Episode 397 - Josh Smith - Manufacturing, Tariffs, and Bringing Jobs back to the United States

Summary

Podcast Title: Cleared Hot
Host: Andy Stumpf
Episode: 397 - Josh Smith - Manufacturing, Tariffs, and Bringing Jobs Back to the United States
Release Date: July 25, 2025

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1. Introduction

In Episode 397 of Cleared Hot, host Andy Stumpf engages in a candid discussion with Josh Smith and Evan Hafer, delving deep into the intricacies of American manufacturing, the impact of tariffs, and the broader political landscape influencing job creation in the United States.

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2. The Impact of Tariffs on Manufacturing

Josh Smith initiates the conversation by expressing his frustration with the current administration's tariff policies, which significantly affect his manufacturing business.

"[04:37] Josh Smith: ... if you really actually wanted to challenge legally with enough power behind it, it's your, it's your job as the government to provide some form of clarity on what you're doing with our tax money."

Smith highlights how tariffs on equipment, such as a blade grinding machine priced at half a million dollars, have surged to 37% and could potentially jump to 50% shortly. This abrupt increase poses a substantial financial burden on his business, complicating plans to scale operations and invest in necessary machinery.

Evan Hafer adds, emphasizing the unpredictability of tariff decisions:

"[52:28] Evan Hafer: ... there’s been 146 different tariff decisions since Trump has been in office. It’s probably closer to 200 at this point."

The duo discusses the tiered approach to tariffs, advocating for focus on finished goods before materials and equipment, arguing that tariffs should primarily target finished products to encourage domestic production without strangling the supply chain.

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3. The Decline of the American Steel Industry

Smith laments the decline of domestic steel production, referencing the bankruptcy of Crucible Steel Technologies and its acquisition by a Swedish company, leaving the U.S. without crucial steel manufacturing capabilities.

"[62:53] Josh Smith: ... so there’s no more powder technology steel in America, which means any knife company in America using stainless steel in a powder technology form, which is superior...."

The conversation underscores the national security implications of losing domestic steel production and the challenges faced in rekindling this once-thriving industry.

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4. Personal Experiences and Business Challenges

Smith shares his entrepreneurial journey, detailing how he bootstrapped his knife manufacturing business from a garage to a burgeoning enterprise with plans to expand further. He emphasizes the importance of American-made products and the community support that fuels his growth.

"[34:17] Josh Smith: ... what I wanted to build in a company and how I wanted to look and feel and the goal."

He recounts the difficulties in obtaining specialized machinery domestically, illustrating the scarcity and high costs associated with procuring equipment necessary for high-quality manufacturing.

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5. The Epstein Scandal and Political Implications

A significant portion of the discussion pivots to the Epstein scandal, exploring its ramifications on political strategies and public trust.

"[17:57] Josh Smith: ... when you only have one term to serve, you can be as you can be whatever you want to be because you have to worry."

Smith and Hafer debate the potential government cover-up, speculating on the involvement of high-profile figures and the long-term implications for political accountability and transparency.

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6. Strategies to Rebuild American Manufacturing

The hosts brainstorm strategies to invigorate American manufacturing, advocating for a mix of broadsword and scalpel approaches—bold initiatives complemented by nuanced, expert-driven solutions.

"[12:53] Josh Smith: ... but there's a way to do some planning and there's a way to find your route to that."

They discuss the necessity of public-private partnerships and governmental support to reinvigorate key industries, ensuring that investments lead to sustainable growth rather than short-term gains.

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7. Collaboration with Black Rifle Coffee

Smith introduces his partnership with Black Rifle Coffee, highlighting a symbiotic relationship that leverages shared values of American manufacturing and community support.

"[94:59] Josh Smith: ... it makes that store special."

The collaboration includes opening a coffee shop within the manufacturing facility, designed to attract customers and promote a unique brand experience combining quality products with a strong sense of patriotism.

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8. Taxation and Government Accountability

The conversation shifts to broader economic concerns, particularly taxation and the national debt. Both hosts express skepticism about the government's fiscal responsibility and explore unconventional methods to hold officials accountable.

"[86:30] Evan Hafer: ... how can you hold the government accountable?"
"[87:34] Josh Smith: ... but it's also incumbent upon us as citizens to hold our government accountable."

They debate the feasibility and potential repercussions of large-scale initiatives like tax strikes, emphasizing the importance of civic engagement and education in fostering governmental transparency.

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9. Conclusion

In wrapping up, Josh Smith reaffirms his belief in the American dream and the resilience of citizens in driving meaningful change. Despite the myriad challenges—from political instability to economic uncertainties—he remains optimistic about the potential for rebuilding American manufacturing and creating sustainable jobs.

"[86:30] Josh Smith: ... I believe in our country and I believe in our citizens and I think the greatest country on earth."

Evan Hafer concurs, emphasizing the importance of unity and proactive measures in overcoming systemic obstacles.

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Notable Quotes

• Josh Smith [04:37]: "If you really actually wanted to challenge legally with enough power behind it, it's your, it's your job as the government to provide some form of clarity on what you're doing with our tax money."

• Evan Hafer [52:28]: "There’s been 146 different tariff decisions since Trump has been in office. It’s probably closer to 200 at this point."

• Josh Smith [17:57]: "... when you only have one term to serve, you can be as you can be whatever you want to be because you have to worry."

• Josh Smith [34:17]: "... what I wanted to build in a company and how I wanted to look and feel and the goal."

• Josh Smith [86:30]: "I believe in our country and I believe in our citizens and I think the greatest country on earth."

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Final Thoughts

This episode of Cleared Hot offers a thorough exploration of the challenges and opportunities within the American manufacturing sector, highlighted by personal insights and a deep dive into the political factors at play. Listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of how tariffs and governmental policies directly impact small businesses aiming to revive domestic manufacturing and employment.

For those interested in the intersection of politics, economics, and entrepreneurship, this episode serves as a valuable resource, providing both strategic perspectives and heartfelt narratives.

Transcript

[Josh Smith]

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[Evan Hafer]

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[Josh Smith]

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[Evan Hafer]

Okay, I got the red smoke.

[Josh Smith]

Sun runs north to south. West of the smoke. West of the smoke.

[Evan Hafer]

Okay, copy. West of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now.

[Josh Smith]

Come on with it, baby. Give it to me. I mean it.

[Evan Hafer]

You're cleared hot. Can't be cleared hot. So be honest with you, you seemed a little whiny on the Internet. Yeah, bordering on cuntish, if I'm being honest. I'm on a little rucksack march and no podcasters will even host me. No one will even.

[Josh Smith]

That part, I did. That part I do regret. But it was. It wasn't even actually podcast. It's trying to get.

[Evan Hafer]

It's like, hey, man, you have my number. You've been.

[Josh Smith]

Well, I'm not gonna call and ask you to be on, but why?

[Evan Hafer]

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[Josh Smith]

Yeah, I know it's. It's actually and I, I said podcast. It's actually more like the, the, the actual like media, you know, as far as like Fox News or some of the news stations that which we've got a greater reach. We've got somebody. Well podcast is where it's at. Obviously. The last election just proved that I.

[Evan Hafer]

Well which leads to the question of what do you think the Democratic strategy will be in 28?

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, they're already talking about trying to find the Democratic version of Joe Rogan, which is kind of funny because he was name is Joe Rogan.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah, he when I first met him and I've known him long enough now to see his opinions on things change. He used to be staunchly Weed has no downside. It's for everybody. That's one of the main ones that he has shifted on. But yeah he's. He was pretty probably not all the way to the left but left or leaning the. Yeah, I think more than, more than anything what happened is they actually shifted the definition of what it means to be on the left. But yeah, they had him already.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah there was a little image of like, you know, I Think they use Joe or somebody as a. An individual who was left of center at one point, and then he doesn't move, and then the whole entire scale slides. And the next thing you know, you look over and you're like, wait, am I. Am I on the right now?

[Evan Hafer]

Well, to be clear, the right side is shifting as well, and the extreme right is. Scares me just as much as the extreme left.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, and actually, we'll probably get into that a little bit, because I. I agree. It's. It's. It's actually what bothers me a lot about what's going on right now is that if you think for yourself at all, you're a traitor. Whether you're left or right, you know, you're.

[Evan Hafer]

It's either 100% party line or you are off the cool bus.

[Josh Smith]

Right?

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah.

[Josh Smith]

And you look at what's going on with this Epstein thing right now. Like, all of a sudden, even Trump said, like, my past supporters, you know, blah, blah, blah.

[Evan Hafer]

And it's like, dude, Michael and I were talking about this yesterday, and again, I start this with. I didn't pay an immense amount of attention to politics. Younger in my life. Not that I'm an expert by any stretch, but I cannot think of an example of either a candidate or an elected official that has kind of turned on the base of people and said, I don't want your support anymore.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

What is going on there?

[Josh Smith]

There? It's. Dude, it's. It's bonkers. It's bonkers.

[Evan Hafer]

And have you seen some of the response? And again, I. We covered this yesterday, but I. I take everything I see online with a grain of salt. I have seen now my fair share of people. Like, I lost friends. I have problems with family. Now I lost a job because of supporting you, and now I'm an idiot, and you don't want my support. I'm done. Now, whether they mean that or not, or that's an emotional thing, much like somebody else who might be in this room who makes emotional content, sniveling, whining, Those would be good terms sometimes.

[Josh Smith]

Sometimes. Yeah. When you get off the calls I had that day, you feel a little bitchy.

[Evan Hafer]

Here's a better question. In your rucksack, were there 50 grenades?

[Josh Smith]

I take 50 grenades.

[Evan Hafer]

Everywhere I go, I take 51.

[Josh Smith]

Do you? Well, you know, you're a SEAL. I can't be quite as cool as you, so.

[Evan Hafer]

Sure, you can just make stuff up.

[Josh Smith]

Jesus. Oh, my God. Yeah, no, it's.

[Evan Hafer]

Anyway, I have never seen somebody turn on their base like that. And, and well, you can do that.

[Josh Smith]

I guess one way you could look at it is when you only have one term to serve, you can be as you can be whatever you want to be because you have to worry.

[Evan Hafer]

About reelection, care about yourself, if you cared about the trajectory. To me, when I've talked with people about this, what do they call it when you're a lame duck presidency? Because you obviously can't be re elected, but if you believe in the core principles of whatever party you're in, you would have to think a little bit about paving the Runway for whoever's gonna be next because you would think somewhere in the Republican Party people are saying, listen, J.D. vance is likely to be the next candidate because he was the VP and.

[Josh Smith]

He'S wildly popular right now, so why.

[Evan Hafer]

And he, and not only Trump, but a lot of other people on, on the right hand side of the political aisle ran on a lot of the same platforms of transparency.

[Josh Smith]

Right?

[Evan Hafer]

Drain this, their words, not mine, you know, drain the swamp. This, that or the other. A lot of them mentioned the Epstein.

[Josh Smith]

Files, specifically jfk, mlk, Epstein. We're going to release it all. They brought it up. I mean, Trump himself. And, and to be fully honest, like, you know, just the people that don't know me on this podcast, like I was a Trump supporter. I still am a Trump.

[Evan Hafer]

You have a MAGA tat under your shirt.

[Josh Smith]

Well, tram stamp.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah, that's very jocko.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Not here to confirm or deny. I'm just saying tribal, maybe lower back. Well, don't ask him about it.

[Josh Smith]

Don't be jealous.

[Evan Hafer]

You didn't hear about it from me.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, no, I, I mean Trump Jr. Last spring stayed at my house. Like I, I consider him a friend. I'm friendly.

[Evan Hafer]

Same bedroom or just same house?

[Josh Smith]

Obviously the same bedroom.

[Evan Hafer]

Just checking. All right.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. You know, I, I absolutely adore Tulsi. Hung out with her quite a bit. I, I know a bunch of people throughout that, somewhat throughout that administration and was a big supporter of it and still am. I mean there's still a lot of good things they're doing. And this is kind of the point. Like, well, I, I, I get comments on my Instagram on even like that post or other ones I've made where I'm critical of Trump or their administration. And then people come on and they're like, you know, you get what you deserve. See, you know, we told you this and it's like, oh yeah, I'm sure k going to be better for us. Like, yeah, I'm sure you guys Were right the whole time.

[Evan Hafer]

I see that on the Internet quite a bit too.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. It's like, come on. Just because I'm being critical of Trump, like, let's slow your roll here. That's. This doesn't mean that I think Kamala or Biden was the answer.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, two things can be true at once, or five things or six things can be true at once. There can be. And he actually, I kind of hate even using the word truth, social or the truths. It's just.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Not a fan of that particular vernacular. But, you know, one of the things he said was, while people are ignoring the successes, it's like, no, they might be paying a little bit more attention to a few things like what you were mentioning. You know, bring America the manufacturing back. But, oh, by the way, let's tariff the countries that you have to buy this manufacturing equipment from, which is going to hinder the growth and bring like, okay, two things can be very true here. Like, you can be having some victories, but also over here in this area, this is the. This was the section on my report card and most of my schooling years where it was like, needs improvement.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

That's where I spent a lot of my time.

[Josh Smith]

And the. And these people aren't our best friends. They're not your family. These people are government officials. And even if they were your best friends, as soon as they take that oath, they're the government. And it's our job as citizens to hold the government accountable. And again, I, I love a lot of what he's doing with the immigration stuff. I think there's a bunch of things that, that Trump administration. I mean, how. How little did Biden do in four years and how much did Trump's administration or at least appear to be doing, like, with the Doge stuff originally, Musk, but there again, Doge kind of lost some steam. It did. And, and, you know, you have to wonder, of course, people will spin it and say Elon was in it for his own contract, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Stuff. Right. With. Didn't work out so well for Elon and SpaceX. But is. Is. Is Elon. Was Elon actually trying to do the right thing and trying to find cuts, you know, and trying to find the.

[Evan Hafer]

Waist, you know, I think so. But I think you also have to do it properly. I think the Doge concept was more of a broadsword where I. It needed to be a combination of probably a chainsaw, which. Did you ever imagine a world where a man would get on stage with a running chainsaw? Hopefully at least that thing was demilled and not sharp because that man, I know nothing about diagnosing anybody with autism, but I feel like that man is pegging the spectrum in many respects a thousand percent. So, yeah, yeah, let's hope that that didn't have an actual chain that was shown.

[Josh Smith]

I don't, I don't think he cuts his own firewood. No.

[Evan Hafer]

Do you think he started that thing.

[Josh Smith]

On his own or something was running.

[Evan Hafer]

But you need, you need chainsaw, broadsword, but you also really need to scalpel, too.

[Josh Smith]

And this is the point of this conversation that we'll get into is there's nuance. You know, anytime that you take a broadsword to, you know, a situation, when you're running the entire federal government, it, it takes nuance throughout the entire thing, quite honestly. And it's the, the nuances where you can really lose people or you can really damage unintentionally. You know, things that you actually believe in, you accidentally damage. And this is my point with some of this stuff is I don't actually feel that they're bringing in the people that are involved in it, truly, that know it to ask some, some advice or some questions of like, hey, we're doing this, or we've done this. Maybe that pendulum, we swung it super, super hard. But we realize, and Trump even said in the beginning, like, hey, we're going to swing really hard one way and we're going to do some things and we're going to go back and fix some things, you know, and so it's like, well, okay, we're, I'm trying to identify some things that maybe need to be fixed to help them actually accomplish their goal. You know, it' like seeing a mountain peak way off in the distance. And we all agree we're going to hike to it and climb it and stand on top of it and not me by helicopter.

[Evan Hafer]

Meet you guys up there.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, it's true. But there's, there's a, there's a way to, to do some planning and there's a way to find your route to that. That's the easiest route. Or you can choose some ways where there's some people going to fall off the cliff unnecessarily along the way with it. Don't need to fall off the cliff. You know, why wouldn't they bring in.

[Evan Hafer]

The people with the knowledge?

[Josh Smith]

I don't know. And so part of my good reasoning.

[Evan Hafer]

For not bringing the experts in, there's not a lot of good reasons.

[Josh Smith]

And that's my Ask like that's, that's what I. And you know, you can blame Trump on this, but let's face it, Trump has thousands of people in Washington helping him.

[Evan Hafer]

Be careful where you go with analogy. This applies to both sides of the political aisle. People try to hang the Afghanistan withdrawal specifically on Biden, things like that. The same architecture and structure is true. Overall responsible. Cuz he sits in the chair. You gotta be careful with how far you extrapolate that out.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. And it's, he owns the decisions. He does. And I'm not, I'm not. And that's why I'm, that's why I'm talking about him specifically. Because granted he's not sitting there writing the policies, but he's approving it and he owns it. Right. And so this is where I believe they need to bring some people in and this is why I'm trying to be vocal about it. And where my frustrations actually boiled over are I tried through the right paths. Right. So I called our senators and our senators said, I mean I specifically talked to him and they said, well this is, this is potus, this is White House. Like we, this isn't policy that's happening. Like all this tariff stuff isn't happening through lawmaking. Right. And I can all, I can also argue, I understand why Trump's doing it the way he is because our Congress basically did Jack, for the first six months. I mean the.

[Evan Hafer]

How dare you, sir. They got, they collected paychecks, they spent 70% of their time working on being re elected and fundraising. How can you say they did nothing like that?

[Josh Smith]

Well, it's true. And they, they did some stock trading as well, some very successful stock trading. On both sides. Yeah, both sides. I actually went and made a little stock trader watch, watch list.

[Evan Hafer]

They have mutual funds that match politicians.

[Josh Smith]

I just took all, and I did on our side of the aisle, I took all of Marjorie Taylor Greene's stocks that she purchased in a like a five day period. And I just made a stock trader list just for fun, a watch list on my app to watch. She's doing real good.

[Evan Hafer]

Like better than Warren Buffett.

[Josh Smith]

Not as good as Pelosi.

[Evan Hafer]

Nobody does.

[Josh Smith]

Well, no, she's, you know who's amazingly.

[Evan Hafer]

Good at stock picking as well? Pelosi' husband.

[Josh Smith]

Well, I'm sure he's swinging for the fence. He's got a deep financial background and.

[Evan Hafer]

I mean we're talking home run after home run, stepping up to the plate and just grand slam after.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it's Luck and some skill. I'm sure there's nothing there. There's no there.

[Evan Hafer]

Why do we tolerate this? These people are supposed to work for us to include the President of the United States.

[Josh Smith]

But we get. But we allow ourselves to get more riled up and I'll agree. Preface this by saying there's nobody that's more pissed and frustrated about the Epstein thing as me. But at the end of the day, those are the topics we love to get riled up about. We love to get riled up about the. The space CEO and his girlfriend that got caught at a Coldplay concert together and talk about it like, who gives a shit?

[Evan Hafer]

Like, I would say they're probably their families.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. And that's their problem. I don't care.

[Evan Hafer]

But here's the thing with the Epstein one. The Epstein one, I think. And again, talk with Michael yesterday. I think we found an issue that wherever you sit on the political spectrum, we agree upon. We agree whether it's underage women, it's trafficking kids, trafficking in general. So there's that. But the problem is, and this is why I think, I think it goes beyond just that particular issue. It's transparency. It was, and you know, the words I'm about to pair people will laugh at. It was a political promise of transparency. It was part of the campaign with every speech. Every speech. And that's the bigger issue. So it is directly, I think, tied to that because, I mean, I'm sorry, the FBI are the people who said there are over a thousand victims. Those are not my words.

[Josh Smith]

That's right.

[Evan Hafer]

That's the words of the FBI. And now, hey, there's nothing here. And by the way, this was a hoax the whole time. I'm sorry, you're gonna lose people at the door.

[Josh Smith]

There's a woman in prison for trafficking. Well, she had to traffic to someone.

[Evan Hafer]

So who'd she traffic to? Epstein himself. She is in prison for trafficking to Epstein. You tell you who I'd love to have a podcast with.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, she would be a good one.

[Evan Hafer]

We would both shoot ourselves in the back of the head afterward accidentally. But.

[Josh Smith]

But the, the Epstein thing. I believe this is our modern day government cover up. Modern day JFK cover up. I. I believe that this is going to be something that if they don't reveal this stuff now, 60 years from now, people are still going to be asking, when are you going to reveal these files? How are you going to. This is.

[Evan Hafer]

If they revealed it and there was nothing in there, would you accept that? Because that's an important question. Some people are past the point where they're going to believe either way, but.

[Josh Smith]

There isn't nothing in there. There's something.

[Evan Hafer]

I agree.

[Josh Smith]

Now maybe is if they reveal it and Donald Trump's name doesn't exist in it, or Bill Clinton's name doesn't exist in it, believe it, both of those.

[Evan Hafer]

Names demonstrably will exist in there. And I've talked about this a few times. There is the illicit activities that he was involved with, but then there's broad social circle overlap of which both of those had social circle overlap. So it's show up somewhere.

[Josh Smith]

I don't believe that Donald Trump had any part and this is just my belief and you can just say that's because I'm a supporter of his and his family. But I don't believe that he had any part in any illicit activities.

[Evan Hafer]

I, I agree. But I also think he knew Epstein far better that he went on in the campaign as well. Met the guy once or twice, probably.

[Josh Smith]

Knew he was a shitbag.

[Evan Hafer]

As you and I have social circles, I am not a huge fan of everybody and sometimes I end up in places where I don't want to be with people. I can explain it, especially if it were to, you know, earth shattering news like this person is wearing human skin as a leotard at their house. Yeah, like, listen, I kind of know that dude. I don't agree with that at all. It's a little icky for me to explain it, but I think that's where the names, those particular names would show up.

[Josh Smith]

Right.

[Evan Hafer]

But they'll still be in the investigative documents. It doesn't mean that they were part of a crime.

[Josh Smith]

That's right.

[Evan Hafer]

It's just an uncomfortable. Here's my worry. If that's the case and he doesn't want to disclose those investigative documents because he doesn't want to explain that and he lets one abuser pass because of that.

[Josh Smith]

Right.

[Evan Hafer]

That's a full stop for me.

[Josh Smith]

And I agree. If he, that's, that's where I'm at is if he's not willing to take the, the, the word is now it sounds like from what's being reported, allegedly Trump met Melania through Epstein. Okay. And maybe it's that whole supermodel Victoria's Secret whatever network like you say, group parties, whatever. He could have very well met him, met her through Epstein, an Epstein party or something. That was completely valid way of meeting.

[Evan Hafer]

They're both adults and they're consenting. I don't care.

[Josh Smith]

And that's. And, but it sounds like that, that's, that gets out, that's potentially embarrassing. My argument is, okay, who cares if it's embarrassing or not?

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah.

[Josh Smith]

If you're not willing to take that embarrassment on, to expose if a single abuse people who were abusing young women and boys, but especially young boys and young, young, young girls, then, then I.

[Evan Hafer]

I, I write you off like, well, I'm a fan.

[Josh Smith]

I would be willing to expose anything embarrassing about myself, to expose government officials or, you know, anyone involved in trafficking young women.

[Evan Hafer]

Like, I like documentaries, crime ones specifically. I've watched a bunch of them on Epstein. It's really clear that, yes, he had a propensity for young women, but it's also really clear he wasn't alone in.

[Josh Smith]

What he was doing.

[Evan Hafer]

There have been payments. There are connections. You know, a lot of people say he was a Mossad agent. I don't know if I'm willing to go that far. I wouldn't be surprised if he was operating in plain sight with a little bit of oversight and protection from intelligence apparatus because they want leverage on people as well. Yeah, like that. The blackmail game, you know, what do they say prostitution is the only business? Is the oldest business that there was. Or carpentry. Whatever made the whorehouse first.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Politics and blackmail, those two probably came around about the same time. I don't know if I'm willing to say he was a Mossad agent, but even like in some of these documentaries, again, and this is the lens that I'm kind of looking at it through, and I've watched a bunch of them, and I'm not saying that they're all gospel, but if you or I had bumped up against law enforcement in some of those ways, I feel like we would have been treated differently.

[Josh Smith]

And, and a really great YouTube explanation of all this that's super in depth. And I, I listened to it all the way up here this morning. Tucker Carlson just had on Daryl Cooper, and they have gone from the time the first record of Epstein showing up on the map anywhere at 20 years old. They talk about professor. Well, that's the thing there, there's. It's, yeah, it's weird, right? Yeah, exactly. He was hired, he was hired as a math professor at one of the most prestigious colleges in America at 20 years old. And he was a college dropout and he's. And, and, and guess who was hired by. So was William Barr. Bill.

[Evan Hafer]

Bar hunting, though.

[Josh Smith]

Bill Barr's dad hired him.

[Evan Hafer]

Let's just not. I mean, I know a story of a guy who was a janitor at MIT solving math problems. You know what I mean? He's a dropout too.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, well, the.

[Evan Hafer]

The amazing things happen. Sometimes it.

[Josh Smith]

Sometimes it does. Sometimes it does. So Good Will Hunting, the. The. The. The guy who hired him was Bill Barr's dad. And then, what, 40 years later, Bill Barr's the. The guy that puts him in prison and he dies under. Under his watch. Like. But. But again, Tucker goes through with. With Daryl. This. The entire. And all the connections to. There's too much stuff with the Iran Contra situation, all the gun running, all. There's just too much there for that. Not there for. For. At the very end of this entire story to get to today and go, oh, there's nothing.

[Evan Hafer]

So I'm saying demonstrably, there's. There's already been a vast amount of research, proven money paid. I mean, just really weird stuff. Like the billionaire that gave him power of attorney over his entire financial affairs, this fund that he was supposedly managing that nobody can find.

[Josh Smith]

Right.

[Evan Hafer]

Again.

[Josh Smith]

So. So here's my question to let Trump off the hook for a second. Is this a JFK situation where there's so much intelligence connections and power connections behind it that at the end of the day, all the people in modern day government today have some form of a threat happening where if you do release everything, you or your family members may cease to breathe. There.

[Evan Hafer]

I mean, that's an awesome movie plot.

[Josh Smith]

It is, but it's also okay. I mean, who killed jfk?

[Evan Hafer]

Lee Harvey album by himself. He took a few shots from the. Whatever floor he was on, then ran to the grassy knoll and finished up. That's the theory I operate under. There was multiple shoes. I'm like, no, it's the same guy. He was just moving quickly.

[Josh Smith]

He was fast.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah. Faster than the car.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. Batman.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah. So, okay, you're in the seat. What decision would you make if I'm Trump or anybody who's in that seat? The movie plot scenario that you just laid out, which I guarantee you is probably being worked on in Hollywood somewhere because it is a fantastic movie plot, but you're the guy who has to make that call. What do you do? I know these people.

[Josh Smith]

It's easy for me to say, sitting here with zero information, but in my mind, if we allow, if we are okay with our government officials, and by all rights, it sounds like there's very powerful government officials, potentially major executives, the Bill Gates of the world. If we allow this to go by and we don't correct it, we have lost our country and our society, and we have no over. If we have that lack of accountability held of our government officials, I don't think we have a country in 50 or 100 years. And so in.

[Evan Hafer]

So you would release it.

[Josh Smith]

In my mind, they should release everything. I don't care if it takes down everybody and we start over.

[Evan Hafer]

I agree.

[Josh Smith]

I, and I was actually hoping, and I'll admit the people who come on my Instagram page and are like, you were such an idiot. You believed that he. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I actually did believe and hoped that Trump going in as a lame duck president at 80 years old would go it. Why did you blow in this up?

[Evan Hafer]

Why did you believe that he would do that?

[Josh Smith]

Because the other thing to believe is that our country is over.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, what did you see?

[Josh Smith]

Who else is going to do it?

[Evan Hafer]

What did you see in his first term that gave you the indication that he would do that?

[Josh Smith]

It wasn't about his first term. It was the way he was treated since the fact that the government came after him in the way that they did the, with the court cases and the way that our government the first, the first time, even with Clinton's, when Clinton was running against him, the way they spied on his campaign and then especially the way him and his family were treated following everything around the January 6th stuff, which again, he didn't handle January 6th perfectly. But, but the way that they handled that afterwards, I believe that he was coming in pissed off and ready to ax everything like, and I was okay with it. I was okay with coming in and we talk about taking a broadsword, like taking an absolute broadsword to government, you know, and exposing whoever needed exposed. It was, I don't know if I.

[Evan Hafer]

Believe tough because we do there, we do need some semblance of government to continue our day to day. And this is where it's like broadsword this, scalpel this. I totally agree with what you're saying, but it has to be done properly because if we have a country that's not going to exist in 50 to 100 years, at least we have time. If we start broad sorting everything, we cease to exist in two and a half years. That's a little bit more of an.

[Josh Smith]

Existential threat when it comes to releasing pedophiles names. I don't think there is a nuanced way to do it. You just release it all and say, you know, I don't care if it's, you know, this might be unfair because I don't know what names, but I don't care if it's a Lindsey Graham. I don't care if it's freaking. I don't care what name it is on what side of the aisle release at all. And I don't care how deep it goes. If it, if it crumbles. The CIA and everything, everything can be rebuilt. If you can rebuild, rebuild it. On truth and transparency.

[Evan Hafer]

I wonder how, you know, the pedophile topic is very, it's, it's sticky, it catches with people. I wonder if it was the minority or the majority of what he was trafficking in. I think that there is an immense amount of probably just prostitution and him providing people that were of age. And there's a whole conversation.

[Josh Smith]

That's what it sounds like.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, and there's a whole conversation to have about that, about trafficking. You know, what is consent? You know, I mean like how much control did they have? And that's.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, you, you, you, you're trafficking an 18 year old girl. But she, but she walked in and said I'm willing.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah.

[Josh Smith]

And, and it's like, but, but you, you've got a very powerful 65 year old guy trafficking her to a 50 year old billionaire.

[Evan Hafer]

And I don't think, honestly I think the pedophilia aspect of it, I wouldn't be surprised. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the minority or the majority because I've heard such outlandish tales either way. My suspicion would be is a lot of powerful people were paying for sex outside of the relationship or marriage that they were in. And that's really inconvenient when that comes out. And guess what? Suck it.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. And I don't, I don't care if it was, if it was one or if it was two. But, but I, but I do believe our we there is your personal life. If, if like the guy at the, at the, at the concert the other night, like what, what, what that guy does with his time is his business. I don't really give a.

[Evan Hafer]

Unless it impacts his employees. You know what I mean? Like there's cascading downstream effects that are odd given that because people will react emotionally to that. Right?

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Who knows what will happen with the stock. The families are obviously gonna have to deal with their own stuff. Is that can impact employees. You know, I mean so there is the personal aspect of it. Public figures are a little bit different.

[Josh Smith]

Especially when public figures are being put in a situation to then say hey Andy, we got you on camera the other night with so and so. Guess what you're going to do for us.

[Evan Hafer]

Not true. I Always wear a Batman mask. Well, nobody knows who Batman really is. I mean, clearly it's Bruce Wayne, but who's Bruce Wayne? No one ever asked that question.

[Josh Smith]

Stump, I guess.

[Evan Hafer]

No.

[Josh Smith]

He also started black rifle coffee.

[Evan Hafer]

I did do that. I still, to this day tell people.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

And for whatever reason, they still believe me.

[Josh Smith]

Sometimes Evan's too short to start, like a real company.

[Evan Hafer]

Micro sf, that's what I call him. It's still my favorite image ever of his hand coming up with a check to clear the bail section for Glover as he was fucking Green Beret on Greenberry Love. I've said that to both of them directly. They both were dying.

[Josh Smith]

That is hilarious. That is hilarious. No, I think. I think. I don't know that I actually believed Trump would do it. I had hope and I. And I think as a. When you start to lose hope as a. As a citizen in your government at all, like, if this Epstein thing goes the way that it seems to be going and there's no transparency, I think it's easy for people to say it. I'm not voting. I have no hope. I'm just gonna ride this to the end. And that's a scary.

[Evan Hafer]

Maybe that's the goal of those in power, though.

[Josh Smith]

Good chance of it. And. And you. Do you. You hear people say, like, I'm not going to vote. And I understand the frustration, but I think as a non veteran, I feel like it's my duty to go vote because I absolutely believe that we had people fight and die for this country, and it's our job to be educated and to go down and have a voice in some form or fashion, even if it's a write in, whatever that is. Um, that's just my personal belief. I mean, you have the right to not vote. That really bothers me that, you know, that people can't even find the time, take the time or they're too lazy to educate themselves on either local politics or national. And I actually really am beginning to believe more and more that locals where you spend your time. But here I am trying to. I am trying to have an impact on the national part of it, because I do believe it affects local people.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, it 100% does with what you're building down in Missoula.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

I mean, I just. I love Instagram because I can just chirp at you and call you a slap dick.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

And then here we are sitting down a few days later. Yeah, but what you're talking about is real. I mean, you're trying to bring jobs back. You're investing back in the community you live. You agree with, hey, let's bring back this manufacturing capacity. And all of a sudden this machine, which I have for people who haven't gone and seen your shop, like, I don't even understand the machines.

[Josh Smith]

Right.

[Evan Hafer]

All I know, like I kind of know what they do, but all I hear when they run is a cash register because I feel like they're super inexpensive.

[Josh Smith]

Right? Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Lasers and robots and I don't know where those are made, but I bet they're not made in the US and now it's like, hey, Josh, by the way, I'm sure that building you're, you know, you're creating is also extremely cheap. How about 50% more for that machine that will help you bring jobs back to the U.S. yeah.

[Josh Smith]

And that's, you know, I get, I get the comments like, you know, well, maybe you should just build the machine yourself or maybe, maybe you should, maybe you should buy the machine in the answer.

[Evan Hafer]

Haven't you thought of just building these grinding company?

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

No, just start from scratch. Just start building a cnc. Yeah, you have a CNC machine. Use it to build another one.

[Josh Smith]

I identify as a computer science major and I can figure out the technology just lateral.

[Evan Hafer]

You have some of the machines, use them to make parts so you can continue to make other machines for you. Okay, no more knives. Now you just make machines.

[Josh Smith]

Well, you built your, your espresso machine in black rifle, didn't you?

[Evan Hafer]

I did help take it out of the box.

[Josh Smith]

So, so for what? For, for people to understand and maybe the people that don't know what I've been trying to do over the last five years. You know, five years ago I started this in my garage. I mean, and you remember that? I mean it was, it was my wife and I and I was a lineman standing on a power pole during the day and, and with this dream of building this company at night. And so that's how it started. And it was during COVID in 2020. Quit my job the January 1st of 2021. And again we were in my garage at my house for the first couple years. And then we built a. What I thought was a big shop at the time, way bigger than what I was in then.

[Evan Hafer]

Do you remember what I told you as you were building that? Was that not big enough to be big enough.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, you were right. But it does show to people that like that are, that want to go chase their dreams like you don't. You don't need to go build the big commercial facility in the beginning, like, I had to step my way into what we're doing today. There was no, there was no bank that was going to go loan me $18 million to build a facility.

[Evan Hafer]

I think it's advisable to actually build the facility before you have the demand.

[Josh Smith]

Well, we weren't sure. We saw a lot of demand, but we weren't sure. Is this demand gonna, gonna tap out here in six months? Yeah. Yeah. Is this gonna flame out? And so the idea was, okay, we're gonna build another shop. And frankly, I kind of snuck that one by the county and built a, a man cave basically, that I intended to make knives in. But it worked out. Thankfully, the county didn't really catch on to that one. Now, now we're in a good spot. But I built that on my home property. Even today, since that day, we've hired 80 employees and they're working at my house, on my property. I mean, you've landed your helicopter there. It. I, I just want to put that across so when people hear me, they're not like, oh, some guy with a big company just bitching about not being able to buy stuff overseas or whatever, or, you know, you know, be able to spend his money overseas. Like, no, I've been preaching from day one, I want to prove everyone wrong and build this knife company and prove you can manufacture in America. That's what I've been preaching about since day one. And I was told it wasn't possible because you can buy $19.99 knives made in China at Walmart, like hunting knives, you can buy those. And so everyone's like, well, how are you going to build a $300 knife and sell it? It's not possible. Well, we've proven that's possible. And we've shown that Americans desire to have American made products and support an American made business. And we've also proven there's benefits to, to spending that money because we will then stand behind you. We will sharpen. It will. You know, we donate our money to local causes, we raise money for floods, like all the things, right? That's what a domestic business does. They support their country and community. So as we grew into that, that building on our property, we quickly. You proved to be right. We were like, holy shit, we're growing out of this thing.

[Evan Hafer]

Like within a year.

[Josh Smith]

Within a year. And so I started hunting for property, started figuring that out, and bought a piece of land there in Missoula. And again, no big nope. No investors, no outside money. This is just Brandon and I reinvesting dollars back into the company the entire time. The first time that we really went to take a loan was for the building. And the reason for that, frankly, was in the beginning, I didn't want to take any loans because I already just quit a good job. And I was afraid I was going to be putting our family in a bind we could never dig out of if I went and borrowed a bunch of money. So we just bootstrapped it. And that's why people were frustrated we didn't have enough knives in the beginning.

[Evan Hafer]

They also forget you have to order the steel so far in advance.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

That what you make is not something you can lateral in 30 or 60 days and all of a sudden more.

[Josh Smith]

No. In fact, just so people understand this process and this is why we're building this building, and I'll actually explain how we're going to solve this. We just had blades come in from heat treat last week. I'm just being full disclosure, being super, super honest here. We had blades come in from heat treat last week. Our blades are heat treated somewhere else, and they're ground right now somewhere else. And we're getting into this blade grinder thing. So these blades get laser cut in New York, heat treated in New York, ground in Washington. All right. And then they come to us and we do all the finishing process. We make the handles, we assemble, we sharpen, we. We package, we do all that. Okay. So I don't own that whole first part of this supply chain in our company. Okay. And that's really, from a standpoint of the equipment to do those first three steps. Laser grind and heat treat are massive, massively expensive. Big equipment to do this.

[Evan Hafer]

Huge kilns for the heat treating.

[Josh Smith]

Big kilns. Yep. Big kilns that inject liquid nitrogen gas into the kilns for the quenching. Like it's.

[Evan Hafer]

How many times do they heat them? Remember, my knowledge of knives comes from forged in fire.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Which will you describe it as? You make your best, worst knife.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, exactly.

[Evan Hafer]

You see him heat cycling.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. They'll go through a heat cycling process and then they'll go heat. They'll heat them up to a. You know, to get them into solution to quench. And that's around 2,000 degrees. And then these.

[Evan Hafer]

Stiffens them. Right. Or hardens it.

[Josh Smith]

It hardens them. Yeah, that's right. And it. So it makes them more wear resistant to losing their edge. Right. And there's this balance between toughness and hardness. And there's a whole bunch of science behind that, which is why? It's hard. Like it's. It's a. And you have to be absolutely dialed in that process. If you make a mistake in it, you end up with which. Which is what we got last week, which is bad blades. So we have that how? Like brittle, Too soft. So something happened in the process where they didn't get hardened enough. Well, we test our blades when they come into our shop to ensure we're putting out good blades. We start testing. We have 2,000 blades that aren't hard enough.

[Evan Hafer]

What do you do there?

[Josh Smith]

Throw them in the garbage.

[Evan Hafer]

There is no going Montana knife company, Butter knives.

[Josh Smith]

It's genius.

[Evan Hafer]

Let's just create something.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

I'm thinking wooden handle, not designed to cut anything. Let's just dole it up.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

And say this is our first few steps into our culinary line. Not chef knife, but like we're gonna do, you know, spoons, forks, maybe sporks. You never know because you can combine the two. And a butter knife. You should have called me. I've already solved this problem for you. MKC Butter knives.

[Josh Smith]

I don't know how you got where you got in life. I think actually this is how. By solving problems.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah, I just make sure. Yeah. I mean, I feel like your guys brand is so strong. You could have sold butter knives.

[Josh Smith]

Probably could.

[Evan Hafer]

And you know what? If you would have actually just said, hey, these were supposed to be this, but they're too soft. So if you want to buy this, don't you dare try to do anything with this other than spread jam on toast. It would have sold out.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, we're not gonna do that. I'm not putting out an inferior product.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, all right.

[Josh Smith]

Because somebody will go right on ebay and sell it for full price.

[Evan Hafer]

Just tell me where you put them. Michael and I will start a side business. We'll call it Kalispell Knife Company, kkc. No, no, no. That's way too close to other things that have negative connotations.

[Josh Smith]

You're gonna get a launder these blades.

[Evan Hafer]

We'll do Flathead Valley Knife Co. Specializing in butter knives.

[Josh Smith]

Perfect.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah, perfect.

[Josh Smith]

Well, no, we get these. We get these blades in, we start doing our testing, and they're bad. They're already.

[Evan Hafer]

So they just bend.

[Josh Smith]

They're ground. No, I mean, that's the thing. They're partially hard. There's a joke there that before.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah. You know.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. So we got a little partial hardness going on where, you know, you. You wouldn't be able to tell as a customer, but where you would tell is when you Start using it and you lose your edge. Super, super.

[Evan Hafer]

I just bill super fast.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, no wear resistance.

[Evan Hafer]

So butter doesn't require.

[Josh Smith]

It's not very abrasive.

[Evan Hafer]

Don't throw these away yet. I feel like we have a new vertical.

[Josh Smith]

Unless you freeze your butter.

[Evan Hafer]

Then at least talk to Brandon. Let's be honest, he's the brains behind the operation. He may, in fact, Brian will market.

[Josh Smith]

The shit out of them butter knives.

[Evan Hafer]

I'm telling you that they might be one of your fastest releases.

[Josh Smith]

Better butter knives.

[Evan Hafer]

Let's try this. We'll split it 60, 30. So I get the 60, you get the 30. 10%. Nobody knows where that goes. Michael Marketing. Nobody knows. Yeah, maybe for the second batch of butter.

[Josh Smith]

Butter knives. There you go. Just cut out the heat treat process altogether.

[Evan Hafer]

What blade was it?

[Josh Smith]

Mini goats or speed goats?

[Evan Hafer]

Oh, those aren't big enough to be butter.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, no, they're a little speed goat would be pointy little butter knives.

[Evan Hafer]

That'd be tough.

[Josh Smith]

So here's, here's the point with all of this stuff. So we test all these blades and we lose several hundred thousand dollars in sales by those things going in the garbage.

[Evan Hafer]

Who eats that cost, though?

[Josh Smith]

We do. And they. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

[Evan Hafer]

What about the heat treater?

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, it's kind of funny. There's not real guaranteed contracts in that stuff, which is.

[Evan Hafer]

They don't quality control their stuff.

[Josh Smith]

Well, they're supposed to.

[Evan Hafer]

I feel like there's a conversation there.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, no, we're having it. But there's not. But there's not. There's not. There's not probably going to be a check written there. It's more of a. We're now making sure we're doing some more QC even for them in that before those blades get ground and go down the process before we get them and it's too late.

[Evan Hafer]

I'm ready to consult with you in this process. Yeah.

[Josh Smith]

The point of all this is this stuff is all really big process stuff that has to happen outside of our shop. And. And you know, I've heard some of the hate of like, well, these guys don't even make the whole entire process in their shop. And it's like, man, when you start a business in your garage, you don't do everything right off the bat. Like, you know, this was a building process from day one. And I've been trying to prove that you can do this without selling out to conglomerates and you know, bringing in, you know, multi millionaires to build the whole process right off. And no one would. You wouldn't go spend 25, $30 million to build a knife company before you've proven that you have the demand, you know, in the, in the support. So, yeah, not with the backgrounds we have.

[Evan Hafer]

Maybe if you grow up fantastically wealthy with generational wealth, you could.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. No businessman is going to put that money into a company until it proves it can sell. Now, we could get that. We could get that investment today with what we've proven, but now it's more of like, yeah, I could get that investment. I want to keep proving we can do it our, ourselves. I don't, I don't. We've. We've had those conversations. I don't like where that stuff goes. I want to prove that we can do it. And we are. So the point with this is, is, all right, here's this situation, right? We're making handles in our shop. We're assembling, we're sharpening, we're doing all that, but we're missing these first few pieces. But it's several million dollars worth of equipment to finish that step of bringing American manufacturing soup to nuts in. And, and here's my point with those blades. And you talked about supply chain length. Those blades were heat treated last September.

[Evan Hafer]

Oh, wow.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. So we're talking 10 months. Yeah. Until those blades got to our shop for us to finish. That's how long this process. So when people say, why don't you release more knives? Why haven't you done this? That. Well, when I react today to an event that happens, if I do a drop, and it's like, holy cow, that new knife we launched is the most popular thing on the planet. Let's make more.

[Evan Hafer]

18 months from now.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. 10, 10, 11 months later, we're, we're showing the reaction to that. Right. And that's what it's been. And trust me, when people come on and they email customer service or they comment and they're like, why the. You know, you guys are a joke, whatever. It's like, do you, do you think I don't want your money? Like, do you think I don't want to make more knives? Like, we're trying, but I've been absolutely against, to probably my own detriment, bringing on the investment to ramp that up, like, fast, fast, fast. Right. I wanted to do it all on our own. And that's what we've been doing. And so here we are. This last summer, this last entire, you know, 10 months, we've been building this new manufacturing facility that will make all this possible. Right. It's 51,000 square feet. We can bring every process in house, and we are about three months away from that building being complete, maybe four, tops. And so we're in that time period right now where it's like, all right, we got to start ordering equipment and hiring people to run this stuff to put into this building. Yep. I got to remind you, this is. This is stuff I've never done before. I've never owned laser cutting machines, heat treating machines, these big blade grinding machines. Right. This mass finish stuff that we have to have never done any of this, but I'd also never done any of the stuff I've done in the last four years. You know, it's totally different than a custom knife. So I just have the confidence, like, I have really good people. I find smart people, and we'll figure it the hell out. That. That's been my attitude from the beginning, and it's worked. So here we are, we're getting ready to order this equipment, we're having all these conversations. We start discussing price and find out this blade grinding machine, for example, is a half. Basically half million. It'll be right at a half million bucks, probably a little more once it's installed. So 500 grand. Oh, there's a 37% tariff on it right now, but depending on what happens with some of these things going on with the EU and what Trump's saying, it could be a 50% tariff. August 1st in 12 days. That's a big, big hike on a $500,000 grinder. Now, people's instant reaction on my Instagram post is, we'll just buy it in America, dude. Like, you're bitching about buying things overseas. These machines, there's about 12 per year built and sent to America and. And. And bought in America. They're highly specialized. They're massive machines. There is not like an industry quote, unquote.

[Evan Hafer]

There's no Napa Auto parts for what you're doing.

[Josh Smith]

No. And there's not even the demand for it, because the only people who are installing these machines are major manufacturers of maybe scissors, you know, blades that might go like lawnmower blades, you know, stuff for farm implements. You know, knives. There's.

[Evan Hafer]

You guys gonna make scissors now? I'm interested.

[Josh Smith]

I'm. I'm very interested in that.

[Evan Hafer]

But shears, perhaps?

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, no, it's. It's all possible with this machine. The point is, how often do you hear of scissor manufacturers being built in America right now? Or farm implement manufacturers or whatever? It's. It's. It's real Small. So like I say, about 12 machines a year are shipped to America. There's two companies that build these machines and they're both in Germany. They invented this machine process and they supply essentially the world, these bevel grinding machines. And they only make a few dozen a year for the world. So it's a very specialized industry machine. My point is and my frustration with Trump's policies. Well, let's talk about tariffs for a second here. I'm actually, well, I'm going to preface it all by saying I'm not an economist. I can't argue if tariffs are a good thing or a bad thing. Right. Some people are going to say it's a form of tax, it's a terrible idea. Government, we need less tax, whatever should have free trade or whatever you want to say. Other people like Trump are going to say, hey, it makes us more competitive with the cheap labor overseas and all that. And I tend to during the election and even today fall on that side with Trump of like, hey, man, like, let's take knives for example. There's American made knife companies here already that are making knives and trying to sell them. But we have 19 knives coming in from China. That's a major competitive disadvantage. When I was at the Atlanta Blade show in June of major manufacturers, I think I only saw three in that entire show. Everything else is being made by a couple knife companies in China. We knives. I mean, they hit me on LinkedIn all the freaking time. We'll make your knives, we'll make your knives and like, piss off. You're not doing that. But all these small knife manufacturers you see popping up and most of these, these small knife makers trying to scale their businesses, all are using a company like that. It's called We Knives. My point is, if you want to tariff finished goods like knives, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm biased on knives. Well, let's talk about cars. If you want to tariff cars being made in China or somewhere else, we have American car manufacturers. I could see the argument that that makes a more even playing field for our American car manufacturers. I can also see the argument on the other side. And this is why I'm not smart enough to figure out what the right answer is. That, you know, hey, it's driving up the cost for the American consumer. They need a cheap car to drive or to buy or they need a cheap knife. So again, I'm not the one really in a position to decide that. What I'm saying in our situation is I'm trying to build American Manufacturing. I am doing exactly what Donald Trump wants to be done, bootstrapping it from start to finish, from a garage to a major manufacturing facility. When we build this building, we'll probably hire another 100 people, 150 people over the next five years. That's going to be a 200 to 250 person building.

[Evan Hafer]

How big is one at your property now?

[Josh Smith]

The new one you built, the one on my property at my house right now is just under 10,000 square feet.

[Evan Hafer]

Okay. So 5x the size of that.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Okay.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. And, and way more usable in regards to like bodies and manufacturing space. I would argue it's, it's, it's gonna much more than 5x our potential.

[Evan Hafer]

Let's also not forget the most important feature and aspect of your new building.

[Josh Smith]

It's a coffee shop.

[Evan Hafer]

That's right.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. Black Rifle Missoula.

[Evan Hafer]

Black Rifle Missoula. I'm changing our name to Black Rifle Montana just to piss you guys off. Then I'll sue you.

[Josh Smith]

I already, I already did it. No, but, but here's the, you know.

[Evan Hafer]

The tariff one is an interesting one. Also not an economist for people who didn't realize that already. I've done a bunch of episodes though for change agents with economists, and there was an interesting stat that was brought up. What's not helping, whether you land on the tariffs are good or tariffs are bad, is the fact that these decisions are like flip flopping, as if they're in the wind. There's been, I did an episode a few weeks ago. I think it just released on the ironclad side. 146 different tariff decisions since Trump has been in office. It's probably closer to 200 at this point. Unless he is trying to sow or make people feel unstable. And maybe there's an argument for that so it can be resettled. That's kind of more of what it's doing, is making people really unsure of what the hell is going on.

[Josh Smith]

So I'm glad you bring that up because to your point, maybe it's the art of the deal, right? Maybe it's, maybe it's, maybe it's a genius. And I hope so.

[Evan Hafer]

I hope it is not.

[Josh Smith]

Maybe it's not. What I'll say as a, I guess now sitting here, big business owner, right? We're a pretty large business. We're doing fair amount in revenue and we have a bunch of employees and we're growing. What it does is it provides a lot of uncertainty and uncertainty doesn't allow you to plan. Right. And so here I am with this big building, right. That's empty. I could to fill this building with all the equipment that I feel like we're going to need over the next seven years. It'll probably be around $18 million worth of equipment, dude.

[Evan Hafer]

Just.

[Josh Smith]

And that's in the next say decade. Right, but we're obviously not just write a check. Yeah, well, I can easily write a check. My bounce like a ball. What I'm saying is, is that's, that's projecting like if, if things were to just continue growing for a decade. Right. So now we have to look and we're after like, well, let's plan on this next year or two. Right. And we have to anticipate. And this is where. With the economy also. Also have to look at the overall economy and like, do we think we're headed up? Are we headed down? What's the consumer going to do? Are they going to have extra money to spend on. On knives? You could argue, do they really need a knife? If times are tough, what are they going to cut out of their budget? You know, same with your business. Like, if times are tough, are they going to stop for that cup of coffee on Thursday? Maybe they're just going to.

[Evan Hafer]

What you'll find is it's awesome to sell an addictive product. Coffee sales or coffee sales.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, well, we're trying to make our knives be an addictive product. But, but the point is coffee's at.

[Evan Hafer]

A price point that impacts people's wallet a lot differently than a consumable like a $300 knife.

[Josh Smith]

It does.

[Evan Hafer]

It's, it's honestly one. You could raise the price of coffee one and a half times. Not that I have any intention of doing this. And people may not think twice about it. You raise your. Raise Your product price 1 1/2 times, you're going to have some back black.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. No. And that's why you see companies do the pricing the way they do it. It's like, well, it's $299.99. Well, it's not $300, you know, but the minute you're like, well wait, it's 325. Oof. You know, well, it's not that much more money. But the, the uncertainty really is an issue. And actually we're in this with this grinder, right? So if we ordered this grinder and it's a 37 or let's say it's. We think it's about to go to a 50% tariff. We order it and two months later, Trump says Oh, these guys in Germany are our best friends. Now we're back to 5% tariff. Well, we just bought blew 33 extra percent or 32 extra percent on tariffs that we didn't need to blow just because they're going back and forth, you know, like a pendulum. And, and, and so then it makes you go, well, let's just wait, because, you know, it's Trump. He's going to, you know, in six months, these guys are going to be best friends. He's going to have it solved. So we're not going to spend the money. Okay, well, that now means we're not going to spend that money. We're going to wait. We're not going to hire those jobs. We're also not going to be able to produce those knives. We're not going to need those sheets that we buy from Idaho that are made down there from all those people. So it, it does have a major downstream effect. And my point, with manufacturing equipment and with these tariffs, let's just assume tariffs are a great idea and we should do them. I don't understand why Trump's policies would create conditions that make it harder to build American manufacturing. Now, again with nuance. The laser cutting machine is Made in America. I can also buy it from Taiwan. Okay, now there's a great argument for punishing me for buying that machine from Taiwan.

[Evan Hafer]

Which one's cheaper?

[Josh Smith]

The one from Taiwan.

[Evan Hafer]

Really? Even with shipping?

[Josh Smith]

Yep. We are buying the one from Made in America. We're buying an IPG cube laser.

[Evan Hafer]

So does it sound like a bald eagle when you turn it on? Is that the difference?

[Josh Smith]

Maybe I'll put a speaker on, at least make it sound like that.

[Evan Hafer]

Did you know fun fact from Leah, that the bald eagle noise that they use every time on TV and movies.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Is not the sound of a bald eagle.

[Josh Smith]

Really? Is it a hawk or something?

[Evan Hafer]

Apparently bald eagles sound like.

[Josh Smith]

I mean, a red tail hawk has a cool sound. It's probably what it is.

[Evan Hafer]

No, actually, I think that is exactly what it is. She hit me with that one. Not too long. I'm like, come on. She. She worked up in Alaska a bunch.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

She's like, yeah, that's not what they sound like.

[Josh Smith]

Well, red tail hawks sound cool, so I bet that's what it is.

[Evan Hafer]

Just so people know. I'm just saying, how American are we.

[Josh Smith]

That we need to open an investigation into that too? Epstein. And eagle noises, I feel like you buy those two. So, you know, when I, when I, you know, people who I. So when I, when I put a Post up like that, or when I, when I bitch like this and I'm bitching straight out the Trump administration about this, like, what the fuck are you guys doing? This is stupid. I get the right going, well, dummy, just buy it in America. Okay, well, you don't understand. Okay? And they say, well, the point is, if he does this over the next few years, they are going to be made in America. And you might argue that for some things, you might argue, I don't know.

[Evan Hafer]

If I would say in the next few years, people don't understand what it would take. First off, the machines don't exist, the talent doesn't exist, the facility to make that doesn't exist. You need to get all of those things, train them, and start like, we're talking probably closer to a decade.

[Josh Smith]

Well, so I want to dive into that on the material side, because with tariffs, there's three things. There's a finished good, there's the materials to make a finished good, and there's the equipment used to use the materials to make the finished good. Right? There's three parts of tariffs that I believe that's where the nuance should come in. And I think we are in phase one of bringing American manufacturing back. So in phase one, it's finished goods. Like, that's, to me, where they should be targeting. And then if you want to have some arguments about, like, hey, this finished good is not available in America and we don't want to, we don't want to tax essentially the citizens too much, we're going to, we're going to put a lower tariff on it, and we're going to start to ramp that up over the next three years. Because by the end of three years, that finished goods should be made in America if we do it right. And the government could even invest some money into that. That. And I have an example of that. But what I get on the right and the left is I get the guy who's saying, you know, well, yeah, dummy, just buy whatever. Or I get the guy on the left that's like, well, you got what you wish for. You were a Trump supporter.

[Evan Hafer]

The classic statement, this is what you voted for.

[Josh Smith]

And I'm saying in the middle here, I'm trying to actually solve the problem of bringing American manufacturing back on the material side. Let's talk about that, if you don't mind, for a second. So when tariffs first came out, I, I even made kind of a funny post where I'm like, you know, I kind of announced like, we're going to need to Raise prices, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, with all these tariffs on all this materials. And then, you know, my guy interrupts me in the background and he's like, hey, we don't get anything overseas. I'm like, oh, never mind. We're good, right? Carry on, carry on. We're not raising prices. Thank you for your attention to this matter with materials. I think it's somewhat similar. And we are actually in an interesting spot here. And this is again, where I'd love to talk to the government, the steel industry. How do we bring the steel industry back to America? And I think most of us would agree, even from a national security standpoint, that we should have ample ability to produce any amount of steel that we need. And maybe it's not all of it, but we should be producing steel, not losing steel industry jobs. And you look at what it's done to, like, western Pennsylvania, to all of Pennsylvania, New York, upstate New York, what it's done to their economy. With losing the steel industry in the last 50 years, it's, it's, it's been very impactful.

[Evan Hafer]

How much capacity remains well in the.

[Josh Smith]

Knife industry with the steel that we now use. And this is what I wanted to get to zero. So, like, not a single producer, unfortunately. And, and the timing on this was very unfortunate because I actually looked into this and I felt like had this happened eight months later, with my connections maybe to Trump and whatnot, we might have been able to figure something out. Crucible Steel Technologies for the last 40 years has made knife steel in America. It's. And they had a certain technology. It's a powdered metal technology where they atomize steel, they turn it into powder, and then they produce billets of steel, and then it gets rolled out into sheet stock. Well, they've been struggling bad for 30 years, so much so that there is a clip. Should try to find it. There is a clip of Harry Reid, Democrat, talking like he's Donald Trump 20 years ago from Crucible Steel Technology, saying if we don't change what's happening with our trade situation here, we're going to start losing companies like Crucible Steel Technology in my home state, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He sounds like Donald Trump standing there. And it was about China and the steel industry.

[Evan Hafer]

And then that's, I'm assuming, exactly what happened.

[Josh Smith]

That's exactly what happened, actually. In between that time and now, Crucible went bankrupt twice. Emerged from it, kept going. And in January this year, well, late last year, they went bankrupt for a third time. And in January, right around the Inauguration. They got bought out of bankruptcy by Aerosteel out of Sweden. Okay, well what did Aerosteel do? Did they buy it and just keep running it and you know, say, well, now we have American supply of steel? No, they bought it. They bought basically a dilapidated steel mill because Crucible was struggling so bad. They were. They lacked in any kind of maintenance, upkeep, technologies, whatever of their steel mill. They were barely getting by. So now you buy this dilapidated steel mill, they shuttered it, they get rid of everyone and they bought the ip, so they bought the patents and they bought the technology of the powder and they took it back to Sweden. And so there's.

[Evan Hafer]

This is where people are going to be forced to buy from anyway.

[Josh Smith]

There's no more powder technology steel in America, which means any knife company in America using stainless steel in a powder technology form, which is superior. And this gets into the question that we now are up against as a company. And this is Benchmade, this is Spyderco, this is Buck. It doesn't matter who your favorite knife company as it's all of us. You, you now have a decision to make. We're going to buy our steel from Sweden because it's the best steel. It was actually this CPM Magnacut steel that we use was invented by Laren Thomas, a metaler just here in America. They went and had Crucible make it. Crucible owned all the patents and whatever on it. Some bad business stuff that they did there. But anyway, they lost it to Sweden. So it's an American invented steel that's now in Sweden. My point with this is, is we have a decision as a company and so do a lot of other knife manufacturers. Do you use the best steel available to make the best product possible for your customer? Right. Which would be a Swedish steel or do you use more of a flat strip steel that's been widely common available for decades in America, but is a far inferior product at the end of the day. So I'm going to sell you a knife. The edge, you're going to lose the edge much faster. Yeah, it's not going to be as good a tool or, you know, am I going to send you down range with a tactical knife or whatever from a steel that's not as tough, it's more breakable. That's the thing with Magnacuts. It's the toughest stainless steel on the market, period. Or am I going to buy Swedish steel? And I would argue, I don't think people really give a. If the steel's made in Sweden, it's not like Sweden's China, right? I think China, Taiwan, some of these countries, people care a little more about. And I'd argue even this blade grinding machine that's made in Germany.

[Evan Hafer]

This episode is brought to you by Element. If you follow the show, you know that I've been talking about these guys for a while. I've known Rob Wolf for well over a decade. We started our career together, if you will. My words, not necessarily his. Back when we were working in the CrossFit days, moved up to Montana, ended up in the same place doing Jiu jitsu. And he is the one who exposed me to Element, which makes sense given that he is a co founder. There's a couple ways you can get this stuff. So I have two of them in front of here. You can get this big box right here and I'll open this thing up. This is what they come in, these individual packs. I have heard, depending on the person and how much you need electrolytes, you know, the dosage can vary. One thing I'll say about this, if you take too much sodium, potassium, magnesium, too many of these things, be cautious with how far away you get from a bathroom. So start slow. But in every one of these, 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, 60 milligrams of magnesium. This particular flavor I'm holding is the watermelon salt. This used to be my favorite. Then they came out this summer with lemonade. And that is my absolute go to every morning. I have been starting it with a 12 to 16 ounce glass of water, half of one of those, some collagen peptides, and that's how I start off my day. Every day after Jiu Jitsu, it's a minimum of one of these things. And like I've said before, it's like feeling it course back through your veins. It's like for those, this will date my date me here. But the first Tron movie where you sit them dripping, dipping their little discs in the water and you drink it and they start glowing again. That's kind of what it feels like. So there's another way you can get it though, and that is in these bubbly waters right here. Sparkling electrolyte water. Same thing. 1,000 milligrams of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium, 60 milligrams of magnesium. Here's what's wild. I own a coffee shop. We order boxes of both of these things every single week because we can't keep them in stock. These things are flying out the door. Head over to drinklmnt.com clearedhot. You're gonna get a free LMNT sample pack with any purchase. And also don't forget to try the new element sparkling Like I said right in front of me, 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Love having these things in the fridge. Grab em right after class, slam the thing, drink them during a podcast. Delicious, convenient. And I actually oftentimes will cut it with even more water to increase my hydration. Drink normal spelling LMNT limamike November tango.com clearedhut It'll be right down the show notes. Check it out. Up your electrolyte game and I'm gonna say with that up your recovery and preparation for your next hard effort game as well. Back to the show.

[Josh Smith]

I would argue there are certain times it's okay to trade with our allies to keep also their economy strong. There is such a thing as the back and forth which helps them remain strong as a country as well. Which gives us, you know, good allies and stable governments and countries around the world that we trade with. Right.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah. I don't think an isolationist, isolationist approach in the long term like a true isolationist isolationist approach benefits America.

[Josh Smith]

Agree. And so here we are today and this I'll give you an example. So now There is a 36% tariff on steel that we're buying. Given that tariff, if we from April of 24 to April of 25 had we had that tariff on our steel, we would paid an extra $608,000 in expense for that steel. Okay. So when you look at that with a company our size, that 608 grand's a big big deal.

[Evan Hafer]

Especially that's your grinding machine.

[Josh Smith]

Exactly, exactly. Or that's several employees salaries at least six if not eight or ten. Right. It's people. So now you have a choice as a company, do you pass that $608,000 in the next 12 months and it'll actually be more we're growing. It'll probably be closer to a million dollars in tariff money. Do you pass that on to the customer? Do you just eat it as a company right now our plan is just to eat that we're not going to raise our prices because I actually believe like we just talked about planning, Trump will wake up one day and be best friends with the president of Sweden or the he'll figure out shit with the EU or whatever. I also I don't want to do with that with my prices. Right. And it's the only now material that we using our knives that won't be American because all of our handle material, we, we're even making our own screws. Anything we source is all American made. We actually have enough American made steel left from before the company was bankrupt. They were still producing. We bought a bunch this spring. So we actually have enough steel to get all the way through 1Q26.

[Evan Hafer]

Where do you guys store that stuff?

[Josh Smith]

At our laser cutting facility.

[Evan Hafer]

Just ship it to them and have.

[Josh Smith]

Hold it for you. It'll be shipped at our building when our lasers arrive. But here's the, here's the point with planning. Right? We have it sounds great. Oh, you got enough steel to last through the first quarter of next year? Well, we're buying our steel now for second and third quarter. You start planning and you start going, well, how much of that 36% tariff steel do we really want to buy? Do we get real short on it? We want to plan for growth, which is what we've been doing. We've been over buying steel and then outrunning our projections. But at least we still have steel to make the knives. If you don't have steel, you can't make the product. Right. And there again the point is with this is to this tiered approach, Tier one tariff finished goods, Tier two materials will, hey, let's look at this as a government and realize like, okay, we're going to start taking the tariff money from tier one and maybe the government is going to talk to some steel mills that are in the US or some, some professionals are back to the crucible type people and say, hey, we're going to subsidize bringing steel mills back to America. Maybe the government's even going to invest that tariff money into actually doing what the goal is. And maybe it's a private public partnership. If it becomes profitable, the government gets paid back. There's ways that I think the government could help actually bring that back and say we're not going to beat you up for buying Swedish steel for the next five years because at the end of the day it's the government's fucking fault that that shit went away. Harry Reid and Republicans and Democrats all alike for 30 years have been talking about losing the steel industry. We've now lost it. And then you're going to turn around and tariff us. And it is a form of tax on Americans. Like if we decide to raise that price, the customer's going to pick up the cost.

[Evan Hafer]

You know what sucks about that even more? The government has demonstrably proven that they're a poor steward of our money.

[Josh Smith]

Yes.

[Evan Hafer]

And we're just giving them more.

[Josh Smith]

And that's my issue with the tariffs. Okay. If you're going to tariff, is it just going in the general fund and are we just shipping to Ukraine?

[Evan Hafer]

Also, why did we just add $5 trillion to our $36.1 trillion big, beautiful bill.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Wasn't that the opposite of what was run upon?

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. And there again. But you're, you're a traitor if you say that. Just because maybe you voted for the right and it's like, no, actually, how, how about I'm actually just holding you accountable for what you said you were going to do.

[Evan Hafer]

I mean, if we can't even as a country balance out our budget. Do you know when the last time the Department of Defense passed an audit was? Nevary.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. And there again, I was okay. I would have been okay with Trump saying, I'm just gonna veto shit till you send me a balanced budget. And yeah, we're shutting down the government and it's gonna create a lot of hardship for people for a while.

[Evan Hafer]

I saw a video the other day, and I wish I could say the name of who it was from, but it was an older one. And the guy essentially said, yeah, I can fix the deficit right now anytime. We have a more than a 3% deficit, every sitting member of Congress, an elected official, is no longer eligible for reelection.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, exactly.

[Evan Hafer]

But instead we have clearly shown, like if, if you're, if you ran, if you ran your family's finances like we do as a country.

[Josh Smith]

Right. You're on the street, you're living in a box. Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

But we keep giving money to our government. Yeah, I have a problem with that.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. And I don't want to sound like I'm, I'm, I'm not really complaining that much about the material thing like it does.

[Evan Hafer]

I, I, again, I think your approach makes sense. I would say you could also apply that to immigration. Trend has. The last time I did a podcast on this, 16 states that they have influence in. I would like to see those people taken out of this country before the farmer. The farmer who is. People don't understand the cascading downstream effects that that can have if the agricultural market in California no longer has people to work there. And this is not me making an argument for illegal immigration, which I don't support in any way, shape or form.

[Josh Smith]

But if the Stump family in California owns apples and they need them picked and they can't get them picked like there is, there is an argument and A discussion to be had around that. But I would agree. I don't think that apple picker guy is the guy that we all voted for as far as like, you know, with Trump of like, we need to get these illegals out.

[Evan Hafer]

Montana is One of the 16 states that what has trend Aragua influence. Oh, Bozeman.

[Josh Smith]

Really?

[Evan Hafer]

It's known. How about. Let's start there.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

How about the apartment complex in Colorado that the government tried to say wasn't controlled by trend. There's this dude's rocking rifles and like, actually, I don't want to tell people.

[Josh Smith]

There'S nuance to these things. And, and it's like you say it's taken a scalpel to it. And again, I, it's my. I don't have as big a problem with the steel thing because I have the choice to use other steel made in America. But I'm not willing to make a product that's inferior to my competitor because he's using Swedish steel. Like, and I think our customer will get that. And, and if you don't and you want to buy 100American, everything that's fine. And I'm sure there's going to be those knives available. But my thing is, is why with our country are we not making the best steel in the world? And you could argue this with other, other, other manufacturers. Like, I got a bunch of comments back to me on a different post that I'd done on the material thing. And it's like brass for bullet manufacturing, right? Well, if we're not making brass in America and bullet manufacturers are now paying a 50% tariff on that, how much is going to cost you to go shooting on the weekend?

[Evan Hafer]

Now that'll be back to Covid prices.

[Josh Smith]

And again, from a national defense standpoint, why aren't we making our own brass in America? Right? Why aren't we making our own steel or enough of it. And again, I think back to this decision of like, wait, are you choosing to buy screws from China because they're cheaper and they're screw manufacturers in America? Yeah, we're going to tariff the shit out of you for that. Like, okay, that, that makes sense. Like, that's fair. But what you're, you're choosing to buy steel or brass or, or, you know, the apparel industry is real similar situation here where a lot of the most technical apparel that you can possibly buy, you know, with the, the heat transferring, you know, it's coming out of Vietnam, the drying. Yeah, all those technologies are coming out of Vietnam and some other countries and you know, places like Gore are making that stuff over there, and they're. And a lot of it is around chemicals. And this is a, this is a conversation we need to have as Americans. Some of these, some of these. Let's even talk about steel for a second. Do you, do you want a steel mill in your backyard? Like, there has to be that discussion. Like, you want steel made in America. I do. But do you really want it in your town? Is it done clean? You know, some of those situation, you know, discussions, but with, with materials especially, a lot of that manufacturing process is dirty. And it's like, well, maybe there's certain things that we just don't actually want to do in America. Do you want. Do we have enough labor to sew, you know, billions of garments a year? Well, no, but China does. Like, it's, it's an unfortunate discussion that we sometimes have to have is like, we as Americans. Do you really want to put iPhones together or do you just want to buy your own iPhone from overseas? You know? Yeah. So it's, it's nuanced. And I, I again, I think the finished good thing is a really good place to start. And there again, I would love to see that money all going into a bucket. And if that bucket was going to solve steel, if it was going to solve brass, if it was going to solve apparel, cool. Like, that would make me feel better about spending an extra 150 or 200 grand on a blade grinding machine if I actually thought that money was going to get used and not shipped overseas.

[Evan Hafer]

It's an interesting time, man. I feel like the next few weeks will be pretty telling as far as the trajectory of the administration. Yeah, there, there is some pressure.

[Josh Smith]

It's a bumpy road at the moment. Yeah, they're on some washboard, Washboard roads here.

[Evan Hafer]

And let's be honest, it's their own doing.

[Josh Smith]

It is.

[Evan Hafer]

And, and that's not wrong or right.

[Josh Smith]

And I'm actually, though I might sound like I'm bitching, I'm actually trying to be a bit of a solution. Like, I texted Tulsi and we're going to maybe try to talk this weekend. I feel bad. I've never asked anything of any of these people. I do know. You know, I did. I did call Trump Jr. About this, and Jr. Was like, you know, I'll try to connect you to some people. But he said, I'm not involved in the administration. Really. Like, I was a lot more involved in the first one, and I don't think it was that enjoyable. And he's not that involved. And for people who do comment, send me a message. Well, how about your boy? You stayed at your house, your friends. How many people do you think. And it's why I haven't called Junior until now. How many people of any policy that Trump's doing are affecting someone Trump Jr. Might know? And you're calling him and it's like, man, it's. That's. My dad's. The president I can't solve. Everybody be ringing off the hooks. And I, I, I, I do not hold, you know, Trump Jr. Again, it flows at the top. It's Trump Senior. I was looking, I am looking for some connections in the administration to help solve some of these problems, to accomplish the goal of climbing that American manufacturing mountain. You know, do you think he's using.

[Evan Hafer]

The knife set that you gave him in the White House?

[Josh Smith]

I'm pretty sure Trump chops all his own vegetables.

[Evan Hafer]

I don't think. I don't think Trump or any president is loud around knives.

[Josh Smith]

I think with his new vein thing, he's probably on some Coumadin. I hope he's not using.

[Evan Hafer]

What is Coumadin?

[Josh Smith]

It's a blood thinning, like if you have heart attacks.

[Evan Hafer]

Oh, I just saw, I didn't read the article. I saw something. What? That.

[Josh Smith]

Yourself. You're gonna bleed for days.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, there's pictures of his ankles. What are people complaining about that he has a.

[Josh Smith]

Well, he's, he's got some vein issue where you, you know, older people, they, they're, they die. Their circulation. Yeah, it's the beginning of death. The circulation in your veins, in your legs, and in your extremities starts to become troubled.

[Evan Hafer]

Chronic venous insufficiency, a minor vein condition. After noticing swelling in his legs. Okay.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. I mean, the guy's old. I, I think 79. Yeah. Phenomenal shape.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah. He's older than my dad. And I'll be honest with you, my dad's barely keeping it together.

[Josh Smith]

And you look at the election cycle, and I, it blew me away that, that guy, that guy's energy to be able to do what he did. You know, the speeches, the lack of sleep, the, the air travel. I don't care if it's on a private jet. You're freaking going up and down and doing all that. I mean, I think the guy's incredibly impressive, especially living on Big Max and freaking coke or whatever he drinks.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah, I was gonna say you're talking about the beverage, not the Colombian marching powder. Yeah, no, he's a year older than My dad. Michael, I have another one for you. We did a few stories from my dad just yesterday.

[Josh Smith]

Okay.

[Evan Hafer]

In the time that I went home, since yesterday's episode.

[Josh Smith]

Got some more, huh?

[Evan Hafer]

Went out to the house and the first thing Leah says is, you're not gonna believe what happened. And of course my response is, well, tell me more. My dad has a dog. His name is Buster. Black lab, fantastic dog. They're water animals. My dad and my sister's in town with her husband and my niece and nephew, all staying out at our lake house. And they go down to the.

[Josh Smith]

The.

[Evan Hafer]

Dock where people can put boats in. There is a man sitting down fishing on the end of the dock. So what does my dad do? He gets the tennis ball that Buster wants to chase. And the way the story was told to me was basically threw it and hit the man with the tennis ball, which Buster is right behind him.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, Buster has a job to do.

[Evan Hafer]

Almost barreled the man over, couldn't find the tennis ball, so bit his fishing bobber instead.

[Josh Smith]

Oh my God.

[Evan Hafer]

Got tangled up in the lines. Like there was little blood drops. Buster's lip was cut from when he bit. And I'm looking at the house and there's just a little blood drop here and a little blood drop there. And I just, I look at my dad. I'm like, dad, man, what are you doing? What's his response? Oh, word sure travels fast, man. I can't get away with anything. No explanation. It's like, no, you can't. Because several people were watching what happened. And you know what my dad says? Oh, the ball slipped out of my hand.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. Yeah. He should be, he should be a president.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah. Oh, it was Buster. I'm like, you're not blaming this on the dog? Yeah. His favorite toy, he is a heat seeking missile. He was apparently under the dock looking for it wrapped in fishing line. And the guy reasonably not super stoked.

[Josh Smith]

Not, not super happy. Yeah. Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

And I come back and you know.

[Josh Smith]

I hope he's a listener.

[Evan Hafer]

Oh yeah, for sure.

[Josh Smith]

Awesome.

[Evan Hafer]

Oh no. We opened. I told him today's episode that we put out was just two stories from my dad. My dad was trying to tell us at dinner the other night, he was 86. He was trying to guess the age of one of his friends. He's like, well, he's probably 86, cuz I'm two years older than him. I'm like, dad, how old are you? Oh, it's like 80, 86. You're 100, not 86.

[Josh Smith]

How old is he?

[Evan Hafer]

78. 100 not. And then. Yeah, we started talking about this.

[Josh Smith]

This might be a whole nother topic of why I think there needs to be an age maximum on presidents.

[Evan Hafer]

Oh, I think. And I think we talked about this during the, you know, the run up to this. I don't think the maximum combined age should be able to be over 100 of the two. Yes.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Because I think it was at 272 with the last two kids. No, I mean clearly that's exaggeration.

[Josh Smith]

But it's probably. Yeah, it's 150 or 60.

[Evan Hafer]

I do worry about our system though. All joking aside, if those were the two candidates were the best that we had available at that age, we don't have anybody younger in life that could be a better representative if that is what our two systems. Well, and an argument can be made about the left. It's like you guys skipped a few steps there along the way. Especially when you put Harris in.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Which your base I hope is taking a very hard look at and making sure that that never happens again.

[Josh Smith]

Which they're not.

[Evan Hafer]

Which is unfortunate. But if that's what the apex of those two systems created, man, we have got some problems.

[Josh Smith]

I was very impressed with JD and I was actually unsure about him in the beginning. But, but I actually. He's in an interesting spot because he has to support the top if he.

[Evan Hafer]

Wants to have Runway for himself. Yes.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. Because Trump has proven that he'll. He'll also write you off real, real fast. But some of this, at some point when the election cycle begins in About a year, JD's gonna have to answer for yes. A lot of this. And as Harris was being asked to answer a lot of Bidens, JD's talking about it today like how am I gon navigate all this? Epstein and all this stuff. It's. But, but I think JD is brilliant. I think he's really any. And his approval rating is really, really high. But, but it's easy to have a high approval rating when you don't have to stand up there and answer questions that. That's going to be a tough one to navigate.

[Evan Hafer]

It gets tough. I mean Harris is. The questions that she was getting grilled with are legitimate. How involved were you with these decisions? How much do you personally support these decisions?

[Josh Smith]

Right.

[Evan Hafer]

Those are not easy.

[Josh Smith]

And in the campaign he's going to probably have to break from Trump on some things and it's going to be interest. Trump then torpedoes him or not.

[Evan Hafer]

Which is wild because loyalty is a two way street.

[Josh Smith]

It is supposed to Be at least.

[Evan Hafer]

Not a one way street.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. And I, that's what's. So you talked about it earlier. That's where as a conservative I'm, I was so excited about with Trump going in and I thought taking a wrecking ball to government and then trying to patch it up best as we can and rebuild during the Trump presidency. But if it's really, really going well in four years and then you stack eight more on with with JD I really thought we were in this for a, you know, a 12 year run, you know, with what's happening now. What I guess at the end of the day what really bothers me so much about all this stuff happening is is the results of it may mean the pendulum goes back the wrong direction in just four years.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, I've thought about that too and that I actually think would put us in a worse place because it takes time to both break in to fix and you'll find yourself like even your business and let's say three and a half years from now you're still building out and you're still planning on all of these things and the policies that you were planning on, whatever it may be. The opposite approach is taken just because that's what the other side wants to say is we're going to take the opposite. That puts you in an even worse position.

[Josh Smith]

Right.

[Evan Hafer]

And the country as well. Yeah, I don't it, I don't know man. It's an interesting time. Also not an expert on politics.

[Josh Smith]

It's an interesting time. I still believe in our country and I believe in our citizens and I think it's the greatest country on earth. I think we'll get through it. That's the part. As negative as it's easy to talk about the things that bother you and things that are pissing you off, but as negative as we can be, you know, you look at what I built in just five years, it's the American dream is still real. I'm not somebody that's special or any of that stuff. Like I, I had a dream and worked hard for it and am in the process of accomplishing it. Still a long road to go. But it's also incumbent upon us as citizens to hold our government accountable. And that whether that's luck or by.

[Evan Hafer]

What mechanism I mean legitimately, how can we hold the government accountable? I think you should stop paying your taxes.

[Josh Smith]

I'm with you.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, I would like you to test this. I'll watch from a distance and argue against what you're doing, but quietly support you.

[Josh Smith]

But what if every single conservative in the country one day just said this April 15, we're done. We're not paying taxes. I mean in mass.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, I also think you'd get a large portion of the other side of the aisle because I don't think taxes are really anybody's favorite. It.

[Josh Smith]

Right.

[Evan Hafer]

So I think you might get a little bit of bleed over. There's a Venn diagram overlap.

[Josh Smith]

So let's say we get 50% of the, of the left and 80% of the right that just say, you know.

[Evan Hafer]

What, I don't know what do you think would happen?

[Josh Smith]

And, and is, is a guy like an Elon Musk powerful enough with enough voice to arrange something like that and say, we're going to boycott our own government until you balance a budget.

[Evan Hafer]

Oh, that would be wild Times in the U.S. yeah. I wonder what the government response to something, an initiative like that, I wonder what their response would be.

[Josh Smith]

They would have to balance the budget. You can't go arrest 180 million Americans. You can't send the IRS after all of them. I really hope it does because I believe if you really actually wanted to challenge legally with enough power behind it, it's your, you, it's your job as the government to provide some form of clarity on what you're doing with our tax money. And if you can't, I shouldn't have to pay it.

[Evan Hafer]

I don't know if that's codified anywhere, but I appreciate the headspace.

[Josh Smith]

Well, it'd be fun to try. Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

The budget thing kills me. It absolutely kills me. They make it sound like it's not possible.

[Josh Smith]

And even with what they did with this big, beautiful bill, and if I'm being totally honest, the big beautiful bill, as a business owner is going to save me a bunch of tax money in the next year. Like it is. Like it's. As a citizen, I don't like it. As a business owner, it's a great thing. But at some point, and this is why I stood up kind of in opposition to it, at some point, even if it's going to benefit us, it will benefit me.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, there's a dichotomy, but you have.

[Josh Smith]

To stand up and say, even though it's going to benefit me, it is not right. We, we have to start thinking about the next generations and this national debt that's, that's ticking up and, and the, the interest payment on it and the interest building on it. At some point we have to say like, yes, that tax, that little carrot that you're dangling Me sure would taste nice. But, no, we're not taking it.

[Evan Hafer]

The vector on that line, the payments on that debt is. Is accelerating at a pace that is shocking.

[Josh Smith]

No, it's spinning. It's. It's about to spin completely out. And this makes me wonder, like, is that where I. I don't know anything about the crypto stuff. I actually really wish I understood it better, but I'm like, are they preparing to kill the dollar? Because they can't. The dollar's in a bad way.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah. There's a dichotomy in the big, beautiful bill for you, because as a business, it'll benefit you, which you then could reinvest into your people.

[Josh Smith]

Right.

[Evan Hafer]

So you could look at it through that lens.

[Josh Smith]

Yep.

[Evan Hafer]

I just hate the name of that bill, to be honest with you.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

I hate anything.

[Josh Smith]

Well, any of these ominous packages. Yes. It's just throwing all this stuff in, which, again, is what they said they weren't going to do. And this idea that, like, well, it's going to save a ton of money in 10 and in 20 years, it's like, well, you guys are all gone. Like, you know, government rights, these things. Like, no, how about we save a lot of money this year in the next 360? That'll be.

[Evan Hafer]

That'll be the tough part for JD answering the questions of. This is what you guys said you were going to do. This is what ended up happening.

[Josh Smith]

Right.

[Evan Hafer]

Where do you stand on that? Why should the people believe, you know? Yeah, those are tough questions.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, it's. It's a challenge, but I don't know. Again, I. I hope people understand, like, this is. This is the government, and this is the side of government I voted for, and I'll stand by that. Like, it's the side of government. I wanted to be in power because I believe any of the issues we're having now are. Are better than what we had for an alternative. When you're putting children on hormone blockers and you're telling me that a woman, you know, a man can be a woman, like, again, those are hard stops for me. Like, the Epstein thing. Right. Like, we can debate tariffs, and I can respect the other side that says absolutely no tariffs or yes to tariffs and tariff your equipment and all that. Like, like, again, we're all playing economists here on television, but none of us really know what the hell we're talking about. I do say I feel like I know what I'm talking about in this regard with this equipment, materials, because I'm a business owner. That's Experienced in it. And I know as a business owner, what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to figure out how to fill up this building and hire hundreds of people. I know that these things prevent me from doing that. So take it for what it's worth. That's, that's if that's a fact. So that's in that part of being an economist, I'm pretty qualified to talk about that.

[Evan Hafer]

Most other people would only experience it on a difference in price you are experiencing from a difference in what's causing that price increase. Because you're in that manufacturing world.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Where you'll make the difference is in your coffee sales.

[Josh Smith]

There you go.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, first off, why would you want to add a coffee shop to a knife factory? Let's talk about this. Let's get to the root, the most important issues of the day to try.

[Josh Smith]

And undermine your business, of course.

[Evan Hafer]

But it's like 91 miles away. No, actually, you guys are 110south.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. Every customer that you ever have comes from Missoula. And so I'm just going to stop them right there.

[Evan Hafer]

Now they won't even know you're there.

[Josh Smith]

But no, we, I1 I really think there's a cool. I think, I think our customer, Black Rifle Coffee's customer is very similar to our customer. I feel like it's the person who does appreciate American manufacturing and appreciates our country and the freedoms we have. And so I think it's a similar customer. I know it is. I've experienced that. I also wanted to create a, you know, we were talking about putting in a retail store area, but how do you get people off of the highway, off of the interstate who, who just blast through on Interstate 90 headed east or headed west and give them a reason to walk into a knife company they've never heard of? It's like, oh, there's a coffee shop. Oh, there's a Black Rifle Coffee. Been a fan of theirs. And they walk in and then they discover our company. In the same sense, I think it's a benefit to Black Rifle that, you know, we're a popular, growing brand. So when they come in and they come to events at our shop and whatnot, they're also learning about Black Rifle. You know, Black Rifle, I think, has received again, a bunch of unfair Internet hate in the last few years. And I, I, I believe companies like ours can also be share the stories of like, no, I've, I've watched Black Rifle Coffee set up a bunch of veterans without legs, with bows and do all this different stuff. And no, I know the owners, and I know their core values and principles, and so I think it's just a cool brand tie. I think it's a neat way to come into and experience a coffee shop in a lot different way, where there's going to be huge windows that look into our manufacturing space, and you can see the knives and you can see the people making them. And it's going to be our people in our shop that will be working up in the retail store, and we'll be switching people in and out of those roles. So you get to talk to the people actually making the knives. So it's just a. I think it's a cool experience.

[Evan Hafer]

I think so.

[Josh Smith]

In a different experience than any other coffee shop would have.

[Evan Hafer]

I mean, I think it's clear that there's a huge overlap. I mean, you guys see the number of knives we sell in the store. It's ridiculous.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. And people are, you know, they're tourists. They're coming to Montana. They want to take something cool home.

[Evan Hafer]

We're selling probably three to four knives a day in the summer months. Yeah.

[Josh Smith]

That's awesome.

[Evan Hafer]

Like, Gayla was putting the hatchets out, and I think she sold them when the thing was still open.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. No, you guys have been. Honestly, in the beginning, some of the orders you guys gala placed, I was like, boy, hopefully they're not doing that just to support us. And then she. And then it's like a few months. A couple months later is like, we need more knives. I'm like, yeah. What are you doing?

[Evan Hafer]

I'll be down in the helicopter tomorrow. Put them in boxes.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. No, you guys move. You guys move a lot of stuff. And it's. It's super cool because I was. When the first time I came up here and did podcast, you were just building that thing. And I got to walk through and I got to watch what you went through with all of the different stuff with the city, the county, all the things. And frankly, I learned some things from that. Things to try to watch for. And. Yeah. The. The amount of money you spend on engineering and permitting and even the cost of materials.

[Evan Hafer]

I actually think so. We built that during COVID We had committed to the process before. You know what I mean? So we were kind of locked In, I think 30, maybe 40% over what it would cost us if we built it today.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

I mean, lumber quotes that were good for 24 hours.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Would go up.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. You were in that. That. That was the COVID insanity.

[Evan Hafer]

It was literally insane. Sometimes lumber quote would be up 60 the next day, down 40. Yeah, I remember the electrical panel. And I don't know you would know more about this, but it's whatever is needed to go from city power to actually get the stuff to work in the building. Yeah, there was a single company that could make those. They're like, that's. Yeah, it's eight months late. I'm like, well, there's no competitors or anybody else that makes these, so thanks.

[Josh Smith]

And that's, that's a form. That's another thing that if, like, if you are going to collect tariff money. The fact that we don't build transformers in America, or is that what it is?

[Evan Hafer]

It was a transformer.

[Josh Smith]

Transformers were a major, major problem during COVID And also all of your switch gear equipment that goes on the side of the building, you know, all of that stuff is made overseas. And again, you want to talk about from a national security standpoint, if all of a sudden China said, we're not going to ship you any transformers, we're going to ship you that equipment, it stops progress, you know, to be able to have any building going on whatsoever.

[Evan Hafer]

If that part hadn't showed up, we were. If it hadn't showed up when it did, we were getting ready to bump the grand opening because we wouldn't have had power.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, no. The electric grid situation all the way. And I was alignment for the power company. The electric issue, and especially with all this AI technology and the draw that all that computer technology takes the bitcoin stu or whatever you want to call it, crypto. But really the AI talk, these data centers that they're building. The power issue in this country is a big problem. And the problem is nobody, including myself. I was alignment. I loved working on power lines. I don't want a new one in my backyard. Right. Nobody wants a new power line running through their backyard. But we're going to have to build power lines in a big way. And also with these, you want to talk about the fragility of the grid, me and four or five buddies could go to the right and I know where the substations are. You go to the right substations and very easily knock off the right transformers on that system. And these are transformers that are a year, year and a half out. Like you don't keep, you know, 500 KVA transformers in a yard somewhere. You know, those are special order. We're building a power line and in four years we're going to land a 500 KVA transformer. That's how far out the stuff's ordered, you could knock out the entire west coast in a couple hours. You know, it's scary, scary how exposed we are. And it's a, you know, it's a freaking chain link fence you climb over. I mean, these aren't secured facilities, but again, we don't, we don't make that. We had, we lost a big transformer on the 100,000 volt line out at Superior one year. And we set up a temporary transformer substation on a semi trailer deal for an entire summer. And a guy was paid to sit there and man that and fill it with diesel every day. Yeah, and it took, it, it took, it took like eight, nine months to get that town back on their substation. And that's just one. So what happens if you knocked out 40 of those across the country in a coordinated attack?

[Evan Hafer]

Let's not give people ideas.

[Josh Smith]

Let's not give people ideas.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, happier thoughts.

[Josh Smith]

Those ideas are out there. It's, it's so, it's, it's crazy. But I don't know, man, it's, I'm, I'm very thankful for the country we live in, our customers. You know, I, I, I think that's, I just, I have so much hope that I think. But, but when we see ourselves starting to go down the wrong path, we need, as citizens, we need to call it out, no matter what side of the aisle we're on. And it doesn't mean we don't still support those people, but I think you are supporting by being honest. It's the same thing of telling your buddy, like, hey, bud, I think you're drinking a little too much. Like, little worried about you, you know.

[Evan Hafer]

I agree.

[Josh Smith]

You know.

[Evan Hafer]

How'd you meet Brandon? He's like the hidden face behind mkc.

[Josh Smith]

He is, yeah. He's the genius behind the marketing. I was at Winter Strong at Sorenex, and I was just telling people about like this company I wanted to build and I need, I asked a couple of their video guys. I was like, hey, I need to build a website. I need some photography, some content. And do you know any good photographers in Montana? And I'm in South Carolina. And these guys were like, actually, I do know one. He's up in Kalispell. And they were like, is that close to you? I'm like, a couple hours. So when I got home that spring in March, I paid him. I just called him up, I hired him to come down. He shot some photos for me and I explained to him what I wanted to build in a company and how I wanted to look and feel and the goal. And he's like, well, I can build you a website. I'm like, all right. I said, so. He's like, well, I'll build you a homepage and send it to you, see if you like it. So he went home that day, and that night he sends me a homepage. I'm like, holy.

[Evan Hafer]

Is that what he was doing at the time? He was focusing on, like, he was.

[Josh Smith]

Working for Flag Nor Fail.

[Evan Hafer]

Okay.

[Josh Smith]

And he was doing their marketing, and he was actually on the side building up and about, and it was going well. He was. Six months later, he actually quit Flag Nor Fail not to do MKC to run his own marketing agency. He had built that on the side. So he was working for Flag Nor Fail, doing their stuff for Rob and Dana, and he was just doing marketing stuff at night. And I think that's what he was looking at my deal as, like, hey, another client for his marketing agency, right? So he built me this webpage, and I was like, damn. Like, that. He got the feel of everything I wanted, like, the photography that he did. Like, he's talented. So, like, yeah, build me a website. So we worked on that throughout the spring of 2020, and actually I was driving up to the ski hill with my wife to go to my first tack, the COVID tack and Big sky. And he called me as we were pulling into the parking lot up there, and he's like, hey, your guys's website's live. And we had launched it with the Blackfoots, and that's where that was, July of 2020. And so then he kept helping me do stuff through the fall. And I told my wife, I'm like, this guy's really freaking good. But I can't afford to keep paying him because I was still alignment and trying to just build this on the side. So I talked to him in August, and I was like, hey, do you want to partner up on this? And we chat a little bit about it. And we came to an agreement basically September 1st to partner on the business. And my idea of it was, this is either going to go big or it's not going to go at all. Like, I didn't have real small aspirations on it. And then so he had. By the time we partnered, he'd already quit his job again. I think he was looking at this like, it's low risk. He's going to do the marketing anyway. For me, if it grows into something, it's something for him. If not. And in case he goes away. He still has got all his marketing clients.

[Evan Hafer]

He's got such a good eye for it, man. Yeah, he can nail the digital stuff.

[Josh Smith]

He's. He's really good. And then he was training a guy during that time to help him with some of his marketing stuff. And as MKC release took off in 2021, by the middle of 21 I was like, bro, you need to be on this like full time. Which he was realizing that. So he was letting Mike kind of run some of his stuff for him on the marketing side. And Brandon was spending all his time on mkc. And finally Brandon offed all of his marketing stuff and brought Mike over. And that's who's running our website is Mike. So Mike's been with us from day one.

[Evan Hafer]

So begs the question, what collaboration are we going to do that involves helicopter and hunting. The two H's if you will, in Montana.

[Josh Smith]

Do you want to fly me to Alaska for my goat hunt next month? No, it's a long helicopter ride.

[Evan Hafer]

I would 100% do it. That's.

[Josh Smith]

That's a long flight.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah, there's some pretty cool things you could do just in Montana.

[Josh Smith]

No, there's. There. Well, I got a really cool photo the other day. Randomly Tim Sheehy sent me a photo and it was kind of a selfie, but in the back of his plane was his little boy and it was I think his eighth birthday. And yeah, they went camp flying, camping and he landed on some public land. They camped and Tim took. Sent me a picture because his little boy had. Bruce had our MKC hat on. But that's an example of like flying into landlocked, you know, public land which thankfully we kept that off of the.

[Evan Hafer]

That kind of combined both left and right a little bit. A, A political people are like, no, no, I don't think you should sell off public land like that.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, you don't get the. You don't have the right to decide to sell our public land.

[Evan Hafer]

Every once in a while there's these little issues where everybody can just let's hang out by the fire.

[Josh Smith]

Gives you a little hope. Like maybe we could all actually like agree on a few things that are important.

[Evan Hafer]

Usually squash within hours or minutes.

[Josh Smith]

So it's fine.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah. For a few moments. Yeah, there's got to be some cool stuff we could do around hunting in Montana with the heli. Cuz that thing is freaking designed for it, man. Yeah, you can lift so much with that bird.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, no, we, we definitely need to figure out something this fall to go do for sure did. Did anybody find your hidden.

[Evan Hafer]

I never heard from the person who did, but I heard in the comments the best one, my favorite was me and my son just risked our lives coming out here in 3 to 4 foot wind chop and it was gone. So I have to assume.

[Josh Smith]

Really? Yes.

[Evan Hafer]

But I got three more actually. Michael. No. You weren't even involved with that. It was Johan. Right. Did you have any involvement? Johan has to go because he's, quite frankly, the star of the show. It's just the stream of German consciousness, mostly because he has no idea to turn the camera off. So he just kept talking to it.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

And it was fantastic. And he absolutely loved it.

[Josh Smith]

So.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah, we need to do that. I have three more. I need to get three more knives from you, actually, is what I need.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, we can do that.

[Evan Hafer]

That's an easy one.

[Josh Smith]

But I just brought a bunch up, so we'll. We'll.

[Evan Hafer]

What are you talking about? You brought one up?

[Josh Smith]

Well, I have a whole pickup load of stuff for your store that you're.

[Evan Hafer]

You're swiping credit cards.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. I think Gail is selling them on the side. She's got a little side gig going.

[Evan Hafer]

I tell you what.

[Josh Smith]

EBay gig.

[Evan Hafer]

We get hit up almost every day for people who want to buy them and have us ship them to them. And we hold a very hard line. No, we will not do that. They're like, why not? Like, I'm not competing with your website.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Like we forced them to come into the store.

[Josh Smith]

Well, we're gonna do that even with our store. We're gonna do some stuff knife wise and even some of the accessory stuff where you have to come to the store to get it.

[Evan Hafer]

Yep.

[Josh Smith]

You know, and that's kind of the point. It's kind of the point. It makes that store special.

[Evan Hafer]

Well, it's that and you let us sell them because you trust us, obviously. And the last thing I need is somebody sending it like, hey, I bought this knife online from Andy's coffee shop and it came messed up. I need you guys to fix this. Like, hey, Andy, what are you.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, what are you doing?

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah, no, it's. Come to the store that's. Or send somebody, you know, to the store. That's the solution that I provide for them. But it's going to be in person. It's the only way we do it.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah. Yeah. Your. Your coffee shop is like none other I've ever been in. And I've even been in some of the other black rifles. I mean, I was just in the one down In. In. In Clarksville, Tennessee. Cool store. Like really cool. The way they did like all the wallpapering of all the old, you know, scenes of. Probably was like World War II or World War I stuff. But again, a neat coffee shop. But there's nothing like your store, your guys.

[Evan Hafer]

It. We built it that way. You know, that's what it was designed to be like, so.

[Josh Smith]

But I remember you telling me like you had that vision, like you did exactly what. Yep. There was no accident there.

[Evan Hafer]

No Everything in there. I mean, I would certainly change some things. As an example, the keys for the toilet roll dispenser. What country do you think our toilet roll dispenser comes from?

[Josh Smith]

America for sure. Like. Like Wyoming. No big manufacturing state.

[Evan Hafer]

Turkey.

[Josh Smith]

Turkey.

[Evan Hafer]

Yes.

[Josh Smith]

Really?

[Evan Hafer]

I don't know if you've ever tried to order spare keys from Turkey.

[Josh Smith]

I go to Istanbul a couple times a month.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah. They're not cheap. And since we had to order some, my guidance was perhaps take this to the ACE Hardware and see if we can make some extras. Yeah, but you know, things like that I would probably pay more attention to in the design iteration phase. Like why does. What's the cost? I'm sorry, we're getting this from where you no longer work on this project. Send me somebody who's reasonable.

[Josh Smith]

See, now these are the things we're in the toilet roll like ordering phase right at the moment.

[Evan Hafer]

So don't get them from Istanbul.

[Josh Smith]

I might. I might have to.

[Evan Hafer]

It's. I mean, we told them to swing for the fences. Probably should have changed some of the vernacular used with the architects because they were actually doing exactly what we said and the shop is what it is. It's awesome.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

But, yeah, you know, you don't need Turkish toilet paper holders.

[Josh Smith]

I always wondered why it was my favorite bathroom in the state. Now I know my favorite aspect is.

[Evan Hafer]

The C130 lights that come on when.

[Josh Smith]

You lock the door.

[Evan Hafer]

That was actually my only probably.

[Josh Smith]

I just wish there was wind in the bathroom.

[Evan Hafer]

Match it. I mean, we could probably do this. I'm sure there's a movie FX coordinator that could solve this for us. Like when you click it and you open the door, it's just like.

[Josh Smith]

It would be awesome if it was on a pressure sensor and it didn't kick on until you sat on the toilet with your pants down. It just blows your hat off.

[Evan Hafer]

God, that would be amazing.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, it would be. Well, thanks for letting me come up and. And a little bit.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah, I'm going to turn this one. We'll get this out next Friday, a week from today.

[Josh Smith]

Awesome.

[Evan Hafer]

Little State of the Union, State of Manufacturing with Josh Smith. Little whiny, I hope. Little whiny, a little snively, you know.

[Josh Smith]

Yep. Well, you know, like I told. Here's the secret I told.

[Evan Hafer]

Record those videos.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

But don't post them, you know.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah, there you go. I. I did go through. I broke it down even more in detail on my podcast, just as a solo episode for people that are actually interested in this stuff. But I did. Did you know, I told. I texted a little bit with our senators and I said, you know, I called. You know, you talked to Trump Jr. You do what you can as a citizen. And I'm a little bit more connected than some. Like, at least have that ability. And when you don't get any, like, answers or path forward of like, well, hey, here's a connection with a guy that. That, like, maybe you should chat with in the government. Maybe we're interested. If it's just like, yeah, we don't know what to tell you, then your only option is to turn around and just be loud and hope that it drives a conversation, you know?

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah.

[Josh Smith]

Cause, like, I want to try and help solve maybe a problem that if I'm having, I guarantee you, and I'm on a tiny scale, I guarantee you, this is a problem on a way bigger scale than just myself.

[Evan Hafer]

You know, the being loud is, I think, one of the answers to how you hold the government account accountable. It's one of the tools, especially in the modern era that we live in, where everybody can be their own journalist. It's one of the ways that it may not always work, because, let's just be honest, not all issues people care.

[Josh Smith]

About worked on public lands.

[Evan Hafer]

It really did. And it seems to be, again, it's this. We're kind of back around the campfire here thing about this just. I mean, I don't even know how an investigative organization like the FBI maintains any faith unless they can, like, of course, redact and, like, protect victims.

[Josh Smith]

Victims.

[Evan Hafer]

But lay that stuff out there and let people make up their own minds.

[Josh Smith]

There shouldn't be anything in. In that Epstein deal that. That is sensitive from a. From. I mean, there's no. I don't. I don't imagine that there's any military operators or, you know, even if you had some CIA operatives that were involved and you want to redact those names to hold, if they are undercover or whatever, fine. But there is no reason that that stuff can't absolutely just be put out in full. Like you say redact victims names, protects the innocent, but.

[Evan Hafer]

But don't protect the guilty.

[Josh Smith]

The being loud is the only thing that we have. And it does work when people band together. And again, people can complain, you know, say on our side of like, well, we're mega. We got to stay together. And you know, the left doesn't do this. You know, the right always gets fractured and it's like, no, I. I would argue that a lot of times us on the right are more willing to stand on our own two feet and not just be attached to a God in the government. You know, I don't think you saw a lot of, say, Democrat people stand up during COVID when they were shutting down government and masking stuff and all this stuff that was going on. You didn't see a lot of people on the left going, hey, this is wrong. You saw it on the right. But I think that's what makes the right a lot of times unique, is that we're willing to call our own out too, which I think is a. That's a. That's a good quality.

[Evan Hafer]

Remember deep into Covid, I ran into you and Jess in the airport and you were literally the only two people not wearing a mask.

[Josh Smith]

Yeah.

[Evan Hafer]

Yeah, I think we were right at that. Right before you go down the stairs, when you go from the A to the B terminal, I was like, oh.

[Josh Smith]

It'S Josh the B March. The other time that I saw you in the tournament or in the terminal there, somehow my right foot launched into space and you tried tripping me.

[Evan Hafer]

I did that. I run into Brandon there quite a bit too.

[Josh Smith]

Tripping.

[Evan Hafer]

No, he's. He's fragile.

[Josh Smith]

He is, he's fragile, you know.

[Evan Hafer]

Now the other walkway is open. You can those two portals over to the B terminal. Yeah, it's getting better, man. Yeah, that's a ridiculous airport. But I digress. All right, man, let's get you back on the road.

[Josh Smith]

Thanks a lot. Cool. Yep. Appreciate it.

[Evan Hafer]

It.

[Josh Smith]

Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host, you seek it.

[Evan Hafer]

Out and download it.

[Josh Smith]

You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements, or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to Libsynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.