17min chapter

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe cover image

403: Josh Smith—From First Blood to Last Bite

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

CHAPTER

Montana's Spirit and the Craft of Knives

This chapter explores the unique landscapes of Montana and the hardworking spirit of its people, illustrating the contrast between mountainous and flat terrains. It also delves into the speaker's journey of starting a knife-making business, reflecting on personal connections and the importance of craftsmanship amidst modern consumer culture. Through anecdotes and reflections, the narrative emphasizes resilience, heritage, and the emotional significance of handmade items.

00:00
Speaker 2
I wonder where you learned an appreciation for that kind of consequence. It's almost as if you had a dad who wouldn't let you go do a thing until the woodshed was all full. It didn't much matter how you felt about it at all. Yeah. Exactly. Before I open these knives and show their unrivaled matchless beauty to the world, everything you've said I think really lays the pipe metaphorically. Because I want to understand how all of what you've described, and we'll get back to the speech for sure, but as an entrepreneur, that's a different set of muscles from a tradesman, which are different from a craftsman.
Speaker 1
But
Speaker 2
I wanted to ask you about Montana in general, because again, most people listening to this have probably never been there. We know it's there, we know it's big, something about the sky, you know, 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 sum up. So I'll leave it to you. Man,
Speaker 1
when they say big-sky country and I never really understood it until I started traveling more you know when I was out on the East Coast and there's something about the way the mountains come up out of the ground, the size of the sky, the length of time you can drive in a car without seeing another house or a farm light and the variation in terrain from the west side of the state of you know mountains and trees and to the east side of the state which is just rolling flat lands you know and cattle country. Us on the west side of the state like to say the east side of the state you can watch your dog run away for a week out there. That's for you people out by Billings. But it's just and it's filled with just really good people that are working hard and not looking for a handout and they're there to help their neighbor.
Speaker 2
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 Kalispell. phone. I mean, everyone has. Let it dirty. Who says that? I mean, it really rang my bell and production was worried and we had to kind of stop down for a day to make sure I didn't have some sort of hematoma or whatever. And I didn't. But in the time off that I had, I took the production van and I just drove up through Glacier. Yeah. Like right up to the border and then back down and around. And I've seen some things man. I've been around. I have never seen anything as drop-dead gorgeous as that. Yeah. Nothing.
Speaker 1
Yeah. And I was blown
Speaker 2
away by how accessible it was from Kalispell. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1
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.
Speaker 2
So you have access to unlimited beauty. You got an old man who sounds utterly practical, highly skilled, utterly practical. Your poor mother just gets dragged along, you buy the giant shithole and you move into it and then you got, they built the doghouse or the house. It made her cry. It made her cry. Yeah. Honey, look what I got. Oh, God. So, I mean, like, all of these interesting different things, you know, and you played baseball, too, as a kid.
Speaker 1
What position did you play? Short stop and pitcher. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Okay. So, it all sounds horribly and wonderfully well-rounded, and I'm wondering if that somehow is connected to whatever entrepreneurial muscle you're about to describe that led you to make the very things I'm about to reveal. Yeah,
Speaker 1
I think the totality of that never-equip 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. Like you're not a Navy seal yet until they say you're a Navy seal. I think, uh, sticking with something and working, I watched my parents build their excavation business from a cabless backhoe to four new backhoes and an excavator, but it took them my entire, it took them 20 years. It takes a long time. And I think people a lot of times expect things to happen too fast. I registered the name Montana Knife Company when I was 19 years old. But I didn't launch it until I was 39. It was COVID. It was 2020. And thank God, my mom was smart enough to, you know, register the name. thought it was a great name and we talked about it. And then I talked about starting Montana Knife Company for 20 years and just didn't do it. Because I didn't know how to start a production knife company, like I was making high end two, $3,000 knives, one at a time. Mm-hmm, how do you scale that? How do you scale that, right? And that's kind of back to that Drummond speech. I told these kids, I said, for a long time, I thought, well, I'm just from Montana. You're like, it's not possible to start a brand or do this or do that. And then I started to get to know some people that ran big brands. You know, somebody like Evan Hafer, we talked about earlier before the podcast at Black Rifle Coffee. I mean, he's just from Logging Town, Idaho. Went to the military and he started what ended up being Black Rifle Coffee. And I told those high school kids, what you end up realizing maybe later in life is by growing up a rancher's kid or a plumber's kid or whatever, you learn resiliency and hard work that a lot of other kids don't learn. And stick-to At a certain point you realize, like, why not? Why can't a really cool brand start in small town Montana? I told my wife, my new wife, I had gotten my apprenticeship with the power company and I did the lineman thing, ended up actually divorced, and then my house burned down. And so I was living in a camper in my driveway with my four kids, and I was rebuilding my home. I sold my pickup, I barely hung on to my place, and I was broke as hell 10 years ago this year. The Facebook memories popped up. I mean, I was, I bought a piece of crap old 1980 Chevy from my four minute work, and then the thing died on me two weeks later. And I was so broke living in my camper. I was so far away from starting this company. What do you do when your foreman sells you a lemon? Um, get laughed at by all the other journeymen. That's, that's Lineman. Yeah, he just made fun of. You know, but I, I went a few years of just grinding out. Coming home doing kids' laundry, trying to be a journeyman, lineman, not making much for knives, just trying to survive, frankly. And then I met my new wife. I met Jess after we got married, as we were getting married. I kind of told her my idea, this Montana knife company. And every day in the bucket truck, I would talk to a couple of the guys about like this dream of what I wanted to build. This guy named Dave Kennedy in particular and I would tell him I'm gonna build this company someday. And I'm sure he thought this is never gonna happen but we talked about every day for years.
Speaker 2
In the bucket truck.
Speaker 1
Up in the bucket. You know you're in the bucket, you're working on wire doing whatever and you talk, you bullshit about you know everything. But some of them are your like your dreams like we're gonna quit this job, we're gonna start our own this or that.
Speaker 2
I got a riff real quick just on the in the same way that Montana is really important to the 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 and you're 30 or 40 feet up in the air. Typically surrounded by all sorts of things that will kill you if you touch it wrong. 7200 volt wire. Just humming and buzzing. And so yeah, that's when you start to talk about stuff that matters to you, I guess. Yeah. Your bucket list, I dare say.
Speaker 1
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 when I met my new wife, I told her about this Montana knife company idea, and she said, well, I've if you touch it wrong. 7200 volt wire. Just zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz 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 Winter Strong. of friends from the outdoor industry and the fitness world and sports world but he only invites people 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, could be a businessman, whatever. And I was there teaching forging with another knife maker that actually invited me there, Neil Kamamura. 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, I'm doing, we're doing this. I'm going home and I'm doing this. And that was right. That was first weekend in February 20. And right then COVID started bearing down. I
Speaker 2
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've got like all lights are green. Let's go. Let's do it. But you didn't.
Speaker 1
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 the trend in stores One so many things were being made more and more overseas and as men Generally, we have passed down for generations knives and guns. And all of a sudden, I started seeing in stores like replaceable blade throwaway knives, because a guy doesn't know how to sharpen a knife. We now buy razor blades and we throw them in the bushes or we throw them in the garbage. Because, you know, my great great grandfather and yours and everyone else probably sat around at night with no Instagram and just sharpened his pocket knife. But now we don't know how to do that, so we're throwing those away. And I sharpened over the years hundreds and hundreds of knives that guys would bring in and say, my grandfather was in Vietnam, he passed away, this is the only thing I have of his, it was his pocket knife. Or he carried this knife in Vietnam, or he carried this knife as a logger in Idaho. It doesn't matter what the knife is, it mattered who carried it, and we're now throwing that away. And also, it doesn't have as much heart and soul when it's coming from Pakistan or China or whatever. And we also passed down 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 gonna go. I'm just gonna put it up here on the mantle or in my safe I'm not gonna throw that away, you know because my great-grandpa might carried it, you know Isn't that somewhat
Speaker 2
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,
Speaker 1
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. mean they've been sharpened away to nothing but my great-grandmother my grandmother my mom every one of them have their hands have used those. That thing
Speaker 2
cut a turkey at Thanksgiving in 1950.
Speaker 1
Right there's something about it so it's when I started this company I had no idea how to produce knives on scale at all. You can't just call some big knife company and ask them how they do it right. And so I did everything wrong in the beginning, but I started me, I made a couple hundred blades and met my business partner Brandon. He helped me do the marketing side of it, built me a website. And in 2020, I just decided I'm gonna 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 gonna control what I can control, and we're gonna just build this. And we just ignored COVID. And my 14-year daughter at the time, she's 18 now, she was helping grind handles. My little boy Hank at the time, he was five foot tall, barely now he's six five and a monster, but they were all helping me in the shop, put those knives together. And we were doing everything wrong. How big's Hank? Six five you said? Yeah, 16 year old, he's a monster. Oh my god. Yeah. She's a gladiator. But the point is, is we just started building these in my garage, my two car garage, you know, one knife at a time and learning and this thing started to kind of ramp up and go well through 20. On 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 a ski resort down in Big Sky. And I went to my boss at the power company and I said, hey, I need the 31st off here in a few days, but I'm out of vacation time. Right. And he was like, well, it means corporate. He's like, well, you're out of vacation. I'm like, well, I have four weeks starting the next day. The first like I said, I need this staff. Let's figure out a way to move vacation around whatever. And he was like, it's not going to happen. And I said, well, this is a big deal. I don't know what's going to come of it. I asked him about it a few times and finally on December 31st I walked in and or December 30th I said hey what about tomorrow getting that off and he was like well it's not gonna 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.
Speaker 2
Shameless plug.

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