When it comes to work ethic, Master Bladesmith Josh Smith self-identifies as “the guy Mike is always talking about.” At age 11, Josh was taught how to build knives by his little-league baseball coach. By age 19, he was the youngest bladesmith to ever pass the Master Smith test of the American Bladesmith Society. Today, he owns and operates the Montana Knife Company. Josh talks about giving up the security of a six-figure journeyman lineman job to start his own knife company, how he changed the way contestants are treated on Forged in Fire, and what it was like to build a sword for a sheik in Abu Dhabi.
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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 has 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. Then 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, but not just any knife, Chuck. It's a chef's knife, and it was unlike any other blade. I had had the pleasure to grip gliding as it did through various sirloines, various... 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. 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, it's a different breed of person, at least in my experience. Yeah. Josh epitomizes those people, and he really is the essence of the kind of person we were always hoping to find on dirty jobs, and the type of individual who were trying to encourage through microworks. Right. He was right. He is the guy I've been talking about for a long time, and today he is running a multi-million dollar knife company that is the toast of Montana, and the envy of knife makers from C to shining C. 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 there was nothing I could do except give him a bottle of noble, because I don't have anything else around him, I can hand out. So you should send him a case, because those dogs are worth a lot of time. These knives are amazing. You're going to love this guy, honestly. I mean strap in, it's a really great conversation with a hard working 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 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, 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 the last bite right after this the last seven years I've been encouraging hiring managers and business owners to post a job for free at zippercruiter.com slash row and I am pleased to report to you that many of you have not only taken my advice, you've gone on to find a quality candidate in just 24 hours. I know this is true because I've heard from many of you over the years who have done that very thing. I also know it's true because I've used zippercruiter myself and I've seen it work exactly as advertised. 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Thank you for making the trip. You don't 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 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. 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. Yeah. 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, you know, my kids loved it. And we don't want. What are the names? How old are they? Three girls and a boy, 20, 18, 16, and 14. So it'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 a fluvium. Yes. 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 at a 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. This is the guy coming back. Right. I don't think the world's gone completely wrong, but I grew up in a tiny little logging town in Montana. And I told those kids, a lot of you kids sitting here, you look out and you see the big world and you see what's happening in all these big cities in this place and that place and you see these big brands pop up and you think a lot of what they're doing is not possible because you're just from Lincoln, Montana or Drummond, Montana and your dad's a rancher. And how are you gonna 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. How does one duck hunt their way out? When your professor asks you not to come to class in your waiters anymore, you have a decision to make. And so I didn't go to class anymore at all. I mean, the birds were flying and you know, we had a decision to make. You know, I grew up in the excavation world. My dad was a backhoe operator. We had a couple of backos and dump trucks and excavators and while 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 back wall up and I'd go around there with the loader and the teeth and I would chop the block of wood in half and then he would tip it back up and turn it 90 and chop and we'd quarter it. Why is chopping wood among the most satisfying things to do on the face of the earth? I don't know but there's something fun about it. It's a good feeling. It's manly shit. Well it's that, I mean you know for me we grow 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 and that's how we heated our house. And so the big chores were you pick up the worst crap and then you go back into the woods and drag it up and cut it and those are my best memories as a kid with my granddad and my pop up in the wood pile. Listen to them say things like chop your own wood, it'll warm you twice and all of that. It was actually some of my worst memories too because I remember my dad telling me into the knife making part of it I was all excited to go to a knife show and I was 14 years old and my dad said well you can go to this knife show out in Oregon. But when you go you have the wood shed 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 yellow 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 wood sheds not full. I mean it was a long ways from being full too. And I worked well into the night getting that wood shed full before I could climb in the car the next morning to go to the knife show. I remember that night stacking wood wasn't as enjoyable 14. I was 13 I turned 14 at that show in Oregon. Would you say you learned 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. So I grew up in the excavation business from running back 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 backos and an excavator but we built it up and my folks got married they had like $50 of their name and my dad's first backo was a hunk of crud cabless backo and 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 and when I started making knives when I was 11 I did that during high school as well. So those were all things that I did 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? Well it's a matter of consequence if the tool shed is full you go. If it's not, you don't. We're not going to spend a lot of time laughing or crying about the outcome it's just physics at this point. And when we would finish jobs, excavation jobs or I would finish whatever I was supposed to be doing, it was always pretty good but not quite good enough. 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 because these guys that taught me 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 well they're all right but 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 exist and that to me has always been interesting not just from a TV standpoint but just in general whether it's barbershop or square dancing or knife making yeah whatever it is like I 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 right who pulled the kid aside and said hey yeah right I mean you just can't script it. He knew I was pretty responsible I mean he you know with working in my parents excavation business and stuff you know my folks bought me one of his knives for Christmas that year and then he invited me up and he was a tough guy too as an outfitter in the Bob Marshall Wilderness he was a logger Rick Dunker lease 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 him up to his shop to ask him to like critique me or help here and there yeah and then I started making such a mess in my dad's shop when I was 12-13 that my dad then took an enclosed a lean two 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 throw a little bandsaw mill that's one oh yeah yeah you know bandsaw mill yeah yeah out there by the lathe right well he built this bench at the height that he thought I would be someday so I stood for the first three years on a milk crate grinding knives at my own grinder and there's a picture me in blade magazine when I'm 14 years old they wrote an article about me and there's a photo of me in there in my car hearts in the winter standing on a milk crate grinding knives what do you reckon the subscription you know the distribution rate is for blade magazine I mean I think it's pretty dang big today back then I don't know what it would have been that would have been probably 1992 or three or 95 today you know with the growth of Forged and Fire on television history channel because I was on that a couple times and back when I used to tell people I was a full time knife maker and 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 and Fire you know it's a lot more mainstream than it was sorry to leapfrog around like this but it's really interesting you strike me as a craftsman you know obviously an artistic sensibility which is why I called really I mean I called you to thank you for the knife and then we chatted and then I went on your website and learned some of what you're telling me now that's just super interesting 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 dog house that his parents built almost entirely by themselves and then the reason I'm wearing glasses right now is because I can't see anything it's actually a small log house yeah but honestly Chuck when I read this I was like this is amazing I had no idea Josh Smith sister yeah lived in a dog house very very it wasn't much bigger than a house so you're splitting wood you're living in a log house yeah it's it's a cool little log I mean it's more like a cabin but we my dad did all of the coping of the logs I mean we I remember being a probably eight or nine which coping me coping you know when you you have a round log and you want to fit another round log on it you cut out essentially a V but you have to 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 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 you know he was working with me on a book years ago and he's like you know when you get the story right and you get to the last line you can almost hear it in your head when it closes like a box it goes yes SNCC needs to say it's the same thing with building log homes which I had a chance to watch some guys do up in up in the UP yeah in Michigan and watching them work and watching them use blades yeah I guess that's the duality that I'm interested in you grow up cutting grass with blades splitting wood with blades right now suddenly you 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 like well we help 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 we he brought home a ton of just rails from a like trees they cut down from a job site like four inch diameter just rails and he said my dad said if you peel all these I'll build you guys a playhouse so my sister and I peeled Sarah yeah we peeled probably a hundred of those rails by hand and that mean that so are you guys holding up like drawing I've been 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 that's so Montana yeah are you up up but we'll stay in that little bunkhouse that my sister and I peeled the logs of 30 years ago which is pretty cool again pardon the sidebar but I'm just thinking of things responsible parents today hand their kids 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 lawn mower blade and then told your kid to put it on a piece of wood and pull it towards them from a 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 and because it was like this thing is so sharp and you really have to lean into it and pull yeah right at your torso yeah you know with all of it I had friends in high school that peeled logs the lap goes 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 anyway and if you want to see just how insanely durable and downright indestructible and American giant hoodie really is google micro hoodie and fish click on images and what you'll find is me wearing the same American giant hoodie I've been wearing since 2009 while clutching a giant catfish I just plucked out of the Mississippi River I can't think of a better way to illustrate the unparalleled excellence of this my favorite sweatshirt than 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giant american made you ever detastle corn or in season i haven't yeah it's not really comparable but it's 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 yeah little tiny blades the microscopic little things it'll cut you and it's just this is a miserable job yeah but character 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 backos and the trucks and just make sure my mom was like when your dad goes to work tomorrow morning at five in the morning i wanted to have a clean machine clean truck my job was to grease all the equipment so i'd grease all the grease irks on the back of every night and you know the things like that and then it worked into actually going out on job sites uh you know like when we put in drain fields hauling pipe around so my dad didn't have to jump on and off the back go getting pipe into the ditch and checking grade running the transit that was before lasers we checked a ton of grade and then as i got older then i got to start running the equipment you know and um do you still remember the first time you climbed on a big machine and turned the key and realized you were you basically had a tiger by the tail i mean honestly i was so young i wouldn't even be able to remember it because i mean i ran equipment when i was really little yeah so it was a cool upbringing and uh just a great way to grow up you know i just think that that's worth belaboring a little bit you know it's a kind of singularity that you find again in really great i guess craftsman is the right word but also in great workers i saw it on dirty jobs all the time guys with really very little education but they'd been doing this for so long that you didn't really appreciate them fully until you saw them on the machine yeah and then it was hard sometimes to figure out where the man ended and the machine began that's my dad really i mean he actually competed when i was uh you know that junior high time frame they had back o 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 uh 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 ten seconds or some i don't know but my dad's is just 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 and i got honestly i i mean i'm 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 gonna be hirkey jerky but if you're pulling multiple controls in different directions everything's working fluidly you don't move your arm one motion at a time right you know and that's how you operate a machine smooth yeah it's art it is i mean it truly is you know i make the point on this podcast a lot when we talk about work and we talk about craftsmanship when you take the art out of a thing like when we took the art out of the vocational arts we just like robbed it yeah of this thing we're talking about right now the mastery and and even as like alignment later in life when i became a alignment for the power company when you're building a power pole structure you're building something that's going to likely be there for a hundred years in the old days they used to put date nails and 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 alignment you know in 1922 built and so i remember our foreman is what i was being trained in my apprenticeship you want to make that pole look like an algebra equation both sides look identically the same right what you do to one side you do to the other and the wires are all formed 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 an all different craft i don't care if you're a plumber an electrician you open up a panel on a breaker box and you take the face off of it no one sees it back there but 50 years from now or 20 years from now someone's going to do some work and they're going to pull that off and be like well whoever wired this really had took some pride you mind if we linger on that trade for a minute yeah because our foundation has assisted a fair amount of aspiring linemen and when i hear back from them they're so enthused i know a lot of happy people and a lot of different trades but pound for pound i think linemen have a level of self actualization and i think it's because what you just said they know that they're keeping the lights on literally yeah and they know that they're not doing it like an electrician would right they're out there without a net right doing something that most civilians understand intellectually is important but practically we have no sense of a josh no i put in one pole with one team in uh Wyoming an alliance no it was alliance nebraska i guess it was yeah man i walked funny for about a week yeah and had splinters and places i couldn't reach you know i mean and these guys were just it was such a tough group of good-natured noble shit man yep i want to know how you got into it and uh if you miss it you know and we are bouncing around and i'll eventually i'll tie it all back down oh we'll land the plane trust me that's my only skill eventually i'll tie it back around to that drum and speech that i was talking about but we'll get there um when i left high school you know i became a full-time knife maker and i was really aspiring to become one of the best knife makers in the country like that was my goal i was chasing these men that i'd been learning from and you know i got pretty good in my 20s and i you know got a good reputation to 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 besides man as i recall the ducks were flying the birds were in the air they were they were flying and they're 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 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 gonna beat the odds hard for you yeah exactly watch the meat yeah the day i closed on my first home loan i quit my full-time job and started making knives full-time i was doing excavation for a guy in mazula 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 shake and abudabi he flew me to Istanbul turkey he flew me to do buy wait wait wait how old are you when you get flown to this this is like 24 yeah and wait wait like each i'm sorry man you can't just just catch his gloss over there you get a call from a chic are you free to come to the 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 um 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 locations 20 acres in the location was amazing and i just saw the potential there's garbage everywhere it was awful so as soon as i bought it my dad brought his equipment in we dug some test pits and we found gravel and water ground water so we decided to build a road into it and i ended up building beautiful pond over the next 10 years but built driveways and did all that stuff but the next spring i was actually doing some fencing and that 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 good thanks for the distinction look he runs to montana knife company man says he's doing a little fencing it's definitely where it's not i wouldn't be clear uh 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's vince Evans call that guy and the guy's it wrote me back his name was husain 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 called vince and is that the right verb by the way build as opposed to make or fabricator i like to build i am it's fine with me i'm just curious i just haven't i just wouldn't group that verb with that noun yeah sword builder yeah like bridge builder yeah yeah no i build a sword build knives build swords and so he said my friend likes your Damascus steel it 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 from it my friend to see and i was like sure whatever yall send you some samples i wasn't going to send him any samples you know and so a week later i'm killed male Damascus steel yeah so the u.s male a week later i'm building uh this fence and i get a phone call i had never talked to this guy and it's husain and he's like hi josh this is husain how are your samples coming along and i was like oh they're coming along fine i was just building one right now and uh i was supposed to have him to him in the next like seven to ten days and uh 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 um so we kind of agreed to and i got off the phone i'm like oh shit i got to build some Damascus and so i did i went to forgen i didn't know what this guy wanted to see i made a bunch of steel samples and uh sure enough ten 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 i 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 shake from abudabi and he's like he speaks good english don't worry about it like whatever and so it was really cool i met is shaykam had been zaliad al nayan 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 really i'm just gonna say it's william i may like this it's such a better story if it's brave heart yeah i'm going with it what's the brave heart museum exactly yeah millgibson was there yeah um in fact i have a surprise for a job 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 and making this 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 i'm fine i'm not hungry and uh 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 will wait and he starts watching soccer and i'm in like a 3000 square foot hotel room with shake ham and watching soccer and i'm sitting there you eat will wait and that was a moment i thought i'll bet you my teachers in high school didn't see this moment coming and you're a little league coach no exactly maybe sword making's not so bad after all sword building sorry i believe my bad but not to put too fine a point on it but you're 24 and you've been out of the country before um no i don't think i had other than Canada doesn't count that doesn't count 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 um went to the top cap p 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 and it was weird but and then when i did build this sword he flew my ex-wife and i too Abu Dhabi and we delivered it it was amazing experience that must have been awkward going there with your ex-wife i would be yeah timelines chuck they're so important okay so back to the thing is like i was a pretty serious knife maker but as time was going along 2008 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 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 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 because sure 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 five thousand dollar knife orders dropping out you know like uh the economy's bad and so they had a backo operating job come open on the gas side to just be an operator for digging gas line and then so i applied for it and i got that position with the power company locally so after about nine years of making knives full time i went and i got this backo operating job and i was gonna be a welder i thought just talking to him i was like well get an apprenticeship and weld and really quickly i looked around the room when i got hired there and all of the linemen in there a lot of them were gray-haired and i was like the opportunities there that's it man and honestly i started learning more about what linemen do it's a cool damn job you know for the novice give me the short version if you were the spokesman for amalgamated lineman yeah you know make the case for that trade one minute you're on a backo digging ditch putting in some pipe for a subdivision and the next minute they call you 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 snowcat 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 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 back step barbecuing uh having a camp fire 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 my job in the next 60 seconds is to encourage you to schedule a free home inspection from the experts at ground works but before I do that I want to encourage you to watch an all-new episode of go below with row over at groundwork.com/row the title makes me laugh every time I say it but really it's no different than an episode of dirty jobs it features an amazing team of foundation crawlspace and waterproofing experts working me into the dirt over the course of a very long day underneath a house in Baltimore technically what we filmed that day is a commercial but practically it's the most entertaining and the most honest advertising I've ever seen and a great way to see why I quit doing dirty jobs last year but it's an even better way to see exactly what the guys from ground works can do to save your house from the ravages of groundwater or a crumbling foundation or a damaged crawlspace which believe me when I tell you can pose a clear and present danger to you and your family which brings me back to my actual job here for the love of god schedule a free no obligation inspection with ground works today it really is free and there really is no obligation and this is not a joke if your floors are sloped or sagging or if you've got cracks in your drywall or your exterior walls or if you've noticed a musty smell in your house you can have a real problem please don't wait until the evidence is self-evident go to groundworks.com today request a free no obligation inspection it really is free there really is no obligation and it'll either save you a fortune or give you some peace of mind and while you're there check out the latest episode of go below with row and see what's really going on underneath your house at groundworks.com/row that lineman job I always tell people that is such an amazing career you know you start off you get a ground man 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 the one of the coolest professions out there is it's the closest you can find to a military feel a unit feel in the civilian world and by that what I mean is if the three of us are on a crew and he's on the ground as a foreman and you're up in the bucket truck I'm watching you're 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 hey that wire is 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 gonna 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 there's wires down everywhere and how are people going to perform under pressure I wonder where you where you learned an appreciation for that kind of consequence it's almost as if you had a dad who wouldn't let you go do a thing until the woodshed was awful right didn't much matter how you felt about it yeah at all yeah exactly before I uh open these knives and uh 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 yeah 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 yeah 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 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 a length of time you can drive in a car without seeing another house or a farm light and the variation and 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 flat lands you know in cattle country us on the west side of the state like to say the east side of the state you can watch your dog run away for a week out there that's for you people out by billings but it's just and it's filled with just really good people that are working hard and not looking for a handout and they're there to help their neighbor it's just a great place to be I just I mean I asked for a couple reasons first is I told you offline I got kicked in the head by a yak outside of Calaspa I mean everyone has let it dirt you know who says that it really 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 yeah nothing yeah and I was blown away by how accessible it was from Calaspa you know I was explaining that to somebody yesterday that one thing that makes Montana so special is the accessibility to public land yeah if you're a hunter and you're in Texas you have to find a lease or you have to pay or it's all private land right but in Montana it's vast amounts of public land that's accessible from almost every town you're in and so even if you're not from a family with lots of money or you don't have to have much to hop on your mountain bike and go up into the wilderness or hop in your car and run up in car camp or go fishing or hiking or hunting it's a special place because most of what you see as you drive through is accessible to put feet on which is really unique compared to most states so you have access to unlimited beauty you got an old man who sounds utterly practical highly skilled utterly practical your poor mother just get dragged along you buy the giant shit hole and you move into it and then you got they built the dog house or the log house it made her cry it made her cry yeah honey look what I got so I mean like all of these interesting different things you know and you played baseball too as a kid what positions you play a shortstop and pitcher yeah yeah okay so it all sounds horribly and wonderfully well rounded mm-hmm 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-equipped mentality of just plugging away I think today we live in such a society that everything has to happen instantly and so fast yeah right and an apprenticeship as a lineman is three and a half years you know a college degree is four years like things don't happen overnight it takes a lot and then even when you turn out as an apprentice you know as a journeyman lineman they still don't trust you it's like being a new navy seal right like you're not a navy seal yet until they say you're a navy seal right I think uh sticking with something and working I watched my parents build their excavation business from a cabless back out uh four new backos in an excavator but it took them my entire it took them 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 COVID it was 2020 and thank god my mom was smart enough to you know register the name she thought it was a great name and we talked about it and then I talked about starting Montana Knife Company for 20 years and just didn't do it because I didn't know how to start a production knife company like I was making high-end two three thousand dollar knives one at a time mm-hmm how do you scale it how do you scale that right and that's kind of back to that drum and speech I told these kids I said for a long time I thought well I'm just from Montana you like it's not possible to start a brand or do this or do that and then I started to get to know some people that ran big brands you know somebody like Evan Haefer 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 and I told those high school kids what you end up realizing maybe later in life is by growing up a ranchers kid or you know a plumber's kid or whatever you learn resiliency in the 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 um 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 four minute work and then the thing died on me two weeks later and I was so broke living in my camper and I was so far away from starting this company what are you doing your foreman sells you a lemon um get laughed at by all the other journeymen that's that's lineman yeah that's right just made fun of yeah you know but I I went a few years of just grinding out coming home doing kids's laundry trying to be a journeyman lineman uh not making much for knives just trying to survive frankly and then I met my new wife I met Jess after we got maras we were getting married I kind of told her my idea this Montana knife company and every day in the bucket truck I would talk to a couple of the guys about like this dream of what I wanted to build this guy named Dave Kennedy in particular and I would tell him I'm gonna build this company someday and I'm sure he thought this is never gonna happen but we talked about every day for years in the bucket truck yeah up in the bucket you know you're in the bucket you're working on wire doing whatever and you talk you bullshit about you know everything but some of them are you're like your dreams like we're gonna quit this job and we're gonna start our own this or that I got a riff real quick just on the uh 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 locate 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 70 200 volt wire and humming and buzzing and so yeah that's when you start to talk about stuff that matters to you I guess yeah your bucket list I dare say yeah I mean it might be your issues that you're with your spouse it might be what your kids are up to or might be what your dreams are you know and uh when I met my new wife I told her about this Montana knife company 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 Burt Soren's he owns Sorenex out in South Carolina to an event called Winterstrong and it's his collection of friends from the outdoor industry and the fitness world and sports world but he only invites people 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 yeah and it could be a Navy Seal it could be a guy that played for the Green Bay Packers it could be a businessman whatever and I was there teaching a forging with another knife maker that actually invited me there Neil Kememora 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 when my wife and I left there in February 22 after that weekend or 20 after that weekend I was like we're doing this I'm going home and I'm doing this and that was right that was first weekend in February of 20 and right then COVID started bearing down I just think too it's really important to point out that you'd already had a level of success you made a sword for a chic you know it would seem that right in the wake of doing something that incredibly cool you would go that's it I'm making knives that's it I got I like all lights are green let's go let's do it but you didn't yeah I wanted to build this brand all the while before I ever started this company over that stretch from my say from 20 years old to 39 when I started this I noticed a trend in stores one so many things were being made more and more overseas and as men generally we have passed down for generations knives and guns and all of a sudden I started seeing in stores like replaceable blade throwaway knives because a guy doesn't know how to sharpen a knife we now buy razor blades and we throw them in the bushes or we throw them in the garbage because you know my great great grandfather and yours and everyone else probably sat around at night with no Instagram and just sharpen his pocket knife yeah but now we don't know how to do that so we're throwing those away and we're I sharpened over the years hundreds and hundreds of knives that guys would bring in and say my grandfather was in Vietnam he passed away this is the only thing I have of his it was his pocket knife or 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 passed 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 manner in my safe I'm not going to throw that away you know because my great grandpa might carry 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 a 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 of use those that thing cut a turkey at Thanksgiving in 1950 right there's something about it so it's when I started this company I had no idea how to produce knives on scale at all you can't just call some big knife company and ask them how they do it right and so I did everything wrong in the beginning but I started I made a couple hundred blades and met my business partner Brandon he helped me do the marketing side of it built me a website and in 2020 I just decided I'm going to ignore covid because in 2010 I quit my job because I was worried about the breaking news on television and I told my wife during covid I'm not doing that again I'm ignoring the breaking news on television and I'm just going to control what I can control and we're going to just build this and we just ignored covid and my 14 year old daughter at the time she's 18 now she was helping grind handles my little boy Hank at the time he was five foot all barely now he's six five and a monster but they were all helping me in the shot put those knives together and we were doing everything wrong how big's Hank six five you said yeah 16 year old he's a monster yeah 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 uh this thing started to kind of ramp up and go well through 20 in January 1st of 2021 I needed a day off from my job as alignment I actually needed December 31st off Thomas Rhett the country music singer had DM'd me and wanted to meet up and get a knife from me at 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 him is 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 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 the 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 gonna love this one pick up a copy at micro.com/mom's book you can put your pre-order in there and you can order really from anywhere you want but that's the simplest place to go micro.com/mom's 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 and her latest book oh no not the home go ahead and reserve your copy now interesting juxtaposition that you just said that you said kind of a big deal I don't know what's going to come of it yeah but it was still kind of a big deal yeah if 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 I don't know I mean it felt selfish because you know alignments make on 110 to 15 grand a year benefits you 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 in to make a 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 handle material eventually hired Tristan who was in high school he was graduating a straight a student had a full ride to college on an academic scholarship this is a kid that grew up camping in his yard like doing outdoor stuff he's just an outdoorsy kid right but he's really smart and he was in high school and I hired him in 21 in the spring before he was out of high school he worked for me through the summer and fall came in 21 and he had a choice to go to college or to keep working for us mind you I have one employee two maybe two at that point uh making 12 bucks an hour I mean four years ago four years ago and uh Tristan would just back and forth over this decision and I said hey man I can't promise 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 and 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 all together 65 how many knives will you turn out or anim this year we'll do about 150 000 150 000 individual knives and they range in price from what to what 200 to 350 and then you know we sell apparel and cutting boards and all kinds of things and what's really cool about what we've 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 2021 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 look 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 cove it out either in fact I don't know I didn't have the same experience you did but I I was so agitated by a march April by May I was just jumping out of my skin and I just felt like something so tragic was a foot I was getting all these letters from people like you who who grew up watching dirty jobs with their kids and they're like man essential work is headline news the 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 you're dad you know not around anymore obviously but we got some pretty good whiskey put his name on it and what was his name Carl Noble Carl Noble K-N-O-B-E-L electrician by trade that's cool not aligned but well cheers to Carl well cheers to uh 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 horseshief she cleaned out today and like just all this grosses out my son but uh Hank six five Hank yeah grossed out by his sister she's just beautiful 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 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 seventh eighth ninth grade I ended up using in my lineman career you know when I got my apprenticeship I had to go buy the book math for dummies because I didn't pay attention right in high school because I thought it was dumb and I wished I had a paid more attention then but I also told those kids if you don't go to college you're not a failure a lot of people were telling us when we were graduating high school like college was that's how you became successful sure but I watched my dad become for 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 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 meeting people like you and Joe Rogan and all these neat people and I said what you end up finding out is those people are just like you you know they've just done extraordinary things because they ground for 20 30 years at what they do to get to where they got and they also had a moment in their life like you did when you get these two convergent and divergent thoughts it's kind of a big deal I don't know what's going to come of it we don't have to but you either act on it or you don't yeah I'm sure Rogan has great stories in the early days about you know burning the ships and taking the risk and finding yourself in the middle of the lake and you either keep going yeah or you turn back yeah you know but what does success look like what will it take if it hasn't already happened to look at MKC and go yeah yeah 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 4h auction and we buy last year we bought like a steer at the local 4h auction that the neighbor kid raised and we put it in our freezer in the shop for the employees to take home at night I think there's so much more and one thing that I want to see and this is really up your alley you know how do we make America quote unquote great again right I see these politicians all talking about everything overseas but I don't see them talking much about how they're going to fix at home right because I think the problem at home is hard it's really hard and it's in front of our face yeah I actually talked to Trump Jr was at my place a few weeks ago and I talked to him about this and I said what if the government actually funded a program where we built a huge warehouse right in the dead center of the inner city a big empty building yeah and you brought a bunch of kids in and I'm talking like 14 15 year olds 13 year olds and you said there's water at the edge of this building we're going to lay out some rooms in here we're going to put a bathroom down at that end we're going to put in a kitchen and we're going to build some walls all the way through this building we're going to wire it we're going to turn the lights on on this place we're going to plummet we're going to put sheet rock all through it we're going to paint it we're going to do every trade essentially that is is out there you know from framing wiring plumbing mechanical sheet rock 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 the summer and probably make 20 bucks an hour right and when you graduate high school you'll probably in 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 back-o business where's the hope when I walk around LA when I drop into LA and I see a little kid that's born in the middle of this of LA how is that kid ever going to get to run a back-o or swing a hammer or how does he even know what's possible he doesn't he doesn't look and the only way that they're going to know what's possible is if we and if we built that all we're building one time is a big empty warehouse and then every year we frame it out and we wreck it out but it's something real that you teach those kids and when they're like hey this summer you can go join the gang and you can go do whatever or you could go get a job and make 20 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 yeah I feel like you know we've been at this 16 years now with micro works and the last couple of months I've had like 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 it's themed 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 gonna love this and this this actually I didn't 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 gonna leave this was my dad's idea I'm gonna leave and go somewhere I don't know where but I'm gonna 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 sheet rock 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 back go 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 woodshop 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 yeah 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 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 got to pry people out of their zip codes now anymore it goes to your point to 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 uh the thing is as though is like when people say shop class I'm not talking in high school about making red boxes we need to teach kids how to build things for real like maybe you can't frame up a whole shed and maybe you can't frame up the whole thing that I explained but maybe all you do is frame up a 10 foot long by 8 foot tall wall and show kids how to run wire through it and how to wire outlets and plumb and do different things we have to teach kids real actual skills that they can use having said all that might if I open these things up now please do take a look at them and share their magnificence with the world this is a bison leather roll that's made by an awesome leather worker in Idaho Francesca she's an amazing she's like 25 years old when she's 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 gotten amazing teton leather company amazing uh 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 I use it backwarded forever now yeah we don't take backwarder 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 big horn chef there but yeah this is um it just it feels right for starters I mean back to the art of a thing how do you make it feel so good in the hand you know we draw these things up in the beginning of the company I would custom make everyone I would make model after model and this is where I said like I was doing some things maybe not exactly the most efficient now we can actually kind of 3d print drawings and stuff but then I'll still go grind blades and actually feel them in the hand yeah and make sure you have the balance right another knife maker actually marico malmasy 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 marico had a lot of experience in chef's knives he helped me design these kind of like the tactical knives I get a lot of uh feedback from actual veterans I didn't serve I asked active duty guys veterans as we're designing knives I'm handing them prototypes and they're hey rip this apart and we'll change it because I want to make what's the best tool for that person did you talk to jocko 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 our new tactical knife jocko's great I'm talking about jocko uh wilnik and uh I mean just the no pressure son but your name is Thor yeah okay we're all yeah we're all counting on you to save the day dude yeah Thor's awesome he's nice kid does he know Hank I don't think they've met no no they haven't think Thor and Hank together would be formidable yeah this what you call you're a full tang construction yeah as I recall yeah Chuck that means the uh the steel and the blade runs all the way through the length of the handle yeah I got to get rid of my half uh half ones you're half tang yeah my half yeah be careful those are very sharp man this looks very sharp what makes it great well the steel first of all it really starts with the steel this is magna cut stainless steel there's another really cool story with that uh tell me when I turned 13 years old at the organ knife show in Eugene Oregon a really nice knife maker offered to share his table with this little kid named Josh his name was Devin Thomas everyone called him Haas he was a big guy and he made Damascus steel and so he and it just make so people understand what is Damascus 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 2500 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 um work on wagon wheels and all that maybe the most critical vocation throughout history without a doubt the sword 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 uh 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 magna cut Devin was sharing this table with me way back then out of the gracious goodness of his heart 30 years later today his kid laren who wasn't born then is a phd metallurgist and invented magna cut steel for knife makers when he 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 for to resist wear and industry we make knives in case he does out of ball bearing steel but that was made to make ball bearings and then knife makers repurposed it because it works well but magna cut steel was made for knife making is the idea to work with the hardest steel that you can or does it need to be soft enough to hold a great edge yeah it seems like it's a great question so it's like a number one pencil a number two pencil right and the number three like three is real hard yeah and one is like a skid mark people seem to gravitate to two so it depends on the use of the knife right so that's a great question the harder a piece of steel is the more brittle it is and it's an inverse scale as that blade softens and becomes less hard your toughness goes up tensile strength yes yep so for example as that blade softens way way down that steel gets tougher and tougher to the point where actually it becomes like mild steel where you can bend it back and forth but it has no edge holding ability it's not hard at all i said i became the youngest master blade smith in the world when i was 19 right to do that i had to hand forge a blade finish that knife it had to be able to chop a one inch rope in half and one chop right that shows sharpness that's not too hard hemp yep one inch hemp rope you then had to take that same blade without sharpening and chop two two by fours and half as many chops as you want and when you get done that blade has to shave hair off of your arm when you're done with that you then have to take that blade and bend it 90 degrees in a vise without breaking it that's what i'm what that's the crazy part yeah i've seen this done in competitions yep and maybe even in forged and steel yeah 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 x caliber from the rock and go about your business and i might heat treat a knife like that for a camp knife that's gonna bend and flex and you're gonna pry and do all that but for a chef's knife i don't need that bend you know 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 right he's overseas he's an afghanistan he can't send it in for warney 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 fifteen hundred dollars yeah yep um i think thirteen hundred 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 in to 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 sharpen knives you're going to pay somebody to just stand there 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 uh forge dare i say loyalty yeah and that's pretty good buy 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 uh you know and we do that all the time can you recycle uh 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 a way 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 honey 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 and i imagine the hunting world is its own thing yeah and i imagine cutlery is its own thing yep is there another thing there is and it's a big one coming it's almost like i gave you these questions asked you're doing a really good job thanks you know thank you it's uh it's my only skill i think it was the one sheet i gave you yeah yeah so he's not reading oh you mean the one that says you grew up in a dog house yeah we're working on developing our own folding uh 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 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 but two generations ago the average guy was walking around with a pocket knife mm-hmm 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 walk 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 this seems like there's less people uh carrying knives but i 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 um even out hiking everyone should have a pocket knife yeah really should yeah so that's the next phase that's the next big one but that's a couple years down the road we're really trying to build out the rest of our tactical our tactical knives this year we have some butcher knives coming out for those butchers out there that's the one thing you're going to see us as a brand we're not necessarily going to like the butcher market for what we're doing probably isn't massive compared to like culinary or the tactical world but we're going to build knives for people who need a knife for their job so i might sell less knives to butchers that i'm going to sell like folding knives to guys in their pocket but if that means we make five thousand butcher knives or ten or two 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 to i'm also curious what did the chic one with the sword yeah a lot of guys asked me that he actually is a a real studious um he's a guy that loves his history of his uh region of the world and so ottoman empires yeah yeah there's a book arms and armor of i ran amazing amazing what they built back in those days the 1700s shake actually sent me some original 1700s armor that's absolutely incredible because i kept trying to talk him in actually to some other things that i i didn't want to build that sword yeah uh actually that sword was a real pain in the ass but he had no interest in you know american stuff or european stuff he wanted his kind of iranian region he wanted some of that that old sword in that history he wanted the history that collection of the wall's collection he wanted it done in today's damascus steel and and what i could do so yeah 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 is a good one um so how long we've been talking Chuck i don't want to be over an hour and a half okay great so i gotta 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 and fire you well how do i say this the right way reality tv is a siren song of sorts to a lot of people and a lot of different worlds for a lot of different reasons you know and i'm sure you're thinking of american chopper and all these different worlds that that world right 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 yeah which is a good thing the danger of going on any reality show is that somebody's gonna screw it up yeah and turn you into something you don't want to be portrayed as i'm just curious how that calculus played out for you know it's it's a great question because the the first year it came out i refused to go on it they asked and i i didn't want i'm very proud of my craft right and we are professionals in what we do as far as knife makers right i didn't want to go on something that was going to make us look like 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 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 four guys make it they get a lot of stuffs gonna 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 in there was a manufacturer not not manipulating no it was not it was a contest though right it was a contest topped with steel it was but i thought i've always thought i haven't watched it honestly in the last few years but those years that i was on it or that it was going um i always thought they did a good job with that yeah i understand that things are gonna have to hit the floor right the one thing that bothered me the first year was or the first couple years was that that they never sent back you know it's as a contestant whatever you made on there they kept right and i would be okay with that except for the only person that ever got money from that show was the guy who won he won 10 grand right so the way that show works is it whittles down the first four to two and then two go head to head and so those two make a beautiful sword or whatever they make it's a challenge every week yep different challenge yep and you go back to your home shop each of you do you and i go back to our shops we have a week we make what they've told us to make we come back to new york and we present it to the judges right and they test it and they do all their stuff okay let's just say you win right you get 10 grand i've just spent basically the last three weeks of my month as a knife maker dedicated to this show i don't win any money but they also keep the item right and i go home and what really bothered me was is they kept saying that we're about the knife maker we're really wanting to highlight knife makers well they don't even say like it just says josh from montana they're not putting your website on there they're not even putting your last name a lot of times and my thing is is when they ask 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 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&m's 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 it 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 like these guys that go on that show are hobbyist makers that's like the biggest thing they've ever done maybe their sword bent or broken half on the show or whatever forged and 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 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 gonna try a promise here that was a really good point it was seven months later i got a random text it was both the swords that i had made on that show and he said both of these are coming back to you and every contestant from now and i'll get their swords back wow do you remember his name i regretfully i do not i wish i did did he work for the history channel he did yep and uh he was very very good person i mean look i just asked like credit words 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 uh i said no it's in your basement with rust all over and it's a beautiful sword and uh when he called me back a few hours later he was like man i gotta 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 him i said all those swords in there mean more to the guy who made them then they mean to you guys you know this is i mean you've said a lot of memorable things in the last two hours that's so important for me to hear for a lot of different reasons i'll only tell you because you brought up dirty jobs and it was so important to not leave those people who welcomed me into their home feeling like they were being used as fodder or a punchline or just a necessary part of some i mean this was really before reality tv was truly a thing yeah you know and the thing that saved us were and save us but the thing that allowed me to do that was the behind the scenes camera which taylor now is my like our go-to guy for that and like whenever you show the viewer the truth of the thing you know you get credit yeah and i just really feel for craftsmen who would be brought in there and knowing their swords rotting somewhere in a basement and they came in so i mean it's just it's unnecessary and good for that executive yeah no and i don't think they were doing anything malicious when they weren't sending them back they just didn't know they're making a show it's a thing they made whatever but you don't understand it took me 30 years to get good enough to the point to go on that show like when i when i make something like that and 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 he's a you know a dentist during the day or whatever and he makes knives and he happened to get on forged and fire it might be the biggest moment his knife making career you know i've done other really cool things but it was just the idea of it camera does funny things to people yeah you know funny good and funny not good but mostly just interesting taylor do you remember who made that sign for me was it uh dragon for dragon forgia in pine colorado is rory right look at that for me for a second drink that in man that is iron and copper and no it's beautiful it's i mean he hand forged all those points it took a long time you know and they gave it to me yeah which is funny because it's 140 pounds at least yeah that was a nightmare to hang but one thing i want to point out you know the success i'm having and everything that i'm doing today with montana knife company and where i've been and stuff it all is because one because a guy rick dunkerley my little league baseball coach invited me to a shot right and then it's also because there was no youtube there was no shows there was no forged and 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 uh 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 that 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 shackleford the editor of blad magazine would write articles about us up there and he nicknamed our region the montana mafia and it was these knife makers in montana were working together just pushing each other and coming up with ideas i got to where i got because the knife-making community was willing to share ideas a lot of other industries you go to art shows and a lot of other people they hide their tips and their techniques um the knife-making community is really really cool in that way that's great yeah 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 in 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 and 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 and would you tell those kids in high school and that speech of yours just because you're from that small town montana or wyoming or atahoe or wherever you're from it doesn't mean you can't do great things you can't go out and create a brand right you don't have to go to college you know i i told them when i was in their class good job a students for being a students and see students those are going to make really great employees someday but i 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 uh it's how i ended up growing a brand and i said you're sitting there looking at the big city but what you don't know is a lot of those people are looking back at your instagram going i can't believe they're dragging cows around by the whole my kids are in four h right my little girls are dragging around a fourteen hundred pound steer and riding horses and doing the things they do and i said you're jealous or sometimes you think you're missing out on things in the big city but it's really the other way around those kids are missing out on things in your hometown grass really is greener in montana yeah it's true do you ever see a river runs through it yeah that was made about our river the blackfoot river where i grew up the big blackfoot yeah i swear chucked have you seen this of course that was uh Norman McLean wrote that book oh really and that last page man i read this thing probably 20 years ago 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 um now all of the people i knew when i was young and didn't understand are dead but i still reach out to them and standing there in the arctic half-light of the canyon all existence flows into my soul the memories and the sounds of the little blackfoot river the big blackfoot river and the count of a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise and then he writes ah in the end all things merge into one and a river runs through it that's really cool that's where you think it ends and then you turn the page and he says the river was cut from the great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time on the rocks are priceless teardrops and below them are the words and some of the words are theirs and then i am haunted by waters that's amazing 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 taken the 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 but because my dad busted his ass as a self-employed backhoe operators whole life he would have loved to have had paid vacation and benefits so and 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 it was going to happen i was going to have to go get another lineman job somewhere fill up another wood shed yeah yeah the reason we're running out of media is because with the possible exception of my mother this is the best conversation i've had in ages and the nicest gift i've gotten since Rory made me that sign well thank you really your mother's amazing by the way yeah she's something 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 and thank you for what you do for uh for america it's a pleasure thanks for what you do for cooks and hunters and soldiers josh smith everybody oh i assume it's montana knife company dot 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 the world was this yeah that's our seasoning another another cool american brand tactic calories that you put that on a stake it's going to blow your mind oh you know sometimes you make stuff like he was like hey let's do a seasoning together it's like oh that sounds good you know it's cool it's got our logo on it and then you put on a stick you're like that shit's actually pretty good yeah well eventually all things merge into one and a river runs through 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 one more than a four just a quick review with five stars too from the u5 stars will do hey moms looking for some light-hearted guidance on this crazy journey we call parenting join me Sabrina Colberg and me Andy Mitchell for pop culture moms where each week we talk about what we're watching and examine our favorite pop culture moms up close to try to pick up some parenting hacks along the way come laugh learn and grow with us as we look for the best tips and maybe a few what not to do is from our favorite fictional moms from Good Morning America and ABC audio pop culture moms find it wherever you get your podcasts
