Transcript of Made in USA: How One Startup is Reshaping Manufacturing | Josh Smith DSH #1177

Completely worn down. The bear that my son shot had almost no teeth left. She had zero fat on her, and it was right before winter. She was absolutely going to starve to death. A hundred %. It was game over for her. And so when you think about it, generally in nature, an animal only dies from starvation.

All right, guys. Josh Smith from Montana Knife Co. Thanks for coming on today, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Yeah, first master Smith I've had on the show. Yeah, I appreciate it. No joke getting that title.

Yeah, no, that was a pretty cool thing to attain for sure.

You got it at a young age.

Yeah, especially at that age. I I became the youngest in the world when I was 19. I'm definitely not 19 anymore with all this gray hair, but yeah, it was quite the accomplishment for sure.

What's the process for that for people that have no idea what that even is?

Yeah, I started making knives when I was 11, and you have to become an apprentice, which basically, you just join the American Bladesmith Society. For a couple of years, you're just apprenticing. Then you can test for... First, you have to test for your journeyman. That involves actually making a performance blade that you have to be able to chop a one-inch rope in half and then chop two two by fours in half as many chops as you want to take, but then it still has to shave hair when you're done. Then you have to bend that blade 90 degrees in a vice without breaking it. Whoa. Yeah, it's legit. That proves that you have a knowledge of heat-treating and edge geometry and a lot of those things. Then you take five knives and you present them to a panel of judges, master Smith judges in Atlanta at the Blade Show, and they judge fit and finish and how good of a maker you are across your five knives. I did that when I was 15 and was the youngest to do that. Then you have to be a journeyman in two years, and then you're allowed to test for your master.

It's the same test, but it's with Damascus steel blades. That's steel. It's layers of steel forged Most people know that as the way the samurais used to do it. It's quite a process. But it's the same test, but with that Damascus steel blade, and I did that when I was 19. There's about 120 or 30 in the world now, so it's a pretty prestigious thing to-Yeah, that's intense.

To do. It's like being a sommelier for drinking. Yeah, for sure. Because there's not many of those guys.

Exactly.

You were doing it super young. What compelled you at that age to get in a knife?

My Little League baseball coach, Rick Dunkerly, he started He would bring his knives to practice and show the parents. He was learning, honestly, at that point. I think being an 11-year-old little boy, I just thought the knives were cool. He invited me to a shop to make one. I think I was a pretty responsible kid, and he could tell I made a couple, and then he was like, Well, if you want to be a knifemaker, you have to have your own shop, which I think was his way of getting me out of his shop. But I had a lawn mowing business, and I was earning money doing that. I bought a belt grinder, and Honestly, I was just a pretty driven kid. I started buying more equipment. Then finally, my dad booted me out of his shop. I was making a mess, and he enclosed the lean-to shed that we had. I made I was before school, after school, weekends. Then I started going to knife shows all over the country when I was about 14. Everywhere I was, when I was around other masters, I was just asking them lots of questions, How do you do this and that?

They were a community. What I didn't know when I started making that Rick would actually end up becoming one of the best knife makers in the world someday. I got lucky that I wasn't learning from some just scrub. I was trying to catch him, but then he was also learning and getting better. It's just constantly chasing these guys I was learning from. I became a pretty damn good maker by the time I was in my 20s. That's super cool.

You knew from a young age what you were going to do with your life. It's a life.

Yeah. I made those first couple of knives, and I sold them to my math and science teacher for $20 a piece. It just blew me away that you could do something so fun. I could make a knife, and then you can make money from it.

It's like a win-win.

Yeah. As a kid, when you're 12 years old, it's like, I'm making 20 bucks to make a knife. I'm going to keep doing this. That's fascinating. It became a career.

When people buy fancy kitchen sets, are those handmade, those knives, in those kitchen sets?

Yeah. With our knives, there's two different kinds of knives that I basically make. I have my custom stuff, which is what I did for years. Then I started Montana Knife Company in 2020. That's It's a production knife. I started very small in my two-car garage. What we've built that into now, if you buy a Montana Knife Company knife, it's semi-production, like the machines and all that, and then they're hand-sharpened on a belt.

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Cleaned by hand, packaged all by hand, but we have CNC machines and some stuff, so I don't want to compare those to a truly handmade knife. But But there's a lot more handwork in those than maybe this knife stamped out in China.

Is there a massive quality difference between just a regular kitchen set and Montana knives?

Yeah, there really is. The knives that we build, even though they're We produce them. We're trying to produce them on scale. We're producing them at a level of quality that I would expect in a custom knife. Steel selection, not using cheap junky steel. We're using the best steel that we can possibly for a blade heat treatment. Those skills that I learned young with those heat-treating tests and stuff, I've applied that stuff to our production knife company. When you buy a blade, the edge geometry, which is like how thick the blade is, how it's sharpened, how it's heat treated, all those things that I did in my custom knife, you're getting that in a production knife. Our knives aren't the cheapest. Montana Knife Company's chef set isn't the cheapest. That whole set of knives is 1,300 bucks. It's It's not cheap. But we also sharpen those for life for free. Oh, really? Yeah. If once a year, twice a year, you want to send them in, we'll sharpen them up, we'll send them back to you for free. If you never have to buy another knife set the rest of your life, you've gotten pretty good value.

You literally use your chef's knives every day. They're definitely better than what most people are used to.

I could see that. That makes a lot of sense because we're probably on our It's a well-worth set of knives right now.

Yeah. You pay a few hundred bucks every few years. Are you really ahead at the end? The other part of that is they're made in America. That's the thing. All of our knives are made here in America. Everything's done in the US. We're trying to bring American manufacturing back. That's really what Montana Knife Company is. We sell a ton of apparel. A lot of people wear our hats and shirts and don't even own a knife yet. But it's because of our story and what they've seen me grow this from a two-car garage. I started it in COVID, and my kids were literally helping me assemble the knives at no employees. I was doing it before and after my day job. Today, we have 80 employees, and it's becoming this national brand. But people are seeing that the American dream is still achievable. It's alive and real. It just takes a lot of work.

Yeah. Now with Trump, he's trying to bring a lot more jobs to America, right?

Absolutely. The people ask me about the tariff stuff and whatnot It's like, Well, that's why it doesn't bother me what he does with tariff because we do everything right here in the US.

Other companies are going to be affected, though. Yeah. 25% territory.

Trump's got a chef set from us. Don Jr is a good friend of mine. They're very supportive of American manufacturing. I think people, they say buy America and whatnot, and some people are like, Yeah, I support that. But even myself, I didn't have any idea how impactful American manufacturing was until I built this company. It's not just my 80 employees that I've hired in the last three years. It's also all the other businesses that we pay to do things in that process. We're not doing everything in-house yet. We're not Because we're trying to build this all the manufacturing process, but it takes years because some of these processes cost millions of dollars to bring in house. The steel is made in New York. It's rolled in New York. It's heat treated in Pennsylvania. We're paying people all across the country. Our leather sheaths are made by a gal, Teton Leather Company in Idaho. Just because of our business, she's hired 8 or 10 people. Our wood blocks, our cutting boards, and our display boards and everything are made by a guy that was making some cutting boards and a few things as a hobby in his garage.

He now has nine employees and just trying to keep up with our production. When people support American manufacturing, it means more than people know, and it really does spread the dollar around.

Yeah, I didn't even think about it that way, but that's so true because you're working with other companies and people.

For a small place like Montana, for Western Montana, a lot of times in those really small rural towns, it could be in North Dakota or Idaho or anywhere that's small, generally, dollars just get spun around in the community, and there's not a lot of inflection of new dollars. It's like you have a local business, I hire you, but then you hire me to do something, and it's just back and forth. A national brand like ours is bringing millions of dollars of revenue into our state from out of state. 90% of our sales are out of state. All that money comes into our Our state, we hire our employees, we spend all that money in our state. It's a huge thing for rural areas.

Absolutely.

I hope more small businesses will grow and become bigger businesses in small rural areas besides just the big cities.

That way the city could grow, right?

Right. Yeah. That way there's the money that we make now, now they tax us. Those taxes go to the fire department, the local schools, and EMS. It's a benefit to small towns to have some form of manufacturing.

Yeah, makes sense. Are you born and raised in Montana?

Basically, I was born in Colorado Springs, but my parents moved there when I was six months old. My mom was born in Montana. I always feel like fraud if I say yes. Yeah, I grew up in a tiny town. I actually grew up in Lincoln, Montana. It's where they caught the Unabomber. Oh, wow. He was hiding in the woods up there.

Yeah, it's-Was that guy from there or he was just randomly there?

That's where he That's where he lived. He wasn't from there. I think he actually was a professor at Berkeley. Then when he started doing all his bullshit, he moved to hide from the feds and lived in a cabin in Lincoln. It's a small little logging town of 1,500 people, and he lived with no power up off the grid. Nobody really knew who he was, obviously.

It's probably a good spot to hide out.

Yeah.

1,500 people? Yeah. Wow. I had more people in my high school than you did in your whole town.

Exactly. I graduated with 20 kids in my class, and it was the biggest class that ever graduated from there. Holy crap.

That's nuts. Everyone's super tight with each other. Yeah, exactly. There's value in community, though.

There's a lot of value in it. Helping out your neighbor, and when people are down or need help, you take care of each other.

That's something that's lost in these major cities, that network. That network. People you can rely on.

I interviewed a guy. I now live in Frenchtown, Montana, which is a little bit bigger than Lincoln, but still small. I think my kids have about 80 kids in their class or so now. But I interviewed a guy that we're hiring from Baltimore, and I took him to my son's football game. We interviewed him during the day, and I was like, he's not flying out until the next day. He's like, Dude, have dinner with us, and we're going to my kid's football game if you want to go watch. He just couldn't believe that sense of community where everyone knows everyone, and it was safe. It was just a beautiful Friday evening in Montana, and you're saying hi to all the neighbors. He's like, Man, I have to move here. This is what I'm missing. He's like, There's no community like this in big cities. He's like, It's just so nice to know that even if you If you're not around your kid, you know that maybe someone that knows your kid's looking out for it.

That's cool. I hope to one day live in that atmosphere. Right now with the podcast, it's a little tougher. I got to be in a major city, but I go to a Whole Foods now. I don't recognize anyone. In Vegas.

If you came and visited me, we'd go down to the grocery store and I'd say hi to four or five people just walking through there.

That's great, man. When you look at these blue zones and people live long there, community is a big part of it.

Yeah, exactly. But it has its drawbacks, like you say, when you're running a podcast. I have a podcast. It's not something I push or whatever. I just do it because I really like people. With my business, I've really come to get to meet really neat people. But I was telling some of your folks out there, it's hard because I only do them in person. When you're in Vegas, there's always somebody cool coming to town that you could interview. But when you're in Montana in the winter, it's like, well, who's going to be around that's interesting to talk to? It's not quite like...

Yeah, you probably get a ton of snow out there, huh? Yeah, we get quite a bit. We don't get any out here.

Yeah, no. It's been unseasonably dry and warm right now. It's been in the 30s during the day, maybe 40, maybe. But we don't have much snow yet, but we do get quite a bit. And skiing is a big thing there. I can see that. Snowboarding.

I did see on your YouTube, you did an archery rifle challenge. Yeah, With Tulsi and Bow Nickel. Yeah. That's awesome.

Yeah, Sig Sauer, big gun manufacturer, phenomenal people. They put on an event and they said, We're going to do this competition, and it's for fun, but the winning team, we're going to give $50,000 to to give to whatever charity they choose. They asked some well-known people in the space to put together a team. They basically chose team captains, and then it was on us to choose our own teammates. They chose me as a captain, and I sent a message to Tulsi, invited her and Bo, and they both jumped on it.

You guys did well.

Yeah, we did. It was actually amazing because Tulsi's a good gun shooter. She'd never really shot a bow. Boehnickele shoots some rifle, but he hadn't really ever shot much pistol. I worked with both of them a little bit on some of that stuff. Man, we were… You know, there was a bunch of… It was a bunch of... Tulsi was the only woman in the competition, so she was on my team. Everyone else had all these high-speed dudes, military guys or hunters and whatnot. Sure enough, after day one, we were in the lead. Then a really good team passed us up the next day. But I think we took second or third in that.

I think it was second.

Yeah. It was an absolute blast. Tulsi, she was in the middle of the whole craziness of that campaign season. For her to take a days out and come compete for a veteran charity like that. She had never met me in her life. We had mutual friends, so I think she knew I wasn't some weirdo. We camped in wall tents and stripped down in our underwear and swam in the river afterwards during the day because it was really hot and dusty and you're sweating because it was very physical. She's just a real person, just such a good person. That's awesome.

She's been one of my favorite guests I've had. I've had on 1400 people.

Wow, 1400.

She's been one of my favorite, though.

She's one of my favorite humans. Her husband actually came along and just hung out and he took photos. Abe is just a really nice guy, too. That's awesome. I see everything being said about her with this whole Senate confirmation stuff coming. It actually really disappoints me because it's like, if you can make up bad things about her, then I just can't believe anything that you ever say, like with the media.

Yeah, I saw AOC said she's like pro-war or something.

Yeah, pro-war. She's absolutely not. In fact, what made Democrats so originally upset with her is when Obama tried to authorize bombings in Syria, and she went against him and voted against it. That was when the beginning of her end in the Democrat Party. Yeah, that was like the turning point. How can you say she's pro-war? I mean, yeah.

Yeah, that was silly. I think she might be running for President next term. Really? We'll see how that goes.

There's no chance.

I like a lot of Trump's pics lately. I see a new one every day, and I'm like, Oh, I like that.

Yeah, he's done a pretty good job. I can't imagine. You're going to probably pick some ones that aren't... You pick that many people. It's like hiring. If you hire 100 people, the odds say you're going to miss on a few. You're going to interview them the best you can, you're going to miss. You also have to lean on advisors in that position. I can't imagine, but I really am happy with what he's doing.

Yeah, 100%. It's a numbers game. He has to fill 10,000 positions, something crazy. Not every single person is going to be the best person.

Exactly. I don't think Trump's exactly sitting there reading a 10,000 resumes at night.

Then you'll see the media cancel him for one higher.

Exactly.

That happened last term.

Pete Hague Seth, another guy I know that's a really good guy. I really give Trump credit because an RFK, a Tulsi, people that haven't been lifelong Republicans, I don't really see the other side doing that, bringing in people from the other side. No. Clearly, Trump and RFK don't agree on everything. He's like, I'm going to keep him out of the environmental stuff. But he does respect RFK for what he is an expert in with the health stuff.

Which is cool. I don't see the other side doing that at all.

How many seven-year-olds do you see doing that many push-ups and pull-ups?

Not on that side.

That's what the guy in charge of our health should look like.

Yeah, 100%. Do you try to separate the politics from the business?

We do, yeah. I think it's known how we feel. But you know what? Democrats buy knives, too. I have absolute respect for the other side. We can have a healthy debate. I have friends that are Democrats or liberal, and we disagree on certain topics and stuff. But I If you're respectful and we want to have a good debate and agree to disagree, I'm fine with that. But I want our Instagram page and our website and some of that to be a little bit of maybe a break from the storm. It's like you see that stuff everywhere. It's on everything. A few times, I made my voice known during the election because I felt like, I mean, if Trump is willing to take a bullet in the ear, I should be willing to stand up, maybe lose a few followers, but say what I believe. We can either agree to disagree or you can stop following us. But I try to not hit the politics stuff too hard with the company page. On my page, I say a little bit more, but I figure if you're following the CEO of the company and the founder, you might want to know a little more how I am and how I feel.

Well, you're in Montana, so I think people can assume where you're at.

Yeah, we're a honey knife company, right? We make chef's knives and that stuff. But I'm proud to be conservative and have my feelings about the way our country should be. If you have a lock on your door or your house, then why wouldn't you have a lock on the door of your country? That's how I feel.

Absolutely. Any crazy hunting stories? I've actually I've never been hunting, by the way. Really? Yeah. Never gone.

Do you want to go?

I wouldn't be opposed.

Really? Yeah. I would do it. It's really cool. We took another gal that had never been hunting a couple of years ago, WWEW wrestler, Natalie Eva Marie.

She's been on the show?

Yeah, Natalie Eva Marie. She's Natalie's great. We took her on her first elk hunt and got her an elk. Elks are big, right? Yeah, they're big. She got a nice bull, and she totally embraced it. But she wanted to know where her food comes from. She You wanted to be a part of that. I understand some people that maybe don't want to go hunting, but to maybe denigrate it or talk poorly about it because you don't understand it. That's really where I think a lot of people are misled or misguided a little bit. Also, the role that hunting plays in conservation of the animals. What people don't know is the conservation of all the animals in Alaska or in Montana all come from taxes and stuff from hunting dollars. If you buy a box of bullets in Montana for hunting, they tax that box of bullets and it goes to conserving animals. Really? Yeah. All the trail maintenance, all of the They do animal counts every year. If there's a drought or the winter was really hard, they'll back down the numbers that hunters can harvest. They might even make it a draw-only area or completely shut hunting off in that area for a few years.

Hunters I want animals to be on this landscape more than anyone because I want my kids and my grandkids to be able to enjoy the same things I do. The last thing hunters want to do is wipe animals out. I mean, obviously in the settling of the West, this white people came out and overdid it on taking that Buffalo. But those times have definitely changed. I took my son to Northern British Columbia this summer. We took a float plane into the middle of absolute nowhere and moose hunting, and he shot a giant moose. That sounds fun. Ten days on horseback, no cell phone coverage, sleeping in tents, out in the rain and cold. But you sit around at night around a fire and you hear nothing. It's just birds and some squirrels and nothing. It's something that I think very few people will ever get to experience. I think there's something cleansing about being out in nature and just hearing nothing when you're laying there and you're looking at the stars. You also tend to think about a lot of things. It's a cool way to connect with your kid or your spouse or your buddy without the distraction of the world.

I agree. I do believe nature is very healing. It is. Just grounding barefoot on the grass.

It is. You have to do something hard. A lot of times you fail. You try to stalk in on an animal or you're not in good enough shape and you don't get up there in time and the animals are gone. Then there's something really rewarding once you work that hard for that many days and you take down an animal, if you have some leftovers on your plate, you don't throw it away. You appreciate your food. Even here at home, people who go buy beef or chicken or whatever, all you're doing really is outsourcing your murder to somebody else. That animal is still being put down and feeding you. When you're a part of the process, you're really thankful for, one, living in a free country to be able to do it. You're thankful for the environment that provided that animal a place to live. You're thankful to the landowner that maybe let you go hunt there and their conservation and whatnot. Then you're thankful just for the animal, for the meat and the food that it provides.

Absolutely.

It's really, not to mention all It's the connection with the people that you're with.

Yeah, that's awesome. It took you guys days to get a moose out there?

Yeah, we were out there 10 days.

It took full 10 days to get one?

Well, he got one in four days, and then we hunted for the next six days hard, hiked miles, and we never saw another bull moose. Wow. That's the other thing. Hunters generally go out and fail. I mean, it's a failure sport. You hunt. A lot of times you go out in the woods and you're on a more even plain field with those animals, and they have all their and the terrain's hard. Generally, you fail, but that's what makes the success feel so good. Then also, again, I can go out and see some elk or deer or whatever, and maybe it doesn't work out, and I go home and I haven't shot something, and I had the best day. You got to see animals in their environment. We saw two different grizzly bears up there. Damn. Are you allowed to shoot those? Not in British Columbia. You can in Alaska, you can in the Yukon, where We weren't, so we just watched him. Actually, Hank's bear, my son Hank, or his moose, after we dressed all that moose out and got all the meat out, the bones and the carcass are left there. The next day, the grizzly bear got on it.

I have videos afterwards I'll show you in pictures, but that grizzly bear buried that entire carcass, and then he sat on it for the next five days while we were in there. Holy crap. Gardening it from the wolves and the other bears.

So he wanted to save it for hibernation?

Yeah, well, he's saving it, and he'll eat on it up until hibernation. But yeah, that's a prize, right? That's a big deal to that bear. That's the other thing, too, is even that gut pile and some of that stuff that's left over from us taking the meat out, that bear is going to clean that completely up. That's going to provide him that sustenance to get through the winter. He's going to guard that with his life because that's a big deal for that bear. For a bear to go take down a moose or something, he could get injured, spend a lot of energy, maybe not get it. He basically happened along a free meal.

That's cool. You ever have any sketchy incidents where the animal got a little too close for your comfort?

Not too bad. I've hiked in and hunted, and then as I was hiking out, found out that a mountain lion had been following me for miles in your tracks. I had some close encounters with bears, but nothing too terrifying. My son had a fairly close encounter with a bear. When he was 14, he was hunting by himself with his bow. My son... The bear didn't attack him or anything. I don't want to overstate that, but it was snapping its jaws at him and whiffing at him. My son shot that bear with his bow at six yards. Holy crap. Yeah, at 14. That's scary. Killed that bear.

With one shot? Mm-hmm. Wow. Those are that powerful.

Yeah. A bow and arrow will go completely through an animal. What? Yeah. You have to go look for your arrow. That's a lot of force. Yeah. A lot of times, an animal won't even know it was shot. It's that fast. You'll shoot it. It's that fast. That broadhead is that sharp, and it goes through, and the animal will pick its head up or flinch and be like, What was that? They'll go back to eating at times and then just tip over. I mean, it's crazy.

They don't even feel the pain.

No. A lot of times they don't feel the anything. That's interesting.

Well, I have seen other people say that hunting is actually the quickest way for these animals to go.

Yeah. When you think about that moose my son got was a big old moose. People denigrate or they want to talk trash about trophy hunting. But if you think about it, you're taking an animal that is at his most mature and oldest point. Quite honestly, he's the 70-year-old guy that's on the way down. He's maybe not even breeding anymore, but he might be keeping the young Bulls away from breeding the cows. He's still pretty dangerous and he can still be a problem. But at a certain At some point, even like my son's moose, when you look at the teeth and stuff in that moose's skull, he may not have even lived another year. Oh, wow. The teeth are completely worn down. The bear that my son shot had almost no teeth left. She had zero fat on her, and it was right before winter. She was absolutely going to starve to death that winter, 100%. Yeah, it was game over for her. When you think about it, generally in nature, an animal only dies from starvation or injury because old age generally means they get injured, they get sore, something happens, or they just can't feed enough, and their body isn't robust enough to build fat up and make it through winter.

Old age generally means starvation. To take an animal out in an instant with no pain and then utilize that animal, utilize that meat and the stuff that is left that the rest of the animals get. There again, now you provide that opportunity for that young bull to come in and take over the herd and breed. There's a lot of benefits to hunting for sure.

Yeah, my stance on it has changed over the years because I grew up pretty liberal in New Jersey. I was like, Oh, you're hunting? You're a bad person.

Yeah. No, and I understand. I've had this conversation with a lot of people that really don't get it. I start to explain It's not just a bunch of people going out and just shooting a bunch of animals. There's a lot of work that goes into the studies of animals and how many are on the landscape and how many can ethically be taken out of this area. The other thing is, if things get overpopulated, they can also get disease. Humans do a pretty good job of managing that, especially in areas where there is good... Fish, wildlife, and parks in Montana does a really nice job of making sure animals are taken care of.

Yeah, that's cool. What's the most challenging animal to hunt, in your opinion?

That's an interesting one. There's different challenges. Like a big horn sheep or a goat can live up at 10: 20 12,000 feet and be in just the gnarliest country where you're literally crawling around on rocks. I mean, your rock climbing at any point can fall to your death. There's not a lot of oxygen up there. It can be very difficult physically. Then there's There are animals that are really, really twitchy. An antelope out in Eastern Montana that lives out on the Prairie, and they have vision that's unbelievable. They will spot you from two miles away and be gone. Two miles? Yeah, easily.

Holy crap. You got to wear camo.

Yeah, camo. Even with camo, you have to keep terrain features between you and them. Then they can smell. In addition to their vision, their noses are unbelievable. If you If you don't have the wind right, they will smell you from... A bear will smell you from a mile away easily. Holy crap.

You got to be thinking about the wind while you're hunting?

Yes, absolutely. Wind is your number one thing, even over sight. Bears don't have good vision, but I've been watching bears on the other mountain, across the draw from me, and all of a sudden, he'll pick his nose up and… Smell you? And then look around and bolt. Dead. Gone. Elk and deer, absolutely. Scent is the number That's the one thing to watch for.

How do you master your scent then?

You have to understand the thermals in the mountain. At night, the air is heavy and it's cold, and so it's settling. In the evening, if you have elk below you, you have to know that as soon as the sun starts going down and gets cool, your air is going to start to settle. It's going to go into the valleys and your scent is going to settle down on them. You have to get around and position yourself in a place where you know your scent isn't going to go down there. But in the morning, if you're hiking in and those are above you and the sun comes up, it starts to heat, you get daytime heating, and the therm will start rising up the mountain, and your scent will carry right up that mountain into them. That's great. You have to have an idea of where you're hunting, where you think the elk are. When my sun took another bear. We spot him from a mile and a half away, and we made an amazing stalk. But we had to loop way around and get downwind because the wind was coming out of the west, so we had to get east of the animals and then sneak in and keep our sound down.

If they hear sticks break or any of that stuff, your brush on your pants, you can't wear slick rain gear that's real swishy. Then you have to watch your scent and your dry site. There again, that's why archery hunting is so hard, because with a gun, my son shot that moose at 650 yards in one shot. That's far. And dropped that moose. The moose was dead before he hit the ground. But with a bow, 20, 30, 40 yards. You got to get close. Yes. A long, long shot. One could argue that for most people, it's not even ethical to shoot an animal at 100 yards with a bow. Generally, it's 60 yards and in.

Why is it not ethical?

You get less accurate. Also, you start to lose energy and speed on your arrow. So your arrow travels in an arc, just like if you throw a rock. If I tell you a rock as far as you can. If you're going to throw a rock 50 yards, you're going to throw it real high and it's going to be dropping. If I tell you to throw a rock from here to that TV right there, you're going to throw it in basically a straight line, and it's going to get there fast. Even with a deer or an antelope or an elk, an animal that's real twitchy, the sound of your arrow flying through the air, they'll hear it and they will flinch and they can actually move. If you make a perfect shot, by the time the arrow gets there at too far of a range, that animal will move and you can hit it in a poor, in a bad shot.

Wow. Their hearing is very good.

Very good. They're very quick. They're on edge all the time. Bears are hunting them, mountain lions are hunting them. They're always on edge. Something humans aren't. We've lost those senses.

We are not on edge. No.

Imagine just sitting, if we were all just sitting somewhere out on a park bench at a park, and all of a sudden, you smelled something. It just took off running. I just ran with you, and I didn't even know why. It's like they have that sense.

That's crazy. I did not know this much went into hunting. I just thought you guys wandered aimlessly and just...

No. You do a lot of research into where are you going to find water? Where do those animals have to where do they go to water? Where do they go to feed? Where do they go to bed? You try to position yourself and put yourself in areas. If the weather's really hot, they're going to probably be going to water. You're going to be trying to hunt in an area where there is water, and maybe they're going from really thick and in the middle of the day, they got to go to get a drink. You're looking for bedding areas where it's safe and thick. The animals are really smart. They know a lot of times they'll go nocturnal where you won't see them at all during the day.

They're that smart where they can see if there's people around?

Absolutely. Wow. It's amazing.

I thought they were just wandering around.

No. In fact, the animals have gotten so used to hunting and whatnot that maybe certain pieces of property, maybe I have, let's say I had a ranch and I don't allow hunting, but everyone around me does. I swear those animals have a calendar in their head because the opening day of hunting season, those animals will be on my ranch because everyone else is hunting. Those animals will move to areas where they feel safer.

I could see it, man. I went fishing in Greece once, and I swear these fish were so smart. They could see your fishing line. Yeah.

Especially animals to get more pressure and fish. That's That's why in areas where, let's say, Yellowstone Park, they're never hunted. They're a lot more used to people, so they're not going to run from cars and people and whatnot. But then those animals, I think, tend to be a little bit more susceptible to the other predators in the park, wolves and bears. They also be a little bit more susceptible to disease because they get to have so many because there's no hunting allowed in those parks. That makes sense.

What's been your favorite meat to eat on your hunts?

That moose was really good over the fire. Once my son shot that, we hunted for the next six days and we carried, we kept the back straps in my son's pack. Every night we cut meat off of that and started a fire in just the rocks and just got branches and stuff and cook those on a hot rock over the fire. I think part of that was just it tasted so good because we were working so hard and cold. But Axis Deer, I shot an Axis Deer in Hawaii. Axis? Axis deer in Hawaii are an invasive species. They are actually not native to the island of Hawaii, and they're everywhere. There's no predators in Hawaii. There's no wolves, foxes, coyotes, mountain lions. They have a real problem with them there. When you hunt them there, there's a lot of them, but they taste. They're probably the best tasting wild game.

I got to try that out.

It's amazing. You can actually buy it. Hawaii as a state, tries to manage the populations, and they go through and they will euthanize a bunch of them, but they take all those to a... I think it's called Maui Nui, and it's a place that butchers all that meat, and then they donate a ton of it to homeless people, and then they also sell it. The selling it funds the meat that goes to the homeless people. Oh, wow.

I've heard of that company, Maui Nui Venison.

Yeah, Rogan talks about it a lot.

Yeah, I've seen them sponsor a podcast. I need to try that out. How did they get there, though? You're in Hawaii, that's weird.

People, as they were settling, those islands brought them in on ships, basically. People brought them in from... I think they came over from Asia. People were like, Oh, well, we'll let these deer loose, and then we'll have something to hunt and harvest and eat. But without predators, they just overpopulated and they're overrunting the islands. That makes sense.

I grew up in Jersey. There's a lot of deer in Jersey, but you're not allowed to hunt them there, I think.

Yeah, in certain areas you can, but there are so many people in places like Jersey and whatnot that those deer, we call them town deer, they know they're safe and you can't hunt them and they get overpopulated and you really get problems with diseased deer in towns. You get a lot of inbreeding because there's no real predators in town, the bears and mountain lines and stuff aren't in town. Hunters can't hunt them. You do have a lot of problems with that where there's high populations of people.

There were so many there. You could get right up close to them. They would not react.

Yeah, exactly.

I almost pet one one time.

Yeah. No, those town deer, a lot of times people do feed them right out of their hand. They just get so used to humans. Yeah.

They probably have ticks and stuff, right?

Oh, yeah. Well, even the wild ones.

You ever get ticks on your hunts? Oh, yeah. Just brush them off?

Yeah, I try to. I hate those creepy little things, God. But yeah, in the spring, when you're out in the woods, you'll come back with 10 or 12 of them on you. You have to really check yourself.

Some of them are so small, you can't even see them.

I had one buried in my damn belly button. That's gross. But he was locked in there. I heated up a hot piece of steel. Holy crap. Burned it on him. If you pull on him, their head will come off and they'll stay in you. I heard that. You can get Lyme disease. Jim Miller, the UFC fighter. Good friend of mine, he got Lyme disease from a tick. Shit. He's fought his whole career with Lyme disease. What? Yeah, it jacked him up bad for a while.

Lyme disease is no joke.

Yeah. If you do, that's why you really want to get them damn things off of you.

Yeah. What's your favorite weapon of choice when you're going on these haunts?

I mean, an archery, a bow.

Do you like the short range stuff?

Yeah, Because it's so hard. You're going to fail. More often than not, you're going to fail. But that's the joy of it. It's like the animal has... It's such an even playing ground, and it's almost like caveman days. It's you and the animal He has way more senses than you do. He knows the area. His nose works better than you. His eyes, his hearing. It's a game of chess, trying to figure it out and make it happen. But there's just something really special about archery hunting. But with rifles, like a Seacons Precision, a 28-nausler, a 2-nausler ammo. Seacons is a gun company in Idaho. They build guns up there. They're really good guys make amazing guns. That's what my son shot his bull with. Nice.

You have to get a silencer on all the guns.

You can. I actually have just ordered some to put them on there. It's weird. Silencers suppressors are a pain in the ass to get. They have weird regulations around just getting approved to get them, which is dumb because all it is is a round steel pipe. They got a weird wrap, I think, from the movies because Because everybody envisions James Bond walking in.

For the guy in New York, he saw he had one. Exactly.

But it doesn't make your gun silent. It just makes it quieter. But still, you can hear the crack of the gun go off. That gun in New York, that would have still been loud. Oh, really? But just not as loud. Okay. Yeah, the movies make it sound like there's no sound. Yeah, it makes it sound... Yeah, that's totally BS. But what the suppressors do, the sound, it's It's nice because then you're not having to use hearing protection. But what the suppressors do a really good job of is a recoil management. My young kids or my wife, hell, even myself, with a high-powered rifle, when you shoot it, it just slams you in the shoulder so hard. After a good day of shooting, my shoulder would be black and blue.

Damn.

It's that hard? Oh, yeah. Holy crap. With a 300-win mag, 45, 70. But you put a suppressor on them and it off-gasses in the way that it works. It takes a lot of that force off of your shoulder and you can shoot. It actually makes you a more ethical hunter. This is the argument for suppressors. Let's say I take my wife out, and I've shot with her, and it wax her like that. It's like being kicked by a donkey every time, right? Well, guess what she's going to do when she goes to shoot? She's going to flinch. She's going to squint, and she's going to jerk the trigger, and it's going to make her less accurate, which is going to result in a poor shot and likely wounding an animal. Well, if she shoots with a suppressor and that gun doesn't hurt her, now she can practice more because it doesn't hurt. She's going to shoot more shots in practice. Then when she's going to shoot, she's going to be thinking about making a good shot, not thinking about, Oh, this is going to hurt. You actually end up wounding less animals, being more ethical.

There's literally not a single reason why a suppressor should be even something that you have to get a license for at all.

I didn't know that was required. It's a separate license?

It's a separate background check than the gun. I ordered two about two months ago, and I'm still waiting on the background to come back. Holy crap. Yeah, it's a long- That's crazy. I can get a gun and have a gun tomorrow. But the little round pipe that screws on the gun, if If I just took that round pipe, I could take that round pipe on an airplane. I mean, it literally does nothing. It's a round pipe with a bunch of little holes in it. You could drop a bullet in it. You could do whatever. It's just literally a pipe.

That's nuts.

It only does something when you actually put it on a gun. But it's weird. Our government, they do some strange things.

They think everyone's going to turn into an assassin if they start selling those stuff.

It's politicians that actually don't know at all what they're talking about. That's That's literally what it is.

Yeah. Hopefully, times will change with that, right?

Yeah. To be honest, people should actually... In England or in Europe, you can't hunt without a suppressor. Oh, wow. So by law. Because it does make the guns quieter. When you are shooting at a range or you're out in the woods shooting, it makes it quieter. It's less obnoxious for the other people that may be in the vicinity. It scares people less and whatnot. They hear a big boom go off and they're scared. Even at shooting ranges, generally, a lot of shooting ranges are surrounded by neighborhoods and stuff. You can't shoot guns there without them. It shows you the two countries. One country is looking at it as a benefit to the public because it's quieter and whatnot. In our countries, it's going to make everyone James Bond.

That's interesting. Is there anyone working on this legislation?

Yeah, there's constantly the gun lobby, and there's constantly people working on it.

See if that gets through this term.

It's gotten better. The background check length, it used to be like 10 months, 12 months.

It's gotten better because when I moved here, first thing I did was go to the gun store. I got in like a week, the Glock. It used to be months, though, you got a gun?

Well, to get the suppressor. Oh, the suppressor. Okay. The guns have always been pretty good as far as getting those. A couple of days. Texas, you could choose.

Same day in Texas, I feel it.

It depends a little on your name. My name's Josh Smith. When the FBI is doing the background check, they're looking through a lot of Smiths. If you have a little bit more of a strange name, it goes a lot quicker because there's less people to sift through. Yeah.

I saw the FBI guy just resigned. Who? I forgot his name. It was like two days ago. Oh, really? Well, Trump already announced the new guy. I guess the old guy resigned earlier.

Okay. Interesting. No, I didn't see that. I've been on planes each of the last two days. Oh, yeah.

You've been all over.

Missing some things. Yeah.

You were in Nashville yesterday. Yeah, last night. I saw that. I'm like, damn, he's going to get all the way here in a night?

Yeah. I ran there the night before and then came back this morning. Oh, yeah.

Well, dude, it's been cool. Where could people check out the knife stuff and your personal stuff?

Yeah. Montana MontanaNifecompany. Com is our website. Then just Instagram at Montana Knifecompany. You just spell it out. There's no periods or no double. There's so many fake Instagram pages of our company. It's crazy. People trying to scam me. Scammers. It drives me crazy. Follow our social media. We do drops. Our knives are really actually hard to get. It's crazy how fast they sell within minutes every week. It's pretty wild. Every Thursday night, we do a drop at seven o'clock mountain time. A lot of times, they sell it within two or three minutes. Holy crap.

Those are the ones you're handmaking?

No, those are our production knives. We'll move a thousand knives in a couple of minutes. It's That's crazy. But people, they really love the story of the company, the fact that I started this in my garage with just my kids. A lot of people have watched this grow. Five years ago, or during COVID, I think, in 2020, four years ago, I was a lineman working for the power company, making knives at night and whatnot, and started this. Today, I'm sitting here talking to you and...

Joe Rogan as well.

Yeah, Rogan and all these fun, cool people that I've gotten to meet. It's all because I started a knife company in my garage. We actually still, of our 80 employees, about 70 report to work still at my house. We're building a new manufacturing facility right now. We just bought some land. But I moved from my two car garage and I built a bigger shop out back in my horse pasture, about a 10,000 square foot building. We moved into that January first of '23, and we're absolutely busting at the seams right now. I mean, it's completely jammed up. But all those people park in my driveway every day. That's awesome. It's truly the American dream. We're building a new 50,000 square foot manufacturing facility. It's going to have a Black Raffle coffee in it. It's going to have a retail store. It's going to take another year to get finished.

I can't wait. I'll visit one of these days.

When it's ready. Please do, yeah. Maybe we'll have to try and figure out a way to take you hunting.

Yeah. I've never been to Montana. I've never been hunting, so we could kill two birds with one stone. Yeah, still. Well, thanks for coming on, man. That was cool. Yeah, thanks for having me. Check out the stuff below, guys. Thanks for watching.