What does it take to turn a 40-plus-year obsession with blades into a YouTube channel worth watching? Joe Steel of The Steel Mindset can answer that question.

In Episode 669 of The Knife Junkie Podcast, host Bob DeMarco sits down with Joe for a conversation that covers the origins of a lifelong passion, the craft and culture behind the katana, top production sword brands, and what it is like to build a knife and sword channel from the ground up while living in one of the least collector-friendly states in the country.

Joe Steel traces his love of blades to May 14, 1982, the opening day of Conan the Barbarian. The forge scene at the start of that film hooked him at age nine, and the obsession never let go. He grew up collecting flea-market swords, bringing blades back from travels abroad, and absorbing everything he could find about bladecraft long before the internet made that easy. When the 2020 shutdown ended his career in live event production overnight, he discovered the YouTube sword-review community and made a decision: he had the production skills, equipment, and knowledge. He was going to make his own videos. The Steel Mindset channel was born from that decision.

Much of this episode focuses on the katana, and for good reason. Joe talks about studying Japanese culture and sword forging since his teen years, reading about tamahagane steel, the quenching process that creates the blade\'s natural curve, and the remarkable fact that the katana was designed to be disassembled. A single bamboo peg called the mekugi holds the entire sword together. The tang of the blade, the nakago, reveals the level of care a maker put into the work. Joe explains all of it with the kind of detail that only comes from decades of genuine study and collecting.

Joe also discusses the top production katana companies available right now, including Citadel, Motohara Evolution Blades, and Hanwei, as well as American smiths Walter Sorrells and Howard Clark. He touches on the strict laws governing katana ownership in Japan, where blades must be registered like firearms and can only be legally owned if they were made on Japanese soil. Bob and Joe also talk through the challenges of collecting knives in New York State, where the laws are strict, and Amazon will not ship knives to a residential address.

Beyond The Steel Mindset channel, Joe co-hosts the Blade Talk with Joe and Scab podcast with Scott Baldwin, known as Scab of Choirboyz Cutlery Outdoors. The show has brought in a number of well-known names from the knife world, and the chemistry between a New York voice and a Southern one makes for great listening. Joe is also heading to the Blade Show in Atlanta and working toward surpassing the 10,000-subscriber mark on his channel.

Find Joe and The Steel Mindset on YouTube at www.youtube.com/@JoeSteel1 and on Instagram at www.instagram.com/the_steel_mindset.

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