403: From First Blood to Last Bite with Josh Smith
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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, as logos go, as slogans and mottos, 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, Chuck. Okay. It was a 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

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 we're 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'd

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 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 Montana Knife Company dot 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. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-dum!

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Welcome. Thank you for making the trip. No, thank you for having me. I'm still not sure why you just reached out. This is Josh Smith, by the way. Montana Knife Company. 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 podcast landia 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 two giant, well-calloused 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. My kids loved it. What are their names? How old are they? Three girls and a boy, 20, 18, 16, and 14. 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...

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 in Drummond High School. This is the guy coming back, 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 and 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 Drummond, 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, 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. Yeah.

How does one duck hunt their way out? When your professor asks you not to come to class in your waders 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 backhoe operator. We had a couple backhoes and dump trucks and excavators and

Well, I learned to run backhoe actually chopping wood when I was like four with the backhoe. My dad would tip blocks of wood up on end and he'd set the backhoe all 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 wood pile and wood stoves, you know, 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 woodpile, listening to them say things like, chop your own wood, it'll warm you twice, you know, and all that stuff. 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 when I was 14 years old. And my dad said, well, you can go to this knife show out in Oregon. But

When you go, the woodshed needs to be full before you 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, naughty yeller, just gets his point across. And he goes, well, those knives are nice, but I hate to 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. 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. How old were you at that point? 14. I was 13. I turned 14 at that show in Oregon. Would you say you learned most of 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 from running backhoe. 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 did your dad do? He had an excavation company. Oh, so you came by it. We had like four backhoes and an excavator. But we built it up. I mean, my folks got married. They had like $50 of their name. And my dad's first backhoe was a hunk of crud.

you know, cabless backhoe. 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 lawn mowing business, you know, and when I started making knives when I was 11, I

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 man of consequence if the tool shed is full you go if it's not you don't we're not gonna 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 and 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 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, no.

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. What I love so much about all of this is that you're firmly ensconced in a world that most people don't know exists.

And that to me, you know, has always been interesting, not just from a, 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 a 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 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, with working in my parents' excavation business and stuff, 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. He was an outfitter in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. He was a logger. Rick Dunkerley is 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 lawn mowing business and I worked for my folks. So I took that money and I went and bought a grinder and I put it in my dad's shop.

And I started making knives at home and then I would take them 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 12, 13 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 of or whatever. I'm nodding and saying, yeah, like everybody listening has their own little bandsaw mill. Has one, does. Oh, yeah, yeah, the bandsaw mill, yeah. Out there by the lathe. Well, he built this bench at the height that he thought I would be someday. Yeah.

So I stood for the first three years on a milk crate grinding knives at my own grinder. And there's a picture of 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 Carhartts 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 three or 95. Today, you know, with the growth of Forged in 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 Forged in 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 person.

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. But 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 doghouse 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 and his sister lived in a dog house. Very, very. It wasn't much bigger than a dog 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 my dad did all of the coping of the logs. I mean, I remember being probably eight or nine. What's coping mean? You know when 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 scribe 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. Yeah. Even writers. Remember our buddy Alex? Sure. 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 the UP in Michigan. Yeah.

And watching them work and watching them use blades, I guess that's the duality that I'm interested in. You grow up cutting grass with blades, splitting wood with blades. 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...

Then that's when I'm like, Chuck, I want to talk to Josh Smith for real. This guy who lives in a dog house. I got to learn 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 trees they cut down from a job site. Like four inch diameter just rails. And 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 a hundred of those rails by hand. And that means, so are you guys holding like a saw? Like drawing knives. Drawing knives 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. Rough. Rough.

That's so Montana. R-U-F-F. 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...

responsible parents today hand their kids. Yeah. 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, man, because it was like this thing is so sharp, and you really have to lean into it and pull right at your torso or 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. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do

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American Giant American Made American Giant American Made You ever de-tassel corn?

No. The 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 in Nebraska and so forth, just going down the rows, taking the tassels off, little tiny blades, little microscopic little things that'll cut you, and it's just a miserable job. Yeah. But character. Yeah. Yeah.

All the work that we always did was all 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 backhoes 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 zirks on the backhoe every night and, you know, the things like that. And then it worked into, you

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 backhoe, 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... Do you still remember the first time you climbed on a big machine?

and turned the key and realized 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 ran equipment when I was really little. It was a cool upbringing and just a great way to grow up. I just think that that's worth belaboring a little bit. 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 backhoe 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 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 he...

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, you're going to 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. And that's how you operate a machine smooth. It's art. It is. I mean, it truly is. 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 a lineman later in life, when I became a lineman 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 1922. And you're climbing up there and you're fixing something that a craftsman, a lineman, you know, in 1922 built. And so I remember our foreman as I was being trained in my apprenticeship saying,

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. And 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? You know, so,

It's that way in all different crafts. 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 in 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. And they know that they're not doing it like an electrician would. They're out there without a net, doing something that most civilians understand intellectually is important.

but practically we have no sense of it Josh. No. I put in one poll 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

Of good natured, no bullshit men. 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. No, we'll land the plane. Trust me. That's my only skill. Eventually I'll tie it back around to that drumming 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,

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 in 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. And 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 me. 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...

uh 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-end 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 two to five thousand dollars 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 sheikh in Abu Dhabi. He flew me to Istanbul, Turkey. He flew me to Dubai. Wait a minute. How old are you when you get flown to Istanbul? I was like 24.

Yeah. And look, I'm sorry, man. You can't just gloss over this. 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 and 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 a 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 a 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. That's correct. Thanks for the distinction. Because, look, he runs the Montana Knife Company. The man says he's doing a little fencing. That'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 Hussein.

- 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. - Like a bridge builder, yeah. - Yeah, no, I-- - 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, will 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 him any samples. Yeah.

And so a week later, I'm building... Get mail Damascus steel. Yeah. To the U.S. mail. So a week later, I'm building this fence, and I get a phone call. I'd never talked 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 10 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? You know, 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 Forgin. 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 Capital 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, you know, 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 Sheikh 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 as Sheikh Hamid bin Zayed Al Nahyan and we actually went and got in the car. 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 the sword that he wanted built. By the way, who's the Wallace in question?

Um, I don't know. I'm just going to say it's William. I mean like this, it's such a better story if it's Braveheart. Yeah. I'm going with it. I went to the Braveheart museum. Exactly. Good. Yeah. Mel Gibson was there. Yeah. Um, in fact, I have a surprise for you, Jack. Mel, come on in here. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, we viewed this sword in this museum. And, uh, the funny part of it is, is we went back to his hotel to kind of talk about the business details of making the sword. And, uh,

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? And 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

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 Sheikh Hamid watching soccer, and I'm sitting there eating burgers. 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, I believe. 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. Doesn't count. That doesn't count. America's hat. That's not even... I'm not even sure that's leaving Montana. No, I mean, a few months later, he flew me to Istanbul, Turkey, went to the Topkapi 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. But, and then when I did build the sword, he flew my ex-wife and I to Abu Dhabi and we delivered it. It was amazing experience. That must've been awkward going there with your ex-wife. 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, um,

2008, nine 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, you make knives all up for a show, you go to it, you sell them, you're rich. And a couple of weeks later, you've paid all your bills and you're back to the grind. And I was teaching a friend of mine who was a journeyman welder, uh,

uh, 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. Cause I don't get any of that. And, uh,

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, oh, the economy's bad. And so they had a backhoe 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 tobacco operating 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 opportunity's 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 a

amalgamated lineman. Yeah. You know, make the case for that trade. One minute you're on a backhoe, digging ditch, putting in some pipe for a subdivision. And the next minute they call you and they're like, we got a tree in the line on the 230 up near the Idaho line. It's the dead of winter. You got to take a snow cat to the top of a mountain, try and 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 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 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.

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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 wires with ropes and cables. And it's hard work.

I think one of the reasons that it's 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 you're depending on the word of the guy that

is with you. Yeah. 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 all full. 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, you know? 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.

Just a great place to be. I just, I mean, I asked for a couple of reasons. First is I told you offline, I got kicked in the head by a yak outside of Kalispell. I mean, everyone has. On a dirty job. Yeah.

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 drop-dead gorgeous as that. Nothing. And I was blown away by how accessible it was from Kalispell. You know? I was explaining that to somebody yesterday that one thing that makes Montana so special is the accessibility to public land. If you're a hunter and you're in Texas, you have to find a lease or you have to pay. 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 man who sounds utterly...

highly skilled, utterly practical. Your poor mother just gets dragged along. You buy the giant shithole and you move into it. And then you build the doghouse or the loghouse. 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 positions did you play? 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, uh, 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, 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 back out a four new backhoe and an excavator but it took him my entire it took him 20 years mm-hmm 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 kovat it was 2020 and

And thank God my mom was smart enough to 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 because I didn't know how to start a production knife company. Like I was making high end two, $3,000 knives one at a time. How do you scale that? How do you scale that? Right. 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. 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. Somebody like Evan Hafer, we talked about earlier before the podcast at 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 and hard work that a lot of other kids don't learn and the stick-to-itiveness. At a certain point, you realize, like, why not? Why can't a really 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. 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 of 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 it 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 bullshit about, you know, everything. But some of them are like your dreams. Like, we're going to quit this job and we're going to start our own this or that. I got to 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. 7200 volt wire. Just 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. I mean, it might be your issues with your spouse. It might be what your kids are up to. 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 Soren's. He owns Sorenx out in South Carolina to an event called Winter Strong. And it's his collection of friends from the outdoor industry and the fitness world and sports world.

But he only invites people who have 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. 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 Kamimura.

I showed him these prototypes around and that community there was incredibly supportive. They were like, you got to do this. You have a great story. This is, these are great knives. Like when you're surrounded by so many people that have accomplished amazing things, um,

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 sheik. 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. All lights are green. Let's go. Let's do it. But you didn't. Yeah, I wanted to build this brand myself.

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 and

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 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 it was, he carried this knife in Vietnam or he carried this knife as, you know, 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. Yeah. 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 mantel or 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 me. I made a couple hundred blades and met my business partner, Brandon. He helped me do the marketing side of it, built me a Web site.

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? 6'5", you said? Yeah, 16-year-old. He's a monster. Okay.

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. And January 1st of 2021...

I needed a day off from my job as a lineman. I actually needed December 31st off. Thomas Rhett, 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, I mean, 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 day off. 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. Shameless plug.

So you can go ahead and file this one under shameless plugs, but you can do that when you have your name in the title of the podcast. This is an ad for my mom's book. It's amazing. And it's going to be available. Actually, it's kind of available right now for pre-orders. It's called, Oh No, Not the Home. Observations and Confessions of a Grandmother in Transition. And honestly...

I don't know who else could make life in a retirement home funny, but my mom has done it. And it's, well, trust me, if you like the last one, Vacuuming in the Nude, and the one before that about your father, and the one before that about my mother, all of which were bestsellers, you're going to love this one. Pick up a copy at micro.com slash momsbook. You can put your preorder in there, and you can order really from anywhere you want.

but that's the simplest place to go micro.com moms book they say she's america's grandmother i just call her mom call her what you will she's a funny 86 year old broad and she can prove it in her latest book oh no not the home go ahead and reserve your copy now interesting juxtaposition that you just said that you said uh

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, ah,

I don't know. I mean, it felt selfish because, you know, a lineman's making $110,000 to $15,000 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 material. Eventually hired Tristan, who was in high school. He was graduating and.

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

Or to keep working for us. Mind you, I have one employee, two, maybe two at that point, making 12 bucks an hour. I mean, 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, worked 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 per annum? 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 we sell apparel and cutting boards and all kinds of things. And what's really cool about what we've 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. Carl Noble. K-N-O-B-E-L. Electrician by trade. That's cool. Not a lineman, but an electrician. Well, cheers to Carl. Well, cheers to MKC. Amazing.

Well, you know, the whole thing is, is I hear your, your message all the time about, you know, the trades and, 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 and grosses out my son but uh Hank six five Hank yeah that guy he grossed out by his sister she's just 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 have applied 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 7th, 8th, 9th grade. I ended up using in my lineman career. 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 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. But I watched my dad become successful over 20 years, you know, very successful and, um, and also not rich, like successful doesn't necessarily mean rich, but grew a great business and raised a great family and,

And I told those kids too, you can grow a big brand like what we've grown. I mean, 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 where,

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

burning the ships and taking the risk and finding yourself in the middle of the lake and you either keep going or you turn back. But what does success look like? What will it take if it hasn't already happened to look at MKC and go, 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're we've hired 60 people here in america on jobs with benefits and paid vacation and and we're making knives in america and it's 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, is

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 him 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 plummet. We're going to put sheetrock 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. Yeah. 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 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 backhoe or swing a hammer? How does he know, 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, and,

make 20 bucks 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. I feel like

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...

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 alignment. Right. Yeah. The shortages are unbelievable. So one of these gajillionaires, 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, 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 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 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 gotta 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 made a portable knife shop. Yeah. And it's still at my house today. And 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 eight foot tall wall and

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? Yeah, 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 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 yeah 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 and that makes a full set um that's our bighorn 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 every one. 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 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. Cause I want to make what's the best tool for that person. Did you talk to Jocko and that crowd? Not on our knives, but I actually just sent his son Thor a knife. He's in seal team five. And I sent that whole crew, his whole platoon, uh, our new tactical knife. Jocko's great. I'm talking about Jocko, uh, Wilnick. And, uh, I mean, just the,

No pressure, son, but your name is Thor. Yeah. Okay, we're all counting on you to save the day, dude. Yeah. Thor's awesome. He's a 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, as I recall. Chuck, that means the steel and the blade runs all the way through the length of the handle. Yeah, I've got to get rid of my half ones. Your half tang? Yeah, my half tang. 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 MagnaCut 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 just make, 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 weld 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 Cerakote 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 Cerakote just helps protect the steel. But with the MagnaCut,

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 MagnaCut 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, 5200 steel. It's made to resist wear in 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 knife?

Yeah, it seems like... 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. Tinsel 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 bladesmith in the world when I was 19, right? Yeah.

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 by fours in 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 vice without breaking it. That's what I'm... What? That's the crazy part. Yeah. I've seen this done in competitions. Yep. And 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 like 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 warranty work. 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. We 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 sharpen. 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 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. Mm-hmm.

And I imagine the hunting world is its own thing. And I imagine cutlery is its own thing. Is there another thing? There is, and it's a big one coming. It's almost like I gave you these questions to ask. You're doing a really good job. Thanks. Thank you. It's my only skill. I think it was the one sheet I gave him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That he's not reading? Oh, you mean the one that says you grew up in a doghouse? Yeah. Love. Love.

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, uh,

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 we're 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 for a bottle of Noble. Yeah. Build me a sword. It definitely seems like there's 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 knives. This year we have some butcher knives coming out for those butchers out there. That's the one thing you're going to see us as a brand.

We're not necessarily gonna like the butcher market for what we're doing probably isn't massive compared to like culinary or the tactical world. But we're gonna build knives for people who need a knife for their job. So I might sell less knives to butchers than I'm gonna 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. Phenomenal. 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 Armor of Iran. Amazing, amazing. What they built back in those days, the 1700s. Sheikh 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 American stuff or European stuff. He wanted his kind of Iranian region. He wanted some of 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 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 have we been talking, Chuck? I don't want to be... Over an hour and a half. Okay, great. So I got to land the plane pretty soon. So we got to come back to your speech in a moment. But I also got to ask you about Forged in Fire. You, well, how do I say this the right way? Reality TV is a...

siren song of sorts to a lot of people in a lot of different worlds for a lot of different reasons. 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 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, which is a good thing. The danger of going on any reality show is that somebody's going to screw it up 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...

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 ass hats. Right. And, you know, reality television can have that effect in certain, depending on how it's shot and what shows after seeing the first year, I thought they did a pretty good job of representing knife making respectfully. Um,

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 40 minutes or whatever it is in an episode for guys make it. They get a lot of stuff's going to hit the cutting room floor.

Yeah. And I get that, but they didn't try to interject or infuse drama that was ridiculous or anything like that. It wasn't manufactured, not, not manipulated. No, it was not. It was a contest though, right? It was a contest with steel. It was, but I thought I've always thought, uh, I haven't watched it honestly in the last few years, but those years that I was on it or that it was going, um, 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 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, but

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're 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've 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 uh 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 m&ms in my locker room or whatever my dressing room

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 on, 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, uh,

He was very, very good person. I mean, look, I just ask credit where I wish 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 bat 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 I said, no, it's in your basement with rust all over it. And it's a beautiful sword. And 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 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. 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 our go-to guy for that. And whenever you show the viewer the truth of the thing, you know? Mm-hmm.

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 anything.

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 in Ohio that never went to a knife show in his life and he does it in his garage and he's a...

you know, a dentist during the day or whatever, and he makes knives and he happened to get on Forged in Fire, it might be the biggest moment of his knife-making career. You know, I've done other really cool things, but it was just the idea of it. Cameron 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? Rory, yeah.

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.

And they gave it to me, which is funny because it's 140 pounds at least. That was a nightmare to hang. One thing I want to point out, 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 Dunkerley, my little league baseball coach, invited me to a shop. 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 hammer-ins and it would 30 and 40 guys would get together at our shop and we would forge till two in the morning. Right.

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 hammer in plus where they took it from there. Right. Steve Shackelford, 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 to

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 Bladesmith Society, that's where I passed my master and journeyman Smith test through. You join the American Bladesmith 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...

You put some effort in, they're going to keep helping you more and more. What did 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. I told them when I was in their class that

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 and,

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 holder. My kids are in four H right. My little girls are dragging around a 1400 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. Did 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, 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 haunted 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 was, 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. Because my dad busted his ass as a self-employed backhoe operator his whole life. He would have loved to have had paid vacation and benefits. So I think he thought I was crazy, you know, 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. 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 else. 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 MontanaKnifeCompany.com 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. I was 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 and you're like, that shit's actually 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 for more. As in a one more than a four. Just a quick review with five stars too. From a you five stars will do.

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