such thing as an American bevel grinder.

There's nuance in these laws that sometimes things get. What that grinder cost? Like, what would it cost just to buy it in a non-tariff? About $800,000. And what's a tariff? Well, what's 30% tariff on that? $240,000. Yeah.

So what a fascinating, I think we're both rooting for this president. And so far as we want to see manufacturing reinvigorated. What kind of position does that put you in? Please don't share anything that's not appropriate to share, but I just want people to understand that the business of employing 121 people in Missoula Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a going concern and it's capital intensive. Right. And this is a policy. For me, I mean, I want to see this country make that bevel grinder. Right. I want somebody in that business to go, you know something? There's been a shift in the wind. And we think there's a market here, so let's make them here. And so in order to get that to happen, maybe there's some logic. long-term and that policy. But short-term, I do think it's fair to say,

you know, you're taking it in the neck. Yeah. And, you know, all politics aside, I don't care who you vote for, these need to be policies that are bipartisan. I mean, we are, you hire Democrats and Republicans, right? This is about providing, you know, true stability, even from a defense standpoint, like the government today could now walk into my building and say,

hey, you don't make knives anymore. We need you to make this part, right? We're in a war and we're short on this or whatever. From a national defense, national security standpoint, the country, to a small degree, is now better because we are, we exist. And if there's 5,000 more Montana knife company style manufacturers all over this country, our supply chain and our national defense is better off for it. But like in America, in 1979, there were 19 million manufacturing.

jobs. Today, there's 12 million. Okay, so that's a seven million loss. That's not great. But then when you think there's 125 million more Americans than then, that's a problem. And these manufacturing jobs, they spin off other jobs, right? When we make knives here, we then need parts made, you know, in Seattle. We need things, even if it's fixturing for the machines, right? There's all these ancillary things that we need to have built. The sheath. The sheath. You know, Francesco with Teton leather in Idaho.

I saw her in the video. I don't know how many employees she has now. She went from her basement to now eight or nine employees just basically supporting Montana Knife Company and then the other stuff that she does. Fantastic people. Montana Block. They make our cutting boards and our magnetic blocks and proof razor razors. Another really cool American-made razor brand for your face.

and we do collabs. We try to co-lab, Aries watches. We try, proof razors. What makes them great? Just the way that the razors are built, the way that the steel that they use in their blades, and then it's actually the body of the razor, that the way that they're all manufactured out of aluminum and powder-coated and they're beautiful. And they also, frankly, I was like, that's, you know, it's a razor.

And I got it and I shaved it. And I was like, these are cool. Like, they work really, really well. Look, man, that's why I'm asking you. I think everybody is susceptible to, you know, it's a razor. I mean, how excited can you get? Same as a knife. A lot of people would say the same as a knife.

You know what? A lot of people say the same for a car. Yeah. So does it start and stop when I need it to? Right. Reliable? Can I afford it? It's like, eh, you know.

So we have to decide constantly every day, all of us, what to get excited about and buy. Unless, unless the question is, we have to decide how to get excited or what sort of process excites us, not necessarily the finished product. Assume it's excellent. Assume it's a proof razor. Assume it's an MKC knife.

Well, even think about passing things down like that proof razor or that knife. If you buy a Bick razor from Walmart and you give it to your dad for Christmas, it doesn't really seem like much of a gift. It seems like more of a hint that he should shave more often. Right. Right. But if you give him a proof razor for Christmas or you give him a Montana knife or an Ares watch, you're giving him something that was made in America that has real value to it. You know, that's something, all of those are items that, you know, can be passed down or like, oh, I've got dad's old razor, right? Like nobody really cares if you have dad's old plastic bick razor. But that custom made American made proof razor or Montana knife actually has real value because of the people that made it. And that's why. why when you come to our manufacturing facility in Missoula, it's not just a manufacturing facility. We put a black rifle coffee in it in a retail store. And when you come in and you order coffee

and sit down at the table, we have giant glass windows that look out into the manufacturing. So you can see where your money is being spent. All right. This year alone, we are going to spend a fuzz over $15 million in salary and benefits for our employees. Not one of the of those jobs existed five years ago in our county. There's 78,000 people in our county. That has a major impact. And those people, those customers, those crazy people that drove from Maine

or the Bayou to come to our grand opening are supporting the people behind that glass to raise their families, to take that money and spend it on something else. That's what American manufacturing does. And when you see so many of these buildings along the interstate, you know, these big cinder block buildings

with not a single window in it, you don't see the humans inside of them. Nope. No. And that's why there's glass. We call it built in public. We want to take you on tours of our facility. We have anything to hide.

We put these vlogs up on our YouTube every Friday night, and we highlight our employees, because I want you to see Tristan's face, Melissa's face, the people that you are supporting, I mean, heck, you might grow wearing our t-shirt, right? When you're out doing your talks or our hat, or the average guy in Florida that has a roofing business, when you're wearing that hat or that shirt, it has meaning.

You stand for something. 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 and 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. 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, skills, U.S. Skills USA. You know what, man, it's very true. I wish I knew it. Like before I started doing it, it would have made me feel more deliberate.

But on dirty jobs, everybody figured I was bald because I was always wearing a cap. It was always a different cap. And it was always the cap of the business who invited me in to get dirty and learn stuff. And I just did it because it seemed polite. But it wasn't until I got a letter from a guy who ran a very specific type of farm who said,

every time that show airs, he said, it was great for business, but never mind the business. I've got employees who care deeply about that logo. And when they saw that logo on international television, well, their hearts grew two sizes that day. There was pride. And dignity. Yeah. And that, you know, I don't use those words a lot because they, you know, they're often overused and they can be manipulative. but it is absolutely a real thing, a powerful thing.

Yeah. You know, I'm sure you, to a certain degree, realize the impact you're having, but at our grand opening, a guy walks up to me, and he was like, hey, if you ever see Mike Rowe, tell him what he's doing is working. And I was like, oh, really? How's that?

And he said, well, I teach at a trade school in Spokane, and I've had several students come through my trade school that have had a micro work scholarship. I was like, no, that's cool. I'll tell him. That's super cool. It's whether you're Mike Rowe or you're just a regular guy, when you put that hat on and you wear it, it really does matter to a company like us. I mean, it's hard for us to advertise knives, right?

We get shadow banned and we actually, we literally can't advertise on Fox television because they have a, I don't know if it's a weapons policy or whatever. But we get, whether it's Fox or, and sorry if I'm naming networks, I shouldn't be naming on here. but not just that, but like the meta ads we try to run. We're not a normal company where we can run ads. And so by having the average American buy a t-shirt, it's also hard to rep a knife, right? It's like you're not walking down the street being like, hey, do you see my knife?

Wearing that t-shirt or their hat. And it's not just of our company, any company you think is cool that's doing something that's good for our country, wear their apparel, where their hat. It makes a statement. and it helps make, frankly, our country better. I think you're too modest or maybe self-effacing to say what I want you to say. So I'm going to say it as you, okay?

We spoke a couple weeks ago. You invited me again to this grand opening, and I'm sick to death that I couldn't be there. There's just no way I could work it out. But I really wanted to be there. And you told me in that conversation that, you were frustrated because, in your opinion, the national media should have been there. Where was the Today Show?

Right. Where was CBS this morning? This is the story of a guy who used to get our electricity to us, who decides, okay, I'm going to hang out my shingle. He only risks everything, and he creates 121 jobs in Mazula. you're looking at a, it sounds like a million dollar monthly payroll. Your company must be $60, $70 million now. And so you're looking around, tell me if I got this right, but you're looking around going, what do I have to do?

What do I have to do to get the country's attention? I'm creating jobs. I'm doing it the right way. I'm paying the tariffs. It hurts. I'm the very manufacturer you want to see reinvigorated. And I am, but it's tough, it's hard, it's scary, you're raising four kids, you're providing for 121 families, can I get an amen?

Can I get an ENG crew to show up? How is that not a national story? Now, you didn't use those exact words, but I could hear it in your voice. So, you know, like on the one hand, I'm looking at this video. It's an incredible love letter to everything you've accomplished. On the other hand, I hear frustration. Yeah. So if there's a question in there, it's how do you not be discouraged?

Because you're Sisyphus, man. You're pushing the rock up the hill. Well, it is discouraging or frustrating when you can't get national media to tell a positive story because it's, there's a self-serving part, right? Like we're trying to grow and we want to sell more knives because that creates more growth. And quite frankly, we have to pay for this facility and pay for those employees. But it's more than that, it's a true belief in that this is how we save, I guess, our country. This is how we make our country better.

It's through the motivation that people might receive by seeing this story. There's so much negativity when you turn on the news and we're at war. and the gas prices and you just pick the topic. It always seems to be negativity. And I think it's easy for the guy who, you know, just turned out as a journeyman plumber or journeyman alignment or whatever to think, can you really go anywhere from there, right? Is he topped out, has an idea of this fly-tying business that he has or whatever it is,

right, a special material that could be used for building. And he doesn't quite have the guts to do it because he's, never seen it been done. Well, no, it's been done. It's being done right here in Frenchtown, Missouri, Montana. And if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere in the country. And that's probably my biggest frustration of not having national media talk about it is because I want people to go recreate what we've done. And see, we're a direct-to-consumer company. We didn't even do it through Cabela's or through Bass, you know, Bass Pro. We have done at all through sales on our own website. And my wife was doing all the fulfillment in our basement

of our house. And she's still doing it now in this building with our employees. Like she runs that fulfillment. And I just want people to see like we design it, we prototype it, we test it. We now manufactured all in our house. We sell it and we ship it. How many companies in the country do that? And we need to tell that story that that is possible. Yeah, you do. So along with my frustration with the national media for not showing up and doing an obvious site location piece, meta, what are you doing? It's a knife. It's not a box of plutonium.

Right. It's a tool. And it's a tool that help build this country, frankly. Well, look at what you can find on social media. I mean, as long as I'm on my soapbox, I'm currently featured in five. promotional campaigns on Facebook. None of them are sanctioned. It's all AI.

It's, you know, okay, so, so these nefarious pricks and God knows what little backwater somewhere with a laptop and a basement have created. Yeah. It's diabolical. It's, they're defrauding, never mind DeWalt or Yeti or like five big brand. They're all with me. So I'm all in these things out there with some bullshit invitation to enter a sweepstakes. And these guys get your information and then all kinds of mischief unfolds.

So I don't mean to pick on Facebook. I got six and a half million reasons on Facebook not to start trouble. But it's not just my fans. And it's not just Yeti's fans. It's Facebook's customers. Yeah. And I'm glad you brought that up. And it's something I need to say, like, if because of this podcast, you want to come check out our website or you want to buy one of our knives, be very careful because now this is another problem that I'm having with our government right now is they're not protecting the American businesses well enough and consumers against China.

The IP. The IP. And there are over 4,000 fake Montana Knife Company that we can find right now websites carrying Montana Knife Company. knives with our branding, our logo, fake knives that are being made in China and being sold. One of the worst has traditionally, we keep after them with our lawyers, but has been Timu. Our knives have been littered on Timu, and it'll be interesting to see after this drops if they, we send them a letter here just a couple weeks ago, so hopefully they're down. But name the site, they're all over the place. You just start Googling them.

If it's not on our website, because we don't allow our knives to be sold on any other website, period. but they're everywhere and they're we get them in to get people get them and they they send them to us saying hey i got this knife from you guys and it's not sharp and we have to write back and say you didn't that's not our knife so people understand all your knives come with a essentially a lifetime warranty like you'll you'll sharpen those things for free for free for the end of time so somebody buys a montana knife because it's labeled montana knife it's your logo it's your model it's your model, it's your make, everything looks legit, but it's not off your site. And they get it, and it doesn't hold the edge, they send it to you, and you have to tell them that I didn't make

this knife, brother. Right. You got robbed. That's it. It hurts. It takes dollars. Those people intended to buy a knife from us. So it takes dollars out of the manufacturer's pocket, and it also robs dollars from the American consumer. It's a double whammy. And where is is our government on that. That should be an easy bipartisan, hey, Timu, hey, whoever else, Ali Baba, we are going to absolutely slam you guys for this. Like, you have to protect, if you want to grow American manufacturing, you have to protect the manufacturers and the consumer. And I don't understand how that's not a hundred to zero vote in the Senate. I don't know what to tell you, brother. I got slapped pretty hard four years ago for sharing a story that suggests,

that Hunter Biden's laptop may, in fact, be a smoking gun. I didn't do it to grind a political axe. I did it because that was a giant story, and it was very consequential. They have the power to knock that down. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Surely we have the power to keep this kind of thing from happening.

There's a friend of this podcast, guy called Arthur Lee. You probably don't know him, but I bet you've seen his product. He made a thing a few years ago called LifeFack. Okay. The LifeVac is a device if your kid or really an adult, anybody starts to choke. You just put this on their mouth and you squeeze the thing and it essentially pulls the blockage. Oh, wow. I mean, it's incredible.

He came on here. How many lives had this thing saved, Chuck? 22, based upon somebody who either listen to the podcast or someone they know, listen to the podcast and bought one in this just our audience. Yeah, 22 people. He saved over 5,000 lives. Yeah. Now, China is ripping him off like crazy.

Instantly. Now, the problem here, there is a corollary. It's not just that the knife doesn't hold the blade. It's not just, oh, that's disappointing. This freaking thing doesn't work. Right. And your kid has 60 seconds. And now you can't.

I mean, that, so I don't understand why this isn't DefCon, what is it, one or five? What's the bad one? Oh, yeah. Looking at that show. Five sounds bigger. Five sounds bigger, but DefCon one might be the bad one. I'm not sure. Whatever it is, all hands on deck.

It's not just mischief, you know, and I'm afraid that if it keeps going like this, and honestly, I'm not really afraid of this, but I think the only way through is for, the default position for the average person to assume that whatever they're seeing is a lie. Yeah. And until we get there, then, you know, the social media companies are going to continue to profit from these very scams because it's advertising and they're making money. So until people just look around and go, you know what, what's the point in advertising? Right.

I'm sorry to hijack the conversation, but I... No, it's... I raise money for my foundation every day with videos like these. Yeah. And these bums are taken name and likeness from those scholarship videos and using them. Yep. Right. So yeah, boo-hoo, poor Mike, whatever.

I'll be fine. But the bottom's liable to fall out of the whole thing. And if the public loses their trust in that. That is where, you know, I'm generally kind of a limited government guy, But that is where government, that's their role, is to protect the American citizen, whether it's national defense or through commerce policy like this. You have to protect, again, the American consumer. It does. It makes it incredibly hard when you're borrowing money to build buildings and to hire people to get on the internet and see 4,000 fake websites, you know. All selling your thing.

Your product. Exactly. That's a DEF CON 1 situation. That's the worst. That's the worst, right? It's all backwards, right? It does feel like five ought to be city on fire kind of thing. But look at golf.

It's like if you get the highest score, you've lost. Yeah. It will be interesting. Like when we launch our folder to see how fast they've copied it. I mean, I got to hand it to China. Like they have gotten, it took them a few years before we ever saw our first one. It was really just probably at the beginning of last year that we saw our first fake. And we're like, at first it was like, oh, we've made it.

There's a fake. It was kind of like almost like, hey, we're starting to become a real company. China's faking us. And then it was six months later and it was thousands of knives. And it was like, oh, this is a problem. It's a problem. Yeah. And if they're doing it, let's face it, Montana Knife Company is not on the national scale,

really a household name. We would love to be someday. But if they're doing that to us, just imagine the suction and the dread. on our economy that they're having. If they're doing that to small little Montana knife company, what is that to, you know, all these big brands, not to mention all the mom and pop brands out there? It's unspeakable in its implications.

And it's ramifications. I mean, every supply chain that I know of is tied in to this to some degree. But I mean, obviously, during COVID, we're looking at our medical supply. We're looking at our, you know, antibiotics and so. And you're right there. the same, I've heard my buddies who were in the medical field talking about tourniquets, you know, these cheap Chinese turnicets.

And there again, it's just like with your friend's life fact, you're talking about a, I mean, like you say, at the end of the day, a knife, whatever, right? But a tourniquet, that's in a life-saving moment that if that fails, because you bought a cheap one off of Alibaba and you thought the $19 product was as good is the $50 product, you know, somebody dies. Well, like we're going down the hierarchy of consequential bad acts. I mean, there's not a lot of distance between what you're talking about and the fact that, I don't know, like every two or three thousand Adderall tablets might have a little fentanyl

in there, right? Yeah, it might have a little bit in there. Like, what would we do if the announcement was, listen, your favorite brand of beer is still, available. It's just that every thousand bottles or so is, you know, filled with poised. Somebody's going to die. Yeah. Yeah. So how we go, you know, just lay out, it's one in a thousand. The odds are still with you. Enjoy that Adderall and watch it down with a Heineken and hope for the best, you know? Exactly. So, yeah, you're, I mean, it has to stop in the same way trust in every major public institution has eroded. Just the, the basic, can I even believe what I'm looking at, you know?

Well, and it's, that's just becoming, I mean, let's face it with AI and especially with you who makes a living off of your voice and face. I mean, they've gotten so much better at that even in just the last six months. Imagine how good they're going to be in two years at that. You know who's pissed off and I've been meaning to reach out is Morgan Freeman. Oh, really? He's as angry as I am, probably angrier because he's a, it's his, what do I call it, NIL, name image likeness, right? That's really all you have to sell if you're in this line of work. It can all be co-opted in so many ways, but I don't know, man. It's been a very weird day for me because the person here before you made a very persuasive case that AI is the best hope we have of saving our education system as it exists.

Far and away the best hope. Yeah. And I'm persuaded. I think so you're right. And I'll tell you, we are doing right now fully integrating, trying to fully integrate AI into what we do. I mean, I talked to a very interesting person that found me through your podcast the first time in 2024. He reached out to me, and he is one of the top AI engineers at Google and, you know, share his name with you off of this. But he reached out because he believes in the American manufacturing story, and he thinks AI can play a really great part in that and offered to basically help us, even as we start to integrate AI into what we do, help us even potentially.

potentially build like AI systems for our manufacturing floor. Don't leave here without giving me that name or Chuck. I just spoke at Google's AI conference a week ago. Really? Yeah. No, this is 18 months ago. Well, I guarantee you, man. If they haven't fired him yet, he was there. I mean, these guys are all paying attention.

And people should know this too. I haven't made a big deal of it here yet. But I mentioned it to you when we spoke. everybody's looking at manufacturing and skilled trades with one eye and with the other they're looking at AI and they're coming together in ways that I didn't predict you know I knew we were going to get to an existential you know splat period with the skills gap but I didn't know that it was going to be AI that accelerated it or made electricians or linemen yeah you know the Lineman College advertises on this podcast now all the time.

I mean, power and water, frankly, are going to be our two biggest issues as a nation. Power is quickly outrunning the water. The water issues, I think in 20 years is going to be a big one. You just fly into here and look down and go, that doesn't work forever. Yeah. You know, but power as a lineman. And let's face it, I don't want a new power line going through my backyard. Yeah.

Right? Nobody wants, if you buy a ranch in Wyoming, you don't want a power line running through your new ranch. Honey, they're putting it at a data center. Yeah. It's going to be great. Nobody wants that. But we have to have an upgrade to our infrastructure in a big way. We must.

And so the power issue with these data centers and whatnot is going to be, it's becoming a real problem. But with the AI technology, you know, you can be a doomsdayer. And I compared a lot to social media. There's a lot of bad about social media. And there's a lot of lives that social media ruined. Montana Knife Company grew to 120 employees in five years because the world is tiny because of social media. And MicroWorks is going to give away $10 million this year because of Facebook.

Yeah. I couldn't have done it without Facebook. Yeah. And we were just talking about meta and Facebook. And, you know, two things can be true. Meta and Facebook could be better and could allow us to advertise and push the word out better. but at the same time, it makes the world so small. When I started making knives as an 11-year-old in 1992,

you had to get lucky to get an article in a magazine or you had to go to a trade show, to a gun show. There was no way to get seen. And now you can take a picture and a million people can see it. And it is what makes it possible to be in Webo County in Montana. Did you know there is a consultant, and this is another big concern, I bounce all over here, but there's a consolidating of, I wouldn't say necessarily power,

but wealth, it's consolidating into these cities. And Montana's an example of there's five or six towns, cities in Montana that are growing. Did you know in like four counties in eastern Montana, there hasn't been a single business application put in like two and a half years for a new business? These towns are shrinking. They're completely dying. And what I'm trying to get across is you don't have to be in these big areas to succeed. You can start a business from your garage like we did and use the power of social media and Shopify and, you know, AI.

And that's the thing. Back to AI, you can be in tiny town Montana and have an AI assistant and AI help you write contracts. And you can be a guy. Build a website. Yeah, starting to build a business while you're also working for the rancher down. the road. I just think it's a, we're not the first to make the point, but it's worth repeating because like big brains, big think tanks are wrestling with ways to save small town America. And the tool we're talking about right now, in the same way I think it can save education, to your point, I think it can just be transformational. What better way, why do people leave?

Yeah. Why do they leave, you know, and come back so infrequently? It's because there's a promise of something better somewhere else. And you know, back to your, you know, just thinking about the economy in these small towns and why people leave, like these kids are leaving Montana because they can't afford to stay, right? That median house price, I think, in Missoula is almost $600,000. It's almost $800,000 in Bozeman. So how do you graduate high school and stay? The apprenticeship programs and the tradespeople are going to be some of the highest paid people, I swear, they're going to going to be some of the highest paid people. They already are some of the highest paid people in our area in Montana. And that's how these kids can't, you know, go to college and start life with

$100,000 in debt. Well, unfortunately they can. And even myself, you know, I've got like Tristan, right? He started with me when he was a senior in high school. He could have gone to school. He had full rides for scholarships to school. He kept putting it off and putting it off because he was seeing the growth of MKC. He's now basically got a four-year business degree under Andrew, who worked at Amazon, who works for me, that runs our operations. And now Tristan's, you know, making really, really good money. I don't want to put his finances out there, but making really, really good money with zero debt and a true, I would say, master's degree in business in five years. And a front row seat to the business of making a thing. Yeah. Yeah, man. It's mind-boggling

how hard our government and our media make it. When you look around at the list of things that ought to be encouraged and you see the way they're being affirmatively discouraged. I don't know how to fix it, but I knew halfway through our last conversation that I wanted to have you back soon to talk about all this because I really think people need to hear your story

and they need to understand that whether it's making a knife or a razor or a watch. Right. If you start with a commitment to do it here, you know, you met my friend Bayard over at American Giant. Same story, man. This is this again and again and again. You're playing from a different rulebook, you know?

And what I love about like the knives we've made, like this knife right here, you know, it'd be different if I was sitting in front of you and I had somehow grown a giant car manufacturing company, right? Like that's, it seems like a car manufacturing. company seems so daunting, grand, right? Like, you know, it's like, the average guy is going to be like, well, I can't start a car manufacturing company, right?

Our knives all the way along have been basically this three-piece knife, right? It's so simple. And the point of that is, if you can do it with a knife, did the world need another knife company? No. No. Right? Did the world need black rifle coffee?

No. It's an idea. It's a. movement, right? Excuse me. The world didn't need your finished product in either case. They need your dream and they need your passion and they need your hope and they need your initiative because that's what makes, that's what bipeds have that matters.

And with encouragement from you, I'm actually going to start to, um, develop my podcast in a little different way with telling that story a little bit and trying to provide and share the story of the struggles of starting a business and actually tell people from my perspective. And honestly, we are just getting started. It's funny, I say with moving into this building, we actually just got going. We moved out of my backyard four months ago. All 80 employees back then were reporting to work at my house. right i had to tear it on my horse fence to build that building okay we were competing with the big dogs and doing all this and growing this brand from my basement from my garage from my horse

pasture so we have only been in this building four months where we go from here is going to be just as hard as where we came from and i want to share that with people and share the stories the lessons just as i've been really doing all the way along and but i want to do it in a bit of a more podcast format where I can take certain topics. And I hope people take it from not a guy with an MBA that was trained, that's got all this experience, but from a blue collar, my dad was a backo operator. From a lineman who ignored his board. Yeah. It's true. I mean, I mean, but look, I wanted to make that point earlier, just so you don't get too much grief when you go home. But in defense of your board, you know, it's,

full of smart people, right? Yeah, brilliant. And so what don't they know that you do? What do they know that you don't? And why ultimately would you take the reverse commute like that? Well, to cover a topic that I would cover on my podcast would be, this is why you don't sell out to the VC company that takes control over your business and tells you the guy that knows that.

the customer, that is the customer, what to do with your brainchild and your baby, right? And they didn't know what I knew. And what they would have done had they had control and own the company versus they're an advisory board, right? These are brilliant people. And they aren't necessarily wrong. And in fact, in the end, they might be right. If the book someday is the rise and fall of Montana Knife Company, they will have been right. And their point was, you can always offload, contractors, right? If I'm having blades cut in Pennsylvania and blades ground over here and things slow down or I don't know, we happen to get in a war in Iran and the economy slows down, you can offload those people, but you can't offload a 51,000 square foot manufacturing facility and $18 million in equipment and 120 people. And so what I saw, though, was the difference, what the difference was between us and what their used to is people were resonating with the story. They weren't necessarily buying the knife just because of the quality of the product. It's there. They were buying the knife because of

the movement, the mission that we are on. The true, like, I don't know, you're obviously better with words, but I'm trying to find how they resonated with the brand and how it felt. And I knew by bringing those processes in and controlling those process and telling the story that people would continue to support. And at the end of the day, what will end up maybe potentially being a brilliant move is that we will then control that entire supply chain. Like right now, it's still a giant liability

to have all that overhead. But if Americans continue to support the brand and prove that this is actually the way, the next board member might say, you know what you guys should do? You should buy some land and build a building because Montana Knife Company did that. And they're now not beholden

to the supplier that has a bigger competitor that's telling them what they can and can't do. Well, I mean, it's the old Ray Kroc story, man. You've got to, like, what business are you really in? What do you really make? Is it really knives? Are you a facilitator for the feeling that a satisfied customer gets

when they buy the product? You know, McDonald's, you know, the famous lecture, we used to go around and talk to kids, And he'd ask roomfuls, what's my business? You know, and obviously people would say, well, you're in the restaurant business. You're in the meat business. You're in the ranching business. You're in the customer service business and on and on and on.

Like, no, man, he's in the real estate business. McDonald's owns more real estate than anybody, you know. And what they did with it was tertiary. You know, we just happen to put golden arches on it and build that brand. I think right now we're living in a time when the, people who dare to make their stuff here go against the grain, knowing that the government can't protect them from fraud, knowing that their product can't be fairly marketed on social media for whatever reason, knowing all these things.

You know, that I think you might be on the vanguard of some kind of genuine renaissance. In which case, your business might not be exactly what you think it is. Just look, thank you for the gifts, by the way. I mean, are you in the shirt business? Yeah. Are you in the hat business? You know, I mean, we're kind of in all of those things, but it's, uh, we actually have, you know, a bunch of American made apparel that we're trying to launch.

Uh, I want to talk to, um, you know, those guys that American giant and try to figure out a way to co-lab with those guys. But again, it's, it's a way to have people represent what they believe on their body. What about your buddies up in Maine? You know, Jocco. Origin. Yeah. Yeah.

We're definitely friends with those guys. We just got to figure out something to do. It's honestly, getting past this building, and I think I, I don't know if I told you were, I had lunch with a friend before this, you know, I generaled the whole building project, right? General contracted it? Yeah. So I ran the entire project for the last year and a half. That's very big.

And so when you run an $18 million building and project, and it has to be on time and budget, which we were about a month early getting it done and about a 1% over budget. So it went well. But if this knife thing doesn't work out. I feel like I don't want to do that again. But I feel like the aperture is opened up to and I want to start to bring other companies into what we are doing more and more. And the apparel side is something that we absolutely want to work with more American apparel producers. Because it's hard. I mean, we absolutely, we have apparel that's sourced and we have some American apparel. But as American giant knows, it's hard to do in this country. I dare you. I double dog dare you. Yeah. I mean, it's every single

thing. Sourcing your own cotton, growing your own cotton, making those deals, handling those deliveries. It's, yeah, people don't, that, it chaps my ass too because people talk a good game. It's very easy to say, oh yeah, buy American. And it's very easy to stitch a flag on a thing. But when it comes right down to it, I don't know if we talked last time about the experiment. I worked for Wrangler for a couple years. And I was like, guys, you know, why can't we?

At the time, it was Vanity Fair, Lee Jeans, Wrangler, and a couple of other brands. I'm like, can't we just do a simple line of American-made jeans here? I know they'll be more expensive, but just to give people a choice. And they were like, yes, we can. But let us show you the data from what happened last time we tried. Yeah.

And basically they were $10 more expensive. Nobody bought any. So they knocked it down $5 more expensive. Nobody bought any. They knocked it down at $2 more expense. Same exact pair of jeans. One made here, one not. Yeah.

Nothing. Now they're losing money. But at this point, they need to know where the tipping point is. So they took it down like a quarter, 25 cents more for the same thing, made in America. Nothing. Like they tested it all through JC Bennett. nothing. Not until they, oh, they went to a penny, a penny more. And they got a little, a little. It wasn't until it went to zero. That it worked. I do think that's changing.

And I don't know what year they did that, but I would guess it was pre-COVID. Oh, yeah. That was a couple of decades ago. And I do think, I've said, I don't need 400 million Americans to support my idea of my business. I understand that there's still going to be plenty of knives made in China that are bought. I need a tiny fraction of those Americans to support my idea. And quite frankly, I think it's a lot more than a tiny fraction that believe in what we're saying. Maybe they don't need a knife, but maybe it is a pair of origin jeans or an American giant shirt. I believe really since COVID. And we are. We are seeing a renaissance in this stuff. But we do need support from the government to help these ideas scale from just tiny small niche brands into

giant American brands. And I I think there's things they could do with taxes. I think you could give new businesses incredibly low tax rates for the first five years or up to a certain cap. Say, hey, once you cross 10 million in sales, you're going to pay the normal business taxes. But in the first five years, we're going to help you pay almost no tax. Like it takes so much money to just get off the ground as a business owner. And we did it. We bootstrapped it. We just sold 200 knives. And then we made 200 more and sold those. And then we made 500. But we were fortunate because of the style of the product.

It was relatively simple. Some of these new businesses take a heavy, heavy investment up front in equipment before you can make one thing. Yeah. And that's why I say I don't also begrudge somebody who does have to sell 50% of their idea to VC to fund the first machine that they have to buy. How else can you compete? Yeah.

You can bootstrap it. but you know not everybody's got the colonies but the government could absolutely find ways to to grease the skids for that what kind of knife is that this is our stockyard knife it's an interesting blade it's got not really any kind of a tip on it and that's for if you're working around animals if you're you usually find ranchers and farmers carrying this so if say you're you're riding your horse you get bailing twine or something wrapped up in your horse and you get off to cut that out and the horse kicks or a calf kicks. It doesn't stab them. It's safe around animals. This is one of our working class knives. We call it our blue collar line. You know, yes,

that's a little bit niche, but honestly, I make tools for people, and not every tool is going to be for every single American, though you find tons of people opening boxes with these at work. Sure. Because, again, you're not going to stab yourself. It's a pretty safe tip. This is a lineman knife here, a skinning knife that linemen use at work. You can take this ring and you suck it up in what's called a shotgun. And you can cut like say

twine that a bird is dropped in the power line off or whatever. They call it hot sticking. But both of these knives, we're adding to our blue collar line. And in addition to your blade, we are going to add this to

the MicroWorks Foundation donation. So the rocker. And these two blades, so a percentage of every one of these sold is going to go to the MicroWorks Foundation. So we're expanding that blue-collar line. And honestly, I told you this in the very beginning, it'd be a crawl-walk run. As we grow in scale, I can't tell you how much I believe in your mission with trade schools, with apprenticeships. This is truly how America survives. These people build America and I actually called these people out at our at my speech on Friday night we kind of had a friend's family event and I invited a bunch of the contractors that built our building too often we

see these buildings open up and they cut the ribbon and all the fancy investors are there the government officials and everybody and the guy who froze his ass off on the steel you know beams in February when we started tipping it up they're not there and so we invited a bunch of our contractors and thank them. And it's those guys that build the buildings that allow us to build America, you know, to build the American dream. Well, I know how much you care. Since you told me you were going to do this,

you guys have sent my foundation $188,000. For a small company that's making a go of it in Frenchtown, Montana. I don't take that lightly. I tell your story often and to anybody who will listen because you put your money where your mouth is. And I appreciate the kind words. And, you know, did you see that thing I did with Theo Vaughn last year? Yes. Yeah. We may do that again. I just mention it because in spite of the fact that the media couldn't get its act together to show up to cover your thing, there are a lot of people who are paying attention. Obviously, 5,000 people show up just to be on hand is a thing. But,

you know, Theo has a huge audience and that, he cares. Yeah. He's a really nice guy. He really is. People see the comedian side, but I don't want to overstate how much I know him. I've been around him a couple times. Have you been on his show? No. No.

Hey, Theo. He's sitting here. But his, his, his, haven't been on Joe's, no. Joe, again, has been very good to us. Yeah, you know what? He gives you regular shout-outs. He does. And he wears our show.

shirt or hat once in a while, which is, which is massive. But, uh, but Theo, I think really does believe in like things like what we are doing and things like you're doing. And, you know, Theo came from a background of, you know, um, you know, blue collar. Louisiana, uh, poor. You know, he saw people struggling to make livings. And now that he is where he is, I think he, he wants to do what he can do to help. You know what? His manager told me something. And I've confirmed it. I know it. I know it's true, but he'll go to a town, he'll do a show. It's exhausting, as you can imagine. You're living on the road. You go to a town. You promote the thing. You go out. You do the thing. And now it's, what, 1130 at night and you're beat. And, you know, Theo's relationship with his fans is

like yours, is very engaged. You know, they want to stick around and say hello. And so he sticks around. And it's no Bum's Rush. And, I mean, there are stories of him standing there in the lobby of the venue. After the people who run the venue are like, look, you got to go. He doesn't go. He just stays there. And people come up and they tell him stories. They thank him. It's not just, oh, that was so funny. They're connecting. That's what I meant earlier. Theo is a comedian. Yeah. But his brand is not comedy. Right. Right. And I saw it firsthand. He did that in Missoula. He stood out in the lobby and shook hands for over an hour afterwards. And it wasn't just a quick you know, photo and out. And, you know, those guys are on the road every other night. They're doing that.

That's exhausting. I mean, you know, you talk to people all the time. It's exhausting. He really is a, from what I've seen, a really good person. Well, look, I mean, it's like Bush used to, he got a lot of grief for it, but the whole, you know, thousand points of light thing. Yeah. I think about that all the time now. I think it's true. I think you can find that sentiment in certain kinds of companies. you can find it in certain kinds of comedians, podcasters, personalities. You know, those are the ones who I think can have a real seat at this table. And, you know, if the Today Show is not going to show up.

If the national media is not going to show up to cover that event, then, you know, and again, I hope I'm not talking out of school, but I loved our conversation two weeks ago. You didn't call to invite yourself on this podcast. You didn't, you just called to invite me to your thing. And then we just talked about these basic. I asked you advice. You were very kind to give it.

Well, I'm very stingy with advice because God forbid somebody take it. Well, but you're, you are telling such an important message. And I feel like our message is not the same exact message about the same thing, but they are parallel paths. And they are both as critically important to our nation's existence. And they really, you know, flow in and out. out of each other, the apprenticeships and the trade schools that you are helping kids go to might be working for us down the road. That might be a machinist, that Swiss lathe operator, I mean,

I'm sorry, but we need help. We need machinists. We need Swiss lathe operators. We need those people that you are helping put in school. And so what you are doing is helping feed into businesses like mine and other businesses that are trying to do the same thing. And so it's a parallel path that is bipartisan. What we are talking about is not a Democrat-Republican thing. And it's just unfortunate that on television, that's pretty much mostly all they want to talk about. That's it. Is this or that? Yeah. Right. Yeah. One last thing I've got here, I have to show you this. And I'm going to give it to you. This is the culmination. And it's going to sound crazy. And the average consumer is going to go, you know, yeah, it's just a folding knife. But we have been trying to develop.

up and build a folding knife for two and a half years. Like a pocket knife. A pocket knife. That's the first thing you and I talked about two years ago. Yeah. That's the... We've been working on it since. Really?

And the new manufacturing building, like we could not have made this in my backyard in Frenchtown. We had to purchase this equipment. I had to hire... Well, when I was on your podcast in 2024, I had 50 employees. Today's 120. That growth is what's made this podcast. And I say this, and I'm actually asking you guys, I'm asking Chuck to not put this out for about two weeks because we literally started assembling these yesterday. Oh, wow.

Like, we are, uh, this has been just such a giant undertaking and I'm very excited about it. But this is our new folding knife. It's called the Montana. And I want you to open that. Um, we're very excited. You're the first person to ever receive one. So. Oh, wow. Made for America.

Why not in? I feel like that brings the customer in, like they're a part of it. We made this for the people that have been supporting us this entire time. Not in, but for that. I love that, man. That preposition, sometimes the smallest, you know, the smallest words have the biggest impact. Well, our customers that bought these knives,

all the way along, they made this possible because I could never have made this in my garage five years ago. Even the box. Is there a more satisfying sound than a well-machine box than the snick? Of course, that's a magnet, but whatever. Yeah. That works great. Beautiful. Beautiful. Wow. What do we call it? The Montana. It's a liner lock. It's got a couple things that I think are cool. It's got no screws on this side, like there's no screw heads. And in fact, this arrowhead actually has a screw going into it from the other side to hold that handle on. How does that work? We've re-engineered the liner lock to be what we think is one of the best liner locks ever made. That's the mechanism that you're pushing on there. The arrowhead on the pocket clip. So when you're

at a restaurant and you look down at somebody's pocket, if it's not an arrowhead, it's not an MKC. And there's a couple things with that. One, we started as a hunting knife company, and I never want to lose our roots. And also you can find arrowheads. You know, people go arrowhead hunting in Montana. So it's the Montana. It's got the arrowheads.

And then the engineering and the manufacturing, everything in that, there's, I mean, 120 people making that possible. So it's a big moment for us, for sure. That's huge, dude. Congratulations. And thank you. Yeah, thank you. I mean, I assume this is a gift.

right? Yes, absolutely. Well, it's not just a gift, but it is a thank you. You know, in the last year and a half since you and I met, you know, you go do these talks. We see it. We see our hat that you wear our shirt. There's a lot of people that, you know, talk a big game and whatnot, but you truly do believe in the mission that we are on and, uh, and we believe in your mission. Well, you've been extraordinarily generous, you know, and, uh, again, I don't take it lightly. Uh, we're Big fans, we're rooting for you in every way. What is it about a pocket knife, man? How is it that this talisman has endured?

Why are these things passed down from generation to generation? I really believe one, I think it's in who carried it. If you had a pocket knife that your grandfather carried right now, and if somebody was to set that on the table and say, your grandfather carried that, it would mean something to you. any tool, a hammer, a framing hammer. If you had, if your grandfather was a framer and you had his framing hammer, it's about the hands, I feel like.

And, you know, my dad has working hands. My hands have gotten soft in the last few years sitting in an office. But, you know, I think it's about who carried it, the things they've done. And also, do you really want to be the guy when some gal asks, hey, do you guys have a pocket knife? I need to open something. And do you want to be the guy that doesn't have the pocket knife? You want to be McGuiver.

Of course I have a pocket knife. Yeah. And then you want to be Crocodile Dundee. That's not a knife. That's a knife. Wow. Yeah. Well, look, I made the point the last time, but the fact that you're doing this in Montana is just so great.

I was up there not long ago. You know, in fact, I texted you, but I met, what's his name? The governor, Gene Forte. Yeah. And he's doing some good stuff, too. He's a fan. Yeah, he is. he's doing a good job in Montana for sure.

And I heard about friends of mine that own central plumbing and heating were at that talk. And Jesse Waldembourg texted me and he's like, Mike's wearing your hat. You know, I mean, why wouldn't I? I was in Montana. Yeah, exactly. I was in Montana where a river runs through it. God, remember that one? Yeah, Norman McLean.

That was made about the Blackfoot River, which is where I grew up, Blackfoot River Valley. That's why the first knife that we ever made was called the Blackfoot. Eventually all things merge into one and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On the rocks are teardrops. Beneath them are words and some of the words are theirs. That's so cool. It's great book.

You're a pro. He's really good. You know what I remember, man? I remember Robert Redford. He lets me know all the time. I think the stuff's going to work out for you. No, man, look, it's a... Our country could learn a lot from the big sky boys.

And anybody who's paying attention, we'll see that on display. You know what? Go on YouTube and find the video. It's like 18 minutes long, and it's just a fly on the wall, and you can see what a love letter looks like to manufacturing. that's writ by the guy who built it. I had no idea you were your own general contractor on that thing, you lunatic. That's crazy.

But you're a, yeah, yeah, man, your lineman who made good. Look at that. They flew in on a black hawk? Yeah, the local firefighting people offered to bring that black hawk. They put our logos on it and everything. But they offered to bring that in. They believe in what we're doing. Those guys fighting wildland fire with black hawks.

They put the logo on there. backfired a little because people came up and started congratulating me for buying a black hawk. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, we need more C&Z machines and lathes and people. Easy. Okay, so you're still doing the mic drops. There's still new stuff in the works. The website is still mkc.com. Yeah, montananife company.com. Okay. Soon to be mkc.com. We're this close, actually. We had to buy that. But isn't that crazy? Yeah, it's crazy. There was a guy who owned microdo. 18 years ago. Yeah. Yeah, he was happy to sell it to me. And I was like, you know something?

I'm not going to buy my name. I'm just going to wait until you die. And he died four months later. Did you? You didn't have anything. Under suspicious circumstances as I remember. It was a real tragedy. Do you know Hillary? Well, it took you 90 minutes to get there, Josh. But you finally landed the plane or the Blackhawk. Go buy a knife that was made in this country by people who give a damn. And thank you for coming back on the pod. And I will make it up there soon. And I'll expect nothing less than a private tour.

Well, I'll hold you to that for sure. Maybe a decent cup of black rifle coffee. Perfect. We can do that. Gosh, Chuck, I wonder if they'll ever advertise on this podcast. You know what? Do me a favor. Would you, Josh?

You just ask Evan. Tell him, I still, I mean, I'm drinking this coffee right now for crying out. Yeah. Evan, what are we doing here? Let's go. We've got to advertise. What are we doing, man? Yeah.

All right. Thank you. It's a good one. I really put the arm on poor Evan there. Thank you. Thanks for the life. I appreciate it. Amazing.

Josh Smith, everyone. Goodbye. If you like what you heard. And even if you don't. Won't you please? Won't you please? Won't you please? Pretty please.

Subscribe. Well, I hate to beg and I hate to plead. But please. Pretty, freeze. Please.